Leftwing crooks attempt to cover their tracks, employment numbers are up, Trump’s tariffs already bring some quick action, Eric Three Phones beats the wrap, the criminal leftwing racketeers lined up against Telsa, and Tren de Aragua scumbags show up well the hell out in the countryside.
U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) officials attempted to delete one terabyte of financial data to “cover their crimes,” Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Chief Elon Musk alleged Monday.
After President Donald Trump signed an executive order last month targeting USIP for reductions, DOGE visited the organization’s Washington headquarters, prompting a dramatic standoff.
Prior to DOGE’s arrival, USIP employees reportedly barricaded themselves inside their offices and had to be physically removed by Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officers. At some point, USIP employees allegedly attempted to scrub damning records, but, according to Musk, the DOGE engineers were able to recover the entire archive.
“They deleted a terabyte of financial data to cover their crimes, but they don’t understand technology, so we recovered it,” Musk posted on X.
The recovered data includes detailed financial transfers tied to individuals and groups in Afghanistan and Iraq.
USIP was receiving “$55M in congressional (taxpayer) funds” every year, the DOGE X account posted, adding that “prior management would sweep excess funds into its private Endowment” which has no congressional oversight.
“In the past 10 years, USIP has transferred ~$13M to its private Endowment, mainly used for private events and travel,” DOGE posted on X.
USIP contracts cancelled by the Trump administration, according to DOGE, include:
– $132,000 to Mohammad Qasem Halimi, an ex-Taliban member who was Afghanistan’s former Chief of Protocol.
– $2,232,500 to its outside Accountant, who attempted to delete over 1 terabyte of accounting data (now recovered) after new leadership entered the building
– $1,307,061 to the Al Tadhamun Iraqi League for Youth
– $675,000 for private aviation services
Mohammad Qasim Halimi is the former Minister of Hajj and Religious Affairs in Afghanistan, according to the Doha forum. He is currently a member of the National Council of Ulema, the highest religious authority in Afghanistan. The National Council of Ulema is responsible for ensuring that all Afghan policies conform to Sharia law.
The Al Tadhamun Iraqi League for Youth is a United Nations Democracy Fund (UNDEF) project that allegedly “works to strengthen youth participation in democratic processes” by “building a network of young activists to develop skills in leadership, negotiation and communication.”
According to Foundation For Freedom Online (FFO) director Mike Benz, USIP had been “bribing Afghan Taliban warlords to keep the drugs flowing.”
So graft, fraud, wire fraud, banking fraud, destruction of evidence, and supporting terrorism, all at the same time!
Trump’s tariffs are already bringing results. “Israel removes all remaining tariffs on US imports. Israel and the US signed a free trade agreement in 1985, and some 98% of goods are tax-free.”
When Collins pressed him on whether such escalation could turn into a full-fledged trade war, [Treasury Secretary Scott] Bessent dismissed the idea. “Not a trade war. Depends on the country,” he said, before explaining that history favors the United States in such disputes.
“Remember that the history of trade is, we are the deficit country. The deficit country has an advantage,” he explained. “[The others] are the surplus countries. The surplus countries traditionally always lose any kind of a trade escalation.”
His message to foreign governments was clear: Acting hastily would be a mistake. “As a student of economic history or a professor of economic history, I’d advise against it,” he said. When Collins sought further clarification, he reinforced the point: “I would say that doing anything rash would be unwise.”
Bessent’s remarks leave no doubt that Trump’s trade policies are rooted in historical precedent and strategic calculation. While globalists may panic, the Trump administration remains confident that America is in a stronger position than its trade partners. And history is on our side.
Bessent’s message is clear: Trump knows exactly what he’s doing.
We absolutely want a strong economic and security alliance. It’s not going to be the whole world because China is going to have its own sphere as well, but what we wanna have within our sphere is a few things in the past the United States didn’t exactly ask for.
We’re going to want balanced trade, where in the past we were happy to let the manufacturing go elsewhere. We’re going to want others to essentially own their own defense burdens … everybody take primary responsibility for their own defense.
Snip.
It’s not that Trump doesn’t want free trade, it’s that free trade doesn’t exist right now for the American people. It only exists in the starry-eyed fever dreams of Reaganite commentators who think that’s how the world actually works.
“Reaganite” is the wrong word here, since Reagan’s trade strategy was specifically geared to help win the Cold War, which it did. Nor was Reagan a zero tariff fundamentalist, as shown by his policies on automobiles and steel. Zero tariff fundamentalism is more of a libertarian policy, where it was postulated to be beneficial even if the other side (like China) didn’t remove tariffs on their end. Trump obviously operates under different imperatives, and employs (as I’ve noted before) tit-for-tat game theory strategy.
And if we’re talking about the Democratic Party’s theoretical conversion to post-Cold War free trade starting with Bill Clinton, then the proper term is probably neoliberalism, a word that bears a whole lot of additional baggage.
Exports made by Americans are taxed by other countries while we let them import their cheap products for essentially free, giving Americans price cuts but making it impossible for American companies to compete unless they outsource production elsewhere. That is exactly what has happened over the last few decades and it has destroyed countless American towns.
Trump’s whole schtick is to impose economic tit-for-tat in the hopes that other countries will drop their tariffs on U.S. goods. In that case, we actually get closer to free trade. It also allows us to invest in American manufacturing because we cannot rely on rising superpowers like China for all our industrial needs.
Whether or not that strategy works is up for debate.
“Sen. Mike Lee Introduces Legislation to Ditch the TSA: ‘Too Much Groping, Too Little Benefit.'”
The proposed measure would officially abolish the TSA three years after it is enacted into law and also would require the Departments of Homeland Security and Transportation to create and submit a reorganization plan to Congress.
Tuberville echoed the frustrations expressed by Lee, calling the TSA “a bloated agency—riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars—that has led to unnecessary delays, invasive pat downs and bag checks, and frustration for travelers.”
As we first pointed out on Sunday morning, former Wall Street Journal journalist Asra Nomani unveiled one of the most comprehensive reports on the NGO network behind at least one Tesla Takedown protest.
Nomani’s investigative report, which focused on 24 groups, revealed that these protests were far from organic and likely fueled by rent-a-protesters.
Snip.
In an article for the @FairfaxTimes, I wrote about how the local protests in Tysons, are a window into how the protests are AstroTurf, not “grassroots.” What this case reveals is the way that a multi-million dollar professional protest industry manufactures outrage in top-down political theater, agitprop, or agitation propaganda, and now criminal offenses.
From a spreadsheet linked in that article, here are the NGOs behind the attacks:
50501
ActionNetwork
Action Network Fund
ActUp New York Inc., ACT UP New York, the “AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power”
Climate Defenders
Climate Defenders Action Fund
Arizona – Coconino County Democratic Party
California – Aliso Niguel Democratic Club
California – California Democratic Party
California – Democratic Club Of Carlsbad
Florida – Broward County Democratic Party
Florida – Democratic Progressive Caucus of Palm Beach County Inc.
Florida – Osceola Young Dems
Florida – Rainbow Democrats of Central Florida
Illinois – Democratic Party of DuPage County
North Carolina – Durham County Democrats
Ohio – Eastside Cuyahoga Democratic Clubs
Texas – Harris County Democratic Party, Cypress-Tomball Democrats
Democratic Socialists of America
Disruption Project
Housing Works Inc., providing “assistance & expertise to homeless persons living with AIDS or HIV-related illnesses”
Indivisible Action
Indivisible Project
Mobilize.us, run by MobilizeAmerica Inc. – owned by EveryAction, the parent company of NGP VAN
MoveOnorg Civic Action
Not Above the Law Coalition — Coalition members as of 6/9/2023: American Oversight; Center for American Progress Action Fund; Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW); Common Cause; Congressional Integrity Project; Constitutional Accountability Center; The Criminalization of Poverty Project at the Institute for Policy Studies; Daily Kos; Defend Democracy Action Project; Defend the Vote Action Fund; DemCast USA; End Citizens United/Let America Vote; Fix Democracy First; Free Speech For People; Greenpeace USA; Indivisible; J Street; League of Conservation Voters; MoveOn; NextGen America; Our Revolution; People For the American Way; People Power United; Public Citizen; Public Wise; Secure Elections Network; Sierra Club; Stand Up America; Wisconsin Democracy Campaign; and The Workers Circle. SOURCE: press release
Planet Over Profit
Public Citizen Foundation
Public Citizen Inc.
Rise and Resist Inc.
Stand Up America Inc., established to “mobilize progressive Americans”
Swing Left, dedicated to “help Democrats win”
Tax Reformers LLC, running “TaxElon.us” (“an offshoot of TeslaTakedown.com”)
On Tuesday morning, former Biden administration “disinformation czar” Nina Jankowicz repeatedly refused to disclose who’s funding her new gig – the ‘American Sunlight Project’ – which cropped up after a stint at the USAID-funded UK-based Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) – for which she registered as a foreign agent while serving as their Vice President.
To review – Jankowicz, who previously served as a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as part of the Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship, and was then selected to head the Biden DHS’s newly formed Disinformation Governance Board – which was quickly dismantled amid criticism over censorship under the guise of fighting disinformation.
Four months later, she launched “The Hypatia Project” for CIR – where she was the Vice President until April 2024, at which point she co-founded the American Sunlight Project.
Fast forward to this morning, Jankowicz was evasive when asked by Republicans during a congressional hearing on disinformation about her funding…
As it turns out, Jankowicz’s co-founder at the American Sunlight Project is Carlos Alvarez-Aranyos, a “communications professional” who worked for the Biden DoD, and is “one of the people who launched the call for a boycott of Tesla.”
Alvarez-Aranyos comes from a wealthy and prominent family in the Dominican Republic. His father, Luis Álvarez Renta, is a well-known Dominican financier. Carlos is a nephew of the renowned fashion designer Oscar de la Renta.
A mixed bag in April 1st elections. Republicans easily retained two congressional seats in Florida and won a voter ID ballot proposition in Wisconsin, but lost a Wisconsin Supreme Court race that Elon Musk and others had poured a lot of money into.
In a lawsuit against the Trump administration filed in Washington, D.C. federal court, the Democratic National Committee said Trump exceeded his authority in the March 25 order by requiring voters to prove they are U.S. citizens, preventing states from counting mail-in ballots received after Election Day, and threatening to take federal funding away from states that do not comply.
Snip.
‘The Executive Order seeks to impose radical changes on how Americans register to vote, cast a ballot, and participate in our democracy — all of which threaten to disenfranchise lawful voters and none of which is legal,’ according to the lawsuit, which was filed by longtime Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias and other lawyers at his firm.
U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer and U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the leaders of the Democratic minorities in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, respectively, are also plaintiffs in the case.
Democrats are still all in on transing your kids. “New Colorado bill would penalize ‘misgendering’ in public places, use it as justification to take your kids away.”
“Migrant influencer” who bragged about squatting in Americans’ homes is deported. “Leonel Moreno, who encouraged illegal migrants to ‘invade abandoned houses’ in sick TikToks, was sent back to the narco state [Venezuela] this week, after President Trump resumed deportation flights to the country.”
The economic policy of the Democratic Party is grifterism.
Like the Politburo of the former Soviet Union, the words of Democrats often bear little resemblance to the actions their words embody. “Equity” is an excellent example, as when Democrats say “equity,” they really mean highly inequitable policy solutions. Sometimes, however, Democrats deliberately fail to coherently describe the meaning of their actions, and then it becomes even harder to ascertain meaning. Such is the case with the basic economic policies of Democrats. Many on the right like to say that Democrats support socialism, but that’s not wholly true given how many capitalist components exist inside Democrat economic policies. Similarly, it is inaccurate to describe Democrat economics as being purely capitalistic because wealth redistribution is one of their core competencies. Some say that the Democrats enjoy government control of capitalist entities, rendering their economic persuasion fascist in nature. Yet, even that is inaccurate, given that fascist states view their economies as a source of nationalistic pride and strength, while Democrats tend to abhor nationalistic pride in the United States.
It’s not socialism. It’s not capitalism. It’s not fascism. What, then, is the overarching label that explains the economic policies and priorities of Democrats and their leadership?
It’s Grifterism. (I did not invent that word, or at least that’s what Google tells me. However, I believe I am the first author to ever use that term to describe a formal system of national economic governance, so I’m going to run with it.)
Grifterism is, as the name suggests, a system run by and for the benefit of grifters. Webster defines the verb “grift” as “to acquire money or property illicitly.” Grifters have always been a part of human society, but it took the 21st-century Democratic Party to turn the idea into a comprehensive economic system. The best way to understand this system is to analyze the four classes of citizens upon which Grifterism relies, and into which all American citizens are divided one way or another: Billionaires, Productives, Dependents and, of course, Grifters.
Snip.
4. The Grifters: Well, we’re finally here. By now, you probably have a pretty good idea of what the Grifters are up to, but let’s be clear that this class consists of more than just government workers. The Grifter class includes all of the intelligentsia: the university professors, the traditional journalists, the lobbyists, the Hollywood elite, the “BigLaw” attorneys, and, most of all, the NGO crowd. Further, not every government worker is a Grifter—the military, the police, the justice system, and many other government offices that provide what economists call “Public Goods” all house highly necessary government employees. (Those employees are not Grifters—they are Productives, but unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of government workers are in fact Grifters.)
But let’s get back to the NGOs (a term I use in this article interchangeably with non-profit entities), as they reveal the true level of perfidy perpetuated by the Grifters. If you have been paying attention for the last two months, you are probably aware that DOGE and brilliantly relentless and patriotic volunteer data analysts like Data Republican have uncovered the widespread prevalence of U.S. federal agencies taking your tax dollars and using them to fund dubious efforts by various NGOs. This wicked grift cycle goes like this: (1) Taxpayers pay taxes required because Grifters establish programs that require funding; (2) Congress approves such funding in the vaguest possible terms of intent and appropriates those funds to a federal agency run by Grifters; (3) the Grifters in that agency interpret Congress’ intent in the broadest manner possible and provide funds to NGOs that employ other Grifters with six-figure salaries; and (4) that NGO then engages in some sort of woke cause such as training transgender farmers—a cause very few taxpaying voters would vote for if they only knew about it.
The cycle of grifting prospers beyond just NGOs: the universities receive taxpayer funding to indoctrinate our youth; the lobbyists curry favor with the Grifters to improve their business opportunities; the journalists cycle in and out of government, spreading the Grifter ethos as truth; Hollywood pays homage to it all, infecting American brains with woke ideas that Grifterism is noble; the BigLaw attorneys become rich navigating the vast regulatory schemes that are the lifeblood of Grifterism, and the members of the Grifter class constantly cycle in and out of the various organizations that benefit most from their economic parasitism.
The Grifters are the only class of Grifterism that fully benefits from the corrupt system; in fact, the system exists by, for, and because of the Grifters—almost all of whom are voting for Democrat candidates who themselves wallow in the pig trough of Grifterism. “But wait!” you may say, “Government workers are not Billionaires, they are not wealthy. How is that a grift?” Grifters in government generally enjoy wages in excess of the national median income; they are entitled to retirement plans largely unheard of in the private sector; they have healthcare and other benefits that far exceed those of equivalent private workers; and, most of all, they enjoy job security that is unmatched by any other sector of American society. Most Grifters are unfirable—they have life tenure. Finally, they have the power to pull the strings of the entire Grifter class for their own benefit—back-scratching and beak-wetting are their secret ways of communication.
The Democrats are obviously struggling with coming to terms with the rejection they faced last November. They’re always bad at introspection and taking responsibility for anything, but this is like nothing I’ve seen in all of my years in politics. It’s gotten to the point where I have to read at least one or two of the 2024 post mortems in the mainstream media every day to get my fix. Yeah, it’s a blast watching them not get it. The real joy for me, however, is seeing the myriad ways that they are finding to not come to the proper conclusions about why they lost.
They’ve been so reluctant to face their Pandora’s boxful of problems that they didn’t even start making attempts until just before the second Trump term was underway. In days of yore, the Democratic National Committee would have called an all-hands-on-deck meeting for around 6 AM on the morning after the election to begin plotting how to win the next one. Not only that, the Dems would have some plans in their back pockets and some viable candidates for the future on their bench. That Democratic Party and political machine no longer exist.
The reason for that is one that they will probably never admit to themselves. The decimation of its candidate bench and the party’s long-term planning ability can be laid squarely at the feet of the man who they worship above all others: His High Holiness the Lightbringer Barack Obama.
Democrats had long been invested in identity politics but went all-in to the exclusion of anything else after Barack Obama won in 2008. As my friend Stephen Green mentioned a few times last year, the Dems sold an idea in 2008 rather than a candidate with a record. Of course, that was because Obama had no record to speak of at the time.
They got kinda hooked on that.
The party higher-ups and their media mouthpieces spent the next eight years hero worshiping and not attending to the mundane nuts and bolts of keeping a successful political machine running. While they were “oohing and aahing” over the emperor’s new clothes, the emperor was sucking the life out of the party’s future. Who needed a bench when all they had to do was anoint a candidate who checked off a “historic first” diversity box on his or her résumé?
They were so invested in the diversity route that the DNC gamed the 2016 primary to make it nigh on impossible for anyone to beat Hillary Clinton — the candidate they’d unceremoniously thrown on the trash heap eight years earlier in favor of Obama because he checked off a higher-priority diversity box.
None of the Democratic Party rules applied in 2020. The Dems went with Joe Biden because he was essentially an emotional support stuffed toy who made them feel better because he had a connection to Obama. Biden immediately got them back in the identity politics game by promising to pick a Black female running mate.
We know the rest of this story.
The real problem for the Democrats in 2024 wasn’t Joe Biden’s late exit or Kamala Harris’s short campaign — no combination of circumstances was going to enable either of them to beat Donald Trump. The Dems’ real problem is what the party is now about. Things like biological males competing in girls sports and hanging around in their locker rooms. Things like drag queen story hours in first-grade classrooms. Things like “Free Palestine” lunatics attacking synagogues.
Things that they really haven’t backed off of after getting shellacked last year.
So more social justice victimhood identity politics and more Orange Man Bad. That, abortion and gun control are pretty much all they have… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Bruen on the march: “Justice Dept. Investigates L.A. Sheriff Over Concealed Carry Permit Delays.”
The Justice Department said it was investigating whether the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had violated the Second Amendment rights of residents through what it said was a pattern of long delays in issuing concealed carry permits.
The department said the investigation, announced in a news release on Thursday, was part of a larger push to protect gun rights across the United States. It added that it could open similar investigations in “any other states or localities that insist on unduly burdening, or effectively denying, the Second Amendment rights of their ordinary, law-abiding citizens.”
The Supreme Court has upheld Second Amendment rights in recent years, but, the Justice Department wrote in the announcement, some states “have resisted this recent pro-Second Amendment case law.”
The department called California “a particularly egregious offender,” saying it had passed laws restricting the right to bear arms. It said some areas of California had also imposed excessive fees and lengthy wait times on concealed carry permits.
The investigation follows a lawsuit filed in federal court in 2023 by gun rights advocates who claimed it had taken more than a year to obtain a concealed carry permit from the Los Angeles County Sheriff. Last year, a federal judge agreed that the Second Amendment rights of two individuals in the lawsuit had most likely been violated when the county made them wait 18 months before they received a decision on their permits. The Justice Department said it believed others had also experienced long delays in obtaining permits in the county.
The Sheriff’s Department wrote in a statement that it respected the Second Amendment and that it was committed to processing all concealed carry permits, but it added that it was facing a “staffing crisis” and had a backlog of cases. It said it had around 4,000 applications to process, with only 14 people to review them.
Last month, President Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to assess “any ongoing infringements” on Second Amendment rights in federal agencies across the country.
“The Second Amendment is not a second-class right,” Ms. Bondi wrote in the news release announcing the investigation in Los Angeles, “and under my watch, the department will actively enforce the Second Amendment just like it actively enforces other fundamental constitutional rights.”
A victory in the war against lower court judicial overreach. “Supreme Court Shuts Down Activist Judge, Lets Trump Cut $250 Million In DEI Training For Teachers.”
The Supreme Court on Friday overruled an activist judge in Boston, allowing the Trump administration to slash $250 million for more than 100 teacher training grants for DEI and other woke programs.
In a 5-4 decision nine days after the request, the Supremes sided with the Trump administration’s emergency request to stay the court order by judge Myong J. Joun of the federal District of Massachusetts – who had ordered the Trump administration to “immediately restore” the “pre-existing status quo prior to the termination.”
According to the ruling – which is likely to narrow the ability of district courts to halt agency actions involving grant function, Joun lacked authority to order the Trump admin to restore the funding.
The Supreme Court upheld the Biden administration’s regulations on “ghost guns” Wednesday, finding that guns assembled using at-home kits are subject to the same rules as traditional firearms, including requirements that they carry a serial number and that purchasers undergo a federal background check before buying them.
The justices ruled 7-2 in Garland v. VanDerStok to preserve rules imposed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in 2022 to combat what the government called an explosion of “ghost gun” usage in criminal activity. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.
Second Amendment issues aside, the Supreme Court missed an opportunity to par back some post-Chevron regulatory overreach.
He’s outa there: “South Korean court removes president from office, says he violated duties. The Constitutional Court upheld the impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol over his martial law gambit. South Korea will elect a new president within 60 days.”
A Manhattan judge on Wednesday dismissed the federal corruption charges levied against New York City Mayor Eric Adams last fall, partially granting the Trump-era Department of Justice’s request to drop the case.
U.S. District Judge Dale Ho, who presided over the Democratic mayor’s case in the Southern District of New York, permanently dismissed the charges in a highly anticipated decision.
In February, the DOJ ordered federal prosecutors to stop pursuing the case and subsequently asked the judge to dismiss the case without prejudice. That would have allowed prosecutors to refile charges against Adams in the future if the DOJ wanted to do so.
Ho dismissed the indictment with prejudice, meaning the prosecution cannot be revived based on the same evidence used in the original case.
The DOJ’s move, spearheaded by former acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, sparked accusations that the Trump administration and Adams were engaged in a “quid pro quo” agreement, in which the mayor’s charges would have been dropped as a way of ensuring his cooperation with enforcing the White House’s immigration agenda. Adams denied the allegations of a quid pro quo.
In his order, Ho wrote that dismissing the case without prejudice “would create the unavoidable perception that the Mayor’s freedom depends on his ability to carry out the immigration enforcement priorities of the administration, and that he might be more beholden to the demands of the federal government than to the wishes of his own constituents.”
The Biden-appointed judge described that perception as “inevitable” and concluded that “it counsels in favor of dismissal with prejudice.”
Adams requested a dismissal with prejudice, to which the DOJ did not object.
In September, Adams was indicted on five counts of corruption related to his alleged acceptance of benefits, such as free luxury travel from Turkish officials, in exchange for pressuring city inspectors to open a new Turkish consulate building in Manhattan without a proper fire inspection. Adams pleaded not guilty.
The New York City mayor has suggested his indictment was politically motivated because of his criticisms of the Biden administration’s lax immigration policies.
Given that Adams was a Democratic mayor of New York City, my working assumption is that he’s dirty as sin in general, but not necessarily for this particular case. And it’s entirely possibly that the Biden Administration did indict him for daring to question open borders. Also, even if guilty, dismissing his charges might be justified in the same way that a mobster who turns state evidence gets their charges dismissed. (Honestly, three different iPhones seems like overkill. One iPhone and two burner phones for different dirty deals seems sufficient, unless you’ve got so much dirty going down that you need to use the Stringer Bell SIM card swap to keep all the balls in the air. On the other hand, were the FBI to raid my house for some reason, they too might seize three iPhones: One working, and two old, mostly broken models…)
But wait! Adams says that, while he’s still a Democrat, he’s running for re-election as an Independent. Maybe he figures (correctly) that his heretical questioning of The Message means he has no chance to win a Democratic primary…
EuroElites are hoping that lawfare can succeed there even though it failed against Trump: “French Court Sentences Marine Le Pen to Jail, Bars Right-Wing Presidential Hopeful from Running in 2027.”
A French court on Monday sentenced right-wing leader Marine Le Pen to jail and barred her from seeking public office again for five years, preventing her from running in France’s 2027 presidential election after she was found guilty of embezzlement.
A member of the French Parliament, Le Pen and others were accused of misusing 4.4 million euros, or $4.8 million, in European Parliament funds to pay staff who were working for her National Rally party. In violation of European Union regulations, the alleged embezzlement occurred between 2004 and 2016. She was found guilty alongside eight members of Parliament and twelve assistants. The French right-wing leader has denied any wrongdoing.
Le Pen faces a prison sentence of four years, with two of those years suspended; a $108,000 fine; and ineligibility to run for office for five years, effective immediately. She is expected to appeal the ruling.
But even if she does appeal, the political ban will likely remain in place unless she is victorious. Meanwhile, her prison sentence will be suspended during the appeals process. The ban doesn’t affect her parliamentary position.
There’s widespread belief that “embezzlement” charges like this would never be employed against politicians that hew the EU line.
Earlier this month, President Trump wrote to Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei saying he wanted to negotiate an end to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, emphasizing “I would prefer to make a deal, because I’m not looking to hurt Iran. . . . I’m not sure that everybody agrees with me, but we can make a deal that would be just as good as if you won militarily.” This weekend, the Iranians rejected direct negotiations but left the door open to indirect negotiations. This is all occurring as a quarter of the U.S. Air Force’s B-2 bombers are at the joint U.S.-United Kingdom military base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. A U.S. military conflict with Iran feels increasingly plausible.
Snip.
Northrop B-2 Spirits are what the U.S. Air Force uses when it needs to drop very powerful bombs in a very stealthy manner. Among those very powerful bombs is the Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP) Bunker-Buster, a 30,000 pound bomb that is described as “the most powerful and deeply burrowing non-nuclear bunker buster on earth.” In fact, the B-2 is the only plane that can carry a MOP.
The MOP is exactly the sort of weapon you would use if you wanted to hit Iran’s underground nuclear facilities. On March 25, Iranian state media “showed Iranian Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Mohammad Baqeri and Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Aerospace Force commander, showing off what Iranian media said was an ‘underground missile city.’”
(Howard Altman of The War Zone noted that from what viewers could see in the video, “The munitions are stored out in the open in long continuous tunnels and large caverns with no, or at least limited, blast doors or separated revetments. That could result in devastating consequences should the facility be breached in an attack. The lack of these protective measures could lead to an absolutely massive chain reaction of secondary explosions.”)
As of May 2024, Iran has 42 declared facilities and at least 8 suspected facilities in its nuclear program.
Texas Department of Public Safety officers arrested over three dozen individuals—including suspected members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua—near Dripping Springs, a small town a half-hour west of Austin.
Law enforcement also seized narcotics during the Tuesday raid and took nine minors into custody.
Texas continues to cement itself as a hub for capital investment with the opening of a new Lone Star State-based stock exchange on Monday.
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announced plans to establish its own exchange in Dallas back in February — which came on the heels of the Texas Stock Exchange being founded in June last year.
“As the state with the largest number of NYSE listings, representing over $3.7 trillion in market value for our community, Texas is a market leader in fostering a pro-business atmosphere,” NYSE Group President Lynn Martin said in a press release at the time.
Now, March 31 is opening day for the Texas-based New York Stock Exchange, which Martin said will “allow companies to capitalize on the pro-business dynamics in Texas.”
The NYSE also announced that the first security to be listed on the Texas exchange will be the Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG).
TMTG describes itself as a “social media and technology focused company” where its goal is to “end Big Tech’s assault on free speech by opening up the Internet and giving people their voices back.” Its most well known product offering is the social media platform TruthSocial.
Headquartered in Florida, the company debuted on the NYSE in March 2024 under the ticker “DJT” and skyrocketed to a market valuation of at least $8.4 billion on an undiluted share basis during its first day of business; it currently sits around $4.37 billion in market capitalization.
“We’re honored to become the initial listing for NYSE Texas, which is a great fit for TMTG as we diversify into financial services and other realms,” said TMTG CEO and Chairman Devin Nunes.
“Texas provides a fantastic climate for business and entrepreneurship that aligns with TMTG’s mission. This listing, alongside our plans to reincorporate in Florida, shows we’re part of a growing movement to take our business to states that value free enterprise and personal freedom.”
After attending a “transgender conference” at the University of Texas at Austin, State Rep. Brian Harrison is demanding an end to the school’s Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department.
Harrison (R-Midlothian) is calling for the university to be defunded unless it terminates the department, along with its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
“The Texas government has failed Texans, by weaponizing their tax dollars against them, their values, and their children, and I won’t stand for it, especially in light of what I recently discovered on my undercover visit to the University of Texas campus yesterday as they were hosting a transgender conference,” Harrison stated.
He warned that if the programs are not immediately dismantled, he will attempt to strip UT Austin of taxpayer funding in the upcoming state budget.
On Tuesday, Harrison shared photos captured at the 32nd Annual Emerging Scholarship in Women’s and Gender Studies Graduate Student Conference.
One featured a banner promoting an art exhibit called “TRANSCENDENCE: A Century of Black Queer Ecstasy.” The banner shows two black men standing in front of a cross.
The event agenda for day one of the conference included a lecture titled “Keeping Time: Queer-Crip Temporal Attunement Through Tarot.”
Pamphlets and flyers throughout the library advertised “Resources for Trans Folks,” which primarily focused on the use of cross-sex hormones or mutilating surgeries used to appear like the opposite sex.
One flyer directed students to UT’s University Health Services for medical transition procedures and to the UT School of Law’s Gender Affirmation Project for legal name and gender changes.
The flyer was created by The Queer and Trans Student Alliance, which is an agency of the UT student government.
Another day, another leftwing scam discovered by DOGE. But this one is a two-fer: The get to use it for both raking off graft and committing voting fraud.
One day after Elon Musk and Antonio Gracias—founder and CEO of the Chicago-based investment firm Valor Equity Partners, and now a DOGE official—unveiled a “mind-blowing” chart showing a surge in Social Security numbers issued to illegal aliens over the Biden-Harris administration’s first term during an America PAC town hall in Wisconsin on Sunday, Musk’s America PAC hosted an online tele-town hall with Wisconsin voters on Monday night, where he provided more color on the SSN fraud.
During the tele-town hall, one Wisconsin voter asked Musk: “You found a lot of fraud in Social Security. Do you know whether the Attorney General will investigate and prosecute that fraud?”
Musk responded: “I believe someone is going to be arrested tomorrow, because there’s someone who actually stole 400,000 Social Security numbers and personal information from the Social Security database… And was selling Social Security numbers and all the identification information in order for people to basically steal money from Social Security.”
“This is a particular avenue of fraud for illegal immigrants and voter fraud – because the main way identification is established in the US is via Social Security. If you comprise the Social Security system, you can basically get people to get defacto registered to vote – even if they’re not citizens – and get a bunch of benefits and to milk the system – this is pretty insane,” Musk said.
Ahead of Tuesday’s pivotal election in Wisconsin—which will determine whether conservatives or liberals control the state’s Supreme Court—Elon Musk’s America PAC hosted a town hall to rally support for conservative candidate Brad Schimel. The event covered several topics, including an update on DOGE-related efforts in the corrupt DC Swamp.
Forty-two minutes into the online town hall—streamed on X and other social media platforms—Musk welcomed Antonio Gracias, founder and CEO of the Chicago-based growth equity firm Valor Equity Partners. Gracias has been leading DOGE efforts to uncover fraud and waste in Social Security.
Musk told the audience with Gracias on stage that DOGE found “20 million dead people marked as alive… Social Security database, this is too crazy, and then you’ll notice there’s a strange trend here.”
At that moment, Musk and Gracias turned their backs to the audience to explain a graph projected on the wall titled “New Non-Citizen Social Security Numbers Issued. ”
Gracias told the audience, “We started at the top of the system—mapping the whole system of Social Security to understand where all the fraud was—and there were a lot of great people there who showed us, um, really a lot of waste, and so that came with a big list of stuff. But this is what jumped out at us. When we saw these numbers … we were like, what is this? In 2021, you see 270,000 people go all the way to 2.1 million in 2024. These are non-citizens that are getting Social Security numbers.”
Musk said this chart “was mind-blowing …”
Gracias followed that up with: “This literally blew us away. Like we went there to find fraud, and we found this by accident – and this isn’t political, by the way – my parents are immigrants – uh yeah, this country has been great to us. My brothers and sister were all born in Spain. I’m pro legal immigration. This is not political. This is about America and the future of America, and there are a lot of good people in the system who pointed us in this direction. I want to honor them right now who work in the government today, who took risks to show us these numbers and tell us what’s going on. I want to stop for a minute. I want to honor those people today – very good people. I have been from DC to Social Security offices and to the border to track this down, and very good people have helped us along the way. I want to thank them.”
He explained, “This number – what is when you come in the country if you’re an illegal, uh there’s a couple ways come in – you can go through a Port of Entry and you can tell them you’re afraid and you’ll get an asylum case and you’ll get an interview then you get in – that’s one way to do it. Another way to do it is to go to the border – literally, this happened. I talked to the border patrol myself. Elon was there too. I went to Laredo, and you walked up to a border portal officer and told them you wanted to come. They have a couple of choices. They could charge you with a misdemeanor or a felony under 1325 or they can make an administrative offense like a parking ticket basically, they were told to do that make an administrative offense under the last Administration and then you go walk across the border they uh do what’s called a release from your own recognizance and they give you an NTA (notice to appear) which to appear at a judge the weight times on judges are like average six years -look at Grok-you’ll see it on immigration judges – there’s only 700 of them this is 5.5 million people.”
“Next, once you’re in the country and you got asylum through one of these pathways we mapped the whole thing out – you can apply for a work document – you file a 765 – it’s the work form – you get this form called the 766 – that’s the authorization – and then Social Security Administration automatically sends you in the mail your social security number – no interview no ID,” Gracias explained further.
Musk chimed in: “Just reiterating, sometimes people think that Biden was asleep at the switch. But this was a massive large-scale program to import as many illegals as possible ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people and make it a permanent deep blue one-party state, from which there would be no escape.”
Gracias emphasized that “defaults in the system from Social Security to all of the benefit programs have been set to Max inclusion – max pay – for these people and Minimum Collection – that’s what’s happening. We found that 1.3 million of them are already on Medicaid. And the 5 million of them on benefit programs.”
Wait, you can set a program to “Minimum Collection”? I rather doubt this was authorized by congress.
“What was really disturbing us was why. We’re asking ourselves why, and so we actually just took a sample and looked at voter registration records and we found people here registered to vote in this population – yes – and we found some by sampling some that did vote. And we have referred them to prosecution at the homeland security investigation,” Gracias said, adding, “Truly disturbing thing to me and the darkest thing about this to me uh the voter fraud is terrible but the human tragedy this created is extraordinary. Americans need to know – that’s why I’m here – that human traffickers made 13 to 15 billion dollar off of this – that’s the money that’s going around the world moving people around the world to our borders because of these incentives.”
No wonder Democrats are trying so hard to push the lie “Elon Musk wants to cut your Social Security!” Social Security fraud like this is not a two-fer, it’s a trifecta of graft: They make money off selling stolen Social Security numbers to illegal aliens, they make money staffing the bloated government agencies providing welfare state benefits to illegal aliens, and they get more Democrats elected though illegal aliens illegally voting.
If you’re a leftwing crook, it’s a Win-Win-Win.
Note: I could have sworn I hit publish on this April 1st, but evidently not…
More DOGE uncovered fraud, Trump yanks security clearances for a lot of swamp creatures, the Democratic Party goes all in on antisemitism, good luck getting an MRI in Canada, Warner Bros Discovery is considering a sale that’s absolutely loony, and a member of the Very, Very, Very Heavy Brigade takes on a Tesla.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
For all the talk of trump not allowing a peaceful transfer of power, it’s lefty Biden appointees who are thwarting democracy.
On Friday, the Board of Directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace informed the group’s president, George Moose, that he was relieved of his duties. The same day, Moose’s replacement, Kenneth Jackson, arrived at the office for the congressionally funded nonprofit to assume his new role.
There was one problem: Moose refused to go.
A source intimately involved in the situation told The Daily Wire that Moose put the building on lockdown when Jackson and his team were en route. When they arrived, they were astonished to find that the doors were locked and they were unable to gain entry.
“They treated us, quite frankly, like criminals,” a person who was with the group shared with The Daily Wire.
Jackson encountered similar behavior on Monday. He was ultimately able to enter USIP with the help of the Metropolitan Police Department, and ordered all unauthorized personnel to leave — including Moose, who confirmed to The Daily Wire that he was escorted out by police.
When Jackson and the rest of his group were finally able to get into the building, they found things in turmoil. The shades were drawn, with white noise playing when they arrived. USIP employees were using walkie talkies to communicate within the building, according to the person who was with Jackson. As of Tuesday, none of the phone systems in the building were working, nor were the elevators, and the internet was down, The Daily Wire has learned.
“I’ve never seen something so broken,” the source familiar with the situation told The Daily Wire. Moose did not respond to inquiries into whether he and his colleagues tampered with these systems.
Colin O’Brien, the chief security officer at USIP under Moose, told The Daily Wire on Tuesday evening that the systems likely were not working because the building had been placed on lockdown at Moose’s orders, meaning that all the systems would shut down. O’Brien and other employees were told to exit the building, and he said he hadn’t been in contact with anyone on Tuesday, though he believes he is still employed by USIP.
O’Brien said that Moose ordered that members of DOGE were not to be admitted into the building, and that members of USIP were under the impression that there was an ongoing dispute with DOGE about who the leadership of the USIP was — “something that, in my understanding, was going to be litigated,” he said. He disputed the notion that DOGE had the authority to enter the building.
This story, based on accounts from individuals who were on the scene as Jackson attempted to gain access to the organization he’d been put in charge of, shows how federally-funded bureaucrats worked to sabotage operations to stop the Trump administration from taking control.
Moose, who allegedly “barricaded” himself in his office until police arrived, has told the media that members of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) broke into the office without warning. But a review of events and internal emails show not only that USIP leadership blocked Moose’s replacement from entering the building, but that it was preparing to resist changes for weeks ahead of their arrival.
Elon Musk, the world’s most successful businessman and President Donald Trump’s top White House adviser, said this week that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has uncovered shocking cases of fraud within the federal government.
Musk made the remarks during a Monday meeting with the president and his cabinet secretaries.
“One case of fraud was with the Small Business Administration, where they were handing out loans—$330 million worth of loans—to people under the age of 11,” Musk said. “I think the youngest, Kelly, was a 9-month-old who got a $100,000 loan.”
“That’s a very precocious baby we’re talking about here,” Musk quipped.
SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler followed up Musk’s remarks by saying, “We’re tackling the fraud, waste, and abuse at the agency.”
“We’ve seen, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud go unprosecuted, so we’re taking that on,” she said. “We have a zero-tolerance policy for fraud, and we continue to crack down on it and make sure people are held accountable.”
Trump said that they have found “far too much” fraud, waste, and abuse in the government over the last couple of months.
“It’s pure fraud,” he said. “We like to use the words ‘waste’ and ‘abuse’ because they sort of sound good, but many of these things are pure fraud.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) said this week that the state was returning nearly $900 million to the federal government, something it tried to do repeatedly during the Biden administration.
“For years, Florida has been trying to return federal funds to the federal government due to the ideological strings attached by the Biden Administration—but they couldn’t even figure out how to accept it,” DeSantis said in a post on X.
The governor said that he met with Elon Musk on Friday and the rest of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team and was able to return the money.
“We got this done in the same day,” DeSantis said. “Other states should follow Florida in supporting DOGE’s efforts!”
The governor posted the letter that he sent to the U.S. Treasury Department alerting them that the state was formally returning $878,112,000.00 in taxpayer dollars to the federal government “as part of DOGE’s efforts.”
The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced on Wednesday that non-permanent residents will no longer be eligible for Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgages, National Review has learned, part of a broader effort by the administration to ensure that American citizens are prioritized under taxpayer-funded housing programs following massive flow of illegal immigration under former President Joe Biden.
FHA loans offer government-insured mortgages to ensure that lower-income individuals have access to home ownership. While illegal immigrants are technically ineligible to obtain FHA-backed home loans under U.S. law, HUD’s announcement will strengthen enforcement mechanisms to ensure that illegal immigrants are not abusing the program in the future. It is unclear how many illegal immigrants have obtained FHA-backed loans.
“FHA does not retain citizenship or residency data from the loan application and therefore does not maintain information on the number of non-permanent residents who have received FHA-insured loans under past policies,” General Deputy Assistant Secretary for Housing Jeffrey D. Little wrote in a March 26 mortgagee letter shared exclusively with National Review. “This update ensures that FHA’s mortgage insurance programs are administered in accordance with Administration priorities while fulfilling its mission of providing access to homeownership.”
The new policy will also prohibit government-backed mortgages for non-permanent residents moving forward. “Currently, non-permanent residents are subject to immigration laws that can affect their ability to remain legally in the country,” Little wrote in the March 26 memo. “This uncertainty poses a challenge for FHA as the ability to fulfill long-term financial obligations depends on stable residency and employment.”
HUD’s revised residency requirements for FHA-backed loans, which take effect on May 25, will apply to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients as well as individuals who are pending asylum or pending refugee status, according to HUD, since there is no guarantee that their residency status will be renewed under the current administration.
The new policy eliminates the “non-permanent resident” category entirely from the FHA’s Single Family Title I and Title II programs, and reverses a Biden-era policy which allows FHA loans for DACA recipients who provide a valid Social Security Number and work eligibility status.
I wonder if these programs were abused for helping illegal aliens buy homes in Colony Ridge.
Others named in the list are retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, former White House Russia expert Fiona Hill, former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic Norman Eisen, former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, and lawyer Mark Zaid.”
Can anyone really say America is less safe because the people on that list no longer have access to classified information?
What the support for Mahmoud Khalil, Hasan Piker and Rasha Alawieh really shows.
A few days after the anniversary of Oct 7, the New York Times reported that Columbia University Apartheid Divest officially endorsed terrorism against Jews and withdrew an apology by one of its members for threatening to kill Jews.
Over the past weeks, the paper and the entire Democratic Party, including 103 members of Congress, the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the Jewish Democratic Council of America led by Kamala’s former foreign policy advisor, went all in on fighting for Mahmoud Khalil, a leader in CUAD who had defended terrorism, from being deported.
The signatories to a letter standing up for a Syrian national who had taken part in a pro-terrorist group’s harassment of Jewish students and faculty included half of House Democrats, not only extremists like AOC and Rep. Ilhan Omar, but Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking House Judiciary Democrat, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with multiple House Democrats of Jewish ancestry and those who represent large Jewish districts including Rep. Jerrold Nadler in New York, as well as Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove and Rep. Laura Friedman who holds down Sen. Adam Schiff’s old seat, in the LA area. The same Democrat politicians who had remained silent when Jewish students and faculty were being terrorized on campuses in their areas now rushed to the barricades for a member of a group that had openly celebrated the murder of Jews.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest is a front group for the college’s suspended Students for Justice in Palestine chapter which reacted to the first anniversary of Oct 7 by promoting a statement from a Maoist publication, “October 7th was Not ‘Barbaric’ or ‘Unfortunate’—It was Strategic and Anti-imperialist” and hailed the “moral, military, and political victory of the Operation”. This is what the Democrats who condemn Trump’s proposed deportation of a CUAD leader as “authoritarian” now support. Not just terrorism: but the mass murder of Jews.
Now, Democrats rallied once more in support of Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese Hezbollah supporter, traveling to America on a visa who was refused entry into the United States.
According to Customs and Border Protection, Alawieh (pictured above) had deleted Hezbollah materials on her phone, attended the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and claimed that she followed Nasrallah’s teachings “from a religious perspective.”
Hezbollah is not only responsible for the murder of Jews, but the barracks bombing in Beirut which killed 220 Marines, the kidnapping and brutal torture of Colonel William R. Higgins, who was castrated and skinned before his body was dumped near a mosque, and the vicious killing of Robert Stethem, a Navy diver, during an airline hijacking when, as a stewardess described, “They were jumping in the air and landing full force on his body. He must have had all his ribs broken… they put the mike up to his face so his screams could be heard by the outside world.”
“A visa is a privilege not a right—glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied. This is commonsense security,” the Department of Homeland Security warned. Democrats fundamentally disagree with that position.
Judge Leo Sorokin, a Clinton appointee, barred the Hezbollah supporter from being deported, and then demanded to know why she had not been allowed into the country. Instead of reporting that Rasha Alawieh had visited a terrorist group’s event responsible for the murder of hundreds of Americans, the media claimed she had been visiting her family in her country.
Rep. Gabe Amo, along with other Dems, have stated that they intend to continue fighting for her
Brown University, which employed Alawieh and is under investigation for antisemitism, responded by urging foreign employees like her not to travel abroad because of “travel bans, visa procedures and processing, re-entry requirements” they might conceivably run afoul of if they support terrorists and the mass murder of Americans and Jews.
In the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz hyped Hasan Piker, a Muslim influencer on the video game streaming platform Twitch, as the best hope for the Democrats winning over “bros” and “young men” .Somewhere in the middle of the article, after mentioning his dog’s name and his support for ‘non-binary’ people, gets around to briefly mentioning his “soft-pedalling the brutality of Hamas, or the Houthis, or the Chinese Communist Party” and being named “Antisemite of the Year” as a minor detail before pivoting to a discussion about a possible Hasan reality show.
And to Democrats today, such things are minor details, less important than anything else.
Piker, has said, “it doesn’t matter if rapes f***ing happened on Oct. 7, like that doesn’t change the dynamic for me even this much” while holding up his fingers slightly apart. “The Palestinian resistance is not perfect.” And he’s been featured on CNN, invited to the DNC, and Democrats, from Rep. Ro Khanna to AOC to Sen. Ed Markey appeared on his podcast. Buttigieg has been trying to get on. Expect most other Democrats aspiring to run in 2028 to do likewise.
This week, the Texas Legislature took steps to strip power from the Texas Lottery Commission, possibly setting the agency up for abolition, and Las Vegas Sands’ casino plans suffered a setback in Irving at the hands of outraged citizens.
On Monday, State Sen. Mayes Middleton (R-Galveston) laid out Senate Bill 1721 in the State Affairs Committee. It would transfer the administration of bingo games in Texas from the Lottery Commission to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation.
Snip.
When introducing his measure to ban lottery couriers operating in Texas, State Sen. Bob Hall (R-Edgewood) noted that on a hierarchy of administration complexity, bingo and lottery are at the bottom of the totem pole.
During a September 2024 Sunset Commission hearing, State Sen. Judith Zaffirini (D-Laredo) noted that revenues to the state before and after the lottery was created remained flat. The state is not likely to lose money if the lottery goes away.
At two separate hearings this week in Irving, citizens showed up in force to oppose a planning variance to build a casino. Ultimately, Sands asked the city council to pull the language allowing the construction of a casino from the development request.
Sands currently operates no casinos in America and derives most of its revenue from China.
The mess at the Lottery Commission probably deserves a separate post…
In his lengthy announcement post on social media, McGregor voiced his opposition to the European Union (EU) Migration Pact, which the bloc has mandated that Ireland must ratify by June 12th, 2026. The pact would relax Ireland’s border security and make it easier for illegal aliens to claim asylum.
“Between now and 12 June 2026, several pieces of legislation have to be passed by both Houses of the Oireachtas and then signed by the President,” McGregor explained. “The next presidential election must take place by 11 [November] 2025.”
“Who else will stand up to Government and oppose this bill? Any other Presidential candidate they attempt to put forward will be of no resistance to them. I will!” McGregor declared.
He also said that, as president, he would pursue a nationwide referendum on the Migration Pact, allowing the people of Ireland to decide for themselves whether or not the country should be forced to abide by the deal.
In celebrating the life of Tony Dolan, President Reagan’s chief speechwriter, the most remarkable fact is that he was executing a strategy he conceived to defeat the Soviet Union.
In numerous conversations in the speechwriting office—long before any foreign policy experts dared to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet Union itself, Tony said that he knew how to defeat the Soviets.
As a young journalist in his hometown of Stamford, Connecticut, he had exposed organized crime that, he said, had entirely corrupted the city. Tony was relentless, ultimately breaking the mob’s power and becoming one of the youngest journalists to win the Pulitzer Prize. He said that the same method would bring down the Soviets, an entirely corrupt system, another form of organized crime. Tell the truth about them; expose them as evil; let everyone—especially those in power—hear them described as what they are. It was his conviction that President Reagan, by speaking with moral clarity about the Soviets, could hasten their collapse.
In his essay How the United States Won the Cold War, Warren Norquist identifies the rhetorical moral battle, “demoralizing the Soviets and generating pressure for change,” as one of seven crucial components in the US victory over the USSR.
Tony later wrote in the Wall Street Journal that for criminal regimes, there is “one weapon they fear more than military or economic sanction: the publicly-spoken truth about their moral absurdity, their ontological weakness.”
Snip.
The Reagan administration, internally, was a battlefield of competing visions that came to a head over presidential speeches. Once the president said something, it became the official policy—which made speechwriting a critical front in these internal struggles. The battle cry of conservatives in the administration was, “Let Reagan be Reagan.” In that struggle, Tony was unwavering. He would not wobble when West Wing power players tried to intimidate him. He was himself an exceptionally skilled political infighter—usually scheming, always charming, and with a spine of coiled steel.
From the outset of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Tony helped to chisel out the rhetorical space in which the speechwriters could give voice to President Reagan’s resolve that the outcome of the Cold War would be, “We win, they lose.”
And it was not only combative phrases. At times it was subversive speech, as in Reagan’s 1981 Univ. of Notre Dame speech drafted by Tony: “The West won’t contain communism; it will transcend communism. … it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”
Or his 1982 speech in London, the Westminster address, “… one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: of all the millions of refugees we’ve seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward, the Communist world. Today, on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east—to prevent their people from leaving. … What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy, which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”
California announces it will need another seven billion dollars in taxpayer money not to build a high speed rail. But I’m sure all the consultant graft will be channeled into the proper left-wing pockets… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Canadian woman gets a referral from her doctor to get an MRI to see if she has a brain tumor. So now she has an appointment for one. In 2026.
Carole Stewart Keeton McClellan Rylander Strayhorn (to use all the names she was known under), former Democratic mayor of Austin, Republican Railroad Commissioner and Comptroller of Texas, has died. In a way her career was emblematic of a certain kind of moderate politician in Texas at the time, with a huge realignment from the Democratic to the Republican Party, a change that started with John Connally, picked up speed with Phil Gramm and Rick Perry, and continues into this day with Hispanic office holders still switching over. Speaking of Perry, she was one of two prominent female Republican moderate officeholders (Kay Baily Hutchinson being the other) who destroyed their careers trying to unseat Perry from the Governor’s Mansion.
Is Warner BrothersTime WarnerAOL-Time WarnerWarnerMedia Warner Bros. Discovery putting Loony Tunes for sale? What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
Guy who did the Vegas Tesla bomby/turns out to be a dirty Commie.
Annals of criminal genius: 5-foot-2, 449-pound drives his 4-wheeler into an Tesla. “Demarqeyun Marquize Cox was arrested after one of his alleged attacks was recorded by the Tesla he purposely ran into, police in Texarkana, Texas announced.” And yes, there’s video:
The ongoing DOGE revelations prove that leftists feel absolutely no compunction about stealing money from taxpayers. Given that, and the revelations of where all those #BlackLivesMatter dollars ended up, perhaps it’s not surpirsing that more and more obviously feel no compunction about stealing from their own organizations.
A prominent diversity, equity, and inclusion nonprofit declared bankruptcy this month after its board accused its founder and top employees of stealing millions of dollars, a Daily Wire investigation found. Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey are set to keynote a conference run by the alleged thief, apparently through his for-profit firm, next month.
The National Diversity Council filed for bankruptcy on March 17 after its board said in a lawsuit that its founder R. Dennis Kennedy “improperly paid himself millions of dollars from NDC’s donor funds.” The suit said Kennedy “paid himself a grossly excessive salary” while using the nonprofit as a front for his for-profit diversity consulting business called Diversity & Leadership Inc (D&L).
The group’s 2020 IRS disclosure said Kennedy was paid $450,000 for 10 hours of work per week.
Nice work if you can get it.
In 2022, at the height of corporations’ DEI hype, Kennedy, chief executive officer Ángeles Valenciano, and chief financial officer Jason deGroot also “unilaterally decided that they were owed almost $3 million in ‘back pay,’ and then paid themselves more than $1 million of donor funds,” the lawsuit said.
Working the levers of the White Guilt Machine is evidently labor so grueling that it requires no less than a million bucks to perform.
As board members became suspicious and determined that there was no basis for the payments, Kennedy systematically moved the nonprofit’s trademarks and web domains into his own name, and essentially created a fake organization with the same name that would trick people into paying him directly, the suit indicated.
“Kennedy, Valenciano, and deGroot conspired to protect their scheme and ill-gotten gains by attempting to destroy NDC and move its resources and partnerships to another organization where they could continue exploiting donors’ funds and the organization’s resources with minimal oversight,” it said.
The suit said the trio’s conduct “gives rise to criminal liability…at a minimum, a third degree felony.”
NationalDiversityCouncil.org now leads to a website of an organization that purports to be the National Diversity Council, listing Kennedy as its founder and no board. Dawn Hooper, an accountant who is managing the bankruptcy for NDC’s board, told The Daily Wire that the site is “not operated by the National Diversity Council.”
In addition to the for-profit D&L Inc., Kennedy ran two Texas-based nonprofits, the Texas Diversity Council and the California Diversity Council, which were used to double-dip on salaries for the trio and siphon off consulting revenue from NDC, while using NDC staff and resources for all the groups’ expenses, the lawsuit said.
According to tax disclosures, in 2021 Kennedy was paid $787,000 in salary by the national nonprofit and $351,113 from the Texas one; Valenciano was paid $460,000 from NDC and $133,000 from Texas; and deGroot was paid $460,000 from national and $123,000 from Texas. The IRS filings claim Valenciano and deGroot worked 40 hours a week for the Texas nonprofit while also working 35 hours a week for the national nonprofit. They also claim Kennedy worked 40 hours a week for the Texas nonprofit, which would leave little time for his many for-profit ventures or the national nonprofit.
75 hours a week! “Jason deGroot was a graft-driving man…”
A tax form provided to help attendees pay for conference tickets indicates that the payment would go to D&L Inc. According to Texas business filings, D&L Inc.’s corporate registration was revoked in March 2023 for failure to pay taxes, but was reinstated two months later.
The fake NDC website says “The National Diversity & Leadership Conference celebrates its 25th year as one of the largest and most prestigious events dedicated to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace and beyond. This year’s conference will feature an inspiring keynote address by Oprah Winfrey.” The conference site says that Bill Clinton, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro, and left-wing professor Cornel West will also keynote. Conference-goers can meet them for $4,999.
In 2024, in what was advertised as the conference’s 21st year, Hillary Clinton, Magic Johnson, Castro, and Eric Holder spoke.
Most of those names are long-time grifters, but you wouldn’t think that Oprah or Magic would need the money.
For $8,900, participants could “take photos with each keynote speaker listed on the Speakers page except for Hillary Clinton.”
Man, the cost for these photo ops has radically increased in my lifetime. These things used to be $50-100 bucks. Also, just how much egoboo does a picture with Eric Holder get you?
And nearly ten grand and you don’t get a picture with Hillary. Just how special does she think she is these days?
Or maybe it takes several glasses of wine for her to get through these things, and she’s simply in no condition to stand around with the grubby peasants.
For the diversity industry, it’s grift all the way down, all the time…
More DOGE revelations, more leftwing violence, more pervert school teachers arrested, Baltimore builds a ghost city, astronauts get rescued, DVDs rot, and a bunch of fierce togers with a gentle mom.
Muslim charity with links to Hamas was awarded more than $7.2 million in taxpayer cash, which has now disappeared, according to a watchdog group.
An “immediate investigation” needs to be launched into The Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) California chapter’s use of funds, according to the watchdog, who sent a complaint to the Department of Justice Thursday.
According to the Intelligent Advocacy Network (IAN), a California-based, non-partisan advocacy group, the money was given to the chapter to help re-settle impoverished immigrants in California between 2022 and 2024.
In what appears to be a sleight of hand, the money – $7,217,968.44 — was sent to CAIR-Greater Los Angeles and not to CAIR-CA, which was the only group eligible to receive it, according to the complaint.
The Greater Los Angeles chapter of the Muslim organization, which is not a registered non-profit and not eligible to handle charitable donations, received the entire pot of money according to the complaint, viewed by The Post.
I think we all know where that money went: Leftwing pockets and murdering Jews.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday shuttering the Department of Education, fulfilling a long-standing conservative wish to do away with the agency.
Trump’s order directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take the “necessary steps” to close the $268 billion agency and transfer its authority back to the states. The order does not immediately shutter the agency, and it will require programs and services to continue uninterrupted.
“Everybody knows it’s right,” Trump said moments before signing the order, which he said was 45 years in the making. “We have to get our children educated.”
The long-expected executive order will likely face significant legal challenges over whether Trump has the authority to dismantle the agency. Fully closing down the Department of Education will require congressional approval.
Since the days of President Ronald Reagan, Republicans have sought to eliminate the Department of Education, created in 1979 under former President Jimmy Carter, for its role in promoting left-wing ideology and encroaching on state authority. The Education Department’s responsibilities primarily consist of allocating grant money, administering student loans, and enforcing federal civil rights laws
Trump has long promised to terminate the agency and empower states to run their own education systems without federal interference. Shuttering the Education Department was a bullet point on the 2024 GOP platform.
National Review seems to think Trump’s plan is more flawed than the previous Republican Presidential attempts to shutter the Department of Education by not doing a goddamn thing…
The Department of Education has a budget of about $280 billion dollars per year. Less than 25% goes to educating our students.
It goes to a bureaucracy. It goes to a consultant. And that consultant then donates money back to the Democrats. And then it goes to a different consultant. And then it goes to an NGO. It is money laundering and money churning at its absolute best.
It appears that the entire point of both the Biden and Obama Administrations was to turn the entirety of the federal government into a giant graft machine for the radical left.
“Paxton Opinion States District Courts Cannot Order Sex Changes on Government ID.” State district courts can no longer direct state agencies to change a person’s sex on government documents.”
For years, the left has advanced utter untruths for cheap partisan purposes that it knew at the time were all false. And now when caught, they just shrug and say they were lying all along.
Once it was known that the first COVID-19 case originated in or near a Chinese communist virology lab engineering gain-in-function deadly viruses—with help from Western agencies—the left went into full persecution mode.
They damned as incompetent, racist, and conspiratorial any who dared follow logic and evidence to point out that the Chinese government and its military were both culpable for the virus and lying.
A million Americans died of COVID. Millions more suffered long-term injuries. Still, the left-wing media and Biden administration demonized any who dared speak the truth about a lab origin of the deadly virus.
The lies were designed to protect the guilty who had helped fund the virus’s origins, such as Doctors Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins.
The Biden government also tried to use the lab theory to ridicule a supposedly pro-Trump “conspiracy.”
Western corporate interests deeply invested in China did not want their partner held responsible for veritably killing and maiming hundreds of millions worldwide.
Almost as soon as Joe Biden was inaugurated, the left knew that he was physically and mentally unable to serve as president.
Indeed, that was the point.
Biden’s role was designed as a waxen figurine for hard-left agendas that, without the “old Joe Biden from Scranton” pseudo-moderate veneer, could never have been advanced.
His handlers operated a nightmare administration: the destruction of deterrence abroad, two theater wars, 12 million illegal aliens, a weaponized justice system, hyperinflation, and $7 trillion more in debt.
By 2017, the public knew three truths about the so-called Christopher Steele dossier.
One, it was completely fallacious—fabricated by a has-been, ex-British spy Christopher Steele. He childishly had cobbled together lurid sex stories, James Bond spy fictions, and Russian-fed disinformation to destroy the Trump candidacy and later presidency.
Two, it was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. She hid her checks behind the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GSP paywalls.
Three, the FBI under James Comey hired Steele as an informant. It helped disseminate his concocted files and was also instrumental in trying to subvert the Trump campaign and later administration.
No sane person ever believed that Hunter Biden’s laptop was the work of “Russian disinformation.” Its contents a year before the 2020 election were verified by the FBI, but it kept mum about its confirmation.
The pornographic pictures, the evidence of prostitution and drug use, the electronic communications implicating Joe Biden in his family’s illicit shake-down operation of foreign governments—all were never challenged by anyone who was associated with the laptop’s contents.
Yet future Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, along with former interim CIA Director Mike Morrell, sought to fabricate a colossal lie to arm their candidate, Joe Biden, with plausible denial in the last presidential debate before the 2020 election.
They rounded up a rogue’s gallery of 51 now utterly discredited former intelligence authorities to lie to the nation that the laptop was likely fake.
All knew the FBI had verified the laptop. But they also knew that their titles would empower their lies that the Russians likely invented the laptop to aid the sinister Trump.
The question of whether federal judges can review alien deportation orders under the Alien Enemy Act has already been decided in Ludecke v. Watkins. “The Alien Enemy Act precludes judicial review of the removal order.” Pp. 163-166. (Hat tip: Grim’s Hall.)
Sanity: ” New York’s Highest Court Blocks NYC Law Allowing Noncitizens to Vote. ‘Instead, it is plain from the language and restrictions contained in Article II that “citizen” is not meant as a floor, but as a condition of voter eligibility.'”
You may not have heard in another packed news week, but once again Recep Tayyip Erdogan is doing Erdogan things in Turkey.
Ekrem Imamoglu, Istanbul’s mayor and a high-profile member of the opposition to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was arrested along with dozens of others Wednesday, state-run media reported, in what critics said was a significant escalation of the government’s crackdown on dissent.
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The chief public prosecutor’s office ordered the arrest of about 100 people Wednesday, saying Imamoglu and others faced allegations including membership in criminal organization, bribery, aggravated fraud and unlawful acquisition of personal data. More than 80 people had been detained so far, according to local media reports.
Imamoglu, a popular politician and member of the opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, became mayor of Turkey’s largest city in 2019 and won reelection last year in high-profile races where he defeated candidates from Erdogan’s ruling party. He was expected to be selected as the CHP’s candidate for president in the party’s primary elections scheduled for this weekend. The mayorship of Istanbul is seen as a political stepping stone: Erdogan once held the role.
Over two decades in power, Erdogan has tightened his control over state institutions and deepened restrictions on speech and expression, including within the judiciary, bringing charges against and imprisoning opponents. He has also exerted widespread control over the media, universities and other institutions.
US Attorney General Pam Bondi released a statement overnight, calling the “violent attacks” on Tesla showrooms, service centers, Supercharger networks, and vehicles “nothing short of domestic terrorism.”
“The swarm of violent attacks on Tesla property is nothing short of domestic terrorism. The Department of Justice has already charged several perpetrators with that in mind, including in cases that involve charges with five-year mandatory minimum sentences,” Bondi stated in a press release.
She continued: “We will continue investigations that impose severe consequences on those involved in these attacks, including those operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes.”
The latest domestic terrorism attack on Tesla occurred at a service center in Las Vegas early Tuesday morning.
ver the next few days you’re going to see an organized progressional protest effort at Tesla stores put together by a group called Indivisible.
George Soros foundation has given Indivisible nearly $8 million dollars for their “activism”.
They’re calling these “Tesla takedown” events and they’re doing it in the midst of a domestic terror spree targeting Tesla and Tesla owners. They have these planned across the entire country. These images are just six examples.
How can this not be seen as encouraging more violence and terrorism? I personally think that any violence occurring near locations they’ve chosen should result in Soros, his foundation, Indivisible and their founders being held criminally accountable as co-conspirators.
The indivisible founders are Ezra Levin and his wife Leah Greenberg. They became “resistance” figures during Trump’s first term and their work is celebrated by elected Democrats. So yeah, it’s clear to me that the Democrats and their typical thugs are organizing this insanity.
There’s reportedly even a form protest leaders can fill out to receive “reimbursement” payments for their protests.
Meanwhile, Musk’s SpaceX Dragon crew compartment was busy returning stranded astronauts to earth, a path I’m assuming the Biden Administration didn’t pursue because there was no way to rake off leftwing graft from the rescue mission…
Plus Trump says they’ll get overtime, even if has pay it out of his own pocket:
BREAKING: Trump says he will pay the astronauts who were stranded in outer space overtime out of his own pocket.
DOOCY: They didn't get any over time. $5 per day per diem, that's $1,430 in extra pay. Can the administration fix this?
People called up North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis’ office to express polite disagreement with his policies. Ha, just kidding! They threatened to kill him and his family.
“Two Texas Universities Investigated by U.S. Department of Education for ‘Race-Exclusionary Practices.'” That would be Rice University and North Texas University.
New York Times is now saying that lab leak theory is now plausible, after years of attacking anyone who mentioned it as “conspiracy theorists.” And yes, Not The Bee used the Hot Dog Guy meme.
“Federal Prosecutors Secure Convictions for 2022 Human Smuggling Event that Killed 53.”
Federal prosecutors announced the convictions of two of the human smugglers responsible for the horrific 2022 mass casualty event wherein 53 people were killed and 11 injured after being locked into a tractor-trailer and left in the Texas heat.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) described the tragedy as the single deadliest human smuggling case in U.S. history at the time. Four men, all Mexican nationals, were charged in connection with the crime: 30-year-old Riley Covarrubias-Ponce, 28-year-old Felipe Orduna-Torres, 37-year-old Luis Rivera-Leal, and 53-year-old Armando Gonzales-Ortega.
Fast forward, and the DOJ confirmed in a press statement that Orduna-Torres and Gonzalez-Ortega were convicted for their roles in the alien smuggling conspiracy that led to the deaths.
Japan’s “evaporated people,” who completely abandon their previous life, family and friends to move to slums anonymously. Some similarities with American homeless or China’s “lie flat” movement, but I get the impression a big difference is that evaporated people are primarily motivated by shame of failure.
Baltimore offers tax incentives to inner harbor development project, only to create a ghost city.
Kotaku gets a defamation lawsuit by former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. Some people are calling it “Gawker 2.0.”
A music bigwig who helped launch Nipsey Hussle’s career and was lauded as rap’s “godfather” has been accused of running a “Mafia-like” criminal enterprise involving murder, human trafficking, robbery and extortion on the streets of Los Angeles.
Eugene Henley Jr. — known as “Big U” in the entertainment world — was one of 18 members of the Rollin’ 60s Neighborhood Crips street gang charged in a sprawling federal racketeering complaint, the US Attorney’s Office said Wednesday.
Henley has “maintained the image of an entertainment industry entrepreneur running a music label and of somebody who gives back to the community here in Los Angeles,” US Attorney Joseph T. McNally said while announcing the indictment.
Amazon driver goes ballistic, cussing out woman’s doorbell camera for “buying all this shit.” Turns out the woman is in a wheelchair. Pink slip ensues.
New Yorker art critic Jackson Arn fired for “making ‘inappropriate overtures’ at some of the party guests and appeared to be drunk.” I hold no water for Arn (a lefty who used to write for The Nation) or Conde Naste (Teen Vogue), but “getting drunk and making a pass” at a holiday party used to be a forgivable sin in corporate American, but the woke religion of social justice is incapable of offering forgiveness or redemption. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
A simplified description of how your brain actually operates. I wouldn’t take it as gospel, but I’m regretting that I never actually read Marvin Minsky’s The Society of Mind…
Rick Beato interviews Hans Zimmer. “The job is not to listen to the director telling you what the music is he wants, because if if he knows what music he wants, then he can do it himself. My job is to sort of listen to him tell me the story and then do the thing that he can’t even imagine.”
One of the seven small federal agencies that President Donald Trump ordered downsized or eliminated on Friday was rife with corruption, with its employees hiring friends and relatives, commissioning paintings of themselves, and using government credit cards to indulge in constant luxuries.
The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) occupied a nine-story office tower on D.C.’s K Street for only 60 employees, many of whom actually worked from home, prior to the pandemic. Its managers had luxury suites with full bathrooms; one manager would often be “in the shower” when she was needed, while another used her bathroom as a cigarette lounge. FMCS recorded its director as being on a years-long business trip to D.C. so he could have all of his meals and living expenses covered by taxpayers, simply for showing up to the office.
FMCS is a 230-employee agency that exists to serve as a voluntary mediator between unions and businesses. As an “independent agency,” its director nominally reports to the president, but the agency is so small that in effect, there is no oversight at all — and it showed, becoming a real-life caricature of all the excesses that the Department of Government Efficiency has alleged take place in government.
This reporter spent a year investigating the agency a decade ago, and I found egregious and self-serving violations of hiring, pay, contracting, and purchase card rules. One thing I could not discover is why the agency actually existed, other than to provide luxurious lifestyles for its employees. Endless junkets to resort destinations, which employees openly used to facilitate personal vacations, were justified as building awareness of the agency in the hopes that someone would actually want to use its voluntary services.
FMCS seemed, quite clearly, to exist for the benefit of those on its payroll, and not much else. One employee told me: “Let me give you the honest truth: A lot of FMCS employees don’t do a hell of a lot, including myself. Personally, the reason that I’ve stayed is that I just don’t feel like working that hard, plus the location on K Street is great, plus we all have these oversized offices with windows, plus management doesn’t seem to care if we stay out at lunch a long time. Can you blame me?”
Top FMCS official George Cohen used a “recreation and reception fund” to order champagne and $200 coasters for his office, and to purchase artwork painted by his wife. The tiny agency commissioned paintings of its top employees — as one employee told me, “like they were reigning kings or something…I’ve never seen anything like it before.” It spent $2,402 retouching the portrait of someone who briefly held the top job in an acting capacity.
FMCS employees “unblocked” their government credit cards to turn off typical abuse protections, then used them to apparently fund personal expenses and simply bill anything they’d like to the government. One employee leased a BMW; another (IT director James Donnen) billed the government for his wife’s cell phone, cable TV at both his home and his vacation home, and even his subscription to USA Today.
Employee Dan W. Funkhouser used his FMCS card to rent a storage unit near his home in rural Virginia, two hours from the office he supposedly worked at, which was used to store personal possessions such as a photo album of his dog, Buster. Funkhouser also spent $18,000 at a jewelry store near his house, and “destroyed all purchase card records upon leaving the agency,” an audit said.
When Charles Burton retired from FMCS, he incorporated an LLC to which another FMCS employee paid $85,000 using his purchase card, listing it as a “Call Center Service,” even though the company had neither a website nor a working phone.
When an accountant, Carol Booth, blew the whistle on financial abuses to the General Services Administration, which manages purchase cards and contracting, Cohen forced her to send an email (which he wrote under her name) rescinding her statement.
Like something out of “The Office,” the employees spent an inordinate amount of time and money congratulating one another for being employed there and engaging in “work” that really amounted to pampering themselves.
One purchase was for $30,000 on trinkets making employees’ anniversaries. The agency’s office was absurdly oversized, but it refused to move. It hired a consultant for a “Hallway Improvement Project” to decorate. It had an in-house gym for employees, and purchased a $1,000 TV for the gym, a $3,867 ice-maker, and a $560 stereo.
The expenses that were actually business-related were hardly better. It paid, for example, $895 “for Suzanne Nichter’s enrollment in the English Essentials: A Grammar Refresher course” and $735 “for Lakisha Steward to attend Listening and Memory Skills Development Course.”
FMCS used federal jobs as a spigot of cash for friends and relatives. Allison Beck, a former union lawyer who became a top FMCS official, employed her sister-in-law as a “special assistant,” and an inspector general found evidence that she tried to create a high-level job for a friend.
FMCS employees allegedly steered contracts to friends, allowing them to write the “statement of work” that would be used to choose the contract winner — resulting in, of course, their own selection. Such “trainers” were paid $1,500 per day per person to train FMCS’s staff, plus $163 an hour for travel. When a low-level employee eventually said the extra travel pay ran afoul of federal rules, a contractor made clear he viewed it as an entitlement, huffing: “Work we have successfully performed for the agency for more than a decade — at great personal sacrifice, I should add — will be taken away unless we comply in an unquestioning manner with your edict.”
Scot Beckenbaugh, a top agency official, was paid $174,000 a year, but that wasn’t enough: He had his “duty station” listed as Iowa so that he could have all of his living expenses and food paid for in D.C., where he lived and worked, as if he was on a six-year-long business trip. When an employee raised the issue to an agency lawyer, the lawyer told him he “should not raise these issues … it would open a can of worms.”
FMCS hired a former mail carrier who lived in Pennsylvania, Lu-Ann Glaser, for a high-level, D.C.-based job, and agreed to pay for her to stay in a hotel for half of every month — even though it would have been easy to find someone better qualified who didn’t need to be put up in a hotel to simply do her job.
Paul Voight, a human resources official, was listed as living in D.C. even though he actually lived in Wisconsin, in order to fraudulently obtain higher cost-of-living pay. Voight’s boss was Artur Pearlstein, who left the agency to become a law professor, and was then re-hired after his academic career imploded in a plagiarism scandal. His first move in his new job was terminating an independent investigation into FMCS staff abusing taxpayer funds for personal gain.
How convenient.
Some of these things may lie in a gray area, but others are out and out fraud against the American taxpayer. At the very least, these bureaucrats living like kings should be forced to reimburse the federal government for clearly illegal cases of bilking the American taxpayer. For others, they need to be indicted for fraud as an example to others.
The Democratic-dominated Deep State has been living high on the hog for decades while the taxpayers they ripped off have trouble paying for eggs. And now DOGE is bringing all these abuses to light.
And there are hundreds of similar agencies still to be probed.
It’s hard to keep up with all the waste and fraud allegations coming out of the DOGE deep-dives into the labyrinth depths of federal funding swamps. Musk just went on Ted Cruz’s Verdict podcast and revealed some new twists.
Musk estimates that there is an 80/20 ratio of waste to fraud in the federal budget and says $1 trillion in annual savings is not outside the realm of possibility.
“You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes, okay? It’s very obvious, basic stuff. In every government department, and I say ‘every’ because we’ve not yet found a single exception, there are far too many software licenses and media subscriptions, meaning many more software licenses and media subscriptions than there are humans in the department. Like, an agency with 15,000 people might have 30,000 licenses,” Musk said. “We found entire situations of software licenses or media subscriptions where there were zero logins. And yet we were paying for it. Yes, the government was paying for thousands of licenses of software or media subscriptions, and no one had ever logged in even once. Or, like credit cards—you found the same thing with government credit cards. We found that there are twice as many credit cards as there are humans.”
“I still don’t have a good explanation for why this is the case. And these are $10,000-limit cards, so it’s a lot of money.”
“It’s like 80% waste, 20% fraud but you do have sort of gray areas. We saw a lot of payments going out of treasury that had no payment code, no explanation to the payment,” Musk said. “Like a contract was supposed to be shut off, but someone forgot to shut it off, so the company kept getting money. is that waste or fraud? Both.”
“One of the biggest scam/fraud hauls we’ve uncovered -which is crazy- is that the government can give money to a so-called ‘non-profit’ with very few controls and there’s no auditing subsequently of that non-profit,” Musk said. “They then give themselves lavish insane salaries, expense everything to the non-profit, buying jets and homes and all sorts of things.”
“This is happening at scale,” Musk said. “This is not just one or two, we’re seeing this everywhere. It’s insane.”
“You may think that these government computers all talk to each other—they synchronize, they add up what funds are going somewhere, and it’s coherent, that the numbers you’re presented as a senator are actually the real numbers,” Musk offered. “They’re not.”
“I mean, they’re not totally wrong, but they’re probably off by 5% or 10% in some cases.”
“So, I call it a ‘magic money computer,’ any computer which can just make money out of thin air,” he said. “It just issues payments. And you said there’s something like 11 of these computers at the Treasury that are sending out trillions in payments? They’re mostly at the Treasury. Some are at HHS, some—there’s one or two at State. There’s some at DOD. I think we’ve found now 14 magic money computers. They just send money out of nothing.”
“The government is run by computers. So, you’ve got essentially several hundred computers that effectively run the government,” Musk said. “So, when somebody, even when the President, issues an executive order, that’s going to go through a whole bunch of people until, ultimately, it is implemented at a computer somewhere. If you want to know what the situation is with accounting, and you’re trying to reconcile accounting and get rid of waste and fraud, you must be able to analyze the computer databases. Otherwise, you can’t figure it out—because what you’re doing is asking a human, who will then ask another human, ask another human, and finally usually ask some contractor, who will ask another contractor to do a query on the computer.”
How many of those “magic money computers” were directly transferring money to Democratic pockets?
It seems like it’s graft, fraud and corruption all the way down.
Government leftists at USAID call to break the law to cover their tracks, DOGE uncovers still more outrageous examples of government waste, Democratic bagman john Podesta showered billions on newly created NGOs, billions in LA homeless funds are unaccounted for, Syrian jihadis slaughter civilians, more pedo teachers get caught, lobbyists rake in big bucks, and the heart-stopping thrills of a man…baking.
A senior USAID official on Tuesday ordered the agency’s remaining staff to report to their now-former headquarters in Washington DC for an “all day” group effort to destroy documents, many of which contain sensitive information, Politico reports.
The materials marked for destruction include “classified safes and personnel documents” at the Ronald Reagan Building, according to an email sent by USAID’s acting executive director, Erica Carr.
“Shred as many documents first, and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break,” read the email instructing staff to label the burn bags with “SECRET” and “USAID/B/IO” (which stands for “bureau or independent office”) in dark sharpie.
Again, how is this not breaking the The Federal Records Act and other laws against destroying evidence?
Legal Insurrection readers may recall that late last year, Brent Efron, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) special advisor implementing Biden’s climate agenda, made many controversial statements during an undercover video about the agency’s actions in anticipation of a potential Trump administration.
Efron reportedly told Project Veritas that the EPA was rapidly distributing billions of dollars in grants to nonprofits as an “insurance policy” against Trump winning the election. He described the situation as “throwing gold bars off the Titanic,” referring to the urgency with which the agency allocates funds.
Now the Trump Administration has followed those gold bars. An exclusive report by the New York Post indicates the trail of those bars led back to Deep State Obama/Biden minion, John Podesta.
The story began in September 2022, when Biden named Podesta to helm the $375 billion climate fund, which resulted from the Inflation Reduction Act, a 2022 law that was basically “Green New Deal” poison hidden beneath a wrapper of sweet economic promises.
Here is how The New York Times announced the 2022 fund creation:
As a senior adviser to Mr. Biden on clean energy innovation, Mr. Podesta will shape how the government disburses billions of dollars in tax credits and incentives to industries that are developing wind and solar energy, as well as to consumers who want to install solar panels, heat and cool their homes with electric heat pumps or buy electric vehicles.
..In an interview, Mr. Podesta described his new job as “throwing the weight of federal government policy behind a cycle of investment and innovation that we haven’t seen before in the United States, and that is almost unique in the world.”
There was absolutely no questioning by The New York Times as to where these monies would go, or how the funds would be used to help either our climate or energy industry.
On the other hand, the New York Post has a map of the gold bar trail. Apparently, billions went to “Non-Governmental Organizations” that were founded after the fund was created.
The Biden administration funneled at least $20 billion dollars into environmental groups, most of which had only recently been founded, The Post has discovered.
In one case, former Vice President Kamala Harris handed over a check for nearly $7 billion to Bethesda, Maryland, based group Climate United Fund, which does not appear in the IRS’s charities database, and has no federal filings.
The non-profit fund had only been incorporated in Delaware on November 30, 2023, according to public records, five months before Harris handed over the cash in April 2024.
The Climate United Fund then announced “the historic investment” in a press release, noting the group’s work “delivers benefits like cleaner air…and increased energy security.”’
However, because the company is so new, there is no publicly published accounting of how it plans to spend the $7 billion.
Climate Fund, which received nearly $7 billion in Biden Climate Gold, was just one of eight similarly set-up entities. Others are:
Coalition for Green Capital: Received $5 billion
Power Forward Communities: Received $2 billion
Opportunity Finance Network: Received $2.29 billion
Inclusiv: Received $1.87 billion
Justice Climate Fund: Received $940 million
Appalachian Community Capital: Received $500 million
“Exposed: Secret Pact Between 14 Blue States, Left-Wing Groups, and NYC Law Firms.”
Well, well, well. It’s hardly a surprise to discover that the wave of lawsuits against Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is no coincidence. The Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation has obtained a copy of a secret agreement outlining a coordinated legal offensive—an alliance between 14 blue states, left-wing activist groups, and prominent NYC law firms—all targeting DOGE and Musk himself.
What is surprising, however, is that they actually formalized their nefarious intentions.
Signed less than a month after DOGE began operations, this agreement is yet another example of the Democrats’ “whatever it takes” brand of political warfare.
The document begins:
This Common Interest Agreement (“Agreement) is made and entered into by and between the States of New Mexico, Arizona, Michigan, Califomia [sic], Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington and State Democracy Defenders Fund (the “Parties”). The Parties have agreed that they have a common interest in developing legal strategies to challenge the creation and actions of the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE) and the actions of Elon Musk as a special government employee and a common interest in existing or future investigative, regulatory, administrative, and judicial actions or inactions, including but not limited to any administrative or judicial proceedings related to or arising from those legal strategies (“Matters of Common Interest”).
“The Democrats are on the wrong end of an 80-20 issue, fighting tooth and nail to block a federal government audit that has already uncovered more than $105 billion in fraud, waste, and abuse. A recent Harvard/Harris poll shows that 76% of voters support DOGE’s efforts, yet Democrats—whose job is to represent the interests of their constituents—have gone to extraordinary lengths to obstruct it, even putting their opposition in writing.”
1. Billions in “Dark Money” Outpacing Political Parties
Arabella’s network raised $2.4 billion in the 2020 election cycle, dwarfing the combined fundraising of the Democratic and Republican National Committees. This tax-exempt cash, hidden from public scrutiny, fueled anti-Trump campaigns and progressive agendas, all while average Americans had no clue their tax system enabled it. It’s a shadow operation that makes traditional political spending look like pocket change.
2. Fake Grassroots “Pop-Ups” Everywhere
The Sixteen Thirty Fund, an Arabella spoke, spins up temporary “pop-up” groups like Floridians for a Fair Shake or Opportunity Wisconsin, which vanish after their mission—say, attacking a senator or pushing a ballot measure—is done. These tax-exempt fronts, funded by anonymous donors, masquerade as local movements while redirecting millions to sway elections, leaving taxpayers blind to the manipulation. It’s a conveyor belt of synthetic activism, exploiting 501(c) loopholes.
3. Funding Supreme Court Protests
Demand Justice, birthed by the Sixteen Thirty Fund, spent millions opposing Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, complete with costumed activists and aggressive ad blitzes. This tax-exempt war chest didn’t just influence public opinion—it tried to bully the judiciary, all subsidized by a tax code Americans fund. Most folks never connected the dots to Arabella’s puppet strings behind the chaos.
4. Zuck Bucks’ Election Meddling
Arabella’s New Venture Fund funneled $25 million to the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which then got $350 million from Mark Zuckerberg to “administer” 2020 elections—read: juice Democratic turnout in swing states. Tax-exempt dollars turned local election offices into partisan tools, and the public was none the wiser about this backdoor power grab. It’s a masterclass in using charity status to rig the game.
5. Foreign Billionaires Pulling Levers
Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss has pumped at least $208 million into the Sixteen Thirty Fund since 2016, exploiting tax laws that let foreigners bankroll U.S. political causes through “dark pools.” This foreign cash—untouchable by direct campaign finance rules—shapes American policy, yet taxpayers footing the system’s bill don’t even know his name. It’s a loophole so big you could drive a Swiss bank vault through it.
he report painted a grim picture of Los Angeles’ homeless program managed by Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), which was established in 1993.
“Repetitive information gaps, coupled with a lack of accurate and complete data and documentation, posed significant obstacles to this assessment,” the report states.
“Insufficient financial accountability led to an inability to trace substantial funds allocated to the City Programs. Fragmented data systems across LAHSA, the City, and the County and inconsistent reporting formats made it challenging to verify spending and the number of beds or units reported by the City and LAHSA, track participant outcomes, and align financial data with performance metrics.”
The report also cites a paucity of uniform data standards and real-time oversight, which limited the ability of the auditor to fully assess the true impact of homeless programs and raised concerns of resource misallocation.
A&M found that key stakeholders failed to monitor homelessness programs, and that LAHSA was unable to identify relevant service provider contracts and expenses. It also found gaps in documentation.
Of course there are gaps in documentation. That’s to hide the graft disappearing into leftwing pockets…
Crimea, Sevastopol, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk — these are regions of Russia. They are written into the constitution. This is a given fact,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. That amounts to one-fifth of Ukraine’s legitimate, internationally recognized pre-war territory. Putin demands that Ukraine permanently renounce any claim to these territories.
Ukraine must disarm itself of any NATO weapons. Of course, the top suppliers of the Ukrainian military are the United States with $69.7 billion worth of weapons systems and ammunition since the start of the war, Germany with $13.7 billion worth, the United Kingdom at $10.8 billion worth, Denmark at $8.1 billion worth, Sweden at $5.1 billion worth, Poland at $3.9 billion worth, France at $3.8 billion worth, and Canada at $2.8 billion worth. (All figures from the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine support tracker, converted from Euros to dollars, and as of December 31, 2024.) All those countries are NATO members, and thus, under the Russian demands, Ukraine would have to give up all weapons systems received from those countries. This amounts to a unilateral disarming of the Ukrainian military, in exchange for a promise from a former KGB lieutenant colonel that he will not start the war again.
Putin also demanded that Ukraine cap its military size. Previously, Putin had demanded Ukraine limit the size of its army to 50,000 troops. As of January, the Ukrainian army is 880,000 troops, meaning that Russia wants the Ukrainian army to be reduced to less than 6 percent of its current size.
According to CNN, “Putin also suggested that Ukraine halt mobilization and any training of its troops, and that other nations stop supplying weapons to Kyiv during the ceasefire.” Halt any training of troops.
Putin insisted no foreign peacekeepers can enter Ukrainian territory.
Ukraine must abandon the idea of NATO membership. While the Trump administration had already made this concession before negotiations began, note that Putin is establishing a system where he gets a veto over which countries NATO can accept.
The U.S. must return six diplomatic compounds that Russia contends were seized illegally by the United States between 2016 and 2018.
All Western economic sanctions upon Russia are illegal and must be lifted.
Bob [Robert B.] Laughlin, who’s a physics professor at Stanford, he got a Nobel Prize in Physics 1998. And he suffered from the extreme delusion that once he got a Nobel Prize in Physics, he’d be free to look at anything he wanted to. And the area of science that he went after was: he was convinced that most scientists, even at a place like Stanford, weren’t really doing very much work, weren’t doing very much science, were stealing money from taxpayers…This was a more this was a more taboo question, more taboo topic, than just going narrowly after climate science, or, you know, or any of these things. And obviously, he got promptly defunded and his grad students couldn’t get PhDs anymore. [My] sort of hermeneutic of suspicion is that if there’s a topic you can’t discuss, if there ideas you aren’t allowed to articulate, my shortcut is they’re just true.
Remember all the way back in 1986, when the New York Times blithely asserted as fact that evangelicals are “more easily led than other kinds of voters?” Well, just last we they asserted that “a majority of gun owners are white, conservative, male and from rural areas.” The first three are probably true, and the fourth definitely not, and no one who was even passingly familiar with gun culture would make that mistake…
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz pinned the massacre on the country’s new leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the leader of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) terrorist group, which was an offshoot of Al-Qaeda and was close to ISIS.
“Al-Julani took off his [robe], put on a suit, and presented a moderate facade,” Katz wrote in a post on X that included a video of scores of people who had been massacred. “Now, he has removed the mask, revealing his true face: a jihadist terrorist from the Al-Qaeda school, committing atrocities against the Alawite civilian population.”
Murdering members of other religions is never far from the average jihadi mind.
Just a day after the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) had seized Damascus, and Bashar Assad had fled to Moscow, Assad’s army crumbled into dust, with soldiers ripping off their uniforms so as to avoid being killed by vengeful, and now triumphant, rebels. Those soldiers left largely unattended huge quantities of weaponry. The IDF seized the occasion to improve its defensive posture against Syria. There was a brief window of just a few days, between the fall of Assad and the regime in Damascus stabilizing and taking control of those abandoned weapons, during which the IDF did two things. First, it moved Israeli soldiers into Syria, where they established two new military outposts, one on the Syrian side of Mt. Hermon, and one extending further into Syria from the pre-existing buffer zone separating Israeli and Syrian troops on the Golan. Now the IDF controls the commanding heights that extend into Syria; the Israelis have a clear unimpeded view of Damascus — now literally in their sights — far below.
The second undertaking, which began just as soon as Assad had left for Russia, was the IDF’s systematic destruction of the Syrian army’s weaponry. The Israelis knew exactly where the weapons were located; they had long been preparing for a possible war against Assad, and had their target bank ready.
The IDF announced on December 10 that its air force and navy had conducted over 480 strikes in Syria in the span of 48 hours, 350 of which targeted airfields, anti-aircraft batteries, missiles, drones, fighter jets, tanks, and weapon production sites, destroying between 70% and 80% of Syria’s strategic weapons. It also sank Syria’s navy. And there was nothing that Ahmed al-Sharaa and the men of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham could do about it. Now Israel has not only made itself much safer, having removed Syria as a viable military threat to the Jewish state, but also has “demilitarized” the Jihadists in Damascus.
We have just seen that after al-Sharaa’s repeated promise that Syria’s minorities had nothing to worry about, decently, the jihadist “security services” — as they call themselves — entered Latakia to capture or kill Alawite members of Assad’s army. They were apparently ambushed by Alawite veterans of Assad’s army, and suffered a loss of 125 men. At that point, they decided to take revenge on the civilian population, killing more than 1,000 Alawite civilians — some reports claim up to 4,000 civilians have now been killed, and they also have been killing Christians — mostly Greek Orthodox but including some Melkites — because, of course, that’s what jihadists like to do. More than a thousand civilians, possibly as many as 4,000 according to some Alawite sources, have been killed in the space of two days.
The Texas Association of School Boards is a lobbying organization that is funded almost exclusively by Texas taxpayer dollars through school district dues.
According to TASB’s most recent 990 form, at least 16 of its employees make more than the governor of Texas, who earns just over $153,000 each year.
TASB paid a combined total of $927,644 to just two of its employees during fiscal year 2023.
Executive Director Dan Troxell was paid $412,101 in direct compensation by TASB. Another $64,154 is listed as “other compensation from the organization and related organizations.”
Similarly, TASB paid First Public Managing Director William Mastrodicasa $351,224 in direct reportable income. He was also paid an additional $100,165.
Nice work, if you can get it…
Mess with the bull, get the horns. “Trump admin cancels $400 million in grants to Columbia University.” How’s that pro-Hamas antisemitism working out for you?
“US House Members Push for Ban on Student Visas for Chinese Nationals.” “U.S. Rep. Riley Moore (R-WV) is spearheading the push to secure higher education institutions against espionage and intellectual theft.” I’m sure universities will panic over having to give up all that sweet commie dough…
“X Takes Down Network Of Chinese Accounts Amplifying NYT Attacks On Dissident Arts Group. The accounts, which exhibited inauthentic activity, had been used to boost articles published by The New York Times that targeted a religious group persecuted in China. One of the articles, a Chinese-language version of an attack piece on Shen Yun Performing Arts, was boosted so much it became the most shared New York Times article on X in more than a year, according to data from BuzzSumo, a social media analytics tool.” The question is, why was the NYT so eager to carry the CCP’s water attacking Falun Gong?
“Texas Awards SpaceX Over $17 Million Grant for Semiconductor R&D.” My opposition to the CHIPS Act has been noted before, but this may be already allocated money that the state is contractually obligated to award. Why would SpaceX need semiconductor research? My guess would be for advances in space radiation hardened (“rad hard”) chips. This was traditionally property of Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) rather than silicon-based chips. GaAs chips are generally orders of magnitude more radiation resistant than consumer grade chips, but GaAs is extremely brittle and difficult to work with, so much so that 6″ (150mm) wafers are the largest size for GaAs, and there still a number of older 4″ (100m) fab lines running GaAs out there. GaAs is such a pain that a lot of different substrates have been explored over the years, but I’m not sure any match GaAs’ extreme rad hard properties.
During a tornado warning, a Florida news station broadcasting the warning is hit by a tornado.
Critical Drinker didn’t care for Micky 17. “We’ll just make it dumb as fuck and hammer home the messaging with as much subtlety as a dump truck full of retarded sledgehammers.”
The Supreme Court lands on both sides of the same case, more fraud uncovered by DOGE, the Russo-Ukrainian War continues despite the White House dustup, Mark Steyn catches a break, and strange cell(block) fellows.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The Supreme Court giveth: “Supreme Court pumps brakes on order forcing Trump to shell out $2B in foreign aid.”
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts pumped the brakes on a lower court order that gave the Trump administration a midnight deadline Wednesday into Thursday to unfreeze $2 billion worth of foreign aid.
Roberts paused the order Wednesday until further notice and gave plaintiffs suing the Trump administration until noon Friday to respond, marking the first time the Supreme Court has dealt with a case involving the president’s push to overhaul the federal government.
The question at hand is the Trump administration’s 90-day freeze on US Agency for International Development spending amid a review to ensure the outlays were aligned with the president’s policies.
District Judge Amir Ali, who was appointed to the bench by former President Joe Biden, temporarily mandated that the funds continue flowing while considering the case.
Plaintiffs argued that the Trump administration did not properly unfreeze all of the money, which led to Ali giving the Trump administration a deadline of 11:59 p.m. Wednesday to fully comply.
And the Supreme Court taketh away. “The Supreme Court has *upheld* a lower court’s order forcing USAID/State to immediately pay ~$2 billion owed to contractors for work they’ve already performed….The court in a 5-4 decision upheld Washington-based U.S. District Judge Amir Ali’s order that had called on the administration to promptly release funding to contractors and recipients of grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department for their past work.”
The US Justice Department revealed Thursday evening that Mexico has begun extraditing dozens of high-level cartel leaders to the US, as President Trump reiterated that 25% tariffs on Mexican goods will take effect next Tuesday.
“The defendants taken into US custody today include leaders and managers of drug cartels recently designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists,” the DoJ wrote in a statement, adding these terrorists are facing charges including racketeering, drug-trafficking, murder, illegal use of firearms, money laundering, and other crimes.
Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office and Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection released this statement: “This morning, 29 people who were deprived of their liberty in different penitentiary centers in the country were transferred to the United States of America, which were required due to their links with criminal organizations for drug trafficking, among other crimes.”
The tariffs are currently on hold. CNN has a list of who was exchanged, including Rafael Caro Quintero, Alder Marin-Sotelo, Andrew Clark, José Ángel Canobbio Inzunza, Norberto Valencia González, José Alberto García Vilano, Evaristo Cruz Sánchez, Miguel and Omar Treviño Morales.
We touched on this in a previous LinkSwarm, but here’s more details on Stacey Abrams EPA-backed multi-billion dollar slush fund.
Three short weeks ago, a newly confirmed Lee Zeldin got to his office at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and hit the broom closet to start sweeping.
Thanks to the previous braggadocious occupants and their already well-documented pre-exit shoveling of cash and grants out the door, he had an inkling there might be plenty of questionable transactions to uncover that hadn’t exactly been notated ‘on the books’ or done ‘by the book’ either.
I mean, what were the odds?
It didn’t take long for Zeldin to find himself a whopper of a honeypot hidden away that made quite a splash when he announced it, particularly as it was tied to an infamous Project Veritas video from December boasting about its very surreptitious creation.
David covered the reveal.
Project Veritas dropped a shocker of a video back in December, in which an EPA manager was bragging that the Biden administration was metaphorically ‘dropping gold bars off the Titanic.’ They were shoving every dime they could out to their NGO buddies so they could harass the Trump administration and continue to suck off the taxpayers’ teat for years to come.
We all know such things happen, but to have it so vividly described was revealing.
Well, Lee Zeldin is retrieving those gold bars, and it turns out to be a lot of them. $20 billion, all sitting in the equivalent of a bank vault.
The massive scale of this scam–which as with so many things is SOP at government agencies–blows your mind. Pushing $20 billion out the door to friends of the administration with little to no financial controls, zero accountability, and lots of malice aforethought is only different in scale and not in kind.
Snip.
…It’s a green slush fund. $20B parked at an outside bank towards the end of the Biden administration, given to just eight NGOs…These NGOs were created for the first time, many of them just to get this money. And their pass-throughs…So the EPA entered into this account control agreement with these entities, Treasury enters into a financial agent agreement with the bank, and they design it to tie the EPA’s hands behind their back -to tie the federal government’s hands behind its back. So when the money goes through the NGOs to subgrantees, many of them also pass-throughs, we don’t know where it’s going. We don’t have the proper amount of oversight. And, as you pointed out, it’s going to people in the Obama and Biden administrations, it’s going to donors. It’s not going directly…to remediate that environmental issue…deliver that clean air…’
This is just some stunning stuff. As Zeldin told the NY Post:
…As Zeldin told The Post: “Of the eight pass-through entities that received funding from the pot of $20 billion in tax dollars, various recipients have shown very little qualification to handle a single dollar, let alone several billions of dollars.”
He’s called for the EPA’s inspector general to investigate; who knows what other rank misuse that might turn up.
Bondi and Patel are already on the case, and I hope someone from Scott Bessent’s Treasury IG thinks they should be as well.
Crawl up their collective butts, the lot of them.
No wonder Democrats continued to treat Abrams like a rock star despite high profile electoral flameouts. She’s evidently a vitally important nexus in their graft distribution schemes. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
At some point, some president was going to have to stop the unsustainable spending and borrowing.
To have any country left, some president would eventually have had to restore a nonexistent border and stop the influx of 3 million illegal aliens a year.
Some commander-in-chief finally would have to try to stop the theater wars abroad.
But any president who dared to do any of that would be damned for curbing the madness that his predecessors fueled.
And so none did—until now.
Not since Franklin Roosevelt’s rapid and mass implementation of the New Deal administrative state have Americans seen such radical changes so quickly as now in Trump’s first month of governance.
Americans are watching a long-awaited counter-revolution to bring the country out of its madness by restoring the common sense of the recent past.
It is easy to run up massive debts and hard to pay them back. Politicians profit by handing out grants and hiring thousands with someone else’s money or creating new programs by growing the debt.
Yet it is unpopular and considered “mean” to spend only what you have and to create a lean, competent workforce.
1776, not 1619, is the foundational date of America.
Biological men should not manipulate their greater size and strength to undermine the hard-won accomplishment of women athletes.
Affordable fossil fuels, when used wisely, are still essential to modern prosperity.
American education must remain empirical and inductive, not regress into indoctrination and deduction. If college campuses no longer abide by the Bill of Rights, then perhaps they should pay taxes on income from their endowments and guarantee their own student loans.
If American citizens are arrested and arraigned for violent assaults, destroying property, and resisting arrest, then surely foreign students who break the laws of their hosts should be held to the same account—and if guilty, go home.
Tribalism and racialism, and government spoils allotted by superficial appearances, are the marks of a pre-civilized society. Such racialism leads only to endless factions and discord.
It is easy to destroy a border, and hard to reconstruct it. And it was not Trump who invited in 12 million unaudited illegal aliens, a half million of them criminals.
Who is the real culprit in the Defense Department—the new secretary with the hard task of restoring the idea among depleted ranks that our race, religion, and gender are incidental, not essential, to defeating the enemy and ensuring our national security?
Is it really wise to divert money from needed combat units and weapons to indoctrinate recruits with social and cultural agendas that do not enhance, but likely undermine, our national defenses?
Who is the real callous actor—Elon Musk, who is trying to prevent the country from insolvency by eliminating fraud and waste, or those who bloated the bureaucracy in the first place with jobs and subsidies for their constituents, friends, clients, and fellow ideologues?
No one likes to fire FBI agents.
That certainly is an unpleasant job for the new FBI Director, Kash Patel.
But again, who are the true culprits who so cavalierly turned a hallowed agenda into a weaponized tool to warp elections, harass political enemies, lie under oath, surveil parents at school board meetings, doctor court documents, and protect insider friends?
Massive borrowing is an opiate addiction that needs shock treatment, not more deficits to break the habit. An unchecked administrative state becomes an organic organism that exists only to grow larger, more powerful, and more resistant to any who seek to curb it.
“DOGE reveals most savings at Dept. of Education with nearly $1B cut. DOGE claims to have saved the most money at the U.S. Department of Education out of any government agency through cuts in wasteful spending. DOGE launched an ‘Agency Efficiency Leaderboard’ that ranks government agencies based on how much wasteful funding has been cut, and the Dept. of Education is ranked in first place.”
Campus Reform reported that DOGE has canceled nearly $900 million in contracts and training grants at the Department of Education.
This includes “over $600 million in grants to institutions and nonprofits that were using taxpayer funds to train teachers and education agencies on divisive ideologies” such as critical race theory (CRT) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), according to a press release from the department.
“Diversity” had already been around for many years, its hustler scratching at the university door. Not actual diversity, mind you, but the skin-deep diversity of noxious racialism tarted-up with fake Enlightenment discourse. This concept of “diversity, equity, inclusion” quickly metastasized until it was everywhere, and this was no accident. It was a bureaucratic initiative designed to anchor a new raft of social justice programs as an inescapable presence on the campus.
It was no accident that it was violence and the threat of violence that opened the door for this effervescence of DEI. It sounded absurd. I knew it was absurd; I knew it was a con. Most people likely knew it was a con but then most people on the campuses also knew to keep their mouths shut in a time of hair-trigger tempers and performative chaos unleashed by well-funded activist groups. No college administration wanted the summer violence of 2020 overflowing onto the campuses. And so they opened the university to barbarian ideas rather than the barbarians themselves.
This was the madness of crowds brought en masse onto the campuses, and it was wildly successful. It achieved this success with a superb combination of psychological factors—relentless hustling, a primitive ideology suffused with mysticism and “indigenous knowledges,” and the barely concealed violent urges of quasi-communist and terroristic revolutionaries. All of this shielded from criticism and even the mildest of questioning.
You knew something was terribly wrong with it.
Anyone on a college campus subjected to the mediocrity of a DEI hustler knew there was something wrong with it.
It was not noble. It was not idealistic. It was not the many wonderful things its proponents said. It was one thing to the public, and it was another altogether when enacted on the campuses. It was weird and alien and hateful at its core, but the public is rarely exposed to any of this. It was the classic Potemkin village offering, with a façade masking a brute, racialist substance.
In other words, it was a con. In fact, it was the biggest Con Story of the 21st century, with America’s universities the biggest suckers imaginable. And the crowning achievement of Western civilization—the modern university—tottered under the assault of mediocrity, racialism, and pseudoscience.
I suppose that folks duped by the big cons will eventually retreat in their embarrassment at having been fooled by one of the shadiest Con Stories ever deployed. Even now, DEI is in retreat. As it plays out in its final act, I assure you that it will dissipate in a flurry of new acronyms and new labels designed to hide its failure.
Its proponents will roll out new slogans to replace the vapid “Diversity is our strength.” Already, “inclusive excellence” is supplanting DEI as this trusty acronym becomes freighted with failure. The Con Story will morph and adapt. Reluctantly. Buzzwords will change, new slogans will be coined, but the underlying ideology will remain the same as it always has. It must serve yeoman’s duty for the Big Con.
A bill came up in the senate to block men from women’s sports and every Democrat voted against it. The social justice hive mind is still controlling the Democrat party.
California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, however, has broke ranks on men playing women’s sports. Sort of. Kinda. “Notice that at no point does Newsom add, ‘And thus, I will be pushing to repeal the 2013 law that gave students the right to participate in sex-segregated programs, activities and facilities based on their self-identification and regardless of their birth gender.’ He feels that those born male participating in women’s sports is unfair, but not quite strongly enough to do anything about it.”
Guaranteed Income scheme once again fails to improve lives of recipients. “Receiving guaranteed income had no impact on the labor supply of full-time workers, but part-time workers had a lower labor market participation by 13 percentage points.” And recipients smoked more. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The first and most important question is whether Russia has lost the war. Wars are fought with an intent formed by an imperative. A prudent leader has to take steps to avoid the worst possible outcome, and Putin, as a prudent leader, prepared for the possibility that NATO would choose to attack Russia. He expressed this fear publicly so the only question was how to block an attack if it occurred. He needed a buffer zone to significantly impede a possible assault.
That buffer was Ukraine, and he on several occasions expressed regret that Ukraine had separated from Russia. The distance from the Ukraine border to Moscow, on highway M3, is only about 300 miles (480 kilometers). Russia’s nightmare was that Germany could surge its way to Moscow. Three hundred miles by a massive force staging a surprise attack is not a huge distance. He rationally needed Ukraine to widen the gap.
I predicted years before the war that Russia would invade Ukraine to regain its buffers. That Russia wanted to take the whole of Ukraine is confirmed in its first forays into the country. The initial assault was a four-pronged attack, one thrust from the east, two from the north and one from the south via Crimea. The two northern prongs were directed at the center of Ukraine and its capital, Kyiv.
Details of the failure of that plan snipped since I covered that as it was happening.
It is clear that the Russians intended to take all of Ukraine. They made minor gains in the east, but their northern penetration failed, as did any attempts to turn westward. It is true that they have gained territory in Ukraine, but it is far from what their initial war plan was designed for. Now their argument is that they never wanted more territory in other parts of the country.
To call this a Russian success is false, and to call a failed war plan a defeat is reasonable. The war was meant to gain a buffer against NATO, and in that, Moscow failed. But it was also intended to be a demonstration that Russia was still a great power. After three years, a major commitment and, by most reports, close to a million dead Russian soldiers, Russia has little more than 20 percent of Ukraine. It also failed to demonstrate the power of the Russian army. Therefore, except for its nuclear capabilities, it is not a military threat or a great power.
The issue now is whether Russia, assuming it agrees to some kind of negotiated settlement, can launch another war. Here it’s important to note that while Putin is powerful, he is not an absolute ruler. He cannot govern Russia the way, say, Stalin did. Under Stalin, Moscow ruled Russia down to the smallest homes in the smallest villages. He ruled not only through military and law enforcement but also through the rank-and-file members of the Communist Party who drew benefits from their membership in return for vigilance. They reported misdeeds, real and imagined, to the internal police, which was controlled by the party, which was controlled by the Politburo, which was controlled by Stalin. Later iterations would be slightly less deadly, but the instruments of oppression were always there.
The collapse of the Soviet Union meant the collapse of the Communist Party. The structure of terror no longer functioned.
Putin’s goal was to resurrect Russia. But with the Communist Party gone, the state structure was also gone. Putin had to find a new base. He had only one source of power: the oligarchs. Between Mikhail Gorbachev and Putin, the party’s assets were sold off to private citizens on the basis of their relationship with the government. The agreement was simple: Putin and his subordinates distributed vast industries and other things of value to the new oligarchs, who pledged to support the regime with money and deference, as well as a network of political and economic relationships that gave them significant influence.
Putin handled the politics — and apparently was well paid. The oligarchs became fabulously wealthy, and for most Russians life improved, as the new arrangement ended the terror and created employment. Disagreement was no longer a capital offense, and the media was comparatively independent and reliable. It was not long before the new private enterprises started entering the global market.
Putin was in charge at first, but in short order power was transferred to the oligarchs who underwrote the regime. They depended on access to European markets for their revenue, and many lived outside of Russia and expected Putin to facilitate trade. But when Putin’s initial invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 failed, many of the most lucrative markets closed their doors to the oligarchs and Western investment cratered. Putin ordered the oligarchs to return to Russia, which many did. However, some of the oligarchs were not happy with their former patron and left Russia permanently, or until the political and economic environment would shift. That this has gone on for three years has created serious problems for them. They wanted the war over and a settlement reached long ago.
Snip.
Putin must end the war and hope for the best. The best way to end a failed war is to declare victory and go home. Putin is declaring victory by saying he got all he wanted. But only Americans believe that. The Russians know they lost. The question is not how Putin will suppress dissent. It is how he will deal with the devils he created, and how the country responds if he doesn’t. A reign of terror might help, but there is no mechanism to carry it out now, and later is too late.
U.S. President Donald Trump knows the game that is playing out. The one who blinks loses. It won’t be Trump. He will take every bit of power and every cent he can from Putin’s weakness. Like a good hedge fund manager, one moment he says he is Putin’s friend, the next moment he will walk away from the deal. Then, after the borrower really starts sweating, he will come back. Trump holds the cards in this business. And he wants some of Putin’s economic and geopolitical power.
What SpaceX is building is more than just a rocket. Starship is a strategic weapon, not as a one-off but as a fleet. A fully reusable heavy-lift system capable of hauling 200 tons per launch per rocket is not just an engineering marvel: it’s a military revolution.
Why? Because a fleet of Starships could land an entire armored division anywhere on Earth in under an hour and keep it supplied in the field.
Just as the speed of tanks revolutionized warfare between the World Wars, this development changes everything. Forget C-17s and cargo ships: you might as well use horses and wagons. A fleet of Starships is not just an incremental improvement in logistics: it’s a fundamental shift in the nature of warfare. The ability to almost instantaneously create and reinforce a whole combat theater anywhere on Earth will give the United States overwhelming power, unlike anything heretofore seen outside of science fiction.
And let me stress: we’re not just talking about the initial deployment. The bigger deal is the resupply. It took six months in 1990-91 for the United States to get its forces in position to invade Kuwait. Maintaining them in the field required a constant stream of slow-moving cargo ships from U.S. ports halfway around the world. A decade later, and for 20 years thereafter, a similar supply chain ran through Karachi, Pakistan, up a rail line, then on truck convoys over the Khyber Pass. Since that was often impractical (there were these pesky Taliban guys about), the military frequently had to rely on the only available alternative, a grueling 36 hours on a C-17 (including layovers). All of this depended on deals with shady, unfriendly countries, subsidies (bribes), and endless risk of attacks on our personnel.
What if you could ship everything you wanted anywhere in the world straight from Texas? Or Florida? Or anywhere else? In under an hour?
Wars are often won by those who can move the fastest, supply the best, and sustain their forces longest. A conflict in Taiwan or the Baltics could see adversaries complete their objectives before the U.S. military can even begin meaningful counter-operations.
Starship negates all these timelines. Instead of waiting days or weeks for military assets to arrive by conventional means, forces could be on the ground on the same day as an invasion. No need for prepositioned stockpiles, forward operating bases, or painfully slow sealift capabilities. Those days are over.
In a Taiwan crisis, Starship could land American armor and mechanized infantry before the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) finishes crossing the Strait. It would change the strategic calculus entirely. Every U.S. war game predicting Taiwan’s fall under a rapid Chinese assault assumes conventional response times. Starship forces a complete rethink, for both sides. It will allow American forces to arrive in time to fight the decisive battle, not the delayed counter-offensive.
I think the Starship assembly timeline is a bit optimistic, but point-to-point global logistics really is a game-changer. (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)
California is getting the energy policy it deserves, good and hard.
Back when I served in the California State Assembly from 2004 to 2010, California ranked 7th or 8th in the nation for electricity costs. At the time, the Democratic majority in Sacramento was pushing bill after bill mandating greater reliance on renewable energy, assuring everyone that these policies would make us look like “geniuses” when the price of fossil fuels inevitably soared.
I warned that these laws, regulations and subsidies would instead drive up electricity costs for Californians, making the grid less reliable and California’s economy less competitive.
Now, two decades later, the results are in. In 2024, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that California had the second-highest electricity prices in the nation for the second year running, behind only Hawaii. The Golden State’s misguided energy policies have steadily increased the price of electricity as green energy mandates, grid instability and regulatory burdens have taken their toll. Meanwhile, states with more balanced energy policies — natural gas, coal and nuclear power — have fared far better.
What’s worse, California’s natural advantage in AI will be lost to Texas and other low-cost energy states. California’s industrial electricity prices averaged 21.98 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2023 vs. 6.26 in Texas, a whopping 251% price premium that no electricity-hungry AI installation or server farm operator is going to pay.
The core issue is simple: California’s policymakers prioritized renewable energy mandates over affordability and reliability. Over the years, they have forced utilities to integrate ever-growing amounts of wind and solar power while discouraging natural gas, nuclear and large-scale hydroelectric projects. These decisions ignored the reality that intermittent renewables require extensive grid upgrades, costly backup power sources and expensive storage solutions — all of which drive up costs for consumers and industry.
California’s high electricity prices are not an accident; they are a direct consequence of these policies. The state’s cap-and-trade system, restrictive permitting laws and mandates like the Renewable Portfolio Standard (which requires utilities to generate 60% of their electricity from renewables by 2030) have all contributed to rising rates.
At the same time, bureaucratic obstacles have made it nearly impossible to build new natural gas plants or modernize existing infrastructure. From 2014 to 2024, California approved or built only five natural gas plants, four of which replaced older facilities for a total output of up to 4 gigawatts. By comparison, in the prior 10 years, California commissioned dozens of plants totaling more than 20 gigawatts of nameplate capacity.
Follow-up: Remember the guy who opened fire at a band competition before being tackled by four band parents? He died in the hospital.
“Honors student sues Connecticut school district for not teaching her to read and write. Meet Aleysha Ortiz, a 19-year-old who graduated with honors from Hartford Public High School in Connecticut. It would seem congratulations are in order … except she says she’s functionally illiterate.”
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BREAKING: Trump says he will pay the astronauts who were stranded in outer space overtime out of his own pocket.
(@AMAZlNGNATURE) 
