Welcome to the first edition of The Morning Volley, the 4Liberty Network’s daily morning brief. Every morning we round up the stories we’re tracking, the numbers that matter, and the receipts you’ll want in hand before the day’s arguments start. Coffee recommended. Here’s what we’re watching this week.
New York Blinked: Mamdani Quietly Extends His Pied-à-Terre Tax Deadline
On Saturday, with no fanfare, Mayor Zohran Mamdani extended the exemption-application deadline for his new pied-à-terre tax from August 21 to September 18. The official reason: making sure New Yorkers who got the “You may be subject to…” letters have “the time and information they need.”
Here’s what needed extending. The city posted a public, searchable database of more than 900,000 properties that “may” owe the surcharge. Then it admitted that only about 17,000 addresses actually received letters. That’s roughly 53 households frightened for every one the city meant to bill.
And the extension fixes none of the underlying cases we’ve been tracking all week: the $55,048 bill sent to an 81-year-old woman for the Midtown townhouse she’s owned since 1996; the $42,824 bill to Upper West Side brownstone owner Karen Young, whose proof-of-residency documents the city’s own appeals portal lost; and the searchable list of names and addresses that Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella called “almost like an enemies list.” The bills still stand. The portal still runs. The list is still up.
The critique isn’t just coming from the right anymore. Professor Scott Galloway, an NYU professor, a Democrat, and the co-host of Kara Swisher’s Pivot podcast, is on the list himself, and said this week: “He’s taken a legitimate source of tax revenue, and he’s turning it into a wanted poster.” He went further, reading the definition of doxing on air and concluding, “I’ve been doxed.” When that argument is coming from Pivot, it has stopped being a partisan argument. A government list of disfavored citizens is dangerous no matter whose government builds it. That’s the whole reason you never let anyone build one.
“Zero Percent”: The Streamer Primary Gets Its Test Tuesday
Twitch streamer Hasan Piker told CNN there is, in his words, “zero percent chance that whoever the elected Democrat is that wins the primary will be pro-Israel in any way, shape, or form.” Not a prediction. A guarantee. Watch the clip:
This week the fight escalated. After Piker taunted conservative writer Jonah Goldberg by asking if he seemed “real scared,” Goldberg answered with the response worth bookmarking: “I’m not scared. I think you guys will fail because your ideas are stupid and very, very, old and will fail wherever put into practice.”
Why it matters now: the enforcement test has a date. On Tuesday, Michigan Democrats choose their Senate nominee, and Piker has spent months rallying for Abdul El-Sayed against Rep. Haley Stevens. (State Sen. Mallory McMorrow dropped out of the race in early July, and polling has El-Sayed leading heading into Tuesday.) If El-Sayed wins, “zero percent” stops being streamer bravado and starts looking like a platform plank. If he loses, the loudest voice in the online left just got told no by actual Democratic voters. Either way, Tuesday tells us who runs that party’s 2028 conversation.
Missouri’s Amendment 5: The Final 48 Hours
Missouri votes Tuesday on Amendment 5, which would phase out the state income tax. If you can’t make it Tuesday, in-person absentee voting runs through Monday. The Secretary of State projects roughly 32% turnout, which means every vote cast this week carries about triple the weight of a November ballot.
The No side’s closing number is a claimed “16% average sales tax” needed to replace the revenue, a figure that assumes lawmakers replace every dollar with sales tax alone, exempt nothing, and cut nothing, by its own author’s admission. The amendment as written phases out the income tax on revenue triggers through 2032 and mandates no sales-tax expansion. The Yes side’s closing argument, from Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick: the states doing best economically are the ones without an income tax, and Tennessee has been running the experiment next door. Read the Beacon’s fact-check of both sides’ ads and the Show-Me Institute’s FAQ, and make up your own mind, in a voting booth rather than on the couch.
The Fifth Amendment Goes to Committee Wednesday
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is scheduled to vote Wednesday on a resolution certifying Dr. Anthony Fauci’s contempt of Congress, after he invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times at the July 29 hearing.
Our position hasn’t moved and won’t: you cannot be for a constitutional right and for official punishment of the man who uses it. The Fifth doesn’t have an asterisk for unpopular witnesses. It was written for them. And none of that requires going easy on the record, which convicts itself in Fauci’s own handwriting, no testimony needed. Defend the plea; prosecute the record. Wednesday we find out how many senators can hold both halves of that sentence.
Last Week on the 4Liberty Network
A taste of what ran across the network this week: Austin took apart the Vice President’s “economics is fake” line with a refrigerator and a labor-hours chart in Alexander Hamilton, Milton Friedman, and JD Vance’s Refrigerator, and Brad Boeckmann reported from Jefferson City on the Salvation Army’s 62-bed shelter expansion, civil society doing the work without a dollar of government operating money, in this piece. Starting with tomorrow’s edition, this section will recap highlights from all six shows across the network, with clips.
Wake Up America streams live weekdays 7–9 AM Central on Rumble. For memberships, the shop, and the Discord, everything lives right here at 4LibertyNetwork.com. See you tomorrow morning. Same time, fresh volley.
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