A new stock exchange headquartered in Dallas will launch next year aimed at competing with New York City’s exchanges, whose rules and regulations some companies have found onerous.
TXSE Group Inc. is founded and operated by James Lee, who says the company has already raised $120 million for the project — the largest backers of which are BlackRock and Citadel Securities.
BlackRock is a surprising name to be investing in a major initiative in Texas. After all, BlackRock’s previous headlines have been about various Texas retirement funds divesting from BlackRock over the company’s leftwing “Environmental Social Governance (ESG)” investing policies and their hostility to the oil and gas industry. Indeed, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink was a poster boy for ESG, but seems to have had at least a partial change of heart over ESG, saying he’s “ashamed” to use the term anymore, instead being less hostile to fossil fuels and supporting a strategy of “transition investing” in decarbonization technologies. (Maybe getting their stock downgraded over ESG had something to do with that.) Stefan Padfield says “Fink has apparently simply replaced ESG with ‘conscious capitalism,’ which suggests nothing much has really changed given that ‘ESG is conscientious capitalism in practice.’ He also notes that BlackRock’s stock price has under-performed the S&P 500 over the last 12 months.
The last time we looked into Citadel Securities was because they had apparently been caught with their hands in the GameStop naked shorts cookie jar at the same time they were telling trading platform (and investment recipient) Robinhood to stop allowing retail customers to buy GameStop.
The plan was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. TXSE Group intends to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) later this year. It will operate virtually but also eventually establish a physical presence in Dallas.
“Changes in equities trading markets are driving more volume to exchanges and more choices for issuers and sponsors,” Lee said in a press release.
“TXSE will ultimately create more competition around quote activity, liquidity and transparency, resulting in more consistent and reliable markets that benefit investors, global issuers and liquidity providers alike.”
Lee added, “Texas and the other states in the southeast quadrant have become economic powerhouses. Combined with the demand we are seeing from investors and corporations for expanded alternatives to trade and list equities, this is an opportune time to build a major, national stock exchange in Texas.”
TXSE sees Nasdaq’s and NYSE’s approaches to compliance and non-financial regulations, such as diversity targets, as heavy-handed and onerous.
“BlackRock is proud to be a founding investor in the Texas Stock Exchange to increase liquidity and improve market efficiency for BlackRock’s clients and other investors in the U.S. capital markets,” BlackRock Vice Chairman Mark McCombe told The Texan in a statement.
“TXSE is well positioned to capitalize on the Texas economy and strength of the state’s business environment. We look forward to engaging with the other investors on the benefits of the TXSE’s unique value proposition.”
This follows other similarly aimed projects that BlackRock and others have partaken in over the last decade — a list that includes things like Members Exchange, RFQ Hub, and Luminex Trading. Given the state’s growth and regulatory posture, those backing this new project see a unique investment opportunity.
This states the obvious: Texas has a pro-business, pro-growth regulatory environment, while New York (city and state) has a hostile, anti-growth regulatory environment.
No points for guessing which political parties control which state.
Not mentioned, but a distinct possibility, is that many big business owners see the Trump kangaroo court conviction as a potential threat to themselves. If Democrats are willing to use a weaponized judiciary to go after their political enemies, the law be damned, then who might be next? A presence in New York, even only a listing on the New York stock exchange, may now be perceived as a much bigger potential liability than it was. With companies moving their physical presence from failing blue states like New York and California to Texas, it make a great deal of sense to do the same in as many legal venues as possible.
Both Texas Scorecard and The Texan have done good work highlighting a disturbing reality: Numerous public school teachers of all grade levels have been arrested for sex offenses, many involving children.
I’ve been running several of these in LinkSwarms, but Texas Scorecard has featured a number over the last week:
A former Texas teacher received the maximum sentence of 30 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to producing child pornography—specifically videos showing her performing sexual acts on a prepubescent child.
Sonya Conchita Murillo, 33, was a substitute teacher for the Marfa Independent School District in West Texas.
Murillo was arrested in June 2023 on federal sexual exploitation of children charges, a month after her boyfriend was arrested on similar charges. She has been held in federal custody without bond ever since.
The former teacher pleaded guilty in January to one count of production of child pornography; four additional counts were dropped.
“The fact that the judge delivered the maximum allowed 30-year imprisonment to this defendant for producing child pornography, is indicative of the utterly horrendous predatory acts Murillo committed,” said U.S. Attorney Jaime Esparza in a Justice Department statement.
Murrillo’s one-time boyfriend Patricio Javier “PJ” Serrano, a youth softball coach in Marfa, was arrested in May 2023 for possessing child sexual abuse materials featuring images and videos of prepubescent boys.
While investigating Serrano, authorities found at least eight Snapchat videos of Murillo performing sexual acts on a boy who was 3 to 5 years old, according to an affidavit filed in the case.
If you had done this on a 3-5 year old 40 years ago in west Texas, I strongly suspect you’d get a bullet in the back of your head and a shallow grave, no law enforcement involvement required.
A federal judge has rejected an immunity claim by a Central Texas school administrator accused of facilitating a male teacher’s molestation of a 5-year-old female student in 2020-21.
The judge found that Lorena Primary School Principal April Jewell’s lack of action to protect pre-K children from a teacher’s sexual abuse “shocks the conscience.”
According to a lawsuit filed last year by the victim’s parents, Jewell ignored months of warnings from multiple school employees about inappropriate behavior by the teacher, Nicolas Scot Crenshaw, toward two of his female students.
Crenshaw eventually pleaded guilty to multiple counts of aggravated sexual assault of a young child and other sex crimes against the students and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
Jewell kept her job as the school’s principal, shocking many parents who say the ordeal has shattered their trust in the local school system.
In a May 20 report to U.S. District Judge Alan Albright, Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Manske rejected Jewell’s claim to qualified immunity and recommended that her motion to dismiss the parents’ case against her be denied.
Parents of the victim, identified as Jane Doe, are suing April Jewell and Lorena Independent School District for failing to protect their then 5-year-old daughter from months of sexual abuse by pre-K teacher Nicolas Scot Crenshaw during the 2020-21 academic year.
Crenshaw was a long-term substitute teacher at Lorena Primary School, where Jewell was—and still is—the principal.
At the beginning of the school year, Crenshaw shared a class with another teacher.
According to court documents, in January 2021 teachers and other school staff began reporting to Jewell about Crenshaw’s inappropriate behavior with Jane, which included him lying under a blanket with Jane during nap time and frequently placing her on his lap or having her straddle him.
An aide even gave Jewell photos of Crenshaw’s suspicious behavior, but she was reprimanded by Jewell for taking the pictures.
What principled principal would receive repeated reports of a teacher creeping on young children and go “Nah, it’s fine?”
A Texas charter school teacher is in jail after being accused of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old student. The visiting international teacher had been reprimanded and then fired for placing his hands on students, but the school later rehired him.
International Leadership of Texas teacher Jose Adrian Hernandez Grimaldo, 46, was arrested last month and charged with one count of aggravated sexual assault of a child, a first-degree felony punishable by 5 to 99 years in prison.
At the time of the alleged assault, Hernandez Grimaldo taught at the ILTexas K-8 school in College Station. He later transferred to the school’s Lancaster K-8 campus where he worked at the time of his arrest.
According to an arrest report from the College Station Police Department, the female victim alleges the teacher attacked her in a bathroom in February 2023. She told police he threatened to kill her if she told anyone about the attack.
Hernandez Grimaldo denied the allegations, but according to a report by KBTX, he failed a polygraph test.
ILTexas Superintendent Eddie Conger confirmed in a statement Friday that, as a result of the arrest, Hernandez Grimaldo was terminated from ILTexas on May 24.
The ILTexas statement included a timeline of Hernandez Grimaldo’s employment with the school system.
Hernandez Grimaldo, who is in the U.S. on a teaching visa, was hired in August 2022 to teach Spanish at ILTexas’ College Station K-8 campus. According to the timeline, he cleared a standard background check and additional security clearance from the Department of Homeland Security.
I hardly think we need to be importing child molesters from other countries. We seem to have quite enough trouble with the home-grown variety.
He was placed on administrative leave and reprimanded in October 2022 for putting his hands on a student.
In March 2023, Hernandez Grimaldo was terminated from ILTexas following more complaints about him touching students.
He then filed a grievance and the district overturned his termination in May 2023.
“We can’t hire this guy! He had multiple complaints that he was molesting students!” “But wait! He filed a grievance! We have to hire him back so he can molest more children!”
Sounds like the person in charge of managing the grievance process also needs to be fired.
The teacher was offered a transfer and began working at ILTexas Lancaster K-8 in August 2023.
In September 2023, a parent reported to the ILTexas College Station principal that inappropriate sexual interactions took place between their then-6th-grade student and Hernandez Grimaldo.
He was again placed on administrative leave in October 2023.
Superintendent Conger said ILTexas investigated but was unable to substantiate the sexual assault claims. Hernandez Grimaldo was reinstated as a teacher at ILTexas Lancaster K-8 in January 2024.
The superintendent said ILTexas filed “required reports with the local police department, Department of Family and Protective Services within 48 hours of initial notice, and the State Board of Education as appropriate.”
Just how many sexual assault claims are needed until a charge is considered “substantiated?” People were willing to give Bill Cosby the benefit of the doubt when it was one or two women accusing him, but the scale tipped well before the 60 or so who eventually came forward. Grimaldo should never have been put back into a position to molest children after the initial charges.
A Houston-area elementary school teacher filmed sexually explicit videos of herself while on campus, and community leaders are demanding that her teaching certificate be revoked.
Adrienne Harborth was a music teacher at Gray Elementary in Lamar Consolidated Independent School District in Fort Bend County near Houston.
Harborth can be seen in two videos shaking her bare breasts and buttocks while in a classroom and a bathroom at the school. Harborth’s school ID badge with her name printed on it is also visible.
[Blinks] This is not exactly what people think of when discussing the perfect crime. I think the Babylon Bee would reject the ID badge detail in one of their stories. “Nah, too heavy handed.”
Censored versions of the videos, first posted by Grizzy’s Hood News under the title “Teacher Gone Wild,” have gone viral on the internet.
My cousin told me about Grizzy’s Hood News a while back. Basically a Houston woman went “OK, I’m gonna start my own news web page,” and now she breaks a lot of news that seems too spicy for mainstream Houston media. That “Teacher Gone Wild” video is no longer up, but, having watched a bit of it, I can assure you that you didn’t miss anything…
Harborth has since told Texas Scorecard she filmed the videos on the weekend, not during school hours, and that an ex-boyfriend released the videos as revenge porn.
“I want to shoot a nude video of myself. I know! I’ll go down to my school and wear my name tag! That can’t possibly backfire on me!”
Shooting a nude video of yourself is a pretty stupid thing to do, especially if you’re not a porn star. While people may be inclined to forgive such a thing if it was a mistake made in youth (say, drunk college girls on spring break), doing it at your place of work is going to be a firing offense pretty much everywhere, but especially at a public school.
Texas Scorecard has a Bad Apples tag for such incidents, and an interactive map of incidents at the bottom of the relevant news stories that I don’t see a way to embed or link to directly.
I am not so naive as to believe we’ve never had sex offenders as teachers before the 21st century, but when one seems to pop up every week in Texas, there’s a problem. (I’m also willing to bet that the problem is actually worse per capita in blue states.) Something has certainly changed in society, and new “pedo friendly” element seems to have entered political discourse in western society, from Jeffrey Epstein to Salon to Germany decriminalizing child pornography, today’s leftwing elites can’t seem to help being soft on child rape.
Texas citizens need to demand better screening by schools, and swifter action when sex offenders are discovered.
Austin’s cooperatively-owned grocery store and market Wheatsville Food Co-op is going to be closing its original North Campus location eventually. The last day for the 3101 Guadalupe Street shop will be on December 31, 2026.
A press release noted that Wheatsville board of directors and management decided to not renew the West Campus store’s lease, which ends at the end of 2026. A major reason for this decision was the city’s light rail plan Project Connect, which would run through Guadalupe Street. “While this project is in the public interest, it will also curtail our ability to operate in this location,” says general manager Bill Bickford via a statement. The train would take up the major street’s middle lane, so then it would be “impossible for the large trucks our primary suppliers use to access the delivery area,” he writes. Therefore, “if we cannot receive product, we cannot operate a grocery store.
Rita Daily, Wheatsville’s marketing director, noted through email that the shutter was announced to the owners — its website boasts over 28,000 members — this morning. The company is going to se if they can reopen or operate what they describe was “small-format stores” instead.
There’s a south Austin location that will evidently remain open, though one wonders how long the south location can survive without a steady influx of dewey-eyed leftwing college saps the Guadalupe location’s proximity to UT provided.
A kangaroo trial reaches its kangaroo conclusion, Biden’s ludicrous Gaza pier floats away and sinks, ESG lawsuits get the green light, the Libertarians nominate a hard left social justice warrior, and the NRA picks up a Supreme Court win. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The kangaroo trial where they tried Trump on supposed violation of a federal offense in a state courtroom and the judge decreed that the jury didn’t need to come to a unanimous opinion to find Trump guilty found Trump guilty. I expect this to result in expedited appeal and equally expedited overturning.
Result? “Today, the Trump campaign announced a record-shattering small-dollar fundraising haul following the sham Biden Trial verdict totaling $34.8 million – nearly double the biggest day ever recorded for the Trump campaign on the WinRed platform.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
While the CIA is strictly prohibited from spying on or running clandestine operations against American citizens on US soil, a bombshell new “Twitter Files” report reveals that a member of the Board of Trustees of InQtel – the CIA’s mission-driving venture capital firm, along with “former” intelligence community (IC) and CIA analysts, were involved in a massive effort in 2021-2022 to take over Twitter’s content management system, as Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag report over at Shellenberger’s Public (subscribers can check out the extensive 6,800 word report here).
According to “thousands of pages of Twitter Files and documents,” these efforts were part of a broader strategy to manage how information is disseminated and consumed on social media under the guise of combating ‘misinformation’ and foreign propaganda efforts – as this complex of government-linked individuals and organizations has gone to great lengths to suggest that narrative control is a national security issue.
According to the report, the effort also involved;
a long-time IC contractor and senior Department of Defense R&D official who spent years developing technologies to detect whistleblowers (“insider threats”) like Edward Snowden and Wikileaks’ leakers;
the proposed head of the DHS’ aborted Disinformation Governance Board, Nina Jankowicz, who aided US military and NATO “hybrid war” operations in Europe;
Jim Baker, who, as FBI General Counsel, helped start the Russiagate hoax, and, as Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, urged Twitter executives to censor The New York Post story about Hunter Biden.
Jankowicz (aka ‘Scary Poppins’), previously tipped to lead the DHS’s now-aborted Disinformation Governance Board, has been a vocal advocate for more stringent regulation of online speech to counteract ‘rampant disinformation.’ Jim Baker, in his capacity as FBI General Counsel and later as Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, advocated for and implemented policies that would restrict certain types of speech on the platform, including decisions that affected the visibility of politically sensitive content.
Furthermore, companies like PayPal, Amazon Web Services, and GoDaddy were mentioned as part of a concerted effort to de-platform and financially de-incentivize individuals and organizations deemed threats by the IC. This approach represents a significant escalation in the use of corporate cooperation to achieve what might essentially be considered censorship under the guise of national security.
Nina Jankowicz And The Alethea Group
Remember Nina? A huge fan of Christopher Steele – architect of the infamous Clinton-funded Dossier which underpinned the Trump-Russia hoax, and who joined the chorus of disinformation agents that downplayed the Hunter Biden laptop bombshell, Jankowicz previously served as a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, and advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as part of the Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship. She also oversaw the Russia and Belarus programs at the National Democratic Institute.
Jankowicz compares the lack of regulation of speech on social media to the lack of government regulation of automobiles in the 1960s. She calls for a “cross-platform” and public-private approach, so whatever actions are taken are taken by Google, Facebook, and Twitter, simultaneously.
Jankowicz points to Europe as the model for regulating speech. “Germany’s NetzDG law requires social media companies and other content hosts to remove ‘obviously illegal’ speech within twenty-four hours,” she says, “or face a fine of up to $50 million.”
By contrast, in the US, she laments, “Congress has yet to pass a bill imposing even the most basic of regulations related to social media and election advertising.” -Public
In a 2020 book, How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict, Jankowicz praises a NATO cyber security expert for having created a “Center of Excellence,” a concept promoted by Renée Diresta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, in which she made the case for the (now failed) Disinformation Governance Board that Jankowicz would briefly head up.
One year later, Jankowicz began working with ‘anti-disinformation’ consulting firm, Althea Group, staffed by “former” IC analysts.
Lots more at the link.
Remember when fast food was cheap food you bought to treat kids or didn’t feel like cooking? Now 78% of Americans surveyed think it’s a luxury good they can’t afford. Thanks, Joe Biden!
Also, one of Putin’s dachas burned down, though it’s so far from the theater of operations that it may be unrelated.
“Biden’s Gaza ‘Pier to Nowhere’ a Disaster and National Embarrassment, Breaks Apart.” Evidently the pier can only work in seas with waves smaller than three feet, and 4.5′ chop and 20 MPH gusts KO’d it. Also, no less than four U.S. vessels have run aground in the process of trying to build and move this thing. That’s some mighty fine pier-building, Lou.
The Supreme Court unanimously handed the National Rifle Association a win Thursday in the gun rights group’s effort to revive a 2018 First Amendment lawsuit accusing a New York official of causing damage to the NRA’s relationships with banks and insurers.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a unanimous opinion that found the NRA “plausibly alleged” that Maria Vullo, a former superintendent of New York‘s Department of Financial Services, illegally retaliated against the pro-Second Amendment group after the Parkland, Florida, high school mass shooting that left 17 people dead.
The question before the justices was whether Vullo used her regulatory power to force state financial institutions to cut off ties with the NRA in violation of constitutional First Amendment protections.
Vullo, who worked in former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration, said her regulations targeted an insurance product that is illegal in New York, which is dubbed by critics as “murder insurance.” In essence, such insurances are third-party policies sold via the NRA that cover personal injury and criminal defense costs after the use of a firearm.
“Here, the NRA plausibly alleged that Vullo violated the First Amendment by coercing DFS-regulated entities into disassociating with the NRA in order to punish or suppress gun-promotion advocacy,” Sotomayor, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, wrote in her decision.
A mysterious shooting in North Carolina north of Fort Liberty, formerly Fort Bragg, not far from where some of America’s most elite U.S. Special Operations forces live and train is under investigation by the Army Criminal Investigation Division as well as local police. The shooting in Carthage, North Carolina occurred May 3 at 8:15 p.m. following a phone call about a suspected trespasser near a Special Forces soldier’s property.
Two Chechen men who spoke broken English were found near the soldier’s home. The family alleges the suspected intruder, 35-year-old Ramzan Daraev of Chicago was taking photos of their children. When confronted near a power line in a wooded part of the property, an altercation ensued and Daraev was shot several times at close range. A second man, Dzhankutov Adsalan, was in a vehicle some distance from the incident and was questioned by authorities and then released. The Moore County Sheriff’s office is leading the investigation.
The FBI told Fox News, “Our law enforcement partners at the Moore County Sheriff’s Office contacted the FBI after a shooting death in Carthage. A special agent met with investigators and provided a linguist to assist with a language barrier for interviews.”
A district judge has granted a pilot’s request for a class-action lawsuit against American Airlines for allegedly investing pension funds into environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds.
The case revolves around the allegation that American Airlines—headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas—violated its fiduciary obligation to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) “by investing millions of dollars of American Airlines employees’ retirement savings with investment managers and investment funds that pursue political agendas” through ESG initiatives.
“By pursuing ESG goals, Defendants gave Plan assets to fund managers, such as BlackRock, who allegedly ignored financial returns as the exclusive purpose and lowered the value of Plan participants’ investments,” the order states.
In addition to being disloyal to the employees, the plaintiff, Bryan Spence, argues that American Airlines’ investments were “imprudent because it is well known that ESG funds are associated with poor performance given the detrimental effects of such activism on stock prices.”
“To remedy these alleged ERISA violations, Plaintiff filed this lawsuit individually and on behalf of a proposed class of Plan participants and beneficiaries,” the order says. “ERISA authorized participants in a qualifying plan to bring an action on behalf of other participants to enforce the statute’s fiduciary obligations and remedial provisions, as well as recover all losses to a plan caused by a breach of a fiduciary duty.”
Two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a large, mysterious new Internet hosting firm called Stark Industries Solutions materialized and quickly became the epicenter of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on government and commercial targets in Ukraine and Europe. An investigation into Stark Industries reveals it is being used as a global proxy network that conceals the true source of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns against enemies of Russia.
At least a dozen patriotic Russian hacking groups have been launching DDoS attacks since the start of the war at a variety of targets seen as opposed to Moscow. But by all accounts, few attacks from those gangs have come close to the amount of firepower wielded by a pro-Russia group calling itself “NoName057(16).”
As detailed by researchers at Radware, NoName has effectively gamified DDoS attacks, recruiting hacktivists via its Telegram channel and offering to pay people who agree to install a piece of software called DDoSia. That program allows NoName to commandeer the host computers and their Internet connections in coordinated DDoS campaigns, and DDoSia users with the most attacks can win cash prizes.
Microsoft’s announcement of the new AI-powered Windows 11 Recall feature has sparked a lot of concern, with many thinking that it has created massive privacy risks and a new attack vector that threat actors can exploit to steal data.
Revealed during a Monday AI event, the feature is designed to help “recall” information you have looked at in the past, making it easily accessible via a simple search.
While it’s currently only available on Copilot+ PCs running Snapdragon X ARM processors, Microsoft says they are working with Intel and AMD to create compatible CPUs.
Recall works by taking a screenshot of your active window every few seconds, recording everything you do in Windows for up to three months by default.
These snapshots will be analyzed by the on-device Neural Processing Unit (NPU) and an AI model to extract data from the screenshot. The data will be saved in a semantic index, allowing Windows users to browse through the snapshot history or search using human language queries.
Who wouldn’t want AI recording and monitoring their every move? Yet another reason never to turn on Windows Copilot+…or use a Windows machine at all.
Time for an update to this old classic
Though Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan survived by the skin of his teeth, a majority of Republican Texas House members say they won’t vote for him for speaker.
A majority of the 2025 Republican House caucus opposes Democratic committee chairs, and effectively will not support another term for Speaker Dade Phelan (R-Beaumont), the group said in a letter released on Friday.
“In a collective effort to respond to Republican voters and reform the Texas House, we will only vote for a candidate for speaker pursuant to the Platform and the Caucus By-Laws who will only appoint Republicans as committee chairs,” the brief letter and joint statement reads.
It adds, “The absence of a member’s or nominee’s name from this statement does not necessarily mean the individual is opposed to this statement. All members and nominees are invited to sign on to this statement.”
Forty six current or presumptive members signed the letter, including 23 members who voted for Phelan’s speakership last year.
One of those signatories, GOP nominee in House District 70 Steve Kinard, has a difficult general election fight against state Rep. Mihaela Plesa (D-Dallas) in a D-52% district.
The letter includes signatures from each of the 21 “Contract with Texas” signatories, most of whom campaigned specifically against Phelan’s speakership. That contract also includes a ban on Democratic committee chairs, though has 11 other planks to its demands as well.
Last session, a parliamentary maneuver precluded a vote on the question of banning Democratic chair appointments, though the idea had gained steam among GOP House members and was included in the party’s list of legislative priorities. It is likely to be featured again.
In a March interview after being pushed to a runoff and state Rep. Tom Oliverson (R-Cypress) announcing his challenge for the gavel, Phelan said he would not back down on the appointment of Democrats as committee chairs.
Snip.
This release makes Phelan’s path toward a third term as speaker much more difficult. Should this group hold, ostensibly opposed to Phelan, it will be impossible for him to win the Texas House Republican Caucus endorsement. However, the speaker could give in on some concessions, such as Democratic chair appointments, and win back this group’s support.
GOP caucus rules require members to vote for the body’s nominee, presumably enforced by the bylaws, though no section exists in that portion of the document laying out penalties for voting differently than the caucus has chosen. It’s happened before, for example last year when three members — state Reps. Tony Tinderholt (R-Arlington) and Nate Schatzline (R-Fort Worth), and now-former member Bryan Slaton (R-Royse City) — voted against the caucus nominee, Phelan, and for Tinderholt.
Article IX of the Texas Republican House Caucus bylaws lays out the procedure for selecting a speaker candidate. It requires the selection process to be conducted by secret ballot until a member receives two-thirds support from the body, currently 58 votes; if no candidate reaches that line, the last-placed candidate will be eliminated from the contest and that will be repeated until one candidate reaches 58.
Should the vote reach a third round, the threshold needed will drop to three-fifths support — currently at 52 votes. Should nobody reach that line, after a fourth round of voting, all nominations will be withdrawn and the floor reopened.
Depending on what happens in November with potential flips, those 58- and 52-lines may shift.
This intra-caucus vote will occur in early December, per the rules.
Libertarians nominate a social justice warrior Chase Oliver for their Presidential candidate. A fair number of Libertarians are saying they’ll vote for Trump now…
“I believe this is one of the most important elections of my lifetime, and I’m supporting Trump. I know that I’ll lose friends for this. Some will refuse to do business with me. The media will probably demonize me, as they have so many others before me. But despite this, I still believe it’s the right thing to do.”
The physics PhD said that he refuses to live in a society where people are afraid to speak their minds.
Red Lobster followup: Turns out Red Lobster is privately owned by seafood supplier Thai Union. And just who did Red Lobster buy all that “endless shrimp” from? No prizes for guessing…
“George Miller’s Furiosa is projected to take in only $31 million at the box office. When adjusted for inflation, that’s the worst Memorial Day box-office haul in 43 years.”
Will wokeness and the Biden recession kill off comic shops? Also, is Disney looking to outsource comics from Marvel?
World’s largest Buc-ee’s to open. “The new center is located in Luling, Texas, and will open its doors to the public the morning of June 10, according to a news release from the company. The new 75,000-square-foot center is symbolic for the Luling community, as it will replace the city’s current Buc-ee’s store, which was the first Buc-ee’s travel center built in 2003.” (Hat tip: Dave.)
“Donald Trump Found Guilty Of Being Donald Trump.” “‘It was an open and shut case,’ said prosecutor Joshua Steinglass. ‘There wasn’t any way he could sit there being Donald Trump and just get away with it. We were given strict orders to hold him accountable for being Donald Trump, and that’s what we’ve done.'”
More worrying signs of inflation, more evidence of Biden family corruption, more creepy child sex offenders, F-35s are stacking up, and an infamous movie may finally have a premiere. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
This is Memorial Day weekend, and in Texas there’s a runoff election on May 28, so be sure to vote if you have a runoff in your area. (There are no Republican runoffs in Williamson County.)
House Democrats’ reelection campaigns have accepted $6.5 million from three major political families, which have helped bankroll several student groups participating in the protests. The family members cut most of those checks over the last two years, although some of the donations to longstanding House members came over the last decade.
The names are well-known among Democratic funding circles: Soros, Rockefeller, and Pritzker. Yet before the anti-Jewish protests swept college campuses over the last few months, their financial ties to the student groups were not widely known. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a member of the same wealthy Pritzker family, is not among the donors.
Several investigative media reports over the last month have uncovered the extensive financial ties between these families and student groups involved in organizing anti-Israel protests and activism across the country predating the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel and in its aftermath and during Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.
The donors to student groups include George Soros, a billionaire philanthropist and Democratic campaign contributor who helms the Open Society Foundation and his family members; the Pritzkers, the owners of Hyatt Hotels Corporation; and members of the famed Rockefeller family, including relatives of the wealthy American Banker and philanthropist David Rockefeller. The donations have either gone directly to student groups involved in campus demonstrations or to umbrella foundations and organizations, which have, in turn, channeled the funds to the protestors.
The House Democratic Congressional Committee and the House Majority PAC, which was founded by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and is directly affiliated with the House Democratic leadership, collected most of those funds, nearly $5.5 million by those two Democratic campaign entities alone, FEC records show.
Meanwhile, 30 House Democrats, including Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and other members of the leadership, received a combined total of $856,858 from the Soros, Pritzker, and Rockefeller families, while a dozen Democratic candidates in competitive races received a total of $139,000. RCP did not examine Senate recipients.
The House members in competitive races who received funds from at least one of the three families include Reps. Mary Peltola of Alaska, Mike Levin of California, Yadira Caraveo of Colorado, Johana Hayes of Connecticut, Eric Sorensen of Illinois, Frank Mrvan of Indiana, Sharice Davids, Jared Golden, Hillary Scholten, Angie Craig of Minnesota, Don Davis, Chris Pappas of New Hampshire, Gabe Vasquez, of New Mexico, Susie Lee of Nevada, Steven Horsford of Nevada, Paty Ryan of New York, Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, Andrea Salinas of Oregon, Susan Wild of Pennsylvania, and Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania.
Craig’s campaigns have received the most of any other House member from the three families: $96,490 since 2018. Lee’s campaign received the second most: $75,000 since 2017.
The Democratic candidates who accepted donations from at least one of the three families include Kirsten Engel in Arizona; Adam Gray, Rudy Salas, George Whitesides, and Will Rollins in California; Lanon Baccam in Iowa; Tony Vargas in Nebraska; Lauren Gillen, Mondaire Jones, and Josh Riley in New York; Ashley Ehasz in Pennsylvania; and Michelle Vallejo in Texas.
American households gained net worth under Trump. Under Biden, adjusted for inflation, it’s gone negative.
Inflation isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. “In fact, the progressive political class does have a plan to deal with the national debt. Their plan is to perpetuate inflation and thereby to engineer a slow-motion stealth default on the debt that will enable them to continue to enjoy without disruption the political benefits that flow to them from their irresponsible debt-funded vote buying.”
A trove of new whistleblower documents provided to House GOP investigators reveal, among other things, that the CIA prevented federal investigators from pursuing Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris as a witness in their investigation of Hunter Biden.
Morris, a Hollywood entertainment lawyer who has ‘long supported’ Hunter (and why?) has loaned the First Son more than $6.5 million, according to a January letter to the House oversight committee.
We’ve known about the CIA connection since March, when the Chairmen of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees, Jim Jordan (R-OH) and James Comer (R-KY) said that a whistleblower has brought them information that ‘seems to corroborate our concerns’ that the CIA directly interfered with DOJ and IRS investigations of Hunter Biden.
According to a whistleblower, the CIA “intervened in the investigation of Hunter biden to prevent the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) from interviewing a witness,” the letter, addressed to CIA Director William Burns, reads.
Specifically, the Committees were concerned at how “the DOJ deviated from its standard processes to afford preferential treatment to Hunter Biden,” which they learned “after two brave whistleblowers testified to Congress” that the Justice Department had done just that.
According to Hunter Biden’s business associate, Devon Archer, he and Hunter Biden were equal owners of Rosemont Seneca Bohai, and that entity was used by both individuals. According to evidence provided by the IRS whistleblowers, Hunter Biden was the beneficial owner of the entity’s associated bank account, which was used to receive Hunter’s salary from Burisma and to receive foreign wires, such as funds allegedly transferred from a Kazakhstani individual through an entity that were then used to purchase a Porsche for Hunter Biden. Congressional investigators questioned Hunter Biden during his February 28th deposition regarding his connection to Rosemont Seneca Bohai, as well as bank accounts associated with the entity.
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu dishes the truth on fellow governors. Andrew Cuomo? “Complete jackass. No one like him.” Gavin Newsom? “Just a prick.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“Bill Maher Scolds Pearl-Clutching Lefties Over Harrison Butker Tradwife Speech.” For feminists, evidently being a traditional wife and mother isn’t an allowable “choice.”
Hmmmm: “Lockheed Running Out Of Parking Space For F-35s Pentagon Refuses To Accept.” “Last summer, the DOD put a complete freeze on accepting the stealth fighters until Lockheed fixed huge hardware and software problems associated with ‘Technology Refresh-3′ (TR-3), a $1.8 billion package intended to expand the planes’ capabilities.”
Media Matters for America, the group that thinks American journalists just aren’t leftwing enough, just had a massive layoff, thanks in part to a defamation lawsuit from Elon Musk. Thanks, Elon! (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy and is closing 87 locations, none in Austin. Evidently an “Endless Shrimp” promotion was a big contributing factor, which suggests executive learned nothing from the losses they incurred in a similar endless crab promotion in 2003…
Could the infamous, uncompleted Jerry Lewis movie The Day the Clown Cried finally be screened this year? Maybe. Lewis gave the footage to the Library of Congress in 2014, specifying it couldn’t be seen for ten years, which puts it next month. But evidently there are a lot of editing required before that debacle could be seen in anything close to final form.
You may have heard something about a remake of Time Bandits and thought “that sounds like a bade idea.” An even worse idea? Making it without dwarves*.
“Yet another Hollywood reboot that seems to be kicking actors with dwarfism to the curb. So why does Hollywood hate people with dwarfism?”
“I mean, if you were a ginger person with dwarfism, then you’d really be fucked.”
“Time Bandits is getting a reboot, uh, continuation, reimagining, whatever on Apple TV+ and this is the cast.” Not a dwarf in sight.
“Actors with dwarfism who are like, hey, it’s hard enough to get roles right now, so why you keep replacing us with CGI creatures? Hugh Grant was an Oompa Loompa.”
“In their quest to not be offensive, they’re actually making sure that some people are not getting work.”
The same thing happened with Disney’s live-action Snow White before Disney did a 180.
No one (or at least no one rational) was offended when Terry Gilliam used actual dwarves in the original.
“Paradoxically fantasy films such as Time Bandits have often been the one genre in which filmmakers have liberated actors with dwarfism to be fully human.”
“Every character now has to be a black lesbian, because that’s this year’s flavor.”
The Willow reboot was such a massive failure they purged it from Disney+.
I’m far from a fanatic that actor X must share characteristic Y with the person they’re portraying, but when it comes to dwarves in films about dwarves, come on. Plus it’s cheaper, better and more convincing that CGI. Also, I’m pretty sure that every dwarf/midget/little person in Hollywood save Peter Dinklage needs the work more than Lisa Kudrow…
*I know my spellchecker wants me to spell it “dwarfs.” I’m going with Tolkien and D&D on this one.
In the tradition of “something lite for the weekend,” here’s The Babylon Bee’s Satan asking Democrats to tone it down a notch:
“I love the homicidal thing that you got going on there. I really dig it. OK, but maybe market it just a little bit differently. Like the serial killer that everyone thinks is such a sweet guy. You know, he’s got 27 bodies in the basement, but he’s like, you know, coaching Little League. That’s what I want.”
More Biden corruption unearthed, the Biden Recession has canaries dying left and right, yet another Katy ISD teacher involved in child sex crimes, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge is being given another tomb raider to destroy. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on Thursday as part of a probe into whether the Biden DOJ coordinated with Trump prosecutors.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on Thursday as part of a probe into whether the Biden DOJ coordinated with Trump prosecutors.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer dropped a bombshell on Thursday, revealing that his panel had unearthed new financial accounts tied to the Biden family investigation. Adding to the drama, Comer announced a fresh subpoena aimed at an undisclosed bank, ramping up the pressure in this ongoing probe.
“This morning, I issued a subpoena for targeted financial information from a certain financial institution related to Jim Biden, Sarah Biden and Hunter Biden. This is a result of many of the documents that Devon Archer turned over,” Comer told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business.
The Oversight Committee began investigating the Biden family’s alleged shady business dealings over two years ago. In March, they called for Biden to testify before Congress, stating that “the committee has accounted for over $24 million that has flowed from foreign sources to you, your family, and their business associates.”
“It is unbelievable,” Comer continued. “I don’t think you would find very many people that have a billion-dollar net worth that have as many different bank accounts as this Biden family had. Many of these were shell companies.”
Those were “companies [whose] sole purpose was to launder the money that the Bidens were receiving from China, from Romania, from Russia,” Comer added. “And never one time through the course of this entire investigation, even during the depositions with Hunter Biden and the transcribed interview with Jim Biden, were they able to answer exactly what the family did to receive this money.”
Gov. Greg Abbott has pardoned U.S. Army Sergeant Daniel Perry following a recommendation of pardon and restoration of his firearm rights by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.
The board voted unanimously on the recommendation.
Shortly after the recommendation was made, Abbott officially pardoned Perry.
“The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles conducted an exhaustive review of U.S. Army Sergeant Daniel Perry’s personal history and the facts surrounding the July 2020 incident and recommended a Full Pardon and Restoration of Full Civil Rights of Citizenship,” Abbott wrote in a press release.
“Among the voluminous files reviewed by the Board, they considered information provided by the Travis County District Attorney, the full investigative report on Daniel Perry, plus a review of all the testimony provided at trial. Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws on self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney. I thank the Board for its thorough investigation, and I approve their pardon recommendation.”
Perry was convicted of murdering Air Force veteran and Black Lives Matter protester Garrett Foster in 2023. A Travis County jury deliberated for 17 hours before finding Perry guilty of murder but not aggravated assault of Foster at the intersection of 4th Street and Congress Avenue in downtown Austin, as well as threatening a crowd with his car during the 2020 protest.
Perry, who was working as an Uber driver, shot and killed Foster with a .357 Magnum revolver after Foster approached the driver door of his Hyundai Ioniq.
This dispassionate description hides the fact that Perry’s car was surrounded by a crowd of rioters, including the one who aimed a gun at Perry. This was a clear case of self defense that never would have gone to trial if Travis County’s far left Soros backed DA Jose Garza weren’t so in favor of radical left wing rioters and hostile the right of self defense.
The Department of Justice recently argued that a whistleblower lawsuit against Pfizer, filed by Brook Jackson, should be dismissed.
Jackson, a 20-year veteran in clinical trial administration employed by a third-party vendor (Ventavia Research Group), worked on Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine trials in 2020. Alarmed by what she witnessed, Jackson raised concerns to her superiors, Pfizer, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in September 2020.
She claimed the trial was being run, documented, and reported in a manner that violated Federal law and was potentially dangerous.
Hours after contacting the FDA on September 25, 2020, Jackson was fired. Her sealed whistleblower complaint seemed to stall, with the FDA not investigating her claims. Faced with inaction, Jackson filed a lawsuit.
As the case progressed towards discovery, the DOJ intervened, asking the judge to dismiss the case. Jackson argues that the government failed to articulate a legitimate reason for dismissal and did not demonstrate why the burdens of continued litigation outweigh its benefits.
Disturbingly, a former FDA lawyer who worked at the agency when Jackson’s complaint was filed has moved to the DOJ and is now representing the government in its attempt to shut down the suit, raising concerns about regulatory capture and the use of government to shield companies from accountability.
In 2021, the British Medical Journal published an article investigating Jackson’s claims and found them credible. The journal’s investigation concluded that Jackson’s account was supported by documentation and raised serious questions about the integrity of Pfizer’s vaccine trials and the FDA’s oversight.
Other former Ventavia employees vouched for Jackson’s complaint, describing a “helter-skelter” work environment and lack of oversight.
Despite evidence and corroboration, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia after Jackson’s complaint, and Pfizer did not mention any problems at Ventavia in its FDA submission for emergency use authorization.
BMJ’s findings lend significant credibility to Jackson’s claims and raise serious questions about the integrity of Pfizer’s vaccine trial data, the adequacy of regulatory oversight, and, ultimately, the approved emergency use authorization.
Follow the money…
Court throws DEI amendment to NY constitution, off November’s ballot. “The NY State Supreme Court (trial court) in Livingston County (near Rochester), granted summary judgment throwing the ERA off the November ballot, on the ground that the proponents of the legislation did not follow the constitutionally required procedure for advancing a ballot initiative for a constitutional amendment.”
A Tompkins High School teacher has been arrested on nine counts of possession of child pornography.
James Paul Stone was booked into the Fort Bend County Jail Monday.
According to the Montgomery County Precinct 3 Constable’s office, thousands of images of child pornography were recovered from Stone’s residence, including several images that Stone admitted to producing himself.
Ah, not this crap again. “Venezuela Moves ‘Substantial Quantities’ Of Troops To Guyana Border.”
People like to feel like they’re appreciated and make a difference. In crime-friendly California, police don’t, so they’re headed to Texas.
Hundreds of California cops are fleeing to Texas to escape ‘soft-on-crime’ policies they say have made their jobs ‘pointless’, DailyMail.com can reveal.
Rank-and-file officers up to department chiefs have hit out at state legislators, claiming a succession of ‘anti-law enforcement’ policies have made their work impossible.
Overworked and unsupported, they have instead taken up jobs in Texas and other states that are seen as tough on crime.
Evan Leona, 38, who ditched his job as a detective in a multi-agency gang unit in Fresno, California, to work for Denton Police in Texas, in 2022, said he had met ‘more than a hundred officers’ in the Dallas / Fort Worth area who had fled California.
‘There are five officers who have come from various agencies in California on my shift alone in Denton,’ he told DailyMail.com. ‘The justice system just works a lot better here.’
At least in Texas, we don’t have a one-party state that’s institutionally hostile to police and the rule of law. Some locales in Texas have suffered spiking crime rates thanks to stupid policies and Soros-backed DAs (I’m looking at you, Austin), but Democrat-run California is hostile to law enforcement from top to bottom, wants to put felons back on the streets and wants to tax lawful gun owners out of existence.
Leona said the majority of those who leave headed to Texas, with others finding work in states such as Montana and Arizona.
It comes as the Golden State is hemorrhaging thousands of police every year, with numbers down by more than 5,000 since 2019.
There are now fears that high-crime Californian cities are suffering a brain drain in law enforcement, leaving the public unprotected as criminals run riot.
Just like Republicans said would happen. What are the odds?
Ray Bottenfield, a former Santa Monica College Police Captain who retired to Hewitt, Texas, admitted it had become increasingly difficult to retain or recruit officers due to the lack of support from the state.
‘When you’re getting beaten up constantly, your cost of living is getting worse and you’re dealing with all this political stuff, it is overwhelming,’ he told DailyMail.com.
Many in law enforcement blame controversial legislation including Proposition 47 and 57 for turning prisons into ‘revolving doors’ and putting their lives at risk.
Gina Miller, a former deputy at San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, told DailyMail.com that California’s legal system had left officers feeling ‘like whatever they did was pointless’.
The 37-year-old moved to Texas in 2021 and now works for Lewisville Police Department, around 25 miles north of Dallas.
She said her work now had a purpose again, adding: ‘If I take someone to jail they’re actually going to stay in jail until they see a judge.’
Officer Miller said some of her former California colleagues had quit to take up desk jobs tackling welfare fraud because they no longer felt safe patrolling the streets.
In particular, she hit out at Proposition 57, which she claims has let violent offenders onto the streets.
Put forward by then-Governor Jerry Brown and passed by voters in 2016, the law was designed to reduce prison overcrowding by offering the possibility of early parole for non-violent offenders.
But critics highlighted a loophole that meant offenses such as domestic violence and assault with a deadly weapon were not included under a list of violent offenses.
It came under the spotlight after it was revealed that Smiley Martin, a suspect in a 2022 mass shooting in Sacramento that left six dead, was released early from a ten-year sentence for domestic violence and assault under provisions set out in Proposition 57.
Miller claims the law has also put officers’ lives at risk by opening the door for violent criminals.
The officer, whose last assignment during her 11-year stint at San Bernadino was in the relatively safe and affluent city of Rancho Cucamonga, said four of her colleagues at the Sheriff’s Department were shot during her final six months.
One of them, Sergeant Dominic Vaca, 43, was killed after he was shot pursuing a motorcycle without a license plate in 2021.
There is no indication that the suspect, Bilal Winston Shabazz, had been released early under Proposition 57.
But Miller said such policies had created a general lawlessness within the state, leaving officers and the public feeling unsafe.
She recalled a time she took a man to jail for putting a loaded gun to his wife’s head, only for him to be released the same day.
‘I got into this job to try to help people and make a difference,’ she said. ‘It was heartbreaking to be telling this victim, “I know your husband just tried to kill you, but he’s already out of jail, so just call us if he comes back”.
‘To see their faces, it wears you down. You’re like: “This is stupid, because I can’t do anything for anybody”.’
Officer Leona, 38, who spent five years in Tulare County before serving in Fresno County Sheriff’s Office for a decade, said he was hospitalized following an assault by a violent criminal.
He said the suspect, who was ‘presumably high on narcotics’, had been chasing school children before running into a stranger’s garden.
A standoff with police ensued.
‘At one point, he hit me over the head with a board,’ he recounted. ‘I hit him with my baton. He picked me up and threw me through a sliding glass window into the kitchen of this lady’s house.
‘I was bleeding all over the place. He was bleeding. We’re rolling around in the kitchen.
‘It took eight officers to finally subdue him. I broke my hand. I had to get sutures on my face.
‘Another officer broke his wrist and a third officer had to get sutures or stitches with it.
‘He was only in custody for a couple months. And then he got released.’
Miller also claimed Proposition 47 had turned California’s prisons into ‘revolving doors’.
The measure, passed by voters in 2014, reclassified some nonviolent offenses as misdemeanors, including shoplifting where the value of the stolen property does not exceed $950.
It has been blamed by some, including Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and California retail head Rachel Michelin for a rise in thefts after scores of stores in the state suffered brazen heists.
Sounds like there’s a grand bargain to be had: California sends Texas all its good law enforcement officers, and in return Texas sends California all the homeless drug addicts and illegal aliens so beloved by the Democratic Party over ordinary, law-abiding citizens. Then we’ll see which state prospers more. (Except we’re already seeing it. People have been leaving California for Texas for over a decade.)
Decline is a choice, and California voters have decided that they side with the Democratic Party and George Soros in embracing high crime rates and treating police and Republicans as the villains.
Now they get to live with the consequences of their choices.
Details on the people and organizations dedicated to burning America down, more Biden corruption, more of his censorship regime, a few Russo-Ukrainian War updates, and a pedophile gets ventilated. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Have America’s college students suddenly converted en masse to anarcho-communist-jihadism? Not quite. Many are far left and anti-Israel. Some are foreigners, or the children of foreigners, who have imported the conspiracies and hatreds of their homelands. More, admitted under relaxed pandemic-era admissions standards and proudly ignorant of both American and world history, are taking the “decolonial” half-knowledge pushed by their elders to its logical conclusion.
But students are not the only, and perhaps not even the most important, faction active in the campus protests. As in the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, “outside agitators”—professional radicals and organizers, black bloc antifa thugs, Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, and Palestinian and Islamist radicals—have played a central role in organizing and escalating the campus protests, just as they have organized and escalated the wider anti-Israel protest campaign that began almost immediately after Oct. 7. This largely decentralized network of agitators is, in turn, politically and financially supported by a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark-money groups ultimately backed by big-money donors aligned with the Democratic Party.
The first hint that the protests are not entirely organic is their striking resemblance to previous rounds of organized far-left agitation, from the “uprising” of summer 2020 to the rolling antifa vs. Proud Boys brawls of 2016-17. The creation of “liberated” or “autonomous” zones on campus, for instance, is a hallmark of anarchist organizing familiar from Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and New York’s City Hall Autonomous Zone four summers ago. Familiar, too, is the governance of these zones, with masked security details prohibiting filming from outsiders and directing reporters to trained media representatives. During clashes with police or with counterprotesters, students and their allies have deployed classic “bloc” tactics, covering their faces and dressing in matching outfits to promote anonymity, linking arms to interfere with police attempts to conduct arrests, and attempting “de-arrests”—i.e., the coordinated swarming of police officers—to rescue apprehended comrades. At Yale, student activists doxxed the police officers sent to clear them out of the encampment—another harassment tactic frequently deployed by antifa.
These resemblances are no accident. All of these tactics require a degree of instruction and training. Footage from Columbia showed the professional “protest consultant” Lisa Fithian, a veteran of Occupy, BLM, Standing Rock, and Stop Cop City, teaching students at Columbia how to barricade themselves into Hamilton Hall. Recent video from inside the protest encampment at UCLA, meanwhile, showed masked men leading a hand-to-hand combat training. When police cleared out encampments at the University of Texas-Austin and Columbia and the City University of New York last week, roughly half of those arrested—45 of the 79 in Texas, 134 of the 282 in New York—had no connection with the university at which they were arrested. Some, like the 40-year-old anarchist heir James Carlson, arrested at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, had protest related rap sheets going back two decades.
“What you’re seeing is a real witches’ brew of revolutionary content interacting on campuses,” says Kyle Shideler, the director for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and an expert on far-left domestic extremism. “On the left-wing side, you have a broad variety of revolutionary leftists, who serve as rent-a-mobs, providing the warm bodies for whatever the leftist cause of the day is. And on the other side you have the Islamist and Palestinian networks: American Muslims for Palestine and their subsidiary Students for Justice in Palestine, CAIR, the Palestinian Youth Movement. We’re seeing a real mixture of different kinds of radical foment, and it’s all being activated at the same time.”
The far-left groups active in the protests include antifa and other anarchists: Anarchist literature has been distributed in the encampments, and antifa websites have published dispatches from “comrades” on the inside. They also include various communist and Marxist-Leninist groups, including the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and the International ANSWER coalition, a PSL front group that worked with several Muslim groups to organize the Jan. 13 March on Washington for Gaza, at which protesters flew the black jihadist flag. On April 29, for instance, shortly before masked assailants stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and barricaded themselves inside, The People’s Forum—a Manhattan event space affiliated with the PSL and funded by Neville Roy Singham, a wealthy businessman who “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide,” according to an August profile in The New York Times—urged its activists to rush up to Columbia to “support our students.” Similar calls for an “emergency action” were distributed throughout radical networks in New York City.
Snip.
The “movement,” in turn, while it recruits from among students and other self-motivated radicals willing to put their bodies on the line, relies heavily on the funding of progressive donors and nonprofits connected to the upper reaches of the Democratic Party. Take the epicenter of the nationwide protest movement, Columbia University. According to reporting in the New York Post, the Columbia encampment was principally organized by three groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Within Our Lifetime (WOL). Let’s take each in turn.
JVP is, in essence, the “Jewish”-branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, backed by the usual big-money progressive donors—including some, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that were instrumental in selling Obama’s Iran Deal to the public. JVP and its affiliated political action arm, JVP Action, have received at least $650,000 from various branches of George Soros’ philanthropic empire since 2017, $441,510 from the Kaphan Foundation (founded by early Amazon employee Sheldon Kaphan), $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and smaller amounts from progressive donors such as the Quitiplas Foundation, according to reporting from the New York Post and NGO Monitor, a pro-Israel research institute. JVP has also received nearly $1.5 million from various donor-advised funds—which allow wealthy clients to give anonymously through their financial institutions—run through the charitable giving arms of Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard, and TIAA, according to NGO Monitor’s review of those institutions’ tax documents.
SJP, by contrast, is an outgrowth of the Islamist networks dissolved during the U.S. government’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and related charities for fundraising for Hamas. SJP is a subsidiary of an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); SJP in fact has no “formal corporate structure of its own but operates as AMP’s campus brand,” according to a lawsuit filed last week against AJP Educational Fund, the parent nonprofit of AMP. Both AMP and SJP were founded by the same man, Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian academic who formerly fundraised for KindHearts, an Islamic charity dissolved in 2012 pursuant to a settlement with the U.S. Treasury, which froze the group’s assets for fundraising for Hamas (KindHearts did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement). And several of AMP’s senior leaders are former fundraisers for HLF and related charities, according to November congressional testimony from former U.S. Treasury official Jonathan Schanzer. An ongoing federal lawsuit by the family of David Boim, an American teenager killed in a Hamas terrorist attack in 1996, goes so far as to allege that AMP is a “disguised continuance” and “legal alter-ego” of the Islamic Association for Palestine, was founded with startup money from current Hamas official Musa Abu Marzook and dissolved alongside HLF. AMP has denied it is a continuation of IAP.
Today, however, National SJP is legally a “fiscal sponsorship” of another nonprofit: a White Plains, New York, 501(c)(3) called the WESPAC Foundation. A fiscal sponsorship is a legal arrangement in which a larger nonprofit “sponsors” a smaller group, essentially lending it the sponsor’s tax-exempt status and providing back-office support in exchange for fees and influence over the sponsorship’s operations. For legal and tax purposes, the sponsor and the sponsorship are the same entity, meaning that the sponsorship is relieved of the requirement to independently disclose its donors or file a Form 990 with the IRS. This makes fiscal sponsorships a “convenient way to mask links between donors and controversial causes,” according to the Capital Research Center. Donors, in other words, can effectively use nonprofits such as WESPAC to obscure their direct connections to controversial causes.
Something of the sort appears to be happening with WESPAC. Run by the market researcher Howard Horowitz, WESPAC reveals very little about its donors, although scattered reporting and public disclosures suggest that the group is used as a pass-through between larger institutions and pro-Palestinian radicals. Since 2006, for instance, WESPAC has received more than half a million in donations from the Elias Foundation, a family foundation run by the private equity investor James Mann and his wife. WESPAC has also received smaller amounts from Grassroots International (an “environmental” group heavily funded by Thousand Currents), the Sparkplug Foundation (a far-left group funded by the Wall Street fortune of Felice and Yoram Gelman), and the Bafrayung Fund, run by Rachel Gelman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. (A self-described “abolitionist,” Gelman was featured in a 2020 New York Times feature on “The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism.”) In 2022, WESPAC also received $97,000 from the Tides Foundation, the grant-making arm of the Tides Nexus.
WESPAC, however, is not merely the fiscal sponsor of the Hamas-linked SJP but also the fiscal sponsor of the third group involved in organizing the Columbia protests, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), formerly known as New York City SJP. Founded by the Palestinian American lawyer Nerdeen Kiswani, a former activist with the Hunter College and CUNY chapters of SJP, WOL has emerged over the past seven months as perhaps the most notorious antisemitic group in the country, and has been banned from Facebook and Instagram for glorifying Hamas. A full list of the group’s provocations would take thousands of words, but it has been the central organizing force in the series of “Flood”-themed protests in New York City since Oct. 7, including multiple bridge and highway blockades, a November riot at Grand Central Station, the vandalism of the New York Public Library, and protests at the Rockefeller Center Christmas-tree lighting.
More info on the people backing the Stop Cop City protestors:
Where did the money come from? From donations solicited through left-wing fundraising and organizing networks. One of those networks was the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), an umbrella group for more than 80 “community organizations,” including the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, which organized an illegal anti-Israel protest in the Capitol Rotunda in December at which more than 50 activists were arrested. CJA’s website promotes a grab bag of far-left causes, and includes a “Free Palestine” page proclaiming that “the path to climate justice travels through a free Palestine.” To this day—eight months after the Georgia RICO indictment alleged that the Forest Justice Defense Fund was a fraudulent charity paying for ammunition purchases in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy—CJA maintains a Stop Cop City page urging readers to donate to the Forest Justice Defense Fund and the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. CJA also endorsed a “statement of solidarity” with Stop Cop City, which claimed, by the inexorable logic of intersectionality, the fight against “gentrification and police violence” in Atlanta as part of the fight against climate change.
CJA is a subsidiary of the Movement Strategy Center, a California-based 501(c)(3) that has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and various branches of the Open Society network. But it has another financial supporter, one that may come as a surprise: You, the American taxpayer. In November, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was entrusting $50 million in federal grant money under the Inflation Reduction Act to the CJA, to be distributed in sub-grants to fund “environmental justice” projects by “community-based nonprofit organizations.”
Read the whole thing.
More on the same subject: “Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors.” Surprising to people who haven’t been paying attention, maybe.
The donors include some of the biggest names in Democratic circles: Soros, Rockefeller and Pritzker, according to a POLITICO analysis.
Two of the organizers supporting the protests at Columbia University and on other campuses are Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Both are supported by the Tides Foundation, which is seeded by Democratic megadonor George Soros and was previously supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It in turn supports numerous small nonprofits that work for social change.
Soros declined to comment, but a spokesperson with the Open Society Foundations, of which Soros is the founder and chairman, said in a statement that it “has funded a broad spectrum of US groups that have advocated for the rights of Palestinians and Israelis and for peaceful resolution to the conflict in Israel.” The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has previously funded the Tides Foundation and other groups, said it no longer has active grants to Tides. It also does not support Jewish Voice for Peace or IfNotNow.
Covers some of the same ground as the Tablet piece, but still worth reading the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Former president Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Florida for allegedly mishandling classified documents is being postponed indefinitely.
Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon ordered a new pretrial schedule for motions and discovery Tuesday afternoon after the classified documents case was originally scheduled to go to trial later this month.
“The Court also determines that finalization of a trial date at this juncture — before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and CIPA issues remaining and forthcoming — would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions before the Court, critical CIPA issues, and additional pretrial and trial preparations necessary to present this case to a jury,” Cannon said in her order.
The trial will likely be pushed until after the 2024 presidential election this November.
It’s hard to exaggerate how abysmal Biden’s polling has been lately.
No incumbent president should ever want to be near 43 percent in a head-to-head ballot test. Yet here is Joe Biden at 43 percent in the latest CNN poll, 43 percent in the latest Morning Consult poll, 43 percent in the latest Economist/YouGov poll, and 43 percent in the latest Harvard/Harris poll. (NB: Biden ticked up to 48 when Harvard/Harris pushed respondents to choose between Trump and Biden, and the Economist/YouGov poll had RFK Jr. in the mix.)
Detect a trend? (There are other polls that have Biden a little higher.)
It’s no mystery why Biden’s polling is at crisis levels.
An incumbent president’s level of support in a reelection bid is typically tethered closely to his job approval. It’s hard to get much more than a couple of points above it. Biden’s job approval is at 40 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average and at 39.3 in the 538 polling average.
Desperate for cash, James Biden traveled to Qatar with the aim of personally presenting to Qatari Finance Minister Ali Sharif Al Emadi who was later arrested and charged with bribery and laundering over $5 billion and sentenced to 20 years in prison. While little is known about the details behind the internal power struggle in the corrupt terror state, Al Emadi had been accused of “channeling Qatari support to various Islamist groups over the years” as well as subverting American and European institutions with sizable infusions of Qatari money.
As the American end of the deal fell apart in recriminations and lawsuits, one of the litigants received “blood-stained currency” and a “torture ticket” after suing James Biden and his partners. The blood money came from a Middle Eastern country known to be associated with terrorists. But the FBI refused to name the country and insisted the media also hide its identity.
Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released an 800-page report that reads like Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”
Take a look:
In March 2021, an Amazon employee emailed others within the company about the reason for the Amazon bookstore’s new content moderation policy change: “[T]he impetus for this request is criticism from the Biden Administration about sensitive books we’re giving prominent placement to.”
In March 2021, just one day prior to a scheduled call with the White House, an Amazon employee explained how changes to Amazon’s bookstore policies were being applied “due to criticism from the Biden people.”
In July 2021, when Facebook executive Nick Clegg asked a Facebook employee why the company censored the man-made theory of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the employee responded: “Because we were under pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more. . . . We shouldn’t have done it.”
There’s chutzpah, and then there’s chutzpah: “Denver Illegals Make Demands, Include ‘Culturally Appropriate’ Food, Lawyers, Unlimited Showers And Warnings Before Evictions.”
It was fun seeing Ukraine’s Bradley’s take out Russian tanks with their Bushmaster, but they just took out a T-80 from a mile away with their TOW missile, which is the recommended method of a Bradley killing a Russian tank.
In addition to using high tech weapons against Russia, Ukraine is also using caltrops to shred their tires, a weapon first deployed by the Roman empire.
So the City of Pasadena, Texas was hassling Azael Sepulveda’s Oz Mechanics car repair shop over parking for no apparent reason, came to an agreement to settle his lawsuit, and now says, get this, they don’t have to follow the agreement because they claim the city enjoys “immunity” from lawsuits. “The property he purchased had housed another auto mechanic shop for more than 30 years and included five parking spaces, but under revised ordinances, the city demanded that Sepulveda provide 28 parking spots.” Somebody in the Pasadena city government deserves a dick punching…
