🗡️ Sword of Power – February 25 2025

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Happy Tuesday.

The Philadelphia Eagles did not visit the White House after their 2018 win because the Trump presidency was a social liability at the time. This year, the team says that they would very much like to visit in the wake of their most recent win if the White House will please extend an invitation. How times have changed!

Photo credit: AP

In Case You Missed It. 

🎭 The GOP House Oversight committee says that the first hearing on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy will happen in March 26. This feels like theater to me. We don't need this curated through Congressional hearings. Just release it.

🕊️ Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent who leaped onto the back of President John F. Kennedy’s limousine after the president was shot, died at the age of 93.

🏳️‍🌈 Workers at the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall in the U.K. are facing layoffs after the Trump administration froze USAID funding. U.S. taxpayer money was being funneled through Stonewall to fund transgender programs in Georgia, Romania and Bulgaria.

⚖️ A judge ruled that the White House does not have to allow the Associated Press into the White House briefing room.

🇮🇱 Israeli says that 40,000 Palestinians in the West Bank cannot return to their homes now that the IDF has moved in.

🇷🇺 Russia says that it is willing to work with the U.S. to secure the rights to rare earth minerals in what was Eastern Ukraine but is now a part of Russia.

🇨🇦 Canadians have begun a petition to revoke Elon Musk's Canadian citizenship.

📺 The full live replay of last night's Redacted can be found right here

MARKETS

Gold

$2,934.88

Silver

$32.14

Bitcoin

$89,883.87

Dow

43,461.21

S&P

5,983.25

Nasdaq

19,286.93

*Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 5:00pm AM. 

 

The Lead: Europe's War Drum

credit: Ukrainian Presidency/dpa

What's that about how the people of Ukraine stand with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky? Ukrainian parliament doesn't.

On Monday, a resolution to reaffirm the legitimacy of Zelensky's Presidency failed to pass.

This was a stunt of Zelensky's own making. It was designed to show the world that the country supports Zelensky but 54 members of parliament abstained from voting, including 38 representatives from Zelensky's Servant of the People party.

Now that's embarrassing.

Europe is divided over how to keep the war going. The U.K. is all in, claiming that the British Army is "absolutely read" to deploy to Ukraine. French President Macron visited the White House on Monday, signaling that he was going to convince President Trump not to negotiate a peace with Russia. No such thing happened. President Macron sat next to President Trump for hours while Trump continued to lay out his plan for making peace and diplomacy with Russian President Putin and Macron did not say boo. He nodded and smiled and acquiesced to President Trump with this post, saying that France wants "to build a solid and long-standing peace. The USA and France will always stand on the same side of history."

Mission not accomplished if he was there to convince Trump for more war in Ukraine. Keir Starmer, you're up. See if you can do any different.

National Security Emergency

Photo credit: Reuters

Federal employees may become a liability on their way out, according to many reports.

Journalist Michael Shellenberger reports this: "FBI whistleblower Garret O'Boyle confirmed to me that a source inside FBI said FBI employees were destroying evidence on servers, and that he informed [new FBI director] Kash Patel."

Now CNN reports that people who are disgruntled about federal workforce layoffs and buyouts might sell the entire country down the river. They say that on the CIA's 7th floor, a "group of disgruntled former employees… might be motivated to take what they know to a foreign intelligence service."

Is this foreign intel or public interest information that belongs to the American people? Could it be more damning than what Wikileaks has already published? Can the Trump administration play a successful game of Whack-a-mole to shore this up before it puts us all at risk? And maybe the information should have been locked down BEFORE the mass layoffs?

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Perverts on Federal Chat Groups

Photo Credit: City Journal

The National Security Agency had secret pervert chats that were hot and heavy during the Biden administration. This was exposed by investigative journalists Christopher F. Rufo and Hannah Grossman on Monday.

The journalists "obtained logs from the NSA’s secret transgender sex chatroom, in which NSA, CIA, and DIA employees discuss [brace yourself] genital castration, artificial vaginas, piss fetishes, sex polycules, and gangbangs—all on government time." The chats date from 2022.

"According to our sources, the sex chats were legitimized as part of the NSA’s commitment to 'diversity, equity and inclusion.' Activists within the agency used LGBTQ+ 'employee resource groups' to turn their kinks and pathologies into official work duties. According to the current NSA employee, these groups 'spent all day' recruiting activists and holding meetings with titles such as 'Privilege,' 'Ally Awareness,' 'Pride,' and 'Transgender Community Inclusion.' And they did so with the full support of NSA leadership, which declared that DEI was “not only mission critical, but mission imperative. In this case, 'diversity' was not a byword for racialism, but rather a euphemism for sex talk."

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard confirmed that this did happen. She said this: "This behavior is unacceptable and those involved WILL be held accountable. These disgusting chat groups were immediately shut down when @POTUS issued his EO ending the DEI insanity the Biden Admin was obsessed with. Our IC must be focused on our core mission: ensuring the safety, security, and freedom of the American people."

What's Trending?

credit: Nicholas Galitzine

Nicholas Galitzine is trending because he announced that he has been in "intense training" to play He-Man Masters Of The Universe. You can't zoom out on the image. I tried.

Lester Holt is trending because he announced that he is stepping down as the anchor of NBC Nightly News.

Moon Knight is trending because Marvel TV executives said that the character will return but not in a second season of the hit show.

News By The Numbers

credit: Apple

$500 billion. That is how much Apple says that the company will be investing to ramp up manufacturing in the U.S. They say they want to expand their offices in Michigan, Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, Iowa, Oregon, North Carolina, and Washington and plan a new factory in Texas.

33%. That is how many people with a bachelor's degree or higher say that they have at least 6 close friends, while 10% of them say that they have no friends at all and research shows that friendlessness is declining.

Two. That is how many English bulldog puppies were stolen from a pet store in Colorado after one of them created a distraction by faking a seizure. One of the thieves was arrested but the other and the puppies have not yet been found.

Homeless Industrial Complext

Photo credit: Getty Images

California announced an expensive new way to combat homelessness: throw more money into the Homeless Industrial Complex.

Governor Newsom announced a new $920 million initiative to track homelessness on a new website, accountability.ca.gov. He says that it will help Californians "quickly assess how their local government is tackling the homelessness and affordable housing crisis." He continued: "As California continues to support local officials working to fix this issue, make no mistake — we expect results, not excuses."

The website will not address the root cause of homelessness: drug addiction and a mental health crisis. Instead, it measures how many homes are built for the homeless and how many people are employed in the industry in each county.

When journalist Michael Shellenberger studied homelessness in California in his groundbreaking book San Fransicko, he found that providing homes for the homeless only lead to them dying faster because the state refuses to rehabilitate their drug addictions. He also found that California employs many governmental programs to combat homelessness but they don't work with law enforcement and they don't even work together. It is a lucrative industrial complex. Newsom can't be serious about attacking this if he thinks a website that will count out free housing is the answer.

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This newsletter is written and researched by Natali Morris.
Please feel free to reach Natali at [email protected]
for any editorial feedback.