There's No Place Like The HOMES States
Traitwell, Clearview, Immigration, Housing and Food Production
As you know I’ve spent the last two weeks traveling throughout the Great Lake States, or what I’ve taken to calling the HOMES states. I’m currently in Ann Arbor, Michigan, en route back to Cleveland. I hit all the states save The Empire State which I’m not terribly interested in as an investor or as a state, really.
I’m being asked a lot about what I think about Kamala’s plan to tax unrealized capital gains.
When your "unrealized gains" come from foreign-backed money laundering operations they should definitely be taxed. When your "unrealized gains" come from growth from American industry they should be subsidized.
So I’m deciding that I’m going to be a sort of anti-JD Vance, who moved from the Midwest, to California and the Imperial City. I’m going the other direction — at least with my investments. I love this part of the country which holds a communitarian charm that’s hard to ignore. A woman I care about very deeply is from Gaylord, Michigan, so of course I had a coffee there.
Along the way I listened to Joe Nocera’s podcast on the real people behind The Great Gatsby — I don’t agree with his conclusion that Gatsby inspiration Max Gerlach wasn’t a German spy — and I’m not sure that he’s right that Gerlach alone explains Gatsby. Indeed Gerlach reminds me a lot of German-born Fred Trump senior whose whorehouse exploits were almost certainly done with the tacit understanding of the German Empire. Still, worth listening to even if it’s from a New York Times reporter.
I also listened to some playlists some readers had made for me and did some Twitter spaces (of course). To the extent I had a model for my sojourn it was Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962), which I now understand was largely ficitionalized but I still found thrilling when I was younger. We don’t spend enough time talking about Steinbeck and Hemingway as deep state players but that’s a post for another time. Check those archives, reader!
True to my word where I said only an act of God would force me away I went to the Minnesota State Fair. I found myself utterly transfixed by what I understand is the nation’s second largest state fair. The crop art in particular was arresting.
I’m very interested in cultivating relationships in Minnesota, especially with Governor Walz (and soon to be Governor Peggy Flanagan) and Ilhan Omar, whose pin I proudly wore throughout the state fair.
I had a quasi-religious experience driving through the Upper Peninsula in my convertible. If there’s a Shire-to-Mordor drive in America it’s from the Upper Peninsula to Detroit. There’s definitely a bit of the old bootlegger culture going on with all the cannabis shops springing up like weeds. I’ve come to think about Michigan as where the Germans, Italians and Scandinavians all meet up to trade between the British and American empires.
So what was I doing? Well, I’ll be building a genomics lab with Dr. Jon Badalamenti for Traitwell.com. John and I are very interested in preserving the world’s genetic diversity and in the spirit of Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal and was educated nearby at the University of Minnesota where he got his BS, MS, and PhD. To be sure, human genomics is terribly interesting but it’s not going to do us much good if we all starve from a lack of genetic diversity in our food as climate change hits.
I’ll also likely be investing in Scott Colosimo’s company, LAND, and working with Trevor Perrott at Censys Tech about expanding his drone company into the Midwest. (Perrott is from Carbondale, Illinois but currently lives in Florida.)
I’ll have more to say about Scott and Trevor at a later date. If you’re interested in this sort of investing please reach out.
It was also great to see my friend Ben Marchionna who has recently become the Chief Innovation Officer of Michigan. Michigan needs a lot of help in that regard because it’s been terribly mismanaged.
I’m hoping that a Japanese-American-Canadian U. Michigan president like Santa Ono and CFO Geoffrey Chatas will crack down on the looting of University of Michigan’s endowment from Chinese-Israeli players like Sam Altman who got $75M for his investment fund.
Do better, Michigan. We need you firing on all cylinders. Like you used to.
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Still, the politics drags me back in.
Of course, my liberal friend, deporting millions of people would lower the price of housing. So, too, would restricting foreign purchase of American real estate from countries with atrocious human rights and environmental records. You shouldn’t be able to rape your country’s environment—and then buy a house in America.
There’s this fantasy that we can build our way out of America’s housing crisis. You hear it most often from urbanites and you saw it on display in the Democratic Convention where Barack Obama revealed himself to be a YIMBY. Didn’t you know he’s so trendy?
Never you mind that YIMBY donor AirBNB is a leading culprit for driving up the cost of housing in California — or how silent Obama is about repealing the Faircloth Amendment which would make public housing much easier to build and supply. (AOC supports its repeal.) You know my views about how corrupt Obama is. Yet another convention, yet another opportunity for him to come out of the closet…
No, I don’t think Republicans will actually deport anyone. Now smart players think more seriously about Jewish-Italian fraudster Mike Benz being subsidized by the Home Depot mobsters whose stock is up, up, up. They also think that maybe the party of H1B visas and seasonal workers at their hotels might not be terribly serious about immigration changing. There weren’t too many native born Americans working at Trump’s hotels. The accusations of slum lording against Jared Kushner’s family — and Steve Miller’s family — aren’t ill-founded.
If there’s going to be immigration enforcement it’ll come from an alliance between the Deep State and the unions.
My own sense of this is that the Republicans want to talk about the Border (and immigration) generally but not fix it whilst the Democrats want to fix the Immigration problem (but not talk about it) lest their base get mad at enforcement!
Having driven throughout the Great Lakes State this past week there’s plenty of housing that’s relatively affordable. It’s just not in the places that liberals want to live. You have crazies even talking about 100 million Californians or a billion Americans. No thanks! There’s such a thing as “carrying capacity,” after all.
No, the housing crisis doesn't exist everywhere. It is acute in areas where the commercial real estate sector has been hurting the most. Could it be that the human traffickers like Russian asset (and Rebekah Mercer friend) Matt Michelsen, Greg Abbott, Ron DeSantis are moving people to prop up the real estate interests of their New York and Chicago donors? Of course they are.
But the solution to America’s housing crisis comes from the Heartland and from the Great Lakes in particular. It, along with New England, has the water and where there is water, there is life.
One of the things I talk about very quietly with a lot of Democrats is how we can use facial recognition to deport illegal alliens who take work from union workers. Oh you thought those agricultural slaves just stayed there doing that job? How silly of you.
Now I don’t mean to be a jerk about this but as a cofounder of Clearview.AI let me tell you it would be trivially easy to identify and then deport millions of illegal aliens. Now a more interesting question is “should we?”
Yes! At the very least we need to mass identify and register people, especially working in our agricultural sector which is under tremendous strain and targeting by foreign actors. Don't take my word for it. Take the FBI’s:
More than 400 farmers, cybersecurity experts, and policymakers from 30 states gathered in Nebraska recently to learn about threats to the nation’s food and biofuel pipelines and how to protect against them.
Speakers at the FBI’s second annual Agriculture Threats Symposium in Omaha described how farmers and ranchers today are more digitally connected than ever, using precision farming tools like GPS and automation to produce higher yields more efficiently. But technological advances that have supercharged the nation’s agriculture sector—from small family farms to industrial-scale packing plants—have also created vulnerabilities.
Using slave labor to keep food prices low hasn’t worked but it’s juiced food profits though! And there’s plenty of evidence that the food industry
Normal countries and key American allies — Japan, Türkiye, France, Australia — take their food supply very seriously and they work to automate their agricultural industries rather than rely on slave (and immigrant) labor like the US. Housing prices have gotten higher because of these slaves.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s school lunch program presents a different future which could be a model for the rest of the country. Farmers should be backed by state support.
It seems far wiser to me to deport illegal aliens, automate away their jobs, and hire them in their home countries where the money goes further if they are really essential.
You’ll know it by the crop art.
Oh did I mention that Scott Colosimo is looking at building a factory in the Philippines?