Proud Christian, Texan-American, Longhorn, Golfer, Creator - striving for excellence in everything I do
The Woodlands, TX
Joined January 2009
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Craig Heiser retweeted
If godly people do not step forward to influence the trajectory of the nation, godless people WILL (and are).
Why Christians *should* vote in the midterm elections this week 👇
Craig Heiser retweeted
If any country wants to become extremely wealthy extremely quickly, the process is simple: Introduce sound money & Dubai-style economic freedom. Hong Kong, Singapore & Dubai all show you don’t even need natural resources to create a prosperous society (although those certainly help).
These countries learned about free markets from the United States, which has sadly forgotten all about them.
Dubai's free zones are the closest thing to a controlled experiment in what happens when you strip government interference down to its skeleton.
The Dubai International Financial Centre operates under English common law, a 0% corporate tax rate, and full foreign ownership. Companies in JAFZA (Jebel Ali Free Zone) move $200 billion in annual trade with customs procedures that would embarrass Singapore for their simplicity. Over 45 distinct free zones now operate inside the UAE, each competing to attract capital by offering something radical: predictable rules and bureaucrats who mostly stay out of your way.
This matters because the alternative is everywhere you look. France's business licensing process averages 66 days. Argentina's capital controls have driven investment offshore for decades. Compare that to a foreign founder who can incorporate in DMCC (Dubai Multi Commodities Centre) in 72 hours with 100% profit repatriation rights intact.
Capital flows to jurisdictions with predictable rules, low regulatory burden, and property rights enforcement. You don't need natural resources. You don't need centuries of institutional tradition. This is what free market economists spent a century arguing, and Dubai demonstrated it.
Free markets create a metropolis out of a desert within 20 years.
Craig Heiser retweeted
I am speechless. Thomas Aquinas College just dropped a study on the rigor of the new SAT.
It compares the 1980/87 test with 2026. The findings should terrify every parent and teacher...
Vocabulary has collapsed.
Old SAT: 70.6% of questions tested vocab.
New SAT: 15%.
The old test forced students to know a wide range of words through analogies, antonyms, and sentence completions. The new test abandoned that. Most vocab questions now just ask students to fill in one blank from context.
Reading passages also got radically shorter (average ~97 words vs 300–340).
The new test uses short expository passages and hands you the necessary background knowledge inside the text. The older tests leaned much more heavily on argumentative and persuasive writing, assumed far more historical, scientific, and cultural knowledge, and penalized students who lacked it.
This is a redefinition of what "college readiness" means.
If you believe that kids should develop rigorous vocabulary, be capable of sustained reading, and possess background knowledge, I have bad news for you. The SAT no longer measures these.
If you want a future where children can actually read difficult texts and construct complex arguments, the SAT must be replaced now.
This cannot go on.
We were concerned that the SAT has become a less reliable measure of student preparedness for a rigorous college curriculum.
So, we commissioned a study from Johns Hopkins University. What does this study tell us about the state of higher education?
The results are shocking. thaq.co/4iLThZ0
Craig Heiser retweeted
I made a list of 63 of U.S. Senate candidate James Talafreako's most insane and deranged statements.
Sourced and referenced.
1. "Modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes. In fact, there are six" 2021-04-20, Texas House Public Education Committee
2. "God is non-binary." 2021-10-14, Texas House
3. "Our campaign has officially become a non-meat campaign." 2022-02, Texas Humane Legislation Network fundraiser
4. "I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity, right?" 2021-03-04, Activist Theology
5. "In context of abortion … God asks for Mary's consent … So, to me that is a an affirmation in one of our most central stories, that creation has to be done with consent. You cannot force someone to create." 2025-07-18, The Joe Rogan Experience
6. "Radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country." 2021-03-18, Twitter/X
7. "#AhmaudArbery is the latest American killed by the virus of racism. The virus kills our black neighbors if they’re jogging, playing music, sitting in church, selling CDs, or carrying a bag of Skittles... White skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus. But we spread it wherever we go" 2020-05-08, Twitter
8. "Young activists have really drawn the link between climate change and white supremacy and capitalism in our country and I think only by understanding the ways that all three of those oppressive systems work together, are we going to be able to begin the process of dismantling them." 2020-09-01, Austin Sierra Club climate forum
9. "Restoration, repairing past harms, is part of my faith tradition. … it's exactly why we need … to invest in black communities, to invest in black Texans" 2026-07-20, DeSoto town hall
10. "I think the Confederate flag is a symbol of treason and terrorism, but the American flag is such a complicated symbol for most of us." 2019-09, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin
11. "Defund the police is considered off limits in our political debate when defunding health services, defunding public education has been the stated policy of our state government for decades now." 2020-08-02, Texas Rising
12. "Governor Abbott has filled this special session agenda with far right conspiracy theories about trans children causing problems on sports teams, which we know does not occur in the state of Texas" 2021-07-19, FOX 7 Austin
13. "Are districts getting, you know, almost hopefully near unanimous consent for students to learn about [sex education,] maybe the most important topic that they'll learn about in school?" 2022-07, Texas House Public Education Committee
14. "Every one of our neighbors with a uterus became the property of the state." 2022-10-02, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin
15. "God is not a Christian." 2023-10-22, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin
16. "So, this idea that to be a Christian means you have to be anti-gay and anti-abortion, there really is no historical, theological, biblical basis for that opinion." 2025-07-18, The Joe Rogan Experience
17. "Jesus is the prophetic voice in my own life, but it could be for you a different prophetic voice from a different faith tradition." 2019-09, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin
18. "I oppose voter ID." 2021-07-13, Fox News Primetime
19. "Leasing federal property to abortion clinics on federal lands or in federal offices" 2022-06-24, Letter to President Biden
20. "Did they teach you in Sunday school that Jesus Christ himself was a radical feminist?" 2022-10-02, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin
21. "I don't want you in my school doing discipline." 2019-02, The Trey Blocker Show
22. "For me, prophetic voices like Jesus have helped me reckon with my own whiteness, my own masculinity, my own certainty, my own ego." 2019-09, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin
23. "That [oil and gas] industry is not gonna last." 2020-09-01, Austin Sierra Club climate forum
24. "Our system of policing is deeply broken. We must replace it with something new and something better." 2020-09-02, Honest Austin
25. "The Bible doesn't mention abortion or gay marriage" 2023-10-22, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin
26. "I'm not an expert on this particular case, but I know that there were no Black members of the jury [in Anthony’s case]." 2026-08-05, The Breakfast Club
27. "Our office is the first in the history of the Capitol to add pronouns to our official business cards." 2021-03-31, Twitter/X
28. "If we took just half of what we spend on wars, prisons, and policing, and spent it on education, healthcare, and jobs, we could make prisons obsolete." 2022-04-11, Ferguson prison graduation
29. "Jesus came to transform the world. Christian nationalism is here to maintain the status quo. They have co-opted the son of God. They've turned this humble rabbi into a gun-toting, gay-bashing, science-denying, money-loving, fear-mongering fascist." 2023-10-22, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin
30. "In Genesis, God creates life by breathing life into the first human being, which we later call Adam. That life starts when you take your first breath." 2025-07-18, The Joe Rogan Experience
31. "ICE executed a man in broad daylight on our streets just this morning. It's time to tear down this secret police force and replace it with an agency that actually is going to focus on public safety." 2026-01-24, Texas AFL-CIO debate, Georgetown
32. "I'm Season 2 [of Judaism, Christianity and Islam]—the most violent season. My religion has done more damage to both of those religions than they've done to each other." 2026-02-23, The New Yorker
33. "I think there are some folks … that would think that if you deny your child's gender identity that that's incredibly harmful. And whether or not we can—we label it with the term abuse, I mean, it's abusive for sure." 2019-04-03, Texas House Juvenile Justice & Family Issues Committee
34. "Our system, our public education system, particularly here in Texas is not built for poor students. It's not built for students of color." 2020-08-02, Texas Rising
35. "I felt like I didn't have the time or space or training or resources to have the really important conversations with my students … I was trapped in a system that was focused purely on academics, reading, writing, arithmetic." 2020-08-02, Texas Rising
36. "Prison is violence." 2022-04-11, Ferguson prison graduation
37. "But inevitably we're going to spend hours hearing bills that are just kind of conspiracy theory, right, driven, and kind of kooky stuff." 2022-07-26, Texas House Public Education Committee
38. "I know personally that I've learned as much about my faith from Salman's tradition, from the Islamic mystics, from poets like Rumi, as much as I have from Christian authors and Christian writers." 2023-09-16, The State of Belief
39. "God is a verb." 2023-10-22, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin
40. "And again, I haven't studied this enough to say this definitively, but there are interpretations of certain passages from the Torah where some folks will even say that there is a, there is some subtle instructions for how to perform an abortion in the ancient world." 2025-07-18, The Joe Rogan Experience
41. "People who're like, "You're in seminary, you're studying to become a minister. Why wouldn't you want the Ten Commandments in every classroom?" … I said I thought the bill was un-Christian." 2025-07-18, The Joe Rogan Experience
42. "Incarnation, by the way, is not just limited to Jesus, it's everybody." 2025-07-18, The Joe Rogan Experience
43. "The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, said that in Christ there is neither male nor female. And so, if someone's got a problem with that statement, they shouldn't take it up with me. They should take it up with the Apostle Paul." 2026-04-22, CNN The Lead
44. "An assault weapon ban, a large capacity magazine ban" 2020, Virtual voter meet-and-greet
45. "I don't care what taxes you have to raise, but you're not going to make our students and our teachers, you're not going to make the sick and the elderly pay for this pandemic." 2020-08-02, Texas Rising
46. "Platforms like YouTube, 4chan, and Parlor are radicalizing an entire generation of white boys." 2021-03-18, Twitter/X
47. "Trans children are God's children, made in God's own image. There's nothing wrong with them. Nothing at all. They are perfect. They are beautiful, and they are sacred." 2021-10-14, Texas House
48. "The only person to teach Jesus something was a woman. Even the son of God had something to learn from one of God's daughters." 2022-10-02, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin
49. "We only have Jesus because a woman consented to creating him." 2022-10-02, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin
50. "Resurrection is when we see Christ in everyone and everything." 2025-04-20, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin
51. "Billions of people across the globe celebrate Passover, Easter, and Ramadan. We may use different lyrics, but we are singing the same hymn." 2025-04-20, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin
52. "The current administration has grown the size of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, except it's not people doing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It is a secret police force that is terrorizing communities." 2025-12-14, Jubilee: Surrounded
53. "I will use every bit of financial and diplomatic leverage that this country has to end the atrocities in Palestine. … I will not use your tax dollars to fund these war crimes." 2025-12-19, Houston campaign town hall
54. "I would not vote to send any offensive weapons to Benjamin Netanyahu that he is currently using to slaughter children in Gaza." 2026-01-24, Texas AFL-CIO debate, Georgetown
55. "And I taught a lot of undocumented students. And those students tended to be my most patriotic students." 2026-03-19, The Bulwark Podcast, Dallas
56. "I think the Supreme Court needs to be overhauled. … I am open to a discussion about expanding the number of justices." 2026-09-09, Fox Special Report, Dallas
57. "The first thing is to elect candidates who recognize institutional racism and are committed to dismantling it." 2018, Reddit AMA
58. "As a Texas legislator, they’re also my constituents. Like so many immigrants throughout our history, undocumented Americans came to this country for the same simple reasons: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." 2019-07-12, Twitter
59. "This bill [SB 14, restricting gender-transition care for minors,] I think is the most dangerous bill that's being heard on this floor this session." 2023-05-12, Texas House
60. "Meet Tim Dunn & Farris Wilks—two billionaires from West Texas. … Their ultimate goal is even more ambitious: transforming Texas into an authoritarian, Christian Nationalist state." 2023-10-05, Twitter/X
61. "Jesus lost, and Trump is obsessed with winning. … And on Good Friday, Jesus lost his reputation, lost his ministry, lost his friends, lost his life." 2025-04-20, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin
62. "Matthew 25 tells us how we will be judged and saved: by feeding the hungry, by healing the sick, by welcoming the stranger, by visiting the prisoner. Nothing about being a Christian. Nothing about going to church. Nothing about reading the Bible." 2025-04-20, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin
63. "It was a new state curriculum that would teach Christian Bible stories as historical fact, as the only truth to our youngest students, … And to push propaganda, to push indoctrination on those youngest students is deeply immoral and should trouble all of us." 2025-08-05, Faithfully (CAP Action / Interfaith Alliance)
Craig Heiser retweeted
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
Craig Heiser retweeted
Elon Musk often says: "Patents are for the weak."
Why does he say that? In 2014, Tesla opened up all its patents. Anyone could use them. Everyone thought it was a PR stunt. It was actually a declaration of war. Elon's point was that patents mostly serve to slow down progress, protect the positions of giant corporations, and make lawyers rich. Not to innovate.
His logic is simple: if your competitive advantage lives inside a legal document, you're already dead. The only real moat is your speed of innovation. If you move faster than everyone else, you don't need patents. If you need patents to survive, it means you've stopped moving fast enough.
The strong build. The weak file.
And AI is about to make that sentence true for the entire economy.
Take biotech. For 50 years, starting a biotech company meant a PhD, ten years in a lab, access to closely guarded knowledge, millions before your first proof of concept, and a network in the right academic and regulatory circles. Knowledge was scarce, access was scarce, and that scarcity was worth billions.
That scarcity is dying.
I genuinely believe we're entering a world where anyone will be able to start a biotech company. A 19-year-old with AI agents will be able to explore molecular spaces that entire labs used to spend years mapping. Trade secrets, credential rents, access rents, positional rents: all of it is about to blow up.
And look at what's already happening. Some of the first calls to "urgently regulate AI agents" are coming from established biotech players. Coincidence? When your business model depends on scarce knowledge and knowledge becomes free, you're left with only two weapons: the patent and the regulator.
The two weapons of the weak.
Here's what's coming. A wave of panic. Dozens of labs and incumbents retreating behind their patents, filing lawsuits, and above all pouring money into regulatory capture. They won't try to build better. They'll try to make it illegal for anyone else to build.
Because the truth is, a lot of people in business were never strong. They were protected. They never won on product, on innovation, on speed of execution. They won because the market was locked. Because attacking their industry required hundreds of millions of dollars, years of approvals, and armies of lawyers. The wall was never their talent. The wall was regulation.
And when the wall comes down, we find out who actually knew how to build.
This isn't just biotech. Banking. Insurance. Law. Healthcare. Energy. Hardware. Education. Defense. Almost every industry where incumbents were sleeping behind barriers to entry is about to get hit by thousands of founders able to attack their business from every angle at once. With teams of 5 people and an army of agents.
Everyone gets to play now.
My conviction, and I'll say it plainly: a huge chunk of the S&P 500 could be completely flushed in the next 5 years. Not because those companies will make mistakes. Because their competitive advantage was never real. It was built on how hard it was to get in, and that difficulty is disappearing.
The weak will cry danger. They'll talk about safety, risk, disaster. Sometimes they'll be right on a specific point. But most of the time, what they're protecting isn't the public. It's their rent.
What's coming isn't a collapse. It's a renaissance. The biggest explosion of value creation in history, driven by people who were always told they weren't allowed to play.
Patents are for the weak.
And the weak are about to have a very bad decade.
They are afraid. AI will disrupt and "open source" everything, not just games and software. It will also go after almost all hardware and drugs.
Basically everything.
Some things sooner, some later.
Everything will change. Current ways of doing things must/will change.
Economy will look very different by 2030s.
Craig Heiser retweeted
At 47 he paid the SEC $20 million for a tweet a jury later found him not guilty for. If he hadn't paid, Tesla would have gone bankrupt the same day:
His CFO told him the banks would pull every credit line instantly.
He calls it a hostage negotiation.
Then he explains why the SEC never touches hedge funds.
Save this.
Craig Heiser retweeted
Dog died so I read The Dooze @BillSimmons and wrote my best imitation
open.substack.com/pub/thothw…
Invest 25 minutes if you want to feel like a kid amazed at space flight while simultaneously appreciating the insane engineering underway in Texas
Craig Heiser retweeted
Sometimes this world wears you out and leaves you cynical … and then you see a moment like this and realize there will always be more good than bad.
Beautifully written and painfully true
Receiving all of those gifts and all of that ambition must be so outrageously fun. Learning that you are preternaturally skilled at this singular thing must feel like magic. No achievement is too outlandish. Nothing beyond your reach.
You must feel like you are a god.
And over time, you become convinced that giving your entire self over to your gifts must be the answer. What are you supposed to do, *not* develop them? *Not* strive to be great at whatever it is you do? This is the weight of the gifts.
The highs are so high. The achievements so extraordinary. You are historically relevant for generations. You fulfilled the life everyone thinks they want.
What you aren't told until it's too late, though, is that the moments are more fleeting than you were promised. The happiness less fulfilling than it should have been.
What you aren't told is that giving your entire self over to the extreme pursuit of greatness oftentimes -- not always, but oftentimes -- comes at a tremendous price.
What you are not told when you're 18 or 22 or 30 is that the true cost of all these dreams and all that glory and this entire life you were supposed to live is so much greater than you ever would have paid.
Craig Heiser retweeted
75 degrees today in Ardmore and the covers are being removed from greens.
Which means in just a few short weeks, the gorse will bloom yellow to welcome golfers back for the new season and Merion will become even more beautiful than usual for a stretch of spring.
I hate the winters here, but the spring sure does make up for most of it.
Craig Heiser retweeted
🚨New: Jessica Steinmann has officially won the Republican Primary for the Texas 8th Congressional District
Why do you golf? Have you ever been in a flow state? Read on and tell me if you know the secret
substack.com/profile/5311190…
Craig Heiser retweeted
@ScottAdamsSays announced today that his cancer will probably take him by the end of January.
So, it's time...
#presidential_medal_of_freedom_for_scott
MAKE IT TREND
@Cernovich
@JackPosobiec
@JDVance
@donaldtrumpjr
@elonmusk
@chamath
@greggutfeld
@OwenGregorian
@joshualisec
@ZiaErica
Re-tweet if desired, I don't care, but MAKE IT TREND
I wrote about what I see in the world today - its not short, its not funny, but it might help connect some dots in a way you hadn't considered...
open.substack.com/pub/craigh…
Craig Heiser retweeted
This was said to me, on my podcast.
John Spitzer is the managing director of equipment standards at the USGA.
The guy in charge of equipment, at the USGA, said distance gains on the PGA tour (since 2004) are almost entirely due to the player himself.
Not the ball. Not the club. The player. Said by the guy in charge of equipment at the USGA.
🤔🤔🤔
