Posts Tagged ‘Democrats’

LinkSwarm For September 26, 2025

Friday, September 26th, 2025

A whole lot of despicable Democrats voted against remembering Charlie Kirk and denouncing political violence, a whole bunch of lefties are still lying about Kirk, Comey indicted, President Trump officially backs a complete Ukraine victory, a new American stealth fighter enters production, two murderous lefty scumbags die, and an infamous thirty-four year old Austin murder mystery is solved.

It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Democrats cast 58 “noes” on simple vote to honor Charlie Kirk’s life, condemn his assassination.” They couldn’t even do that.
  • Here’s the list of shame.

    Democrats who voted against:

    • Gabe Amo of Rhode Island
    • Joyce Beatty of Ohio
    • Wesley Bell of Missouri
    • Sanford Bishop Jr. of Georgia
    • Shontel Brown of Ohio
    • Andre Carson of Indiana
    • Troy Carter of Louisiana
    • Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida
    • Yvette Clarke of New York
    • Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri
    • Jim Clyburn of South Carolina
    • Jasmine Crockett of Texas
    • Danny Davis of Illinois
    • Veronica Escobar of Texas
    • Adriano Espaillat of New York
    • Cleo Fields of Louisiana
    • Shomari Figures of Alabama
    • Valerie Foushee of North Carolina
    • Maxwell Frost of Florida
    • Sylvia Garcia of Texas
    • Al Green of Texas
    • Jimmy Gomez of California
    • Jahana Hayes of Connecticut
    • Steven Horsford of Nevada
    • Glenn Ivey of Maryland
    • Jonathan Jackson of Illinois
    • Pramila Jayapal of Washington
    • Hank Johnson Jr. of Georgia
    • Sydney Kamlager-Dove of California
    • Robin Kelly of Illinois
    • Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois
    • Summer Lee of Pennsylvania
    • Lucy McBath of Georgia
    • LaMonica McIver of New Jersey
    • Robert Menendez of New Jersey
    • Kweisi Mfume of Maryland
    • Gwen Moore of Wisconsin
    • Seth Moulton of Massachusetts
    • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York
    • Ilhan Omar of Minnesota
    • Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts
    • Mike Quigley of Illinois
    • Delia Ramirez of Illinois
    • Emily Randall of Washington
    • Robert Scott of Virginia
    • Terri Sewell of Alabama
    • Lateefah Simon of California
    • Marilyn Strickland of Washington
    • Emilia Strong Sykes of Ohio
    • Shri Thanedar of Michigan
    • Bennie Thompson of Mississippi
    • Rashida Tlaib of Michigan
    • Lauren Underwood of Illinois
    • Nydia Velazquez of New York
    • Maxine Waters of California
    • Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey
    • Nikema Williams of Georgia
    • Frederica Wilson of Florida

    Democrats who voted “present”

    • Alma Adams of North Carolina
    • Donald Beyer Jr. of Virginia
    • Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon
    • Julia Brownley of California
    • Janelle Bynum of Oregon
    • Salud Carbajal of California
    • Greg Casar of Texas
    • Diana DeGette of Colorado
    • Mark DeSaulnier of California
    • Maxine Dexter of Oregon
    • Lloyd Doggett of Texas
    • Dwight Evans of Pennsylvania
    • Lois Frankel of Florida
    • Laura Friedman of California
    • John Garamendi of California
    • Daniel Goldman of New York
    • Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire
    • Val Hoyle of Oregon
    • Sara Jacobs of California
    • Julie Johnson of Texas
    • Timothy Kennedy of New York
    • Ro Khanna of California
    • Doris Matsui of California
    • Jennifer McClellan of Virginia
    • Grace Meng of New York
    • Brittany Pettersen of Colorado
    • Chellie Pingree of Maine
    • Mark Pocan of Wisconsin
    • Andrea Salinas of Oregon
    • Linda Sanchez of California
    • Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania
    • Brad Sherman of California
    • Suhas Subramanyam of Virginia
    • Mike Thompson of California
    • Jill Tokuda of Hawaii
    • Paul Tonko of New York
    • Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico
    • James Walkinshaw of Virginia

    Democrats who did not vote:

    • Nanette Diaz Barragan of California
    • Sean Casten of Illinois
    • Kathy Castor of Florida
    • Joaquin Castro of Texas
    • Steve Cohen of Tennessee
    • Herbert Conaway Jr. of New Jersey
    • Robert Garcia of California
    • Jesus Garcia of Illinois
    • George Latimer of New York
    • Teresa Leger Fernandez of New Mexico
    • Kevin Mullin of California
    • Joe Neguse of Colorado
    • Donald Norcross of New Jersey
    • Nancy Pelosi of California
    • Raul Ruiz of California
    • Janice Schakowsky of Illinois
    • Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico
    • Eric Swalwell of California
    • Norma Torres of California
    • Ritchie Torres of New York
    • Marc Veasey of Texas
    • Eugene Vindman of Virginia

    Name and shame…

  • “The ‘Study’ You’re Citing About Right-Wing Violence Is Full Of Fake Data.”

    After Charlie Kirk was assassinated last week, conservatives noted that most political violence comes from the left. The left bristles at this fact and has responded by dramatically padding the numbers to pretend the reverse is true.

    Consider a Sept. 12 piece from The Economist claiming, “extremists on both left and right commit violence, although more incidents appear to come from right-leaning attackers.”

    Right up front, the piece admits it used data “largely compiled by researchers whom sceptical (sic) conservatives would probably dismiss as biased.” The disclaimer is meant to inoculate The Economist’s audience to its sloppy reporting, as if challenges from conservatives will somehow prove The Economist’s accuracy.

    Yes, readers should be beyond skeptical of the source in that piece, The Prosecution Project. Its website claims to “track[] and provid[e] analysis of felony criminal cases involving illegal political violence, terrorism, and extremism occurring in the United States since 1990.”

    The founder and executive director of the Prosecution Project is Michael Loadenthal, although the links naming the website’s leadership were broken Friday, meaning no names were visible. Google had not yet scrubbed Loadenthal’s name from searches.

    Loadenthal is an “openly anarchist Antifa-affiliated … researcher at the University of Cincinnati who, by his own admission, is a far-left violent extremist,” The Federalist reported in 2023.

    So we have an Antifa-connected researcher with rabid bias against the right, held out as an expert on deciding who is extreme. It is like using a vegetarian to define which meat eaters are the most humane — none of them, says the vegetarian.

    The Prosecution Project lists January 2024 charges against John Reardon of Massachusetts, who made antisemitic threats against synagogues and the Israeli Consulate. It notes, “Influenced by events in Gaza, he also said, ‘you do realize that by supporting genocide that means it’s ok for people to commit genocide against you.’” The Department of Justice never identified Reardon’s political affiliation, but The Prosecution Project’s own account seems to indicate he was a pro-Palestine fanatic, a cause typically associated with Democrats. Yet The Prosecution Project identifies Reardon’s crimes as “rightist” because they’re “identity-focused.”

    The group also lists 2022 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act charges against Edmee Chavannes — even though “Chavannes was found not guilty.”

    The Prosecution Project even includes the posting of racist stickers in its tracker, as if that’s comparable to terrorism or violence. One wonders if the group will treat Democrats’ desecration of Charlie Kirk memorials with the same seriousness.

    Most crimes involving race or abortion businesses are blamed on the right in the data, with nothing to back up those claims. Yet these issues and others often cross over to the left. The Federalist has reported on the progressive anti-abortion movement, for example, and the left’s Marxist oppressor-versus-oppressed framework is manifestly racist.

    Comb through the ridiculous data on The Prosecution Project’s website, and you will soon conclude it is worthless to everyone except leftist propagandists trying to downplay Charlie Kirk’s murder and flip the blame for violence in the U.S. to the right.

    Similarly, a biased “study” by Alex Nowrasteh at the Cato Institute was debunked this week by Amber Duke at The Daily Caller.

    Nowrasteh claims politically motivated violence is rare in the U.S., but that when it happens, “right-wing terrorists” are more often to blame than the left — that is, when you exclude the terrorists who killed 2,977 victims on Sept. 11, 2001, and exclude injuries, property damage, and people who were not killed. Thus, his criteria exclude the two assassination attempts on President Donald Trump, for example. Additionally, Duke found that some of the crimes Nowrasteh blamed on the right were at best questionable and at worst downright wrong.

    Duke pointed to another lopsided study by the Anti-Defamation League, which also claims the right is to blame for increased political violence. Ryan James Girdusky unpacked those magic numbers and noted glaring omissions. For example, the ADL left the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson out of its study.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • How the fact-free conspiracy theory about Charlie Kirk’s assassin being a right-winger magically spread around the world.

    Despite the evidence all pointing to Kirk’s killer being on the left wing of the ideological spectrum, the conspiracy theory about a right-wing shooter was pushed by a host of Democratic members of Congress, high-profile left-wing activists, liberal social media influencers, and more.

    The most common evidence-free claim on the left has been that the shooter was a follower of far right influencer Nick Fuentes.

    Lot’s more quotes from various lefty idiots asserting this connection without proof at the link.

  • More from Jeffrey Blehar:

    As each new detail trickled out, and the killer’s transgender associations became clearer and clearer, the hysterical spin and assertions of blunt unreality mounted. Cynical pros began inserting outright lies into the mix, as partisan myrmidons took up their work and used it in desperate, craven attempts to either spin facts in ridiculous ways (“his parents are Republicans!”) or simply pretend the facts weren’t “facts” at all. All of it was done with the intent of trying to will into existence — through the spread of fear, uncertainty, and doubt — an alternate narrative whose intended moral calculus amounted to, in so many words, Charlie Kirk was killed by his own team, and this is actually your fault.

    So, no, I’m not about to move on just yet.

    I could understand a certain amount of denialism at first, because I understand human nature. For those on the left who treat politics like a substitute religion — an increasing number of people in our irreligious age — this moment has been akin to seeing several of the central tenets of your faith publicly refuted. The revelation of the identity of the alleged shooter and the reports about his beliefs were arguably the worst possible scenario for the sorts of loud Democratic types who are deeply invested in the idea of the MAGA right as America’s true fever-swamp of hatred and violence.

    I can understand ignorance as well, because I depend on documenting it for a job — the Carnival of Fools would have to fold up its tent without it. In the days before the suspect was caught, it was natural that desperate progressives who get their news from left-wing authorities would use that span of time — when the killer was still at large — to conjure their own arcane interpretive theories in defiance of the known evidence. I feel inevitable disgust at these sad attempts at spin — I know who publicly celebrated the attack on Kirk, after all, and it wasn’t anyone on my side — but again, it was expected.

    But I can’t understand any of this after Tyler Robinson was caught on Friday morning. At that point, mere ignorance and wish-casting turned into an active disinformation campaign, and it was particularly appalling to see from people whose civic responsibility it is to know better. To take one example, how about the repellent Eric Swalwell? On Friday afternoon, in an audaciously sleazy bit of “partial storytelling,” the California congressman tweeted: “It doesn’t matter that Kirk’s killer was a straight white male. Or that he was from a Republican family that voted for Donald Trump. Violence has NEVER been the answer.”

    If he thought this was a cute joke, he’s a moral reprobate. If he thought it was an effective deceit, he’s also a moral reprobate. I think it is thus fair to conclude that he’s a moral reprobate. The jury’s still out on his fellow California Democratic congressman Dave Min, however, who may simply be stupid. Min said on Saturday: “Now that the Charlie Kirk assassin has been identified as MAGA, I’m sure Donald Trump, Elon Musk and all the insane GOP politicians who called for retribution against the ‘RADICAL LEFT’ will now shift their focus to stopping the toxic violence of the RADICAL RIGHT.” (As it turns out, Dave? No, we won’t!)

    How about Harvard Law professor — and Joe Biden legal adviser — Laurence Tribe? Tribe announced on Twitter that the killer “seems to have been ultra-MAGA, exploding the GOP/MAGA attempt to pin the blame for this tragedy on liberals.” (How he got that idea is anybody’s guess.) Later, he deleted the tweet and posted a non-apology accusing the right of “making things up” by associating the killer with transgender or left-wing causes. I can only tell you that once upon a time he had a fine legal mind.

    I certainly can’t say the same for Heather Cox Richardson, the world’s most-followed Substacker. Richardson is a Temu Tribe, an oracle of the complacently progressive academic establishment, and demonstrated it once again by going on a podcast on Friday to claim that the killer was a “right-winger” and all those outraged conservatives online were now retreating “in a real hurry.” (Lest you think that was an error born of speaking off the cuff, Richardson put it in writing as well.)

    Now that the gaslighting has become impossible to sustain, the left has moved on to its last line of defense: “Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed whom.” It will be a long time before I forget the five days I have just spent being gaslighted both by political operators as well as people who remain transparently in denial. I expected better of them. I held them only to the standards that I hold myself. It was a mistake.

  • “Trump golf club gunman [Ryan Routh] found guilty after assassination attempt; tries to stab self in court.” The left is sending us an endless parade of violent lunatics and losers.
  • Biden Autopen scandal deepens.

    One of former President Joe Biden’s top aides – Jeff Zients, told the House Oversight Committee on Thursday that an aide with his email credentials was green lighting some of the most controversial ‘autopen’ pardons, that Hunter Biden – who received an insane pardon himself – was involved in the pardon discussions, and that Joe Biden’s brain was pea soup.

    According to Axios, Zients – one of the highest ranking officials from the Biden White House – confirmed that Joe Biden had difficulty remembering dates and names, and often required extra briefings to make decisions during the final years of his presidency.

    Instead of having three meetings before making a decision, for example, Biden would want four.

    Zients said Biden had long had trouble with names and dates, but acknowledged to investigators that the president’s memory of such facts got worse in the final years of his term.

    Jill Biden, meanwhile, spoke with Zients about ‘managing Joe’ as Zients was readying himself to take on the role of Chief of Staff in early 2023 – urging him to adjust Biden’s schedule so he could get more rest and return to the White House residence earlier in the evening.

    Longtime Biden aide and deputy CoS Annie Tomasini also spoke with Zients about limiting Biden’s schedule and shortening distances and stairs.

    According to Fox News, Zients “admitted that President Biden’s speech stumbles increased as he aged,” adding “He also noted that the president’s difficulty remembering dates and names worsened over time, including during the administration.”

    Also interesting – Zients told investigators that Hunter Biden was involved in discussions about presidential pardons towards the end of Biden’s term, which included the blanket pardons of several members of the Biden family issued during Joe’s final 24 hours in office. It had been previously reported by NBC News that Hunter was sitting in on White House meetings following the former president’s horrible performance during a June 2024 debate against Donald Trump.

  • And just like that millions of lefty sorts who piously sand “No one’s above the law!” for the ginned-up Trump indictments all automatically switched to “This is a dangerous precedent!” when it comes to indicting James Comey.

    Former FBI Director James Comey has been indicted on criminal charges related to allegations that he lied to Congress during testimony in 2020 about whether he authorized a leak of information.

    Comey is facing one count of false statements and one count of obstruction of justice, according to a release from the Department of Justice.

    “No one is above the law. Today’s indictment reflects this Department of Justice’s commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people. We will follow the facts in this case,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.

    President Trump reacted gleefully to the indictment in a statement shared to Truth Social.

    “JUSTICE IN AMERICA! One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to is James Comey, the former Corrupt Head of the FBI.”

    “Today he was indicted by a Grand Jury on two felony counts for various illegal and unlawful acts. He has been so bad for our Country, for so long, and is now at the beginning of being held responsible for his crimes against our Nation. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

    Comey’s indictment in Virginia federal court comes just days before the statute of limitations for the perjury charge was set to run out. The charges come five years after Comey testified on September 30, 2020, before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he never authorized anyone at the FBI to leak information to the press related to the investigations of either possible collusion between Trump and Russia or Hillary Clinton’s use of an unauthorized email system.

    During the hearing, Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) asked Comey whether he had authorized leaks related to either investigation. Comey reiterated what he said in 2017 congressional testimony, that he had not.

    Cruz argued that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had said Comey authorized at least one such disclosure, related to the Clinton investigation. But the Justice Department inspector general found in 2018 that McCabe had “lacked candor when he told Comey, or made statements that led Comey to believe, that McCabe had not authorized the disclosure and did not know who did.”

    The charges also center in part on an October 2016 New York Times report, “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.”

    The Times article was in response to reporting in Slate that Trump had established a communications back channel with the Kremlin, involving servers at Trump Tower in Manhattan and Alfa Bank, one of Russia’s largest financial institutions.

    Hours after the Slate article was published, the Times report related the FBI’s conclusion that the back-channel claim was unfounded. The report also detailed that the bureau’s counterintelligence investigation of Russia’s malign activities in connection with the 2016 campaign were not linked to Trump and his campaign.

    Special counsel John Durham probed the leaks to the Times in connection with the story as an unauthorized public disclosure (UPD) of classified information.

    The February 2020 closing memorandum for the probe, obtained by veteran journalist Catherine Herridge, found there were two major government sources for the story: James Baker, FBI general counsel and a close adviser to Comey, and FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki. Baker told investigators that he was “under the belief” that he was “ultimately instructed and authorized to [provide information to the Times] by then FBI Director James Comey.”

    However, Baker did not claim that Comey gave him a direct order. “Baker indicated that FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki instructed him (Baker) to disclose the information to the NYT, and Baker understood Rybicki was conveying this instruction and authorization from Comey.”

  • The Antifa left are stepping up their insurrection against American law enforcement. “Shooting at Dallas ICE Facility Leaves Detainees and Suspect Dead.”

    A Dallas U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility was the target of a shooting Wednesday morning that left two detainees dead, one person injured, and the suspect committing suicide at the scene.

    According to the Dallas Police Department, law enforcement responded to a call at a Dallas ICE facility after reports that someone had opened fire from an adjacent building.

    Two detainees were pronounced dead, with another being rushed to the hospital in critical condition with a gunshot injury.

    The suspected shooter, a white male armed with a rifle on a roof, died by suicide as agents approached, FOX4 Dallas reported.

    ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons spoke to CNN about the shooting as the event unfolded, saying that the scene is secure and the shooter is “down from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

    Bullets found had anti-ICE slogans written on them.

  • Stephen Green has some some official Antifa guidelines for engaging in a criminal conspiracy to thwart federal law enforcement through violence and intimidation.
  • Why people who kept freaking out at Trump negotiating with Putin shouldn’t have. “Trump Says Ukraine Can Win Back All of Its Territory from Russia.”

    President Donald Trump declared his belief Tuesday that Ukraine can win its war against Russia outright, an extraordinary shift in tone with significant ramifications for U.S. policy.

    Trump shared his views on Truth Social after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.

    “I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form. With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this War started, is very much an option,” Trump said.

    Trump’s position is a 180-degree shift from his longstanding view that Ukraine would have to cede territory to Russia as a condition for ending the war. Moscow holds roughly a fifth of Ukraine’s territory after invading its neighbor three-and-a-half years ago. Russian forces have slowly made gains along the eastern part of Ukraine in what has become a grueling war of attrition with hundreds of thousands of estimated casualties.

    Trump argued Russia is a “paper tiger” and suggested Russian people were not aware of the damage Russian President Vladimir Putin has done to their nation. He also praised the “Great Spirit” of Ukraine and said Ukraine could “maybe even go further” than reclaiming its original territory. Trump’s comments are a stark contrast from his past statements that argued Russia was winning the war and likened Zelensky to a dictator.

    Trump promised the U.S. would keep sending weapons to NATO for the alliance to use in the way it sees fit. His comments will likely prompt a furious response from Putin and Russian forces in Ukraine. It also remains to be seen how Trump’s restraint-oriented cabinet members and political allies react to his unexpected shift.

    As previously observed, Trump’s negotiating strategy works on persuasion and tit-for-tat strategies. Zelensky, after some early stumbles, is finally fully onboard with Trump, while Putin hasn’t offered anything in return to Trump’s overtures. That means that Zelensky gets all the carrots, and Putin gets all the sticks. Golly, who could have seen that one coming except everyone who’s actually watched Trump operate for the last ten years who isn’t suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome?

  • Ukraine launched another big drone strike, this one on the Saratov oil refinery in Bryanskaya Ulitsa, Saratov Oblast, the third time they’ve hit it since August.
  • They also hit the Afipsky oil refinery in Krasnodar again. Plus more reports of gas shortages across Russia.
  • Their marine drones hit an oil loading pier at Tuapse in Krasnodar.
  • Secretary of War Pete Hesgeth has summoned 800 generals and admirals from around the world to Washington D.C. without telling them what for. They’re going to be pretty surprised when he announces that he’s brought all of them there to talk about Amway…
  • Russia just flew a wave of drones over Denmark.
  • “Gunman yelling “Free Palestine!” opens fire at New Hampshire country club.”

    23-year-old Hunter Nadeau was arrested on scene for shooting multiple victims at the Sky Meadow Country Club in Nashau, New Hampshire, Saturday night. A 59-year-old named Robert DeCesare was killed in front of his family. At least two others were injured.

    Tom Bartelson of Pepperell, Massachusetts, is the witness in the video above. He was at his nephew’s wedding in a private room of the club when the gunman entered the building dressed in all black. The shooter yelled, “The children are safe!” and “Free Palestine!” before killing DeCesare. He then moved into the club restaurant and opened fire again.

    Funny no matter what the leftwing cause, the solution seems to be murdering American citizens.

  • Another month, another #BlackLivesMatter bigwig using donations to fund her lavish lifestyle.

    A once-celebrated Boston social activist has pleaded guilty to defrauding donors — including Black Lives Matter — out of thousands of dollars that she used as a personal piggy bank.

    Monica Cannon-Grant, 44, pleaded guilty Monday to 18 counts of fraud-related crimes that she committed with her late husband while operating their Violence in Boston (VIB) activists group, according to the US Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts.

    The activist scammed money — including $3,000 from a BLM group — while claiming it was to help feed children and run protests like one in 2020 over the murder of George Floyd and police violence.

    Cannon-Grant also conned her way into getting $100,000 in federal pandemic-related unemployment benefits — which she used to pay off her personal auto loan and car insurance policy.

    But she has now confessed to transferring funds to personal bank accounts to pay for rent, shopping sprees, delivery meals, visits to a nail salon — and even a summer vacation to Maryland.

    (Previously.) (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • Self-Replicating Worm Hits 180+ Software Packages.

    At least 187 code packages made available through the JavaScript repository NPM have been infected with a self-replicating worm that steals credentials from developers and publishes those secrets on GitHub, experts warn. The malware, which briefly infected multiple code packages from the security vendor CrowdStrike, steals and publishes even more credentials every time an infected package is installed.

    You may remember Crowdstrike from such hits as “we helped Hillary Clinton illegally erase her secret email server.”

  • Speaking of technology running amok: “OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws.” That sounds like the sort6 of cruel fact that should throw a kink in all of these AI company’s getting trillion dollar valuations but somehow won’t.
  • In California, 13 year old boy killed by sex-abusing, illegal alien soccer coach. The family of boy is “suing Los Angeles County and the City of Los Angeles for failing to perform a background check on the coach.”
  • Turns out that when conservatives said they were being unfairly censored due to Biden Administration pressure, they were right all along. “YouTube Lifts Ban on Censored Creators, Admits Biden Admin Pressure Was ‘Unacceptable.'”

    Google is making major changes to YouTube’s free speech policies following pressure from House Republicans and shifts among its top competitors.

    In a letter to House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), an attorney for Alphabet, Google and YouTube’s parent company, announced a series of changes to YouTube’s approach to free speech, including the return of banned creators to the platform and the implementation of a community notes system to replace third-party fact-checkers.

    YouTube is rolling back its restrictive policies surrounding political speech, especially the Covid-19 pandemic and elections. The video platform said its reliance on public health authorities was well intentioned, but expressed regret at its impact on public debate on issues that were far from settled.

    More broadly, YouTube admitted senior Biden administration officials conducted extensive outreach to YouTube to influence its approach to “misinformation” and Covid-19 content that did not violate YouTube’s policies.

    “Senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies,” the letter reads.

    While YouTube independently enforced its policies, Biden officials “continued to press the Company” to remove content that did not violate the platform’s policies. The letter calls out Biden and other administration officials for creating a “political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms” under the guise of “misinformation.”

  • “Trump to Sign Off on TikTok Deal with Majority American Investors, ‘Retrained’ Algorithm.”

    President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order later this week declaring that an emerging deal involving the video-sharing app TikTok meets American security needs and constitutes a qualified divestiture under U.S. law, according to people familiar with the matter.

    Under the deal, American tech company Oracle will serve as the app’s security provider, which will independently monitor the source code of the app as well as study how a U.S.-controlled copy of the TikTok content recommendation algorithm operates and interacts with phone features and updates.

    Oracle will be required to “retrain” a leased duplicate TikTok algorithm…

    So it will not necessarily be a Chinese spyware app any more, but will still be malware for your brain…

  • Good news from the border! “Texas, Southwest Region See ‘Historically Low’ Southern Border Apprehensions in August.”
  • Less good news from the border: “Shrinking Resources Cast New Doubt on Operation Lone Star Prosecutions.”

    Texas’ border jurisdictions are scrambling to manage thousands of pending Operation Lone Star cases after key state partners abruptly pulled out, leaving local officials to coordinate housing and transportation for defendants.

    Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith told Texas Scorecard the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) and the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM), both of which helped provide housing for illegal crossers arrested under the border security initiative, are no longer handling those responsibilities.

    The Del Rio Processing Center is reportedly shutting down, along with Val Verde County’s detention facility—the original epicenter of Operation Lone Star (OLS) prosecutions.

    “We’re left holding the bag,” Smith said. “Counties are having to figure this out on their own without the infrastructure the state had in place.”

    Smith said approximately half of all prosecutions tied to OLS in Kinney County have already been resolved, either through pleas or dismissals, but thousands of cases remain active.

    According to numbers from the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, more than 2,600 felony cases have already been resolved. Nearly 2,000 cases are still pending, in part due to lengthy appeals.

    Meanwhile, the Kinney County Sheriff’s Office has more than 700 outstanding warrants for alleged smugglers and another 1,400 warrants that have not yet been executed because of limited capacity to house and transport defendants.

    Kinney County has contracts with about 10 jails across Texas—including some as far away as the Panhandle—but the county jail cannot hold a person beyond 72 hours, as it is considered a temporary holding facility. That has forced sheriffs and prosecutors into a patchwork system for transferring detainees, with major bottlenecks since TDCJ and TDEM stopped coordinating.

    The Dolph Briscoe Unit in Dilley and the Segovia Unit in Edinburg, which had filled major housing roles, are no longer available, worsening the shortage.

    Plus border counties have been avoid arresting women because they don’t have room for them in separate facilities.

  • 21-Year Age Minimum for Purchasing THC Products Adopted by Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission.”
  • Boeing starts production of the F-47.
  • Amazon settles a lawsuit for tricking people into signing up for Prime and making it nearly impossibility to cancel to the tune of $2.5 billion.
  • So where did President Trump get the crazy idea that using Tylenol during pregnancy could result in autism? A Harvard study. “Using acetaminophen during pregnancy may increase children’s autism and ADHD risk.”
  • Austin Yogurt Shop Murders finally solved? retired Austin detective John Jones fingered serial killer and rapist Robert Eugene Brashers (who died in a standoff with police in 1999) as the culprit. Brashers is a serial killer and rapist who committed at least three murders between 1990 and 1998 in the states of South Carolina and Missouri. He died in January 1999 by suicide during a standoff with police. Evidently a new type of DNA testing finally matched up Brashers as the culprit.
  • Robber/home intruder gets stabbed by a samurai sword.
  • “Graceland, Graceland Graceland/Trying to steal Graceland/Four years in prison for a mortgage scam trying to steal Graceland.”
  • More scenes from The Fall Of England: “Muslim who shouted ‘I’m going to kill you’ while stabbing man is given suspended sentence by British court; victim charged instead.”
  • UK’s Labour government thought they could get away with some cost-free virtue signaling by recognizing “a Palestinian state.” Surprise! “UK could face claim for $2,700,000,000,000 in reparations for recognizing Palestinian state.”
  • “Eli Lilly Latest Recipient of Texas JETI Award, Totaling $6.5 Billion Harris County Investment.”

    Gov. Greg Abbott today announced a $5.5 million grant from Texas for the construction of a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Harris County — one of multiple projects approved under the Texas Jobs, Energy, Technology, and Innovation (JETI) program over the past year.

    Abbott joined Eli Lilly and Company executives for a press conference on Tuesday afternoon in Houston to announce its creation of a nearly one million-square foot active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturing facility. The company estimated that it’ll produce around 600 new jobs and will invest more than $6.5 billion within the state.

    The grant of $5.5 million towards Lilly’s new project was made possible through the JETI approval process, a property tax abatement program established through contentious legislation passed during the 88th regular legislative session.

    House Bill (HB) 5, which was signed into law by Abbott in June 2023, replaced a 20-year-old initiative with a new economic incentive program. It created a pathway for school districts to grant companies a decade-long break in their property tax payments in exchange for relocation to their area. It limited the kinds of companies eligible to receive abatements and grants for projects in Texas, excluding renewable energy projects after negotiations proved its removal to be necessary for passage in the Legislature.

    Let me reiterate my general opposition to government subsidies of business in almost all circumstances. Government shouldn’t be in the business of picking winners and losers. However, an end to subsidizing money-losing “renewable energy” sources that made the Texas Interconnect Grid less reliable is a big plus.

    One of the first projects approved under JETI this year, also in Harris County, was to assist Summit Next Gen in opening “a world-class sustainable aviation fuel manufacturing and refining facility along the Texas Gulf Coast,” in January 2025. It’s expected to produce over $1.6 billion in capital investment for Texas.

    In February, Abbott made two JETI expansion project announcements: one for a new Braven Environmental facility in Texarkana, estimated to rake in more than $145 million in investment for the state, and the other for Vinton Steel’s “advanced manufacturing facility that recycles ferrous scrap into new steel products.” Vinton is expected to invest over $229 million in the state and create an additional 180 new jobs.

    Brazos Midland Processing LLC, also known as Brazos Midstream, was announced as an approved recipient in late August for a “300 million cubic feet per day natural gas processing plant” in Martin County, expected to create $185 million in capital investment.

    At Tuesday’s announcement of the new Lilly project, Abbott reiterated that “Texas is the best state in America for doing business.”

  • And speaking of unreliable renewable energy subsidies: “$2.2 billion solar plant in California scheduled to be turned off after years of wasted money.” That would be Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert, the one that used mirrors to concentrate light onto a single tower, and which fried lots of birds every year. I’m surprised that it was still running, given how markedly unsuccessful it’s been at generating affordable energy years ago. But I may be confusing it with the similar (and similarly failed) Crescent Dunes project. That’s the one that suffered the molten salt leaks… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Dwight also brought news of the deaths of two murderous leftwing scumbags: Would-be Gerald R. Ford assassin Sara Jane Moore, and JoAnne Chesimard, aka “Assata Shakur”, of the Black Liberation Army, who murdered New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster. The latter died in Havana. Rot in hell, commie.
  • California attorney hit with $10,000 fine for brief filled with fake ChatGPT quotes. “The Los Angeles-area attorney fined last week, Amir Mostafavi, told the court that he did not read text generated by the AI model before submitting the appeal in July 2023, months after OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as capable of passing the bar exam.” The real fine should be no client ever willing to trust his lazy ass again..
  • This is pretty damn funny:

    (Hat tip: Ed Dricoll at Instapundit.)

  • “The radical Lower East Side shop that lured drug addicts to its storefront by offering free clothing, food and Narcan suddenly shut down Tuesday — sparking internal warfare and finger pointing.”

    Without warning, Bluestockings Cooperative announced that it would permanently shut down after more than 26 years, stating that “daily operations are unfortunately no longer sustainable on multiple fronts.”

    “This was our absolute last resort. On top of our crew’s ongoing struggle against the organized abandonment of New York City and the constant crises, the remaining worker-owner and staff are at the limits of what they can manage in terms of health, disability, and finances,” a statement posted to Instagram reads.

    The Suffolk Street shop blamed the closure on its failure as a worker-owned cooperative to “come to consensus around the guiding principles and practices Bluestockings should embody” — adding that an inability to align on political and business operations directly led to the setbacks the business faced over the last two years.

    “Of course, $12,000 a month in rent, thousands in utilities, and racist, classist violence from ‘neighbors’ certainly didn’t make our work any easier,” the statement continued.

    Bluestockings came under intense outrage from its posh Lower East Side neighborhood, which transformed into a “zombie apocalypse” of strung-out junkies shooting up in broad daylight who were drawn to the bookstore’s free and indiscriminate services.

    The self-described “radically inclusive” shop was a state-recognized Opiate Overdose Prevention Program and offered “harm reduction services” like Narcan, drug-testing strips and a used needle-drop off bin — which neighbors alleged enabled the junkies.

    In recent years, Bluestockings plunged into around $100,000 in debt to its publishers and book distributors, according to reports.

    Social justice is incompatible with both profit and basic human decency. (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • Has Toronto become the exotic car theft capital of North America? It’s also funny how all these carjackers and thieves seem to have guns despite Canada’s gun control laws…
  • Critical Drinker and company talk about Britain’s unkillable soldier, Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart VC KBE CB CMG DSO.
  • Seven things to do before buying a used car.
  • Korean court orders man to pay fine for defaming virtual pop star.
  • That time an American soldier saved his own life by not killing a spider. (Hat tip: Infidel753.)
  • Inside Tokyo’s smallest apartment.
  • “Satan: ‘I’ve Made A Huge Mistake.'”
  • “Nazi Rally Inspires Millions To Forgive And Love Their Enemies.”
  • “Logo Update: Democrat Donkey Now Holding Sniper Rifle.”
  • “Hamas Calls On Democrats To Tone Down Violence.”
  • “Americans Return To Not Watching Jimmy Kimmel By Choice.”
  • “AOC Loses Debate Against Cardboard Cutout Of Charlie Kirk.”
  • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    Even Antifa Realizes It Screwed Up

    Monday, September 22nd, 2025

    For a long time, far left domestic terror group Antifa seemed to operate with impunity. Teaming up with #BlackLivesMatter at an operational level temporarily gave them a fake halo of social approval. Soros-backed DAs in the deep blue locales that make up their homebases constantly let them bail out and walk without felony charges, preferring to prosecute law-abiding citizens exercising their right of self-defense like Kyle Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny or Daniel Perry instead.

    But in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, that unearned immunity finally seems to be coming to an end. Not only has President Trump designated Antifa a terrorist organization, but according to Andy Ngo, the scumbags making up Antifa now realize they screwed up.

    On Sept. 17, I joined Newsmax to discuss how Antifa are stunned by the unity of outrage on the right after the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week. A Corvallis, Ore. Antifa cell — based in the same city as Oregon State University — has now published an after-action report detailing their concerns about the fallout after the murder.

    In their own words, they admit fearing the loss of their long-standing ability to mark conservatives for death without much resistance. They point out that for the first time, even apolitical groups, institutions, and businesses feel safe expressing sympathy to Kirk’s family and supporters. Compounding their panic, numerous people have already been fired after celebrating the assassination online. Meanwhile, Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show has been pulled off the air by Nexstar after he attempted to mislead the public by falsely suggesting the assassin was “MAGA.”

    The report also acknowledges that Antifa’s recent attacks on Sean Feucht’s Christian worship events have backfired badly. Cameras captured masked militants assaulting families and children — images that damaged Antifa’s carefully crafted narrative. The group admits these events, combined with the Kirk assassination, risk “galvanizing otherwise politically inactive conservatives.” They are desperate to prevent that.

    Waking the normies from their slumbers is the last thing the left wanted to do, but now Kirk’s assassination, and more crucially, the horrifying open celebration of it on the left, has done precisely that.

    The backlash against the sick, ugly-souled left only continues to build. And the real-time disintegration of the money-losing legacy media outlets that use to cover for them has fatally undermined the systemic preference falsification by which they used to maintain the facade of historical inevitability. All the old tricks are losing their power, and the ugliness of Antifa and their numerous enablers and apologists stands revealed for all to see.

    They have no idea what’s coming for them.

    DOJ Investigates Austin For Racism

    Sunday, September 21st, 2025

    This could get spicy.

    he U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into whether the City of Austin is violating federal law by engaging in discriminatory employment practices tied to its diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda.

    In a notice sent Thursday to Mayor Kirk Watson, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division said it is examining whether Austin is involved in a “pattern or practice of discrimination” based on race, color, sex, or national origin in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

    Title VII is the section that prohibits discrimination based on an “individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

    “The Department of Justice will not tolerate discriminatory race-based employment practices and DEI policies, in Austin or other cities,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon. “Such practices are illegal and un-American, and we will vigorously protect equal opportunity and hold accountable those who seek to perpetuate vestiges of outlawed discrimination.”

    At the center of the probe is the City of Austin’s Office of Equity and Inclusion. On its website, the office describes its mission as working “across all City departments … to build capacity and leadership in working from a racial equity lens.”

    The office promotes citywide guidance that instructs managers to set racial equity expectations in hiring, urges stronger racial equity criteria in executive-level searches, and directs departments to collect demographic data on employees in order to identify gaps and set targets for eliminating them.

    The office also encourages the use of “racial equity tools” designed to inject race into city decision-making on policies, programs, and budgets.

    According to the DOJ, these directives raise legal concerns that Austin is discriminating against job applicants, employees, and even participants in training programs. Officials stressed that no conclusions have yet been reached but confirmed that a full investigation has been authorized.

    Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Eric Sell has been assigned to lead the probe.

    This is likely to put Austin Mayor Kirk Watson in a bind. Watson is a Democrat, but he campaigned on being a moderate Democrat, someone who was going to reverse the far-left excesses of the Steve Alder era. While Watson did tack closer to the center on a few key issues (like reinstating the homeless “camping” ban), he has done very little to dismantle various other hard left policies enacted by the Austin City Council and the city bureaucracy.

    Numerous federal laws ban discrimination based on race, but the whole point of “equity” is that it allows social justice democrats to discriminate based on race to hand out jobs and goodies to favored groups (blacks, Hispanics, gays, transsexuals, Muslims, women) while denying the same to disfavored groups (whites, Asians, Jews, straights, Christians, men). Favoring group rights over individual merit is one of the “features” of social justice, and is the theoretical glue that binds together the Democratic Party’s increasing fractious coalition. A DOJ investigation has the potential to uncover all sorts of illegal discriminatory policies, including graft grants to favored victim group NGOs.

    It could discover a whole lot of things the Watson Administration and Austin leftists don’t want dragged out into the sunlight.

    I’m hoping for fireworks.

    Shoe0nHead Horrified At The Left Celebrating Charlie Kirk’s Murder

    Saturday, September 20th, 2025

    Another ostensibly liberal YouTuber comes to the conclusion that lefties celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk are actively evil “atomized bug people” that can’t be reasoned with.

  • “Charlie Kirk had many bad takes over the years. Like for example, the two most popular quotes I see people posting are the one where he advocated for stoning gays and black women are too stupid to be pilots. But guess what? Both those things, the two most popular quotes people are posting to justify this guy being murdered, are out of context. But idiots like Stephen King ran with it, then later had to apologize for spreading misinformation about a dead man.”
  • “These people will build a straw man of you in their minds. They get so fucking mad about it that they celebrate the real you dying. Horrifying.”
  • “But more importantly, even if everything was in context, who cares? Oh, he said this. Oh, he said this. I don’t care. There are many things he said that I disagree with. There are many things he said that I think are bad. Who cares? It is just a fact that nothing he said warranted his life being taken away. This is America. We have freedom of speech here.”
  • “One person may have pulled the trigger, but then we saw the reaction of many.” She then plays a sampler of clips of lefties ecstatically celebrating Kirk’s murder, including one who argued that his wife and children should also be murdered.
  • “There were thousands of videos like that. Some of these people posting with their full names and faces with hundreds and thousands of likes, thousands of tweets celebrating it with half a million likes. And it’s important to remember that all of those likes are a real person. Millions of people in this country apparently believe the acceptable response to speech they don’t like is murder.”
  • “They were teachers, professors, doctors, HR workers, healthcare workers, nurses, pediatricians, people who work with kids, people’s classmates, roommates. They are teachers showing our children the gory, horrifying video of Charlie’s murder on repeat. The hippie-dippy in this house we believe shitlib mask was ripped off and underneath was nothing but psychopathic bloodlust.”
  • She says the only time she ever saw anyone on “the right” celebrate a death was a dozen Stormfront losers, who were immediately condemned by the entirety of the Internet.
  • “This is different. It’s never been like this before. It’s never been this much. It’s never been this brazen. Normal people have to log into like an alternate Twitter account where they can post their more ‘unorthodox’ opinions. And these people are out here full face, full name, like ‘Hell yeah! Murder!”
  • “The smug, unearned confidence these people have to be openly sociopathic with their full name and face because they live under the pathetic delusion of being on the right side of history needs to end.”
  • “They will blame you for your death because words are violence.”
  • “So them killing you is just self-defense. That’s why they are using Kyle Rittenhouse as some kind of gotcha. ‘Oh, if you don’t condone political violence, why do you support Kyle Rittenhouse?’ They fundamentally don’t see the difference between killing someone over speech and killing someone over self-defense because these are the same things to them.”
  • “Why are most of them women? Most of the people celebrating are women. Like, it’s a good like 80/20 ratio all over the internet. What is going on, ladies?”
  • “Basically, the whole country is shook because last year they realized how many people would celebrate the murder of a president, and this year they realized how many people would celebrate the murder of them.”
  • “This is all the inevitable conclusion of the punch a Nazi thing from like 2017. Do you guys remember that? We always knew it was a slippery slope. That’s why we were against it. And they always say this dumb shit. Like, if you don’t want to be called a Nazi, stop being a Nazi. Even a congressman from my state, New York, was like, ‘Oh, if you want to stop being called a fascist, you should stop being a fascist.’ Yeah, that’s great. Except you’ve called everyone and their mother a fascist and a Nazi for the past like 15 years.”
  • She then reads a long, long list of all the things she’s personally being a called a Nazi or fascist over, including “making fun of Joe Biden eating ice cream.”
  • Quoting Blair White: “They don’t kill you because you’re a Nazi. They call you a Nazi so they can kill you.”
  • “I’ve been to the TPUSA AmericaFest in 2021. I actually went there planning to make a video making fun of it, but I had so much fun and met so many friends that I’m still friends with to this day.”
  • After Kirk was killed “I kept going to every single like lefty, liberal, left-wing person I know and like checking out what they have been saying about this. And besides maybe like four or five, every single one was being an unhinged psychopath about this, or saying some backhanded shit like ‘This is why we need gun control,’ which, first of all, we were just watching a whole bunch of people celebrate killing someone over political differences. You are never taking our guns now. That that is not happening.”
  • “I felt like I was in the middle of the ocean. I was trying to, like, grasp onto a flotation device, checking all of these accounts for their take. Like ‘Be normal, be normal.’ Nothing. Nobody. I’m just drowning in a sea of evil, apparently. Maybe I was just blind up until now.” So basically it’s as bad as conservatives have been saying for the last decade.
  • “This is how they would react to me, my family, my friends, you, your family, your friends that have ever stepped out of line from the nebulous, ever-changing definition of progressive.”
  • “These are people I thought were levelheaded. They were left-wing, but you know, like they were one of the good ones. Like you can joke with them. You know, they weren’t those like woke SJWs. Like they were cool. We can disagree and still be friends.”
  • “You know, your friend wouldn’t celebrate you being murdered, of course. But if they would celebrate an exact clone of you that wasn’t you, that had all the same opinions, or some of the opinions that you have, if they would celebrate that clone being murdered, they’re not your friend.”
  • “It’s just sick.”
  • “I would rather live in a world full of Charlie Kirks who would sit down and debate than a world full of people who agree with me, but would murder people who don’t.”
  • “You can’t say, ‘What if that was your dad or your brother getting killed for their opinions?’ Because they’ve already cut those people off. They’ve already cut those people off out of their lives. And posting videos and pictures of Charlie’s wife and young kids will not move these people at all because they hate their lives. They hate their families. They are atomized bug people.”
  • “From a political standpoint, not even a personal human standpoint, why are you celebrating the most popular college Gen Z political pundit dying? Like, why are you celebrating him becoming a martyr? Say goodbye to that young male vote. All the liberal Joe Rogans in the world are not fixing this.”
  • She ends with a Trumpism: “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
  • Previously.

    Finally: Antifa Declared Terrorist Org (And A Walk Down Memory Lane)

    Thursday, September 18th, 2025

    In an action that’s many years overdue, President Trump is finally declaring Antifa a terrorist organization.

    The man arrested for Charlie Kirk’s murder thought he was stopping hate. In actuality, he united the country against his own leftwing hate … and gave the president the standing to arrest all his associates as terrorists.

    I’m hope this will give the Trump Administration the tools to subpoena, back-trace and freeze terrorist funding coming from various NGOs, including a wide variety of Soros, Singham, MacArthur and Rockefeller hydra heads.

    Let’s take a trip down memory lane to cover the myriad violent felonies the commie losers of Antifa have committed over the years:

  • They attacked journalist Andy Ngo in Berkeley and Portland.
  • They helped escalate the violence in Charlottesville back in 2017 by fighting with the LARP Nazis there.
  • They assaulted police officers in a number of cities.
  • Portland seems to have especially enjoyed a number of Antifa riots over the years.
  • They declared an an “autonomous zone” in Seattle, where they shook down local businesses for protection money.
  • They had a major hand in the #BlackLivesMatter/George Floyd Rioting that swept much of the country in 2020, including looting a Target here in Austin.
  • Remember the Kenosha riots.
  • And remember that the (white) attackers Kyle Rittenhouse shot there were sex offenders.
  • A good description of how Antifa tactics work at the street level.
  • Speaking of Andy Ngo, he went on Joe Rogan to discuss Antifa.
  • Remember that Antifa isn’t only an American problem: In Austria, they protested Muslim rapists being deported.
  • Don’t forget the Antifa schoolteacher who bragged about trying to turn his students into Communist revolutionaries.
  • Don’t forget their penchant for attempting to murder law enforcement officers.
  • This is just a Greatest Hits package of Antifa scumbaggery. This post could easily be ten times as long…

    (Note: While doing this roundup, I noticed that a lot of the sources I linked to prior to 2020 are no longer good. With linkrot, the stability of online digital data seems several orders of magnitude less permanent than ink printed on paper…)

    Homeless Org Kicked Off Austin Gravy Train For Lying

    Wednesday, September 17th, 2025

    There’s been a shakeup in the Austin Homeless Industrial Complex hierarchy.

    The City of Austin’s Homeless Strategy Office (HSO) will end its contract with homelessness resources nonprofit Urban Alchemy at the end of September. According to a city memo, some Urban Alchemy staff “misrepresented Homeless Management Information System exit dates and records.”

    Urban Alchemy operated the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless (ARCH) and the Eighth Street Women’s Shelter in downtown Austin.

    For those unfamiliar with Austin geography, ARCH is the city’s big downtown homeless shelter on Eighth Street, just two blocks north of the booze and nightclub district on Sixth Street, and two blocks east of the APD headquarters; sort of one-stop shopping. Before the Austin City Council decided to invite every drug-addicted transient in Texas to move to the city in 2019, ARCH constantly showed up as the epicenter of crime. Since that calamity, and the lunacy of police defunding, crime seems to have spread to the rest of downtown as well.

    Urban Alchemy is a West Coast Homeless Industrial Complex outfit that runs shelters in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, etc.

    A spokesperson for the nonprofit said that staff had “misreported” those exit dates and records. Homeless Strategy Director, David Gray said there was no financial impact and that the records have been fixed.

    “We notified the City after our internal controls discovered the issue and terminated the employees that we identified as responsible,” the spokesperson said. “We hold our entire team to the highest possible standards, and will never hesitate to take appropriate action when we fall short of those standards.”

    KXAN was told five Urban Alchemy employees were fired.

    Gray sent the memo to Austin City Council on Tuesday, notifying members that the contract with Urban Alchemy will end Sept. 30. According to Gray, the records that were changed, make it harder to know how shelters are actually operating.

    “When a record is incorrect or it’s incorrectly altered, it makes it more challenging for us to know whether or not a client truly is successfully housed or not, and where they’re at in their journey,” Gray said. “It could make outcomes look better than what they are, or make a shelter look more efficient than what it actually is.”

    Though the records have been corrected, Gray told council members, ending the contract with Urban Alchemy is about accountability.

    “Ending this contract reflects HSO’s commitment to upholding the integrity of its operations,” Gray said in the memo.

    Gray told members that in order to keep downtown homeless shelters in operation, HSO will enter into an emergency contract with Endeavors. Endeavors is currently responsible for operating HSO’s Marshalling Yard Temporary Emergency Shelter and Northbridge Shelter.

    The Marshalling Yard Homeless Shelter (yes, the city spells it with two Ls) is basically a big metal warehouse at the edge of Montopolis, near the 183/71 interchange, they just plopped some beds down into. Montopolis is one of the last remnants of Austin’s traditionally poor, traditional black neighborhoods (lots of little houses) that’s being transformed by both an increasing Hispanic population and the terrible slow sword of gentrification. Either way, the land is too close to downtown to keep letting poor black people live there, so apartment complexes and $500,000 home subdivisions are popping up like mushrooms.

    The Northbridge site is a former hotel near the I-35/183 interchange that the City of Austin bought in 2020 and it’s now reportedly strewn with drugs and trash.

    Endeavors is a San Antonio-based Homeless Industrial Complex outfit.

    HSO plans to place an emergency contract on city council’s Oct. 9 agenda, according to Gray. That emergency contract would authorize an agreement with Endeavors until Sept. 30, 2026.

    Gray told KXAN, Endeavors will need to hire roughly 150 employees within the next three weeks, in order to take over for Urban Alchemy.

    “HSO selected Endeavors for this emergency contract based on the organization’s demonstrated ability to rapidly hire and train staff for large-scale operations, its familiarity with HSO’s contracting requirements, and its strong track record in delivering quality services,” Gray said in the memo.

    Urban Alchemy will continue its operations until the emergency contract is approved. The nonprofit also said it was “grateful for [its] years of partnership” with the city.

    Maybe it is as simple as Urban Alchemy lying about results and getting replaced. Or maybe they simply didn’t do a good enough job of getting the graft wheels greased, and Endeavors will keep better keep the kickbacks and graft flowing to the right people…

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

    The Ugly Left Faces Charlie Kirk Consequences

    Tuesday, September 16th, 2025

    I started this post to roundup reactions to the Charlie Kirk assassination, and it’s grown to enormous size due to the large number of ugly-souled leftists celebrating his murder. So let’s wade into the filth, and the reactions (and consequences) therefore.

  • Larry Correia probably stated it most succinctly:

    These poor fools are missing the big picture.

    When there’s a killing the left always tries to assign the killer to the right. We’re used to it. And the vast majority of the right always overwhelmingly condemns the killer.

    Only this time all the moderate normie republicans out there saw MILLIONS of liberals celebrate and justify the brutal murder of a man… all because that man held beliefs similar to theirs. Beliefs that regular Americans consider completely normal and common sense.

    These normal folks were going about their day, then they saw some shocking brutality, and before they could even process it all their liberal friends were dancing in the blood and gleefully justifying it. “He deserved it for believing X and Y.” And that normal person realized that they also believe X and Y, so them getting murdered would be just as celebrated too. At best they saw a “Murder is bad, BUT… he deserved it for believing X and Y.”

    And the lights go on.

    It doesn’t matter how hard the left scrambles to put the shooter in some particular ideological bucket to cover their asses and take no blame (as usual), because regular America saw how fucking gleeful libs were when somebody just like them dies horribly, and they realized that the left wants them dead. Not metaphorically. They want you to die. Some of us have known this for a long time because we pissed off the left somehow previously, but for the regular folks coming to that understanding is a life changing moment.

  • “Turning Point has received 18,000 inquiries about new chapters since Erika Kirk’s speech Friday night.”
  • Democratic representative and “Squad” member Ilhan Omar reminds, yet again, that she’s simply a horrible person. “Kirk was a reprehensible human being.”
  • “Texas Education Agency to Investigate ‘Reprehensible’ Educator Comments Regarding Charlie Kirk Killing.”

    The TEA will be referring all posts that contain the “vile content” to its Educator Investigations Division, as the posts could be in violation of the Educators’ Code of Ethics and potentially result in a reprimand, suspension, or permanent dismissal.

    One standard in the code of ethics includes that the educator “shall be of good moral character and be worthy to instruct or supervise the youth of this state.”

    “While the exercise of free speech is a fundamental right we are all blessed to share,” the letter states, “it does not give carte blanche authority to celebrate or sow violence against those that share differing beliefs and perspectives.”

    The letter directs Texas school superintendents to share potential violations and “inappropriate content” with the TEA’s Misconduct Reporting Portal.

    A number of recorded such incidents involving Texas educators have circulated online, showing disparaging comments about Kirk’s assassination.

  • Washington Post writer Karen Attiah fired over her Charlie Kirk comments. She also just made up quotes, which seems a serious defect in a reporter.
  • “A Middle Tennessee State University employee has been fired after commenting about conservative speaker and influencer Charlie Kirk’s death on social media, the university confirmed….University spokesman Jimmy Hart said Sept. 11 that the fired employee is Assistant Dean of Students Laura Sosh-Lightsy.”
  • Asmongold gathers several examples of brain-dead leftists celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder, including employees of Blizzard, Bungie, Sucker Punch Productions and Wizards of the Coast, some of whom have already been fired:

  • FA: Texas Tech student Camryn Giselle Booker celebrated Kirk’s death, interrupted a vigil, and actually assaulted other students. FO: “Texas Tech confirmed to Texas Scorecard that Booker is no longer enrolled.”
  • There was a video of a nose-ringed girl who literally mimed to the “He had it coming” part of “Cell Block Tango” from the musical Chicago, and then starting bawling out because every one of her close friends said she was a shitty, horrible person for doing so. Did this make her stop in a moment of self-reflection to consider that she was, in fact, a shitty person? No. She was bawling because she now had to cut ties with all her friends. She seems incapable of self-reflection.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • The hate orgy on BlueSky was so bad that the management of that infamous hive of scum and villainy had to step in and tell them to cut that shit out, that it violated their terms of service.

    Plus Tranny developer/comic creator Gretchen Felker Martin (that’s the ugly in the thumbnail) got canned over celebrating the murder.

  • Despite that, some lunatics on BlueSky are now calling for J. K. Rowling to be murdered as well.

  • Others on the list include “podcaster Joe Rogan, Harry Potter author JK Rowling, conservative political commentators Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh, among others.”
  • Ugly-souled rappers Bob Vylan celebrate the murder:

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • And the consequences: “Bob Vylan Gig Canceled After Front Man Celebrated Charlie Kirk’s Death On Stage.”
  • More consequences: “State Department Revokes Visa for Rapper Who Mocked Assassination of Charlie Kirk.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • LA teacher Erik Travis is another ugly-souled leftist who should be fired for celebrating murder.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • “A grieving Colorado family put up a memorial to Charlie Kirk in their backyard. It wasn’t long before deranged leftists set it on fire and vandalized the cars parked in their driveway.”
  • We’re not the same:

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Cancel Culture: Leftist Fired Simply For Having A Different Opinion On Whether Conservatives Should Be Murdered.”
  • This post easily could have been ten times longer than it is…

    LinkSwarm For September 12, 2025

    Friday, September 12th, 2025

    Too damn much news out this week. Biden’s “boom” is busted, Charlie Kirk’s assassin is caught, Israel dirtnaps top Hamas kingpins in Qatar, the curse of BlueSkyism, more illegal alien perverts sexually abusing children, more of the evil George Soros funds, and California’s “Jay Leno Bill” dies in committee. Plus some Prog Rock.

    Hell of a week. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm.

  • Turns out the “Biden Boom” was a complete lie.

    The U.S. economy probably added close to a million fewer jobs in 2024 and early 2025 than previously reported, the latest sign that the labor market, until recently a bright spot in the economy, may be weaker than it initially appeared.

    The revised data was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as part of a longstanding annual process known as benchmarking. But the big downward adjustment comes at an awkward moment for the agency, just weeks after President Trump fired its top official following a separate set of negative revisions last month.

    The data released on Tuesday showed that employers added 911,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months through March than had been indicated in the monthly payroll figures. That implies the economy added only about 850,000 jobs during that time — half as many as previously reported.

  • Charlie Kirk’s assassin captured.

    Police have identified the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s assassination as Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah man who authorities say became more political ahead of the shooting and recently expressed animosity toward Kirk.

    Robinson, who is believed to have acted alone, came to the attention of the authorities after he contacted a family friend following the assassination, Utah Governor Spencer Cox revealed during a Friday morning press conference. That friend reported Robinson to the local sheriff’s office and Robinson’s father, a veteran police officer, then orchestrated his surrender to authorities at his home in Washington County, Utah.

    The alleged gunman is expected to face at least three felony charges, including aggravated murder, obstruction of justice, and felony discharge of a firearm causing serious bodily injury, according to a probable cause affidavit obtained by NBC News. Cox said state law requires authorities to file the charging documents within three days.

    Robinson appears to have become more political ahead of the shooting and criticized Kirk by name at a recent dinner, a family member of Robinson’s told authorities. Robinson said Kirk was “full of hate” and accused him of “promoting hate,” Cox said, though the affidavit, released later, indicates another family member may have made those remarks.

    Robinson’s arrest comes after authorities had recovered a high-powered bolt action rifle they believe was used in the assassination, along with unspent rounds that were engraved with antifascist writing.

    “Hey fascist, catch,” read the engraving on one round. Another round was engraved with the message “Bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao,” a reference to a song favored by resistance movements and revolutionary anti-capitalist partisans.

  • Charlie Kirk, Martyr.” (Hat tip: TPPF’s The Post email.)

    This is who they chose to kill: the affable man whose main act was having good-faith political debates with college students. The man who, since fatherhood, was turning more toward Christianity as both a purpose and a theme. He was a partisan to be sure, but he was nowhere near the outer limits of the American tradition, especially given his relentless fixation on Lincolnian persuasion as a stabilizing force in a slowly disintegrating polity. The ones who kept losing debates with him didn’t feel that way, of course, but they were only the instrument, not the object, of his work. The object was the millions of Americans who watched, learned, and saw who won again and again—and decided that they wished to side with the winner.

    In this way, Charlie Kirk was perhaps the closest thing to Socrates in the American public square. The leftist intellectuals who sneered at him—the rube peddling his simple lines, his crass sophistry, his heartland aw-shucks certainties—would guffaw at the parallel, but it is no less true. He argued—amiably, fairly, relentlessly—until they couldn’t stand it any longer. And like Socrates, they had him killed.

    Also like Socrates, his students will now do more for his cause after his martyrdom than they ever did during his life. The Socratic vindication was in his deification through literature at the pens of Plato and Xenophon. Millennia later, everyone remembers the philosopher, but vanishingly few know who ended his life.

    The armies of Charlie Kirk, martyr, will be much more vast: not a handful of Athenians but millions of Americans. Their work will not be in philosophical literature but in the politics of the years to come. Whatever benefit accrues to the Republican Party is merely incidental. We are now in the realm of fundamental politics, which is concerned with the nature of the nation and the wielding of power for the common good. The generation of Americans that Charlie Kirk molded will be drawing conclusions about both from his life and his death alike.

  • President Trump says that Charlie Kirk’s assassin smells a lot like George Soros.

    After President Trump told Fox & Friends hosts that Charlie Kirk’s assassin is “in custody,” he went on to comment about radical leftist organizations, stating, “We are going to look into Soros. It looks like a RICO case.”

    Recall that on Wednesday night, just hours after Kirk’s assassination, President Trump addressed the nation from the Oval Office, calling it a “dark moment for America.” He vowed to crack down on radical left movements across the country that have fueled chaos and even death this year.

    Then on Thursday night, Texan News reporter Cameron Abrams wrote on X that Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and two dozen others in Congress called for a select committee on “the money, influence, and power behind the radical left’s assault on America and the rule of law.”

    Just weeks ago, Trump stated on Truth Social that George Soros and his radical leftist son, Alex Soros, “should be charged with RICO because of their support of violent protests.”

    Around that time, the “dark money” leftist NGO network operated by Arabella Advisors reportedly lost one of its top funding sources: Bill Gates.

    Civil terrorism expert Jason Curtis Anderson of One City Rising states:

    After the political assassination of Charlie Kirk, President Trump is interested in pursuing a RICO case against George Soros, America’s primary financier of far-left NGOs. What will likely be revealed is a complex web of dark money that observers have warned about for 20 years but never acted on.

    At the center of this web are the various George Soros Open Society Foundation legal entities—four separate tax-exempt charities and one 501(c)(4) dark-money channel. Next are the Tides Foundation organizations, funded primarily by the Pritzker family, which include three separate tax-exempt charities and one 501(c)(4) dark-money channel. Following them are the Rockefeller Foundation nexus, NEO Philanthropy, the Ford Foundation, and a host of similar operations, including the Singham network. Collectively, these entities form America’s dark-money ecosystem. They fund permanent protests, bail demonstrators out of jail, finance legal efforts to sue local governments and police departments, influence immigration policy, promote drug decriminalization and criminal-justice reforms, and help elect district attorneys who decline to prosecute crime. On top of all of this, they also have entities like the Working Families Party that elect local politicians.

    The money flows from donations to tax-exempt charities into non-tax-exempt 501(c)(4)s, and then trickles down to local groups. From there, funds reach the most radical organizations, which can’t even qualify for 501(c)(3) status and are instead “fiscally sponsored” by parent organizations. Because of this fiscal-sponsorship loophole, the books of these groups remain opaque. Everything from terror financing to protests-turned-riots connects in some way to these foundations.

    The revolution against the West is, in effect, a network of tax-exempt charities operating as a powerful parallel government that no one ever voted for. It must be stopped before it’s too late.

    A look into Soros-funded terrorist networks is long overdue. Here’s hoping a lot of indictments, bank account freezes and billions in civil forfeiture claims are forthcoming.

  • Your reminder that the social justice left are horrible people:

  • A roundup of how some horrible people on the left are celebrating Kirk’s assassination. Probably much, much more on this topic in a day or three.
  • Nate Silver covers how Democrats are cursed by the horror of Blueskyism.

    Bluesky, the Twitter spinoff that was once billed as a kinder, gentler alternative to what is now known as X, probably isn’t on death’s door. But after a burst of growth around the election, it’s shrinking and steadily declining in influence, even as other corners of the left thrive during Trump’s second term.

    Snip.

    Even on a logarithmic scale — on a linear scale, the graph is boring, because everything but Twitter would pretty much just be a flat line — the gulf between X and the other platforms is clear. And since the election, Bluesky has lost ground. More precise data based on the number of unique “likers”, “posters” and “followers” at Bluesky tracks a similar curve, with an initial peak around the election and a secondary peak after Trump’s inauguration but persistent erosion since then. The number of unique posters at Bluesky peaked at just under 1.5 million on Nov. 18, 2024 but has since fallen to an average of about 660,000 on weekdays and 600,000 on weekends: in other words, a drop of more than half.

    The decline in Bluesky’s number of unique daily followers is even more substantial. They topped out at 3.1 million on Nov. 18 last year, but are now just under 400,000 per day: almost a tenfold decline. So while a dedicated troupe of Bluesky regulars are still skeeting up a storm, they’re gaining less and less traction, preaching only to the converted.

    Snip.

    Bluesky was initially popular with Twitter refugees who disliked Musk’s takeover of the platform, some of whom proclaimed that Elon had unleashed the “gates of hell” by restoring banned accounts or predicted that the platform would implode due to a shortage of engineering talent. I suppose I have no problem with this; ironically, the first post in Silver Bulletin history is entitled “In case Twitter goes to zero”. (I wanted a hedge in case it did, although if we’re being honest, I also had one eye out the door as ABC News was beginning to dismantle FiveThirtyEight.) However, this also self-selected for a certain type of user, adherents of an attitude that I call “Blueskyism”.

    Blueskyism should not be mistaken for general left-of-center political views. Google search traffic for Bluesky over the past year is highly correlated with Kamala Harris’s vote share, but has some other skews: controlling for the Harris vote, it’s (statistically) significantly higher in states with a large white population and where the percentage of people with advanced degrees is higher. Bluesky is disproportionately popular in D.C., but also in crunchy white states like Vermont and Oregon. Search traffic for Twitter/X over the same period shows the same bias toward highly educated states, but less toward Harris voters4 and actually an inverse correlation with the white population share. (X gets more search traffic in more diverse states.)

    Demographics alone only go so far in explaining Blueskyism, however. It’s not a political movement so much as a tribal affiliation, a niche set of attitudes and style of discursive norms that almost seem designed in a lab to be as unappealing as possible to anyone outside the clique.

    Emphasis added. Snip.

    Some of the most annoying people on the platform have exited for Bluesky.

    As compared to other people with a similar level of public prominence — so not heads-of-state or celebrities or NFL quarterbacks — I was a “trending topic” on Twitter as often as just about anyone for a period from roughly 2018-2021. Matt Yglesias and Maggie Haberman also come to mind as other people who share this particular “honor”, which is not a welcome one: it means you’re the main character of the day, the person that other people have decided to dogpile upon.

    There’s still some of this. If you tweet about election-related stuff, there is a pervasive tendency to “shoot the messenger” from partisans when the polls aren’t going their way. But much less than there once was: no more of the dogpiles for exceptionally strange reasons that I couldn’t even explain to my IRL friends.

    And that’s because this behavior — I guess you could call it harassment but I’m a big boy and I can take it — consistently came from a relatively narrow group of power users, birds of a feather who flocked together, people who could demonstrate their fidelity to the group by picking on the main character. On Bluesky, exactly the same people — and I do mean exactly — attack exactly the same perpetual enemies, but to roughly 1/60th the size of the audience.

    So I feel freer using Twitter these days for jokes, memes, and tongue-in-cheek ideas that aren’t meant to be taken entirely seriously, intended to be read as though they’re written in comic sans.

    Snip.

    What really matters in elections is simply being popular and winning over new converts. Blueskyism, with its intolerance for dissent, is the opposite of that.

    Because, yes, while this is personal for me, annoyingness matters in politics.

    Snip.

    The three essential characteristics of Blueskyism.

    The first essential characteristic: Smalltentism

    Aggressive policing of dissent, particularly of people “just outside the circle” who might have broader credibility on the center-left. Censoriousness, often taking the form of moral micropanics that designate a rotating cast of opponents as the main characters of the day. Self-reinforcing belief in the righteousness of the clique, and conflation of its values with broader public sentiment among “the base”.

    A healthy political movement, you’d think, would welcome people who agree with them on 70 percent of issues, particularly if it sees Trump as an existential threat to democracy and wants a broad coalition against him. Blueskyists do literally almost the exact opposite: their biggest enemies are people on the center-left like me and Yglesias and Ezra Klein. Or center-left media institutions like the New York Times, which are often viewed as more problematic than Fox News.

    This aggressive policing of boundaries might at least have been tactically smart during the miraculous Blue Period when Twitter was afflicted with Blueskyism. Yglesias, say, is followed by a lot more Democratic staffers than Ben Shapiro or some actual conservative is.

    But now that Blueskyism is losing the battle of ideas, it just draws the tent narrower and ensures that it will remain obscure. There’s nothing more Blueskyist than this, literally creating a “list of shame” of Bluesky posters who remain active on Twitter.

    And sometimes, Blueskyists even make violent threats toward people who disagree with them. For instance, the journalist Billy Binion says he recently “logged onto Bluesky to find thousands of people screaming at me, many of whom were telling me to kill myself” after having posted that “billionaires should exist”. There’s some of that on every social media platform, unfortunately, and I’m not going to make assertions about the relative frequency on Bluesky without taking some more comprehensive approach to the question. It certainly shouldn’t have a reputation for civil discourse, however, and this may help to explain the high rate of exits from the platform.

    The second essential characteristic: Credentialism

    Appeals to authority, particularly academic authority. Centering of the suitability of the speaker based on his or her credentials and/or identity characteristics (standpoint epistemology) as opposed to the strength of his or her arguments, accompanied by the implicit presumption to claim to be speaking on behalf of the entire identity group.

    Although Blueskyism is small, its practitioners mostly consist of people within the professional-managerial class: (over)educated blue-state liberals, perhaps people who have drawn the short straw of elite overproduction. You can see that in the demographic data, or in the attitude site management takes: the platform literally just banned people from Mississippi because of a dispute over age verification.

    And Bluesky has become relatively popular among academics, which I regard as a problem on various levels. The Democratic Party has already forgotten how to talk to large groups of voters like young men, who have become considerably less likely to complete college than young women. Meanwhile, the experts have made a lot of mistakes, and sometimes the reason is because they’ve become self-serving in pursuit of social media validation or blinded by political partisanship. Increasingly often, I’ll see academics engage in incredibly sloppy argumentation and this seems to be correlated with recent exposure to Bluesky. Because Bluesky is so small, it has a highly specific signature. It’s like if you have some toxic persona on the periphery of your friend group; someone starts speaking in a particular way that you just know they recently hung out with George or Gina.

    While academic credentials are one way to gain credibility under Blueskyism, they aren’t the only one. Even though the Google search data suggests that the platform is disproportionately white, an alternative is to claim to speak on behalf of a disadvantaged group. I swear to God, I’m not trying to make this about “wokeness” but there is overlap there.

    Perhaps the most prominent example of Blueskyism creeping into real life is when a group of left-leaning public health professionals, who often took a bullying approach during Twitter’s Blue Period, went out of their way to rationalize mass protests after George Floyd was murdered in 2020. Personally, I think it was perfectly fine to join in on these protests; political expression is important (and these protests were usually outdoors and masked). But I also think a lot of other things, like sending your children to school or visiting your dying relatives in the hospital, would have risen to this threshold also, and this group specifically used their credentials to endorse the Floyd protests after having campaigned for those other activities to be prohibited.

    Indeed, this controversy recently resurfaced on Bluesky. After Brian Schatz, the Democratic senator from Hawaii, wrote sympathetically in response to a Sean Trende tweet that recalled the hypocrisy of endorsing the protests, he and other “Dem elected/staff/consultants” were blamed on the platform for being “awash in right-wing brainrot.”

    The third essential characteristic: Catastrophism

    Humorless, scoldy neuroticism, often rationalized by the view that one must be on “war footing” because the world is self-evidently in crisis. Sublimation of personal anxiety as a substitute for political activism or material solutions to the crisis, with expressions of weariness and pessimism signaling virtue and/or savviness.

    Although the first two characteristics already limit the appeal of Blueskyism, this makes it worse. Even people who might otherwise be sympathetic to Bluesky have noticed how impossible it is to get away with a joke on the platform, one of the things that X sometimes13 still has going for it. The Bernie-era, Chapo Trap House strain of left-wing discourse also at least had a caustic if sometimes juvenile humor streak. Blueskyism does not.

    Instead, the prevailing Blueskyist attitude is often something like this — that we’re in the midst of a “late stage capitalist hellscape” and that you have to be “delusional” to have any amount of hope or optimism”.

    Most people outside of Bluesky don’t think like this. Although literally almost zero Democrats are happy with the state of the country, overwhelming majorities of Americans are happy with how their personal lives are going and are able to compartmentalize politics away or recognize that other things matter in life, too.

    Conclusion: “A subculture like Blueskyism that sees depression as a rational and even virtuous response is going to select for a lot of miserable people. And misery likes company. So the Blueskyists gather in a corner, exchanging tales of woe, while the rest of us slink away.”

    Though there is the usual Silver hemming, hawing and sifting things into ever-finer categories (not to mention his willful denial that “wokeness” is an actual thing, despite so carefully delineating some of its most central characteristics, and his dismissal of the Twitter Files), it’s still worth reading the whole thing. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Rich Hamas honchos throught they could hang out safe in Qatar while their footsoldiers died in Gaza. Wrong.

    Israel carried out a strike on senior Hamas leaders in Qatar’s capital, Doha, on Tuesday afternoon.

    Qatar quickly accused Israel of “reckless” behaviour and breaking international law after the attack on a residential premises in the city.

    The Israel Defense Forces claimed to have targeted those “directly responsible for the brutal October 7 massacre”.

    Snip.

    According to the Israeli military, it conducted a “precise strike” targeted at Hamas senior leaders in Qatar using “precise munitions”.

    Israeli media says the operation involved 15 Israeli fighter jets, firing 10 munitions against a single target.

    Qatar has hosted Hamas’s political bureau since 2012 and has played a key role in facilitating indirect negotiations between the group and Israel since the 7 October attacks.

    Hamas said members of the group’s negotiating delegation in Doha were targeted but survived the strike. However Hamas said six others, including a Qatari security official, were killed.

    According to Hamas, those killed were:

    • Humam Al-Hayya (Abu Yahya) – son of chief negotiator al-Hayya
    • Jihad Labad (Abu Bilal) – director of al-Hayya’s office
    • Abdullah Abdul Wahid (Abu Khalil)
    • Moamen Hassouna (Abu Omar)
    • Ahmed Al-Mamluk (Abu Malik)
    • Corporal Badr Saad Mohammed Al-Humaidi – Qatari internal security forces
  • Russia sends drone swarm into Polish airspace.
  • “Trump is enjoying his highest approval rating of either term right now according to a DailyMail/J.L. Partners poll. He’s sitting at a solid 55% approval rating.”
  • Justice Kavanaugh: Judges are not appointed to make policy calls.

    Once again, the Supreme Court has stepped in to prevent a rogue district judge from hamstringing the executive branch in performing core executive functions under Donald Trump. And once again, the Court’s conservative majority has dispatched this order without explanation, over an angry and overwrought dissent from the Court’s liberals. This time, however, Justice Brett Kavanaugh stepped up to explain what was going on.

    The Court’s order this morning in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo stayed an August 1 order by district judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong-

    That name sounds like it came out of a Monty Python skit.

    -of the Central District of California, a Biden appointee and former Obama Justice Department official. The order will thus have no effect unless and until the Ninth Circuit rules in the case — perhaps only a brief reprieve, given that the Ninth Circuit previously declined to stay Judge Frimpong’s initial temporary restraining order in the case.

    The crux of the case is whether the government may stop individuals in Los Angeles on suspicion of being illegal immigrants on the basis of four factors: “(i) presence at particular locations such as bus stops, car washes, day laborer pickup sites, agricultural sites, and the like; (ii) the type of work one does; (iii) speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent; and (iv) apparent race or ethnicity.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent noted that the order attempted to enjoin Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) only from stops based solely on those four criteria, but as Kavanaugh noted, there are inherent problems in the judiciary trying to prospectively micromanage law enforcement in such fashion: “Even if the Government had a policy of making stops based on the factors prohibited by the District Court, immigration officers might not rely only on those factors if and when they stop [the lawsuit’s named] plaintiffs in the future,” and “the District Court’s injunction threatens contempt sanctions against immigration officers who make brief investigative stops later found by the court to violate the injunction. The prospect of such after-the-fact judicial second-guessing and contempt proceedings will inevitably chill lawful immigration enforcement efforts. . . . Judges are not appointed to make those policy calls.” As Kavanaugh added, particular plaintiffs do not have standing to enjoin the government in advance from stops that may or may not involve them and may or may not, depending on the circumstances, violate the Fourth Amendment.

  • “DHS Launches ‘Operation Midway Blitz’ Immigration Crackdown in Chicago Despite Local Pushback.”

    The Department of Homeland Security launched Operation Midway Blitz on Monday to combat the influx of illegal immigration Chicago has seen under Democratic Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

    DHS said that the program was created in honor of Katie Abraham, a college student who was struck and killed by a Guatemalan national in a drunk driving hit-and-run accident in Illinois.

    “DHS is launching Operation Midway Blitz in honor of Katie Abraham who was killed in Illinois by a criminal illegal alien who should have never been in our country. This operation will target the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens in Chicago,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “For years, Governor Pritzker and his fellow sanctuary politicians released Tren de Aragua gang members, rapists, kidnappers, and drug traffickers on Chicago’s streets — putting American lives at risk and making Chicago a magnet for criminals.”

  • How the Biden Administration helped enable illegal alien child sex trafficking.

    During Joe Biden’s term, an estimated 233,000 unaccompanied children crossed the border and were completely lost.
    The Trump admin has now found 22,638 of these children.

    But many of them have suffered unbelievable horrors:

    John Fabbricatore, HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement senior advisor, said to Fox News:

    We found children who have been raped. We’re talking about debt bondage, where children are being made to work off debt, trafficking debt. We’re talking about children that were brought into situations and then treated like sexual slaves.

    So far, 27 of the children Biden lost have been found dead, often from murder or drug overdose.

    Children are in horrific environments, just environments that they should not be in, where the sponsor is a heroin dealer and that child winds up dying of a heroin overdose.

  • Before Charlie Kirk drove everything else off the news, the murder of Iryna Zarutska was the story the media didn’t want to report on.

    Iryna Zarutska was a 23-year-old Ukrainian who fled the war in her country for Charlotte, North Carolina.

    Over the weekend, police released video of her being stabbed in the neck by a violent career criminal.

    Iryna got on the train, sat down, and immediately went “condition white” (looking at her phone without paying attention to her surroundings).

    Let this be a reminder that, if you’re in public, you need situational awareness at all times.

    In the blink of an eye, her throat was slashed and she was bleeding out over the floor of the train.

    Despite the horror of the crime, the media has remained ostensibly quiet.

  • Charlotte Pocketed $3.3M From Left-Wing NGO To Empty Jails For ‘Racial Equity.'”

    The optics are incredibly awful for the entire Democratic Party machine.

    The brutal killing of Iryna Zarutska (Ukrainian refugee) on a commuter train in North Carolina highlights not only the willingness of leftist corporate media to cover up news stories that jeopardize their woke narratives but also the broader failure of so-called criminal justice reform, which appears to have shockingly backfired and become a major public safety threat. Adding to the mounting outrage, a leftist magistrate judge released the schizophrenic monster on cashless bail (before he killed Zarutska) – another failure point. And then there’s this: far-left nonprofits accelerated the push for disastrous criminal justice reforms.

    It’s now widely known that Decarlos Brown Jr., 34, Zarutska’s killer, had been previously arrested 14 times in North Carolina for crimes ranging from assault to firearms possession, and whose own mother admitted he was schizophrenic and should never have been allowed back on the streets, was recently released on cashless bail (before he killed Zarutska) by a progressive magistrate judge despite a two-decade violent crime spree.

    But the failures don’t stop with local leftist politicians and rogue progressive judges (or magistrate judges) who embrace woke and enabled criminal justice reform from hell. They extend much deeper – into the shadowy world of the dark-money-funded nonprofit industrial complex, which poured millions of dollars into Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, to push for “reducing the jail population.”

    “Another factor in the death of Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte’s light rail–the left-wing MacArthur Foundation giving Mecklenburg county a $3.3 million grant to reduce the jail population. Specifically as part of racial equity aims,” Daily Wire’s Megan Basham wrote on X.

    Basham noted, “Like Soros’ Open Society, the MacArthur Foundation incentivizes local municipalities to make residents less safe by leaving threats like Decarlos Brown on the streets.”

  • Via Stephen Green comes news that the suspect in a Dallas beheading was an illegal alien the Biden Administration let out of custody one week before Trump47 took office.

    [Yordanis] Cobos-Martinez has a prior criminal history of:

    False imprisonment in CA (unknown disposition)
    Indecency with a child in Texas (dismissed)
    Grand theft of vehicle in Florida (dismissed)
    Carjacking & false imprisonment in CA (acquitted on carjacking, convicted of false imprisonment).

    Disturbing surveillance video shows Cobos-Martinez allegedly kicking and picking up the victim’s severed head in the motel parking lot as it drips blood…

  • Ilsky Oil Refinery Hit by Drones: Over 27% Of Russia’s Refining Capacity Gone!”
  • “Ukrainian drones strike fuel pumping station supplying diesel to Moscow.”
  • “Russian Oil Tanker in Primorsk Set on Fire by Drones & Smolensk Oil Depot Hit.” Primorsk is a good 1,000km from the Ukrainian border, up near Finland.
  • Report from Ukraine says that a number of Russian commanders in Donetsk were killed in coordinated drone strikes. Usual caveats apply.
  • Gold hit an all-time high this week.
  • Malcom Gladwell has a long history of being disigenious asshat.
  • “Pete Hegseth updates pronouns of Navy’s ‘transgender healthcare’ director to ‘She/Her/Fired.'”
  • Speaking of which, it’s now The Department of War again.
  • Long overdue. “War Department bans Chinese nationals from Cloud environments.” (Previously.)
  • U.S. busts China-based fentanyl ring, charges 29 in operation.”

    The Trump administration announced Wednesday that an unprecedented law enforcement operation has busted a Chinese-based fentanyl drug and money laundering conspiracy, resulting in charges against 22 Chinese nationals, four Chinese pharmaceutical companies and three U.S. citizens.

    FBI Director Kash Patel described Operation Box Cutter as a “first-of-its-kind” law enforcement action targeting the threat posed to the American public by China-manufactured precursor chemicals used in the production of fentanyl.

    “We’re done playing whack-a-mole,” he said during a press conference in Cincinnati, Ohio.

    “We didn’t arrest a couple of people. We charged an enterprise-wide system in mainland China to include dozens of individuals and banks and companies that are responsible for making these lethal precursors and shipping them here.”

    The Dayton, Ohio, grand jury five-count indictment unsealed Wednesday focuses on a Tipp City, Ohio, resident, 39-year-old Eric Michael Payne.

  • Trump endorsements have that winning touch.

    At this rate, with President Donald Trump being one of the most decisive presidents in history, statistics show that his endorsement could undoubtedly lead a candidate to victory.

    As Ian Vallencillo, commissioner of Sweetwater, Florida, told the Washington Examiner, Trump is one of “the most popular political figures,” stating that voters “overwhelmingly support Trump’s picks.”

    At this rate, with President Donald Trump being one of the most decisive presidents in history, statistics show that his endorsement could undoubtedly lead a candidate to victory.

    As Ian Vallencillo, commissioner of Sweetwater, Florida, told the Washington Examiner, Trump is one of “the most popular political figures,” stating that voters “overwhelmingly support Trump’s picks.”

    The commissioner is right.

    Candidates endorsed by Trump have lost, but very rarely. Former Republican North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson conceded his gubernatorial election against an incumbent after receiving Trump’s approval, partly over a scandal that engulfed the news cycle days before the election.

    Similarly, former presidential candidate and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) lost his reelection bid, over years of controversy, anti-Trump skepticism, and a failure to get the Republican Party in the White House in 2012.

    During the 2024 federal and gubernatorial election cycles, Trump endorsed 306 candidates. Eighty-nine percent of those candidates now occupy the office they ran for. In the 2022 election cycle, Trump endorsed 195 candidates, 83% of whom were sworn in to office a few months later.

    One of those key endorsements includes the key race of Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA), who unseated a longtime incumbent, former Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, by a 0.5% margin.

    Similarly, in the same election cycle, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) won his Senate race against former Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, who had been in office since 2007.

    The year before that, after former California GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy resigned from Congress in 2023 following a motion for him to step down as speaker of the House from a Trump-endorsed representative, California Assemblyman Vince Fong was elected soon after receiving the nod from the president.

    Similarly, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), who was challenged by a local Democratic advocate, won his third term soon after Trump endorsed him.

  • “Democratic Rep. Cherfilus-McCormick Under Federal Investigation for Campaign Finance Fraud,Taxpayer Fund Misuse.”

    The latest scandal involves a web of shell companies, family members on mysterious payrolls, and taxpayer money that somehow found its way into campaign coffers. Multiple federal agencies are now investigating what appears to be a deliberate scheme to circumvent campaign finance laws through a maze of LLCs and nonprofits. The numbers are staggering: millions in taxpayer funds allegedly embezzled, hundreds of thousands in unreported campaign contributions, and a trail of financial breadcrumbs leading through family businesses.

    The politician at the center of this storm? Democratic Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida.

    Cherfilus-McCormick had won her seat after campaigning against the corruption of her predecessor, Alcee Hastings.

    Today, Cherfilus-McCormick finds herself drowning in exactly the kind of investigations she once condemned. The Federal Election Commission has launched a formal probe into her campaign’s alleged violations, while the Office of Congressional Ethics has found “probable cause” that she accepted illegal campaign contributions. The schemes are breathtaking in their audacity: her husband and sister-in-law running an LLC that funneled $725,000 through a nonprofit that then paid her campaign vendors. A political consultant with direct access to these funds, making payments on her behalf while she pretended not to know.

    But here’s where my blood really starts to boil. Before entering Congress, Cherfilus-McCormick was CEO of Trinity Health Care Services, a family company that received a $5 million “overpayment” from Florida’s emergency services department – supposedly due to a misplaced decimal point. Instead of immediately returning the taxpayer money, investigators allege she began moving it between family businesses, including companies where she held major stakes. The state had to sue to get its money back.

  • As expected. “James Talarico Launches Democrat Bid for U.S. Senate. Talarico has positioned himself as one of the more left-wing voices in the Texas Legislature.”
  • Remember how Adam Carolla said the Palisades fire would used as an excuse for a land grab by the Democrats running Los Angeles and California? Guess what? “Iconic Malibu restaurant is told it can’t rebuild after Palisades Fire.”
  • Illegal alien sexually assaulted a woman, was ordered to be deported, but instead got a state job in Minnesota.

    An Alpha News reporter participated in a ride-along with ICE agents during the arrest. Wilson Tindi, a Kenya native, pled guilty to sexually assaulting a sleeping woman in Minneapolis in 2014 after breaking into her home. A judge ordered Tindi to be deported, but a federal judge later overturned this ruling. ICE released him after 18 months.

    After his release, Tindi became a chief audit officer at Minnesota’s education department. He was later fired after his past became known, raising questions about how he was ever hired in the first place.

  • While everything else was happening, the second Texas special legislative session ended.

    Among the most high-profile and controversial legislation passed was a handful of social issue bills — in particular, one establishing civil cause of action against chemical abortion pill providers, and another separating publicly-funded private spaces by biological sex. The former came with its fair share of backdoor negotiations and amendments before it was successfully carried through both chambers, as was the case for multiple priorities of Abbott’s.

    One issue which faced an untimely end in the Legislature was the attempted regulation of hemp-derived THC products. Ultimately, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, House Speaker Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock), and Abbott were unable to reach an agreement on Wednesday.

  • After that failure, Abbott just issued an executive order limiting consumable THC sales to those over 21.
  • Collateral damage from the death of print magazines. “Publishers Clearing House Winners Say They Are No Longer Receiving Their Lifetime Payments.”
  • It seems that some leftwing Texas school nurses are practicing malicious compliance.

    Texas Education Agency Updates First Aid Guidelines After Controversy Over Withheld Medical Care

    The TEA updated their guidance to allow schools to provide “first aid” without parental consent.

    The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has released updated guidelines for how Texas public schools should approach the implementation of Senate Bill (SB) 12, known as the “Parent Bill of Rights,” after recent reports of school nurses not providing first aid to students.

    One aspect of SB 12 that caused distress and confusion among lawmakers, parents, and schools alike is the requirement for school districts to receive documentation of notice and consent from parents for their child to receive “medical, psychiatric, and psychological treatment.”

    State Rep. Jeff Leach (R-Allen) posted a letter on social media he had sent to TEA Commissioner Mike Morath last week regarding “concerns with the implementation” of SB 12 after reports of how “some school districts are taking an ‘all or nothing’ approach” to the new policy requirements, which has resulted in “band-aids” and “ice packs” being withheld from children.

    Following the publication of the letter, which was also signed by the bill author state Sen. Brandon Creighton (R-Conroe), reports of children not being treated for certain “general care” services began being made public.

  • “Texas State Terminates Professor Who Called for Overthrow of US Government.”

    “After a thorough review was conducted of the video recordings of the statements, it became clear to me that their actions amounted to serious professional and personal misconduct,” Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse stated late Wednesday. “Conduct that advocates for inciting violence is directly contrary to the values of Texas State University. I cannot and will not tolerate such behavior.”

    “As a result, I have determined that their actions are incompatible with their responsibilities as a faculty member at Texas State University,” Damphousse continued. “Effective immediately, their employment with Texas State University has been terminated.”

    Damphousse was referring to Tom Alter, who was previously an associate professor of history at Texas State.

    Alter had been exposed making comments calling for the overthrow of the U.S. government.

  • Facebook and Tik-Tok are garbage. You know what’s worse? Eurocrats trying to regulate and tax them.

    The European Commission has suffered a major defeat in court over its plans to make large tech platforms pay it to enforce the Digital Services Act.

    Meta and ByteDance’s TikTok took the European Commission to court after it presented them with a “supervisory fee” equal to 0.05 per cent of their yearly global net income. The bill was to cover the EU executive’s expenses in monitoring their compliance with the Digital Services Act.

    The Digital Services Act (DSA) gives the European Commission oversight of very large online platforms and search engines—ones with more than 45 million EU users a year. To fund this oversight, the Commission has said it will charge these providers an annual fee, based on their average monthly users.

    The Commission adopted rules saying how it would set these fees on 2 March 2023. The next month, on 25 April, it classified Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok as very large platforms. That November, it finalised the 2023 fees for each.

    In two decisions 10 September, the Court of Justice of the EU determined the Commission’s supervisory fees on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok were void for procedural grounds.

    To set the 2023 fees, the Commission decided to calculate each platform’s average monthly users using a methodology based on third-party data it attached to each decision.

    However, the Court ruled that this methodology for calculating fees should have been established through a delegated act–a process which involves the European Parliament and Council.

    The judges said it was incorrect for the European Commission to determine the fees using implementing decisions it devised on its own authority alone.

  • Add “classic cars” to the long list of things California Democrats hate.

    Jay Leno’s star power wasn’t enough to persuade a California legislative committee to pass a measure to allow owners of classic cars like him to be exempted from the state’s rigorous smog-check requirements.

    The Assembly Appropriations Committee on Friday blocked Bakersfield Republican Sen. Shannon Grove’s Senate Bill 712 from advancing for a full vote. Leno had testified in support of the measure in Sacramento earlier this year.

    The committee’s members and its powerful Democratic chairperson, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks of Oakland, did not provide a reason for killing the bill during Friday’s hearing, which quickly and with little fanfare announced the fate of 260 other bills that had been placed on the committee’s so-called “suspense file.” Seventy other bills also were killed without explanation.

    The Senate and Assembly’s appropriations committees, which both met Friday and rejected hundreds of bills, are supposed to be the gatekeepers for bills proposing to spend taxpayer money. But the committees’ suspense files are where hundreds of politically touchy bills die quietly each year with only a few insiders knowing the real reasons.

  • Random meme stolen from Facebook:

  • So I don’t think I’ll be watching all of the Joe Rogan podcasts with Carrot Top or Charlie Sheen, but I suspect I’ll be watching snippets from them, and felt I should make you aware of their existence…
  • For some reason, all three Top Gear/Grand Tour presents have decided they need to come out with their own gin.
  • Rick Beato examines why Genesis’ “Entangled” is a great song.
  • Speaking of Prog Rock, here’s a piece on how a burned out Mike Oldfield pushed through to deliver Hergest Ridge.
  • Ten musical pieces you know, but not the names of. I already knew a good number, but a few were new, and a couple of others I didn’t know under their original language name.
  • Not a Babylon Bee story: “Emotional support alligator is no longer welcome in Pennsylvania Walmart.”
  • “‘Why Won’t Conservatives Give Up Their Guns?’ Ask The People Shooting At Them.”
  • “Democrats Condemn Violence They Incited.”
  • “Dems Warn Surveillance Videos Perpetuate Stereotypes By Accurately Depicting Events.”
  • “Tough-On-Crime Democrats Propose ‘100 Strikes And You’re Out’ Law.”
  • “ICE Enforcement Action At Chocolate Factory Nabs 475 Illegal Oompa Loompas.”
  • “Greta Thunberg Reports Flotilla Struck By Jewish Space Laser.”
  • “Kids Find A Secret World Behind Old Wardrobe, But It’s Just Toledo, Ohio.”
  • “NFL Fires Officiating Crew That Allowed Chiefs To Lose Season Opener.”
  • “Colorado Authorities Warn Marijuana Consumption Could Lead To Attending Rockies Games.”
  • When the little Lebowski became The Big Lebowski:

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





    The Charlie Kirk Assassination And The Failure Of Woke

    Thursday, September 11th, 2025

    I’m sure that every single person reading this blog is aware that Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated yesterday while speaking at a campus event at Utah Valley University. Since every single conservative blogger is going to be writing about this, I was looking to write about something else today, but sometimes you have to bow to the inevitable.

    National Review just published an article stating “Unspent rounds found inside the rifle that authorities believe was used in the Charlie Kirk assassination were engraved with transgender and antifascist writing, according to an internal law enforcement memo obtained by the Wall Street Journal.” So another crazy Transtifa shooter, just like the Minneapolis Catholic School shooter and the Nashville Christian school shooter. (See also: “You Can’t Tell The Satanic Leftwing Tranny Deathcults Without A Program.”)

    The radical left has always been violent, so why are we seeing such an upsurge in violence now? It may be that social justice is just the latest leftwing God that failed.

    I’m reminded of Hunter S. Thompson’s famous quote about how San Francisco’s hippies were absolutely sure their movement would triumph:

    There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

    And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

    So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

    Chris Bray sees a parallel between that failure and the one the left is now experiencing.

    First, the murder of Charlie Kirk is just the next level up the behavioral chain from the way Robert F. Kennedy was just treated in front of a Senate committee. He wasn’t mistaken, or wrong: He was an unforgivable monster, wholly illegitimate in every imaginable sense, who had no views or arguments that were worth considering in any way, and the only possible response to him is personal destruction. Our institutional left is a rage mob with formal titles. We’re not having a debate.

    Second, the transition to radical violence is a reflection of the events that followed the death of the radical dream of the 1960s New Left. After the hippies, the Weatherman and the Symbionese Liberation Army. The turn to radical violence is the turn that follows obvious failure. It’s an acknowledgement of political impotence, and a last-ditch emergency reflex: If they won’t submit to our political vision, we’ll coerce them into submission. It’s the death rattle. It means the arguing and convincing has failed, and they see the failure.

    Third, Camille Paglia persistently describes late-cultural-stage sexual disorder, especially widespread transgenderism, as a turn to sadomasochism, and I didn’t get that description for a long time. I’m seeing it now. It comes from an impotent rage over the limits of personal will, a Veruca Salt disgust that the world doesn’t do what I want, and a desire to hurt the body that’s trapped by a nature that won’t yield to ideology. I’m going to dive back into Sexual Personae today. Notice how much left-oriented political identities are currently invested in causing literal, physical injury, and in celebrating moments in which political opponents suffer actual pain. Go look for leftists celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death on social media, if you want to wade into that sewer. “Progressive” politics is becoming a torture fetish.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

    Some have observed that the wave of Islamic terrorism (yes, I know today in the anniversary of 9/11) is a result not of unshakable faith, but of deep doubt; last, desperate gestures by those losing their faith against the onslaught of the modern world looking commit dramatic acts to prove they still believe.

    There was a time, not so long ago, when woke social justice appeared to be on the ascent everywhere. Institution after institution was infected with its peculiar madness, and cancel culture bloomed, attacking anyone who dared to express #WrongThink over its sacred tenets. The radical left seemed to believe their victory was inevitable.

    And then a funny thing happened on the road to Woketopia: America fought back, and Trump was elected president in 2016. (Charlie Kirk played an important role in America fighting back, along with thousands of others.) The little platoons of American society decisively rejected social justice, and its inevitability proved to be an artifact of systemic preference falsification by a thin veneer of echo chamber urban elites who thought they could bully their way to culture war victory by censoring all opposition. Hence the irrational rage of Trump Derangement Syndrome when the Bad Orange Man rose up to inexplicably thwart their plans. Hence all the desperate fraud to drag Slow Joe over the finish line to keep the leftwing graft firehose running.

    Though illusory, the woke left thought they had achieved an unshakable stranglehold over American, but now all they taste is ashes. With Trump47 retaking American institution after institution in the name of basic sanity, the only important organization the woke left seems to retain control of is…the Democratic Party.

    They’re not the vanguard of the revolution they thought they were, they’re just pathetic asshole losers that normal people hate. And none are more pathetic than transexuals who were convinced to mutilate their bodies on a lie only to find that it did nothing to reduce their insane self-loathing. Instead of acceptance, they’ve only found that normal society has rejected them even harder. No wonder they’ve turned violent.

    A deluded woke leftist assassinated Charlie Kirk in rage at their own pathetic failure, and all the senseless murder will accomplish is cause ordinary, sane Americans to reject the poison of wokeness all the more decisively.