March 11: Short Term Pain, Long Term Gain?

Torched Tesla cyber trucks; ActBlue inquiry; InfoWars reporter killed

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The Big Story

President Donald Trump’s tariffs policy has led to a market downtown, raising fears of an imminent recession. Goldman Sachs has spiked the probability of a recession hitting the United States in the next 12 months from 15% to 20%, according to The Wall Street Journal. In an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, Trump didn’t rule out the possibility of a recession but made the case that the changes he’s making to the economy could make a small recession worth it in the long run. “There is a period of transition because what we’re doing is very big,” he said. “We’re bringing wealth back to America.”

That’s a change. During his first term, Trump often boasted about the strength of the stock market as a win and proof that investors approved of his performance. Now, however, he seems more than willing to entertain short-term pain. Though Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick did an interview Sunday to dispel fears about an imminent recession, Trump refused to rule out the possibility that it could happen. That discrepancy seems important. Trump believes that the benefit of using tariffs to drive manufacturing back to the United States would justify the recession they might trigger. 

But could there be any other benefit to a recession, aside from a restored manufacturing base?

Some 20th-century economists, including Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, believed that recessions, though painful, are necessary for the market to correct imbalances caused by unsustainable booms fueled by government intervention. In 2020, the Federal Reserve handed out a $500 billion bailout to minimize the damage of the COVID-19 virus. These bailouts—as well as the volatility of energy prices, backlogs of work orders for goods and services caused by supply chain issues due to COVID-19, and price changes in the auto-related industries—all contributed to the skyrocketing inflation of the past five years. While a recession can hurt young professionals by causing job instability and increased economic stress, there are upsides as well. During recessions, central banks often lower interest rates, which could lead to lower mortgage rates that could make homeownership more affordable for young people. Half of millennials and a quarter of Zoomers own homes, according to Carrier Management, compared to nearly 80% of Gen Xers and older Americans. Also, if a recession results in a weak market, younger Americans could find themselves investing in it for the first time. According to a recent study the Motley Fool and Nasdaq, approximately only 57% of millennials are invested in the stock market, likely due to lingering trauma from their coming-of-age during the 2008 market crash. 80% of the stock market is currently owned by Americans older than 55, according an analysis of Federal Reserve data conducted by Rosenberg Research.

While the risk of recession isn’t zero, ZeroHedge reports, it’s also important to note that it’s not guaranteed to happen either. In 2022, most economists were convinced that “recession” was imminent, but by 2023 it never happened. That said, the main factors that prevented that recession—namely, massive federal spending fia the Inflation Reduction Act, accelerated immigration providing cheap labor to companies, and a massive expansion in government hiring—are now being diminished beneath the Trump administration’s policies. Immigration flows have dropped dramatically, and the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) reduction of federal spending will negatively impact economic growth. ZeroHedge describes the Biden-era monetary policies as an “adrenaline” boost to the economy. Fox Business senior correspondent Charles Gasparino said today on X that most market analysts believe Trump is trying to “puke” the government bloat out of the economy in the first year of his administration. But if our economy was merely being artificially inflated by the injection of government adrenaline, perhaps a small recession is a necessary course correction as we transition to an economy built upon domestic manufacturing in a post-tariffs Trumpian “Gilded Age.”

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The Rest

→In yesterday’s Big Story, we wrote that the deportation of the Syrian-born Columbia student activist Mahmoud Khalil was likely permitted under section 237(a)(4)(C)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows for the removal of any alien “whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” On Tuesday, a White House official appeared to invoke exactly this provision—and not the more commonly cited INA provision against endorsing or espousing a terrorist organization—in comments to The Free Press. Khalil is a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States,” the official said. “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law.” On Monday, shortly after The Scroll published, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York blocked Khalil’s deportation and scheduled a hearing for the case for Wednesday.

→Four Tesla cyber trucks were torched in a storage lot in Seattle on Sunday night, according to KOMO News. Seattle Police have not confirmed whether or not the fires were the result of foul play, but the incident is being investigated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms as a possible arson. The incident follows a nationwide string of protests at, and attacks on, Tesla salesrooms, charge stations, and vehicles over the past few weeks. For instance, shots were fired at a Tesla showroom in Portland, Oregon, this past Thursday, and on March 3, several charging stations in a mall outside Boston were set ablaze. A Colorado woman named Lucy Grace Nelson faces federal charges for malicious destruction of property after allegedly vandalizing a Tesla dealership in Colorado by spray-painting Tesla vehicles with phrases like “NAZI!” and, according to local police, throwing a Molotov cocktail during one of the incidents.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a post on X Saturday that Democratic Party fundraising platform ActBlue is responsible for bankrolling the Tesla protests as retribution for his budget-slashing work as head of DOGE. Musk said there are five ActBlue-funded groups behind the demonstrations—Troublemakers, Disruption Project, Rise & Resist, Indivisible Project, and the Democratic Socialists of America—and he accused high-profile Democratic Party donors like George Soros and Reid Hoffman of funding the protests. So far, we have not seen any independent confirmation of his claims.

→Nevertheless, ActBlue has had a rough week. House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer and House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent yesterday suggesting they are investigating ActBlue’s activities and requesting all suspicious transactions made by ActBlue from Jan. 1, 2023 onwards, according to the New York Post. The committees are looking into potentially fraudulent financial activity related to candidates’ campaigns for federal office facilitated by ActBlue and similar fundraising platforms, according to the Washington Examiner, but they need the cooperation of the Treasury Department to look into it further. As we reported last week, seven members of ActBlue’s board have recently stepped down, and its last remaining lawyer in its general counsel office, Zain Ahmad, wrote in an internal memo that his internal communications were cut off and he was placed on leave. He then wrote in an internal Slack message that ActBlue has “whistleblower and retaliation policies for a reason,” suggesting that he is revealing information about something that the ActBlue management is unhappy about.

→During his broadcast Monday night, Infowars’ Alex Jones said that his “best reporter,” Jamie White, was “brutally murdered” at his home in Austin on Sunday night. Austin law enforcement authorities have not confirmed White’s death but said they responded to an emergency call late Sunday night and found an injured man with “obvious signs of trauma” and that the man died later in a hospital, according to The Independent. Jones didn’t speculate about who killed White or why they did so, but he blamed his death on George Soros and the progressive district attorneys that Soros backed, as well as the Democratic Party. Austin’s Travis District Attorney José Garza is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, according to Jacobin Magazine, and his first campaign was largely funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Nothing is known about who killed White, but as you might expect in the mysterious death of an Infowars correspondent, plenty of theories are going around. Jones, for instance, drew attention to a tweet from June 2024 in which White said he had been placed on a “Ukrainian ‘Enemies List”.

→The Trump administration’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff spoke with Fox News yesterday and claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had sent President Trump a letter apologizing for the blowup between him, Trump, and Vice President J.D. Vance during their meeting at the White House on Feb. 28. White House officials demanded an apology from Zelenskyy in the aftermath to the incident, and on March 4, Zelenskyy did make a conciliatory statement calling the incident “regrettable.” It is unclear if Witkoff was referring to the March 4 statement as the apology or if there were other, personal correspondences between Zelenskyy and Trump. Witkoff corrected the media’s claims last week that the United States had stopped sharing defense-related intelligence with Kyiv, saying that the United States. had never stopped sharing intelligence and expressing optimism that there could still be a revival of the minerals deal that Zelenskyy was supposed to sign at the infamous Oval Office meeting.Just after 2 p.m. today, it was announced by Kyiv and Washington officials that Ukraine would accept a 30-day cease-fire deal after the talks in Saudi Arabia Tuesday, mere hours after the talks took place, CBS News reports.

→A pro-Palestinian hacktivist group called Dark Storm took credit for hacking X yesterday, briefly disabling the site. In a post, X owner Musk claimed that the outages happened as a result of a “cyberattack” on X; later, on Fox News, he suggested the attack was traced back to IPs in Ukraine. Cybersecurity group SpyoSecure later revealed on X that it had located a post on Telegram in which the Dark Storm team claimed credit for the attack. According to cybersecurity experts, the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack flooded X’s servers with an overwhelming volume of fake requests, handicapping the app’s ability to perform and causing 40,000 users to lose connection to the app. Dark Storm attacks pro-Israel entities and groups, according to the Washington Examiner. In February 2024, Dark Storm issued ultimatums threatening cyberattacks on NATO countries, Israel, and nations supporting Israel. The group claims responsibility for a DDoS attack on John F. Kennedy International Airport in October 2024, citing the airport’s support of Israel as their motivation.

→Video of the Day

In his podcast episode with news anchor Chris Cuomo yesterday, Tucker Carlson made numerous outlandish claims, including that AI and transhumanism are worse than slavery and that Ukraine is not a sovereign country. Perhaps the most predictable of his statements, however, came during an exchange about the botched release of the Jeffrey Epstein files and the JFK files. Tucker then suggested that a person being discussed for a position in the intel world was blocked by a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Intel Committee because the person would have pushed for the release of the JFK files. When pressed, Carlson said that the person allegedly blocking the release of the JFK files was Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR)—who has recently come under fire as a “neocon” and “globalist” due to his rumored opposition to the nomination of Elbridge Colby to the number three role at the Pentagon. Cotton denied Carlson’s claims on X earlier today, saying he’d have “no problem” with the JFK files being released.

→TruthSocial of the Day

President Trump has vowed to lead the charge to primary Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie after the congressman announced he wouldn’t support a resolution to keep the government funded through September, avoiding a potential shutdown, according to Newsweek. Massie said Monday he wouldn’t support the resolution because it maintains federal spending at current levels without adjusting for cuts made by DOGE. Some Republicans have opposed Trump’s decision to primary Massie.

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