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Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick bragged this spring that he had already raked in $5 billion for the Trump administration’s new “Gold Card” program, a $5 million fast-track for green cards and citizenship for wealthy migrants.

On March 20, Lutnick told the All In podcast he had sold 1,000 Gold Cards in a single day — March 19 — an eye-popping claim that, if true, would make it the most lucrative day in U.S. immigration history.

 

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But seven months later, no one can find the money. The Treasury Department tells Migrant Insider that the money has never been deposited. Trump’s September executive order requires all Gold Card application fees, previously handled as discretionary “gifts” to Commerce, to be deposited into the Treasury.

Investor visa attorneys and offshore wealth managers doubt Lutnick ever moved that many cards. “A thousand in one day? It’s never happened before, not even close,” one told Migrant Insider on condition of anonymity.

 

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The Gold Card, which exists as a direct compteitor to the EB-5 investor visa, is already under legal challenge and economic scrutiny. At $5 million a slot, experts question whether the market is deep enough to support Lutnick’s boast.

That leaves a simple question hanging over the administration: Where is the $5 billion Lutnick promised?

 

  • Rage+1 3
Posted
3 minutes ago, Gap03 said:

Bro is putting out some real Hitler vibes from 1:10 on ...

I was thinking about this the other day. If we fast forward a few years, I could see him being the one that rises to be hitler 2.0. Trump is too old and unhinged. 

Posted
2 minutes ago, SubliminalHorn said:

I was thinking about this the other day. If we fast forward a few years, I could see him being the one that rises to be hitler 2.0. Trump is too old and unhinged. 

that is 100% his ambition so we should expect him to try

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Posted

This is a fascinating, if long, Wired article about Peter Thiel and the philosophical beliefs behind everything he does. It goes into his background with Vance and touches on his reasons for investing in Facebook, and all that eventually converges to provide a ton of insight into his political leanings.

The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel's Antichrist Obsession

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You know you live in strange times when one of the most influential billionaires in the world—an investor who lit the financial fuses on both Facebook and the AI revolution, who cofounded PayPal and Palantir and launched the career of an American vice president—starts dedicating his public appearances primarily to a set of ideas about Armageddon borrowed heavily from a Nazi jurist. (As in: the guy who rapidly published the most prominent defense of Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives.)

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Girard’s core insight, Palaver would learn, is that all humans are imitators, beginning with their wants. “Once their natural needs are satisfied, humans desire intensely,” Girard wrote, “but they don’t know exactly what they desire.” So people mimic the aspirations of their most impressive neighbors—“thus ensuring for themselves lives of perpetual strife and rivalry with those they simultaneously hate and admire.”

According to Girard, this “mimesis”—this relentless copying—builds as it ricochets across relationships. In groups, everyone starts to look alike as they converge on a few models, ape the same desires, and furiously compete for the same objects. And the only reason this “mimetic rivalry” ever fails to break out into omnidirectional warfare is that, at some point, it tends to get channeled into a war of all against one. Via something Girard called the “scapegoat mechanism,” everyone aligns against an unfortunate target who is held responsible for the group’s ills. This mechanism is so essential to cultural cohesion, Girard wrote, that scapegoat narratives are the founding myths of every archaic culture.

But the arrival of Christianity, Girard believed, marked a turning point in human consciousness—because it revealed, once and for all, that scapegoats are actually innocent and mobs are depraved. In the crucifixion narrative, Jesus is murdered in a heinous act of collective violence. But unlike nearly every other sacrificial myth, this one is told from the perspective of the scapegoat, and the audience cannot help but understand the injustice.

With this epiphany, Girard wrote, the old scapegoating rituals instantly started to lose their effectiveness, having been unmasked and discredited. Humanity no longer gets the same relief from collective acts of violence. Communities still scapegoat all the time, but with less and less unifying cohesion to show for it. What awaits us at the end of history, then, is the unchecked, contagious, and ultimately apocalyptic violence of mimetic rivalry.

 

I kept thinking about the concept of mimetic rivalry as I watched clips of the right's reaction to EscalatorGate. It started off with fairly typical MAGA outrage, but as more and more people joined in, the outrage got worse and worse ("we should bomb the UN and Trump should put piece of the rubble on the Resolute Desk!"), as if they were competing for a title. Thiel explained that he was "betting on mimetic rivalry" when he invested in Facebook - people have called him the founder of the Like button. 

Anyway, I think some of you will find it as interesting as I did.

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Posted
This is a fascinating, if long, Wired article about Peter Thiel and the philosophical beliefs behind everything he does. It goes into his background with Vance and touches on his reasons for investing in Facebook, and all that eventually converges to provide a ton of insight into his political leanings.
The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel's Antichrist Obsession
You know you live in strange times when one of the most influential billionaires in the world—an investor who lit the financial fuses on both Facebook and the AI revolution, who cofounded PayPal and Palantir and launched the career of an American vice president—starts dedicating his public appearances primarily to a set of ideas about Armageddon borrowed heavily from a Nazi jurist. (As in: the guy who rapidly published the most prominent defense of Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives.)
 
Girard’s core insight, Palaver would learn, is that all humans are imitators, beginning with their wants. “Once their natural needs are satisfied, humans desire intensely,” Girard wrote, “but they don’t know exactly what they desire.” So people mimic the aspirations of their most impressive neighbors—“thus ensuring for themselves lives of perpetual strife and rivalry with those they simultaneously hate and admire.”
According to Girard, this “mimesis”—this relentless copying—builds as it ricochets across relationships. In groups, everyone starts to look alike as they converge on a few models, ape the same desires, and furiously compete for the same objects. And the only reason this “mimetic rivalry” ever fails to break out into omnidirectional warfare is that, at some point, it tends to get channeled into a war of all against one. Via something Girard called the “scapegoat mechanism,” everyone aligns against an unfortunate target who is held responsible for the group’s ills. This mechanism is so essential to cultural cohesion, Girard wrote, that scapegoat narratives are the founding myths of every archaic culture.
But the arrival of Christianity, Girard believed, marked a turning point in human consciousness—because it revealed, once and for all, that scapegoats are actually innocent and mobs are depraved. In the crucifixion narrative, Jesus is murdered in a heinous act of collective violence. But unlike nearly every other sacrificial myth, this one is told from the perspective of the scapegoat, and the audience cannot help but understand the injustice.
With this epiphany, Girard wrote, the old scapegoating rituals instantly started to lose their effectiveness, having been unmasked and discredited. Humanity no longer gets the same relief from collective acts of violence. Communities still scapegoat all the time, but with less and less unifying cohesion to show for it. What awaits us at the end of history, then, is the unchecked, contagious, and ultimately apocalyptic violence of mimetic rivalry.
 
I kept thinking about the concept of mimetic rivalry as I watched clips of the right's reaction to EscalatorGate. It started off with fairly typical MAGA outrage, but as more and more people joined in, the outrage got worse and worse ("we should bomb the UN and Trump should put piece of the rubble on the Resolute Desk!"), as if they were competing for a title. Thiel explained that he was "betting on mimetic rivalry" when he invested in Facebook - people have called him the founder of the Like button. 
Anyway, I think some of you will find it as interesting as I did.

Pretty sure that was Jesse Waters on Fox saying that we should bomb the UN (although obviously not the only one). In prime time. You know, what every maga idiot you know calls “the news”.
Posted
54 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

 

 

 

Is this article saying nobody can find $5 billion, or that nobody can find any income from these things?

Only a fool would have believed for one second that 1,000 cards were sold in a day.

  • Hook 'Em 1
Posted

yeah it's way more likely he's just a lying pos than a bunch of rich foreigners wanted to come to the current USA bad enough to pay these morons millions. pffft.

Posted
4 hours ago, Hookah Horns said:

Hockey ain't my bag, but I wouldn't call it boring.

The wishbone teams were great to watch no matter the color. 



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