Bold Pro-Working Class Policies

BREAKING: Hungarians are now tearing down Viktor Orban’s anti-Ukraine posters on the streets. This is amazing.

Orban Falls: a Huge Win For Accountability and a Big Loss for MAGA Orban, who was described as "Trump before Trump," falls after a massive, organized resistance to his corrupt, authoritarian 16-year rule. What does this mean for MAGA & global right-wing movements? open.substack.com/pub/thelefthoo…

I need you to sit with this for a second. A sitting US president, the most powerful man on earth, launched a cryptocurrency project where his family quietly pocketed 75% of all revenue before a single retail buyer could even sell their token. No liquidity. No exit. Just a one-way door with a MAGA flag on it. And almost nobody is talking about how utterly devastating this was for the ordinary people who trusted him. World Liberty Financial (WLFI) wasn't built for you. It was built on you. The structure was never hidden, it was just written in the fine print that hype cycles don't let you read. The Trump family and insiders: 75% of token revenue. The retail investor who saw Donald Trump's face on the website, who believed this was the financial revolution he promised, who scraped together $500 or $5,000 because they finally felt like the system was working FOR them for once? They got a token they couldn't sell at launch and a front-row seat to watching their money become someone else's net worth. Think about who bought WLFI. It wasn't hedge funds. It wasn't institutions with lawyers and risk teams. It was regular people. Trump supporters who finally felt included in something big. Crypto newcomers who saw a president endorsing a project and thought "this must be legitimate." People in Ohio, in Texas, in Florida who don't have Bloomberg terminals or insider access, just a phone, a dream, and a wallet they opened because the man they voted for told them this was different. This was theirs. It wasn't theirs. Donald Trump was the "Chief Crypto Advocate." Barron Trump, a teenager, was placed on the advisory board. Eric Trump promoted it. Don Jr. promoted it. Melania had her own NFT plays running in parallel. The entire family transformed the Trump name, a name millions of Americans treat with genuine reverence, into a multi-pronged monetisation machine aimed squarely at the wallets of their most loyal followers. This is the part that should make your blood boil regardless of your politics. These weren't strangers being scammed. These were believers. And belief was the product being sold. Now layer in the conflict of interest that makes this truly historic in its audacity: Trump was simultaneously campaigning on crypto deregulation. He was promising to fire Gary Gensler. He was pledging to make America the "crypto capital of the world." He was dismantling the SEC's enforcement posture. He was, in plain English, using the power of the presidency to remove the exact regulatory framework that exists to protect retail investors from exactly the kind of token structure WLFI was built on. The cop wasn't just looking the other way. The cop was the one running the scheme and had abolished the law at the same time. This is not speculation. This is the documented, public, on-chain, SEC-filing reality of what happened. And here's what kills me most. The crypto space spent years fighting for legitimacy. Builders sacrificed. Developers worked for free. Communities organised. The entire movement was founded on one idea: that financial systems could exist that didn't prey on the little guy. That code could replace the gatekeepers. That ordinary people could finally access the same tools as the wealthy and powerful. And then the most powerful family in America looked at that movement, looked at that dream, and saw an audience to monetise. They didn't join crypto. They strip-mined it. The people who got rich from WLFI had their names on the term sheet. The people who got poor had their hope on the line. There will be those who say retail knew the risks. That crypto is always speculative. That nobody forced anyone to buy. And technically, legally, in the fine-print sense, maybe. But there is something categorically different about a president of the United States putting his face, his family, his political brand and his policy power behind a token sale aimed at his own voter base. The asymmetry of information, trust, and power is so extreme it breaks every normal framework for "buyer beware." When the most trusted person in your political world tells you this is the future, "do your own research" is not a real defence against that. It was never a fair fight. The Trumps will move on. They always do. There will be another project, another launch, another opportunity to convert political capital into financial capital while the people who funded it are left holding bags they can't unload. This is the pattern. This is the business model. But retail crypto investors deserve to hear it said plainly, loudly and without the usual hedging: You were not investors in their vision. You were the exit liquidity for their wallets. And they did it while calling it freedom.

I’m grateful for Ezra Klein’s super thoughtful column today, and also appreciate that he referenced the piece I wrote on Hasan. But I need to make one (in my opinion) corrective point. Ezra wrote, "What made the Nazis notable wasn’t their support for an ethnostate. Ethnostates are common. What made the Nazis notable was their effort to exterminate the Jewish people." I think Ezra would probably agree, if push came to shove, that the Nazis were notable before their launch of the Final Solution in 1941. (It'd be fair to say "what made the Nazis most notable," but "what made the Nazis notable" is just not really defendable, as a precise statement of fact.) The Nazis were the Nazis in 1933, and 1935, and 1939, etc. They were bad and they were worth opposing before they began their effort to exterminate the Jewish people. And I don’t think it makes much sense to say we can only analogize to them or learn lessons about them post-1941.

🚨🚨🚨 Everyone should be talking about this! Media is NOT reporting on this‼️

Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam on Israel: "I swear to god there's some people out there just ready to kill and go across borders and take over land that doesn't belong to them, and they should get the fuck out. We don't want to give them our taxes to drop bombs on children. No more!"

Magyar: “Those who stole from the country have to face consequences.” That sounds like a great plan!!

first time in more than 60 years a major city mayor has embraced Milwaukee’s very own good government philosophy of “sewer socialism” proud to see Milwaukee’s history continuing to make waves today across the country

Hungarians showing how to win big in an unfair election: organize AND protest AND vote AND demand profound change.

Summer lee will be the best replacement for Fetterman in 2028

Good piece. I have many disagreements with Ezra, think his instinct is to almost always side with power & push Dems in a corporate direction. But I also think it's important to credit those we disagree with most of the time when they get stuff right some of the time.

“If the Democratic Party wants our support it must become a party of the working class—not of corporate America.” @BernieSanders

Majority of Congress is silent.

ICE cannot be reformed or retrained. ICE must be abolished.

Trump attacks the Pope in a Truth Social rant, calling him “weak” and attacking his views on foreign policy, Iran, and even his legitimacy as pontiff—claiming he wouldn’t be Pope if Trump weren’t president.

Abdul El-Sayed: “If you’re out of a job, it’s probably because a corporation figured out how to automate your job. If you’re out of a home, it’s probably because a corporation is speculating on the home that you should have been able to afford. If you’re out of healthcare, it’s probably because a corporation has figured out how to monetize you because you get sick”

Hasan Piker: “My goal is to instill class consciousness in people and help them identify who is actually causing harm to them and in my assessment it’s the billionaires and the corporations not the vulnerable populations. It’s not a trans person or a Guatemalan migrant that’s raising your rent, it’s your landlord”

Armed masked man starts fight at high school ICE protest—turns out to be off duty police sergeant. His plan was to trick students to "assault me"—then "arrest them all." Then called his buddies with rifles to "back him up." Sgt. Dusten Mullen makes $336,000 a year—making him a top 10 earner in the Phoenix Police Department. He is currently on administrative leave—which means he's reassigned to work from home. Incident occurred outside Hamilton High School in Chandler, Arizona.

Paolo Zampolli is traveling with the VP during one of the most consequential diplomatic negotiations of this administration, the US-Iran ceasefire talks. Here are the questions nobody in MSM seems to be asking about him. How does a man go from modeling agency owner in the 1990s to introducing Trump to Melania, to real estate partner at the Trump Organization, to UN Ambassador for Dominica, to ocean conservation events with Ghislaine Maxwell, to Kennedy Center trustee, to Special Envoy for Global Partnerships, to walking red carpets with the Vice President in Hungary? In the DOJ’s Epstein files, Zampolli’s name appears in 11 documents. In one email, he is described as a “killer.” In another, Epstein himself warns an associate to “be careful” of Zampolli, calling him “trouble.” The context of the “killer” reference is not fully clear, but the question is worth asking: why is this man traveling with the Vice President? There are multiple sketchy newspaper clippings where the photo is courtesy of ID Models. One describes a model “about to become the world’s most popular ninth-grader.” It notes she was “attending high school classes in Miami” when she was spotted by “ID Models owner Paolo Zampolli.” She was 15 years old. He should be investigated.

Netanyahu sent his son to campaign for Orbán. Netanyahu sent a personal video to Orbán's rally. Orbán just lost by 14 points, the biggest landslide in Hungarian democratic history. Why did Netanyahu care so much? Because Orbán was the only EU leader who vetoed sanctions on Israel. Every single time. That veto is gone. The ICC withdrawal is reversed. The EU firewall is dead. Israel's own Ynet News headline, two days ago: "If Orbán falls, Israel could lose its EU firewall." He didn't just fall. He was buried.