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Goldman Sits Down With Anduril As ‘War Unicorns’ Reshape Defense Tech

Palmer Luckey’s defense startup, Anduril, is emerging as the Department of War’s answer to the urgent need for affordable, scalable advanced weaponry produced at lightning speed, rather than through the slow, over-budget procurement cycles that have long defined the legacy primes.

The twin conflicts raging across Eurasia and the Middle East, from the Russia-Ukraine war to the U.S.-Iran war, have forever altered modern warfare, with drones, seaborne drones, ground robots, and AI kill chains now reshaping the battlefield.

The quick rise of Anduril, something we call a “war unicorn,” has attracted the attention of Goldman analysts, who recently felt compelled to sit down with Anduril executives to better understand the story and how it will play a major role in the next phase of rebuilding America’s defense-industrial base.

Analyst Noah Poponak recently hosted Anduril co-founder and CEO Brian Schimpf and head of investor relations Allison Lazarus in New York to gain more color on how the defense company is solving the defense industry’s biggest bottleneck, speed.

Oculus headset creator Palmer Luckey, who founded the company in 2017, has focused on building lower-cost, scalable systems in categories such as drones, counter-UAS, and missiles, positioning itself against a legacy defense-industrial base that includes Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and many others.

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DOJ investigating fmr Rep. George Santos under suspicion of insider trading on Kalshi

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is reportedly investigating former New York GOP Representative George Santos after a prediction market website reported him to federal authorities for suspected market manipulation.

Santos is accused of using the popular prediction/betting platform, Kalshi, to engage in some form of insider trading ahead of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union (SOTU) address on February 24th this year. 

The day before, he notably posted a video to X in relation to the SOTU.

At the time, Kalshi users had already placed millions of dollars worth of wagers on potential high-profile attendees at the SOTU.

While contracts predicting Santos’ attendance opened at 16 cents in January and hovered around 33 cents the day before the event, his posted X video sent prices soaring to 76 cents around 10:00 a.m. ET on the morning of the address.

However, the former congressman failed to show up.

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California’s ‘Wealth’ Tax Is Coming For Everyone

If you own property in California, you’re not safe. A new ballot measure will empower the state to confiscate a percentage of the assets of any resident, even though its initial provisions don’t communicate that intent. California’s “One-Time Wealth Tax for State-Funded Healthcare, Education, and Food Assistance Programs Initiative,” which has already qualified for the November ballot, is even worse than it appears.

It’s not as if appearances aren’t bad enough. The explicit intent of the initiative already chased at least six billionaires out of the state in 2025. Moved to Florida are Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, along with PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Nevada is now home to billionaire Don Hankey, and Texas has welcomed former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Famed director Steven Spielberg has moved to New York, apparently concluding even that deep blue state is a safer bet than California. Just the departure of these six men has lowered the potential take from the wealth tax by an estimated $27 billion.

A Hoover Institution study claims that another 20 California billionaires have already made departure plans and will leave immediately if the initiative is approved by voters. One of the initiative’s many diabolical provisions is that it will apply retroactively to anyone living in the state after January 1, 2026, but unlike the six who got out in 2025, this next tranche of would-be exiles have been advised by their attorneys that the initiative’s retroactivity will not survive a constitutional challenge.

Other details of this initiative are likely to survive court challenges, and they reveal a stunning level of aggression toward wealth. If you live in California, and this bill is approved by voters, you will have to pay a “one-time” tax of 5 percent of your “covered assets” valued over $1 billion. “Covered assets” include unrealized gains in the value of stock owned by employees of private companies. It is unlikely the framers of this initiative didn’t understand the implications of this provision. Valuations of private companies are subjective, volatile, and illiquid. An employee with stock options valued at a few billion in the last private equity round could be assessed tens of millions of dollars in wealth tax on money they don’t actually have access to, based on a value that could plummet at any moment.

It gets worse. The language of the wealth act provides for what amounts to unrestricted escalation of its reach, something that will surely become necessary when high earners are driven away, taking their taxable assets with them. Built into the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act is the right of the state legislature to amend its provisions with a two-thirds vote. That would include lowering the $1 billion threshold, replacing “one-time” with an annual assessment, and eliminating the exemptions currently present for real estate and retirement accounts. The wording of this initiative is purposely designed to give the state legislature the authority to override the property tax protections afforded by Proposition 13, passed by voters in 1978 and one of the only obstacles left that prevents the state from stripping the state’s middle class of assets they’ve earned and stewarded over generations.

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Rubio Mocks Screeching Democrat Rep. as She Storms Out of Hearing

Democrats spent Wednesday morning shouting at Secretary of State Marco Rubio during a hearing over the State Department’s budget.

Marco Rubio’s testimony to the House committee on Wednesday comes just one day after he had back-to-back hearings on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

Rubio testified before the House Foreign Relations Committee about the Trump Administration’s 2027 budget.

Democrat Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove shouted at Rubio about his role in shutting down USAID abuses.

“And giving contracts with no transparency is exactly the reason why you shut down USAID! So practice what you preach!” Rep. Kamlager-Dove shouted.

“Can I answer? Oh, she gets to scream now, too?” Rubio said.

“What kind of thing is this? What is this? You get asked questions for 5 minutes, and you don’t get time to answer? It’s not a hearing! What is this?” Rubio said.

Democrat Rep. Kamlager-Dove then stormed out of the hearing.

“Why is she leaving? I’m gonna answer her questions!” Rubio said, pointing to Rep. Kamlager-Dove.

The Democrat shouted at Rubio as she stormed out.

“Well, thank you for coming,” Rubio said.

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ICE Nabs Violent Criminal Illegal Alien After Sanctuary Chicago Authorities Set Him Free

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Chicago arrested Luis Manuel Saucedo-Cardenas. The violent illegal alien felon and suspected former gang member was intentionally released by the Chicago Police Department. The troubling occurrence is repeating itself in multiple sanctuary jurisdictions across the country.

According to ICE, Saucedo-Cardenas, a 40-year-old criminal illegal alien from Mexico, has an extensive rap sheet that includes multiple arrests for assault, carjacking, controlled substance violations, and a prison stint for wire fraud. Saucedo-Cardenas, according to authorities, is a former member of the La Raza street gang. The gang primarily operates in the Chicago area but has been found operating in small numbers engaging in criminal enterprises in Florida, Georgia, and several parts of the western United States.

ICE previously removed Saucedo-Cardenas from the United States in 2022. According to ICE, a federal criminal arrest warrant was obtained for illegal re-entry into the United States for Saucedo-Cardenas and was confirmed by the Chicago Police Department, which had the criminal illegal alien in their custody at the time. Despite confirming their awareness of the existing warrant of arrest on May 1, ICE says the Chicago Police Department refused to transfer custody of Saucedo-Cardenas to ICE Chicago despite multiple requests.

According to ICE, operating under sanctuary policies enacted by politicians, the violent repeat offender was released back onto the streets of Chicago. Expressing frustration at the lack of cooperation with ICE by Chicago law enforcement authorities, ICE Chicago Acting Field Office Director Tammy Marich said, “The Chicago Police Department knowingly jeopardized the public’s safety by releasing a dangerous suspect with a federal criminal arrest warrant. Politics aside, there is no excuse for sanctuary politicians to threaten the well-being of the communities they purport to serve.”

According to ICE, the safest way to arrest criminal illegal aliens starts with lodging immigration detainers against them. An immigration detainer is a request from ICE that asks other law enforcement agencies, including jails, prisons, or other detention facilities, to notify ICE as early as possible before releasing a removable alien, or to hold the individual for up to 48 hours beyond normal release time so DHS may assume custody in accordance with federal immigration law.

The Chicago Police Department has a long history of failing to honor the detainers or to cooperate with ICE when an illegal alien is arrested for a suspected criminal act within the sanctuary city. The lack of cooperation can have devastating impacts on residents when offenders are released back into the community. As reported by Breitbart News’s John Binder, Jose Medina-Medina, a 25-year-old illegal alien from Venezuela, was arrested by the Chicago Police Department and charged with murdering Sheridan Gorman, an 18-year-old freshman at Loyola University, in a random attack on a pier at Tobey Prinz Beach on March 19.

Records show Medina-Medina was arrested after crossing the southwest border in 2023 and released to pursue asylum shortly afterward. Within months of arriving in Chicago, Medina-Medina was arrested by Chicago authorities and charged with shoplifting. Under Chicago and the state of Illinois sanctuary policies, Medina-Medina was set free by authorities rather than being turned over to ICE officials for removal proceedings.

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DOJ Sought YouTube Subscriber Data

Federal prosecutors went looking for the personal details of everyone who subscribed to three YouTube channels and a judge refused to let them.

Newly unsealed court records from the Justice Department’s prosecution of people who disrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota show the government reaching for subscriber data that had little to do with the conduct it was investigating.

We obtained a copy of the warrant application for you here.

Journalists and commentators Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were charged as part of the disruption, though both allege they were there as reporters rather than participants.

On February 24, prosecutors filed five search warrants. Three of them asked YouTube to turn over the names, mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and IP addresses for every subscriber to channels run by Lemon, Fort, and activist William Kelly, whose channel goes by DaWoke Farmer.

The applications, sworn out by Homeland Security Investigations agent Timothy Gerber, went beyond the journalists and activists running the channels. They swept toward the audience, the ordinary people whose only link to the case was having clicked the channels’ subscribe button.

Magistrate Judge John Docherty rejected all five, several of them for lack of probable cause. On the warrant aimed at Kelly’s channel, Docherty pointed to a video that “appears to be paradigmatic political speech protected by the First Amendment.” A demand that treats a list of viewers as evidence turns watching journalism or activism into a reason to be identified by the state, which is a steep price for pressing play on a livestream.

Prosecutors tried again on March 6, refiling four warrants, including the three tied to Lemon, Fort, and Kelly. This time they cut the request down to the channel owners themselves, dropping the demand for subscriber rosters and asking only for the same categories of identifying data on the three named people.

What’s interesting here is that the government already treats the list of people who subscribe to a YouTube channel as something it can ask a court to hand over.

Picture that same demand landing in a world where every account is welded to a verified government identity. That world is being built right now.

The numbers tell part of the story. By late 2025, half of US states required people to prove their age before viewing some content, with nine states enacting such laws in 2025 alone. The movement started in Louisiana in 2022 as a single-state experiment and turned into a coordinated national push.

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HORROR: Young Husband and Father to Four Children Beaten to Death by Man Released From Jail for Similar Assault

A young husband and father to four children was brutally beaten to death by a man who was just released from jail.

Dylan Plouff, 34, was working as a security guard in Milwaukee when he confronted a man who was trying to break into cars on May 18.

The suspect, 32-year-old Daniel Mcrae, brutally beat Plouff.

Mcrae was released from jail on May 12 without any charges for a similar assault. During the May 12 arrest, Mcrae injured an officer.

Six days later, Mcrae fatally beat Plouff.

Plouff died on June 2 from his injuries.

TMJ4 reported:

The 34-year-old man who was assaulted at the MacArthur Square garage in May has died, according to Milwaukee police.

His family tells TMJ4 that he was working as a security guard when police say he was allegedly assaulted after he “encountered” a 32-year-old man who was trying to enter cars in the garage in the early morning hours of Monday, May 18.

The man then allegedly assaulted the 34-year-old, identified by his family as Dylan Plouff, who was taken to a hospital. Police later confirmed to TMJ4 on June 3 that he had since died, but said his cause of death has not been determined.

The 32-year-old man accused of assaulting Plouff was arrested, and criminal charges were referred to the Milwaukee County district attorney’s office, which confirmed to TMJ4 that the case was referred to them but said it is “still pending investigation at this time.”

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Are Unions And Public Schools Violating Election Laws/Ethics?

The Easton Gazette received an email regarding the political activities of the Worcester County Public Schools. The email included this letter from a resident of the county.

The letter alleges that the school placed or allowed campaign material connected to a candidate for county commissioner to be placed into teachers’ school mailboxes within Worcester County Public Schools. The materials allegedly urge teachers to support certain candidates including this candidate and others and also have instructions for changing party affiliation.

As the letter states, this action could possibly pressure public school employees to feel that they must support a candidate who was once a system employee. Also, public schools, along with other public institutions, are supposed to remain politically neutral. Certainly, public materials and time should not be spent on political campaigns. One of the documents references a “building rep” which most likely refers to a “union” rep.

Again, these are allegations. However, they do bring up some important questions.

What is the law in Maryland regarding using school communications to promote candidates?

Maryland law prohibits teachers’ unions and any other group from using public school communication systems to promote or oppose political candidates, because doing so constitutes political activity using government resources, which is barred under both state ethics rules as well as federal tax rules for labor organizations such as teacher’s unions

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Graham ‘Nazi Tattoo’ Platner Goes Into Hiding From the Media As His Campaign and Poll Numbers Implode

Graham Platner, the Democratic Socialist (communist) who is running for U.S. Senate in Maine, has gone into hiding from the mainstream media as scandals tank his campaign and his poll numbers.

Platner reportedly met with Senate Democrats this week, who wanted to know if another shoe was going to drop on him and his campaign. Most people believe that the worst is yet to come.

He is already dealing with fallout from having an actual Nazi tattoo for 20 years, countless hateful comments on Reddit about women, black people, gay people, and rape victims. It’s hard to imagine how things could get worse for him.

Is there any wonder why he’s hiding from the press?

FOX News reports:

Graham Platner avoids mainstream press as scandals surrounding Maine Democrat grows

Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner has been largely avoiding the press in the wake of his most recent scandal.

The presumptive Democratic nominee came under controversy over the weekend after reports revealed that Platner had sent explicit messages to at least six women while he was married. In the days following the reports’ release, Platner has continued to make public appearances at rallies but has stopped speaking to mainstream news outlets.

In a newsletter on Monday, News of the United States (NOTUS) reported that Platner had dropped out of a rescheduled phone interview on Sunday after the initial story broke on Saturday.

“It’s been hard to pin down Platner over the past few days. Igor [Bobic] was supposed to interview him Thursday in Maine, but Platner’s team said he didn’t have time. Platner’s staff then offered Igor some time to speak with him by phone on Sunday, but after the story broke Saturday, the interview was canceled again,” NOTUS reported.

The Maine Wire, a conservative local news outlet, also shared video on Sunday of Platner’s staff blocking reporters from speaking with the Maine Democrat as he left a rally.

People know this is not a winning campaign.

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Cardinal McElroy removes exorcist for saying demons disguise themselves as aliens

Cardinal Robert McElroy removed Monsignor Stephen Rossetti as an exorcist of the Archdiocese of Washington after the renowned priest said that he believes demons can disguise themselves as aliens or UFOs.

A press release from the archdiocese adds that McElroy, who is well-known for his heterodoxy on homosexuality and other issues, has “ended all affiliation” between the archdiocese and Monsignor Rossetti’s Saint Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal (SMC) in Washington, D.C.

“Cardinal McElroy said that statements made by Monsignor Rossetti linking UFOs to demonic presence and the Center’s recent use of social media gravely undermine the Church’s very precise teaching on the devil, demons and exorcism,” according to the press release.

Monsignor Rossetti responded to Cardinal McElroy’s action by apologizing for “any ways that I have not been faithful to the teachings of the Church’s Magisterium” but did not explicitly repent for anything specific that he mentioned in the video. He noted that the SMC “plans to continue its ministry elsewhere”:

I am saddened by the decision of the Archdiocese of Washington to cut its affiliation with St. Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal (SMC). I ask forgiveness for any ways that I have not been faithful to the teachings of the Church’s Magisterium, particularly in the cited video on “aliens and the demonic”.

I believe it is of the utmost importance to be obedient to the Church and I will continue to endeavor to subject all that I do and the Center to be thus obedient.

Also, I will continue to encourage all to do so as well. As I often say: “Stay in the Boat!”, that is, stay in the barque of Peter, it will lead you safely home.

I am grateful for 19 years of ministering in the Archdiocese of Washington as its exorcist and I thank the Archdiocese for its support and blessing all these years. We will remember the Cardinal and all in ADW in our prayers for its important ministry. SMC plans to continue its ministry elsewhere.

The video that McElroy referred to, published on YouTube on Monday, has now been deleted. It was made in response to a surge of interest in the topic after the Trump administration’s recent release of files documenting alleged observations of UFOs.

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