I think everything that needs to be said about the O.J. trial has been said, so I’m just using this as an opportunity to put up videos of Norm Macdonald on Saturday Night Live (which, I assure you, was actually funny at various points in its history) slamming O.J.:
The biggest story right now is that Abbott isn’t backing down from securing the border, and a whole bunch of states are backing him in his high-profile fight with the federal government.
As the standoff continues between the Biden administration and the state of Texas over the crisis at the southern border, Gov. Greg Abbott says Texas will continue to push back against the invasion.
At the center of the current controversy is a recent U.S. Supreme Court order that allows federal agents to remove concertina wire and other barriers placed along the Rio Grande by the Texas National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Ground Zero of that battle is Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, where state forces have taken over a park along the border and have thus far prevented federal officials from entering.
Abbott says the state is taking action because of a failure from the Biden administration.
“The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States. The Executive Branch of the United States has a constitutional duty to enforce federal laws protecting States, including immigration laws on the books right now. President Biden has refused to enforce those laws and has even violated them,” said Abbott. “The result is that he has smashed records for illegal immigration. Despite having been put on notice in a series of letters—one of which I delivered to him by hand—President Biden has ignored Texas’s demand that he perform his constitutional duties.”
He went on to say the U.S. Constitution allows for states to push back against invasions:
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the other visionaries who wrote the U.S. Constitution foresaw that States should not be left to the mercy of a lawless president who does nothing to stop external threats like cartels smuggling millions of illegal immigrants across the border. That is why the Framers included both Article IV, § 4, which promises that the federal government “shall protect each [State] against invasion,” and Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which acknowledges “the States’ sovereign interest in protecting their borders.”
To that end, Abbott cited an executive order issued by him in November 2022 to “invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself.”
“President Biden and his Administration have left Americans and our country completely vulnerable to unprecedented illegal immigration pouring across the Southern border. Instead of upholding the rule of law and securing the border, the Biden Administration has attacked and sued Texas for stepping up to protect American citizens from historic levels of illegal immigrants, deadly drugs like fentanyl, and terrorists entering our country.
“We stand in solidarity with our fellow Governor, Greg Abbott, and the State of Texas in utilizing every tool and strategy, including razor wire fences, to secure the border. We do it in part because the Biden Administration is refusing to enforce immigration laws already on the books and is illegally allowing mass parole across America of migrants who entered our country illegally.
“The authors of the U.S. Constitution made clear that in times like this, states have a right of self-defense, under Article 4, Section 4 and Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution. Because the Biden Administration has abdicated its constitutional compact duties to the states, Texas has every legal justification to protect the sovereignty of our states and our nation.”
Signatories include: Governor Kay Ivey (AL), Governor Mike Dunleavy (AK), Governor Sarah Sanders (AR), Governor Ron DeSantis (FL), Governor Brian Kemp (GA), Governor Brad Little (ID), Governor Eric Holcomb (IN), Governor Kim Reynolds (IA), Governor Jeff Landry (LA), Governor Tate Reeves (MS), Governor Mike Parson (MO), Governor Greg Gianforte (MT), Governor Jim Pillen (NE), Governor Joe Lombardo (NV), Governor Chris Sununu (NH), Governor Doug Burgum (ND), Governor Mike DeWine (OH), Governor Kevin Stitt (OK), Governor Henry McMaster (SC), Governor Kristi Noem (SD), Governor Bill Lee (TN), Governor Spencer Cox (UT), Governor Glenn Youngkin (VA), Governor Jim Justice (WV), and Governor Mark Gordon (WY).
Moreover, documents prove that Biden’s assault on America’s border security was intentional.
As President Joe Biden’s immigration crisis overwhelms the United States and wreaks havoc on the state’s resources, confidential documents suggest the president’s open border policies were intentional.
The Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) filed a lawsuit against Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS), claiming the agency halted the 287(g) program, which assists in the deportation of illegal migrant child rapists, attempted murderers, assailants, carjackers, and other known criminals.
In August 2023, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) revealed that the government ended the program in January 2021— right after Biden entered office. However, the compromised agency gave no reason why the government did that.
The 287(g) program allows local law enforcement agencies to work closely with ICE to capture illegal aliens who have committed crimes. They were then able to turn the migrants over to federal officials for arrest and deportation.
Expenditures on one of the most controversial federal programs aiding the millions of illegal immigrants and refugees from Afghanistan, Cuba, and Haiti have skyrocketed more than $2 billion in two years, according to a new report by a non-profit government spending watchdog.
Spending on the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) jumped from $8.9 billion in 2022 to more than $10.9 billion last year, auditors at OpenTheBooks.org (OTB), the Hinsdale, Illinois-based watchdog, found.
Most of the ORR spending explosion came in grants under ORR’s Refugee and Entrant Assistance program that provides a lengthy list of services to such individuals, including emergency housing assistance, work authorizations, public assistance benefits, medical screening, school enrollment, employment, and mental health referrals, and legal assistance.
Such spending was $33.4 million in 2021, the first year of President Joe Biden’s administration. But it hit $404.5 million the next year and then increased to $616.6 million last year, according to federal data obtained by OTB under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Much of the funding went to seven social service organizations, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops ($66.5 million), the International Rescue Committee ($66.4 million), Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services ($66.2 million), Church World Service ($64.9 million), U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants ($64.6 million), HIAS (originally the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society)($56.4 million), and the Ethiopian Community Development Council ($51.6 million).
Trump says he’ll reverse all this:
NEW: Donald Trump says illegals shouldn't get too comfortable because they will be going home, pledges to work with Abbott and Texas to stop the invasion pic.twitter.com/i9dPyBglaA
1. More Democrats voted for Haley than Republicans.
Much like the morning after a drunken hookup with that salad-phobic dude from the IT department, the sun rose to reveal Darling Nikki’s reality. It turns out that a whopping 70% of Haley’s votes were grudge votes from Democrats according to exit polls.
I’m surprised Haley didn’t dump a bucket of Gatorade over herself Tuesday night as she celebrated another shattering loss. More importantly, either Haley doesn’t know a bunch of patchouli ghoulies voted for her, or she doesn’t care.
According to my calculator, 70% of her 136,461 votes is 95,522. Do the subtraction and Haley received a paltry 40,938 Republican votes compared to Trump’s 172,202. In other words, Trump got well over four times as many Republican votes, and Haley got hammered like Thor for the second time.
And yet Haley still got more votes than Biden…
Things that make you go Hmmm: “U.S., Chinese Researchers Wanted to Engineer Virus Similar to Covid One Year before Pandemic Outbreak, Internal Docs Show.”
In an editorial fit for The Onion or the Babylon Bee, Los Angeles Times’ letters editor Paul Thornton wrote a column this week entitled “If you want to leave, fine. But don’t insult California on the way out.”
The column acknowledges an exodus from the state, but sees the problem as former Californians sharing their experiences about what drove them from the Golden State.
It is like Captain William Bligh asking the mutinous crew of the Bounty for a reference as they head for the lifeboats.
Thornton wrote that “more than 800,000 Californians moved away in 2022, and many thousands more left last year. Often, the departees, cash in hand from the sale of their $1-million bungalows, feel the need to express disdain for their home state, and even some anger too.”
He then begs them to keep mum about their reasons for leaving the state, which commonly range from rising crime to high taxes to runaway spending.
And speaking of the LA Times, 115 staffers were just laid off. Sucks to be you. I would suggest learning some Python, but with so many startups shutting down, it probably wouldn’t help. Instead, maybe they should learn to weld. (Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.)
“Senate Candidate Says Fraudulent Donation to Speaker Phelan Made in His Name…Jace Yarbrough, an attorney and Air Force veteran, was shown on a recent campaign finance report as having sent a $75 donation to Phelan on December 24, just days after he filed to run for the open Senate District 30 seat. Yarbrough, however, has categorically denied making any donation to Phelan…He also emphasized his role as counsel to State Sen. Angela Paxton (R–McKinney) during the impeachment trial of her husband Attorney General Ken Paxton that was championed by Phelan.”
Islam is on the verge of completely taking over Europe, in all ways—at least according to one who should know, Hans-Georg Maaßen, Germany’s top domestic intelligence chief from 2012 to 2018. In a recent interview, he stressed several points that spell the imminent downfall of Europe to Islam.
His warnings are buttressed by disturbing demographic changes. According to conservative estimates from Pew Research, over the next 25 years—meaning most of the current generation’s lifetime—Europe’s Muslim population will triple to a staggering 76 million. In fact, the actual current and future numbers of Muslims appear to be higher, though there are no official tallies. For example, in an earlier, 2011 study, Pew Research found that “The number of Muslims in Europe has grown from 29.6 million in 1990 to 44.1 million in 2010. Europe’s Muslim population is projected to exceed 58 million by 2030.” Clearly 58 million in five years’ time is more significant than 76 million in 25 years’ time.
Not only is mass migration responsible for Islam’s exponential growth in Europe, but once there, the average Muslim woman has significantly more children than the average European woman. “Muhammad” is taking West Europe by storm as the number one name for newborn baby boys.
During his interview, Hans-Georg Maaßen said that these large numbers are intentional, and the work of Europe’s ruling elite. For this intelligence chief, the “great replacement” theory is no myth. The more ideologically mixed a population is forced into becoming, the less able it is to identify itself, much less protect any beliefs:
[O]ur politicians want a different population. The political left follows the course of the anti-German ideology. The more heterogeneous a population, the less able it is to articulate itself and have a democratic say. The more politics accept immigrants from other countries as they see fit and grants them citizenship, the more politics select the people of the state and influence the election results. These migrants then vote differently than the locals.
Journalist who criticized tennis players Novak Djokovic for not getting the jab dies of suddenly.
B-21 Raider officially enters production. Though the B-21 has contained costs better than some Air Force programs, I believe the days of expensive manned bombers has passed.
Director Norman Jewison dead at 97. He directed more popular and critically acclaimed films, but for me he’ll always be the director of the vastly underrated Rollerball. (Previously.) (Hat tip: Dwight.)
America’s largest skyscraper will be built in…Oklahoma City? Yeah, can’t see the economic case there.
Trump wins Iowa (and picks up Ted Cruz’s endorsement), Democratic party popularity becomes ever more selective, Hunter Biden’s laptop confirmed as Hunter Biden’s laptop (not that we ever had any doubt), two shithole countries exchange airstrikes, and a science fiction legend dies. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Donald Trump won the Iowa Caucuses in convincing fashion, winning 51% of the vote. Ron DeSantis came in second with 21%, and MSM-and-Never Trump darling Nikki Haley pulling in 19%, and Vivek Ramaswamy a distant 4th with 7.6%. (Ramaswamy then endorsed Trump.) The most satisfying part of this result is seeing the Hindenburg of Haley puffery crash and explode.
Ted Cruz has endorsed Trump. “‘I’m a big believer in letting democracy play out,’ Cruz said. ‘I’ve got to say Trump’s victory was across the board. He won 51 percent of the vote. He won 98 of the counties. Congratulations to President Trump on that dominating victory.'” Despite DeSantis many strengths as a governor, he did not run a good campaign. And remember, Cruz actually beat Trump in Iowa in 2016, and ran a competitive campaign into May. That’s not going to happen this year. Trump seems likely to win all the primaries in every state.
A Gallup poll released on Friday reveals that a record low percentage of Americans who identify as Democrats in 2023 hit a record low, when independent ‘leaners’ are excluded.
Just 27% of Americans self-identify as Democrats, the smallest figure in the party’s history according to the survey. That said, self-identifying Republicans also hit 27%, though it did not mark the lowest figure in the party’s history – which was in 2013 when just 25% of Americans identified as such. The previous low for Democrats was in 2017 and 2015 at 29%.
Independents, meanwhile, take the cake – with 43% of Americans identifying as such.
Not that any of us ever had any doubt, but DOJ confirmed that the “Laptop from Hell” is in fact Hunter Biden’s laptop, and that they knew that all along:
‼️ In a new court filing today, the DOJ confirms Hunter Biden’s laptop is real, that he left it at a computer store, and that the contents matched what they obtained from a search warrant of his iCloud. Don’t hold your breath for a retraction from Joe Biden (“It’s a Russian… pic.twitter.com/xSZ2YG8JIB
Things that make your blood boil: “Texas man arrested in connection with videos showing seven men who sexually assaulted toddlers at a public mall.”
A Texas man is in federal custody after the FBI linked him to videos from the dark web depicting group sexual assault on toddlers in a mall.
Arthur Hector Fernandez, 29, was arrested Dec. 18, 2023 in Kingwood, TX as the result of a Dec. 14 criminal complaint filed in federal court in Houston, records show.
The FBI were led to Fernandez as a suspect after viewing videos of an assault of a three-year-old child; a relative of the child “recognized the bracelets an individual in the video was wearing as belonging to Fernandez.”
The executive director of the Rainbow Resource Center, a prominent LGBTQ+ support center based in Modesto, has been identified as one of 17 men apprehended on suspicion of attempting to engage in sexual activities with a minor.
The revelation was first reported by the Modesto Bee.
Gerad Slayton, 42, was taken into custody during a sting operation organized by the Turlock Police Department, targeting individuals believed to be seeking illicit encounters with minors. Slayton, recently appointed as the executive director of the Rainbow Center, a local nonprofit dedicated to providing resources for LGBTQ+ individuals across all age groups, faces allegations of pursuing sexual activities with minors.
Rape kits that should have been analyzed by the NYPD but were left in storage at hospitals across the city are now part of a sprawling Department of Justice probe into the department’s Special Victims Division, The Post has learned.
The revelation comes after The Post revealed the snafu, which meant that an unknown number of cases were not fully investigated, victims didn’t get justice, and countless rapists could be roaming free.
Pakistan and Iran have traded airstrikes in each other’s territory. “The unprecedented attacks by both Pakistan and Iran on either side of their border appeared to target Baluch militant groups with similar separatist goals. The countries accuse each other of providing a haven to the groups in their respective territories.”
The Disney magic seems to extend everywhere. “Pixar is planning on MAJOR layoffs this year, up to 20% of employees could be dismissed.” Under Jobs it made money hand over fist, but after Disney went woke it’s produced one flop after another.
Speaking of layoffs, Sports Illustratedlays off everybody. Wait, you mean putting fat women and trannys on the cover of your swimsuit issue and fluffing Colin Kaepernick weren’t tickets to success? Who knew?
Science fiction legend and personal friend Howard Waldrop died over the weekend. Howard was one of the greatest short story writers the field has ever produced. Since you can’t make a living from short stories, Howard was never far from penury, and he spent six months living in a spare room in my house. Pretty much everyone in the field loved him, and he will be missed.
Congratulations! You’ve successfully made it to the last month of 2023! Give yourself a cookie!
I’ve spent most of today getting my latest book catalog ready to send out, so I’m probably going to have to break this LinkSwarm into two parts. This part: More Biden corrupton evidence, Big Brother wants all your tweets, Jihadi gets stabby in Ireland, and a couple of fairly notable political deaths.
A bank money-laundering investigator expressed serious concerns about a transfer of funds from China that ultimately trickled down to President Biden in the form of a $40,000 check from his brother, James Biden, according to an email obtained by the House
Biden received a $40,000 personal check from an account shared by his brother, James Biden, and sister-in-law, Sara Biden, in September 2017 — money that was marked as a “loan repayment.” The alleged repayment was sent after funds were filtered from Northern International Capital, a Chinese company affiliated with the Chinese energy firm CEFC, through several accounts related to Hunter Biden and eventually down to the personal account shared by James and Sara Biden.
Northern International Capital sent $5 million to Hudson West III, a joint venture established by Hunter Biden and CEFC associate Gongwen Dong on August 8.
On the same day, Hudson West III then sent $400,000 to Owasco, P.C., an entity owned and controlled by Hunter Biden. Six days later, Hunter Biden wired $150,000 to Lion Hall Group, a company owned by James and Sara Biden. Sara Biden withdrew $50,000 in cash from Lion Hall Group on August 28 and then deposited the funds into her and her husband’s personal checking account later that day.
On September 3, 2017, Sara Biden wrote a check to Joe Biden for $40,000.
We all know that if Trump did something remotely close to this, he’d already be in prison.
Special Counsel Jack Smith demanded information on Twitter users who liked or retweeted former President Donald Trump’s tweets leading up to the January 6 riot, according to a heavily redacted search warrant and other documents released Monday.
Smith’s comprehensive search warrant sought the 2024 Republican presidential primary front-runner’s search history, direct messages, and “content of all tweets created, drafted, favorited/liked, or retweeted” by his account from October 2020 to January 2021.
The special counsel also demanded a list of all devices used to log into Trump’s then-Twitter, now X account, as well as information on users who interacted with the then-president in the months leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, the court filings show.
Among the information Smith sought were lists of all Twitter users who “favorited or retweeted” Trump’s tweets, “as well as all tweets that include the username associated with the account” in “mentions” or “replies.”
The special counsel also requested a list of every user Trump “followed, unfollowed, muted, unmuted, blocked, or unblocked” and a list of users who took any of the same actions with Trump’s account during the aforementioned timeframe.
“There is no benign or reasonable justification for that demand,” wrote former FBI agent/whistleblower Steve Friend on X.
Henry Kissinger, the legendary diplomat who played a central role in advising Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford on foreign policy, died at his home in Connecticut late Wednesday at age 100.
Kissinger was the only person to simultaneously be secretary of state and hold the position of White House national-security adviser. In 1973, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Le Duc Tho for their work in brokering the 1973 Paris Agreement ending America’s involvement in Vietnam.
Kissinger was born in Germany in 1923. Three months before Kristallnacht, his family fled, bound for New York City. Kissinger served in the Army during World War II and was assigned to the 84 Infantry Division, voluntarily staying behind at the Battle of the Bulge to reportedly conduct “hazardous counter-intelligence duties” while also “making good use of his German.”
Kissinger was a key Cold War figure as Secretary of State, and one who doesn’t deserve all of the extensive condemnation he receives (for different reasons) from left and right, nor the hosannas of praise he received from the mainstream media during is heyday. The instantly betrayed peace treaty with North Vietnam (the won he won the Nobel Peace Prize for) was shameful, but LBJ’s incompetence and Washington elite failure of nerve probably doomed South Vietnam before Kissinger even got to the negotiating table. The opening to China was a brilliant move to counter the Soviet Union at the time, and helped usher in a brief period of economic and political liberalization that has now been almost completely undone. SALT1 and the ABM treaties were violated by the Soviet Union before the ink was even dry.
Kissinger was at his best down deep in the intricacies of face-to-face diplomacy, and played a key role in negotiating details after the Yom Kippur War. Indeed, Kissinger’s goal of stabilizing the Middle East (at least as far as preventing another major Arab-Israeli War) was met.
Kissinger was ultimately wrong for favoring detente over rollback, but that preference was also emblematic of the Washington foreign policy establishment of the time, and it would take Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 to set America on the right course (and the Soviet Union to the dust-heap of history).
Sandra Day O’Connor dead at 93. Eh, she wasn’t the worst Republican appointee to the Supreme Court.
Irish riot over illegal alien stabbing spree against children. Rioting is bad, mmkay, but Irish citizens, like those across the rest of the EU, are tired of the enforced consensus for allowing unassimilable Islamic immigrants to cross the border and immediately apply for the welfare rolls.
Not just Ireland. “‘We are here to stab white people’: Teen killed, 16 others wounded in French village after migrant gang reportedly descends on winter ball.”
High prices and “lot rot” are doing CarMax in. Not to mention the Biden recession…
South African Zulu leader and key figure in helping end apartheid Mangosuthu Buthelezi has died at age 95.
Mangosuthu Buthelezi, a towering figure in South African politics and outspoken Zulu chief, has died at the age of 95.
During the racist apartheid regime, he founded the Zulu Inkatha [Freedom] party after becoming disillusioned with the African National Congress (ANC).
Thousands were killed in clashes between supporters of the two parties in the early 1990s.
But he was later welcomed back into the fold, serving as President Nelson Mandela’s minister of home affairs.
Chief Buthelezi was a shrewd but controversial politician, who disagreed with the ANC’s tactics of armed action against white-minority rule and trod a moderate path as leader of an ethnic-Zulu homeland.
He was opposed to international sanctions on South Africa, arguing that they would only harm the country’s black majority.
Buthelezi was a key figure in ending apartheid, not only as ancestral leader of the Zulu nation, the largest ethnic group in South Africa, but also as elected leader of the (at the time) KwaZulu bantustan homeland. Both he and his Inkatha Freedom Party were strongly pro-Western, pro-capitalist and anticommunist, as opposed to the ANC, who were unabashed allies of the South African Communist Party. The ANC itself was riddled with communist sympathizers, including Mandela’s wife Winnie, who was a real piece of work, and who advocated “necklacing” ANC’s political opponents by setting fire to gasoline-filled tires around their neck.
Despite this, Buthelezi insisted that Nelson Mandela’s release was a precondiction for a political solution in South Africa.
For decades, the Soviet Union had been funding communist revolutionary organizations around the world, the economic strain of which was one of the many factors (along with communism’s horrible economic inefficiency and low oil prices) that forced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to institute perestroika and glasnost. Those dire economic straits meant the Soviets could no longer afford to fund their “franchise for totalitarianism” program for communist parties in Africa and elsewhere.
The combination of Soviet bankruptcy, Buthelezi’s insistence on a peaceful, democratic and capitalistic post-apartheid South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s moderation, and South African President F. W. de Klerk belief that apartheid was unsustainable all came together to allow South Africa a peaceful transition to majority rule.
For all the troubles South Africa has experienced over the last 40 years, it has fared far better than the like of Zimbabwe, Mozambique or Angola, and Buthelezi’s influence was a big factor in making South Africa’s transition a peaceful one.
I met Buthelezi at a 1987 Dallas-area conference put on by the Landrum Society, a conservative group founded (I think) by Dallas Morning News columnist William Murchison. Buthelezi struck me as a smart, dignified man.
San Diego tries enforcing the law, a sampler of the lies Obama told about his life, Blade-Runners take on Big Brother’s cameras, a nuke rises in Texas, and a Cthuloid horror swims the chilly waters of Antarctica. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
San Diego tries “this one weird trick” to deal with homeless problem: Enforcing the law.
Police began enforcing San Diego’s controversial new camping ban Monday, and although officials said they’ve so far focused only on Balboa Park, the new ordinance combined with other enforcement of laws long on the books has already made notable changes in the encampment landscape.
The “Unsafe Camping Ordinance” allows officers to force people off public land if they’re sleeping within two blocks of a school, shelter, trolley station, waterway or park “where a substantial public health and safety risk is determined.”
Capt. Shawn Takeuchi, head of the city’s neighborhood policing division, said his five-member team did arrest several homeless people Monday by Balboa Park, but only for existing warrants.
Others were given a warning, he said. If any of the same people are found illegally camping a day later, they’ll get a ticket even if they’ve moved locations.
Nobody in Balboa Park accepted offers for shelter Monday, the captain added. Enforcement will continue to focus on schools and parks in the near future, and officials declined to say where the team might move next.
Do you think Austin’s government might start enforcing the city’s camping ban? Of course not. Then how are they supposed to rake off the graft? (Hat tip: Instapundit, who offers some takeaways worth highlighting:
1. The homeless respond to policy and incentives like anyone else. The mere announcement of a future camping ban (plus some enforcement of other existing rules) rapidly cleared out major problem areas.
2. The provision of shelter or housing is neither necessary nor sufficient to accomplish these clear-outs. Of the people asked to leave Balboa Park on the first day of enforcement (issuance of warnings), none accepted offers of shelter.
3. The NGOs that have colonized the homeless problem have neither the incentive nor the knowledge to solve it. The head of one shelter was confused by the magical disappearance of his potential clients. “Where did they go?”
There is a fascinating passage in Rising Star, David Garrow’s comprehensive biography of Barack Obama’s early years, in which the historian examines Obama’s account in Dreams from My Father of his breakup with his longtime Chicago girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism. As readers, we know that the stakes of this decision would become more than simply personal: The Black American man that Obama wills into being in this scene would go on to marry a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago named Michelle Robinson and, after a meteoric rise, win election as the first Black president of the United States.
Yet what Garrow documented, after tracking down and interviewing Sheila Miyoshi Jager, was an explosive fight over a very different subject. In Jager’s telling, the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.
At the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Spertus Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. The episode highlighted a deep rift within the city’s power echelons, with some prominent Black officials supporting Cokely and others calling for his firing.
In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism. While acknowledging that Obama’s embrace of a Black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted that what upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn Cokely’s comments. It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.
Snip.
Perhaps the most revealing thing about Jager’s account of her fight with Obama, though, is that not one reporter in America bothered to interview her before David Garrow found her, near the end of Obama’s presidency. As Obama’s live-in girlfriend and closest friend during the 1980s, Jager is probably the single most informed and credible source about the inner life of a young man whose election was accompanied by hopes of sweeping, peaceful social change in America—a hope that ended with the election of Donald Trump, or perhaps midway through Obama’s second term, as the president focused on the Iran deal while failing to address the concerns about rampant income inequality, racial inequality, and the growth of a monopoly tech complex that happened on his watch.
The idea that the celebrated journalists who wrote popular biographies of Obama and became enthusiastic members of his personal claque couldn’t locate Jager—or never knew who she was—defies belief. It seems more likely that the character Obama fashioned in Dreams had been defined—by Obama—as being beyond the reach of normal reportorial scrutiny. Indeed, Garrow’s biography of Obama’s early years is filled with such corrections of a historical record that Obama more or less invented himself. Based on years of careful record-searching and patient interviewing, Rising Star highlights a remarkable lack of curiosity on the part of mainstream reporters and institutions about a man who almost instantaneously was treated less like a politician and more like the idol of an inter-elite cult.
Snip.
Progressive theology is built on a mythic hierarchy of group victimhood which has endured throughout time, up until the present day; the injuries that the victims have suffered are so massive, so shocking, and so manifestly unjust that they dwarf the present. Such injuries must be remedied immediately, at nearly any cost. The people who do the work of remedying these injustices, by whatever means, are the heroes of history. Conversely, the sins of the chief oppressors of history, white men, are so dark that nothing short of abject humiliation and capitulation can begin to approach justice.
It goes to say that nothing about the terms of progressive theology is original. It is the theology of Soviet communism, with class struggle replaced by identity politics. In this system, Jews play a unique, double-edged role: They are both an identity group and a Trojan horse through which history can reenter the gates of utopia.
Read the whole thing to see all those facts about Obama that the media ignored…including his fantasies about having sex with men.
Members of the IPCC, such as Pedro Moura-Costa (above) and Gareth Philips, had major conflicts-of-interest. They owned, created and/or worked for businesses — such as Ecosecurities and SGS Forestry — that would directly profit from the report’s conclusions.
In fact, the IPCC panel members’ companies were positioned to earn millions of dollars from the report. But the mainstream media did not report these conflicts and instead piled on the “global warming” and “carbon offset” bandwagons.
Solar energy portal Ecotopia reported that members of the IPCC “…had vested interests in reaching unrealistically and unjustifiably optimistic conclusions about the possibility of compensating for emissions with trees… [and] should have been automatically disqualified from serving on an intergovernmental panel charged with investigating impartially the feasibility and benefits of such ‘offset’ projects.”
According to accounts of four people with knowledge of the situation, M. Kaleo Manuel, a Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner and DLNR’s deputy director for water resource management, initially refused West Maui Land Co.’s requests for additional water to help prevent fires from spreading to properties managed by the company. Manuel eventually released water but not until after the fire had run its course.
His office has not yet commented on the delay of water resources.
How much damage could have been prevented with the extra water is not yet known. However, the question of “Why?” needs to be addressed in the wake of one of the worst natural disasters in Hawaii’s history. Though bureaucratic red tape might be the most obvious suggestion, a recent interview with M. Kaleo Manual offers some interesting and disturbing insight. Manuel waxes philosophical on “water equity” (“equity” being a pervasive woke buzzword) and an ancient “reverence” of water as god-like. He uses these beliefs to support his rationale for keeping tight controls over Hawaiian water supplies; not as a resource to be used, but as a holistic privilege offered by the government.
Economist who named BRICS says the idea of a common BRICS currency is “embarrassing.”
“It’s just ridiculous,” [Lord Jim O’Neill] told the Financial Times in an interview on Monday. “They’re going to create a BRICS central bank? How would you do that? It’s embarrassing almost.”
The economist spoke ahead of the 15th BRICS summit next week, where the nations will meet to decide whether to expand membership to other countries and may also float the idea of the common currency.
The following story was related to me by a former Governor of Minnesota, who was of Norwegian descent. A number of years ago, a Norwegian dignitary (the Prime Minister, I think) visited Minnesota. Talking to our governor, the Prime Minister tut-tutted about Minnesota’s crime rate, saying that there was much less crime in Norway. Minnesota’s governor replied, “We don’t have a crime problem with our Norwegians, either.”
That anecdote came to mind when I read, in the London Times, “Sweden’s slide from peaceful welfare state to Europe’s gun-killings capital.”
Today, Sweden is Europe’s capital of gun homicide. Last year, according to the Swedish national council for crime prevention, 63 people were shot and killed: more than double the European average and, per capita, multitudes higher than London or Paris.
… The effect on Swedish society has been striking. As well as the lives lost, the violence has brought down a government, changed laws and policies, and become the biggest talking point in a country that once prided itself on its reputation as a peaceful welfare state.
Violent crime will do that, although, to be fair, Sweden’s homicide rate is considerably lower than ours. But it is now significantly higher than homicide rates in quite a few other European countries, including Norway. Why is that? Have Swedes suddenly started getting violent? No.
It has also kicked the hornet’s nest of integration. Today, one fifth of all people living in Sweden were born outside the country.
Dow Chemical is planning to build a small nuclear reactor to power their plant in Calhoun County. Good for them. The TRISO-X fuel they’re using sounds like it will be a pebble bed reactor design.
“Target Sales Dipped in Last Quarter Due to Pride Backlash.”
Target loses $9 billion in market cap for trying to tranny dress toddlers. I would boycott them over that, but I was already boycotting them over the tranny bathrooms.
“‘There’s Poop Everywhere’: San Francisco’s Office District Not Only A Ghost Town, It’s Also Covered In Sh*t.”
Everyone knows that San Francisco is the nation’s largest public toilet – requiring the city to employ six-figure ‘poop patrol’ cleanup team, however a new report from the city Controller’s Office really puts things in poo-spective.
For starters, feces were found far more often in commercial sectors, covering “approximately 50% of street segments in Key Commercial Areas and 30% in the Citywide survey,” second only to broken glass as can be seen in the ‘illegal dumping’ section.
If you’re wondering about the city’s fecal methodology, look no further than a footnote on page 43;
Feces also includes bags filled with feces that are not inside trash receptacles. Feces that are spread or smeared on the street, sidewalk, or other objects along the evaluation route are counted. Stains that appear to be related to feces but have been cleaned are not counted. Bird droppings are excluded.
As far as where most of the poo is found, Nob Hill takes the top spot, followed by the Tenderloin and The Mission districts.
“After California health authorities in 2014 imposed a mandate requiring requiring churches to provide elective abortion coverage to its employees, four churches sued, and after a long court battle, have now won a $1.4 million settlement.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
In a classic case of bad timing, Tim Scott also announced that he’s running for president. I don’t see him making much headway against Trump or DeSantis, but he’s a serious veepstakes contender.
C. Boyden Gray, RIP. Among his most important tasks was spearheading the campaign for Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court.
It’s weird to be on the same side of an issue as Taco Bell. Namely that no one should be able to trademark “Taco Tuesday.”
Citing air-worthiness concerns, the FAA grounds the…B-17? Good to know they’re finally working through that 1946 backlog… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
The first rule of baggage claim fight club is you don’t talk about baggage claim fight club. The second rule of baggage claim fight club is that the blue zone is for loading and unloading only.
What is it like to cross the Darien Gap by car? A green hell.
One quarter of the year gone! Career criminals coddled by Soros Stooges, crazy woman who thinks she’s a man murders children, lots of Flu Manchu fraud, and Botox makes you crazy(er). It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Everyone and their dog is covering the ham sandwich Trump indictment, so I’ll leave that to others. I will note that Alan Dershowitz is not impressed. “Based on what we know about this case, it may be one of the weakest cases in my six years of experience.”
On the morning of Election Day last November, William French went to his local polling place in Freeland, Pennsylvania, to cast his vote. But the qualified and registered voter wasn’t allowed to. The disabled U.S. Army veteran was told that the precinct had run out of paper for ballots and he had to come back later in the afternoon.
So that’s what he did, returning at 3:30 p.m. But the precinct still didn’t have ballots. Election workers told him to return yet again. But by nightfall, it was too difficult. French has endured 17 surgeries on his destroyed leg and uses a cane to walk. But the sidewalks are a mess, and he was worried about the risk of falling and further injury.
That same morning, Melynda Reese and her husband went to their polling location in Shickshinny, Pennsylvania. But only Reese’s husband was allowed to vote, and for the same reason: The precinct had run out of paper. They came back at 4:00 p.m. and were told there would be a lengthy wait.
Reese is a corrections officer and her husband’s primary caregiver. He had recently suffered two cardiac arrests and a stroke. He required regular medication and attention and couldn’t be left alone. Long waits were also too much to bear. The couple returned at 6:30 p.m., and saw a line that stretched so long that they knew they couldn’t wait. Around 9:15 p.m., an election official called Reese and told her that ballots were finally available and she could vote. But her husband had just taken his sleeping pills and she couldn’t leave him unattended.
French and Reese are just two of the thousands of voters affected by poor election administration in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. The two just sued Luzerne County, its Board of Elections and Registration, and its Bureau of Elections in federal court for violations of their constitutional right to vote.
“Voters in Luzerne County through no fault of their own, were disenfranchised and denied the fundamental right to vote. William French and Melynda Reese are two of those voters. They bring suit to vindicate the denial of their sacred right to vote, to make sure voters are not disenfranchised in the future, and to bring integrity back to elections in Luzerne County,” said Wally Zimolong, lawyer for French and Reese.
The House Oversight Committee is investigating the explosive claims by Dr. Gal Luft, a former Israel Defense Forces lieutenant colonel with deep intelligence ties in Washington and Beijing, who says he was arrested to stop him from revealing what he knows about the Biden family and FBI corruption — details he told the Department of Justice in 2019, which he says it ignored.
Luft, 56, first made the claims on Feb. 18 on Twitter, after being detained at a Cyprus airport as he prepared to board a plane to Israel.
“I’ve been arrested in Cyprus on a politically motivated extradition request by the U.S. The U.S., claiming I’m an arms dealer. It would be funny if it weren’t tragic. I’ve never been an arms dealer.
“DOJ is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim, and Hunter Biden.
“Shall I name names?”
Luft remains in jail awaiting extradition to the US over what he says are trumped-up charges of arms trafficking to China and Libya, and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Luft claimed that he tried to reach out to the DOJ about the Chinese energy company CEFC paying Hunter $100,000 and James Biden, Joe’s brother, $65,000 “in exchange for their FBI connections and use of the Biden name to promote China’s Belt and Road Initiative around the world.”
James O’Keefe has not allowed his forced exit from Project Veritas to stop him. His new journalism outfit, O’Keefe Media Group (OMG), just released a video uncovering evidence of what O’Keefe calls a possible “money-laundering scheme” for the Democrats. Some individuals reportedly appear to have donated thousands of times over a relatively short period to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars to ActBlue and Biden for President, based on Federal Election Commission records.
“FEC data shows that some senior citizens across the U.S. have been donating thousands of times per year,” O’Keefe began. “Some of these individuals’ names and addresses are attached to over $200,000 in contributions. We went and knocked on a few of their doors to corroborate the data that we received from a group of citizen journalists called Election Watch in Maryland.” The video then showed O’Keefe visiting someone who is listed as donating over $217,000, through 12,000 separate contributions. This money was earmarked for various entities through leftist platform ActBlue over three years’ time. Some of the donations were made with variations of the person’s name and address, O’Keefe stated.
The data he obtained was state and FEC data, O’Keefe said. “We’re wondering if these donors are victims of what appears to be a money-laundering scheme, or [if] these residents actually participated in the scheme. We’re making phone calls, we’re knocking on doors, these are things that you can do, we hope you do that.” There are “bizarre amounts of data” on homes and individuals making many thousands of dollars of donations, O’Keefe said, urging others to help him investigate.
The first person shown opening the door to O’Keefe, a Marylander listed as donating $32,000 in 3,000 different contributions, said he was unaware of the donations but advised O’Keefe as a solution to hit Donald Trump “with a bat.” The man added, “I want to see a scar on his f**king head. Now stop f**king with me,” and slammed the door.
Another donor, Cindy, according to O’Keefe, supposedly donated over $18,000 in 1,000+ donations to ActBlue in 2022, which would necessitate donating “three times a day, every day, for the whole year.” When asked if she’d donated over $18,000, Cindy responded with a quick laugh, “I doubt that. No, I don’t think so… I wish I could have donated $18,000 to Biden’s presidency.”
Meanwhile Carolyn Lenz, in Tucson, Ariz., told OMG that she “absolutely [did] not” donate over 18,000 times for $170,000+ to ActBlue. She looked at the data showing “she” donated multiple times a day, often in $5 to $15 increments, and insisted that the donations were not hers. “They must be” fraudulent, Lenz said.
After rejecting her in 2018, the voters of Alameda County, California selected Pamela Price as their new District Attorney last year. Price had taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from George Soros for her two campaigns. That probably tells you most of what you need to know, since Soros only funds candidates who are soft on crime and willing to empty the jails as much as possible. Price quickly proved herself no exception, seeking to cut a plea deal with a killer who had been arrested for one triple murder for hire, was accused in the murder of a court witness, and several other violent crimes. Rather than the 75 years to life sentence that Delonzo Logwood was eligible for, Price wanted to cut him loose after fifteen years. Thankfully, a County District Judge stepped in and rejected the deal out of hand. (Free Beacon)
A California judge this week blocked a newly-elected progressive prosecutor’s effort to slash a triple murderer’s sentence.
Alameda County district judge Mark McCannon rejected District Attorney Pamela Price’s plea deal for a 31-year-old man jailed for a 2008 triple murder-for-hire, among other crimes. Price, who took office in November and has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the progressive billionaire George Soros, attempted to sentence Delonzo Logwood to just 15 years in prison, though he was eligible for a sentence of 75 years to life.
You can’t keep a bad man down. Keith Chastain, 38, is a one-thug crime spree.
Chastain racked up an impressive array of arrests in Fresno County, California, (of course). Between Feb. 19 and March 21, he was arrested 10 times for a menagerie of crimes encompassing 15 misdemeanors and 18 felonies, including:
six stolen cars
fraud
DUI (duh)
drugs (duh)
vandalism
Chastain was hit with three additional charges — DUI, trespassing, and auto theft — but those were dropped when cops failed to file the charges in time.
Snip.
“Unfortunately, this is not as unique of a situation as it seems,” Tony Botti, spokesman for the Fresno County Sherriff’s office, stated. “California has watered down the laws so much over the years for property criminals and repeat offenders that they are not held accountable like they should be. Sadly, it is our community members who suffer due to these soft-on-crime policies.”
According to court documents, Edwin Maldonado spent many months thumbing his nose at what he was ordered by the court to do.
His punishment for that is more like a prize.
“You’ve got someone who was rewarded for being a failure, and this guy was a failure over 1,000 and some odd times,” said Andy Kahan with Crime Stoppers.
First, Maldonado gets a felony charge for drug possession. A few weeks later, he’s charged with aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. He makes his $30,000 bond and walks out of jail.
“I’ve certainly had clients hauled back into court on violations, maybe two or three times that have been alleged,” said criminal defense attorney Emily Detoto.
Associate Judge Tiffany Hill presided over a bond revocation hearing for Maldonado.
“For obvious reasons, you are not abiding by your rules and conditions period, and God knows what he was doing when he wasn’t where he was supposed to be,” Kahan said.
According to court documents, Maldonado failed to comply with any of his bond conditions for eight months.
According to his GPS monitor, he left his curfew zone 847 times, was called 453 times about his whereabouts, and had more than 1,000 GPS monitor violations.
A suspect arrested and charged in a recent brutal “jugging” robbery in Houston that left a woman paralyzed was out on a $100 bond for a weapons-related charge.
On the morning of February 13, Nung Truong, 44, withdrew money from a bank ATM but was followed for approximately 24 miles by two suspects. Surveillance video released by the Houston Police Department shows a black male bumping into Truong and causing her to drop her belongings. The suspect initially fled with an envelope but returned seconds later to body-slam Truong to the ground before taking $4,300 in cash.
A mother to three children aged 13, 15, and 20, Truong is now paralyzed and unable to walk or care for herself.
Last Friday, Houston Police arrested Joseph Harrell, 17, and Zy’Nika Ayesha Woods, 19, for the attack and charged both suspects with Aggravated Robbery with Serious Bodily Injury.
According to court records, on January 26, 2023, Harrell had been granted a General Order bond of $100 for Unlawful Possession of a Weapon. He also faces charges of Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon related to an incident in February in which he threatened another victim with a gun. Harrell is currently being held in the Harris County jail on bonds totaling $240,000.
Snip.
Although Harrell’s Unlawful Possession of a Weapon charge was assigned to Harris County Court 2 under Judge Paula Goodhart, his bond was signed by Judge David Singer.
Elected to Harris County Criminal Court 14 in 2018, Singer lost in the March 2022 Democratic primary election and his term ended December 31, 2022. As a one-term judge, Singer is not eligible under state code to serve as a visiting judge.
The 11th Administrative Judicial Region confirmed to The Texan that Singer is not listed as a visiting judge.
The Harris County Office of Court Management emailed the following statements to The Texan:
“David Singer was appointed as associate judge pursuant to Section 54A.002 of the Texas Government Code and the Local Rules for Harris County Criminal Courts at Law. His start date was Jan. 1, 2023.”
Finland gets the green light to join NATO, with Turkey and Hungary approving their membership. Sweden’s application is still under negotiation. As I noted previously, tangling with the Finns has not been a source of happiness for Russia.
Poor priorities. “European Ammo Maker’s Growth Stymied By TikTok Data Center Sucking Up Electricity.”
LA City Council member Mark Ridley-Thomas convicted of taking bribes. “He was convicted of one count of bribery, one of conspiracy, one count of honest services mail fraud, and four counts of honest services wire fraud. The jury acquitted him on 12 other counts.”
Veterans Affairs assistant secretary Kurt DelBene is married to Rep. Suzan DelBene (Wash.), chairwoman of the DCCC. It’s a big club, and you’re not in it. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Federal prosecutors announced a 58-year-old Plainview man is facing 102 years in prison after pleading guilty to stealing $4 million in federal relief funds passed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
On Friday, Andrew Johnson pleaded guilty in the Northern District of Texas to three counts of bank fraud, one count of aggravated identity theft, and one count of engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from unlawful activity, according to a news release published by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
Johnson swindled millions from the Paycheck Protection Program passed in the early weeks of the pandemic to help stave off the economic effects of business closures, government restrictions, and shelter-in-place mandates. As part of the fraud, Johnson applied for and received forgiveness for 27 bogus loans.
He spent more than $3.5 million of the stolen funds on “home renovations, vacations, clothing, cosmetic surgery, college tuition, cars, wedding expenses, and equipment for an unrelated business venture,” according to the DOJ.
After an investigation that took longer than a year, the Office of the City Auditor in Austin said it found Central Texas Allied Health Institute (CTAHI), a nonprofit City of Austin contractor, committed fraud against Austin Public Health and falsified health records.
According to the investigative report, CTAHI misrepresented over $1.1 million in financial transactions across three contracts with Austin Public Health and was incorrectly paid roughly $417,000 between December 2020 and September 2021 because of fraudulent contract claims. The report also claimed CTAHI falsified its COVID-19 vaccine contract performance by overstating vaccination totals and fabricating patient data.
“This is up there with some of the biggest cases we’ve investigated on my team,” said Brian Molloy, chief of investigations at the Chief of the City Auditor.
CTAHI, President Todd Hamilton, and Dr. Jereka Thomas-Hockaday — both of whom were named in the report — denied the claims made in the report in a statement Thursday.
Snip.
CTAHI’s three contracts with Austin Public Health were for COVID-19 testing, workforce development, and COVID-19 vaccines, according to the city. Between December 2020 and September 2021, the city said CTAHI submitted 23 claims for reimbursement to APH under the workforce development and COVID-19 vaccine contracts.
Flu Manchu is the fraud fount that just keeps giving… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
NHL might stop pushing gay pride after backlash from players and fans. “Philadelphia Flyer’s player Ivan Provorov didn’t want to participate in a ‘Pride’ event during warmups…Soon, other players also refused to participate after Povorov showed it could be done, and some entire team organizations dropped their planned LGBT pride events. And thanks to this one man’s stand, the NHL is considering dropping the whole ‘Pride’ push.”
Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel and coiner of Moore’s Law, is dead at age 94. Semiconductors have radically changed just about every facet of the world.
There are some people whose staggering failures are so awesome that they put ordinary successes in the shade. Like Christopher Columbus trying to find a quicker route to India and discovering the New World instead.
Such is the case with Mikhail Gorbachev, who died yesterday at age 91.
Gorbachev never meant to destroy Soviet Communism, he merely meant to reform it so that it could run more efficiently, allowing the Soviet Union to compete more effectively with capitalist nations that were stomping their communist counterparts both economically and technologically. Moore’s Law was creating a tech boom racing so far ahead that the Soviets couldn’t even copy technology fast enough to keep up. Reagan’s obvious resolve and the threat posed by SDI scared them even more. To compete with the west, Gorbachev had to reform his stagnant nation.
His means for doing so were glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reform, or restructuring). Those two methods, meant to rejuvenate Soviet communism, actually ended it. Glasnost made it clear that a majority of Soviet citizens across the various republics hated the oppressive nature of communism. Perestroika was a hard sell to stagnant and ossified state agencies and enterprises. While some well-connected oligarch’s got rich on the first green shoots of capitalist reform, western companies proved unenthusiastic about investing in Soviet co-ventures.
Politically, Gorbachev’s reforms eventually resulted in the draft New Union Treaty, which would have devolved more power to the constituent Republics. This was deemed so threatening to the status quo that an abortive coup was launched against Gorbachev by communist hardliners the day before it was supposed to be signed. The coup, opposed by Russian President Boris Yeltsin and a large swath of Soviet citizens, collapsed in a matter of days, sealing the fate of the Soviet Union, which would dissolve on December 25, 1991.
In the process trying to reform the Soviet system, Gorbachev would stop funding communist movements around the world and withdraw troops from eastern Europe. These were great, liberating decisions, but they were committed in support of reforming Soviet communism, not ending it. By that grand mistake, Mikhail Gorbachev did more to make the world a better place than all previous Soviet Premiers combined.
Kathy Boudin, who spent decades in prison for her part in the deadly 1981 Brink’s armored truck heist as a member of the radical militant group Weather Underground, died of cancer at the age of 78 in New York on Sunday.
For those too young to remember, the Weather Underground was a radical communist terrorist organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government.
In October, 1981, Boudin and members of the group teamed up with the Black Liberation Army for the robbery to help fund their anti-government campaigns.
The Black Liberation Army was a radical, black nationalist communist terrorist organization that also sought the violent overthrow of the American government. They may have killed as many as ten police officers across the country. Remaining members of both the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army would later join forces as the May 19th Communist Organization, under which banner they would carry out a series of terrorist bombings through 1985.
They targeted a Brink’s armored truck, which they held up in Rockland County, making out with $1.6 million.
During the robbery, gunmen killed Brink’s security guard Peter Paige before transferring the money to a U-Haul truck a mile away, where a 38-year-old Boudin sat in the cabin.
The truck was stopped by police at a roadblock, where Boudin — unarmed — immediately surrendered. Gunmen in the back of the truck popped outside and began firing on the officers, killing two policemen —Sgt. Edward O’Grady and Officer Waverly Brown.
She pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery and second-degree murder in the death of Paige in 1984.
She spent 22 years in prison before she was paroled for good behavior in 2003.
The armored car holdup fell into a period in New York history after the death penalty for killing a police officer had been ruled unconstitutional by the New York supreme court, before Republican Governor George Pataki signed legislation restoring it in 1995.
Was Boudin shunned by civil society after her release?
She was not.
After jail, she was hired by Columbia School of Social Work Associate as an adjunct professor in 2008. She was hired as a full-time professor in 2013, lecturing about issues facing convicts and their families when a person is released from prison.
Help kill two cops and a security guard and get tenure.
Boudin was the mother of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin…
The Soros-backed soft-on-crime DA facing a recall election for that city’s spiraling crime rate.
who last year successfully lobbied former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to commute the sentence of his father, David Gilbert — who was also a member of the Weather Underground who was imprisoned for his role in the stick-up.
Gilbert, who served as a getaway driver, was serving a sentence of 75 years to life in prison with no possibility of parole until 2056. Gilbert is among the last surviving people involved in the robbery.
Judith Clark, another former Weather Underground member, served 35 years of a 75-years-to-life sentence for her role in the robbery at a mall in suburban Rockland County before her sentence was commuted by Cuomo in 2016. She was paroled in 2019.
Andrew Cuomo, always willing to shower mercy on cop-killers, just not on elderly nursing home residents.
The Democratic establishment is always willing to forgive and lionize radical cop killers, as long as they’re on the left. “No enemies on the left.”
