Michael J. Bernard
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Michael J. Bernard
@mj-bernard.bsky.social
23 followers 64 following 77 posts
Investing and Op-Ed Writer
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mj-bernard.bsky.social
Street-level Trumpism was presence more than ideology. It didn’t disappear because it lost support, but because the environment that allowed it to exist was shut down.
#TCOT #MAGA #AmericaFirst

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Michael J. Bernard on X: "When The Street Was Closed" / X
When The Street Was Closed
x.com
January 2, 2026 at 12:36 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Universities don’t get “taken over.”
They get endowed.
And permanence does the rest.
#AcademicCapture #MAGA #AmericaFirst

tcotreporter.com/why-universi...
Why Universities Don’t Even Notice They’ve Been Captured - #TCOT Reporter
How Foreign Funding Becomes Normal, Structural, and Invisible Universities are not captured the way governments are toppled or corporations are bought out.
tcotreporter.com
January 2, 2026 at 11:55 AM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
California didn’t “discover” a problem. It admitted one. When failure becomes ambient, audits stop being warnings and start being descriptions.
#HighRiskState #California #CalFraud

tcotreporter.com/californias-...
California’s High-Risk State - #TCOT Reporter
The uncomfortable part isn’t who’s at fault, but what kind of system produces this outcome reliably. California now governs with a tolerance for failure that
tcotreporter.com
December 30, 2025 at 6:24 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
The Affordable Care Act is usually judged by what it failed to deliver. A better way to understand it is by asking why it endured anyway. Once a system reaches enough scale, failure can become the safest condition available.
#ObamaCare #TCOT #MAGA #AmericaFirst

tcotreporter.com/failure-is-t...
Failure Is the Feature - #TCOT Reporter
Obamacare promised “affordable care” the way a timeshare promises “vacation ownership”: lots of paperwork, surprise costs, and somehow you’re worse off at the
tcotreporter.com
December 29, 2025 at 7:08 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Foreign money doesn’t buy opinions anymore—it buys permanence.
Endowed chairs and academic infrastructure quietly shape what counts as “expertise” long after donors disappear.
Section 117 reveals the blueprint.

#Section117 #DarkMoney #HigherEd

tcotreporter.com/the-permanen...
The Permanence Machine - #TCOT Reporter
How Foreign Funding Becomes Academic Authority Without Giving a Single Order Section 117 is usually discussed as a transparency problem. Who paid how much, to
tcotreporter.com
December 29, 2025 at 6:29 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Most people still think journalism begins in the newsroom. It usually doesn’t anymore. This walks through the pipeline that shapes what gets reported long before the first draft is written.

#MainstreamMedia #Journalism #NGOArchipelago

tcotreporter.com/the-journali...
The Journalism Pipeline Nobody Sees - #TCOT Reporter
For most readers, journalism still appears as a straightforward transaction. A reporter notices something, verifies it, writes it up, and publishes.
tcotreporter.com
December 28, 2025 at 8:33 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Minnesota’s ICE backlash and Medicaid fraud crisis aren’t separate scandals—they’re symptoms of the same governing failure. When enforcement is treated as destabilizing and oversight as optional, disorder becomes policy by default.
#Minnesota #SomaliScam #ICE

tcotreporter.com/a-sanctuary-...
A Sanctuary for Disorder - #TCOT Reporter
When enforcement becomes “provocative,” and fraud becomes “unfortunate,” what you actually have is a state that no longer believes in authority. Minnesota is
tcotreporter.com
December 28, 2025 at 12:04 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Institutional memory and process quietly shape what’s possible long before voters notice anything is wrong. If every administration feels temporary, it’s because the system was built to be permanent.
#TCOT #MAGA #AmericaFirst

tcotreporter.com/why-every-ne...
Why Every New President Governs Like a Temp - #TCOT Reporter
Every incoming president is introduced to Washington with the same quiet reassurance: the professionals will help you. The machinery is experienced, the staff
tcotreporter.com
December 28, 2025 at 12:34 AM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Foreign influence in American education isn’t secret — it’s federally disclosed and quietly ignored.
Section 117 reveals a system designed to acknowledge risk without ever forcing accountability.
#TCOT #MAGA #AmericaFirst
tcotreporter.com/the-ledger-t...
The Ledger They Hope You Never Read - #TCOT Reporter
How Section 117 Turned Foreign Influence Into Background Noise Foreign money does not need to buy conclusions inside American education. It doesn’t need to
tcotreporter.com
December 27, 2025 at 7:28 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Using rhetoric drawn directly from neo-Nazi literature delivered through an influencer of Candace Owen's reach normalizes ideas that have historically been used to justify exclusion, persecution, and violence.
#CandaceOwens #NeoNazi #AntiSemitism

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x.com
December 27, 2025 at 5:18 AM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Trucking is where the economy becomes physical, and right now it’s under audit. A prolonged freight downturn has collided with federal enforcement on labor, licensing, and training, squeezing an the industry from every direction.
#Economy #Trucking #CDLDrivers

tcotreporter.com/the-trucking...
The Trucking Crackdown - #TCOT Reporter
How America’s Real Economy Got Put Under Audit Trucking is where the economy stops being a spreadsheet and starts being a physical object you can’t fake. You
tcotreporter.com
December 26, 2025 at 5:24 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Billions in U.S. foreign aid now move through a contractor network so dense that even USAID’s own auditors can’t follow the money. The agency’s watchdog admits it can’t verify if overhead costs are “reasonable"
#NGOArchipeligo #TCOT #MAGA #AmericaFirst
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USAID’s Black-Box Economics - #TCOT Reporter
How Washington Privatized Virtue In theory, foreign aid is America’s purest export. In practice, it’s one of the most efficient wealth-transfer programs ever
tcotreporter.com
December 26, 2025 at 1:36 AM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Alvin Toffler saw it coming—a moral-political merger of crusades that would make democracy flinch. Three decades later the Radical Left and the Crescent crowd are sharing slogans and strategy decks inside the same coalition.
#JihadDonkeys #TCOT #MAGA #AmericaFirst
tcotreporter.com/unholy-marri...
Unholy Marriage - #TCOT Reporter
The Green-Crescent Convergence: How Toffler’s darkest forecast is showing up in the Democratic coalition’s new marriage of moral politics and militant
tcotreporter.com
December 25, 2025 at 10:40 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
The “multipolar world order” crowd calls it balance; the rest of us call it open-source chaos. Venezuela has turned itself into a shared Airbnb for China, Russia, and Iran—minus the cleaning fee.
#Venezuela #TCOT #MAGA #AmericaFirst

tcotreporter.com/confront-car...
Confront Caracas to Collapse the Axis - #TCOT Reporter
Why Pressuring Venezuela Is the Smartest Way to Counter the China–Russia–Iran Nexus in a Multipolar World In the alphabet soup of global strategy,
tcotreporter.com
December 25, 2025 at 9:30 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Foreign influence doesn’t need to win arguments to win power. It just needs to fund institutions long enough for their assumptions to become invisible.
#Education #NGO #Qatar

tcotreporter.com/how-foreign-...
How Foreign Money Became Educational Infrastructure - #TCOT Reporter
How foreign funding reshaped American education without ever touching a textbook There is a persistent misunderstanding in how Americans talk about foreign
tcotreporter.com
December 25, 2025 at 6:15 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
The Biden presidency felt unusually quiet long before the debate stage made the reason why obvious. It’s less about who sat in the Oval Office than about the system that ran comfortably without friction.
#TheShadowPresident #TCOT #MAGA

tcotreporter.com/auto-pilot-t...
Auto-Pilot: The Proxy Presidency (2021–2024) - #TCOT Reporter
How Joe Biden ran such a detached, absentee administration without any real opposition or oversight, long before the average American became aware of his
tcotreporter.com
December 24, 2025 at 6:00 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Cracker Barrel didn’t stumble into trouble—it was marched there by a rebrand that solved nothing. Since October, weak earnings, traffic erosion, and shifting excuses have made the damage impossible to ignore.
#CrackerBarrel #TacoJulie #JulieFelssMasino

tcotreporter.com/taco-julies-...
Taco Julie’s Extended Collapse - #TCOT Reporter
Cracker Barrel’s rebrand fallout didn’t end with one scandal. This tracks Taco Julie’s extended collapse and what it signals about elite-driven brand decay.
tcotreporter.com
December 23, 2025 at 8:39 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Foreign influence doesn’t need slogans or spies when it can shape what counts as “serious knowledge.” From K-12 classrooms to endowed university chairs, curriculum is quietly routing beliefs before power is ever reached.
#Education #TCOT #MAGA #AmericaFirst

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Curriculum as a Foreign Policy Platform - #TCOT Reporter
For decades, American policymakers treated education as a domestic concern—local, fragmented, culturally neutral. Foreign influence was assumed to operate
tcotreporter.com
December 23, 2025 at 2:02 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Peru’s jumbo squid fishery once sustained thousands of coastal workers and anchored entire towns. Satellite data and investigative reporting now show how industrial fleets followed the migrating squid until the stock collapsed offshore.

#China #Economy #Peru

tcotreporter.com/how-chinas-s...
How China’s Squid Fleet Broke Peru’s Pota Economy - #TCOT Reporter
For decades, Peru’s jumbo flying squid—pota—was a quiet economic miracle. The species migrates along the Humboldt Current in vast numbers, close enough to
tcotreporter.com
December 22, 2025 at 3:46 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Migration doesn’t begin with movement—it begins when media signals that movement will be rewarded. From Cold War information operations to the southern border surge and Europe’s open-door crisis...
#TooBigToTackle #TCOT #MAGA #AmericaFirst

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The Migration of Narratives - #TCOT Reporter
How Media Became Infrastructure—From Cold War Psy-Ops to the Border Surge and Europe’s Open Door Migration is usually discussed as a physical act. People move.
tcotreporter.com
December 22, 2025 at 12:58 AM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Ben Shapiro finally did the thing most of the movement’s “big voices” have refused to do: he said the names out loud, drew a bright line between truth and performance, and treated grift as an actual threat to coalition survival

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x.com
December 20, 2025 at 2:42 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Elections feel decisive, but the moment after the votes are counted tells a quieter story. Presidents inherit legitimacy, not control, and quickly discover a system designed to wait them out rather than obey them.
#TCOT #MAGA #AmericaFirst

tcotreporter.com/winning-the-...
Winning the Election Isn’t Winning Power - #TCOT Reporter
Every four years, Americans participate in an elaborate ritual designed to reassure them that political authority changes hands cleanly and decisively. Votes
tcotreporter.com
December 20, 2025 at 2:21 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Minnesota’s fraud scandals weren’t just about bad actors — Keith Ellison’s role as the political interface, and why that position matters more than intent. Systems fail where enforcement becomes negotiable.
#SomaliScam #Minnesota #KeithEllison

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Keith Ellison: The Interface Problem - #TCOT Reporter
How Keith Ellison Became the Human Firewall Between Fraud and Accountability Systems rarely fail at the edges. They fail at the interface. In every large-scale
tcotreporter.com
December 20, 2025 at 1:58 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
On the morning of September 5, 1972, the Olympic Village in Munich looked the way it had been designed: open, informal, unguarded. These were to be the “Happy Games”—a deliberate contrast to Berlin 1936, a repudiation of militarism, fences, and armed authority.

tcotreporter.com/a-festival-o...
A Festival of Appearances - #TCOT Reporter
Munich Summer Olympic Games, 1972 The Munich Olympics were designed as an act of national self-correction. West Germany wanted distance from the memory of
tcotreporter.com
December 19, 2025 at 6:20 PM
mj-bernard.bsky.social
Examining modern NGOs through the historical lens of piracy, where intermediaries and “ports” mattered more than the raiders themselves. If the structure doesn’t change, neither will the outcome.

#TCOT #NGOArchipeligo #SomaliScam

tcotreporter.com/ports-factor...
Ports, Factors, and Prize Agents - #TCOT Reporter
How the Modern NGO Economy Recreates the Infrastructure of Piracy Piracy was never defeated by bravado or moral condemnation. It was defeated when governments
tcotreporter.com
December 19, 2025 at 6:03 PM