They filled a stadium for Charlie Kirk’s memorial. A stadium. Virtually the entire Trump cabinet was in attendance along with the president and his family. Even Elon Musk was there. The most chilling remarks came from Stephen Miller who called for a holy war of sorts in the least coded white supremacist language. But the unintentional comedy came when Tucker Carlson gave his signature high-pitched guffaw while offering an analogy from scripture, seemingly likening the attempt to silence Jesus Christ to Kirk’s murder.
Kirk is being exploited in death by the right in the most appalling way. One by one, speakers praised Kirk as a free speech martyr, protector of western moral values and a champion for lost young men (in the west.) According to nearly all of them, he’s sitting at the Lord’s side right now. That’s what struck me the most. The most prominent role at this memorial was reserved for none other than Jesus Christ.
I’m going to have to look into this Jesus fella. Or just read more from Kirk. I’m sure their messages are pretty similar. Anyway.
What’s the going rate in America?
H1-B Visas, which are not hepatitis shots you pay for with a credit card, are now available for $100,000. That’s right! Are you a highly skilled worker from another country looking to practice your valuable trade here in the United States? For the low-low price of $100,000 you can come here and give us all your knowledge before we deport you right back to where you came from. That should serve us well in the battle for AI supremacy.
There was a bizarre social media moment when the news broke on MSNBC that Hermann Goering, er, Tom Homan was under investigation for allegedly pocketing $50k in cash in 2024 from FBI agents posing as businessmen looking to secure border control contracts.
Former Fox host Megyn Kelly—who has her own media company now—took to X to demonstrate how lazy conservative commentators get to be now. Why bother with an explanation or cover up when you can just say, “we do not care.” The most honest words Megyn Kelly may have ever spoken.
I do find it interesting that the going rate to work in this country went from $50k in Homan’s pocket to $100k in Trump’s if you want a visa. Talk about inflation, amirite?
Upcoming
Lots of economic data releases coming this week from retail sales and inventory, housing starts to initial jobless claims, and core inflation. We’ll also hear remarks from around the Fed world, from the NY Fed Chair to the first speech from newly appointed sycophant and architect of Trump’s disastrous tariff regime, Stephen Miran. He has already distinguished himself by being the lone dissenting voice on the Fed’s decision to cut rates by 25 basis points, arguing that the cuts should have been much steeper. He claims that these beliefs are his and his alone and that Dear Leader did not tell him what to say, even though he had been at the Fed for a nanosecond before making that incredibly well-informed decision. As far as the releases, the ones to watch will be existing home sales and core PCE year-over-year.
Of course, this all pales in comparison to the announcement from the Oval Office later today. RFK has discovered the cause of autism. What a time to be alive.
Other things I’m obsessing over…
I want to turn you on to a young creator who goes by Keith D. I’ve been following him with great interest lately because he’s extremely knowledgeable about crypto but also tuned into the role it plays in global finance. We’ve received a good amount of feedback on our crypto videos lately and there’s a hunger for good information so consider this an endorsement.
You ever watch an online hangout or interview and say, “damn, wish I was there.” While this doesn’t rise to the level of a Miami Vice reunion with Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, it certainly falls under the ‘wish I was there’ category. Tim Heidecker and Hasan Piker hanging on a livestream together.
And since we mentioned Heidecker, here’s a clip from his Office Hours show about Zuck’s Meta glasses shitting the bed in a live demo. Zuck, you’re no Steve Jobs.
-Max
Killer Left Take of the Week
KLTW goes to Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News featured here answering colleague Ryan Grim’s question as to whether the Trump Administration would consider assassinating Venezuelan President Maduro. More important than this speculation is how Scahill frames the difference between our horrific covert past under figures like Allen Dulles versus how openly, carelessly and brazenly the Trump team has to actualize the dangerous off-the-cuff threats of this president.
It’s evident now that the alt-right figures in charge of this administration are quickly realizing the vision set forth in Project 2025. But it’s also clear that they are moving just as quickly to implement the vision of Project Esther, the Project 2025 companion and follow-up from the Heritage Foundation. The two visions work in tandem to destroy the institutions that barely held Donald Trump in check during his first term and to undermine free speech of anyone opposed to their radical agenda. The combined projects are so well coordinated and overwhelming that we may be living through the end of the American experiment.
Here’s a snippet from the pod:
Max: This economy is going to fail. Quickly. It’s already coming apart at the seams and in this collapse there is opportunity on both sides of the political spectrum. The opportunity on the right is to weaponize this economic precarity further by blaming others. But they’re running out of people to blame. Immigrants have been shut out already. Black and Brown Americans hold no political power. Unions have been decimated. Thus the animus toward the so-called Radical Left.
I covered this over the weekend for MeidasTouch. The Leading Economic Index from the Conference Board has been one of the most reliable indicators of recessions, if not the most. This chart highlights how difficult it is to understand the current economic conditions in the United States. You can see from the chart that the primary line (LEI: where the economy is headed) diverges greatly from the coincident line (CEI: where the economy currently stands.) The LEI shows an economy headed for freefall while the CEI is showing persistent growth. The reason for this is the weight of “financials” in the CEI propping up the basket of factors the board evaluates. The equities market is so hot and overperforming that it’s skewing the rest of the data. In other words, a stock market bubble.
Headlines
Ta-Nehisi Takedown
Ta-Nehisi Coates hit a bullseye with this piece about the death of Charlie Kirk. He skillfully identifies the hypocrisy from all sides without managing to appear shrill or even provocative. It’s a measured and intellectual take on the media circus and America’s inability to call balls and strikes.
From the article:
“What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself? What are we to make of an NFL that, on one hand, encourages us to ‘End Racism,’ and, on the other, urges us to commemorate an unreconstructed white supremacist? And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself.”
California continues to offer a vision to workaround the increasingly dystopian future in Trumpland. This article makes an interesting case to draw the best from the so-called abundance theory from the bottom up rather than the top down. It works because the unions are driving the bus rather than politicians.
From the article:
“Overall, this UAW report is an all-too-rare example of a union getting serious about a vision for industrial policy and putting real legislation on the table. While other important clean energy sources like nuclear power and geothermal are left out, the policy proposals play to California’s natural strengths and build on already existing successful initiatives.”
This Truthout piece is a good one-two punch about data centers. The tech industry is heading south to build massive data centers where regulations are looser and jobs are needed. These power hungry, water guzzling facilities are an environmental disaster, which means tech companies are also looking to build in marginalized communities that lack representation and resources to fight back against them. As usual, the promise of job creation is at the core of the argument to build them in these areas. But it’s just a ruse because it takes a shockingly low number of employees to run these giants.
From the article:
“Big Tech promises thousands of jobs when data center projects are announced. However, in reality, data centers create very few permanent jobs. Even Microsoft admits that a data center can run with less than 50 technicians. According to a Business Insider analysis, ‘tax breaks given to developers can amount over time to more than $2 million for every permanent, full-time job at an operational data center.’ Despite the widespread talking point that data centers bring jobs to local areas, half the states that provide tax subsidies for data centers do not actually require job creation. States that do only require a small number of jobs to be created. In Tennessee, only 15 jobs are required for data centers to qualify for tax breaks.”
A United Nations commission has officially concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, releasing a 72-page report documenting deliberate killings, torture, starvation tactics, and systematic destruction of Palestinian lives since October 7, 2023. The report includes evidence of intentional mass killing, blocking of humanitarian aid, torture of detainees, and attacks on pregnant women and children. Despite this official finding, the war of annihilation continues with U.S. support, while civil liberties are being eroded for those who speak out against it.
If we’re going to rally and rise up, we need to understand how left social movements have fallen apart in the past.
“By revisiting the successes, failures, and betrayals of the Fourth, we gain the necessary clarity to understand why a mass revolutionary communist international is essential in the fight against capitalism today. For listeners interested in the history of communism, Trotskyism, and revolutionary strategy, this talk offers key lessons on how Marxists must organise, study the ideas, and assess perspectives, and why the method of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Ted Grant remains the indispensable guide for overthrowing capitalism in the 21st century.”
What I love about Milanovic’s analysis is that he stays true to the visions of these great thinkers through the lens of their respective eras, rather than evaluating them in retrospect. It offers valuable insight into how they approached socioeconomics and inequality under the conditions of their time.
“A sweeping and original history of how economists across two centuries have thought about inequality, told through portraits of six key figures. Visions of Inequality takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production.”
“Founded in 1989, Wilderness Watch is the leading national organization whose sole focus is the preservation and proper stewardship of lands and rivers included in the National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS). The organization grew out of the concern that while much emphasis is being placed on adding new areas to these systems, the conditions of existing Wilderness and rivers are largely being ignored. We believe that the stewardship of these remarkable wild places must be assured through independent citizen oversight, education, and the continual monitoring of federal management activities.”
-Sep-22-2025-02-40-38-2342-PM.png?upscale=true&width=1000&upscale=true&name=unnamed%20(1)-Sep-22-2025-02-40-38-2342-PM.png)
-4.png?upscale=true&width=1120&upscale=true&name=unnamed%20(2)-4.png)
