It’s been an expensive month. I had to get a new dishwasher, quarterly home and car insurance payments were due, and my dog Avery has enlarged lymph nodes that my vet and I are hoping is just due to her current bad bout of allergies (hence buying a lot of medicine) and not cancer. I’ll find out in a couple of weeks. Fingers crossed.
The Russiagate Hoax gets investigated, more WINNING, Iran’s nuke program confirmed to be toast, Colbert vs. Math, Gen Z workers get roasted, and The Case of Too Much Moose Meat.
The Department of Justice announced on Wednesday the creation of a so-called strike force to investigate allegations advanced by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that former President Barack Obama and members of his administration led a “treasonous” conspiracy to promote the false claim that Trump colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election.
The task force announcement came hours after Gabbard released a previously classified House Intelligence Committee report that said the conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s was interested in aiding Trump was based on “one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports.”
The DOJ strike force will assess the legal options it can take in response to the “alleged weaponization of the intelligence community.”
“Our facilities have been damaged, seriously damaged, the extent of which is now under evaluation,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed in a Fox News “Special Report” interview on July 21.
Later in the interview, Araghchi conceded that “the facilities have been destroyed,” referring to nuclear enrichment sites that were targeted by the U.S. military on June 22. President Donald Trump authorized the strikes amid a nearly two-week aerial war between Iran and Israel.
I’m sure this will completely end any discussion of the effectiveness of the strike in the comments…
The Iranian nuclear sites were bombed 24 days ago. Despite high-profile figures making predictions of near-apocalyptic consequences of that action, the Iranian retaliation, so far, consisted of a missile strike on a geodesic dome used for communications at the Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar. Parnell said the Iranian response “did minimal damage to equipment and structures on the base.”
(If you think you’re having a tough day, imagine being a salesman for the air-defense systems purchased by the Iranian regime. Israel dismantled Iran’s air defenses within 48 hours. Zohar Palti, former head of intelligence for the Mossad, told Sky News, “This is shocking in a way. This is amazing. We thought that it would be much harder. It was much more fast than we anticipated.” Despite claims from the Iranian government, there are no confirmed shootdowns of Israeli or U.S. planes.)
This morning, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany agreed to restore tough U.N. sanctions on Iran by the end of August if there has been no concrete progress toward a new nuclear deal.
Today, Benjamin Baird, the director of MEF Action at the Middle East Forum, writes at NR, “Congress has already introduced much of the legislation needed to bring the ayatollah to his knees, and committee chairmen need only hold markup hearings to advance these bills and send them to the House and Senate floors.” This legislation would enact crushing sanctions on key parts of the Iranian economy, place an economic stranglehold on Iran’s remaining proxies, rescind Biden-era loopholes, and undermine the Iranian regime’s ability to censor information.
The year 2025 has been a terrible one for the Iranian mullahs, and we’re not even in August yet.
Snip.
“Across every branch of the U.S. armed forces, military recruitment has significantly increased since President Trump took office . . . the Army hitting its goal four months early and the Navy doing so three months early. The Air Force and Space Force have both achieved their recruiting goals three months ahead of schedule.”
Speaking of foreign economies, the official numbers from the Chinese government tell us they’re easily withstanding the trade war and tariffs. But Reuters reports that once you look closer, the Chinese economy is showing signs of strain:
Contract and bill payment delays are rising, including among export champions like the autos and electronics industries and at utilities, whose owners, indebted local governments, have to run a tight shop while shoring up tariff-hit factories.
Ferocious competition for a slice of external demand, hit by global trade tensions, is crimping industrial profits, fueling factory-gate deflation even as export volumes climb. Workers bear the brunt of companies cutting costs.
Falling profits and wages shrank tax revenues, pressuring state employers like Zhang’s to cut costs as well. In pockets of the financial system, non-performing loans are surging as authorities push banks to lend more.
The New York Times warns that China’s “local governments are swimming in debt after decades of building airports, train stations and bridges.” (And if you’ve been reading our Thérèse Shaheen, you know that modern China is beset by four walls closing in on them — environmental degradation, runaway debt, the inherent flaws of a centrally planned economy, and demographics of an aging and declining population.)
Closer to home, the U.S. unemployment rate is 4.1 percent, low by historical standards. The U.S. has 7.8 million job openings. Inflation ticked up a bit last month, to 2.7 percent, which is not great (and a likely consequence of the tariffs), but it’s still down from the 3 percent number in January. The stock market has won back all of its big losses from the spring, and the NASDAQ closed at another all-time high yesterday.
Plenty more winning at the link.
Remember in last week’s LinkSwarm how Alan Dershowitz claimed two federal judges were blocking access to Jeffery Epstein information? Well:
A federal judge in Florida on Wednesday denied a request from the Trump administration to unseal grand jury transcripts from an investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Separately, the House Oversight Committee has issued a subpoena for Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s long-time associate, in an attempt to obtain further details about his high-profile clients.
Chairman James Comer of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform issued the subpoena Wednesday to Maxwell for a deposition at a federal correctional institution in Tallahassee, Florida, on August 11. Representative Tim Burchett made the motion for Comer to subpoena Maxwell, who was convicted for her role helping Epstein solicit minors for prostitution, in a Tuesday House subcommittee hearing. The motion was adopted by voice vote.
Snip.
United States District Judge Robin Rosenberg denied the request in a 12-page opinion Wednesday, saying she could not legally release the transcripts under the guidelines that govern grand jury secrecy set by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit because the government had not requested the grand jury’s findings for use in a judicial proceeding. She further stated that the legal standard for transfer of the petition to another district was not met in this case.
Reeling from their 2024 election loss, Democrats are scrambling to reconnect with the working class—yet their brilliant strategy of embracing socialist and communist candidates, doubling down on un-American woke ideology, shielding criminal illegal aliens, and supporting dark-money NGOs that fuel insurrectionist behavior like the Los Angeles riots—isn’t a comeback plan but just political suicide.
The party of leftist social justice warriors is cracking under the weight of its own failures. Woke culture is imploding, “green” fantasies are backfiring, and nowhere is this more evident than in the Democrat stronghold states of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, where the retirement of stable, affordable fossil fuel power in favor of unreliable solar and wind is driving up energy costs to the highest in the nation this summer and breaking the pocketbooks of working-class families they claim to champion.
Energy policies should balance three key objectives: affordability, reliability, and environmental sustainability — often referred to as the “energy trilemma.” Yet Democrats rammed through climate policies that torched two objectives, affordability and reliability for the environment.
According to the latest EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook for July, the average summer wholesale power prices across the PJM, NYISO, and ISO-NE grids are the highest in the nation. These prices now far exceed those in Texas’ ERCOT, the U.S. average, and even the traditionally high-cost West Coast markets. The blame is squarely focused on the Democrats’ initiative to decarbonize power grids.
“Oh, Look, Another Little-Known Democrat Who’s Going to “Turn Texas Blue.'”
Here we go again. Politico declares that Democratic Texas State Representative James Talarico “might turn Texas blue,” in large part because he recently was a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Talarico is thinking of running for Texas’s U.S. Senate seat in 2026.
This is a couple months after Politico wrote about the “eye-catching showing of support” Democrats had for Senate candidate Colin Allred, who lost to Ted Cruz by about 960,000 votes in the 2024 Senate race. And about seven years after Politico wrote “Beto-Mania Sweeps Texas.” And the August 2013 “Game On” cover of Texas Monthly. And . . . well, you get the idea.
You know what a Texas Democrat must do to get members of the national mainstream media to write that they have a chance to win that deep red state? Just show up, apparently.
Of course Talarico is making all the usual moderate noises Texas Democrats make when they’re trying to run statewide, and which he would almost certainl;y abandon if elected, like all Democrats seem to. He has a lifetime Freedom Index score of 4%.
In the last midterm, 8 million Texans voted; in the last presidential election, 11 million Texans voted. If turnout is 8 million, and a Democrat is behind by “just” five percentage points, he’s trailing by “just” 400,000 votes.
And yet cycle after cycle, we get not only credulous coverage saying a Democrat could win Texas — sotto voce conceding it is unlikely — last year you could easily find left-of-center columnists who were willing to go on the record predicting Allred would beat Cruz. Again, Cruz won by 959,492 votes or about 8.5 percentage points. It wasn’t close, and it was never close. Every cycle, the “Democrats could win Texas this year” coverage turns out to be pure wishcasting, as farfetched and unlikely as Trump’s quadrennial prediction that he will win his home state of New York.
According to a DHS report, those arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement include individuals guilty of murder, rape, and pedophilia.
“Over the weekend, our brave ICE agents arrested more depraved criminal illegal aliens, including murderers, rapists, and three child pedophiles. These are the types of barbaric criminals our ICE law enforcement is arresting and removing from American communities every day,” said DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
McLaughlin said that despite the rise in assaults against ICE officers, they continue to put their lives on the line to make American communities safe.
DHS highlighted the arrests of nearly a dozen individuals. Among those apprehended is 58-year-old Jose Arinaga-Ramirez, who is in the U.S. unlawfully from Mexico and was arrested in San Antonio by ICE Dallas. He has been convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child.
ICE Dallas also reports that Ramirez has a criminal history of resisting arrest, driving while intoxicated, and has two convictions for illegal re-entry.
Gilmer Vertiz-Bustemante, 37, another illegal alien from Mexico, was arrested by ICE Houston and has a murder conviction in Tarrant County.
Several other ICE field offices across the nation also reported the arrests of illegal aliens guilty of similar crimes, including ICE Los Angeles, ICE Philadelphia, and ICE Boston.
As if stealing their aid money wasn’t enough, LA and California government officials are letting squatters take over the burned lots of fire victims. “Local independent journalist Luke Melchior recently checked out the Palisades and gave this report that squatters are setting up entire campsites, even RVs, on the property of fire victims who are still waiting on permits to rebuild. It’s terrible what’s happening to these people. It begins to make more sense when you learn about a proposed bill in California, which will allow the state to buy up these properties to be used for low-income housing.”
Winning. “U.S. Olympic Committee Quietly Bans Men from Women’s Sports in Compliance with Trump Executive Order.”
You can be like Chris Hayes, Brian Stelter, Vox, The New Republic, Adam Schiff, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other progressives, and choose to believe you live in a world where the ending of The Late Show is a sinister plot by spineless, cowardly corporate executives who are terrified of irking President Trump and who desperately want the Federal Communications Commission to approve the merger of CBS’ parent company, Paramount Global, with Skydance Media. (And, it should be noted, Colbert’s choice to turn the show into a four-nights-a-week version of the speaker list at the quadrennial Democratic National Convention.) That is a dramatic world, with noble heroes and dastardly villains, plotting against the interests of the public, punishing a brave comedian, smashing dissent, and bending the knee in obedience to a ruthless, vindictive, power-mad president.
Or you choose to believe you live in a world where the ending of the show is a reflection of the fact that CBS was losing $40 million each year on the show, as the Wall Street Journal reports today. And as much fun as it would be to blame Colbert for being greedy and making the show unprofitable with his $20 million per year salary, with numbers like that, the show would still be unprofitable even if he worked for free.
Reuters adds, “the show’s ad revenue plummeted to $70.2 million last year from $121.1 million in 2018, according to ad tracking firm Guideline.” If a show’s ad revenue gets nearly cut in half over a six-year period, that is a serious and worsening problem, and an indication that it isn’t a reflection of a one-year blip or temporary economic pressures.
The real problem with CBS’s Late Show isn’t that it needed Letterman to survive, or even that CBS’s recent lawsuit payout to Donald Trump left Paramount/CBS looking to quickly cut a cool $16 million from their operating budget. The Late Show deserved to die simply because it got swallowed by the media trends surrounding it: Colbert used his star power to turn it into a watered-down variant on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. (Or, more often, and infinitely more damningly, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.) He became irrelevant.
Lately, he just doesn’t seem to be bothering at all. NR contributor Becket Adams hilariously noted how many of Stephen Colbert’s guests since taking the helm — on CBS, on a marquee-brand late-night talk show meant primarily to highlight Hollywood’s latest effluvia — have been better suited for The Maddow Report than late-night broadcast entertainment. “Where will I go now for lighthearted, fun celebrity interviews of, uh, CNN staffers, obscure federal administrators, and failed gubernatorial candidates?” Becket asks.
Stacey Abrams helpfully chimed in to salute Colbert on his way out the door, noting that she had appeared four times on the show — which, as Dominic Pino assesses, is a remarkable “2-to-1 exchange rate between Late Show appearances and number of elections lost to Brian Kemp.” And the just-so story to cap it all off: Who was the young Hollywood celebrity joining Stephen Colbert on the day he announced his cancellation? None other than that buxom starlet Adam Schiff, Democratic senator from California — for the full hour.
What is there to say? This was supposed to be a goofy, winkingly subversive late-night comedy show. With Colbert at the helm it has turned into Theme Time Therapy Hour for aging liberals who just want to watch a little TV in bed before turning out the light. “Political comedy” talk shows have infamously been the death of late-night comedy, the substitution of “clapter” in place of “laughter,” which is much harder to earn in any media era, and particularly one dominated by censorious progressive sensibilities. Their ratings trajectories have long since been clear. Why didn’t Colbert ever just try to be funny instead?
Because he’d rather garner the seal-clapping seal of approval for #CorrectThought.
One harbinger of the coming social justice warrior-initiated culture war was Democrats trying to shove tranny bathroom regulations down people’s during the Obama days. Well, returning to sanity is on the current Texas Special Session agenda.
Legislation separating biological males from women’s private spaces and vice versa is set to take the stage once again in the Texas Capitol as one of Gov. Greg Abbott’s items for this year’s first special session after a similar bill died in committee during the regular session.
The “Texas Women’s Privacy Act,” or House Bill (HB) 239, was filed during the 89th regular session by state Rep. Valoree Swanson (R-Spring) — resembling a nearly identical piece of legislation filed in 2017 that was also brought up during a special session, although it ultimately failed to pass.
Swanson filed HB 32, the special session version of the “bathroom bill,” on July 14. Identical to the legislation filed during the regular session, it seeks to establish a “statewide standard” for “private spaces” such as locker rooms or bathrooms in publicly-funded facilities such as prisons or domestic violence shelters. It stated that they “must be designated based on biological sex as stated on a person’s original birth certificate.”
“Belton ISD Teacher Faces Federal Child Porn Charges. Belton High School teacher Pietro Giustino is charged with possessing child sexual abuse material including depictions of minors engaged in sexual intercourse.”
“Three Big Drone Strikes Hit Novocherkassk: Railway, Power Plant and Telecoms Building.” Ukraine has been on a tear hitting infrastructure targets throughout Russia.
I don’t know about you, but I didn’t have war between Thailand and Cambodia on my 2025 bingo card. Thailand is a “Major Non-NATO Ally” of the United States, whereas Cambodia is an ally (some say puppet) of China.
“Vance Slams Microsoft For Firing Americans While Applying For H-1B Visas…I don’t want companies to fire 9,000 American workers and then to go and say, ‘We can’t find workers here in America.’ That’s a bullshit story.”
While the Democratic Party increasingly embraces socialist and Marxist-leaning policies, such as the seizure of private property, this idea of government-funded grocery stores appears disconnected from both fundamental economic realities and historical precedent.
Nowhere is this more evident than in East Kansas City, where a nonprofit operates a grocery store on government land that has become a symbol of failure, plagued by the smell of rot and empty shelves.
Local media outlet KSHB 41 Kansas City toured Sun Fresh Market at 3110 Wabash Ave (31st & Prospect) on the city’s Eastside. The store opened in 2018 as part of a multi-million dollar public-private revitalization of the Linwood Shopping Center. Operated by Community Builders of Kansas City, a nonprofit focused on urban development, the store has since become a massive reminder that while socialism may sound great on paper, in practice, it can be an absolute disaster.
KSHB 41’s Alyssa Jackson reported that her news team received a tip from a viewer about empty shelves throughout the dairy section, meat department, bakery aisle, and deli counter.
In capitalist countries, food waits for people. In socialist countries, people wait for food.
The U.S. Agency for Global Media sponsored hundreds of visas over a number of years for foreign journalists to come work for its subsidiary Voice of America, some of which were awarded to employees tied to Chinese state media, according to records reviewed by Just the News.
The agency’s hiring of more than 400 foreign journalists, from about 2009 to the end of the Biden administration, raises questions because of the liberal use of J1 cultural exchange visas, which are not designed for use as a general work authorization.
So Obama started importing communist Chinese and Biden continued it.
Sig Saur’s P320 issues just got a whole lot worse. “An Air Force command is pausing its use of a Sig Sauer pistol following a fatal incident.” The M18 is military version of the P320. (Hat tip: Karl rehn at KR Training.)
Edwin J. Feulner, founder and longest-serving president of the Heritage Foundation, died yesterday at 83. He is survived by his wife, Linda, and their two children.
Feulner founded Heritage in 1973 alongside Paul Weyrich and Joseph Coors. Since his passing, Republican politicians and conservative institutions have remembered him as a courageous and wise defender of truth.
Snip.
Feulner served for 37 years as Heritage’s president before he moved into an advisory role.
“His unwavering love of country and his determination to safeguard the principles that made America the freest, most prosperous nation in human history shaped every fiber of the conservative movement—and still do,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts said. “Whether he was bringing together the various corners of the conservative movement at meetings of the Philadelphia Society, or launching what is now the Heritage Strategy Forum, Ed championed a bold, ‘big-tent conservatism.’”
Though it’s become yet another ossified inside-the-beltway institution, in its heyday under Fuelner, Heritage was a force to be reckoned with The Reagan Revolution probably isn’t half as effective without the studies and policy guides Heritage produced, including the various Mandate for Leaderships.
They FaceTime at their desks, show up in sweats or other inappropriate office attire, and expect a promotion by lunchtime. Some of them even bring their parents to job interviews.
To put it mildly, their older coworkers aren’t impressed. The latest crop of Gen Z workers is attempting to redefine workplace norms, and they’re running into some resistance along the way.
There are several possible explanations for why Gen Zers are struggling to adapt to the corporate workplace. Perhaps it’s because they’re the first generation to grow up entirely online. Or maybe it stems from a lifetime of being coddled—made to feel exceptional by parents, teachers, and other adults. The disruption of remote learning during the pandemic certainly didn’t help. Whatever the cause, many Gen Zers are entering the workforce with little understanding of how to behave in a professional environment.
And yet companies don’t want to hire older workers, either. Make up your mind!
A look at UK’s superheavy “Tortoise” tank, which never saw combat because World War II ended. I saw the one they have at Bovington, and it is indeed massive.
Happy Independence Day! It’s rained most of the last 24 hours here in central Texas, so the good news is no burn ban means we can set off fireworks, but the downside is significant flooding in the Hill Country (Kerville was particularly hard-hit).
The “Big Beautiful Bill” is now law, employment ticks up, more high profile leftist/media perverts busted, Democrats remain stuck on stupid, some Republicans retire, and proof, yet again, that the rules for the well-heeled are different than for other people.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
“Employers added 147,000 jobs in June as U.S. labor market continues to defy expectations.” For the MSM, it’s always “unexpectedly” all the way down.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist was arrested and charged after authorities allegedly discovered child porn on his work computer, DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced Friday.
Thomas Pham LeGro, a 48-year-old video editor at the news outlet, was taken into custody on Thursday after FBI agents raided his Washington, DC, home and discovered a folder on his work laptop which contained 11 videos depicting child sexual abuse material, according to Pirro’s office.
FBI agents also discovered “fractured pieces of a hard drive in the hallway outside the room where LeGro’s work laptop was found,” during the execution of the search warrant.
The University of Pennsylvania has agreed to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports and correct records set by transgender swimmer Lia Thomas. The university issued a statement on Tuesday vowing to comply with Title IX on the basis of biological sex and says it will apologize to “disadvantaged” female athletes.
“While Penn’s policies during the 2021-2022 swim season were in accordance with NCAA eligibility rules at the time, we acknowledge that some student-athletes were disadvantaged by these rules,” Penn President J. Larry Jameson said in a statement. “We recognize this and will apologize to those who experienced a competitive disadvantage or experienced anxiety because of the policies in effect at the time.”
The U.S. Education Department and UPenn announced the voluntary agreement as part of a resolution of a federal civil rights case focused on Thomas, the biological male who won a Division I women’s title for the Ivy League university in 2022. The department’s Office for Civil Rights found that UPenn had violated Title IX by allowing a male to compete in women’s sports and occupy female-only facilities.
“Today’s resolution agreement with UPenn is yet another example of the Trump effect in action,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said. “Thanks to the leadership of President Trump, UPenn has agreed both to apologize for its past Title IX violations and to ensure that women’s sports are protected at the University for future generations of female athletes.”
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) opened the Title IX investigation into UPenn on February 6, following President Donald Trump’s executive order “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports,” which interpreted Title IX law on the basis of biological sex rather than gender identity. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program or activity that receives federal financial assistance.
Trump’s diplomatic method, the exact opposite of what standard diplomats recommend, is a roaring success.
The least diplomatic president in U.S. history is scoring diplomatic victories.
Over the last couple of days, Donald Trump has gotten NATO to agree to a defense spending target of 5 percent and backed Canada off imposing a digital services tax on American tech firms.
He’s done this while being loathed by many of his foreign interlocutors. In fact, Trump has executed a near-complete inversion of the typical diplomatic formula. He’s not nice. He’s not conflict-averse. He’s not euphemistic. And yet he’s gotten results.
The NATO commitment, in particular, is potentially historic and could materially strengthen the position of the Western alliance for the long term.
Trump is violating the usual rules of persuasion. Abraham Lincoln famously said: “It is an old and true maxim that ‘a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.’” Trump doesn’t hesitate to pour on the gall, often in ALL CAPS on Truth Social.
The leading 19th-century French diplomat Talleyrand said, “A diplomat who says ‘yes’ means ‘maybe,’ a diplomat who says ‘maybe’ means ‘no,’ and a diplomat who says ‘no’ is no diplomat.” Trump says “go to hell” as the start of the negotiation.
He persuades by pressuring.
He coaxes by threatening.
He de-escalates by escalating.
He wins friends and influences people by convincing them he thinks they’re freeloaders and losers.
A lot of this is a function of his personality and his experience as a Gotham real-estate developer with a nose for power dynamics, knack for showmanship, and willingness to court risk. It’s hard to see how his style of international politics will be replicable by a more traditional political figure. But undergirding his approach is a strategic insight into the gap between U.S. military and economic might and that of its allies, and how this meant there was a vast unexploited potential for the U.S. to throw its weight around.
When the U.S president is talking about pulling the plug on NATO, or cutting off trade talks with Canada — as Trump did in response to the proposed digital services tax — it’s going to get everyone’s attention.
The bull standing outside the door of the china shop is a powerful incentive to get along with the bull.
The rest of the conservative movement noticed this no later than, what, 2017? Nice of National Review to catch up…
In a post on social media platform X, FBI Director Kash Patel wrote that $14.6 billion in losses were incurred, while $245 million was seized, as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino said in a separate post on X that hundreds of people were charged in the case.
“Public corruption will not be tolerated as the Director and I vigorously pursue bad actors who violated their oaths to all of us,” Bongino said, describing the case as the “largest healthcare fraud investigation” in the country’s history.
The investigation encompassed 50 federal districts and 12 state attorneys general, according to the DOJ. State and federal law enforcement agencies also took part, according to the FBI.
A statement issued by the DOJ said that criminal charges were filed against 324 defendants, including 96 doctors, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, and other health care workers across the United States. Officials said that 29 defendants were charged with partaking in transnational criminal groups who allegedly submitted around $12 billion in fraudulent health-related claims to U.S. health insurance companies.
Further, four defendants were apprehended in Estonia based on cooperation with law enforcement agencies in that country, while seven others were arrested at the U.S.–Mexico border or at American airports, the DOJ said.
That organization, federal prosecutors said, is accused of using individuals sent into the United States from other countries to purchase “dozens of medical supply companies located across the United States” before submitting $10.6 billion in fraudulent health care claims to Medicare for medical devices and equipment.
At the same time, that group allegedly exploited stolen identities from U.S. citizens across all 50 states, using their stolen medical information to submit the false claims, according to the DOJ.
In another action announced by the DOJ, federal officials said they filed charges in Illinois against five people, including the owners of two Pakistan-based marketing companies, in relation to a $703 million Medicare fraud scheme.
The defendants allegedly stole Medicare beneficiaries’ confidential information and sold it to laboratories and other medical companies, which then submitted false Medicare claims, according to the statement.
“The defendants allegedly used artificial intelligence to create fake recordings of Medicare beneficiaries purportedly consenting to receive certain products,” the DOJ’s statement said.
Here are some reasons why the Democratic drive to reinvent the party seems to have stalled out—and may have a hard time restarting despite their political opening.
The “’tis but a scratch” problem. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Black Knight insists, against all evidence, that his wounds are not that serious—“’tis but a scratch.” Democrats, in the aftermath of losing two of three elections to the widely-disliked Trump and seeing their coalition re-configured by massive losses among both white and nonwhite working-class voters, are still in denial about how serious their wounds are. They are not but a scratch and cannot be fixed by anything less than a full-scale overhaul of the party’s approach and image. Tinkering around the edges, while easier, will not work.
The breaking point fallacy. Democrats have a hard time thinking outside their own views of Trump and the GOP. They are deeply convinced that Trump is perhaps the worst person to ever walk the earth and find it difficult to relate to voters whose views are more mixed. They are convinced that a breaking point from Trump’s actions will inevitably be reached where voters will wake up and realize Democrats were right all along, with happy political results to follow. This fallacy undergirded Democrats’ thinking in the 2024 campaign with rather unhappy results when that breaking point was not reached. Democrats’ reliably florid responses to Trump’s outrage-of-the-day in 2025 indicates that they are still hoping that breaking point can be reached and that they are puzzled, indeed outraged, that voters have not yet mounted the barricades. Conveniently, the expectation of a breaking point let’s Democrats off the hook from changing very much in their own party.
The “whatever it is, I’m against it” problem. In the classic Marx Brothers movie, Horsefeathers, Groucho uncompromisingly asserts: “whatever it is, I’m against it.” That pretty much sums up Democrats’ approach to Trump administration proposals and actions. With very minor exceptions, Democrats have refused to support any of it, even where these actions are popular and/or are targeted at clear areas of Democratic vulnerability that needed shoring up. Little to no effort has been made to stake out a middle ground that recognizes some of Trump’s actions address areas where Democrats have screwed up, while setting out a better (kinder, gentler?) approach that would more effective and less illiberal. Easier though to adopt Groucho’s approach and avoid the uncomfortable need to acknowledge mistakes and convince voters you won’t make them again.
The rising generations chimera. Many Democrats have seized upon the fact that leading Democratic politicians tend to be quite old, if not ancient (hello, Joe Biden!) and decided what is needed is younger Democrats. The changing of the guard—that’ll do the trick! On net, it seems like a no-brainer to move younger cohorts up in the party who can better communicate with young voters where Democrats have been losing ground. But what if these young communicators aren’t communicating anything to voters that would actually help Democrats dig out of the hole they’re in? Then the changing of the guard will only help at the margins.
Take Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic Millennial who pulled off an upset victory in the New York City Democratic primary and will likely be New York’s next mayor. His energy and media savvy are admirable but his radical cultural politics—only lightly sanded off recently—and his wildly impractical economic plans don’t seem likely to change the image of the Democratic Party in a good way. But he nevertheless will be a pole of attraction in the party, just as AOC and “the Squad” were in the aftermath of the 2018 election—and we saw how well that worked out. Democrats’ thirst for generational excitement, whatever its content, will make it even harder than it already was for Democrats to re-orient the party around an effective majoritarian politics.
Snip.
The “round up the usual suspects” problem. In the movie Casablanca, Captain Reynaud (Claude Rains) concludes the film by saying “round up the usual suspects.” The Democrats have an establishment and establishments don’t like change. Thus, there is a built-in tendency to blame messaging, narrative, lack of coalitional input, etc.—the “usual suspects”—rather than deeper problems of culture, economic policy, and class antagonism. Most recently this tendency was on display in the formation of a Project 2029 group drawn from various sectors of the Democratic establishment to craft a new, improved approach for the Democrats. As the Politico article on the group notes:
Some would-be allies are skeptical that such an ideologically diverse and divergent set of policy minds could craft anything close to a coherent agenda, let alone a politically winning one.
“Developing policies by checking every coalitional box is how we got in this mess in the first place,” said Adam Jentleson, who has spent recent months preparing to open a new think tank called Searchlight. “There is no way to propose the kind of policies the Democratic Party needs to adopt without pissing off some part of the interest-group Borg. And if you’re too afraid to do that, you don’t have what it takes to steer the party in the right direction.”
For Texas voters: “17 Proposed Amendments Head to Voters in November.” Expected a more detailed post on this sometime in October.
“Houston Parents Sue HISD Over Daughter’s Secret Social Gender Transition. A Houston family is taking the state’s largest school district to court, claiming their daughter was socially transitioned by school staff in direct defiance of their explicit instructions.”
Terry and Sarah Osborn, the parents of a Bellaire High School student, filed a federal lawsuit against the Houston Independent School District earlier this week, alleging the school socially transitioned their daughter against their explicit wishes. The lawsuit names several individuals, including Superintendent Mike Miles, Bellaire High School Principal Michael Niggli, school counselor Sarah Ray, and multiple teachers.
According to the suit, more than six Bellaire High School employees referred to the Osborns’ daughter—who is biologically female—using a masculine name and male pronouns for two years. The situation began in ninth grade, when the student’s theater teacher distributed a worksheet asking for students’ names and pronouns. Sarah Osborn specifically requested that the teacher use her daughter’s legal name and female pronouns. However, the student altered the worksheet, crossing out the original entry and writing in “he/him” pronouns.
The parents claim they did not learn about the consistent use of male pronouns by teachers until the student was well into her sophomore year. At that point, they formally requested that teachers revert to using their daughter’s biological pronouns. Despite these repeated requests, the lawsuit alleges that the teachers continued using male pronouns.
By the student’s junior year, the Osborns met with Principal Niggli to address the situation directly. They reiterated their concerns about the school’s handling of the matter. Principal Niggli attempted a compromise: teachers would refer to the student only by her last name to avoid using any pronouns at all. The Osborns, however, rejected this compromise and again instructed the school to use their daughter’s legal name and female pronouns.
The lawsuit also notes that the Osborns filed a request under the Texas Public Information Act, seeking employee communications regarding their daughter, HISD’s policies on the use of preferred names and pronouns, and documentation related to the student’s counseling sessions over the years. Elizabeth Rice, HISD’s attorney, responded that the request was too broad and asked for clarification. When the Osborns’ attorney insisted the request was sufficiently specific, Rice again claimed it was overly broad and said fulfilling it would require producing at least 77,344 pages of emails.
The lawsuit argues that HISD’s responses are evidence of “widespread past and ongoing treatment of their daughter as a boy by its employees,” carried out without parental consent and in direct opposition to explicit parental instructions.
The Osborns are asking the court to declare HISD’s policies in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, prohibit the district from using masculine pronouns or an alternate name for their daughter, and award attorney’s fees along with compensatory and punitive damages. The complaint states the district violated the parents’ “fundamental parental rights” under the Fourteenth Amendment and their “sincerely held religious beliefs” protected by the First Amendment.
Not only should the school district pay, but everyone involved in this should having their teaching certificate revoked and never be allowed to teach in the state again.
Yeah, Kerville has been hit hard by the flooding:
More good news: “Hamas leader and Oct. 7 mastermind Hakham Muhammad Issa Al-Issa killed in airstrike, IDF says.” Unlike Democrats, I think it’s a good thing when terrorist leaders get killed.
Diddy do it, but according to a jury, not all of it. “Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs was convicted of a prostitution-related offense but acquitted Wednesday of sex trafficking and racketeering charges.”
A steady stream of reports is now developing that suggests Covid vaccinations may indeed hurt fertility and pregnancy outcomes.
I reported on a rat study that clearly showed fertility was impacted after the animals were injected with mRNA Covid vaccines. A recently published study (not peer reviewed yet) looking at data from Israeli women found a substantially higher-than-expected number of eventual fetal losses associated with Covid vaccination during gestational weeks 8-13.
A newly published peer-reviewed study analyzing nationwide data from the Czech Republic has reported a significant association between Covid vaccination and reduced fertility rates in women of childbearing age. The study, which examined approximately 1.3 million women aged 18–39 between January 2021 and December 2023, found that women who received the Covid vaccine before conception had a substantially lower rate of successful conceptions (“SC”, i.e., pregnancies that resulted in live births) compared to their unvaccinated counterparts.
Of course, vaccine mandate advocates swore up and down it was absolutely safe. Meanwhile, it seemsto be harming those with very low chances of dying from Flu Manchu…
“Florida Gov. DeSantis Announces Tax Holiday On Guns.” September 8 through December 21. Your move, Greg Abbott…
On July 1, District Judge Ann Donnelly of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York ruled that there was sufficient evidence to proceed with a 16-count indictment against Huawei and its subsidiaries.
Huawei, which is closely tied to the Chinese communist regime, stands accused of racketeering, stealing trade secrets from six U.S. companies, and committing bank fraud.
With Donnelly’s ruling, the case will move forward toward trial. Currently, the proceedings are scheduled to begin on May 4, 2026.
Huawei stands charged with using a Hong Kong-based front company, Skycom, to conduct business in Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions and with misleading banks in order to facilitate more than $100 million in illegal money transfers.
Additionally, the indictment alleges that Huawei engaged in racketeering to expand its global brand.
“Harris County Agencies Reportedly Spent Millions With No Paper Trail.” Even lefty County Judge Lina Hidalgo has been raising the alarm over it. Maybe she didn’t get her cut…
“Famed Mexican boxer Julio César Chávez Jr. was arrested for overstaying his visa and lying on a green card application and will be deported to Mexico, where he faces organized crime charges.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“Spanish Operator of Proposed High-Speed Rail Liquidates American Subsidiary.” Yet another roadblock to the pie-in-the-sky Texas high speed rail project that will never be built.
So remember that story a while back in New York magazine’s The Cut, when the (I kid you not) Finance Reporter got scammed, withdrew $50,000 in cash from a bank, and handed it to a total stranger? To a lot of people, the details didn’t add up. Can you even withdraw $50,000 in cash without filling in a boatload for forms or triggering fraud warnings? One reporter went digging for the truth, and found out that, yeah, it looks like it’s true and you can just waltz out with that much cash…if you’re related to the Roosevelts.
So Diamond Distributors declared bankruptcy, and the new owners evidently decided, “Hey we can just sell all this consignment inventory we have, not pay the publishers for it, and use the money to pay back this Chase loan.” The publishers disagree…
Israel continues to pummel Iran’s nuclear program, President Trump sets a deadline, illegal alien border crossings are down radically, Democrats are bankrupt (financially, not just morally), more horrifying sex offenders, and a new face for the Texas Democrat Party.
The big news of Wednesday, reported in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere: “President Trump told senior aides late Tuesday that he approved of attack plans for Iran, but was holding off to see if Tehran would abandon its nuclear program, people familiar with the deliberations said.” This feels like a strategic leak to reinforce to the Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that he faces the choice of giving up his country’s nuclear weapons program or war with the
There’s an important distinction between approving the attack plan and ordering the attack plan. Our military forces are poised to strike, but at least as of Tuesday, no U.S. fighters are in Iranian airspace, according to Pentagon officials.
“I don’t know how much longer it’s going to go on,” Trump said. “They’re totally defenseless. They have no air defense whatsoever, totally captured. We totally captured the air.”
There’s that “we” again. One of the reasons people keep wondering if the U.S. is covertly helping Israel in an offensive manner as well as the revealed defensive manner (helping shoot down incoming ballistic missiles) is that Trump keeps using “we” to describe Israel’s actions in the war. “We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.” “We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.”
I know, I know, everybody’s obsessed with which pronouns you use these days.
Yesterday at the White House, Trump continued:
Q: What does unconditional surrender mean?
Donald Trump: Well, you know what it means, unconditional—
Q: Can you explain—
Donald Trump: Two very simple words, very simple: unconditional surrender. That means I’ve had it. Okay, I’ve had it, I give up, no more. Then we go blow up all the nuclear stuff that’s all over the place there. They had bad intentions. For 40 years, they’ve been saying death to America, death to Israel, death to anybody else that they didn’t like. They were bullies. They were schoolyard bullies and now they’re not bullies anymore, but we’ll see what happens. Look, nothing’s finished until it’s finished. War is very complex, a lot of bad things can happen, a lot of turns are made. So, I don’t know. I wouldn’t say that we won anything yet. I would say that we sure as hell made a lot of progress and we’ll see. The next week is going to be very big, maybe less than a week, maybe less.
Snip.
The Economist has a scoop about the Israeli intelligence that spurred its decision to launch this military operation:
We understand that the information presented by Israel includes a detailed account of a recent, more urgent, push by Iranian scientists towards “weaponization”, or the creation of an explosive nuclear device. The dossier provides two key pieces of reported evidence for this claim. The first is that an Iranian scientific team has squirrelled away a quantity of nuclear material, of unclear enrichment status, that is unknown to the monitors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a UN watchdog (on June 9th the IAEA assessed Iran had official stockpiles of over 400kg of highly enriched uranium). The second piece of reported evidence is that the scientists have accelerated their work and were about to meet commanders of Iran’s missile corps, apparently to prepare for the future “mating” of a nuclear warhead with a missile. . . .
In a report published on May 31st, the IAEA noted that in 2003 Iran had planned to conduct what the Institute for Science and International Security, a think-tank, calls a “cold test” — a simulated nuclear weapon which uses natural or depleted uranium rather than weapons-grade uranium. . . .
The Israeli intelligence dossiers also contain information that, if correct, is genuinely new. They suggest that roughly six years ago the scientists formed a secret “Special Progress Group”, under the auspices of the former AMAD director, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. This group’s aim was to prepare the way for a much quicker weaponisation process, if and when a decision was made by Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, to rush for a bomb. Mr Fakhrizadeh was assassinated by Israel in November 2020. On June 13th in the first hours of the war, the Israeli government published slides describing this backstory. But we have been told that it also shared further assessments with allies that suggest the Special Progress Group stepped up its research at the end of last year. Iran had a new incentive to advance to a bomb. It was reeling from the limited impact of its missile attacks on Israel, and the depletion of its air defenses by Israeli strikes in October 2024. And it was facing the collapse of its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, in Gaza and Lebanon.
Bonus:
Israel secret services used a fake phone call to trick the top commanders of Iran’s air force into gathering at a single location before taking them out in a targeted strike, an Israeli Channel 12 commentator has said.
In a statement confirmed to the JC by Israeli sources, Amit Segal told the Call Me Back podcast on Monday: “What Israel did was create a fake phone call for 20 members of the air force senior staff an calling them to a specific bunker in Tehran.”
This meant there was no one to give the order to fire the initial salvo of 1,000 ballistic missiles as Iran had previously threatened to do, he added.
According to sources familiar with the operation, Mossad initiated a targeted disinformation effort days before the strike.
Using falsified communications through Iranian channels, they triggered what appeared to be an emergency meeting.
The ruse successfully drew the entire senior leadership of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force, including Commander General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, his deputies, and key technical personnel, into a fortified bunker outside Tehran.
Moments before the strike began, that bunker was hit in a precision airstrike, eliminating Iran’s top missile command.
Border Czar Tom Homan dropped a bombshell on X Tuesday night that should have every American asking why we tolerated four years of Biden’s border catastrophe.
“In the last 24 hours the Border Patrol encountered a total of 95 illegal aliens across the entire southern border,” Homan posted. “That is the lowest number EVER recorded. Compare that to the Biden administration, who surpassed more than 10,000 per day.”
Read that again. Ninety-five. That’s not a typo. For the first time in recorded history, we’re seeing double-digit border encounters. Meanwhile, Biden’s administration was routinely processing more than 10,000 illegal crossings daily. The contrast couldn’t be more stark or more damning for the previous administration.
“Since taking office, my administration has launched the most sweeping border and immigration crackdown in American history. And we quickly achieved the lowest numbers of illegal border crossers ever recorded,” he said. “The media and our friends in the Democrat party kept saying we needed new legislation, we must have legislation to secure the border. But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president.”
But here’s where it gets even worse for Biden’s defenders. Homan revealed that the Biden administration released the “vast majority” of illegal immigrants back into American communities. How many were released under Trump in May? “Zero,” Homan revealed.
The numbers are staggering. In May 2024 alone, Biden released 62,000 illegal aliens into the country. Let that sink in: 62,000 people who crossed illegally were simply turned loose on American streets in a single month. This wasn’t immigration policy; it was an authorized invasion.
While ICE arrests and deportations have grabbed headlines, President Trump is also running a separate but complementary “mass deportation” program — one that encourages aliens here unlawfully to go home voluntarily.
And if reports are correct, that plan is more successful than anyone could have imagined.
Based on government data, my organization, the Center for Immigration Studies, has conservatively estimated there are about 15.4 million illegal aliens in the United States, a 50% increase over the four tumultuous years of the Biden administration.
That’s no surprise, given how Biden and his Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas ignored congressional detention mandates and ushered millions of illegal migrants into the United States.
Trump rode a wave of concerns about the costs those migrants are imposing on schools, hospitals, housing, and essential government services in cities and towns across the United States to a second term.
Now that he’s back in the Oval Office, it’s up to him, “border czar” Tom Homan, and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to drive the unauthorized population down and restore credibility to our immigration system.
They’ve implemented a two-track plan to tackle this onerous task.
One of those tracks relies on arrests and deportations of aliens unlawfully here, which at the outset has focused mainly on criminals (the “worst first” strategy).
The other track is more subtle but also cheaper for taxpayers and arguably much more effective —encouraging illegal migrants here to self-deport.
It began with an Inauguration Day Trump directive requiring DHS to ensure all aliens present in the United States — legal and otherwise — have registered with the federal government, and to prosecute those who don’t comply.
By late February, Noem had implemented that registration program.
DHS next launched a multimillion-dollar ad campaign warning migrants not to enter illegally or, alternatively, to leave voluntarily now and possibly “have an opportunity to return and enjoy our freedom and live the American Dream.”
Noem also rebranded the notorious CBP One app — which the Biden administration used to funnel hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants into our country — as “CBP Home,” which aliens can use to “notify the U.S. Government of their intent to depart.”
That rebranding coincided with an offer of financial incentives for aliens who leave voluntarily, a stipend of $1,000. That’s in lieu of costly physical deportation, which can cost taxpayers $17,100 per person on average.
How effective has self-deportation been?
One way to track the program is by checking employment numbers. One financial whiz cited by the Wall Street Journal calculated a decline in the immigrant population of 773,000 in the first four months of Trump II.
The Washington Post claims “a million foreign-born workers have exited the workforce since March.” The Post frames this as “a sign of the weakening labor supply.” Yet the paper also notes, “Average hourly wages accelerated, rising by 0.4 percent over the month, to $36.24 in May, as earnings continue to beat inflation in a boost to workers’ spending power.”
In other words, with fewer illegal immigrants, businesses have had to raise wages to attract workers.
Win-win-win for everyone except Democrats, illegal aliens, and the businesses addicted to cheap, illegal labor.
ICE raid nabs more than 100 illegal aliens at a meat packing plant. Americans applying for jobs ensues. The “jobs Americans won’t do” canard was always a lie.
Kash, who just shared the documents with Congress, then shared the accompanying article from Just the News to shed more light:
Officials who have seen the documents told Just the News the FBI had a relatively new confidential source who provided information in summer 2020 that the Chinese government was manufacturing and exporting fake U.S. driver’s licenses as part of a plot to create voter identities for Chinese residents living in the United States so they could vote with fake mail-in ballots.
The intelligence source claimed the plot was specifically designed to benefit Biden, officials said.
Wait, you’re telling me that China wanted “10% for the Big Guy” Joe Biden, a man whose family made money by peddling political influence with Chinese businessmen, to be the US president?
🚨 BREAKING 🚨
In a 2018 email, a bank flagged serious concerns about the China money Hunter Biden received – $40,000 of which ultimately landed in Joe Biden’s bank account.
In the email, the bank’s money laundering investigator highlighted:
Hmmm. “The U.S. Navy now has five guided-missile destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean, according to U.S. defense officials. This is a significant increase. Earlier this week, the U.S. had just one in the eastern Med.” (Previously.)
Even God has taken a crack at Iran. “A 5.2 magnitude earthquake has just struck Central Iran as Israel continues its attack on Tehran. The quake’s epicentre was just outside the city of Semnan, around 210km east of the capital.”
The Democratic Party is struggling. In every way a political party can be dysfunctional, the Democrats are careening toward an implosion.
Riven by poisonous factionalism, running out of cash, and devoid of purpose and plan, the oldest political party in the Western World is falling apart right before our eyes.
How bad is it? When the New York Times gives space to a 1,800-word, five-alarm article giving excruciating detail about your party’s travails, you know it’s not time to pop the champagne cork and celebrate.
To make matters worse for the Democrats, on the same day the Times aired the party’s soiled panties for all to see, the other Democratic Party house organ, Politico, laid 1,600 words of criticism on party chairman Ken Martin.
The media couldn’t be quiet about it. With 17 months to go before the 2026 midterm elections, the Democrats find themselves in an existential crisis. Half the party wants to abandon the radical left, while the radical left wants to give the heave-ho to anyone to the right of Karl Marx.
Let’s start with Ken Martin as a point of contention. Barely four months into the job, he’s already made plenty of enemies. Worse, those enemies aren’t going quietly into that good night. They are sniping at him from the sidelines, drawing blood with criticisms no party chair has ever heard before.
David Hogg section skipped. Judging by Kolby Duhon (see below), Hogg really was too masculine for the DNC.
“This is worse than some high school student council drama,” said Wisconsin Democrat Representative Mark Pocan. I’d say that’s right on the mark.
One DNC member told Politico that Martin looked “weak and whiny,” and another said he has been “invisible.” Similar sentiments were expressed by other DNC members.
These aren’t Republicans talking about their leaders. It’s the supposed leadership caste of the Democratic Party.
Awesome, isn’t it?
Snip.
The biggest blow to the party may have been the recent exit from the DNC of American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and AFSCME President Lee Saunders. Together, they represent millions of members and tens of millions of dollars in contributions.
“The DNC is weaker than I have ever seen it… They have shown zero ability to chart a post-24 vision for Democrats,” a Democratic strategist with close ties to labor unions, told Politico.
Weingarten and Saunders couldn’t “in good faith continue to rubber-stamp what was going on with the DNC,” the strategist said.
Instead of developing a strategy for 2026 and preparing the battlefield for 2028, Martin and the DNC are bogged down in the minutiae of organizational warfare. There’s no plan, no purpose behind the DNC’s pronouncements. Martin is too busy putting out political brushfires and soothing bruised egos to get anything organizationally done.
No one is going to wave a magic wand and put the party back together.
Unspoken in this piece: The Social Justice hard left would literally rather kill the Democrat Party than give up control of it. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“The Supreme Court upheld the state of Tennessee’s ban on irreversible transgender procedures for minors, a major victory for parental rights advocates and those seeking to protect distressed children from harmful operations. The justices ruled 6-3 in United States v. Skrmetti, with all of the conservative justices opting to allow Tennessee’s ban to remain in place and the liberal justices dissenting. The ruling will likely allow similar bans in more than 20 other red states to be upheld in the face of legal challenges.” Decision by decision, the transsexual madness is finally being beaten back.
The man suspected of assassinating a Minnesota Democratic state lawmaker and attempting to kill another is being brought up on federal murder and stalking charges and could face the death penalty, prosecutors said Monday, hours after he was arrested following a days-long manhunt.
Acting U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Joe Thompson said during a press conference that Vance Luther Boelter went to the homes of four Minnesota lawmakers with the intent of killing them….
Boelter, 57, is facing six federal counts: two stalking charges, two firearm offenses for the non-fatal shooting of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette, and two murder charges for the killing of former State House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark. He faces anywhere from 20 years in prison to a potential death sentence for the federal murder charge.
The case had a lot of weird aspects to it, from him being a Tim Waltz appointee to the suspect’s wife being stopped with cash and passports in her car to the supposed anti-abortion motive to the No Kings flyers in his car to the murdered lawmaker being the only Democrat to vote for repealing taxpayer frunded illegal alien health care. A bunch of things don’t add up, especially how quickly the story seemed to disappear off news radar…
Finally. “Feds Crush Violent Antifa Uprising Outside Portland ICE Facility.” Now the feds need to start looking into RICO charges against Antifa funders…
Speaking of antifa behaving badly, they just attacked two more journalists, Cameron Higby and Brandi Kruse.
“DOJ charges another Chinese researcher with smuggling ‘biological materials’ into US. The new case accuses Chinese researcher Chengxuan Han of trying to smuggle packages containing concealed biological material related to round worms into the country by sending multiple packages that contain the material to a lab in the U.S.” It looks like we need to check the lab of every Chinese national studying biology in the U.S. for possible biological warfare material. Indeed, given these arrests, we may already be doing so. (Hat tip: TPPF.)
“New Law Protects Property Owners, Assists in Removing Squatters.” Good to see Texas getting ahead of the issue.
We don’t cotton to cop killers in Texas. “El Salvadoran Illegal Alien Receives Death Penalty for Murder of Harris County Deputy. Oscar Rosales never disputed that he killed Deputy Corporal Charles Galloway in a January 2022 shooting.” El Salvador, eh? Maybe we can pay El Salvador to keep him in CECOT while his appeals play out, then fly him back to execute him…
Trigger warning: Another case of two gay men adopting a baby and raping it to death.
That’s the face (and haircut) Democrats want to put forward as representing their party.
Over the weekend, Texas Democrats elected Kolby Duhon as their new vice chair for finance. The position is responsible for a variety of duties related to the party’s raising and spending of money.
Duhon filled a vacancy that opened when the previous vice chair, Kendall Scudder, was elected party chairman in March.
His X feed reveals his radical views.
Duhon describes himself as a “pansexual.” Advocates claim “pansexuals” do not take gender or sexuality into account when choosing a partner. In 2020, Duhon tweeted his admiration for State Rep. Mary Gonzalez (D–San Elizario) and claimed she inspired him to run for a position with the Texas Young Democrats on an “openly Pan” platform.
By “pansexual” I assume he strikes out with both men and women. And what self-respecting gay would want to be seen with someone with that hairstyle?
Duhon uses “they/he” pronouns and helped found the Socialist Caucus of the Texas Young Democrats in 2017.
Beyond his lifestyle choices and political affiliations, Duhon has expressed views on subjects including Israel, policing, and racism that place him on the far-left end of the political spectrum.
Duhon has repeatedly posted in favor of pushing gender confusion on so-called “trans kids.”
Of course he has.
Here’s the perfect face for the modern Democratic Party: A freakshow all the way down…
More signs of the decline of the Democratic Party in Texas. “Tarrant County Democratic Party Chair Resigns Months After All Staff Laid Off. [Crystal Gayden] will continue as chair until July 7 when an election will take place to decide her successor.”
Just a couple months after laying off all of its paid staff, the Tarrant County Democratic Party will need to find a new party chair as incumbent chair Crystal Gayden announced her resignation at the beginning of June.
Gayden, who became party chair back in July 2023, stated in her announcement that she had overseen the strengthening and re-energizing of the party, which had expanded its precinct chair network, prioritized turnout in local elections, grown its supporter base, and increased party visibility, among other things.
For those outside Texas, Tarrant County is home to Ft. Worth and is the third largest county in the state, so the Democrats having no staffers there is a kind of big deal.
As far as “prioritizing turnout,” it’s certainly not visible in national elections. Biden’s recorded vote total in Tarrant County in 2020 was 411,567, edging Trump by just under 2,000 votes. In 2024, it was 384,501 votes, or more than 40,000 votes under Trump’s total. Some triumph of turnout…
“State Sen. Kelly Hancock has officially entered the race for Texas Comptroller with the backing of Gov. Greg Abbott, resigning from the Senate and being sworn in as chief clerk of the agency by outgoing Comptroller Glenn Hegar.”
The move is designed to sidestep a 2002 legal opinion from then-Attorney General Abbott, which held that a sitting state senator cannot be appointed to a position requiring Senate confirmation during the term for which they were elected.
By resigning and taking on the role of “chief clerk,” Hancock avoids triggering the Senate confirmation process while still stepping into the agency’s top position for the remainder of Hegar’s term—through January 2027.
Hegar, who will officially take over as chancellor of the Texas A&M University System on July 1, praised Hancock as his successor.
Snip.
In 2023, Hancock was one of only two Republican senators who sided with Democrats to attempt to remove Attorney General Ken Paxton from office following his impeachment trial. During this most recent legislative session, he was one of seven Republican senators who voted to water down Senate Bill 19—intended to ban taxpayer-funded lobbying—by supporting an amendment that exempted organizations like the Texas Association of School Boards from the ban.
Snip. Don Huffines:
“The political elite are manipulating the system to install another go-along-to-get-along lap dog as State Comptroller, because they know President Trump’s DOGE-style transparency would expose everything. But they don’t just fear me. They fear you—the taxpayers, the grassroots. And they should. The conservative base in Texas is wide awake, fed up, and ready to take back control. And they know we will win,” said Huffines, pointing to endorsements from U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Charlie Kirk, Riley Gaines, Ron Paul, and a majority of the State Republican Executive Committee.
Another declared candidate, current Railroad Commissioner Christi Craddick, responded by pointing to her statewide record.
“No matter who else enters the race, I’ll put my record up against anyone,” said Craddick. “I’m the only candidate in this race with statewide experience and a proven record running one of Texas’ most important agencies, cutting red tape, generating billions in revenue from oil and gas, and delivering results that fund our schools, roads, and first responders.”
Been a while since we had a juicy crazed poisoner story, so here’s one. Did it not occur to to supergenius (accused) perp that two former lovers both being poisoned by cyanide was pretty handily going to mark him as a suspect?
How many of these classic prog rock intros can you name? Harder than you might think, though I got “The Musical Box” off Genesis’ Nursery Crime on the very first note…
FBI Houston arrested six alleged members of a criminal ring for “sex trafficking and sexual exploitation of children” as a part of a coordinated national operation that resulted in the arrest of 225 “child sex abuse offenders” and the rescue of 115 children.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the results of the “Restore Justice Operation,” a nationwide crackdown on child sexual abuse in collaboration with all 55 FBI offices on Wednesday. Among the arrests made via the operation were six alleged members of a child sex trafficking group, “including its female ring leader,” captured by the Houston FBI branch.
Among those six arrested were Natalia Flores, Deatric Wiltz, Christopher Hutchins, Salathien Lilly, and Cedrick Fisher. “The sixth person is a separate case. His name is Joshua Jerome Finney,” FBI Houston told The Texan, providing no further information.
First launched as an effort following the DOJ’s “observance of National Child Abuse Prevention Month in April,” the DOJ stated that Operation Restore Justice “underscores the Department’s unwavering commitment to protecting children and raising awareness about the dangers they face.”
The FBI said that in “many” of the cases, “parental vigilance and community outreach efforts played a critical role in bringing these offenders to justice.”
Snip.
“The Department of Justice will never stop fighting to protect victims — especially child victims — and we will not rest until we hunt down, arrest, and prosecute every child predator who preys on the most vulnerable among us,” U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a press release.
Bondi added that she’s directed her prosecutors “not to negotiate” in the cases.
The DOJ shared that the 225 arrested are alleged to have committed a number of crimes, including “the production, distribution, and possession of child sexual abuse material, online enticement and transportation of minors, and child sex trafficking.”
It may be a false impression, but it sure seems like the Trump47 Administration has been a whole lot more aggressive pursuing child sex trafficking crimes than the Biden Administration was, maybe because some of their precious illegal aliens were involved in it. Then again, it may just be that lots of FBI resources have been freed up now that J6 defendants and random Trump associates are no longer the main targets…
Trump’s first hundred days, a Ukraine mineral deal at last, Democrats choose rapists over women (again), employment numbers are up (unexpectedly!), Josh Hawley names and shames PELOSI, Reform UK wins big, Spain blacks out (and not from Sangria), a sneaky local Williamson County election tomorrow, and the return of the Worst Gun of All Time.
After President Trump’s first 100 days, what stands out to me is his straightforward trademark phrase — “promises made, promises kept.”
He was elected on November 5 to transform the country in a completely different direction from the failed presidency of Joe Biden.
And that is precisely what Mr. Trump has done.
He is a disruptor. He is a change agent. He is fighting the entrenched elites and their institutions. He’s not afraid to use shock and awe. He is also a master dealmaker. He is also a man chockful of common sense.
None of this is going to be easy, nor will it come without glitches. But the political reality of his first 100 days is that Mr. Trump has kept his word to the American people.
So, 142 executive orders later, Mr. Trump has secured the border, restored safety, and is making great progress on the deportation of criminal illegal aliens.
For every one new regulation, Mr. Trump is abolishing ten others.
He is cutting taxes across the board to launch a blue-collar boom, while reducing prices with the production of more goods.
He has reopened the energy spigots, and will profitably deploy America’s abundant resources.
He is eliminating federal waste, fraud, and abuse. He is shrinking the size of the federal government.
And he has launched a reciprocal fair-trade initiative.
So, pulling all of this together, in his first 100 days Mr. Trump has fundamentally restored hope for faster growth and greater affordability.
And, as tough as it may be, he is working to restore peace in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran.
Culturally, he has stopped the Democratic woke march to DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion.
He has fought hard for religious freedom, an end to government censorship, and has stopped the weaponization of justice.
Mr. Trump has gone after the elite universities for their failure to stop antisemitism.
And, indeed, for all of Mr. Trump’s pro-growth economic initiatives, and his ‘peace through strength’ foreign policy, his determination to restore a more traditional, cultural, and spiritual country is one of his greatest accomplishments in the first 100 days.
#Winning.
Finally: “U.S., Ukraine Sign Minerals Deal in Major Breakthrough for Peace Talks.”
U.S. and Ukrainian officials have signed a long-anticipated deal that gives the U.S. access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals in exchange for a promised security guarantee to protect Kyiv from future Russian aggression, signaling President Donald Trump’s commitment to ending the war.
The deal was signed Wednesday afternoon on Trump’s 100th day in office by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Ukrainian Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko, as the latter visited Washington, D.C., to finalize the details. The Treasury Department confirmed the signed deal, called the United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund.
“This agreement signals clearly to Russia that the Trump Administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term. President Trump envisioned this partnership between the American people and the Ukrainian people to show both sides’ commitment to lasting peace and prosperity in Ukraine,” Bessent said in a statement. “And to be clear, no state or person who financed or supplied the Russian war machine will be allowed to benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine.”
The minerals deal grants the U.S. access to Ukraine’s natural resources, including aluminum, graphite, oil, and natural gas, according to Bloomberg. It also lays out details about the economic partnership between the U.S. and Ukraine.
With that deal finally done, Trump finally has the excuse he needs to keep supporting Ukraine, especially if Russia refuses Trump’s demands to come to the negotiating table.
More proof that the Democrat Party is objectively pro-rape: ‘California Dems Vote To Keep Male Sex Offenders In Female Prisons.”
Democrats on the California Senate Public Safety Committee shot down a bill on Tuesday that would have kept male sex criminals out of female prisons.
The committee, which includes far-Left Senator Scott Wiener, voted down a proposal from Republican Senator Shannon Grove to protect women from males who are registered sex offenders from being able to be housed in women’s prisons. The bill also would have given women privacy in sleeping arrangements and showers, meaning that they would be protected from males who have taken advantage of California’s lax laws that allow men to be placed in women’s prisons.
“Today I am here on behalf of incarcerated women in California prisons who are dealing with the unintended consequences of allowing transgender inmates to be housed in women’s correction facilities,” Grove said at the committee hearing. “Everyone agrees that we need to keep inmates safe and provide additional protections.”
She noted that she had received a letter from a female inmate discussing how males were being housed in her prison. The letter included a condom that had been distributed by prison staff.
“Why is the state of California paying for condoms in women’s prisons?” Grove asked the committee.
The only lawmaker to support the bill was Senator Kelly Seyarto, the lone Republican on the committee.
Grove’s bill is seeking to address problems created by SB 132, a bill sponsored by Wiener that said that inmates should be housed according to their “gender identity.” Her legislation would “establish a secure facility at each women’s prison to house transgender women, in order to protect the security needs of biological women at birth in sleeping and other intimate areas” and prohibit male sex offenders from being eligible to be assigned to female prisons.
“SB 132 created a preference for transgender individuals. If you are a woman serving in the women’s prison and a transgender self-identified check-the-box person comes in and goes, ‘I want to house with you,’ the woman in that cell has no recourse. They can’t say no because that’s considered discriminatory,” Grove told The Daily Wire on Monday.
Grove said that she was told before the hearing that the committee planned to kill the bill. She said that the California Democrat supermajority had a “preference for predators versus victims.”
Democrats are at war with biology, reality, and basic human decency.
Along the same lines, Maine Democrats have censured state Republican Rep. Laurel Libby for standing against men in women’s athletics, including stripping her right to vote on bills. Boy, Democrats sure seem unclear on this whole “democracy” thing…
“Trump signs order ending taxpayer funding for NPR and PBS.” Good. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Up until yesterday, Matthew Bruderman was the chairman of Nassau University Medical Center. A couple of weeks ago, Mr. Bruderman announced he was cooperating with the FBI and Department of Justice in an investigation. Specifically, Mr. Bruderman claims that New York state and Long Island have stolen at least $1 billion from the organization.
Bruderman said he believes the officials’ ultimate goal was to financially strangle the public hospital, paving the way for state and local leaders to shut it down, take over the land currently owned by the public-benefit corporation that runs it and have it redeveloped for profit.
Wednesday night, Mr. Bruderman’s house was burglarized. However, the only thing allegedly taken was…documents tied to the investigation.
Bruderman wasn’t home at the time of the robbery and only found out after police called to inform him they had recovered a binder with his name on it in a car driven by an unidentified couple, he said.
“I was confused because that was the binder I had on my desk when I left,” he said.
Bruderman said he later found his backdoor pried wide open.
The binder, he said, contained “sensitive” materials related to the ongoing federal investigation, including documents and records tied to the financial misconduct he claims to have uncovered while reviewing hospital finances and state reimbursements.
Snip.
At the heart of the alleged scheme is a little-known federal program called the Disproportionate Share Hospital Fund — meant to help keep afloat struggling hospitals such as NUMC, which treat large numbers of low-income patients on Medicaid and Medicare.
Under the program, the federal government agrees to give hospitals tens of millions of dollars in funding as long as their state matches the investment.
According to [Bruderman’s] review of internal financial records, previous hospital leadership allegedly “borrowed” what was supposed to be the state’s matching share from an offshore account tied to a Cayman Islands trust, originally set up to cover the medical center’s legal bills.
That money would be temporarily transferred into the hospital’s general fund just long enough to fool the feds into thinking New York had paid its share — unlocking the federal portion of the funding, he claimed.
But once the federal funds cleared, the state’s contribution would allegedly be moved right back offshore.
That would mean those matching funds vanished into the shadows in a conspiracy that could’ve included top officials.
Seems plausible to me. Oh, also: “Mr. Bruderman was fired on Thursday.”
Blue state governance in action: “Washington state now gives $120,000 ‘forgivable loans’ for new homebuyers. But only if they’re not white.”
As part of the covenant homeownership program, the department shall contract with the commission to design, develop, implement and evaluate one or more special purpose credit programs to reduce racial disparities in ownership in the state by providing down payment and closing cost assistance… The contract must authorize the commission to use up to one percent of the contract to provide targeted education, homeownership counseling, and outreach about special purpose credit programs created under this section to black, indigenous, and people of color and other historically marginalized communities in Washington state.
Forgivable means they’re giving your tax dollars to other people to buy a home based on their skin color. I think this violates all sorts of civil rights and equal protection causes, and Pam Bondi’s DOJ should sue.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has reintroduced the “Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments” (PELOSI) Act that would prohibit members of Congress and their families from trading stocks while in office.
The name of the act is a direct nod in the direction of 20 term Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) whose net worth has soared from $160,000 when she was first elected in 1987 to more than $140 million in 2024.
A dozen of the White House’s (WH) newly-published list of 100 of “the worst of the worst criminal illegal immigrants” arrested since President Donald Trump took office in January were apprehended by Texas branches of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
In a news release titled “In the First 100 Days, the Trump Administration Has Taken Killers Rapists Off Our Streets,” images of the 100 detainees were listed online in chronological order by the date of their arrests — as well as displayed on the White House lawn — prior to a press conference held by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Border Czar Tom Homan.
Six of the illegal immigrants included in the “worst of the worst” list were arrested by Houston ICE authorities, five by Dallas ICE, and one by Austin ICE.
One of the arrests made by Houston ICE was of a 70-year-old Indian national, Raju Varughese Vayechaparampil, convicted of “aggravated sexual assault of a child” in Harris County. With a similar conviction also in Harris County for “indecency with child sexual contact,” Che Xol Norberto was arrested on March 18. Osvaldo Diaz, a Cuban national, was arrested by the same ICE branch for convictions of “Trespassing and Sexual Assault Child/Battery Child” while in Florida.
Another arrest made by ICE Houston was a 64-year-old citizen of Honduras, Eduardo Garcia-Cortez, convicted of murder in California.
“God bless the men and women of ICE who strap a gun to their hip every day … To not only secure our border and protect our national security but … they’re removing public safety threats and national security threats every day,” Homan said during the presser.
“While you’re all sleeping, at two or three in the morning, there are men and women out there, enforcing the law, making this country safe again. And we’re going to keep doing that, full speed ahead,” he addressed the WH press pool.
ICE Austin’s arrest was of Humberto Ruiz-Zapata, who has convictions of murder and Driving While Intoxicated. He is a citizen of Mexico, with a prior “final removal date” of May 12, 2017.
ICE Dallas arrested Tay Myint, a citizen of Burma, on March 3. Myint was sentenced to prison for 12 years due to “aggravated sexual assault of a child” in the City of Cactus.
ICE Denver officers arrested Joel Matos-Nieto, 23, a criminal alien from Venezuela and member of the international gang Tren de Aragua with a final order of removal April 23. Matos has convictions for motor vehicle theft, obstructing a police officer and criminal mischief. pic.twitter.com/ZcaavP8A72
As Michael Shellenberger writes at PUBLIC, this wasn’t just a Spanish blackout. It shook the entire European grid.
…none of this should have been a surprise. The underlying physics had been understood for years, and the specific vulnerabilities had been spelled out repeatedly in technical warnings that policymakers ignored.
…
As countries replaced heavy, spinning plants with lightweight, inverter-based generation, the grid became faster, lighter, and far more sensitive to disruptions. That basic physical reality was spelled out in public warnings as far back as 2017.
…
Although political leaders promised that renewable energy would provide stable, affordable power, in practice, Spain grew more reliant on the remaining nuclear and natural gas plants to sustain inertia — even as the government pushes them to close.
…
Despite all these warnings, political and regulatory energy in Europe remained focused on accelerating renewable deployment, not upgrading the grid’s basic stability. In Spain, solar generation continued to climb rapidly through 2023 and early 2024.
Coal plants closed. Nuclear units retired.
On many spring days by 2025, Spain’s midday solar generation exceeded its total afternoon demand, leading to frequent negative electricity prices.
The system was being pushed to the limit.
And today, at 12:35 pm, it broke.
…
Spain’s blackout wasn’t just a technical failure. It was a political and strategic failure.
…
Unless Spain rapidly invests in synthetic inertia, maintains and expands its nuclear fleet, or adds some other new form of heavy rotating generation, the risk of future blackouts will only grow worse.
Nigel Farage’s Reform Party racked up big gains in UK local elections.
It has won over 630 council seats from around 1,500 declared so far, with results from a further 100 or so still to come in.
Reform has seized control of six authorities from the Conservatives after elections on Thursday, including Tory heartlands such as Kent and Staffordshire.
The party has also won control of Doncaster council from Labour, and taken control in Durham, where Labour was the largest party.
At least the UK isn’t trying to ban a suddenly popular, outsider party. Unlike Germany. ” Germany’s Intel Agency Designates AfD Party as ‘Extremist,’ Paves Way for Possible Ban. AfD officials made “xenophobic, anti-minority, Islamophobic and anti-Muslim statements,” spy agency cites as reason for the ‘extremist’ designation.” Eveidently the powers that be in Germany feel that notcing the baleful effects of unlimited, unassimilated Muslim immigration is “extremism.”
Germany has designated the country’s leading opposition party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), as ‘extremist,’ paving the way for a possible ban. The decision to classify the party was taken by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency Verfassungschutz, which operates under the country’s Interior Ministry.
“Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has designated the Alternative for Germany, the country’s second-largest political party, as a right-wing extremist group, a controversial step that could lead to the organisation being banned altogether,” the Belgian news website Euroactiv reported.
Good thing Germany banning political parties has never had any negative effects in the past…
Palmdale to Gilroy is about 300 miles. In 20 years. Or about 15 miles of track a year. Or, counting 260 work days a year, that’s an astonishing .0587 miles of track a day, or a whopping 300 feet a day. By the way, the 1,911 mile transcontinental railroad was built in six years, largely by hand. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
This was unexpected: “Donald Trump Endorses Speaker Dustin Burrows, All Pro-School Choice Texas House Republicans
The endorsement was relayed by Abbott in a closed-door meeting on Tuesday.”
President Donald Trump has endorsed Speaker Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock) and every House Republican who voted for education savings account legislation earlier this month, according to Gov. Greg Abbott.
Abbott relayed the news to a meeting of House Republicans on Tuesday morning before the chamber gaveled in for the day’s business, The Texan reported.
The endorsement goes to the 86 House Republicans who voted for Senate Bill (SB) 2 on April 16. It comes for the 2026 midterms, and for Burrows himself, it’s also an endorsement for re-election as speaker. Trump told the caucus the morning of April 16 in a closed-door meeting that he would endorse them if they voted for SB 2. All but two Republicans, former Speaker Dade Phelan (R-Beaumont) and state Rep. Gary VanDeaver (R-New Boston), voted for it.
Passing school choice was indeed an accomplishment, but Burrows is still the latest in the Straus-Bonnin-Phelan cabal who have kept Democrats in a power-sharing agreement and thwarted conservative priorities for over a decade. burrows himself has presided over a House that has slow-walked conservative bills long after they sailed through the senate. This may be case of President Trump seeing things at a very high level and not being aware of the details. And speaking of Republican dissatisfaction with the Burrows Speakership…
With just over a month remaining in the 2025 legislative session, a group of conservative Texas House members gathered for a press conference to issue a stark warning to their leadership: time is almost up to deliver on Republican priorities.
“Today is day 107 of our 140-day legislative session,” said State Rep. Tony Tinderholt (R–Arlington). “In 12 days, every House bill that is going to pass must be reported by its committee. The clock is ticking, and our Republican voters are looking for the Republican majority they elected to the Texas House to deliver.”
Immigration and Border Security
State Rep. Mike Olcott (R–Aledo) said border security remains the number one priority for both the Texas GOP and voters across the state. He outlined four key policy targets: mandatory use of E-Verify, ending in-state tuition for illegal aliens, requiring local law enforcement cooperation with ICE, and addressing Colony Ridge.
On E-Verify, Olcott noted that “Senate Bill 324 was approved on second reading just yesterday, and we anticipate it will pass over to the House this week.” But in the House, he warned, progress has been sluggish.
“So far in the Texas House, the only legislation that’s been heard in committee on E-Verify is House Bill 323 … which only requires E-Verify for new local government employees, which is noble, but does not come close to turning off the employment magnet driving illegal immigration into this state.”
Snip.
Banning Social Transitioning of Minors
State Rep. Steve Toth (R–Conroe) focused on protecting children from social transitioning in schools. He said that while Texas banned gender mutilation surgeries in the last session, the House still hasn’t acted on legislation to prevent social transitioning.
“The good news is that we now have a great bill, House Bill 2258, to protect these kids,” Toth said. “Even better news is, it’s on its way to the governor’s desk … Bad news is, it’s not the governor of Texas. It’s the governor of Arkansas.”
Despite support from some members in the State Affairs Committee, the bill remains stuck.
“Chairman King won’t give it a hearing,” Toth said. “Texans will not forgive our massive Republican majority if we fail to protect children from groomers.”
Williamson County has local elections tomorrow. I’m not in a locale that’s having an election, but Michelle Evans of the Wilco GOP wrote to say they’re endorsing Mike Snyder for Hutto Mayor, Shannon Quicksall for Taylor City Council District 4, Cyndi Hauser for Liberty Hill ISD Trustee Place 7 and Ben Butler for Georgetown City Council District 3.
Democrats still want to trans your kids, censorship shellgames squashed, Google is declared a monopoly, socialists behave badly, more illegal alien depravity, some 2026 contenders jump in, pie-in-the-sky plans for high speed rail in Texas bite the dust, more Cybertruck drag-racing, and a Very Good Boy indeed.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Yes, Democrats are still all in on transing your kids. “Dad shares horrifying story of his daughter being groomed and transitioned behind his back at school.”
Just yesterday, a dad named Dustin Gonzales in the Jeffco Public School District of Colorado spoke at a school board meeting and shared a heartbreaking story that’s now all too familiar: his daughter was groomed by teachers and gender-transitioned behind his back.
Dad claims his daughter changed her gender identity secretly with a school therapist, who kept him in the dark about it.
The school didn’t ask me or inform me, they replaced me. By the time I found out, I was already labeled ‘the problem.’ My objections weren’t treated as concerns, they were treated as opposition. my voice was dismissed as ‘hateful,’ my presence undermined.
The father claims the school then got the therapist and an investigator involved, to separate the girl from her dad.
I’m here to make sure what happened to me, to my family, never happens to another parent in this district.
The father is now at risk of losing his daughter as a result of a new Colorado bill that would take kids away from parents who aren’t “affirming.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has just killed the Biden administration’s last-ditch effort to shelter the government’s Ministry of Truth, the Global Engagement Center (GEC).
In a new op-ed published by The Federalist (a target of the GEC along with yours truly), Rubio writes;
GEC was supposed to be dead already. But, as many have learned the hard way, in Washington, D.C., few things ever truly die. When Republicans in Congress sunset GEC’s funding at the end of last year, the Biden State Department simply slapped on a new name. The GEC became the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R-FIMI) office, with the same roster of employees. With this new name, they hoped to survive the transition to the new administration.
Today, we are putting that to an end. Whatever name it goes by, GEC is dead. It will not return.
Alphabet’s Google illegally dominates two markets for online advertising technology, a judge ruled on Thursday, dealing another blow to the tech giant and paving the way for U.S. antitrust prosecutors to seek a breakup of its ad products.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, found Google liable for “willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power” in markets for publisher ad servers and the market for ad exchanges which sit between buyers and sellers.
The decision clears the way for another hearing to determine what Google must do to restore competition in those markets, such as sell off parts of its business at another trial that has yet to be scheduled. It is the second court ruling that Google holds an illegal monopoly, following a similar judgment in a case over online search.
Publisher ad servers are platforms used by websites to store and manage their digital ad inventory. Along with ad exchanges, the technology lets news publishers and other online content providers make money by selling ads. Those funds are the “lifeblood” of the internet, Brinkema wrote.
“In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” Brinkema wrote.
However, antitrust enforcers failed to prove a separate claim that the company had a monopoly in advertiser ad networks, she wrote.
U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi called the ruling “a landmark victory in the ongoing fight to stop Google from monopolizing the digital public square.”
“A 13-year-old boy in California was allegedly sexually abused and murdered by his soccer coach and, as it turns out, the soccer coach was an illegal alien. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has lodged a detainer with the Los Angeles County jail for Mario Edgardo Garcia-Aquino, a 43-year-old Salvadoran citizen living unlawfully in the United States, the agency confirmed Wednesday to the Daily Caller News Foundation. Garcia-Aquino is accused of killing 13-year-old Oscar ‘Omar’ Hernandez, a San Fernando Valley, California, resident found dead earlier in April.”
Evidently the cartels have expensive taste. “A federal grand jury has charged two men who allegedly tried to smuggle five high-caliber sniper rifles to Mexico last month, and prosecutors are seeking the forfeiture of the firearms, five .50-caliber Barrett long guns and four magazines for .50-caliber bullets. Wednesday’s charges of unlawful smuggling of goods from the United States stem from the March 12 arrest of Oscar Sanchez Gonzalez and Arturo Martinez Aguilar as they allegedly attempted to drive to Mexico over the Calexico West port of entry.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Smith says people asking him to run is an indictment of the Democratic Party.
“I have no choice, because I’ve had elected officials, and I’m not going to give their names, elected officials coming up to me. I’ve had folks who are pundits come up to me. I’ve had folks that got a lot of money, billionaires and others that have talked to me about exploratory committees and things of that nature. I’m not a politician. I’ve never had a desire to be a politician,” Smith told ABC News’ “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl.
Smith reiterated that because of the number of people asking him to consider a run, he has to leave the door open.
Smith usually strikes me as a moderately annoying “hot take” artist, but he has been condemning the Democrat Party about their lurch to the right on several issues, and has discussed that with the likes of Dave Rubin. Smith has no business running for President, but would be immediately be a more sane alternative than anyone else named as a Democratic front-runner.
When police raided a factory in Georgia, they found dozens of Chinese nationals being kept in near slave-like conditions, and authorities say they were pressed into service by a forced labor trafficking ring.
Last month, agents from several agencies raided Wellmade Industries in Cartersville, Georgia, 40 miles north of Atlanta, and what they found shocked them, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Federal officials said that around 60 Chinese nationals were being held in tiny rooms and forced to work long hours in the flooring manufacturing plant. The exploited workers at Wellmade are just a few of the many exploited workers the Trump administration has rooted out.
ICE Homeland Security Investigations Atlanta Special Agent in Charge Steven N. Schrank said the conditions these workers were living in was “horrific,” and noted that he and his fellow agents were investigating eight other locations for similar offenses.
Three Wellmade Industries officers were arrested, including company owner, Zhu Chen, his nephew, Jiayi Chen, and company associate Jian Jun Lu.
At the bond hearings for the suspects, assistant district attorney Austin Waldo claimed that officials of the company immediately confiscated the workers’ travel and ID documents as soon as they arrived at the plant to make it harder for them to leave.
Well, this would have made my Nvidia roundup had it dropped a day earlier, and not in a good way. “Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang boarded a private jet to Beijing shortly after the U.S. Commerce Department announced new export licensing requirements for the company’s H20 AI chips for the Chinese market. Once there, Huang met with the head of a Chinese state-backed trade body, where he reaffirmed Nvidia’s commitment to the Chinese market despite a deepening trade war.”
Baltimore student: “Hey, doesn’t Maryland law require a United States flag in every classroom?” Baltimore County Board of Education: “Hey, you’re suspended and we’re calling the cops on you.”
The East Plano Islamic Center’s planned development faces continued scrutiny from Texas officials.
U.S. Sen. John Cornyn is calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate EPIC for potential religious discrimination.
In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, Cornyn expressed concern that a “master-planned ‘community of thousands of Muslims’” could violate the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by discriminating against Christians, Jews, and other non-muslim minorities.
“Religious discrimination, whether explicit or implicit, is unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments,” wrote Cornyn. “Religious freedom is a cornerstone of our nation’s values, and I am concerned this community potentially undermines this vital protection.”
Sanity in the UK: “U.K. Supreme Court Rules Males Don’t Qualify as Women Under Anti-Discrimination Law, in Landmark Ruling.”
The United Kingdom’s supreme court ruled Wednesday that males who identify as women do not fall qualify as women under anti-discrimination law, a monumental decision that will have major consequences for British law.
The high court defined “woman” based on sex rather than gender identity, keeping it within the bounds of scientific reality rather than giving into the demands of left-wing activists. The ruling specifically addressed the question of whether transgender-identifying males who obtain a gender recognition certificate — a legal document acknowledging them as women — enjoy the same protections extended to females under Britain’s 2010 Equality Act, an anti-discrimination law that covers nine protected characteristics and applies to various sectors of British life.
“The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological women and biological sex,” said Lord Patrick Hodge, deputy president of the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court, in announcing the ruling.
Bad news: A house exploded two miles from me. I actually heard it, and thought that one of my dogs had run into a wall or something. Worse news: The house belonged to Sara Felix, who I know from the Austin science fiction community, and her husband was in the house at the time. The silver linings are that he’s now out of surgery, though badly burned, and that the family hadn’t actually moved into the house, and were still living in their old house in the same general area.
When your band name stops being ironic: “New Pornographers Drummer Joe Seiders Arrested for Possession of Child Porn.” I have a few of their albums I bought 15 years ago. I considered embedding “Breakin’ the Law” for ironic effect, but it’s a lousy song. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
A foster mom in Missouri is facing multiple charges of abuse and is accused of trading a teenage girl she was guardian of for a pet monkey, authorities said.
Brenda Ruth Deutsch, 70, of Lincoln County, was charged with two counts of abuse or neglect of a child and one count of endangering the welfare of a child, according to Lincoln County Prosecutor Mike Wood. She was taken into custody last weekend.
Deutsch has fostered more than 200 children for about 15 to 20 years, Wood told NBC News.
While it’s tempting to chalk this up to more “annals in human depravity,” given the age of the alleged perp, I have to wonder if some mental illness/senility/Alzheimers was involved.
Anderson Ronaldo Reyes Giron — a member of the “Most Wanted” list — was taken into custody on April 2 by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) and the Texas Highway Patrol for charges related to deadly conduct from shooting a firearm in Travis County, as well as theft of property in Williamson County. He’s originally from Honduras, from which he came illegally, and was arrested by the Austin Police Department in August 2024 for the afore-listed charges before being let out on bail.
Thanks again, Austin.
“Governor Greg Abbott, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), and the Texas National Guard continue to work together with the Trump Administration to secure the border; stop the smuggling of drugs, weapons, and people into Texas; and prevent, detect, and interdict transnational criminal activity between ports of entry,” a press release from Abbott’s office stated upon announcement of Giron’s arrest.
Giron has been wanted since February 2025 when Travis County issued a warrant for his arrest following the firearm violation, and then when Williamson County similarly filed a warrant after his theft incident.
Former Texas Congresswoman Mayra Flores has officially thrown her hat into the ring to challenge the indicted Congressman Henry Cuellar (R-TX-28) and his 20-year-plus tenure representing Texas’ 28th Congressional District in Washington, D.C.
“I am deeply honored to announce my candidacy for Congress—a chance to serve the people and uphold the values that make our nation great,” Flores posted on X upon announcement of her challenge to Cuellar’s seat.
The first female Mexican-born former congresswoman, Flores comes to the drawing board with experience in Texas elections — first scoring a seat in a special election to represent the Lone Star State on the federal stage after Democratic Congressman Filemon Vela resigned in 2022, allowing her to flip the historically Democratic 34th Congressional District. Flores flipped parties from Democratic to Republican in the early 2000s, primarily citing pro-life motivations.
She also ran against Rep. Vicente Gonzalez twice (D-TX-34), losing first in the 2022 general election and second in 2024, although she notched her numbers up significantly the second time around — losing the election by a 2 percent margin.
Cuellar maintained his seat during the 2024 general election against Republican candidate Jay Furman with nearly 52 percent of the vote — a race rumored as potentially dangerous for Cuellar due to his indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that year after an FBI investigation in 2022 for alleged bribery and money laundering in coordination with his wife, Imelda Cuellar, and the country of Azerbaijan.
TX-28 favors Democrats with a rating of D-51% per The Texan’s Texas Partisan Index, although President Donald Trump made history in the district during the November election — winning Webb County’s presidential vote, the first Republican president to claim victory there in a century.
Until Flores’ announcement, the only other notable contender for Cuellar’s seat was Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina, who flipped parties in December 2024.
For more on Cueller’s indictment, see here and here.
“With Attorney General Ken Paxton officially running for U.S. Senate against Sen. John Cornyn, the race to replace him is heating up. After former U.S. Attorney John Bash became the first to enter the race, State Sen. Mayes Middleton has now launched his own campaign for Texas attorney general, pitching himself as a conservative fighter ready to take the reins.” I regularly get press releases from Middleton’s office, and he seems a pretty solid conservative.
The U.S. Department of Transportation officially terminated a $63.9 million federal grant intended for the planning and development of a high-speed rail line between Dallas and Houston.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the move will save taxpayers millions while allowing Amtrak to focus on improving existing operations.
Personally, I’d kill Amtrack and hand the assets to the states to subsidize if they felt like.
Originally pitched as a private venture, the Texas Central Railway project aimed to connect two of Texas’ largest cities with a 205-mph bullet train, promising a 90-minute travel time.
The project has faced strong opposition from landowners and lawmakers since it was proposed in 2009.
As cost estimates soared from $12 billion to over $40 billion, the project became increasingly reliant on federal funding.
Duffy was blunt in his assessment: “Underwriting this project is a waste of taxpayer funds and a distraction from Amtrak’s core mission of improving its existing subpar services.”
“If the private sector believes this project is feasible, they should carry the pre-construction work forward, rather than relying on Amtrak and the American taxpayer to bail them out,” Duffy added.
State Sen. Charles Schwertner (R-Georgetown) posted on X, “Thank you to President Trump and Secretary Duffy for standing up for taxpayers and terminating the $63.9 million grant to Amtrak for the proposed high-speed rail project between Houston and Dallas.”
Even the $10 billion version was a boondoggle that wouldn’t have made money and required taxpayer subsidies to stay afloat, and more likely never would have been completed anyway. High speed passenger rail works in Japan because they already had high urban density and an existing rail system and culture to support it. Texas has none of those things, and even if it was built it would never be profitable here (or just about anywhere else).
And just to drive the point home: The highest density high speed rail in Japan seats 1,634 passengers. Assume passengers pay $100 a ticket each way, the train is entirely full, and the Texas high speed rail train runs six times a day (all optimistic and unlikely assumptions), 365 days a year, and you get $357,846,000 a year in gross revenue, which means, even without the including the cost to run the train, it would take just under 112 years to make back the initial investment.
Despite his new position as a vice chair of the DNC, gun control weasel David Hogg wants to primary old Democrats. In this particular task I wish the little weasel the best of luck.
This is your mayor on social justice. “The mayor of South Fulton faces an eviction action at an Atlanta apartment complex, Fulton County court documents show, adding another development to what’s been a turbulent year so far for the city leader. Mayor Khalid Kamau, who has gone recently by Mayor Kobi, has had eviction proceedings initiated against him in Fulton County Magistrate Court by an apartment complex at 6200 Bakers Ferry Rd. Court documents show the complex filed to initiate eviction after alleging Kamau failed to pay rent in March.”
Snip.
Documents show the amount of past due rent was listed at $1,663.77. A late fee of $100, utilities of $39.77 and “other fees” amounting to $175 are also being sought.
Kamau has been at odds in recent weeks and under scrutiny from the South Fulton City Council over his spending and alleged “abuse” of the position.
He in turn has defended himself from what he has termed the City Council’s “overreach” after his access to city buildings was revoked and his budget frozen in February, and said he has faced resistance from the council throughout his tenure.
The move by the city council came after reports on the mayor’s trips — which spanned four continents in four months — as well as updates at City Hall that included a film studio and refurbished conference/pool table room. The City Council voted to redistribute several pieces of new electronic equipment to the city IT department and send back the film studio.
I know you’ll be shocked, shocked to learn that Kamau is a Democratic Socialist…
Your feel-good dog story of the week: A dog named Buford kept a two-year old boy safe after the latter wandered seven miles from his home. Another article states that Buford is an Anatolian Pyrenees.
I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.
I hope your taxes are finished, or at least in the home stretch. Mine are done but not mailed out yet. I made so little last year that I’m getting every cent I sent in back, pitiful though it is.
This week: The Supreme Court hands Trump two victories, more progress in the war against illegal aliens, a trade war reprieve for everyone but China, Jasmine Crockett seems to think illegal aliens pick cotton, Tim Walz proves he’s still a putz, and after 72 years, police finally arrest an infamous Mexican bandit!
The Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to move forward with its plans to fire thousands of probationary federal employees, overturning a lower court order preventing the terminations.
The Supreme Court lifted an injunction Tuesday from a California federal court barring the Trump administration from firing employees across six federal agencies. The lower court order came last month following a lawsuit from the American Federation of Government Employees, a powerful public sector union.
“The District Court’s injunction was based solely on the allegations of the nine non-profit-organization plaintiffs in this case. But under established law, those allegations are presently insufficient to support the organizations’ standing,” the justices said in an unsigned ruling.
Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the court’s order. Sotomayor did not explain her reasoning, while Jackson said the Trump administration failed to demonstrate the urgency of the issue.
Nearly two months after a top Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) official and support team arrived at IRS headquarters to investigate waste and fraud—aiming to streamline a bloated and corrupt federal bureaucracy—the Trump administration has begun a sizeable workforce reduction across the federal agency.
Fox News reported late Friday evening that the IRS will begin laying off about 20,000 staffers — up to 25% of the workforce — on Friday and through next week.
Most job cuts will center around the IRS Office of Civil Rights and Compliance, which protects taxpayers from discrimination, audits, and investigations.
White House spokesperson Liz Huston told Fox News, “In a stark contrast to the previous administration’s wildly unpopular plan to hire thousands of additional IRS agents, President Trump is focused on saving tax dollars, eliminating bloat, axing useless DEI offices, and increasing the agency’s efficiency.”
Here’s more from Fox:
In addition to the layoffs, the agency said in a letter to employees that it is eliminating its Office of Civil Rights and Compliance, which is responsible for protecting taxpayers from discrimination, audits and investigations.
. . .
“This action is being taken to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the IRS in accordance with agency priorities and the Workforce Optimization Initiative outlined in a recent Executive Order,” the letter states, referring to President Donald Trump’s executive order directing the Department of Government Efficiency to get rid of wasteful spending.
The agency said it was approved to offer Voluntary Early Retirement Authority (VERA) and Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment (VSIP). Information about those programs will be shared with employees at a later date, the message said.
“This calendar year to date, approximately 5% of this office left through the Deferred Resignation Program and attrition,” the message said. “An additional 75% of the office will be reduced through a RIF (Reduction in Force).”
A Treasury Department spokesperson told Fox News, “The rollback of wasteful Biden-era hiring surges and consolidation of critical support functions are vital to improving both efficiency and quality of service. ” The spokesperson added, “The Secretary is committed to ensuring that efficiency is realized while providing the collections, privacy, and customer service the American people deserve.”
An official with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) said that millions of migrants are currently receiving taxpayer-funded Medicaid benefits while thousands are on voter rolls across the country and are illegally voting in American elections.
DOGE official and equity firm CEO Antonio Gracias said that migrants have obtained Social Security cards after being released into the interior of the country with a notice to appear in immigration court, with court dates scheduled an average of six years after their release.
“So now you’re in the country with some quasi-legal status, you’re waiting for your court date … you can fill out an asylum application,” Gracias explained during a recent appearance on the “All In” podcast, which featured Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro. “Once that application is in, you can file another form, a 765 to get work authorization, once you get that, you get a 766, which is the authorization and we automatically send you a Social Security card in the mail.”
With access to Social Security cards, Gracias says, over a million migrants have been able to receive Medicaid benefits. “We mapped this through the benefit programs, we found every benefits program that is being accessed by these people, 1.3 million are on Medicaid right now, today,” Gracias said.
He went on to explain that thousands of migrants have been found on voter rolls as well, also asserting that the Democratic Party opened the border in order to import new voters.
“We looked at voter rolls and we found that thousands are registered to vote in friendly states. And we looked even further in those friendly states and found that many of those people had actually voted. It was shocking to us,” Gracias explained. “I think this was a move to import voters.”
“This doesn’t include the 7.8 million that ICE has that have come in illegally that we know are here and all the people who are here illegally who we don’t know are here,” he explained.
DOGE is uncovering illegal aliens and massive fraud. It’s easy to see why Democrats are upset…
The Supreme Court on Monday lifted a federal judge’s order that once blocked the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport suspected members of a Venezuelan gang to El Salvador.
In a 5–4 majority opinion, the Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a major victory against legal challenges regarding his mass deportation agenda. The decision allows Trump to continue invoking the Alien Enemies Act to accelerate the removal of illegal immigrants believed to be in Tren de Aragua.
The nation’s highest court, however, noted that the administration should give immigrants it seeks to deport “reasonable time” to challenge their removal from the U.S. in court. Those legal challenges must take place in Texas, where the detainees are held, and not Washington, D.C., the conservative majority ruled.
“The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs,” the ruling states. “The detainees subject to removal orders under the [Alien Enemies Act] are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal.”
President Donald Trump announced Thursday that his administration is finalizing plans to withhold all federal funding for sanctuary cities and states that provide safe harbor to illegal aliens.
“No more Sanctuary Cities! They protect the Criminals, not the Victims,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “They are disgracing our Country, and are being mocked all over the World.”
On his first day in office, Trump signed the “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” executive order laying out a framework to strictly enforce the nation’s immigration laws and “prioritize the safety, security, and financial and economic well-being of Americans.”
In the E/O, Trump authorized the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security to “evaluate and undertake any lawful actions” needed to ensure sanctuary jurisdictions across the U.S. are not receiving federal funds.
Now, it appears Trump is ready to drop the hammer on these Democrat strongholds.
“Working on papers to withhold all Federal Funding for any City or State that allows these Death Traps to exist,” the president said in his post.
Sanctuary jurisdictions are states, counties, or cities that refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement agencies seeking to deport criminal illegal aliens.
There are about a dozen states and hundreds of cities across the US that consider themselves “sanctuaries” for illegals.
The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security and Enforcement held a hearing Wednesday to address the issue, titled “Sanctuary Jurisdictions: Magnet for Migrants, Cover for Criminals.”
Republicans contended that sanctuary cities have been an impediment to the mass deportations the Trump administration has prioritized in its first 100 days of office.
But Democrats defended Sanctuary Cities, arguing that trust between local law enforcement and the community erodes when the police comply with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
In his opening statement, Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) argued that the strong measures were necessary after Democrats deliberately trafficked over eight million unvetted illegal aliens into the country, “including some of the most dangerous, vicious criminals and cartel members in the world.”
“Congress must enact stronger laws that will prevent a future Joe Biden from ever again placing our families at risk, and that will stop today’s Democratic politicians from impeding the enforcement of our immigration and public safety laws,” said McClintock stated.
The usual talking heads said that Trump was going to trigger higher inflation (higher, that is, than the Biden inflation they’d been taking such pains to hide). Reality: Not so much. “CPI Shows 12 Month Inflation Rate at 2.4%; Lowest Core in 4 Years.”
ICE deport criminal illegal alien for the 40th time. “Julian Estrada-Garcia, 36, has four convictions for illegal entry and convictions for driving while intoxicated, possession of illicit narcotics, and fraud.” Just the sort of people Democrats are working so hard to keep us from deporting…
The U.S. House of Representatives has passed Rep. Chip Roy’s (R-TX-21) Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would require proof of American citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.
The SAVE Act would require states to verify U.S. citizenship and identity through documentary proof in-person when an individual registers to vote in federal elections, regardless of the registration method. Additionally, it requires states to remove “non-citizens” from voter rolls.
“The American people have spoken very clearly that they believe only American citizens should vote in American elections. There’s nothing controversial about that,” Roy said on the floor before the vote.
“This legislation is designed to restore that faith, to save our elections, to save election integrity,” he added.
The U.S. House passed the SAVE Act 220 to 208, with four Democratic members voting in favor of the legislation — one of them being Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX-28). No Republicans voted against the bill.
A Gallup poll from October 2024 found that 84 percent of respondents are in favor of requiring voters to provide photo identification at voting locations, and 83 percent favor requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote.
What do you know, another 80/20 issue Democrats are on the wrong side of. Of course, they’re lying about the SAVE Act, so if you see misinformation about it on facebook, ask them where in the ext of the bill itself do they see the nonsense they’re peddling.
President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he is implementing a 90-day pause on retaliatory tariffs for countries that have come to the negotiating table, while raising tariffs on China to 125 percent following Beijing’s latest retaliatory levies.
Trump stated on Truth Social that he is lowering the retaliatory tariffs he unveiled earlier this week for the “worst offenders” to the baseline rate of 10 percent after more than 75 nations expressed a willingness to negotiate new trade deals with the U.S. He vowed not to raise rates on those countries for 90 days while negotiations proceed.
“Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately,” Trump posted.
“Conversely, and based on the fact that more than 75 Countries have called Representatives of the United States, including the Departments of Commerce, Treasury, and the USTR, to negotiate a solution to the subjects being discussed relative to Trade, Trade Barriers, Tariffs, Currency Manipulation, and Non Monetary Tariffs, and that these Countries have not, at my strong suggestion, retaliated in any way, shape, or form against the United States, I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately,” Trump added.
Stocks immediately surged upon Trump’s announcement with each of the three major indexes jumping by over 7 percent. The Dow Jones and S&P 500 saw their biggest gains in five years, and the tech-oriented Nasdaq jumped over 10 percent. Wall Street had been reeling since last week when Trump announced a dramatic global tariff package consisting of a 10 percent minimum tariff and much higher tariff rates for many countries worldwide.
Golly, It’s almost like Trump knew what he was doing and planned something like this all along, integrating both carrot and stick in his negotiating strategy. And it’s almost like China is on the outside looking in as Trump wins lower rates for American goods, accomplishing the decoupling of America from China and more firmly cementing other nations in America’s sphere of influence rather than China’s.
A whole lot of promising return for one week of work…
This week, President Trump instituted a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs for the nations that are clearly interested in coming to the negotiating table to make deals more fair to the United States. The reality is brutally simple: America holds all the cards.
“What’s the largest consumer market on Earth? The United States,” Kevin O’Leary noted this week. “Almost 40% of all goods consumed worldwide. What’s the largest GDP? 25 or 26% of the world? The United States of America. China needs the United States.”
Even our top competitor in the global market, China, needs us more than we need them.
During a recent appearance on “The Ingraham Angle,” investor Chamath Palihapitiya laid out a stark picture of China’s economic fragility, arguing that the ongoing tariff standoff gives the United States far more leverage than Beijing wants to admit.
“Even the Chinese economists are admitting that the tariffs are gonna hurt China a lot more than the United States,” Ingraham said, pointing to growing concern within China itself. She quoted one Chinese economist who conceded, “The impact on China is mainly that Chinese products have nowhere to go. These companies will be hit very hard.”
Palihapitiya agreed, saying Americans routinely underestimate just how dire China’s economic outlook has become. “Together, America and China represent almost half of world GDP,” he explained, “but underneath the covers, what we keep forgetting time and again is America is the market that matters.”
He pointed to a series of structural problems dragging China down, including its rapidly aging population, tightening restrictions on foreign investment, and unreliable intellectual property protections. “Foreign investment in China has fallen off of a cliff,” Palihapitiya noted, painting a picture of a nation increasingly isolated and economically vulnerable.
This tariff cliff is precisely what America needs to force real change.
China’s economic trajectory, he warned, is far from sustainable. “They have a very difficult economic forecast if they shrink,” he said. “When you look at the China case, they’re in a worse position than we are, which is why they have to sort of come to the negotiating table now and figure out some reasonable thing.”
Palihapitiya added that President Trump understands this imbalance well. “I think this is what President Trump was alluding to when he said, ‘They want to come to the table, and they don’t quite know how.’”
With China’s economy teetering on the brink, the United States is in a far stronger position than most so-called experts ever imagined—and President Trump is wasting no time seizing the advantage.
“Our investigation of MECA has yielded evidence suggesting it holds fiscal and personnel ties to US designated foreign terrorist organizations, chiefly the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), alongside a host of extremist anti-government actors based in the United States,” reads the report by the NCRI, released on Monday.
MECA states on its website that it has sent more than $31 million in aid to children in “Palestine,” Iraq, and Lebanon since 1988. The nonprofit further purports to provide financial and professional assistance to community organizations in the West Bank and Gaza, fund university scholarships for Palestinians, and develop educational programs about the Middle East. MECA states that its “founding advisors” include Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Edward Said, and Maxine Waters.
The supposedly humanitarian organization has expressed its support for violence against Israel. The day after October 7, MECA declared its support on social media for the attack: “We are witnessing the people of Gaza rising up to respond to decades of Israeli settler colonial violence. The US [government] bears responsibility for its political, economic & military support of this brutal apartheid regime. Join us to stand in solidarity with Palestine.”
The NCRI report identifies deeper relationships between MECA and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which has been a designated foreign terrorist organization since 1997 and participated in the October 7 attack on Israel.
MECA’s current director of Gaza projects, Dr. Mona El-Farra, previously served as the deputy director of the Union of Health Work Committees, which was recognized as the “health organization” of the PFLP in a 1993 USAID report. In 2014, El-Farra was reportedly denied an exit visa by Israel for “security reasons.” El-Farra and Barbara Lubin, MECA’s founder and current executive director, have both met with Leila Khaled, who joined the PFLP when it was founded in 1967 and became the first woman to hijack a plane.
A media advisory released by MECA in 2011 listed Leena Al-Arian as its communications coordinator. Al-Arian is the daughter of Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist who was sentenced to 57 months in prison for “conspiring to violate a federal law that prohibits making or receiving contributions of funds, goods or services to, or for the benefit of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).”
I think it’s far safer to assume that every middle eastern or Islamic charity raising money for “the children” is actually buying weapons for terrorists or lining the pockets of jihadis. But I’m cynical that way…
“Journalist Matt Taibbi is suing Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove for libel, after the California Democrat claimed during her opening remarks in a House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee hearing on Tuesday that he’s a ‘serial sexual harasser.'” Juding from that picture, I can only assume that Kamlager-Dove has never been on the receiving end of sexual harassment…
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-ranged) evidently thinks that illegal aliens pick cotton. Eli Whitney died in vain. (Though it wasn’t until John Rust invented an improved picker that manual cotton picking finally died out after World War II.)
Follow-up: “Collin County Residents Reject Planned Islamic ‘City‘. County Judge Chris Hill said he ‘cannot support’ the proposed EPIC City project.” (Previously.)
Tim Walz gets a savage heckling from veterans at the Minnesota state capital. Say what you want about Hillary’s losing Veep pick Tim Kaine, but he wasn’t a weirdo who didn’t know when to get off the stage and slink back into relative obscurity.
Evidently made jealous by Amazon ruining J.R.R. Tolkien, Netflix decided to ruin C. S. Lewis. “Netflix offered Meryl Streep the role of Aslan in new ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ movie.”
Hoovie makes a six figure error calculating the capital gains costs of trading in a Lamborghini Countach for a lease-to-buy Bugatti Veyron. Offered here as a public service for all my viewers leasing a Bugatti Veyron…
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.”
Pinkslipapalooza in BureaucratLand, more DOGE savings, the deportation machine gets cranked up, Apple invests in America. Plus some depths of human depravity.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
“Federal Judge Rules In Favor Of Trump Government Layoffs.” “U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, who was appointed by Barack Obama, ruled that the labor unions which filed the lawsuit against the government layoffs had to take their case before the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) rather than a federal court.”
The now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development has funneled at least $122 million in approved grants to terror-tied aid charities, including an evangelical Christian group that in 2014 facilitated a $125,000 sub-grant to a Sudanese terrorist organization linked to al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden.
USAID has long been complicit in funding humanitarian aid groups associated with designated terrorists, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. This is just one egregious example of the waste, fraud, and abuse within USAID that the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency are working to uncover.
“There’s a fox loose in the henhouse of our foreign aid system—a system intended to uplift lives abroad that instead has funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to radical and terrorist-linked organizations,” Gregg Roman, executive director of the Middle East Forum, said in his testimony before House Oversight’s DOGE Subcommittee on Wednesday.
The Middle East Forum published these findings in a years-long study earlier this month, as DOGE head Elon Musk started targeting USAID and its wasteful, often ideologically-driven spending.
One organization, World Vision, was given $200,000 in taxpayer funding to direct toward the Islamic Relief Agency a decade ago. Of those funds, a $125,000 sub-grant was approved by the Obama administration. A whistleblower came forward to reveal the improper relationship between the two groups.
The evangelical non-governmental organization claimed in 2018 it had no knowledge of the al-Qaeda affiliate’s terrorism ties. In 2010, two members of Islamic Relief’s U.S. branch pleaded guilty to money-laundering, theft of public funds, conspiracy, and other charges. Six years earlier, the Treasury Department designated Islamic Relief as a terror-financing organization.
Despite the scandal, World Vision obtained $200 million in approved grants from USAID last year. It has received an estimated $2 billion since 2008.
Additionally, Helping Hand for Relief and Development received a $78,000 USAID grant in 2023 even after USAID’s inspector general launched an investigation into a prior grant. The group held ties to Pakistan’s Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation, a designated terrorist organization that played a role in the 2008 Mumbai massacre.
Helping Hand is partnered with the Unlimited Friends Association, a charity affiliated with Hamas and known for promoting violent antisemitism.
Another Hamas-tied group, Bayader Association for Environment and Development, received its last USAID grant on October 1, 2023, just before the October 7 terror attack on Israel. Bayader previously featured senior Hamas officials, including the son of the late Ismail Haniyeh, who orchestrated the October 7 massacre.
Other examples of aid groups involved in funding terrorists, sometimes knowingly, include the American Near East Refugee Agency, Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, and Tides Foundation.
Is there no evil in the world George Soros doesn’t have his fingerprints on?
Surprise! Trump’s policies are hugely popular…even among Democrats.
81% of Americans, including 70% of Democrats and 80% of Independents, support deporting illegal aliens who have committed crimes.
76% of Americans support a “full-scale effort” to eliminate government fraud and waste.
76% of Americans want to close the border and add extra security.
69% of Americans, including half of all Democrats, want to ban men from women’s sports – and a similar number want the government to declare that there are only two sexes.
And yet the Left has spent the last month railing against ICE arrests and DOGE audits while stumping for the right to castrate kids and let boys in girls’ restrooms.
Some more key findings:
70% of Americans said government should hire people “strictly on the basis of merit and objective evaluations.”
79% of Americans said the government should make sure that categories “like race, gender, and religion” are not used to discriminate against applicants.
66% of Americans, including more than a third of Democrats, think Democrats shouldn’t oppose everything Trump is doing out of the gate and help Trump eliminate government waste.
58% of Americans say Trump is doing a better job than Biden.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) told Morning Wire that the Senate GOP “has not let up the pressure at all” on Democrats as Republicans ram President Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments through their confirmations.
Senate Republicans, with their 53-47 majority, have cleared nearly all of the president’s most controversial picks after Kash Patel was confirmed to be the next FBI director in a 51-49 vote on Thursday. Mullin, who has gone to bat for each of Trump’s cabinet picks, told Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley that the confirmation process had gone smoothly thanks to Republican leadership that is laser-focused on supporting Trump’s agenda.
“What you’ve seen is a new leader in the Senate with Leader [John] Thune. He is just 100 percent grinding the Democrats down from the get-go,” Mullin told Morning Wire.
“And so once the president got confirmed and sworn into office on the 20th, what we did is we immediately started the clock on these nominees, and [we] haven’t stopped,” he added.
The Republican senator from Oklahoma explained that the party didn’t wait for Trump to be sworn in on January 20 to push his nominees through the confirmation process. Since the new Republican-controlled Senate began on January 3, the GOP immediately went to work putting pressure on Democrats to speed up confirmations.
Mullin said that Thune “has literally kept that clock running 24/7, seven days a week” on cabinet confirmations.
After a cabinet nominee gets reported out of committee, “there’s a 24-hour soak,” followed by a 30-hour debate, he explained, adding, “On directors, like Kash Patel, when you invoke cloture on them, you have a two-hour debate. So while you still have a 24-hour soak, you only have two hours of debate on that person. So you can move those faster.”
“Even when we’re not here, the Democrats will negotiate and say, ‘If you don’t make us stay over on the weekend, we’ll allow the clocks to run consecutively, even though we’re not here.’ So we’ll go ahead and invoke cloture on the next person,” Mullin told Morning Wire. “So when we get back here on Monday, we can confirm two people at once. That’s why we’re so far ahead — because Leader Thune has not let up the pressure at all, not one bit on the Democrats.”
Sounds like Thune is a vast improvement over Cocaine Mitch…
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working with the newly-established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cancel over $67 million in grants that had been issued by the Biden Administration.
According to Fox News, the EPA is focusing on $77.1 million in spending that was earmarked by the Biden-era EPA for “environmental justice” grants, distributed to 20 different recipients. Although approximately $10 million has already been spent and is irretrievable, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the agency was able to successfully cancel $67.4 million in planned funding.
“We will make sure every penny spent by EPA goes towards protecting human health and the environment, and Powering the Great American Comeback,” said Zeldin. “I am proud to partner with DOGE to restore fiscal responsibility and accountability in our government.”
In response, the official X account for DOGE lauded the EPA cuts as “good work.”
Among the canceled grants was a $4.2 million grant to San Diego State University Foundation, which planned to use the money to bring “environmental justice” to “tribal, indigenous, and Pacific Island communities.”
Under Zeldin, the EPA has revealed that the previous administration’s EPA was freely giving at least $20 billion in taxpayer dollars, with the spending being determined solely by eight agency entities “at their discretion.” Among this spending was a $2 billion grant sent to Power Forward Communities, a far-left non-profit with ties to failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
We’re very fortunate that those on the left were too greedy and incompetent to keep rigging elections…
Tiffany Henyard, the crooked, free-spending mayor of Dolton, Illinois, got slaughtered in a Democratic primary this week. “[Jason] House won the primary with 3,896 votes (87.91%), compared to Henyard’s 536 votes (12.09%).”
Christopher Rufo: Tell me about this culture and how it’s been spreading through the NSA. And talk to me about what it was like, even a year ago or a few months ago, before Trump reentered the White House.
NSA Whistleblower: About ten years ago, they started doing the “employee resource groups”: African-American, veterans, Pride. It was just a meeting here and there, almost like a potluck—culture, food, a speech. Then it started to get more and more. Instead of just one day a month, it was one week a month, or the whole month. You could be hired as a mathematician, a staff officer, or system engineer, but you would spend your time going to these events and having meetings all day about it. They got themselves into position to help craft policy and started pushing the idea that if you want to get promoted, you have to participate in these events.
And then everything became Pride. You would go to a training, and it would be about “privilege” and “how to be a better ally.” A lady would give classes on how to talk “gender-neutral” to people. You had analysts that didn’t want to do the reporting they were supposed to be doing because they were going to have to report on somebody’s “dead name.” They were having this crisis of conscience about reporting the adversary’s actual name because they thought it was their “dead name,” and they didn’t want to disrespect the person. It was like a cult that was hellbent on pushing gender ideology.
Rufo: It seems like this is a clique of very activist male-to-female transgender agents. Tell me about this community.
Whistleblower: There is a very small number of them, but they wield an enormous amount of power. And outside of the sick stuff, you also see a prevalent Marxist philosophy going on with these people in their chat rooms. They hate capitalism. They hate Christians. They’re always espousing socialist and Marxist beliefs.
I know several people at the agency brought that up, like, “Hey, we’re here to fight for the U.S.A. and go after the adversaries.” And they just got hammered. They would just start coming out with “transphobe” and “homophobe” right away or calling you a “racist.” And that’s why a lot of folks are still hesitant to say anything, because you still have people at these agencies in those key spots. It infected everything.
If this is true, intelligence head Tulsi Gabbard needs to purge the Puzzle Palace of all transculters and commies with a pink slip machine gun. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ. )
Bill Clinton advisors saying Democrats are screwed is nothing new, but this time it’s not James Carville.
“It’s very hard to be optimistic about the Democrats,” the advisor to President Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign, Douglas Schoen, tells The New York Sun. The party is “totally off base.” Lacking a message, strategy, or leader, the pollster says President Trump may defy expectations in next year’s midterms.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Schoen likened Mr. Trump to the boxing legend, Mohammed Ali, at his peak. He’s “moving so quickly, he has the Democrats totally unnerved,” he said. “They can’t hit him. They can’t find him. He’s way ahead of them.”
Mr. Schoen, “exaggerating” for illustration, said the Ukraine War “could be settled and resolved before the Democrats develop a coherent position.” They’re “MIA,” with “no interesting voice.” He suggests governors take the lead, rather than Senator Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
“There is nobody making policy,” Mr. Schoen said. “There is nobody with an overarching strategy.” That weakness is reflected in his Schoen Cooperman Research surveys. It “sort of tells you how off base the Democrats are” that their favorability is 31 percent versus Mr. Trump’s 53 percent.
“The Democrats spent $2 billion on Kamala Harris,” Mr. Schoen said, “and her percentage was lower than where she started. It’s an inescapable conclusion that $2 billion bought Democrats nothing at all.” Mr. Trump dodged every uppercut, jab, and haymaker.
Mr. Schoen said that Mr. Trump “gets the public mood” that “people are frustrated with government and angry about immigration.” The president also gets that Americans “want plain speaking and somebody outside the system.”
Democrats, in Mr. Schoen’s view, aren’t counterpunching against these strengths. He sees them as “off-putting and scolding,” whereas on the other side, “people love” Mr. Trump. “His rallies and his approach were entertaining — and, in their own way, positive.”
Mr. Schoen cites as another misfire the way Democrats went after Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees on “personal stuff rather than policy.” He adds: “It wasn’t, ‘We disagree with you on this,’ etc. It was all, ‘You had an affair, you were drunk, etc.’”
In a flip from Mr. Schoen’s time in the Clinton White House, voters now judge Democrats, not Republicans, as focusing too much on “social issues” and personal lives. “Abortion,” Mr. Schoen said, “may be good in a midterm. It’s not going to win a presidential election.”
Even modest gains next year could give Democrats control of one or both chambers of Congress, but Mr. Schoen has doubts. “I worry about 2026,” he said, “because I don’t see a message, a strategy at all — and the Republicans have a message and a strategy.”
“Apocalyptic environmentalism by Maryland’s far-left Democratic leadership in Annapolis has plunged the state into a severe energy crisis, with power bills doubling in some cases and 20% of households in Central Maryland now behind on payments.”
Soros DAs seem to love illegal alien criminals a whole lot more than they hate “gun violence.” “Two men arrested in a Feb. 5 gun and drug raid at a New York City auto repair shop were later released on reduced charges that may not lead to prosecution, according to police and court records – despite being suspected members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, which has been spreading violence across the country. Jose Tamaronis-Caldera, 27, and Richard Garcia, 33, were taken into custody after authorities seized a Glock handgun, two imitation pistols, and a significant amount of drugs.”
A new disclosure by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to the House Judiciary Committee reveals that, under the Biden administration, the IRS leaked the taxpayer information of more than 405,000 Americans–including President Trump.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, began an inquiry into the leaks last year and with this latest disclosure has found that the scope of the leak was much larger than the Biden administration initially led the public to believe.
The scandal began in late 2019 when an IRS contract worker named Charles (Chaz) Littlejohn, illegally accessed and stole tax returns and return information for President Trump and other wealthy Americans and then leaked that information to news outlets.
Littlejohn pled guilty to the unauthorized disclosure in Oct 2023 and was sentenced to 5 years in prison.
In April 2024, the IRS issued letters of notification to victims whose data had been leaked but the notifications prompted deeper questions into how many people’s data may have actually been disclosed.
One month later, an IRS spokesman stated that “more than 70,000” taxpayers had been affected by the leak.
Turns out that when you put warfighters in charge of the Pentagon rather than social justice weasels, recruiting problems disappear.
After years of struggling recruitment numbers — in 2022, the Army faced a shortfall of 15,000 recruits — the service celebrated record-breaking enlistment in December 2024 with nearly 5,877 recruits joining up.
“@USArmy: @USAREC had their most productive December in 15 years by enlisting 346 Soldiers daily into the World’s greatest #USArmy!” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote in a post on X.
A Navy spokesperson tells National Review the service has contracted 4,000 more sailors and shipped 5,000 more sailors to boot camp at this point in the fiscal year, which began in October, than the year prior. (Navy officials said last month it will take three years of meeting recruiting goals to recover from the Navy’s current 20,000 operational gaps at sea.)
Hegseth and Senator Tom Cotton praised the “Trump effect” for the rise in recruiting numbers, though the trend does pre-date Trump’s election.
“Army’s recruiting started getting better much earlier. We really started seeing the numbers, the monthly numbers, go up in February of 2024,” former Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told Fox News. “We were seeing sort of in the high 5000 contracts per month, and that accelerated, you know, into the spring all the way into August, when the Army really hit a peak.”
Still, the record-setting December is nothing to sneeze at, and regardless of who would go on to win the 2024 election, the boost began as Biden prepared to exit the White House.
Veterans tell National Review they feel confident the recruitment wave is here to stay, with prospective service members feeling more confident in our current commander in chief.
The Department of Defense is giving the military branches 30 days to identify service members who identify as transgender in order to remove them from the armed forces.
Pentagon senior leadership were notified in a Wednesday memo that they must begin setting up mechanisms for finding troops with gender dysphoria by March 26th to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order barring transgender-identifying people from the military.
“The medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals who have a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria are incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service,” defense undersecretary for personnel Darin Selnick said in the memo…
The Department of Defense recognizes the two sexes, male and female, and will only allow service members to be subject to standards based on their biological sex. Pronoun usage and access to facilities will be determined by biological sex, ensuring that males will not be allowed into female spaces for sleeping, changing, or bathing, the memo clarifies.
Were it not for social justice madness, these essential truths wouldn’t even need to be explicated…
When immigration agents were first ordered to deport Ivan Oramas and Santos Maradiaga-Villalta, President George W. Bush was in the White House and the iPhone was a distant dream.
That was over two decades ago—yet both men were arrested this week, according to federal data reviewed by DailyMail.com.
They were among over 50,000 illegal immigrants removed so far, a Department of Homeland Security official revealed to DailyMail.com.
News of their arrest was circulated Thursday in an internal immigration memo noting recent enforcement actions made by President Donald Trump’s administration.
Oramas, 61, is a citizen of Cuba with a rap sheet including convictions for sexual battery and aggravated assault.
His sexual battery case caused serious injury, according to his charges in the file.
ICE Houston nabbed Oramas this week, enforcing a deportation order first handed down in October 2003—21 years overdue.
Maradiaga-Villalta, a 40-year-old alien from Honduras, has convictions for smuggling aliens into the U.S. He was arrested recently by ICE in Phoenix. His first deportation order dates back to January 2006, a 19-year lapse in action.
A new study from the Discovery Institute’s Fix Homelessness reveals the devastating consequences of Seattle’s failed policies, which have not only failed to address homelessness but have actively worsened the crisis, according to 770 KTTH.
Driven by progressive ideology rather than practical solutions, city leaders have fostered a system that attracts homeless individuals from outside the region while keeping them trapped in cycles of addiction, crime, and dependency.
Rather than tackling the root causes, these policies have invited more homelessness, turning the issue into a manufactured disaster rather than a problem to be solved.
The study reveals that nearly half of the city’s homeless population became homeless outside of Seattle or King County, drawn in by the city’s permissive policies—free tents, open-air drug use, and a refusal to enforce encampment laws. An overwhelming 86.6% were born elsewhere, and 80.2% didn’t even attend high school in the area.
As in Austin, homeless programs in Seattle are not designed to solve the homeless problem, they’re designed to provide conduits of graft to the far left.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, along with a coalition of 22 states and several industry groups, has initiated legal action against New York over its Climate Change Superfund Act.
“New York’s law is nothing more than an unconstitutional shakedown of vital American energy industries that form the bedrock of our national economic independence,” said Paxton.
The lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of the act, which seeks to impose significant financial burdens on energy producers for past greenhouse gas emissions.
New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act, signed into law in December 2024, aims to collect approximately $75 billion over the next 25 years from oil and gas companies to fund “climate change adaptation” and infrastructure projects within the state. It retroactively holds energy producers accountable for emissions dating back to 2000, regardless of whether the companies operate within New York.
New York is quite ambitiously stupid to cram two different unconstitutional provisions into a single law, adding a lack of jurisdiction cherry on top of an ex post facto sundae…
Transsexual madness is alive and well in the Democratic Party. “Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers introduces budget recommendation that replaces ‘mother’ with ‘inseminated person.'”
Jeff Bezos made liberal heads explode with an editorial shift at the Waswhington Post.
Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is overhauling the paper’s opinion section and shifting its editorial stance towards defending personal freedom and free markets.
Bezos emailed Washington Post employees Wednesday morning to inform them of the dramatic change and told them contrary opinions could be found elsewhere.
“I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages,” Bezos wrote. “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars can be left to be published by others,” Bezos added.
“There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.”
Bezos’s announcement, which he posted on X after emailing it to Post staffers, also revealed that opinion editor David Shipley opted against staying on in the role given the section’s new direction.
I think Bezos has figured out that WaPo has a bad infestation of social justice, and the cheapest way to get rid of it is to publically announce policy changes that encourage the SJW termite to quit…
The latest onshoring trend, spurred by President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports, has led to a major announcement from Apple. The company has embraced “Make America Great Again” with plans to hire 20,000 US workers to manufacture high-tech AI servers in the Heartland and invest hundreds of billions of dollars in new factories.
Bloomberg reports Apple plans to unleash a tsunami of investments in the US, upwards of $500 billion over the next four years, including a new AI server manufacturing plant in Houston, Texas, and a supplier academy in Michigan.
This disclosure comes just days after President Trump announced that Apple CEO Tim Cook plans to relocate manufacturing operations from Mexico to the US.
He’s investing hundreds of billions of dollars,” Trump said after his meeting with Cook at the end of last week, adding that the executive is ramping up US investments because he wants to avoid tariffs.
Earlier this month, Trump imposed a 10% US levy on Chinese imports, where Apple manufactures most of its iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other products. In a tit-for-tat effort, Beijing announced retaliatory tariffs on US goods shortly after.
Apple’s $500 billion investment and promise to add 20,000 new US jobs over Trump’s second term is more evidence that corporate America is more willing to participate in onshoring efforts this time.
I live less than a mile away from Apple’s Austin campus, so it would be nice if they could open some technical writer recs there…
A man accused of cannibalism and murder has been granted conditional release, according to the Connecticut Psychiatric Security Review Board (PSRB).
The board granted Tyree Smith’s release after a careful review of his clinical progress, officials said.
He’s currently at Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown. Smith is accused of hacking a man to death with an axe in Bridgeport and eating part of the victim’s brain and an eyeball….Smith stood trial for the murder of Angel Gonzalez with an axe and consumed parts of the victim’s brain and eyeball in 2011. He was found not guilty because of insanity in 2013 and ordered confined to Whiting Forensic Hospital for 60 years.
An East Texas teacher and her boyfriend have been arrested on child pornography charges.
Authorities allege the couple had child sexual abuse images and video of her performing a sexual act on a male dog on their phones.
Hillary Danielle Williams, 33, was arrested Saturday in Lufkin and charged with bestiality and possession with intent to promote child pornography.
Her partner, 37-year-old Michael Scott McCary, was charged with possession of child pornography.
Texas public schools seem to have let some real filthy degenerates teach kids…
“New Caney ISD Teacher, Coach Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison for Sex With Student. Samantha Cummings had sex with a 17-year-old female student at New Caney High School.”
Liberals are staging a boycott today in a vain attempt to prove they matter, so now would be a good day to buy something from Amazon or Walmart. In fact, today I went to Walmart for the first time in, I don’t know, probably over a year…
What happens when a Detroit water main breaks during a deep freeze? This.
Another deep freeze week here in Texas, with temperatures below freezing most of the week, but the state grid seems to be holding, and I haven’t seen any widespread power outages. I did lose power, but only for five minutes.
This week: More waste and corruption exposed by DOGE, the Secretary of Defense gets a spite audit from the IRS, and Texas rolls out plans for securing cybersecurity and nuclear power futures. Plus an unusual amount of stories about China, AI, Chinese AI, airlines, Canada, and an airliner in Canada.
Judge says that DOGE can access student financial aid data. “US District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan has denied an emergency filing to block DOGE’s access to federal records and government layoffs – saying in a 10-page decision that the 14 states who brought the lawsuit have failed to meet the burden of proof to prove ‘imminent, irreparable harm.'”
“A judge who blocked President Trump’s federal spending freeze is Chairman Emeritus of a nonprofit that will continue to receive millions in government funding as a result of his ruling, in an apparent conflict of interest seen as a second cause for the judge’s impeachment. On Wednesday, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) announced articles of impeachment against federal Judge John McConnell on the grounds that he overreached his authority and engaged in partisan activism by blocking Trump’s executive order freezing federal funding while Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) searches for wasteful spending. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Doug Ross has chosen 20 of the best examples of waste and fraud DOGE has discovered “Stacey Abrams/Power Forward Communities $2 Billion Grant (2025). DOGE uncovered $2 billion in taxpayer funds allocated to Power Forward Communities, tied to Stacey Abrams via Rewiring America, from a $20 billion EPA grant in April 2024. With $100 in revenue, it’s under scrutiny for potential fraud.”
The Democratic Party is polling about 31 percent approval, a near-historic low.
Despite enjoying a huge lead in fundraising, legacy media favoritism, and incumbency, in the 2024 election, Democrats lost the White House to Donald Trump. Ever since, they have offered nothing new, no novel agenda, no innovative policies—nothing other than screaming that they are loudly against everything and anything that the president is for.
In the past, what did they accomplish by following their prior two impeachments with attempts to de-ballot Trump? Who thought sending an FBI swat team to raid Trump’s home or waging five lawfare civil and criminal suits and issuing 91 felony indictments against him would win over the public?
Was conducting a media barrage of Hitler-Trump invectives, or lowering the bar of demonization that likely led to two assassination attempts of Trump a good way to win an election?
Apparently not, given the Democrats have now lost the presidency, the House, and the Senate. The Supreme Court is conservative. They have no power to subpoena anyone; they cannot block any nomination. Much of their old administrative state control is eroding. All the main issues—the economy, energy, border security, illegal immigration, crime, DEI/woke, and foreign policy—poll against the Democrats. The more they shouted that biological men must be able to compete as transgendered females in women’s sports, the more that 80% of the public disagreed, women were turned off, and the absurd idea was exploded by Trump.
The power of the administrative state, the legacy network news, print media, and Silicon Valley’s social media and search engines, the billions that poured into the Biden and Harris campaign all went for naught.
The efforts of moderators to warp debates, of network news to edit out unfavorable Harris or Biden comments, of leftists to cancel, deplatform, ostracize, censor, and shadow ban their enemies have failed. More likely to succeed now are numerous lawsuits against leftwing media for chronic defamation and censorship.
Given that collective meltdown, what would a sane Democratic Party do?
If they were stable, then they might renounce political suicide and perhaps return to something akin to the Clinton efforts of 1992 and 1996. Then the once self-destructive Democrats finally gave up on disastrous out-of-touch McGovernism, Carterism, an Dukakism. Instead, they began to embrace legal-only immigration, secure borders, balanced budgets, support for law enforcement, and meritocracy.
The result?
After twelve years in the wilderness (1980-1992), the Democrats regained power for the next 16 of 24 years—only in the second term of Barack Obama to go full radical Jacobin and soon lose it.
The current self-destructive obsessions with DEI/woke racialism, bi-coastal talk-down elitism, boutique transgenderism, and nonstop America Lastism all came to fruition during the Biden years. A shameless conspiracy to use an enfeebled John Biden as a prop to masque an otherwise unpalatable radical, neo-socialist agenda ensured the MAGA counterrevolution.
But instead of postmortem autopsy and introspection, since Election Day, the Democrats have doubled down on their veritable collective self-destruction.
On immigration, after wiping out the border and allowing in 12 million illegal aliens, including more than 500,000 suspected felons, they seem deliberately to be alienating public opinion even further.
So, thousands of leftists swarm and block the freeways of Los Angeles to protest the deportations of criminals. And how exactly?
By enraging middle-class commuters, while burning the flag of the country that they demand must allow them to stay, while chauvinistically waving the flag of the country to which under no circumstances they wish to return?
New Jersey Democratic governor Patrick Murphy idiotically virtue-signaled that he would defy the law, as he bragged that he was harboring an illegal alien living above his garage.
Then, when apprised that such performance-art showboating was a felony, in theory entailing a long prison sentence, the now buffoonish governor changed his narrative that the occupant of his garage was not really illegally living above his garage.
Democratic governors and mayors vie, bragging that they will be foremost in breaking the law by impeding the efforts of the federal immigration services to find and deport illegal aliens—for now, half a million criminals. Other activists are tipping off criminal illegal-alien gang leaders to avoid US government efforts to apprehend such dangerous criminals.
Is that the way to win back the working classes? By ensuring that the felons of M-13, Norteños, Sureños, and Tren de Aragua can flee and put in danger fellow American police officers?
Elon Musk has been appointed by Donald Trump to create a new government agency, DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), to find waste, fraud, and abuse in the government spending of taxpayers money.
He and his young team of tech standouts have exposed shocking waste and fraud, but mostly insanity, in the USAID’s $50 billion of foreign aid grants.
Why are Americans paying for overseas drag shows or gay and trans advocacy in culturally imperialist fashion in traditional and conservative societies abroad? Why are we paying eight percent of the budget of the hardcore left-wing BBC? Is that a way back to the White House?
Do Politico, the New York Times, or the Wuhan gain-in-function virology lab and birthplace of COVID-19 really need millions of dollars of taxpayer dollars?
Do Democrats really think the middle class will hate Elon Musk for exposing that their government may well have handed the communist Chinese the necessary cash to birth a manufactured killer virus that took one million American lives?
Is that a winning strategy—to scream in Congress that Musk is a Nazi, a dictator for showing that Biden’s USAID under leftist Samantha Power was a clearing house to enrich and empower well-off leftist organizations that only weakened their own country abroad?
On December 6, 2024, a federal judge ordered the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to release documents related to the emergency use authorisation of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine. These documents had been hidden from public view.
The legal battle traces back to September 2021, when attorney Aaron Siri filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on behalf of the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency. The plaintiffs sought access to the vast trove of documents the FDA relied on to approve Pfizer’s vaccine.
Initially, the FDA proposed a slow release schedule. In November 2021, the agency stated it would release just 500 pages per month—a pace that would have stretched the full disclosure process to 75 years.
However, in January 2022, District Judge Mark Pittman of Texas rejected the FDA’s proposal, ordering the agency to expedite its release to 55,000 pages per month, aiming to complete the disclosure of all 450,000 pages by August 2022.
As the documents trickled out, researchers began uncovering glaring gaps that prevented a systematic review of the data. These gaps fueled suspicions about what else the FDA might be withholding.
It became evident that the FDA had withheld records directly tied to its emergency use authorisation of Pfizer’s vaccine, estimated to be over one million pages.
These documents, which the FDA had full knowledge of, were excluded from earlier disclosures, effectively misleading the judiciary and undermining public trust.
People need to go to jail.
Trump and Musk’s attempts to cut federal waste are super popular.
In recent months, Democrats have manufactured an elaborate narrative around Donald Trump’s push to streamline government operations and eliminate waste, branding it as a “constitutional crisis.” This exaggerated portrayal overlooks a critical reality: many Americans, particularly those who are politically moderate, actually support Trump’s initiatives aimed at reducing the size of government.
A recent focus group composed of Arizona swing voters, including those who previously backed Joe Biden, revealed a striking consensus on this issue: they overwhelmingly approve of Trump’s agenda and Elon Musk’s efforts with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to make government more efficient. “Every Arizona swing voter in our latest Engagious/Sago focus groups said they approve of President Trump’s actions since taking office — and most also support Elon Musk’s efforts to slash government,” reports Axios.
Vice President JD Vance confronted European leaders at the Munich Security Conference on Friday over their support for authoritarian restrictions on speech, putting the assembled dignitaries on notice that the Trump administration expects the continent to revive its commitment to Western values.
“The threat that I worry most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values,” Vance said. “When I look at Europe today, it’s not clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners.”
The vice president recited a litany of examples, taken from across Europe, in which governments cracked down on politically disfavored ideas.
In Brussels for example, officials notified citizens that they would shut down social media platforms “during times of civil unrest” if users post so-called hateful content. Vance also cited examples taken from Germany, where “police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online”; Sweden, where a judge recently explained to a man accused of participating in a Koran burning that he does not have “a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief,”; and the United Kingdom, where citizens can be arrested for silently praying within 200 meters of an abortion facility.
“In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear is in retreat,” Vance said.
The vice president lamented Europe’s abandonment of other democratic values, such as border security, he said, adding that Europeans should work with anti-immigration factions to address the record-breaking influx of illegal immigrants into Europe.
“While the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, [we] also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense,” Vance said.
A majority of French, German, Dutch, Italian, and Portuguese citizens believe that their countries should have stricter border security measures to curb illegal immigration, according to a poll conducted by the nonprofit EU-US Forum and the Tyson Group. Most respondents from France, Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands also agree that “I am more worried today than I was a decade ago about government censorship of my ideas,” according to the same poll.
Vance connected the massive flow of migrants into Europe with recent terrorist attacks, such as the one carried out this week in Munich by a 24-year-old Afghan migrant. The man has an Islamist motive, police said, and he plowed a car into a crowd of people blocks away from where the Security Conference is being held, injuring at least 30.
Another Saudi migrant rammed a car into a Christmas marked in central Germany last December, injuring hundreds, and killing five.
“Over the span of a decade, we saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city,” Vance said.
European leaders responded with a large bout of pearl-clutching and a chorus of “Well, I never!”
“Legislators File ‘Atomic Texas’ Act to Spark Nuclear Power ‘Renaissance.’ With the advent of small modular nuclear reactors, the nuclear industry feels bullish on a revival of nuclear power. Gov. Greg Abbott called for forging a “nuclear power renaissance” in Texas during his 2025 State of the State address, two legislators have filed legislation intended to make the concept a reality. State Rep. Drew Darby’s House Bill (HB) 2678 would create the Texas Advanced Nuclear Energy Authority and a low-interest loan fund to go with it, and is the companion bill to state Sen. Tan Parker’s (R-Flower Mound) Senate Bill 1105.”
Ukraine hits another oil refinery. I’m ignoring the news about U.S. Russian talks, etc., because Trump does a lot of persuasion bracketing, and it’s fruitless to place too much import on it at this stage.
New York governor Kathy Hochul says she might remove new York City Mayor Eric Adams from office, now that trump’s Department of Justice has dropped charges against Adams. My working assumption is that since Adams is a New York Democratic politician, he’s guilty as sin, but it’s funny how Hochul only started paying attention to Adams’ alleged misdeed when he started cooperating with Trump on deporting illegal aliens…
With the Trump administration cutting off billions of US taxpayer funding for the USAID international slush fund, formerly flush NGOs are now begging woke EU nations for money to continue operations, according to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
“WARNING! Our fears have come true: the globalist-liberal-Soros NGO network is fleeing to Brussels, after President Trump dealt a huge blow to their activities in the US,” Orbán wrote in a Tuesday post to X. “Now 63 of them are asking Brussels for money, under the guise of various human rights projects. Not going to happen! We will not let them find safe haven in Europe!”
“The USAID-files exposed the dark practices of the globalist network. We will not take the bait again!”
“A series of by-elections were held for local government seats on Thursday, with Nigel Farage’s [Reform] party storming to victory in Trevethin and Penygarn in Torfaen, Wales, gaining 47% of the vote from a standing start. Labour plummeted a whopping 49.2% to just 26.6% of the vote, down from 75.8% last time. Two independents then came in third and fourth, with the Greens in fifth on 2.6%.” The Tories didn’t even run a candidate.
Gov. Greg Abbott delivered his State of the State address several days ago, outlining his priorities for the 89th Legislative Session and listing his emergency items, which included an unexpected addition — the creation of a Texas Cyber Command.
“We must deploy cutting edge capabilities to better secure our State,” Abbott declared.
Minutes after the proclamation was made, information from the governor’s office on the new proposition was circulated, detailing the necessity of a Texas Cyber Command to increase the state’s ability to protect critical infrastructure from cyber threats and hostile foreign adversaries like China, Iran, Russia, and “other rogue outlets” around the world.
The governor’s plan is to have the new venture be headquartered in San Antonio — a city with a large presence of cybersecurity experts, including the University of Texas (UT) at San Antonio, which is a member of the United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) Academic Engagement Network.
Austin has at least as many cybersecurity firms as San Antonio…
“Attorney General Paxton Launches Investigation Into Chinese AI App. Paxton expressed concerns that artificial intelligence company DeepSeek could be violating the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act.”
In Houston: “22-year-old Chilean national arrested with device that disabled communication between arresting officers.”
“Transgender migrant featured in NYC Pride Parade charged with raping 14-year-old boy in public restroom.” “A migrant transgender woman [man] wanted by federal immigration officials allegedly stalked and raped a boy in Manhattan this week, The Post has learned. Nicol Suarez allegedly followed the 14-year-old into the bathroom of a bodega across the street from Thomas Jefferson Park in East Harlem Tuesday and attacked him, police and sources said.”
Chinese foreign investment declines 99% in the last three years. That’s what happens when you’ve got dirty commies being jerks of the world…
Accidents will happen. “Trump Administration Un-Fires Hundreds Of Nuclear Weapon Workers.”
California’s one party Democratic rule is so incompetent and burdensome that weed dealers can’t make money selling pot to Californians. “California’s legal cannabis market has hit another grim milestone: There are now 10,828 inactive and surrendered pot licenses in the state and only 8,514 active ones, meaning dead pot licenses now outnumber active ones.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Jihad terrorism is still very much alive in Africa. “70 Christians Decapitated in Church in Democratic Republic of Congo. DRC also faces violence from the Rwanda-backed armed group M23.”
“Trump Administration Pulls Approval of NYC Congestion Toll.” “The congestion toll came into effect last month, imposing a $9 charge on drivers entering Manhattan below 60th street. The tax will increase by $3 increments in 2028 and 2031 as drivers adjust to the program, if it remains in place.” London’s “carbon tax” is widely unpopular with drivers as well, so I imagine New York drivers are just as livid.
