Thank you for being on our email list. As a perk, you'll receive this newsletter, the same one Tucker Carlson reads, for free each Friday.

Want to read it every weekday instead? Become a member to be added to the daily list.

Looking to catch up on our full Morning Note archive? Browse the complete library here.

Here's today's roundup.

The Latest 

IT’S OVER: Trump and Musk’s Relationship Falls Apart

First, it was just the “Big, Beautiful Bill.” Elon Musk called it fiscally irresponsible, and Donald Trump disagreed. Nothing vicious, just a respectful ideological difference.

The dispute got personal on Thursday, however, with the president suggesting the former DOGE boss is suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and calling him “CRAZY” on Truth Social. Those were escalations.

Then, things reached the point of no return. Musk cranked the heat up to 100 less than an hour later, alleging that Trump is in the Epstein files, and that’s why his administration hasn’t made them public.

Retweets about impeachment, the “Liberation Day” tariffs causing a recession, and the chief executive’s old acquaintanceship with Epstein quickly followed, seemingly solidifying Musk and Trump’s new status as not friends anymore. Musk also announced plans to decommission SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, which NASA uses to service the International Space Station. He backtracked soon after. Read more.

NO LAUGHING MATTER: Comedian Gets Eight Years in Jail for Telling Jokes

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy went on a blistering tirade against free speech on Wednesday, arguing that people should not be allowed to make offensive jokes. Spit flew from his lips as he raged. 

The Brazilian government appears to agree with Portnoy’s sentiment. One of that “free” country’s federal courts sentenced comedian Leonardo Lins to eight years in prison earlier this week as punishment for comedy he spread in a YouTube post. The video reportedly contained distasteful humor about black people, obese people, the elderly, HIV-positive people, homosexuals, indigenous people, people from the Northeast, evangelicals, Jews, and the disabled. 

The TCN Morning Note does not condone that form of comedy, but there’s a big difference between opposing it on a human level and insisting it should be illegal. There are plenty of things free citizens can do, but acknowledging that is entirely different from believing they should. Saying nasty things is chief among them. 

If populations lack authority over their own tongues, then they are not truly free. While government censorship against mean language may seem moral, it is really the beginning of a slippery slope toward tyranny. Brazil is well on its way. Read more.

ICE Officers Are Stranded in Africa

Have you ever been stuck in Djibouti?

Three Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are right now. 

According to a new report, the officials are stranded in the African country with eight criminal illegal immigrants after a judge barred the octet’s deportation to South Sudan. The convicts, found guilty of murder, sexual assault, robbery, arson, and more, are living in a shipping container on a U.S. naval base with around-the-clock surveillance from the agents. The officers regularly encounter toxic smog from nearby burn pits and live under the threat of Houthi rocket attacks.

The group remains in Djibouti because U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy blocked the Trump administration from deporting invaders to countries from which they did not come. The White House claims the deportees’ crimes were so “monstrous and barbaric” that no country other than war-torn South Sudan will take them.

Read more here, including details about the criminals’ records and a look at their headshots.

Does Hakeem Jeffries Want ICE Agents to Get Murdered?

Hakeem Jeffries is pledging to expose the identities of ICE agents involved in recent immigration raids. His promise comes despite official warnings that anti-law activists could target and harass the public servants if their names become available.

“This is America. This is not the Soviet Union. We’re not behind the Iron Curtain. This is not the 1930s,” the Democrat House leader said on Tuesday. “And every single one of [the agents], no matter what it takes, no matter how long it takes, will, of course, be identified.”

We’re not clear on what having a functioning immigration system has to do with Joseph Stalin’s Russia, but we do know that Jeffries’s vision could endanger law enforcement officers in similar ways that the murderous Soviet leader’s purge policies did to people in his country. Earlier this week, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons revealed that his agents are facing increased “death threats to their family and themselves.” Read more.

Supreme Court Says Discrimination Is Illegal, Even If It’s Against Straight Whites

Title VII is clear: workplace discrimination based on race, religion, ethnicity, sex, or sexual orientation is illegal. This is America, where we’re supposed to treat people based on their character, not their demographics. 

Does that apply to non-minorities, too? Say, to straight white people? According to the Supreme Court, yes it does. 

In a unanimous Thursday decision, the High Court revived a lawsuit from Ohio woman Marlean Ames, who claims to be the victim of reverse discrimination. Her employer, the state’s Department of Youth Services, allegedly denied her a promotion because she isn't a lesbian, instead hiring a gay woman for a position she sought, then demoted her from the job she already had and filled the spot with a gay man. 

A federal district court previously ruled against Ames, saying citizens filing reverse discrimination complaints must clear a higher bar than those with allegations of normal discrimination, which ironically is discriminatory in and of itself. Read more.

REPORT: White House Shuts Down Ukrainian Rocket Shipments

When you pay your taxes, you probably want the money to go toward things that make your life better. That’s a reasonable stance.

It’s also what makes Washington using fortunes of taxpayer dollars to fund foreign war machines so frustrating. The United States needs help with homelessness, education, infrastructure, the economy, the drug crisis, and plenty of other issues. Could our politicians maybe use our paychecks to solve those problems before sending lethal aid to Ukraine, Israel, and who knows where else?

The Trump administration took a step in the right direction on Thursday, reportedly redirecting shipments of anti-drone technology initially meant to fight Russia to U.S. Air Force units in the Middle East. Although the American troops in that region probably shouldn’t be there in the first place, they surely deserve strong security as long as they are. These munitions should help provide it. Read more.

Trump Threatens to Sanction Ukraine

Donald Trump compared Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky to two bickering children on Thursday, saying, “Sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart.”

The comment came during an Oval Office meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who urged the president to put more pressure on Moscow, through sanctions or other means, to pursue a diplomatic solution to finally end their war.

“It could be on both countries to be honest,” Trump quickly replied. “You know, it takes two to tango, but we’re going to be very tough, whether it’s Russia or anybody else.”

Does that mean he sees the Ukrainians as an equal obstacle to peace as the Russians? Maybe. Whatever happens next, the White House should ensure all policies relating to this conflict advance the interests of the United States. The previous administration spent years prioritizing other countries’ needs, and it turned out disastrously. The president should make any decision on sanctioning Ukraine, Russia, both, or neither based on how it will affect our country, not a foreign agenda that has nothing to do with the American people. Read more.

Bill Clinton Demands We Ignore Biden’s Decline Because it Was in the Past

Shut up!

That’s what Bill Clinton wants us to do when it comes to Joe Biden’s dazed and confused state. 

The one-time first gentleman hopeful said Americans “should think less about that and more about the future” during a Thursday appearance on The View, insinuating that the United States spending four years under a commander in chief with the mental wherewithal of a pile of dirt is somehow no big deal because there’s a new president now. 

See how this works? The establishment is thrilled to milk the past when it comes to stories like 2021’s election justice protest, George Floyd, or the now-debunked Russia hoax. But when it comes to things that hurt them politically? 

Oh come on! The past is in the past! Read more.

Jasmine Crockett Says You’re Not Allowed to Criticize Stacey Abrams

Did you know the Biden administration gave Stacey Abrams’s nonprofit a $2 billion grant?

That fact alone raises some obvious questions. Was that a fair allocation of taxpayer dollars? Would Abrams have still received the money if she were a Republican? Or even a regular, non-political person? 

Democrats don’t want you to wonder about those things, so they’re resorting to their typical strategy for whenever they’re in a pinch: calling their opponents racist. Party intellectual thought leader Jasmine Crockett pushed that deranged narrative on Thursday, accusing people who think shelling out $2 billion for Stacey Abrams might not be the best use of government money of wanting to “keep a strong black woman down.”

“To hear the comments about Stacey Abrams, it really got me goin’,” the distinguished congresswoman said. “Why not muddy the water if we can to keep a strong black woman down?”, she then accused critics of asking themselves before daring to suggest Abrams shouldn’t have received the $2 billion. Recall that she wants to be one of Washington’s most powerful Democrats.

Read more and watch the remarks here.

Commentary

$600,000 Salaries and No Taxes?

Harvard has been in the news a lot lately, but some of the stories are hard to follow.

Sure, headlines about the university losing its ability to enroll foreign students or forfeiting federal funding tend to garner plenty of attention. How much, though, do they impact the average American? Not a ton. 

But the institution’s tax-exempt status? That’s a different story. By allowing the stuffy Cambridge academic hub to dodge paying federal income taxes, the government sends the clear message that the school gets special privileges Washington would never afford everyday citizens. Given the university has an endowment of over $50 billion, it could surely stomach cutting Uncle Sam a check or two. But it doesn’t. 

Education conglomerates like Harvard are far from the only groups somewhat free from the IRS’s wrath, and one of them is particularly on our minds today: non-profit hospitals. 

A Wednesday Townhall column broke down the seemingly crooked relationship between those entities and the government, detailing how they overwhelmingly fail to provide the public service they should to justify swiping left on their taxes.

Before exploring some numbers, it’s worth taking a step back and pondering what an institution should do to warrant an exemption. From an economic perspective, the answer is simple. They should provide the public with at least as much value as they save by not paying taxes. Makes sense, right?

So how are America’s non-profit hospitals behaving? Do they meet that bar? Not even close. According to a study cited in the aforementioned article, “more than 1,900 nonprofit hospitals receive more in tax breaks than they give back to their community, totaling billions” of dollars in profits. The report analyzed figures from 2,425 hospitals throughout the U.S., meaning over 80% are taking more than they give. 

“In total,” the Townhall piece states, “the amount was so staggering – a shocking $25.7 billion in fair share deficits – it would have been sufficient to ‘pay off the medical debt of everyone in California, Texas, New York, and Pennsylvania combined.’”

Now here’s the real kicker, also as written in the article. Emphasis is ours:

“Americans are starting to notice that ‘non-profit’ hospital CEO salaries have reached Fortune 500 levels, and continue to rise exponentially. Between 2012 and 2019, CEO compensation grew 30 percent – reaching a mean average of over $600,000 a year – which, frankly, seems kind of ‘profitable.’”

$600,000 salaries and no taxes? Doesn’t that sound like abuse? 

We’re not typically clamoring for more government regulations, but anyone raking in 600 grand to run a “charitable” organization that’s actually an overwhelming net taker should probably be subject to some tighter rules. The current situation is clearly unfair to regular people, and that’s who both the government and so-called charities are supposed to serve.

Video of the Day

Baboons take selfies.

This Day in History 

June 6, 1944: D-Day. Led by Dwight Eisenhower, Over 150,000 Allied soldiers landed on the beaches of Normandy to liberate Western Europe from the Nazis. Although the Allies only landed fractions of the intended supplies and vehicles, they triumphed in their invasion and pushed German rule out of Northern France within three months. Roughly 4,000 Allied troops died in the effort. 

Join now to receive this Morning Note every weekday, gain access to our members-only documentaries, support real journalism, and unlock all of the rest of TCN's members-only perks.

Paid for by Last Country, Inc. You are receiving this email at: [email protected]
Last Country, Inc. 3495 Lakeside Drive # 1115, Reno, NV 89509.

If you would like to stop receiving these newsletters, unsubscribe here.
If you would like to opt-out of receiving all messages from Tucker Carlson Network, unsubscribe here.

Privacy Policy.