The Cerf Report

David Cerf

5.0 (1)
Business
Updated Weekly

The Cerf Report delivers clear, critical analysis of issues that often lack depth or rigor. Each episode examines the forces shaping economic power, public policy, technology, and institutional change — separating signal from noise. Audio editions are adapted from written research published on Substack, preserving the original analysis in a format designed for listening. thecerfreport.substack.com

Jul 24

America in Crisis: Epilogue

For six episodes, this series turned over one coin at a time — a plane, a fortune, an energy bet, a career, a memecoin, the office itself — and found the same thing every time: two Americas looking at identical facts and seeing opposite countries. The Epilogue asks the question all the others were pointing at. Forget whether any single deal was good or bad. What is it costing us — in dollars, in years, in the trust that lets a hundred million strangers build something together — that we can no longer agree on the answer? And who is getting rich off the fact that we can’t? The trail runs from the ruins of the post-Civil War South, where distrust cost a generation of growth, to a strategist’s on-record confession that the way to defeat the press is to flood the zone until no one can find the truth in the pile. The division isn’t a side effect. It’s a product — and both parties are the vendors. This is the case that the crisis was never really about him. It’s about us.There are always choices… Thanks for reading The Cerf Report! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to The Cerf Report at thecerfreport.substack.com/subscribe
Jul 22

America in Crisis - Part 6 - What He's Actually Selling

A plane, a fortune, an energy bet, a career, a memecoin — and finally the office itself. In the last part of America in Crisis, we turn over the clearest coin of all: the president’s crypto fortune, read two opposite ways from the identical facts. Nobody disputes the numbers. A token launched three days before the inauguration, 80% of the supply kept in-house, a fee on every trade. Nearly a million buyers underwater by $3.8 billion while an early third walked off with $4 billion in gains. A $148 million scramble for a seat at the president’s table. The fastest access to the president’s market-moving posts, sold to Wall Street by the millisecond. One America sees a winner who stayed rich and never apologized. The other sees the office itself put up for sale. Same facts, opposite countries — and that gap, not the evidence, is the crisis. Thanks for reading The Cerf Report! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to The Cerf Report at thecerfreport.substack.com/subscribe
Jul 21

America in Crisis - Part 5

The energy bet, traced from where it actually started — not a policy judgment but a purchase, made at a Mar-a-Lago dinner and promised from a stage. Part Five follows the money in and the money back out: at least seventy-five million from the oil and gas industry, and roughly eighteen billion in tax breaks returned in one legislative package. Then the audit a builder would run — what a hundred-and-fifty-year petroleum strategy actually buys over its full term, the chaos it exports, and the future it forfeits. Because while America was sold the past, the rest of the world started buying the future. Australia now runs a rooftop-solar surplus so large it gives power away at midday — and when the Iran war choked the Strait of Hormuz and its fuel suppliers capped their exports, Australia's answer wasn't to drill. It was to race further off imported oil, the same shift Europe is making for the same reason. Even Texas, the oil state, is now the nation's biggest solar and wind producer, because there it pays. And the market has already voted: in year one of "drill baby drill," oil fell and clean energy climbed. There are always choices. Get full access to The Cerf Report at thecerfreport.substack.com/subscribe
Jul 20

America in Crisis - Part 4

One deal is an anecdote. A pattern is an argument. This episode pulls back from the jet to the full record — Atlantic City casinos, the airline, the university fraud settlement, steaks, vodka, and the long trail of branded ventures that carried the name and failed. The country had the file the entire time. Why did it hand the office to a man whose business history was public for decades? The answer is a manufactured image that overpowered the ledger: a persona of infallible success built for television and believed over the facts underneath it. Set against the failures is the one enterprise that has always paid — and the pattern that predicts everything still to come. Plus the deeper machine: a country stuck cycling through leaders in recoil, grabbing whoever is most unlike the last, never reading the record before handing over the keys. There are always choices. The Cerf Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading The Cerf Report! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to The Cerf Report at thecerfreport.substack.com/subscribe
Jul 19

America in Crisis - Part 3

A foreign government handed the President of the United States a Boeing 747 valued at $400 million. He called it free. This episode turns the coin over: the billion-dollar retrofit (partly funded by pulling money from the nuclear modernization budget), the plan to transfer the jet to his presidential library foundation when he leaves office, and the telling detail that he refused to fly it home from a NATO summit over security concerns. Both Americas see the same plane and reach opposite conclusions — shrewd deal or open corruption. We grant the strongest version of the “great deal” case, then weigh it against the constitutional guardrails the Framers built for exactly this situation. Same facts. Two different countries. There are always choices. Get full access to The Cerf Report at thecerfreport.substack.com/subscribe
Jul 15

America in Crisis Part 2

Extending charity to the other side doesn't mean surrendering your judgment. This episode builds the one tool the rest of the series runs on: a test anyone can apply to tell a genuine disagreement from a lie. A real disagreement survives inspection — grant the other side its best case and it still holds, because it was never about the facts. A counterfeit fails the instant you check; it depends on you not looking. To prove the test cuts both ways, it's aimed first at a claim the left defended and then abandoned — and then at the standard both sides pick up and drop depending on who's being filmed. The hardest part isn't spotting the other side's forgeries. It's checking the ones in your own pocket. There are always choices. Get full access to The Cerf Report at thecerfreport.substack.com/subscribe
Jul 13

America in Crisis Part 1

Two Americas watched the same year and saw opposite countries. Not different facts — the same jet, the same disclosure forms, the same speeches — read by one side as a rescue and the other as a wrecking. Are We in a Crisis? is a multi-part series that takes that split seriously. It hands you a simple tool for telling an honest disagreement from a con, then turns over the biggest coins of this presidency one at a time: a foreign government's gift of a jet, a lifelong pattern of failed ventures and one thing that always works, an energy bet sold from a stage, an office monetized in the open. The argument underneath all of it is that the division itself has become the product — and that specific people are getting rich by keeping the country too confused to notice. Independent analysis of the systems running the world, in plain language, from someone who spent more than thirty years bringing products and companies to market. Not left or right. Get full access to The Cerf Report at thecerfreport.substack.com/subscribe
Jun 29

The Enemy Is Never Discovered. It Is Chosen.

The President ranked communism above two world wars and 9/11. So where is the communist country we’re supposedly becoming? Nowhere that fits the definition. The man warning that communists will seize industry is seizing it himself. Show Notes / Sources Trump Truth Social post ranking communism as “the Greatest Threat to our Country since World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or 9/11”: Trump’s Truth archive (trumpstruth.org), Jun 28, 2026. Same-week reuse of the label against a D.C. mayoral candidate (”the Communist”): Clash Report / Truth Social feed, Jun 2026. Trump calling Mayor-elect Mamdani a “communist”/”communist lunatic,” threatening NYC federal funding, and calling the rent freeze a spreading “cancer”: Al Jazeera, Nov 6, 2025; Fox News, Nov 3, 2025; CBS New York, Jun 26, 2026; The Hill, Jun 2026. Trump’s post-election shift, calling Mamdani “a very rational person” and “we agree on a lot more than I would have thought”: NPR, Nov 21, 2025. Democratic socialism distinct from communism; Mamdani self-identifies as a democratic socialist and rejects the communist label: The Hill, Jun 2026; Al Jazeera, Nov 6, 2025. Definition of communism (public ownership of the means of production): Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Communism.” Status of China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba as non-communist economies in practice; Cuba’s private-enterprise liberalization: Britannica; widely reported. Distinction between communism (economic system) and authoritarianism (concentration of power); authoritarian traits of one-person/one-party rule, rule by decree, punishing opponents, rewarding loyalty: Britannica, “Authoritarianism”; PolSci Institute, Jan 2026. History: Marx and Engels (1840s); Russian Revolution 1917; U.S. Red Scare; Cold War fusion of the term with the Soviet enemy: standard historical reference. Industrial Revolution labor conditions (long hours, dangerous conditions, little legal/political protection) as the context Marx and Engels were responding to: standard historical reference. Pre-WWII Europe contesting capitalism, communism, fascism, and socialism; Western firms continuing commerce with Nazi Germany before the war; Cold War U.S. support of authoritarian anti-communist regimes: standard historical reference (e.g., documented cases of U.S. corporate dealings with Germany pre-1941; Cold War interventions in Asia, Africa, Latin America). Sovereign wealth funds across the political spectrum (Norway Government Pension Fund Global; Alaska Permanent Fund dividend; Singapore’s Temasek/GIC; Saudi PIF); Trump’s proposed U.S. sovereign wealth fund (EO Feb 3, 2025): widely reported; U.S. Treasury/White House announcements 2025. Common authoritarian characteristics (one-party rule, surveillance, top-level corruption, loyalty over competence, politicized courts, hostility to independent press, hollowed-out elections): Britannica, “Authoritarianism”; “Totalitarianism.” Roy Cohn as McCarthy’s chief counsel and “chief architect” of McCarthyism (ruin by accusation), later Trump’s personal lawyer and mentor who taught him to never back down/never admit defeat/attack: History.com, Nov 2025; Britannica, “Roy Cohn”; Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed, Apr 2026. Home equity theft via tax-sale forfeiture over small delinquencies (owner loses equity far exceeding debt): widely reported; cf. Tyler v. Hennepin County (U.S. Supreme Court, 2023) on this practice. Engels on state ownership not abolishing the capitalist character of production: Friedrich Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” (1880). Intel: federal CHIPS funding converted into ~10% equity stake, government as largest shareholder, “owns and controls” framing: CNBC, Aug 22, 2025; CNN, Aug 22, 2025; Washington Post, Aug 22, 2025; Built In, Jan 28, 2026; Intel press release. U.S. Steel “golden share,” presidential veto over closures/HQ/production, used to block the Granite City, IL plant closure: CNBC, Nov 24, 2025; Fortune, Sep 20, 2025; Atlantic Council, Jun 16, 2025. “Quasi-nationalization,” “breach of government’s proper role,” U.S. “to the left of the EU”: Competitive Enterprise Institute, Jun 24, 2025. Defense Dept. principal shareholder in MP Materials (rare earths): PBS NewsHour, Sep 20, 2025; Fortune, May 18, 2026. Civil asset forfeiture: property seized without charge/conviction; burden on owner; 87% of federal forfeitures are civil; federal forfeiture (~$5B in 2014) exceeded burglary losses (~$3.5B); ~$69B seized 2000-2019; practice predates current administration and has drawn bipartisan criticism: Institute for Justice; Washington Post, Nov 2015; Restore the Fourth; Illinois Policy Institute, Nov 2015; AEI, 2022. (Note: total property crime incl. larceny/MV theft ~$12.3B in 2014 exceeds forfeiture; the accurate comparison is forfeiture vs. burglary, not vs. all crime.) Executive order counts (highest first-year total since FDR 1933; exceeds prior full term; highest first year since 1945): Ballotpedia 2025-2026; Pew Research Center, Dec 16, 2025; Federal Register; Axios, Dec 17, 2025. “Lawfare” / selective enforcement (cases pressed against opponents, eased for allies) is presented as a contested characterization, not a settled fact; framed as pattern critics describe. Get full access to The Cerf Report at thecerfreport.substack.com/subscribe

The Cerf Report delivers clear, critical analysis of issues that often lack depth or rigor. Each episode examines the forces shaping economic power, public policy, technology, and institutional change — separating signal from noise. Audio editions are adapted from written research published on Substack, preserving the original analysis in a format designed for listening. thecerfreport.substack.com

Creator

David Cerf
Years Active

2025 - 2026
Episodes

26
Rating

Clean
Copyright

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Show Website

The Cerf Report

Politics

Politics

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