Posts Tagged ‘2026 Election’

Cornyn’s Slaughter: A Postmortem

Thursday, May 28th, 2026

It’s pretty rare that a four term incumbent senator gets primaried out of office. Indeed, I think you’d have to go back to Alfonse D’Amato defeating Jacob Javits in 1980 for the last time it happened, back when New York was still capable of electing Republicans statewide. So it’s worth taking a deeper look at why John Cornyn got slaughtered by Ken Paxton in Tuesday’s runoff.

And a slaughter it was. Cornyn lost by 384,000 votes, or 27% of people voting. Nor was it a geographical narrow victory for Paxton. Cornyn lost everywhere:

Cornyn won two counties: Liberal, politics-obsessed Travis County, where Cornyn won by just over 2,000 votes, and (as commenter FM noted) rural coastal Kenedy County, the third least populous county in the state with 350 people, where Cornyn won by all of 6 votes to 2. If there’s ever been such a geographically dominant statewide victory in a runoff, I can’t remember it. (Dan Patrick walloped David Dewhurst by a slightly larger margin in the 2014 Lt. Governor runoff, but Dewhurst still won more counties than Cornyn did.)

Some national media has gotten a key fact about the race wrong. No, it was not a dead heat until President Trump endorsed Paxton; polls throughout the runoff constantly showed Paxton ahead by substantial margins. Indeed, between Paxton, Wesley Hunt, and longshot Sara Canady, fully 58% of Republican primary voters cast their ballots against longtime incumbent Cornyn, which should have been a big warning sign.

And if money was truly the only thing that mattered in politics, Cronyn should have mopped the floor with Paxton. Cornyn’s own campaign and allied Super PACs poured more than $100 million into Cornyn’s campaign to no visible effect.

No, the reason that Cornyn lost was because Texas Republicans were finally well and truly tired of him. Cornyn’s playing footsie with illegal alien amnesty while claiming he was against amnesty was one of the biggest reasons voters rejected him.

There’s being rejected by voters, then there’s being absolutely embarrassed.

That’s what we saw in Texas last night. John Cornyn, who outspent his opponent Texas AG Ken Paxton 10-1, was absolutely wrecked at the polls.

No incumbent senator has done worse than Cornyn in half a century, and no other election in U.S. history has seen two incumbent senators voted out in the same election.

Cornyn’s holdout on the SAVE Act, his pro-amnesty leanings, and his refusal to push Trump’s agenda, along with Ken Paxton’s statewide popularity and effectiveness totally sealed the deal.

Funny, Cornyn is a co-sponsor of the SAVE Act, but didn’t make himself conspicuous by trying to get the senate to actually pass it.

The GOP is WILDLY out of step with its voters, who keep trying to send the establishment a message.

Moreover, Paxton did better among Hispanic than white voters.

The population of Hidalgo County, Texas, is almost 100% Hispanic. Like many other similar counties, it had heavy support for Paxton.

While the number of Hispanics who voted in this primary was only in the tens of thousands, the fact that they supported the pro-deportation candidate even more than white voters is an important data point.

If you spend any time with Hispanic Americans, you will know that they hate people who cheat the system with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns. I am told this makes them racist.

John Cornyn has become the poster boy for someone who votes right the overwhelming majority of the time, but still manages to be out of touch with the base on their biggest priorities.

In a not-so different time and age, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) would still be considered one of the good guys: As a pro-life conservative who voted with President Donald Trump 99.2% of the time, just a generation earlier, he would’ve been lauded as one of our most staunchly conservative, reliably Republican senators.

And not just reliably Republican: He’s reliably a winner, too. Sen. Cornyn hadn’t lost an election in 42 years.

Yet last night, this four-term senator with a 42-year winning streak was smooshed like a bug, winning just 36% of the vote in his Republican primary runoff. Nearly two-thirds of his constituents rejected him!

Just like that, his political career is over. No second acts, no chance for redemption.

GOP politicians beware: The rules for Republican Party membership ain’t what they once were. Violate the new rules at your own peril.

But don’t look to the mainstream media to explain the new rules. Reductive, knee-jerk journalists can’t see beyond the Great Orange Monster, interpreting Cornyn’s fate — as well as Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), and a slew of Indiana state senators — as the umpteenth sign that Trump is a dictator/fascist/authoritarian.

Examples snipped.

The mainstream media defines “bipartisanship” as Republicans crossing the aisle to help Democrats. But when Democrats cross the aisle to help Republicans, they’re sellouts and traitors.

Case in point: Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.). Because he’ll occasionally side with Republicans, he’s a Judas to the Donkeys.

Snip.

Today, we expect a Republican district will send a loyal, dependable Republican representative to Washington. Helping our GOP “team” is considered part of the job. And given how narrow the margins are, we’re unwilling to sacrifice a roster spot for someone who refuses to play ball.

It’s a luxury we can no longer afford.

Congressmen and senators aren’t simply judged by how much pork they can peddle. Not anymore — that’s as out-of-fashion as parachute pants, Wham! records, and the mullet. Instead, they’re judged by how effectively they help their “team” advance the national football.

That’s because the Democratic Party has changed. Until the Obama years, it was a coalition party: liberals, unions, Catholics, environmentalists, blue-collar workers, minorities, and women. Post-Obama, it became a vehicle for left-wing radicalism — and this alone became its North Star.

Not compromise. Not meeting in the middle. Its stated goal was “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Which made conservative compromise an impossibility.

The Republican Party and the Democratic Party have evolved to address each other’s deficiencies. It was probably inevitable: The political marketplace demanded it, because they’re competing products.

So, when one party changes, so must the other:

As the Democrats have embraced socialism, Wokeism, and trans/LGBTQ policies, Republican voters have recoiled in horror. We want our party to protect us from their madness.

And that’s an all-hands-on-deck challenge.

The Democratic Party nationalized state elections in 2008 with Barack Obama. It ceased to consist of free-wheeling, locally attuned legislators who represented different segments of the Democratic coalition and became a unified, unapologetic, left-wing movement that placed ideology first.

The Democrats’ goal wasn’t compromise. It was victory.

And during the Obama years, the Democrats won a lot.

The MAGA movement responded by nationalizing elections on the Republican side, too. It’s one of Donald Trump’s most significant legacies, because pre-Trump, we were a party of John Fettermans — always ready to swing a deal and compromise — and the best we could hope for was electing the occasional John Cornyn, who’d sway his GOP colleagues a little to the right.

It was an age when the Republican Party AND the Democratic Party were moving to the left. The only difference was, the Republicans moved slightly slower than the Democrats.

The Trump revolution wasn’t just a response to Democratic Party excesses. It was also a stinging rebuke to the GOP establishment — and to Republican politicians who’d cosplay as senior statesmen, earning mainstream media “kudos” for (repeatedly) bending their knee before their Democratic masters.

Snip.

Under the old rules, “conservative” senators like John Cornyn were incentivized to move to the middle, because their Republican seats were safe. Nobody dared primary a sitting GOP senator; therefore, his only real threat was being too “extreme” and angering the left.

As such, many conservative states and conservative districts had wishy-washy RINOs representing them in Congress. (Many were there for decades at a time.)

It was inefficient. We were squandering precious resources.

Not anymore. Now, on a national level, we expect more from conservative states and conservative districts — not less — and we’ll vote you out of office if you don’t deliver.

Like it or not, there are no local federal elections anymore. Everything is national. For better or worse, politics has become the ultimate team sport.

And the team that maximizes its resources is the one that will win.

If you want a bright future in today’s Republican Party, the path is clear: Be an asset to your team. Become indispensable. Listen to your coach, know your role, and do it well.

And let’s score some frickin’ points!

(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

Finally, it wasn’t all about Cornyn’s manifest deficiencies. Ken Paxton, despite being grossly outspent, was simply the more conservative candidate. Hell, Paxton even tried to unseat Joe Straus for speaker back when he was in the Texas House. He was the most conservative candidate when he first ran for Attorney General. He started fighting the radical dictates of the Obama administration and social justice initiatives here in the state in his first term. As I’ve said many a time before, I say about Paxton what Abraham Lincoln said about Ulysses S. Grant: “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”

For all the money backing him, Cornyn was a weak candidate who’d grown out of touch with the base and state he represented. But Ken Paxton got the nod to be the Republican candidate for U.S. Senator from Texas the old fashioned way: He earned it.

Paxton Slaughters Cornyn, Middleton and Thomas Win, French Leading

Wednesday, May 27th, 2026

Outgoing Rep. Dan Crenshaw can rest slightly easier tonight: His is no longer the most embarrassing incumbent Texan Republican loss of 2026.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton slaughtered incumbent John Cornyn in the Republican runoff. As of this writing, the Texas Tribune tracking page has Paxton garnering 64% of the vote against Cornyn’s 36%. That’s a crushing defeat for a four-term incumbent, especially one who went into the runoff with a slight lead over Paxton. But once in the runoff, Paxton constantly polled ahead of Cornyn, with Republicans dissatisfied with Cornyn’s defections on key conservative priorities over the years (especially on the issue of illegal alien amnesty), and President Trump endorsing Paxton over Cornyn was the final nail in his coffin. I mean, look at this freaking map:

That’s a curb-stomping.

State Senator Mayes Middleton scored a decisive win over U.S. Congressman Chip Roy in the Texas Attorney General’s race by around a 55-45% margin. I think Middleton ran the more effective direct mail campaign, establishing himself as the “MAGA” and cultural conservative candidate early on, and painting as weak on a variety of cultural issues early on. I didn’t see any actually see any flyers for Roy until the week of the runoff, when it was way too late.

Thomas Smith beat Alison Fox decisively by about 58-42% for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Place 3.

Right now, Bo French is leading incumbent Jim Wright by about 26,000 votes with 94% of ballots in, so I think he’s going to hold on to win. That would mean I was 4 for 4 in my runoff picks. Behold, the power of my endorsements! (If they are powerful, it’s a pretty recent development, given my support for the Presidential campaigns of Jack Kemp, Phil Gramm and Rick Perry.)

In other results:

  • Maureen “send Zionist to the camps” Galindo lost handily to Johnny Garcia for the TX-35 Democrat nomination.
  • Colin Allred beat Julie Johnson for the TX-33 Dem nod.
  • TX-18 incumbent Christian Menefee (age 38) beat TX-9 incumbent Al Green (age 78) in the Democrat TX-18 primary by a 2-1 margin.
  • Speaking of TX-9, the Trump-endorsed Alex Mealer beat Briscoe Cain (who supported Dade Phelan and voted for the Paxton impeachment) in the Republican primary by an over 2-1 margin.
  • It’s late and thunderstorms are rolling through, and I’ve already briefly lost power a couple of times, so I’ll go ahead and press publish on this. But it was a very good night for Texas conservatives.

    Possibly more tomorrow.

    Texas Runoff Election Roundup

    Tuesday, May 26th, 2026

    Today is primary runoff day in Texas, so get out and vote if you haven’t already.

    Here’s a brief roundup of Texas election-related news.

  • First up, the crazy Democrat in the 35th Congressional District runoff who literally wants to send Jews to camps.

    TX-35 Democratic candidate Maureen Galindo says she will convert ICE detention center in Karnes County into an internment camp for “American Zionists.”

    “It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists,” she added.

    If you’re an American and you support Israel, well, it’s the Texas concentration camp for you.

    A much better use of resources than deporting illegal immigrants, for sure.

    Here’s the San Antonio Current:

    ‘She’ll turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking,’ Galindo wrote in an Instagram post over the weekend, referring to herself in the third person. ‘It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists.’

    Johnny Garcia is her primary opponent. The 35th used to be an Austin-San Antonio district, but redistricting changed to stretch from southeast San Antonio all the way down to just short of Goliad.

  • Gambling interests are pouring a lot of money into the Railroad Commission runoff.

    One $500,000 donation by the casino advocacy group funded by the Las Vegas Sands Corp. has made it the single largest donor in the runoff election for the Texas Railroad Commission, the department largely responsible for regulating the oil and gas industry.

    Texas voters heading to the polls in the Republican Primary Runoff Election for the Texas Railroad Commission are getting a fresh look at how big-money players from the gambling world are trying to shape even the most obscure corners of state government.

    Incumbent Commissioner Jim Wright just reported a $500,000 contribution from Texas Sands PAC, the latest in what has become a pattern of heavy spending by casino-backed groups and predatory gambling interests in Texas elections.1

    Right off the bat, the donation looks out of place. The Railroad Commission’s core job is regulating oil and gas production, pipelines, and mining. It has nothing to do with gambling or casino bills and legalization. Yet a PAC funded directly by Las Vegas Sands, the Chinese-centered casino giant, has decided half a million dollars is a smart investment in Wright’s reelection.

    I wonder how Chinese gambling interests think they can benefit from having their man on the Railroad Commission.

    Wright is running against conservative Bo French.

  • In the last week, Chip Roy finally started dropping flyers in his runoff against Mayes Middleton, something Middleton has been doing for months. So behold this tale of two flyers:

    The problem for Roy is that Middleton has already been painting him as the the “non-MAGA” candidate for months. Any low-information voters that could be persuaded by a flyer have probably already been persuaded that Middleton is the MAGA candidate. Roy let himself be outMAGAed early in the race and I don’t see him catching up now.

  • I already voted early for:

  • Texas Senate race: Ken Paxton over John Cornyn
  • Texas Attorney General race: Mayes Middleton over Chip Roy
  • Texas Railroad Commission: Bo French over Jim Wright
  • Court of Criminal Appeals Place 3: Thomas Smith over Alison Fox
  • Go vote if you haven’t already!

    LinkSwarm for May 22, 2026

    Friday, May 22nd, 2026

    More of the Democrat election fraud that doesn’t exist, more Democrat welfare state fraud, a commie scumbag gets indicted, Ukraine returns to hammering Russia’s oil infrastructure, a very busy week for Kash Patel, the BBC wants us to sympathize with Muslims who enable child rape, and the best bagels in America are found in…Dallas?

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • “Left’s election fraud denials crumble as DOJ exposes two-decade-long California cheating scheme. FBI Director Kash Patel says prior administrations looked the other way on election cheating but ‘those days are over.'”

    Despite evidence to the contrary, liberal voting activists have spent years minimizing cheating concerns and portraying those who want to investigate such problems as “election deniers.”

    But the FBI and the departments of Justice and Homeland Security are now systematically exposing electoral fraud – from non-citizen voting to ballot-box-stuffing schemes that are turning the table in epic fashion.

    The latest strike came Monday when a longtime voting activist in California reached a deal with federal prosecutors to admit to illegally paying homeless people to sign election petitions and paying people to register to vote. The two-decade scheme allegedly leveraged the Democrat-run state’s lax mail-in voting system, which sends ballot forms to everyone whether they ask for them or not.

    The felony charge and plea deal announced Monday against Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, 64, of Marina Del Ray, Calif., not only signals an investigation into others, it likely will provide legal fodder to the Justice Department’s efforts to force California to turn over its voter registration database to look for other abuses.

    That case, and others like it against blue states, are working their way through the federal courts in a major initiative led by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.

    Prosecutors said Armstrong spent two decades collecting ballot registration forms, including in California’s high-profile voter initiatives. On occasion, Brown targeted homeless people on Skid Row in Los Angeles, offering them money to fill out forms, and even sometimes letting them use her own address to put on the forms.

    The plea deal mentioned Armstrong was paid by “coordinators” to gather signatures for ballots, and she used some of that money to enlist people to register to vote and sign petitions.

    “Because her coordinators only paid for signatures attributable to registered voters, Armstrong endeavored to ensure the people who signed her petitions were registered voters,” the DOJ said in announcing the plea deal.

    “Armstrong regularly paid and offered to pay individuals cash, usually in amounts between $2 and $3, to induce them to sign her petitions,” DOJ said, adding in January she “knowingly and willfully paid another person to register to vote. She paid the person for the purpose of causing that person to register to vote in federal elections.”

    Democrats have hundreds of ways to cheat in elections, and one by one the Trump Administration is shutting them down and prosecuting the perps.

  • A vast improvement: “Trump administration had full year of zero border releases.”

    While campaigning in 2024, President Donald Trump pledged to fix the nation’s broken immigration system, a system exacerbated by the rogue incompetence of the Biden administration. Now, after 18 months into his second term, Trump has maintained his excellence in border security and upheld his campaign promise regarding illegal immigration, as the Trump administration has achieved a year of zero releases at the U.S.-Mexico border.

    Whereas the Biden administration wantonly permitted, if not outright encouraged, border security agencies to release illegal immigrants into the United States, Trump has ensured such ineptitudes would not happen under his watch. After innocent victims such as Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, Jocelyn Nungaray, and many others were murdered by violent illegal immigrants, the Trump administration utilized every possible avenue to ensure that such atrocities would not recur. The first barrier to accomplishing this was limiting border releases.

    It is a remarkable success that shows the country’s border security issues stem from failed leadership and a failed president. Biden’s atrocious border policies made the country more dangerous. Trump’s policies made the country safe again. It’s a success that should not go unrecognized.

    Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin touted the historic feat in a press release.

    “Twelve straight months of ZERO releases at the border. Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, we are delivering the most secure border in American history,” Mullin said. “The days of catch and release are over. We are enforcing the nation’s laws and sending illegal aliens back to their home countries.”

  • Another day, another indictment for Minnesota welfare state fraud. Kash Patel:

    Today – 15 individuals have been indicted for over $90 million in an alleged massive healthcare fraud scheme in Minnesota, after a sweeping FBI investigation with @TheJusticeDept
    and our Interagency Partners.

    These charges involve the two LARGEST Medicaid fraud cases ever charged in this district and first-of-their kind charges involving 7 additional Medicaid programs.

    As alleged, the defendants defrauded Minnesota public healthcare resources for tens of millions, targeting programs such as Housing Stabilization Services, Child Care, Medicaid programs, Individualized Home Supports (IHS), and more.

    In one case, defendants even developed a scheme worth over $40 million to target the Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention (EIDBI) – an autism healthcare program – paying kickbacks to parents who fraudulently used autism centers to diagnose children with autism regardless of medical necessity, and billing for services not actually provided. This not only defrauded taxpayers, but robbed valuable resources from families truly in need.

    President Trump gave this law enforcement team a mandate to investigate and systematically dismantle this exact kind of public fraud in America – which grossly abuses and mismanages money from hardworking American taxpayers – and that’s exactly what we’re doing. Today’s indictment in a massive moment in this effort.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “The Democratic Model: Corruption as a Feature, Not a Flaw.”

    Gavin Newsom is, in many ways, the most corrupt governor in America.

    By that, I don’t mean that he spends his time and effort skimming off the top to put money in his own pockets. I have no evidence that he does, although an awful lot of money flows to and through the fingers of his wife. His personal wealth is not staggering by California standards—estimated at a few tens of millions of dollars—and he has it through his relationship with the Getty Oil family. Sort of a nepo-baby once removed.

    His corruption is more in the style of Putin—using power to make others rich and indebted to him, and he has pillaged the coffers of the City of San Francisco and the State of California in order to do so. The ultimate goal is ultimate power, and his path to that power has been to leverage the power he has gained at each step up the ladder to enrich a group of allies who will, in turn, fund his rise further.

    In 2023 Newsom was given a bill to sign that would have required private insurers to cover hearing aids for children. Many other states require insurers to cover them.

    According to NY Post, Newsom vetoed the bill and decided instead to have the state provide the hearing aids. The result was $23 million spent on hearing aids for 300 people. About $76,000 a person. About 20,000 children in CA still need hearing aids.

    Well done Gavin.

    The scale of Newsom’s corruption is almost beyond comprehension. California, if it were its own country, would have the fourth-largest economy in the world. Its economy is about twice the size of Russia’s, and its state budget is about 50% larger than Russia’s, despite having no war to fund against Ukraine or anybody else besides the taxpayers of California.

    That gives a lot of room for corrupt spending, especially when nobody is looking to uncover it.

    The other day, I took a look at Newsom’s Baby 2 Baby free diaper program, which is an obvious scam, paying highly inflated prices for cheap Mexican diapers to an NGO run by friends of his wife, who all make nice salaries.

    Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Suck it, commie scumbag: “Former Cuban President Raul Castro indicted in US court.”

    The United States has indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro, a senior Trump administration official confirmed. A federal grand jury in Florida indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro along with five other defendants, according to court filings made public Wednesday.

    The charges mark a major escalation in a long-running US legal case tied to the 1996 downing of two civilian aircraft, an incident that killed four people and has remained a flashpoint in US-Cuba relations for decades.

    Castro, 94, served as Cuba’s defense minister at the time of the shootdown before becoming president in 2008, following the illness of his brother Fidel Castro. Fidel Castro died in 2016.

    Remember that the commie rulers have a secret corporation (GAESA (Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A.) that allows them to rob Cubans blind. “How is it possible for a military company to control 40% of the national economy, accumulate $14.5 billion in bank deposits, not publish financial statements, avoid paying taxes in foreign currency, and not be accountable to the National Assembly?”

  • Hope you enjoyed your Victory Day parade, Vlad. “Moscow Attacked By Drones: Oil Depot, Microchip Factory & Airport All Hit.” The chip factory is Angstrem, which was reportedly running some very ancient process technology indeed. But I bet a bunch of what they could produce was used by the Russian military.
  • Big Drone Strike on Kstovo Oil Refinery: Fourth Biggest in Russia.” This is in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, east of Moscow.
  • Big Strike on Syzran Oil Refinery by Drones: Fourth Hit in a Week.”
  • Huge Fire at Moscow as Factory/Warehouse Burns!” Possibly a drone strike, possibly something else.
  • “Ukraine Liberates Stepnohirsk in Zaporizhzhia.”
  • Multiple Tanks & MT-LB Destroyed. A Russian mechanized assault was defeated near Chervonyi Lyman, Donetsk Oblast.”
  • “Buyan-Class Corvette Reported SUNK At Kaspiysk Naval Base, Caspian Sea.”
  • “Drones Completely Destroy FSB Base on Arabat Spit: 100 KIA/WIA.” That’s the thin strip of land immediately to the east of Crimea.
  • Yo, dawg, we hear you like drones, so we put attack rockets on your drones, and hit a Russian Black Sea Fleet base with them.
  • “Former Texas Lottery Director Gary Grief Re-Indicted After Travis County DA Dismissed Initial Charges. Also indicted is the now-defunct Texas Lottery Commission.”

    Gary Grief, the former executive director of the Texas Lottery Commission, has been re-indicted in connection with a rigged jackpot following the dismissal of a prior indictment.

    A summons was issued one day after Texas Scorecard originally reported that an initial indictment against Grief had been quietly dismissed by the Travis County District Attorney’s office.

    The reissued indictment, a carbon copy of the first, and the new summons come amid ongoing scrutiny of the handling of the high-profile case.

    Travis County District Attorney José Garza told Texas Scorecard Thursday he could not currently comment on the matter, but that his office would release more information on the case soon.

    Before the latest indictment came to light, Gov. Greg Abbott called the initial dismissal “incomprehensible.”

    Snip.

    Court records posted to X by Dylan McKim with KXAN-AUSTIN indicate that not only was Grief summoned, but the Texas Lottery Commission itself is named. A separate indictment identifies Ed Rogers and Clay Kidd alongside Grief as “managerial agents” acting on behalf of the agency.

    Notably, Ryan Mindell, Grief’s right-hand man at the Texas Lottery Commission in 2023 and his short-lived successor, is not currently summoned in connection with the case. Mindell quit the commission after lawmakers called for his removal during the 2025 legislative session.

    The original indictment against Grief was secured in April 2026 on a first-degree felony charge of abuse of official capacity involving more than $300,000, stemming from a rigged $95 million jackpot.

    The charge came after a year-long investigation by the Texas Rangers into Grief’s controversial authorization of third-party companies that resold lottery tickets on behalf of customers, effectively enabling the online sale of Texas lottery tickets without legislative approval.

    During the 2023 legislative session, Grief misled members of the Senate about resellers operating openly in Texas. The practice was ultimately outlawed during the 2025 legislative session after revelations that couriers facilitated bulk purchases, leading to a $95 million Lotto Texas jackpot win in April 2023 that was reportedly rigged by an international gambling syndicate.

    Yeah, that lottery win was suspicious as hell.

  • Massie Ousted by Trump-Backed Challenger in Kentucky Primary.”

    Farmer and former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein prevailed over Representative Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) in a closely watched primary race on Tuesday evening, bringing to an end the most expensive U.S. House primary on record.

    Massie, who has represented Kentucky’s fourth district since 2012, is one of several lawmakers to lose a seat this cycle thanks to a retribution campaign Trump has undertaken against legislators who have dared to cross him.

    The bad blood between Massie and Trump dates back to the president’s first term. As early as 2020, Trump called the Kentucky Republican a “third-rate grandstander” after Massie voted against the president’s Covid-19 relief package.

    While Trump and Massie seemed to make amends, with Trump endorsing Massie for reelection in 2022, the president’s second term has seen the pair butt heads repeatedly over a slew of issues, from the Iran war to tariffs.

    Trump on Monday blasted Massie as an “obstructionist and a fool.”

    Massie, who also controversially opposed Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” worked with Democratic Representative Ro Khanna of California to advance a bill in Congress to compel the Trump administration to release government files on deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

    Massie’s opposition to U.S. aid to Israel and his vote against a resolution condemning antisemitism made him a target of not only the president but the Republican Jewish Coalition and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as well. Both groups have spent more than $4 million on anti-Massie ads.

    You can stray from the party on an issue or two and still survive, but when you make a habit of working with Democrats against stated Republican priorities time after time, expect a reckoning.

  • Republicans have one thing going for them in the midterms: Fat stacks of cash.

    The Republican National Committee ended the month of April with more cash on hand than at any other point in the group’s history, as closely contested midterm elections draw near and the fate of Republicans’s majority in the House and Senate hang in the balance.

    The RNC raised $18.6 million in April, bringing its total cash on hand to $123.8 million, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

    “Republicans have the candidates, resources, and momentum needed to win the midterms, but we cannot let up now,” RNC Chairman Joe Gruters said in a statement. “Democrats will spend whatever it takes to try to stop President Trump’s America First agenda, which is why the RNC is already investing aggressively in our ground game and election integrity operation, including deploying 34 State Directors and Election Integrity Directors across 17 key battleground states to drive turnout and secure victories this November.”

  • Democrats lie to everyone, including themselves: “Harris Campaign Didn’t Go Negative Enough on Trump, DNC Autopsy Concludes.”

    A newly-released Democratic National Committee report looking back at how the party lost the 2024 election concludes that then-Vice President Kamala Harris lost, in part, because she failed to focus sufficient negative attention on President Trump.

    “The national campaign did not effectively drive Trump’s negatives, and the White House did not effectively support Vice President Harris over three and half years to improve her standing before the candidate switch,” reads the autopsy, written by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, who was asked by the DNC to investigate why the party failed to wing big in 2024.

    Rivera goes on to suggest that Democrats failed to remind Americans why they disliked Trump in his first term.

    “The idea Trump’s negatives were ‘baked in’ is a major failure of analysis and reality, given how his favorability has cratered less than a year into this term,” he adds.

    Rivera’s finding that Harris wasn’t sufficiently negative is curious given that Harris and her surrogates incessantly depicted Trump as a threat to democracy who revealed his true colors on January 6.

    Harris attacked Trump repeatedly during the campaign, calling her opponent “increasingly unhinged and unstable” and telling CNN that she believed he was a fascist who wanted “unchecked power.”

    Party officials interviewed hundreds of Democrats in all 50 states to create the report. Democrats had asked DNC Chairman Ken Martin for months to publicly release the findings, but Martin chose to do so only after being “presented with CNN’s reporting about much of its contents,” according to the outlet, which first obtained the nearly 200-page report.

    The report is littered with notes drafted by DNC editors pointing out that many of Rivera’s claims are unsubstantiated and/or contradict publicly available reporting.

    Yay think? It wasn’t the fact that, oh, Harris was a cringingly bad candidate, that Biden was an ambulatory corpse whose headless administration was a disaster for ordinary Americans thanks to inflation and letting a flood of illegal aliens enter the country, or that actual voters hate transsexual madness and social justice lunacy? But no, telling the truth would offend the Party’s toxic cadres of intersectional grievance mongers. They’d rather lie to themselves and continue to lose rather than being dragged on BlueSky.

  • Supreme Court rules that trucking companies can be held liable for unsafe drivers. Result: Foreign drivers are suddenly off the road.

    This trucker is in Eden, Ohio, and just parked at a truck stop where he got a bite to eat at an Indian restaurant.

    (Sikh Indians now own 20% of all trucking businesses in North America.)

    He says foreign truckers are being hit HARD after the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that logistics companies can be held liable for hiring unsafe drivers.

    None of ‘em can get loads out of Ohio today. And I was talking to the Iman guy while I was in there at the Punjabi place getting something to eat, and he said that the reason they they can’t get freight out of Ohio today is because the freight workers won’t work with them anymore.

    Apparently, what has happened, is yesterday they had the Supreme Court ruling that brokers could be held liable for accidents with carriers with red flags. Apparently, the trickle trickle-down effect happened like THAT.

    A leftist might look at this and say it’s racist. An “inequitable” number of carriers with foreign drivers are being excluded??

    Well, as it turns out, these truckers just so happen to be the ones that are the least safe.

    I was looking up a few of these DoT numbers for these guys, and they do have pretty substantial track record of unsafe behavior – accidents, high out-of-service rates, things like that.

    Many foreigners, even illegals, have been able to game the system, getting CDLs issued by Democrat-led states like New York and California even though they are not qualified. CDL schools run by migrants have participated in this fraud for years.

    Meanwhile, the number of deaths involving 18 wheelers on U.S. roads has risen 50% in just the last 15 years. Thanks to SCOTUS, that might reverse very quickly in the near future.

    As a bonus, Americans will have a chance to get back into a trucking industry that’s excluded them in favor of cheap, unsafe, illegal labor!!

  • And more wins over scamming foreigners: “FBI shuts down Indian call center for defrauding Americans.”

    The FBI announced on Wednesday that they were shutting down a scam call center in India which has defrauded hundreds of elderly Americans out of millions of dollars.

    Snip.

    Former CEO Adam Young, 42, of Miami, FL, and former CSO Harrison Gevirtz, 33, of Las Vegas, NV, admitted to operating a business that provided telecommunications-related services, including telephone numbers, call routing services, call tracking, and call forwarding services, to customers they knew were engaged in tech-support fraud schemes. Young and Gevirtz each pleaded guilty to misprision of a felony, in violation of federal law. They are scheduled to be sentenced on June 16, 2026. The sentences imposed will be determined by a federal district judge after consideration of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors …

    Indian citizens Sahil Narang, Chirag Sachdeva, Abrar Anjum and Manish Kumar, were convicted of charges related to telemarketing fraud schemes based in the Republic of India that targeted and defrauded Americans of millions of dollars, many of them vulnerable to fraud schemes due to age or infirmity. The investigation also contributed to the conviction of another individual, Jagmeet Singh Virk, in the U.S. District Court for the Norther [sic] District of California. The investigation further revealed that call centers based in India utilized Young and Gervitz’s business to route their ‘tech fraud’ scheme calls and, in some instances, advised those fraudsters on methods intended to reduce complaints and prevent account terminations.

    Now if they could just shut down every Indian company pretending to be an American company (a plague among temporary and contract work firms), that would greatly improve the situation for American job seekers.

  • “Tulsi Gabbard is stepping down from her role as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to support her husband, Abraham, as he battles an extremely rare form of bone cancer.”
  • “Texas Children’s Hospital Agrees to Create Detransition Clinic, Pay $10 Million in ‘Historic’ Settlement. The agreement stems from a years-long investigation into alleged Medicaid fraud tied to sex-change procedures on minors.”

    A years-long controversy surrounding gender mutilation procedures at Texas Children’s Hospital have culminated in a sweeping settlement with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that will force the hospital to pay $10 million, fire five doctors, halt “gender-transition” procedures, and create the nation’s first “Detransition Clinic.”

    According to Paxton’s office, the settlement resolves allegations that Texas Children’s improperly billed Texas Medicaid for sex-change interventions using false diagnosis codes despite longstanding state policy prohibiting Medicaid coverage for such procedures.

    Under the agreement, Texas Children’s will establish a multidisciplinary clinic intended to provide care to patients who previously underwent “gender-transition” procedures. The hospital will fully fund the clinic for at least five years, with services provided free of charge to patients.

    The settlement also requires Texas Children’s to terminate and permanently revoke privileges for five physicians accused of performing the procedures. The hospital further agreed not to provide “gender-transition” services moving forward and to adopt new ethics and compliance measures.

    We asked the sick leftwing freaks not to mutilate children in the name of their perverse social justice religion, and they just couldn’t help themselves.

  • Case in point: All but eight Democrats vote against bill to let parents know if teachers are trying to trans their kids.
  • [sigh]: “Federal Judge Again Blocks Texas Law Allowing Arrest and Deportation of Illegal Immigrants.”

    Just one day before a controversial Texas law on illegal immigration was set to take effect, a federal judge granted a new injunction saying most of the law would not pass constitutional muster before the U.S. Supreme Court.

    U.S. District Judge David A. Ezra, who blocked implementation of Texas Senate Bill (SB) 4 in 2024, opined that the law “threatens the fundamental notion that the United States must regulate immigration with one voice.”

    Approved by lawmakers in 2023, SB 4, filed by Texas Sen. Charles Perry (R-Lubbock), established a criminal offense for illegal entry into the state from a foreign nation, and provided a mechanism for judges to order offenders to return to their nation of origin.

    Implementation was delayed until the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a pending lawsuit last month on the grounds that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue, clearing the way for the law to take effect on May 15.

    Earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Texas Civil Rights Project filed a new challenge on behalf of two unnamed individuals who said they could be arrested and subject to SB 4’s provisions.

    Ezra’s injunction applies to four provisions of SB 4: criminal penalties for re-entry without authorization; authorizing magistrates to order deportation; criminalization of failure to comply with a Texas magistrate’s deportation order; and SB 4’s requirement that magistrates continue a prosecution even when a person has a pending immigration case under federal law.

    In his opinion released last week, Ezra noted that while federal authorities can elicit help with immigration enforcement actions from state and local law enforcement, SB 4 would clash with precedent set in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling in Arizona v. United States.

  • “British authorities finally give Pakistani rape gang nearly 300 years of combined jail time for crimes committed 23+ years ago.”

    The offences mainly took place in Dewsbury and Batley, north Kirklees, and involved three girls.

    One was just 12 years old when the offences started in 1995. They ended in 2003.

    The trials began in 2023 and the perps were convicted and sentenced in 2024 through late 2025. The reason we are only learning their sentences now is because there was a court-ordered ban on reporting (they can do this in England)

    Reporting restrictions had been put in place to ‘safeguard the fairness and integrity of the court process.’

    Translation: They were to ensure the safety of Labour poll numbers from outraged Britons…

  • BBC tries to make Afghan man selling his own daughters for child rape a sympathetic victim.
  • “California ‘problem solving’: Create a useless bureaucracy that voters can’t touch.

    California is the land of expensive, useless bureaucracies, which Democrats allow to do nothing but impose more regulations on Californians.

    In 2023, California created a fast-food council to micromanage fast-food restaurants from wages to working conditions. The council, the first of its kind in the United States, exists to justify California’s fast-food minimum wage hike, which jumped to $20 an hour, and the council has the ability to increase over the coming years. By now, you know how this went: Fast-food restaurants shut down, cut jobs, cut worker hours, raised prices, or did some combination of those things.

    More notably, though, the council that is required to meet at least twice a year does not really exist. The last subcommittee meeting for the council took place in February 2025. It has now been over a year since the council has done anything, and even then, it could not be bothered to gather all nine members. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) plucked the council’s chairman for a different state appointment after that last subcommittee meeting, and it hasn’t gathered since.

    Despite this, the council was still allocated $1.1 million from the state budget.

  • Ian McCollum talks about the wild, woolly days of shipping guns out of the post-communist eastern bloc.
  • Louis Rossmann: 1,600 forks. That’s a lot of pie…
  • Fender won a lawsuit (by default) in Germany, and now it’s suing every guitar maker in the world that makes guitars that look even remotely like Stratocasters. “The decision to enforce the EU-based ruling on US builders marks a huge development in the case, and the outcome of such legal battles could very well reshape the guitar industry as we know it.” I rather suspect this strategy isn’t going to work out well for them…
  • “Schlitz beer production ends after 175 years.” And now an interlude via MST3K:

  • Long Beach, New jersey has to impose a curfew due to “unruly teens.”

  • Google is about to ruin the Internet. “Google is changing its search engine to focus on AI recommendations and NOT links to websites, according to its Google I/O presentation. And it’s a wrap. That’s it for the free and open internet. Niche publications and independent voices will likely get completely shut out of organic search as the internet becomes pay-to-win.” Another reason to stick to DuckDuckGo.
  • The world’s best bagel is now evidently found in Dallas, Texas, at Starship Bagel. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • “4s on Tinder are no longer layups for 6’3 millionaires.”
  • Crazy money is pouring into hypercars.
  • Speaking of crazy money, here are some highlights from the David Aronovitz Auction of important science fiction, fantasy and horror first editions.
  • And speaking of science fiction first editions, I’m going to be sending a new book catalog out next week. Drop me a line if you want a copy.
  • Critical Drinker reviews Pragmata, mostly enjoys it. If the terminally online left hadn’t freaked out about this game, I doubt I ever would have heard about it…
  • Once again, the Babylon Bee is doing straight up reporting from LA: “New Polls Show Dead Heat Between ‘Make Everything Worse’ Candidate And ‘Fix Everything’ Candidate.”
  • “Zillow Adds New Feature For California Homes Showing Whether They Are Currently On Fire.”
  • “London Mayor Confused By Protesters Not Chanting ‘Death To Jews.'”
  • “Man Just 17 Home Depot Trips Away From Purchasing Correct Light Bulbs.”
  • “Hi-ho Silver, away!”

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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





    Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend!

    Breaking: Trump Endorses Paxton Over Cornyn

    Tuesday, May 19th, 2026

    Put out the lights, the party’s over.

    President Donald Trump endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over incumbent U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) on the second day of early voting for their U.S. Senate Republican primary runoff.

    “Ken is a true MAGA Warrior who has ALWAYS delivered for Texas, and will continue to do so in the United States Senate,” Trump stated in a Truth Social post.

    “John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough,” Trump added.

    Paxton responded shortly after Trump’s announcement, stating via an X post, “I am incredibly honored to have President Trump’s COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT.”

    “No one has ever fought harder for the American people than President Trump, and I look forward to championing his America First agenda in the Senate!”

    Cornyn and Paxton headed to a runoff after the March 3 primary election resulted in them being the top two candidates, although neither collected a majority, with Congressman Wesley Hunt (R-TX-38) knocked out of the contest.

    Early voting for the primary runoff began on Monday and will conclude on Friday. Election day is on May 26.

    Trump’s endorsement in the race was long-awaited, as he has repeatedly teased the possibility of one and suggested both candidates are strong supporters of his — a claim the two have intentionally aimed to prove in their campaigning.

    Paxton already had a substantial lead over Cornyn, but this drives the final nail into Cornyn’s coffin. He’s toast. The fat lady isn’t warming up in the wings, she’s already climbed into her 2009 diesel-powered Jetta and driven back to Dusseldorf. Ken Paxton will be the official Republican nominee and can start concentrating on beating the truly strange Democrat nominee James Talarico in November.

    Texas Criminal Court Of Appeals Place 3 Runoff

    Monday, May 18th, 2026

    Early voting for the runoff starts today, so direct mail flyers and cards are dropping hot and heavy, including this one:

    (That 1301 Ledbetter Street, Round Rock, TX 78681 address points back to Israel and Linda Gonzales Avila. Linda Gonzales Avila ran unsuccessfully for the Round Rock ISD school board. If I remember correctly, she was an anti-SJW candidate, but not on the main conservative slate that year (all of which, alas, lost).)

    I’m already voting for Paxton, Middleton and French in the runoff, so let’s look at the Court of Criminal Appeals Place 3 runoff. Here Thomas Smith is in a runoff with Alison Fox.

    Smith touts conservative values, and spent a decade working under Ken Paxton, so that’s definitely a point in his favor. He’s got endorsements from Texas Eagle Forum, True Texas Project, Texas Homeschool Coalition, Grassroots America We The People, Texas Values, CLEAT (Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas), and, on another card I received in the mail, Texas Gun Rights. Plus Tony Dale and Sara Gonzales.

    Fox also touts faith and police backing, and has some good endorsements, including the Kingwood Tea Party, Republican Liberty Caucus, and Texas Right to Life, along with some police associations. However, she also lists endorsements from the San Antonio Express-News, the Houston Chronicle and The Dallas Morning News. Once upon a time, say, 30 or 40 years ago, that wouldn’t have been a problem, as at least the last two were pretty conservative newspapers. However, like the rest of the media, they’ve drifted quite far to the left over time, and actually touting their endorsements is pretty tone-deaf, and not a positive for conservatives.

    Based on that tone-deafness, I’m giving Smith the nod as he candidate to back in the runoff.

    Who Is Behind Pro-Cornyn “Association of Texas Conservatives”?

    Wednesday, May 13th, 2026

    I got a card in the mail yesterday:

    It claims to be from the “Association of Texas Conservatives,” an organization (and I use that term loosely) I’d never heard of before, endorsing John Cornyn in the Texas Senate runoff.

    Not really making any sort of argument in favor of Cornyn, just a checkmark, a name, and a picture. Nothing remotely compelling.

    It made me curious.

    Doing a search on the address of “1305 West 11th Street #217, Houston, TX, 77008” brought a strip mail mailbox center. But it also brought up the FEC form for Association of Texas Conservatives, which shows the Treasurer for the organization as one Les Williamson.

    That name and contact info are also on the FEC form for Old North Action, a PAC supporting Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins, being run out of the exact same postal box.

    That address and Williamson’s name also show up on the FEC for “Protect our Family Values Action.” Clearly Mr. Williamson is wearing a lot of hats.

    Williamson evidently runs Strategic Victory Solutions, a political consulting firm. He seems to have previously been “a former staffer for the National Republican Senatorial Committee who also worked for a Mitch McConnell political action committee.”

    Since he announced his retirement after this election and stepped down from his role as Majority Leader, it’s easy to forget that McConnell is still in the senate and will be until the 120th congress is sworn in January 3, 2027, a mere 42 years since McConnell entered the senate.

    Is Williamson running “Association of Texas Conservatives” on behalf of McConnell or a McConnell-related PAC? I have been unable to find any definitive proof of this, and its certainly possible someone else, including someone directly connected to Cornyn, is paying for Williamson to stand up that organization. Still, Cornyn is just the sort of squishy establishment Republican McConnell loves to back, so it seems a distinct possibility.

    I sent Williamson an email asking him is paying for “Association of Texas Conservatives,” but thus far have received no reply. I’ll let you know if I do…

    Dead Starmer Walking?

    Monday, May 11th, 2026

    While British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is swearing up and down he won’t resign after the Labour Party’s disasterous showing in council elections, a whole lot of Labour MPs are calling for him to step down. From the Mirror‘s running updates:

    Keir Starmer teeters on the brink as Cabinet splits emerge on PM’s future

    Keir Starmer’s premiership is hanging in the balance as Cabinet ministers warned him his time was up amid an explosive Labour revolt.

    Splits emerged in his top team as Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood was said to be among several ministers who told the Prime Minister to consider setting out a timetable for his departure. Deputy PM David Lammy and Chief Whip Johnny Reynolds were at the PM’s side as he weighed his options, but did not call for him to go.

    Housing Secretary Steve Reed and Attorney General Lord Hermer were among those urging the PM to fight on, the Mirror understands.

    Jonathan Hinder, Labour MP for Pendle and Clitheroe, has joined the growing number of MPs calling for Sir Keir Starmer to resign, adding that the Prime Minister “has never been an electoral asset”.Speaking on BBC’s Newsnight, Mr Hinder said: “The blunt reality is, and every single Labour MP will tell you this, he has never been an electoral asset.“Our best electoral asset was the unpopularity of the Conservatives and the fact that Reform split their vote.”

    Gordon McKee says Starmer ‘has lost the confidence’ of the public

    Gordon McKee, who is MP for Glasgow South, has tweeted: “I’m deeply sad that we’re in this position and proud of what Keir Starmer achieved reforming the Labour Party.

    “However, the message in Glasgow and across the country in last week’s elections was clear; the Prime Minister has lost the confidence of the public.”

    Yay think? The entirety of the Muslim rape gang-friendly Labour Party has lost that confidence.

    Those names we listed just now as the purported new ministerial aides have replaced those have quit today.

    They include Joe Morris and Tom Rutland, who served as parliamentary secretaries to Wes Streeting and Emma Reynolds respectively.

    Scores of Labour MPs calling for Keir Starmer to stand down following a disastrous set of local election results.

    Sayeth Wikipedia: “A parliamentary secretary is a member of parliament in the Westminster system who assists a more senior minister with their duties.”

    Tahir Ali, Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green & Moseley, has tweeted to call on Keir Starmer to step down.

    He said the election results show “party in crisis” and claimed Labour is “coasting without a real vision”.

    Maureen Burke, the Labour MP for Glasgow North East, has joined the growing number of discontented MPs calling for Sir Keir Starmer to step down, saying her party is “bigger than one person”.

    In a statement posted on X on Monday evening, she said: “When I see communities like mine, in Glasgow North East, turn against the Labour Party in such numbers, we must seek to understand why and refocus our efforts to win back their trust.”Despite two decades of SNP failure, people were reluctant to give Labour a hearing and told me that they could not, in good faith, vote Labour while Keir Starmer is Prime Minister.

    Sarah Hall, MP for Warrington South, tweeted that last week’s election results “were devastating for our party.”

    “Across the country and our region, we lost hardworking Labour representatives who dedicated themselves to their communities and to the values our movement was founded on,” she said. “Voters delivered a clear message. They feel disconnected from the current leadership and frustrated that progress is not happening quickly enough.”

    She continued: “A pattern of poor decisions and unforced errors has created a growing sense of distance between the government and the people I was elected to serve.

    “We cannot respond to this moment with another reset, another relaunch or more rhetoric.

    Those are just a few quotes. The Mirror‘s current count has at least 75 Labour MPs calling for Starmer’s ouster from Number 10 Downing Street. While far short of a majority, it does show that there seems to be no fear of of declaring opposition to Starmer, which suggests he’s in a perilously weak position. And in truth, it’s hard to think of any leaders bouncing back from such an electoral disaster.

    To quote a Peter Gabriel-era Genesis song, “More opened ears and opened eyes/And soon they dared to laugh.”

    The Democrat Party’s Existential Crises

    Sunday, May 10th, 2026

    Jeff Childers has an interesting piece on the Democrat Party’s self-inflicted “polycrisis,” when all the Party’s myriad bad decisions and extremist positions all come home to roost at the same time.

    If you listen closely to the wind blowing through Washington, D.C., you might hear a faint, high-pitched whining sound. That is not the sound of cicadas fluttering through the cherry blossoms. That is the sound of the Democrat Party realizing that the check has finally arrived, and their credit card was declined. Last month, the Washington Post broke a story that perfectly captures the Democrat Party’s woebegone state:

    The DNC expected big money after big Democratic wins. It never came.

    The Democratic National Committee has scaled back some of its plans as donors remain reluctant to give, despite candidates’ recent victories.

    Ruh-roh.

    For the last few years, despite occasional bouts of truth bursting through the costume’s seams, corporate media has generally assured everyone that the Democratic Party is in fine fettle. Sharp as a tack. It is, they say, like a double-decker bus packed with a coalition of highly educated coastal elites, powerful unions, a motivated gang of highly diverse grievance groups, plus legions of narcissistic white boomers who somehow still believe that NPR is the best way to learn what’s going on in the world.

    But underneath the hood, the engine was smoking, the transmission was held together by duct tape, and the bus driver was staring blankly at the dashboard trying to remember what to do when it makes that weird noise. The passengers argued about whether the bus should be renamed to something more trans-inclusive, whether to start with a land acknowledgment, and whether that weird noise was actually a microaggression.

    Now, the bus has completely stalled out, parked on the side of the highway, and the passengers are sitting inside waiting for someone else to come fix it.

    Corporate media is desperately trying to conceal what historians and political scientists call a “polycrisis.” As defined by historian Adam Tooze (and the World Economic Forum, which considered it an opportunity instead of a problem), a polycrisis happens “where disparate crises interact such that the overall impact far exceeds the sum of each part.” It describes where the political ground is destabilized from so many different directions at once that policymakers ultimately become paralyzed, usually while forming another gold-star committee to consider funding a new study on the destabilization.

    Tooze explained, “In the polycrisis, the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”

    Snip.

    But amid all those examples, the modern Democratic polycrisis stands out as uniquely spectacular. It’s experiencing the political equivalent of getting audited by the IRS on the same day your Pekinese chews through your internet cable and then your roof caves in right after you opened the insurance cancellation notice.

    All the insiders know it. Trad-media is doing its level best to distract and obfuscate, but some recent headlines are flashing red: On April 9th, Bloomberg warned that “Michigan Shows Democrats’ Identity Crisis Up Close.” On March 15th, Axios reported that “Democrats face a post-Trump identity crisis for 2028.” On March 30th, the NDSMC Observer simply called it “The Democratic party’s identity crisis.”

    “The Democratic Party has an aura of ineffectiveness,” NDSMC wrote. “This is an existential threat.” The main problem, according to the author, is that the party is now only about opposing Trump— which manifestly is not working. So, the author argued, “with that opposition, there needs to be an alternative message. Something that voters can get behind. An idea. A value. Not the lack of values. Not just anti-MAGA.”

    Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, agreed. “You can’t win a presidential election on opposition alone,” he told Axios. Democrats (not MAGA) are fractured. “Democrats are deeply divided over what they’d do if they returned to power,” Axios said. They intend to run against Trump in the 2026 midterms, but realize that won’t work in 2028, when Trump is terming out.

    Democrats must “build a message predicated on values rather than reactions,” the NDSMC author fretted, “lest they doom themselves to a future of perpetual minority status, forever living in the shadow of the MAGA right.” But what screamed from the pages was that the author had no suggestions for a message. Not one.

    The reason he didn’t is the same reason the Democrats cannot fix this problem. It’s a structural problem broken beyond repair.

    Identity crises are the worst. A person or group questioning their very identity is a sinkhole of potential disaster. It’s like the Democrat Party is bored with being a stay-at-home dad named Benjamin, and yearns to move to Las Vegas, change its name to Mercedes, get that special surgery, and become a stripper.

    It would be bad enough if identity were the only crisis Democrats were facing. Let’s dissect the anatomy of this rapidly approaching fast-motion disaster.

    A polycrisis isn’t just a regular old run of bad luck. It is a structural failure. In any normal political cycle, a party could lose an election, suffer a fundraising dip, or deal with pushback against an unpopular leader. Or even all three. Those problems are manageable. You just replace the leader, change the messaging, and pretend you never actually supported the things you supported yesterday.

    But in a polycrisis, the mechanisms for fixing the problems also break. The disease and the cure become indistinguishable. That’s what Democrats face. They are currently trapped in a perfect storm of intersecting, overlapping, cannibalistic calamities, each feeding and feeding off the others.

    Democrats core problem is that their party has become an “odd coalition” of wildly divergent interest groups united by only one thing: opposition to Donald Trump. The so-called “No Kings” movement is the problem’s purest expression. No Kings is a hot mess of a tire fire, a janky collection of unrelated grievance groups, united only by deliberately vague policy positions— because articulating any specific proposal would immediately expose that half the coalition actively despises the other half.

    When a political party has no articulable platform besides “we are not the other guy,” a polycrisis is not just possible. It becomes mandatory.

    Snip.

    The 2024 election exposed the fracture for all to see. Kamala Harris won 80% of the Black vote— solid, but a massive 10-point drop from Joe Biden’s 90% in 2020. President Trump secured 20% of the Black vote, the highest level of support from that demographic since George W. Bush in 2000. The shift was even more extreme among Hispanic voters, where Trump narrowed the gap to a mere 3 points, as compared to Biden’s 25-point margin four years earlier.

    The shift among young men is particularly stark. Men under 50 split evenly (49% to 48%) between Trump and Harris, erasing a 10-point Democrat advantage from 2020.

    Instead of addressing these defecting voters’ concerns, factions within the Democrat party are doubling down on purity tests, which I’ve previously labeled as the “purity spiral.” In Michigan, for instance, progressive Democrats punished the Harris campaign over the administration’s handling of Gaza, proving that for some factions, “wallowing in the illusion of purity” was more important than building a winning coalition. (That’s from last month’s Detroit News.)

    The Detroit News wrung its bony hands over the fruits of the state’s recent Democrat primary nomination results, which produced far-left candidates whose views “raise serious questions about their electability.”

    Recent polling by the Manhattan Institute confirmed the disconnect. The Democrat party is essentially three blocs: Moderates (47%), Progressive Liberals (37%), and a “Woke Fringe” (11%). The median Democrat actually wants border security and safe streets, but the party is held hostage by the 11% who think math is racist, there’s an infinite number of genders, and Karl Marx was on the right track but just didn’t try hard enough.

    The problem is even worse than Childers makes it out to be. Where are the “Progressive Liberals” willing to call out the radical woke left on their insane agenda? Nowhere, that’s where. They’re scared to death of being called racist and dragged on Twitter. To deviate even slightly on, say, transing children or letting ICE deport illegal alien rapists, is to invite brutal reprisals ranging from ostracism to termination of employment.

    Or being shot by a woke lunatic because you’re a “fascist.”

    Moreover, after their long march through the institutions of the left, the levers of power for the Democrat Party apparatus and their Academic/Media Complex/NGO fellow travelers are all in the hands of social justice warriors. Any “Progressive Liberals” with any sort of power are in their 70s or older, and how many of those supposed “47% Moderates” are actually speaking up against the radical agenda? John Fetterman? Bill Maher? Stephen A. Smith? They’re so few and so far outside what today’s Democrat Party considers “acceptable discourse” that we can name them individually. Indeed, the online woke left is already calling all three “fascists.”

    Snipping over Childers’ talk of the Democrat “gerontocracy,” since so many are part of those “moderates” losing their grip on power within the Party.

    Perhaps the most under-appreciated aspect of the polycrisis is the perplexing psychological condition of the Democrat base. Studies consistently show that liberals report significantly lower levels of happiness and psychological well-being compared to conservatives. Maybe building an identity out of imminent global climate destruction and looming, ever-present fascism was a bad idea.

    Progressivism is literally driving them insane.

    According to the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, conservatives outnumber liberals 51% to 20% among those reporting “excellent” mental health, while liberals outnumber conservatives 45% to 19% among those reporting “poor” mental health. Read that again— nearly half of liberals self-report having poor mental health. Shocker.

    On a 100-point happiness scale, even childless conservatives scored a 63; while childless liberals scored a dismaying 48. So weird.

    Perhaps the most under-appreciated aspect of the polycrisis is the perplexing psychological condition of the Democrat base. Studies consistently show that liberals report significantly lower levels of happiness and psychological well-being compared to conservatives. Maybe building an identity out of imminent global climate destruction and looming, ever-present fascism was a bad idea.

    Progressivism is literally driving them insane.

    According to the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, conservatives outnumber liberals 51% to 20% among those reporting “excellent” mental health, while liberals outnumber conservatives 45% to 19% among those reporting “poor” mental health. Read that again— nearly half of liberals self-report having poor mental health. Shocker.

    On a 100-point happiness scale, even childless conservatives scored a 63; while childless liberals scored a dismaying 48. So weird.

    Childers is right on the insanity but outdated on some of the components. We’re already seeing an abandonment of global warming talking points among the woke. Trump is their apocalypse. There are too many intersectionality shibboleths to keep straight for woke brains to keep green catechisms in mind. Another possibility is that blacks, Hispanics, and all those Muslim illegal aliens they’ve imported obviously don’t give a rat’s ass about any of it.

    Running a modern political campaign requires astronomical amounts of money. For years, Democrats relied on two massive funding streams: small-dollar digital donations via ActBlue, and a sprawling network of government-funded NGOs. Both are now collapsing.

    I wonder how much of ActBlue was ever real and not simply foreign and NGO money laundering.

    Last month, the Washington Post reported that the Democratic National Committee is facing a massive cash crunch as “top donors have been slow to open their wallets.” The DNC had assured party officials that their resounding 15-point victory in the Virginia governor’s race would open the floodgates. “But big checks did not flood back,” leaving DNC Chairman Ken Martin presiding over a financial and leadership crisis.

    Left unsaid: Wealthy Jews in New York used to make up a significant fraction of the Democrats’ fundraising network, but they’ve all been tossed overboard in the name of demonizing “the 1%” and pandering to all the Muslims Democrats (not to mention political parties in Europe) have insisted on importing.

    Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has taken a sledgehammer to the NGO complex. DOGE first targeted USAID, leading to the elimination of over 5,000 programs. These programs were rife with fraud and political grift, with taxpayer money flowing through dizzying arrays of cut-out corporations to Democrat coffers. Musk bluntly explained, “This is one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world— government-funded NGOs.”

    The broader recent crackdowns on Medicare fraud, autism services, and daycare funding are systematically cutting off the federal spigot that has long nourished progressive advocacy groups and political operatives. The “blue laundromat” is being condemned, and the DNC is suddenly discovering that running a political party requires actual money and real fundraising, which tends to be harder than making backroom deals with Somalian cartels.

    Section on lawfare blowback and indicting Dem corruption skipped, since there seem to be plenty of examples in every LinkSwarm.

    An entirely separate problem for Democrats is the collapse of the legacy media infrastructure that has for decades carried water for the progressive platform. Trust in mass media has hit a record low of 28 percent. Viewers are migrating to alternative media, mostly conservative or conservative-adjacent podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience.

    Corporate media is shifting rightwards. Within the last six months or so, conservative billionaires Larry and David Ellison acquired Warner Brothers (which owns CNN), independent commentator Bari Weiss was installed as editor-in-chief at CBS News, Jeff Bezos’ new head of the Washington Post fired 13 “climate reporters,” and the list goes on. Furthermore, as you well know, X (formerly Twitter) under Musk’s ownership allows uncensored conservative content…

    The Democratic Party’s traditional megaphone is on the fritz. The batteries are running out. Which means they can no longer just scream “racist!” at their political problems and expect them to go away. They can no longer rely on corporate media to promote their narratives and psyops.

    They are going to have to work harder to earn audience attention— but their problems are multiplied since they can’t enunciate clear policy positions anyway. They must feel like an aggressive drunk who dominated the barroom conversation through brute force until new management made him take it outside. Now nobody listens, and everybody feels better. And it’s much quieter inside.

    Most of the argument on how the contradictions of slavery destroyed the Whig Party snipped.

    Like the Whigs, today’s Democrat Party faces a similar irreconcilable fracture line. Not just one. Several of them. Immigration, police funding, and trans “rights” are all solid examples. All of them are potentially slavery questions for the loose Democrat coalition. If the DNC takes a strong position on any of those issues, it will forever fracture the coalition. That’s why they can’t commit.

    Take immigration, for example. The progressive wing views open borders and amnesty as a moral imperative rooted in anti-racism. But Democrats’ working-class wing —especially unions, black, and hispanic voters, who are currently all defecting to the GOP— views unrestricted immigration as direct economic competition that drives down wages and overwhelms local resources.

    The immigration question cleaves the coalition along lines that cannot be papered over with vague language about “comprehensive reform.” Every time the party tries to stake out a middle position, it simultaneously enrages multiple factions.

    Progressives accuse leadership of fascism; the working class accuses leadership of abandonment.

    The Whigs were destroyed not by a single catastrophic defeat, but by a slow accumulation of contradictions that ultimately made the coalition mathematically impossible to maintain. Then, snap. That is precisely the dynamic of a polycrisis, and it is precisely what the Democrats are facing now.

    In complex systems theory, a polycrisis does not resolve itself gradually. It builds pressure until it reaches a tipping point— a threshold where a final small change —the proverbial camel’s straw— triggers an abrupt, potentially irreversible transformation or collapse.

    For the Democratic Party, the 2026 midterms represent that tipping point. They face a brutal structural map, needing four seats to retake the Senate. Midcycle redistricting, wildly exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais decision striking down minority-majority districts, has scrambled the House battlefield more thoroughly than eggs on a Waffle House grill.

    But the most profound implication of where the polycrisis is going, and what it will make politically possible, can best be understood through the Hegelian dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

    The thesis is the current, chaotic, decentralized election system with late counting, mail-in ballots, harvesting, permissive voter rolls, and weak ID requirements. Democrats’ viability depends on that system, and they will fight to the political death to preserve it.

    The Hegelian antithesis is the current crisis— the ongoing federal investigations in Georgia, Arizona, and elsewhere, combined with aggressive crackdowns on non-citizen voting and the stalled SAVE America Act, which would mandate ID, citizenship, and strict voter purges.

    If the DOJ’s investigations produce credible convictions of election workers or political figures, it will shatter whatever remaining trust exists in the system. The synthesis is the solution that comes next, having been made politically possible by the thesis/antithesis dynamic. In this case, it will probably take the shape of a comprehensive federal elections bill. Maybe the SAVE Act. Maybe something bigger.

    Here I think Childers is probably wrong. I think most Democrats have internalized the understanding that their Party is cheating nine ways to Sunday (even if they’d never admit it), and they simply don’t care. Trump is The Devil, and The Devil must be fought by any means necessary. Never mind that the idea that Trump (and by extension all Republicans) is some sort of racist monster is a laughable delusion engendered by the Southern Poverty Law Center literally subsidizing Nazis and the KKK. The idea that Republicans are Evil Racists and that Democrats are The Good People forms a bedrock in their political identities, and they’ll cling to it with religious fervor. Reason had nothing to do with them adopting the social justice worldview and reason cannot talk them out of it.

    Thus Democrats will never support the SAVE Act or anything like it as long as the woke mind virus runs the Party. (A much bigger and thornier question is why old-line congressional Republicans refuse to support any strategy that threatens to implement it.)

    No, the only path for Democrats out of the social justice wilderness is for their own Trump-like figure to come from outside the Party to cleanse the Augean stables of Obamaism entirely. Right now, Democrats don’t have such a Trump, and their entire SJW-ruled party apparatus stands ready to ensure their hands are never removed from the Party levers of power they’ve dedicated their entire adult life to controlling. The hard left is willing to lose an infinite number of elections rather than relinquish control. Just look to the lengths they took to keep Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. entirely off the 2024 Presidential ballot, and for a Democrat Trump to appear, he would need to be at least a hundred times better known than RFK Jr.

    So I think Childers’ idea of how Democrats might solve the polycrisis is misguided, but his description of that crisis has admirable breadth.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

    Scenes From The Labour Party Wipe Out

    Saturday, May 9th, 2026

    We touched on this in Friday’s LinkSwarm, but more news of Labour’s council election wipe out has come in, and the scale at which UK voters rejected Keir Starmer’s party is staggering.

    Take a look at this chart from the BBC.

    Nigel Farage’s Reform went from two council seats to 1,453. Labour, by contrast, lost 1,446 seats. But the conservative also lost council seats, 563 of them, which now puts them behind the Liberal Democrats, something that hasn’t happened since, well, ever.

    Indeed, as this Sky News video notes, this is the first time since they started keeping track in the 1970s that the combined Labour/Tory share of these seats fell below 50%, and is now down to 35%.

    If Farage can avoid screwing things up, we may be seeing the end of that political duopoly. The useless Tory wets couldn’t simply accomplish Brexit and get the hell out of their own way, and instead named feckless incompetent PM after feckless incompetent PM. Just think, if Labour, having turned back the Corbyn threat, could have simply avoiding become the party of pedophiles and illegal alien Muslim rapists, they might have ruled for a generation. Instead, they’re likely to go the way of the Whigs. And backbench Labour MP Catherine West has threatened to launch a leadership challenge to Starmer if no one in the cabinet does.

    If the “conserving conservatism” crowd had gotten their way, the Republican Party might be mired in the same decline plaguing the Tories instead of controlling all three branches of government.