ON THE POLITICS OF POSTHUMOUS HONOR
We the People, Not We
the Vindictive
The nation’s highest civic tributes have become
spoils of a partisan war that ought to end at the grave.
It is time to bind them in statute.
When Lindsey Graham lies in state beneath the Capitol dome on July 28, the Rotunda
will do what it too often does. It will confer the republic’s highest civic honor
by the oldest and least honorable of standards: who had the votes.
There is no statute that governs this. None. Lying in state requires only a concurrent
resolution of Congress, and the criteria are whatever the majority happens to
feel that week. That is precisely why the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a man who marched
from Selma, ran twice for president, and carried the moral weight of a movement,
was denied the Capitol Rotunda his supporters requested and sent home to a state
capitol instead.
Honor flows to friends․ Insult flows to rivals․
The dead deserve better than a scorecard․
It is why John McCain, a genuine war hero, was saluted with the flag grudgingly
lowered to half staff. A sitting president raised it and lowered it again only after veterans’
groups shamed him into decency.
The pattern is unmistakable. The dead are ranked not by service to the country
but by their standing with whoever holds the gavel and the flagpole. And so the
machinery of national mourning, including the Rotunda, the flag at half staff, and
commemorative coins and stamps, becomes one more prize in a feud that should
have no place beside a casket.
This is a disgrace, and it is fixable. Congress should establish clear, neutral criteria
in federal law for who receives these honors, considering the length and character
of national service and measuring it by law rather than by grudge. It should take
the decision out of the hands of small men who treat a funeral as a ballot.
The Rotunda belongs to the nation, not to a faction. The flag at half staff should
salute the citizen, not flatter the powerful. Let these honors be dispensed by We the
People, not We the Vindictive.

The Wanted Poster
and the Parade
Picture your own town. Then look at what we’ve become.
Picture the sheriff’s office in your own town. On the wall hangs a poster: WANTED.
The charge is stealing children by carrying them off from a neighboring county
in the middle of a fight. Everyone who walks in sees that face. Everyone knows what
he is accused of. Now picture the Fourth of July. The mayor doesn’t just let that man
into town. He gives him the lead float. He seats him up front where the children can
wave. He rides beside him down Main Street, smiling for the cameras, while the
band plays and the flags snap in the wind. Nobody mentions the poster. It is still on
the wall, three blocks away, gathering dust.
“The poster is still on the wall․ We just handed him the float․”
That parade was real. It happened on August 15, 2025, in Anchorage, Alaska. The
man on the float was Vladimir Putin, wanted by the International Criminal Court
since March 2023 for the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children. The lead float
was a red carpet and a shared limousine. The mayor was the President of the United
States. And the poster, the warrant, is still on the wall, gathering dust.
There is a second float in this parade. Israel’s prime minister rides it while under
his own ICC warrant for the conduct of the war in Gaza. He is welcomed to the
reviewing stand more often than any other guest in town. When someone asks the
mayor why, the answer is always the same: these are good men to do business with.
As if a warrant were a credit rating. As if the poster on the wall were a suggestion.
And here is the part that should turn a decent stomach. There is one poster that
can never be printed in this town: the mayor’s own. We built the sheriff’s office so
that no outside court could ever hang our leaders on that wall. A rule that binds
only the strangers you dislike, and never the friends you profit from, is not the law.
It is a parade permit.
You can tell what a town honors by whom it puts on the lead float. Right now, we
are saving that seat for wanted men while asking the children to wave.

The Chickenhawk’s Ledger
They declare the wars. Someone else’s children pay for them.
They send the young to die, then call it honor.
Consider the arithmetic no one in power wants totaled. The average American
killed in Iraq and Afghanistan was about 26 years old. He earned a junior enlisted
wage, often $25,000 to $40,000 a year, and his net worth, after a truck payment and
some debt, hovered near zero. He left behind a spouse who will raise his children
on the memory of a folded flag.
Now consider those who signed his orders. The President draws $400,000 a year.
A member of Congress draws $174,000, and the median lawmaker is worth roughly
$1 million. In the House, the average member is worth some $8 million. They vote
for war from marble chambers, confident that their own sons will never have to
trade civilian life for a Humvee.
“The powerful discover their courage precisely when
the bleeding will be done by someone else․”
The pattern is bipartisan and shameless. Donald Trump, who as commander
in chief ordered strikes and deployments, sat out Vietnam through a string of deferments,
capped by a convenient diagnosis of heel spurs. Bill Clinton, who fired
cruise missiles from the Oval Office, maneuvered clear of that same war through
his own tangle of deferments. Two men, two parties, one privilege: the wars are
always for other people’s children.
This is the oldest swindle in the republic. The powerful discover their courage
precisely when the bleeding will be done by someone poorer, younger, and more
decent than themselves. The soldier believes he is defending a democracy. Too often
he is defending the fortunes and reputations of men who arranged, when it was
their turn, to be somewhere safe.
We are told to honor the fallen. Fine. But honor is cheap when it costs a wreath
and a speech. Real honor would mean this: no one who dodged a war should vote
to start one, and no lecture on sacrifice from a millionaire who never risked a dime
or a son.
The ultimate price is paid by the few: the young, the broke, and the loyal, all
on behalf of the many who profit and preen. Until that ledger is read aloud, the
speeches are only noise over fresh graves.

Selling Tickets to Insider Information
on a Platform Called “Truth Social”?
Consider the branding. A company named for truth, running a platform named
for truth, now proposes to sell truth itself by the millisecond to the highest bidder.
Beginning August 1, Trump Media & Technology Group’s “Truth API” will pipe the
president’s posts that move markets to banks and trading firms milliseconds before
the public sees them, for a reported monthly fee in the six figures. The name promises
information for the people; the product delivers it to the auction winner.
Recall Joseph Kennedy’s shoeshine boy, trading on the same tip as the tycoon.
At least he shared the tycoon’s information. Today, the White House teleprompter
operator reads the words that move markets before they are even spoken and is
better informed than Kennedy’s bootblack ever was, while the public learns them
last. Proximity to the podium is now an asset for rent.
One set of rules for you․ No rules for him․
Strip the euphemism and it is plain: tickets to insider information, sold at the
door. Speed, when the merchandise is government policy, is no convenience. It is
a head start on the Treasury, marketed by a company largely owned by the president’s
own trust. The SEC exists to forbid exactly this asymmetry. That presidents
were exempted from conflict of interest statutes decades ago does not bless the arrangement;
it exposes the loophole. Every prior occupant treated policy as public
property and released it to everyone at the same time. This one meters the tap and
pockets the meter.
Retire the pretense: “Truth Social” is a turnstile, and truth is the commodity behind
it, sold first to the few and delayed for the many. Veritas pro populo? Not at
these prices. “Markets already move on our posts,” the company boasts. Precisely.
That is the confession, not the defense.

The Wrong Kind of Strength
When the Pentagon starts measuring its people by their
hormones instead of their heads, the Republic should worry.
The Secretary of Defense has apparently concluded that the gravest threat to
American arms is not incompetence, not poor judgment, not the slow erosion of
merit, but low testosterone. Last week, Pete Hegseth ordered mandatory annual
hormone screening for every service member over thirty, wrapping the order in
swaggering rhetoric about high testosterone and a “Department of War.” Physicians
reacted with something close to disbelief; one kinesiologist dismissed the idea
of blanket screening of everyone over thirty as a ridiculous notion. They are right.
Consider what actually won the Second World War. It was not the biggest biceps
in the barracks. It was radar, the codebreakers, the Manhattan Project, penicillin,
and an industrial machine no adversary on earth could match. America triumphed
because it out-thought its enemies, not because it looked more menacing. The decisive
weapon was the disciplined human mind, marshaled by leaders who understood
that victory is counted in objectives achieved, not in blood spilled.
Our finest commanders earned their laurels the same way. Washington’s patient
retreats and Eisenhower’s meticulous planning avoided needless slaughter rather
than chasing it. Strategic restraint is not weakness. It is the highest form of strength,
and it requires a clear head, not a chemically inflated one.
That is precisely why this fixation alarms. We are telling the men and women
who guard the most fearsome arsenal ever assembled, an arsenal capable of ending
civilizations, that aggression is a virtue to be maximized. Roid rage and the nuclear
codes are not a pairing any sane republic should court.
And beneath the hormone charts lies the real rot: a merit system built on competence,
character, and candor is being quietly swapped for a loyalty system built on
flattery. Advancement now flows to those who echo the boss, not to those who tell
him hard truths. Ability is out; adoration is in.
Has all sanity left Washington? The nation’s defense demands both the best
minds we can find and the spine to promote them.
When the Bank Robber
Lectures You on Vault Security
A convicted felon’s crusade against “election fraud”
collapses the moment you read the record.
When Donald Trump warns America about “election fraud,” listen closely. It is
the bank robber lecturing the tellers on vault security. No public figure alive has a
thinner claim to the language of law and honesty, and the case against him is not
opinion or partisan spin. It consists of docket entries, signed memos, and pardon
paperwork. Together, they form a record any citizen can read.
Trump is a convicted felon, found guilty by a Manhattan jury in 2024 on thirty
four counts of falsifying business records. It was the first such verdict against a
former president in our history. Not an accusation. A verdict. He lectures us on
“rigged” systems from the far side of a conviction he could not talk his way out of.
Then recall 2020. He swore the election was stolen and marched into court
roughly sixty times to prove it, appearing before judges he appointed. Even his own
attorney general found no fraud that could have changed the result. He lost nearly
every case because he had no evidence. A man who cannot win a single fraud case
has no standing to cry fraud forever.
Consider whom he has freed. On his first day back in office, he pardoned or commuted
some 1,500 January 6 defendants, including Oath Keepers and Proud Boys
convicted of seditious conspiracy and rioters who beat the officers defending the
Capitol. The party of “back the blue” now cheers the very men who bloodied them.
Then, in December 2025, he pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former
Honduran president whom a U.S. jury convicted of moving over 400 tons of cocaine
toward American streets in one of the largest and most violent trafficking
conspiracies in the world. He bombs fishing boats in the name of a drug war while
unlocking a convicted kingpin’s cell.
One set of rules for you․ No rules for him․
Consider whom he shields. He signed a law to release the Epstein files, then let
his own Justice Department blow past the deadline and keep the record buried.
His deputy attorney general, his former personal lawyer, interviewed Ghislaine
Maxwell, a convicted trafficker of underage girls. She was quietly moved to a softer
prison. The victims wait. Maxwell gets comfort.
And consider whom he exempts. In 2026, a Justice Department memo declared
the IRS “forever barred” from auditing Trump, his family, his trusts, and his businesses.
A possible $100 million penalty simply evaporated. One set of rules for you.
No rules for him.
This is not conservatism. It is not law and order. It is a man rewriting history in
real time, betting you won’t check the record. In November, check it. And if you can
cheer every line above, you have earned the red face to match the red hat.
A Personal Note From the Author
They haven’t thrown me from a window but they are trying.
In Putin’s Russia, dissidents have a way of falling from hospital windows. Businessmen
who speak inconvenient truths meet inconvenient ends on staircases and
balconies across Moscow. I am writing this from Omaha, Nebraska. I have not been
thrown from a window.
The IRS as a weapon of silence.
But I am being thrown out of something just as vital: my life savings. What I am
experiencing is what I believe to be a targeted, methodical IRS assault. It is not random,
routine, or coincidental. It follows my speaking out. It follows my refusal to
be silenced. In Russia, they silence critics with gravity. In America, I think they are
learning to do it with audits, paperwork, and financial ruin, stripping away everything
a person has built until the cost of speaking becomes too steep to bear.
See Lambi v. United States of America, et al., Case No. 8:2026cv00101,
U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska.
Slander Through Trusted Institutions: The Berkshire Hathaway Campaign
And the IRS is not the only instrument being wielded against me. I believe I have
also been the victim of deliberate, government-sourced slander and lies spread to
professional contacts who had no reason to doubt what they were told. I believe
that honest, hardworking real estate agents employed by Berkshire Hathaway were
fed false information about me by government actors. Berkshire Hathaway is one
of the most respected real estate companies in America and was built on a foundation
of integrity. These were decent professionals simply doing their jobs, used
as unwitting vectors of what I think is a smear campaign designed to isolate me
professionally, damage my reputation, and ensure that doors would close before
I could even knock on them. This is not the free market. This is not the rule of law.
This is the deliberate destruction of a private citizen’s livelihood by government
machinery set in motion to punish dissent. I believe that Berkshire Hathaway is as
much a victim of this as I am.
See Brent Lambi, pro se v. Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, et al.,
Case No. D01CI260001752, Nebraska District Court, Douglas County.
I am still standing.
This is the American version of defenestration. No broken glass. No headlines.
Just a man with his savings under assault and his name poisoned in his own community,
all of it meant to serve as a quiet warning to everyone watching. The message
is clear: speak up, and we will take everything. Your money. Your reputation.
Your future.
I am still watching. I am still writing. I am still standing. And I intend to be heard.
The opinions expressed above are solely those of the author.Sell Alaska. Take the money. Run.
Two broke empires once sold us a continent.
It is time we returned the favor.
America has a long and honorable tradition of buying continents from broke
warmongers. It is time we returned the favor.
Consider the pattern. In 1803, Napoleon needed cash after bleeding out in Haiti
and preparing to bleed out across Europe. He sold us 828,000 square miles for
$15 million, roughly three cents an acre, because empires with expensive hobbies
eventually need a garage sale. In 1867, Tsar Alexander II, still nursing the hangover
of the Crimean War, sold us Alaska for $7.2 million. Two cents an acre. Seward’s
Folly, the papers sneered. The folly, of course, belonged to the man who had spent
his treasury on artillery instead of infrastructure. We are now that man.
“Every nation that ever sold a continent said the same
things right up until the invoices arrived.”
Our national debt has sailed past $37 trillion, propelled by a foreign policy that
treats the Pentagon budget like a bar tab we will settle in the next life. Venezuela.
Iraq, twice, in case the first one did not take. And now serious people in serious
rooms are discussing the acquisition of Greenland, apparently on the theory that
what this country really needs is more frozen real estate we cannot afford to heat.
So sell the frozen real estate we already have.
Alaska is, geographically speaking, Canadian. It sits atop British Columbia and
the Yukon like a hat. It is separated from the contiguous United States by an entire
foreign country, a fact we handle by pretending the map is not doing what the map
is obviously doing. Alaskans drive to the rest of America by driving through Canada.
Let us stop the charade.
The price? Alaska’s proven oil and gas reserves, mineral deposits, fisheries, timber,
and 365 million acres of land plausibly run into the low trillions. Call it $3 trillion,
at a friendly neighbor rate, with financing available. That is eight percent of the
debt erased in a single afternoon, plus we stop paying for statehood’s upkeep and
gain a permanent excuse to blame Ottawa for the price of salmon.
The objections write themselves. National security. Sovereignty. Sentiment.
Fine. But note that every nation that ever sold a continent said the same things,
right up until the invoices arrived.
History’s lesson is not that great powers fall. It is that they get billed. Russia and
France learned it. We are about to.
Two cents an acre bought it. Let us see what we can get.
This satire is offered in the spirit of Swift and in earnest about the arithmetic

Fill America’s gas tanks with corn, bring the troops home,
and the one weapon Iran holds over us simply disappears.
The U.S.–Iran ceasefire fell apart this month. American forces struck dozens of targets,
Iran hit back at bases in Kuwait and Bahrain, and the Strait of Hormuz, the sea
lane that carries much of the world’s oil, came under attack again.
The plain truth most headlines skip: Iran’s greatest weapon against ordinary Americans
isn’t a missile; it’s the price of gas. Threaten that shipping lane and pump prices
jump, hurting families that have nothing to do with the fight. Remove that lever, and
Iran loses most of its power over us. This can be done without an invasion and without
putting American lives at risk.
1. More Home-Grown Fuel in Every Gallon
Today’s gas is mostly oil with a splash of ethanol, a clean fuel made from American
corn. The plan raises that to “E27”: 27 percent ethanol in every gallon. More corn in
the tank means less oil burned, so a distant crisis does far less damage to your wallet.
Farmers win, drivers win, Tehran loses leverage.
2. Make New Cars ‘Flex-Fuel’ Ready
A flex-fuel car runs on high ethanol blends as easily as it runs on gasoline, and the
equipment that allows it to do so costs about a hundred dollars per car. Require it in
all new vehicles, and the country can shift to home-grown fuel as fast as farmers can
supply it.
3. One Clear Red Line — and Only One
America steps back from policing the region and stops offensive action against Iran
with one exception. If Iran moves to build an actual nuclear weapon, the facility involved
can be struck precisely from the air, with no ground troops. One firm rule replaces
a hundred smaller provocations that keep the war spiraling.
4. Let the Peacemakers Work
Qatar and Pakistan are already carrying messages between Washington and
Tehran. Back that channel: ease sanctions that punish everyday Iranians in exchange
for letting inspectors back into Iran’s nuclear sites. Talking costs nothing
and risks no one.
5. Move Troops Out of Harm’s Way
The bases Iran keeps firing at are tripwires. Pull those exposed forces back,
and there are fewer targets, fewer excuses for the next round, and less pressure
to strike again.
The bottom line is simple: Make American gasoline immune
to disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran’s ability to
squeeze us would quietly end, with no war required.

A Rigged Game: When the
Plaintiff Owns the Courthouse
How “Plaintiff Donald Trump” became the accuser,
enforcer, and appointer of his own judges, all at once.
Imagine a baseball game where one team’s owner also hires the umpire, picks
the official scorer, and installs his personal batting coach as commissioner of the
league. Would you call that a fair game? Of course not. You’d call it a fraud. Yet that
is precisely the arrangement now being built around a single litigant in America:
Plaintiff Donald Trump.
Here is what should alarm every citizen, whether left, right, or independent:
When Donald Trump is a party to a legal fight, he does not merely argue his case.
He controls the machinery meant to judge it. He directs the prosecutors who decide
whom to charge. He nominates the federal judges who preside over the disputes.
And he has now placed Todd Blanche, the lawyer who personally defended him
in his criminal cases, atop the entire Justice Department as acting attorney general.
Read that again. The man whose job was to keep Trump out of prison is being
handed the keys to the nation’s prosecutorial power. That is not a coincidence. It
is by design.
The oldest rule in Anglo-American law, older than the Constitution itself, is this:
no man may be a judge in his own case. It is the beating heart of due process. The
Fifth Amendment promises that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property
without a fair and neutral hearing. There is nothing neutral about a courthouse
where the plaintiff picks the umpire, signs the judge’s commission, and lunches
with the commissioner.
Call it what it is: a kangaroo court, a proceeding in which the verdict is settled before
the gavel falls and the process is dressed up in the costume of legitimacy. When
one man is at once the accuser, the enforcer, and the appointer of his own judges,
the trial is theater and the Constitution is a prop. The Founders fought a revolution
to escape exactly this. We did not trade a king for a courtroom.

The Wrong Scoreboard
A record on Wall Street is not a verdict on the
Republic. Most Americans do not own the
market—and the asset that built the middle class
is slipping out of reach.
When a president wants to prove the nation is thriving, he points
to the closing bell record highs, offered as proof the country is well.
Both parties do it when the numbers flatter them. Both are wrong. A
stock index measures one thing: the market value of American corporations.
It says nothing about whether a young family in Omaha
or Des Moines can buy a house.
Who actually owns this market? Supposedly most of us as about
six in ten adults hold stock in some form. But most hold it indirectly,
locked inside a 401(k) or IRA they cannot touch for decades. And
what exists is hoarded, not shared: the wealthiest one percent hold
roughly half of all corporate equity, more than the entire bottom
ninety percent combined. Among six‐figure households, seven in
eight own stock; among those earning under fifty thousand, barely
one in four.
The wealthiest one percent own more stock
than the bottom ninety percent combined.
Wealth itself tells the same story. The top one percent command
about thirty percent of everything; the top tenth, two‐thirds; the
bottom half a little over two percent. The typical family is worth
near $192,000; the average, dragged up by the fortunes above,
tops a million. That is not broad prosperity. It is a Gilded Age with
better marketing.
Yet one asset built the American middle class. Not the trading
floor, but the front porch. The typical homeowner is worth about
forty times the typical renter. And that ladder is being pulled up.
Homeownership sits near sixty‐five percent, below its 2004 peak.
In 1960 a home cost about twice a family’s income; today, five to
seven times. First‐time buyers have fallen to a record‐low one
in five of all purchases, and the median first‐time buyer is now
forty, a generation older than the old norm. Every year of delay
is equity never built. The house that made a middle class is becoming
an inheritance.
The Constitution does not open with “We the Shareholders.” It
opens with “We the People,” and charges government with the general
welfare, not the general index. A market at record highs while a
generation is locked out of ownership is no triumph. It is an indictment
and neither party is innocent. Both point at the ticker; neither
has built the homes. So ask the plainer question: is the number of
American owners rising, or falling? The Dow measures the wealth
of the few. The deed measures the worth of the many.
Count the owners, not the index.
SOURCES
Gallup, Economy and Personal Finance Survey (2025–26); Federal
Reserve, Survey of Household Economics and Decision-making
(2025), Survey of Consumer Finances (2022), and Distributional
Financial Accounts (Q1 2026); U.S. Census Bureau, Housing
Vacancies and Homeownership Survey (Q1 2026, national rate
65.3%; 2004 peak 69.2%); National Association of Realtors, Profile of
Home Buyers and Sellers (2025). Figures reflect the most recent data
available as of July, 2026 and are rounded for readability.
Veritas Pro Populo
July 12, 2026
Brent Lambi
The Smear That Confesses Its Own
Bankruptcy
When a candidate cries “Communist,” the word
reveals more about the accuser than the
accused.
When a politician calls an opponent a “Communist,” listen closely
for the word reveals far more about the accuser than the accused.
It is the white flag of a candidate who has run out of ideas. Unable
to debate policy, unwilling to offer an agenda, he reaches for a slur
that requires no thought and invites none. Leadership proposes;
cowardice name-calls.
Let us be honest about the word itself. What Russia and the former
Soviet Union practiced was never communism in any meaningful
sense. It was totalitarianism dressed in a borrowed costume:
one-party rule, secret police, gulags for dissenters, and the silencing
of every free press.
The crime of the Soviet state was not that it cared too much for
working people; it was that it crushed them, jailed them, and lied
to them. To equate that machinery of fear with a neighbor’s call for
fairer healthcare is not analysis. It is the deliberate confusion of cruelty
with compassion.
“That is not Marx. That is the Golden Rule
with a payroll deduction.”
What Americans Already Believe
Consider what Americans already believe. Social Security, that
supposedly “socialist” program, remains among the most popular
institutions in our national life. Republicans and Democrats alike
defend it; no serious candidate dares campaign to abolish it.
Why? Because Americans long ago decided that a wealthy nation
should not let its elders die in poverty. That is not Marx. That is the
Golden Rule with a payroll deduction.
If we accept the principle, we should have the courage to extend
it. Our neighbor Canada guarantees medical care to every citizen as
a right of belonging, not a privilege of income. We can fold a similar
guarantee into our own Social Security tradition and add to it
emergency shelter, so that no American freezes on a sidewalk in the
richest country the world has ever known.
These are not foreign impositions. They are the natural maturing
of a promise we have already made to one another.
Building, Not Branding
None of this is communism. It is a self-governing people deciding,
through their own representatives, what decency requires. The
Founders gave us a Constitution to “promote the general Welfare”,
their words, not mine.
So when the next demagogue points and shouts “Communist,”
answer him plainly: name your plan. Tell us how you would care for
the aged, heal the sick, and house the desperate. If you cannot, then
stand aside.
The work of a republic is building, not branding and the people
deserve leaders with blueprints, not just labels.

We’re Both Getting Dirty
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
OPINION |
Charlie Munger said it plain. “Never wrestle with a pig. You
both get dirty, and the pig likes it.” I want to say something
today that an opposing party in active litigation almost never
says. Berkshire Hathaway and I are both being hurt. By the
same thing. And it isn’t each other.
Case No. CI 26-1752, Douglas County District Court. I sued
Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices entities for breach of a
Buyer’s Listing Agreement and defamation. Separately, I have
a federal civil rights and FOIA enforcement case pending in
the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska, Case No.
8:26-cv-00101-SMB-RCC, against components of the DEA,
DOJ, and DHS.
–
want my state defamation case bogged down. Discovery in my
state case touches my federal case. If my state case never produces
discovery, their exposure shrinks. Delay protects them.
Resolution exposes them.
Now here is what most writers would never admit. Berkshire
is not the villain in this story. Berkshire is bleeding too.
Count the costs. Defense counsel fees, billed by the hour, in a
case the math says should have settled. Insurance reserves tied
up. Brand exposure every week the case stays in the news. Discomes
cheap. Every dollar Berkshire’s insurer spends defending
this case past the point where settlement made sense is a
dollar shareholders will not see. Charlie Munger could have
done that arithmetic on a napkin.
fronts at once. Filing fees, transcripts, expert costs, the unrecoverable
hours of my own life. Reputation hits in a small civic-
journalism market. Stress I will not pretend does not exist.
–
ing a return on this litigation is the federal actor who bene-
Which raises the only question that matters: why is this case
still being fought the way it is being fought?
I do not believe Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, as a
–
tine state defamation and breach-of-contract case this way.
for delay, not resolution. Discovery resistance that costs more
than the underlying claim. A posture that drives up fees on
both sides while the actual exposure sits unchanged.
When the math does not work, somebody else is doing the
calculations.
I believe — and I will say it directly — that the defense stratinterests
outside the four corners of the Berkshire Hathaway
HomeServices contractual relationship. A third party. One
with its own reasons. One whose interests are not Berkshire’s
interests, and are certainly not mine.
If that is true, Berkshire is not the defendant. Berkshire is the
host. And I am the bait.
Charlie Munger warned about exactly this. When you wrestle
walks away clean while everyone else is covered in mud and
short on cash.
who keeps pushing for more depositions, more delay, more
motion practice in a case that should have closed months ago.
Whose money is paying for this? Whose strategy is this actually
serving?
And then look at the door. I am open to resolution. I have
always been open to resolution. A buyer’s agency dispute is
not a constitutional crisis. It is a contract and a duty of care,
–
sion-makers want to talk — not the defense apparatus, the
actual decision-makers — the door is open.
One actor laughing.
–
ers, and for every lawyer billing on this case, is whether anyone
is going to do the obvious thing: stop wrestling each other, and
look at who let the pig in.
–
las County District Court, and in the matter docketed as Case
No. 8:26-cv-00101-SMB-RCC, U.S. District Court for the District
author’s observation of the proceedings. Nothing herein is inare
presumed entitled to a full and fair adjudication on the
merits. Honest Politics welcomes responses for publication.
Archive
Reader Feedback
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Much More
June 14, 2026
The Shareholder Cost of
Defending the Indefensible
Why What I Believe Was Serious Misconduct by a Federal Employee Can
Damage a Trillion-Dollar Holding Company—and Why I, as Both Shareholder
and Plaintiff, Am Asking Berkshire Hathaway to Choose Truth
OPINION | June 17, 2026
I am, simultaneously, two things in connection
with this matter. I am the plaintiff
in Case No. CI 26-1752, suing Berkshire Hathaway
HomeServices Ambassador Real
Estate, its parent chain, for the defamation
against me. I am also a Berkshire Hathaway
shareholder. I attended Berkshire’s annual
meeting in Omaha in May 2026. I hold stock
in the parent company my lawsuit names.
This dual standing is not a contradiction.
It is, in my opinion, the strongest argument
I can make to Berkshire’s senior leadership:
our interests are aligned, not opposed.
In a typical defamation case, the plaintiff
and the corporate defendant pull in opposite
directions. The plaintiff wants maximum
recovery; the company wants minimum
payout. Each side burns through
years of legal expense to discover where
the truth lies. Both sides emerge poorer, regardless
of verdict.
My case is different. I do not want maximum
recovery at Berkshire’s expense, because
Berkshire’s expense is partly my expense.
Once as a plaintiff awaiting relief, and
once again as a shareholder paying for the
defense. Every additional month of delay by
defense counsel costs me twice. It costs every
other Berkshire shareholder once.
In my opinion, what is happening is this:
a single bad actor inside a federal agency
– specifically, what I believe to have been
a materially incorrect April 29, 2025 DEA
FOIA response concerning my own records
– has set in motion a cascade of damage
that now flows through one of the largest
holding companies in the world. None
of this had to happen. It is happening because,
somewhere in the federal apparatus,
my name was mishandled, my record was
distorted, and the distorted record leaked
downstream into commercial compliance
pipelines that touch every brokerage, every
bank, every counterparty.
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
THE COST CASCADE
Let me describe how the damage flows, as
a shareholder would see it.
Litigation defense cost. The hours billed to
this case by outside counsel do not come
from nowhere. They are paid by a subsidiary,
consolidated into HomeServices of
America’s results, and rolled up into Berkshire.
The defensive posture in this matter,
which in my opinion, is to file a motion to
dismiss, refuse to identify counsel, and decline
pre-trial resolution, is itself the most
expensive option available. Honest engagement
would be cheaper. Settlement would
be cheaper still. Each escalation transfers
shareholder capital to outside counsel.
Executive bandwidth. HomeServices’ senior
leadership must be briefed on material
litigation. BHI’s general counsel’s office
must be briefed on litigation that could
reach the parent. Every hour spent on a defamation
case rooted in bad federal data is
an hour not spent on capital allocation, on
succession planning, on the operating businesses
Warren Buffett and Greg Abel exist
to oversee.
“I am not asking Berkshire to
defend what its subsidiary did.
I am asking Berkshire to let
its subsidiary tell the truth.”
Reputational exposure. Berkshire’s brand
is its most valuable single asset. Mr. Buffett’s
own formulation: “Lose money for
the firm and I will be understanding. Lose
a shred of reputation for the firm and I will
be ruthless” applies whether or not BHI’s
senior leadership is aware of this case today.
Defamation litigation paired with what
I believe is obstruction creates the precise
reputational headwind Berkshire’s culture
is supposed to prevent.
Reserve and disclosure consequences.
Material litigation eventually consumes
balance-sheet capacity. Even where
reserves stay below disclosable thresholds,
they affect insurance pricing on errorsand-
omissions and directors-and-officers
coverage. Banks and counterparties notice
the litigation profile.
Recruitment and retention. Quality real
estate agents, the people who actually generate
revenue for BHHS Ambassador, are
increasingly selective about culture and
compliance. A brokerage publicly defending
against unresolved defamation allegations
is a recruiting headwind. The cost
shows up as lost agent placements, lost listings,
and lost revenue per office.
Strategic distortion. Most consequentially,
every dollar and hour spent defending the
indefensible distorts strategy. Resources
that should go into expansion, technology,
and agent training go instead to outside
counsel. The opportunity cost is invisible,
but it is the largest line item of all.
THE UPSTREAM CAUSE
Now run the chain backwards. None of
these costs exist without the original injury.
If the federal record of me as a citizen
had been accurate, no compliance vendor
would have flagged me, no brokerage compliance
officer would have escalated, no
listing agent would have been primed to
believe what they were told. The contract
would have been honored. The alleged defamation
would not have occurred. There
would be no lawsuit. There would be no
defense costs, no executive distraction, no
reputational drag, no opportunity cost.
One bad federal employee and the costs
cascade through a trillion-dollar holding
company.
THE ASK
This is why, in my opinion, the argument
that honest testimony would clear my
name is not only personally important to
me. It is important from a fiduciary standpoint
to Berkshire Hathaway. The senior
leadership at BHI owes its shareholders,
including this one, a duty to take the cheapest,
fastest, most honest path through this
matter. That path runs through truthful
testimony. It does not run through continued
litigation tactics.
I am not asking Berkshire to defend what
its subsidiary did. I am asking Berkshire to
let its subsidiary tell the truth.

We’re Both Getting Dirty
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
OPINION |
Charlie Munger said it plain. “Never wrestle with a pig. You
both get dirty, and the pig likes it.” I want to say something
today that an opposing party in active litigation almost never
says. Berkshire Hathaway and I are both being hurt. By the
same thing. And it isn’t each other.
Case No. CI 26-1752, Douglas County District Court. I sued
Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices entities for breach of a
Buyer’s Listing Agreement and defamation. Separately, I have
a federal civil rights and FOIA enforcement case pending in
the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska, Case No.
8:26-cv-00101-SMB-RCC, against components of the DEA,
DOJ, and DHS.
–
want my state defamation case bogged down. Discovery in my
state case touches my federal case. If my state case never produces
discovery, their exposure shrinks. Delay protects them.
Resolution exposes them.
Now here is what most writers would never admit. Berkshire
is not the villain in this story. Berkshire is bleeding too.
Count the costs. Defense counsel fees, billed by the hour, in a
case the math says should have settled. Insurance reserves tied
up. Brand exposure every week the case stays in the news. Discomes
cheap. Every dollar Berkshire’s insurer spends defending
this case past the point where settlement made sense is a
dollar shareholders will not see. Charlie Munger could have
done that arithmetic on a napkin.
fronts at once. Filing fees, transcripts, expert costs, the unrecoverable
hours of my own life. Reputation hits in a small civic-
journalism market. Stress I will not pretend does not exist.
–
ing a return on this litigation is the federal actor who bene-
Which raises the only question that matters: why is this case
still being fought the way it is being fought?
I do not believe Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, as a
–
tine state defamation and breach-of-contract case this way.
for delay, not resolution. Discovery resistance that costs more
than the underlying claim. A posture that drives up fees on
both sides while the actual exposure sits unchanged.
When the math does not work, somebody else is doing the
calculations.
I believe — and I will say it directly — that the defense stratinterests
outside the four corners of the Berkshire Hathaway
HomeServices contractual relationship. A third party. One
with its own reasons. One whose interests are not Berkshire’s
interests, and are certainly not mine.
If that is true, Berkshire is not the defendant. Berkshire is the
host. And I am the bait.
Charlie Munger warned about exactly this. When you wrestle
walks away clean while everyone else is covered in mud and
short on cash.
who keeps pushing for more depositions, more delay, more
motion practice in a case that should have closed months ago.
Whose money is paying for this? Whose strategy is this actually
serving?
And then look at the door. I am open to resolution. I have
always been open to resolution. A buyer’s agency dispute is
not a constitutional crisis. It is a contract and a duty of care,
–
sion-makers want to talk — not the defense apparatus, the
actual decision-makers — the door is open.
One actor laughing.
–
ers, and for every lawyer billing on this case, is whether anyone
is going to do the obvious thing: stop wrestling each other, and
look at who let the pig in.
–
las County District Court, and in the matter docketed as Case
No. 8:26-cv-00101-SMB-RCC, U.S. District Court for the District
author’s observation of the proceedings. Nothing herein is inare
presumed entitled to a full and fair adjudication on the
merits. Honest Politics welcomes responses for publication.
Archive
Reader Feedback
Podcasts
Much More
June 14, 2026
The Shareholder Cost of
Defending the Indefensible
Why What I Believe Was Serious Misconduct by a Federal Employee Can
Damage a Trillion-Dollar Holding Company—and Why I, as Both Shareholder
and Plaintiff, Am Asking Berkshire Hathaway to Choose Truth
OPINION | June 17, 2026
I am, simultaneously, two things in connection
with this matter. I am the plaintiff
in Case No. CI 26-1752, suing Berkshire Hathaway
HomeServices Ambassador Real
Estate, its parent chain, for the defamation
against me. I am also a Berkshire Hathaway
shareholder. I attended Berkshire’s annual
meeting in Omaha in May 2026. I hold stock
in the parent company my lawsuit names.
This dual standing is not a contradiction.
It is, in my opinion, the strongest argument
I can make to Berkshire’s senior leadership:
our interests are aligned, not opposed.
In a typical defamation case, the plaintiff
and the corporate defendant pull in opposite
directions. The plaintiff wants maximum
recovery; the company wants minimum
payout. Each side burns through
years of legal expense to discover where
the truth lies. Both sides emerge poorer, regardless
of verdict.
My case is different. I do not want maximum
recovery at Berkshire’s expense, because
Berkshire’s expense is partly my expense.
Once as a plaintiff awaiting relief, and
once again as a shareholder paying for the
defense. Every additional month of delay by
defense counsel costs me twice. It costs every
other Berkshire shareholder once.
In my opinion, what is happening is this:
a single bad actor inside a federal agency
– specifically, what I believe to have been
a materially incorrect April 29, 2025 DEA
FOIA response concerning my own records
– has set in motion a cascade of damage
that now flows through one of the largest
holding companies in the world. None
of this had to happen. It is happening because,
somewhere in the federal apparatus,
my name was mishandled, my record was
distorted, and the distorted record leaked
downstream into commercial compliance
pipelines that touch every brokerage, every
bank, every counterparty.
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
THE COST CASCADE
Let me describe how the damage flows, as
a shareholder would see it.
Litigation defense cost. The hours billed to
this case by outside counsel do not come
from nowhere. They are paid by a subsidiary,
consolidated into HomeServices of
America’s results, and rolled up into Berkshire.
The defensive posture in this matter,
which in my opinion, is to file a motion to
dismiss, refuse to identify counsel, and decline
pre-trial resolution, is itself the most
expensive option available. Honest engagement
would be cheaper. Settlement would
be cheaper still. Each escalation transfers
shareholder capital to outside counsel.
Executive bandwidth. HomeServices’ senior
leadership must be briefed on material
litigation. BHI’s general counsel’s office
must be briefed on litigation that could
reach the parent. Every hour spent on a defamation
case rooted in bad federal data is
an hour not spent on capital allocation, on
succession planning, on the operating businesses
Warren Buffett and Greg Abel exist
to oversee.
“I am not asking Berkshire to
defend what its subsidiary did.
I am asking Berkshire to let
its subsidiary tell the truth.”
Reputational exposure. Berkshire’s brand
is its most valuable single asset. Mr. Buffett’s
own formulation: “Lose money for
the firm and I will be understanding. Lose
a shred of reputation for the firm and I will
be ruthless” applies whether or not BHI’s
senior leadership is aware of this case today.
Defamation litigation paired with what
I believe is obstruction creates the precise
reputational headwind Berkshire’s culture
is supposed to prevent.
Reserve and disclosure consequences.
Material litigation eventually consumes
balance-sheet capacity. Even where
reserves stay below disclosable thresholds,
they affect insurance pricing on errorsand-
omissions and directors-and-officers
coverage. Banks and counterparties notice
the litigation profile.
Recruitment and retention. Quality real
estate agents, the people who actually generate
revenue for BHHS Ambassador, are
increasingly selective about culture and
compliance. A brokerage publicly defending
against unresolved defamation allegations
is a recruiting headwind. The cost
shows up as lost agent placements, lost listings,
and lost revenue per office.
Strategic distortion. Most consequentially,
every dollar and hour spent defending the
indefensible distorts strategy. Resources
that should go into expansion, technology,
and agent training go instead to outside
counsel. The opportunity cost is invisible,
but it is the largest line item of all.
THE UPSTREAM CAUSE
Now run the chain backwards. None of
these costs exist without the original injury.
If the federal record of me as a citizen
had been accurate, no compliance vendor
would have flagged me, no brokerage compliance
officer would have escalated, no
listing agent would have been primed to
believe what they were told. The contract
would have been honored. The alleged defamation
would not have occurred. There
would be no lawsuit. There would be no
defense costs, no executive distraction, no
reputational drag, no opportunity cost.
One bad federal employee and the costs
cascade through a trillion-dollar holding
company.
THE ASK
This is why, in my opinion, the argument
that honest testimony would clear my
name is not only personally important to
me. It is important from a fiduciary standpoint
to Berkshire Hathaway. The senior
leadership at BHI owes its shareholders,
including this one, a duty to take the cheapest,
fastest, most honest path through this
matter. That path runs through truthful
testimony. It does not run through continued
litigation tactics.
I am not asking Berkshire to defend what
its subsidiary did. I am asking Berkshire to
let its subsidiary tell the truth.