June 3, 2026

BESSENT IN BEAST MODE:

More:

The administration is moving enforcement from geography into transaction permission. The question becomes less “who crossed the border?” and more “who is allowed to operate inside the financial system?”

That is a much more powerful enforcement layer.

A person can avoid a checkpoint. A person can move cities. A person can use sympathetic local systems. A person can live in a sanctuary jurisdiction. But modern life requires payments, bank access, cards, transfers, payroll, rent, app-based services, benefits, and digital identity.

Once access to those rails becomes conditional on legal status, the border follows the person everywhere.

That is the phase shift.

Read the whole thing.

Previously: IS BESSENT KILLING CHINA’S CURRENCY?

Posted at 3:03 pm by Stephen Green

CHRISTIAN TOTO: How Taylor Swift Could Save Freedom 250 Concert.

Quick, who have benefited from the U.S. more than Taylor Swift?

Tough question, right?

America has delivered endless dreams to hard-working patriots, immigrants seeking a brighter future and those who never stopped reaching for their stars.

And then there’s Swift. She’s the biggest pop star on the planet, a 30-something artist who has taken full advantage of the freedom and opportunity America offers. To her credit, she’s made the most of every chance her country gave her.

Now, it’s time to return the favor, but it won’t be easy.

It wasn’t easy becoming one of the world’s biggest pop stars, either.

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green

FACE, MEET PALM:

Immigration detention facilities, what are they for?

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

OLD AND BUSTED: Gambling Going On in Rick’s Café.

The New Hotness? Ron Wydon’s son investing in Rick’s Cabaret!

‘Most Corrupt Regime in American History!’ Scott Bessent Fires Off Epstein Accusation in Wild Hearing Brawl.

“I had hoped to keep this in terms of the economy — Senator Wyden has mendaciously slandered the Treasury building in an attempt to cover up his son having an investment meeting with Jeffrey Epstein to ask for funding,” Bessent said.

Recently-unsealed DOJ documents showed that Wyden’s son, Adam Wyden, met Epstein through a mutual fund and later sought to pitch him an investment opportunity.

“I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and hope my passion and dedication for my business came through in the meeting,” Adam Wyden told Epstein in a 2016 email.

“Let’s be clear here. Nobody is interested in the ramblings of a capo in the most corrupt regime in American history. We want to get some facts about this deal. That’s what we’re here for,” Sen. Wyden shot back at Bessent.

“And we would like to hear what Adam Wyden and Jeffrey Epstein talked about. Your son’s largest investment position was Rick’s Cabaret. So did your son and Jeffrey Epstein talk about pole dancing as he begged him for money using your limited credibility?” Bessent threw back.

From Forbes in 2021: How This Democratic Senator’s Son Made $100 Million In Stocks And Why He Fled To Low Tax Florida.

[Adam] Wyden is no shrinking violet when it comes to making big bets. His fund is the single largest shareholder in Houston’s RCI Hospitality, operator of over 40 gentlemen’s clubs and parent company of Rick’s Cabaret. Wyden built his 10% position beginning in late April 2020, when the coronavirus led investors to believe that in a world of masks and social distancing, a company built on drunken bachelor parties and lap dances was toast. But Wyden reckoned that as the pandemic ebbed there would be pent-up demand for RCI’s clubs, many located in Florida and Texas, and that they would reopen fast. Another plus: It’s exceedingly difficult to obtain a strip club license, meaning the company has a deep moat around its business.

And from the New York Post this past April: Ron Wyden’s son had business meeting with Epstein.

Democrat Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon has bashed the Trump administration over its handling of Epstein files, but documents released last month reveal his own son arranged a business meeting with the convicted pedo.

Seven years after Epstein was released from a Florida prison after pleading guilty to solicitation of prostitution from a minor, Adam Wyden, who founded his own private investment fund, ADW Capital, in 2010, was introduced to the disgraced financier through mutual friend Jonathan Farkas.

“Adam my friend jeffery Epstein who manages 5 billion said to call his office he wants to see your record and would consider investing with you,” Farkas wrote on April 27, 2016.

A message from a redacted email address also helped arrange the meeting, according to a trove of emails released by the Justice Department.

The men decided to huddle the following day at Epstein’s Upper East Side townhouse at 10 a.m., according to the documents.

Wyden gushed in a follow-up message to Epstein after the meeting about his “passion and dedication for my business” while seeking to reel him in as a client.

He also called them “like minded individuals” and said he ‘would very much look forward to having you join us at the fund.” There are no indications Wyden knew about any illegal Epstein activity or that Epstein became a client.

When contacted by The Post, Adam Wyden, 41, said, “No comment — I’m not interested,” and hung up.

As Leon Trotsky never said, you may not be interested in Rick’s Cabaret, but Rick’s Cabaret is interested in you.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE: How China’s wealthy sidestep strict rules to get money out of the country.

China’s capital controls remain among the world’s strictest. Individuals are generally limited to transferring US$50,000 overseas each year, while emigrants are given a one-time opportunity to move their assets abroad.

Concerns about China’s economic outlook and a drive by President Xi Jinping to reduce inequality have prompted many wealthy families to seek a financial foothold overseas. Households, institutions and companies moved a record US$807 billion, roughly, out of the country last year, according to estimates from the Institute of International Finance.

But demand for overseas assets, as well as the rapid accumulation of private wealth, has fuelled a vast underground industry dedicated to circumventing capital controls. While the true scale of illicit capital flight is impossible to quantify, court records, regulatory disclosures and interviews with industry participants point to sprawling networks that move billions of US dollars offshore each year.

This has drawn increasing scrutiny from authorities. China’s latest crackdown on overseas brokers accused of helping mainland clients trade offshore is the latest sign that regulators are intensifying efforts to monitor cross-border capital and ensure tax compliance on such money flows.

Here are some of the most common ways mainlanders circumvent the government’s strict rules to get money out of China.

Money, to borrow a phrase, finds a way.

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

SO MUCH WISDOM IN THIS COLUMN: No, it’s not one of mine. It’s Substack’s Virgil Walker and his point applies to all of us equally – be careful who or what you make your god.

Posted at 1:24 pm by Mark Tapscott

‘WHAT A COOL PIC:’ Totenkopf-Tattooed Graham Platner Admired ‘German Helmets’ in WW2 Photo of Nazi-Allied Troops, Deleted Post Shows.

Maine’s embattled Democratic Senate candidate, Graham Platner, praised a “cool pic” of Nazi-aligned troops aiming a rifle during World War II, zeroing in on their “German helmets” and weapon, in a now-deleted social media post, the Washington Free Beacon can reveal.

It’s not the first time Platner has shown enthusiasm for Nazi iconography. He notoriously had a chest tattoo of an SS “Totenkopf,” the skull and crossbones symbol worn by SS officers who manned the Nazi concentration camps.

In April 2019 a Reddit user shared an image of “Swedish Volunteer Battalion in a trench during The Continuation War, 1941.”

The image showed soldiers in German helmets during the conflict, pointing a Browning Automatic Rifle at the enemy over a defensive trench. A soldier gesturing to an enormous dog—which appears to be an Alsatian or German shepherd—dominates the foreground.

In a comment from his now-deleted Reddit account P-Hustle, Platner offered this response:

“German helmets and a [Browning Automatic Rifle]. What a cool pic.”

As John Levine of the Washington Free Beacon adds in a tweet, “If NOTHING else — this post shows that Platner is a deep in the weeds WWII military history nerd, making it especially unlikely he wouldn’t know what a Totenkopf was.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

REQUIRED READING:

This bit stands out: “F-37, a member of the leadership chat for the Charlottesville rally in 2017, made racist posts under an SPLC employee’s supervision and arranged transport for others to attend the rally. SPLC paid this person $300K.”

Posted at 12:59 pm by Stephen Green

YUCK: Microsoft Devs Hate Eating Own AI Slop Dog Food. “There’s a phrase in enterprise software: ‘Eat your own dog food.’ It means you should be using the software you’re developing internally, because you find bugs more quickly that way.Evidently Microsoft developers prefer the taste of Anthropic’s Claude over their own Copilot AI slop.”

Posted at 12:44 pm by Stephen Green

PLATNER WILL CONTINUE DEMOCRATS’ LONG TRADITION OF EXCELLENCE IN THE US SENATE, SHOULD HE SUCCESSFULLY CONCLUDE HIS KAMPF:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHARLES COOKE: Scott Pelley Is Ridiculous in All the Usual Ways.

Here’s Scott Pelley, formerly of CBS’s 60 Minutes, complaining about being fired for cause:

“I have been in combat in Afghanistan. I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast.”

Where to start? First off, if Pelley cared about his job that much, he probably shouldn’t have behaved as unprofessionally as he did when he met his new boss, Nick Bilton. As the Washington Post reports, “Pelley laid into Bilton during a Monday morning ’60 Minutes’ meeting, when he questioned Bilton’s qualifications” in front of a host of other staff. During that meeting, Pelley also insisted that Bari Weiss, his other boss, “has no qualifications for her job,” and, later, when Bilton organized a private meeting, Pelley continued in the same vein. In his letter firing Pelley, Bilton wrote that Pelley had:

rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility — enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation — demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show.

Which . . . well, yeah. There is simply no circumstance in which an employee can behave like this and expect to remain employed. A lot of journalists in this country seem to believe that they belong to an elect class to which the normal rules do not apply. They do not. Journalists are protected by the First Amendment, yes, but they are not more protected than anyone else, and nor do those protections afford them the right to behave like jerks in the workplace. CBS is a private company. It is not, at root, any different than Unilever or Ford or Home Depot. Scott Pelley attacked his boss in public and private. Scott Pelley was fired. Film at 11.

“The film at 11” reference is a nice touch – Pelley, and those on the left vigorously defending him, are acting exactly like they did when they defended NPR and PBS last year when Trump cut its government funding. As Iowahawk joked:

Paddy Chafesky’s Network was a brilliant satire of how those in a network television newsroom thought and behaved in the mid-1970s, the last era of three terrestrial commercial television networks. Why do the men and women who inhabit those spaces a half century later still pretend that they have an absolute monopoly on information?

Or as John Nolte writes: Bari Weiss Accused of Killing ’60 Minutes’ After Pelley Firing (Let’s Hope So).

Normal People are surely not gullible to give 60 Minutes a second chance. We all know that the corporate media is an institution too insulated to reform because it has been infested with leftists more concerned with status than truth.

Still, we owe Scott Pelley a huge thank you for once again exposing the elite media for who they are: narcissistic prima donnas unwilling to reform, opposed to any kind of change, and laughably incapable of understanding that their sense of self-importance is a check they can’t cash.

Nolte concludes:

When’s the last time you gave any of these former media elitists a thought: Ryan Lizza, Eugene Robinson, Lester Holt, Alex Wagner, Andrea Mitchell, Jennifer Rubin, Matthew Dowd, Philip Bump, Terry Moran…?

They all vanished into the ether of Substackian irrelevance to talk to one another….

And it is glorious.

But could someone who makes Ted Baxter appear to be a well-grounded font of humility even function in Substack-land?

 

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll