Evidently MSNBC saw CNN being sued for being worthless partisan shills, and went “Hey, we can do that too!”
In this case, they deceptively edited a Joe Rogan segment critical of Kamala Harris that went on to praise Tulsi Gabbard to make it appear that Rogan was praising Harris.
Just watch the first three minutes of this:
It’s extremely blatant. (And they evidently took the video down.)
Tulsi Gabbard:
Not only does Joe Rogan deserve an apology, there’s actually something far bigger at stake here. This is yet another example of how MSNBC is working hand-in-glove with the Democrat elite and the Kamala Harris campaign uh to try to spread lies, simply things that are not true. What this means is MSNBC is a for-profit corporation, they are helping Kamala Harris’ election campaign, and what they are doing through their platform would qualify as an in-kind contribution to her campaign. It’s worth a lot of money. The fact that they are doing this should require the Federal Election Commission, that manages campaign spending and campaign finance, require them to report this as an in-kind campaign contribution, or to be punished for abusing their position in trying to use their platform, that has nothing to do with journalism it is purely a propaganda platform, and that they are using this in order to try to help Kamala Harris get elected.
The clip brings up that this is not the first time the MSM has lied about Rogan for propaganda purposes, bringing up the “horse dewormer” lie over taking Ivermectin to fight his bout of Flu Manchu. “I can afford people medicine, motherfucker.”
Given MSNBC’s blatantly false editing, Rogan is reportedlysuing MSNBC for $30 million. I say “reportedly” because stories about the lawsuit with that $30 million amount have popped up all over the Internet, but I have yet to find a primary source or real court documents stating that. Let it never be said that I have the callous disregard for truth shown by the likes of CNN and MSNBC.
Given how obviously blatant and deceptive the video editing was, you wonder why they even tried it in the first place. But given the outlandish, over-the-top lovefest the MSM has thrown to gaslight the American public into thinking that unpopular, perpetual mediocrity Harris is somehow smart, accomplished and popular despite all evidence to the contrary, I wonder if all MSNBC staffers are under specific orders to produce segments that make Harris look good by any means necessary.
I would say the MSM will do everything it can to drag Cackles McSidepiece across the finish line, even if it means destroying what’s left of their own credibility, but I don’t see any left to destroy…
Neal Brennan’s interview with Simon Rich offers a revealing glimpse into the American ruling class, where letting their obtuse, opulent offspring fail simply isn’t an option.
Simon Rich: “They had these sort of easier classes that were designed to allow children of affluence to continue at Harvard.”
SR: “They have something called the Z-list.”
SR: “So the Z-list is—”
Neal Brennan: “Donor kids?”
SR: “Yeah. To get on the Z-list I mean I think you need to donate like particle accelerators. Ambassadorships. Pardons.”
SR: “The Z-list is like, you have a student who is so academically inept that no tutor, no study drug, no recommendation from a senator, can can mask the fact that this is a person does not belong here. This is a dumb person.”
SR: “They concoct a fake volunteer project that lasts a year that is the front cover to justify their admission.”
SR: “I don’t know who it’s designed to trick. I think it might be designed to trick the child themselves.”
SR: “The smartest people at Harvard are often the poorest people.”
So there’s your glimpse into America’s ruling class, where moneyed morons can’t be allowed to fail.
If a Harvard grad was born rich and has a well-known last name, what are the odds they’re actually a Z-lister?
What are the odds that Yale and the other Ivies have their own version of the Z-list? I’d say pretty good.
Some car review channels and magazines like to brag about putting a vehicle through a “torture test.” YouTuber WhistlinDiesel sets out to show they’re amateurs, and puts a Cyberturk through a real torture test, starting with backing it off a flatbed without lowering the bed.
Other tests: Driving over large concrete pipes, door slamming, beating on it with tools and rakes and implements of destruction, etc.
To be fair, he tested it against a Ford F-150 for the same tests, which did better on some tests and worse on other. For example, the Ford cracked an axle driving off the truck bed. But the tow hitch for the Cybertruck literally tore off trying to tow the Ford.
Overall, the Ford scored better than the Cybertruck. It turns out that when you abuse the Cybertruck this badly, a whole lot of the electronics go bye-bye. But the Cybertruck was surprisingly resistant to C4…
There’s too damn much going on in the world right now! Compiling the LinkSwarm used to be more like hunting and gathering, but the last few weeks have been like drinking from the firehose.
The real unemployment rate is crushing ordinary Americans, another Trump assassin thwarted, Maricopa cues up illegal alien voter fraud again, Tim Walz’s own National Guard unit accuses him of stolen valor, Ukraine captures a chunk of Russia, Google is declared a monopoly, a global censorship organization immediately folds at the first sign of scrutiny, the leader of Bangladesh flees, and California fines a business for daring to fly Old Glory.
There are lies, damned lies, and government statistics — and maybe none is more damnable than the official unemployment rate which is half the actual rate, according to Rasmussen. Worse, the number of Americans who are neither retired nor employed is more than four times higher than July’s official rate of 4.3%.
I’ve been writing for months now in quick-hit Instapundit items that this country has been in a jobs recession since the COVID lockdowns and, thanks to Bidenomics, never recovered from. Well, the latest Rasmussen unemployment survey has the numbers.
The report is paywalled, but I pay the subscription fee (and take the tax write-off) so you don’t have to if you ever wondered where some of your VIP membership dollars wind up.
Rasmussen surveyed nearly 9,000 American adults and found that in July the percentage of Americans who are unemployed and looking for work — this is the number that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) should report each month — was 8.4%. The BLS reported a rosy 4.3% unemployment rate last month, up from June’s equally imaginary 4.1%.
From there, things only get worse. Because under Bidenomics, of course, they do.
One in four adult Americans is retired, which is nice for them. Fifteen percent say they’re entrepreneurs (that can be anything from driving an Uber to launching a Silicon Valley startup), and just under 30% are employed by a private company.
Nearly one in 10 work for the government at one level or another. Those workers are supported entirely by tax dollars without producing any material wealth. Every government employee involved in regulation makes it harder for the rest of us to do so.
If you’ve been keeping track of these numbers in your head, you might notice they don’t add up to anything close to 100%. About three percent of adults surveyed answered “not sure” about their employment situation, the kind of answer that I assume involves smoking weed. The remaining 9.7% said they were unemployed but not looking — i.e., “Not in Workforce.”
That means the percentage of Americans who could be working and perhaps would really like to be working but either can’t find work or have given up finding work is 18.1%. That’s more than four times the official unemployment rate.
An alleged Iranian agent plotted to hire hitmen to assassinate US government officials — including possibly former President Donald Trump, according to sources and a federal criminal complaint.
Pakistani national Asif Merchant, 46, is accused of planning political assassinations in New York City in August or early September, and paid $5,000 in advances to men he believed to be contract killers, according to US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace.
“The Iranian indicted in Eastern District today is 100% an agent of the Iranian government,” a law enforcement source told The Post.
The plot was allegedly in retaliation to the 2020 Trump-ordered killing of prominent Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani, US Attorney General Merrick Garland confirmed Tuesday.
Trump has been a known target of previous Iranian-backed assassination plots, and the feds believe he may have been one of Merchant’s targets, law enforcement sources told The Post. But, the accused terrorist never divulged the name of who he planned to kill during his meetings with undercover agents — instead cryptically saying only that the target would have “a lot of security.”
Last week’s plea bargain deal to let 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and accomplices Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi avoid the death penalty broke a little late to include in the last LinkSwarm, but defense secretary Lloyd Austin has nixed the deal.
Although the last few weeks have had their alarming aspects – chief among which was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, the odds-on favorite candidate for president – they have also had their amusing moments.
In the latter category, I place the sudden queen-for-a-day-like coronation of Kamala Harris.
True, that coronation was in the nature of an anti-democratic semi-soft-coup (or anti-democratic “inversion of a coup”). Biden and his handlers, right up until the morning of July 21, were insisting that he was not dropping out, that he was “in it to win,” etc. But someone made him an offer he couldn’t refuse and out he went.
Here’s the amusing bit. Until the moment Biden was chased out of the race, Kamala Harris functioned primarily as political life insurance. “You might not like me,” Biden communicated, “but if I go, you’re stuck with her.”
Biden’s polls were in the toilet and, following his catastrophic debate with Donald Trump, were circling the drain, poised for oblivion. But Kamala’s polls were even worse. She was cordially disliked by—well, by everyone. Her staff, her colleagues, but above all, by voters. In the 2020 race, she got no delegates: none, zero, zip. She dropped out of the race for president but was then tapped to be VP only because this half Indian, half Jamaican woman was swarthy enough to pass as black and Biden had promised to select a black female as a running mate. Kamala truly is, as Biden himself acknowledged recently, a DEI vice president.
And sure enough, Kamala was every bit the disaster people predicted she would be. As a matter of clinical interest, she proved that senility is not the only cause of supreme rhetorical incoherence. Some people, and she is one, come by it naturally. Her tenure as vice president is littered with examples, and she provided another doozy just a couple of days ago when she attempted to comment on the prisoner exchange with Russia.
It’s painful, as are all the many video clips of Harris angrily denouncing people who say “Merry Christmas,” of her presiding as “border czar” over the disaster of our non-existent southern border, of her outlining how she wants to give Medicare, as well as the franchise, to all illegal immigrants, and how she wants to develop a national data base of gun owners so that she can confiscate firearms by force.
Can such a person win the presidency? No.
Then, how can we explain the sudden efflorescence of Harrismania? Democrats are wetting themselves with glee over their sudden fundraising windfalls ($200 million in a week, it is said) and sudden surge in the polls. New York magazine just beclowned itself with a cover showing Kamala sitting on top of the world with Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and even Joe Biden dancing and whooping it up below. “Welcome to Kamalot,” we read: “In a matter of days, the Democratic Party discovered its future was actually in the White House all along.”
Was it? Again, the answer is no. It is a temporary sugar high caused partly by the feeling of liberation following the sudden release from Joe Biden, partly by the slobbering media jumping all over the reinvention of Kamala like dogs vibrating over a bitch in estrus. The feeling of intoxication may linger through the Democratic convention, but there are already signs that it is fading. I think James Piereson is correct. Kamala’s position now is akin to that of Michael Dukakis (remember him?) in 1988.
Dukakis was way ahead of George Bush in the summer of 1988. Then it all unraveled.
The puppeteers have stopped pretending. “Obamaites Take Over Team Kamala.”
Ho hum, nothing to see here, just another cycle in which Barack Obama runs for president. What is this, five in a row now?
In this case, though, we may have to give Kamala Harris a pass. It’s not as if she developed a team of campaign experts on her own. Or that they’d stick around for long if she did (via Memeorandum):
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris hired a battery of new senior advisers to her campaign this week, moving swiftly to replace lifetime loyalists of President Biden with Democratic campaign veterans, including multiple leaders of Barack Obama’s presidential bids, according to people briefed on the campaign shifts.
David Plouffe, a top strategist on both of Obama’s presidential campaigns, joins Harris as senior adviser for strategy and the states focused on winning the electoral college. Stephanie Cutter, the deputy campaign manager for Obama’s reelection who has been working in recent months with Harris, is the new senior adviser for strategy messaging. Mitch Stewart, a grass-roots organizing strategist behind both Obama wins, will become the senior adviser for battleground states. David Binder, who led Obama’s public opinion research operation and previously worked for Harris, will expand his role on the Harris campaign to lead the opinion research operation.
All of the new hires will report to campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, another veteran of Obama’s two campaigns. She managed Biden’s 2020 campaign and built his 2024 operation from the White House before moving to Wilmington, Del., this year. Harris took control of Biden’s campaign as soon as Biden announced he would not seek reelection, an operation consisting of more than 1,300 employees and more than 130 offices. She asked O’Malley Dillon to remain in charge.
O’Malley Dillon tried gaslighting this right off the bat, although the Washington Post doesn’t put it that way. “This team is a reflection of the vice president,” she declared, but the Post’s reporting makes it abundantly clear that it reflects Obama rather than Harris. Harris’ existing staffers will remain in place, but the reporting strongly suggests that they will be eclipsed by people who [checks notes] know how to get to Iowa in a primary cycle.
On one hand, this is smart politics, especially given Harris’ record of abysmal performance on the campaign trail. Until now, Harris has only faced one significant competitive election against a Republican, the AG race in California, which she almost lost while other Democrats won statewide races by double digits. Thanks to California’s jungle-primary system, she won her Senate seat against a fellow Democrat in the general election. She then failed to get to a single primary contest in 2020 after entering that primary cycle as one of the favorites, melting down in two debate exchanges with Tulsi Gabbard and utterly failing to inspire Democrat primary voters.
If anyone needs an Obama rescue, it’s Kamala.
Still. During most of Biden’s presidency, Obama’s team largely drove policy, especially in foreign affairs, and Biden’s clear cognitive decline made it appear that someone pulled the strings behind the scene — and Obama was the most likely suspect. Then Biden got humiliated in a debate he demanded and suddenly Obama became even more of a public puppeteer in forcing Biden to withdraw. And now practically his entire political team has taken over Team Kamala even more than they had with Team Biden.
And not to be too conspiratorial about it, but how did we find out about this? In the oh-so-traditional Friday afternoon news dump.
It seems like the Democrats’ rule of thumb is: if you can’t win, cheat.
On Thursday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed itself and will now allow Arizonans to register to vote in federal races without having to prove citizenship.
“It’s another dizzying swerve in the legal battle over a 2022 law that aims ultimately to reverse a portion of the National Voter Registration Act and require all Arizona voters to show proof of citizenship to register to vote,” reports USA Today. “The order reopens a path for potential voters who just two weeks ago were barred from using the state voter registration form to sign up to vote unless they could produce proof of U.S. citizenship. It comes with two months left before the Oct. 7 registration deadline for the high-stakes presidential election.”
The order means people can again use the state-issued voter registration form even if they don’t produce proof of citizenship. Instead, they attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens, and are limited to voting in federal races only.
In the first 10 days after the July 18 ruling that required the documentary proof, the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office said it had rejected 200 voter applications.
On Thursday, the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office clarified the impact of the ruling.
“Election officials may not reject voter registration applications submitted without DPOC, regardless of which form is used,” communications director Aaron Thacker said. DPOC is shorthand for documentary proof of citizenship.
There is only one reason to allow Arizonans the ability to register to vote without proving citizenship: to let illegals vote. That’s why Joe Biden opened up the border, and that’s why the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed itself.
America First Legal (AFL) has filed a lawsuit against Maricopa County, Arizona recorder Stephen Richer for failing to remove non-citizens from county voter rolls.
On Monday the legal organization founded by former senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller sued Richer and Maricopa County on behalf of the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona and a registered voter and naturalized citizen, for allegedly refusing to verify the citizenship of voters registered in the county, Just the News reports.
On July 16, AFL sent letters to all 15 Arizona counties demanding that election officials follow state and federal law by ensuring that non-citizens were unable to vote, and warned of legal action if they didn’t by the following week.
America First Legal (AFL) has filed a lawsuit against Maricopa County, Arizona recorder Stephen Richer for failing to remove non-citizens from county voter rolls.
On Monday the legal organization founded by former senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller sued Richer and Maricopa County on behalf of the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona and a registered voter and naturalized citizen, for allegedly refusing to verify the citizenship of voters registered in the county, Just the News reports.
On July 16, AFL sent letters to all 15 Arizona counties demanding that election officials follow state and federal law by ensuring that non-citizens were unable to vote, and warned of legal action if they didn’t by the following week.
Richer replied via his legal counsel, claiming that he’s following the law by verifying the citizenship of voters – however AFL says he’s lying, as voter rolls have had an increase in the number of registered voters without confirmed citizenship under his watch, and that databases have not been accessed which would verify voters’ citizenship.
CNN: “Do you think Kamala Harris is black?” Actual black people in a barbershop: “Nope.” CNN: “You black people have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Tim Walz’s first executive order as the Democratic governor of Minnesota governor was establishing a diversity, equity and inclusion council for all of the state government’s actions and designated himself as the chair. On Tuesday, Waltz was selected to be Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate in the 2024 presidential election.
The Democratic Vice Presidential nominee told The Associated Press in 2019 that the “One Minnesota Council on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity” would ensure the “lens of equity” for all state government businesses, including “recruiting; retaining and promoting state employees; state government contracting; and civic engagement.”
“Walz told reporters Wednesday he’ll chair the council,” the AP said at the time, “patterned on a similar council formed by former Gov. Mark Dayton, but expand its scope to include geographic diversity and other considerations.” Walz said that the point of the council, per AP, was to “work to ensure that all Minnesotans have the opportunity to fully participate in the development of state policy. He says it will ensure that the ‘lens of equity’ is focused on everything the state does, whether it’s transportation projects or hiring.”
He has spoken many times about the “privilege” he’s been given as a “white man.” “I understand the privilege I’ve been given as a white man,” he said during his leadership, saying that he was in office “not just to talk about the problem” of racial disparity “but the solve the problem.”
It was late in the spring of 2005 when Tom Behrends, a farmer in his mid 40s with three kids, got the call from his superiors: The Minnesota National Guard’s 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery was being sent to Iraq. Tim Walz, the unit’s command sergeant major, had just resigned to run for Congress. Behrends was in line to take his place.
He’d need to talk with his family, Behrends told his bosses. He had a farm to run and his youngest child was still in elementary school. Because he wasn’t in the unit when it was activated, technically Behrends had to volunteer to go.
But Behrends told National Review it was clear what he needed to do.
“My first reaction was, I’m not going to let my soldiers down,” he said.
Behrends ended up spending 17 difficult months in Iraq with the unit. Among the unit’s tasks was maintaining a key supply route, keeping it clear of explosives. Three of his soldiers were killed and dozens more were injured during the tour, he said.
Although they were both first sergeants in the Minnesota Guard, Behrends said he didn’t really know much about Walz. They were in meetings together. “The only thing I knew about him is he talked too much, and he liked to hear himself talk,” Behrends said.
When Democrats decide they need a veteran to help disguise their radical nature, they inevitable seem to pick a “blue falcon,” dating back at least as far as tapping John Kerry in 2004.
The Tim Walz Stolen Valor story goes back to the very beginning of his political career. From the onset of his foray into national politics, Walz sold himself to the public and the media as a combat veteran of the Global War on Terror, masking the reality that he quit the military to run for office and avoid being deployed to Iraq.
Thanks to some quality reporting, we know that the Minnesota governor — who yesterday officially joined the Kamala Harris campaign for President as its VP on the ticket — quit the military in 2005, after learning that his battalion was about to be sent to Iraq. Walz spent his entire career in the Army National Guard learning to lead people into battle, with training and his lone six month overseas deployment to Italy provided at U.S. taxpayer expense. He then retired when he learned he was going to be leading people into battle in Iraq, leaving Minnesota’s 125th Field Artillery Regiment high and dry for a career in politics.
But that’s not what Tim Walz told the public when he decided to run for public office upon abruptly leaving the military.
Just months after leaving his battalion to go to Iraq without him, he announced a run for Congress, and the dissembling about his service record began immediately.
Instead of being honest about his early departure from the military, Walz told the media a much more heroic tale, one that was entirely fictitious.
To this day there are Democrats who believe that Walz served in Iraq, when he never got closer than Italy.
When the US Marine Corps asked me to go to Iraq to serve my country, I did it.
When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, he dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him. I think that's shameful. pic.twitter.com/Dq9xjn4R51
Minnesota National Guard spox Army Lieutenant Colonel Kristen Augé told Just the News that Walz, Kamala Harris’ vice presidential running mate, was demoted and did not retire as a command sergeant major as he has claimed for years – including on his official gubernatorial biography – as he failed to complete a 750-hour course in the Army’s Sergeants Major Academy, a mandatory course for E-9s, the Army’s highest enlisted rank.
While Walz temporarily held the title of command sergeant major he “retired as a master sergeant in 2005 for benefit purposes because he did not complete additional coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy,” Army Lt. Col. Kristen Augé, the Minnesota National Guard’s State Public Affairs Officer, told Just the News.
The statement reignited a controversy that began during his 2018 election for governor in which National Guardsman claimed on social media and in a paid ad that Walz declined to deploy to Iraq for combat duty in 2005 and forfeited his title of command sergeant major. Walz chose to run for Congress that year. -Just the News
The governor’s biography, however, says that “Command Sergeant Major Walz” retired from the Minnesota National Guard in 2005. At the time he was serving as one of the highest ranking members of the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion.
How is it that stolen valor and career embellishment are so endemic among Democratic office holders? Is it status anxiety, or the arrogance of the entitled? “It’s OK to lie about my record, because I deserve this!”
Ex-UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter’s home in upstate New York was raided by the FBI as part of a federal investigation, Wednesday, officials said.
An FBI spokeswoman confirmed to The Post that agents conducted a raid on the Delmar home as part of a federal investigation. She declined to comment further, citing the ongoing probe.
Ritter, a convicted sex offender, told reporters outside his Delmar home after the raid that the warrant focused on potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the Times Union reported.
He recently had his passport seized by the US Department of State as he tried to fly to Russia for a conference – a brouhaha he contended in the Russian propaganda site RT was a spiteful move against his pro-Russia stances.
The raid came a day after Ritter, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, palled around with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was in an Albany courtroom for a hearing over whether the independent presidential candidate should be on New York’s November ballot, the Times Union reported.
Ritter is indeed a Russian tool, but the timing from our increasingly politicized FBI does seem a tad suspicious…
Google has engaged in illegal activity by using its search-engine dominance to thwart competition, a federal judge ruled on Monday in a landmark decision that could have major implications for the way Americans consume information.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled against Google this week, after the Department of Justice and a coalition of state attorneys general challenged the tech company’s market dominance in 2020. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said in the decision that Google is a “monopolist” that has “acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” Google paid $26.3 billion in 2021, for example, to promote its search engine as the default option on smartphones and browsers.
“The default is extremely valuable real estate,” Mehta wrote. “Even if a new entrant were positioned from a quality standpoint to bid for the default when an agreement expires, such a firm could compete only if it were prepared to pay partners upwards of billions of dollars in revenue share and make them whole for any revenue shortfalls resulting from the change.”
“Google, of course, recognizes that losing defaults would dramatically impact its bottom line. For instance, Google has projected that losing the Safari default would result in a significant drop in queries and billions of dollars in lost revenues,” he added.
Once again, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took a leading role in bringing the lawsuit. “The legal battle began in October 2020 when Paxton announced that Texas had sued Google for utilizing business strategies to squelch competition for search advertising and internet searches.”
We have been discussing media rating systems being used to target advertisers and revenue sources for certain cites and companies. NewsGuard and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) have been criticized as the most sophisticated components of a modern blacklisting system targeting conservative or dissenting voices. I recently had a series of exchanges with NewsGuard after a critical column. Now, the House Judiciary Committee under Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is moving forward in demanding documents and records from leading companies utilizing the GARM system, a company that I have previously criticized. It is a welcomed effort for anyone who is concerned over the use of these blacklisting systems to curtail free speech. However, time is of the essence.
The demand to preserve evidence went to various companies, including Adidas, American Express, Bayer, BP, Carhartt, Chanel, CVS and General Motors.
In my new book, I discuss the rating systems as a new and insidious form of blacklisting.
It is an effort to strangle the financial life out of sites by targeting their donors and advertisers. This is where the left has excelled beyond anything that has come before in speech crackdowns.
Years ago, I wrote about the Biden administration supporting efforts like the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) to discourage advertisers from supporting certain sites. All of the 10 riskiest sites targeted by the index were popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. That included Reason.org and a group of libertarian and conservative law professors who simply write about cases and legal controversies. GDI warned advertisers against “financially supporting disinformation online.” At the same time, HuffPost, a far-left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation.
Once GDI’s work and bias was disclosed, government officials quickly disavowed the funding. It was a familiar pattern. Within a few years, we found that the work had been shifted instead to groups like the GARM, which is the same thing on steroids. It is the creation of a powerful and largely unknown group called the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which has huge sway over the advertising industry and was quickly used by liberal activists to silence opposing views and sites by cutting off their revenue streams.
Notably, Rob Rakowitz, head of GARM, pushed GDI and embraced its work. In an email to GARM members obtained by the committee last month, Rakowitz wrote that he wanted to “ensure you’re working with an inclusion and exclusion list that is informed by trusted partners such as NewsGuard and GDI — both partners to GARM and many of our members.”
GARM is being used by WFA to achieve what GDI failed to accomplish. The WFA sites refers to Rakowitz as “a career change agent” who will “remove harmful content from ad-supported digital media.”
Rakowitz’s views on free speech are chilling and his work shows how these systems can be used to conceal bias in targeting the revenue of sites with opposing views.
Rakowitz has denounced the “extreme global interpretation of the US Constitution” and how civil libertarians cite “‘principles for governance’ and applying them as literal law from 230 years ago (made by white men exclusively).”
He appears to be referring to free speech.
Know who else isn’t wild about GARM? Elon Musk, who’s suing them for coordinated boycott of Twitter/X.
Elon Musk’s X sued a coalition of advertisers leading a boycott against the social platform, accusing the group of conspiring to “collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue.”
The suit takes aim at the World Federation of Advertisers and its initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which led a boycott against the platform formerly known as Twitter after it was acquired by Musk in 2022.
“The boycott and its effects continue to this day, despite X applying brand safety standards comparable to those of its competitors and which meet or exceed those specified by GARM,” reads the lawsuit, which was filed Tuesday in Texas federal court.
X accused the coalition and several specific advertisers, namely Unilever, Mars and CVS, of violating antitrust law and circumventing the competitive process with their boycott.
“The brand safety standards set by GARM should succeed or fail in the marketplace on their own merits and not through the coercive exercise of market power by advertisers acting collectively to promote their own economic interests through commercial restraints at the expense of social media platforms and their users,” the platform argued.
Since Musk’s takeover of the platform, X has struggled to retain advertisers, which were wary of the tech billionaire’s early decisions to roll back content moderation policies and reinstate previously banned users, like former President Trump.
An advertising industry initiative targeted by an Elon Musk lawsuit is “discontinuing” its activities and has deleted the member list from its website.
On Tuesday, Musk’s X Corp. sued the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) over what X claims is an illegal boycott spearheaded by a WFA initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM). The WFA isn’t disbanding but is halting GARM’s activities, and the GARM member page now produces a 404 error. An archived version of the page from yesterday shows the initiative members, including X.
X’s antitrust lawsuit has drawn skeptical responses from law professors, who say it will be difficult to prove that companies violated antitrust laws by stopping advertisements. But while X may never obtain financial damages from the advertising group or corporations like CVS and Unilever that it also named as defendants, fighting the lawsuit could be costly.
Business Insider reported on the GARM shutdown today:
The advertising trade group The World Federation of Advertisers told its members on Thursday that it was “discontinuing” activities for its Global Alliance for Responsible Media initiative following an antitrust lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X against the company earlier this week.
Stephan Loerke, the CEO of the WFA, wrote in an email to members, seen by Business Insider, that the decision was “not made lightly” but that GARM is a not-for-profit organization with limited resources. Loerke said that the WFA and GARM intended to contest the allegations in X’s suit in court and were confident the outcome of the case would “demonstrate our full adherence to competition rules in all our activities.”
If that’s not an open admission of guilt, it will do until one comes along. In the meantime, expect this censorship hydra to put up again under another same.
What has all that investment in “green” energy gotten California? “Since January 2014, residential average rates for the PG&E service area have jumped by 110%, those of SCE have surged by 90%, and SDG&E rates have soared by 82%….A total of 18.4% of the customers of the three investor-owned utilities are in arrears in their energy bills.”
“Bangladesh Leader Flees Country In Helicopter As Protesters Storm Parliament.” “Bangladesh’s long-serving Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, resigned and fled the country on Monday, after protesters defied a military curfew and stormed her official residence. Hasina, who had been in power for 15 years, fled the capital Dhaka along with her sister by a helicopter to India, the daily newspaper Prothom Alo reported, after weeks of violent crack downs on protesters left nearly 300 people dead.”
“Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus took charge of Bangladesh’s caretaker government on Thursday, hoping to help heal the country that was convulsed by weeks of violence, forcing Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to quit and flee to neighbouring India. Known as the ‘banker to the poor’, Yunus is the pioneer of the global microcredit movement. The Grameen Bank he founded won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for helping lift millions from poverty by providing tiny loans to the rural poor who are too impoverished to gain attention from traditional banks.” I’d be more enthused about Yunus if their bank hadn’t been a contributor to the Clinton Global Initiative.
Just a normal everyday traffic stop: pulling over a couple of Chinese nationals, driving through Texas, with $250,000 worth of gold bars on their person.
That was the scene last week in Van Zandt County, according to KETK NBC.
Sgt. Charlie Hughes of the Wills Point Police Department was monitoring traffic on I-20 near the 533-mile marker when he saw a White Chevy Malibu with Michigan plates committing a traffic violation.
He then stopped the vehicle and identified the driver as 25-year-old Weijian Chen.
KETK writes that due to a language barrier, Hughes asked Chen to use a translator app in his patrol vehicle to communicate.
The officer said that during the interview he “observed multiple factors that lead [him] to believe there was criminal activity afoot.”
The driver said that he was heading to Dallas and had also been in Florida to “play”.
The vehicle was rented under the name of the passenger, 46-year-old Wenqiang Lin, who consented to a search but appeared uncertain. A K9 unit alerted to the front passenger door.
Inside, officials found a Spirit Airlines boarding pass indicating that Weijian Chen had flown from Los Angeles to Atlanta on July 30-31 without any bags. The rental agreement showed the car was rented in College Park, Georgia, on July 31 and was due in Los Angeles by August 3, the report continued.
A bag behind the driver’s seat contained gold bullion bars worth an estimated $200,000 to $250,000, including:
Seven 1-ounce 999.9 gold bars
Three 5-gram 999.9 gold bars
One 1-gram 999.9 gold bar marked with 20 squares
Eight 10-ounce 999.9 gold bars
After arresting Chen and Lin, Sgt. Hughes contacted U.S. Homeland Security, which revealed both men had entered the country illegally. Lin entered on September 15, 2023, and was awaiting immigration processing in Los Angeles. Chen entered on December 17, 2023, and is also pending immigration judicial action.
“Austin ISD Chief Financial Officer Arrested on Insurance Fraud Charges. Austin Independent School District (ISD) Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Eduardo Ramos has been placed on paid leave following his arrest on charges of insurance fraud unrelated to district activities.” Maybe. But I’d still say a forensic audit is in order…
The New York State Supreme Court has denied New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s request for a preliminary injunction against busing illegal immigrants from Texas to the city.
Adams, who faces challenges from New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and others in his reelection bid next year, filed a lawsuit against 17 charter bus companies in January.
His goal was to stop the companies from busing migrants, many of them undocumented, from communities in Texas to New York. The mayor cited Social Services Law 149, which stipulates that any person “who knowingly brings, or causes to be brought, a needy person from out of state into this state for the purpose of making him a public charge” has an obligation “to convey such person out of state or support him at his own expense.”
But in her nine-page July 29 ruling, Judge Mary V. Rosado found that the lawsuit was “unconstitutional.”
Maybe if NYC hadn’t gone out of its way to declare itself a “sanctuary city” I might feel a tiny more smidge of sympathy. Who am I kidding, no I wouldn’t. This is all on Adams’ Democratic Party. Choke on it.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has provided an update to an investigation related to allegations that the Democratic fundraising operation ActBlue is involved in illicit activities.
“ActBlue has cooperated with our ongoing investigation. They have changed their requirements to now include ‘CVV’ codes for donations on their platform,” Paxton said in the press release.
“This is a critical change that can help prevent fraudulent donations.”
Paxton added that “suspicious activity on fundraising platforms must be fully investigated to determine if any laws have been broken.”
This alleged “suspicious activity” by ActBlue in Texas has been an ongoing point of contention.
Current Revolt first reported on the investigation into ActBlue and the allegedly illegitimate donations last week.
Journalist James O’Keefe recently produced a series of videos where he purported to show alleged money laundering by ActBlue in Texas.
According to O’Keefe, some individuals in Texas are being reported by ActBlue to have made thousands of individual donations, but said individuals deny them when asked if they made those contributions.
O’Keefe received a statement from the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office regarding some of these incidents.
“It appears that both donors made voluntary contributions through ActBlue. One donor was reimbursed after contesting some of the charges, while the other cannot recall whether all or only some of the donations were authorized,” the sheriff’s office told O’Keefe.
I suspect ActBlue will drop any reforms just as soon as they need to launder more money.
“Federal Court Orders California College To Drop Censorship Policy. A federal judge ordered a California community college on Aug. 2 not to enforce a poster policy that was used against three students whose anti-communist posters were taken down. U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston found that the poster policy of Fresno-based Clovis Community College violated the students’ First Amendment and 14th Amendment rights.”
Warner Brothers Discovery took $9.1 billion write-down on it’s network TV assets. As many have observed, this means that not only is CNN worthless from the standpoints of truth, philosophy and morals, but that it’s quite literally worthless as an economic asset as well. It may actually be worth less than your grandmother’s closet full of Beanie Babies…
Actually, it could be worth considerably less than nothing. “CNN Could Be Forced to Pay Upwards of $1 Billion from Defamation Suit from Tapper Show.”
The case may not be as well known (yet), but CNN could be facing a defamation liability rivaling or exceeding the $787 million Fox News paid out to Dominion Voting Systems. NewsBusters recently reported on Florida’s First District Court of Appeals affirming that plaintiff Zachary Young could seek punitive damages, in addition to economic and emotional damages, from the Cable News Network in a civil trial after they allegedly defamed him regarding his work in getting people out of Afghanistan. The total could near or exceed $1 billion.
For that outcome to be remotely in the cards, Young needed to prove malice and according to the ruling, he’s done exactly that. “Young sufficiently proffered evidence of actual malice, express malice, and a level of conduct outrageous enough to open the door for him to seek punitive damages,” Judge L. Clayton Roberts wrote in the court’s ruling.
The court felt the high bars for actual and expressed malice were met because of internal CNN messages that were extremely vicious toward Young. Correspondent Alex Marquardt, the “primary reporter” expressed in a message to a colleague that he wanted to “nail this Zachary Young mfucker” and thought the story would be Young’s “funeral.” On that declaration of wanting to “nail” Young, CNN editor Matthew Philips responded: “gonna hold you to that cowboy!”
Alongside Marquardt, CNN senior editor Fuzz Hogan, who’s a member of CNN’s internally lauded “Triad” of editorial, legal, and standards/practices oversight personnel, described Young as “a shit.”
In an interview with NewsBusters, Vel Freedman, the lawyer representing Young, said that “everyone makes mistakes” but what CNN’s messages showed was a “systemic problem” inside the network. He added that their internal mechanism for accountability had “clearly failed” and opened themselves to “massive, massive liability.”
Freedman told NewsBusters that his client had lost between $40-60 million in economic opportunity over the course of his now-damaged career as a security contractor since people in the field no longer wanted to work with him. If a jury awarded his client for emotional damages, the upper end could be as high as $600 million. The court recognizing the malice and outrageous conduct by CNN, effectively removed the cap on punitive damages in the State of Florida.
All of that meant CNN could be facing upwards of $1 billion in total damages.
Dell lays off 12,500 employees. The Biden Recession is bad for everyone, but especially tech workers.
“Tim Walz Vows To Make America As Great As Minneapolis.” “As the governor who presided over the looting and burning of Minneapolis during the summer of 2020, I have full confidence that I will be able to apply my experience stirring up race riots on the national scale as well as I have in my home state.”
I think these LinkSwarms have gotten too long. Since I’m I’m still between jobs, I have more time to waste on read the Internet. “Oh, there’s a link I should include!” Wash, rinse, repeat. I’m either going to have to start cutting these down in size or start doing multiple LinkSwarms a week.
British Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer has vowed that police have his full support in taking on “extremists” as anti-mass migration protests and riots have broken out across the United Kingdom following the mass stabbing at a children’s dance party in Southport earlier this week.
Facing a full-blown crisis less than one month into office, recently elected leftist Prime Minister Starmer gathered top cabinet ministers on Saturday as unrest erupted in dozens of towns and cities throughout the UK, in many cases in typical Labour Party strongholds in the north of England, in response to the slaying of three young girls and the stabbing of eight others, including children, allegedly by a 17-year-old Rwandan-heritage second-generation immigrant on Monday.
The Guardian, citing the far-left Hope Not Hate organisation, reported that an estimated 35 locations had been scheduled to see protests on Saturday, some of which saw violent clashes between participants and the police, as well as attacks on businesses, particularly in Belfast, Hull, Liverpool, and Manchester. According to The Telegraph, at least 90 arrests were made throughout the country on Sunday.
Snip.
The prime minister’s response to his first crisis of his expected five-year term has been heavily criticised by the Reform UK party of Nigel Farage, who accused Starmer of failing to address the root cause of the anger, which is mass migration.
On Friday, Farage’s deputy, Boston and Skegness MP Richard Tice, said: “Many millions of concerned British citizens are furious at lawless Britain. Children being slaughtered. Machete mobs abound. Soldiers being stabbed. Police violently attacked in airport.
“Instead of empathy, Keir Starmer labelled folk as “far-right”. Out of touch, clueless.”
As Farage put it a month ago, “Something is going very, very wrong with the country.”
He rails against the social justice push to paint the history of the UK as a merely a long story of oppression (sound familiar?), and the radical increase in crime that recent immigration policies (including those under ostensible “conservative” governments) have brought to the UK, and notes that crime used to be concern of the middle class and elderly, but now is a worry of the young as well, who get assaulted when going out to concerts and events at night. “The answer, of course, to that is a completely different, less woke approach to policing.”
We’ve accepted absolutely, since the late 1940s, that immigration into Britain can be a good thing. Certainly the choice of food in most of our towns is rather better as a result of it. But what has happened over the course of the last 25 years is something entirely different. It is mass migration on a level that in fact begins not just to divide and damage communities, and potentially to set people apart from each other, which is dangerous. But also, I think, a feeling that perhaps something about our culture is directly under threat. That sense of who we are. and that this is a problem. Just think about the numbers. You know Tony Blair came to power…Teddy Blair comes to power and opens the door, and bear in mind for the previous 50 years, net migration had been 30—40,000 a year, that’s what it had been for 50 years. Tony Blair comes to power and opens the door, and net over his premiership 2.7 million people come. And the conservatives accelerate it, because now nearly 4 and a half million have come since they came to power.
Just as in the United States, UK residents have been subjected to boiling the frog, using high immigration levels to change the character of the country.
Much like our froggy friends, the British people are being gradually induced into a dangerous “new normal”, in which criminality, disorder, and personal tragedy are part and parcel of life in this country. As a result of our failed policies on crime, immigration, and integration over the past thirty years, we have gradually transitioned from one of the world’s safest societies to a country in which criminality is the norm. There is a risk that the public becomes used to this new reality, and stops expecting politicians to address the root causes of disorder.
Rather than reacting to the slow drip-feed of news stories on an individual basis, it can be informative to step back and take a holistic view. In just the past few weeks, the headlines have been dominated by events which, in the aggregate, point to a precipitous decline in public order.
On July 11th, the new Labour government announced that 5,000 prisoners would be released early, in order to ease prison overcrowding. On July 15th, reports emerged that London’s once-great Metropolitan Police had failed to solve a single burglary, phone theft, or car theft in 166 London neighbourhoods over the past three years. On July 17th, a Jordanian refugee who attacked a female police officer in Bournemouth was spared community service on the grounds that he could not speak English — and on July 18th, two asylum seekers from Egypt who stole a watch worth £25,000 in London’s West End were spared jail.
That same day saw two separate cases of rioting. In the Harehills area of Leeds, police were attacked and a double-decker bus was set on fire by local residents after four Romani children were taken into care by social services. In East London’s plurality-Bangladeshi borough of Tower Hamlets, rioting broke out in response to political unrest in Bangladesh.
Let me stress this again — all of these incidents took place within the space of a single week. In years gone by, each of these high-profile incidents would have dominated national attention, and provoked a conversation about the state of law and order in this country. Today, they’re little more than fodder for the 24-hour news cycle, as fleeting as stories about vapid celebrity drama or tiresome political rigmarole.
The list goes on. July 23rd, Anjem Choudhary is charged with directing an Islamic terrorist group. July 24th, British cadets at an Army Barracks in Gillingham are told not to wear uniforms in public after an officer is targeted and stabbed. July 26th, protests break out after police in Greater Manchester are recorded restraining two brothers seen fighting passengers at Manchester Airport. July 27th, six people arrested after a drive-by shooting in Watford. July 29th, one man dead and two others injured after a knife fight in East London. July 30th, a machete fight breaks out in Southend and protestors take to the streets in Southport following a brutal knife attack at a ballet school, which killed three girls and injured eight others.
As anybody familiar with the sorry decline of South Africa will be able to attest, decline is a process, not a moment. It consists of thousands of individual incidents, system failures, and personal tragedies. When ordinary citizens become accustomed to high levels of violence and criminality, it becomes harder to address the underlying causes of those issues. Adaptation, rather than prevention, becomes the name of the game — gated communities and private security for those who can afford it, atrophying police capacity for those who can’t.
Restoring the kind of high-trust, stable society that we once enjoyed will be a slow, long process — but it is a process which begins with a restoration of law and order. El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele demonstrates that, even while implementing misguided policies such as price controls, a country can still achieve stability and growth if it can maintain law and order. This simple principle gives businesses the confidence to prosper, ensures a harmonious public realm, and gives ordinary citizens — particularly women — peace of mind as they walk the streets.
The Muslim child rape gangs in Rotherham and Oxfordshire should have been huge warnings to how unlimited, unassimilated Muslim immigration into the UK was dangerously destroying the rule of law and social cohesion, but evidently not.
America may not (yet) have Muslim rape ranges, but we certainly have high levels of unassimilated immigration destroying law and order and social cohesion. A course correction to secure the border is badly needed.
It seems you can add “Amazon” to the list of companies censoring information critical of anointed Democrats.
Caleb Maupin published a book in September of 2020: Kamala Harris & The Future of America – An Essay in 3 Parts. It sold some copies and then dropped back into that vast long tail of Amazon backstock.
Until Kamala Harris was selected as the Democratic presidential candidate. Then suddenly, Amazon banned the book for spurious reasons and refused to let it be sold.
It originally sold a few hundred copies.
Last Monday Maupin got an email from Amazon. “They said there was something with the cover that was not correct, and they said I had multiple options, one of which was to just change the cover. And so I thought, well, jeez, I don’t want to miss this moment where everyone’s talking about Kamala. So I adjusted the cover put a completely generic Bland cover and re-uploaded to Amazon. Denied. Tried it again. Denied. Tried it again. Denied.”
“It’s pretty clear this has been removed from Amazon. It is not allowed to be on amazon.com, despite being on there for four years. And so it appears that my book is not permitted to be on the world’s largest bookseller.”
“It just happens to come on the day Kamala Harris is named the presumptive nominee, and it looks like censorship to the world.”
When you went to the Amazon page for it, you got not the usual “out of stock” page, but a “Sorry we can’t find anything” page.
It covers some of Harris’ attitudes and activities as California Attorney General that are now verbotten in the Democratic Party, like building more prisons, keeping prisoners past their release date so California could enjoy using their near-slave labor, how she knew about the drug lab scandal and continued to cover it up, etc. “Over about a thousand cases are thrown out people are released from jail because Kamala Harris was caught concealing false positive drug test results.”
“The fact that she’s tried to reinvent herself as Miss Black Lives Matter, the spokesperson for the downtrodden and all of this, it is the most phony thing. She rose up the ranks of California’s criminal justice system in the late 1990s, early 2000s, when they were locking up people at astronomical rates.”
Jimmy Dore says that #BlackLivesMatter’s just came out against anointing Harris the nominee, which appears to be the case, saying the process was undemocratic. Broken clock, twice a day.
When leftists self-righteously denounces censorship, they only mean censorship against the left. The Twitter Files prove that the left is happy to censor dissenting voices when it suits their ends, and this is just the latest example.
Just before I hit publish, I checked to see what message Amazon now gives you for the book…and it appears to be available again, at least for now. So it appears they just reversed course after having gotten caught…
It’s been an eventful two weeks, which makes me feel like I’ve been blogging flat out for most of them. So here’s something a bit lighter, but dealing with those heavy topics: Comic Andrew Schulz on fire going after Kamala Harris, Trump’s Secret Service detail, etc. in the first four minutes of his Flagrant podcast. It’s edgy, crass, politically incorrect, very not safe for work, and hilarious. You have been warned.
A few tamer samples:
“It kind of feels like the Democrats dragged Biden’s lifeless corpse through the campaign long enough to avoid a primary so they could place whoever they wanted as the nominee, and that’s about as democratic as North Korea’s Got Talent.”
“I’m saying is they used a vegetable to install a plant.”
“Are you saying Herpes Potter [would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks] was just walking around with a loaded gun like he was on an Alec Baldwin set, carrying a fucking ladder and a rangefinder, propped it up on a building that had cops in it, positioning himself on the roof with a perfect sight line to the president and no one did anything?”
“It doesn’t exactly feel like a 20-year-old fetal alcohol face McLovin should be able to infiltrate the most advanced security detail in history.”
I’ve only watched that and a few minutes more, so I can’t comment on the rest of the podcast. Maybe it’s great, maybe it sucks…
Now that most prominent Democrats have dutifully lined up behind Kamala Harris as their 2024 presidential candidate, let’s have a roundup that confirms what regular blog readers already know: Kamala Harris is just the worst.
Short of Joe Biden staying in the race while exemplifying the energy and lucidity of an empty bag of Lay’s Sour Cream and Onion potato chips on the floor of a basement frat party, “passing the torch” to Kamala Harris is the best thing Republicans could have wished for — and simply “the next worst thing” for Democrats who, in their hail mary hour, reached into their quiver and pulled out the political equivalent of a Fran Drescher laugh track on repeat.
The entire party all of a sudden throwing their endorsement behind a woman who polled worse than a quart of cottage cheese that was left to sit in the sun for six months during the 2020 primary exemplifies the point I made a month or two ago when I argued that politicians have a talent for making the worst possible decisions.
Not only did Tulsi Gabbard publicly humiliate Kamala Harris on the debate stage during the 2020 primaries, but both polling and the results of Harris’ campaign forced us to one conclusion: most Americans find Harris detestable. And, in 2024, there doesn’t seem to be any indication that this attitude has changed.
I can’t describe the pleasure I get from watching the stupid decisions the Democratic party makes—namely, selecting Kamala Harris based on her gender and race to be Vice President of the f*cking United States —come back to bite them in the ass.
The fact is that if Harris was not vice president, she would never be next in line to be the Democratic nominee. She was picked to be vice president only because Joe Biden made his selection based on race and gender hustling, completely ignoring the fact that nobody seemed to like Harris and she doesn’t appear to have the brain torque necessary for the job.
By circumventing an actual legitimate selection process for Vice President, which should always boil down to a meritocracy as one of the most important positions in the world, Democrats planted a political seed in a pile of horse manure that has now blossomed into poisonous, cackling political fungus. And by moving Kamala Harris into position to be the next Presidential nominee, the party is officially taking the first bite of the fungi they began growing on the dung heap four years ago.
Beyond identity politics coming back to bite Democrats, the Harris pick makes no obvious sense because she is easily tethered and tied to the horrific last four years President Biden had in office. We are voting to “continue to be burdened by what was”, to use the parlance of Kamala’s time.
Under Kamala Harris, the Office of the Vice President has been called a “revolving door,” a “staff exodus” of key aides “heading for the exits.”
That’s not hyperbole from the national media. Our auditors at OpenTheBooks quantified an extraordinarily high 91.5-percent staff turnover rate. We used U.S. Senate disclosures to conduct our investigation and those databases can be downloaded below.
Elected in November 2020, Harris took the oath of office in January 2021. As of March 31, 2024, only four of the initial 47 staffers from the first year are still employed – consistently and without interruption – by the Vice President.
Furthermore, the turnover chaos isn’t getting better. In the trailing 12-month period, 24 staffers left — that’s almost half the employees.
The “top-to-bottom dysfunction” that The Atlantic referenced in October 2023 is shown in the reported payrolls that we captured.
“In her first year and a half as vice president, Harris saw the departure of her chief of staff, communications director, domestic-policy adviser, national security adviser, and other aides,” the magazine wrote.
If only that was all who left.
The semi-annual Report of the Secretary of the Senate, among other things, lists the names, titles and salaries of staff in the Office of the Vice President (OVP).
In the most recent publishing through March 31, only four staff from the original 47 listed in the 2021 report remained consistently employed and are among the office’s 50 current staff members.
The Kamala Harris Fabulous Four – here are the names, titles, employment date, and salaries of the four employees most loyal to Kamala Harris:
Yael S. Belkind has been assistant to the chief of staff since Jan. 20, 2021, earning $85,924;
Nasrina Bargzie was associate counsel since Feb. 10, 2021, now is deputy council, taking home $118,066.
Oludayo O. Faderin was associate director from July 2021, then became deputy director of west wing operations, making $85,924.
Olivia K. Hartman was hired in August 2021 as advance coordinator and became deputy director of scheduling, making $94,750.
Remember how everyone was saying that only Harris could use money raised for Biden? Trump’s lawyers say “Not so fast!”
Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers on Tuesday filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission arguing that Vice President Kamala Harris cannot legally gain control of nearly $100 million donated to President Joe Biden by changing the name of his campaign committee.
“This is little more than a thinly veiled $91.5 million excessive contribution from one presidential candidate to another, that is, from Joe Biden’s old campaign to Kamala Harris’s new campaign,” Trump general counsel David A. Warrington wrote in a complaint obtained by The Daily Wire. “Contributions by federal candidate committees to other federal candidates are limited to $2,000.”
“Kamala Harris is in the process of committing the largest campaign finance violation in American history and she is using the Commission’s own forms to do it,” the complaint alleges.
Candidates for office must create a campaign committee which includes their name, and file a statement of candidacy designating that committee as their fundraising vehicle. Harris did neither. Instead, on Sunday, the campaign treasurer “amended” Biden’s statement of candidacy to swap his name with Kamala’s, and pointed to Harris for President as her committee, using the same ID as the Biden for President committee. It also filed amended paperwork changing the name of that committee.
“There is no provision in federal campaign finance law for Kamala Harris to take over Joe Biden’s candidacy now by quite literally attempting to become him via an amendment… and making off with all of his cash,” Trump’s lawyers say. “Ms. Harris’ actions constitute a massive excessive contribution from Biden for President to Ms. Harris.”
With few exceptions, a campaign committee can only be linked to one candidate. Harris’s name has appeared on the Biden committee’s forms since 2020, but Trump’s lawyers argue that does not entitle her to the funds. Had Harris dropped off the ticket to challenge Biden for the presidential nomination, they note, she would not have been able to claim half of the campaign’s war chest.
“If the Commission were to deem Joe Biden to have ended his candidacy before transferring his campaign funds to Kamala Harris, then this only creates another violation. Federal candidates are prohibited from keeping contributions for elections in which they do not participate,” the complaint said.
Trump’s lawyers accuse Harris and committee treasurer Keana Spencer, who is in charge of submitting forms to the FEC, of committing “an attempted fraud on the Commission and should be referred to the Department of Justice for investigation and prosecution” as “a conspiracy to obstruct the lawful functions of the United States.”
You know who else doesn’t trust Kamala Harris? Democrats.
This is going to sound immodest,” Kamala Harris told an interviewer in the summer of 2019, “but I’m obviously a top-tier candidate.” That, she said, was why she drew so much fire from her fellow Democratic presidential candidates. But her face-saving appeal did not explain why she wilted in the face of those attacks, made a hash of her campaign, and ultimately dropped out of the race before a single primary vote was cast. Harris’s aborted presidential campaign clarified for Democrats what Republicans already knew — that the former California senator cannot live up to the standards her image-makers set for her. Contrary to the story Democrats are about to try to sell to the public, Harris’s party has never regained confidence in her abilities.
The trouble signs were apparent early in the vice president’s tenure. Just six months after she was sworn in, sources in Harris’s orbit began telling anyone willing to listen that her office was “not a healthy environment.” She was accused of refusing to read her briefing materials only to turn around and “berate employees” whom she accused of being responsible for her embarrassing unpreparedness. By the summer of 2022, 13 senior Harris staffers had left for greener pastures.
The chaos unfolding behind closed doors reinforced the impression she cultivated in public as a maladroit executive. The revolt of the staffers coincided with a one-on-one interview with NBC News reporter Lester Holt, in which Harris defended her failure to visit the rapidly deteriorating Southern border by laughing awkwardly while insisting she hadn’t “been to Europe” either. “I don’t understand the point you’re making,” Harris insisted. No one else appeared similarly perplexed.
As New York Times reporter Astead Herndon later detailed, Harris and her allies were so demoralized by the vice president’s faceplant that she withdrew from the public spotlight. “Over the following year, Harris traveled less often,” he reported, “and she mostly avoided further media interviews, preferring friendly settings like The View and a show on Comedy Central hosted by Charlamagne tha God.”
“Whatever happened to Kamala Harris?” Los Angeles Times columnist Mark Barabak asked in late 2021. Barabak attributed Harris’s disappearing act to the demands of the vice presidency and the Biden team’s allergy to the “merest hint of personal ambition” shown by the president’s subordinates. But as CNN reported at the time, Harris was being managed by the White House in ways her supporters bitterly resented.
“Many in the vice president’s circle fume[d]” over the degree to which Harris was “being sidelined,” the dispatch revealed. “The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she’s able to do politically.” Indeed, Harris was “perceived to be in such a weak position” that Democrats had begun to wonder aloud why the White House would allow the vice president to “become so hobbled in the public conscious” — the assumption being that this was done to Harris rather than something she did to herself.
After spending the first two years of the Biden administration waiting without reward for the competent campaigner Democrats had been promised to emerge, Harris’s allies began to show their impatience. The “painful reality” of Harris’s vice presidency, Times reporters wrote in early February 2023 after speaking to “dozens of Democrats,” was that “she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country.” These sentiments were not confined to Harris’s embittered rivals within her own party: “Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.”
Democratic leaders soon moved on Harris in a scaled-down version of the very putsch that finally rid them of Joe Biden. In January 2023, Senator Elizabeth Warren was asked if Biden should keep Harris on the ticket in 2024. “I really want to defer to what makes Biden comfortable on his team,” Warren replied. The remark was described as “pretty insulting” by Harris’s staff, and Warren made multiple efforts to apologize to the vice president for her flippancy. But if Warren’s remarks betrayed her doubts about Harris’s political acumen, those doubts weren’t hers alone.
In September of that year, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper pressed former House speaker Nancy Pelosi for her thoughts on Harris’s potential. “Is Vice President Kamala Harris the best running mate” for Biden, Cooper asked. “He thinks so,” Pelosi replied curtly. In turn, influential House Democrat Jamie Raskin was asked the same question, and he, too, attempted an evasive maneuver. “That’s President Biden’s choice,” Raskin finally said when pressured for a definitive answer. “Raskin, after receiving backlash, later went on a different network to clarify his support,” Herndon noted.
Today, for want of any realistic alternatives, Democrats are stuck with Harris at the top of the party’s ticket in November. But for all the party’s public displays of bravado, Democrats appear to understand that the vice president needs to operate in a rigidly structured environment . . . or else. “Harris has been cautious and reluctant to participate in events that weren’t tightly controlled,” Axios reported on Monday. For example, when Harris was invited to attend a 2022 dinner at the house owned by the former owner of the Atlantic, David Bradley, Harris was so beset with anxiety that “her staff held a mock dinner beforehand,” with her staffers “playing participants.” The preparation must have proven insufficient because, in the end, Harris declined to attend.
Say what you want about Trump, but he’s never been afraid to attend a dinner party.
As attorney general, it was her job to give propositions appearing on the ballot accurate titles and explanatory summaries. In order to fool the voters into passing Proposition 47 — decriminalizing crime — and Proposition 57 — allowing the release of thousands of violent criminals — Harris intentionally lied to the voters about what these laws would do.
Proposition 47 basically turned every crime into a “misdemeanor.” Grand theft, commercial burglary and possession of illegal narcotics — all misdemeanors.
Theft of anything worth less than $950 — even theft of a gun — became a misdemeanor, no more consequential than a waiter giving a straw to someone who didn’t ask for one. As Californians have since learned, that $950 cap does not include the tens of thousands of dollars required to repair smashed car windows, store fronts or display cases.
As a result, smash-and-grab robberies have become the new sport in the Golden State, leaving entire inner-city neighborhoods without a pharmacy. The police don’t even respond to thefts of less than $950. Retail stores have to keep their entire inventory under lock and key, including ordinary items, like shampoo and toothpaste — and those are the ones that aren’t closing permanently. San Francisco’s landmark Union Square shopping district is now plastered with “For Lease” and “Going Out of Business” signs. Roughly 50% of all videos on the internet are clips of California “teens” dashing out of upscale stores with armloads of stolen goods — Gucci, Prada, Burberry, Luis Vuitton.
Last year, Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco topped the list of the U.S. cities with the most retail theft, according to the National Retail Federation. A fourth California city, Sacramento, came in at No. 7. These days, when a customer tries to actually pay for something, the cashier calls the manager.
The shoplifting is so pervasive that, earlier this year, a Target shoplifter strolled out of the store right past Gov. Gavin Newsom. During a CNN report on the rash of thefts in San Francisco, three shoplifters hit the CVS as they were filming.
Also good for business: Tourists are warned not to rent cars, because they’ll only be broken into. Drug addicts clog the sidewalks, writhing in their own needles and fecal matter.
KAMALA HARRIS: "The United States shares a very important relationship, which is an alliance with the Republic of North Korea." pic.twitter.com/H2dI5UYOlo
Let’s also not forget that she’s a liar, even about trivial crap:
You know how Democrats crowed about that one poll that showed Harris was leading Trump? Yeah, they oversampled Democrats, just as you would expect. Always check the crosstabs…
“How do you perceive Vice President Harris compared to President Biden in terms of competency and experience?” Jordan asked.
One woman said she believes Harris is “worse” while another said, “She doesn’t even know what’s going on at the border. That’s what she was supposed to be doing.”
Jordan asked when the group believes the United States will have its first woman president.
“When there’s a competent one,” a different voter said.
Another voter said, “I don’t get a good feel for her” while a voter named Mary said, “I think she’s an idiot.”
Jordan asked Mary why she feels this way about Harris.
“Because she hasn’t done anything in the time that she’s had. We don’t know anything about her as far as her three years so far in the White House. She’s not real smart.”
I can’t find a full video of that, just this snippet:
Either MSNBC or YouTube (or probably both) sure doesn’t want you to find that interview…
The Democratic Media Complex that gaslighted us for four years about Biden’s cognitive decline has now forced him out of the race.
President Joe Biden announced that he will be dropping out of the 2024 presidential race after intense public pressure from Democratic lawmakers and liberal commentators following his disastrous presidential-debate performance last month, a dramatic shake-up to the electoral landscape with only months to go until votes are cast.
Biden posted a statement on X, declaring his intention to drop out of the presidential race after seemingly having decided that he is not the Democratic Party’s best candidate to defeat former president Donald Trump this November. He did not endorse a replacement to top the presidential ticket.
Now a lame-duck president, Biden, 81, will serve the remaining months of his single presidential term. His political career, which has spanned five decades, will likely be defined by his decision to bow out of the presidential reelection contest.
Before stepping aside, Biden and his aides vigorously defended his mental acuity but failed to convince the public. Poll after poll found that most Americans believed Biden’s age presented a serious concern, and his decline became increasingly noticeable with each public appearance.
In February, special counsel Robert Hur observed Biden’s memory issues in his final report on the investigation into whether Biden had mishandled classified documents as a private citizen. Although Hur concluded that Biden “willfully” mishandled classified materials, he did not recommend criminal charges, in large part because he did not believe Biden was fit to stand trial.
When Hur’s report came out, Democrats leaped to his defense and claimed that Hur was a right-wing partisan who unnecessarily editorialized throughout the final report. Only after Biden’s horrendous debate showing last month did Democrats finally begin discussing publicly the problem posed by Biden’s advanced age.
Throughout the presidential debate, Biden coughed, stumbled over his words, lost his train of thought, whispered into the microphone, appeared outright confused, and rambled incoherently. Immediately, Democrats and their media allies began discussing the possibility of removing Biden from the presidential ticket.
So now the party that swore up and down that you had to vote for them to “save democracy” is now going to throw the only candidate to receive primary delegates this year (after keeping Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. off the ballot) out of the race so unelected party insiders can pick a new candidate.
His letter says he’s going to serve out his term, so they’re trying to maintain the fiction that he’s fit to govern:
My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best… pic.twitter.com/x8DnvuImJV
Update 2: It occurs to me that the people actually running the Democratic Party may have decided they’re not beating Trump this year, and have settled on Harris as the sacrificial victim to toss to the tigers while they keep running things behind the scenes.
Update 3: It seems like a whole lot of media outlets had “Is Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro going to be Kamala’s running mate” pieces cued up and ready to go…
Update 4: And the first electoral map polling video since the announcement. Spoiler: Trump 340, Harris 198.
“Democrats have basically already lost this election.”
Here’s a story that demonstrates the astounding failure of Democrat-controlled California’s soft-on-crime (but hard on legal guns) policies to keep citizens safe.
A man whose record includes seven felony convictions now faces an attempted murder charge after prosecutors say he opened fire with a machine gun on two Los Angeles police officers, grazing one of them.
Malcolm Darnell Guss Jr. is accused of using a fully automatic AR-style rifle to shoot at Officers Stefan Carutasu and Joshua Rodney after they tried to stop his white Chevrolet sedan at around 9:30 p.m. on July 3 in Willowbrook near Broadway and Rosecrans Avenue, just south of Los Angeles.
The articles uses “machine gun,” which is probably technically correct in terms of the National Firearms Act definition, but it sounds like what he was using was an actual assault rifle, capable of selectable fully automatic fire. But since the democratic media complex loves to call Modern Sporting Rifles like the AR-15 “assault rifles,” they’re bereft of language when a real one shows up.
Guss allegedly unloaded on the officers before they could get out of their patrol car, resulting in two graze wounds to the head. Both officers suffered lacerations from the glass fragments of the patrol vehicle’s windshield. Guss fled the scene but was apprehended July 12. On Tuesday, he pleaded not guilty in Compton court to attempted murder and other charges for allegedly using a machine gun in the attack.
Court records show Guss’ prior convictions include two strikes for residential burglaries in July 2014 and December 2018. Since 2020 he’s been charged three times with being a felon in possession of a firearm.
In December 2020, records show, Guss was arrested with drugs and a gun by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies. He was sentenced to two years in prison after striking a deal to plead no contest to a single felony charge in March 2021. That same month, he received another two-year sentence in a separate gun case that stemmed from a September 2020 incident.
The district attorney’s office in a statement said the two convictions had concurrent prison sentences
Guss was arrested again in the Antelope Valley in May 2022, charged with resisting arrest and assault with a deadly weapon. He pleaded no contest to the resisting offense and got 16 months in prison, according to court records.
In February 2023, a judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest after he allegedly violated the terms of his release. LAPD officers in Newton Division arrested Guss on July 10, but he was released a month later, county jail records show.
And yes, there’s footage of Guss trying to kill two cops by blazing away with a “machine gun” through his rear window:
(I’m not sure if it’s the youth, the Gen Z, or the California, but those cops do sound radically different than classic LA police as depicted in TV shows like Adam-12 or Dragnet.)
So we have a repeat offender with multiple felony convictions, who by all accounts should already have been behind bars for a good long time, driving around free as a bird. “Since 2020 he’s been charged three times with being a felon in possession of a firearm.” Once again, Democrats scream and shout about “gun crimes,” but in the locales they control (especially in places with a Soros-backed DAs like Los Angeles’ George Gascon), they seem to do nothing about locking up felons with multiple gun violations. And in a state with some of the strictest gun laws in the country, a felon had no problem obtaining a fully automatic weapon.
Soft on crime policies in Democrat-run California, whether at the state level through bad legislation or at the local level due to Soros-backed DAs who refuse to prosecute, is putting convicted felons back on the street and endangering the lives of both ordinary California citizens and law-enforcement officers. Given how thoroughly the mind virus rot of social justice has infected the Democratic Party, that won’t change until Californians are willing to start electing Republicans again.
Which seems deeply unlikely. But New Yorkers elected Rudy Giuliani in 1993 for the same reason, so maybe it’s not entirely impossible…
