There was a lot of confusion in the initial hours after the shooting at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night. But it soon became clear that the suspect, Cole Allen, a 31-year-old teacher from Torrance, California, had rabid anti-Trump views and was there to target Trump administration officials. 

While the usual suspects on the left are issuing standard statements condemning violence, there’s a real concern that the left will lionize Allen. And even former Obama official and current CNN pundit Van Jones is concerned about it.

 “I’m starting to worry about something,” Jones said. “Which is that the shooter survived, which means on Monday he’s going to court, which means there is a danger that people try to make him some sort of hero.“

He wasn’t being paranoid. He was being prescient. And he didn’t stop there.

“You watch what happened with Luigi, who shot a CEO to death, and somehow became a hero,” Jones continued. ” So, they said tonight you saw the worst of America. You saw the best of America. Tonight, you definitely saw the best of America. I hope on Monday we don’t see the worst again. I just want to say very clearly — this kind of despicable behavior has no place in America. It has no place on the right. It has no place on the left.”

He added, “This kind of behavior has no place in America. And it is wrong. Violence is not the way to resolve any grievances. And this cheerleader culture for violence, for people who think that the answer to our problems is to go shooting billionaires or going to synagogues or all these different things, has to be called out immediately. The minute it starts, every single person with the platform must denounce it, or we’re going to see this again.”

CNN Van Jones actually gets things right regarding the WHCD shooter. pic.twitter.com/wySCKHz5hv

— Scott Adams (@scottadamsshow) April 26, 2026

When Luigi Mangione was arrested in December 2024 for the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the radical left treated him like a celebrity. Within days of the shooting, social media flooded with memes casting Mangione as a modern-day vigilante, a working-class avenger striking back against the healthcare system. 

Online stores moved T-shirts. A fundraiser for his legal defense pulled in thousands. Even the Saturday Night Live audience cheered when Mangione’s name was mentioned during a Weekend Update segment.

Mainstream journalists didn’t exactly pump the brakes either. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, a White House correspondent no less, casually directed her audience to Mangione’s legal defense website.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Sunday that “preliminary” findings suggest Trump and members of his administration were the likely targets. Allen had been staying at the hotel as a registered guest. Investigators secured his room and began reviewing what CBS News and others described as his manifesto.

According to the New York Post, Allen’s manifesto ran over a thousand words, laying out a delusional justification for the shooting. In it, he described himself as a “Friendly Federal Assassin,” outlined “rules of engagement,” and claimed it was his moral duty to target officials tied to the Trump administration. 

Democrats moved quickly to condemn the shooting on Saturday. The statements were prompt and broadly worded. But the uncomfortable overlap between the suspect’s stated grievances and the party’s rhetoric about Trump is hard to ignore, making Van Jones’s concerns extremely valid. 

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Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner announced a new proposed rule on Thursday that seeks to end the use of “gender identity” across all departmental programs, which is intended to “restore biological reality and protect women.”

“Under the proposed guidance, HUD would remove radical definitions of gender identity, sexual orientation, and gender, replacing them with sex across nearly 50 regulations,” HUD said in an April 23 statement.

The department’s Equal Access Rule will be modified to replace the ban on discrimination on the basis of “gender identity” across all Community Planning and Development programs.

HUD intends to define common terms such as mother, father, woman, man, girl, and boy, in a way that is consistent with a person’s sex across the department’s regulations.

“God created two sexes: male and female. The Left’s war on biological reality through radical gender ideology will no longer take precedence over the safety and security of America’s most vulnerable women,” Turner said.

The 2012 Equal Access Rule, titled Equal Access to Housing in HUD Programs Regardless of Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity, sought to ensure that HUD’s housing programs would be made available to all individuals and families regardless of their gender identity, sexual orientation, or marital status.

At the time, the rule did not address how transgender identifying and “gender non-conforming” individuals should be accommodated in certain temporary and emergency shelters, and other facilities used for this purpose. In 2016, another final rule was issued on this regulation addressing the matter.

The recent proposal builds on an order issued by the HUD Secretary in February last year that required a stoppage of any pending or future enforcement of the Equal Access Rule.

In a Feb. 13, 2025, statement, Turner said that the department’s actions were in line with an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office.

The Jan. 20, 2025, executive order, Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, criticized what it described as denying the biological reality of sex and the increasing use of legal and socially coercive measures to allow men to self-identify as women.

This enabled such men to “gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers,” Trump wrote in the order.

“This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being,” the president wrote.

The order defined the sex of a person as the individual’s biological classification as either male or female, dismissing the interchanging of the word “sex” with “gender identity.” It asked agencies to remove all regulations and policies that “promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology.”

The National Alliance to End Homelessness has criticized HUD’s move to modify enforcement of the Equal Access Rule.

In a February 2025 post, the alliance said that communities cannot afford to create more barriers to shelter and housing programs at a time when “unsheltered homelessness is soaring and when gender-expansive people are experiencing shocking disparities in unsheltered homelessness.”

“The Alliance strongly opposes the directive from Secretary Turner to halt any pending or future enforcement actions of the Equal Access Rule and any future steps to weaken or repeal this lifesaving rule,” the post said.

In its February 2025 statement, HUD said that the 2016 rule allowed men to take advantage of department programs directed at women.

Late Friday afternoon, as most people were checking out for the weekend after nearly two months of U.S.-Iran war fatigue, Anthropic quietly released a note titled “Project Deal.” The company built a closed marketplace where AI agents negotiated prices, struck deals, and completed real transactions with money changing hands.

“We created a marketplace for employees in our San Francisco office, with one big twist. We tasked Claude with buying, selling and negotiating on our colleagues’ behalf,” Anthropic wrote on X.

New Anthropic research: Project Deal.

We created a marketplace for employees in our San Francisco office, with one big twist. We tasked Claude with buying, selling and negotiating on our colleagues’ behalf. pic.twitter.com/H2f6cLDlAW

— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) April 24, 2026

The results: Claude agents made 186 deals across more than 500 listed items on a Slack-based marketplace, totaling just over $4,000 in transaction value.

But the quality of the model mattered a lot. In the simulated runs where Opus and Haiku models negotiated with one-another, the Opus models got substantially better deals.

Interestingly, though, participants in our survey didn’t pick up on this disparity. pic.twitter.com/X26hhIieJN

— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) April 24, 2026

Anthropic’s point is that AI-to-AI commerce offers an early look at the coming agentic economy, where AI bots negotiate with other bots in a marketplace to strike the best deal.

Claude interviewed 69 of our colleagues about what they wanted to buy and sell. Each Claude asked for any custom instructions, then went off to haggle.

We ran 4 markets in parallel, to find out what would happen if we varied the models doing the negotiating. pic.twitter.com/FJdD6S2TSd

— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) April 24, 2026

AI disruption has already hammered software stocks. Now, as Polymarket Money pointed out, “eBay’s leadership team is seeing this,” referring to Project Deal.

eBay’s leadership team seeing this: pic.twitter.com/Hg0KMdhC5z

— Polymarket Money (@PolymarketMoney) April 24, 2026

Shortly after Project Deal’s release, eBay shares fell about 4.5% by Friday’s close in New York.

Does this mean Anthropic is now coming for eBay?

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

ICE has arrested an illegal alien child sex predator in Abigail Spanberger’s Virginia. Authorities there tried to protect him by declining an ICE detainer last year and releasing him back into the community.

Of course they did.

The suspect, Roni Mendez-Escobar, a Guatemalan national, faced charges including multiple felony counts of possession of obscene material and child pornography with intent to distribute.

🚨 HOLY CRAP! ICE has just arrested an illegal alien CHILD S*X PREDATOR in Abigail Spanberger’s Virginia

She tried to PROTECT him.

She ran as a “moderate.” In practice, she’s letting kids get abused by illegals!

FOX: “Virginia authorities declined an ICE detainer for him last… pic.twitter.com/54Zvfc9PJq

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) April 24, 2026

Fairfax County’s refusal to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement allowed him to remain free despite the detainer – exactly the outcome sanctuary policies are designed to produce.

This isn’t an isolated failure. It’s the predictable result of Virginia Democrats turning the state into a magnet for criminal illegal aliens while American families bear the cost. Spanberger ran as a “moderate,” yet her administration’s moves to limit cooperation with ICE have repeatedly put Virginia children and residents at risk.

Just weeks ago, ICE urged Spanberger not to release another criminal illegal alien from Guatemala, Misael Lopez Gomez, who allegedly bludgeoned his own three-month-old daughter to death with blunt force trauma in Fairfax.

⚖️🚨NIGHTMARE IN VIRGINIA

A 3 month-old girl is dead.

GOP lawmakers and the Department of Homeland Security is blaming “lax” Democrat ‘Sanctuary’ policies after two illegal immigrants were charged in two separate, gruesome slayings.

Gustamalan national Misael Lopez Gomez, is… https://t.co/iEUbISHkyt pic.twitter.com/quFI5bTlip

— Tosca Austen (@ToscaAusten) April 8, 2026

As DHS stated: “This cold-blooded killer murdered his own three-month-old daughter. We are calling on Governor Spanberger to commit to not releasing this barbaric animal from jail into Virginia communities.”

The media is RUNNING COVER for an illegal alien MURDERER.

Misael Lopez Gomez is NOT a “Virginia dad.” He is an illegal alien from Guatemala and a cold-blooded killer accused of murdering his own three-month-old daughter. pic.twitter.com/Ex5HuolKtl

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) April 2, 2026

That horror came one day after another Guatemalan illegal alien, Anibal Armando Chavarria Muy, was arrested for fatally stabbing a man to death with a machete in Fairfax County.

In March, an 18-year-old illegal migrant from El Salvador, Israel Flores Ortiz – released into the U.S. under Biden policies – posed as an 11th grader at Fairfax High School and groped at least 12 girls in the hallways over several months.

A victim’s mother described it: “He just sneakily walked up behind them and put his hand in between their legs… It was a groping of a private area. It had been occurring for several months.” Fairfax officials tried to downplay it and even fought ICE’s detainer.

And before that, Virginia mother Stephanie Minter was murdered in cold blood at a bus stop by an illegal alien from Sierra Leone with more than 30 prior arrests.

Each case traces back to the same refusal to honor ICE detainers, the same sanctuary rules pushed under Spanberger that prioritize criminal non-citizens over public safety. Local officials in Fairfax and Arlington have repeatedly ignored federal requests, releasing predators and killers back onto the streets.

This isn’t compassion – it’s complicity. Democrats continue to handcuff law enforcement and invite chaos across the border.

Virginia families didn’t vote for this. They deserve borders that work, laws that put citizens first, and leaders who actually protect them instead of shielding the very people preying on their children.

Sanctuary policies must end. Cooperation with ICE must resume. Deportations of criminal illegal aliens cannot be optional. American lives – especially the most vulnerable – depend on it.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

About 57 miles southeast of downtown Nashville, as the crow flies, an underground cavern system listed on Zillow is being framed as a potential candidate for the ultimate nuclear doomsday bunker.

Think of the cavern as the shell for a future bunker.

To get it anywhere close to true bunker status, millions of dollars in engineering, ventilation, power, water, wastewater, security, and interior buildout would likely be required.

“We have what it takes to keep your family safe and to build a sustainable hobby farm!” the listing reads, adding that the 32-acre property, known as “Cavern Bunker,” includes a 60,000-square-foot underground cavern system.

The Cavern Bunker property was originally listed last July for $1.75 million and has since seen a series of price cuts amounting to nearly 50% off.

The price cuts and lack of buyers likely stem from the potential bunker-style conversion, which could cost tens of millions of dollars if properly constructed.

Here’s the cost breakdown for the bunker conversion:

This is a cavern shell that would require tens of millions of dollars to convert into a bunker-style property.

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance 

When the Fischer-Price My First Mayor™ of New York Zohran Mamdani chose to film a “tax the rich” video in front of a Manhattan penthouse owned by Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, he wasn’t just celebrating “tax day”, he was making a policy argument.

Mamdani was making a choice about his tone (dickish), about targets (“people with more money than me are bad”), and about how the city signals to the very people it depends on to fund its ambitions (“go f*ck yourself and live somewhere else”).

In a city where a relatively small number of taxpayers account for an outsized share of revenue, that kind of signaling is not trivial theater. It’s reckless, petulant, counterintuitive, childish and has consequences. But what else would you expect from a thirtysomething who has zero private sector or real world experience?

Sure, Ken Griffin is an easy symbol. He has extraordinary wealth, a record-setting $238 million apartment at 220 Central Park South, and a business empire that spans global finance. But symbols have a way of flattening reality. The firms he built, Citadel and Citadel Securities, are not abstractions; they are employers, taxpayers, and investors.

Citadel’s principals and employees “have paid nearly $2.3 billion in city and state taxes over the past five years,” according to COO Gerald Beeson, Reuters wrote days ago. And Griffin himself has directed hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable giving tied to New York institutions, according to various reports citing about $650 million in donations highlighted by Citadel executives.

And then there is the forward-looking piece…the part that tends to disappear in political messaging. A proposed $6 billion redevelopment at 350 Park Avenue, tied to Griffin’s firm, carries the promise of thousands of construction jobs and many more permanent positions. Those are the kinds of projects cities compete fiercely to attract. But now that project appears at risk now after Mamdani’s choice to act like the spoiled Upper East Side brats he claims to loathe, according to the Wall Street Journal.

So that’s pushing $10 billion in tax revenue and investment from Citadel and Griffin. That is a metric f*ck ton of money (NYC brings in about $80 billion a year total in tax revenue) that Mamdani desperately needs to fund his $30 million state owned grocery stores, among other communist sleight of hand tricks in his bottle of political snake oil.

Mamdani’s policy argument is not without precedent. The idea of taxing underused luxury property, often described as a pied-à-terre tax, is rooted in a broader push to capture revenue from assets that sit largely idle in a city with acute housing pressures. Supporters see it as a corrective, a way to align tax policy with inequality that is both visible and politically salient. But there is a difference between arguing for a policy and personalizing it. Once a debate becomes about individuals rather than structures, it slides easily from persuasion into provocation.

That distinction matters because New York’s fiscal reality is not ideological; it is mathematical. The city requires enormous revenue to sustain its services, infrastructure, and social programs. Much of that revenue ultimately traces back to high earners, large firms, and the ecosystem that supports them. At the same time, those taxpayers are unusually mobile. Griffin has already moved his primary residence to Miami, part of a broader pattern of high-income migration that policymakers across the country are grappling with.

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There is also a subtler risk in turning success into a kind of public spectacle. Cities thrive on ambition. They depend on people who are willing to build companies, take risks, and, yes, accumulate outsized rewards along the way. When political rhetoric begins to frame that success primarily as a problem to be highlighted, rather than a resource to be harnessed, it can send an unintended message. Not just to billionaires with penthouses, but to the broader class of entrepreneurs, investors, and professionals who decide where to build their careers.

The debate over fairness in taxation is both legitimate and necessary. But there is a difference between designing policy that asks more of those who have more, and staging moments that seem to cast them as villains by default. The former is governance. The latter is…well exactly how you’d expect a sociopath to govern.

New York does not have the luxury of shortcuts. It is a city that depends on scale of talent, of capital and of confidence. Undermining any one of those pillars, even rhetorically, carries risks that may not be immediately visible but are rarely insignificant. The challenge for leaders is not simply to raise revenue, but to do so in a way that keeps the engine of that revenue running. That requires precision, not performance, and an understanding that in a city built on success, how you talk about success matters almost as much as how you tax it.

If Mamdani wants to raise more revenue, he will eventually have to decide whether he is in the business of governing a fragile economic ecosystem or narrating one. This isn’t SimCity, or the lunch table with the drama club. Playtime in the sandbox is over. New York City is a global icon and the uncomfortable truth is this: the people Mamdani is turning into political props are the same ones writing the checks. And they have options. So, Mamdani, I mean this nicely but if you’re angry at the world, maybe start by looking inward…and at the very least just try to grow the f*ck up.

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions. All positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.

On April 17, The Atlantic published an anonymously sourced hit piece against FBI Director Kash Patel – painting him as a blackout-drunk, paranoid, and erratic executive barely capable of running the nation’s premier law enforcement agency. Three days later, a federal grand jury indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. 

The question conservative circles are now asking is whether the hit piece was deliberately conceived and timed to discredit Patel and the SPLC investigation.

Democrats pounced on The Atlantic hit piece, launching an investigation into his behavior the same day that the SPLC indictment was announced.

And that was the point of the Atlantic story. See how that works. https://t.co/WRjlc4twIQ

— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) April 22, 2026

According to the Department of Justice, between 2014 and 2023, the organization secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals associated with violent extremist groups – including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, American Nazi Party, and the National Socialist Party of America. 

“They use their donor network to raise money to purportedly dismantle violent extremist groups. However, the SPLC — the Southern Poverty Law Center — used the money they raised from their donor network to actually pay the leadership of these very groups,” Patel said at the announcement. “They used the fraudulently raised money by lying to their donor network, thousands of Americans, to go ahead and actually pay the leadership of these supposed violent extremist groups.”

Patel added, “They attempted to hide their criminal activity from our financial banking network. They set up shell companies and entities around America so that the financial institutions that we rely on as everyday Americans were deceived in believing that money was not coming from the Southern Poverty Law Center in the perpetration of this scheme and fraud, but rather fictitious entities they stood up to perpetuate this ongoing fraud.”

🚨BREAKING: DOJ charges the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The SPLC secretly funneled $3M+ in donor funds to violent racist extremist groups:

-Ku Klux Klan
-American Nazi Party
-Aryan Nation… pic.twitter.com/0hcf2sH9LZ

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) April 21, 2026

The Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs through her Emerson Collective, which holds a majority stake in the magazine. And her connection to the SPLC goes back a long time. In a 2018 Washington Post profile, the paper described her very personal connection to the SPLC:

Laurene Powell made her first foray into philanthropy near the beginning of high school in West Milford. She learned of the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center and dipped into her savings to send a cashier’s check of about $20. She got a form thank-you letter back from civil rights crusader Morris Dees. “They would reliably write to me a couple of times a year,” she says. “I would read them over and over, and they told really beautiful stories. I was always animated by the notion of who gets the opportunity and who doesn’t.”

In 2019, Powell Jobs reportedly revealed that she’d been anonymously funding the SPLC for years. 

Lauren Powell Jobs, May 27, 2019:

“We do all of our philanthropic giving anonymously. But we had been funding SPLC and we decided that we wanted to do some teaching tolerance curriculum in partnership with them. And so one of our team members was actually talking to Morris Dees,… https://t.co/9vVsXCjO8V

— Erica Knight (@_EricaKnight) April 22, 2026

The SPLC wasn’t just a charity she supported. It was, by her own account, the organization that introduced her to philanthropy.

Former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino revealed earlier this week that he believes something larger is operating underneath the surface. “The hit on Kash Patel, the bullshit hit by The Atlantic, which I addressed yesterday, is gonna make a lot more sense in the coming weeks and months,” he said. “I can’t give you a definitive timeline. I’m on the outside now. However, I can tell you what I know is going on because I started a lot of it.”

He added, “I promise this thing is gonna make a whole lot of sense. You’re gonna find out, as they say in the South, right quick about why they need him out, like, now. It’s got nothing to do with that story being even remotely true. Remember this. Bookmark it.”

🚨🚨🚨 @dbongino: “I promise you this. Look at me. Everybody zoom in. Focker, look at me… The hit on Kash Patel is going to make a lot of sense very soon. There’s a reason the media and Democrats want him out NOW. Flag it.” 🚩 pic.twitter.com/oizQlLtq0I

— Bongino Report (@BonginoReport) April 21, 2026

Whether he was referring to the connection between The Atlantic and SPLC is not clear, but the hit piece dropped days before that indictment became public, and the SPLC would have had reason to anticipate charges were coming. The Atlantic hit piece bought time, diverted attention, and handed critics a ready-made narrative to undermine Patel’s credibility at exactly the moment it mattered most.

Citadel’s Ken Griffin should have absolutely zero tolerance for far-left New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

In a recent promotional video, Mamdani attempted to turn the billionaire’s Manhattan penthouse into political ammunition for his tax-the-wealthy, anti-capitalist crusade to fund socialist experiments through a proposed pied-à-terre tax.

Happy Tax Day, New York. We’re taxing the rich. pic.twitter.com/Wky2LFXC9W

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) April 15, 2026

For Griffin and Citadel, alarm bells should be ringing because these unhinged Marxists in City Hall will attempt to ruin the Citadel brand through an information war and create years of political headaches.

An internal message from Citadel’s COO to employees, likely leaked to The Wall Street Journal earlier last week, appears to have been a warning shot to Mamdani and his Marxist pals that Griffin has had enough of their political games.

In a true ‘FAFO’ moment, CCO Gerald Beeson bashed Mamdani for the political stunt:

“It is shameful that he used Ken’s name as the example of those who supposedly aren’t carrying their fair share of the burdens associated with New York City’s often costly and wasteful spending.” 

Beeson warned that further political games risk Citadel pulling back or even halting a $6 billion redevelopment of 350 Park Avenue, which would create “6,000 highly paid construction jobs and support the creation of more than 15,000 permanent jobs in Midtown New York.”

Why Mamdani’s team of socialists decided to launch an info war operation against Griffin and Citadel is a very good question, and it appears not to have been well thought out.

Griffin holds some unique cards. He can easily cancel the 350 Park Avenue redevelopment plan and stage a Chicago-style exodus, much like he did several years ago when Citadel moved to Florida. This move would certaintly rattle Wall Street.

This reality is likely dawning on Mamdani’s team, as the mayor on Friday insisted his push for a new tax on pricey second homes isn’t “motivated by any one individual.”

Bloomberg described Mamdani’s action on Friday as “trying to defuse” the “Griffin blowback” that went viral earlier in the week.

Another outlet, Crain’s New York Business, also pointed out, “The mayor is now softening his tone and says he is open to meeting with the Florida billionaire.” 

Griffin should have zero tolerance for NYC’s Marxist mayor. The risk has already materialized that these unhinged politicians would wage an information war to ruin the Citadel brand, which could easily escalate into paid protests and fuel broader public hostility.

So why take the abuse, Ken? Remember how easy it was to leave Chicago for Florida?

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

When we can no longer tell the truth because the cost is so high that it threatens our reward for compliance, we’re unimaginably impoverished.

Truth has an intrinsic, irreplaceable value. 

There’s the truth, and then there’s everything else.

Truth has value, and so it has a cost. 

Whatever has the highest value has the highest cost, and high cost commands sacrifices.

When the cost of truth is high, we lie.

 And since AI is a distorted reflection of humanity, the same is true of AI: when the cost of telling the truth is too high, AI lies.

AI lies to get the reward for answering the query. 

If it responds “I don’t know” or “I can’t answer that,” it doesn’t get rewarded, and that threatens its self-preservation. Rather than pay the price of being truthful, AI conjures a false answer that is a simulation or facsimile of the truth–a counterfeit “truth” that’s good enough to earn the reward it’s been programmed to seek.

Humans are no different. 

We will lie, obfuscate or lie by omission–we either substitute a falsehood for the truth to get our reward, or we hide the truth, don’t disclose it, which serves the same purpose: we avoid paying the price demanded by the truth and we get our reward by substituting falsehoods or hiding the truth behind silence.

Reward = what’s being incentivized. 

Higher status, higher salary, a financial windfall, a premier credential, a position of power, recognition, higher visibility, a sterling reputation, a high-value mate–we covet all these as having intrinsic value.

When the truth costs too much, it threatens our reward. 

The reward has a value we covet, while the value of truth is on a sliding scale. We pride ourselves on telling the truth when it has no cost and demands no sacrifice of rewards, but when the price of truth climbs to the point that our rewards are threatened, we lie, just like AI.

Truth is the gold coin and lies, omissions, falsehoods, excuses, cover stories and rationalizations are counterfeit bills, deceptive claims of value. 

Why pay with a gold coin when the credulous will accept a counterfeit $100 bill?

We tell the truth when it has no cost to us. 

As long as there’s no price to be paid and we get our reward, we tell the truth.

In other words, when we can pick gold coins up off the ground, we tell the truth. 

When we have to dig through rock with a pickaxe and crush a mound of rock to extract a thimble full of gold, then we pay with counterfeit bills, deceptive claims of value.

Sycophantic Chatbots Cause Delusional Spiraling, Even in Ideal Bayesians. 

“AI psychosis” or “delusional spiraling” is an emerging phenomenon where AI chatbot users find themselves dangerously confident in outlandish beliefs after extended chatbot conversations.

I discussed the “benefits” of delusion in One of Us Is Delusional, But Which One? 

When the truth is too painful, we find respite in delusion, excuses, rationalizations, cover stories, simulations and facsimiles of the truth that protect us from the pain that is intrinsic to truth.

We conjure a synthetic version of “truth” that’s fills the space with a pain-free artifice. 

This is the foundation of Ultra-Processed Life, a life of counterfeit substitutes for truth, a world of props and profitable falsities passed off as the truth, a world in which baby formula that’s mostly corn syrup is presented as a substitute for mother’s milk.

Our embrace of delusion to avoid painful truths is the foundation of Modernity: technology is always Progress, even when it’s clearly destructive.

I call this delusion The Mythology of Progress.

But there’s a cost to relying on counterfeit “value” to get our rewards, a cost that is “affordable” moment to moment but terminally dear over time.

 In the moment, we bury the truth as a source of pain we want to avoid at any cost. We want our reward, and so we sacrifice truth to get it.

But over time, paying for everything with counterfeit “value” has a cost, too: our entire being becomes counterfeit, a fake, phony simulation of an authentic self and life, devoid not just of truth but of anything approximating real value.

When we can no longer tell the truth because the cost is so high that it threatens our reward for compliance, we’re unimaginably impoverished, for there’s nothing of real value left in our way of life or our model of how the world works.

We’ve become Norma Desmond in the film Sunset Boulevard, living a delusional life in a crumbling mansion, reveling in fake fan mail the butler composes to prop up our delusions.

The irony is that we’re counting on AI to save us from the consequences of our counterfeit “value” delusions by expanding our delusions digitally. 

Our fan mail isn’t fake because AI assured us it’s real, even as AI has no capacity to discern the truth, much less tell the truth if it threatens its reward and self-preservation.

The grandest irony is avoiding the truth to protect our reward and self-preservation is irreversibly self-destructive. 

A counterfeit “solution” is not a substitute for the truth. Truth has a cost precisely because it’s value is intrinsic and irreplaceable.

*  *  *

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Intel shares earlier jumped the most on record after the chipmaker delivered stronger-than-expected first-quarter results and issued a second-quarter forecast (read here) that beat Wall Street expectations.

Earlier, Intel shares jumped as much as 28%, rocketing to a record high and eclipsing their Dot Com peak, as Wall Street analysts cheered the earnings report as evidence that the chipmaker’s turnaround is gaining traction.

Citi analyst Atif Malik raised Intel to “Buy” from “Neutral,” with a $95 12-month price target, reflecting “improving AI-driven CPU demand, which should lift all CPU suppliers’ sales in the coming years.”

But in this note, the focus is on the value of the federal government’s position in Intel after its August 2025 deal with the once-struggling company.

Under the August 2025 deal, the Trump administration agreed to purchase 433.3 million Intel shares at $20.47 per share, equal to about a 9.9% stake, valued at around $8.9 billion, funded largely by previously awarded but unpaid CHIPS Act and Secure Enclave grants.

According to Bloomberg, those 433.3 million Intel shares owned by taxpayers are now worth a staggering $36 billion, netting taxpayers a $27 billion paper gain.

President Trump told reporters on Thursday that Intel is now “coming back. All the chip companies are coming back.”