People have asked me to do some election roundup/endorsements, since early voting starts on Tuesday. I’m going to try, but, to quote Calvin & Hobbes, the days are just packed.
So let’s start with a race that’s most interesting because there are two good choices in it: The Texas Attorney General race, where conservatives have a tough choice between State Senator Mayes Middleton and U.S. Congressman Chip Roy. The most recent polls show Roy leading by about ten points, but both at well under 50%. I don’t consider Joan Huffman or Aaron Reitz to be competitive in the race.
Both Middleton and Roy have conservative voting records in their respective legislatures, and both have firmly conservative positions on a wide range of issues. Indeed, the choice is so tough that Young Conservatives of Texas issued an endorsement of both.
Both have extensive lineups of conservative endorsements. For Middleton that includes True Texas Project, Texas Eagle Forum, and Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian. Middleton’s direct mail flyers also include a great Trump quote (“voting record on conservative issues is second to none”), but are also careful to include the date issued (December 28, 2021, so not this race). Chip Roy’s endorsements starts off with a trio of heavy hitters (Senators Ted Cruz (who Roy was chief of staff for), Mike Lee and Rand Paul), several fellow U.S. congressman, Gun Owners of America and also Texas Eagle Forum (presumably another dual endorsement). And just today Roy sent out an email celebrating his endorsement by Turning Point USA. So I think Roy is winning the endorsement race right now.
On issues, both Middleton and Roy have firmly conservative beliefs on a wide range of issues. (Including Second Amendment rights. While Roy picked up the GOA endorsement, Middleton’s been very active walking point on gun rights bills in the Texas legislature.) But here, I have to give Middleton the edge, as Roy’s answers tend to be a bit vaguer. Roy talks about “defeating the woke agenda,” but Middleton drills further down, calling out not only the left’s “radical gender agenda” but also calling out his opposition to Soros-backed DAs and judges in his direct mail flyers, which wins points in my book
I think I was already leaning slightly toward Middleton over Roy, but what seals the deal for me is Roy condemning President Trump’s actions on January 6 as impeachable. It was obvious to me that, however inadvisable the January 6th rally may have been, buying even slightly into the Democratic Media Complex BS that this half-assed riot was an “insurrection” displays a disturbing susceptibility to inside-the-beltway thinking.
If Roy wins, I think he’ll be fine as Attorney General. But I see Middleton as the candidate most likely to carry on Ken Paxton’s tenacious fight against the Democrat’s radical left-wing agenda, which is why I recommend voting for him in the Republican primary.
Happy Friday the 13th, everyone! Good job numbers drop, a court win for Trump on deportations, more California fraud, more Chinese researchers stealing secrets, and the cure for global warming is global warming.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Naturally, a week after I blog about the “no hire, no fire” economy, it comes out that the economy added 130,000 in January, the most since December 2024. “However, the report shows the U.S. only added 181,000 jobs in 2025.” And the numbers for previous months keep getting revised downwards.
As I’ve said before, I’ll believe we’re out of the Biden Recession when I have a job again…
Petitions for Habeas Corpus to release illegal aliens from detention, or at least grant them bond hearings, have overwhelmed the federal courts, with most district court judges who have ruled on the subject siding with the detained aliens. It was the practice of prior administration from both parties to grant bond hearings. But is it a legal requirement?
A ruling by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers critical border state Texas, has rejected the argument that a bond hearing and release is required by law. To the contrary, it held that the applicable legislation passed by congress does not require such bond hearings or release. That prior administrations did not exercise their full powers of detention under the law did not mean the present Trump administration could not do so, the court ruled.
Another win for secure borders and the rule of law in the face of massive leftwing judicial resistance.
The House of Representatives on Wednesday night passed the new Republican-led Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which requires individuals to present proof of citizenship to register to vote and requires Americans to show ID when voting.
The House passed the legislation, which combined two bills, in a 218-213 vote. The bill saw little support from House Democrats, with Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar being the sole Democrat to join Republicans in passing the legislation.
“It’s just common sense,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters of the legislation. “Americans need an ID to drive, to open a bank account, to buy cold medicine, to file government assistance. So why would voting be any different than that?”
Senate Democrats, of course, with the exception of John Fetterman, will do anything to prevent it from being passed. If they can’t cheat, they can’t win…
Stephen Green: California raked off $370M in taxpayer money to bankroll leftwing activism.
1. Californians voted to fund youth drug prevention through the Cannabis Tax. Instead, $370M in revenue is bankrolling leftwing activism.
2. The money flows through a single unelected nonprofit – The Center at Sierra Health Foundation’s Elevate Youth program.
3. The Center has gotten rich off this arrangement – growing from $11.8M in 2018 to $197M in 2024. The CEO makes over $600K.
4. The Center runs Prop 64 dollars through to a web of NGOs, including the Jakara Movement, Young Invincibles, and Asian Refugees United – for activism, organizing, and voter registration.
5. This is not drug prevention – it’s a taxpayer funded pipeline from the governor’s office to leftwing political organizing.
Snip.
“The state does not pick who gets the grants,” CAL DOGE said. “The intermediary does, bypassing the rigorous procurement processes mandated for direct government contracts under the Department of General Services and State Controller oversight.”
That’s a multimillion-dollar slush fund, in other words, in which tax dollars pass through to the well-connected for the purpose of maintaining Democrat control of the state. And, one presumes, lining pockets along the way —allegedly including Newsom’s:
According to the California Fair Political Practices Commission’s Behested Payment Transparency Report (pg.19-20), in 2020 alone, Sierra Health Foundation was the third-largest payor of behested payments statewide at $14,747,724 and the single largest payee of behested payments statewide at $30,869,901 — payments Newsom solicited from private companies.
“Newsom himself was the top behesting official in the state that year at $226.8 million total,” the report continued, “and Sierra Health Foundation ranked among his top three financial partners in the system.
Los Angeles spent about $418 million on homelessness programs in 2025, yet only a small share went toward helping people leave the streets for good, according to the New York Post. A recent City Hall report suggests most of the money supports short-term services that manage homelessness rather than resolve it.
The review, released as the city prepares major budget cuts, shows that hundreds of millions were directed to hygiene facilities, outreach teams, temporary housing, and vehicle-living programs with limited long-term success. These efforts often keep people in transitional situations instead of moving them into permanent homes.
The Post noted that councilwoman Monica Rodriguez condemned the system, saying, “We’re hemorrhaging money on a homelessness system that was never designed to succeed — and no one is being held accountable for the failure.”
She also argued that ineffective programs are protected instead of evaluated: “If we really wanted to do something about this crisis, we would be advancing real oversight, demanding results, and shutting down programs that don’t work — not protecting a system that keeps spending more while delivering less.”
It’s not designed to end homelessness, its designed to line the pockets of the Homeless Industrial Complex and leftwing activists.
Indeed, California’s entire NGO funding structure is designed to avoid scrutiny.
The money moves smoothly, the explanations pile up, and the ability to see end-to-end quietly disappears. The deeper the look went, the more consistent the pattern became. California doesn’t struggle to explain where the money goes. It has arranged things so the explanation never quite arrives.
Snip.
When the information is pulled in its entirety and organized outside the state’s presentation layer, the scope becomes impossible to miss. More than 1,100 vendors associated with humanitarian-related contracts. Roughly $8.8 billion flowing through them. Not scattered grants. Not pilot programs. An economy of vendors, operating continuously, funded at scale. The dashboard never highlights that universe. It doesn’t need to. It only needs to make seeing it difficult enough that most people never try.
At the same time, at the federal level, the Small Business Administration acknowledged what everyone working in procurement already understands. Billions of dollars under review. Tens of thousands of entities flagged for potential fraud exposure. Large systems, large sums, limited verification, delayed audits. The numbers don’t have to match perfectly to rhyme. They already do. When separate data streams begin pointing toward the same structural vulnerabilities, the story stops being about isolated actors and starts being about architecture.
Requests for clarity meet resistance long before they reach conclusions. Public records requests stall. Narrow questions expand into bureaucratic negotiations. Specific funding totals become “unavailable.” Amy Reihart’s experience in San Diego fits neatly into this rhythm. The data is said to be public, but pulling it cleanly proves elusive. The formal channels exist, but they lead nowhere quickly. What’s left is a familiar posture from the state: the information is technically available, practically unreachable, and always just one more step away.
The same rhythm shows up in how California moves money on the ground. Childcare subsidies offer a clean example. In many states, the government pays providers directly. The path is short. Attendance aligns with eligibility. Eligibility aligns with reimbursement rates. Payments can be checked against records without heroic effort. In California, that line bends. Funds are routed through intermediary NGOs charged with administering the program. The state pays the intermediary. The intermediary interfaces with providers. Documentation flows inward. Payments flow outward.
Following that path takes work. First, identify which NGO controls which geography. Then locate its audit filings, assuming they are current and complete. Then reconcile those filings with procurement records that are already difficult to interrogate. Only after that does the provider level come into view. Each step adds distance. Each handoff adds discretion. Sources describe monthly subsidy flows exceeding $1,400 per child with minimal verification. Whether every dollar is misused is unknowable from the outside. What is visible is how easily the structure absorbs misuse without producing alarms.
That same opacity shows up beyond childcare. Walk through downtown Los Angeles and the conversations repeat. Not policy debates. Observations. Barbers, bartenders, people who work late and walk home early. The homeless system comes up unprompted. Everyone knows how much money moves through it. Everyone knows how little seems to change. Deliveries arrive at storefronts with no customers. Benefits circulate with minimal identification. Stories circulate about organized applications and quiet laundering through approved channels. None of this appears on a dashboard. It doesn’t need to. It lives in the gap between official narratives and daily experience.
The system doesn’t rely on secrecy. It relies on diffusion. Money enters labeled as humanitarian assistance, housing support, community partnership. It passes through nonprofit layers that soften scrutiny and multiply explanations. By the time it reaches the ground, responsibility is spread thin enough that no single ledger tells the whole story. Each participant can point upward or downward and remain technically correct. Oversight exists everywhere in theory and nowhere in practice.
Organizations operating at the intersection of activism and public funding sit comfortably inside this environment. The Solidarity Research Center in Los Angeles, connected to broader political networks, is one example drawing attention. Not because of slogans or mission statements, but because proximity to power and insulation from scrutiny tend to travel together. When funding, politics, and moral language overlap, questions are framed as attacks and audits become optional. The structure does the work long before anyone has to defend it.
The contrast between damage and response is hard to ignore. Drive through the Palisades fire zone and the destruction remains visible. Burned properties. Long stretches untouched. The rebuild lags. The NGO signage does not. Clean placards promise recovery, resilience, and renewal, often paired with donation links. The messaging arrives faster than the materials. The branding arrives faster than the permits. Money is already being organized, even as the outcomes remain distant. It’s a familiar sight in California: urgency in fundraising, patience in results.
None of this happens by accident. The systems are too consistent. The barriers appear in the same places. Presentation layers substitute for access. Intermediaries substitute for accountability. Requests for detail meet friction rather than answers. The result is a machine that keeps moving regardless of whether anyone outside it can explain how. For the people inside, it works. For the public, it produces impressions instead of records.
The report’s overview notes the beaming confidence of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on the morning after the election. Appearing on the Today Show, Raffensperger said a record 4.7 million Georgia voters cast a ballot in the election. More importantly, the secretary of state said only 2 percent of the ballots remained to be counted. Trump, at that time, led Biden by nearly 104,000 votes, seemingly more than enough for a Georgia win. Raffensperger, at the time, said about 94,000 ballots had yet to be counted.
“We can see where the candidates are right now in both presidential, congressional, senatorial. When you look at how many votes are out there, even if one of the candidates got 100 percent it probably wouldn’t be enough to move it on way or another,” the elections official told the Today Show crew. He should know, the report notes. The secretary could see the numbers in real time through the state elections database.
Raffensperger added that his office would wait until everything was done.
When the dust settled, the confident secretary turned out to be very wrong. The final vote count — at least then — was an incredible 5.023 million. Between the time Fulton County’s polls closed on Election Day and the final ballot was tallied, the number of absentee ballots soared from 74,000 to more than 148,000, according to the report.
Trump went from the verge of winning a key battleground state to losing it. Just like that.
“At the time of this writing, no known explanation has been provided to justify” the surge in ballots, the report states.
Snip.
The number of absentee ballots counted doesn’t match the number of credited voters, the report notes. It draws from Fulton County and state records that show 148,318 ballots were counted in the 2020 election, although only 125,784 voters were recorded as casting an absentee ballot. That’s a difference of 22,534 votes between the absentee ballots tallied and the number of individuals given credit for voting.
“Remember: the margin between President Trump and Joe Biden was 11,779 votes…and that was the THIRD certified number and didn’t match either of the first two counts….the counties could not get their numbers to match from the first count to the second to the third…..
Ukraine also hit a GRAU arsenal in Volgograd with multiple missiles. GRAU is the umbrella organization for Russian logistics.
While Russia has continued to eek out ever smaller territorial gains at high cost, Ukraine just liberated 100 square kilometers of territory in Huliaipole, Zaporizhzhia oblast. “Ukrainian forces have liberated the towns of Dobropillia, Pryluky, Olenokostiantynivka and part of Varvarivka in an assault south on the Zaporizhzhia Frontline.”
Scientists at the University of California, Irvine have discovered that climate change is causing nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas and ozone-depleting substance, to break down in the atmosphere more quickly than previously thought, introducing significant uncertainty into climate projections for the rest of the 21st century.
A recent watchdog report revealed that several top-ranked American universities have brought in Chinese academics who have links to Chinese military-linked technology firms like tech behemoth Huawei and other Chinese firms linked to the CCP’s state security endeavors.
A conservative non-profit watchdog group, the American Accountability Foundation, reported that it found nearly two dozen Chinese academics working at elite U.S. schools and labs “who, because of the dual-use threat of their research, close ties to the military research sector in China, and/or clear ties to the Chinese Communist Party” and as such “should be expelled from the United States or never be re-admitted.”
The new AAF report pointed out that multiple Chinese students working at American universities had previously collaborated on projects with researchers at Huawei, including working with researchers at the Internal Cybersecurity Lab at Huawei.
Just the News also found that at least one of the Chinese academics had also worked at iFlytek — a similarly blacklisted Chinese company which often collaborates with Huawei. The U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence stated in 2021 that “national champion” firms such as Huawei and iFlytek help “lead development of AI technologies at home” and “advance state-directed priorities that feed military and security programs.”
Snip.
The AAF report argued that Guangyao Chen “poses a high national-security and dual-use risk due to his expertise in adversarial machine learning” and that “this risk is amplified by his training at Peking University, PRC government funding, and collaborations with PRC universities and Huawei, placing his work squarely within China’s military-civil fusion ecosystem.”
Chen currently appears to be affiliated with Cornell. The ResearchGate page for Chen says that his “top co-authors” include Lin Du, a researcher at Huawei. Chen appears to have conducted multiple research projects with the Huawei researcher. The Huawei scientist’s ResearchGate profile lists Du’s skills and expertise as being “computer vision,” “object recognition,” and “machine learning.”
Snip.
Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s CFO and the daughter of the company’s founder, was arrested by Canadian authorities in December 2018 at the request of the U.S., indicted in the Eastern District of New York in January 2019, and charged with bank fraud and wire fraud as well as conspiracy to commit both, but was allowed to walk free by the Biden Administration in 2021 in a deferred prosecution agreement wherein she admitted violating U.S. law.
Snip.
Fengqui You, a Cornell professor, leads the Fengqui You Research Group at Cornell, which is “pushing the boundaries of systems engineering, artificial intelligence, and data science.”
Chen is listed as a member and Fengqui You is listed as the principal investigator for the lab. You attended Tsinghua University, which the House Select Committee on the CCP has warned about. You did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Snip.
The report by AAF said that Cen Zhang’s “prior work with Chinese entities and his influential role at Georgia Tech is highly concerning given the nature of computer science’s impact on U.S. national security.”
Zhang co-authored a 2021 paper on “Practical Binary Fuzzing Framework for Programs of IoT and Mobile Devices” — related to security vulnerabilities for mobile phones and other smart devices — with co-authors Xiaoxing Luo and Miaohua Li from the Internal Cyber Security Lab at Huawei Technologies.
Zhang has also conducted research with Hongxu Chen, who now lists himself as a lead engineer at Huawei, and who also went to Nanyang Technological University.
Zhang’s personal curriculum vitae also says he was previously an algorithm and engine development engineer for iFlytek. Zhang says on his GitHub page that he won the “Best New Employee Award of Year” at iFlytek in 2017.
The firm has long received state support and recognition from China’s government. The company was named a national “AI champion” by the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology in 2018.
The Commerce Department said in October 2019 that iFlytek was among more than two dozen Chinese entities added to a U.S. blacklist, saying they were “implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups.” Liu Qingfeng, iFlytek’s founder and CEO, is also a deputy to the National People’s Congress, the CCP’s rubber-stamp national legislature.
There are problems with how this piece is organized, but I wanted to capture the names (some of which are are already familiar) to keep track of them. At this point, any organization that hires a Chinese national for scientific research should assume they’re stealing data.
The legislation raises the current $10 billion asset threshold that caps debit card fees for banks and index annually to inflation.
Sen. Cruz said, “The Durbin Amendment was not designed for the current economic and regulatory reality and subjects community banks to fee limits that the original language intended for much larger institutions. My legislation modernizes the interchange fee cap to reflect inflation, helping small banks support local economies while lowering banking costs for Americans.”
Sen. Britt said, “As we’ve seen in so many instances, countless regulations in the Dodd-Frank Act were not only onerous but set fixed thresholds that have become outdated over time, and the Durbin Amendment is no exception. The largest burden is on our smallest financial institutions who provide vital sources of credit to Main Streets that drive our local economies. This commonsense legislation would simply index, to both inflation and COLA, the outdated threshold in this provision of Dodd-Frank, ultimately providing relief for our community banks who were never intended to be burdened by this regulation.”
Companion legislation was introduced in the House by Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY-6).
Rep. Barr said, “The Durbin Amendment was sold as a win for consumers in the Dodd-Frank Act by Democrats. Instead, it’s hurt Kentucky’s community banks and credit unions that do so much for underserved communities by limiting their ability to grow and compete with larger financial institutions. I’m working with Senator Cruz to fix this — because Washington shouldn’t be picking winners and losers at the expense of our local banks and the families they serve.”
This bill is supported by Americans for Tax Reform, Independent Bankers Association of Texas, and the Texas Bankers Association.
A new political organization has launched with the stated goal of countering one of Austin’s most powerful and long-standing special interest groups.
Republicans Against Texans for Lawsuit Reform, a 501(c)(4) organization, announced its formation this week. It is positioning itself directly against Texans for Lawsuit Reform (TLR), the influential tort reform group that has played a major role in Texas politics for decades.
On its website, Republicans Against Texans for Lawsuit Reform (RATLR) accuses TLR of abandoning its original mission and becoming what it describes as a major player in the “Austin swamp.” The group argues that TLR, which began in the mid-1990s advocating civil tort reform, now prioritizes the interests of “big business, big pharma, and big insurance” over conservative policy outcomes and Texas citizens.
RATLR also points to millions of dollars in political donations—including contributions to Democrats and Republican incumbents it labels as “RINOs”—as evidence that TLR wields outsized influence at the Texas Capitol.
“Protecting big business, big pharma, and big insurance should never override protecting you, Texas’ citizens,” the group states.
RATLR says it plans to focus on grassroots education and outreach, including speaking engagements with conservative groups across the state. The executive director is James Wesolek, the former communications director for the Republican Party of Texas.
So here’s a longish essay by Hugh Hendry on gold, Bitcoin and fiat money. I don’t necessarily agree with everything, but he has a provocative argument that creation of fiat money was justified to keep the entire economic system from breaking down.
he defining monetary lesson of the twentieth century was not ideological. it was traumatic. it emerged not from debates about socialism versus capitalism, or keynes versus hayek, but from the lived experience of what happens when economic systems impose rigidity on societies already under extreme stress.
after the first world war, germany was not a failed society. it was bruised, diminished, politically unstable, and deeply resentful, but it remained functional. industry existed. labour existed. institutions existed. the system was strained, not yet broken. the collapse came later, and it was not inevitable.
versailles changed that.
the treaty was not merely punitive. it was vindictive and economically illiterate. reparations were demanded in hard terms, payable in gold, at precisely the moment germany’s productive capacity was being constrained. forgiveness was absent. flexibility was absent. economic reality was ignored.
when germany struggled to meet those obligations, the response was not renegotiation but enforcement. in 1923, french and belgian forces occupied the ruhr valley, seizing control of germany’s industrial heartland, its coal, its steel, its metal production, while still demanding gold payments to the allied victors. output was taken. gold was still required. rigidity was imposed from both ends.
this was the breaking point.
what followed was not ideological radicalisation in the abstract, but economic paralysis in practice. unemployment surged. production collapsed. a growing share of the adult population became economically useless. not inefficient. not underpaid. useless. idle. watching. waiting. that condition does not produce reflection or moderation. it produces rage. and hyper-inflation.
hard money did not cause the collapse of weimar germany. but it failed catastrophically to absorb the trauma. and when institutions fracture under mass unemployment, money fractures with them. hyperinflation wasn’t softness. it was panic. it was the monetary expression of legitimacy evaporating in real time.
that sequence mattered. and it was remembered.
a decade later, the world faced another shock that threatened to replay the same pattern at a far larger scale. the crash of 1929 produced mass unemployment, collapsing demand, and the genuine possibility that the american system would follow germany down the same path. the ingredients were familiar: idle men, shuttered factories, political stress, and a rigid monetary framework that transmitted pressure rather than absorbing it.
this time, the response changed.
gold was abandoned as the governing constraint, not because it was immoral or discredited, but because it was brittle. too rigid to cope with systemic trauma. under gold, pressure concentrates until something snaps. under fiat, pressure disperses. elasticity replaced purity. monetary doctrine abandoned to keep the system intact.
the response was ugly. it was unfair. it produced deserved anger. but it worked.
the united states survived intact. unemployment was brutal, but the political centre held. extremism remained marginal. fiat didn’t heal the trauma, but it prevented it from metastasising. that became the lesson: in moments of economic shock, hardness accelerates entropy, while monetary elasticity buys time. and time, in stressed societies, is the difference between repair and collapse.
this was not an argument against scarcity. it was an argument against rigidity in the wrong place, at the wrong time. fiat emerged not as an ideological triumph, but as an adaptive response to the catastrophic failure of hard constraints under conditions of mass unemployment.
that distinction matters, because bitcoin did not arrive to overturn this lesson. it arrived long after, in its aftermath.
fiat’s ugly success.
over the subsequent century, that logic has been tested repeatedly, and each time it has been reaffirmed under pressure.
the global financial crisis of 2008 was not a scare or a stress test. it was a system-wide cardiac arrest. the banking system was insolvent in any meaningful sense. the only open question was whether circulation could be restarted before institutional damage became permanent. the response was not elegant. rules were bent. balance sheets were expanded. losses were socialised. hard constraints were suspended to keep the system alive. it was ugly, unfair, and morally nauseating to me and many others. it also worked.
the same pattern repeated during the pandemic. supply chains froze. borders closed. hospitals filled. the phrase “human extinction” escaped the laboratory and entered the bloodstream of culture. belief alone was enough to threaten collapse. once again, fiat leaned in. too much some say. money expanded. credit expanded. time was frozen. people were paid to stay home while the system was held upright. once again, rigidity was rejected in favour of elasticity. once again, the worst tail events were avoided.
this is what fiat does well.
it absorbs shocks that hard systems transmit. it disperses pressure instead of concentrating it. it allows societies to survive periods of mass dislocation without forcing immediate liquidation of people, institutions, or legitimacy. in a world repeatedly exposed to financial crises, pandemics, and geopolitical shocks, this has proven to be a feature, not a bug.
elasticity, however, is not free.
the cost shows up as inflation. not as a temporary inconvenience, but as a ratchet. prices spike, settle, and then remain elevated. grocery bills do not return to their old levels. this is the mechanical consequence of pushing risk forward in time. fiat smooths the present by borrowing from the future.
this matters most for those without assets. for the disenfranchised, inflation is not a macroeconomic abstraction or a debate about models. it is a daily budgetary pressure. rent before wages. food before leisure. energy before dignity. when prices ratchet higher, there is no portfolio adjustment, no rebalancing, no clever hedge. there is only less room to breathe.
modern financial systems are exceptionally effective at protecting those who already participate in them. the franchise holders. equities rise with nominal growth. property absorbs inflation and then some. credit, leverage, index-linked instruments, real assets, productive ownership. the menu is broad, liquid, and proven. elasticity doesn’t destroy capital for insiders. it often enriches them. asset prices inflate faster than wages precisely because the system is designed to keep capital mobile and solvent.
the burden falls elsewhere.
what inflation punishes is not thrift in some moral sense, but exclusion. money left idle because it must be. capital that cannot move because it does not exist. patience without agency. this is not a judgment about behaviour. it is a structural outcome. fiat rewards participation and mobility, not fairness. and over long periods of sustained monetary elasticity, that distinction compounds into something corrosive. something unfair.
Revelations continue to surface from the giant Epstein files data dump, so let’s do a roundup of some of the more interesting bits.
By far the most frustrating revelation for TDS-obsessed Democrats is learning that Donald Trump’s main tie to Epstein was being one of the first people to report him to the police. “Unsealed court docs reviewed by the Miami Herald show DONALD TRUMP called Palm Beach police about Jeffrey Epstein in 2006.”
Mar-A-Lago is a mixture of everyone. DONALD TRUMP told [blacked out] that he threw EPSTEIN out of his club. TRUMP called the PBPD to tell him “thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this”. TRUMP told him people in New York knew EPSTEIN was disgusting. TRUMP said [GHISLAINE] MAXWELL was EPSTEIN’s operative, “she is evil and to focus on her”. TRUMP told [blacked out] that he was around EPSTEIN once when teenagers were present and TRUMP “got the hell out of there”. TRUMP was one of the very first people to call when people found out that they were investigating EPSTEIN.
Snip.
Trump’s comment came in direct response to reporters asking if he had any knowledge that Epstein had molested girls. He was denying awareness of Epstein’s crimes or the allegations of molestation/sex trafficking that surfaced prominently around Epstein’s 2019 arrest.
Nowhere in this FBI interview does it indicate he had specific knowledge of the criminal molestation, sexual abuse, or trafficking details that later emerged in the full Epstein investigation or his 2008 plea deal. It’s Trump saying he had heard from others about “disgusting” behavior and how he was so creeped out that he had to remove Epstein from his club.
Countless people in Palm Beach social circles noticed Epstein had a pattern of questionable behavior with young women, without having direct evidence or knowledge of the felony-level crimes. Good try, media.
“Nothing within the FBI report even alludes to Trump knowing about Epstein and Maxwell’s crimes. Sometimes your gut tells you something is off about people.”
You know Democrats and their MSM familiars must be gnashing their teeth as their Great White Whale swims away again…
But you know who did pal around with Epstein? Noam Chomsky.
Valeria Chomsky, the wife of Noam Chomsky, issued a statement about their longtime friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. Noam Chomsky, 97, suffered a massive stroke in 2023 and is unable to speak.
Noam and I have felt a profound weight regarding the unresolved questions surrounding our past interactions with Epstein. We do not wish to leave this chapter shrouded in ambiguity.
Throughout his life, Noam has insisted that intellectuals have a responsibility to speak the truth and expose lies — especially when those truths are uncomfortable to themselves.
As is widely known, one of Noam’s characteristics is to believe in the good faith of people. Noam’s overly trusted nature, in this specific case, led to severe poor judgment on both our parts.
Ah. Another brilliant and successful expert in human behavior who hung around Epstein at length and just never noticed anything unusual or suspicious about him. It’s amazing how often those keen, long-honed skills at reading people just disappeared once Epstein entered a room. Valeria Chomsky continues:
Noam and I were introduced to Epstein at the same time, during one of Noam’s professional events in 2015, when Epstein’s 2008 conviction in the State of Florida was known by very few people, while most of the public – including Noam and I – was unaware of it. That only changed after the November 2018 report by Miami Herald.
A reminder: That conviction was for “felony solicitation of prostitution and, pursuant to the NPA, to a criminal information charging him with procurement of minors to engage in prostitution.” It was public record and covered in the Palm Beach newspapers.
We had lunch, at Epstein’s ranch, once, in connection with a professional event; we attended dinners at his townhouse in Manhattan and stayed a few times in an apartment he offered when we visited New York City. We also visited Epstein’s Paris apartment one afternoon for the occasion of a work trip. In all cases, these visits were related to Noam’s professional commitments. We never went to his island or knew about anything that happened there.
We attended social meetings, lunches, and dinners where Epstein was present and academic matters were discussed. We never witnessed any inappropriate, criminal, or reproachable behavior from Epstein or others. At no time did we see children or underage individuals present.
Here’s the biggest and most prominent problem with Valeria Chomsky’s “we just had no idea” excuse. Several months after the Miami Herald published the series, on February 23, 2019, Epstein emailed Chomsky looking for advice on how to handle his bad press.
In a response purportedly from Chomsky, the famed linguistics professor advised Epstein “the best way to proceed is to ignore it” and “not to react unless directly questioned.”
Chomsky drew parallels to his own experience with “hysterical accusations of all sorts,” writing, “I pay no attention, unless I’m approached for a comment on a specific matter.”
“What the vultures dearly want is a public response, which then provides a public opening for an onslaught of venomous attacks, many from just publicity seekers or cranks of all sorts,” the email said. “That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder.”
Does that sound like a man who’s deeply concerned about what Epstein may have done?
But Valeria Chomsky insists that message is being taken out of context.
Noam’s email to Epstein, in which Epstein sought advice about the press, should be read in context. Epstein had claimed to Noam that he [Epstein] was being unfairly persecuted, and Noam spoke from his own experience in political controversies with the media. Epstein created a manipulative narrative about his case, which Noam, in good faith, believed in. It is now clear that it was all orchestrated, having as, at least, one of Epstein’s intentions to try to have someone like Noam repairing Epstein’s reputation by association.
Noam’s criticism was never directed at the women’s movement; on the contrary, he has always supported gender equity and women’s rights.
Oh, shut up. You don’t get to send a message to Epstein reassuring him that “hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder” and then turn around and tout yourself as a feminist.
But there’s more. Back in 2023, Noam Chomsky confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that he received a March 2018 transfer of roughly $270,000 from an Epstein-linked account. That too was just an innocent favor, Valeria Chomsky insists.
Regarding the reported transfer of approximately $270,000, I must clarify that these were entirely Noam’s own funds. At the time, Noam had identified inconsistencies in his retirement resources that threatened his economic independence and caused him great distress. Epstein offered technical assistance to resolve this specific situation. On this matter, Epstein acted accordingly, recovering the funds for Noam, in a display of help and very likely as part of a machination to gain greater access to Noam. Epstein acted solely as a financial advisor for this specific matter. To the best of my knowledge, Epstein never had access to our bank or investment accounts.
Now, keep in mind, for just about all his intellectual career, Noam Chomsky has been a furious critic of American capitalism (“a grotesque catastrophe”), the wealthy elites of the U.S., and corporate influence over politics. He has written, “in this world there happen to be huge concentrations of private power that are as close to tyranny and as close to totalitarian as anything humans have devised… The corporations are just as totalitarian as Bolshevism and fascism.”
Recall that Epstein ran a financial management firm that catered to billionaire clients.
Let yea who has never had a convicted pedophile wire $270,000 into their account cast the first stone.
Top donors to Wisconsin politicians are mentioned in the latest release of files related to investigations into pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, including top Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, who appears in the documents more than 2,500 times.
Hoffman, a venture capitalist and co-founder of LinkedIn, has donated $15 million to the state Democratic Party since 2019, contributions that include a recent pair of donations totaling $275,000, state campaign records show.
Hoffman was among those who visited Epstein’s private Caribbean island called Little St. James in 2014, six years after the American financier pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution of a minor and registered as a sex offender, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel first reported the Democratic donor’s ties in 2023. Hoffman has not lived in Wisconsin, but the Silicon Valley billionaire has dedicated his spending in part because of Wisconsin’s battleground political dynamic.
The new batch of documents show scheduled meetings between Hoffman and Epstein between 2013 and 2018.
At one point in 2015, Epstein invited Hoffman to visit him to “play.” In 2014, Hoffman told Epstein he had sent gifts to his New York home that included ice cream for Epstein to try or “for the girls.”
I don’t have a team of researchers like The New York Times to review the Epstein files, but I have flipped through them and found a couple things that you won’t read in the Times — and you definitely won’t see on MS-NOW.
Criminal defense lawyer David Schoen sent an informative email to Epstein, saying no one would ever take the Russia investigation seriously because special counsel Robert Mueller had selected a legal team that was a “murderer’s row of the worst.”
Schoen’s case-in-chief was Andrew Weissmann, frequent Times opinion writer (Title of actual column: “A Former Prosecutor on the ‘Incredibly Strong Case’ Against Trump”). He appears so frequently on MS-NOW, he has a cot and toothbrush under Lawrence O’Donnell’s desk.
Weissmann, Schoen said, was known in the U.S. attorney’s office as “The Pathological liar,” because he “literally would withhold exculpatory evidence throughout the case.” When defense counsel complained, Weissman waited until the guy “went to the bathroom or lunch, stick the documents under other [papers] on his table, and tell the judge the lawyer had it all along.” He did this even in murder cases, which Schoen knew because, “his rats have come to me to admit their role in it.”
If true, this is a Brady violation, about as bad as it gets.
The Times has frequently discussed the rule, saying it ought to be “obvious,” to “prosecutors with any sense of fairness” that they have to “inform a defendant’s lawyer of evidence that could be favorable to the defendant’s case.” The paper complains about the “near complete lack of punishment for prosecutors who flout the rule.”
Democrats are demanding that ICE agents be stripped of their qualified immunity? Federal prosecutors like Weissmann have absolute, blanket immunity for their actions.
Schoen noted that Weissmann’s unsavory tactics “ruined” some of the biggest criminal cases ever tried. For example, he led the federal prosecution of Arthur Andersen LLP, a major player in the Enron scandal. But because of his extreme overreach on jury instructions (agreed to by the pliant judge) the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the conviction.
In terms of Weissmann’s appearance of fairness, Schoen said Weissmann is a “Trump hater and Clinton sycophant.”
Saying he could “go on and on,” Schoen singled out only two other Trump/Russia investigators with personal and political baggage: Jeannie Rhee, who “was actually Clinton’s lawyer in the email investigation,” and Greg Andres, “100% in the pro-Clinton, anti-Trump camp.”
Snip.
The media may want to ignore Barry Krischer, but the Epstein files don’t.
Palm Beach’s Democratic district attorney, Krischer spent years going after Rush Limbaugh for pain pills — raiding drugstores, seizing records, and leaking to the press — before finally dropping all charges. But when the Palm Beach police handed him a child sex ring implicating Epstein, a major Democratic donor, Krischer intentionally tanked the case.
There was no excusing it: The police’s meticulous investigation gave us pretty much everything we know today about Epstein’s crimes. The media have raged against U.S. attorney Alex Acosta for his sweetheart plea deal with Epstein a few years later, solely because he was Trump’s first Secretary of Labor. Krischer makes Acosta look like Elliot Ness.
Instead of locking up Epstein and putting an end to his sexual predations on young girls back in 2006, Krischer’s office treated the girls as if they were the ones on trial. Prosecutor Lanna Belohlavek accused the teens of prostitution, asking them, “You’re aware that you committed a crime?” She also grilled them about their drug and alcohol use, body piercings and posts on MySpace.
After a presentation like that, the grand jury ended up charging Epstein with only one count of soliciting prostitution. Krischer released him on bond. No prison sentence, no fine — and no ankle monitor to get in the way of massages.
One of Epstein’s semi-literate emails gives us some insight into Krischer’s thinking. Reporting a conversation between the Democratic prosecutor and the Democratic former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Epstein says Krisher believed that “what i did was barely crimianl but basically inapporritate,,, “ [spelling in original].
Perhaps this was merely Epstein’s self-flattering version of the conversation. Except we know what Krischer did. Back pain pills: Bigger than the Manson murders! Raping 14 year-olds: Basically “inapporritate”
A few days ago we talked about the appearance of the word “jerky” in Epstein communications. Well, the Podcast of the Lotus Eaters (Sargon of Akkad, Firas Modad and “Nate” AKA MrHReviews) delve into the Epstein files and notice a lot more weird food references that appear to be codeword for…something else. Including:
Shrimp
Tuna
Pizza
Grape soda
And they watch the Asmongold jerky clip as well.
“There’s not enough evidence to say that this is a satanist network or that this is a child eating network.”
“That’s very restrained of you.”
“Yes. And I’m willing to accept that they might be all of these things.”
“Epstein is messaging [I assume Peter] Mandelson saying, quote, I love the torture video. It’s [hard] to think of a good context for that.”
They also note how a journalist who dismissed “Pizzagate” as a “right wing conspiracy” later went to prison for child rape.
I don’t know what to make of this, but the possibilities range from dark to very, very, very dark…
More fraud in California, Homan declares victory in Minnesota, Virginia declares war on lawful gun owners, a lefty drops the N-Word on a black ICE agent, Musk shuts off bootleg Starlink to the Russian army, NOPD hires an illegal alien, and Illinois declares that no Democrat can express #WrongThink about trannies.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
I did get that second check from my closing 401K, so I have a few months worth of food and utilities in the bank.
The massive hospice fraud racket thriving under California’s lax oversight is finally getting the spotlight it deserves, as the Trump administration’s CMS chief Dr. Mehmet Oz hits the streets of Los Angeles to call out the billions in stolen taxpayer dollars.
With organized crime rings, including Russian-Armenian mafia elements, infiltrating the system through ghost patients and fake companies, the scam highlights how globalist policies have opened the door to foreign exploitation of U.S. resources. As fraudsters traffic beneficiaries like commodities, real Americans suffer denied care while the deep state looks the other way.
Los Angeles County alone accounts for 18% of the entire country’s home health care billing, a staggering figure that screams foul play.
One California physician billed the government $120 million in a single year, claiming to oversee 1,900 patients—a workload that defies logic and reeks of corruption.
The county boasts almost 2,000 hospice agencies, more than 36 states combined and 30 times the number in Florida or New York.
Dr. Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was forthright during his on-the-ground tour: “Hospice is crazy here… You’ve got hospice that’s grown seven-fold in the last five years. They represent about three and a half billion dollars of fraud, we believe, just in LA County.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta has admitted the problem’s scale, calling it “an epidemic in California, specifically in the greater Los Angeles area.”
The fraud operates through recruiters who lure seniors with freebies like walkers or cash, harvest their Medicare numbers, and sell them to providers for $1,000 to $3,000 each. Providers then bill the feds $260 per day per patient, often for nonexistent services, while shuffling enrollees between sham outfits to evade detection.
In LA’s San Fernando Valley, particularly Van Nuys, the density is absurd: 210 agencies crammed into one square mile, with one building listing 112 hospices showing no actual operations.
Vice President JD Vance is poised to chair a new White House task force aimed at rooting out potential fraud and abuse in government programs in California, according to CBS News.
Andrew Ferguson, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, is expected to serve as the task force’s vice chairman and handle day-to-day operations, CBS News reports. President Donald Trump is anticipated to issue an executive order in the coming days to formally establish the group, the news outlet said.
The White House task force would operate separately from a related Justice Department effort led by Colin McDonald, a Trump nominee for a new fraud-investigation role at the department. McDonald is expected to also probe fraud in Minnesota uncovered by YouTuber Nick Shirley and other independent journalists.
California has long grappled with documented issues of waste, fraud, and weak oversight in state and federally funded programs. State auditors have for more than a decade flagged problems including persistent cost overruns, inadequate internal controls, and unimplemented reform recommendations across various initiatives, CBS News reported last month.
California’s Employment Development Department faced acute criticism during the pandemic, when unemployment-insurance fraud resulted in an estimated $20 billion or more in improper payments, while many eligible claimants endured lengthy delays in receiving benefits, according to NPR News.
Separately, federal officials have recently scrutinized fraud risks in hospice and home-health services, particularly in Los Angeles County. Last week, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz visited the area to draw attention to the issue, citing the rapid proliferation of hospice providers and potential billions in improper billings.
See above. Given the vast scale of graft Democrats rake in from various fraud schemes, I can only imagine they’re experience quiet panic at the prospect…
Tom Homan declares victory, says city and state officials in Minnesota will now cooperate with ICE and turn over illegal aliens. Just think of the deaths that could have been avoided if they had only done this in the first place.
California Democrats are taking a victory lap, celebrating the fact that their election system has no way of verifying that the people who are casting votes are legitimate, registered voters.
The Supreme Court of California effectively struck down Huntington Beach’s voter ID law, refusing to review a lower court decision that blocked the law. The city argued that it could impose a voter ID requirement for citywide elections, but California Democrats passed a law in 2024 banning localities from requiring voter ID in elections. California law not only does not require you to prove you are who you say you are when you vote, but it actively prevents cities and localities from having that requirement in place at all.
The Trump administration will publish a notice in the Federal Register on Friday that will demolish the slow-moving process of deporting illegals. The proposed rule aims to streamline the current process and reduce the backlog of cases that has nearly brought the system to a screeching halt. That said, we know it faces an uphill fight as federal judges, acting without jurisdiction, will certainly declare the changes improper at some point.
The Federal Register notice titled RIN 1125-AB37, Appellate Procedures for the Board of Immigration Appeals, extensively overhauls the current process that could lead an immigration case to the Supreme Court.
The first part of the system seems to remain intact. An apprehended illegal is brought before an Article 2 Immigration Judge and given a hearing. The judge either lets them stay or tells them to go home. If ordered deported, a removal order is entered. As we’re seeing from the cases popping in the news, it is not uncommon for an illegal apprehended today in Minneapolis, perhaps a contractor working for the Quality Learing Center, to have a removal order dating back two decades.
Breaking the logjam at the Board of Immigration Appeals is the target.
The filing lays out how Trump 1.0 tried to fix the problem.
Among other changes, the Appellate Procedures NPRM proposed: (1) simultaneous briefing schedules for both detained and non-detained appeals before the Board; (2) shortening the reply brief deadline; (3) limiting briefing extensions; (4) harmonizing the 90- and 180-day Board adjudication timelines to both start from when the record is complete; (5) limiting the Chief Appellate Immigration Judge’s ability to hold a group of cases while awaiting certain outside actions; and (6) removing the process for Immigration Judge review of proceeding transcripts.
Snip.
The new regulation will “change the deadline for filing an appeal with the Board from 30 to 10 days, except for cases involving certain asylum applications.” This is not as trivial as it could appear. The current filing fee for the BIA is $1,030. There are provisions for filing “in forma pauperis.” This requires jumping through more hoops to prove you are indigent. The illegal now has 10 days to find representation and prepare an appeal, as well as pony up money. Historically, claiming you are broke is a good way to get the next flight back home.
Once you appeal, there is no requirement that the BIA will hear the case. Rather, “the default will be summary dismissal unless a majority of current Board members vote to consider the appeal on the merits.” There is an expedited hearing process that will “require simultaneous briefing within 20 days of the Board setting the schedule in all cases not summarily dismissed, with no reply briefs and limited extensions.”
Plus, there are deadlines for the BIA: “the Board shall dispose of all cases assigned to a single Board member within 90 days of completion of the record, or within 180 days of completion of the record for all cases assigned to a three-member panel.”
So an appeal is no longer a way to buy time before a final decision is rendered. The 10-day window makes it difficult prepare, and the BIA will focus on “selecting decisions for review that present novel issues warranting the Board’s attention.” If you are lucky enough for your case to be heard by the BIA, it has no more than 180 days to render a judgment. There is still an appeal to a federal appeals court; however, this requires representation and a $600 filing fee.
Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced a wide-sweeping investigation into alleged abuse of the federal H-1B visa program by Texas businesses, issuing civil investigative demands to three North Texas companies suspected of operating sham enterprises to fraudulently sponsor foreign workers.
Paxton said his office has issued the demands—known as Civil Investigative Demands, or CIDs—seeking documents identifying company employees, records detailing the products or services provided, financial statements, and communications related to business operations.
Standing outside a single-family home listed as the office address for one of the companies highlighted in recent reporting, Paxton credited BlazeTV and Texas Scorecard personality Sara Gonzales with prompting the investigation.
“Thanks to you, we’re here today,” Paxton said during an interview with Gonzales. “We’ve started an investigation of three different companies that we think might be scamming people with these H-1B visas.”
Paxton did not publicly identify the three companies that received CIDs. However, his office said the investigation includes “entities identified in videos that were widely circulated online.”
A portion of Paxton’s interview with Gonzales was filmed outside a residential home listed as the office address for 3Bees Technologies Inc., a location that Gonzales reported appeared vacant, despite the company’s sponsorship of multiple H-1B visa holders.
According to Paxton’s office, reports indicate that businesses under investigation may have created sham companies featuring websites advertising nonexistent products or services while listing residential homes or unfinished buildings as offices. Despite those irregularities, the companies allegedly sponsored numerous H-1B visas in recent years.
“Any criminal who attempts to scam the H-1B visa program and use ‘ghost offices’ or other fraudulent ploys should be prepared to face the full force of the law,” Paxton stated. “Abuse and fraud within these programs strip jobs and opportunities away from Texans.”
Attorney General Ken Paxton is asking a court to shut down Bexar County’s taxpayer-funded deportation-defense program for illegal aliens, arguing it violates state law and the Texas Constitution.
The Bexar County Commissioners Court voted on December 16, 2025, to allocate $566,181 in county funds to provide legal services to individuals unlawfully present in the United States through the county’s Immigration Legal Services fund.
Paxton’s office noted that, with additional commitments, total spending on the program could ultimately exceed $1 million.
The money is earmarked to pay lawyers to represent illegal aliens in federal deportation proceedings—a role typically handled either by private counsel or nonprofit organizations, not county governments. Paxton’s lawsuit names Bexar County, the Commissioners Court, and multiple county officials as defendants.
Paxton’s petition argues that subsidizing deportation-defense work for people in the country unlawfully “confers no public benefit,” serves “predominantly private radical interests,” and falls outside any lawful power granted to counties under Texas law.
He framed the program as an attempt by local officials to interfere with federal immigration enforcement while using statewide taxpayers as the funding source.
“Leftists in Bexar County have no authority to use taxpayer dollars to fund their radical, criminal-loving agenda,” Paxton said in a statement, adding that “state funds cannot underwrite deportation-defense services for individuals unlawfully present in the country.”
Not just Minnesota: “HS Reports More Than 180 Vehicle Attacks On Law Enforcement.”
Immigration officers have faced 182 vehicular attacks since President Donald Trump took office last year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a Feb. 3 statement.
Out of the 182 attacks between Jan. 21, 2025, and Jan. 24, 2026, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers faced 114, up by 124 percent from the 51 attacks during the same time period the previous year. The remaining 68 attacks were faced by officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Attacks on ICE are up by 3,300 percent from two assaults previously, according to the DHS.
So part of the huge Epstein data dump includes a conversation with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak from 2014, discussing bringing Russians (I assume Russian Jews) to Israel. Weirdly, I think it makes it less likely Epstein was Mossad (or at least current Mossad). In 2014, Barak’s left wing (Labor/One Israel/etc.) had been out of power for a while and Benjamin Netanyahu was in the midst of a long run as Prime Minister, despite Obama’s best efforts. It just seems unlikely that a Mossad asset would just be shooting the shit with a former PM of an out-of-power party. (Of course, maybe he was team Barak/Barack.) And the message “Goyim were born to only serve us,” that’s so outlandish it could have come from The Protocols of Elders of Zion. Like the LARP Nazis chanting “Blood and Soil!” at Charlottesville, it reeks of someone trying too hard to fit in with a culture they’re largely ignorant of.
The Epstein revelations might indeed topple one world leader: Keir Starmer.
Already-struggling UK Leader Keir Starmer is facing mounting pressure to step down over the latest scandal involving his former ambassador to America’s shocking close links to Jeffrey Epstein.
The prime minister, whose popularity was already at a near-record low since his 2024 election, faced revolt even from his own party over the fresh revelations about former diplomat Peter Mandelson, who was even seen in his underwear with an unknown woman in photos in the latest Epstein files.
Starmer went into a desperate damage-control mode Thursday, accusing his one-time close ally of “deceit” — even though Mandelson’s friendship with the now-deceased pedophile was well known when Starmer gave him the cushy role as the UK’s ambassador to Washington in December 2024.
Starmer is indeed a nasty piece of work, but the sad truth is that any replacement Labour PM is likely to be every bit as committed to importing unassimilated illegal alien Islamic rapists as Starmer is.
It took almost a year, but the White House finally chalked up its first objective in implementing the newly revitalized Monroe Doctrine. Or, as we call it, the Donroe Doctrine.
Its very first manifestation came almost immediately after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Panama president Jose Raul Mulino and told Mulino in no uncertain terms that the US would not allow China to control ports on the Panama Canal any longer. On February 3, 2025, Muloino repudiated Panama’s Belt and Road Initiative agreements with China and would force the sale of control of those ports. China began a two-front strategy to reverse that decision, with parallel diplomatic and legal tracks. Diplomacy gave way to trade negotiations, which ultimately proved fruitless.
Late yesterday, so did the legal challenge. Panama’s top court annulled the country’s contracts with China’s CK Hutchinson to operate both ports, effectively severing China from control of the Panama Canal.
A woman who received a double mastectomy at the age of 16 under the guise of transgender-related healthcare was just awarded $2 million in the first successful medical-malpractice lawsuit brought by a detransitioner.
Fox Varian sued her New York-based psychologist and plastic surgeon for facilitating her gender-transition double mastectomy in 2019, independent reporter Benjamin Ryan who attended Varian’s recent trial, said. Although a host of detransitioners have sued doctors who rush to “affirm” gender confusion with life-altering surgeries, Varian’s is the first known successful lawsuit.
Claire Deacon, Varian’s mother, was led by her daughter’s psychologist to believe that breast removal was the only way to heal Varian’s gender dysphoria, she told the jury. At first Deacon told Varian’s psychologist Kenneth Einhorn that top surgery was “never gonna happen” if she could help it.
“This man was just so emphatic, and pushing and pushing, that I felt like there was no good decision,” she said, according to an Epoch Times report. “I think it was a scare tactic: I don’t believe it was malice, I think he believed what he was saying … but he was very, very wrong.”
Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender opposes the Democratic Party’s general elevation of gender identity over sex in public policy, especially subjecting gender-confused people to the lifelong consequences of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical interventions so they more closely resemble the opposite sex.
The nonprofit’s leaders could allegedly be fined or go to prison in Illinois if they register as “Democrats” without the state party’s permission.
The Land of Lincoln’s bespoke “party name provision” in its 40-year-old General Not for Profit Corporation Act, which Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias repeatedly invoked to deny DIAG’s applications to solicit charitable contributions in the state, is the target of a First Amendment lawsuit on DIAG’s behalf by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
“Not only would they likely face an uphill battle in getting approval from the Illinois Democratic Party, they refuse on principle to seek permission from the very party they plan to criticize,” a flagrantly unconstitutional condition on protected speech, said FIRE, which also filed a motion for preliminary injunction.
While the state party officially supports so-called gender affirming care as “health care,” without age or other restrictions, DIAG opposes throwing “gay, lesbian, and gender non-conforming/gender-distressed children and vulnerable adults under the wheels of a regressive ideological bus” through “predatory medical harm.”
It portrays the standard Democratic position on medicalized gender transitions as pseudoscientific and harmful to both physical and mental health.
The Illinois Democratic Party told Capitol News Illinois it hadn’t received a request from DIAG, but “the fact that they’re proudly anti-transgender does not align with the Democratic Party of Illinois’s values” of “progress and inclusivity.”
Evidently men who believe they’re women have replaced black people in the Democrat Party’s Victimhood Hierarchy.
Canadian comedian with a solid international fanbase just watched six sold-out shows vanish in Minnesota. Ben Bankas lost his gigs at Laugh Camp Comedy Club in St. Paul after clips of his routine on Renee Good’s death blew up online – the routine hit raw nerves in a city still reeling from the January 7 shooting.
Club owner Bill Collins cited threats, media frenzy, and street chaos as the reasons for the cancellation.
Snip.
Bankas opened his bit by calling for a moment of silence for Good, then pivoting to say he hoped “that dog’s okay…and her pet,” a reference to Good’s dog, who was in the car with her, and her wife, Becca, who had been in the vehicle but left shortly before she told Renee to drive off while the agent was in front of her car.
“That’s what you don’t want when you’re dealing with the police — your lesbian wife saying ‘drive, baby, drive,’” he told the crowd. “Her last name was Good; that’s what I said after they shot her in the face,” he continued. He then backed off slightly, saying, “I’m not a liberal, so I don’t celebrate the death of people that I… I didn’t hate her, I didn’t know her, but now that I know her, I hate her”.
Old and busted: Leftists demanding police bodycams to prove they’re killing innocent black people. The new hotness: Leftists demand we stop using bodycams because they’re showing police shootings are justified.
“Couple Sentenced After Fake ID Bust by Dallas ICE. According to ICE, the manufacturing of fake identification documents by the couple took place from August 2020 until their arrest in February 2025. ”
A Mexican couple living in Oklahoma has been sentenced for manufacturing fake identification documents for illegal aliens, a scheme uncovered by ICE Homeland Security Investigations in Dallas.
Karina Garcia-Salazar, 47, was sentenced to 60 months in federal prison and three years of supervised release for Conspiracy to Transfer Identification Documents and Conspiracy to Possess with Intent to Use or Transfer Five or More Documents.
Her partner Jorge Augusto Prieto-Gamboa, 41, was sentenced in December to 15 months in federal prison and three years of supervised release following conviction for Conspiracy to Possess Five or More Documents with Intent to Transfer.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma reported that Garcia holds a Lawful Permanent Resident card, while Gamboa has been living illegally in the U.S. since 2002.
Sounds like authorities have reason to strip Garcia of their green card and deport them.
Winning: “Texas A&M Ends Women’s & Gender Studies Programming. The university cited low enrollment as the reason for the decision.”
Ukraine said last week it was working with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to block the use of Starlink terminals used on Russian attack drones and was trying to compile a “white list” of all Ukraine’s terminals so the Russian ones could be turned off.
“Starlinks included in the ‘white list’ are working — Russian terminals have already been blocked,” Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who took office last month, wrote on Telegram, adding that the list was still being updated.
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Musk said on Sunday that moves by SpaceX to stop the unauthorised use of Starlink by Russia seemed to have worked.
Russia used to be home to space-faring superpower capable of launching its own communication satellites. Now its dependent on western COTS technology that can be turned off by Elon Musk.
Russian GRU military intelligence General Vladimir Alexeyev shot in assassination attempt in Moscow. No word if Ukraine or internal enemies attempted the hit. Alexeyev is a nasty piece of work with several planned assassinations and war atrocities laid at his feet, so he’s exactly the sort of person Putin would assassinate if he feared internal dissent.
Please note that nowhere does he say the Washington Post should stop doing this:
· ‘Melania’ Doc Is a Box Office Flop Hoax · The Rural America Can’t Live Without NPR/PBS Hoax · The ICE Detains Five-Year-Old Hoax · The Hegseth ‘Kill Everybody’ Hoax · Trump “Destroying” White… https://t.co/KvkR7nfdcj
Follow-up: Louis Rossmann’s war against Austin paying for AI cameras in its parks has paid off in the form of a new proposal. “If you go down to item 61, approve a resolution directing the city manager to return to council with an ordinance regulating the city’s use of surveillance technology. Mayor Pro Tem Jose Cheto Vela, Council Member Mike Siegel, Council Member Vanessa Fuentes, Council Member Krista Laine, Council Member Jose Velasquez are involved and sponsors of this.”
Except … it’s not the John my husband remembers. My husband was confused and said the following things were odd:
– John has different hair and now wears glasses.
– John is talking extensively about working in a garage because his three children and wife are home. In the interview, he made references to being single and was visibly in an indoor desk area.
– John can’t answer a number of questions that they previously discussed in the interview, things pretty pivotal to the position.
– Husband describes John as being aloof and pretty timid whereas John was confident and articulate when they interviewed him.
He is convinced this is not the person they hired.
Snip.
They heard back from legal … who are less than thrilled about the situation! They approved HR to have a conversation with John regarding what has been reported (more in the vein of “there’s been some concerns about performance and you overselling abilities” and less of the We Think You Are a Liar route).
Snip.
As soon as HR got on the call with him, before they could get through their first question, John said the words “I quit” and hung up the calls. He has since been unreachable!!
While his fellow Democrats are assaulting ICE agents over deportations of illegal alien felons, Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico is kicking it old school by breaking out a bottle of Grandad’s Olde Class Warfare. Talarico just debated primary rival Jasmine Crockett, where he directed his ire against billionaires.
The debate was hosted by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). After hosting the two candidates, the AFL-CIO declined to endorse in the race.
Snip.
In their opening and closing remarks, the two candidates stuck to their respective themes thus far in the race: Talarico with his pitch for unity, loving one’s neighbor, and billionaires’ negative impact on society, and Crockett with her frequent use of the word “fight,” citing her many viral moments chewing out Republicans, the need for authenticity, and her experience as a public defender.
Snip.
Talarico kicked off with similar lines as can be seen on his campaign website and that he’s pitched at various rallies: uniting against billionaires.
He said, “Before I was a legislator, I was a public school teacher on the West Side of San Antonio, one of the poor ZIP codes in the entire state of Texas. On the west side, I learned that the real fight in this country is not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom. We will not win this race in November with the same old politics of division.”
“Billionaires want us looking left and right at each other, so we’re not looking up at them. We are building a people-powered movement to beat them,” he added.
You may remember the social justice left previously declaring that mathematical abstraction, the 1%, was the source of all evil, as part of Obama’s battle-space preparation against Mitt Romney for 2012. Evidently that was just too broad of a class enemy for Talarico. Now he’s setting his sights on the 1% of the 1% of the 1%, at the same time so many are fleeing California’s proposed wealth tax and coming to Texas to open up new factories and create jobs. I bet he’s still smarting over Elon Musk backing Trump.
The Texas Democratic primary for U.S. Senate heated up on Friday with former U.S. Rep. Colin Allred directly criticizing his rival, state Rep. James Talarico, for the first time, calling him out for accepting donations from casino magnate and megadonor Miriam Adelson while railing against billionaires’ influence in politics.
“I like James, but when I see him say that he’s running against billionaires, but then when nobody was looking, his top donor was Miriam Adelson … That contributes to the cynicism that folks might experience,” Allred said during an event at The Texas Tribune Festival.
Snip.
During his 2024 reelection campaign for the Texas House, Talarico accepted $59,000 from Texas Sands PAC, a pro-gambling group funded by Adelson. Talarico has also accepted donations from billionaire Charles Butt, the H-E-B chairman who supported candidates from both parties opposed to private school vouchers.
What are mere scruples when there’s all that sweet, sweet gambling money available to stuff into your campaign’s maw?
Though this rank hypocrisy clashes with Talarico’s performative piety, it’s par for the course for Democrats, who decry billionaires while funding their leftwing street operations through the likes of George Soros and Neville Roy Singham.
Because our billionaires are beyond reproach, and it’s always OK when we do it.
There are all sorts of Constitutional principles that seem to evade the dubious mental grasp of New York Democrats. Yesterday Letita James displayed her ignorance of freedom of religion, freedom of association and the need for the government to avoid viewpoint discrimination when she shut down a Jewish group for opposing jihad.
New York City had Republican mayors within living memory. And in 2024, President Trump had his biggest gains in New York. Especially in the borough of Staten Island where he won 2/3rds of the vote. So now Gov. Hochul’s former lawyer, currently serving as a ‘judge’, has declared the existence of Republican representation in Staten Island to be ‘unconstitutional‘.
A judge on Wednesday threw out the boundaries of the only congressional district in New York City represented by a Republican, ordering the state to redraw its borders because its current composition unconstitutionally dilutes the votes of Black and Hispanic residents.
In his ruling Wednesday, Justice Jeffrey Pearlman said the New York district represented by Republican U.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, which includes all of the borough of Staten Island and a small piece of Brooklyn, should be reconfigured before this year’s midterm elections.
The lawsuit, filed by an election law firm aligned with the Democratic Party, argued that the lines of the district don’t account for a rise in Staten Island’s Black and Latino population. It pushed for the district to be redrawn to include parts of lower Manhattan, which leans more liberal.
Whoa. Hold up a minute there, Pearlman.
Now I may be just be a simple country Hyper-Chicken blogger, but it seems to me that the criteria Pearlman articulated as the reason for his decision, namely the need to carve out race-conscious districts, is precisely the criteria the Fifth Circuit said you couldn’t use in Petteway v. Galveston County.
Indeed, since partisan advantage was cited as an acceptable guiding principle for redistricting in that same decision, Pearlman could have stood hunched over like Gollum and declared “We hates them the nasty Republicans! Hates them! They keeps deporting our precious illegal alien rapists!” and still been on firmer constitutional ground.
Presumably Pearlman is ignoring the decision because New York isn’t in the Fifth Circuit and the case hasn’t been heard by the Supreme Court yet. But when it is heard, Pearlman has articulated the precise criteria the decision declared unconstitutional as a consideration for redistricting, giving Republicans a ready-made criteria for getting the decision overruled if the Supreme Court (as expected) validates the Fifth Circuit ruling.
The Apple Weather app is finally catching up with the National Weather Service and, holy crap, things are not looking good:
Austin Weather forecast 1/23/26
Yeah, it’s going to get above freezing, so the city will run again, but I’ve got to keep my plants inside for a week or more. Any any potential power loss is really gonna suck. Here’s that Austin energy outage map again.
My own 401K travails and money woes continue. I did receive the money I tried to transfer to my checking account in December. But I had only split it up to get half of it into 2025 for tax purposes. I was also going to have to transfer more more into my bank account this month to cover my property taxes. They assured me would only take a day to transfer funds after my IRA got set up. Surprise! It might be a day for most people, but because my phone doesn’t receive text messages, I had to request they send me a check, which is going to take 15 days. (Funny how they seem to be able to transfer money in instantaneously, but you have to jump through hoops to get your own money in 2+ weeks.) Yesterday, I had to sell some silver rounds to cover the last bit of property taxes and living expenses for two weeks (including a vet appointment for my two dogs). Fortunately, silver is at at an all-time high. I sold mine when it was just under $100 an ounce, and now it’s over $103.
Oh, yeah, some other stuff happened this week: More Minnesota fraud, more California fraud, Don Lemon joins the KKK (as a subject of federal scrutiny), more commie ties for left wing agitators, more of Russia’s shadow fleet comes a cropper, and William Shatner eats cereal.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Just like we already knew: “California: Newsom’s ‘National Model’ for Homeless Wracked by Fraud.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom has made reducing the homelessness crisis in California a top priority, saying the scale of the state’s efforts is “unprecedented” and calling for the continued expansion of his signature effort – Project Homekey – that has already cost $3.75 billion.
But in a state with more than 181,000 homeless individuals, or about one-third of the U.S. total, Homekey has been marred by failures and scandals, including a lack of government oversight and accountability as well as a federal investigation into allegations of fraud in Los Angeles.
Lack of government oversight isn’t a bug for Governor Hairgel, it’s a feature.
Newsom, who appears to be preparing for a presidential bid in 2028, could make Homekey, which he calls a “national model,” a talking point in his campaign. The state claims the program has created almost 16,000 permanent housing units that will serve over 175,000 people. But since the state doesn’t track outcomes – whether people placed in housing saw their lives improve or if they returned to the streets – the program’s effectiveness is unclear, according to a critical 2024 state auditor’s report.
“[Our budget] is bloated with homeless spending, a bottomless pit and taxpayer boondoggle that doubles down on failure year after year,” the Republican-turned-Democrat Los Angeles Councilwoman Traci Park said at a meeting in May. “Hundreds of millions of dollars on bridge homes and Homekeys and interim housing sites, and no one can even tell us which ones are operational.”
What is clear is that homelessness in California has skyrocketed in the five years Homekey has been in place, growing by more than 20%, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. That’s an increase of some 36,000 people between 2019 and 2024.
Homekey has been touted by officials as a more cost-effective way to house the homeless. By hiring developers to convert excess motel and hotel rooms and other existing structures into permanent housing, the costs are two to three times lower than building new units, according to the auditor’s report.
But with huge contracts available to developers and very little oversight of their activities, some of that cost savings was lost to fraud, according to federal prosecutors. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli for the Central District of California launched a fraud and corruption task force to find out where the money went, and in October filed criminal charges involving two developers who allegedly defrauded the system.
My guess is that not a single leftwing activist in California will be indicted by the state government for their own role in the fraud…
The videos coming out of Minneapolis, of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers apprehending illegal immigrants in the streets while having to fight off aggressive and sometimes violent anti-ICE activists, are the predictable result of a Democrat strategy that amounts to nullification.
I mean nullification in the historical sense, like the Nullification Crisis of 1832 when South Carolina declared federal tariffs to be null and void within the boundaries of the state, and President Andrew Jackson threatened to send in the U.S. Army to enforce federal law.
What the Democrats of South Carolina did back then is essentially what the Democrats of Minneapolis are doing today, fomenting a 21st century nullification crisis by making it nearly impossible to enforce federal immigration law in the territory under their jurisdiction. Trump, who has ordered 1,500 active duty troops stationed in Alaska to prepare for a possible deployment to Minnesota, is well within his rights (and within historical precedent) to respond in the same vein as Jackson did to what amounts to a nullification crisis.
Indeed, the whole point of so-called sanctuary laws is to make it difficult or impossible to enforce federal immigration laws — to nullify them. Sanctuary policies like the ones operative in Minneapolis (and many other Democrat-controlled cities) prohibit state and local law enforcement from working with federal immigration authorities.
Under normal circumstances, when an illegal immigrant commits a crime the local authorities notify federal immigration officials before the offender is released, so that ICE can take custody and begin the process of deportation. The handover occurs between law enforcement agencies in a controlled, orderly, safe manner.
But in places where Democrat lawmakers have created sanctuary jurisdictions, local law enforcement is barred from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement in this way. Instead of handing over illegal immigrants to ICE, the police simply release them. That means ICE agents have to go out into the community, into neighborhoods and businesses, to track down and arrest illegal immigrant criminals wherever they might be.
This is obviously a much more volatile and dangerous way to enforce federal immigration law. And in Minneapolis, it’s even more volatile and dangerous thanks to anti-ICE activists and vigilante mobs attempting to disrupt, impede, and in some cases attack ICE agents. Indeed, it’s a recipe for violent clashes between ICE and anti-ICE mobs. A cynic might say that’s the entire point, to make federal immigration enforcement as chaotic and tense as possible in hopes of exactly the kind of confrontations that led to the death of Renee Good, the woman who was fatally shot earlier this month when she tried to ram an ICE agent with her vehicle.
The goal of fomenting such mayhem is straightforward: to thwart the enforcement of federal immigration law. Keep in mind, ICE is not doing anything beyond the scope of federal law in Minneapolis. It is not exercising any new or novel powers not authorized under federal statute. As Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander in charge in Minneapolis said at a press conference this week, the operations and tactics of Border Patrol and ICE agents in the city are “born out of necessity” but are nevertheless “legal, ethical, and moral.”
“Our operations are lawful. They’re targeted. They’re focused on individuals who pose a serious threat to this community. They are not random and they are not political,” he said. The “necessity” Bovino refers to is that which has arisen as a direct result of Democrat sanctuary policies. Ordinarily, we wouldn’t see the very public, visible ICE operations now underway in Minneapolis and other sanctuary cities simply because criminal illegal aliens would be transferred to federal custody by local law enforcement.
But that’s not happening because Democrats don’t like federal immigration laws. Since they don’t have the political power to change them, they have decided, like Democrats in South Carolina in the 1830s, simply to declare them null and void in their territory.
I would suggest Minnesota Democrats should reconsider before Trump decides to do to Minneapolis what Sherman did to Savannah in 1864, but knowing Minneapolis, all he probably needs to do is hand out gasoline and matches to the #BlackLivesMatter/Somali set and let them burn it down themselves…
A collection of far-left activist groups — including the Democratic Socialists of America, major labor unions, explicitly Communist groups, and a CCP-linked protest network — have all organized a strike scheduled for Friday which aims to “shut down” schools and businesses statewide in Minnesota in an effort to push ICE out.
The planned shutdown was announced early last week — “ICE Out of MN: Day of Truth and Freedom” — include plans for a large-scale march in Minneapolis and a day of “no work, no school, no shopping.”
The radical Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), the left-wing BreakThrough News media outlet, and the Manhattan-based Marxist revolutionary People’s Forum are all involved in either promoting or organizing the Minnesota shutdown effort. Just the News previously reported on how these and other radical activist groups have leadership links or financial ties to a funding network backed by wealthy businessman and self-avowed communist Neville Singham.
The GOP-led House Oversight Committee voted this month to subpoena Singham for information about this sprawling activist network. The Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the Revolutionary Communists of America, and the Twin Cities chapter of the Communist Party USA — all avowedly Marxist groups — are also listed as co-sponsors of the Friday protest.
The DSA — which helped propel Zohran Mamdani to Gracie Mansion in NYC — including the national organization and the local Minnesota chapter — are listed as backing the anti-ICE effort scheduled for Friday.
Major labor unions such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) are listed as co-hosts of the shutdown effort, while the United Auto Workers (UAW) also endorsed the strike.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon told conservative podcaster Benny Johnson that former CNN host Don Lemon has been put “on notice” by the Justice Department and could face charges under federal civil-rights laws, including the Ku Klux Klan Act, for his role in storming a church service in Minnesota. Lemon allegedly joined a far-left mob that was on the hunt for a pro-ICE pastor at a St. Paul church.
“The Klan Act is one of the most important federal civil rights statutes. Its a law that makes it illegal to terrorize and violate the civil rights of citizens. Whenever people conspire to do this, the Klan Act can be used,” Dhillon told Johnson.
Dhillon continued, “Everyone in the protest community needs to know that the fullest force of the federal government is going to come down and prevent this from happening and put people away for a long time.”
“There is zero tolerance for this kind of illegal behavior and we will not stand for it,” she emphasized.
Johnson wrote on X, “DOJ confirms Don Lemon has zero ‘journalism’ protections against FACE Act violations. Lemon was fully aware of the violations and may face KKK Act conspiracy charges.”
But others got indicted. “FBI Arrests Left-Wing Activist Who Led Mob of Protesters into Minnesota Church.”
Federal authorities have arrested the woman who led an anti-ICE mob into a Minnesota church last week.
Nekima Levy Armstrong is facing charges related to violating the FACE Act, which prohibits interfering with the exercise of religion at a place of worship.
Minutes ago at my direction, HSI and FBI agents executed an arrest in Minnesota. So far, we have arrested Nekima Levy Armstrong, who allegedly played a key role in organizing the coordinated attack on Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a post on X.
“We will share more updates as they become available. Listen loud and clear: WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP,” she added.
Armstrong led a group into the Cities Church in St. Paul on Sunday, believing that one of the church’s pastors works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Dozens of demonstrators interrupted the service shouting, “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good.”
Armstrong is a civil rights lawyer and “scholar-activist,” according to her website. She previously played a key role in organizing boycotts against Target over its decision to walk back its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, according to Fox News.
Homeland Security Secretary Krisit Noem announced on Monday that immigration officers have arrested more than 10,000 illegal immigrants in Minnesota.
“PEACE AND PUBLIC SAFETY IN MINNEAPOLIS!” Noem exclaimed in a post to X. “We have arrested over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens who were killing Americans, hurting children and reigning terror in Minneapolis because Tim Walz and Jacob Frey refuse to protect their own people and instead protect criminals.”
The figure includes about 3,000 “criminal illegal aliens” arrested by federal authorities in just the last six weeks, the secretary said.
Snip.
“There is MASSIVE Fraud in Minneapolis, at least $19 billion and that’s just the tip of iceberg,” Noem asserted in the same post. “Our Homeland Security Investigators are on the ground in Minneapolis conducting wide scale investigations to get justice for the American people who have been robbed blind.”
Indeed.
“Abbott Offers State Assistance to HUD for Fraud Identification Program. HUD Secretary Turner identified $5 billion in potentially erroneous payments.”
Gov. Greg Abbott has volunteered Texas assistance to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in identifying fraud in federal housing programs after the agency identified at least $5 billion in potentially erroneous payments last year.
According to a letter sent to HUD Secretary Scott Turner on Monday, Abbott offered state participation in a pilot fraud identification program through the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA).
“We will gladly work with you to develop fraud-prevention measures that ensure federal taxpayer funds, like those in the rental-based assistance programs, are not taken advantage of by bad actors,” wrote Abbott.
Turner, a former Texas state representative who was appointed by President Donald Trump to head HUD last year, published a financial analysis of the agency that warned of fraud and a lack of internal controls.
Using AI, HUD reported finding more than 30,000 deceased persons either actively enrolled in a rental assistance program or who had received assistance after they died.
Turner’s financial report also warned that his staff had identified examples of non-compliance with standards of internal controls under the Biden administration.
“The reviews determined that under the prior Administration, HUD experienced a deterioration in financial controls and governance and identified a material weakness affecting internal controls and financial governance across multiple program offices.”
Multiple federal agencies launched or extended investigations in Minnesota after new revelations of widespread fraud in the state last month. Last week, Abbott directed the Texas Workforce Commission and the Health and Human Services Commission to investigate potential childcare fraud in Texas.
A member of the violent Latin Kings gang was arrested after allegedly stealing government property from an FBI vehicle vandalized during unrest in Minneapolis Wednesday night, federal authorities said.
Fox News confirmed that Raul Gutierrez, 33, was arrested Thursday in a joint operation involving the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
The FBI said multiple government vehicles were vandalized and broken into Wednesday night in Minneapolis while agents were responding to a reported assault on a federal officer, adding that federal property was stolen from inside the vehicles.
“One individual who allegedly stole federal government property out of an FBI vehicle in Minneapolis last night has been arrested,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X, adding that the suspect was a member of the Latin Kings gang with a violent criminal history. “FBI personnel are continuing to pursue other subjects involved. There will be more arrests.”
Is their any doubt the left will treat this gang banger scumbag as a hero?
A few weeks ago, I noted that California was losing over $160 million due to improper management of its commercial driver’s license program.
And well, Governor Gavin Newsom asserted his current budget would only have a $2 billion deficit, the state’s shortfall is actually estimated to be over $17 billion according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
The budget reports a $2.9 billion deficit, described as a “modest shortfall” by Department of Finance staff. This estimate differs markedly from the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) projection of a $17.6 billion deficit—a gap of $14.7 billion. According to department staff, the governor’s proposal incorporates $31.5 billion in additional revenues not included in the LAO forecast and excludes the risk of a stock market downturn that the LAO elected to factor into its analysis. Overall, the state budget totals $348.9 billion, including $248.3 billion in General Fund expenditures and $23 billion in total reserves.
Now, the gap may even widen.
California is facing federal demands to repay more than $1 billion in Medicaid funds that Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), says were improperly used for health care for illegal aliens.
The Trump administration is planning to claw back over $1 billion in federal Medicaid dollars it says are being spent by blue states on healthcare for illegal immigrants, including some with violent criminal records for murder and rape.
A preliminary audit by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that, over the last few years, mostly during 2024 and 2025, California; Washington, D.C.; Illinois; Washington; Colorado; and Oregon improperly spent a combined $1,351,204,127 in federal Medicaid funds to help pay for healthcare for illegal immigrants.
While federal Medicaid dollars are supposed to be prohibited broadly from being used to cover healthcare for illegal immigrants, they can be used by states for emergency treatment regardless of a patient’s citizenship or immigration status.
While 5 other states were also investigated for illegal alien-oriented Medicaid abuses, California was by far the most egregious.
Virginians asked for it, and if the flurry of bills introduced in the 72 hours since Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s inauguration pass — and with a Democratic supermajority, they likely will — residents of the Old Dominion are going to get it “good and hard.” If enacted, these proposals would raise taxes substantially, shorten sentences for violent criminals, and erode election integrity statewide.
Virginia voters delivered Spanberger a landslide victory in November over her Republican opponent, then–Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears. Despite presenting herself as a moderate during the campaign, Spanberger’s congressional voting record — nearly 100% aligned with the Democrats’ progressive agenda — suggested her governance would be anything but.
Let’s start with the tax increases: HB979 would create two new tax brackets. Currently, Virginians are taxed at 5.75% for all income over $17,000. If this bill passes, residents earning between $600,000 and $1 million will be taxed at 8%, and those earning over $1 million will pay 10%.
Before anyone argues that these taxpayers can well afford it, remember that this group includes farmers, small businesses, and sole proprietors — many of whom are about to be “crushed” by the impact.
The advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform sounded the alarm on the proposed new taxes in a piece titled Democrats Pounce On Virginia Taxpayers. ATF noted, “Under unified Democrat control, Virginia is poised to become a tax-hiking outlier in a region full of states that are phasing out their income taxes.”
The article highlights some of the most shocking tax proposals now being advanced by state Democrats.
HB 378 – Imposes a 3.8% net investment income tax on individuals, trusts, and estates beginning in taxable year 2027. If enacted, HB 378 would raise VA’s top marginal income tax rate on portfolio and passive income to 9.55%.
HB 900 – Authorizes sales tax hikes in various transportation districts, imposes a new tax on each and every retail delivery in Northern Virginia (Amazon, Uber Eats, FedEx, UPS, etc.), similar to the one imposed in Minnesota by Gov. Tim Walz (D).
HB 919 – Imposes a firearm and ammunition tax equal to 11% percent of the gross receipts from the retail sale of any firearm or ammunition by a dealer in firearms, firearms manufacturer, or ammunition vendor, as such terms are defined in the bill.
HB 978 – Extends the retail sales and use tax to dry cleaning, landscaping, and other previously exempt services.
Democrats now control the legislature and Governor’s office in Virginia.
Here are just a few of the bills they’ve introduced
– New 4.3% sales tax on Uber Eats, Amazon, etc deliveries.
– New sales tax on admissions to a wide variety of businesses.
– Create two new higher tax…
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 19, 2026
NEW retail and sales taxes coming to Virginia introduced by Virginia Democrats in a single bill:
“Levies the retail sales and use tax on the following services: admissions; charges for recreation, fitness, or sports facilities; nonmedical personal services or counseling; dry… pic.twitter.com/ki96Ngpj6T
— NOVA Campaigns (@NoVA_Campaigns) January 19, 2026
This legislative blitz has something for everyone — including convicted criminals in the state.
HB863 would “eliminate mandatory minimum sentencing for rape, manslaughter, assaulting a law enforcement officer, possession and distribution of child pornography, and all repeat violent felonies.”
Funny how Democrats are now objectively and reflexively pro-rape…
Here at Davos, I’ve heard numerous versions of this sentiment: “We Europeans/Canadians stood up to Trump and forced him to retreat. This is a major victory for the rules-based international order.”
This is a very wrong take. The reality is that Trump won Davos, hands down. And not only did he win it; he owned it. I have never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important.
Snip.
Davos Man—I should say Davos Person—worries a lot more about such things than he—they—used to. The latest edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report, which is based on surveys of business executives and academics, ranks “geoeconomic confrontation” and “state-based armed conflict” as the No. 1 and No. 2 risks most “likely to present a material crisis on a global scale in 2026.” On a two-year time horizon, geoeconomic confrontation remains top of the list. Asked to characterize “the global political environment for cooperation on risks in the next decade,” 68 percent of respondents picked a “multipolar or fragmented order in which middle and great powers contest, set, and enforce regional rules and norms.”
All of this is just a series of Davosy euphemisms for the one big risk that Davos Person fears above all others: Donald Trump. This is funny when you consider last year’s mood, which—in the wake of Trump’s reelection—was very bullish about the United States under Trump 2.0. “Almost everyone at Davos is long U.S., short EU,” I wrote in these pages this time last year. “The new Davos consensus is that Europe cannot get its economic act together and never will, whereas America is rocking and rolling, and if you don’t own the big U.S. tech stocks, then the FOMO may kill you.”
My long-standing contrarian rule is that the Davos consensus is always wrong. In last year’s case, I added, Davos Person should be very careful what they wished for. Sure enough, in 2025 European stocks outperformed U.S. stocks. And, of course, Trump 2.0 has turned out to be every good European’s worst nightmare.
In the run-up to Davos 2026, Trump did his utmost to wind up Europe’s elite, not to mention Canada’s. On social media and in interviews, he insisted that he was determined to get Greenland for the United States. “Greenland has to be acquired,” he wrote on the eve of his arrival in Switzerland. “Denmark and its European allies have to DO THE RIGHT THING.” He did not rule out military action. He threatened to impose new 10 percent tariffs on all countries that resisted. And he posted memes of maps of Denmark (and Canada) cloaked in the Stars and Stripes and an AI-generated image of himself planting an American flag on “Greenland—U.S. Territory Est. 2026.”
To stoke up the crowd ahead of the president’s arrival, Trump’s cabinet members chimed in. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s anti-European trash-talking so enraged the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, that she stormed out of a Davos dinner. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent drolly wondered if European leaders might unleash their “most forceful weapon,” the “dreaded European working group.”
Snip.
This was vintage Trump, part real-estate pitch, part reality TV. “All we’re asking for is to get Greenland,” he riffed, “including right, title, and ownership, because you need the ownership to defend it. You can’t defend it on a lease. Legally, it’s not defensible that way, totally. And number two, psychologically, who the hell wants to defend a license agreement or a lease[?]”
As for the haters, “Canada lives because of the United States,” Trump declared. “Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.” And: “Here’s the story, Emmanuel. The answer is you’re going to do it. You’re going to do it fast. And if you don’t, I’m putting a 25 percent tariff on everything that you sell into the United States. And a 100 percent tariff on your wines and champagnes.”
Except that, almost as an aside, Trump then called the whole Greenland thing off. “We never ask for anything [from NATO],” he rambled, “and we never got anything. We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force where we would be, frankly, unstoppable. But I won’t do that. Okay? Now everyone’s saying, ‘Oh good.’ That’s probably the biggest statement I made because people thought I would use force. I don’t have to use force. I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force.”
Later that evening, following a “very productive meeting” with NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, Trump announced on Truth Social that he would not impose the additional tariffs on European countries he had threatened. He and Rutte had “formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region.”
Snip.
The problem with all of this is the premise that Trump ever seriously meant to annex Greenland or to impose new tariffs on the Europeans. Why would he when a) the United States already enjoys (under a 1951 treaty with Denmark and a 2004 agreement with Greenland) all the military access to the frigid island it could every possibly need, while the Danes pay for the heavily subsidized inhabitants of the island; and b) Trump means what he says on Truth Social only about half the time, according to The Wall Street Journal’s recent analysis of 2,700 substantive Truth posts. I’ll say it again: Half the time he’s bluffing. And it was the same when he was on Twitter in series one.
Snip.
Ten years ago, Europeans made the mistake of taking Trump neither seriously nor literally. Now they make the opposite mistake of treating him both seriously and literally. But, as Saleno Zito explained nearly 10 years ago, the correct approach is to take him seriously but not literally. The fact that Trump carries out only around half the threats he makes on social media is a feature, not a bug—and it’s certainly not a sign of weakness. It is a deliberate tactic designed to leave counterparties uncertain. On this occasion, Trump was bluffing, and the administration never had the remotest intention of imposing new tariffs on Europe, much less taking military action to annex Greenland.
So Trump asked for the moon, threatened to disastrous sanctions on his negotiating counterparts, and then settled for what he actually wanted all along.
Cue the tiny violins: “Eric Swalwell Could Be Ineligible for Governor or Face Jail Time.”
Eric Swalwell’s political ambitions just hit a major snag. Swalwell, most famous for public flatulence and bedding a Chinese spy, wants to be the next governor of California, but he is now the target of a court challenge that could blow his entire gubernatorial campaign out of the water before it even gets started.
The accusation? He doesn’t actually live in the state he wants to govern.
Conservative activist and filmmaker Joel Gilbert dropped a legal bomb on January 8, filing a petition in Sacramento Superior Court arguing that Swalwell is constitutionally barred from seeking the governor’s office.
Gilbert has a strong case.
California’s constitution requires gubernatorial candidates to live in the state for five years before the election. Gilbert says Swalwell has been living in Washington, D.C., not California, which makes him legally ineligible to run for office.
“Swalwell is ineligible to run for governor of California because the California constitution requires that a candidate live in the state for five years before an election,” Gilbert told PJ Media. “Swalwall has no home address in California; that’s why he committed perjury on his candidate statement form 501 by providing his attorney’s office for his home address. Swalwell has a sworn Deed of Trust on his Washington, D.C. home where he declared that location as his primary residence.”
The complaint gets more interesting from there.
Public records searches allegedly show that Swalwell has no ownership or lease of any California property — his congressional financial disclosures from 2011 through 2024 back this up, listing zero California real estate holdings. When Swalwell filed his campaign paperwork on December 4, he listed an address on Capitol Mall in Sacramento. The problem is that the address isn’t a residence; it’s the office of his Sacramento lawyer, Greenberg Traurig, located in a high-rise.
Swalwell owns a $1.2 million, six-bedroom home in northeast Washington, D.C., where he lives with his wife, Brittany Watts, and their three kids. Mortgage documents from April 2022 list that D.C. property as his “principal residence.”
There are really only two possibilities here, according to Gilbert: Swalwell either committed mortgage fraud — a serious crime that could result in prison time — or he’s ineligible to run for governor.
New Labor Department filings reveal the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers’ union, has been channeling millions in taxpayer dollars to far-left political outfits, including Soros-backed networks and shadowy activist groups.
Instead of bolstering education, these funds are propping up anti-American causes, from anti-Israel protests to rigging electoral maps.
The bombshell underscores the deep rot in union leadership, where public money meant for schools is weaponized against conservative values and national security.
The filings, obtained by Fox News Digital, paint a damning picture of misdirected priorities. “The NEA’s last fiscal year report showed it sent $300,000 to the 1630 Fund, the liberal dark money group Fox News has been reporting on extensively, and in most cases exclusively — Tens of thousands of dollars to the (George Soros’) Tides Foundation Network,” according to the report.
These aren’t voluntary donations from union members’ pockets—these are taxpayer dollars funneled through the system. The Tides Foundation has ties to anti-Israel activism, while the Sixteen Thirty Fund operates as a hub for progressive dark money, influencing elections without transparency.
The NEA didn’t stop there, the report notes, adding it “was also involved in several state issues. It backed a campaign to end standardized testing in Massachusetts and fight gerrymandering in Ohio, to the tune of half a million dollars for each of those and it sent hundreds of thousands of additional money to groups committed to racial and education justice movements.”
One of the biggest payouts was a whopping $3.5 million to Education International, a global teachers’ federation where NEA President Becky Pringle serves as vice president. Critics call it a cozy self-dealing arrangement, with American tax dollars flowing offshore to international agendas.
The subpoenas went to the offices of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, according the outlets, including Reuters, the New York Times and Fox News, which cited anonymous sources.
The subpoenas come days after the Department of Justice announced it was launching an investigation into Walz and Frey in connection with a suspected conspiracy to impede federal immigration enforcement in the state.
I am hoping there are also subpoenas in the works for several years of their bank records, to see how much they participated in the Somali fraud…
Over the past several days, it appears that Minneapolis police officers have quietly kind of quit in another way.
From Alpha News:
Around 100 Minneapolis police officers could soon be off duty for weeks to months from an already critically understaffed police department, and just as the city faces a serious public safety crisis with protesters inciting confrontations with the surge of federal agents working in the city.
Multiple sources confided to both Alpha News senior reporter Liz Collin and to Crime Watch Minneapolis that 60 to 100 officers from the Minneapolis Police Department have applied or plan to apply for the state’s new paid leave program. The Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) program was signed into law by Gov. Tim Walz during the 2023 DFL trifecta and went into effect on the first of this year.
This won’t end well: “Japanese Yields Soar To All Time High After PM Takaichi Calls Snap Election Seeking More Spending, Less Taxes.” Doubling down, yet again, on Abenomics, won’t solve Japan’s continuing problems.
New York has finally ended its nearly decade-long campaign to force Catholic nuns and other religious ministries to fund abortions.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty announced on Tuesday that New York agreed to enter into a settlement with their clients after a lengthy court battle over a state abortion mandate that went to the Supreme Court twice. Plaintiffs in the case, Roman Catholic Diocese v. Harris, included a group of Catholic and Anglican nuns, Catholic dioceses, Christian churches, and faith-based social ministries.
“For nearly a decade, New York bureaucrats tried to strong-arm nuns into paying for abortions because they serve all those in need,” said Lori Windham, senior counsel at Becket and an attorney for the religious groups. “At long last, the state has given up its disgraceful campaign. This victory confirms that the government cannot punish religious ministries for living out their faith by serving everyone.”
In a press release, AG James, who had previously worked to shut down the NRA because she disagreed with its politics, announced that she had closed down Betar, a pro-Israel group , for appearing at synagogues to defend them from Muslim mobs, for claiming that “that all devout Muslims ‘hate America’, and for making derogatory remarks about Islam and Gaza.
Did Howard University not cover the unconstitutionality of viewpoint discrimination back when James was obtaining her law degree there? (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Nick Shirley sat down with YouTuber Andrew Callaghan, and caught Callaghan deceptively editing the interview just like the MSM does.
Microslop 365. “Microsoft has invested tens to hundreds of billions of dollars into AI, okay? And so AI is not allowed to be the problem. And so it has to be you.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has issued a sweeping new legal opinion declaring that “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” programs rooted in race- and sex-based preferences are unconstitutional in the public sector and expose private companies to significant legal liability.
The 74 page opinion argues that government policies awarding opportunities or benefits based on “skin color or sex” cannot survive strict constitutional scrutiny and should be dismantled across Texas.
An attorney general opinion is a formal written interpretation of the law issued by the state’s top lawyer, typically in response to a legal question about how existing statutes or constitutional provisions should be applied.
Paxton’s office said the opinion targets decades of DEI frameworks embedded throughout state and local government, including programs in public institutions and schools. The attorney general framed the action as a return to equal opportunity and a rejection of what he called “woke, race-based favoritism.”
“This action to dismantle DEI in Texas helps fulfill the vision articulated by Martin Luther King, Jr. when he dreamed that his children would one day live in a nation where they were judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” Paxton said. “America is waking up to the egregious unfairness of DEI policies. People should be judged based on merit and the quality of their character and qualifications, not their race, sex, or any other inherent characteristic conferred at birth.”
Seems like apt phrasing for a decision issued on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Paxton added that “it’s imperative that all private-sector employers, schools, and state and local government entities—based on this legal opinion—immediately abolish any DEI, affirmative action, or unconstitutional discrimination programs under their authority.”
In the opinion itself, Paxton’s office contends that DEI has evolved into a system in which immutable traits have become “the currency of advancement,” spreading through academia, government, and private industry.
While an AG opinion can carry significant weight for state agencies and local governments—often shaping how officials administer programs and avoid legal risk—it does not, by itself, change the law, repeal statutes, or carry the force of a court order.
It does, however, signal how his office will treat DEI going forward.
If you read the decision, it goes into considerable detail not just on how racial preferences violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, and Paxton cites the words of American Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine and George Mason.
It also fiercely critiques the reintroduction of official support for racial preferences and the introduction of racial quotas under President Lyndon Baines Johnson in the name of “affirmative action,” as well of the slight-of-hand by which temporary solutions to address past discrimination have been transformed into permanent “diversity” bureaucracies. “The rhetoric that diversity is essential for ‘business survival’ continued to take form and brought with it a cottage industry of diversity training programs, networking, and mentoring programs that fixated on the advancement of women and minorities.”
The legal opinion concludes that race- and sex-based preferences in public institutions “cannot survive strict scrutiny and are therefore unconstitutional.”
It also warns that many private-sector DEI practices could trigger liability under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Texas Commission on Human Rights Act, and federal civil rights law, including Section 1981, as well as potential exposure under state and federal securities laws.
A major focus of Paxton’s opinion is Texas’ historically underutilized business (HUB) contracting framework, which Paxton describes as a “pervasive, discriminatory regime” that violates both the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause and the Texas Constitution’s Equal Rights Amendment.
The opinion argues the state’s HUB structure defines eligibility and access to government benefits by race and sex, triggering strict scrutiny and creating what it calls de facto quotas through race- and sex-based “targets.”
Plus a slam at current Senate race rival John Cornyn for failing to address DEI when he was Attorney General.
Our nation was founded on the radical notion that all are created equal. Though we have often failed to live up to that promise, it remains as a constitutional lodestar—both in the U.S. and Texas Constitutions. The race- and sex-based, public sector preferences discussed in this opinion cannot survive strict scrutiny and are therefore unconstitutional. Furthermore, a large body of DEI practices in the private sector triggers liability under Title VII, the Texas Commission on Human Rights Act, and Section 1981 in addition to state and federal securities law.
That should be the proper death-knell for DEI in Texas. The question remains how much resistance will Democrat-run blue locales like Austin and Houston, who desperately want to continue discriminating on the basis of race, put up against the ruling, and long will it take private sector entities to fall in line to limit their legal liability?
Judging from their actions in other states, leftwing activists seem to think they can protect illegal alien criminals from deportation by yelling, screaming and assaulting federal law enforcement officers. While that tactic might produce some success in blue cities in blue states that turn a blind eye to leftwing crime, that sort of law-breaking doesn’t fly in Texas.
A protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) moved through downtown Austin without a city permit Saturday night, leading to multiple arrests by law enforcement.
The protest was part of a wave that began after the fatal shooting of Minnesota woman, Renee Nicole Macklin Good, 37, by an ICE Deportation Officer in Minneapolis on Jan. 7.
The demonstration, organized by the group Dare to Struggle Austin, began around 6:30 p.m. Saturday outside the J.J. Pickle Federal Building, located on East 8th Street.
Dare to Struggle is one of those astroturf pro-illegal alien, anti-law enforcement organizations that seems to have sprung up overnight. Not much information online about their funding sources, but what are the odds that Soros or Singham orgs are bankrolling them?
“We were out there [Saturday] night to demand justice for Renee Good,” said Emi, a member of Dare to Struggle Austin.”
Good got justice. She tried to run over a federal agent and was killed in self defense.
The protesters blocked 8th Street around 6:30 p.m. Saturday. Austin Police Department (APD) and Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) officers arrived shortly after. Around, 6:45 p.m., DPS issued several loudspeaker warnings instructing protesters to leave the roadway or “force will be used.”
For nearly two hours, protesters marched through several downtown streets, blocking traffic as they moved. Emi said the group intentionally did not coordinate with law enforcement beforehand, adding that blocking streets was necessary “to challenge the system.”
“We believe it is right to rebel against a system that incarcerates people, puts them in detention centers, and tears families apart,” Emi said.
Translation: Our right to virtue signal trumps your right to use public streets.
Austin Police Association (APA) President Michael Bullock said Sunday that although people have a right to protest, public demonstrations must still operate within legal limits.
“The First Amendment is an inviolate right that people have and that we are here to safeguard,” Bullock said. “But that doesn’t mean you can trample on other people’s rights or impede traffic, take over roadways, or commit other criminal acts — that is not a First Amendment right.”
Indeed.
When the protest returned to the Pickle Building around 7:30 p.m., DPS sprayed a chemical irritant at the protesters. Many left the area shortly after.
Pepper spray!
Pepper spray!
Pepper spray makes us go away!
Multiple arrests were then made by APD and DPS officers. APD said it expects to have updated numbers available Monday.
Even though Austin is a deep blue city, the close scrutiny it receives as the capital city of a very red state means that it can’t get away with letting lawbreaking slide the way it does else, a point driven home by Texas governor Greg Abbott:
Happy New Year! The Somali welfare fraud scandal just grows and grows, Ukraine hits more Russian oil refineries, Iran revolts against the Mullahs, and Austin steels itself for an .0825% budget cut.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Here’s the original Nick Shirley video exposing child care fraud in Minnesota:
🚨 Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet. We uncovered over $110,000,000 in ONE day. Like it and share it around like wildfire! Its time to hold these corrupt politicians and fraudsters accountable
A 42-minute bombshell video by journalist Nick Shirley and a local private investigator documents an on-the-ground investigation in Minneapolis that alleges massive, ongoing fraud in government-funded social services. The main focus is on Somali-owned businesses in child daycare, adult/autism care, home healthcare, and non-emergency medical transportation programs that draw from the taxpayer-funded Child Care Assistance Program.
Shirley claims his team uncovered more than $110 million in questionable payments to Somali-owned businesses on just the first day of their investigation, as part of a broader welfare fraud scandal totaling upwards of $9 billion.
Shirley and the investigator visited several childcare facilities that had no visible children, toys, or activities during peak hours. Staff could not answer basic questions about rates or licenses. Both were denied entry to the reception areas of these facilities:
Quality Learing Center: Licensed for 99 children; received $4 million over two years. Sign misspells “learning” as “learing”; no children visible, doors locked, no playground.
Future Leaders Early Learning Center: Licensed for 90 children; received $6.67 million over two years. Facility empty; staff evasive when asked about child numbers.
Mako Child Care and Mini Child Care Center (combined): Licensed for 120 children; received $1.3M (2020), $987K (2021), $714K (2022), $1.6M (2025). No children observed.
ABC Learning Center: Licensed for 40 children; nearly $3 million over three years. Blacked-out windows, no activity.
Sweet Angel Child Care: Licensed for 74 children; $1.26 million in 2025 alone.
Millions of taxpayer dollars went to one daycare company that could not even spell “learning” correctly…
Agents with Homeland Security Investigations, the primary investigative arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are on the ground in Minneapolis Monday morning, conducting what DHS Secretary Kristi Noem described as a “massive investigation into childcare and other widespread fraud.”
Snip.
While allegations of Somali-linked welfare fraud in left-wing-controlled Minnesota have been known for years, the timing of Nick Shirley’s bombshell investigation suggests the federal government needed positive sentiment in the news cycle to begin the action phase on the ground. That’s usually how these types of operations work.
* * *
A viral video that has topped 76 million views on X within 48 hours has significantly heightened public scrutiny of multiple Minneapolis daycare centers linked to Somali operators that received millions in state and federal funding despite showing minimal operational activity. The apparent mismatch between allocated taxpayer funds and observable services strengthens a recent report by Christopher F. Rufo, which alleges that Somali-linked fraud in the left-wing-controlled state may involve front companies potentially diverting taxpayer funds to at least one overseas terrorist network.
Update: And according to FBI Director Kash Patel, the agency will “continue to follow the money” in Minnesota, and their investigation is “ongoing.” (And why did it take Chris Rufo cracking the case before they took action?)
“To date, the FBI dismantled a $250 million fraud scheme that stole federal food aid meant for vulnerable children during COVID. The investigation exposed sham vendors, shell companies, and large-scale money laundering tied to the Feeding Our Future network,” Patel said on Sunday.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party and its PR machine across left-wing corporate media outlets, including CBS, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, 60 Minutes, The New York Times, and the Associated Press, have largely remained silent on citizen journalist Nick Shirley’s investigation.
And the “Quality Learing Center” has been shut down…
Moreover, it’s obvious that the fraudulent child care facilities were always fraudulent, and yet the checks kept coming.
Daycare centers with millions of dollars in government funding and no children inside, and neighbors who say they’ve never seen children going in or coming out. This is a slam dunk, and I couldn’t possibly love it any more.
He names the daycare centers he visits, so you can start to find out how much the State of Minnesota knows about the scam without getting off the couch. Daycare centers are licensed and inspected: government inspectors regularly show up with a clipboard and look around. So go look at the record of inspections for Quality Learning Center of Minneapolis, the one in the video with the misspelled sign over the door. The whole thing instantly becomes darkly funny, because there’s no way anyone has ever believed that this is a functioning daycare center running at anything near its declared and funded capacity of 99 children.
He then supplied a list of 29 code violations just from May of 2022. And there are lists of violations from 12 other visits.
This inspection implies that there have been some children on site at some point, possibly family, but the inspector couldn’t identify anyone in the building: “The program did not have a file for each child,” and, “The program did not have a file for each staff person.” No training, no equipment, no records. This place has never been a functioning daycare center. No one has ever believed that it was. But the government checks kept coming, and government inspectors kept coming around and playing make-believe.
Spending in Minnesota has risen 19% per person since 2019.
As government does more and spends more, government does less. Explosive budget growth leads to declining effectiveness and quality. Low-tax red states pave the roads. High-tax blue states slop cash around to friends. Progressive elected officials view the task of governance as a series of costumed performances.
They’re not trying to run anything. They intend to make faces for the camera and steer money to their friends, the end.
The “Nick Shirley Effect” has begun, with Muckraker founder Anthony Rubin on the ground in Columbus, Ohio, home to the second-largest Somali community in the U.S., investigating daycare centers. This development comes less than a day after Ohio attorney Mehek Cooke said federal investigators are examining allegations that elements within Ohio’s Somali community defrauded millions of dollars from the state’s Medicaid system.
“The first Somali-affiliated daycare facility that we knocked on after landing in Columbus, Ohio, today did not answer,” Rubin wrote on X, alongside a video showing the daycare center, Great Minds Learning Academy.
Rubin continued, “A neighbor across the street told us, ‘I’ve never seen anybody come out of the building or go into the building.'”
On Sunday, Breitbart News published an interview with Ohio attorney Mehek Cooke, who alleges that members of the Somali community in Ohio have defrauded millions of dollars from the state’s Medicaid program. She said that authorities at the highest levels are investigating “what is happening in Ohio.”
Since Ohio is a red state, at least there’s a chance that officials there will actually investigate the fraud…
“Could Democrat Tim Walz Face Criminal Charges Over Growing Somali Fraud Scandal in Minnesota?”
The growing social services scandal in Minnesota — now reckoned to amount to billions of dollars — raises the possibility that the state’s two term Democratic governor, Tim Walz, could face criminal jeopardy.
Congressman James Comer, who leads the House Oversight Committee, is widening his probe into the scandal, which is centered on Minnesota’s Somali community. This week he took to Fox News to declare that “The walls are caving in on Tim Walz,” who was Vice President Kamala Harris’s choice as a running mate in the 2024 election. They lost to President Trump.
While regular citizens are not usually required to report crimes, public officials like Mr. Walz are usually held to a higher standard. They are generally seen to have a fiduciary duty to protect state assets. Actively concealing a felony could amount to the crime of “misprision of felony” or, alternatively to obstruction of justice. A failure to report could —theoretically — even lead to a charge of conspiracy, with the silent party accused of being an accessory to a crime.
Mr. Walz has a national reputation due to his service as Ms. Harris’s running mate, and has become a lightning rod for criticism of how such staggering fraud could have gone unnoticed for years until two New York-based publications, the New York Post and City Journal, an outlet of the conservative Manhattan Institute, published investigations.
Earlier this month, Mr. Walz sought to deflect negative attention from the Somali community, telling reporters that society “should be holding a lot of white men accountable for the crimes that they have committed,” rather than focusing on one ethnic group. Mr. Walz has also said he is accountable, as the fraud occurred “on my watch.” He added that “I am accountable for this, and more importantly, I am the one that will fix it.”
Mr. Comer announced his intention to invite whistleblowers to testify under oath and subpoena banks that operate out of Minnesota. He added that “hopefully we’ll have some criminal referrals at the end of this investigation.” Once a criminal referral is issued by Congress, it is up to the Department of Justice — led by Attorney General Pam Bondi — to seek indictments, perhaps of the governor himself.
Snip.
Mr. Comer, in a statement last week, declared that “The House Oversight Committee is aggressively investigating widespread fraud in Minnesota’s social services programs and the failures of Governor Walz’s administration that allowed taxpayer funds to be funneled to terrorist networks responsible for the deaths of Americans.” The reference is to allegations that stolen money made its way to the coffers of Al-Shabaab, a Somali terrorist group.
Longtime critics of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party – what the state’s Democratic Party is known as — accuse Mr. Walz of looking the other way at misconduct in the Somali community since they wield significant political power as a voting bloc.
Snip.
Prosecutors claim that more than half of the $18 billion in taxpayer funding spent on 14 Medicaid programs in Minnesota since 2018 was stolen. More than 90 people have been charged, the vast majority of Somali ancestry. The lead federal prosecutor, John Thompson, said in a statement earlier this month that “What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes. It is staggering industrial-scale fraud.”
The question, of course, is whether Walz is merely grossly incompetent, or an active participant in the fraud and the cover-up.
And why do Somalis keep getting away with all this fraud? Because Social Justice infected Democrat judges let them.
Meet three AWFL (Affluent, white, female, liberal) Minnesota judges who are making headlines for the most predictable reasons imaginable.
These ladies have recently dismissed cases against Somali fraudsters in Minnesota, even overturning jury verdicts, allowing the immigrants stealing millions from Americans and Minnesotans to walk free.
🚨 BREAKING: Multiple corrupt Minnesota judges are under fire for dismissing a FLURRY of recent Somali fraud cases
– Judge Sarah West: Abdifatah Yusuf – Judge Amber Brennan: Yusuf's wife Lul Ahmed – Judge Hilary Caligiuri: co-defendant Abdiweli Mohamud
Each of these judges found small, technical prosecutorial errors, resulting in the cases being tossed.
Snip.
Here’s local reporting in Minnesota on the case where Judge Sarah West tossed the jury verdict:
Jurors who were chosen for the case were shocked by West’s decision.
‘I am shocked,’ jury foreperson Ben Walfoort told KARE 11 News.
‘I’m shocked based off of all of the evidence that was presented to us and the obvious guilt that we saw based off of the said evidence.’
When the one case was tossed, these other lady judges decided to toss the related cases.
More Minnesota reporting:
… Judge West’s decision stems from a strict review standard for cases that involve mostly circumstantial evidence. A jury is not asked to consider that standard, but appeals courts do, and Young said in this case, Judge West based her decision on it …
Judges analyzing these cases look not just at proof beyond reasonable doubt but whether guilt is the ‘only reasonable hypothesis.’
‘In other words, if there is another reasonable explanation, that could be the reasonable doubt,’ Young said.
So Somali fraudsters haven’t been convicted because Democrat judges don’t want the fraudsters convicted.
In Iran, the people have launched massive protests against the theocratic government in the wake of the currency collapsing. “Protests come as the country deals with economic instability and declining living standards. Not to mention, citizens might just want to be a regular country instead of being the world’s terrorist state.”
In the videos, protesters chant anti-regime slogans and confront security forces in crowded streets.
Footage included scenes of screaming and apparent gunfire, with demonstrators throwing objects and shouting, ‘Death to the Dictator’ and ‘Proud Arakis, support, support.’
What proud Arakis might look like
Additional footage shared by MEK shows crowds chanting, ‘Death to Khamenei!’ and ‘Shame on you, shame on you!’ as anger appears to spread across the country, with a particular focus on bazaar-led protests in Tehran.
The four days of protest have left at least one Revolutionary Guard member dead and the country was at a “near standstill” for about a day due to the unrest. In the city of Fasa, protesters stormed the governor’s office, forcing the Revolutionary Guard to open fire on the insurrectionists. The military then flew helicopters over the city to intimidate the protesters.
Moreover, President Trump is threatening dire consequences if the regime starts killing protestors.
President Donald Trump warned early Friday that the U.S. would intervene if Iran started killing protesters.
Writing on Truth Social, the president said if Iran shoots and “violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue.”
“We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” Trump said.
Trump’s warning comes as demonstrations triggered by Iran’s deteriorating economy expand beyond the capital and raise concerns about a potential heavy-handed crackdown by security forces. At least seven people — including protesters and members of Iran’s security services — have been reported killed during clashes, according to international reporting.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) It’s possible that hostile regimes in Iran, Venezuela and Cuba could all be swept aside before the end of 2026.
Moscow suburb blacks out after Ukrainian drone strike on power sub-station.
Australia donated a number of M1A1 tanks to Ukraine, and they’ve already arrived and entered key fights.
Massachusetts: “When we said ‘life without parole’ we didn’t mean it.”
The Massachusetts Parole Board has granted parole to 39 individuals convicted of murder who were originally sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, following a landmark state Supreme Judicial Court decision that upended sentencing practices for a specific group of offenders.
Under the 2024 Commonwealth v. Mattis ruling, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court held that it is unconstitutional to impose life-without-parole sentences on people who were 18, 19 or 20 years old at the time of their offense. The court defined those in that age range as “emerging adults.”
If you’re old enough to vote, you should be old enough to hold accountable for murder.
As a result, individuals who previously had no opportunity for release were made eligible for parole hearings. In recent months, the Parole Board has processed dozens of cases under that framework, ultimately approving the release of 39 murder convicts while denying parole to a dozen others.
Murderers seem to be one of the social justice Democrats most respected constituencies.
Italian prosecutors said on Saturday they had arrested nine people on suspicion of financing Hamas through charities based in Italy, in an operation coordinated by anti-mafia and anti-terrorism units.
The suspects are accused of “belonging to and having financed” the Palestinian group – classified as a terrorist group by Israel, its top ally the U.S. and the European Union – prosecutors in the northern Italian city of Genoa said in a statement.
Those arrested allegedly diverted to Hamas-linked entities around 7 million euros ($8.2 million) raised over the last two years for ostensibly humanitarian purposes, prosecutors said. Police seized assets worth more than 8 million euros.
In another statement, police said officers had seized 1.08 million euros in cash found in the offices of a pro-Palestinian charity and in suspects’ homes, as well as material supportive of Hamas, Israel’s foe in the two-year Gaza war.
At this point it’s safer to just assume that every “Islamic charity” is funding terrorism.
Are you eating slave sushi? “Feds say Chinese brothers ran sushi slavery ring in Arizona that forced illegal aliens to work 7 days a week.” “Court documents allege Yung Lau, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from China, along with two managers, including his brother, kept dozens of undocumented immigrants in four “stash houses” and forced them to work at restaurants seven days a week with no days off. The restaurants involved were Sakura Sushi in Gilbert, Mesa, and Phoenix and Akita Sushi in Scottsdale.”
Austin’s municipal government is poised to cut its social services budget by approximately $5.3 million.
According to a memo from City Manager T.C. Broadnax, the city plans to “reallocate” social services contracts from a series of city departments. Affected departments include economic development, homeless strategies and operations, Austin community court, and public health.
The $5.277 million in proposed reductions represents a .0825 percent decrease from the record-setting $6.3 billion budget the city council passed in August.
This curtailment follows the landslide defeat of Proposition Q last November. Had it passed, Proposition Q would have represented a record-setting tax increase.
The council had previously approved $95 million in emergency budget cuts following Prop Q’s defeat.
The reductions come as a coalition of citizen groups has launched a petition drive to amend the city charter, requiring an independent audit of municipal finances before any future tax increases. If successful, this petition drive would place the proposed charter amendment on the May 2026 ballot.
A .0825% decrease isn’t enough. All the social justice items in Austin’s budget need to be removed with a chainsaw.
And speaking of Austin, groundbreaking on a planned downtown condo hes been delayed until market conditions improve.
Part 2 of the Professor of Rock’s interview with Rick Beato.
Matt of Diesel Creek once again exposes his junk to the camera. If you ever thought you’ve just got too many projects going on, here’s the ultimate “hold my beer.”
