Dear Secretary Bessent @SecScottBessent, My name is Everett Stern. In 2010 I was a compliance officer at @HSBC. From a back office in New Castle, Delaware, I watched billions of dollars move to drug cartels, sanctioned regimes, and terrorist organizations. The enemies of the United States. I documented it, I escalated it, and when the bank would not act, I took it to the @FBI, the @CIA, and eventually the @SECGov. The result was a $1.92 billion settlement. At the time, it was one of the largest in American history. It was also about five weeks of the bank’s profit. Not one banker was charged. Not one went to prison. I paid a different price. I lost my career, my savings, and my place in the industry I had trained for. I was blacklisted. Every door in American finance closed at once. I slept on a camping cot in a 300 square foot apartment because I could not afford a bed, and I waited tables at @PFChangs to eat. I tell you this not for sympathy, but so you understand that I know exactly what it costs to do the right thing in American finance, and exactly how little the system does in return. I made that sacrifice because I believed it would change something. Yesterday, your department fined @BankofAmerica $1.2 billion for failing to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, some of it tied by your own findings to Chinese laundering networks, narcotics, and the southwest border, alongside 475 apparent sanctions violations touching Russia, Iran, and global terrorism. The bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act. Fourteen years after HSBC. A bank with “America” in its name. And once again, not one individual charged. Secretary Bessent, I want to say plainly what I believe you already know. The fines are not working. A fine is paid by shareholders, absorbed by the balance sheet, and forgotten by the next earnings call. Bank of America reported earnings this morning. Nobody who set the alert thresholds, nobody who decided the 2024 cease and desist could wait, nobody who chose the backlog over the law will lose a single thing they value. Their lives are untouched. That is the entire reason the behavior repeats. This is money laundering. This is blood money. Money that reaches a cartel buys fentanyl that kills Americans. Money that reaches a terrorist organization buys the next attack. This country has fought a war on drugs and a war on terror for decades, at enormous cost in lives and treasure, and all the while we have allowed the financing to flow through institutions we charter and regulate. Cut off the money and we win. We have never seriously tried. There is also a question of equal justice that I cannot let go. Before I walked into the FBI building to report HSBC, I stopped in front of the Great Seal on the wall and read the words engraved beneath it: “Justice is the defense of our liberty.” I believed that. I still want to. But every day in this country, people go to prison for crimes that are nothing next to moving money for the people who want Americans dead. A suit, a title, and a corporate badge should not be a shield from the consequences that apply to everyone else. If a street dealer goes to prison for what he sells, the banker who moved the cartel’s money should be standing next to him. I also want to raise something that is rarely said in these conversations. Why has no one inside Bank of America come forward the way I did? The answer is that everyone in American banking knows what happened to me, and to the whistleblowers who came after. The last person who spoke up is the only policy anyone believes. That is a culture problem, and it starts with leadership, in the banks and in the agencies that regulate them. This is not a political issue. It has spanned administrations of both parties. It is a national security issue, and I am asking you to treat it as one. Three things would change the math overnight. Refer individuals for criminal prosecution. Not the analyst in the queue. The executives who set the thresholds and chose the risk. One banker in handcuffs would do more than every fine in Treasury’s history combined. End “too big to jail.” An institution cannot be too big to fail and too big to jail at the same time. If it is the first, it must be held to a higher standard, not a lower one. And if Bank of America will not act as America’s bank, review its charter. A national charter is a privilege granted on behalf of the American people. It should be conditioned on not moving money for the people trying to kill them. Secretary Bessent, you said yesterday that these actions send a clear message that even the biggest institutions are not above the law. With respect, the institution was never the problem. The people inside it are above the law, and they know it. Until that changes, I will keep writing letters like this one, and the next bank will keep paying the next fine. I gave up everything I had to stop this. I am asking you to use the power you have to finish it. Respectfully, Everett A. Stern HSBC Whistleblower Founder and Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit

One year ago today, I wrote this after Charlie Kirk was murdered. Two days later, Strive became a public company. It was one of the biggest moments of my professional life, and yet I could not get my mind off Charlie, his family, and what his life had meant to mine. If you look back at what I was talking about publicly during those days, it was mostly about Charlie, because that was where my mind and heart were, and it felt inauthentic to spend that moment talking only about Strive. During COVID, my wife and I were living in Northern California. @GavinNewsom had deemed churches “non-essential” and ordered them closed while “peaceful protests” were encouraged. In May 2020, @destinyrocklin church, which was close to where we lived at the time, opened its doors in defiance of those orders. We believed at the time that its pastor could potentially be arrested for taking that stand. He did not care, and neither did the people who filled that building, including my wife and me. We were there because church is essential and because nothing is more important than our faith in Christ. We had never been to Destiny and probably never would have walked through its doors that weekend without Charlie. We heard on The Charlie Kirk Show that he would be there supporting the church, so my wife and I went. We found a church full of Christians on fire for God, unafraid to live their faith publicly, and that experience helped set my family on the Christian journey we have been on ever since. It also directly gave my wife and me the conviction to take a stand against the ramifications of ESG and DEI, which we came to believe represented not only breaches of fiduciary duty, but a broader cultural movement increasingly hostile to Christian conviction. We would not be where we are in our Christian journey without Charlie, and I am certain I would not be at Strive without Charlie Kirk. When Strive was founded in 2022, Charlie was a seed investor. He supported Strive from the beginning in its fight against ESG and DEI, and he was excited about Strive’s evolution into a Bitcoin-focused company. Charlie understood that these fights were about much more than markets or business, and his energy and conviction were unmistakable. I spend a lot of time talking about Bitcoin, the debt crisis, markets and Strive, and I have always promised myself that I will be authentic about what is actually on my mind and speak what I believe to be true. I could not live my life any other way. Make no mistake about what sits beneath all of it for me: Christ comes first. My faith is my foundation, my inspiration and ultimately my why. Charlie blessed this country with an extraordinary amount of energy during a tragically short life. It is fitting to me that his final book was about honoring the Sabbath. Of all the subjects Charlie could have chosen to write about, his final message pointed people back toward God. A year later, what I wrote that day remains true: Charlie changed my family’s life, and his legacy lives on in our home and in countless others. We will never forget Charlie Kirk.

BREAKING: The US Mint announces that the "2026 President Donald J. Trump $1 Coin" has been launched and is now in circulation. US Mint also announces that these coins will be available for purchase beginning at 12 PM ET. This marks the first time in US history that a sitting president has been featured on a circulating US coin.

BREAKING: US Treasury Secretary Bessent says anyone who “helps Iran” will be removed from the US Dollar system. Bessent says countries who “stick with Iran will be isolated with them.”

The US National Debt is now $40 trillion. Washington’s solution to every problem remains the same: Borrow more. Spend more. Let our children and grandchildren deal with the consequences. There is no fiscal discipline in sight. It will take a crisis before anything changes.

I am the Chief Margin Officer at Target. You shop here every week. We just posted our best quarter in years. The analysts called it a comeback. I would like to accept full personal credit, and I will, because the alternative is partial credit, and I did not get where I am by rounding down. Here is how I did it. I found nearly $1 billion. I say found. What happened is that the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs were illegal, and the government, which had taken the money, gave the money back. To me. A refund of $994 million, in a single quarter, adding $1.65 to my earnings per share, which is a phrase I do not fully understand but deliver with great confidence in rooms with good chairs. Home Depot got $685 million the same way. We do not speak. But we nod. People keep asking whether we will give the money back. Give it back to whom? I paid the tariff. The government took a dollar of mine at the border, conceded eventually, in writing, in a 6-to-3 decision, that it had never been allowed to, and returned my dollar. That is my dollar, coming home. You were not part of that transaction. You were, I will grant you, slightly upstream of it. When the tariff cost me a dollar, I added a dollar to the towel. And the sheet. And the lamp shaped like a smaller lamp. I raised the price at the register, one household at a time, quietly, the way you raise a child or an alarm. That is arithmetic. I do not know why you are looking at me the way that you are looking at me. Let me put it in the round numbers I prefer. The tariff cost the industry $160 billion. My share of it, I took from you, at the register, one towel at a time. Then the court gave my share back. I now have my share twice. I am told this is unusual. I looked into it briefly. I made my peace with it immediately, in the car. Now some of you are suing. "Unjust enrichment," the lawyers call it. I looked the term up. It means becoming rich in a manner that distresses people who did not. I find the concept deeply unfair. There is no such thing as just enrichment. There is enrichment, and there is being one of the people it happened to, and you have selected the second category, and you have selected it, if I may, more than once. I did give some of it back. I want that on the record. We lowered the price on 10,000 items. Ten thousand. Say it slowly. It is a very large number, and I would like it to sit in the exact spot in your mind where the word "refund" used to live. I did not lower them by what I had raised them. I did not lower the same ones I raised. I did not tell you which ones. But 10,000 is a big and beautiful number, and the word "some" is technically true, and between those two facts I have built a home. The tariff is gone now. You may have noticed that the price is not. The candle is still $4.99. It was $3.99. I do not think about the candle. You think about the candle. The whole business lives in that gap, and this quarter the gap was worth $994 million. Prices are like tattoos. They go on in an afternoon and they come off never, or with a laser, and I am not the laser. No one at the company is the laser. There is no laser. There is only me, and my quarter, and the good chairs. The board gave me a bonus for the comeback. The comeback was a court ruling I had no hand in, concerning a law I have never read, decided by nine people I will never meet. I accepted the bonus regardless. Refusing it would have raised questions, and I have expensive taste, and a very particular sense of who deserves things, and it is, on reflection, me. You keep telling me the money is yours. I understand the feeling completely. I have felt it about a great many things that turned out to be mine. Most things, actually. So here is the only sentence that matters, and I want you to keep it, because I have kept everything else. The tariff was illegal. The price was not. I live in the narrow space between those two facts. It is a very nice space. You built it. You are not invited.

Makes you wonder - who the fuck is really running this country?