Gavin Newsom’s Giant Ponzi Scheme
California’s Con Man in Chief rips off American taxpayers while crushing small businesses to pay the state’s supersized population of scammers
A scheme too obscenely corrupt for his own party to stomach
Let them eat Gruel
Last November, the celebrity chef and restaurateur Andrew Gruel got a call from his wife, who manages parts of his business. There was an issue with their payroll taxes: They were $2,000 more than the couple had expected. Getting billed for thousands of dollars, without explanation, understandably alarmed the chef. So Gruel called their payroll company to find out what had happened. What he was told provoked him into posting a tweet that went viral the following day.
“California has a budget shortfall,” his tweet explained, “and the federal government wants money back that it lent California for UI that it ‘lost.’ They are making up for it by having business owners pay it.” When Elon Musk commented with his signature one-word boost — “Really?” — Gruel replied, “Yup, state defaulted on their loan and the businesses …
Front Porch
Donald Trump is as close to a one-man show as Washington has seen since Barack Obama’s second term in office. What that means for America’s future — and the rest of the planet — depends on whether Trump can carry through on his promises of a new American Revolution or whether the forces he has unleashed will instead replace the top-down bureaucracies he and his supporters despise with something more brazenly oppressive: Oligarchy.
The radicalism of Trump’s second term in office has been evident since Day One, which began with a salvo of executive orders abolishing the old regime of DEI and gender-neutral bathrooms in government facilities and public schools. Subsequent weeks saw the evisceration of USAID by Elon Musk’s DOGE; the seizure of Treasury Department payments systems by Musk’s young lieutenants, including a 19-year-old programmer who went by the online sobriquet “Big Balls”; an attempt to …
Good Riddance to Shepard Fairey’s Awful ‘Hope’ Posters
How André the Giant became Barack Obama
Laughing at ‘Hope’ made you an asshole
The message of both posters was actually the same: OBEY
The Obama “Hope” Poster, probably the most iconic image from American politics of the last thirty years, is also the most famous work by artist Shepard Fairey. In it, a photograph taken from an Obama press junket was restyled into Fairey’s signature graphic style, forged through his early years as a creator of iconic stickers and stencils for skateboards and T-shirts. Heavily reworked and flattened into bold colors, it reframed Obama as an icon of new leadership, marked by the single fat, sans-serif word: Hope. Once it became officially embraced by the Obama campaign, the image emerged as an emblem of his presidential run and an icon of Democratic Party progressivism. It gave the campaign a grassroots life, eventually becoming its de facto symbol. After his victory, Obama thanked Fairey directly in a letter.
This wasn’t Fairey’s first foray into viral imagery. He had initially generated …
