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Remembering Andrew Wimsatt: “The Coolest Dude Ever”

Sunday, September 13th, 2026

When I originally posted about the random senseless murder of my friend Andrew Wimsatt, I did so out of a sense of obligation. He was a close friend, and I’m a writer with a blog, so if I wasn’t going to write about him, who would?

But I’ve been stunned by how quickly the story blew up. Andrew’s murder has become national or even international news, from Fox News to the New York Post to even The Daily Mail in the UK.

Given that explosion of publicity, and Andrew’s family’s dismay over so many articles dwelling on the murder rather than the man, I felt the need to do another, longer post celebrating Andrew’s life and re-post some of the many tributes to him. He was a man of many parts, in the best possible sense.

The good thing, the heat-warming silver-lining in a very dark cloud thing, is the legions of people who knew Andrew coming from all walks of life, all different enthusiasms, to share what a great guy he was. Here’s one tribute:

I suspect being described as “the coolest dude ever” would have come as a great surprise to Andrew. As an engineer, Andrew was a geeky, goofy, affable, genial guy, and, with the sole exception of playing guitar, had none of the attributes the media use to label someone as “cool.” Our nickname for him (I think bestowed long before we met him) was “Goober,” or simply “The Goob.” And yet in a deeper, more meaningful way, he was a cool guy: A sturdy presence always looking to help out his friends, try new restaurants, listen to new bands. He was a quiet pillar of strength holding up part of the world, a vital cohort in numerous little platoons, each blithely unaware of how much he meant to others.

I knew Andrew for over 35 years, so long ago that my initial meeting with him is lost in the dim mists of time. For the last 30 of those years, he was a member of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy, a loose affiliation of myself, Dwight Brown, and a rotating cast of friends and family who go out to a different restaurant for dinner every week, everything from hot dog and taco places to high end steak joints. Andrew was one of our core members, and BBQ and sushi seemed among his particular favorites. So I’ve seen Andrew most Saturdays for three decades. We probably demolished 100 plates of nachos between us.

And it wasn’t just for food! A quarter century or so ago, we started watching movies every night after dinner, with Andrew usually joining us for that as well. We’ve watched everything from All That Jazz to Suspira to Zulu to any number of Godzilla films. (We have eclectic tastes.) After I bought my house in 2004, it became the de facto movie viewing venue, despite not then having a large TV. Andrew had a video protector he used for teaching classes, and for the first year or two, we projected movies up on a white sheet.

Andrew wasn’t just friends to us, he was a friend to my dogs as well. He would race my Great Pyrenees Buddy up and down the stairs (“Go up! Go up! Go up!”) to burn off some of his energy, and my Lab/Pit mix Avery frequently found her way under the upraised legrest of the battered brown Lay-Z-Boy Andrew always sat in.

One thing missing from all the praise flowing in over Andrew is the dark sense of humor he shared with most of our group. When it came time to divvy up the dining bill, Andrew would often joke “In the end, we will all pay.” He was a fan of The Simpsons back when it was good (which, I know, really narrows it down to “every single person in my generation”), and especially liked the 1996 Treehouse of Horror episode where Bill Clinton and Bob Dole are replaced by space aliens, often quoting the line “It doesn’t matter which one of us you vote for, either way your planet is doomed! DOOMED!”

And he loved a good Hitler joke. “You know who else loved to paint?” And after Dolly Parton died, he showed us an AI generated picture of famous singers (Kenny Rogers, Johnny Cash, Elvis, etc.) welcoming her into heaven, only some wag had swapped out Elvis for Hitler. We laughed.

We grew up in the 1980s. Dark humor is just how we roll.

Long before I knew him, Andrew was a big music fan, and had collaborated with Karl Rehn on various musical projects in high school and college. We shared interests in Peter Gabriel, King Crimson, Yes, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass and Slowdive, among many others. But Andrew’s tastes ran far afield and quite eclectic, championing such odd or obscure bands as Mr. Bungle, Tilts, Tobacco, Torche, and probably dozens I never even knew about. He was a regular attendee of Psych Fest and Levitation, the latter (which Andrew had tickets to attend) being this weekend.

He got into world music before I did, especially artists on Gabriel’s Realworld label. He was such a fan that he flew to England to work as a volunteer on the WOMAD festival. He picked up Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, all 300+ pounds of him, at an airport in a compact car, which must have been a sight to see. He complained to festival management about some of the ways he thought the artists were being treated, and received a snide, condescending letter for his troubles saying that he was being “disingenuous” and had a “hidden agenda.”

That inspired Andrew and Karl to form the band Hidden Agenda (now variously known as Hidden Agenda (of Evil) or Hidden Agenda (TX), depending on the music service, due to multiple other bands with the same name), which I would later join for (some) lyrics and vocals. The whole point of the band was to annoy people. We did a song called “Kill Yourself for Satan” and put Christian back-masking in, just so we could piss off everyone. See the FAQ (and ignore the security warning) for more details of what tremendous smartasses we were in our 20s. More recently Andrew had been playing with transforming Hidden Agenda songs into even more mutated forms via AI tools like Suno.

Apart from his myriad interests, Andrew spent his working life as a civil engineer for the Texas Department of Transportation and associated institutes. He seemed particularly proud of the Mobile Load Simulator, a giant machine he worked on to help test pavement to destruction. He was also a certified bridge inspector, and used to joke about closing bridges, setting them on fire, and then reopening them to see cars race through the flames. Here’s a video of Andrew giving a lecture on pavement fatigue.

Since so many in our group read science fiction, and Andrew came from a literary academic family, it was natural that we got him reading SF as well, and he subscribed to Nova Express, the SF critical fanzine I used to edit. He became a big fan of Howard Waldrop, another close friend of mine. I sold Andrew several of Howard’s books (among others) over the years.

Karl got Andrew into guns and shooting. He would go out on our group’s occasional trips to the range, see our various guns, and go “Ooo, I want that!” He eventually acquired quite a collection. We all greatly admired his ridiculously powerful (and loud) Desert Eagle.

Andrew had been following Iowahawk on Twitter for a while, and we went to a meetup when he moved to Austin. Andrew joined his orbit as a car enthusiast, frequently attending the Hot Rod Meetups at Top Notch Hamburgers, and other classic car events. Here’s a tribute from Iowahawk:

I won’t belabor the terrible circumstances of his death, which have been discussed in depth online recently. I am as angry and upset about his murder as anyone, but my car ID threads are designed as a sanctuary from the woes of the contemporary world. I would rather spare that anger for a different forum and choose here to focus on Andrew Wimsatt, the human being. He was a relentlessly cheerful and positive soul, I hope you will respect his spirit in your replies.

I think our mutual friend @AnnaZ perfectly summed up Andrew as “everybody’s biggest fan.” His various fandoms include countless bands, visual artists, podcasters, @wethefifth, @reason, @uaustinorg, and @TheFIREorg. And I am humbled that one of his fandoms was Dave’s Car ID Service.

You may have noticed from reading the various tributes to him over the past few days his adjectives: kind, generous, warm, positive, never had an unkind word about anyone. All true. But he seldom spoke about himself, despite having a very distinguished career as a civil engineer in road materials research. He was far more interested in talking about you, with zero expectation of anything in return. He was the least transactional person in a hyper-transactional world.

If you were lucky enough to have Andrew as a fan he was generous with his time and support, and in my case, that support included loads of his old family photos with mystery cars.

I can’t fully repay my debt to him for that. But I’d like to dedicate this episode of Dave’s Car ID Service to him, and use those photos to illustrate the life a genuine mensch.

“Least transactional person” seems right. I know if I were friends with important media personalities, the urge to blurt out “Put me on! Put me on! I’m smart and funny and well-spoken and ever so cleeeever!” would be overwhelming.

Andrew was firmly on the conservative-to-libertarian spectrum. He was a fan of this blog (and my Twitter account, before the ancien regime suspended it (which I never managed to get lifted)). I hold small election night gatherings at my house every two years where we eat pizza and watch returns roll in, and Andrew was a regular attendee. He was here in 2020, where we called it a night just before 3 AM, convinced President Trump had been reelected only to wake up to those mysterious 4:30 AM ballot drops.

He was a big fan of Gutfeld! and The Five. Such a fan that he started working behind the scenes compiling music and clips for them. Greg Gutfeld offered up a tribute to him on The Five:

More:

He was also a big fan of the libertarian We the Fifth podcast, and Matt Walsh put up this tribute.

We come here to remember and celebrate and express gratitude toward our friend Andrew, whose name will be etched permanently on our under-construction sixth floor recording studio, probably within the area where Never Fly Coachers will be invited to watch us podcast live. Busty, after all, probably witnessed us recording more than any other fan—coming to all the live shows except one, raising his hand on every damned Second Sunday, pouring drinks around the (very!) Stupid Table for Special Dispatch #34, post-gaming an episode or three back when we recorded at the DIY Paloma Media studio.

Andrew first buzzed across my radar in December 2013 when, over the course of a few days, three things happened for the first time: 1) The Independents television show, starring MTV’s Kennedy, Kmele, and myself, debuted on the Fox Business Network; 2) Wimsatt started following me on Twitter, and 3) he gave a four-figure donation to the Reason Foundation during our annual Webathon. It makes sense that these were related: Andrew l-o-v-e-d music, he adored the anarchic energy of Fox’s legendary late-nite show Red Eye (his pinned tweet for the past decade has been a celebration/compilation of Greg Gutfeld’s chosen outro music on The Five), and he was long attracted to the no-nonsense, structural-engineering ethos of Reason Foundation transportation-policy stalwart Bob Poole, whose annual highway report Andrew suggested improvements for.

We hung out for the first time in Austin back in September 2018, after which he started doing what Andrew Wimsatt does, which is send us (or just tweet out) clips of all us + others in the extended Fifth Column/Red Eye multiverse whenever we’d appear on other media. He was famously much quicker on the draw publicizing a new Fifth Column episode than any of the drunk co-hosts, and at some early point we just gave him the keys to our Facebook page. And oh yeah, did I know he actually saved most of the entire run of The Independents? (You can watch a few over at the Paloma Media YouTube page, which was chiefly the fruit of his labors.) When we started doing Patreon in November 2019, and created what we thought was an absurd, no-one-will-ever-go-there level of $50-a-month subscriptions, Andrew became one of the first few to Never Fly Coach. He would come to New York several times a year, including the last couple during our annual sojourns to the Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Cooperstown. I took calling him “Busty,” for the very stupid reason that a funny British friend of mine back in the ‘90s would always refer to Kate Winslet as “Busty Winslet,” and this very accomplished transportation engineer not only took it in stride, he kind of beamed a bit when the nickname caught on in the community.

So that’s where the “Busty” nickname came, which I swear I never heard before he died.

Here’s one from Nancy Rommelmann, who Andrew brought as a guest to an SDC many moons ago.

Do you know those friends who seem to always have been around and you don’t recall when you first met? Andrew was like that, though the not-remembering could be because Andrew was so unprepossessing, mild and kind and never wanting to intrude, while in fact being both whip-smart and the person so many, many, many of us relied on to spread the word about our work. The Fifth Column, of which there was no bigger fan, had just about zero visibility, in terms of clips, until Andrew started to create them, quietly tugging the pod onto a bigger and bigger stage. Matt wrote yesterday about some of Andrew’s quiet, steady work on behalf of others.

Since Andrew’s absolutely senseless murder, we have learned that he did not just signal boost the Fifth, as he had for more than a decade for Red Eye and Greg Gutfield and anything involving Kat Timpf, all of whom have posted their shock and remembrance, but for others, some I have never heard of.

It is exactly like Andrew not to shine any spotlight on himself. He saw people whose work he liked, probably chortled to himself (he had a good deep chortle) that they could use a little help archiving that work, then did it and them the clips. I literally have a score of these clips from him, as well as twice as many SOSs.

Snip.

I can almost guarantee you that Matt and I would have been texting Andrew that Thursday morning about the frozen computer, and that no matter where he was or what he was doing, Andrew would have responded immediately to tell us how to fix it or that he’d be on it as soon as he was by his laptop.

Snip.

He was also – and I learning this more and more as the days go by and we touch base with people Andrew knew – a Zelig of sorts, appearing wherever you were gathered, at a Fifth live show in LA, at a Cuckoo’s Nest remembrance in Tulsa, at a meet-up in Chicago. As his friend Karl Rehn told me last week, “You’d say to Andrew, ‘I’m going to such and such music show in New Jersey,’ or Las Vegas, and he’d say, ‘Great, I’ll meet you there.’” Andrew always showed up.

More tributes:

Andrew Wimsatt spent his life figuring out how to make things last longer.

Roads, bridges, tunnels, pavement, friendships.

He held three civil engineering degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, spent 18 years at TxDOT, ten of them as Fort Worth District Pavement Engineer, and in 2006 joined the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, where he eventually ran the Materials and Pavements Division and its $9 million annual research program. He worked on ground-penetrating radar, nondestructive testing, asset management.

Describing the work once, he said the real challenge wasn’t building new things; it was making what we already have last longer.

Andrew made what we already have last longer.

He was an obsessive live-music fan who would fly across the country to see a band. He loved Slowdive. In 2023 he was recommending “Souvlaki” and “everything is alive” to anyone who’d listen, singled out their cover of Syd Barrett’s “Golden Hair,” and admitted that when he heard them play it at FYF in 2014, he teared up. In 2016, when bad weather killed Levitation and Slowdive threw together a surprise show at the Scoot Inn, Andrew happened to be sitting at his computer and grabbed two $7.50 tickets in the roughly two minutes before it sold out. Then he recorded the entire set on his iPhone for a friend.

I was the one who used the other ticket. And Andrew got to know at least two members of Slowdive (and possible all of them), one of whom, Simon Scott, helped engineer an album with him.

He made music too. He’d been in bands with Karl Rehn since high school, engineered their home cassette recordings in the early 1980s, and in 1990 released “Reflections” under the name the Andrew Wimsatt Ensemble, cut at Sixth Street Studio. He and Rehn made music videos that ran for years on Austin’s ACTV, and contributed to the score of a 1994 documentary about Barton Springs.

And more tributes:

I could have posted dozens if not hundreds more tributes. It seems both overwhelming and strangely inadequate.

I didn’t anticipate how big the story of Andrew’s murder would be, though I probably should have. The parallels with Iryna Zarutska’s murder are painfully obvious. My initial post may or may not have been the first pebble that started that avalanche, but when your friend’s murder in Texas is news in England and India, many including the tuxedo photo I took of Andrew at A.T. and Carol Campbell’s wedding that accompanied my initial blog post, it tends to give you pause.

And now politicians, including some I support, are coming out of the woodwork to talk about his murder.

I’m pretty sure Dustin Burrows couldn’t have picked Andrew out of a lineup with a gun to his head.

It’s weird to see someone you knew transformed from a man into a martyr for a cause less than a week after his death. Even if it’s a cause you believe in. Even if it’s done by your side. Unsettling. And maybe a little unseemly.

Politics has been played as a blood sport for a long, long time, and I’ve delivered my fair share of rhetorical blows. But the flood of stories had me going “Wait, that detail is not quite right,” and made me wonder how many errors I’ve unwittingly spread here reposting “hot takes” on different stories.

It’s the modern condition. Or the post-modern condition. For a long time, Americans naively believed we had a news media that at least tried to report objectively, but the rise of the alternate news sources on the Internet proved that wasn’t so. But it’s particularly hard watching the sausage being made when it’s someone you know being fed into the machine. (Probably the wrong metaphor to use here.)

As the pitted olive on top of this shit sandwich, Nancy Rommelmann sent me a note pointing out that some scumbag scammer is raising money in Andrew’s name. Losing someone is bad enough without the human cockroaches shuffling out of the shadows to feed. Here’s a form to complain to. Update: In a tiny bit of good news, the scam fundraiser for Andrew has been “unpublished.”

I’m in touch with Andrew’s family, and once they get together any sort of fundraiser (and an obituary and memorial website, etc.), I’ll let you know here.

It still feels a bit overwhelming. This post is pretty long already, but I fear I haven’t adequately captured the smart, goofy friend I knew. But it will have to do.

Feel free to share memories of Andrew in the comments below.

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Posted in Austin, Crime, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »

Updates On The Murder Of Andrew Wimsatt

Saturday, September 12th, 2026

In my original post on my friend Andrew Wimsatt’s murder, I was relying on early accounts of the crime, and thus said a few things that turned out to be wrong.

Here’s the high level summary of corrections:

  1. In the original post, I said Andrew was a CHL/LTC holder who “likely would have survived his assault had he been carrying that day.” The early reports I was relying on didn’t make clear that he was sitting on a park bench when his assailant snuck up behind him and stabbed him in the neck.* I had the impression he was still walking when the attack occurred. Obviously, in such a situation Andrew wouldn’t have had time to draw his weapon to stave off the attack.
  2. I originally wrote that Benedict Ogbodiegwu, Andrew’s alleged attacker, “does not appear to have been released on bail for previous offenses in Travis County.” This may technically be true, but I didn’t think to search the Williamson County judicial database, where it shows he has had one felony and multiple misdemeanors dismissed.
  3. But evidence has emerged that his attacker wasn’t just known as a crime risk, but a mental health risk as well:

    Many are quick to blame revolving-door justice, but the Benedict Ogbodiegwu case—the man charged with murdering Andrew Wimsatt—is a criminal justice failure of a slightly-different sort. He wasn’t a violent repeat offender.

    Ogbodiegwu was ruled incompetent for trial last Feb and sent to restoration. Then, his competency hearing scheduled for May was cancelled, and in April his theft charge was dropped.

    Was he sane enough to walk free, like nothing ever happened? Obviously not. So, what did the system miss? How does mental health treatment, ordered specifically to restore competency for trial, lead to zero accountability instead of that trial?

    A good question.

More complete details of the (be forewarned) grisly crime have emerged:

The affidavit says that a woman had reported finding Wimsatt’s body at around 11:15 a.m. Sept. 7 in a park in the 2400 block of Chandler Creek Boulevard, near Double File Trail Elementary. The woman told law enforcement she had found him near a park bench with significant injuries and called 911.

Video footage obtained from the neighborhood HOA showed a white man in a button-down shirt and dark shorts sitting on the bench at about 10:55 a.m. that morning.

A couple of minutes later, a black man with a knife in his hand is seen coming up behind the other man, later identified as Wimsatt, and beginning to stab him in the neck while wrapping his other arm around him. Wimsatt is seen on video attempting to push the man off, but is unable to.

Wimsatt was stabbed several more times and left on the ground when the suspect wiped the blade on his shift and ran from the scene towards the pool area. More video footage showed the suspect running north of the pool and towards N AW Grimes Boulevard.

Video from before the attack led investigators to a water fountain near the basketball court where they were able to lift a palm print.

The suspect was in a black shirt with red writing, grey sweatpants and dark shoes and had medium-length braids with light-colored tips and a dark goatee.

A canvass of local businesses and homes revealed that the suspect had visited a McDonald’s on E. Palm Valley Boulevard hours after the attack in a different set of clothes. Video footage from the restaurant also showed the man getting into a red SUV in the parking lot.

Detectives identified the SUV as belonging to Ogbodiegwu’s family and registered at a home less than a mile on foot from the park.

Another canvass around the home uncovered surveillance footage showing a black man walking west in the same clothes as the man in the HOA footage at about 10:22 a.m. He also appeared to have an object in his left pocket. He is then seen returning eastbound at about 11:05 a.m.

Snip.

A search of the area did not uncover any new evidence, but a residential search warrant did, with detectives finding a white trash bag inside an outdoor garbage can containing the black shirt, grey sweatpants and black shoes the man in the video was wearing and a 5.5 inch knife with a wooden handle. The sweatpants had red stains on them and the blade tested presumptive positive for blood, says the affidavit.

Despite Ogbodiegwu’s prior history of possible mental illness, he seemed to be cognizant enough to ditch his blood-stained clothes and murder weapon and then enjoy a meal at McDonald’s after his violent murder of a complete stranger.

One thing I have not found in local news reports is that Ogbodiegwu attempted to “behead” Andrew, as some farther flung outlets have reported. This appears to be a too-many-steps removed exaggeration of an already horrific crime. (Edited to Add: A correction to the correction: Though it doesn’t mention “beheading,” the Statesman article does mention the perp “sawing” at Andrew’s neck. It sucks to have to add graphic details in the name of accuracy.)

I felt the need to post this update because many people used the original post as a source, and I fear the original mistakes have already been fed into numerous AI databases, possibly beyond the reach of human correction.

Barring some major new revelation, I hope this is the last post I have to write on the murder itself. Tomorrow I hope to have a post up celebrating Andrew’s life and posting some of the many tributes that have poured in from people who knew him.

*I originally ended this sentence with “like a cowardly little bitch,” but I fear this would have marred the objective tone were media outlets to use this post as a source. Though I still feel this description is totally accurate.

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Posted in Austin, Crime, Media Watch, Texas | 5 Comments »

LinkSwarm For September 11, 2026

Friday, September 11th, 2026

The 25th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, GOP midterm convention, Iran and Yemen both get spicy again, AfD shocks Germany, Ukraine’s longest drone strike yet, more welfare state fraud, more money for Paxton,

It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

More information about the murder of my friend Andrew Wimsatt has come out, and some of my original post needs to be corrected. I’m going to put that in a Saturday post, and there will be another for remembering Andrew on Sunday.

  • Your obligatory 9/11 remembrance post.

    On a perfectly clear morning 25 years ago, America changed forever.

    At 8:46 a.m. on that day, a team of Islamic terrorists crashed American Airlines Flight 11, carrying 76 passengers and eleven crew members, into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. It was followed 17 minutes later by United Airlines Flight 175, carrying 51 passengers and nine crew members, which terrorists steered into the South Tower. Less than 90 minutes later, both of those towers had collapsed into a massive pile of rubble.

    Meanwhile, as Americans’ televisions were tuned to live footage of the burning buildings, American Airlines Flight 77, carrying 53 passengers and six crew members, was slammed into the Pentagon. And shortly after, United Airlines Flight 93, with 33 passengers and seven crew members, crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pa.

    Today, we remember the 2,977 innocent victims who were the first casualties in what would become known as the War on Terror. We also remember the extraordinary heroism displayed that day, without which the horrific losses would have been far worse.

    One of the most miraculous facts about that day was that at the World Trade Center, which may have had an occupancy of 19,000 people between the two buildings at the time, 99 percent of those who were below the point of impact of the planes survived. This achievement is owed to the extraordinary evacuation efforts of first responders, who ran into burning buildings, no doubt knowing that there was a good chance they wouldn’t make it out. In the end, 441 firefighters, police officers, and paramedics did not.

    Then there was the civilian heroism displayed by the passengers on Flight 93, who had heard about what happened at the World Trade Center, overtook the plane, and ensured that it crashed in an empty field rather than into the U.S. Capitol or White House, one of which was believed to be the potential target. Passenger Todd Beamer’s remark to his fellow passengers, “Let’s roll,” overheard from a phone call, became a rallying cry as the nation fought back.

    I have no dramatic, notable 9/11 stories to tell. I was driving to my job at Applied Materials when NPR (yes, I sometimes listened to them in the morning, back in the day) broke into regular coverage to report the first tower impact. I heard a rumor that the layoff that came next week (as the depths of the Dotcom Bust were just being felt) was actually scheduled for that day, but they decided to hold off due to the attacks. Ironically, one of the people in one of the planes was an Israeli Applied employee, who survived a country beset by terrorism only to be killed on an American flight.

    See also my review of United 93.

  • The Republican Party held their first ever Midterm Convention in Dallas.

    President Donald Trump delivered the convention’s closing remarks following a keynote address from Vice President J.D. Vance.Before they took the stage, though, Texas Republicans used their appearances to focus on the November elections, public safety, immigration, and the direction of the Democrat Party.

    Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick invoked Texas history and the Alamo before turning to the November election, portraying the contest as a broader fight over the country’s values.

    “This election coming up is not about politics,” said Patrick. “It’s about darkness, and it’s about light.”

    He accused Democrats of embracing socialism and communism and argued that Texas’ economic growth has been driven by conservative policies including low taxes and no state income tax.

    He also singled out Democrat Senate nominee James Talarico, saying Republicans would put “the Democratic Party and James Talarico and his ilk on the dust heap of history.”

    Patrick closed his remarks by urging Republicans to view the election as a fight for their families and the country. “You started a fight, and the Republicans are going to finish it in November.”

    Eric Flores and Tano Tijerina, two Republican candidates challenging Democrats in South Texas, also addressed the convention. Their appearances highlighted Republicans’ continued focus on South Texas, where the president made significant gains in 2024.

    U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz used his speech to warn about what he described as an emerging red-green alliance between communists and Islamists. He received one of the strongest reactions from the crowd when he declared that Sharia law is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution.

    “Sharia law has no place in America,” said Cruz. “Sharia law is fundamentally inconsistent with the Constitution, and we need to stand together and stop it now.”

    Gov. Greg Abbott focused much of his speech on Texas Democrats running statewide in November, contrasting their legislative records with policies he has signed into law.

    Abbott pointed to the GOP’s success on a variety of issues including border security, policing, property taxes, oil and gas, election laws, parental rights, and school choice.

    “All the Democrats running statewide in the state of Texas, they had a chance to vote on those policies, and they voted against those policies,” said Abbott. “They voted against common sense.”

    Abbott highlighted legislation he signed prohibiting cities that reduce police funding from receiving certain state tax revenue, restricting some purchases of Texas property by citizens and entities tied to China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and prohibiting gender mutilation procedures for minors.

    Snip.

    Vice President J.D. Vance delivered the night’s keynote address, reflecting on the administration’s first 19 months back in office and making the case for Republicans in November.

    Vance also paid tribute to Charlie Kirk on the anniversary of his assassination, recalling that Kirk had been in the front row when Vance addressed the Republican National Convention as the party’s vice presidential nominee in 2024.

    Turning to Texas politics, Vance took aim at Democrat U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico over his previous comments on gender and Christianity.

    “This Talarico guy—he will not shut up about how there are six genders. He will not shut up about how, ‘God is non-binary,’” said Vance.

    “I gotta say, a guy that age who is so obsessed and focused on transgender children-I don’t know about you, but I never want to see that guy’s web browser.”

  • On the AfD’s shocking election win in Germany.

    Last night Germany’s much-maligned AfD party won a crushing and historic victory. The victory is already being downplayed by many, owing to the fact that Saxony-Anhalt is technically one of Germany’s smallest and least consequential states. But there is far more to it than sheer numbers, as the win defines a turning point not only in German but European politics, and cements the gradual downfall of the globalist ruling class that has tried desperately for decades to keep populist movements from gaining power, in particular utilizing the “Brandmauer” or “firewall” to suppress the so-called far-right.

    The destruction of this firewall is an historic occasion, even if it should come by way of such a seemingly inconsequential state.

    Of course, there are other criticisms as well. AfD is seen by many as a kind of Trojan horse, a German “MAGA” party led by a lesbian woman in Alice Weidel. Even so, it represents a striking loss of power for the elites and a turning point which breaks a kind of psychological barrier that will only energize other anti-establishment, “far-right”, or populist parties throughout Europe.

    Another secondary effect of the victory is that it has caused the ruling German establishment to go back to the drawing board and review its most unpopular policies, like on immigration, in order to bend with the clearly changing winds.

    Merz expressed his “deep shock” at the election result, foreseeing it having major repercussions on Germany as a whole:

    The AfD, however, fell just three seats short of an ‘absolute majority’ which would have allowed it to govern the state alone. Some commentators have pointed out some major ‘anomalies’ in regard to mail-in versus in-person votes. Just like in the highly irregular American 2020 election, every party but AfD was allegedly boosted by disproportionate numbers of mail-in votes:

    More analysis at the link. Just think if Germany’s elites hadn’t decided to import millions of unassimilated Muslims into their country, they wouldn’t have empowered the AfD. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Iran: The Islamic regime has been targeting U.S. bases, with a few hits on aircraft, we’ve launched retaliatory strikes on Iranian forces, and we’ve disabled three Iranian tankers in retaliation for unsuccessful strikes against U.S. ships. So: Same old, same old.
  • Yemen has also been getting spicy, with the Iranian-backed Houthis driving for the coast, successfully attacking a Saudi pipeline, and the official anti-Houthi government of Yemen making gains in the interior. More from Preston Stewart. If this week hadn’t been so insane, I might have done a separate post on this…
  • Maybe this is why I’m still unemployed. “Women Filled 98 Percent of Jobs Created in August.”

    Women accounted for 158,000, or 98 percent, of the 162,000 nonfarm payroll jobs created in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ establishment data. Compared to this time last year, there are 870,000 more women employed in the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and 1.5 million fewer employed men.

    So there were only 4,000 men hired in August.

    Accounting for the new data, the gap between male and female employment reached its highest level since 1990, when men were overrepresented in the workforce.

    Dramatic month-to-month swings in employment gains between the sexes are relatively common, and labor economists warn that sharp shifts don’t necessarily indicate lasting changes in the market. However, the August jobs report is in keeping with existing trends that have obtained for decades, namely a substantial increase in employment among women and a linear decline in employment among men.

    There has been a “multi-decade decline in male labor force participation” and a “multi-decade increase in female labor force participation,” Kirk Doran, a professor specializing in labor economics at Notre Dame University, told National Review.

    Part of this shift can be explained by the evolution of American industries. The sectors that grew at the highest rate in August — health care and public education — are female-dominated. Meanwhile, the industries that shrank — computing, data processing, and finance — are male-heavy.

    Sound like illegal discrimination by sex to me…

  • Ace of Spades HQ makes the case for Trump47 being a tremendous success already.

    We have every reason to be excited to go to the polls to ensure an ongoing Congressional Republican majority, and to keep the DSA-influenced Democrats away from any levers of power.

    The 20 months since President Trump’s inauguration in early 2025 have had the most significant conservative victories of my lifetime, far exceeding President Reagan’s accomplishments. Here are just a few of the things President Trump and his team have done:

    • Closed the border to illegal invaders.
    • Deported hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens, and caused millions more to self-deport.
    • Slashed the federal workforce.
    • Eliminated DEI and wokeness from the military and federal agencies.
    • Eliminated EV mandates and green energy subsidies.
    • Effectively terminated corporate average fuel economy requirements for auto manufacturers.
    • Engaged the military to eliminate narco-terrorists.
    • Engaged the DOJ to target corporations engaged in illegal racial discrimination in hiring.

    There are so many more milestone accomplishments beyond those.

    For decades the conservative base has clamored for the above victories. President Trump finally delivered. Amidst all this, there are many “conservative” influencers who are promoting doom. For many of them, that is their job – being paid to blackpill conservative voters to stay home, so as to elect a Democrat Congress. The resumption of Democrat lawfare against the Trump administration is their goal.

    Despite razor-thin congressional majorities, Trump47 has delivered numerous policy wins, and conservatives (and anyone else who wants to stop the insane, jihad-friendly, socialism- and social justice-infected Democrats from reclaiming power) should head to the polls in November to ensure Republican control through 2028.

  • “Ukraine’s Longest Range Drone Strike Yet! Nearly 3,000km! Plus Strikes on Sochi and Dagestan.” “Ukrainian drones carried out their longest range drone strike to date, hitting Russia’s Novy Urengoy and Purovsky gas processing plants in Yamalo-Nenets.” Yamalo-Nenets is an “autonomous okrug” on the Arctic Circle just east of the Urals.
  • “Ukraine Attacks Novorossiysk Fuel & Grain Terminal.” Again.
  • “Ozon Warehouse in Saratov Attacked and Burning Heavily! Plus Saratov Oil Refinery.”
  • “Frigate Admiral Essen & Buyan-M Corvette Confirmed Badly Damaged by Neptune and Drone Strike!”
  • “Two Russian Su-35S Fighters Collide in Kursk.”
  • Seems like a trend: “Nine Russian Aircraft Destroyed in One Week: X2 Su-35 Crash, x5 Helicopers, Su-24 and Su-33.”
  • More: “Satellite Imagery Confirms THREE Russian Helicopters Destroyed, x2 S-300 and a Pantsir at Sochi!”
  • “Su-33 Confirmed Destroyed at Anapa Air Base.”
  • “Ukraine Bombards Russian Cargo Ship in Mediterranean Sea With Bomber Drone.”
  • “Russian Ice Breaker Admital Makarov Sets Itself On Fire at Kronstadt, St. Petersburg.”
  • Autism fraud ring in Maine?

    Quality Care Access, LLC was chartered in July 2020 by Jovin Bayingana, and the Portland-based company rapidly became one of the most lucrative new MaineCare businesses in New England.

    According to Medicaid payment records obtained via a Freedom of Access Act request, the company billed the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) for $1.2 million in 2021, $5.3 million in 2022, $7.4 million in 2023, $6.7 million in 2024, and $7.2 million in 2025 — for a lifetime cost of $27.8 million.

    The more detailed federal Medicaid dataset shows that throughout this time frame QCA had fewer than 16 patients in most years.

  • Finally: “Republican Reinforcements Arrive for Paxton in Senate Race. The Senate Leadership Fund is pouring millions into Texas after questions over whether the Cornyn-aligned group would back Paxton.”

    Republican reinforcements are finally arriving for Attorney General Ken Paxton in his U.S. Senate race, months after the party’s biggest Senate-focused outside group backed his primary opponent.

    The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, has purchased $32 million in television advertisements across Texas and is reportedly preparing to spend more than $50 million to support Paxton against Democrat James Talarico.

    The group announced Friday it created a new Texas PAC dedicated to the race, with ads promoting Paxton and contrasting his record with Talarico expected to run continuously through Election Day.

    The investment ends months of uncertainty over whether the Senate Leadership Fund would support Paxton after backing Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary.

    It also comes as other major Republican groups have already begun pouring money into the race.

    MAGA Inc., the super PAC aligned with President Donald Trump, recently announced $10 million in advertising supporting Paxton. America PAC, the political group backed by Elon Musk, is also supporting Paxton and has begun door-knocking operations to register and get out the vote.

    This is good, if overdue news, but media ad spends are the fools gold of politics. The same group spending zillions for Cornyn didn’t move the needle, so the efficacy of their political efforts seems debatable. But maybe they’re better at convincing squishy moderates than Republican primary voters…

  • “South Texas Democrat House Candidate Sponsored March With Socialists. The Rio Grande Valley DSA has celebrated Zohran Mamdani, depicted a Border Patrol vehicle in flames, and promoted LGBT causes.

    Democrat Texas House candidate Oziel Ochoa’s campaign sponsored a May Day event co-hosted by the Rio Grande Valley chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

    Ochoa is challenging Republican State Rep. Janie Lopez for House District 37, a South Texas district covering Willacy County and portions of Cameron County.

    Campaign finance records show Ochoa’s campaign made three $259 payments to La Union del Pueblo Entero, or LUPE, on May 4. The expenditures, totaling $777, were listed as advertising expenses for the first annual May Day Marcha del Pueblo (March of the People).

    May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day, is an annual labor observance that has long been embraced by socialist and communist movements around the world.

    The event took place two days earlier, on May 2, in Edinburg.

    Organizers included LUPE, Texas Rising, the Rio Grande Valley American Federation of Teachers, the Rio Grande Valley Central Labor Council, South Texans for Reproductive Justice, Poder Latinx, and the Rio Grande Valley Democratic Socialists of America.

    Ochoa was publicly recognized for his financial support, while RGV DSA was listed among the event’s organizers.

  • “Muslim police chief of Detroit suburb told his subordinates that wife-beating isn’t a “formal” criminal offense.”

    The former police chief of Hamtramck, Michigan, is in hot water after investigators have dug into allegations against the Muslim chief for how he ran his department.

    Court records show that Hamtramck Police Chief Jamiel Altaheri personally engaged in a “pattern” of domestic violence in his own household, and told officers that wife-beating isn’t a “formal” crime.

    The primary effects of Democrats importing unassimilated Muslims for political advantage seems to be more wife-beating and more rape.

  • “Criminal Illegal Alien Arrested in Texas, Ordered Deported 26 Years Ago. A Cuban national who evaded deportation for 26 years is now behind bars.” “According to ICE, Cuban national Emiliano Martinez Perez entered the United States around 1998 and was convicted of cocaine possession shortly afterward. He was ordered to leave the U.S. in early 2000, but remained in the country and was later convicted of drug trafficking in 2007.”
  • Speaking of immigration fraud: “Houston Immigration Attorney Arrested for Fraud. Nowowiejski allegedly committed mail fraud and made false statements related to immigration cases.”

    A Houston immigration attorney was arrested Wednesday after a federal grand jury indicted her on charges of mail fraud and making false statements related to her work on behalf of immigrants seeking work-related legal status in the United States.

    Alla Nowowiejski is a naturalized citizen from Russia and has practiced law in Texas since 2009 and specialized in business immigration assistance, but she allegedly never submitted, or only partially submitted, paperwork for clients seeking to obtain work status or work visas.

    The indictment also alleges that Nowowiejski provided clients with false documents or reference numbers tied to active immigration cases unrelated to her own clients to make them believe their applications were being processed.

    In 2023, Audubon Engineering Operations sued Nowowiejski for gross negligence and legal malpractice in Harris County. The company alleged that although she had charged them more than $109,000 for immigration work on behalf of five employees, she never filed paperwork with federal immigration agencies.

  • When your entire life amounts to a bad meme: “Gays for Gaza’ activist killed by Muslim immigrant in Arizona.”
  • Gavin Newsom brags about giving welfare to illegal aliens.
  • “Chaos ensues in Democratic Party after Arab reporter calls black congressman ‘AIPAC monkey.'” Arab reporter is Rula Jebreal (who, I guess, is most famous for dating Roger Waters) and the black congressman is Hakeem Jeffries. Hakeem Jeffries should never be called a monkey, only “TEMU Obama.”
  • “South Korea is eyeing Texas for a new $22.6 billion investment in a natural gas-burning power plant.”

    The deal would mark the first chunk of change the nation will provide to the U.S. under South Korea’s new $350 billion commitment.

    Last year, tariff talks between the U.S. and South Korea led to a 10 percent decrease in tariffs imposed on South Korea — a drop from 25 to 15 percent — provided the country invests $350 billion in the U.S. in exchange.

    The power project would be set in Encinal, Texas, a small city in La Salle County.

    According to The Korea Herald, talks initially began with South Korea proposing $19.8 billion for the project, and the U.S. countering with $25 billion. Negotiations will now proceed in the $22.6 billion range, although the exact amount will not be determined until the project is finalized.

    The proposed gas combined-cycle project plant would total 6.3 gigawatts (GW) of power, built in stages. The first stage will consist of a 1.4-GW gas turbine power facility. Once the first stage passes inspection, the second stage, a 4.9-GW combined-cycle facility, will be built.

    Though unconfirmed, the plant is expected to help meet the state’s booming demands for artificial intelligence (AI) computing capacity, data center development, and semiconductor development.

    Sort of an odd location, but maybe it has to do with this proposed data center near Laredo.

  • “Microsoft Plugs Nearly 1,000 Security Holes.

    Microsoft Corp. today issued updates to plug at least 974 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, by far its biggest single patch batch ever. Microsoft says artificial intelligence is helping to speed the discovery of vulnerabilities, but security experts warn that many organizations already are struggling to prioritize the more human-intensive endeavor of testing and deploying so many fixes each month.

    This month’s patch bundle obliterates the software giant’s previous record set in July, when it released updates for at least 570 security vulnerabilities. September’s Patch Tuesday brings this year’s total to more than 2,600, more than twice Microsoft’s previous record-setting patch year in 2020 (1,245) and with three more months to go.

    There are two “zero-day” flaws fixed this month that are being actively exploited: both CVE-2026-81963 and CVE-2026-85880 allow an attacker to elevate their privileges on Windows system.

    Fully 113 of the bugs addressed today earned Microsoft’s “critical” rating, meaning they could be abused by malware or miscreants to seize control over a vulnerable Windows machine with little or no help from the user.

    Among the more serious critical flaws this month is CVE-2026-69730, a DNS weakness present in Windows Server 2012 onward and on Windows 10. Microsoft warns that an unauthenticated attacker could leverage this weakness simply by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected system, and that it is likely to be exploited.

    Also scary is CVE-2026-69829, a critical, remote code execution flaw in the Windows Shell. This vulnerability has a CVSS base score of 9.8 (10 is the most severe), and can be exploited with low attack complexity, no privileges, and no user interaction.

    Whatever else AI is or isn’t good at, it seems to be great at finding security flaws in Microsoft products…

  • Mac vs. PC, 2026 edition.
  • Rick Beato on why you need to own physical media.

    It’s incredibly important to own physical media, because you do not know what people are going to do that work for these massive tech companies. Once they get a hold of the data and they put it into those AI [slop] machines, because that’s what they are, they can change anything. Half the stuff that people, when they Google things or whatever, that just comes out with some AI thing that’s based on something that somebody wrote on Reddit six years ago that’s probably not even true. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Who actually knows whether it’s true? It’s kind of like if you listen to a record on Spotify that says remastered in 2018, remastered in 2022, remastered in 2012, that’s not the original version. What they’ve done is they’ve either taken the original version, the mastered version, and just remastered it and made it sound worse, or you don’t know what they’ve actually done to it.

  • Another weird blog tidbit that may only be of interest to myself: Starting October 6, 2025 and running through February 9th, 2026, the Internet Archive took multiple daily snapshots of my blog after a long period of snapshotting it on a somewhat random basis, sometimes several time a week, and sometimes only a few times a month. I would say the optimal periodicity would be once a day, but I have no idea how the process works.
  • “Mamdani: Women Attending 9/11 Memorial Will Be Required To Wear Hijab.”
  • “Nation’s Murderers Excited To Learn Killing Legal If You Say You Were Sad.”
  • “Women Honor Gloria Steinem By Leaving Kids At Daycare And Working 9 Hours At Jobs They Hate.”
  • “Hollywood Colorist Fired After Accidentally Leaving Color In Film.”
  • “Breakthrough As Scientists At University Of Michigan Develop Ability To Travel Back In Time One Second.”
  • “Moses Threatens Pharaoh With Plague Of Unskippable YouTube Ads.”
  • “‘Oh, Your Intelligent Creations Are Trying To Kill You? That’s Interesting,’ Says Jesus.”
  • Dog + balloon = happiness.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Technology, Texas, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 3 Comments »

    My Friend Was Murdered On Labor Day

    Thursday, September 10th, 2026

    Andrew Wimsatt, a friend for over thirty-five years, a regular member of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy (and the movie night afterwards) and an all-around standup guy, was murdered on Labor Day.

    New details have emerged in a homicide investigation in Williamson County.

    The Williamson County Sheriff’s Office responded to the 2400 block of Chandler Creek Boulevard on Monday after a report of an injured person. Deputies arrived to find a person who was later pronounced dead by medics. The agency’s Investigation Division determined the death to be a homicide.

    Investigators identified 26-year-old Benedict Ogbodiegwu of Round Rock as a suspect. Court documents identify the victim as 62-year-old Andrew James Wimsatt.

    According to court documents obtained by KVUE, a witness called 911 after finding what appeared to be a dead person near a park bench. Authorities obtained video footage of the incident. After reviewing the footage, the sheriff’s office said it showed a Black man with braids or locks and light-colored tips and a dark goatee holding a knife in his right hand. The man appeared to approach a white man from behind and repeatedly strike him in the neck with a knife while wrapping his left arm around the victim, according to the documents.

    The victim allegedly tried to defend himself but was unable to, the sheriff’s office said. The footage showed the victim was stabbed multiple times before falling to the ground. The suspect then ran toward a neighborhood area, the documents state.

    Detectives later found Ogbodiegwu at a home on Matagorda Drive in Round Rock. He matched the description of the person in the park surveillance video and in footage from a McDonald’s restaurant in Round Rock following the alleged incident, where video showed the suspect leaving the parking lot as a passenger in a red SUV.

    A search warrant at the home led investigators to a white trash bag in an outdoor trash can. Inside, they found a 5.5-inch-bladed knife with a wooden handle and a red substance. The substance was tested for human blood using a Bluestar identi-hem test and showed a presumptive positive reaction, according to court documents.

    Documents state clothing and a knife found in the trash matched what the suspect wore and used in the fatal stabbing, according to video footage reviewed by investigators.

    Following this incident, Ogbodiegwu was taken into custody and is facing a murder charge. Investigators said Tuesday they believe the attack was random and that the victim and suspect did not know each other.

    Andrew was murdered by a thug for no reason other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. His mother is in a nursing home in the area, and he would regularly visit her and take her out for a walk. According to the family, he would do one walk with her, and then one walk alone, and it was during that second walk when this random thug murdered him for no reason. (His mother was unharmed.)

    I looked into whether some of the themes covered by this blog applied to Andrew’s murder, but as far as I can tell Ogbodiegwu was not an illegal alien and does not appear to have been released on bail for previous offenses in Travis County. (See update here.) (Edited to add: I’m hearing reports that I may be wrong on both these counts. Feel free to share additional information in the comments below.)

    Writing about the murder just makes me mad, so let’s talk about Andrew.

    I first met Andrew through Karl Rehn, because Karl and I were both prog rock fans who traded tapes in college at UT. Andrew had been bandmates with Karl in high school, and roommates shortly after college. I remember playing P. D. Q. Bach’s “Prelude to Einstein on the Fritz” in their shared apartment, telling him it was the latest Philip Glass CD. When it got to the “Ko-Hosti-Tatsi” part, Andrew went “This isn’t Philip Glass.” Karl, Andrew and I were also in a band together whose entire point was to piss people off.

    Being smart, geeky and well-read, Andrew naturally slipped into the orbit of my group of friends. In addition to his existing love of music, Andrew was easy to get involved in your own interests, be it science fiction, guns or politics. I sold him several books over the years, and he ended up driving Howard Waldrop and Ellen Brody back to Austin from the 2013 San Antonio Worldcon. Karl and I might have sucked him into politics equally, to the point he was doing some behind-the-scenes work for The Greg Gutfeld Show and the We the Fifth podcast. Andrew frequently flew across the country to catch a show for one of the many bands he followed, or for watching the taping of a political show. He was even an executive producer on the Penn Jillette film Director’s Cut.

    Andrew loved all sorts of obscure bands I’d never heard of, but I was the one who introduced him to Slowdive. We saw three Slowdive shows in Austin, in addition to a King Crimson show and a very intense Filter/Everclear show at Liberty Lunch right after both those bands burst into prominence in the 1990s.

    Andrew was a devoted son and brother, who helped care for both his ailing mother and his father James, a literary academic and occasional SDC member who died at age 96 in 2023.

    Andrew spent his career as a civil engineer working for the Texas Department of Transportation and related entities. He spent stints in Fort Worth and College Station, but even then frequently drove back to Austin on weekends to see his friends.

    I saw Andrew two days before he was murdered, when he came over Saturday to match movies with us, where he saw the giant collection of books someone gave me and we watched the MST3K version of The Crawling Hand.

    His murder offers up several bitter ironies. He was a CHL/LTC holder who likely would have survived his assault had he been carrying that day. (See update here.) He owned a condo in the crime hotspot that is downtown Austin but was killed in nominally safe suburban Round Rock. Both his parents were long-lived, and Andrew, who frequently walked several miles a day, probably would have lived to a ripe old age had he not been cut down.

    He was a sturdy friend, and I will miss him greatly.

    Now that he’s gone, the years grow colder, and more silent.

    Always be aware of your surroundings, and take whatever precautions you can to avoid (or survive) encounters with random criminals or lunatics. Make a will (I need to do this).

    Tomorrow is promised to no one.

    Update: Promoting Greg Gutfeld’s post from the comments:

    man, this is horrible and shocking. Andrew was one of the nicest, most selfless people i’ve ever met. i’m so sorry for you, and for all of us who knew him. if you have any details on how to help, you have my email.
    we are reeling over the news here at gutfeld. he was a regular at our shows, and always lent a hand clipping videos. The whole thing is sickening.

    Update 2: Some notables weigh in on Twitter:

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    Posted in Austin, Crime | 21 Comments »

    LinkSwarm For September 5, 2026

    Friday, September 4th, 2026

    New York Times seems very upset we might win in Iran, the economy adds more jobs (or, as I call it in my house, Passover), ActBlue employees keep invoking the Fifth, the left still wants to trans your kids, a mistrial for Murder Mom, and the unwritten rules of the Internet.

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • “Trump Urged to Surrender Quickly in Hormuz Before Success Becomes an Option.”

    Conditions in the Strait of Hormuz are coming unstuck in ways that advance American interests, although the situation remains stalemated.

    CNN reported late last week that “Iran is losing much of its control over the critical waterway” as the U.S. Navy quietly but effectively transits oil-laden tankers out of the strait under Iranian noses. In concert with the oil and petroleum products escaping the region via overland pipelines, Donald Trump’s energy secretary indicated that energy exports from the region are now approaching pre-war levels.

    CNN couldn’t independently verify the administration’s figures. Nor could the Wall Street Journal. But to a certain extent, that is to be expected from a covert operation like the one the U.S. is engaged in. “Many ships are crossing the strait at night with their transponders off, making them hard to track by radio signal or satellite imagery,” the Journal reported Monday. The report’s headline warns that industry trackers “can’t find” the exports the White House touts, but the body of the article notes that some of those trackers’ estimates about what could be coming online run “closer to the administration’s numbers,” albeit only recently.

    Even if it only backed into the policy of economic strangulation that it’s applying to the Islamic Republic, the Trump administration is finally seeing it produce some positive results. Naturally, then, it’s incumbent on the president to surrender to the Iranians while he still can. At least, that’s the argument Rosemary Kelanic brought to the pages of the New York Times.

    Kelanic, the director of Defense Priorities’ Middle East program and a contributor to the Quincy Institute’s “Responsible Statecraft” blog, contends at the outset of her Monday op-ed that “defeat” is now America’s “least bad option.” The U.S. has little choice but to quit the field, allowing Iran to control and toll an international waterway. But it’s not clear why America must give up now.

    As Kelanic admits, the war has shown that, even if the U.S. “cannot completely open” the strait, Iran “cannot completely close” it either. Why should they be bequeathed an unprecedented level of sovereignty over an international maritime chokepoint that they could not capture on their own? Kelanic doesn’t say. She does, however, dwell on America’s challenges.

    The geography of the strait ensures that it is “impossible to decisively defeat” Iranian harassment initiatives. Modern technology, like cheap missiles and drones, creates “endemic risk of crossing Hormuz that even a negotiated deal with Tehran would not eliminate.” That sounds like a rationale for abandoning the negotiations that will, by Kelanic’s own admission, fail to produce a durable (much less desirable) outcome.

    Indeed, the author doesn’t even attempt to strike a more-in-sorrow tone when arguing for America’s capitulation. The United States is struggling with an irreparable shortage of munitions, she suggests. And even if America’s ordnance stocks were brimming, its people have no stomach for a long-duration mission to “sneak oil through Hormuz.” In fact, the voting public may even resent the political class’s resistance to an Iranian tolling regime that extracts funds primarily from foreign pockets. After all, “those countries could pay their own way.”

    The U.S., Kelanic adds, has little slack in its economy — quite unlike the less “oil-intensive” economies of China and Russia. That’s a kick that Kelanic has been on for some time. And she has a point when it comes to China, albeit one that was overstated at the outset of Operation Epic Fury; China’s energy position today is sustained by its consumption restrictions, its oil reserves, and its “shift toward coal.” By contrast, the argument that Russia can easily absorb a fuel shock is betrayed by the evidence of your own eyes.

    At no point does Kelanic acknowledge the buffers in the American economy. The “shale revolution,” the Journal’s Greg Ip observed, “has turned the U.S. into a net exporter of petroleum and major exporter of liquefied natural gas.” That might account for some of “the recent resilience of world oil markets,” which Kelanic admits “surprised many.”onditions in the Strait of Hormuz are coming unstuck in ways that advance American interests, although the situation remains stalemated.

    CNN reported late last week that “Iran is losing much of its control over the critical waterway” as the U.S. Navy quietly but effectively transits oil-laden tankers out of the strait under Iranian noses. In concert with the oil and petroleum products escaping the region via overland pipelines, Donald Trump’s energy secretary indicated that energy exports from the region are now approaching pre-war levels.

    CNN couldn’t independently verify the administration’s figures. Nor could the Wall Street Journal. But to a certain extent, that is to be expected from a covert operation like the one the U.S. is engaged in. “Many ships are crossing the strait at night with their transponders off, making them hard to track by radio signal or satellite imagery,” the Journal reported Monday. The report’s headline warns that industry trackers “can’t find” the exports the White House touts, but the body of the article notes that some of those trackers’ estimates about what could be coming online run “closer to the administration’s numbers,” albeit only recently.

    Even if it only backed into the policy of economic strangulation that it’s applying to the Islamic Republic, the Trump administration is finally seeing it produce some positive results. Naturally, then, it’s incumbent on the president to surrender to the Iranians while he still can. At least, that’s the argument Rosemary Kelanic brought to the pages of the New York Times.

    We can’t let American win in Iran because that might help Trump.

  • Good news! “Economy Adds 162,000 Jobs in August 2026.”

    The August 2026 jobs report blew all expectations out of the water.

    Economists expected the economy to add only 53,000 jobs.

    Well…the report shows the economy added 162,000 jobs:

    • Food services and drinking places: +59,000
    • Local government education: +42,000
    • Manufacturing: +16,000
    • Health care: +13,000
    • Information: -23,000
    • Construction: +22,000

    The bad news for me personally: My sector (information) was the only one of those with job losses. AI continues to suck up all the VC funding…

  • “More nations rethink funding for UN relief agency after feds refer 100-plus staff for Hamas ties.”

    More countries are reconsidering their support agreements with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a senior State Department official confirmed to Just the News.

    Following Just the News reporting that the United States’ Agency for International Development’s Inspector General’s office found more than 100 UNRWA employees had participated in the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, Finland’s minister for foreign trade and development announced on Thursday that the country would not extend its support for UNRWA.

    Several more countries have since indicated that they are reconsidering their own support for UNRWA as well, a senior State Department official briefed on the USAID IG’s investigation told Just the News.

    It’s a bribe and terrorism organization with a debating society attached.

  • Hmmmm. “Another ActBlue Official Pleads Fifth In House Probe of Alleged Foreign Donations.” Why, it’s almost like they’re guilty.

    Kimberly Peeler-Allen, a member of ActBlue’s board of directors, invoked her constitutional right against self-incrimination while appearing before the House Administration, Judiciary and Oversight committees, according to sources familiar with her testimony.

    ActBlue co-founder Matt DeBergalis invoked the Fifth during a closed-door deposition Aug. 20, while CEO Regina Wallace-Jones asserted the same right during congressional questioning in June.

    The House Administration Committee began investigating ActBlue in 2023 following concerns that the fundraising platform’s fraud-prevention procedures were inadequate to prevent illegal foreign donations.

  • “Kirishi Oil Refinery & Yeysk Airfield Hit By Drones: Ammo Cookoffs at Yeysk.”
  • “Ukraine Hits Two Warehouses in Rostov! Both Burning Heavily.”
  • “Satellite Imagery Confirms Damage to Tu-95 Bear At Engels-2 Air Base After Drone Strike.”
  • “Ukraine Starts Shutting Down Moscow Airports With Drones.”
  • “Big Damage Confirmed to Russian Ship NEFRIT By Marine Drone: Almost Split in Two!” This is a Russian oil supply ship that was docked in Sochi.
  • “Big F-16 Air Strike on Drone Operators in Kostiantinivka.”
  • Terrorists and/or Russians attack two German power stations.

    German police have opened a terror investigation after two attacks on power stations, and a bombing at a railway station, within 24 hours.

    Officials are investigating the possibility that the power plant attacks were carried out by a hostile foreign state, such as Russia, or home-grown Left-wing terrorists.

  • A New Jersey school district is so all-in on transing your kids that they want to ignore Supreme Court rulings to keep doing it.

    California has bicoastal company in its efforts to drastically reinterpret a Supreme Court precedent that reinstated a permanent injunction against the Golden State’s so-called gender secrecy policies in public schools, with the majority citing a century of parental rights precedents that it said lower courts were ignoring.

    Moms for Liberty is suing a New York City suburb on behalf of unnamed members with children there, seeking to force New Jersey’s Chathams School District to notify and give parents veto power over their children’s “asserted ‘gender transition'” and “social transition-related accommodations,” arguing a trio of related policies violate the Mirabelli precedent.

    School Board President Ann Ciccarelli argued at a June 15 public meeting that the high court’s March 2 emergency order was “not binding” on New Jersey public schools, in response to demands from parents to eliminate a policy requiring schools to “accept a student’s asserted gender identity regardless of parent consent or involvement.”

    SCOTUS scolded the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Mirabelli for having “brushed aside” its 2025 precedent Mahmoud, which required school districts to notify and get consent from parents before exposing their children to LGBTQ “storybooks,” by wrongly limiting it to curricular decisions.

    “The Chathams Board of Education’s open defiance of the Supreme Court’s clear rulings in Mirabelli and Mahmoud is an assault on the constitutional rights of every family in that district,” Moms for Liberty CEO Tina Descovich said.

  • “Nevada secretary of state warns that Republicans are trying to keep non-Americans from voting in American elections.”

    Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar:

    “What they are trying to do is exclude certain portions of voters from actually participating…non-citizens on the voter rolls.”

    His state was one of four states reviewed where over 270,000 noncitizens were found on voter rolls.

    Yes. Thanks for noticing.

  • Mistrial in Lindsay Clancy case. Possibly more about this this weekend…
  • “Elon Musk’s America PAC Discloses First Wave Of Spending On Midterm Senate Races.”

    In a Federal Election Commission filing made on Wednesday night, America PAC disclosed $800,475 in total spending in August.

    The expenditure data showed that the billionaire’s PAC primarily poured resources into competitive Senate races in Texas, Maine, Ohio, New Hampshire, Michigan and a few other states.

    The Texas Senate race between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton received the largest share of spending—around $248,000.

    The Maine Senate race, which Democrats view as a key pickup opportunity, received the next largest tranche of spending at around $170,000.

    In total, the PAC spent around $712,000 on seven Senate races—around 90% of the total disclosed expenses—and only around $88,000 on a small number of House races.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “80% of drug traffickers arrested in Portland in the last 3 years have been illegal aliens.

    The US Attorney’s Office for the District of Oregon announced on Tuesday that more than 80 percent of the roughly 100 defendants federally charged with trafficking fentanyl in Portland are illegal aliens from Honduras and Mexico. The apprehensions began in 2023 and remain ongoing as federal and local authorities work to rid the sanctuary city of drug-related criminal activity.

    As a result of the crackdown on open-air drug markets, authorities have seized more than 100 kilograms of fentanyl, 40 guns, and $1.3 million in proceeds. ‘That is enough fentanyl to kill 50 million people, or Oregon’s population, 11 times,’ the US Attorney’s Office said in a press release.

    Illegal alien drug cartels + Woke Portland allowing open drug use = Americans dead.

    What a tremendous scheme here from the Democrats.

    They’re just selling the dope that Americans won’t…

  • President Trump breaks another monopoly.

    After cattle country stresses over President Donald Trump’s plan to flood the market with cheaper foreign ground-beef trimmings, the 47th president posted that four giant processors have made life “miserable” for American ranchers and that he is authorizing farmers to process their own food if desired or necessary.

    “Trump wants to remove some of the red tape and costs associated with setting up USDA inspected facilities for small producers or areas of the country that don’t have USDA processors to be able to sell their protein to consumers in a legal way,” grazier Derek Lange told Just The News last week.

    “Consumers want to buy beef from ranchers and be a part of their story.”

  • “Man arrested in assassination plot at Trump golf course had Melania Trump’s itinerary, detailed reports on Secret Service personnel.”

    Jeanine John Taele, 38, had more than 200 pages of writings that included schedules for the first lady and members of the president’s USSS detail, The Associated Press reported, citing information revealed during a Los Angeles County court hearing Wednesday.

    The New York Post reported that prosecutors said Taele had seven notebooks containing 208 pages of drawings and sketches of Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles in Rancho Palos Verdes, lists of USSS schedules, details about individual security personnel and copies of Melania Trump’s schedule.

    Yet somehow Teale has been declared mentally unfit to stand trial…

  • “Supreme Court approves Trump’s ballroom construction despite Roberts siding with liberals.”
  • Austin’s one woman crime spree. “Austin Woman Arrested After Police Find Hundreds Of Suspected Stolen Bank Cards, Keys And Mail.”

    A routine arrest in North Austin developed into a much broader investigation after police said they discovered a large collection of mail, payment cards, checks and postal keys believed to have been stolen, according to Yahoo.

    Austin police arrested 42-year-old Elizabeth Rozo on Aug. 25 after officers tracked her to an apartment complex near Tech Ridge Boulevard. Authorities were looking for Rozo because she was wanted on a warrant stemming from a credit or bank card abuse investigation.

    Officers with the department’s North Metro Tactical Unit reportedly watched Rozo leave the apartment complex and enter a vehicle. They followed her before initiating a traffic stop.

    The investigation expanded significantly when officers searched the vehicle. Police said they recovered roughly 400 bank cards believed to have been stolen, along with nearly 300 gift cards. Investigators suspect at least some of the gift cards had been purchased using compromised bank cards.

    Officers also discovered two counterfeit Arrow Keys, a type of master key associated with U.S. Postal Service mail equipment. Such keys can potentially be used to open certain shared mailboxes and other postal receptacles, making them particularly valuable to people seeking access to mail belonging to multiple households.

    Evidence from the vehicle led investigators to secure a warrant for Rozo’s apartment. The second search produced considerably more material, according to police.

    By the time officers finished searching the vehicle and residence, authorities said they had collected thousands of pieces of suspected stolen mail and hundreds of checks. They also recovered about two dozen identification documents that police believe were either stolen or fraudulently produced.

    Investigators reported finding 17 stolen postal keys in addition to the two counterfeit keys discovered during the investigation. Authorities have not publicly explained how the postal keys were allegedly obtained or identified how many mailboxes could have been accessed with them. Police also have not announced an estimate of how many people may ultimately be connected to the recovered mail and financial documents.

  • Not The Bee imitates the Babylon Bee: “Canadian PM says he will resume trade talks ‘when the Americans stop doing memes.'” This went over exactly as you imagined it would.

  • Some measure of justice: “Former Houston Police Officer Pleads Guilty to Falsifying Affidavit That Led to Deadly 2019 Drug Raid.”

    A former Houston police officer pleaded guilty to abusing his authority as law enforcement in his falsification of information used to obtain a search warrant that resulted in a no-knock raid and two murders for which the officer is already serving time.

    Gerald M. Goines pleaded guilty to making false claims, including that a resident had sold illicit drugs to a confidential informant and that additional other customers had bought drugs from the resident in prior weeks, in an affidavit that was necessary to obtain a search warrant — known as a “color of law” violation.

    Goines was a senior narcotics officer with the Houston Police Department (HPD).

    The no-knock warrant was executed in January 2019 and became known as the Harding Street Raid when officers shot and killed a couple in their home. The raid added fuel to the fire in regards to particular scrutiny of HPD, with activists and some Houston City Council members calling for the department to be defunded or similarly financially impacted. This occurred amid anti-police protests that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.

    Due to his role in leading the raid, Goines was charged with the murders of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, who were shot and killed alongside their dog during the drug bust. He was indicted in 2019 on two counts of murder and found guilty at trial, and is currently serving a 60-year prison sentence as a result.

    Goines did not fire the fatal shots. The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the summer of 2026 that the officer who did so, Felipe Gallegos, was protected from a civil rights lawsuit under qualified immunity after he was previously indicted for Tuttle’s killing, a charge that was ultimately dismissed due to alleged prosecutorial misconduct.

    (Previously.)

  • “Austin ISD Faces Potential State Takeover After Two Campuses Receive Fifth Failing Ratings.”

    Two middle schools in Austin Independent School District (ISD) received their fifth failing A–F accountability rating from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) last week.

    Under the Texas Education Code (TEC), “If a campus is considered to have an unacceptable performance rating for five consecutive school years, the commissioner shall order: (1) appointment of a board of managers to govern the school district; or (2) closure of the campus.”

    The district originally had three middle schools with four consecutive failing ratings: Burnet, Dobie, and Webb. While Burnet and Webb earned F ratings, Dobie earned a D rating for this year.

    According to TEA, a D rating does not break a consecutive failing streak — only an A, B, or C rating will stop the count. A D rating instead pauses the count until there are three D ratings in the chain, at which point the failing streak resumes.

    Over the past school year, Austin ISD has made headlines for numerous challenges. In November, the district approved 10 school closures and 24 state-mandated turnaround plans for struggling campuses. After a projected $181 million budget deficit, the district was forced to make $205 million in cuts.

    The district also announced the last-minute closure of Paredes Middle School on July 30, shortly before the start of the school year.

    Austin ISD applied for Senate Bill 1882 partnerships for Burnet, Dobie, and Webb, which would have allowed the district to partner with an open-enrollment charter school or institutions of higher education approved by the TEA. These partnerships can receive increases in state funding and are exempt from certain accountability measures for two years.

    Segura told KXAN News that the accountability pause was “not the driving factor” for the partnership, but rather the resources the partnership made available.

    The TEA denied Austin ISD’s request in May, but said that the district could continue the partnerships, just without the state incentives. Austin ISD announced the dissolution of the partnerships for the three middle schools in July.

    In an August 13 letter to parents, Austin ISD Superintendent Matias Segura addressed the possible state takeover, saying that “challenges remain.”

    One failing grade for a school should be a wakeup call. Two demands heads should roll and get AISD to make whatever changes are necessary to fix the problem. Five is educational malpractice.

  • Microstamping cartridges isn’t just unconstitutional, it’s Ineffective.
  • “Ohio Democratic Congressional Candidate Arrested For Attempting to Swallow Crack Cocaine, Slapping Stranger at Baseball Game.”

    Ohio Democratic congressional candidate Brian Poindexter was arrested for allegedly swallowing a rock of crack cocaine at a traffic stop after he was stopped by police and for slapping a man at a baseball game according to police records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

    Poindexter, a city councilman and former union organizer running against the embattled Republican congressman Max Miller in Ohio’s Seventh Congressional District, has a criminal rap sheet dating back to the late 1990s, the records show.

    On Jan. 23, 1998, Poindexter, then 18, was pulled over by police officers at a street corner known for heavy drug activity in Cleveland, according to the police report. Poindexter allegedly pulled out “some small objects from his coat pocket and put them into his mouth” and “began to swallow them.” The officer tried to retrieve the objects from Poindexter’s mouth, and the two men fell to the ground in a scuffle. The officer eventually recovered a “rock of suspected crack cocaine,” according to the records.

    Another towering intellectual genius batting for Team Blue. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • The unwritten rules of the Internet.
  • NVIDIA has agreed to acquire open source AI company Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000.
  • Justice for Tupac? “Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis convicted of masterminding Tupac Shakur’s murder 30 years after rapper gunned down in Vegas.”

    The man accused of orchestrating the murder of legendary rapper Tupac Shakur — one of the entertainment industry’s most captivating crimes — was found guilty by a Nevada jury.

    Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, learned his fate in a Las Vegas courtroom on Monday after about two weeks of trial, as Shakur’s emotional family members passed tissues around and embraced, the New York Times reported.

    The conviction of Davis, a former high-ranking “shot caller” in a Los Angeles chapter of the Crips gang, marked the first person to face justice for Shakur’s murder, which went down on a Las Vegas street on the night of Sept. 7, 1996.

    Shakur, a pioneer of the burgeoning rap scene, was driving in a car when another pulled up alongside and blasted him with a hail of bullets. He died days later at 25.

    Davis was not accused of shooting the gun which killed Shakur, but prosecutors argued he gave it to the gunman — long presumed to be his nephew Orlando Anderson, who died in a gang shootout two years after the murder — and orchestrated the entire attack.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • Serial squatter finally finds a home: 20 years in the big house. 
  • Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI platforms all went down at the same time because of a problem with Microsoft Azure.
  • Borepatch has prostate cancer. I’m sure he’d appreciate your prayers for beating it. 
  • NBA comes down on the Clippers like a ton of bricks.

    The NBA on Wednesday announced severe punishments for the LA Clippers — including the loss of five future first-round draft picks, a fine of $30 million and a yearlong suspension of owner Steve Ballmer — for violating salary cap circumvention rules in a case involving star Kawhi Leonard.

    In a statement, the NBA said a near-yearlong investigation “found a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations by the Clippers organization, a prior offender of the salary cap circumvention rules.”

    As a result, the Clippers must forfeit first-round draft picks in 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032 and 2033. In addition to the $30 million fine, Ballmer is suspended from all league and team activities for one year “for knowingly seeking to help Mr. Leonard obtain off-court income opportunities,” among other issues. President of business operations Gillian Zucker is suspended without pay for one year, and president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank is suspended without pay for six months.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • After her pigheaded refusal to understand what the “W” in her league’s name stands for, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert is retiring.
  • Critical Drinker: The Five Worst Sequels Ever.
  • “Suspicions Of Ayatollah’s Death Rise After His Name Appears On California Voter Rolls.”
  • “Lindsay Clancy Surges To Commanding Lead As 2028 Democrat Front-Runner.”
  • “Satan Wondering If He Went Too Far With Feminism.”
  • “God Decides To Flood Earth Again After KFC Releases Oreo Chicken Sandwich.”
  • Off to the races!

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Elections, Global Warming, Guns, Jihad, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Technology, Texas, Uncategorized, Waste and Fraud | 9 Comments »

    LinkSwarm For August 28, 2026

    Friday, August 28th, 2026

    Huge Supreme Court win, Ukraine switches from Wildberries to Ozon warehouses, yes, DSA are damn dirty commies, more Second Amendment progress, Ted Cruz’s book on Clarence Thomas is out, Aussie gets 15 years for shooting a carnival air gun, remembering Dolly, and the NFL finally takes the Pro-Bowl to a farm in the country.

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • The Supreme Court hands President Trump a huge win on voter integrity.

    The Supreme Court just handed President Trump a massive victory in the fight to secure America’s elections. The justices cleared the way for his executive order restricting mail-in voting to move forward, and after months of Democrat officials trying to bury the policy in court, the administration finally has room to breathe.

    This is a big deal.

    The SAVE America Act is still stalled in the Senate, blocked by Democrats who aren’t even hiding the fact they have zero interest in verifying that voters are who they say they are. Trump’s executive order just got a green light from the nation’s highest court anyway. Election integrity doesn’t have to die in the legislative graveyard to make progress.

    Trump signed the executive order, called “Ensuring Citizenship Verification And Integrity In Federal Elections,” in March 2026. It directs his administration to build lists of eligible voters and orders the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people on those lists. The Postal Service laid out its implementation plan last week, but the clock is ticking. Some states start sending mail ballots in just a few weeks, leaving the administration little time to get this right before the midterms. More court challenges remain possible.

    The victory is real, but it’s not the finish line.

    Mail balloting has been a target of Trump’s for years, and for good reason. The Heritage Foundation has long argued that mail-in ballots are more susceptible to fraud, coercion, and chain-of-custody problems than in-person voting. Anyone who lived through the 2020 presidential election, one of the most disputed elections in history, watched that vulnerability play out in real time.

    Democrats need to cheat to win. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • California passes the Don’t Investigate Democrat Fraud Act. “Gavin Newsom signs ‘Stop Nick Shirley Act’ into California law.”

    It’s official: California just criminalized publicly exposing fraud.

    our tax dollars are paying for fraud, and if someone like Nick Shirley exposes this fraud he, not the fraudster, could get in trouble.

    More from Nick:

    These politicians need the fraud to continue and they sadly use immigrants to do so often. They fund nonprofits and NGOs with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars every year for immigration services, including free healthcare, and have now made ‘immigration support service providers’ essentially a protected class in California.

    For example, if I film a hospice or a ‘learning center’ with no patients receiving millions through Medicaid and the owner gives me a paper saying I cannot publish the video, I cannot publish it. If I publish it to expose them and they claim it caused them ‘fear’ or a third party threatens them, I face a minimum $4,000 civil fine plus the legal fees of the individual or group suing me.

    This bill was created by the Attorney General’s wife and co-sponsored by CHIRLA, a nonprofit that has received over $80,000,000 in taxpayer dollars for ‘immigrant support services.’ Do you understand how this works yet? When the fraud is exposed, they create new laws to protect the fraudsters and penalize those who expose it.

    By signing this bill, the Governor and California politicians expose themselves as the corrupt politicians they are. This is not the end; the fight has just begun. More to come soon; this is far from over.

    An unconstitutional prior restraint First Amendment violation that will be struck down instantly the first time California tries to enforce it.

    If it weren’t for voter fraud, welfare state fraud, crazy trannies, violent criminals and pandering to radical Islamic anti-Semites, the Democrat Party wouldn’t have any business model at all…

  • We’ve covered some of this before, but just a reminder that “Democratic Socialists of America” are full-bore commies.

    “Our goal is Communism,” David Jenkins, a member of DSA’s National Political Committee, said in 2023.

    DSA member Cea Weaver is New York City’s tenant tsarina. She posted via X in December 2017, “Elect more communists.” The next year, she demanded: “Seize private property.”

    Weaver’s boss is Mayor Zohran Mamdani. In his Jan. 1 inaugural address, he stated: “I was elected as a democratic socialist, and I will govern as a democratic socialist.” He told a DSA Zoom call in 2021: The “end goal” should be “seizing the means of production.” Mamdani also said, “The abolition of private property … is preferable to what is going on right now.” These comments loudly echo Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ cornerstone collectivist text “The Communist Manifesto.”

    The magnificently named Darializa Avila Chevalier rode Mamdani’s endorsement all the way to the Democrat nomination for New York’s 13th Congressional District.

    “I’m a democratic socialist,” she boasted June 29 on MS Now. She also wants to “seize the means of production,” as she advised in a not-quite-deleted September 2019 X post. She confessed that December: “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag.” In April 2020, she wrote: “Most of the theory I have read is communism but the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me.” The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine preserved 3,657 such messages that Chevalier thought she had erased.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Italian Extremist Group Provided dismantling Iran’s supposed trump card.

    For months, the assumption that the Strait of Hormuz was Tehran’s ultimate card dominated commentary on the war.

    As a narrow waterway through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and a substantial share of liquefied natural gas had historically passed, it appeared to be a chokepoint Iran could close or severely disrupt at will. It did not need to destroy every tanker. Hitting a small percentage with drones, cruise missiles, speedboats, or mines would spike insurance rates, deter crews and companies, and effectively shut the strait without continuous physical control.

    This idea was not new for 2026. It had long been a feature of the Iranian strategic posture, treated as both a military instrument and a political myth-proof that even under pressure Tehran retained a decisive lever over the global energy system. Parts of the Western media and independent analysts amplified the same narrative.

    Relying on incomplete open-source shipping data, especially once vessels began sailing dark, many concluded that the United States had been caught unprepared and lacked a realistic path to reopen the waterway. Hormuz, they argued, was effectively closed or closable at Iran’s discretion. That framing was powerful, but also incomplete.

    The assumption that Iran’s detection and targeting system could not be dismantled without dramatic escalation proved wrong. Under the U.S. Central Command, also known as CENTCOM, and with significant involvement from the Fifth Fleet and Air Force components, the United States ran a sustained effort to degrade the sensors Iran needed to find and hit ships.

    Iran relied on mobile truck-mounted radars, drones, cruise missiles, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) speedboats, and naval mines. Inside the narrow strait, ships move in relatively predictable lanes. Iran combined active radars with passive electro-optical and infrared cameras on elevated terrain and islands such as Qeshm, Larak, and Abu Musa.

    Mobile radars would radiate briefly to locate shipping, then shut down and move before anti-radiation missiles could arrive. Once a ship’s approximate position was known, strike systems could be sent to search.

    The vulnerability was that every radar emission could be detected. American aircraft responded systematically with anti-radiation missiles while visual and intelligence efforts located the passive sensors. This was the core of what some involved called “draining the swamp.”

    Iran had redundancy, but the number of sensors was finite. Hundreds of precision strikes gradually reduced Iran’s ability to see traffic in the strait. As the detection layer thinned, the effectiveness of the strike systems declined with it.

    Parallel efforts neutralized mines with unmanned vessels and declared the southern lane near Oman largely clear. Convoys moved under escort, often at night with the automated information system (AIS) off. Arleigh Burke-class destroyers with Aegis radars and standard missile (SM)-family interceptors formed the backbone; drones and Apache helicopters armed with laser-guided rockets provided additional cover. American ships also engaged IRGC speedboats that closed on the convoys.

    On the commercial side, the United States addressed insurance barriers. In early March, President Donald Trump directed the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to provide political risk insurance and guarantees for maritime trade.

    The DFC, working with the Treasury and CENTCOM, established a revolving reinsurance facility of roughly $20 billion-later expanded with private partners including Chubb-focused on hull, machinery, and cargo cover. Early uptake was limited. As Iranian success rates fell, more vessels joined.

    Results have been significant. CENTCOM has reported assisting well over a thousand commercial vessels and moving hundreds of millions of barrels since the spring. Independent trackers often showed lower numbers because much of the traffic sailed dark. Pre-war throughput was 20 million to 21 million barrels per day.

    Flows through Hormuz remain below that, but combined with the Abu Dhabi-Fujairah pipeline and Saudi Arabia’s pipeline to Yanbu in the Red Sea, volumes recovered enough to keep oil prices in the $85 to $95 range-elevated, but far from the predicted catastrophe.

  • “Ukraine Attacks Yeysk Port (Likely Oil Storage).” That’s in Krasnodar Krai on the Sea of Azov.
  • “Ozon Distribution Hub Destroyed in Samara! First Strike On Ozon!”
  • “Wildberries Hit Again! Kotovsk Wildberries in Tambov Detroyed!”
  • “Orenburg Ozon Warehouse Attacked & St. Petersburg Warehouse on Fire!”
  • “Two Ozon Warehouses Destroyed & One Damaged in One Night! Dagestan, Krasnodar & Enem.”
  • Followup: “Satellite Imagery of Multiple Ozon Warehouses Destroyed by Ukraine.”
  • “Big Blast as Drone Storage is Hit By Drone & Project 05060 Patrol Boat Destroyed in Crimea.”
  • “Ukraine Destroys Rare Su-33 (First Destroyed), MiG-29 and Orion Attack Drone At Anapa Airport.” This was just the other side of the Kerch Straight Bridge. The Su-33 is normally a carrier based aircraft, but since Russia’s only aircraft carrier has been out of service since 2017, they’re doing much desk landing these days.
  • “Huge Missile Strike in Donetsk! Possibly Flamingo or Storm Shadow. Four Impacts.” Unclear what was hit.
  • Russia is now importing gasoline from India. Plus long gas lines in Moscow.
  • CIA chief John Ratcliffe flew to Moscow to warn Putin against fucking with NATO.

    The surprise visit by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency to Moscow this week was to deliver a warning to Russia not to attack NATO countries, according to people briefed on the visit.

    The trip was spy-agency chief John Ratcliffe’s first publicly known visit to the Russian capital. It followed new U.S. intelligence assessments, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, that Russian President Vladimir Putin could try to test the resolve of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with a limited assault on an allied country in the next few years.

    U.S. officials are concerned that Putin, squeezed in Ukraine and under pressure at home, could launch an assault ranging from a cyberattack to a small-scale land incursion, likely on a Baltic nation, the Journal reported.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Two more Second Amendment wins this month that may have slipped under the radar.

    Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice conceded that Americans are allowed to carry in Postal Service buildings.

    Snip.

    On August 18, a federal judge ruled against Biden’s “ghost gun” ban, saying it violates multiple parts of the Constitution….Judge Reed O’Connor ruled Biden’s “Ghost Gun” rule violates the 2nd and 5th Amendments,

    Decision by decision, the Second Amendment is being upheld and gun rights expanded.

  • More progress: “CDC restores info showing how many good guys with guns stop bad guys after Biden removed it.”
  • Concerning: “Maryland felony cases against Zizian trans death cult members abruptly suspended. After 18 months of prosecution, Maryland abruptly put its cases against three Zizian trans cult members on indefinite hold. Officials have not publicly explained why.”

    The cases against cult leader Jack “Ziz” LaSota and subordinates Michelle “Jamie” “Alex” Zajko and Daniel “Hastur” Blank were made inactive on Aug. 14; All scheduled future trial dates were canceled.

    LaSota, Zajko and Blank were arrested together following a national manhunt on Feb. 16, 2025 in rural western Maryland. They were found with a cache of weapons in their two box trucks. They had spent years moving around the country as members of the Zizians, a radical transgender cult who has been linked to at least eight violent deaths.

    The three initially faced only misdemeanor trespassing, firearms and obstruction charges after an elderly Frostburg-area property owner reported that they had arrived in box trucks and asked to camp on his property.

    Authorities later added charges involving the alleged illegal possession and carrying of concealed and loaded firearms.

    LaSota, a biological male who identifies as a woman and uses the name “Ziz,” is the founder and ideological leader of the Zizians. The group is made up of transgender vegan extremists, several of whom have elite educational backgrounds in science and mathematics. Members embraced an esoteric ideology combining leftist transgender politics, anarchism, rationalism and veganism.

    Snip.

    Though the state charges have been suspended, LaSota is being held on a federal detainer request on a federal indictment of being a fugitive from justice in possession of firearms and ammunition. On Tuesday, he was transferred into federal custody at the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia.

    Zajko, meanwhile, is awaiting extradition to Pennsylvania. She was charged in June with murdering her adoptive parents, Richard and Rita Zajko, on New Year’s Eve 2022. The case had gone cold for years before the surprise announcement by prosecutors in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.

    Authorities allege Zajko traveled from Vermont to her childhood home in Chester Heights on the night of her 30th birthday and participated in the execution-style killings.

    (Previously.) (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Bad news for justice in Colorado: “Former Colorado Bureau of Investigation DNA analyst Yvonne Missy Woods pleaded guilty to four felonies — cybercrime, perjury, attempting to influence a public official, and forgery, after facing 102 felony charges tied to misconduct in 58 cases dating back to 2008. Woods worked at CBI for 29 years, from January 1994 to November 2023, and was qualified as an expert witness more than 500 times. A routine audit in late 2023 uncovered anomalies in her work; an internal investigation found she purposefully deleted DNA data to skip required testing steps. Retesting of roughly 3,000 affected cases cost the state an estimated $11 million. Among the high-profile cases she handled was the 2003 Kobe Bryant sexual assault investigation. ”
  • “ICE Arrests 1,328 Illegal Aliens in DC, Virginia, Maryland in 14 Days. Of those arrested, almost 400 illegal immigrants had criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, including a Salvadoran national wanted in Richmond, Virginia, on a murder warrant.”

    “Other crimes included rape, sexual assault, kidnapping, DUI, robbery and attempted murder.” Also: “They also arrested members of MS-13, 18th Street Gang, and Tren de Aragua gangs.” MS-13 and Tren de Aragua we’ve covered here before. According to Wikipedia, “The 18th Street Gang, also known as Eighteen St, Barrio 18, Mara 18, or simply 18 in North America, is a multi-ethnic (largely Mexican and Central American), street gang from Los Angeles, California. It is one of the largest street gangs in Los Angeles, with 30,000–50,000 members between the United States, Mexico, and Central America.” Evidently they’re enemies with MS-13.

  • “Lottery Boss Appears in Court over $95 Million Scandal. Former Texas Lottery Executive Director Gary Grief faces a first-degree felony charge of abuse of official capacity tied to the controversial 2023 jackpot.”

    Former Texas Lottery Executive Director Gary Grief appeared in a Travis County courtroom Friday morning as the criminal case stemming from the controversial 2023 Lotto Texas jackpot moves forward.

    Grief appeared alongside his attorney before District Judge Dayna Blazey in the 167th District Court. Prosecutors and attorneys representing the entity formerly known as the Texas Lottery Commission were also present.

    Court records show Grief waived formal magistration Friday. Another hearing concerning his personal-recognizance bond was set for October 16.

    Shortly after Friday’s proceedings, Travis County District Attorney José Garza formally announced that a grand jury had indicted both Grief and the now-defunct Texas Lottery Commission for abuse of official capacity.

    The indictments were handed down April 21.

    According to Garza’s office, the charges stem from the April 22, 2023, Lotto Texas drawing and allege that the commission, along with high-level management officials Ed Rogers and Clay Kidd, intentionally and knowingly misused government resources.

    The DA’s office alleges the conduct was authorized by Grief, who was serving as the commission’s executive director at the time.

    The indictment concerns the drawing in which a New Jersey-based lottery purchasing operation acquired nearly every possible number combination and won a $95 million jackpot.

    Grief faces a first-degree felony charge of abuse of official capacity involving $300,000 or more.

    The whole affair stinks to high heaven, and I have to think at least some Lotto Commission employees were in on it.

  • SpaceX to build giant Starbase complex in Louisiana.
  • “X has now confirmed a Chinese bot farm of 200K fake accounts intentionally trying to manipulate public opinion against data centers.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • “Judges Recommend Regulators Reject Proposed 765-kV Line. The Public Utility Commission must now decide whether to accept the judges’ recommendation to reject the proposed multibillion-dollar transmission line projects.” “The judges concluded the utilities [Oncor and the Lower Colorado River Authority Transmission Services Corporation] did not establish that the projects are necessary and failed to comply with notice requirements designed to give affected landowners a chance to participate before the application was filed.”
  • “More people have died from heat in France this summer than all US mass shootings in history.”
  • “Trump-Backed Darline Graham Wins South Carolina GOP Senate Primary Runoff.” I’m always suspicious of dynastic nepotism, but I haven’t studied the race enough to offer an opinion on her as a senate candidate.
  • “Louisiana sheriff’s deputy fired after using Flock camera 3,200 times (!!) to stalk his ex-fiancée.”
  • The jokes write themselves: “Canadian cannabis factory burns down near High River.”
  • Ted Cruz’s profile of Clarence Thomas, Going Further, was released this week.
  • The change in gun and ammo prices between 1986 and today.
  • The plot thickens. “Iowa Attorney General Says She’s Taking California to the Supreme Court Over Paramount-Warner Bros.”

    Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird wrote in an op-ed for The Daily Wire that she is suing California for leading the charge in the lawsuit against the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger.

    “California is once again trying to be the country’s regulator. And once again California is defying common sense to raise costs around the country,” Bird wrote. “That makes this a dispute between states, and the Constitution says those can only be heard in the U.S. Supreme Court.”

  • “Australian man faces 15 years in prison for using toy gun to win carnival prize for daughter.” He was an ex-felony prohibited from using guns, but getting busted for a carnival air rifle seems way, way excessive.
  • The universe seems just a little too fine-tuned to give rise to life to be completely random, doesn’t it? 
  • Dolly Parton, RIP.
  • More on Parton from Rick Beato.
  • The NFL finally kills the Pro-Bowl.

  • How Simon Whistler runs his YouTube channels. He outsources everything except direction and presentation, expands his winners and ruthlessly culls his losers. It’s smart business, but largely antithetical to what I watch YouTube for. (Previously.)
  • Weirdly enough, the animated film Lesbian Space Princess seems to be hated by everyone. See, a film with that title could be highly profitable in porn…
  • “Girl Scouts To Award Muslim Badge To Any Girl Who Gets Married Before Age 8.”
  • “New Data Center Built To Handle Influx Of Online Rants Against Data Centers.”
  • “Dating App Adds Feature Allowing Men To Filter Out Women Who Support Lindsay Clancy.”
  • 140-pound klutz:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.

    • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 8 Comments »

    Austin Seeking Another Rail Boondoggle?

    Wednesday, August 26th, 2026

    You might remember Austin’s light rail boondoggle, which is now scaled back, behind schedule, and very possibly illegal. (For the current status on that project, see here.)

    Now more Austin elites, in the form of the Travis County Commissioner’s Court (an organization so far in the shadow of the Austin City Council that I didn’t previously have a tag for them) has funded the study of a high speed rail line between Austin and San Antonio, the price tag for which would be a staggering $13.5 Billion.

    A high-speed rail line between Austin and San Antonio would cost about $13.5 billion to build, according to a recent feasibility study commissioned by Travis County Commissioners Court.

    The study conducted by HNTB Corporation assessed the potential of a high-speed rail route between Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and the Amtrak station in San Antonio along State Highway 130 and Interstate 10.

    Running from an airport in one city to an Amtrak station in another? Who the hell is this line for, tourists who want to save money traveling to San Antonio? It certainly doesn’t seem geared for the benefit of actual Travis County residents, especially now that the theoretical Project Connect light rail link to Bergstrom has been cancelled.

    Also, if you’re going 130 to I-10 to San Antonio, you’re missing the bigger I-35 cities like Kyle, San Marcos and New Braunfels in favor of smaller cities Lockhart and Seguin. I guess the plan is to keep it high speed because almost no one will want to visit the smaller bergs on the train line.

    The proposed route would run at about 125 miles per hour with a travel time of about an hour between the two cities.

    Sure it would. Pretty much no U.S. “high speed rail” services hit their theoretical maximum because they stop too often and the track’s not straight enough to maintain top speed for long.

    Travis County approved $125,000 to fund the feasibility study in October 2025.

    The proposed 89-mile route presents challenges because of the many cross-street overpasses and an existing right-of-way that has minimal space to accommodate the rail route. These challenges contribute to the $13.5 billion price tag by requiring much of the route to be elevated.

    The high-speed rail would also cost $190 million to operate and maintain annually, according to the report.

    That works out to some $520,000 a day in ongoing operating costs paid by the taxpayers.

    The feasibility study did not include ridership or fare estimates for the proposed high-speed rail line.

    Acela serves just under 9,000 passengers a day. Even if the proposed Austin-San Antonio leg got that many (it won’t; even a thousand a day is probably too many), that results in a cost of over $4,000 per passenger per day over the first year in fixed costs alone. At 1,000 riders, it’s more like $36,000 a passenger per day the first year. For that price you could buy every rider their own Honda Civic, and save the taxpayer gobs of money over the other 364 days of the year (and 15-20 years more to boot). Including the ongoing costs adds a $520 taxpayer subsidy per rider per day.

    The actual Austin Amtrak ridership in 2025 was 47,030. Not per day. Not per week. Not per month. That’s the total yearly ridership to all destinations.

    Maybe my 1,000 estimate is way too optimistic.

    There’s also this: “A separate TxDOT study found expanded passenger service on existing tracks could cost as little as $800 million.” Even that is too much for how much such a line would actually be used. Intercity passenger rail is a money loser everywhere it’s run, and only sorta, kinda works in the northeast because of a much higher population density. Even there it’s heavily subsidized, and even the fastest train, Amtrak’s Acela, only saves just over an hour over a car trip between D.C. and New York City.

    Leftists everywhere love rail because it’s an endless source of graft in the planning and building stages, and a superior means of surveilling and controlling the population. How are you supposed to inflict socialism on the peasants if they can just climb in their car and drive away?

    All this is a boondoggle in search of a problem, as low cost mass transit between Austin and San Antonio already exists in the form of buses, with fares starting at as little as $11. But that’s not a desirable form of transportation for liberal elites, because riding a bus doesn’t show how smugly superior they are over ordinary people. Plus they have to rub shoulders with both the peasants they disdain and the illegal aliens they’ve inflicted on them.

    This proposed train project makes zero economic sense, benefits very few Austinites, costs taxpayers dearly, will be an endless source of graft, and, like California’s Train to Nowhere, will never actually be built.

    For all those reasons, expect Austin Democrats to keep pushing for it.

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    Posted in Austin, Democrats, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 8 Comments »

    Paramount Moving To Austin?

    Sunday, August 23rd, 2026

    Paramount and Netflix continue to fight over control of Warner Brothers, with California’s state government continuing to oppose the Paramount bid, the sticking point reportedly being preserving liberal control of geriatric news network CNN. As a result, Paramount is threatening to move out of California over the state’s opposition to the merger and their generally business hostile environment. And one potential destination for Paramount’s new HQ is Austin.

    Austin could soon be home to more film and television productions as a major Hollywood studio eyes Texas for a potential move.

    Paramount is considering relocating some of its operations out of California as the company fights to close its proposed $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Austin has emerged as a possible destination.

    The potential move is far from a done deal. But according to the New York Post, Paramount CEO David Ellison and his partners are in discussions about establishing a movie and television studio at the Bluebonnet Business Center at 9219 Old Manor Road in East Austin.

    If Paramount follows through, the move could give Austin a new role as an operations base for one of the entertainment industry’s largest companies.

    Austin already has a long history with filmmaking, from the independent movies that helped put the city on Hollywood’s radar to a growing network of production facilities. And if Paramount ultimately chooses the reported East Austin site, it would be joining a particularly film-heavy stretch of Old Manor Road.

    Snip.

    The nearly $111 billion deal has received approval from the U.S. Department of Justice and other regulators, but California and 11 other states have sued to block the merger, arguing that it would reduce competition in the entertainment industry.

    And the Netflix bid wouldn’t? It would essentially mean the end of the movie theater business in America.

    Paramount has agreed to delay closing the deal while the antitrust case proceeds. The trial is scheduled to begin March 2, 2027. But beginning Oct. 1, Paramount is expected to owe Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders $7 million per day in so-called “ticking fees” until the deal closes. Paramount has estimated that the fees could total roughly $1.3 billion if the case stretches into the spring.

    According to Variety, Ellison has reportedly told senior executives that Paramount could begin the process of moving operations out of California on Oct. 1 if California Attorney General Rob Bonta does not agree to settlement negotiations by then.

    The New York Post reported that Austin is among the possible destinations, with Paramount reportedly exploring the Bluebonnet Business Center. Paramount has not formally announced a move to Austin, and the company’s California exit remains contingent on the outcome of the antitrust dispute.

    California Democrats seem to believe that private businesses should serve the needs of the Party, not the interests of shareholders. California’s high tax, high regulation environment has been sending businesses streaming toward the exits for decades, and now film-making, the industry that’s defined California’s image to the world for over a century, looks poised to exit “Hotel California” while they still have a chance to leave.

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    Posted in Austin, Texas | 4 Comments »

    Pro-Tip: If You Rob A Gun Store, Don’t Display Your Stolen Guns On Instagram

    Thursday, August 20th, 2026

    Many people think today’s youth are stupider than than those in the past, and two teenagers who robbed a gun store and then displayed the stolen weapons on Instagram certainly argue in favor of the proposition.

    Three teenagers have been arrested in connection with a July break-in at a Pflugerville gun store where 34 firearms were stolen.

    For those unfamiliar with central Texas, Pflugerville is just north of Austin and just south of Round Rock.

    One of the teens, at just 15 years old, had two active warrants and an extensive history of burglaries and firearms.

    Two of the teens were arrested last month. On August 19, police said a third teen was arrested in the ongoing investigation.

    On July 2 at around 4:30 a.m., Pflugerville police responded to GT Distributors on New Meister Lane about a business alarm. When officers arrived, they saw two people crouching behind an SUV parked in front of the business.

    The two got inside the SUV and immediately fled the scene, passing directly in front of officers, who noted that the car had several distinctive characteristics, including a personalized license plate, five-spoke alloy wheels, two large roof-rack cross members, a chrome strip along the lower part of the doors and a distinct blue paint job.

    Officers found the front glass door of the business had been smashed by a large rock, and inside multiple firearm display and storage cases had been broken into and shattered glass littered the floor.

    I don’t want to be critical of the victims, but if the door to your gun store can be opened with a rock, you need better security.

    Surveillance footage from the store showed two people arriving in a blue Audi SUV parking, backing up into a parking space right in front of the store, then getting out. The two were seen using a large rock to smash into the door glass, then to break into the display cases. The suspects took multiple firearms, hiding them in their pockets.

    If they’re breaking in with a rock and stuffing guns in their pockets, this heist doesn’t exactly bespeak of months of meticulous planning.

    They made multiple trips between the display cases and the SUV. They were seen on video unsuccessfully trying to break into more cases with the rock, then fleeing the store. They then got into the SUV and fled the scene.

    As is so often the case in similar crimes, the SUV was stolen. Indeed, using a stolen vehicle seems to be the only semi-intelligent precaution the alleged perps took during the entire heist.

    The stolen SUV was later found by Austin police about 2.4 miles from where it was stolen.

    Police found multiple fingerprints and one on a door handle came back matching a 15-year-old boy who had a rap sheet and two active warrants.

    “Should I bother wearing gloves for my crime spree? Nah…”

    Pflugerville police went to the Austin ISD Police Department and obtained photos of the 15-year-old from an officer “personally familiar” with the teen, says the affidavit. The officer said he had investigated multiple cases involving the teen and provided PPD with photos from an Instagram account associated with the boy.

    The photos were posted over multiple days following the July 2 burglary, showing multiple Glock-branded firearms as well as large amounts of cash and multiple gun accessories including extended magazines and handgrip covers.

    What is it with today’s criminal youth that they can’t understand that documenting felonies on social media is a bad idea? Do they believe some sort of magical forcefield prevents police from viewing Instagram? “Sure, I’m spending several years in prison, but look how dope I looked holding those stolen guns!”

    Police also uncovered a Telegram account associated with the teen and reviewed paperwork from APD on a robbery at an East Austin apartment complex connected to the teen. Multiple suspects in the robbery fled into two apartments and were identified, one being the teen boy, prompting a request to apprehend him from APD.

    Further monitoring of the boy’s Instagram revealed a photo of the teen driving a Lexus, posted the same day as APD received a report about a stolen Lexus that was found empty less than half a mile from Gunter Street.

    Two days later, on July 27, another photo showed the teen driving an Audi SUV, also reported stolen. The owner reported the SUV also contained a firearm and that he had woken up to find his SUV was missing from his home on Margarita Street. The SUV was later found just a mile away at the Gunter Street apartment complex, so law enforcement placed a tracker on it with the owner’s permission.

    And poof goes the only non-stupid thing the perps did, since they failed to ditch the stolen car after the heist.

    DPS and APD later stopped the vehicle after a pursuit and found the 15-year-old boy at the wheel.

    Since the juvenile’s name is not being released, for the sake of convenience we’ll simply refer to him as Dummy McStupidKid.

    Pflugerville police then investigated the apartment complex, learning that management had received reports from a neighbor fearing for their safety after seeing multiple firearms with people associated with one particular unit. Multiple residents also reported seeing many people loitering outside the building the unit was in.

    Police learned that 17-year-old Jacob Vallejo lived in the unit with his stepbrothers and mother and had been arrested as part of a May 2026 robbery at the complex. Surveillance footage showed the same stolen Audi that the 15-year-old had been driving repeatedly visiting the building and multiple people entering and leaving the unit over a 24-hour period on July 27.

    The AISD police officer also told Pflugerville police that the unit had been previously searched due to social media threats, allegedly made by Vallejo.

    This is not exactly what people call “keeping a low profile.”

    On Aug. 13, police executed a search warrant on the Gunter Street apartment and spoke with Vallejo, who told police and ATF that guns were inside the apartment, and they were being “held for a friend.” He confirmed to police that the “friend” was the 15-year-old teen, the affidavit says.

    Add “not shutting the fuck up” to Vallejo’s long, long list of failures to adhere to Basic Criminal Competence 101.

    When asked if the guns were stolen, he allegedly replied, “Uh, I mean, I would say they are reported stolen because it’s your car hopping them;” ‘car hopping’ refers to when vehicles are stolen for short periods of time to avoid being caught by police.

    Vallejo also allegedly stated there was more than one firearm in the home with a “switch,” an illegal device allowing the Glock to fire continuously while the trigger is held.

    Ding Ding Ding! Vallejo and McStupidKid just leveled up to federal firearms violation charges, and could win a big, big prize of up to 10 years in federal prison!

    At the time of his arrest, the 15-year-old suspect had two active warrants for robbery and carrying a prohibited weapon. He also had several previous arrests for burglaries and firearms.

    The 15-year-old’s identity is being withheld due to his age. He was taken into custody and transported to the Gardner Betts Juvenile Facility.

    Vallejo has been charged with state jail felony theft of a firearm and third-degree felony prohibited weapon. His bond has been set at a collective $15,000 for both charges.

    Being a juvenile means that Dummy McStupidKid may well skate, despite his priors, especially since Travis County’s Soros-backed DA Jose Garza loves to put criminals back on the streets. But Vallejo is likely looking at hard time, especially if the feds decide to nail him on the machine gun conversion charges.

    There’s also a (non embeddable) Fox 7 video on the crime, where criminal defense attorney Gene Anthes discusses the amazing stupidity displayed.

    Criminals have never been the brightest lights, but today’s crop seems particularly dim.

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Texas | 7 Comments »

    Abbott Wants Foreign Funding, H-1B Employment Banned In Public Schools

    Wednesday, August 19th, 2026

    Back in January, Texas Governor Greg Abbott froze H-1B visas for Texas state agencies and universities. Now pushing for the same in public schools, plus an end to foreign curriculum funding.

    Gov. Greg Abbott is calling on Texas lawmakers to ban foreign funding in public schools and prohibit districts from employing workers through the federal H-1B visa program.

    Abbott announced the proposals Tuesday as part of a broader push aimed at eliminating foreign influence in Texas classrooms.

    “The minds of our students are driven by influences that they are exposed to in our public schools,” said Abbott. “Those minds should be shaped by policies that are approved by state lawmakers.”

    Abbott pointed to Austin Independent School District’s acceptance of hundreds of thousands of dollars from Qatar to support Arabic language and culture instruction, as well as school districts that have participated in Confucius Classroom programs affiliated with Chinese government-backed entities.

    “We cannot condone the quiet indoctrination of our children in the classroom,” said Abbott.

    The governor said he will ask lawmakers to prohibit public schools from accepting gifts, money, or property from foreign sources or entering into partnerships or financial agreements with them.

    Abbott was joined at the announcement by officials from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, who highlighted examples they say demonstrate foreign and Islamist influence in Texas education.

    Kate Bierly said public records obtained from Austin ISD revealed classroom materials associated with Arabic language and culture programs, including an activity in which second grade students were instructed to create a greeting card praising the Prophet Muhammad and attach a cutout of the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest site.

    There’s no reason second graders should be studying Islamic culture, or indeed anything much beyond basic American history like Paul Revere and Thanksgiving.

    Bierly said the extent of foreign influence in K-12 education is difficult to determine because reporting requirements are less extensive than those governing higher education.

    “There is no circumstance in which it is acceptable that Texas children should be indoctrinated with radical Islamist ideologies in Texas schools,” she said.

    Abbott is also asking lawmakers to prohibit Texas public schools from employing H-1B visa holders.

    An H-1B visa is a temporary U.S. work visa that allows employers to hire foreign workers in certain specialty occupations that typically require at least a bachelor’s degree.

    “Exactly zero Texas public school employees should be here on H-1B visas,” said Abbott. “This expands on my prior directive, freezing new H-1B visa petitions in all state agencies and all state universities.”

    There’s a narrow case for a few H-1Bs at the university level highly specialized technical roles. There’s none for K-12, as there are plenty of Americans willing to fill those jobs.

    Is there anyone who thinks foreign money from non-democratic regimes like China and Qatar should be flowing into our public schools?

    Well, besides Democrats who seem to think commies, Jihadis, and foreign money are vital to their coalition…

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    Posted in Austin, Communism, Jihad, Texas | 5 Comments »

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