Posts Tagged ‘Democrats’

How Minnesota Welfare Dollars Support Somali Jihad Terrorism

Saturday, November 22nd, 2025

Democrats seem to love welfare fraud and being soft on jihad, so it shouldn’t be a surprise when a story combines the two.

Minnesota is drowning in fraud. Billions in taxpayer dollars have been stolen during the administration of Governor Tim Walz alone. Democratic state officials, overseeing one of the most generous welfare regimes in the country, are asleep at the switch. And the media, duty-bound by progressive pieties, refuse to connect the dots.

In many cases, the fraud has allegedly been perpetrated by members of Minnesota’s sizeable Somali community. Federal counterterrorism sources confirm that millions of dollars in stolen funds have been sent back to Somalia, where they ultimately landed in the hands of the terror group Al-Shabaab.

I’ve covered Al-Shabaab before.

As one confidential source put it: “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.”

Our investigation shows what happens when a tribal mindset meets a bleeding-heart bureaucracy, when imported clan loyalties collide with a political class too timid to offend, and when accusations of racism are cynically deployed to shield criminal behavior. The predictable result is graft, with taxpayers left to foot the bill.

If you were to design a welfare program to facilitate fraud, it would probably look a lot like Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program. The HSS program, the first of its kind in the country, was launched with a noble goal: to help seniors, addicts, the disabled, and the mentally ill secure housing.

Those may have been its stated goals, but I assume the real goals were to line the pockets of leftwing activists and the homeless industrial complex.

It was designed with “low barriers to entry” and “minimal requirements for reimbursement.” Nonetheless, before the program went live in 2020, officials pegged its annual estimated price tag at $2.6 million.

Costs quickly spiraled out of control. In 2021, the program paid out more than $21 million in claims. In the following years, annual costs shot up to $42 million, then $74 million, then $104 million. During the first six months of 2025, payouts totaled $61 million.

On August 1, Minnesota’s Department of Human Services moved to scrap the HSS program, noting that payment to 77 housing-stabilization providers had been terminated this year due to “credible allegations of fraud.” Joe Thompson, then the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, went even further, stating that the “vast majority” of the HSS program was fraudulent.

On September 18, Thompson announced criminal indictments for HSS fraud against Moktar Hassan Aden, Mustafa Dayib Ali, Khalid Ahmed Dayib, Abdifitah Mohamud Mohamed, Christopher Adesoji Falade, Emmanuel Oluwademilade Falade, Asad Ahmed Adow, and Anwar Ahmed Adow—six of whom, according a U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesperson, are members of Minnesota’s Somali community.

Imagine my shock.

Thompson made clear that this is just the first round of charges for HSS fraud that his office will be prosecuting.

“Most of these cases, unlike a lot of Medicare fraud and Medicaid fraud cases nationally, aren’t just overbilling,” Thompson said at a press conference announcing the indictments. “These are often just purely fictitious companies solely created to defraud the system, and that’s unique in the extent to which we have that here in Minnesota.”

Thompson said many firms enrolled in the program “operated out of dilapidated storefronts or rundown office buildings.” The perpetrators often targeted people recently released from rehab, signing them up for Medicaid services they had no intention of providing. He noted many owners of companies engaged in HSS fraud had “other companies through which they billed other Medicaid programs, such as the EIDBI autism program, the . . . Adult Rehabilitative Mental Health Services program, the . . . Integrated Community Support program, the Community Access for Disability Inclusion . . . program, PCA services, and other Medicaid-waivered services.”

Nothing says “social justice” quite like stealing from the retarded.

“What we see are schemes stacked upon schemes, draining resources meant for those in need. It feels never ending,” Thompson said. “I have spent my career as a fraud prosecutor and the depth of the fraud in Minnesota takes my breath away.”

On September 18, the same day that the HSS fraud charges were announced, the U.S. Attorney’s Office reported that a man named Abdullahe Nur Jesow had become the 56th defendant to plead guilty in the $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud scheme.

56 is not a pokey little gang. That’s quite organized crime.

Founded in 2016, Feeding Our Future was a small Minnesota nonprofit that sponsored daycares and after-school programs to enroll in the Federal Child Nutrition Program. The organizations that Feeding Our Future sponsored were primarily owned and operated by members of Minnesota’s Somali community, according to two former state officials with connections to law enforcement.

In 2019, Feeding Our Future received $3.4 million in federal funding disbursed by the state. In the months after the Covid-19 pandemic began, however, the nonprofit rapidly increased its number of sponsored sites. Using fake meal counts, doctored attendance records, and fabricated invoices, the perpetrators of the fraud ring claimed to be serving thousands of meals a day, seven days a week, to underprivileged children. In 2021, Feeding Our Future received nearly $200 million in funding.

In reality, the money was being used to fund lavish lifestyles, purchase luxury vehicles, and buy real estate in the United States, Turkey, and Kenya. In 2020, Minnesota officials raised concerns about the nonprofit’s rapid expansion. In response, the group filed a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination related to outstanding site applications, noting that Feeding Our Future “caters to . . . foreign nationals.”

Dear Sirs: Please see me previous comments RE: shock. Yours in haste…

“That’s the standard operating playbook for that cohort: when in doubt, claim racism, claim bias,” says David Gaither, a former Minnesota state senator and a nonprofit leader. “Even if the facts don’t point to that, it allows for many folks in the middle, or on the center-Left, to stay silent.”

Gaither believes the mainstream media, alongside Minnesota’s Democratic establishment, have long turned a blind eye to fraud within the Somali community. This, in turn, allowed the problem to metastasize. “The media does not want to put a light on this,” Gaither said. “And if you’re a politician, it’s a significant disadvantage for you to alienate the Somali community. If you don’t win the Somali community, you can’t win Minneapolis. And if you don’t win Minneapolis, you can’t win the state. End of story.”

Why, a cynical man might think that capability was the entire reason Somalis were imported into Minneapolis in the first place.

Or just one with a working brain.

The fraudsters have leveraged their growing political influence to cultivate close ties with Minnesota’s elected officials. Several individuals involved in the Feeding Our Future scheme donated to, or appeared publicly with, Ilhan Omar, the Somali-born congresswoman from Minneapolis. Omar’s deputy district director, Ali Isse, advocated on behalf of Feeding Our Future. Omar Fateh, a former state senator who recently ran for Minneapolis mayor, lobbied Governor Tim Walz in support of the program. And one of the accused, Abdi Nur Salah, served as a senior aide to Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey.

Let me put on the third movie in the Shock trilogy, Revenge of the Shock.

Just days later, on September 24, U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson announced his office’s first indictment in yet another fraud case. This time, the scheme involved federally funded autism services for children.

The accused is a woman named Asha Farhan Hassan, a member of Minnesota’s Somali community, who has also been charged in the Feeding Our Future scam. She’s alleged to have played a role in a $14 million fraud scheme perpetrated against Minnesota’s Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention program.

Hassan and her co-conspirators “approached parents in the Somali community” and recruited their children into autism therapy services. It didn’t matter, prosecutors suggested, if a child did not have an autism diagnosis: Hassan would facilitate a fraudulent one.

In a press release announcing the indictment, the U.S. Attorney’s Office made clear that the alleged autism fraud scheme extended to a wide network of people. “To drive up enrollment, Hassan and her partners paid monthly cash kickback payments to the parents of children who enrolled,” the release reads. “These kickback payments ranged from approximately $300 to $1500 per month, per child. The amount of these payments was contingent on the services DHS authorized a child to receive—the higher the authorization amount, the higher the kickback. Often, parents threatened to leave . . . and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks.”

Much like with the HSS program, autism claims to Medicaid in Minnesota have skyrocketed in recent years—from $3 million in 2018 to $54 million in 2019, $77 million in 2020, $183 million 2021, $279 million in 2022, and $399 million in 2023. Meantime, the number of autism providers in the state spiked from 41 to 328 over the same period, with many in the Somali community establishing their own autism treatment centers, citing the need for “culturally appropriate programming.” By the time the fraud scheme was exposed, one in 16 Somali four-year-olds in the state had reportedly been diagnosed with autism—a rate more than triple the state average.

Why it’s almost like Democrats set up welfare programs knowing they’ll be abused, and, in return, the groups abusing those programs continue voting for Democrats.

(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

LinkSwarm For November 21, 2025

Friday, November 21st, 2025

Democrat attempts to link Trump to Jeffrey Epstein backfire big-time, more illegal alien felons get deported, more Democrats committing fraud, more DOGE-discovered spending insanity, Letterman inducts Zevon, and the weirdest White House love-in ever.

It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • The Trump Administration is planning to completely deconstruct SNAP.

    U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Brooke Rollins has said the department will “completely deconstruct” the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in an effort to remove fraud and corruption from the program.

    The USDA told Newsweek: “Secretary Rollins wants to ensure the fraud, waste, and incessant abuse of SNAP ends. Rates of fraud were only previously assumed, and President Trump is doing something about it. Using standard recertification processes for households is a part of that work. As well as ongoing analysis of state data, further regulatory work, and improved collaboration with states.”

    SNAP supports about 42 million low-income Americans nationwide by helping them cover the costs of groceries each month.

    The program came into the spotlight during the recent government shutdown—the longest in U.S. history—when many did not receive their benefits as scheduled in November.

    Rollins’ comment also comes amid the government’s announcement of two major changes to the program: Work requirement provisions brought in by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act could see millions removed from the program, and recipients could be required to reapply for the benefits so that those no longer deemed eligible can be removed from the program.

    In an interview with Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow on Tuesday, Rollins said early data already showed that “186,000 dead people are receiving SNAP benefits,” while another 500,000 people are receiving the benefits in more than one state.

    USDA data indicates that more than 226,000 fraudulent benefit claims and 691,000 fraudulent transactions received approval in the first quarter of 2025, Fox Business reported.

    Fraudulent transactions refer to when SNAP-receiving households do not authorize claims because of card cloning or various kinds of electronic theft.

    These fraudulent claims and transactions cost the government more than $102 million in the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, higher than the $69.4 million figure in the previous quarter and $31.9 million during the same period last year, the USDA data shows.

    As a result of these issues, Rollins said the department had made “hundreds of arrests” in regard to fraudulent claims for SNAP benefits.

    She also said the recent crackdown on SNAP benefit fraud and eligibility was “an unintended consequence of the Democrats shutting the government down for 43 days,” adding that it “shined this very bright light on one of their pet programs and now has given us a platform to completely deconstruct the program.”

    Sounds like a whole lot of fraudsters are going to get snapped off SNAP, thanks to the #SchumerShutdown.

    Welcome to Unintended Consequences Theater. I’m your host, Leonard Pinth-Garnell…

  • “The U.S. economy roared ahead in September 2025, shattering expectations with the creation of 119,000 jobs — more than double what economists predicted.” I can hardly wait for all this job creation to get to me…
  • Jeffrey Epstein was texting sitting members of Congress, Democrat non-voting delegate Stacy Plaskett specifically, and directing the questioning during a congressional investigation of Donald Trump.” Doesn’t exactly seem like Trump and Epstein were best buddies, does it?
  • “Leading fundraising group for Democrats solicited Epstein years after he pleaded guilty in Florida.”

    Desperate to tie President Donald Trump to disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Democrats are ignoring their own ties shown in newly published documents to the deceased registered sex offender.

    One email in the more than 20,000 documents obtained from the Epstein estate and released publicly by the House Oversight Committee shows that a consulting firm working for now-House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, shortly after he was first elected to Congress in 2012, solicited Epstein for a donation. This came long after Trump barred Epstein from his Florida estate in 2007, when he said he cut ties with the financier.

    “Dear Jeffrey – We are thrilled to announce that we are working with Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, one of the rising stars in the New York Congressional delegation,” a team at Dynamic SRG, a political fundraising and public affairs firm, wrote to Epstein in a May 2013 email.

    “Sometimes referred to as ‘Brooklyn’s Barack’, he is a staunch supporter of President Obama and a progressive voice for the people of New York City,” the firm said, touting Jeffries in the email. Jeffries’ name is listed on Dynamic SRG in a database of “selected current and former clients.”

    Nowadays people refer to Jeffries as “TEMU Obama.”

    The email came roughly five years after Epstein became a registered sex offender in Florida and pleaded guilty to state prostitution crimes related to his alleged involvement with underage girls. He avoided federal charges through striking the controversial deal and served only 13 months in state prison.

    The Democrats love money a whole lot more than they hate sex offenders.

  • Top 20 Insanities DOGE revealed in 2025.”

    #4 – $254 million in unemployment benefits for toddlers under five. If your preschooler is filing claims, we may have bigger issues than fraud.

    #3 – The DOD built an HR IT system that ran 780% over budget at a casual $280 million.

    Somewhere, a contracting executive is laughing on his yacht that just docked in the Greek islands.

    #2 – HUD “misplaced” $1.9 billion. Misplaced! As if money that could pave a small state just slipped behind the couch cushions.

    #1 – And the grand champion: $516 billion spent on 1,264 expired, defunct, fossilized government programs. Half a trillion dollars shoveled into the graveyard of bureaucracy. No wonder the Uniparty attacked DOGE so fervently.

  • “Democratic Florida Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick accused of stealing $5M in FEMA funds.”

    Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.) was hit with a federal indictment Wednesday, accusing her of stealing $5 million in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds to support her 2021 congressional campaign.

    Cherfilus-McCormick, who has been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee since December 2023, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Miami and faces up to 53 years in prison if convicted.

    Snip.

    The Justice Department alleges that Cherfilus-McCormick, 46, and several co-defendants, including her brother, Edwin Cherfilus, 51, “conspired to steal” an overpayment of $5 million in FEMA funds their family health care company received in July 2021 as part of a COVID-19 vaccination staffing contract.

    The defendants allegedly routed the funds “through multiple accounts to disguise its source” and used “a substantial portion of the misappropriated funds … as candidate contributions” to Cherfilus-McCormick’s 2021 congressional campaign.

    Cherfilus-McCormick and another co-defendant, Nadege Leblanc, 46, further schemed to utilize “straw donors” to contribute the stolen money to the Florida Democrat’s campaign, according to prosecutors.

    The congresswoman and her tax preparer, David K. Spencer, 41, are also charged with conspiring to file a false federal tax return for allegedly falsely marking political spending and other personal expenses as business deductions — and inflating Cherfilus-McCormick’s charitable contributions to ease her tax obligations.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • Pedophiles and murderers among this week’s ‘worst of the worst’ ICE arrests.”

    As Democrats continue to demonize and vilify the nation’s law enforcement officers, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers keep protecting communities from violent criminal illegal immigrants. Once again, DHS and ICE collaborated to remove some of the “worst of the worst” illegally residing in the United States.

    While Democrats, and their accomplices in the legacy media, regularly promote narratives denigrating illegal immigration enforcement operations, the fact is, as DHS has regularly highlighted, “70% of ICE arrests are of illegal aliens convicted or charged with a crime in the U.S.” And while Democrats insist on prioritizing the safety of the criminal class over the welfare of the innocent, DHS and ICE continue to protect Americans from bad people.

    These bad people include illegal immigrants convicted of manslaughter, murder, and lewd acts with minors. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin commented on these violent people when speaking to the Washington Examiner.

    Snip.

    Andres Mendoza-Salomon is an illegal immigrant who was living in the U.S. Previously, he was convicted of “lewd act with a child under 14, contact with a minor – sexual intent, harmful matter to seduce minor, and indecent exposure in Ventura, California,” according to DHS. These are disgusting actions by a dangerous individual. The local community is better with him after ICE’s involvement. But you won’t see Mendoza-Salomon’s picture on legacy media news reports.

    Snip.

    Oscar Arturo Sanchez-Mondragon was also arrested by ICE on Monday. He is an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was convicted of “manslaughter in the second degree and tampering with physical evidence in Boone County, Kentucky,” according to DHS. He was free to roam within the U.S. and put innocent lives in danger. ICE ensured that he would no longer be a threat to any community.

    ICE arrested an illegal immigrant from El Salvador with a particularly violent history, as well. Miguel Antonio Urias-Argueta had a rap sheet that featured convictions for “criminal possession of a weapon, criminal use of a firearm, attempted assault, and attempted murder in Nassau County, New York,” DHS reported. He’s the kind of illegal immigrant who presents a distinct danger to those around him, based on his criminal record. ICE ensured he would no longer be a threat and arrested him. Unfortunately, once again, no Democrats or members of the media will mention ICE’s arrest of Urias-Argueta, or that communities are safer because of their enforcement operations.

    The agency’s other arrests on Monday included an illegal immigrant from Mexico who caused the “death of another by driving a vehicle while under the influence of alcohol in Sparks, Nevada,” DHS said. Higinio Rodriguez-Ramirez is in the country illegally, also from Mexico, and was convicted of “burglary of a habitation in Johnson County, Texas,” according to DHS.

  • Another day, another scheme to exploit illegal aliens.

    A wealthy Plymouth, Michigan couple has landed in federal court, accused of hiring more than 200 undocumented immigrants to work at their national plumbing business over the years, and housing many of them in run-down motels and houses — all while they raked in $74 million in revenue, according to a new court filing in New York.

    That’s where Moises and Raquel Orduna-Rios are facing federal charges, including money laundering, following a five-year investigation that started with federal agents spotting one of the couple’s company vans outside a motel in Amherst, New York. The agents also encountered — and arrested — a small group of undocumented immigrants, who explained the van belonged to their ‘boss,’ court records show.

    This operation took place in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, and New York where the charges are being filed.

    That boss was 36-year-old Moises Orduna-Rios, president of Michigan-based Orduna Plumbing Inc., which also has operations in New York, North Carolina and Ohio. He was arrested on Tuesday, Nov. 18, after years of being monitored by federal agents who kept close tabs on his company vans, financial transactions, communications and his illegal workers who made $800-$1,500 per week, and in some cases had their living expenses covered.

  • “Legislation To Fast-Track Removal of Criminal Aliens Heads to US House Floor. The bill would address loopholes enabling the abuse of asylum protections and make the removal of convicted violent criminal aliens mandatory.”

    U.S. Rep. Brandon Gill’s Expedited Removal of Criminal Aliens Act passed through a review by the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday and now moves to the House floor for further action.

    The Texas Republican’s legislation, H.R.5713, would strengthen President Trump’s border security plan by allowing law enforcement to remove violent criminal aliens quickly.

    “For far too long, Democrat leaders have allowed illegal aliens to get away with unspeakable crimes on our soil, turning a blind eye to the suffering American families who call this land home,” said Gill. “It’s time to empower our brave men and women in law enforcement to get foreign bad actors out of our country quickly, before they have a chance to cause more pain.”

    The proposed legislation would stop abuses of protections meant for asylum seekers. The bill would also give law enforcement stronger removal authority over violent criminal aliens, making “detention and expedited removal of gang members, terrorists, and individuals convicted of violent crimes or crimes against vulnerable groups” mandatory.

    Currently, removal proceedings can take years of litigation and lengthy appeals, even after a foreign national has been convicted of a serious crime that warrants removal from the United States. The new legislation would fast-track the removal process for criminal illegal aliens.

    Speaking about the bill in a post on X, Gill said it “gives law enforcement the authority to swiftly remove violent criminal aliens and protect American communities.”

    Similar proposed legislation by U.S. Rep. Troy Nehls (R–Richmond) cleared a House Judiciary Committee review on Tuesday. Nehl’s bill, H.R. 4711, the Rapid Expulsion of Migrant Offenders who Violate and Evade (REMOVE) Act, would require removal proceedings to conclude within 15 days.

    “The Biden Administration let millions upon millions of illegal aliens into our country who wreaked havoc on our communities and drained public resources,” said Nehls.

  • “Under Trump Administration, State Dept Has Revoked 80,000 Non-immigrant Visas In 2025.”
  • El Paso federal judge strikes down Texas redistricting.

    The new Texas congressional map passed by the Legislature this summer, intended to gain five seats for Republicans, constitutes a racial gerrymander according to an El Paso federal court, which enjoined the state from enforcing it for the 2026 midterms.

    The long-awaited ruling came on Tuesday after a couple of weeks of anxious speculation from both sides; the filing period for the midterms began on November 8 and ends on December 8.

    “The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics. To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map. But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map,” Judge Jeffrey Brown of the El Paso court’s three-judge panel wrote.

    “For the reasons explained below, the Court PRELIMINARILY ENJOINS the State from using the 2025 Map. The Court ORDERS that the 2026 congressional election in Texas shall proceed under the map that the Texas Legislature enacted in 2021.”

  • But: “U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Smith issued a scathing dissent Wednesday against the federal judicial panel ruling that blocked Texas’ new congressional map from going into effect for 2026, calling it ‘the most outrageous conduct by a judge that [he has] ever encountered in a case in which [he has] been involved.'”
  • Novokuybyshevsk oil refinery hit by drones.
  • Ryazan oil refinery hit again.”
  • Attack ship on fire off the belt of Orion Oil tanker on fire off the coast of Vladivostok.
  • Paul Warburg says the decline of Ural crude prices from $55 to $36 a barrel has been disasterous for Russia’s economy, even before the effects of Ukraine’s oil industry strikes are taken into account.
  • Novomichurinsk Power Station in Ryazan Hit By Drones.”
  • “Lured to Russia With the Promise of Work, Many African Nationals Unknowingly Sign Contracts To Fight in Ukraine.”

    On November 7, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, Andriy Sybiha released a statement on X stating that at least 1,436 citizens from 36 African countries have been duped into participating in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    Hailing from impoverished circumstances in their home countries in Africa, many young men look at Russia as an accessible country to secure economic opportunity. Some arrive to study in Russian universities. Others scour for employment that will allow them to work without documents, but mostly all are convinced that signing a contract in Russian will award them a comfortable salary that can be used to support their families back home. Signing a contract, Mr. Sybiha warns, is equivalent to signing a death sentence.

    According to reports in the LA Times, recruits are promised a monthly pay ranging between $2,500 to $3,500, nearly ten times the average in a country like Cameroon. But when these men go missing or are killed, Russian authorities hardly share any information with the bereaved families, including the bodies of the fallen or their earnings.

  • Ukraine plans to buy up to 100 Rafale warplanes and air defense systems from France.”

    Ukraine on Monday signed a letter of intent to buy up to 100 Rafale warplanes, drones, air defense systems and other key equipment from France over the next 10 years, as part of efforts to strengthen the country’s long-term security.

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who signed the document with French President Emmanuel Macron, called it “a historic deal” at a joint news conference at the Elysée presidential palace. The letter is a preliminary commitment of Ukraine stating its interest in buying a series of French defense equipment.

    Snip.

    The Rafale is France’s most advanced fighter jet, a high-tech, delta-winged, multi-role warplane known for its maneuverability and efficiency. It has been deployed in the country’s foreign military operations including in the Middle East and Africa, and comes at a cost estimated at over $100 million per aircraft.

    “Preliminary commitment” is a long way from “fighters in the air.”

  • “Federal Grand Jury Adds Terrorism Indictments Over July 4 ‘Antifa’ Attack on Texas ICE Facility.”

    A federal grand jury indicted nine alleged “North Texas Antifa Cell operatives” last week on charges including rioting, providing material support to terrorists, and attempted murder in connection with the July 4 attack on the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Alvarado.

    Seven additional individuals were also charged with providing material support.

    “This is the first indictment in the country against a group of violent Antifa cell members,” Acting U.S. Attorney Nancy E. Larson stated. “The charges the Grand Jury has leveled against these defendants, including material support for terrorists, address the vicious attack perpetrated by an anti-ICE, anti-law enforcement, anti-government, anarchist group.”

    More:

    Yesterday’s twelve-count indictment charges Cameron Arnold, a/k/a Autumn Hill, Zachary Evetts, Benjamin Song, Savanna Batten, Bradford Morris, a/k/a Meagan Morris, Maricela Rueda, Elizabeth Soto, Ines Soto, and Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada with multiple offenses for their roles related to the Prairieland attack.

    Snip.

    The nine individuals indicted yesterday are charged with the following offenses:

    • Riot, with the intent to commit an act of violence, involving conduct such as shooting and throwing fireworks and explosives, slashing tires on a government vehicle, spraying graffiti on property and vehicles, destroying a closed circuit camera, shooting at officers, and dressing in black bloc.

      Defendants charged: Cameron Arnold, Zachary Evetts, Benjamin Song, Savanna Batten, Bradford Morris, Maricela Rueda, Elizabeth Soto, Ines Soto

    • Providing Material Support to Terrorists, including property, services, training, communications equipment, weapons, explosives, personnel (including themselves), and transportation.

      Defendants charged: Arnold, Evetts, Song, Batten, Morris, Rueda, E. Soto, and I. Soto

    • Conspiracy to Use and Carry an Explosive, and Using and Carrying an Explosive, during a riot.

      Defendants charged: Arnold, Evetts, Song, Batten, Morris, Rueda, E. Soto, and I. Soto

    • Attempted Murder of Officers and Employees of the United States, involving the unlawful attempt to kill with malice aforethought Correctional Officers-1 and 2, and an Alvarado Police Officer.

      Defendants charged: Song, Arnold, Evetts, Morris, and Rueda

    • Discharging a Firearm During, and in Relation to, and in Furtherance of a Crime of Violence, i.e., the attempted murder of two correctional officers and an Alvarado Police Officer.

      Defendants charged: Song, Arnold, Evetts, Morris, and Rueda

    • Corruptly Concealing a Document or Record, by transporting a box containing numerous Antifa materials, such as insurrection planning, anti-law enforcement, anti-government, and anti-immigration enforcement documents and propaganda from Sanchez Estrada’s residence to a location in Denton, Texas, intending to conceal the box’s contents and impair its availability for use in a federal grand jury and federal criminal proceeding.

      Defendant charged: Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada

    • Conspiracy to Conceal Documents and other objects that would implicate Maricela Rueda in the riot and shooting at the Prairieland facility.

      Defendants charged: Sanchez Estrada and Maricela Rueda

    If convicted, Song, Arnold, Evetts, Morris, and Rueda each face a minimum penalty of ten years in federal prison and a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. Batten, Elizabeth Soto, and Ines Soto each face a sentence ranging from a minimum of ten years up to fifty years in federal prison. Sanchez Estrada faces up to 20 years in federal prison on each count.

  • Japan says that it will defend Taiwan if China tries to invade.

    China remains infuriated by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s statement last week that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would threaten Japan‘s “survival” and would thus justify military engagement to defend Taiwan.

    This is an entirely logical assertion by the new prime minister. A Chinese conquest of Taiwan would result in Beijing’s dominance of trade flows in the western Pacific and its militarily encirclement of Japan’s southern outlying islands. Beijing would be able to leverage this military power to demand political concessions that fundamentally diminished Japan’s democratic sovereignty. In turn, the United States should be grateful to Takaichi. Her leadership here stands in stark contrast to that of other regional leaders such as South Korea’s Lee Jae Myung.

    It is partly due to this broadcasting of support for the U.S. that Beijing’s fury with Takaichi remains incandescent.

    If China doesn’t want to fight Japan, maybe they should refrain from invading Taiwan.

  • Never underestimate President Trump’s ability to do the unexpected. Commie New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani met with Trump in the White House…and it turned into something of a love-in:

    While his hard-left fellow-travelers now denounce Mamdani for meeting with Trump?

  • No matter who is running things, Palestinians seem to love terrorism more than life. “Palestinian Authority Paid Terrorists $214M This Year, Major Increase From 2024.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Giant pile of waste mysteriously appears in the English countryside. I’m not saying it’s necessarily unassimiliated Muslim immigrants doing it (I’m sure the UK has plenty of English litterbugs), I’m just suggesting that’s the way I would bet…
  • Houston mayor defends police coordination with ICE.

    After long denying that Houston had been cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Mayor John Whitmire has now admitted that the Houston Police Department has been cooperating with the federal agency, though he noted that it was the bare minimum.

    The comments came at a conference hosted by former Kemah Mayor Bill King. During an interview with Whitmire, King mentioned a New York Times profile written last month.

    In that article, Whitmire essentially said that, unlike the mayors of other big cities, such as Chicago or Los Angeles—where leaders constantly challenge Trump and his policies, especially on immigration—he prefers to keep a lower profile and focus on his job as mayor. Whitmire noted, “I don’t respond to Trump — that could be counterproductive. Do I have personal views? Sure, and they’re strong, but why do you want to challenge him?”

    On Saturday, Whitmire highlighted this position yet again, stating a certain level of cooperation with the administration was crucial to keeping Houston from becoming a military zone. “I’m not going to say that we’re not cooperating with ICE, because that’s frankly not true,” he said. He continued by pointing out that, even if he tried to get ICE out of Houston’s public spaces, the result would likely be 500 more officers from the Trump administration in response.

    Not to mention that it’s a matter of obeying federal law.

  • Stephen A. Smith interviews Ted Cruz. Cruz even challenges him to a game of basketball…
  • Sarah Hoyt thinks talk of an inevitable “civil war” are overblown.

    This is why I don’t get spooked at things like ante-fa. Because I was spooked, then I poked around and saw that they only operated in areas where the authorities were on their side. And even then, they couldn’t spread thinner than 3 cities or so at a time. This tells you it’s no groundswell movement. Heck, it’s not even as big as the fairly manufactured unrest of the 70s. Because of the way that the news and media worked back then, the people on the street seemed to feel more sympathy for the 70s bs than anyone does now. (No. I don’t know if that was true or the fact that the media and news of the time lent themselves to manipulating the history of the period, as well.)

    Or the reason I didn’t lose all hope in people over the Covidiocy. Yeah, I know. It sure did seem like everyone was onboard. Only we drove if not quite coast to coast close enough, which allowed us to see how widely the nonsense was ignored, and how p*ssed people were on it. After all, it’s very easy to think everyone is onboard with it when places like Twitter and Facebook were censoring any posts questioning it. (At the order of the administration — bah. What DDR bullsh*t.)

    This is the reason I know the groyper bs isn’t taking hold pretty much anywhere except with the extremely online showing how extremely online they are and edgy. And bots. And foreigners. And foreign bots. Because the general attitudes on the street haven’t changed.

    The only people I see talking about “groypers” and Nick Fuentes are either leftwing media, leftwing activists, or gadfly figures headed toward the exit gates from conservatism like Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens.

  • “JD Vance Convicted Of Threatening To Kill JD Vance.” “67-year-old James Donald Vance Jr. is also convicted of threatening President Donald Trump and one of Trump’s children.”
  • Speaking of nomengangers, Texas Democrat Representative Jasmine Crockett accused EPA head Lee Zeldin of taking money from Jeffrey Epstein. It was a different Jeffrey Epstein.
  • Speaking of crazy women, “Ex-GOP aide paid fetish artist to mutilate her, claimed it was an anti-Trump attack.”

    Natalie Greene, 26, was arrested Wednesday and charged with masterminding the violent bogus ambush at Egg Harbor Township Nature Reserve on the night of July 23, the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey announced.

    Prosecutors said the accused fraudster claimed three gun-wielding men approached her and a friend on the trail around 10:36 p.m. before threatening to shoot her and striking her in the head.

    An actual Republican hate crime hoax! That leaves the Hate Crime Hoax tally at (counts) I think 20 Democrats to 1 Republican, but I might be multi-counting Jussie Smollett coverage in various LinkSwarms…

  • “21 Alleged Arlington Gang Members Arrested on Violent Crime, Drug Charges.”

    Federal Department of Justice (DOJ) officials announced charges against 21 alleged members of a violent criminal street gang known as “Kiccdoe” in Arlington.

    The group has been charged with racketeering, murder, drug trafficking, and gun crimes, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Nancy Larson announced in a press release last week.

    As of Friday, November 7, all 21 were in custody.

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Arlington Police Department began investigating “Kiccdoe” in April 2024 after one of its members was shot and killed on a high school campus in Arlington. After the murder, several retaliatory shootings between “Kiccdoe” members and other Arlington gang members allegedly took place.

    “Kiccdoe” began on the east side of Arlington. Its members use words and symbols such as “kiccdoe,” “KDN” for Kiccdoe Nation, “6,” or “600,” including on their clothes, to demonstrate their association with the gang, court documents stated.

    Members also allegedly produced and distributed songs and videos about their gang activities and crimes.

    Yes, that’s a super-smart way to avoid being caught. What could possibly go wrong? The Feds never would have had to work the tax evasion angle if Al Capone had put out a rap video bragging about his illegal booze empire.

    In order to join or remain in good standing in the gang, its members would have to commit violent acts referred to as “stripes,” the court documents stated. The federal complaint alleged that these crimes included murders, robberies, assaults with dangerous weapons, sales of illegal drugs, and continuing threats of violence.

    The violent offenses took place from early 2022 through this year, the DOJ said.

    The alleged gang members range in age from 18 to 22, and many are charged with more than one offense.

    For example, Isaiah Wiley of Dallas is charged with conspiracy to commit murder, assault with a dangerous weapon in aid of racketeering, conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance, and possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime.

  • Despite promising job numbers, the Biden Recession is still with us: “Nearly a third of U.S. job postings don’t result in an actual hire, creating a ‘ghost job economy‘ with millions of roles that never materialize.”
  • David Letterman inducts Warren Zevon into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. A well-deserved honor.
  • Asmongold looks into the Ubisoft situation and compares woke online games “journalists” to the Sirens of Greek myth, lying about the quality of their games and luring them onto the rocks of unprofitability…
  • Jay Leno asks: Which is the better investment: A 1967 Lamborghini Miura, a 1993 Dodge Viper, or a 2013 Bugatti Veyron? The results may surprise you.
  • The story of how the Grumman LLV became America’s ubiquitous mail delivery vehicle.
  • The McRib is back. It’s the guy in the suit reviewing it, and you may or may not like his schtick…
  • “In Devastating Blow, Newly Released Emails Reveal Trump Not Well-Liked By Pedophile.”
  • “To Save Time, ICE Begins Mass Arrests Of Everyone At Soccer Fields.”
  • “Five Guys Now Offering 50-Year Burger Financing.”
  • “Starving African Children Raise Money To Feed Ariana Grande.”
  • “Shocking Study Reveals Someone Still Making Avatar Movies.”
  • “Troubling New Survey Shows 90 Percent Of Graduating High School Seniors Don’t Know The Airspeed Velocity Of An Unladen Swallow.”
  • “Scholars Now Believe Number Of The Beast Is Actually 67.
  • Good boy!

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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





    Arabella Advisors Hydra Head Morphs Into Sunflower Services

    Wednesday, November 19th, 2025

    You can’t tell the radical left social justice NGOs without a scorecard, and now one of the biggest NGOs is shapeshifting again.

    Nearly three months after the New York Times revealed that the Gates Foundation had decided to sever ties with philanthropic advisor Arabella Advisors, which engineered a sprawling “dark money” network of nonprofit entities, including the New Venture Fund (NVF), Sixteen Thirty Fund, Hopewell Fund, and Windward Fund, that continues to wage color-revolution-style operations against President Trump in an effort to crush the populist movement through the protest-industrial complex, there is news that the powerful far-left philanthropic consulting firm that handles money for rogue progressive billionaires or their foundations is being rolled into a new vehicle.

    “Stick a fork in Arabella Advisors. The powerful progressive philanthropic consulting firm is no more,” New York Times reporter Teddy Schleifer wrote on X, adding, “Instead, Arabella’s managed funds are investing in a new vehicle that will effectively bring Arabella’s services in house to each of the funds. And Arabella Advisors won’t exist anymore.”

    Schleifer pointed to a press release stating that Sunflower Services, a newly spun-up Public Benefit Corporation backed by NVF with support from the Windward and Hopewell Funds, has acquired Arabella Advisors’ fiscal sponsorship servicing business.

    “Arabella Advisors will cease operations, and Sunflower Services will ensure continuity for clients and staff,” the press release stated.

    The deal transfers Arabella’s operational infrastructure and staff to Sunflower, which will now provide administrative and operational services for NVF, Windward, Hopewell, and numerous other nonprofit projects. The nonprofits handled more than $1.179 billion across nearly 200 projects in the last year.

    Even though Arabella claims neutrality, overwhelming evidence from Peter Schweizer & Seamus Bruner of the Government Accountability Institute shows that through the Arabella network, some of these funds have supported organizations linked to left-wing, anti-capitalist, anti-police, anti-Israel, and at times anti-American agendas.

    Click through to see the various org charts for both the old and new hydra head, all with founder Eric Kessler on each.

    You may remember Arabella Advisors from such hits as “NGOs Funneling Tax Money To Domestic Terror” and “Let’s All Smear Brett Kavanaugh As A Rapist.”

    Now that same dirty work will be carried out by Sunflower Services.

    Meet the new abomination. Same as the old abomination.

    LinkSwarm For November 14, 2025

    Friday, November 14th, 2025

    Happy Anti-Communism Week everyone! (In addition, of course, to May 1st being one of two Victims of Communism Day.) The #SchumerShutdown ends with a whimper, a whole lot of SNAP fraud has been uncovered, more Democrats committing fraud, Chip Roy wants a complete immigration halt, Ukraine hits a bunch more Russian oil refineries, some semiconductor shenanigans, another company leaves Delaware for Texas, some tech companies in trouble, an interesting new pistol design, and a novel theory on “AI-related layoffs.”

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

    As a side note, the mosquitos have been brutal the last few days. Possibly because it’s been a very warm (though largely dry) November, and the bats have already migrated south.

  • Our short, mild national nightmare is officially over.

    President Donald Trump on Wednesday night signed a continuing resolution at the White House that ends the record-breaking 42-day federal government shutdown.

    The Senate passed the resolution on Monday and the House passed it earlier Wednesday evening. The resolution will keep the entire government funded through Jan. 30, and extends funding for military construction, Veterans Affairs, the Department of Agriculture, and Congress beyond that, through Sept. 30.

    Trump slammed Democrats for causing the shutdown by refusing to go along with a clean continuing resolution for over a month, and urged voters to remember the party responsible for causing the six-week-long chaos during next year’s midterms.

    “Republicans never wanted a shutdown and voted 15 times for a clean continuation of funding,” Trump said. “The Democrats shutdown has inflicted massive harm … So I just want to tell the American people, you should not forget this when we come up to midterms and other things. Don’t forget what they’ve done to our country.”

    The resolution gives backpay to many federal workers and reinstates employees who were fired during the shutdown, but does not include an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies despite it having been a key Democratic demand in the shutdown. The subsidies are set to expire at the end of the year.

  • And what did Chuck Schumer get for shutting down large portions of the federal government for more than a month? Two things: “Jack” and “Squat.”

    I hear that if you call Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office, the hold music is Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.”

    Last Tuesday night, Democrats were jubilant, convinced they had just inflicted the first of many consequential defeats upon their detested foes, President Trump and the Republican Party. And now here we are, six days later, and Democrats are once again disappointed, infuriated, and at each other’s throats.

    For the past 41 days, Republicans have had 53 senators willing to reopen the government, joined by Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and “independent” Angus King of Maine, who caucuses with the Democrats. But it requires 60 votes to cut off debate and bring the legislation to the floor for a vote, and thus to reopen the government, Republicans needed at least four more Democrats to change their mind.

    Last night, five additional Democratic senators agreed to vote to reopen the government — and in the eyes of their fellow Democrats, effectively surrendered. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire shifted their positions.

    Those eight agreed to reopen the federal government at current funding levels through January 30, and in exchange, all they needed was a pledge from Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota to hold a vote on legislation to extend the Obamacare exchange premium subsidies by the second week of December.

    There are one or two other deal-sweeteners in there for Kaine, notably an attempt to reverse more than 4,000 federal layoffs the Trump administration announced in the shutdown, and language to prevent future layoffs through January 30.

    Snip.

    Republicans just got the government reopened in exchange for a promise of a vote — not even promise of passage! — and rehiring government workers who were on the job on September 30. That’s a very small price to pay, and Republicans didn’t have to get rid of the filibuster, the ultimate short-term gain, long-term loss for Republicans in the Senate.

  • 500K Double Dippers, 5K Dead People Found on SNAP in 29 States.”

    Across three-fifths of the United States, the Trump administration has found half a million people receiving SNAP benefits twice over and 5,000 dead people receiving them. In deep blue states, the fraud is probably much worse.

    It is important to clarify that 20+ states out of the 50 did not comply with the federal government’s request for information on SNAP beneficiaries, likely because they are trying to hide how many illegal aliens are illicitly receiving food stamps. So the horrifying numbers revealed by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, The Ingraham Angle, are actually incomplete, and will probably be much higher if the administration can make radical Democrat states provide the necessary data.

    Snip.

    The secretary continued to list off food stamp recipient statistics: “80% [are] able-bodied Americans, meaning they can work, they don’t have small children at home, they’re not taking care of an elderly parent. They can work, and they choose not to work, of course, because they’re getting significant benefits from the taxpayer.”

    We need to restore shame to able-bodied adults living on the public dole.
    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Texas Republican congressman Chip Roy wants a complete immigration freeze until the system is fixed.

    A Texas congressman is proposing a “freeze” on all immigration until the federal government fixes the country’s broken system.

    U.S. Rep. Chip Roy (R–TX) said Wednesday he is introducing a bill called the “Pause Act” that will freeze all immigration until Congress achieves certain objectives, including reforming chain migration and birthright citizenship and ending H-1B visas.

    He said the nation’s record-high foreign-born population is creating “a cultural problem about who we are as Americans.”

    Roy, who is in a four-way race to be the Republican nominee for Texas attorney general in 2026, explained his proposal on The Benny Show.

    In addition to the immigration freeze and related reforms, Roy called for revisiting Plyler v. Doe, a case originating in Texas that resulted in a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring states to fund the education of illegal alien children.

    Roy also said his bill would require vetting people for their adherence to Sharia law.

    “Why are we importing any human being that is adherent to Sharia law, which is totally contrary to the Constitution, and our values, and Western civilization?” Roy asked host Benny Johnson.

    “In Texas, we’ve been dealing with the brunt of the illegal immigration influence. But now we’re seeing, I think, the ramifications of the H-1B system and how it has been abused, in addition to chain migration and diversity visas, which we’ve been trying to fix for a long time, and we’ve been unable to do so,” said Roy.

    Mostly agree with this, though there would probably have to be a way for individual exceptions to be made (say, a foreign Christian under a death threat from jihadists, or a Russian or Chinese defector, or a foreign NBA draft choice). But it should be so narrow as to require the personal approval of DHS Director Kristi Noem…

  • There are Somalis in Minnesota who wouldn’t vote for far leftist Somali Omar Fateh because he was from a different Somali clan, and they want members of the rival clan kicked out of the country…
  • Ukrainian drones hit the Saratov oil refinery for the fourth time since August.
  • They also hit the Orsk oil refinery, some 1600km from the Kharkiv.
  • Ukrainian drones also attacked the Russian Taneko oil refinery in Nizhnekamsk.
  • They also hit multiple targets in Novorossiysk, including both the oil terminal and the S-300/400 system defending it. Also, there’s no way I can donate €100 right now, but I really want one of those “This Is Fine” patches…
  • They also hit two oil depots and a fuel train in Crimea.
  • “Nearly 7,000 transport companies in Russia on verge of bankruptcy.
  • Glorious footage of a Ukrainian Mi-8 door gunner taking out a Shahed drone with a minigun:

  • “Top 20 Outrages of Norm Eisen’s War on America.”

    Orchestrating Over 180 Anti-Trump Lawsuits Through CREW: As co-founder of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Eisen led hundreds of ethics complaints and lawsuits against the Trump administration, often perceived as partisan harassment that politicizes oversight and strains constitutional separation of powers.

    Snip.

    Involvement in USAID Funding Scandal: Accused of ties to $17M misappropriation via family-linked NGO, raising corruption concerns in foreign aid.

    Plenty more at the link.

  • (Heavy sigh) Look, I’ve been avoid the whole stupid Tucker Carlson thing because he hasn’t been a particularly important part of the mediascape for a while, and plenty of other people were already dog-piling him. Yet, this week he seemed to turn up some pretty interesting information on would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks. Namely that he was a pro-Trump supporter…until he radically changed his tune in early 2020.

    On July 19, 2019 Crooks writes: “Ilhan Omar and others are invaders and should honestly be killed and their dead bodies sent back.”

    On July 20, 2018, Crooks writes: “If youre saying trump is a bad president you arent a patriot as trump is the literal definition of Patriotism”

    Seven hours after that comment, Crooks writes: “I hope a quick painful death to all the deplorable immigrants and anti-trump congresswoman who dont deserve anything this countru [sic] has given them”

    Later that evening he wrote: “Everyone of the Trump hat-ing democrats deserve to have their heads chopped of and put on steaks for the world to see what happens when you fuck with America”

    These types of comments continued for months, “and became increasingly violent.”

    “If any of the democratic candidates win. They wont be in there for long. Because unlike the dems we have guns and lots of them”

    He also quoted Mao – writing “The only real political power comes from the barrel of a gun.”

    The Change:

    In early 2020 as the pandemic shifted into the headlines, crooks “radically” changed – writing of “trumps stupidity.”

    He then began to mock the idea of the deep state – writing that “The deep state is simply made up of anybody who dis-agrees with the right wing. Conversation over.”

    In Feb. 2020, Crooks called out Trump supporters as “brainwashed,” and a “cult.”

    Later that day, Crooks called Trump a racist.

    And in April 2020 when the COVID panic was in full swing, Crooks became pro-lockdown, writing “It seems that you people don’t understand that sometimes Public safety comes before your Personnel rights.”

    He then wrote: “…going to a chinese new years party in america isn’t putting you at risk for corona virus because believe it or not viruses don’t spread through race like Tucker Carlson probably told you.”

    In May of 2020, Crooks called Republican concerns over voter fraud “ignorant.”

    He then wrote a comment that sounded like a “digital manifesto,” Carlson reports.

    “they only way to fight the gov is with terror-ism style attacks, sneak a bomb into an essential building a set it off before anyone sees you, track down any important people/politicians/military leaders etc and try to asasinate them. Any sort of head fight is suicide and even ambush/surprise attacks likely aren’t going to end well.”

    Sounds like another “known wolf,” doesn’t it? And the assertion that “there’s no deep state” (combined with what else we know about the assassination) makes you go “Hmmm.”

  • “Obamacare’s Effect on Health Insurance Costs: It Makes Everyone Else Poor.'”

    Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) is pushing back on the idea that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), known as Obamacare, has made health insurance costs more affordable, saying, “Obamacare makes everyone else poor.”

    Lee shared a graphic, first posted by President Trump on Truth social, showing how major health insurance company stocks have performed since the ACA was enacted in 2010 to November 2025.

    The seven major health insurance companies depicted on the graph show gains of anywhere from 414% to 1177% in their stock prices between March 2010 and November 2025.

    Lee called out the insurance providers, noting that they’re “making money hand over fist” but not because they are providing “new & innovative ways of making Americans healthier.”

    Instead, Lee says, these health insurance companies are prospering due to the bureaucratic barriers that prevent new competition and from massive subsidies from the federal government.

  • The Saudis are getting ready to purchase 48 F-35s.
  • “California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Former Chief of Staff Indicted on Public Corruption Charges.

    California Governor Gavin Newsom’s former chief of staff Dana Williamson was arrested Wednesday in an FBI corruption probe and charged with multiple counts of bank and wire fraud.

    Federal authorities accused Williamson, 53, of participating in a scheme to funnel campaign money from former federal Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra into a personal account. Sean McCluskie, Becerra’s former chief of staff, was named as a co-conspirator.

    “This is a crucial step in an ongoing political corruption investigation that began more than three years ago,” U.S. Attorney Eric Grant said in a statement. “As it always has, the U.S. Attorney’s Office will continue to work tirelessly with our law enforcement partners to protect the people of California from political corruption.”

    Williamson and McCluskie stole $225,000 between February 2022 and September 2024 from Becerra’s dormant state campaign fund, the federal indictment says. The Department of Justice investigation into the matter began three years ago, under former President Joe Biden’s administration, FBI Sacramento Special Agent in Charge Sid Patel said.

    “The news today of formal accusations of impropriety by a long-serving trusted advisor are a gut punch,” Becerra told local outlet KCRA 3.

    Williamson was hit with 23 charges, including conspiracy to commit fraud, conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruct justice, subscribing to false tax returns, and making false statements, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

    Democratic political consultants are so money-hungry they’ll rake graft off other Democrats. Big fleas have little fleas…

  • Man, it sure seems like a lot of prominent Democratic politicians are committing mortgage fraud. ‘Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) was hit with a federal criminal referral for alleged mortgage and tax fraud related to his purchase of a $1.2 million home in Washington, DC, that he claimed as a primary residence.” As Dwight notes: “You may remember Eric Swalwell for such hits as ‘banging a Chinese spy‘” and “threatening to use nuclear weapons against gun owners.”
  • Stephen Green wonders how the hell we let China buy a trailer park next door to a stealth bomber base.

    So a Chinese fraudster connected to Communist intelligence services wandered in from Canada and bought a trailer park next door to a stealth bomber base in Missouri.

    This is not the opening line of a surreal joke.

    Whiteman Air Force Base is home to our tiny fleet of B-2 bombers, and yet an RV park just a mile away “is one of several properties near U.S. military interests acquired by a web of shell companies, which are ultimately owned by a couple who live in Canada and belong to organizations controlled by disgraced Chinese tycoon and self-described former CCP intelligence ‘affiliate,’ Miles Guo,” according to a bombshell Daily Caller report.

    Someone in the federal government needs to get this fixed. Get a warrant to toss the entire trailer park to see what spectrum warfare equipment they might be using, then seize the place under eminent domain for national security reasons.

  • “Kansas AG charges small town mayor with illegally voting as a non-citizen day after winning second term.”

    ‘We now have tools, thanks to the current White House, that we haven’t had in over 10 years,’ said Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, ‘that we can check through the SAVE program, to find out if folks end up on our voter rolls. And they could be a legal resident, but they’re not a citizen. We want to make sure that gets clarified.’

    Deport him.

  • Least you think I’m never critical of President Trump, I want to note that his trial balloon for 50 year mortgages is a really bad idea. It’s not a way to build wealth, and the only party getting rich off that deal is the banks. Financially, you’d be better off living in a van for a few years until you can afford a real mortgage.
  • This certainly has a whiff of scandal: “Houston ISD Sues Texas Attorney General to Block Release of Emails with California PR Firm. The district wants to keep communications with a PR firm from becoming public.”

    Houston Independent School District (ISD) filed a lawsuit against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to block the release of emails between the district and Los Angeles public relations firm Bryson Gillette.

    Bryson Gillette is former Obama aide Bill Burton’s public relations firm run by Democratic operatives. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was a senior adviser there.

    Bryson Gillette was involved with the district’s rebranding in May. Houston ISD’s Chief of Public Affairs and Communications Alex Elizondo told an advisory committee that the district had a brand identity that “isn’t inviting or super compelling.”

    A Houston ISD spokesperson said the rebrand came at no additional cost to the district and coincided with the rollout of new district and campus website designs scheduled for August.

    According to the suit, ABC13 News requested one month of emails between Houston ISD and Bryson Gillette on May 8, which the district received on May 9. On May 21, the district asked Paxton to withhold documents and submitted the required materials to the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) asserting attorney-client privilege.

    The OAG issued a ruling on August 12, ordering Houston ISD to release the records and stating that attorney-client privilege did not apply.

    Houston ISD filed a lawsuit in Travis County on September 11, looking to block the emails from release.

    Makes you wonder what they’re hiding, doesn’t it?

  • Federal judge threatens to sanction California for ‘misleading’ him in ‘gender secrecy’ case. State claimed lawsuit over muzzling teachers, hiding students gender identity from parents was moot because it removed FAQ page with challenged policies, but they secretly popped up again in required teacher training.”

    California Gov. Gavin Newsom has repeatedly slurred a federal judge by name, echoing President Trump’s history of diatribes against judges even before the current Democrat started copying the former Democrat’s social media style and insulting nicknames.

    The perceived contender for the 2028 Democratic nomination for president may cluck his tongue again when he sees the latest order from U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez in a lawsuit against The Golden State’s alleged mandate on school districts to hide from parents their children’s asserted gender identity at odds with sex.

    The President George W. Bush nominee ordered state Attorney General Rob Bonta and the California Department of Education to “show cause” on why they should not be sanctioned for “misleading” Benitez so he would remove them from the suit by teachers who allege their school district muzzled them and parents of “gender incongruent children.”

    The state defendants’ motions to dismiss and opposition to the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment claimed that CDE had “withdrawn and conclusively replaced” an FAQ page that contained the challenged policies, which they claimed was the “only basis” for being named defendants and thus made the case moot, Benitez wrote.

    “However, evidence demonstrates that the CDE may have merely moved the challenged content of the FAQ page to a new, required ‘PRISM’ training module,” as documented by the plaintiffs’ lawyers at the Thomas More Society, the judge said, ordering state defendants to explain their behavior Nov. 17 in court.

    “From day one, officials from the local school district all the way to the governor’s mansion have tried to deflect responsibility” but “have now been caught not only lying to California taxpayers but attempting to mislead the Court to escape accountability,” TMS Executive Vice President Peter Breen said in a statement.

  • “The special election for Texas Senate District 9 will continue into a runoff with two candidates: Republican Leigh Wambsganss and Democrat Taylor Rehmet.”

    Based on early voting and some voting day results, no candidate secured over 50 percent of the votes cast, so the two highest vote recipients will move on to the runoff election, the date of which remains to be set by Gov. Greg Abbott.

    The North Texas Senate seat was vacated when former state Sen. Kelly Hancock (R-North Richland Hills) resigned and was appointed by Abbott to fill the vacancy as the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts.

    Snip.

    Wambsganss was endorsed early on in the race by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has vocally opposed expansion of casino gambling in Texas. She has also received support from Texans United for a Conservative Majority (TUCM), which opposes gambling expansion as well. Texans for Lawsuit Reform, a group not frequently on the same side of an electoral battle as TUCM, has also supported Wambsganss.

  • Leave it to Sargon of Akkad to point out the obvious: Female prison guards shouldn’t guard male prisoners. And vice versa.
  • “Substrate’s claims about revolutionary ASML-beating chipmaking technology scrutinized.” That’s because they’re bunk.

    The Substrate startup has been doing the rounds in the news lately, thanks to its proposition of making chips using particle accelerators and X-rays instead of conventional EUV lithography, claiming it can eventually have angstrom-sized features at only $10,000 per wafer—in U.S. fabs, no less.

    Oooo, where to begin? IBM tried experimenting with x-ray lithography in the 1980s and 90s, and found the rays were too energetic to use because they damaged wafers.

    And technically, semiconductor equipment manufacturing already has particle accelerators: they’re called ion implanters and they’re used for gate dopants. Axcelis (formerly Eaton Semiconductor) and Applied Materials (both companies I worked for in the 1990s) make good money selling them, and there are a whole bunch of limits-of-physics reasons why you can’t use them for lithography. (Historical trivia: Applied Materials used to have their own in-house designed ion implanters, but their current offerings trace back to a competitor named Varian they bought in 2011.)

    Those are bold claims, and an article by Fox Chapel Research (FCR) is seriously questioning whether they pay off.

    The write-up is the first of two parts, and takes aim at not just the seemingly outlandish technological claims, but also at the track record of the venture’s founders, as well as the overall messaging on Substrate’s website. The start-up is backed by various investment funds, namely but not only Founders Fund, of whom Peter Thiel is part of.

    The report says the founders are James and Oliver Proud, who reportedly have no experience in the semiconductor industry, nor do any of the investor funds. James’ latest venture was apparently the Sense sleep tracker, a product that had its inception on Kickstarter to the tune of $2.5m, but didn’t materialize until funding rounds raised over $50m. After release, the tracker was found to be borderline useless by reviewers and drew many comparisons to a scam.

    Yeah, that reeks of a scam. Avoid. (See also: “China’s Semiconductor Industry: Shell Games All The Way Down.”)

  • “Wendy’s Is Closing Roughly 300 Restaurants This Year and Next.”

  • ClowfishTV floats an interesting theory: A lot of those “AI-related” layoffs are just companies using that as an excuse to purge the woke from the ranks.

  • Coinbase Leaves Delaware For “Greener Pastures” In Texas As Exodus Continues.”

    For more than half a century, Delaware stood as America’s corporate capital, renowned for its business-friendly laws, respected Chancery Court, and consistent legal rulings. But in recent years, leftist activist lawmakers and politicized judges have undermined that very foundation, sparking an exodus of major companies seeking stability and fairness to more welcoming states like Texas and Nevada.

    On Wednesday morning, Coinbase joined the growing exodus, announcing on its website and in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal that it is moving its state of incorporation from Delaware to Texas.

    “For decades, Delaware was known for predictable court outcomes, respect for the judgment of corporate boards, and speedy resolutions,” Grewal wrote in the op-ed.

    However, he pointed out that recent inconsistent Chancery Court rulings and reliance on ad hoc legislative fixes do not create a sustainable business environment.

    “Our decision to leave is about ensuring more predictable opportunities for the company, our shareholders, our customers and the new on-chain ecosystem we’re building,” he noted, adding, “Texas offers efficiency and predictability, in part thanks to recent corporate-law reforms that enhance governance flexibility and legal predictability.”

    Grewal concluded, “Delaware wasn’t always the go-to choice for companies. At one point it was New Jersey, and before that New York. We’ve reached another inflection point in corporate law. The more states that can credibly attract companies, the better—and we’d like to see Delaware step up to stay in the mix. But as for Coinbase, you can find us in Texas….”

    The exodus list from Delaware increases:

    • Tesla: Moved to Texas.
    • SpaceX: Moved to Texas.
    • Trump Media & Technology: Moved to Florida.
    • Dropbox: Moved to Nevada.
    • TripAdvisor: Moved to Nevada.
    • Roblox: Moved to Nevada.
    • Pershing Square: Moved to Nevada.
    • The Trade Desk: Moved to Nevada.
    • AMC Networks: Moved to Nevada.
    • Madison Square Garden Sports: Moved to Nevada.
    • Fidelity National Financial: Voted to move to Nevada.

    So was a Delaware judge letting Elon Musk know how much he hated him for supporting Trump worth it?

  • Texas Governor Abbott officially files for a fourth term, and is endorsed by President Trump.
  • Incumbent state rep Tom Craddick (R-Midland) has filed for re-election to his 30th term.
  • San Francisco train driver falls asleep while driving. Brown alert ensues. It’s a greatfentanylmystery how this could happen…
  • “Brazil carves through Amazon rainforest for new highway to ferry global climate conference elites.”

  • “750-meter-long Chinese bridge partially collapses just weeks after opening.” From a landslide, but I’m betting the usual Chinesium/tofu drugs construction quality didn’t help…
  • Google is investing $40 billion in Texas AI data centers.

    At its Midlothian Data Center, alongside a number of state officials, Google announced a $40 billion data center infrastructure investment in Texas.

    Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet, said that the investment will go toward the construction of three data center campuses located in Armstrong and Haskell counties.

    Armstrong County is southeast of Amarillo. Haskell County is north of Abilene. Both counties have a whole lot of nothing there.

    “They say that everything is bigger in Texas – and that certainly applies to the golden opportunity with AI,” Pichai stated.

    “This investment will create thousands of jobs, provide skills training to college students and electrical apprentices, and accelerate energy affordability initiatives throughout Texas.”

    Gov. Greg Abbott said the new Google AI data center announcement is “a Texas-sized investment in the future of our great state.” U.S. Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) were also in attendance, along with Congressman Jake Ellzey (R-TX-06) and a number of other local officials.

    “Google’s $40 billion investment makes Texas Google’s largest investment in any state in the country and supports energy efficiency and workforce development in our state,” Abbott added. “We must ensure that America remains at the forefront of the AI revolution, and Texas is the place where that can happen.”

    Google has already officially broken ground on two other data centers in the state: one in Midlothian in 2019, and the other in Red Oak in 2023. The technology company has since announced further investments into data and cloud infrastructure to the tune of $2.7 billion.

    This most recent announcement of a $40 billion investment will focus on building out infrastructure to support the three new data centers. Some of that investment includes building up new and existing energy storage facilities, advanced water use operations, and partnering with universities to offer technology training and education.

    My reservations about Google’s AI notwithstanding, that will offer a bunch of real jobs for real Texans…assuming the AI bubble doesn’t burst before they get built.

  • Remember when Adobe’s new terms and conditions demanded you give them unlimited rights to anything you created with their tools, forever? Well, now their stock is in the toilet, you can’t own any of their software, only rent it, and there’s a big class action lawsuit against them.
  • Speaking of tech firms in trouble, video game maker Ubisoft (makers of Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed games) has not only postponed an earnings report, they’ve suspended stock trading. I can’t recall a single instance where that was a good sign. The last time we mentioned Ubisoft, they were pissing off Japanese gamers for including a black samurai in one of their games…
  • Ian McCollum looks at the new Rideout Arsenal Dragon, a low-bore-axis, lever-delayed pistol. It’s funky looking and has some interesting features, including complete non-tool disassembly. However, the price point would make it way too expensive to consider even if I had a job, he experiences several firing malfunctions testing it (though it is a prototype), and I fear the tiny little tabs it uses may not hold up under heavy use. Still a pretty interesting design.
  • Hasan Piker arrested in China over meme. Sadly, they let him go before he could get to experience more of the communism he professes to love…
  • Disney+ wants to flood you with AI slop.
  • Critical Drinker on the Production Hell of Groundhog Day.
  • “With Cheney Dead, Iraq Finally Admits They Had WMDs All Along.”
  • “Democrats Agree To End Shutdown In Exchange For 15% Off Coupon To Cracker Barrel.”
  • “Congress Prepares To Pivot From Doing Nothing Because Of The Shutdown To Doing Nothing Because They’re Congress.”
  • Dave Ramsey In Critical Condition After Learning Of 50-Year Mortgage.”
  • “Latest Tucker Guest Bigfoot Reveals How Mind-Controlling Chemtrails Are Sprayed Over The Flat Earth By The Jews.”
  • Stampede!

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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





    Paxton Sues Leftist Open Borders Group Over Voter Registration Fraud

    Tuesday, November 11th, 2025

    Ken Paxton hasn’t let running for the senate keep him from his favorite pastime: filing lawsuits. This time he’s suing “‘Radical Open-Borders Group Over Alleged Illegal Voter-Registration Scheme.”

    Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit seeking to dissolve the nonprofit JOLT Initiative, accusing the Democrat-aligned voter-registration group of orchestrating what he calls a “systematic, unlawful voter-registration scheme” designed to “sabotage Texas election integrity and allow illegals to vote.”

    Not that one.

    The suit, filed October 23 in Tarrant County district court, invokes the state’s quo warranto authority—a constitutional power allowing the attorney general to ask a judge to revoke a corporation’s charter if it is violating Texas law.

    According to the filing, undercover investigators from Paxton’s office observed Jolt volunteers stationed outside Department of Motor Vehicles offices instructing people how to fill out voter-registration forms in ways that violated the Texas Election Code, including offering to register individuals who were not present. The state alleges those practices could enable non-citizens without valid identification to submit unlawful voter-registration applications.

    “The left constantly tries to cheat and rig elections because they know they can’t win honestly,” Paxton said in announcing the suit. “Any organization attempting to register illegals, who are all criminals, must be completely crushed and shut down immediately. JOLT is a radical, partisan operation that has, and continues to, knowingly attempt to corrupt our voter rolls and weaken the voice of lawful Texas voters. I will make sure they face the full force of the law.”

    Paxton’s office is asking the court to order the forfeiture of Jolt’s corporate privileges, dissolution of its charter, and appointment of a receiver to wind down the organization’s operations.

    In the petition, the state cites “systematic, knowing, willful, deliberate, and reckless” violations of election statutes and argues that criminal conduct under the election code constitutes “sufficient cause” for revocation of Jolt’s corporate status.

    JOLT, which describes itself as a nonprofit working to “increase civic participation among young Latinos,” has argued in federal court that its volunteer deputy registrars are trained according to secretary of state guidance and must submit all applications they receive—eligible or not—for counties to determine eligibility.

    JOLT Initiative is an Austin-based 501(c)(3) organization. It’s 990 filing shows it’s run by liberal Democrat Diana Maldonado, who longtime readers might remember as a one-term state representative before Republican Larry Gonzales beat her in the Texas House District 52 race in 2010.

    There’s no election fraud vector Democrats won’t try. With some blue states handing driver’s licenses out like candy in a ploy to get illegal aliens onto the voting roles, Paxton is wise to nip this particular fraud attempt in the bud.

    Elon Musk On The Homeless Industrial Complex

    Sunday, November 9th, 2025

    I said I might be putting up some segments from the latest Joe Rogan interview with Elon Musk, and this segment, where he talks about the California homeless industrial complex, sounds like he’s been reading BattleSwarm.

    I’ve elided some of Musk’s verbal tics (“likes,” “uhs” and repeated words) in the interest of clarity and readability.

  • Joe Rogan: “And then you guys [California] spent $24 billion on the homeless and it got way worse.”
  • Elon Musk: “Yes. Like the homeless population doubled or something.”
  • EM: “People don’t understand the homeless thing because it it sort of prays on people’s empathy.”
  • EM: “The homeless industrial complex is really, it’s dark, man. [That] network of NGOs should be called the drug zombie farmers.”
  • EM: “When you meet somebody who’s totally dead inside shuffling along down the street, with a needle dangling out of their leg…”
  • EM: “Homeless is the wrong word. ‘Homeless’ implies that somebody got a little behind in their mortgage, payments and if they just got a job offer, they’d be back on their feet.”
  • EM: “You see these videos of people that are just shuffling, they’re on fentanyl. They’re taking a dump in the middle of the street, and they’ve got like open sores and stuff. They’re not like one job offer away from getting back on their feet.”
  • EM: “This is not a homeless issue. Homeless is, it’s a propaganda word.”
  • EM: “These sort of charities, [they] get money proportionate to the number of homeless people, or number of drug zombies.” So their incentive structure is to maximize the number of drug zombies, not minimize it.
  • EM: “That’s why they don’t arrest the drug dealers, because if they arrest the drug dealers, the drug zombies leave.”
  • JR: “So they’re in coordination with law enforcement on this?”
  • EM: “Yeah.”
  • JR: “So how do they how do they have those meetings?”
  • EM: “They’re all in cahoots. When you find this, it’s such a diabolical scam.”
  • EM: “San Francisco has got this tax this gross receipts tax. It’s not even on revenue, it’s on all transactions, which is why Stripe and Square and and and a whole bunch of financial companies had to move out of San Francisco…you’re taxed on any money going through the system in San Francisco. So Jack Dorsey pointed this out, and they had to move Square from San Francisco to Oakland, I think. Stripe had to move from San Francisco to South San Francisco, different city.”
  • EM: “That money goes to the homeless industrial complex. So there’s billions of dollars that go, as you pointed out, billions of dollars every year that go to these non-governmental organizations that are funded by the state. It’s not clear how to turn this off. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone situation.”
  • EM: “So they get this money, the money is proportionate to the number of homeless people, or number of drug zombies.”
  • EM: “When you add up all the money that’s flowing, they’re getting close to a million dollars per homeless drug zombie. It’s like $900,000 or something, some crazy amount of money, is going to these organizations. So they want to keep people just barely alive. They need to keep them in the area, so they get the revenue. So that’s why they don’t arrest the drug dealers, because otherwise the drug zombies would leave. But they don’t want [them] to have too much, if they get too much drugs and then they die. So they’re kept in this sort of perpetual zone of being addicted, but just barely alive.”
  • So the homeless industrial complex is farming homeless drug zombies as a cash crop in San Francisco. Once you understand this, a whole lot of otherwise inexplicable policies start to make sense. The shocking revelation here, that local law enforcement is in on the deal and that’s why they don’t arrest the drug dealers, makes sense, but I’d really like to see supporting evidence for it.

    This is the sort of thing Republicans in congress should hold hearings on and get sworn testimony on the records. I’d also like to see DOGE-level forensic audits of the government agencies sending the money, and the NGOs spending it, to find out where all the zombie drug farming money is going…

    LinkSwarm For November 7, 2025

    Friday, November 7th, 2025

    Illegal aliens continue raking in welfare benefits, the #SchumerShutdown continues, a look at the Democrats’ foreign paymasters, a jihad attack thwarted, cartels are enslaving American Indians in California in the name of weed, some Joe Rogan interviews, Nasty Nancy bows out, Kill Bill returns to theaters, and Bass Pro Shop Fight Club.

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Stephen Green covers how illegal aliens get food stamps.

    It’s astounding, the things we learn when the money runs out and governments actually have to start prioritizing for a change. As the Schumer Shutdown drags through Week Five with no end in sight, the country’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — aka “food stamps” — ran out of money on Saturday. And given who was taking, it’s a miracle that there was any money left at all.

    Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins reported yesterday that earlier this year, “we told every state to send us their SNAP data so we could make sure illegal immigrants aren’t getting benefits meant for American families. 29 states stepped up. 21 blue states refused — and two SUED US FOR ASKING!”

    That’s because we’re spending billions on benefits to illegal aliens.

    My guess is that the Center for Immigration Studies — which bills itself as “low-immigrant” yet “pro-immigration” — was being a bit ironic with this headline: Illegal Immigrants To Be Hit Hard As SNAP and WIC Benefits Expire.

    The organization’s 2023 analysis of government data showed that “households headed by illegal immigrants make extensive use of the welfare system, particularly food assistance programs.” CIS estimated that 59% of households headed up by an illegal are on one or more welfare programs, whether it’s cash, food assistance, Medicaid, or housing.

    Read that again. We’re giving cash, food, healthcare, and housing to people who aren’t even supposed to be here.

    Millions of them, in fact. Even though I could have sworn that Democrats insisted up and down that sort of thing never happened. No wonder 21 blue states didn’t want Rollins looking at their books.

    Houston, we have a problem. A very expensive problem.

    His suggestions: Require proof of citizenship for all welfare benefits, and ban junk food from purchase with EBT.

  • The Schumer Shutdown continues. Democrats offered a one year ObamaCare extension and Republicans told them to get stuffed. Republicans should counter-offer an extension of the subsidies for American citizens…but none for illegal alien, plus states are required to submit their benefits database so illegal aliens can be kicked off the program and deported. That would make it even more painfully clear Democrats favor illegal aliens over citizens when they refuse…
  • Why is the Democrat Party in the pocket of foreign powers?

    Don Surber:

    Foreigners not only are paying to promote liberal causes and by extension liberal candidates but foreigners are running their own candidates. The Squad has a couple of them and Minneapolis is about to get a Somali mayor.

    Foreigners are funding the Indian who was born in Uganda and sent to New York City at some point. Now he’ll a jihadist-friendly communist—but if justice prevails, he may end up in prison instead of being in City Hall.

    The New York Post reported last week, “Zohran Mamdani was hit with two criminal referrals Tuesday filed by a campaign finance watchdog accusing the lefty socialist of accepting illegal contributions from foreign donors.

    “The Coolidge Reagan Foundation filed the referrals—alleging Mamdani may have violated the Federal Election Campaign Act and New York Election Code—with the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office on Tuesday.

    “The referrals were filed after The Post reported earlier this month Mamdani’s campaign raked in nearly $13,000 in contributions from at least 170 donors with addresses outside the U.S.—including one from his mother-in-law in Dubai.”

    Ed Morrissey:

    The Democrat Party has turned into the Globalist Party. Their constituency isn’t American voters; it’s the international cognoscenti, who want an America that submits to the “global community.” That is why Democrat leaders do not adapt their policies and positions to the clear consensus in the American electorate, because they have already adapted to constituencies outside the United States.

    That isn’t the only institution orienting itself away from American constituencies, and for the same reason. Over the last several decades, Academia has seen billions of dollars flow into its coffers from places like China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. There too, the money has pushed institutions to indoctrinate students into radical-Left globalist values and agendas. Universities have largely stopped providing foundational Western-civilization values and education in favor of revisionist propaganda about Western imperialism and colonialism. This in turn colors all of the institutions into which radicalized graduates enter and rise within those structures.

    Jonah Goldberg, from 2009 (back before Trump broke his brain):

    Liberalism has openly yearned to “Europeanize” American social policy for decades. Liberals point to European health-care systems, union rules, tax policies, industrial policy, foreign policy, and even sexual mores, and say: “We need to be more like them.”

    This is a very old story. The founders of modern liberalism, led by Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts, were quite open about their effort to adopt a more European approach to political economy. The progressive leader William Allen White said in 1911: “We were parts, one of another, in the United States and Europe. Something was welding us into one social and economic whole with local political variations. It was Stubbs in Kansas, Jaures in Paris, the Social Democrats in Germany, the Socialists in Belgium, and I should say the whole people in Holland, fighting a common cause.”

    But it was FDR’s New Deal that truly aimed to “assimilate the American into the ‘European’ political experience,” according to historian Daniel Boorstin.

  • ObamaCare looks like it was designed from the get-go to be a giant bucket of fraud.

    After years of Democrats telling the American people that former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a thriving system, the glaring truth revealed now during the government shutdown is that not only has the ACA resulted in widespread fraud and allegations of kickbacks to insurance companies, the American people are footing the bill for subsidies to hide the fact that Obamacare is broken.

    “Everything Obama told us was a complete lie,” E.J. Antoni told John Solomon during a special report on the government shutdown sponsored by the Association of Mature American Citizens.

    Antoni, who serves as chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, continued: “When he said, ‘If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.’ No you couldn’t. Obamacare made a lot of those health care plans illegal. He said, ‘If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.’ No, it forced a lot of doctors out of business, and it forced a lot of doctors to no longer take most insurance.”

    President Barack Obama repeatedly promised Americans during the rollout of the ACA — commonly known as Obamacare — that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” a claim intended to reassure Americans about the ACA’s impact on existing healthcare arrangements. However, millions of people lost access to their preferred and established physicians due to narrowed insurance networks and cancellations of plans which did not comply with the law’s new requirements, leading even left-leaning PolitiFact to name it the “Lie of the Year” in 2013.

    Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Mich., revealed the latest scandal within Obamacare. Bergman, speaking to Just The News, laid out the timeline for subsidies which were meant to lighten the burden for Americans but when unused, were pocketed by the insurance companies.

    Bergman explained that “In 2010, the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act. Then in 2014, ACA premium tax credits became available, meant to help families earning 100 to 140% of the federal poverty level – that was designed to help those folks. In 2021, through the ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act), Democrats temporarily extended and expanded those subsidies to everyone, regardless of income, for one year. In 2022, the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act), they extended the expansion again, but only through January 1 of 2026.”

    Bergman emphasized that the expiration imposed by Democrats implicitly meant that the extension was not meant to be permanent. That extension expires and is what Democrats have shut down the government over. As Bergman puts it, “They’re blaming us, the Republicans, for letting their own temporary extensions expire.”

    The largest surprise regarding these subsidies, is that they haven’t been going directly to patients. They’ve been going to insurance companies, according to Bergman. “Insurance companies’ profits right now are up something like 240+ percent. There’s something morally wrong with that. Not only is it shamefully wrong, but morally wrong.”

    Bergman did not name any specific insurance companies.

    “Millions of these so-called ghost enrollees, people who are technically eligible, but are unaware of it, never use these subsidies. The insurers pocket the difference.”

    OpenSecrets reported that in 2012, the health insurance industry donated roughly $9.6 million to Democrats. In 2024, the industry donated almost $40 million to Democrats.

    One hand washes the other…

  • “FBI stops Islamic terror attack on Detroit Arsenal that was planned for Halloween night.”

    Five people between the ages of 16 and 20 were arrested Friday, CBS News has learned. Authorities say they were inspired by a former member of the Michigan Army National Guard who was arrested in May for allegedly planning an ISIS-inspired attack against a U.S. Army site in suburban Detroit.

    (Just a reminder that Detroit suburbs like Dearborn Heights are majority-Muslim.)

    The men were inspired by another “Michigan man” who was arrested in May:

    Ammar Abdulmajid-Mohamed Said, 19, was accused of providing support for a planned attack on the U.S. Army’s Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command facility at the Detroit Arsenal.

    Democrats have been importing unassimilated Muslims into America for, what, 30 year now? 40? Who initiated the plan, and why?

  • “Houston ICE Operation Yields 1,500 Arrests of Alleged Criminal Illegal Aliens Over 10 Days.”

    Over 1,500 alleged criminal illegal aliens were arrested during a 10-day operation in Southeast Texas — including documented gang members, a convicted murderer, and over a dozen sexual offenders.

    The Houston branch of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducted the operation between October 22 and 31, arresting a total of 1,505 alleged criminal illegal aliens.

    Among the arrests were 17 “documented gang members,” including an alleged Mexican Mafia gang member, who was convicted for raping and impregnating his minor sister and is wanted in Honduras for murder. A suspected MS-13 gang member was also among the arrested, after he “ran inside a local washateria, climbed through the ceiling panels to get on the roof and became wedged in a sign on the side of the building,” before being captured by Houston ICE.

    Forty “aggravated felons” were reported as being among the 1,505 arrested, as were 13 sexual predators.

    One of the arrested is Vongphachan Phothisome of Laos, who was convicted of sexual exploitation of a child. Similarly, an illegal alien from Honduras, Rony Andy Martinez Lopez, was convicted of “lewd and lascivious acts with a minor and cruelty towards a child.”

    A comparable week-long operation conducted by Houston ICE in early September yielded about half the arrests as this October one, with 822 alleged criminal illegal aliens arrested last month.

  • Ukraine blew up three major pipelines near Moscow, including one carrying fuel used by the military.
  • They also hit the Saratov oil refinery (for the third time) and the Shakhtarsk oil depot.
  • They hit hit the Kstovo oil refinery and the Sterlitamak petrochemical plant. This is the third time Kstovo was hit, and the chemical plant produces a variety of things for the military.
  • The also hit the Oryol thermal power plant with missiles (possibly Flamingo).
  • They evidently destroyed over 1,000 Shahed drones in Donetsk, “using a combination of drones and missiles.”
  • Hmmmm: “IL-76 With Russian Crew Shot Down in Sudan.”
  • Is FSB purging the Russian military of anyone who criticizes the war?
  • Cartels Control Tribal Lands In California, Grow Drugs And Impose Narco-Slavery.”

    Native American sovereignty and California’s policies that shield illegal immigrants have allowed Mexican drug cartels to swoop in on tribal lands of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, a confederation of several tribes, the sheriff said.

    The valley, known for illegal marijuana grows on tribal lands, is remote and surrounded by forested mountainous terrain. It’s a patchwork of tribal lands and those sold off to private owners years ago.

    [Mendocino County Sheriff Matt] Kendall, 56, grew up here in the 1970s. During the drive to Covelo, an isolated town in the valley, he talks about how the times have changed over the decades.

    “Back in the ’60s and ’70s, it was a beautiful place—a lot of freedom here,” he said. “When we were kids, we’d be riding our horses and having fun. Every kid in this valley had a horse. We’d go out to the river. All of us had summertime jobs, hauling hay and cutting firewood.”

    His nostalgic journey ends abruptly as he passes a burned-out building with murals of missing women on its walls—a stark reminder of the violence that plagues the valley. Other banners along the road display their names and faces, including that of Khadijah Rose Britton, a native American woman who, according to the FBI, was last seen in Covelo being kidnapped at gunpoint in 2018.

    Today, Kendall says, “there’s a little bit of farming, and then just tons and tons of marijuana, and pretty much all of it is illegal.”

    “We see a lot of Hispanics here when there is no work, no sawmill jobs, no grapes, no vineyards and not much logging. They’re all here taking orders to grow marijuana, and a lot of it’s happening on tribal lands.”

    He estimates up to 80 percent of the illegal marijuana in Mendocino County is grown on tribal lands, based on aerial surveillance and satellite imagery revealing a vast network of illegal grow ops.

  • A blow against tranny madness. “Supreme Court Reinstates Trump Admin Requirement That Passports Reflect Biological Sex.”
  • Companies announce the most layoffs in 20 years.
  • Joe Rogan interviews Elon Musk, again. I have not remotely watched all three hours of it, but I don’t rule out posting clips from it in the future.
  • Speaking of Musk, Telsa shareholders just approved a $1 trillion pay package for him, assuming he hits certain metrics over the next decade. My guess is that’s a whole lot of pie in the sky, even for him…
  • Speaking of three hour Joe Rogan interviews, he did one with Billy Bob Thorton that just dropped. I’m sure I’ll watch all of that one as well…
  • Nancy Pelosi announces her retirement. She was able to force the abomination that was ObamaCare over the line, and grab a lot of taxpayer-funded pork for Democrats, but it’s doubtful her terms as Speaker resulted in lasting achievements for Democrats. She was bad, but if another Democrat manages to be Speaker in my lifetime, my default assumption is that they’ll be much, much worse…
  • Some good news from a bad week: “Mayor Jacob Frey beat back a challenge from democratic socialist Omar Fateh.” Some may remember Fateh from accusations he cheated in the primary.
  • “Democratic Louisiana Mayor Indicted For Using City Funds To Solicit Prostitute, Pay Off Personal Legal Debts.”

    A Washington Parish grand jury in Louisiana has indicted Democratic Bogalusa, Louisiana Mayor Tyrin Z. Truong on charges of malfeasance in office, public intimidation, and theft, according to the Bogalusa Daily News.

    The indictment is part of what officials describe as an ongoing multi-agency investigation involving federal, state, and local authorities. Prosecutors allege Truong intentionally carried out his official duties unlawfully and knowingly allowed other city employees to ignore theirs. His arraignment is scheduled for November 10, 2025.

    According to prosecutors, the case centers on claims that Truong misused Bogalusa taxpayer funds to pay a personal legal debt from a 2023 Louisiana public records lawsuit in which a judge ruled that Truong personally owed attorney fees and penalties after refusing to release public documents.

    When the Bogalusa City Council denied his request to use public money, prosecutors say Truong threatened retaliation, vowing to overwhelm council members with records requests. Investigators allege he then pressured a city insurance vendor to issue a check labeled as a “reimbursement,” had it deposited into a city account, and ordered another check for the same amount to be written to himself.

    Rookie mistake. Graft pros always have the check written to an intermediary cutout who withdraws the money and pays them in cash…

  • The heartwarming story of how Green Charter Township, Michigan, avoided getting a Chinese Communist Party-linked battery plant shoved down their throats.

    In 2022, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) announced a plan to give $715 million in taxpayer cash and tax incentives to lure Gotion, a Chinese battery maker, to rural central Michigan. She did it in the midst of a reelection campaign so she could fire off a press release claiming credit for 2,600 “good-paying jobs.”

    She didn’t mind the fact that this proposed one-square-mile plant would be located less than 100 miles from an Army and National Guard training facility called Camp Grayling. The real irony is that the U.S. military has been training the Taiwanese military at Camp Graying for years to repel a Chinese invasion. Our governor was going to pay the CCP to operate a plant in the middle of the state. Genius!

    Local residents rose up. Yes, of course, because they objected to the possibility of Chinese spies roaming around their community. But also because they resented the way in which the project was unveiled. Elected officials signed nondisclosure agreements with economic development agencies and then said they were legally bound from sharing details with the residents footing the bill.

    The more questions citizens had, the more obstinate company, township, and state officials became. Green Charter Township is made up of normal people: farmers, small business owners, and the like. James Chapman, the chief project proponent and former township supervisor, quickly lost his patience in meetings and yelled at the rubes who had the temerity to attend and voice their opinions. They would yell right back. The massive project, shrouded in arrogant secrecy, bitterly divided the small community.

    It reached a boiling point when township officials who were supporting the project either resigned or were overwhelmingly recalled. A new board was elected, and they went about doing the due diligence that taxpayers expect elected officials to pursue for such an expensive and disruptive project.

    The CCP-linked company sued the new board, driving up massive legal bills for the tiny community. The company didn’t want to wait for environmental approvals, tearing down trees and homes. The community continued fighting, even employing President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Trump publicly opposed the project. Vance held a campaign rally across the street.

    When they took office in January, they changed former President Joe Biden’s scam electric vehicle mandates, and the whole racket collapsed. It was the beginning of the end for the Gotion project.

    Last week, the state of Michigan announced it was withdrawing the promise of $175 million in taxpayer cash, although $50 million had already been delivered. It’s unclear whether taxpayers will receive an accounting of where that money went.

    The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

  • Voting fraud alert. “North Carolina Republicans say texts show that local Democrats are paying for people’s votes.”

    The North Carolina Republican Party referred an alleged vote-buying scheme to the State Board of Elections for investigation on Friday, claiming that a voter had been offered $100 to vote for Democratic candidates in the Wilmington City Council election.

    ‘This is a troubling allegation and an egregious affront to our democracy and an attempt to buy votes in exchange for cash,’ NC GOP Chair Jason Simmons said in a press conference. ‘The North Carolina Republican Party stands committed and steadfast in its determination for free, fair and transparent elections.’

  • FAA Orders Flight Cuts at Texas Airports as Democrat-Led Shutdown Deepens. The FAA will cut flights by 10 percent at 40 of the nation’s top airports due to staffing shortages among air traffic controllers.”
  • “DOE And NRC Sign Addendum To Fast Track Commercial Reactor Licensing.”

    The Department of Energy (DOE) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recently signed Addendum No. 9 to their 2019 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), paving the way for faster follow-on licensing of advanced nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel technologies.

    This agreement, signed Oct 24th and effective immediately, comes as major concerns have been raised by reactor development companies and industry observers regarding the double work that may be required of developers when they bring their tested products over to the NRC. Demand for clean, reliable energy by data centers and major industrial companies has created a stronger need for change in the path to reactor design commercialization, with companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon signing long-term offtake agreements with reactor operators Constellation, NextEra, and Talen.

    The addition to the MOU comes from the directives out of Trump’s executive orders signed back in May of this year. From section 5.d of the executive order “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission”:

    “Establish an expedited pathway to approve reactor designs that the DOD or the DOE have tested and that have demonstrated the ability to function safely. NRC review of such designs shall focus solely on risks that may arise from new applications permitted by NRC licensure, rather than revisiting risks that have already been addressed in the DOE or DOD processes.”

    Surprisingly, the DOE and NRC took the executive order one step further and included a streamlined licensing process for nuclear fuel facilities as well. It becomes less surprising when we remember the current administration has highlighted multiple times the desire to reduce the reliance on foreign nuclear fuel supplies. Even with the Russian uranium import ban, the US is still importing over a fifth of the required enriched uranium from Russia through last year. The US government is looking to expand the domestic capacity of every step in the fuel chain as quickly as possible.

    Faster, please.

  • “Top 20 Theories on Why the EU Committed Cultural Suicide.” They’re not mutually exclusive. And the piece needs an entry for cultural relativism/Frankfurt School and a Gramscian “war of position” against civil society.
  • Everything is television.

    Digital media hasn’t become the antidote to television. Digital media, empowered by the serum of algorithmic feeds, has become super-television: more images, more videos, more isolation. Home-alone time has surged as our devices have become more bottomless feeds of video content. Rather than escape the solitude crisis that Putnam described in the 1990s, we now seem to be more on our own. (Not to mention: meaner and stupider, too.)

    It would be rash to blame our berserk political moment entirely on short-form video, but it would be careless to forget that some people really did try to warn us that this was coming. In Amusing Ourselves to Death1, Neil Postman wrote that “each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.” Television speaks to us in a particular dialect, Postman argued. When everything turns into television, every form of communication starts to adopt television’s values: immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity. In the glow of a local news program, or an outraged news feed, the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol. When everything is urgent, nothing is truly important. Politics becomes theater. Science becomes storytelling. News becomes performance. The result, Postman warned, is a society that forgets how to think in paragraphs, and learns instead to think in scenes.

    Snip.

    Short-form video is indistinguishable from what today’s youth consider the definition of American success. For five straight years, Gen Z has told pollsters that the thing they most want to be when they grow up is an “influencer.”

    When literally everything becomes television, what disappears is not something so broad as intelligence (although that seems to be going, too) but something harder to put into words, and even harder to prove the value of. It’s something like inwardness. The capacity for solitude, for sustained attention, for meaning that penetrates inward rather than swipes away at the tip of a finger: These virtues feel out of step with a world where every medium is the same medium and everything in life converges to the value system of the same thing, which is television.

    I’m not free from guilt myself. I only turn on my TV one day a week, but I watch waaaaaaay too much YouTube. (Previously.) (Hat tip: Greg Ellifritz via Dwight.)

  • How Gillette destroyed their brand with the “Toxic Masculinity” ad campaign.
  • GM to iPhone users: Drop dead. “General Motors is dropping Apple CarPlay and Android Auto support across all of its brands—Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC.”
  • Another Austin illegal deed transfer case.
  • “Microsoft just revealed that OpenAI lost more than $11.5B last quarter.” “If Microsoft owns 27 percent of OpenAI, it stands to reason under equity accounting that it bears 27 percent of OpenAI’s losses. Microsoft’s admission that it shaved $3.1 billion off its net income to account for its share of OpenAI losses therefore suggests OpenAI lost about $11.5 billion during the quarter.”
  • “Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL: THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR unites Volume 1 and Volume 2 into a single, unrated epic—presented exactly as he intended, complete with a new, never-before-seen anime sequence.”

    Coming to theaters in December. If I wasn’t in financial turtle mode, I’d probably go out and see it…

  • Project Farm compares outdoor solar security lights.
  • Michelin-starred Mexico City taqueria does a pop-up in Dallas. Disaster ensues.
  • The first rule of Bass Pro Shop Fight Club is you don’t talk about Bass Pro Shop Fight Club.
  • Bonus: Bass Pro Shop Swim Club:

  • J.J. Abrams Star Trek timeline officially dead.
  • The most important scene in The Avengers.
  • “Embarrassed Democrats Admit They Can’t Remember Why They Shut The Government Down.”
  • “SNAP Beneficiaries Wishing There Were Some Way They Could Trade Their Labor And Services For Money To Buy Food.”
  • “New York’s Elderly Jews Torn Between Man Who Would Kill Them For Being Jewish And Man Who Would Kill Them For Being Elderly.”
  • “Mamdani Moves Mayor’s Office Under Children’s Hospital.”
  • “State Department Issues Travel Advisory For New York City.”
  • “In Toughest Survival Challenge Yet, Bear Grylls Attempts To Survive Weekend In Chicago.”
  • “Nigerian President Promises To End Genocide If Trump Sends Upfront Fee Of $5,000 In Amazon Gift Cards.”
  • “Dodgers Purchase 2nd World Series Victory.”
  • A busy bee:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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





    HPD To NYPD: Come On Down

    Thursday, November 6th, 2025

    Just like the old gypsy woman said, New York City voted for the commie jihadist. This is great for national Republicans crafting attack ads for next year’s election, but bad for ordinary New York citizens who don’t want their city to turn into a festering hellhole.

    Festering hellhole is one of the polar defaults for post-war NYC. Back under liberal Republican mayor John Lindsay (yes, there used to be such things as “liberal Republicans”), NYC had earned the title as “the ungovernable city.” High crime, endemic corruption, shaky finances, failing infrastructure and poor sanitation made New York in the 1960s-70s so unpleasant that it became a movie cliche all its own (see The Out of Towners or The Warriors).

    But a funny thing happened on the road to perdition: A couple of strong mayors (first Ed Koch, then Rudy Giuliani) managed to pull the city back from the brink by concentrating on lowering the city’s spiraling crime rates. Giuliani’s “broken windows” policing in particular made New York livable again, by prosecuting petty criminals before they could impact the quality of life by graduating to bigger crimes, pretty much the opposite of the soft-on-crime “put repeat offenders back on the streets” policies pursued by Soros-backed DAs like Alvin Bragg.

    One of the few reasons New York City has held together as well as it has through previous leftwing incompetent mayors like David Dinkins and Bill de Blasio is the presence of some 33,000 New York police officers. The NYPD had its own sleaze and corruption problems in The Bad Old Times, as exemplified in movies like Serpico or Prince of the City that only started getting cleaned up after the Knapp Commission. Under Giuliani, the NYPD regained its reputation as one of the better run police departments in the country.

    Now that police-hostile Mamdani has been elected, just what are honest NYPD cops supposed to do? The Houston Police Department has a suggestion: Come on down!

    Soon after Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election on Tuesday night, the Houston Police Officers’ Union began encouraging New York City police officers to move to the Lone Star State.

    Following the projection of Mamdani’s win, the union began highlighting work for the Houston Police Department through a series of social media posts.

    “NYPD, are you disgusted with the election of Zohran Mamdani? Join us! The Houston Police Department is hiring police officers!” one post read. “Texas’ largest police union invites you to consider joining the Houston Police Department!”

    Zohran Mamdani, who calls himself a democrat socialist, has previously attacked the NYPD as “racist,” “wicked,” and “corrupt.” He has also called for defunding the NYPD.

    Fox News called the race for Mamdani just minutes after the polls closed Tuesday evening.

    Job perks highlighted by the Houston union include competitive pay, a police chief who is a retired Texas Ranger rather than “a politician,” affordable housing, and a state government that supports law enforcement.

    I sincerely doubt Houston is the only city trying to poach NYPD officers in the wake of Mamdani’s election.

    The Jewish head of the FDNY commission resigned after the election results. The Police Benevolent Association, the union that represents most NYPD cops, has had disputes with pretty much every NYC mayor back into the dim mists of time, but before Mamdani, they’ve never had a mayor who was actively hostile to the NYPD and on the side of criminals. New York’s Taylor Act prevents police from striking, but what if they simply…left? Or, in an act of “Irish Democracy,” simply refuse Mamdani orders they don’t like?

    It’s possible that NYC under Mamdani will descend into ungovernable chaos that will put Lindsay’s feckless reign in the shade…

    Bill Maher: Democrats Are Spirit Halloween

    Sunday, November 2nd, 2025

    Bill Maher noted how Democrats are in danger of going the way of other “ghost brands” like Sears and Playboy.

  • “A ghost brand, that’s a company or a store that like Sears still exists, but only as a pathetic shell of its former self.”
  • “I fear the Democratic party is at risk of becoming a ghost brand too. Like Sears, it used to be mighty and ascendant and popular. Sears once accounted for 1% of the entire American economy and 41% of the appliance market and built the country’s tallest tower. Democrats once controlled Congress and the Supreme Court, or were at least competitive.”
  • “The Democrats have their lowest rating in 35 years. 63% unfavorable. What happened? I don’t know.” This is a lie. Maher knows that social justice is killing the Democrat Party, he just doesn’t want to say it.
  • “What happened to Sears? It used to be synonymous with the American Dream because it kept faith with what the customer wanted.” This is a reductio ad absurdum, as the American Dreams mean a whole lot more than the ability to buy decent material goods.
  • “Did we love Sears? No. But that was besides the point. You just went. It was like an Avatar movie that sold tools. It used to be where your family bought everything from school clothes to appliances to your family Christmas portrait.”
  • “Sears used to have 3,500 stores and now it has five.”
  • “Same thing happened to Playboy, except in silk pajamas and a captain’s hat.”
  • “For for 66 years, Playboy magazine was also a fact of American life. Sears sold your father a mattress and Playboy was what he hid under it.”
  • “Plus real journalism. You could read an interview with Carter while enjoying photos of bush.”
  • “But but then it started messing around with the formula. Like the Democratic Party, Playboy decided they didn’t need straight men anymore. They put transgender women and gay men on the cover and predictably sales, like their subscribers penises, collapsed.”
  • “The staff began using terms like intersectionality, sex positivity, and privileging. And in response, Playboy readers use terms like, ‘No thanks, get the fuck out of here, and buy-bye.'”
  • Cracker Barrel analogy snipped.
  • “It reminded me of when Chuck Schumer said in 2016 that for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we’re going to pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philly, Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Yeah, how’d that work out?”
  • “But at least Cracker Barrel had the sense to immediately say, ‘Oh sorry.’ and put the sling blades back on the wall. Democrats don’t seem to be doing that. They still seem to want to be that upscale store that impresses celebrities.”
  • Description of how Barney’s went from a solid discount clothing store to a wannabe upscale failure snipped.
  • “And I’m not making this up just because it’s Halloween, but after Barney’s closed for good in 2020, it became, yes, a Spirit Halloween.”
  • “I’m just saying Democrats need to get their shit together, because America needs two political parties, not one party and one Halloween store.”
  • What’s doing in the Democrats is what did in Playboy: Intersectionality, transgenderism, supporting illegal aliens over American citizens, and the entire post-modern social justice woke-mind-virus zoo. They went from seeing blue collar workers as the backbone of the party to seeing them as icky carriers of hetronormative toxic masculinity, patriarchy and white privilege. Donald Trump, alone of all the 2016 Republican presidential candidates, saw those same voters as a key ingredient into making Republicans into America’s natural majority party.

    But unlike Sears or Playboy, there’s a limit to how much the free market can correct a self-destructive ideology. The woke are absolutely sure of their unshakable virtue, and seizing and maintaining control of the Democrat Party is far more important to them than pleasing mere voters. Social Justice Democrats believe they’re on “the right side of history,” and like Tareyton smokers, they’d rather fight than switch. Or, as poor Charlie Kirk found out, they’d rather kill the “Nazis” that oppose their policies than consider the possibility that they’re wrong.

    Texas Democrats went through a similar struggle in the 1960s through 1990s. Liberals knew that if they were ever to take control of the party, they would have to drive conservatives out of the Party, so they convinced conservatives they had to leave the Democrats and vote in Republican primaries, as documented in Wayne Thorburn’s Red State. This they accomplished, but somehow seemed to think Texans would just continue voting Democrats in year after year.

    And that’s why Democrats haven’t elected anyone statewide in Texas in over 30 years.

    Come Tuesday, New York City Democrats will quite likely elect a Jew-hating communist rather than consider the possibility that their ideas are not just wrong, but evil. And thus the party will take yet another lurch toward electoral ghost brand irrelevance.

    And they’re a whole lot less popular and innovative than Spirit Halloween…