The Schumer Shutdown continues, “No Kings” rallies turns out to be a shuffling parade of elderly white dorks, Ukraine continues destroying Russia’s oil infrastructure, that Dutch chip company seizure has bigger ramifications than I anticipated, Canada wants to steal people’s homes, an NBA gambling scandal erupts, and you have a chance to buy a painting from the Iron Lady Collection.
Senate Democrats killed a bill proposed by GOP Sens. Ron Johnson (WI) and Todd Young (IN) that would have paid government essential workers during the extended shutdown.
It failed 54-45. It needed 60 votes to advance.
Only Democrat Sens. John Fetterman (PA), Raphael Warnock (GA), and Jon Ossoff (GA) voted with the Republicans.
“Democrats have voted down the stopgap bill 12 times.”
“How Did California Spend Billions on Homelessness Only for It to Get Worse? Two New Criminal Cases Offer a Clue.” Honestly, the first sentence supplies its own answer even without the second.
How did California manage to spend $24 billion in taxpayer money to address homelessness over the past years, only for the problem to get substantially worse?
The state has not offered any explanation since that figure was revealed in a state audit released earlier this year. But the arrest of two California men on Thursday suggests that at least some of the money may have been stolen through fraud.
Cody Holmes, the former chief financial officer at a downtown Los Angeles-based developer of affordable housing, was arrested on a federal criminal complaint charging him with mail fraud. In a separate case, Steven Taylor is accused of defrauding lenders to aid his property-flipping business. He is charged with seven counts of bank fraud, one count of aggravated identity theft, and one count of money laundering.
The arrests come as part of a larger federal investigation into homelessness funding fraud in the Golden State.
“Accountability begins today,” said acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli when he announced the arrests on Thursday. He said the two cases are part of a pattern of the larger misappropriation of billions in state funds meant to combat homelessness.
An audit released by the state in April revealed that California has spent more than $24 billion over the past five years to address the state’s homelessness crisis. The acting U.S. attorney formed a Homelessness Fraud and Corruption Task Force earlier this year to investigate where those tax dollars have gone.
“The two criminal cases announced is only the tip of the iceberg and we intend to aggressively pursue all leads and hold anyone who broke any federal laws criminally liable,” Essayli said.
Holmes, 31, is accused of fraudulently obtaining $25.9 million in state grant money for Shangri-La Industries, the developer of affordable housing for which he served as CFO. That money was intended to be used to purchase, construct, and operate homeless housing in Thousand Oaks under a state project called “Homekey.”
Holmes allegedly knowingly submitted inflated, fake bank records to the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), to falsely prove the company had the capacity to fulfill homeless housing projects. However, authorities say the bank accounts that Holmes said contained these funds did not exist.
Holmes is now accused of using more than $2 million in state grant money to pay credit card bills that he was associated with, including purchases at luxury retailers.
HCD had previously paid millions of dollars to Shangri-La to buy, build, and operate housing for the homeless in Redlands and King City, among other California cities.
If convicted, Holmes faces up to 20 years in federal prison.
Meanwhile, Taylor, 44, is accused of using fake bank statements and false cash representations to obtain loans and lines of credit to operate his real estate business from August 2019 to July 2025.
The Brentwood man is also accused of lying to lenders about his intended use of various properties. He allegedly lied to the lender behind his purchase of a Cheviot Hills property, telling the lender he intended to renovate and use the property himself. However, he apparently had already contracted to sell the property, which he bought for $11.2 million thanks to a loan acquired through the use of fake bank statements. He was contracted to sell the property to a homeless housing developer who was purchasing the property with public funds from the city of Los Angeles and the state of California for $27.3 million in a double-escrow transaction hidden from the victim lender and others.
If convicted, Taylor would face up to 30 years in federal prison for each bank fraud count, up to ten years in federal prison for the money laundering count, and a two-year prison sentence for the aggravated identity theft count.
I’m sure this is only the tip of the Homeless Industrial Complex iceberg…
Speaking of homeless industrial complex fraud: “FBI raids homes of Charlotte activist Cedric Dean in health care fraud investigation.”
The FBI raided the home of Cedric Dean, a well-known community activist in Charlotte’s Palisades neighborhood, on Thursday.
The search is part of a federal investigation into an alleged multi-million dollar health care fraud scheme, according to federal court documents released to Queen City News.
A spokesperson for the FBI confirmed on Thursday that agents were “engaged in court-authorized investigative activity,” but did not offer further details.
Court documents obtained by QCN reveal that Dean and his company, Cedric Dean Holdings, are accused of fraudulently billing Medicaid for mental health services that were never provided. Investigators said Dean targeted vulnerable people, including those experiencing homelessness, in exchange for their Medicaid information, offering food or temporary shelter in return.
Dean allegedly submitted inflated or false claims to Medicaid, sometimes using fake diagnoses, and paid staff and recruiters through services like CashApp. Authorities said his company billed roughly $1 million per month and operated without enough staff to actually provide care.
“They’ve lost culture… Calling someone a Democrat is an insult,” Travis noted, adding “Calling someone a Kamala voter is an insult. This is white, black, Asian, Hispanic: young men across America are over the BS that they saw at this No Kings rally.”
“Look at the dance. These are huge dorks. They have no power. They are losers. No one wants to hang out with them,” Travis continued, pointing to the event as emblematic of the party’s disconnect.
“They’re old, 1960s protesters who now are on the side that they used to protest against. They don’t realize that the world has shifted around them and they are awkward lunatics,” he further emphasized.
No Kings? They don’t mean it, as they rebranded as “No Tyrants” in countries with monarchies.
“Ukraine hit Russia’s Novokuybyshevsk refinery in Samara, one of Rosneft’s key plants, processing 8.8M tons of crude annually, about 3% of Russia’s total refining capacity,” some 1,000km from Ukraine.
Hamas is carrying out the terms of the ceasefire every bit as well as you would expect. “After Attack on Troops, Israel Hits Hamas Terror Targets in Gaza BBC. Hamas carried out ‘multiple attacks against Israeli forces beyond the yellow line.'”
Israel struck terrorist targets in southern Gaza after Hamas terrorists attacked its troops located inside the agreed ceasefire line, violating the U.S.-brokered agreement. “The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out airstrikes in the Rafah area on Sunday morning in response to violations of the ceasefire by Hamas,” the Israeli TV channel i24NEWS reported.
In response to Hamas’s action, the Israeli military targeted terror tunnels used in the sneak attacks. “Earlier, an IED or anti-tank explosion struck near an IDF engineering vehicle in the same area,” the broadcaster added. “Reports from Gaza indicate the strikes targeted Hamas positions shortly after the terror group fired an anti-tank missile at IDF forces.”
Trump’s genius wasn’t getting an agreement that would bring lasting peace for all time, it was getting the remaining living hostages out before Hamas inevitably violated the ceasefire.
“Palestinian illegal alien arrested by FBI for participating in October 7th terror attack.” “The complaint described the man, identified in court documents as Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi, as an operative for a paramilitary group in Gaza that has fought alongside Hamas.” Naturally, the media refers to him as “Louisiana Man.”
“Haitians who replaced American workers in tiny Pennsylvania town will be unemployed as factory shuts down.” “Many of these migrants were employed by a meatpacking plant known as Fourth Street Barbecue, also operating under the name Fourth Street Foods. They displaced native-born workers, drained local resources, and wired their paychecks overseas to third-world countries.”
One day after German tabloid newspaper Bild reported that Volkswagen had suspended production of the Golf at its Wolfsburg factory due to a worsening semiconductor shortage caused by a supply stoppage of Nexperia chips, the Dutch chipmaker, recently seized by the Netherlands government, warned Japanese automakers on Thursday that it may no longer be able to guarantee chip supply. The chip crisis spreading from Europe to Japan has set off alarm bells across the industry.
Bloomberg reports that the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association (JAMA) has confirmed that its members, Toyota, Nissan, and Honda, have received warnings from Nexperia about chip supply woes and are working with customers to mitigate disruptions.
JAMA cautioned that chip shortages could have a “serious impact” on global auto production and urged governments to reach a “prompt and practical solution.”
“The chips manufactured by the affected manufacturers are important parts used in electronic control units, etc., and we recognize that this incident will have a serious impact on the global production of our member companies,” JAMA wrote in a statement, adding, “We hope that the countries involved will come to a prompt and practical solution.”
There’s something weird going on here. Any global manufacturing giant worth it’s salt should have second-source contingency plans for such lowly parts as semiconductor discretes. Even in Europe, there are other discrete manufacturers like Infineion and STMicroelctronics. Somebody (or a whole lot of somebodies) dropped the ball here.
“In just 7 minutes, thieves allegedly mounted a ladder, stole priceless jewels from the Louvre and fled on motor scooters.” No painstaking disarming of the alarm system? No sophisticated computer intrusion? No hanging from a cable to avoid triggering the floor alarm? Just smashing windows and cases with brute force? The ghosts of a century’s worth of French screenplay writers sigh in disappointment…
Welcome to Richmond, British Columbia, a suburb of Metro Vancouver.
This is a letter the city sent to residents to notify them that their home might belong to the natives who once camped there 200 years ago.
Please take note that the recent BC Supreme Court decision of Cowichan Tribes v Canada, 2025 BCSC 1490 made some very important decisions which could negatively affect the title to your property. A briefing paper prepared by City of Richmond staff is attached for your reference.
If you look at the draft map attached to the briefing, your property is located within the Claim Area outlined in green. For those whose property is in the area outlined in black, the Court has declared aboriginal title to your property which may compromise the status and validity of your ownership – this was mandated without any prior notice to the landowners. The entire area outlined in green is claimed on appeal by the Cowichan First Nations.
Snip.
A liberal female judge issued an 863-page ruling ordering that private properties, some of which have been in families for generations, must return to the hands of a nomadic tribe that once loosely lived on the land hundreds of years ago, long before anyone who is currently alive was ever born.
This matter was so important to the judge and other liberal allies that it was the “longest trial in Canada’s history.” It is also seen as setting a precedent for confiscating property across the nation.
Now you know why the radical left keeps pushing those bullshit “land acknowledgements.”
A tenured professor at the University of Texas at Austin says he was dismissed from his senior administrative post due to “ideological differences,” marking the latest shake-up in Texas’ statewide effort to reform higher education and curb campus DEI influence.
Last week, Art Markman posted that UT leadership had dismissed him in late September as academic affairs senior vice provost.
Climate activist David Bookbinder admits its a shakedown. “Essentially, the tort liability is an indirect carbon tax. You sue an oil company, an oil company is liable, the oil company then passes that liability on to the people who are buying its products.”
NBA gambling scandal: “ESPN is reporting the arrest of Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups. Also arrested: Terry Rozier, guard for the Miami Heat.”
Billups, an NBA Hall of Famer, has been charged with partaking in an alleged illegal poker ring tied to the Bonanno, Genovese and Colombo crime families, sources told The Post.
A total of 31 people across the country are charged with running rigged games, which took place in Manhattan, the Hamptons and Las Vegas, sources said.
The players involved were being paid by mobsters to play in card games fixed with technology and card shuffling machines to give the house the advantage, sources familiar with the case said.
The athletes were told to take a dive when they had to and win when they were told. It didn’t appear as if they were attempting to pay off any debts, sources said.
Rozier is being charged with point-shaving.
Director Blue has a lot more details about the mob guys running the games, and the sophisticated technologies used, like special contact lenses to read marked cards, cryptocurrency money laundering and x-ray tables.
The Critical Drinker walks through every Disney Star Wars film, how much they cost, and how much they made or lost. Since they received substantial tax credits for filming in the UK, they evidently had to submit real numbers rather than the usual Hollywood Accounting bullshit. The Force Awakens evidently cost $638.9 million to make, which would probably rank it as the most expensive film of all time.
That’s quite a depth and breadth. Supposedly these will be replaced by “V Model” handguns in short order.
Here’s GlockStore’s Lenny Magill, who I think broke the news:
“As of November 30th, Glock is going to discontinue all models, Gen 3, 4, 5, everything except for the slimline guns are going to be discontinued and replaced with what they call the new V model.”
“Glock says this is all about an improved trigger and improved slide, but the reality of it is is uh these changes will prevent the Glock from accepting a switch that will convert it to full auto.”
One gun guy I know thinks it might be a response to a lot of lawsuits against Glock. I think a big contributing factor is California literally outlawing Glock guns in a law signed just even days ago.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a law banning sales of one of the most popular types of handgun in the U.S.
Assembly Bill 1127, authored by state Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, D-Encino, and state Assemblymember Catherine Stefani, D-San Francisco, received the governor’s signature on Friday, Oct. 10.
The law bans new sales of “semi-automatic handguns that can be easily converted to a fully automatic machine gun with the use of a simple ‘switch,'” according to a statement from Gabriel’s office.
It covers handguns manufactured by Glock, as well as similarly designed pistols, that use a “cruciform trigger bar,” which lawmakers said makes them easily convertible to fully automatic fire.
The law, which takes effect on July 1, bars firearms dealers from selling Glock-style handguns.
The NRA has already sued California over the law, and there’s a decent chance it won’t stand up to post-Bruen scrutiny.
While significant news, this probably isn’t cause for Glock fans to panic, as I suspect Glock is already ready to start producing the new model V guns. I wouldn’t panic-buy what is about to become old stock right now, but you might keep an eye out for sales on current models you like. And you could also use the news as an excuse look at new models from some of Glock’s competitors…
President Trump does the impossible by bringing peace to the Middle East, France continues to circle the drain, Ukraine continues to wreck Russia’s oil infrastructure, a look at gamed crime statistics, another monthly budget surplus, and stories of various corrupt Americans taking Chinese money.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
President Trump once again confounds his critics by doing the impossible. “All Living Israeli Hostages Return Home.”
Hamas finally released the remaining 20 living Israeli hostages on Monday, ending two years of captivity as part of a cease-fire deal that requires Israel to release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.
The hostages, taken during the brutal October 7, 2023, attack against Israel, were reunited with their families. In Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square, a public square that became the focal point for protests and rallies over the last two years, thousands gathered to celebrate their return, cheering, waving flags, and holding up signs. Tens of thousands of Israelis also watched the return at public viewings across the country.
After the Israeli hostages, all men under 50, were freed, Israel began releasing 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, who were greeted by cheering crowds as they were bussed into the West Bank. Of the 1,900 prisoners, 250 were serving life sentences on murder and terrorism convictions, and 1,700 had been detained since October 7.
Israeli troops will be escorting four deceased hostages from the Gaza Strip back to Israel, according to Israeli military. The return of deceased hostages is part of the cease-fire deal. The timeline on when the remaining 24 deceased hostages will be returned back to Israel, however, is still unclear.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that he was “committed to this peace” in a speech to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.
Netanyahu was followed by President Trump, who received a standing ovation from Israeli lawmakers as he took the podium.
Weird how the Israeli Knesset gave standing ovation after standing ovation to Literally Hitler…
When your beat is the whole wide world, from Ukraine to Syria to Taiwan to India, the news is almost never as good as it is today. So, let’s savor today’s images of the Israeli hostages finally reunited with their families. The Israeli hostages were held 296 days longer than the Iranian regime held the American hostages in 1979-1981.
It’s understandable if you thought you would never see this headline: “Last 20 living hostages return to Israel.”
It is a spectacular breakthrough, and yet not every Israeli taken by Hamas is home yet, as our Jessica Hornik notes:
There are some two dozen hostages who are deceased. Among them are two American-Israelis, Itay Chen and Omer Neutra. Some of the dead were murdered by Hamas on October 7, their bodies taken into Gaza. Others were murdered in captivity. As part of the agreement, Hamas must return all their remains. The Chen and Neutra families, and all the families of the dead, may finally be able to bury their loved ones.
This is likely the greatest day of Trump’s second term, so far. The Israelis are thrilled and are effusively singing the president’s praises:
Addressing US President Donald Trump at the Knesset, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid lauds the American leader for saving “millions from the horrors of war,” stating that he has “done the unimaginable.”
“Mr. President, you have saved the lives of our hostages. But you saved so much more. You have saved the souls of the bereaved whose loved ones now will be brought home for burial, you have saved thousands of soldiers who will not fall in battle, and you have saved millions from the horrors of war. You have saved far more than one life, and each life is an entire world,” Lapid declares in the Knesset plenum ahead of Trump’s address to the body.
“When you were elected, you declared that you would be ‘the President of Peace.’ You have kept your word. The fact that you were not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is a grave mistake by the committee — but they will have no choice, Mr. President. They will have to award it to you next year,” Lapid says.
So how did Democrats celebrate the ceasefire they’ve been demanding for so long? Obviously they didn’t.
Way back on October 11, 2023, New York City Council Member Tiffany Cabán called for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Now, at that point, Hamas had just massacred civilians in 21 communities, killing 1,195 people including 38 children. The Israel Defense Force had barely begun its retaliation for the atrocity, but the answer in the mind of Cabán was clear: Everyone should stop shooting and accept a permanent cease-fire. To some of us, this sounded like allowing Hamas to get a free shot at Israelis and then preventing the Israelis from hitting Hamas back.
Two days later, on October 13, a then-little known state senator by the name of Zohran Mamdani joined the call for a cease-fire: “Now is the moment for all people of conscience to call for a ceasefire and no more military funding.” The same day, another Democratic socialist state senator, Julia Salazar concurred: “A ceasefire is urgent. Please implore your federal elected officials to take every action they can to stop this from continuing.”
On October 28, 2023, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined her call. “Some may dismiss a ceasefire as naïve or worse. Yet who has a plan for what follows this destruction? What do we call that?”
Mamdani offered a statement on Twitter yesterday that declared “Today’s scenes of Israelis and Palestinians are profoundly moving” but also said that “we have watched as our tax dollars have funded a genocide.” At least Mamdani acknowledged that the cease-fire occurred.
AOC’s X feed had nothing about the cease-fire in the past few days. Nor has Cabán’s. Nor Salazar’s.
For two years, prominent leftist Democrats have been screaming their heads off to get a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and now they’ve finally got one. But suddenly, it’s as if the issue just doesn’t interest them anymore. It’s like a Men in Black neuralyzer has wiped the issue of the Gaza Strip from their memories. It’s shameless, hilarious, and deeply revealing about how the Democratic Party perceives issues and America’s role in the world.
I’m not going to quote Jim Geraghty’s demonstration that Biden’s being “too pro-Israel” didn’t hurt Kamala Harris, because nobody outside the loony left believes that. Unfortunately for Democrats, the loony left is firmly in charge of their party’s foreign policy. Democrats can’t celebrate President Trump’s peace deal because they wanted Hamas to win.
Kurt Schlichter: “The Well-Deserved, Utter Humiliation of Palestinian Terrorists and Their Friends.”
There is a lot of rejoicing in America, Israel, and among normal people around the world about the peace deal in Gaza, but the Palestinian terrorist-huggers are heartbroken. And, of course, they should be. This isn’t really a peace deal. This is an utter capitulation, a total surrender by the losers of Hamas who have completely and utterly failed. They started a war and got their asses kicked, yet again. Their fight from the sewers, where they hid behind women and children, was not an example of brave resistance as they steadfastly endured victimhood. Every single misery that the Palestinians have suffered over the last two years was utterly deserved – in fact, they deserved much, much worse.
That’s why my beef with Israel is that it has been far too kind. Because of the unique aspects of Israeli politics and culture, and because Joe Biden’s puppet masters refused the total support America should’ve given, this absolutely necessary war has dragged on unnecessarily for two years. If I were in charge, this would’ve been over in November 2023, and the semi-human savages who started this war would use my name to scare children for the next hundred generations.
But I’m not in charge, nor are you, nor are any of us except the Palestinians and the Israelis. It’s those in charge who get to make the choices and bear the consequences. The Palestinians got here because they chose to continue a war they’ve been losing since 1948. The Israelis got here because they chose not to allow themselves to be murdered by the people who’ve been trying to kill them since 1948. But I’m not interested in history, not anymore. There’s a time to argue and there’s a time to fight, and it’s time to fight. But you can still see people, both smart and dumb, arguing about history all over the media, both mainstream and social, yet it doesn’t really matter. Certainly, the Israelis are right on the facts – it’s their land, both in terms of historical precedence and the more important fact of physical reality. The owner of the land is the guy who you can’t knock off it; that’s how history works. Here, history just happens to align with justice. The idea that Jews only turned up in the Holy Land in 1946 after Hitler failed to complete his Holocaust is utter nonsense, and people pushing it know that. They don’t care. History is just another weapon for them in their quest for actual genocide, like Kalashnikovs, flotillas of moronic Westerners, and suicide bombers. That it’s all a lie doesn’t matter to them in the least. Their idols are the people who invented Pallywood and made stars of the guys who would portray honor students, a doctors, and a future Nobel Prize winners who just happened to be murdered by the Israelis for no reason, and whose deaths – complete with subtle breathing by the ubiquitous thespians – just happened to be captured on video by their fake reporters.
The real weapon of Hamas, though, is the suffering of their own people. With it, and its documentation, both real and fraudulent, they hope to leverage the humanity of Westerners to get them to choose suicide rather than righteous resistance to Jihadi savagery. It doesn’t just work on millions of morally illiterate leftists – and some ridiculous idiots on the right – in America and Europe. It even works on some Israelis. The October 7 atrocities fell mostly on the leftist “peace” people in the Jewish state who were trying to show solidarity with the Palestinians by living adjacent to Gaza. They died at the hands of the people they wanted to be friends with, horribly, but that didn’t stop many on the Israeli left from trying to undermine the war. Some people will choose suicide over admitting they were wrong.
And what they were wrong about was considering the Palestinians a wonderful but misunderstood people. In reality, it is a broken and hideous culture, poisoned by radical Islam and the humiliation of being defeated again and again and again by the tiny Jewish outpost that would still be a barren desert if the Israelis had not made the desert bloom. The prosperity and freedom of Israel shame them in their squalor and despotism. It drives the hate that is central to their society. They train their little kids to be terrorists, and these little kids grow up to be terrorists. Mommy and daddy were so proud, delighted when their disgusting spawn called from the bloody kibbutzes to brag about killing unarmed Jews. As gruesome as the Hamas degenerates are, it wasn’t just Hamas. The Palestinians elected Hamas, and they still support Hamas. They got what they voted for.
You know who’s not pleased by President Trump’s Middle East peace success? The ChiComs.
One of the biggest losers in President Trump’s great, historic Middle East peace plan is Communist China.
Maybe that’s a reason for China’s petulant rare earths trade control circular it dropped on everyone last Friday, completely out of the blue.
Was that a Chinese temper tantrum heard around the world?
China wasn’t at the peace summit. Its horse lost.
For years, China was the biggest purchaser of Iranian oil, thereby financing the Iranian-backed terrorist war against Israel.
Iran was always the key — backed by China.
And that is why Israel’s Operation Rising Lion, the war with Iran in June, and the United States’s Operation Midnight Hammer on June 22, obliterating Iran’s nuclear facilities at Natanz, Fordow, and Esfahan — were so essential to the Trump peace plan.
Here’s what Mr. Trump said yesterday: “So we dropped 14 bombs on Iran’s key nuclear facilities. Totally, as I said originally, obliterating them.”
He added: “If we didn’t do that and assuming we made the same deal that we have today, there’d be a dark cloud over this deal.”
Mr. Trump concluded: “Some of the things I hated to do, I hated certain of the weapons. Because the level of power is so enormous. It’s so dangerous, it’s so bad. But we have to do what we have to do.”
So Iran was crushed. The use of American-Israel military force was crucial. Not Bidenesque appeasement, but Trumpian force.
Mr. Trump is working with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the two great warriors saving democracy and freedom in the Middle East, in America, and around the world.
Yet China lost big also. Not only did it watch the judicious use of allied military force to decapitate Iran, but it’s also watching a new coalition of Middle East nations put together by Mr. Trump.
Out of this new coalition can come a Saudi-Israeli alliance, an expanded Abraham Accords, new business ventures to rebuild Gaza, and a whole new panoply of peaceful foreign policies, buttressed by new trade and investment.
China is not likely to be a player in all of this. Its influence is now almost at rock bottom — because its bet on Iran did not pay off.
No Nobel Prize for President Trump, theoretically because all his peace-making deeds fell after their previous deadline (that that that stopped them from ridiculously handing the award to Obama). Instead they gave it to Venezuelan dissident Maria Corina Machado…who promptly dedicated it to Trump.
A foreign-policy expert who had an advisory role with the State Department is being accused of stealing classified information and meeting with Chinese officials several times.
The Justice Department announced Tuesday the arrest of Ashley Tellis, a well-respected scholar specializing in Asia and India, for unlawfully possessing national defense information.
“We are fully focused on protecting the American people from all threats, foreign and domestic. The charges as alleged in this case represent a grave risk to the safety and security of our citizens,” said eastern Virginia U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, an appointee of President Trump.
“The facts and the law in this case are clear, and we will continue following them to ensure that justice is served.”
Tellis was an unpaid adviser at the State Department and a contractor with the Department of War’s Office of Net Assessment, Fox News reported based on a Justice Department affidavit.
He is currently a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a prominent foreign-policy think tank that opposes the Trump administration. Tellis published analysis for the think tank as recently as last week.
Those looking for data on the US budget deficit contained in the Monthly Treasury Statement had to wait a few weeks because of the government shutdown, but better late than never, and today at 2pm, the Treasury unveiled the US income statement for the just concluded fiscal year 2025. It was ugly, but not as ugly as it could have been and the month of September was outright impressive.
Starting at the top with the month of September, the numbers were surprisingly sold: total tax revenue of $543 billion were the highest since April (which is tax-collections month), a 3.2% improvement from a year ago, and pushed the 6-month moving average to a record high $496 billion.
As usual, the vast majority of govt receipts was in the form of individual income taxes ($298BN out of $544BN), with Social Security contributing about a 3rd of the total receipts and Corporate Income Taxes accounting for 11% or $62 billion of the total.
On the outlays side, here too there were notable improvements, with the US government spending only $346 billion, a sharp from from the $689 billion in August, and down a whopping 25% from the $463 billion last September. Even more remarkable is that the six month moving average of govt spending suddenly slumped from $604 billion – the highest since covid – to $573 billion, the lowest since June 2024. Yes, the improvement may be small, but every little bit helps and whatever Trump is doing to shrink govt spending is starting to show.
Snip.
A big reason for the stellar September surplus is that tariff collections continued apace, and in September the US government collected a record $29.7 billion in tariffs, which translated in a record $195 billion for the fiscal year. And since Trump’s tariff regime was only active for 6 of the past 12 month, expect tariffs to deliver about $350 billion in annual revenue every year, unless they are canceled.
Still a long way to go to actually balance the budget.
Data from my new Centre for Heterodox Social Science report, ‘The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity among Young Americans’, shows that since 2023 both trans and queer identification have dropped sharply within Generation Z.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which conducts a large annual survey of US undergraduates, polled over 60,000 students in 2025. My analysis of the raw data shows that in that year, just 3.6% of respondents identified as a gender other than male or female. By comparison, the figure was 5.2% in 2024 and 6.8% in both 2022 and 2023. In other words, the share of trans-identified students has effectively halved in just two years.
“Two Suspects Indicted on First Antifa-Related Terrorism Charges in Texas ICE Attack…A federal grand jury indicted Cameron Arnold and Zachary Evetts on Wednesday. The pair are charged with providing material support for terrorism, attempting to murder federal officers and assisting officers, and discharging firearms during attempted murders, according to the indictment, which was unsealed Thursday.”
Fiscally bankrupt, France is trapped in economic stagnation.
The immediate issue is the 2026 budget. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu resigned due to an inability to negotiate a budget for 2026. Still, President Emmanuel Macron and Lecornu insist that a path to a budget compromise remains possible. Time will tell. However, the political crisis is pushing up interest rates among the countries that make up the European Monetary Union. Through the European Central Bank, the Union backstops France’s sovereign debt. The crisis also weakened the euro relative to the United States dollar.
France’s major problem?
Any budget deal will be a fudge that fails to put France on a path to fiscal stability. France will continue to violate the fiscal deficit limits of the European Union. But France must reduce its annual fiscal deficit to 3% of GDP, or, at least, set a credible path to reaching that level. Next year, regardless of whatever budget agreement is reached, France’s fiscal deficit will exceed 5% of GDP. In addition, France is obligated by its EU membership to enact policies to reduce its total debt from the current 115% of GDP to 60% of GDP. Obviously, this will be impossible. So, expect fudges and more fudges for years to come.
The French left and populist right want to get rid of the 2023 reforms, which increased the national retirement age from 62 to 64. But repealing the pension reform legislation would increase the deficit by about $3.5 billion USD a year. At the same time, fewer people would be working, so tax collections would be lower. Fewer workers would mean slower economic growth. France is already experiencing an extended period of stagnation.
The other possible area of compromise is to implement a wealth tax on French citizens with a net worth of €100 million/$116 million USD or more. Again, proponents of a wealth tax say that the tax would raise to $23 billion USD a year, but mainstream economists say wealth taxes don’t work. The wealthy simply respond with legal tax avoidance strategies and migrate to lower tax jurisdictions.
The top line is that any budget deal will just delay the inevitable reckoning with financial markets and the ECB’s monetary authorities. At some point, the ECB will force France into austerity. Otherwise, France will drag down Europe’s economy, and France’s politics could actually jeopardize the European Monetary Union.
As France lurches from government to government in a political crisis engulfing President Emmanuel Macron, there has been one consistent beneficiary: Marine Le Pen and her far-right Rassemblement National party.
Hours after Macron’s third new prime minister resigned on Monday, Le Pen cast the RN not just as a party ready to govern but also capable of restoring stability to a nation in turmoil.
Snip.
The RN outflanks rivals from across the political spectrum in opinion polls and maintains a solid base of about a third of the electorate, though its lead has not grown exponentially even as it stands to gain from the chaos.
The populist party also has its own internal divides and problems — not least after Le Pen was barred from running for office for five years when she was convicted of embezzling EU funds. She is appealing against the verdict, with further proceedings scheduled for January.
Still, a series of errors by Macron, Le Pen’s opponent in the last two presidential run-offs, is helping her bolster the RN’s credibility, after a long-running effort to shed the racist and antisemitic legacy of her late father and party founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Macron’s unexpected gamble to call a snap parliamentary vote last year in a bid to stem the RN’s rise backfired, leaving him well short of a majority, while the RN won its biggest ever haul of seats, 120 in the 577-strong lower house.
The French president’s subsequent attempts to break the deadlock by naming prime ministers from the centre-right or his own centrist camp — including Sébastien Lecornu, one of his closest allies — further amplified the crisis, with no premier able to stay in office for more than a few months and struggling to pass budgets.
France’s “centre-right” is probably to the left of Obama.
“It feeds the ongoing feeling that there’s a form of political elite that’s occupying positions of power, and in a totally disconnected way from the people, keep bringing back the same figures,” said Jean-Yves Camus, a political scientist at the Iris think-tank.
Snip.
The political damage from recent months is lasting.
Polling group Odoxa found last week that a third of those who voted against the RN in 2024 — heeding calls by Macron and French centrists to band together against the far-right — would not do so again.
“We found voters were really fed up with this idea of being told to vote against [the RN], they had a feeling they had been asked to do so to purely serve political interests,” Odoxa head Céline Bracq said.
Pollsters and analysts said the RN would at the very least do as well as last year in a new election, and would be one of the few parties set to increase its number of seats, even if the two-round voting system complicates predictions. Much would hinge on a left-wing bloc uniting or not.
Within the RN, however, party executives said they were readying for an outright majority if, as they hope, Macron is at some point forced to call another snap election. In that scenario, the president would have no other option than to appoint Le Pen’s right-hand man and party chief Jordan Bardella as prime minister.
“The RN has to get to Matignon,” said Edwige Diaz, an RN lawmaker, in reference to the prime minister’s official residence. “The people of France can’t take it anymore, they want change.”
Once again, gold and silver hit record highs. There is evidently a shortage of physical silver in London, which is helping drive prices.
They also hit Samara and Kstovo oil refineries, and a Samara substation near a railroad. “Kstovo was the first refinery targeted by Ukraine in the current campaign against Russian oil, hitting it on August the 2nd and again on October the 5th. So the third strike targeting this refinery…This is a big one, the fourth biggest in Russia with a 17 million ton capacity a year. This one alone represents 6% of Russia’s refining capacity overall.”
During last year’s presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump said violent crime was rising. ABC moderator David Muir immediately fact-checked him, claiming, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country…”
Nearly every major media outlet echoed that narrative. National Public Radio ran the headline, “Violent crime is dropping fast in the U.S. – even if Americans don’t believe it.” The Wall Street Journal declared, “Violent Crime Rate Falls Sharply After Pandemic Surge.” Vox insisted, “Violent crime is plummeting.” Axios reported, “New data shows violent crime dropping sharply in major U.S. cities.”
However, a new Bureau of Justice Statistics report, which includes data through 2024, shows that Trump was right during the debate when he said, “Crime here is up and through the roof.” The National Crime Victimization Survey shows violent crime surged 59%, with rape and sexual assault up 67%, robbery up 38%, and aggravated assault up 62%. That’s the largest four-year increase in the survey’s 52-year history.
The contrast with Trump’s first term is stark. The NCVS data shows that between 2017 and 2020, violent crime fell 15%, including a 6% drop in robbery and a 24% decline in aggravated assault. Although rape and sexual assault rose slightly, the increase was less than 10% of what occurred under Biden.
The federal government tracks crime in two main ways. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports count the number of offenses reported to police each year. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, by contrast, annually asks about 240,000 people living in the United States whether they were crime victims. The latter method captures both reported and unreported incidents.
Last year, the media focused almost entirely on the FBI data.
Before 2020, the FBI and Bureau of Justice Statistics trends generally moved in tandem. Since then, they’ve diverged sharply: The FBI reports fewer crimes, while more Americans say they’ve been victimized. Unreported crime was always a factor – and the reasons for it vary. They range from people reluctant to report being victimized by loved ones to a simple aversion by undocumented people to involve themselves with the criminal justice system. In recent years, however, another factor appears to have skewed the FBI data: the breakdown of law enforcement in this country. When people believe police won’t catch or prosecutors won’t punish criminals, they’re simply less likely to report crimes. Between 2010 and 2019, victims reported 63.3% of violent crimes to police. In the last three years, that number plummeted to 48.8%. Arrests fell as well – from 26.5% before COVID-19 to just 16.6% afterward.
They’re slashing their payrolls in anticipation of spinning off basket-case MSNBC from also basket-case NBC “News…”
NBC News eliminated its teams dedicated to covering issues affecting Black, Asian American, Latino and LGBTQ+ groups as part of its layoffs of about 150 staffers on Wednesday, according to two sources familiar with the matter, a significant culling as the Peacock network separates from its sister news network, MSNBC.
The cuts mean that the verticals NBC BLK, NBC Asian America, NBC Latino and NBC OUT will no longer have dedicated teams bolstering their coverage. The verticals will continue to publish stories related to the specific groups and NBC News may ultimately retain up to five staffers who will contribute coverage on the verticals to the newsroom, according to one source, as the dedicated teams focused exclusively on these verticals are sunset.
The total reductions, which affected NBC News’ entire news operation, make up about 7% of NBC News’ newsroom of about 2,000 staffers and 2% of the wider NBCU News Group, which includes Telemundo and the network’s owned-and-operated local news stations. The cuts did not target specific teams and were driven by the network’s budget and the desire to streamline its editorial efforts, according to one source.
They should purge all DEI/social justice hires to help improve shareholder value.
That was quick. “Court Orders Immediate Halt to Loving County ‘Takeover’ Scheme.”
A state district judge has granted Attorney General Ken Paxton’s request for a temporary restraining order against Malcolm Tanner, the Indiana man accused of orchestrating an illegal plan to “take over” Loving County by importing out-of-state voters with promises of free housing.
The order immediately bars Tanner and anyone acting with him from allowing new residents onto the property or discharging sewage that could contaminate soil or groundwater.
A hearing on whether to extend the order or issue a temporary injunction is set for October 31.
“The show is over,” Paxton said in a statement. “A court has ordered that this illegal and deceptive political sham must come to an immediate end. Malcolm Tanner is a two-bit charlatan attempting to defraud people out of their money with false promises of free homes and unlawful government payouts. Texas is for Texans, not out-of-state grifters trying to steal political power from the people who live here.”
The judge found that Tanner and his associates “violated or are threatening to violate Texas Health and Safety Code § 341 by discharging or allowing the discharge of sewage or human excreta in a manner that could contaminate the soil, sub-surface drinking water, or create the potential for disease transmission.”
The court agreed that such contamination posed “immediate and irreparable injury” to public health and justified emergency relief.
The ruling follows Paxton’s earlier lawsuit accusing Tanner of violating public-health laws, running a public nuisance, and committing deceptive trade practices by luring followers—mostly women and children—to a remote site in West Texas with false promises of “free homes” and monthly cash payments.
Tanner, who has described his group as “Melanated People of Power,” claimed on social media he plans to rename Loving County and replace local officials in the 2026 elections.
I feel about Paxton the same way Abraham Lincoln felt about Ulysses S. Grant: “I cannot spare this man. He fights.” (Previously.)
Attorney General Ken Paxton has informed the Texas State Securities Board that his office has uncovered evidence showing entities connected to the East Plano Islamic Center and its controversial proposed EPIC City land development project violated both federal and state securities laws.
In a letter to Chairman E. Wally Kinney and Commissioner Travis J. Iles, Paxton said his office conducted an investigation into Community Capital Partners LP (CCP), the group raising funds for EPIC City, after receiving multiple complaints. The attorney general’s office requested extensive records from CCP and says it has now reviewed more than 750 documents related to the offering of securities tied to the project.
“In the course of the investigation, the OAG identified evidence that CCP violated federal and state securities laws and regulations, including both procedural violations and fraudulent conduct,” Paxton wrote. He invited the Securities Board to meet with his investigative team, review the evidence, and—if it agrees with his findings—refer the case back to the attorney general’s office so that legal action can proceed.
Paxton noted that the Texas Securities Act requires the commissioner and the attorney general to work together to “prevent or detect a violation of the law,” saying he looks forward to collaborating “to ensure that Texas law is being enforced and Texans are protected.”
“After a thorough investigation, it has become clear that the developers behind EPIC City flagrantly and undeniably violated the law,” said Paxton. “The bad actors behind this illegal scheme must be held accountable for ignoring state and federal regulations.”
The development marks a significant escalation in the state’s ongoing crackdown on EPIC City. Multiple state agencies have launched investigations into the project, including the Funeral Service Commission, the Commission on Environmental Quality, and the Workforce Commission.
Additionally, Gov. Greg Abbott has also recently signed legislation he said will effectively ban “Sharia compounds” like EPIC City in Texas. The measure removes certain religious exemptions from the Texas Fair Housing Act for organizations owning more than 25 acres and prevents them from limiting home sales based on religion.
Snip.
If the Securities Board agrees with his office’s conclusions and formally refers the case, the attorney general is expected to file suit against Community Capital Partners and other parties tied to EPIC City for violations of securities law.
At this point the whole project is deader than the last three leaders of Hamas…
Lonoke County, Arkansas: “Dad charged with killing his 14-year-old daughter’s rapist now running for sheriff.” “Aaron Spencer allegedly gunned down Michael Fosler, 67, after catching him driving off with his daughter, whom Fosler had already been charged with grooming and abusing, according to court docs.” “The monster who hurt our child was charged quickly, but released even faster on a $50k bond. He was awaiting court in December for several felonies in relation to what he did to our child.”
Among those charged include Kanaisha Middleton, a supervisor at the Garden City branch of the DMV, as well as her sister, Jamie Middleton, who is accused of taking at least 10 different permit tests for no-show drivers.
Surveillance images show Jamie Middleton wearing different disguises, even fake facial hair as she posed as a man who would be applying for a commercial driving permit, but she forgot to take off her fake nails.
A woman with prior convictions in several southeastern Texas counties and multiple pending felony charges is free on at least nine bonds despite allegations that she has frequently violated the terms of her probation.
Juanetta Solomon’s criminal history dates to at least 2015 with convictions in Brazoria, Fort Bend, Galveston, and Harris counties related to drugs, personal care fraud, and felony theft. She has served time in the state prison system and county jails.
While on probation, in 2023 Solomon was charged with two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in Harris County, and in 2024 for practicing dentistry without a license. According to Houston police records, she allegedly pretended to be a dentist with ISmilez Cosmetic Designz and injured a patient after using a dental drill, file, and chemicals.
Not Juanetta Solomon.
Last year Solomon was also charged with unlawfully carrying a weapon and prosecutors alleged she repeatedly violated the terms of her probation.
Despite Solomon’s record, 232nd Criminal District Court Judge Josh Hill declined to revoke her probation, and she is free on seven felony bonds out of Harris County.
Electing social justice Democrats means letting black criminals walk the streets so they can continue victimizing law-abiding black citizens.
“Men charged with sex crimes in three states get in girls’ locker rooms by invoking gender identity…Case High School Aquatic Center staff invoked Racine Unified School District’s gender-identity policy to justify letting 64-year-old Rohan de Silva use the girls’ locker room.” So thanks to social justice, high schools are now letting 64 year old perverts into girl’s locker rooms. Keep doing that, and you’re going to get a lot more Aaron Spencers…
“ICE Arrests Illinois Cop For Being Illegal Alien Who Arrived On Six-Month Tourist Visa.” Radule Bojovic of Montenegro came over on a tourist visa in 2015…
A Chinese businessman whose company has strong ties to the Chinese Communist Party has poured at least $65,000 into Rep. Mikie Sherrill’s bid for New Jersey governor, records show.
Pin Ni, the founder of Wanxiang America Corporation, cut at least two checks for a combined $60,000 this year for the One Giant Leap super PAC, which is backing Sherrill’s bid against Republican Jack Ciattarelli.
Pin also gave another $5,800 — the maximum allowable — directly to Sherrill’s campaign in June, records indicate.
Only American citizens or permanent legal residents are allowed to make donations to political campaigns. Pin’s status is not fully clear, though records indicate he has a Social Security number.
Remember Des Moines public schools chairman Jackie Norris, who hired an illegal alien superintendent? She just suspended her campaign for U.S. Senate. Do you think that maybe ordinary Iowa voters aren’t as gung ho about importing illegal aliens as the Democrat Party’s ideological core?
Louis Rossmann reports on an interesting story: Denver City council votes 12-0 not to purchase AI cameras. Denver mayor Mike Johnston buys them anyway. Seems like there’s a big push to install these in American cities over the wishes of voters. (Previously.)
Another attempt to “reinvent farming” goes awry. “A company known for its vertical farming is shutting down its North Texas facility and laying off more than 100 employees, according to a recent filing with the Texas Workforce Commission. Both of Eden Green Technology’s greenhouses at 1845 Sparks Dr. in Cleburne are set to close permanently on Dec. 13. The layoffs affect employees at every level—from executives, including the CEO, CFO and Chief Innovation Officer, to greenhouse managers, production and packing staff, and sanitation workers.” There are probably places were “vertical farming” might prove a viable option, like Alaska or Saudi Arabia, but there’s very little point to trying it in a place so well supplied with sun, water and soil as north central Texas… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Iconic Corpus Christi building fails to attract a bidder. Downtown Corpus is weird. As so0meone once said, “it’s like they rebuilt the city after the monster attack but none of the people came back.” I heard someone that a small group of money Corpus families bought up all downtown with the express intention of not letting it be developed. of course, I was last there in 2000, so maybe things have changed…
“Tough Love” Level: Illegal. “Florida parents reportedly ditched 16-year-old son on roadside with sack of guns: ‘You are the chosen one… good luck.'”
An annoyingly awesome and well-thought out vanlife build. I say “annoying” because they evidently paid to have all the custom work done rather than laboriously building it up from bare metal themselves like most van life videos I watch…
Too damn much news out this week. Biden’s “boom” is busted, Charlie Kirk’s assassin is caught, Israel dirtnaps top Hamas kingpins in Qatar, the curse of BlueSkyism, more illegal alien perverts sexually abusing children, more of the evil George Soros funds, and California’s “Jay Leno Bill” dies in committee. Plus some Prog Rock.
The U.S. economy probably added close to a million fewer jobs in 2024 and early 2025 than previously reported, the latest sign that the labor market, until recently a bright spot in the economy, may be weaker than it initially appeared.
The revised data was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as part of a longstanding annual process known as benchmarking. But the big downward adjustment comes at an awkward moment for the agency, just weeks after President Trump fired its top official following a separate set of negative revisions last month.
The data released on Tuesday showed that employers added 911,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months through March than had been indicated in the monthly payroll figures. That implies the economy added only about 850,000 jobs during that time — half as many as previously reported.
Police have identified the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s assassination as Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah man who authorities say became more political ahead of the shooting and recently expressed animosity toward Kirk.
Robinson, who is believed to have acted alone, came to the attention of the authorities after he contacted a family friend following the assassination, Utah Governor Spencer Cox revealed during a Friday morning press conference. That friend reported Robinson to the local sheriff’s office and Robinson’s father, a veteran police officer, then orchestrated his surrender to authorities at his home in Washington County, Utah.
The alleged gunman is expected to face at least three felony charges, including aggravated murder, obstruction of justice, and felony discharge of a firearm causing serious bodily injury, according to a probable cause affidavit obtained by NBC News. Cox said state law requires authorities to file the charging documents within three days.
Robinson appears to have become more political ahead of the shooting and criticized Kirk by name at a recent dinner, a family member of Robinson’s told authorities. Robinson said Kirk was “full of hate” and accused him of “promoting hate,” Cox said, though the affidavit, released later, indicates another family member may have made those remarks.
Robinson’s arrest comes after authorities had recovered a high-powered bolt action rifle they believe was used in the assassination, along with unspent rounds that were engraved with antifascist writing.
“Hey fascist, catch,” read the engraving on one round. Another round was engraved with the message “Bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao,” a reference to a song favored by resistance movements and revolutionary anti-capitalist partisans.
This is who they chose to kill: the affable man whose main act was having good-faith political debates with college students. The man who, since fatherhood, was turning more toward Christianity as both a purpose and a theme. He was a partisan to be sure, but he was nowhere near the outer limits of the American tradition, especially given his relentless fixation on Lincolnian persuasion as a stabilizing force in a slowly disintegrating polity. The ones who kept losing debates with him didn’t feel that way, of course, but they were only the instrument, not the object, of his work. The object was the millions of Americans who watched, learned, and saw who won again and again—and decided that they wished to side with the winner.
In this way, Charlie Kirk was perhaps the closest thing to Socrates in the American public square. The leftist intellectuals who sneered at him—the rube peddling his simple lines, his crass sophistry, his heartland aw-shucks certainties—would guffaw at the parallel, but it is no less true. He argued—amiably, fairly, relentlessly—until they couldn’t stand it any longer. And like Socrates, they had him killed.
Also like Socrates, his students will now do more for his cause after his martyrdom than they ever did during his life. The Socratic vindication was in his deification through literature at the pens of Plato and Xenophon. Millennia later, everyone remembers the philosopher, but vanishingly few know who ended his life.
The armies of Charlie Kirk, martyr, will be much more vast: not a handful of Athenians but millions of Americans. Their work will not be in philosophical literature but in the politics of the years to come. Whatever benefit accrues to the Republican Party is merely incidental. We are now in the realm of fundamental politics, which is concerned with the nature of the nation and the wielding of power for the common good. The generation of Americans that Charlie Kirk molded will be drawing conclusions about both from his life and his death alike.
After President Trump told Fox & Friends hosts that Charlie Kirk’s assassin is “in custody,” he went on to comment about radical leftist organizations, stating, “We are going to look into Soros. It looks like a RICO case.”
Recall that on Wednesday night, just hours after Kirk’s assassination, President Trump addressed the nation from the Oval Office, calling it a “dark moment for America.” He vowed to crack down on radical left movements across the country that have fueled chaos and even death this year.
Then on Thursday night, Texan News reporter Cameron Abrams wrote on X that Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and two dozen others in Congress called for a select committee on “the money, influence, and power behind the radical left’s assault on America and the rule of law.”
Just weeks ago, Trump stated on Truth Social that George Soros and his radical leftist son, Alex Soros, “should be charged with RICO because of their support of violent protests.”
Around that time, the “dark money” leftist NGO network operated by Arabella Advisors reportedly lost one of its top funding sources: Bill Gates.
Civil terrorism expert Jason Curtis Anderson of One City Rising states:
After the political assassination of Charlie Kirk, President Trump is interested in pursuing a RICO case against George Soros, America’s primary financier of far-left NGOs. What will likely be revealed is a complex web of dark money that observers have warned about for 20 years but never acted on.
At the center of this web are the various George Soros Open Society Foundation legal entities—four separate tax-exempt charities and one 501(c)(4) dark-money channel. Next are the Tides Foundation organizations, funded primarily by the Pritzker family, which include three separate tax-exempt charities and one 501(c)(4) dark-money channel. Following them are the Rockefeller Foundation nexus, NEO Philanthropy, the Ford Foundation, and a host of similar operations, including the Singham network. Collectively, these entities form America’s dark-money ecosystem. They fund permanent protests, bail demonstrators out of jail, finance legal efforts to sue local governments and police departments, influence immigration policy, promote drug decriminalization and criminal-justice reforms, and help elect district attorneys who decline to prosecute crime. On top of all of this, they also have entities like the Working Families Party that elect local politicians.
The money flows from donations to tax-exempt charities into non-tax-exempt 501(c)(4)s, and then trickles down to local groups. From there, funds reach the most radical organizations, which can’t even qualify for 501(c)(3) status and are instead “fiscally sponsored” by parent organizations. Because of this fiscal-sponsorship loophole, the books of these groups remain opaque. Everything from terror financing to protests-turned-riots connects in some way to these foundations.
The revolution against the West is, in effect, a network of tax-exempt charities operating as a powerful parallel government that no one ever voted for. It must be stopped before it’s too late.
A look into Soros-funded terrorist networks is long overdue. Here’s hoping a lot of indictments, bank account freezes and billions in civil forfeiture claims are forthcoming.
Your reminder that the social justice left are horrible people:
Right on cue deranged leftists are celebrating Charlie Kirk being shot
Bluesky, the Twitter spinoff that was once billed as a kinder, gentler alternative to what is now known as X, probably isn’t on death’s door. But after a burst of growth around the election, it’s shrinking and steadily declining in influence, even as other corners of the left thrive during Trump’s second term.
Snip.
Even on a logarithmic scale — on a linear scale, the graph is boring, because everything but Twitter would pretty much just be a flat line — the gulf between X and the other platforms is clear. And since the election, Bluesky has lost ground. More precise data based on the number of unique “likers”, “posters” and “followers” at Bluesky tracks a similar curve, with an initial peak around the election and a secondary peak after Trump’s inauguration but persistent erosion since then. The number of unique posters at Bluesky peaked at just under 1.5 million on Nov. 18, 2024 but has since fallen to an average of about 660,000 on weekdays and 600,000 on weekends: in other words, a drop of more than half.
The decline in Bluesky’s number of unique daily followers is even more substantial. They topped out at 3.1 million on Nov. 18 last year, but are now just under 400,000 per day: almost a tenfold decline. So while a dedicated troupe of Bluesky regulars are still skeeting up a storm, they’re gaining less and less traction, preaching only to the converted.
Snip.
Bluesky was initially popular with Twitter refugees who disliked Musk’s takeover of the platform, some of whom proclaimed that Elon had unleashed the “gates of hell” by restoring banned accounts or predicted that the platform would implode due to a shortage of engineering talent. I suppose I have no problem with this; ironically, the first post in Silver Bulletin history is entitled “In case Twitter goes to zero”. (I wanted a hedge in case it did, although if we’re being honest, I also had one eye out the door as ABC News was beginning to dismantle FiveThirtyEight.) However, this also self-selected for a certain type of user, adherents of an attitude that I call “Blueskyism”.
Blueskyism should not be mistaken for general left-of-center political views. Google search traffic for Bluesky over the past year is highly correlated with Kamala Harris’s vote share, but has some other skews: controlling for the Harris vote, it’s (statistically) significantly higher in states with a large white population and where the percentage of people with advanced degrees is higher. Bluesky is disproportionately popular in D.C., but also in crunchy white states like Vermont and Oregon. Search traffic for Twitter/X over the same period shows the same bias toward highly educated states, but less toward Harris voters4 and actually an inverse correlation with the white population share. (X gets more search traffic in more diverse states.)
Demographics alone only go so far in explaining Blueskyism, however. It’s not a political movement so much as a tribal affiliation, a niche set of attitudes and style of discursive norms that almost seem designed in a lab to be as unappealing as possible to anyone outside the clique.
Emphasis added. Snip.
Some of the most annoying people on the platform have exited for Bluesky.
As compared to other people with a similar level of public prominence — so not heads-of-state or celebrities or NFL quarterbacks — I was a “trending topic” on Twitter as often as just about anyone for a period from roughly 2018-2021. Matt Yglesias and Maggie Haberman also come to mind as other people who share this particular “honor”, which is not a welcome one: it means you’re the main character of the day, the person that other people have decided to dogpile upon.
There’s still some of this. If you tweet about election-related stuff, there is a pervasive tendency to “shoot the messenger” from partisans when the polls aren’t going their way. But much less than there once was: no more of the dogpiles for exceptionally strange reasons that I couldn’t even explain to my IRL friends.
And that’s because this behavior — I guess you could call it harassment but I’m a big boy and I can take it — consistently came from a relatively narrow group of power users, birds of a feather who flocked together, people who could demonstrate their fidelity to the group by picking on the main character. On Bluesky, exactly the same people — and I do mean exactly — attack exactly the same perpetual enemies, but to roughly 1/60th the size of the audience.
So I feel freer using Twitter these days for jokes, memes, and tongue-in-cheek ideas that aren’t meant to be taken entirely seriously, intended to be read as though they’re written in comic sans.
Snip.
What really matters in elections is simply being popular and winning over new converts. Blueskyism, with its intolerance for dissent, is the opposite of that.
Because, yes, while this is personal for me, annoyingness matters in politics.
Snip.
The three essential characteristics of Blueskyism.
The first essential characteristic: Smalltentism
Aggressive policing of dissent, particularly of people “just outside the circle” who might have broader credibility on the center-left. Censoriousness, often taking the form of moral micropanics that designate a rotating cast of opponents as the main characters of the day. Self-reinforcing belief in the righteousness of the clique, and conflation of its values with broader public sentiment among “the base”.
A healthy political movement, you’d think, would welcome people who agree with them on 70 percent of issues, particularly if it sees Trump as an existential threat to democracy and wants a broad coalition against him. Blueskyists do literally almost the exact opposite: their biggest enemies are people on the center-left like me and Yglesias and Ezra Klein. Or center-left media institutions like the New York Times, which are often viewed as more problematic than Fox News.
This aggressive policing of boundaries might at least have been tactically smart during the miraculous Blue Period when Twitter was afflicted with Blueskyism. Yglesias, say, is followed by a lot more Democratic staffers than Ben Shapiro or some actual conservative is.
But now that Blueskyism is losing the battle of ideas, it just draws the tent narrower and ensures that it will remain obscure. There’s nothing more Blueskyist than this, literally creating a “list of shame” of Bluesky posters who remain active on Twitter.
And sometimes, Blueskyists even make violent threats toward people who disagree with them. For instance, the journalist Billy Binion says he recently “logged onto Bluesky to find thousands of people screaming at me, many of whom were telling me to kill myself” after having posted that “billionaires should exist”. There’s some of that on every social media platform, unfortunately, and I’m not going to make assertions about the relative frequency on Bluesky without taking some more comprehensive approach to the question. It certainly shouldn’t have a reputation for civil discourse, however, and this may help to explain the high rate of exits from the platform.
The second essential characteristic: Credentialism
Appeals to authority, particularly academic authority. Centering of the suitability of the speaker based on his or her credentials and/or identity characteristics (standpoint epistemology) as opposed to the strength of his or her arguments, accompanied by the implicit presumption to claim to be speaking on behalf of the entire identity group.
Although Blueskyism is small, its practitioners mostly consist of people within the professional-managerial class: (over)educated blue-state liberals, perhaps people who have drawn the short straw of elite overproduction. You can see that in the demographic data, or in the attitude site management takes: the platform literally just banned people from Mississippi because of a dispute over age verification.
And Bluesky has become relatively popular among academics, which I regard as a problem on various levels. The Democratic Party has already forgotten how to talk to large groups of voters like young men, who have become considerably less likely to complete college than young women. Meanwhile, the experts have made a lot of mistakes, and sometimes the reason is because they’ve become self-serving in pursuit of social media validation or blinded by political partisanship. Increasingly often, I’ll see academics engage in incredibly sloppy argumentation and this seems to be correlated with recent exposure to Bluesky. Because Bluesky is so small, it has a highly specific signature. It’s like if you have some toxic persona on the periphery of your friend group; someone starts speaking in a particular way that you just know they recently hung out with George or Gina.
While academic credentials are one way to gain credibility under Blueskyism, they aren’t the only one. Even though the Google search data suggests that the platform is disproportionately white, an alternative is to claim to speak on behalf of a disadvantaged group. I swear to God, I’m not trying to make this about “wokeness” but there is overlap there.
Perhaps the most prominent example of Blueskyism creeping into real life is when a group of left-leaning public health professionals, who often took a bullying approach during Twitter’s Blue Period, went out of their way to rationalize mass protests after George Floyd was murdered in 2020. Personally, I think it was perfectly fine to join in on these protests; political expression is important (and these protests were usually outdoors and masked). But I also think a lot of other things, like sending your children to school or visiting your dying relatives in the hospital, would have risen to this threshold also, and this group specifically used their credentials to endorse the Floyd protests after having campaigned for those other activities to be prohibited.
Indeed, this controversy recently resurfaced on Bluesky. After Brian Schatz, the Democratic senator from Hawaii, wrote sympathetically in response to a Sean Trende tweet that recalled the hypocrisy of endorsing the protests, he and other “Dem elected/staff/consultants” were blamed on the platform for being “awash in right-wing brainrot.”
The third essential characteristic: Catastrophism
Humorless, scoldy neuroticism, often rationalized by the view that one must be on “war footing” because the world is self-evidently in crisis. Sublimation of personal anxiety as a substitute for political activism or material solutions to the crisis, with expressions of weariness and pessimism signaling virtue and/or savviness.
Although the first two characteristics already limit the appeal of Blueskyism, this makes it worse. Even people who might otherwise be sympathetic to Bluesky have noticed how impossible it is to get away with a joke on the platform, one of the things that X sometimes13 still has going for it. The Bernie-era, Chapo Trap House strain of left-wing discourse also at least had a caustic if sometimes juvenile humor streak. Blueskyism does not.
Instead, the prevailing Blueskyist attitude is often something like this — that we’re in the midst of a “late stage capitalist hellscape” and that you have to be “delusional” to have any amount of hope or optimism”.
Most people outside of Bluesky don’t think like this. Although literally almost zero Democrats are happy with the state of the country, overwhelming majorities of Americans are happy with how their personal lives are going and are able to compartmentalize politics away or recognize that other things matter in life, too.
Conclusion: “A subculture like Blueskyism that sees depression as a rational and even virtuous response is going to select for a lot of miserable people. And misery likes company. So the Blueskyists gather in a corner, exchanging tales of woe, while the rest of us slink away.”
Though there is the usual Silver hemming, hawing and sifting things into ever-finer categories (not to mention his willful denial that “wokeness” is an actual thing, despite so carefully delineating some of its most central characteristics, and his dismissal of the Twitter Files), it’s still worth reading the whole thing. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Rich Hamas honchos throught they could hang out safe in Qatar while their footsoldiers died in Gaza. Wrong.
Israel carried out a strike on senior Hamas leaders in Qatar’s capital, Doha, on Tuesday afternoon.
Qatar quickly accused Israel of “reckless” behaviour and breaking international law after the attack on a residential premises in the city.
The Israel Defense Forces claimed to have targeted those “directly responsible for the brutal October 7 massacre”.
Snip.
According to the Israeli military, it conducted a “precise strike” targeted at Hamas senior leaders in Qatar using “precise munitions”.
Israeli media says the operation involved 15 Israeli fighter jets, firing 10 munitions against a single target.
Qatar has hosted Hamas’s political bureau since 2012 and has played a key role in facilitating indirect negotiations between the group and Israel since the 7 October attacks.
Hamas said members of the group’s negotiating delegation in Doha were targeted but survived the strike. However Hamas said six others, including a Qatari security official, were killed.
According to Hamas, those killed were:
Humam Al-Hayya (Abu Yahya) – son of chief negotiator al-Hayya
Jihad Labad (Abu Bilal) – director of al-Hayya’s office
Abdullah Abdul Wahid (Abu Khalil)
Moamen Hassouna (Abu Omar)
Ahmed Al-Mamluk (Abu Malik)
Corporal Badr Saad Mohammed Al-Humaidi – Qatari internal security forces
“Trump is enjoying his highest approval rating of either term right now according to a DailyMail/J.L. Partners poll. He’s sitting at a solid 55% approval rating.”
Once again, the Supreme Court has stepped in to prevent a rogue district judge from hamstringing the executive branch in performing core executive functions under Donald Trump. And once again, the Court’s conservative majority has dispatched this order without explanation, over an angry and overwrought dissent from the Court’s liberals. This time, however, Justice Brett Kavanaugh stepped up to explain what was going on.
The Court’s order this morning in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo stayed an August 1 order by district judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong-
That name sounds like it came out of a Monty Python skit.
-of the Central District of California, a Biden appointee and former Obama Justice Department official. The order will thus have no effect unless and until the Ninth Circuit rules in the case — perhaps only a brief reprieve, given that the Ninth Circuit previously declined to stay Judge Frimpong’s initial temporary restraining order in the case.
The crux of the case is whether the government may stop individuals in Los Angeles on suspicion of being illegal immigrants on the basis of four factors: “(i) presence at particular locations such as bus stops, car washes, day laborer pickup sites, agricultural sites, and the like; (ii) the type of work one does; (iii) speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent; and (iv) apparent race or ethnicity.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent noted that the order attempted to enjoin Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) only from stops based solely on those four criteria, but as Kavanaugh noted, there are inherent problems in the judiciary trying to prospectively micromanage law enforcement in such fashion: “Even if the Government had a policy of making stops based on the factors prohibited by the District Court, immigration officers might not rely only on those factors if and when they stop [the lawsuit’s named] plaintiffs in the future,” and “the District Court’s injunction threatens contempt sanctions against immigration officers who make brief investigative stops later found by the court to violate the injunction. The prospect of such after-the-fact judicial second-guessing and contempt proceedings will inevitably chill lawful immigration enforcement efforts. . . . Judges are not appointed to make those policy calls.” As Kavanaugh added, particular plaintiffs do not have standing to enjoin the government in advance from stops that may or may not involve them and may or may not, depending on the circumstances, violate the Fourth Amendment.
The Department of Homeland Security launched Operation Midway Blitz on Monday to combat the influx of illegal immigration Chicago has seen under Democratic Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.
DHS said that the program was created in honor of Katie Abraham, a college student who was struck and killed by a Guatemalan national in a drunk driving hit-and-run accident in Illinois.
“DHS is launching Operation Midway Blitz in honor of Katie Abraham who was killed in Illinois by a criminal illegal alien who should have never been in our country. This operation will target the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens in Chicago,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “For years, Governor Pritzker and his fellow sanctuary politicians released Tren de Aragua gang members, rapists, kidnappers, and drug traffickers on Chicago’s streets — putting American lives at risk and making Chicago a magnet for criminals.”
During Joe Biden’s term, an estimated 233,000 unaccompanied children crossed the border and were completely lost.
The Trump admin has now found 22,638 of these children.
But many of them have suffered unbelievable horrors:
John Fabbricatore, HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement senior advisor, said to Fox News:
We found children who have been raped. We’re talking about debt bondage, where children are being made to work off debt, trafficking debt. We’re talking about children that were brought into situations and then treated like sexual slaves.
So far, 27 of the children Biden lost have been found dead, often from murder or drug overdose.
Children are in horrific environments, just environments that they should not be in, where the sponsor is a heroin dealer and that child winds up dying of a heroin overdose.
Iryna Zarutska was a 23-year-old Ukrainian who fled the war in her country for Charlotte, North Carolina.
Over the weekend, police released video of her being stabbed in the neck by a violent career criminal.
Iryna got on the train, sat down, and immediately went “condition white” (looking at her phone without paying attention to her surroundings).
Let this be a reminder that, if you’re in public, you need situational awareness at all times.
In the blink of an eye, her throat was slashed and she was bleeding out over the floor of the train.
Despite the horror of the crime, the media has remained ostensibly quiet.
The lack of any mention whatsoever of Iryna Zarutska’s murder despite her being a Ukrainian refugee reminds me of USAID’s call for media organizations to “collaborate” and “agree policies on strategic silence.” https://t.co/AkH4dxxrjtpic.twitter.com/nK6NbqvV4j
The optics are incredibly awful for the entire Democratic Party machine.
The brutal killing of Iryna Zarutska (Ukrainian refugee) on a commuter train in North Carolina highlights not only the willingness of leftist corporate media to cover up news stories that jeopardize their woke narratives but also the broader failure of so-called criminal justice reform, which appears to have shockingly backfired and become a major public safety threat. Adding to the mounting outrage, a leftist magistrate judge released the schizophrenic monster on cashless bail (before he killed Zarutska) – another failure point. And then there’s this: far-left nonprofits accelerated the push for disastrous criminal justice reforms.
It’s now widely known that Decarlos Brown Jr., 34, Zarutska’s killer, had been previously arrested 14 times in North Carolina for crimes ranging from assault to firearms possession, and whose own mother admitted he was schizophrenic and should never have been allowed back on the streets, was recently released on cashless bail (before he killed Zarutska) by a progressive magistrate judge despite a two-decade violent crime spree.
But the failures don’t stop with local leftist politicians and rogue progressive judges (or magistrate judges) who embrace woke and enabled criminal justice reform from hell. They extend much deeper – into the shadowy world of the dark-money-funded nonprofit industrial complex, which poured millions of dollars into Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, to push for “reducing the jail population.”
“Another factor in the death of Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte’s light rail–the left-wing MacArthur Foundation giving Mecklenburg county a $3.3 million grant to reduce the jail population. Specifically as part of racial equity aims,” Daily Wire’s Megan Basham wrote on X.
Basham noted, “Like Soros’ Open Society, the MacArthur Foundation incentivizes local municipalities to make residents less safe by leaving threats like Decarlos Brown on the streets.”
[Yordanis] Cobos-Martinez has a prior criminal history of:
False imprisonment in CA (unknown disposition)
Indecency with a child in Texas (dismissed)
Grand theft of vehicle in Florida (dismissed)
Carjacking & false imprisonment in CA (acquitted on carjacking, convicted of false imprisonment).
Disturbing surveillance video shows Cobos-Martinez allegedly kicking and picking up the victim’s severed head in the motel parking lot as it drips blood…
“Russian Oil Tanker in Primorsk Set on Fire by Drones & Smolensk Oil Depot Hit.” Primorsk is a good 1,000km from the Ukrainian border, up near Finland.
The Trump administration announced Wednesday that an unprecedented law enforcement operation has busted a Chinese-based fentanyl drug and money laundering conspiracy, resulting in charges against 22 Chinese nationals, four Chinese pharmaceutical companies and three U.S. citizens.
FBI Director Kash Patel described Operation Box Cutter as a “first-of-its-kind” law enforcement action targeting the threat posed to the American public by China-manufactured precursor chemicals used in the production of fentanyl.
“We’re done playing whack-a-mole,” he said during a press conference in Cincinnati, Ohio.
“We didn’t arrest a couple of people. We charged an enterprise-wide system in mainland China to include dozens of individuals and banks and companies that are responsible for making these lethal precursors and shipping them here.”
The Dayton, Ohio, grand jury five-count indictment unsealed Wednesday focuses on a Tipp City, Ohio, resident, 39-year-old Eric Michael Payne.
At this rate, with President Donald Trump being one of the most decisive presidents in history, statistics show that his endorsement could undoubtedly lead a candidate to victory.
As Ian Vallencillo, commissioner of Sweetwater, Florida, told the Washington Examiner, Trump is one of “the most popular political figures,” stating that voters “overwhelmingly support Trump’s picks.”
At this rate, with President Donald Trump being one of the most decisive presidents in history, statistics show that his endorsement could undoubtedly lead a candidate to victory.
As Ian Vallencillo, commissioner of Sweetwater, Florida, told the Washington Examiner, Trump is one of “the most popular political figures,” stating that voters “overwhelmingly support Trump’s picks.”
The commissioner is right.
Candidates endorsed by Trump have lost, but very rarely. Former Republican North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson conceded his gubernatorial election against an incumbent after receiving Trump’s approval, partly over a scandal that engulfed the news cycle days before the election.
Similarly, former presidential candidate and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) lost his reelection bid, over years of controversy, anti-Trump skepticism, and a failure to get the Republican Party in the White House in 2012.
During the 2024 federal and gubernatorial election cycles, Trump endorsed 306 candidates. Eighty-nine percent of those candidates now occupy the office they ran for. In the 2022 election cycle, Trump endorsed 195 candidates, 83% of whom were sworn in to office a few months later.
One of those key endorsements includes the key race of Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA), who unseated a longtime incumbent, former Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, by a 0.5% margin.
Similarly, in the same election cycle, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) won his Senate race against former Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, who had been in office since 2007.
The year before that, after former California GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy resigned from Congress in 2023 following a motion for him to step down as speaker of the House from a Trump-endorsed representative, California Assemblyman Vince Fong was elected soon after receiving the nod from the president.
Similarly, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), who was challenged by a local Democratic advocate, won his third term soon after Trump endorsed him.
The latest scandal involves a web of shell companies, family members on mysterious payrolls, and taxpayer money that somehow found its way into campaign coffers. Multiple federal agencies are now investigating what appears to be a deliberate scheme to circumvent campaign finance laws through a maze of LLCs and nonprofits. The numbers are staggering: millions in taxpayer funds allegedly embezzled, hundreds of thousands in unreported campaign contributions, and a trail of financial breadcrumbs leading through family businesses.
The politician at the center of this storm? Democratic Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida.
Cherfilus-McCormick had won her seat after campaigning against the corruption of her predecessor, Alcee Hastings.
Today, Cherfilus-McCormick finds herself drowning in exactly the kind of investigations she once condemned. The Federal Election Commission has launched a formal probe into her campaign’s alleged violations, while the Office of Congressional Ethics has found “probable cause” that she accepted illegal campaign contributions. The schemes are breathtaking in their audacity: her husband and sister-in-law running an LLC that funneled $725,000 through a nonprofit that then paid her campaign vendors. A political consultant with direct access to these funds, making payments on her behalf while she pretended not to know.
But here’s where my blood really starts to boil. Before entering Congress, Cherfilus-McCormick was CEO of Trinity Health Care Services, a family company that received a $5 million “overpayment” from Florida’s emergency services department – supposedly due to a misplaced decimal point. Instead of immediately returning the taxpayer money, investigators allege she began moving it between family businesses, including companies where she held major stakes. The state had to sue to get its money back.
As expected. “James Talarico Launches Democrat Bid for U.S. Senate. Talarico has positioned himself as one of the more left-wing voices in the Texas Legislature.”
Remember how Adam Carolla said the Palisades fire would used as an excuse for a land grab by the Democrats running Los Angeles and California? Guess what? “Iconic Malibu restaurant is told it can’t rebuild after Palisades Fire.”
An Alpha News reporter participated in a ride-along with ICE agents during the arrest. Wilson Tindi, a Kenya native, pled guilty to sexually assaulting a sleeping woman in Minneapolis in 2014 after breaking into her home. A judge ordered Tindi to be deported, but a federal judge later overturned this ruling. ICE released him after 18 months.
After his release, Tindi became a chief audit officer at Minnesota’s education department. He was later fired after his past became known, raising questions about how he was ever hired in the first place.
Among the most high-profile and controversial legislation passed was a handful of social issue bills — in particular, one establishing civil cause of action against chemical abortion pill providers, and another separating publicly-funded private spaces by biological sex. The former came with its fair share of backdoor negotiations and amendments before it was successfully carried through both chambers, as was the case for multiple priorities of Abbott’s.
One issue which faced an untimely end in the Legislature was the attempted regulation of hemp-derived THC products. Ultimately, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, House Speaker Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock), and Abbott were unable to reach an agreement on Wednesday.
Collateral damage from the death of print magazines. “Publishers Clearing House Winners Say They Are No Longer Receiving Their Lifetime Payments.”
It seems that some leftwing Texas school nurses are practicing malicious compliance.
Texas Education Agency Updates First Aid Guidelines After Controversy Over Withheld Medical Care
The TEA updated their guidance to allow schools to provide “first aid” without parental consent.
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has released updated guidelines for how Texas public schools should approach the implementation of Senate Bill (SB) 12, known as the “Parent Bill of Rights,” after recent reports of school nurses not providing first aid to students.
One aspect of SB 12 that caused distress and confusion among lawmakers, parents, and schools alike is the requirement for school districts to receive documentation of notice and consent from parents for their child to receive “medical, psychiatric, and psychological treatment.”
State Rep. Jeff Leach (R-Allen) posted a letter on social media he had sent to TEA Commissioner Mike Morath last week regarding “concerns with the implementation” of SB 12 after reports of how “some school districts are taking an ‘all or nothing’ approach” to the new policy requirements, which has resulted in “band-aids” and “ice packs” being withheld from children.
Following the publication of the letter, which was also signed by the bill author state Sen. Brandon Creighton (R-Conroe), reports of children not being treated for certain “general care” services began being made public.
“After a thorough review was conducted of the video recordings of the statements, it became clear to me that their actions amounted to serious professional and personal misconduct,” Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse stated late Wednesday. “Conduct that advocates for inciting violence is directly contrary to the values of Texas State University. I cannot and will not tolerate such behavior.”
“As a result, I have determined that their actions are incompatible with their responsibilities as a faculty member at Texas State University,” Damphousse continued. “Effective immediately, their employment with Texas State University has been terminated.”
Damphousse was referring to Tom Alter, who was previously an associate professor of history at Texas State.
Alter had been exposed making comments calling for the overthrow of the U.S. government.
The European Commission has suffered a major defeat in court over its plans to make large tech platforms pay it to enforce the Digital Services Act.
Meta and ByteDance’s TikTok took the European Commission to court after it presented them with a “supervisory fee” equal to 0.05 per cent of their yearly global net income. The bill was to cover the EU executive’s expenses in monitoring their compliance with the Digital Services Act.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) gives the European Commission oversight of very large online platforms and search engines—ones with more than 45 million EU users a year. To fund this oversight, the Commission has said it will charge these providers an annual fee, based on their average monthly users.
The Commission adopted rules saying how it would set these fees on 2 March 2023. The next month, on 25 April, it classified Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok as very large platforms. That November, it finalised the 2023 fees for each.
In two decisions 10 September, the Court of Justice of the EU determined the Commission’s supervisory fees on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok were void for procedural grounds.
To set the 2023 fees, the Commission decided to calculate each platform’s average monthly users using a methodology based on third-party data it attached to each decision.
However, the Court ruled that this methodology for calculating fees should have been established through a delegated act–a process which involves the European Parliament and Council.
The judges said it was incorrect for the European Commission to determine the fees using implementing decisions it devised on its own authority alone.
Jay Leno’s star power wasn’t enough to persuade a California legislative committee to pass a measure to allow owners of classic cars like him to be exempted from the state’s rigorous smog-check requirements.
The Assembly Appropriations Committee on Friday blocked Bakersfield Republican Sen. Shannon Grove’s Senate Bill 712 from advancing for a full vote. Leno had testified in support of the measure in Sacramento earlier this year.
The committee’s members and its powerful Democratic chairperson, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks of Oakland, did not provide a reason for killing the bill during Friday’s hearing, which quickly and with little fanfare announced the fate of 260 other bills that had been placed on the committee’s so-called “suspense file.” Seventy other bills also were killed without explanation.
The Senate and Assembly’s appropriations committees, which both met Friday and rejected hundreds of bills, are supposed to be the gatekeepers for bills proposing to spend taxpayer money. But the committees’ suspense files are where hundreds of politically touchy bills die quietly each year with only a few insiders knowing the real reasons.
Random meme stolen from Facebook:
So I don’t think I’ll be watching all of the Joe Rogan podcasts with Carrot Top or Charlie Sheen, but I suspect I’ll be watching snippets from them, and felt I should make you aware of their existence…
For some reason, all three Top Gear/Grand Tour presents have decided they need to come out with their own gin.
Ten musical pieces you know, but not the names of. I already knew a good number, but a few were new, and a couple of others I didn’t know under their original language name.
Every year the timeless adage to “Never bring a knife to a gun fight” gets bandied about, and every year at least one dumbass does just that.
Today’s dumbass is Tikila Walker, AKA Florida Woman.
The incident happened on August 15 in Gulf County, Florida. Police in Port St. Joe responded to a call from a repo driver at 3:42 p.m. who said 41-year-old Tikila Walker had fled while he was trying to repossess her white Ford Fusion for failure to make payments.
Police located Walker, but she fled, getting involved in a hit-and-run at 4:19 p.m. The other driver didn’t press charges against Walker, but the repo driver caught up and police had to deescalate an argument between the two while Walker remained in her car.
Walker drove away to escape the repo man, but at 5:52 p.m., she was involved in another hit-and-run at a convenience store after the repo man had tried to box her in.
At 6:01 p.m., police located her again. She refused to get out of the vehicle after police tried once again to deescalate the situation. She then charged at them with a knife.
And yes, there’s video.
The money shot comes precisely 3 minutes in.
Keep in mind, this is after one of them has already tased her seven times.
She survived and was arrested after treatment at the hospital.
This is such a textbook justified shooting they’ll probably teach it in law courses next year.
If you are surrounded by three cops, one of whom has already tased you, and you find yourself thinking “I should grab this knife and charge one them,” this is the precise moment when you should stop, reflect on the possibility that you’re making a really bad decision, and reconsider your life choices.
The left doubles down on crazy, Trump gets creative in cutting more foreign aid, we start kicking illegal aliens out of public housing, Google skates on monopoly remedies, more Russian refineries go boom, Ryan George examines ghost jobs, and the crazy story behind a classic American film.
From the indigenous LGBT woman’s land acknowledgement that opened the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting in Minneapolis to reaffirming the party’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, Democrats sent a clear signal to Americans: Despite last year’s electoral drubbing and the dismal polling that has followed, they have no intention of recalibrating.
One speaker told attendees that migrant crime and carjackings “don’t matter to that many Americans.” She sees President Donald Trump’s crackdown on crime as a “power grab” and a “political liability.”
Remarks from DNC Chairman Ken Martin showed they’ve learned nothing from their defeat or their time in the wilderness. “I’m sick and tired of this Democratic Party bringing a pencil to a knife fight,” he said. “We cannot be the only party that plays by the rules anymore. We’ve got to stand up and fight. We’re not going to have a hand tied behind our back anymore.”
Does Martin even hear himself?
After an alleged transgender person opened fire during a worship service at a Minneapolis Catholic School on the third day of the meeting, killing at least two children and wounding 17 other people, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey made a remarkable statement to reporters: “I have heard about a whole lot of hate that’s being directed at our trans community. Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community, or any other community out there, has lost their sense of common humanity.”
The reality is that Democrats have been ignoring the rules since Trump declared his candidacy in 2015. After failing to prevent his victory, they sought to undermine his presidency. They used lawfare to try to jail and bankrupt him, and even tried to remove his name from the ballot in several states. It turned out the public noticed, and a majority of voters rejected those tactics at the ballot box.
Dan Turrentine, cohost of the 2WAY Network podcast The Morning Meeting, once worked for the DNC. He attended the first day of the summer meeting and later told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham that his party “keep[s] doing the same thing over and over again,” which he notes is “the definition of insanity. And as a Democrat, it’s maddening that we’re still not serious.”
“We haven’t lost 4.5 million voters, nor is our brand at a historic low, because we don’t fight hard enough,” he told Ingraham. “It’s because we remain completely culturally disconnected and we have absolutely no agenda.”
He concluded, “We are not in good shape.”
Turrentine was citing a recent analysis from the New York Times showing that, over a four-year span, Democrats lost 2.1 million registered voters while Republicans gained 2.4 million. Multiple polls now suggest the party’s approval rating is in free fall, and its policies are increasingly out of step with everyday Americans.
But rather than course-correct, Democrats appear to be doubling down, clinging to a sense of moral virtue while defending principles most Americans reject. The result is a party that no longer even pretends to represent the working-class voters it once championed. Instead, it now serves a narrow circle of progressive elites concentrated in coastal cities and urban enclaves.
Without the sword of Damocles hanging over Trump’s head in the form of a weaponized Department of Justice, an aggressive FBI, and the ever-leaking Mueller team, as was the case during his first term, Democrats now find themselves operating from a position of weakness. Unable to rein him in, aside from occasional blows delivered by district court judges, Trump now sits firmly in the catbird seat.
President Donald Trump on Aug. 28 proposed the cancellation of $4.9 billion in appropriated funds for foreign aid spending, using a maneuver that could effectively bypass the congressional approval process normally required to rescind the funds.
The funds were allocated to the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development—which is in the process of being closed by the Trump administration—during the Fiscal Year 2025 appropriations process.
Under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, the government must make a rescission request to Congress, which then has 45 days to approve the cancellation of appropriated funds. A “pocket rescission,” however, refers to such requests made within 45 days of the end of the fiscal year, which is Sept. 30. In these cases, the funds are withheld during the 45-day congressional review period, and if Congress doesn’t act before the fiscal year ends, the funds expire.
“Last night, President Trump cancelled $4.9 billion in America Last foreign aid using a pocket rescission,” the Office of Management and Budget, a cabinet-level agency in the Executive Office of the President, wrote on X on Aug. 29.
Pocket rescissions are uncommon, and the last one attempted was in 1983, when President Ronald Reagan sought to cut $2 million appropriated to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Trump, during his second term, has successfully requested some rescissions from Congress. A rescissions bill canceling $9.4 billion in funding for foreign aid and public broadcasters was approved by Congress in July.
Rescission requests, when presented to Congress, may be enacted through legislation with simple majorities voting in favor in both houses, meaning that the minority has no leverage to stop or alter the process. Democrats in Congress, who are the minority in both houses, have thus protested against Trump’s rescissions, but often to no avail.
For all that stocks are soaring, we’re still feeling the effects of the Biden Recession. “Putrid Payrolls: Job Growth Collapses To Just 22K, Unemp Rate Rises To 4.3% Putting 50bps Rate Cut In Play.”
Ahead of today’s jobs report, consensus was that a print between 40K and 100K is largely priced in and greenlighting a 25bps rate cut by the Fed in two weeks, and that we would need a real outlier number for the Fed to either cut 50bps… or not hike. Well, we got a real outlier when moments ago the BLS reported that in August the US added only 22K jobs, a big drop from the upward revised 79K (from 73K previously) but more importantly June was revised from 27K to -13K, ushering in the first negative jobs print since 2020.
The systemic falsification of economic data to boost Biden has left the economy in a much bigger hole than most people realize.
No longer will illegal aliens be able to leave citizenship boxes blank or take advantage of HUD-funded housing, riding the coattails of hardworking American citizens,” [Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott] Turner wrote.
The secretary stressed that weak enforcement under previous administrations left thousands of American families on waiting lists.
“Currently, HUD only serves one out of four eligible families due, in part, to the lack of enforcement of prohibition against federally funded assistance to illegal aliens,” Turner continued.
HUD warned that noncompliance could lead to an “examination” of federal funding. Turner told Fox News’ Charles Hurt on Jesse Watters Primetime that Washington, D.C., has already been placed on notice and that more than 3,000 other public housing authorities will face the same requirements.
“American citizens will be prioritized,” Turner said.
No one should come to America to go on welfare, period. So this is a good start, but not as good as completely eliminating subsidized housing entirely.
Anger is boiling over in the UK pressure cooker, and it is hard to see anybody in power finding the courage to use the steam release valve before it explodes. On the issue of immigration, it now boils down to the state vs its citizens.
What began as a flag protest–English people putting up the St George’s flag as an act of defiance against government indifference to their anger–has spread to Wales and Scotland. Larger and larger crowds are gathering, and confrontations with police are becoming common.
It seems that Keir Starmer’s Labour government would rather risk actual outright revolt that deport unassimiliated Muslim rapists. The real question is why. (Hat tip: Irons in the Fire.)
“Trump Administration Warns 40 States To Remove ‘Gender Ideology’ From Sex Education Or Lose $81 Million.” If the purpose of sex education is to prevent out-of-wedlock births, it doesn’t seem to have been a rousing success. Maybe schools should eliminate it altogether.
Today, the decade-long campaign to stop big tech from dominating our society took a significant step backwards, as the judge hearing the search case against Google, Amit Mehta, chose not to meaningfully constrain the firm’s illegal behavior. And to engage in such deferential behavior, he openly ignored Supreme Court precedent.
You don’t have to take it from me. It’s Mehta who last year found Google to have violated the law. “Google is a monopolist,” he wrote, “and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.” It’s also Mehta who found the Supreme Court mandated what he called the “remedial objective” in monopolization cases, to “terminate the illegal monopoly.” But, Mehta wrote, “remedies designed to eliminate the defendant’s monopoly—i.e., structural remedies—are inappropriate in this case.”
So there we go. Mehta understood the law mandates he terminate Google’s monopoly, but he just decided against doing so.
Snip.
So what’s Mehta’s actual remedy? To understand that, we have look at the root of Google’s monopoly, as Mehta saw it. I characterized the case as follows, that the search giant had “bought up all the shelf space for search engines, aka paid Apple and browsers like Mozilla to be the default search provider instead of any of its rivals. It created Chrome so it could control that channel of distribution, and it bought Android for the same reason.” The goal of the remedy that the Antitrust Division sought was to terminate that monopoly, confiscate the fruits of its illegal behavior, and make sure monopolization would not recur. Here’s what I noted the DOJ sought:
The DOJ asked to remove the defaults that automatically place Google as the search choice for most browsers, an end to search-related payments, a spinoff of the Chrome browser which was itself a big search access point, as well as regulation of the mobile operating system Android. It also asked for syndication of Google’s search results and data to approved rivals, which is a way of forcing Google to not enjoy the illegal “fruits” of its monopoly by offering rivals some access to the secret sauce.
There were other requests, but those were the big ones. So what did the judge do? Mehta rejected both a Chrome spinoff and regulation of Android, since that’s a structural separation and he got nervous about that. But more insanely, he didn’t even say that Google had to stop paying Apple $20B+ a year to be the default search engine, it just had to limit such default payment agreements to one year terms. Mehta found that Google was doing illegal things to maintain its monopoly, but he didn’t force the company to stop doing those illegal things.
Why not? Well, he said that new companies like OpenAI had emerged to potentially challenge Google, and he didn’t want to, and I’m not kidding, hinder Google’s ability to compete with them. (“It also weighs in favor of “caution” before disadvantaging Google in this highly competitive space.”).
Beyond that, Mehta wrote that “cutting off payments from Google almost certainly will impose substantial—in some cases, crippling— downstream harms to distribution partners, related markets, and consumers, which counsels against a broad payment ban.” Here he’s talking about… Apple. Yes there are others, but Mehta could have blocked the contract with Apple, and let the other payments continue. But he didn’t. Mehta even wrote that if he restores competition in search, it could hurt Apple’s ability to invest in making phones better. It is quite problematic for a judge to refuse to break an illegal monopoly on the premise that an adjacent non-relevant market might be harmed. I can’t emphasize how crazy that is, it’s like, as my colleague Nidhi Hegde stated, finding someone guilty for bank robbery and then sentencing him to write a thank you note.
Google has been abusing it’s monopoly position for a long time now, and deserves much harsher than a slap on the wrist. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Chalk up a win for the First Amendment. “California’s ‘Deepfake’ Election Ad Ban Is Unconstitutional, Federal Court Rules. ‘Just as the government may not dictate the canon of comedy, California cannot pre-emptively sterilize political content.'”
“St. Louis cop-killer released on bond after paying only $5,000…Accused of shooting and killing an off-duty campus police officer in 2008, Brandon Levy was inexplicably allowed to walk after being required to pay only 10% of a $50,000 bond set by the court.” Thanks a lot, Associate Circuit Judge Michael Colona. I know you’ll be shocked to learn he’s a Democrat.
On that same theme: “Following reports that Texas was not complying with a presidential executive order requiring English proficiency for commercial truck drivers, Gov. Greg Abbott has directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to enforce the requirement for the safety of all drivers.”
Florida just ended all vaccine mandates. Mixed feelings. There is zero reason for children to be forced to take vaccines for Flu Manchu, but skipping polio vaccines is probably a mistake. Still, Florida is a laboratory for democracy. Nobody is forced to skip vaccines, now they merely have a choice. Let’s see if autism experiences a drop in Florida a decade hence…
They also hit the Ryazan oil refinery, again. “Ukraine has so far reduced about 20% of Russia’s refining capacity in the past month or so. This won’t add to that because this refinery was already offline. This is Ukraine doing its new tactic of just constantly hitting the refineries as often as possible to ensure that they remain offline.”
“Electromagnetic Weapon Destroys Drone Swarm In Seconds.” “Defense contractor Epirus quietly tested its latest electromagnetic weapon, Leonidas, against a swarm of 49 quadcopters, neutralizing them in seconds at Camp Atterbury, Indiana.” We previously talked about that system here.
“Pennsylvania Democrat County Commissioner Arrested In Massive Multi-State Drug Bust.” “Lehigh County Commissioner Zachary Cole-Borghi, a Democrat, was arrested at Bethlehem City Hall where he worked as an open records officer. The charges: possession of marijuana and possession with intent to deliver a pound of marijuana.” While you should definately move to a state where the devil’s cabbage is legal to do that sort of thing, the email teaser for this story (“Top Democrat Arrested in Massive Drug Bust”) did rather over-promise and under-deliver…
Ryan George tackles ghost jobs. Since I’m looking for a job (still), I can tell you that there are a lot of them out here…
Universal Music Group continues to attack Rick Beato…even to the point that they’re violating YouTube’s terms of service.
Looks like a clip job. “Kawhi Leonard reportedly paid $28 million for ‘no-show job’ with Clippers as way to get around salary cap, NBA investigating.”
The problem with so many gun control advocates is not their ignorance per se, as ignorance can be cured by study. The problem is their amazing proud ignorance, as if actually bothering to learn the basics of how the firearms they seek to ban operate would somehow sully the purity of their morally superior soul.
Such seems to be the case with Minneapolis’s Democrat mayor Jacob Frey: “Minneapolis Mayor Warns Of “Assault Rifles That Can Reel Off 30 Clips In Conjunction With A Magazine.”
MAYOR FREY: “We have these assault rifles that can reel off 30 clips, in conjunction with a magazine.” 🤡pic.twitter.com/tZePgzQMiY
If he had merely confused a clip with a magazine, one could understand, as they both feed rounds of ammunition to the gun, and sometimes you see that confusion in popular culture. But no magazine in the history of firearms ever let a gun fire “30 clips.”
One wonders whether Frey has trouble finding the carburetor on his Tesla.
This is probably the most embarrassing example of a gun grabber displaying ignorance since USA Today famously invented the “chainsaw bayonet” for AR-15s.
Ironically, this now exists.
The irony is that gun grabbers could easily avoid such excruciatingly stupid mistakes if they just spent a couple of hours at the local gun shop or shooting range familiarizing themselves with firearms basics. But no, their irrational hopolophobia seems to make them feel that guns are so evil that merely touching one would allow that evil to infect them.
And so they continue to display their amazing ignorance of firearms basics over and over again…
The Trump Administration guts two lefty slop buckets of graft, Israel lights up the Houthis big time, crazy tranny shooter might have been in satanic cult too crazy for the Church of Satan, Ukraine bombs the snot out of Russia’s oil infrastructure (again), Scotland and Germany continue to favor unassimilated Muslim immigrants over their own citizens, a secret Spinal Tap concert, and the full weight of Plano ISD comes down on a nefarious…a choir booster club?
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Another court win for Trump47. “Supreme Court Rules 5-4 That Trump Can Slash $783 Million In DEI Research Funding.”
The Trump administration is free to eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of research funding on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) following last week’s ruling by the United States Supreme Court.
In a 5-4 vote, the justices lifted an order from a federal court judge in Boston that blocked $783 million in cuts made by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on health research grants that were being used to advance DEI efforts as well as “gender ideology extremism.”
The Supreme Court was split on the 5-4 decision which marks another win for President Trump and clears the way for his administration to move forward with canceling hundreds of grants after U.S. District Judge William Young ordered the health-related grants restored in June.
Chief Justice John Roberts was among the dissenters in the high court’s decision and Justice Amy Coney Barrett voted with conservative majority to let the administration stop the grant funding.
Roberts and Barrett did land on the side of the dissent and allowed to stand a portion of the lower judge’s order that voided a number of NIH policies that targeted DEI programs at the direction of the White House.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick canceled an Biden administration agreement Monday to distribute billions of dollars for semiconductor research through a nonprofit set up and staffed by former political appointees, according to a letter obtained by The Post.
The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act provided for $11 billion in semiconductor research and development funding to be given out by the Commerce Department’s National Semiconductor Technology Center.
“Rather than establishing these operations within the Department, however, Biden Administration officials spent significant time, effort, and resources creating an unaccountable, outside entity–Natcast–to administer taxpayer funds,” Lutnick wrote Natcast CEO Deirdre Hanford.
Four days before Biden left office on Jan. 20, Lutnick noted, the Commerce Department agreed to set aside $7.4 billion in “advance payments” to Natcast after spending nearly two years setting it up and tapping administration officials, advisers and allies to fill out positions.
That arrangement both effectively removed the incoming Trump administration from being involved in the process and provided “virtually all” of Natcast’s funding — prompting incoming Departments of Justice and Commerce officials to take another look at the Sunnyvale, Calif., nonprofit.
“These actions do not just give the appearance of impropriety; they flout federal law,” Lutnick told Hanford, pointing out that no provisions in the CHIPS Act authorized an outside entity like Natcast to distribute semiconductor research funds.
“The GCCA [Government Corporation Control Act] plainly prohibits agencies from establishing a corporation to act as an agency without specific authorization, and the January 16, 2025, agreement does nothing other than set forth the terms of the Biden Administration’s attempt to do just that.”
Natcast’s selection committee included Biden White House alums like Jason Matheny, former deputy director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; and Kendra Wilkerson, the CEO of a nonprofit that “promotes greater equality for women and nonbinary professionals in technology fields,” according to the Biden Commerce Department.
Donna Dubinsky, another Natcast executive, worked as senior counselor to former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and signed off on the nonprofit’s 501(c)(3) status.
Susan Feindt, the Biden Commerce Department’s vice chair of its CHIPS Act advisory committee, is now the senior vice president of ecosystem development at Natcast.
Jeremy Licht, the former chief counsel on semiconductor incentives at the Biden Commerce Department, is now the general counsel at Natcast.
They weren’t robbing Peter to pay Paul, they were robbing you to line their own pockets. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller told reporters Monday that the Trump administration has uncovered a “massive scandal” in Washington D.C. involving the doctoring of crime statistics.
He said the alleged corruption is currently under investigation and said details of the corruption will soon be brought to light.
“The results will stun you,” he said.
Miller made the remarks in the Oval Office after President Trump signed a slew of new executive orders to end cashless bail throughout the United States and in the District of Columbia, prosecute the burning of the American flag, and additional measures to address crime in Washington D.C.
Miller said D.C. already had the worst crime statistics in the United States when “honestly measured,” but those stats “dramatically understated how bad it was.”
The White House advisor told reporters that murders and homicides were allegedly being reported as accidents instead of murders.
“This is how severe the manipulation of the crime data has been in the city and it will all be uncovered and it will all be brought to light,” he said.
For the past two weeks—since the D.C. crime crackdown began—the city has not seen a single murder or homicide.
“No police officer working in the city can remember a time in their lives when there has been no murders,” Miller asserted.
He said police officers have told him that members of the public have been thanking them for making D.C safe again.
“For the first time in their lives, they can use the parks, they can walk on the streets, you have people who can walk freely at night without worrying about being ribbed or mugged,” he said. “They’re wearing their watch again, they’re wearing jewelry again, they’re carrying purses again.”
Miller explained that D.C. residents had been forced to “change their who lives for fear of being murdered, mugged or carjacked.”
He added that Trump had freed the 700,000 residents of the city from “the rule of criminals and thugs.”
Miller credited Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Administrator Terrance C. Cole with discovering that street criminals in Washington D.C. have been “doing business directly with the transnational criminal cartels,” which are foreign terrorist organizations.
“So not only was the city being run by these criminal thugs, but they were working with some of the most dangerous terrorist organizations on the planet to traffic weapons and drugs into this city,” he explained.
Israel’s military conducted airstrikes on Yemen’s Houthi-controlled capital, Sanaa, on Sunday, targeting high-profile sites in a significant escalation of hostilities.
The strikes hit areas near the presidential palace, the Asar and Hizaz power plants, and Houthi facilities suspected of housing artillery, including ballistic missiles, according to regional reports.
The operation was a direct response to recent Houthi attacks on Israel, including projectile launches on Friday, a military source told the Jerusalem Post. While Israel has previously targeted Houthi infrastructure, its strikes have largely focused on the strategic port city of Hodeida, a critical economic and military hub. The shift to Sanaa signals a broader and more aggressive approach to the conflict.
At least two people were killed and five others injured, Al Masirah, a Houthi-affiliated media outlet reported, according to Al Jazeera.
“The attacks were carried out in response to repeated attacks by the Houthi terrorist regime against the state of Israel and its citizens, including the launch of surface-to-surface missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles towards the country’s territory,” the Israeli military said in a statement.
There’s video:
The exact moment Israel vaporized the entire leadership of Yemeni Houthis 👇
“Westman’s videos, posted hours before the shootings, may only suggest he used ‘very similar to the symbolism used by violent global satanic cults called Order of 9 Angles and 764.'” I reached out to a “left-hand path” guy I knew from science fiction for background, and he offered the following:
Many years ago Dr. Anton LaVey asked Micheal Aquino to write two “Lovecraftain Pieces” for the _Satanic Rituals — “Th Cermony of the Nine Angles”and “The Call to Cthulhu”.
Then back in the 1990s a weirdo (named Myall back in the day) claimed that family knew the REAL SECRET of the nine angles. It was mainly Neo_Nazy stuff — “Kill a Jew for Satan” The guy claimed 100s of followers and had several Orders he was running –my favorite was the “lesbian: Order of the Sapphic Satanists. He tried to join Islam and run an atisemetic Islamic Runic brotherhood that worshipped Azathoth. It did not go well. The ONA shows occasionally with anti-Jewish slogans.
According to this piece last year, 764 is a global Satanic child predator network.
The likely next mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, is, as President Donald Trump put it, a “100% Communist lunatic,” and so you won’t exactly be dumbfounded to learn that his advisors are a rogue’s gallery of political hacks and psychopaths the likes of which have not been seen since Chairman Mao sat down for a tete-a-tete with his fellow cultural revolutionaries. It’s clear that one way or another, once this clown moves into Gracie Mansion, New York City is in for it: skyrocketing crime, an inundation of illegal migrants, bankruptcy, the destruction of the city’s economic base — all that and more is on the table.
Fox News reported Thursday Mamdani’s “growing circle of influence is littered with activists who have espoused anti-Israel views and socialist principles as he attempts to dispel the narrative that he is too ‘radical’ to run the nation’s largest city.” Yeah, these advisors show that he is indeed far too radical to be mayor of New York, but that’s not likely to keep him from being elected.
Among those advisors is Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), which advocates ending “state support for detention, deportation, and mass incarceration.” Awawdeh insists that illegal migrants “deserve” healthcare, presumably at the expense of the American taxpayer. He has also ranted: “NO LISTEN… SEEKING ASYLUM AT THE BORDER IS A LEGAL RIGHT. ASYLUM SEEKERS ARE FLEEING FOR THEIR LIVES FROM VIOLENCE, PERSECUTION, & IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE. THE U.S. HAS A LEGAL OBLIGATION TO PROVIDE REFUGE. #WelcomeWithDignity”
A legal obligation to provide refuge for anyone fleeing any kind of difficulty? Do tell. Anyway, NYIC has “taken in $175,000 from the sprawling George Soros nonprofit network,” and if that connection of Soros to Mamdani is too tenuous for you, there is plenty more. Fox News reported on Aug. 14 that “A former top executive for liberal billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) between 2017 and 2020 is back in the spotlight amid reports highlighting his involvement with Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign and connecting Obama world to the campaign.”
The Soros exec in question is Patrick Gaspard, an old political hand on the left; the first campaign he worked on was Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential run. Gaspard “has served in several high-profile political positions, including advising former President Barack Obama’s historic 2008 campaign, serving as the Democratic National Committee’s executive director, and being tapped as the Center for American Progress (CAP) president in 2021.”
Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel, is set to face the rest of his life behind bars as the Trump administration ramps up its efforts to dismantle cartels.
Zambada, 75, confessed in a Brooklyn, New York, courtroom Monday that he had coordinated with Mexican officials to smuggle drugs into the U.S. for decades — and ultimately pleaded guilty to serving as principal leader of a continuing criminal enterprise and racketeering conspiracy.
The Trump administration has pledged to take down the cartels — and experts predict Zambada’s guilty plea paves the way for the Justice Department to launch more indictments against high-profile cartel members moving forward and exerts additional pressure on Mexico to comply with U.S. requests.
Russia may not have an oil industry at all when this war is over. Ukraine just hit two more oil refineries, Kuybyshevskiy in Samara and Afipsky in Krasnodar. “Multiple swarms hit this refinery, which makes Russia’s air defense look even more incompetent than usual.” It was also 1,000km away.
They also hit the Ust-Luga gas processing terminal near St. Petersburg with ten drones. “This terminal is responsible for processing stable gas condenscent in naphtha jet fuel fuel oil and distillates.” The location makes me wonder if a goodly portion was intended for the export market.
The map of Russian refineries reveals a key strategic problem. The main processing capabilities are in the European part of the country, whilst fuel consumption is rising in the far east. Fuel logistic chains for eastern regions span thousands of kilometers, creating additional costs and risks. Kilometer-long queues in cities are a direct result of the imbalance between western production and eastern consumption.
Harris County’s District Attorney Sean Teare has charged Yunhai Li, a 35-year-old former MD Anderson Cancer Center researcher, with attempting to steal and take proprietary cancer-related research back to China. This comes after multiple warnings about research security in Texas higher education.
While the Department of Transportation has owned the historic station since the 1980s, it has allowed a nonprofit, the Union Station Redevelopment Corporation, more control over the station year after year.
Now, the Department of Transportation says it plans to use a new deal with Amtrak and USRC to fund improvements to elevators, lighting, security and other repairs to the roof and several major systems.
“Scottish Girl Arrested For Using Knife And Axe To Ward Off Migrant Stalker.” She was defending her 12-year old sister from unassimilated would-be Muslim statutory rapists, so of course the police had to arrest her…
Last week, a Houston resident foiled a home invasion attempt by a couple criminals trying to impersonate the police. According to the news article:
“Police said the men told the homeowner they were serving a warrant. They were wearing bullet-proof vests, had badges around their necks and were wearing ski masks.”
The homeowner ended up shooting and killing both offenders.
There are many more tips in the article, but police don’t wear ski masks while serving a warrant…
“Texas Teacher Arrested on Federal Child Porn Charge…Robert Jerome Custer, 56, was arrested on a federal charge of accessing child sexual abuse material, commonly called child pornography. Custer previously worked as an educator and counselor in Palestine, Barksdale, Kingsville, and Abilene, according to a statement from the Texas Department of Public Safety.”
The German welfare state is no longer financially sustainable, Friedrich Merz said on Saturday.
The chancellor argued for a fundamental reassessment of the benefits system as spending continues to soar past last year’s record of €47bn (£40bn).
In a state-level party conference meeting on Saturday, Mr Merz said: “The welfare state as we have it today can no longer be financed with what we can economically afford.”
Once the export champion of Europe, Germany’s economy has slowed dramatically since 2017, with GDP growing by only 1.6 per cent since then versus 9.5 per cent for the rest of the eurozone.
Germany’s economy shrank by 0.2 per cent last year following a 0.3 per cent dip in 2023 – the first time since the early 2000s the economy has retreated two years in a row.
Industrial production fell under the Left-leaning “traffic light” coalition of Olaf Scholz and continues to slide under the new government, with GDP declining by 0.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2025.
Meanwhile, spending on social welfare has exploded, and is set to increase further this year as Germany’s population ages and unemployment rises. Although the majority of benefit recipients are German, large numbers are non-German citizens.
German elites will do anything to support its welfare state…except stop importing unassimilated Muslim immigrants. Just like all the rest of Europe’s elites. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
A decade after the radical left first started shoving tranny bathrooms down the public’s throat without debate, Texas is finally limiting bathrooms to biological sex.
“Mark Teixeira, Longtime Major League Baseball Player, Launches Texas Congressional Bid.” He’s running as a Republican for the 21st Texas Congressional District, where incumbent Chip Roy is running for Attorney General.
Having a meth habit is going to be disqualifying for a lot of jobs. Like District Attorney for Mariposa County. Thus it’s no surprise that DA Mike McAfee resigned…
Another electric bus company goes bankrupt. “Quebec-based Lion Electric, which the Biden administration awarded $159 million ‘to manufacture 435 school buses between 2022 and 2024,’ has fallen into bankruptcy.” (Previously.)
This is a weird story. “Moms Arrested for Running North Texas Choir Booster Club. Cleared of charges, moms still lost choir booster club money to the school district.”
Local authorities in Collin County, including a school district, have harassed three moms in a quest to control a school booster club and its funds, even going so far as to arrest them.
Plano Independent School District targeted the Jasper High School Choir Booster Club for control of its bank account after the mothers charged with running the independent organization insisted that the district pay for Jasper High School’s stage—as was the district’s responsibility.
The district had the Plano police arrest the booster club’s founders—Laura Cervantes, Krisinda Lingenfelter, and Maria Luisa King. Yet, after a Collin County grand jury failed to find enough evidence to prosecute these moms, a Plano municipal judge recently awarded the club’s bank funds to Plano ISD.
Also this: “Oral arguments were held on May 30 before Judge Paul McNulty, chief judge for the Municipal Court of Plano. Texas Scorecard was in attendance. Recording devices were banned from the trial and the booster club was denied its request to bring a court reporter.” Also, another judge involved in the case, Lisa Bronchetti, evidently wrote a bad check to the club but still failed to excuse herself.
Like I said, weird…
Newark Airport sucks. Objectively. One major culprit? God.
Following redistricting, a whole lot of 2026 races are heating up, so let’s do a Texas election news roundup.
Following Rep. Chip Roy’s entry into the Attorney General’s race, Sen. Ted Cruz and current AG Ken Paxton have issued dueling endorsements.
The early favorite for the most interesting 2026 race in Texas is the campaign for the state’s attorney general, and two new endorsements have ramped the intrigue up to 11.
Four candidates are vying for the spot: state Sens. Joan Huffman (R-Houston) and Mayes Middleton (R-Galveston), former Department of Justice appointee Aaron Reitz, and Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX-21).
Last week, Roy jumped into the race after a couple months of speculation — the same day that polling showed 73 percent undecided in the then-three person field.
Middleton remains far and away the frontrunner on the money front, being able to self-fund with an initial $10 million investment — and the intent to put another $10 million in if need be. He also has the backing of a large number of Republicans in the Texas House, where he served two terms before winning his Senate seat.
But each of the candidates has their own competitive advantages, making the race one of the most interesting to watch in the state so far.
Over the weekend, two established GOP figures broke their impartiality in the race and endorsed competing candidates. First, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) backed Roy, his former chief of staff, saying, “There are several excellent candidates right now in the race for Texas Attorney General. All of them are friends of mine, and all of them have been strong supporters of mine for many, many years. Texas is blessed to have an abundance of strong conservatives stepping forward to lead, in such a time as this.”
“I am proud to endorse Chip Roy for Attorney General of Texas. As my very first chief of staff, Chip has been a close friend and ally of mine for over 12 years. We have been in more fights together than I can count, and I know Chip will always, always, always fight for conservative values.”
Reitz, whose campaign had picked up serious momentum since he launched in June, had served as Cruz’s chief of staff before taking a job in the Department of Justice under the second Trump administration earlier this year. The former Cruz staffer had also been seriously considering running for Roy’s congressional seat in light of the congressman’s entry into the attorney general race.
But Reitz decided to stay in, and unloaded his own top shelf endorsement on Monday. “One of the most frequent questions Texans ask me is: ‘Ken, who should succeed you as Attorney General?’ My answer is now definitive: Aaron Reitz,” Paxton said in a press release.
“Aaron Reitz is the only candidate who is fully vetted, battle-tested, proven, and ready to be Attorney General. He is loyal, fearless, trusted, and relentlessly committed to the Rule of Law. He has already proven himself as a defender of Texas, of Texans’ rights, and of the Constitution. That’s why President Trump called him a ‘true MAGA attorney’ and a ‘warrior for our Constitution’ — and I could not agree more.”
Cruz isn’t the only one who endorsed Roy in the race, as Gun Owners of America sent out out an email endorsement that I’m not seeing on their website yet:
As a member of Congress, Chip Roy has been a steadfast ally for gun owners: he has opposed federal gun control, fought executive overreach, and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with GOA to defend your freedoms.
Chip’s record on the Second Amendment is rock solid. As a member of the powerful House Rules Committee, responsible for deciding which bills are sent to the House floor, Chip has been a brick wall to anti-gunners who aim to infringe on the Second Amendment. Chip will call out RINOs who compromise on the Second Amendment or empower the unconstitutional ATF.
Not only does Chip talk the talk, he shows it with sponsoring and cosponsoring pro-gun legislation!
Since January alone, he:
Sponsored H.R. 962 — Defending Veterans’ Second Amendment Rights Act (Prohibits VA from disarming veterans with fiduciaries)
Cosponsored H.R. 3228 — Constitutional Hearing Protection Act (Removes suppressors from the definition of firearms)
Cosponsored H.R. 1643 — SAFER Voter Act (Reduces the age to buy a handgun from an FFL from 21 to 18)
Cosponsored H.R. 1041 — Veterans 2nd Amendment Protection Act (Prohibits VA from disarming veterans with fiduciaries)
Cosponsored H.R. 563 — No REGISTRY Rights Act (Directs ATF to delete their illegal gun owner registry and certify to Congress that they have complied with the law)
In 2021, when Democrats attempted to insert unconstitutional red flag laws for our service members, it was Chip Roy along with key allies in Congress who prevented that from being signed into law.
The gap between Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) in the 2026 U.S. Senate race is narrowing, according to new polling from Texas Southern University.
Cornyn trails five points behind Paxton in the GOP primary, according to a poll conducted by the Barbara Jordan Public Policy Research and Survey Center at Texas Southern University — the same survey which had the senator nine points behind Paxton three months prior.
The survey polled 1,500 likely 2026 Republican primary voters and 1,500 likely 2026 Democratic primary voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.53 percent.
Various polls in the field have gauged Cornyn and Paxton in a head-to-head primary scenario, generally showing the latter to be in a comfortable lead. The Senate Leadership Fund estimates it to be about a 17-point gap, after averaging 13 polls taken over the past six months.
However, data from an Emerson College poll on Friday, alongside this most recent Texas Southern poll, paint a different picture for Cornyn’s odds. Emerson had Cornyn in the lead by one point with 30 percent, Paxton at 29 percent, “someone else” at five percent, and “undecided” at 37 percent.
Congressman Wesley Hunt (R-TX-38), who’s been flirting with a bid against Paxton and Cornyn through a number of campaign-style ads running across the state, was also measured in the poll. In a three-way matchup, Hunt collected 22 percent of the votes, contrasted with Paxton’s 35 percent and Cornyn’s 30 percent.
Congressman Ronny Jackson (R-TX-13), Hunt’s colleague who’s also lightly tested the waters, was also thrown into a three-way mix alongside Paxton and Cornyn. He garnered 15 percent of the vote, behind Cornyn’s 33 percent and Paxton’s 38 percent.
When faced against one another, Cornyn collected 43 percent of the vote against Jackson’s 35 percent. When placed against Paxton, Jackson got 33 percent while the attorney general led with 44 percent.
Hunt received 36 percent when faced against Paxton, who led with 43 percent — while 21 percent voted as “unsure.” Cornyn led with 43 percent against Hunt, while the latter received 36 percent. A similar 22 percent marked themselves as “unsure.”
Taking the usual poll caveats and triple them for a poll this far out. The caveat to the caveat is that the sample size is bigger than some previous polls, and Cornyn has been dropping media ad spends (an unusual move this early), so I can well imagine that he’s been able to close some of the gap. But all the polls have shown Paxton leading, which can’t be comforting for a four term incumbent. Remember, when Cornyn was first elected to the senate, Barack Obama was still an Illinois state senator…
Democratic Congressman Al Green, the current incumbent in the recently redistricted 9th U.S. Congressional District, is waiting for the 18th Congressional District Special Election to declare he’s running for the 18th in 2026.
Congressman Al Green (D-TX-09) has all but officially declared his candidacy for Congressional District (CD) 18, which largely holds his prior constituency following Texas’ mid-decade redistricting.
Green stated during a press conference on Tuesday afternoon that if he “made an announcement today, then there would be mass confusion about where I am. I’m serving the people of the 9th Congressional District,” after outlining how the “new” CD 18 more closely resembles his current CD 9.
“I live in the new 18 — I’m not moving into the new 18. I’ve lived in this house for more than 30 years. This is my home,” Green stated.
“So to those who say I am moving into the 18th Congressional District to run for office, not so. All I’m doing is staying where my constituents are.”
The Texas Legislature passed its new Republican-favored congressional map on August 20, following a two-week quorum break by members of the Texas House Democratic Caucus to prevent the vote. While Green’s CD 9 isn’t one of the five districts expected to flip from blue to red, as requested by President Donald Trump, a majority of CD 9 is now folded into the existing Democratic stronghold CD 18 — a move Green categorized as intentionally racist, as local Democratic lawmakers have also stated. Republicans argue that they are instead reworking the districts due to and in order to increase partisan performance.
“I have no relationships politically with the people in the new 9th Congressional District. The new 18th Congressional District is where I have my home and my constituents,” Green said.
He noted the passing of first Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee in 2024, then Lee’s successor, Congressman Sylvester Turner, this March, as well as referencing the special election which will be held in November to determine the candidate to represent CD 18.
“It’s important for people to know I’m not going to be in that special election,” Green continued.
“I’m not going to be in that special election for a multiplicity of reasons, but here is one: because if I chose to get in it, and should I win it, I would have to then vacate the 9th Congressional District.”
Finally, down in fringe candidate territory, Valentina Gomez, who is running against incumbent John Carter for the Texas 31st Congressional district, made headlines by burning a Quran, giving a whole new meaning to “hot Latinas.” Sorry, I’m just not down with book burning (not that I want her to be charged with blasphemy laws either). Democrats should be asked: Which is worse, burning a flag or burning a Quran…
In our previous examination of Sig Sauer’s P320 uncommanded discharges issue, a whole lot of commenters seem to get hung up on the screw, ignoring the methodology that Wyoming Gun Project laid out in his video. Well, it is a 40 minute video, and maybe he didn’t explain the preconditions for the failure mode he was trying to demonstrate well enough.
Well, here’s a 20 minute video by Shadetree Armorer that explains, in much clearer detail, the part failures the screw simulates before the loose slide come into play.
For legal reasons, he says to add “allegedly” every seven words or so.
“This is meant to be a summary with some connecting tissue uniting the whole so you can understand the big picture.”
“Despite what Sig may publicly claim about the P320, it relies on exactly two things to not go off, and the trigger isn’t one of them.”
“The first thing the P320 relies on is the sear. It is important to note that, unlike a Glock or even a 1911, there is no feature or device that blocks movement of the sear when the trigger is not pressed to the rear.”
“It is floating on two coil springs. These two coil springs and by way of geometry, pressure from the striker spring, are the only thing holding the sear in place.”
“The second thing that the P320 relies on is the safety lock, more commonly referred to as the striker safety or striker safety lever, which is held in place with a torsion spring. So, in order for a SIG P320 to discharge without a trigger pull, both the sear and striker lock must move, and those things are only prevented from moving by spring force.”
“The firing pin safety, that part was designed to be stamped. Someone in finance was like, ‘Hey, let’s save like $30 per pistol.’ So, a bunch of parts that were designed to be stamped end up becoming MIMed [Metal Injection Molded], which includes that striker safety. So, what’s the difference between stamping and MIMD in terms of safety and quality? With MIMing, once in a while, you might run into bubbles in the safety lever. If the bubbles break, then you have a problem where it shears off, the striker goes forwards.”
“With safety levers in particular, if there’s a wear issue, the striker goes forwards and the safety lever saves you a few times. There’s a possibility that it’ll break after a few instances of it happening. Out of the box, if you have a good one, the pistol should be safe, which is why the majority of 320s haven’t gone off. But if you have a bad one out of the factory or if you drop it too many times, then you might have a problem.”
This, by itself, is not enough for an uncommanded discharge. “You also need a sear issue.”
Next up: The FBI Ballistic Research Facilities report on a Michigan State Police P320. Quoting from page 29:
Because of the inherent movement between the slide and frame, a third test of the striker safety lock was conducted. Approximately 50 attempts were made to determine if the striker would impact the prime case after manipulating the weapon while holstered. The weapon was pressed together and pulled apart at the slide and frame. Thereafter, pressure was applied to the frame and the sear manually released from the primary notch. The intent of the manipulation and pressure was to mimic what might occur to a holstered weapon during an officer’s duties, such as running, jumping, climbing, fighting, pressing a weapon against a wall or vehicle, or obtaining a master grip on the pistol prior to drawing, etc.
BRF staff observed the prime case fired on nine attempts, with the primer indent measuring between 019 and 0026 of an inch with, an average of 023. While staging one attempt to allow another BRF staff member to observe the striker safety lock function as designed, the weapon was prepared and placed in the holster with no manipulation. A second staff member released the primary sear notch from the striker and the prime case fired, indicating failure of the striker safety lock.
“The important thing to take away here is that the striker safety in the examined firearm was able to be defeated by simply jostling the P320 in the holster, as would be expected to happen for any firearm carried in the holster throughout the day.”
Following the airman’s death, the Air Force released instructions on checking the striker safety in each gun. “The Air Force does not trust the striker safety lock either. They also mentioned specifically to check for proper assembly.”
“So, we have good reason to believe that the striker safety design is compromised and ineffective. Anecdotally, I have also heard reports elsewhere that it is sometimes assembled incorrectly from the factory, with one leg of the torsion spring being dislodged.
“I have also heard anecdotal reports that fouling such as carbon, unburnt powder and brass shavings can overwhelm the spring, and as a result the safety lever sticks in the upwards defeated position. My perspective on this is that the design seems to allow for a lot of surface area for fouling to build up when compared to the typical round plunger design.”
“There does not seem to be a singular problem with this safety lever. Rather, there are allegedly a lot of problems.”
“Why did SIG choose this design? Well, it is very compact and it saves having to cut a pocket in the slide for a striker safety plunger design like Glock, Smith and Wesson, and pretty much every other striker fired pistol use.”
The P365 doesn’t use safety lever design of the P320.
“The second thing that needs to happen for a P320 to discharge without a trigger pull is that the sear needs to release the striker. Now, you’re never going to guess. It looks like there’s multiple alleged ways for this to happen as well. And they can combine and get worse, just like the striker safety lever issues.”
“First, it seems as though there’s the potential for the takedown lever for large frame guns, that is 10mm and .45ACP, to get mixed up with the takedown lever for small frame guns. Whether this has happened in factory guns has yet to be seen. However, one of the most stalwart defenders of the P320’s honor, Grey Guns, has put out a notice stating that this combination of parts can create an unsafe condition.”
“I won’t get too into the weeds, but the take down lever is what allows the P320 to be disassembled without a trigger press. And it does this by lowering the sear via an arm. For whatever reason, Sig designed the large frame and small frame pre-P320 takedown levers to fit interchangeably. But importantly, the large frame takedown lever reduces the sear engagement in the small frame guns when it is in the assembled and ready to fire position.”
“The second way this can allegedly happen is poor surface finishes, or geometry of the interface between the striker and sear. Because nothing forces the P320 sear to fully engage in the way that the drop safety slot in a Glock trigger housing forces the Glock trigger bar to fully engage the striker, we are again reliant on spring pressure combined with a bit of geometry. However, should the geometry be off or a poor surface finish, or a burr be present in the sliding searsurfaces, these parts can get hung up, resulting in reduced sear engagement.”
“The FBI BRF’s report of the MSP320 that discharged in a holster found that one of the sliding sear surfaces had a ledge. And the US Air Force’s supplemental inspection criteria released on July 22nd specifically calls out the sear and striker assembly as areas to look for damage.”
“The third way that the sear and striker engagement can be reduced is by fouling or debris. That’s a bigger subject that we’re going to get to later because it affects all P320 pistols.”
“The important thing to note is that none of these problems are enough on their own to make the sear release the stiker uncommanded.”
“I was reminded of the Swiss cheese safety model by Gen Y Revolver Guy on Arfcom.” In which only when several problems occur at once, passing through different Swiss cheese holes, does the problem occur when all the holes (flaws) happen to line up. “That final piece of Swiss cheese in this situation, which all the issues I’ve covered combine with, is excessive movement between the slide and frame that seems endemic to the P320 platform. In particular, the slide can move up and down relative to the frame, which is enough to shift the sear engagement. And combined with one or more of the three aforementioned issues of incorrect takedown levers, bad sear surfaces, or firing debris, this can be enough for the sear to let go of the striker entirely.”
Now the part most immediately relevant to this previous post. “In these videos from Wyoming Gun Project, the loose slide to frame fit is demonstrated as well as the ability for that slide movement to release the striker when the striker engagement is reduced. It’s important to note that he set his P320 up to have reduced striker engagement by using a screw to pull the trigger to the rear a small amount past the wall in the travel after the takeup. And the takeup also serves to defeat the striker safety lever. So those two issues are simulated here while the third issue loose slide to frame fit is demonstrated.” Those who still don’t understand the purpose of the screw should read and reread that section until they do understand.
“It’s not simulating a screw getting stuck in the trigger. It’s a static and repeatable simulation of other known issues.”
Back to the debris issue. “The design of the P320 seems particularly susceptible to capturing environmental debris between the sear slide and striker. Indeed, these parts all combine to form a pocket. And if the pistol is carried muzzled down in a holster, the bottom of that pocket is a place where fouling and debris can accumulate.”
“Worse, there’s a gap between the frame and the slide directly above that pocket through which things from the environment can fall into.”
“This video from YouTuber Mischief Machine demonstrates that if the area is fouled with unburnt powder and brass shavings, the sear engagement can be reduced to the point that the slide movement will release the striker.”
Once Mischief Machine inserts the debris with the strike safety already simulated off, he gets the gun to discharge by tugging on the slide.
Again, the P365 doesn’t suffer from this P320 design flaw.
“I think that tidies up things nicely for this P320 saga. It’s pretty obvious what the problems are. The FBI and the US Air Force both seem to be on the same trail, and I honestly don’t think SIG has a realistic chance of fixing all the problems.”
“I think their only option at this point may be bankruptcy, which is why they are pushing so hard with the PR spin to gaslight everyone.”
Shadetree Armorer also points to YouTuber Dick Fairburn’s SIG P320 An unfolding Disaster, which I haven’t had a chance to watch yet (it’s another 40 minute video, and seems heavy on talk and light on illustrations).
I had no intention of doing another Sig P320 post so soon after the last one, but the video was so informative on the (alleged) flaws, and so clear on things people seem to be getting hung up on, that I thought it was worth posting.
