Putting Democrats in charge of money is like putting Al Capone in charge of Ft. Knox: You know the goodies are going to disappear just as soon as they figure out no one is watching.
Item the First: Instead of updating air traffic control systems, Biden transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s DOT spent $80 billion on DEI grants.
Yes, Pete “Booty Juice,” as his boss called him, instead of throwing money into new equipment to replace old air traffic control systems, spent $80 billion on about 400 DEI grants.
Programs such as ‘Justice40’ ended up shelling out 55% of around $150 billion in infrastructure investments to ‘disadvantaged communities,’ pursuant to an executive order Biden signed to ‘advance equitable outcomes.’
Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure law in 2021 provided much of the funding, but some Democrats were critical of the outcomes — including a $5 billion equity effort to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations that resulted in just seven being built by June 2024.
Democrats will point to that Biden infrastructure bill and say they spent plenty on air traffic control. However, most of the $5 billion allocated to the DOT was spent on maintenance, according to airline officials.
So despite this…
In January 2023, the agency ordered the first nationwide grounding of flights since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that left thousands of passengers stranded. The 2023 grounding was due to an FAA system outage.
In an urgent letter to Buttigieg’s DOT in April 2024, air industry trade association officials warned that at the current rate of hiring, it could take as long as 90 years for the FAA to reach its targeted staffing levels in some of the critical New York air traffic control centers.
Investigative journalist Sue Pascoe of Circling The News dropped a bombshell: $100 million raised during the celebrity-packed FireAid benefit concert may have disappeared. The money was initially intended to support homeless residents of Pacific Palisades after a devastating wildfire destroyed thousands of homes. Instead, Pascoe reports the funds were funneled through a complex web of NGOs – potentially diverted toward unrelated causes.
“So I looked at the initially they gave $50 million to about 120 nonprofits. And I looked at these nonprofits and one of them said, we help mobile home parks. And there are two mobile home parks in the Palisades. And so I contacted the people there. They had never received any money. They had never heard of that,” Pascoe told Fox 11 Los Angeles during the interview.
Public records indicate that FireAid appears to be a pop-up NGO, created solely to assist the thousands of Pacific Palisades residents left homeless after the wildfire destroyed their community.
Donate directly to FireAid today to help us start rebuilding our community,” Fire Aid states on its website, adding that the funds will be “immediate relief” channeled through “more than 120 nonprofit organizations, reaching over 150,000 Angelenos.”
Yet according to Pascoe, she told Fox 11’s host, “I don’t think they’re helping the victims at all.” The newscaster told Pascoe that her team has reached out to Attorney General Rob Bonta about where the $100 million went.
Where did the money go? “The Annenberg Foundation was tasked with administering the funds.”
The FireAid website explains that with nonprofits “Our intention is to strike a balance, geographically and organizationally, assisting both large funds and organizations with longstanding experience navigating moments of crisis, and community groups with deep knowledge of impacted neighborhoods.”
The site noted that community nonprofits could apply for grants ranging from $10,000-$50,000.”
There are ten categories listed, and in each are the nonprofits that received grants. Below is a sample.
Children and Family:
El Nido continues to build healthy families by providing community-based social services in some of the most underserved communities in Los Angeles County, including; Pacoima and surrounding communities, South Los Angeles, Compton, and the Antelope Valley.
Home Grown – Our mission is to build a more inclusive childcare system that values and supports home-based childcare (HBCC) as a quality option for families and children.
Pathways LA – based in downtown “works to make sure that children in our most vulnerable communities have access to high-quality and affordable childcare services. And on that site, the NPO recommend reaching out to L.A. County Emergency Services, American Red Cross and 211 L.A. County for fire aid.
Health and Housing:
St. Josephs– In a 2022 Westside Current Story “Almost Half of $5M Venice Boardwalk ‘Encampment to Home’ Funding Used for Staffing, Operations” the money used by St. Josephs went to staffing, operations and indirect costs.
The People’s Concern also received a fire aid grant. People in Pacific Palisades had made donations to the Pacific Palisades Task Force on Homelessness. That group in turn gave the money to the People’s Concern to hire social workers to reach out to the homeless.
Another grant recipient was the L.A.’s Home for Native People, located at West Temple Street, whose mission is to promote and support the physical, behavioral, and spiritual well-being of American Indian/Alaska Natives in Los Angeles and Orange counties. If you go to the calendar of events, most are done Mondays and Thursdays on Zoom.
Pacific Clinics “offer a continuum of services for all ages, including behavioral health treatment and culturally responsive programs, such as the Asian Pacific Family Center, the Latina Youth Program and the Armenian Hye-Wap program,” and is at Western Avenue, New Hampshire Street and El Centro Ave. in Los Angeles and at three sites in Pasadena.
Visión y Compromiso “is committed to community well-being by supporting promotores and community health workers. And what is a promotore? Because they share the same language, culture, ethnicity, status and experiences of their communities, Promotores are able to reduce the barriers to health education and services that are common for native-born and immigrant communities.”
Sounds like pretty much zero percent went toward directly helping people who lost homes in the fire, doesn’t it?
Every pot of money, no matter the source, no matter how sacred the ostensible goal, is just another mouthful of graft to be fed into the insatiable maw of the left.
A shocking budget surplus, the most boring phrase in politics makes a comeback, Trump tours Texas, Paxton slams a scammer, Soros backs the commie, more corruption from Democrats in New York and California, and Stellantis does what it does best: Ruins everything it touches. Plus a bit about Jeffrey Epstein.
I am sure that Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent don’t want to say “I told you so,” but…
Yes, according to CNBC the United States just posted some big economic dubs, with the budget hitting a surplus thanks to the tariffs that – one day, I am constantly assured – will tank the economy.
The U.S. government posted a surplus in June as tariffs gave an extra bump to a sharp increase in receipts, the Treasury Department said Friday.
With government red ink swelling throughout the year, last month saw a surplus of just over $27 billion, following a $316 billion deficit in May.
I just created a tag for “surplus”…
Back in the dim mists of time, someone at National Review noted that “Enhanced Rescission Authority” was possibly the most boring phrase in the English language. Boring or not, it’s now helping Trump cut the deficit.
Vice President JD Vance cast two decisive tie-breaking votes in the Senate on Tuesday to advance a $9.4 billion spending rescissions package backed by President Donald Trump. The measure, which would claw back federal funding from a range of programs, including the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and public broadcasters NPR and PBS, is now headed into a marathon floor debate.
The Senate twice deadlocked at 50-50 on procedural votes to begin debate on the controversial bill. In both instances, Vance stepped in to break the tie and push the measure forward. The rescissions package, approved by the House of Representatives last month, would eliminate approximately $8.3 billion from USAID and $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
Amid the destruction and mourning in Kerrville after the flooding disaster last week, President Donald Trump held a press conference with a number of Texas elected officials where they provided updates on ongoing recovery efforts.
“Well, this a tough one,” Trump somberly stated at the beginning of the press conference. “It’s hard to believe the devastation.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this.”
First Lady Melania Trump also spoke about the stories she has heard from families impacted by the floods.
“We are grieving with you. Our nation is grieving with you.”
Ahead of the Trump press conference, Gov. Greg Abbott announced that the federal government has updated the Presidential Disaster Declaration to include additional Texas counties eligible for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Individual Assistance program.
“We remain committed,” Abbott said during the roundtable, “we’re here for the long run.”
“We will maintain our operations to find everybody that we can, as well as ensure that we build this community from Hunt to Camp Mystic to Kerrville, to down below. We are committed for the long run, not just to rebuild, but to rebuild in a better way.”
At least 160 people remain missing since the floods. Abbott stated during a press conference earlier this week that 109 have been confirmed dead.
“Attorney General Paxton Demands Alleged Texas Flood Fundraising Scam Cease Operations. “In the wake of devastating floods across Central Texas on July 4, a plethora of fundraisers were launched in order to assist affected victims, volunteers, and first responders — one of which Paxton accuses of scamming Texans. Addressed to Tray Coppola, organizer of a GoFundMe marketed as supporting Kerrville flood victims, the letter from the Office of the Attorney General formally demands that he maintain and preserve all records for legal purposes.” Coppola responded to the accusations by screaming racism…
“Illegal From Weed Farm Where Minor Girls Worked Had Convictions for Attempted Rape, Child Molestation.” There’s no illegal alien scumbag whose crimes are too heinous for social justice Democrats hearts to bleed for.
Pay to play, California style: “Corporate Donors Gave Big to a Newsom Family Charity. Then the California Governor Took Their Side on State Issues.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom doesn’t typically get involved in disputes between rival Native American tribes. That changed last year, when Newsom used his office to try to block a small tribe from opening a casino in Northern California.
In August 2024, Newsom’s office sent a letter on his behalf to the Biden Interior Department urging it to reject a $700 million proposed casino project north of San Francisco by the Koi Nation, a tribe with fewer than 100 members. But the Biden administration approved the project anyway, so in May, Newsom sued the Trump administration in a last ditch effort to block the Koi Nation’s casino. Should Newsom get his way, it would be a major win for the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, a major California political donor which operates its own gambling compound just 15 miles away from its rival’s proposed site, which broke ground on a $1 billion expansion in 2023.
A little-known California government disclosure database may shed light on why Newsom took Graton Rancheria’s side in the high-stakes dispute.
In April 2024, a few months before Newsom sent his letter to the Biden Interior Department, the Democratic governor requested Graton Rancheria to contribute $500,000 to his wife’s charity, the California Partners Project. And in April 2025, one month before Newsom filed his lawsuit against the Trump administration, he again asked Graton Rancheria to contribute another $500,000 to his wife’s charity. The tribe cut those checks specifically at Newsom’s request, according to California’s “behested payments” database, which discloses whenever state elected officials request others to make donations on their behalf.
Waste and fraud, New York Governor Grannykiller style: “Governor Andrew Cuomo, before he was unceremoniously forced out of office, convinced state lawmakers to shell out over $100 million to purchase decorative LED lights to enhance the beauty of some of New York’s most iconic bridges…At least $108 million was spent on Cuomo’s “Harbor of Lights” project, which was supposed to install specialty LED lighting on several New York State bridges. The project was pitched as a way to boost tourism, but the lights ended up sitting unused in a warehouse for more than seven years until they were recently auctioned off for less than half a percent of the project’s overall cost.” Plus they paid millions to store them. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
In response to an open records request, the Harris County Housing & Community Development department revealed that it spent $2,071,676.21 in 2024 paying for legal services for illegal aliens.
The services are also available for illegal aliens with criminal records.
Harris County first spent $2,000,000 launching a program called the Immigrant Legal Services Fund (ILSF) in 2020 and has been making payments to the fund since then.
ILSF provides free legal representation in Harris County for people facing deportation from Houston-area detention centers.
Where is the enumerated statute that authorizes Harris County to spend money for illegal alien legal services?
Legal eagle Alan Dershowitz claims that the Trump administration isn’t hiding the names of the alleged pedophiles associated with Epstein; two judges are.
The Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the “blockbuster” story alleging a letter Trump wrote to Epstein for his 50th birthday included some tawdry elements previously worked for Main Justice (his only prior reporting experience listed in his bio).
Main Justice was Glenn Simpson’s wife’s publication. Simpson founded Fusion GPS, which was paid by Hillary Clinton/the DNC (through Perkins Coie) to produce the Steele Dossier at the center of the Russian hoax against Trump.
As the Democrats’ policies grew progressively more anti-American, the gang of hacks, DEI hires, and grifters that once proudly styled itself as the Party of Jefferson and Jackson did everything it could to make people think pointing out that increasingly obvious fact was both ridiculous and offensive. And so, ever fewer people have dared to do so, even as it became even more obvious that hating America and having a taste for Marxism went with being a Democrat like arrogance and self-righteousness went with being Barack Obama.
Now, however, it’s impossible to deny. The best and the brightest among young Democrats are all avowed socialists. The party would have chosen a socialist, Bernie Sanders, as its candidate for president in 2016 and likely also in 2020 if party top dogs hadn’t stepped in and arranged for the candidacy of someone who was at least outwardly more mainstream.
All the while, Democrats insisted their socialism was nothing to be worried about, but was of an extremely cuddly variety. One of the foremost among the party’s up-and-coming new socialists, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Swizzle Stick), maintains that what she has in mind isn’t the bad old socialism of the Soviet Union, Communist China, Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea and the rest, but a type involving more unicorns and moonbeams. “So when millennials talk about concepts like democratic socialism,” she explained, “we’re not talking about these kinds of ‘Red Scare’ bogeyman.” Yeah, tell all the victims of Stalin and Mao that it was just a “scare.” Those hysterical right-wingers were having the vapors over nothing.
Ocasio-Cortez continued, “We’re talking about countries and systems that already exist, that have already been proven to be successful in the modern world. We’re talking about single-payer health care that has already been successful in many different models, from Finland to Canada to the UK.” Great, but none of those countries are actually socialist. Foreign Policy pointed out in 2021 that “Nordic countries are often used internationally to prove that socialism works. It’s true that social democratic parties are enjoying success in this part of the world.” However, it’s not the kind of success that AOC would want to encourage: “Today, the Nordic social democrats have adopted stricter immigration policies, tightened eligibility requirements for welfare benefit systems, taken a tougher stance on crime, and carried out business-friendly policies.”
The brand of socialism that is getting more popular among U.S. Democrats is nothing like that. Instead, we have Zohran Mamdani, who will likely be the next mayor of New York, and has called for “seizing the means of production,” as well as transforming “housing from a private commodity to a public one.” And now there’s Omar Fateh, a candidate for mayor of Minneapolis, who also wants state-owned housing, along with wage rates set by the state. That’s not cuddly Scandinavian socialism. That’s Marxism. Do we have to have actual gulags on American soil to know where it leads?
The Communists are clearly the future of the Democrat Party. Arrayed against their spectre are the party top dogs, not because they’re against their ideology, but because they want to continue the illusion that their party still champions American values. There are still some rubes out there who can be fooled on this point.
Is Mamdani getting money from George Soros? Of course he is.
But in less than a decade, Soros’ ultra-woke grant-making network Open Society Foundation has indirectly funneled a combined $37 million to the Working Families Party and at least other nine left-wing groups whose endorsements and get-out-the-vote groundwork played a pivotal role in helping Mamdani upset ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary, the foundation’s records show.
Since 2016, the far-left, socialist-friendly WFP — which helped score Mandani the Democratic line by brokering cross-endorsement deals that squeezed out Cuomo — has pocketed a staggering $23.7 million from Soros through its nonprofit fundraising arm Working Families Organization Inc.
And at least another $13,944,005 went to the nine nonprofits and their offshoot fundraising entities — including the Make The Road Action ($3,515,00), and social justice nonprofits Community Voices Heard ($2,635,000) and Move On ($2.3 million), and the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace Acton ($650,000), according to records.
Russia will face severe sanctions and tariffs if the country does not sign a ceasefire deal to end the war with Ukraine in 50 days, a White House official confirmed to National Review. President Donald Trump made the announcement in the Oval Office Monday.
“We’re going to be doing very severe tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days,” he said.
The U.S. will impose secondary tariffs on the country at 100 percent, he said. The secondary tariffs would place monetary sanctions on countries that trade with Russia.
The president made the announcement during a meeting with Mark Rutte, secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Rutte has been coordinating European efforts to send more weapons to Ukraine to defend itself against Russian invasion. Under the arrangement, NATO would buy American weapons and pass them on to Kyiv. The president said the U.S. will send billions of dollars worth of weapons to Ukraine through NATO allies in this way.
“We are going to be sending them weapons, and they’re going to be paying for them,” Trump said.
Ukraine will get massive numbers of missiles, air defense systems, and ammunition through the deal, according to Rutte, who said Russian President Vladimir Putin should reconsider peace negotiations.
Undernews: “US Has Launched Over 50 Airstrikes In Somalia In 2025 But Virtually No MSM Coverage…AFRICOM said that the strikes targeted the ISIS affiliate in Somalia’s northeastern Puntland region, to the southeast of the port city of Bossaso.” The group is al-Shabaab, which is also affiliated with
Winning: “Trump Announces Trade Deal With Indonesia, Opening Entire Market to U.S.”
This morning I finalized an important Deal with the Republic of Indonesia after speaking with their Highly Respected President Prabowo Subianto. This landmark Deal opens up Indonesia’s ENTIRE MARKET to the United States for the first time in History. As part of the Agreement, Indonesia has committed to purchasing $15 Billion Dollars in U.S. Energy, $4.5 Billion Dollars in American Agricultural Products, and 50 Boeing Jets, many of them 777’s. For the first time ever, our Ranchers, Farmers, and Fishermen will have Complete and Total Access to the Indonesian Market of over 280 million people. In addition, Indonesia will pay the United States a 19% Tariff on all Goods they export to us, while U.S. Exports to Indonesia are to be Tariff and Non Tariff Barrier FREE. If there is any Transshipment from a higher Tariff Country, then that Tariff will be added on to the Tariff that Indonesia is paying. Thank you to the People of Indonesia for your friendship and commitment to balancing our Trade Deficit. We will keep DELIVERING for the American People, and the People of Indonesia!
“DOJ Fires Former FBI Director’s Daughter, Prosecutor Who Worked on Epstein, Diddy Cases. The U.S. Department of Justice has fired Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI director James Comey and a Manhattan federal prosecutor.”
Good news, everyone! “Department of Justice to Continue Bribery Case Against Congressman Henry Cuellar.” Despite the indictment, Cuellar managed to win reelection over Republican Myra Flores for the Texas 28th Congressional District in 2024. Flores is already raising money for a rematch.
56-year-old Adermis Wilson-Gonzalez, was arrested on June 29 by ICE. He was convicted of hijacking an airplane 22 years ago; the plane he attacked was reportedly flying from Cuba to Key West, Florida.
Among the convictions received by the four illegal aliens from Mexico — Arnulfo Olivares Cervantes, Luis Pablo Vasquez-Estolano, Jose Meza, and Javier Escobar Gonzalez — were offenses for homicide, possession of various illegal substances, sexual assault of a minor, driving while intoxicated, attempted murder, burglary, and unauthorized use of a firearm.
Interesting: “Almost 200 Texas Public School Districts Adopt Four-Day Week.”
In 2015, Kelly Sue DeConnick was praised for “saving comic books.” Instead, she almost killed them. No points for guessing her political agenda…
Steve Miller cancels concert tour due to “climate change.” So no more big old jet airliners for him, and he won’t keep rockin you, baby…
“Memorabilia dealer found dead after alleged $350 million counterfeit confession on Facebook. Brett Lemieux, 45 of Westfield, Ind., was the founder of noted sports memorabilia site MisterManCave, which he claimed sold more than four million counterfeit items.” Caveat emptor. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
A politically created affordability crisis in Texas’ capital city is poised to worsen, even as the Texas Legislature is set to address local government spending statewide.
On Friday evening, Austin’s city manager released a $6.3 billion budget proposal. This represents a nearly seven percent increase from last year’s previous record of $5.9 billion, and a nearly 15 percent increase from 2023’s record of $5.5 billion.
As a matter of perspective, Austin’s budget was $4.5 billion in 2021 and $3.3 billion in 2013. If adopted as proposed, this budget would represent a near doubling in just over a decade.
Mayor Kirk Watson said the proposed budget includes “several important items” that he believes “will help our city move forward and deliver Austinites the services they deserve.”
As proposed, Austin’s budget contains a record-setting $51 million for vagrancy services, a 42 percent increase from the last budget, with thirteen additional staff positions.
When Austin puts more money into “homeless service,” we know that it’s a great avenue for providing graft, either to the politically connected or the hard left (assuming there’s any difference between those categories). We know because they’ve been caught before and had to take their hand back out of the cookie jar.
And of course the hard left Democrats running the Austin City Council would double-down on social justice just as much of the rest of the nation is tossing it on the ash-heap of history.
The proposal also includes significant increases in various race-based programs, including a nearly 40 percent increase for the “Office of Equity and Inclusion” and a nearly 20 percent increase for the “Small and Minority Business Resources Department.”
Meanwhile, the city proposed a modest cut to the Austin Police Department’s overtime budget.
Actually it’s a $9 million cut, which doesn’t strike me as particularly modest.
Austin City Hall just circulated a memo promising every regular employee a 4 % pay bump, a new higher base hourly wage, richer HSA deposits, and zero increases to health‑plan premiums.
“The same budget slashes $9 million in police OT and hikes on your utility bill. Austin is raising its own payroll above private sector rates while telling working taxpayers to brace for higher fees and slower police response times.”
You know how liberals always mock the idea that the left is trying to turn babies gay? Well, this short Asmongold video offers pretty compelling evidence that they’re trying to turn babies gay.
Some titles on in the “Gay Kids Book Section” of Barnes & Noble on display:
Bye Bye Binary
Gay BCs (“Bi s for B,” “C is for Coming Out,” “D is for drag”)
“This is pushing it.” “This is not pushing it. This is beyond everything.”
“F should be for ‘FBI.'”
The irony is that it’s a lesbian couple filming this, and they think it’s too much.
“Bro, I think we’re losing gay marriage pretty soon. I think this is going to go so far it’s going to radicalize. It’s going to make people fucking hate gay people again. Trying to push on literal fucking babies.”
Another Peter Zeihan video, this one on domestic politics, where his insights have usually been…less than stellar. But this time it’s about how screwed the Democrat Party is, though he mostly dances around the real reasons behind their decline, instead wielding his well-worn hammer stenciled “demographics.”
“Is there a future for the Democratic Party in the United States? And the short version is ‘probably not.'”
“The Democratic Party is not what it used to be. It has been through several iterations since it was formed back in the 1800s. But in its most recent iteration, one that dates roughly back to the post-World War II environment, the party basically it it’s formed around three big pillars of voters. The first is organized labor, with capital being on the Republican side of the equation. The second are ethnic minorities with most white people edging towards the Republicans again. And then the third group is coastal elites, specifically of the white tower crowd. People who live in cities and have a very different way of looking at the world than say rural voters who are more likely to be Republicans.” On the last point, Zeihan has shifted from talking about the postwar Democratic Party to the modern one, as Democrats used to own a goodly portion of rural voters, AKA “the farm vote,” especially in the South. Look at this county by county map of the 1932 Presidential election, and you see that Republican rural counties are few and far between. By 1952, rural counties really like Ike…but not in the South, which is still overwhelmingly blue. That change accelerates with the rise of the “new left” in the 1960s and the conscious decision by the left to start pushing conservatives out of the Democratic Party. (At least that was the case in Texas, as outlined in Wayne Thorburn’s Red State.) By the 1980s the process was well underway, as seen by party switches from such politicians as Phil Gramm and Kent Hance, and was mostly complete everywhere except minority majority counties, though in Texas we’re now seeing that Democrat-to-Republican pattern repeat itself with Hispanic majority counties. Smaller cities and suburban voters were where Republicans managed to maintain a foothold during the Democrat-dominated period between FDR’s election in 1932 and Reagan’s in 1980.
“If you look at it just on the numbers, if you add up all racial minorities in the United States with all organized labor or blue-collar workers with everyone who’s living in the cities, it’s a super majority of the population. And it’s pushing 70% of the total. It should, by the numbers, not only be the dominant party, but it should be the only party in the United States. And yet and yet and yet, they keep losing elections by ever more impressive margins.” “All organized labor or blue-collar workers” is another slight of hand, as those are two ever-more-divergent categories. All across the Western world, not just in the U.S., ruling liberal elites can rarely be bothered to hide their contempt for native blue-collar workers, which seems to be one driving factor in their importing immigrant classes to supplant them.
I’m snipping the “but the world changes and politics changes” section (Cold War, digital revolution, Baby Boomers retiring) because it’s all so very non-specific to the question at hand.
“But for the Democrats, this has not been a gift. Three basic things have combined to make it nonfunctional in its current form.”
“First, those liberal, coastally educated, urban living elites, they’re not nearly as united as you might think. And more importantly, they have a hard time resonating their ideas with the rank and file of the United States.” Here’s the first time Zeihan tiptoes up to the central truth that “their ideas,” the whole panoply of radical leftwing social justice, victimhood identity politics, DEI racism, radical feminism, importing millions of illegal aliens, supporting Islamic terrorists killing Israelis, etc., are all profoundly unpopular with everyone outside the leftwing college educated urban elites who make up the ideological core of the Party.
“Most Americans do not own six figures.” Actually, they sort of do, but I think what he meant was most Americans don’t earn six figures. “Most Americans have not graduated from graduate programs. And so, the sort of tunnel vision that you can get if you’re a part of this coastal elite just doesn’t really carry out to others. And when you see people starting to protest for trans rights, that just doesn’t resonate for most of the country.” Americans were more than happy to let the confused freaks do whatever the hell they wanted to with their own bodies, but once the groomers started “transitioning” and mutilating normie children behind their parents’ backs, normie parents started hating Democrats with a deep, righteous anger.
“The second issue is racial.”
“One of the huge mistakes the Democratic Party has made over the last 30 years is to simply bet that, because birth rates were higher under Hispanics than they were under whites, that the country was going to become more and more and more leftist, more and more democratic.” That is, in a nutshell, the John Judis and Ruy Teixeira Emerging Democratic Majority theory. And it 2021, Teixeira said that wasn’t happening.
“Instead, we saw two things happening with specifically the Hispanic population. Number one, they became steadily and steadily more wealthy, which tends to put them over into the Republican camp. And second, Hispanics, especially first and second generation Mexican Americans, are very strong in blue-collar work, specifically the trades like electricity and welding and similar items. Construction. Well, the United States is going through an industrial renaissance where those skill sets are massively in demand. And so if you want to look at politics through the lens of the economic halves and halves nots, the Hispanics have become more and more in the category of the haves moving forward, so for them tax rates have become as important, if not more, for most than things like racial equality.” Except we have racial equality under the law, and republicans support a color blind society based on individualism, while Democrats want perpetual social justice ethnic grievances which well-heeled upper middle class white liberals can signal their virtue by supporting.
“And so more and more of these people have shifted over in the general direction of Trump style Republicans.”
“And the third issue is cultural. If you’re a first or second generation Mexican-American, a first or second generation immigrant from any background, odds are that where you came from is less organized than the United States and less wealthy. You came to pursue the American dream, which means you have some firsthand experience in your family of what a system with weak rule of law looks like. One of the great things that we have forgotten in this country is that most migrants have a deeper degree of religiosity than most Americans. And so when you get a Mexican immigrant or Nigerian immigrant and they come to the United States, they are far more likely to be socially conservative than, say, the social liberals of the coasts.”
“We have all of these things happening at the same time, changing our idea of identity, and the net result is a lot of factions that used to be core to the Democratic coalition are now toss-ups. Hispanics were as likely to vote for Trump as they were likely to vote for Harris. Same for people under age 30. The youth are now in play as well.” No mention of why this might be the case, or why social justice, open borders and Covid lockdown policies are all widely unpopular with “the youths.”
“You pull this all together and at the moment it is absolutely impossible for the Democrats to win any big election unless there’s something else very big in play. Does this mean that the Democrats are dead forever? Not quite what I’m saying. What I’m saying is they can no longer count on winning by the numbers. There has to be another issue out there that motivates.”
Most of the the reasons Zeihan are correct (or at least correct enough), but save Hispanics, there’s very little deeper analysis of why all these various, formerly solid demographic have fallen away from the Democrat fold. And the answer is that the ideas promulgated by the ideological core of the Democrat Party are deeply unpopular. From mutilating children in the name of transsexism to importing millions of illegal aliens to legalizing shoplifting to putting repeat offenders back out on the street, there seems to be no 80/20 hill social justice-infected Democrats aren’t willing to die on.
In a way, the scarcity of details Zeihan provides on the manifest unpopularity of the Democrat Party is less notable than the fact he did a video noticing them at all. After all, a large portion of his bread and butter is speaking at various functions for those same “liberal, coastally educated, urban living elites” that he says are out of touch with much of America. That he can even tiptoe up to the truth indicates that the widespread unpopularity of Democrats has finally so established itself as consensus inside-the-beltway wisdom that it’s no longer taboo to talk about.
But the same thing that’s making the Party so wildly unpopular (the ideological capture of the Party’s core by radical social social justice) is the same thing that prevents the Party from being able to self-correct. The hard left is now so firmly entrenched in the urban centers that make up the Party’s shrinking base that they’ve nominated (and have a puncher’s chance of actually electing) a jihadi commie as mayor of America’s largest city.
A political party exists to win elections, but the Democrat Party’s social justice-infected insane wing is focused on taking complete control away from the corrupt wing, not only for the graft, corruption and patronage, but also to actively foment revolution against capitalism and “fascism” (i.e, anything that stands between their own will to power and complete control of the country). And they’re willing to lose election after election until they achieve that goal.
As the Party shrinks, it becomes ever more shrill and leftwing, and as it becomes ever more shrill and leftwing, the Party shrinks. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop, a purity spiral Democrats seem incapable of escaping from.
Maybe by 2050 or so, an elderly Zeihan can post a holographic lecture on how social justice drove Democrats the way of the Whigs…
Here’s a video featuring Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, discussing data showing that a whole lot of depression and anxiety disorders among girls (less so among boys) were soaring at the same time social media (which, for the time-frame they’re talking about, is mostly Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) were taking off.
Jonathan Haidt: “Something weird happened in 2014. Greg Luciano, my my friend who runs the Foundation for Individual Rights of Expression, he noticed it too, he came to talk to me. Something had changed among the students. There was a new kind of new morality driven by anxiety and fragility.”
JH: “So we wrote an Atlantic article called ‘The Coddling of the American Mind.’ We turned that into a book in 2017, we went much deeper.”
JH: “Writing that book in 2017, we have a page where we say, you know, the timing is right for social media. Like social media comes in just at the right time to maybe have contributed, but we don’t really have evidence so that’s it, that’s all we said.”
JH: “2019: I’m collecting evidence, because now it’s clear it’s not just America.”
JH: “First we saw it in all of the Anglophere countries. When you look at levels of internalizing disorders…This is important. It’s not all mental illnesses, it’s not schizophrenia, it’s internalizing disorders, which is preeminently anxiety and depression related disorder.”
JH: “They’re pretty stable, from the late ’90s all the way through 2010, 2011 there’s really no trend in the United States or in the other English English speaking countries. And then, all of a sudden, there’s an elbow like around 2012, 2013 there’s an elbow, and the rates go up very sharply for girls, with more of a curve for boys, and that’s a clue, the different shape is an important clue. But for girls 2011, 2012 no sign of a problem, 2014, 2015 it’s off to the races with depression, anxiety. We see the same thing in self harm.”
JH: “So that’s that was the empirical puzzle that came to us as college professors, and that came to us in the national data, and that’s what that’s what launched me on this book.”
Jordan Peterson: “It’s an important coda that you mentioned there, that it wasn’t only rates of self-reported depression and anxiety. Because I know there was a criticism directed at your work by a psychiatrist who pointed out or claimed that the self-report data might be unreliable.”
JP: “But you pointed out, quite rightly, I thought, that you saw the same data in episodes of self harm, particularly among young women, which is a much more direct behavioral measure of that proclivity for negative emotion.”
JP: “I should point out clinically, just for those who are watching and listening, that anxiety is a response to the the threat of destruction, psychological or physical. Depression is more of a pain response, and it’s got two aspects: It’s heightening of negative emotion, withdrawal in particular, that causes cessation of activity, but also decrease in positive emotion, which is more associated with demoralization and and lack of motivational impetus to move forward. And you describe those as the internalizing disorders.” Not psychosis fragmentation or manic depressive disorder.
JP: “This is quite a particularized, let’s say, epidemic.”
JP: “What drove you to the conclusion, or even to investigate the possibility, that this had something to do with technology generally, and with social media more particularly?”
JH: “Jean Twenge was really the first person to call attention to this. Jean Twenge has been studying generations for 20 years, and she had an article in The Atlantic, in 2017 where The Atlantic chose the title ‘Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?’ And so Jean laid out the evidence. It was all correlational, which doesn’t prove it. But the patterns are so consistent, there’s a correlation in time, which is when this new technology is introduced, around 2012.”
JH: “In 2010, teenagers almost all have a flip phone or a basic phone. The iPhone exists, but it’s not very common. The front-facing camera comes out on the iPhone 4 in 2010. Instagram becomes super popular in 2012, so that’s the period where teen social life is changing radically from using a phone to call your friend saying ‘Hey let’s get together this afternoon,’ to spending all day swiping and scrolling and commenting and posting. 2010 to 2015 is the great rewiring of childhood.”
JH: “The increases we’re talking about are are generally between 50 and 100% increases in these measures of of psychopathology for pre-teen girls. You sometimes get 200% increases and for self harm. 10 to 14 year old girls did not used to cut themselves, it was very, very rare before 2012. You get over 200% increase in hospital visits for self harm, so the historical correlation is there. It doesn’t prove it, but there’s no other alternative. And then you have the correlation in time use, that is the people who are heavy users of social media in almost every study are doing much worse.” Until they take kids’ smart phones away, and they show dramatic improvement in mood in one to two weeks.
Though barely touched on in this interview, while this is happening, we see a dramatic increase in during the same time, again disproportionately among girls and women, of an epidemic-like spread of the woke social justice mind virus. Victimhood and cancel culture escape from their initial reservoirs of infection in academia and the Democrat Party and spread among the general population. Many have theorized that women are far more driven by consensus and conformity to social pressure from other women, and that this tendency to knuckle under to woke groupthink, combined with the vector for infection that was social media, explains how quickly the irrational psychosis of social justice spread.
And thus the social media explosion of 2010-2015 primed the pump for full blown epidemic of Trump Derangement Syndrome in 2016…
Democrats violently attack ICE agents for (checks notes) rescuing illegal alien children from a marijuana farm, an Antifa shooter is still at large, a commie funder may be on the run, a bit more on flooding, Jeremy Corbyn is splitting up Labour, miracle on 68th street, and something so meta it hurts.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Just missed this for last week’s LinkSwarm: “2016 Report on Russian Election Interference Was ‘Deliberately Corrupted’ by Top-Ranking Obama Officials. [CIA Director John] Ratcliffe said, ‘This was Obama, Comey, Clapper, and Brennan deciding “We’re going to screw Trump.”‘”
In May, CIA Director John Ratcliffe commissioned members of the agency’s Directorate of Analysis to conduct a “lessons-learned” review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russian interference in the presidential election. The review focused on the ICA’s most controversial judgment: that Russia had interfered in the U.S. presidential election to benefit then-candidate Donald Trump. This was precisely the impression the ICA’s authors intended to convey.
The New York Post’s Miranda Devine, the first journalist to obtain the review, summed up its findings as follows:
The review found that the ICA was deliberately corrupted by then-CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who were “excessively involved” in its drafting, and rushed its completion in a “chaotic,” “atypical” and “markedly unconventional” process that raised questions of a “potential political motive.”
…
Brennan’s decision to include the discredited Steele dossier, over the objections of the CIA’s most senior Russia experts, “undermined the credibility” of the assessment.
Brennan’s determination to include the Steele dossier in the ICA was especially significant given that he knew in July 2016 that it was nothing more than a collection of bogus stories commissioned by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign and conjured up by former British spy Christopher Steele and his sub-sources. And so did then-President Barack Obama.
We know that because in October 2020, Fox News reported that Brennan briefed Obama and others present during a July 28, 2016, Oval Office meeting on “Hillary Clinton’s purported ‘plan’ to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as ‘a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server’ ahead of the 2016 presidential election.”
According to the review, “the ICA authors and multiple senior CIA managers — including the two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia — strongly opposed including the Dossier, asserting that it did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards. … CIA’s Deputy Director for Analysis (DDA) warned in an email to Brennan on December 29 that including it in any form risked ‘the credibility of the entire paper.’”
Still Brennan insisted on including it. His response? “My bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”
The FBI also fought for the dossier’s inclusion. The review stated: “FBI leadership made it clear that their participation in the ICA hinged on the Dossier’s inclusion and, over the next few days, repeatedly pushed to weave references to it throughout the main body of the ICA.”
President Donald Trump accused Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday of spewing “bullsh**,” one day after Trump announced plans to send more weapons to Ukraine to help in its fight against the Kremlin.
“That was a war that should have never happened,” Trump said during a cabinet meeting in Washington, D.C., referring to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “A lot of people are dying and it should end.”
“We get a lot of bullsh** thrown at us by Putin if you want to know the truth. He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless,” he added.
Trump also said he is “looking at” further sanctions against Russia.
The president’s latest comments come after Trump had a phone call with Putin in which the U.S president expressed frustration at the lack of progress toward a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine and said he was “not happy” with Putin.
Hours after that call, Putin launched 550 drones and missiles against Ukraine, in what was the largest single aerial bombardment since Russia’s invasion was launched in 2022.
“He wants to go all the way, just keep killing people, it’s no good,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday, one day after the call.
Trump, on Monday, announced plans to send more weapons to Ukraine, backtracking on his administration’s earlier steps to pause military aid to the country.
Putin didn’t respond to the carrot, so now he’s going to get the stick.
Sudden Putin Death Syndrome strikes again: “Russian minister Roman Starovoit kills himself with Kremlin-gifted gun hours after being dismissed by Putin.”
News from late June you may have missed if you weren’t paying attention, because it got almost no coverage in the media: ‘Trump administration officials on Friday oversaw the signing of a U.S.-brokered peace agreement between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, a deal President Donald Trump said would end ‘one of the worst wars anyone’s ever seen.'”
For all the progressive hand-wringing about a so-called “hard-right Supreme Court,” the data point to something far more measured, even reassuring. Contrary to the narrative that this Court is gripped by ideological warfare, lurching from one 6–3 ruling to the next, the actual record shows a surprising degree of consensus. Indeed, roughly half of all decisions made by the current justices have been unanimous. This is not a Court at war with itself. It is, more often than not, a Court in agreement, even across the ideological spectrum.
Since Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the bench in 2022, the Court’s composition has remained stable, offering scholars and commentators a clear window into its decision-making dynamics. During the 2022 term, nearly 50% of the Court’s rulings were 9–0 decisions. The 2023 term followed closely, with approximately 44% of decisions unanimous. These are not mere statistical anomalies. They reflect a broader pattern that decisively undercuts the claim that the Court is narrowly partisan, dangerously lopsided, or fundamentally broken.
Has communist billionaire and NGO funder Neville Roy Singham fled the country?
“Neville Singham— the billionaire communist with ties to the CCP, who funded the LA riots and used immigration & Mexicans as a Trojan horse for communism— is hiding from our letter requesting testimony,” Rep. Luna wrote on X.
She said, “This poses an issue for delivering subpoena,” adding, “Therefore, if he decides to hide in CHINA, we will now be asking the State Dept. and Treasury to freeze his assets/visa.”
Faster, please. “State Dept. to fire 1,300-plus employees in dramatic reorganization plan.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ, who says that lots of DOJ employees are being let go as well.)
Nothing says how confident Democrats are this year like them pumping $20 million in SuperPAC money into a governor’s race. In New Jersey.
A Democratic super PAC is reserving more than $20 million in TV, digital, and streaming ads in New Jersey in an effort to tamp down Republican inroads in the state during and since the 2024 election and to keep Democratic control of the state’s governorship.
Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill hopes to replace Governor Murphy, who was blocked from running again due to term limits. She is running against Jack Ciattarelli, who is backed by President Trump. Mr. Ciattarelli lost to Mr. Murphy by three points in the last gubernatorial election.
A group backed by the Democratic Governors Association, Greater Garden State, says it is reserving the ad buys early to lock in lower prices and reserve prime ad inventory before airwaves get crowded closer to the November election.
The last time Republicans took the governor’s mansion there was 2009, when widespread dissatisfaction with how far left the newly-elected Obama was moving propelled Chris Christie to the office. Usually the party out of the White House does well in off-year elections, but Trump seems to be driving the enemy before him and hearing the lamentations of their women…
As in the months-long rioting of 2020, leftist politicos assume their street bandits will cause so much mayhem, violence, and chaos that Mr. Trump will either be forced to call out the troops (and thus “prove” he’s Hitler) or be too scared to — only to be blamed for the unrest, which could cost him the midterms.
Yet who or what drives the insane rages of these various armies of the left?
One is an obviously bleeding Democratic Party. Despite gushing about its new DEI, illegal alien, transgender, and Middle Eastern constituents, it has no political power. Its issues are mostly 30-70 losers.
It has little power in the House or Senate beyond fake-filibusters, performative outrage, or profanity-laced rants.
It lost the White House. The Supreme Court eventually nullified the illegality of left-wing district judges.
It does not trust the people, so plebiscites and ballot measures are mostly out.
Two, unlike his first term, Mr. Trump is addressing the causes, not just the symptoms, of the progressive project, whether on the border, crime, cultural issues, or foreign policy.
This time around, there are no John Boltons, no Rex Tillersons, no Alexander Vindmans, and no Anonymouses from the inside to thwart the Trump agenda.
The administration is loyalist and committed to addressing the root causes of the left-wing influence, not just its manifestations.
So, Mr. Trump has focused on leftist sacred cows like NPR, PBS, the elite campuses, the United States Agency for International Development, and the administrative state — all the inculcators and laboratories of leftist ideology.
Finally, the left is outraged that so far, the Trump counterrevolution is working.
The border is closed. Military recruitment has radically recovered.
The budget bill has passed. The Iranian nuclear threat has lessened. NATO is strengthening. The Middle East has a chance for calm.
Tariffs did not cause inflation. Deportations created more, not fewer, American jobs. Biological men will likely no longer be winning women’s athletic contests.
Add it all up, and the impotent left in all its orthodox and street manifestations has become unhinged.
And why not when it rightly fears that not just its power, but the very sources of its power, are in mortal danger?
Violent rioters clashed with federal immigration officers on Thursday after U.S. Customs and Border Protection raided two Southern California cannabis farms, one of which is now under investigation for child labor violations.
Ten illegal immigrant minors, eight of whom were unaccompanied, were rescued from the Camarillo Glass House farm. U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott confirmed that feds have put the farm under investigation for child labor violations.
“This is Newsom’s California,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security arrested dozens of illegal immigrants during the raid and “arrested multiple individuals for impeding [the] operation,” U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli said. The FBI is currently searching for one of those individuals, who appeared to shoot a firearm at law enforcement.
“People are welcome to protest . . . but they can’t impede us from doing our job, that’s a felony,” border czar Tom Homan said on Friday. “What happened in California is just another example of protesters becoming criminals and they’ve been emboldened by even members of Congress who compare ICE to Nazis.”
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) shipped thousands of viral samples to a lab in Wuhan over the course of a 10-year program even though it had no formal agreement with the lab in place, according to previously unreported documents.
The documents show that USAID funded the exportation of 11,000 samples from Yunnan Province, where some of the closest relatives of the COVID-19 virus circulate, to Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic, with no apparent plan for ensuring the samples were not misdirected to bioweapons and remained accessible to the U.S. government.
A $210 million USAID public health program called PREDICT, steered by the University of California-Davis, collected viral samples in countries throughout the globe but lacked long-term storage when funding dried up, according to rudimentary plans in 2019.
USAID’s sample dispensation plan for China is sparse: “No need [sic] information from Yunnan. They were never an official lab partner for PREDICT. All samples they helped collected [sic] are sent to, tested, and stored in Wuhan.”
The “lab” refers to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). WIV was a close partner of USAID contractor EcoHealth Alliance and a slated partner for a PREDICT-like program supported by the State Department. The lab has poor biosafety practices and ties to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). (RELATED: US Group Connected To Wuhan Lab Is Stonewalling Congressional Investigation Of Pandemic Origins, Committee Ranking Member Says)
One of the closest known relatives of the COVID virus is among the viruses sampled with USAID funding.
Len McCluskey has suggested trade unions will reconsider their support for Labour if Jeremy Corbyn launches a new political party. The former leader of Unite, who is a staunch supporter of Mr Corbyn, said thousands of union activists want an alternative to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s party.
Labour is wrangling with growing disaffection with Sir Keir’s leadership and the direction of his government. The PM’s flagship welfare reforms were gutted in a backbench rebellion, Sir Keir was forced into a U-turn on starting a grooming gangs enquiry and rowed back on axing Winter Fuel Allowance payments. He now faces another revolt among his own MPs over special needs provision in schools.
Divisions have also been exposed by the Government’s refusal to scrap the two-child benefit cap, which has angered left-wing Labour MPs. Last week, former Labour MP Zarah Sultana said she was to “co-lead the founding” of a new outfit with Mr Corbyn.
Mr McCluskey told GB News that if the new party proves to be credible, then he would join it, campaign for it and urge trade unions to back it.
The California Department of Education (CDE) on Monday rejected the Trump administration’s demands to keep men out of women’s sports.
The U.S. Department of Education (ED) in June announced it found California in violation of federal civil rights for allowing men to compete in women’s sports and access women’s spaces, such as locker rooms and restrooms. CDE apparently notified ED it would not be complying with the Trump administration’s proposed resolution, Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced on X.
The California department said it “respectfully disagrees” with the Office of Civil Rights’ (OCR) findings and added “it will not sign the Proposed Resolution Agreement,” according to the email posted by McMahon. The California Interscholastic Federation (CIF), which was also found in violation of the same law, told ED it “concurs” with CDE’s response.
“California has just REJECTED our resolution agreement to follow federal law and keep men out of women’s sports,” McMahon wrote in the X post. “Turns out [Democratic California] Gov. [Gavin] Newsom’s acknowledgment that ‘it’s an issue of fairness’ was empty political grandstanding.”
Former President Joe Biden’s physician and friend Dr. Kevin O’Connor declined to answer questions about Biden’s mental decline during his presidency.
O’Connor invoked his Fifth Amendment rights Wednesday and did not answer questions during a closed-door deposition with the House Oversight Committee.
“It’s now clear there was a conspiracy to cover up President Biden’s cognitive decline after Dr. Kevin O’Connor, Biden’s physician and family business associate, refused to answer any questions and chose to hide behind the Fifth Amendment,” said Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky).
“The American people demand transparency but Dr. O’Connor would rather conceal the truth. Dr. O’Connor took the Fifth when asked if he was told to lie about President Biden’s health and whether he was fit to be President of the United States.”
The panel is currently investigating the lengths to which Biden’s top officials covered up his worsening mental acuity and whether Biden’s presidential autopen was used without authorization.
O’Connor’s attorneys said he declined to answer questions because of physician-patient privilege and the pending criminal investigation by the Justice Department.
As Biden’s physician, O’Connor is a key witness for the investigation. Last year, he infamously gave Biden rave reviews in his presidential physical and said he was fit to hold the nation’s highest office. It also remains unclear why Biden’s “aggressive” form of prostate cancer was not diagnosed until after he left office.
Benjamin Hanil Song, 32, of Dallas, has six charges pending in relation to the ambush at the Prairieland Detention Center. Song is believed to have fired towards two correctional officers and one Alvarado Police Department officer.
His charges are listed in a criminal complaint document obtained by FOX 4 on Wednesday as three counts of attempted murder of a federal officer and three of discharging a firearm during, in relation to, and in furtherance of a crime of violence.
The suspect wanted in a recent ambush on an ICE facility is a long-time Antifa member, connected to several left-wing militant groups in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The FBI is searching for Benjamin Song, a 32-year-old from Dallas, who allegedly took part in an “organized attack” against an ICE detention center in Alvarado during Independence Day.
Song was a member of the militant Antifa group Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, and he had a history of left-wing radicalism.
He allegedly bought four guns used in the ICE facility ambush on July 4, which wounded an Alvarado police officer, as The Dallas Express reported. He reportedly hid in the woods near the scene for a day after the shooting, then fled.
The FBI is offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to Song’s arrest, and Gov. Greg Abbott announced July 10 that his office is offering a $10,000 reward.
“The targeted attacks against our federal law enforcement officers is a crime and must end,” Abbott said in the release. “Criminals such as Benjamin Hanil Song will be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Song’s radical activity goes much deeper than this incident.
He was a member of the violent Antifa group Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, known for intimidating people outside drag shows. Song faced a lawsuit for “battery, assault, stalking, and conspiracy” after a confrontation at a 2023 drag show, as The Dallas Express reported. During the event, Fort Worth Police busted violent members of Song’s group.
Song was also reportedly a member of the Socialist Rifle Association. A transgender suspect, accused of shooting and bombing a Tesla dealership, was part of the same organization.
He trained Antifa in firearms and combat in 2022, according to a video uncovered by journalist Andy Ngo.
As the far-left animals were cheering the tragic deaths of white Christian girls, the Austin Firefighters’ Association (AFA) came forward with accusations that Austin Fire Chief Joel Baker might have contributed to the tragedy.
AFA President Bob Nicks stated that the Fire Department turned down an informal request to have Austin firefighters deployed — some of whom have been trained in swiftwater rescue — on July 2 and again on July 3. The union voted unanimously on Tuesday to schedule a no-confidence vote regarding Chief Baker.
“Our guys sat on their a*ses while they’re hearing people [are] dying,” Nicks stated on Monday.
Baker is claiming he wasn’t aware of the two informal requests to have firefighters on the scene as the storm approached.
Why would Baker hold back his first responders? According to a blistering attack posted on Facebook by the AFA, he wanted to save money….
Austin’s KUT News is reporting that Baker has admitted to ordering the fire department to suspend deployments until the end of the fiscal year. Moreover, “The Austin firefighters union said Tuesday it will hold a vote of no confidence in the fire chief this week, accusing him of preventing crews from being deployed ahead of historic flooding that killed over 100 people in Kerr County.”
The National Education Association’s policymaking body voted this week to cut all ties with the Anti-Defamation League over the antisemitism watchdog’s defense of Israel.
The 7,000-member policymaking committee approved New Business Item 39, which says the nation’s largest labor union in the U.S. “will not use, endorse or publicize materials from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), such as its curricular materials or statistics.”
The committee explained its decision by saying, “Despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be.”
Proof, once again, that social justice is racist (and antisemitic) poison.
The New Business Item must receive final approval from the NEA executive committee. If passed, the measure would end a nearly 40-year relationship between the ADL and U.S. schools that has involved curriculum, programming and teacher training.
“With antisemitism at record high levels, it is profoundly disturbing that a group of NEA activists would brazenly attempt to further isolate their Jewish colleagues and push a radical, antisemitic agenda on students,” an ADL spokesperson told National Review.
The NEA is an extension of the Democrat Party’s ideological core, and they’ve gone all in on Palestinian victimhood and Jew-hatred.
Miracle on 68th Street: “New York City Goes Entire Day On July 4 With No Shootings Or Murders.”
Illegal ballot harvesting in Arizona? “Arizona State Representative Rachel Keshel (LD-17)…filed a complaint to the Attorney General, Kris Mayes, over potentially illegal election activities by Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA) on behalf of AZ-7 Democrat congressional candidate Adelita Grijalva, the daughter of the recently deceased Rep. Raul Grijalva.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Randall County Republican Party Chairman Kelly Giles has been indicted by a grand jury on allegations of election fraud that occurred in 2023.
According to the indictment, “while acting in his capacity as Randall County Republican Chair, [Giles] falsely certified on the Texas Secretary of State Candidate Filing System that his application and nominating petition were legally compliant for place on the 2024 Republican Primary Ballot for Randall County Republican Party chair.”
Giles faces a state felony charge for violating the Texas Election Code while acting in his capacity as an elected official.
Bid rigging collusion, Texas style. “Oak View Group LLC Chair and CEO Tim Leiweke has been indicted following an antitrust investigation that uncovered his alleged involvement in bid rigging for the construction of the University of Texas’ Moody Center. When OVG learned that the rival company, Legends Hospitality LLC, an entertainment venture partially owned by Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, was entering the bid for the construction and operation of the new facility, Leiweke offered the company a deal to drop its bid in exchange for lucrative subcontracts.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Good news for a change: “31 workers rescued from LA wastewater tunnel collapse 300 feet underground.”
How the town of Babcock Ranch in Florida was designed to avoid hurricane flooding, partially by including more wetlands.
Friday’s LinkSwarm included this quote from longtime Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira:
Democrats have a hard time thinking outside their own views of Trump and the GOP. They are deeply convinced that Trump is perhaps the worst person to ever walk the earth and find it difficult to relate to voters whose views are more mixed. They are convinced that a breaking point from Trump’s actions will inevitably be reached where voters will wake up and realize Democrats were right all along, with happy political results to follow. This fallacy undergirded Democrats’ thinking in the 2024 campaign with rather unhappy results when that breaking point was not reached. Democrats’ reliably florid responses to Trump’s outrage-of-the-day in 2025 indicates that they are still hoping that breaking point can be reached and that they are puzzled, indeed outraged, that voters have not yet mounted the barricades. Conveniently, the expectation of a breaking point let’s Democrats off the hook from changing very much in their own party.
Their complete inability to thwart the inexorable triumph of the Bad Orange Man appears to have broken something deep inside the minds of many Democrats. They just can’t imagine how Trump can continue winning despite a decade of posting anti-Trump memes to Facebook. It’s unfathomable to them that Democrats can’t do more to stop Republicans who control the White House, both branches of Congress and the Supreme Court.
In their derangement, Democrats are casting aside even the pretense of following democratic norms and are demanding blood for the blood god.
Liberal activists are confronting Democratic lawmakers in town halls, office meetings, and online, demanding they ditch political niceties and start “fighting dirty” — even if it means getting hurt, arrested, or worse.
“This idea that we’re going to save every norm and that we’re not going to play [Republicans’] game … I don’t think that’s resonating with voters anymore,” one House Democrat admitted to Axios, as Dems face a mounting tidal wave of frustration from within their own ranks.
In candid interviews with over two dozen House Democrats, Axios found a theme of anger, despair, and a dangerous appetite for chaos.
“Our own base is telling us that what we’re doing is not good enough … [that] there needs to be blood to grab the attention of the press and the public,” one lawmaker revealed, describing discussions with furious progressives. Another added that constituents have urged them to prepare for “violence … to fight to protect our democracy.”
Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL), chair of the New Democrat Coalition, acknowledged the heat from his base: “We’ve got people who are desperately wanting us to do something … no matter what we say, they want [more].”
More means more radical; heckling Trump, rogue impeachment stunts, even getting arrested or tackled during protests. One Democrat recalled people suggesting they should be “willing to get shot” while visiting ICE facilities.
Yet when a bunch of leftwing protestors gathered at an ICE facility to protest the Trump Administration deporting illegal alien felons, it was them who did the shooting.
These people allegedly caused a disturbance outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, around 10:45 p.m. on July 4 in order to lure ICE officers out of the building. They allegedly set off fireworks and vandalized the facility and vehicles outside — a mostly peaceful protest — causing two unarmed ICE officers to exit the building and confront them.
Once the officers were in a vulnerable position, one of the attackers allegedly shined a flashlight in the direction of another assailant. Then the shooting began. An assailant allegedly shot “20-30 rounds” at the ICE officers, and another gunman shot a local police officer in the neck. Fortunately, it seems the AR-style rifle jammed on one of the gunman, and was simply left on the scene.
None of the ICE officers were hit, and the Alvarado police officer was treated for his injuries and has been released from the hospital.
Ten individuals have been charged with three counts of attempted murder of a federal officer and three counts of discharging a firearm in relation to a crime of violence. They all face a mandatory prison term of ten years and up to life in prison.
Dallas man Cameron Arnold, who is transgender and goes by “Autumn Hill”
Dallas man Bradford Morris, who goes by “Meagan Morris” (I’m sensing a theme here)
Savanna Batten of Fort Worth
Nathan Baumann of College Station
Dallas woman Joy Gibson
Seth Sikes of Kennedale
Zachary Evetts of Waxahachie
Maricela Rueda of Fort Worth
Elizabeth Soto of Fort Worth
Ines Soto of Fort Worth
Another co-conspirator, Daniel Rolando Sanchez, “was charged with obstruction of justice and conspiracy for attempting to conceal and destroy evidence in relation to the attack.” He faces up to ten years in prison.
[U.S. Attorney Nancy] Larson tells us, “Some were wearing body armor, some were covered in mud, some were armed, and some had two-way radios on them.”
What’s more, let’s read about some of the items found in the car of one of these conspirators.
From [UPI]:
[T]hey were found in possession of 12 sets of body armor, spray paint and a flag that said ‘resist fascism, fight oligarchy’ as well as flyers stating ‘fight ICE terror with class war’ and ‘free all political prisoners.’
Over the weekend, officers executing search warrants discovered masks, goggles, tactical gloves, a cache of weapons and what Larson called ‘insurrectionist material.’
Enjoy your coming stays in Club Fed, leftwing dumbasses. It seems the leftists would rather attempt murder on law enforcement officers than pause to consider the possibility that their own ideas are wrong. They would rather promote literal violent insurrection (not the fake January 6 variety) than contemplate the option that their very recent enthusiasm for child genital mutilation and opposing the deportation of violent illegal alien felons is both political stupid and morally wrong.
Not only is attacking federal law enforcement officers a remarkably bad idea, it’s one made worse by the fact that both the law and overwhelming public opinion is on ICE’s side in the deportation debate. And Trump47 isn’t going to exhibit the lackadaisical response shown to such crimes in 2020. There’s every indication that the man who already survived a left-wing assassin’s bullet has zero fucks left to give when it comes to showing “restraint” to the violent jackassery the left indulges in. The FBI is reportedly already probing the finances behind the LA riots, which could lead to indictments for the well-heeled Soros/Singham violence-funding networks.
But on top of all this is the final reason why the left resorting to violence is a really, really bad idea for them: Who do they think has been buying the hundred million plus firearms in America since Obama was elected? Hint: It’s not the people with Harris-Waltz stickers on their Prii.
It takes a very special kind of intellectual to think that provoking a violent confrontation with the half of America that’s actually armed is going to work out well for them…
There are big difference when the left and right have rallies. And that’s beyond the looting and arson that seem to accompany so many leftwing “peaceful protests.”
If you visit a conservative or MAGA rally, people will be happy to tell you what they think and why they’re there. If you visit a left wing rally, it seems that they creepily tell you that actually talking to people “isn’t their role for the day.” That’s because paid protesters for the shady hard-left NGOs running the show don’t want you to know they’re taking money from Singham and Soros.
Independent researcher and content creator Nate Friedman (27, New York-based) has released a series of videos on X detailing the command and control structures of these dark-money-funded NGOs operating in New York City. Some of these NGOs are aligned with Marxism, potentially receiving overseas funding. His findings suggest these organizations are engaged in destabilization operations.
🚨Another paid protestor tries to stop my interview and then I expose him and the people he works for. The people's forum and Singham want to destroy America from within… WATCH 👇 pic.twitter.com/YK7qPP2DjV
In the video above, Friedman’s attempt to interview someone is interrupted by paid protester David Chung, “a general manager at The People’s Forum, the company responsible for organizing these pro-Iran protests.” He’s also appears in the official literature for The Party of Socialism and Liberation. The People’s Forum and Party of Socialism and Liberation were involved in previous pro-Hamas protests and the recent LA riots. Per Glassdoor, “it seems that People’s Forum managers get paid between $60,000 and $90,000 a year.”
“Here’s David with Rashida Tlaib….On the right is Manolo [De Los] Santos. He’s the Executive Director of The People’s Forum.” Santos has “one of the largest portfolios for a paid protester I’ve ever seen.” That particular picture was taken at an event for activism in favor of the communist government of Cuba.
“Who’s paying the bail of these paid agitators? His name is Neville Roy Singham…Singham funneled the money through the Goldman Sachs philanthropist fund.” We’d previously covered Singham’s ties to various communist governments (like China) here.
Here’s Friedman exposing another professional paid protester:
🚨Paid protestor stops my interview. Then I expose him all the way back to the columbia encampments. pic.twitter.com/MOKPaJQVx8
Protestors in that clip saying they’re representing Rise and Resist, which we previously covered as part of the network behind the arson spree against Teslas.
People who have following the murky world of leftwing NGOs for any length of time know that they’re hardly a new phenomena. The Party for Socialism and Liberation dates back to at least 2004, when it split from Workers World Party, and has ties to the International ANSWER Coalition, which has further ties to very old communist front organizations stretching back into the Cold War and before. Founder Ramsey Clark has long ties to both pro-Communist and pro-Jihad organizations.
Funny how all those “organic” protests trace back to a couple of multi-millionaires to billionaires (Singham and Soros) and a whole bunch of communist and pro-jihad front groups. Let’s hope that the Trump Administration steps up its investigations of illegal activity by these groups, and that RICO indictments for organizing violent riots is forthcoming.
Happy Independence Day! It’s rained most of the last 24 hours here in central Texas, so the good news is no burn ban means we can set off fireworks, but the downside is significant flooding in the Hill Country (Kerville was particularly hard-hit).
The “Big Beautiful Bill” is now law, employment ticks up, more high profile leftist/media perverts busted, Democrats remain stuck on stupid, some Republicans retire, and proof, yet again, that the rules for the well-heeled are different than for other people.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
“Employers added 147,000 jobs in June as U.S. labor market continues to defy expectations.” For the MSM, it’s always “unexpectedly” all the way down.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist was arrested and charged after authorities allegedly discovered child porn on his work computer, DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced Friday.
Thomas Pham LeGro, a 48-year-old video editor at the news outlet, was taken into custody on Thursday after FBI agents raided his Washington, DC, home and discovered a folder on his work laptop which contained 11 videos depicting child sexual abuse material, according to Pirro’s office.
FBI agents also discovered “fractured pieces of a hard drive in the hallway outside the room where LeGro’s work laptop was found,” during the execution of the search warrant.
The University of Pennsylvania has agreed to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports and correct records set by transgender swimmer Lia Thomas. The university issued a statement on Tuesday vowing to comply with Title IX on the basis of biological sex and says it will apologize to “disadvantaged” female athletes.
“While Penn’s policies during the 2021-2022 swim season were in accordance with NCAA eligibility rules at the time, we acknowledge that some student-athletes were disadvantaged by these rules,” Penn President J. Larry Jameson said in a statement. “We recognize this and will apologize to those who experienced a competitive disadvantage or experienced anxiety because of the policies in effect at the time.”
The U.S. Education Department and UPenn announced the voluntary agreement as part of a resolution of a federal civil rights case focused on Thomas, the biological male who won a Division I women’s title for the Ivy League university in 2022. The department’s Office for Civil Rights found that UPenn had violated Title IX by allowing a male to compete in women’s sports and occupy female-only facilities.
“Today’s resolution agreement with UPenn is yet another example of the Trump effect in action,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said. “Thanks to the leadership of President Trump, UPenn has agreed both to apologize for its past Title IX violations and to ensure that women’s sports are protected at the University for future generations of female athletes.”
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) opened the Title IX investigation into UPenn on February 6, following President Donald Trump’s executive order “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports,” which interpreted Title IX law on the basis of biological sex rather than gender identity. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program or activity that receives federal financial assistance.
Trump’s diplomatic method, the exact opposite of what standard diplomats recommend, is a roaring success.
The least diplomatic president in U.S. history is scoring diplomatic victories.
Over the last couple of days, Donald Trump has gotten NATO to agree to a defense spending target of 5 percent and backed Canada off imposing a digital services tax on American tech firms.
He’s done this while being loathed by many of his foreign interlocutors. In fact, Trump has executed a near-complete inversion of the typical diplomatic formula. He’s not nice. He’s not conflict-averse. He’s not euphemistic. And yet he’s gotten results.
The NATO commitment, in particular, is potentially historic and could materially strengthen the position of the Western alliance for the long term.
Trump is violating the usual rules of persuasion. Abraham Lincoln famously said: “It is an old and true maxim that ‘a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.’” Trump doesn’t hesitate to pour on the gall, often in ALL CAPS on Truth Social.
The leading 19th-century French diplomat Talleyrand said, “A diplomat who says ‘yes’ means ‘maybe,’ a diplomat who says ‘maybe’ means ‘no,’ and a diplomat who says ‘no’ is no diplomat.” Trump says “go to hell” as the start of the negotiation.
He persuades by pressuring.
He coaxes by threatening.
He de-escalates by escalating.
He wins friends and influences people by convincing them he thinks they’re freeloaders and losers.
A lot of this is a function of his personality and his experience as a Gotham real-estate developer with a nose for power dynamics, knack for showmanship, and willingness to court risk. It’s hard to see how his style of international politics will be replicable by a more traditional political figure. But undergirding his approach is a strategic insight into the gap between U.S. military and economic might and that of its allies, and how this meant there was a vast unexploited potential for the U.S. to throw its weight around.
When the U.S president is talking about pulling the plug on NATO, or cutting off trade talks with Canada — as Trump did in response to the proposed digital services tax — it’s going to get everyone’s attention.
The bull standing outside the door of the china shop is a powerful incentive to get along with the bull.
The rest of the conservative movement noticed this no later than, what, 2017? Nice of National Review to catch up…
In a post on social media platform X, FBI Director Kash Patel wrote that $14.6 billion in losses were incurred, while $245 million was seized, as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino said in a separate post on X that hundreds of people were charged in the case.
“Public corruption will not be tolerated as the Director and I vigorously pursue bad actors who violated their oaths to all of us,” Bongino said, describing the case as the “largest healthcare fraud investigation” in the country’s history.
The investigation encompassed 50 federal districts and 12 state attorneys general, according to the DOJ. State and federal law enforcement agencies also took part, according to the FBI.
A statement issued by the DOJ said that criminal charges were filed against 324 defendants, including 96 doctors, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, and other health care workers across the United States. Officials said that 29 defendants were charged with partaking in transnational criminal groups who allegedly submitted around $12 billion in fraudulent health-related claims to U.S. health insurance companies.
Further, four defendants were apprehended in Estonia based on cooperation with law enforcement agencies in that country, while seven others were arrested at the U.S.–Mexico border or at American airports, the DOJ said.
That organization, federal prosecutors said, is accused of using individuals sent into the United States from other countries to purchase “dozens of medical supply companies located across the United States” before submitting $10.6 billion in fraudulent health care claims to Medicare for medical devices and equipment.
At the same time, that group allegedly exploited stolen identities from U.S. citizens across all 50 states, using their stolen medical information to submit the false claims, according to the DOJ.
In another action announced by the DOJ, federal officials said they filed charges in Illinois against five people, including the owners of two Pakistan-based marketing companies, in relation to a $703 million Medicare fraud scheme.
The defendants allegedly stole Medicare beneficiaries’ confidential information and sold it to laboratories and other medical companies, which then submitted false Medicare claims, according to the statement.
“The defendants allegedly used artificial intelligence to create fake recordings of Medicare beneficiaries purportedly consenting to receive certain products,” the DOJ’s statement said.
Here are some reasons why the Democratic drive to reinvent the party seems to have stalled out—and may have a hard time restarting despite their political opening.
The “’tis but a scratch” problem. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Black Knight insists, against all evidence, that his wounds are not that serious—“’tis but a scratch.” Democrats, in the aftermath of losing two of three elections to the widely-disliked Trump and seeing their coalition re-configured by massive losses among both white and nonwhite working-class voters, are still in denial about how serious their wounds are. They are not but a scratch and cannot be fixed by anything less than a full-scale overhaul of the party’s approach and image. Tinkering around the edges, while easier, will not work.
The breaking point fallacy. Democrats have a hard time thinking outside their own views of Trump and the GOP. They are deeply convinced that Trump is perhaps the worst person to ever walk the earth and find it difficult to relate to voters whose views are more mixed. They are convinced that a breaking point from Trump’s actions will inevitably be reached where voters will wake up and realize Democrats were right all along, with happy political results to follow. This fallacy undergirded Democrats’ thinking in the 2024 campaign with rather unhappy results when that breaking point was not reached. Democrats’ reliably florid responses to Trump’s outrage-of-the-day in 2025 indicates that they are still hoping that breaking point can be reached and that they are puzzled, indeed outraged, that voters have not yet mounted the barricades. Conveniently, the expectation of a breaking point let’s Democrats off the hook from changing very much in their own party.
The “whatever it is, I’m against it” problem. In the classic Marx Brothers movie, Horsefeathers, Groucho uncompromisingly asserts: “whatever it is, I’m against it.” That pretty much sums up Democrats’ approach to Trump administration proposals and actions. With very minor exceptions, Democrats have refused to support any of it, even where these actions are popular and/or are targeted at clear areas of Democratic vulnerability that needed shoring up. Little to no effort has been made to stake out a middle ground that recognizes some of Trump’s actions address areas where Democrats have screwed up, while setting out a better (kinder, gentler?) approach that would more effective and less illiberal. Easier though to adopt Groucho’s approach and avoid the uncomfortable need to acknowledge mistakes and convince voters you won’t make them again.
The rising generations chimera. Many Democrats have seized upon the fact that leading Democratic politicians tend to be quite old, if not ancient (hello, Joe Biden!) and decided what is needed is younger Democrats. The changing of the guard—that’ll do the trick! On net, it seems like a no-brainer to move younger cohorts up in the party who can better communicate with young voters where Democrats have been losing ground. But what if these young communicators aren’t communicating anything to voters that would actually help Democrats dig out of the hole they’re in? Then the changing of the guard will only help at the margins.
Take Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic Millennial who pulled off an upset victory in the New York City Democratic primary and will likely be New York’s next mayor. His energy and media savvy are admirable but his radical cultural politics—only lightly sanded off recently—and his wildly impractical economic plans don’t seem likely to change the image of the Democratic Party in a good way. But he nevertheless will be a pole of attraction in the party, just as AOC and “the Squad” were in the aftermath of the 2018 election—and we saw how well that worked out. Democrats’ thirst for generational excitement, whatever its content, will make it even harder than it already was for Democrats to re-orient the party around an effective majoritarian politics.
Snip.
The “round up the usual suspects” problem. In the movie Casablanca, Captain Reynaud (Claude Rains) concludes the film by saying “round up the usual suspects.” The Democrats have an establishment and establishments don’t like change. Thus, there is a built-in tendency to blame messaging, narrative, lack of coalitional input, etc.—the “usual suspects”—rather than deeper problems of culture, economic policy, and class antagonism. Most recently this tendency was on display in the formation of a Project 2029 group drawn from various sectors of the Democratic establishment to craft a new, improved approach for the Democrats. As the Politico article on the group notes:
Some would-be allies are skeptical that such an ideologically diverse and divergent set of policy minds could craft anything close to a coherent agenda, let alone a politically winning one.
“Developing policies by checking every coalitional box is how we got in this mess in the first place,” said Adam Jentleson, who has spent recent months preparing to open a new think tank called Searchlight. “There is no way to propose the kind of policies the Democratic Party needs to adopt without pissing off some part of the interest-group Borg. And if you’re too afraid to do that, you don’t have what it takes to steer the party in the right direction.”
For Texas voters: “17 Proposed Amendments Head to Voters in November.” Expected a more detailed post on this sometime in October.
“Houston Parents Sue HISD Over Daughter’s Secret Social Gender Transition. A Houston family is taking the state’s largest school district to court, claiming their daughter was socially transitioned by school staff in direct defiance of their explicit instructions.”
Terry and Sarah Osborn, the parents of a Bellaire High School student, filed a federal lawsuit against the Houston Independent School District earlier this week, alleging the school socially transitioned their daughter against their explicit wishes. The lawsuit names several individuals, including Superintendent Mike Miles, Bellaire High School Principal Michael Niggli, school counselor Sarah Ray, and multiple teachers.
According to the suit, more than six Bellaire High School employees referred to the Osborns’ daughter—who is biologically female—using a masculine name and male pronouns for two years. The situation began in ninth grade, when the student’s theater teacher distributed a worksheet asking for students’ names and pronouns. Sarah Osborn specifically requested that the teacher use her daughter’s legal name and female pronouns. However, the student altered the worksheet, crossing out the original entry and writing in “he/him” pronouns.
The parents claim they did not learn about the consistent use of male pronouns by teachers until the student was well into her sophomore year. At that point, they formally requested that teachers revert to using their daughter’s biological pronouns. Despite these repeated requests, the lawsuit alleges that the teachers continued using male pronouns.
By the student’s junior year, the Osborns met with Principal Niggli to address the situation directly. They reiterated their concerns about the school’s handling of the matter. Principal Niggli attempted a compromise: teachers would refer to the student only by her last name to avoid using any pronouns at all. The Osborns, however, rejected this compromise and again instructed the school to use their daughter’s legal name and female pronouns.
The lawsuit also notes that the Osborns filed a request under the Texas Public Information Act, seeking employee communications regarding their daughter, HISD’s policies on the use of preferred names and pronouns, and documentation related to the student’s counseling sessions over the years. Elizabeth Rice, HISD’s attorney, responded that the request was too broad and asked for clarification. When the Osborns’ attorney insisted the request was sufficiently specific, Rice again claimed it was overly broad and said fulfilling it would require producing at least 77,344 pages of emails.
The lawsuit argues that HISD’s responses are evidence of “widespread past and ongoing treatment of their daughter as a boy by its employees,” carried out without parental consent and in direct opposition to explicit parental instructions.
The Osborns are asking the court to declare HISD’s policies in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, prohibit the district from using masculine pronouns or an alternate name for their daughter, and award attorney’s fees along with compensatory and punitive damages. The complaint states the district violated the parents’ “fundamental parental rights” under the Fourteenth Amendment and their “sincerely held religious beliefs” protected by the First Amendment.
Not only should the school district pay, but everyone involved in this should having their teaching certificate revoked and never be allowed to teach in the state again.
Yeah, Kerville has been hit hard by the flooding:
More good news: “Hamas leader and Oct. 7 mastermind Hakham Muhammad Issa Al-Issa killed in airstrike, IDF says.” Unlike Democrats, I think it’s a good thing when terrorist leaders get killed.
Diddy do it, but according to a jury, not all of it. “Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs was convicted of a prostitution-related offense but acquitted Wednesday of sex trafficking and racketeering charges.”
A steady stream of reports is now developing that suggests Covid vaccinations may indeed hurt fertility and pregnancy outcomes.
I reported on a rat study that clearly showed fertility was impacted after the animals were injected with mRNA Covid vaccines. A recently published study (not peer reviewed yet) looking at data from Israeli women found a substantially higher-than-expected number of eventual fetal losses associated with Covid vaccination during gestational weeks 8-13.
A newly published peer-reviewed study analyzing nationwide data from the Czech Republic has reported a significant association between Covid vaccination and reduced fertility rates in women of childbearing age. The study, which examined approximately 1.3 million women aged 18–39 between January 2021 and December 2023, found that women who received the Covid vaccine before conception had a substantially lower rate of successful conceptions (“SC”, i.e., pregnancies that resulted in live births) compared to their unvaccinated counterparts.
Of course, vaccine mandate advocates swore up and down it was absolutely safe. Meanwhile, it seemsto be harming those with very low chances of dying from Flu Manchu…
“Florida Gov. DeSantis Announces Tax Holiday On Guns.” September 8 through December 21. Your move, Greg Abbott…
On July 1, District Judge Ann Donnelly of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York ruled that there was sufficient evidence to proceed with a 16-count indictment against Huawei and its subsidiaries.
Huawei, which is closely tied to the Chinese communist regime, stands accused of racketeering, stealing trade secrets from six U.S. companies, and committing bank fraud.
With Donnelly’s ruling, the case will move forward toward trial. Currently, the proceedings are scheduled to begin on May 4, 2026.
Huawei stands charged with using a Hong Kong-based front company, Skycom, to conduct business in Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions and with misleading banks in order to facilitate more than $100 million in illegal money transfers.
Additionally, the indictment alleges that Huawei engaged in racketeering to expand its global brand.
“Harris County Agencies Reportedly Spent Millions With No Paper Trail.” Even lefty County Judge Lina Hidalgo has been raising the alarm over it. Maybe she didn’t get her cut…
“Famed Mexican boxer Julio César Chávez Jr. was arrested for overstaying his visa and lying on a green card application and will be deported to Mexico, where he faces organized crime charges.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“Spanish Operator of Proposed High-Speed Rail Liquidates American Subsidiary.” Yet another roadblock to the pie-in-the-sky Texas high speed rail project that will never be built.
So remember that story a while back in New York magazine’s The Cut, when the (I kid you not) Finance Reporter got scammed, withdrew $50,000 in cash from a bank, and handed it to a total stranger? To a lot of people, the details didn’t add up. Can you even withdraw $50,000 in cash without filling in a boatload for forms or triggering fraud warnings? One reporter went digging for the truth, and found out that, yeah, it looks like it’s true and you can just waltz out with that much cash…if you’re related to the Roosevelts.
So Diamond Distributors declared bankruptcy, and the new owners evidently decided, “Hey we can just sell all this consignment inventory we have, not pay the publishers for it, and use the money to pay back this Chase loan.” The publishers disagree…
