Posts Tagged ‘Christopher Rufo’

LinkSwarm For April 19, 2024

Friday, April 19th, 2024

Israel’s Iran strike is shrouded in mystery, California is shockingly “permissive” on sex trafficking children, Warhammer goes woke, and a new Doom speed-running record. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Early reports said that Israel struck at Iranian nuclear facilities at Isfahan, but current reports say that’s not the case.

    Senior US military sources:The target of the Israeli strike was an Iranian military base in Isfahan near Natanz, not the nuclear facilities themselves. “The Israelis hit what they intended to strike,” The targets within this strike included Iranian air defense systems at the air base including those used to protect their nearby nuclear facilities. It was a message to the Iranians, “We can reach out and touch you.” The Russian made air defense systems were shown to be ineffective. There was one target but multiple strikes within that target. The Israelis used missiles and unmanned aircraft – in other words no manned aircraft (F35’s or others) were used as part of this strike

    Both Israeli and Iranian sources are being cagey about what actually was hit. Right now it’s looking like it was a very limited strike, almost just a “See? We can hit them if we want to” strike to satisfy the Biden Administration’s endless calls for “restraint” while they continue to pound Hamas into a fine red paste. But it does offer a certain amount of support for the Kayfabe theory of Middle East politics…

  • Speaking of Gaza, that plan to send U.S. servicemen there to build a pier was an asinine one, but it was great to demonstrate just how badly screwed up naval logistics is for sudden overseas deployments. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Powerline has a pretty staggering chart on Biden inflation:

  • Traffick a kid in California, spend the weekend in jail; try it in Florida and they execute you.”

    The penalty for the equivalent of child trafficking in “progressive,” “forward-thinking,” “compassionate” California is a maximum penalty of a year in jail, and a minimum of two days in jail, plus a $10,000 fine which may or may not be paid depending on sentencing details.

    Plenty has been said in recent years about soft-on-crime policies in states led by Democrats, and with good reason. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that political movements that believe the execution of preborn children is morally and legally permissible would also enforce such loose penalties for child endangerment and exploitation. But this seems, even for liberals, unconscionable.

    Thankfully, it’s not that way everywhere. Other states with right-leaning leadership handle child predation, shall we say, “differently.”

  • But California especially loves setting sex offenders free if they’re illegal aliens.
  • Speaking of idiot laws in California, their new “mansion” tax means that no one can afford to build apartment complexes any more.
  • “Landmark NHS England Report: Science Doesn’t Support Gender-Affirming Medicine.” Wait, you mean mutilating children to demonstrate your trendy wokeness is a bad idea? Who knew?
  • Despite that, the Biden Administration is going to shove transexualism down the throats of colleges by fiat by rewriting Title IX rules without congressional approval.
  • Uri Berliner exposes the radical wokeness at NPR and is fired by new ultra-woke Alpha Karen NPR head Katherine Maher.

    It turns out that Katherine Maher is no ordinary ascendant progressive media executive. No, this woman’s social-media history reveals her to be the Kwisatz Haderach of white wokeness, presumably bred through generations of careful genetic selection to be the supernaturally perfect embodiment of Affluent White Female Liberalism. (As many have noted, she not only acts but looks like Titania McGrath.) It’s vaguely unreal: If there was a trendy progressive take floating around on Twitter and popular within media circles, then you can reliably bet she was there to voice it in the most preeningly insulting way possible.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, who also offers lots of choice Chris Rufo commentary on tweets from Maher.)

  • “Texas Congresswoman Beth Van Duyne (R-TX-24) has taken out a full-page advertisement in the New York Post in an effort to recruit law enforcement from New York City, encouraging them to ‘escape New York and move to Texas. Sadly, the corrupt and crumbling Empire State is so purposefully anti-law and order, that you should no longer put your careers and lives in the hands of politicians who couldn’t care less about you or your families,’ the advertisement states.”
  • I’ll take “Headlines You Don’t Want To Read At Breakfast” for $400: “New York Suffers Record Rise in Potentially Deadly Disease Caused by Rat Urine. New York City has seen a record jump in the number of human leptospirosis, a disease caused by rat urine that can cause kidney damage, liver failure, and even death.”
  • The University of Texas at Dallas closes its DEI office and eliminates 20 jobs. Progress!
  • “A far-left extremist that firebombed a pro-life office in Wisconsin in 2022 has been sentenced to 7.5 years in federal prison, along with three years of supervised release and a $32,000 fine.”
  • The return of the Turtle Tank.
  • A mass cancellation attack is trying to get Reporting from Ukraine’s YouTube channel deleted.
  • Republicans aim to use ballot initiatives to overturn unpopular Democratic Party policies. “Republicans in Washington are moving to get three major ballot initiatives passed. These measures will repeal Democrat-passed policies that are becoming unpopular among locals. The three changes would repeal the state’s sanctuary status for illegal immigrants, end an attempt to ban natural gas, and a change to the laws to strip squatters of their rights.”
  • You’ll need to click Show More for this one:

  • Venezuelan illegal alien attempts to rob a bank using a translator app.
  • Fleshlight + AI = Brave new frontiers of sad perversion.
  • Has Warhammer gone woke? “I can’t help thinking that you finally started to bow to pressure from ‘Modern Audiences,’ and you were almost certainly encouraged to do this by a sudden infusion of investment money from BlackRock.”

    The moment you make any concession, no matter how tiny, you’ve already given the game away. You’ve made it known that you’re prepared to bow down to their demands if they put enough pressure on you. And so, inevitably, their demands are never going to end. They’ll literally never be happy because there’s always going to be some other thing, some other piece of problematic lore, some other rule or exclusionary detail that has to be altered to comply with their constantly evolving demands, and all in the name of inclusion and diversity.

    Because these people don’t care about your hobby, they don’t care about integrating into a community of like-minded individuals. All they care about is that the community bends and reshapes itself to suit them, until eventually they bend it so much that it breaks. People like that are complete and utter poison for any hobby, any fandom, any franchise. All they ever manage to do is stir up conflict, resentment and division, driving people away and turning fans against the very company that tries to pander to them, because their very reason for existing is to undermine and destroy the thing they claim that they’re trying to save.

    And if you’ve got any common sense whatsoever or any love for the fandom that you’re so passionate about, you’ll think very carefully before bending the knee to them.

  • Madam Web finally crawls just past the $100 million mark before going to streaming to die.
  • And by the way, Disney still isn’t in the black on it’s purchase of Star Wars and Lucasfilms.
  • My review of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.
  • After 6 months and 100,000 attempts, Doom speedrunner beats 26 year old record…by one second.
  • White House Calls In Elmo To Help Explain Latest Global Conflict To President.”
  • “Biden Unveils Official Campaign Slogan ‘Death To America.'”
  • Rufo On Rogan: Democrats Destroying Democracy To Save It

    Saturday, March 16th, 2024

    I haven’t reported much on the farce of Democrats tearing through the thicket of law to get at their great devil Donald Trump, mainly because it is such a farce, but here’s Christopher Rufo on Joe Rogan discussing how dangerous and anti-democratic their blood vengeance crusade is.

  • Joe Rogan: “How disturbed are you by what seems to be this acceptance that people have for prosecuting political opponents?”
  • JR: “Because to me, it’s, regardless of what you think about Donald Trump as a human being and the polarizing figure that he is, setting the precedent of trying your political opponents to somehow or another, either put them in jail, or make them seem like complete total criminals in a way that would, for the casual, for the person who’s not reading deep into the headlines.”
  • JR: “The casual Democrat that sees this Trump real estate thing that just happened, where he got fined $365 million. I’ve seen people argue ‘fraud is fraud and this is that and he’s a fraud,’ and then I saw Kevin O’Leary from Shark Tank explain this is what every real estate developer does.”
  • JR: “They say ‘My building’s worth $400 million,’ and then someone comes along from the bank, and they say ‘No, it’s worth $300 million. We’ll give you a loan on $300 million’ or whatever.”
  • Christoper Rufo: “It’s negotiation.”
  • JR: “People overvalue their property all the time. [Someone] has a house and it’s worth $700,000, they decide to list it as $900,000.”
  • Plus the lunacy of a leftist judge saying Mar-a-Lago is worth only $18 million, when a more realistic valuation is well over $1 billion.
  • CR: “We have a democratic system that favors Trump, in the sense that he won in 2016, he’s winning the primary right now for republicans in 2024.”
  • CR: “But you have a bureaucracy that is dead set against him. And the rhetoric amounts to a very odd claim. They essentially say: ‘We want to keep him off the ballot, we want to put him in prison, we want to bankrupt him so he can’t become the president, even if the people support him. We want to deprive the people of making the decision.'”
  • CR: “So you want to take it out of the realm of politics and into the realm of administrative justice or the criminal justice system, and adjudicate it in that way on bogus pretexts.”
  • CR: “Who actually rules in this country? Is it the American people who get to decide by their vote who represents them in the government? Or is it the permanent bureaucracy that has accumulated so much power?”
  • CR: “I’m of the mind that the people should decide, not the bureaucracy. And this is a contest where Democrats are saying essentially we have to destroy democracy in order to save democracy.”
  • Evidently there’s no undemocratic Rubicon Democrats won’t cross, no bridge they won’t burn, to destroy democracy in the name of saving it from Orange Man Bad.

    A Tale Of Two Governors

    Saturday, January 7th, 2023

    If you want to know why Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a leading presidential contender in 2024, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott is not, this story about DeSantis shaking up a college board of trustees provides a big hint.

    Governor Ron DeSantis appointed six new members to the New College of Florida’s Board of Trustees on Friday, directing the new conservative majority to reorient a public university that has been led astray by progressive ideologues in recent years.

    In 2001, the New College of Florida (NCF) was designated the state’s honors college by the Florida legislature. Since then, the school has increasingly embraced progressive ideological causes, such as expanding DEI initiatives, all while missing its 2022 enrollment goal by 45 percent.

    DeSantis’s six appointees are Christopher Rufo, Mark Bauerlein, Matthew Spalding, Charles Kesler, Debra Jenks, and Jason “Eddie” Speir. Several are well-known conservatives.

    Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and is best known for his activism against critical race theory in K–12 education, corporations, and higher education. Kesler is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and editor of the Claremont Review of Books, a quarterly conservative publication of political philosophy, history, and literature. Spalding is vice president of the graduate school of government at Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C., and has published books on the Constitution and the Founding.

    “Governor DeSantis is leading the nation in educational reform and post-secondary responsibility,” Spalding said in a statement to National Review. “I am honored by the appointment and look forward to advancing educational excellence and focusing New College on its distinctive mission as the liberal arts honors college of the State of Florida. A good liberal arts education is truly liberating and opens the minds and forms the character of good students and good citizens.”

    While they must first be confirmed by the GOP-controlled state senate, the selections are on board with the governor’s plan to refocus NCF. DeSantis chief of staff James Uthmeier says the administration intends to convert the college to a classical model akin to that of Hillsdale College. The Michigan conservative bulwark rejects the neo-Marxist school of thought, including critical race theory and its contention that white supremacy is intrinsic to America’s national fabric and that positive discrimination is necessary to rectify historical racial injustice.

    “It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South,” he told National Review.

    I have no doubt that Rufo and the other new regents will do their best to purge New College of Florida of the poison of Critical Race Theory and other radical social justice teachings.

    Has the Texas Governor ever appointed a true conservative reformer to a college school board? One: Wallace Hall, appointed to the University of Texas System Board of Regents, who dug deep into the scandal of the offspring of the well-connected receiving preferential treatment for admission into college administration programs.

    The problem is, Hall was appointed by Rick Perry, and Abbott essentially hung him out to dry, failing to take any action on the scandals he uncovered and failing to reappoint him when his six-year term was up.

    From the outside, Abbott seems like a fairly conservative governor, and he is when compared to the likes of Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom. But at heart, Abbott seems to be a cautious, consensus-driven politician who is reluctant to rock the boat. When it comes to real efforts to sand-blast the social justice rot out of higher education, the contrast between him and DeSantis is night and day.

    LinkSwarm for April 22, 2022

    Friday, April 22nd, 2022

    Russia eyes Moldova, Ron DeSantis and Florida republicans strip Disney of it’s special privileges in record time, CNN+ dies quicker than Sean Bean, and Florida Man scores a trifecta! It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • A Russian general just announced plans to invade Moldova.

    A Russian General announced plans to occupy the Transnistria region of Moldova on Friday.

    Speaking at a defense industry meeting, Brigadier General Rustam Minnekayev, acting commander of Russia’s Central Military District, stated that the Russian Armed Forces plan to “make passage” into the region – in Moldova’s East, bordering Ukraine and less than 30 miles from the port city of Odessa – to create a “land corridor to Crimea,” Russian media reported. Such a corridor would also purport to connect the Russian mainland to Transnistria.

    Minnekayev stated that the measure was part of Russia’s second phase in its war in Ukraine, which involves establishing full control over the Donbas Region and Ukraine’s coast along the Black Sea. No timeline was provided for the maneuver to begin, however.

    Rather seems like overweening hubris to think about invading another country when they haven’t managed to defeat Ukraine despite pouring huge resources into the attempt.

    Speaking of Russia walking on rakes:

  • Giant fire engulfs Russia’s biggest chemical plant right after a fire broke out at “a sensitive Russian Defense Ministry research facility in the city of Tver.”

    Huge plumes of smoke were seen enveloping the Dmitrievsky Chemical Plant late this afternoon. The cause of the fire remains unknown. Almost 150 plant workers were reportedly evacuated.

    The facility in Kineshma, east of Moscow produces more industrial solvents than any other in Russia. It is less than 1,000km from the border with Ukraine.

    “Less than 600 miles” does not strike me as super close, even for Russia.

    Naturally, observers are starting to ask in connection to Russia’s war in neighboring Ukraine: coincidence? sabotage operation?

    Anti-Putin racecar driver Igor Sushko in tweeting the above video of the Dmitrievsky Chemical Plant going up in flames commented: “We are beginning to see a pattern develop.”

  • Florida Governor DeSantis Signs Bill Stripping Disney of Autonomous Legal Status.”

    Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation Friday that strips Disney of its 50-year-old “independent special district” status in retaliation for lobbying against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law.

    The law dissolves the Reedy Creek Improvement District, an autonomous area created in 1967 to accommodate the massive Disney World complex near Orlando. The independent status has shielded Disney from significant tax burden.

    The governor fast-tracked the initiative to a special session Tuesday, after which the state Senate voted 23-16 on Wednesday to advance it.

    The parental rights measure keeps gender identity and sexual orientation instruction out of K-3 elementary school classrooms and enjoys majority support among Floridians.

    To quote The Wire: “You wanted to be in the game, right? Now you’re in the game.” For years, The Mouse was considered an unstoppable juggernaut that always got what it wanted. Then Disney decided to to throw it’s corporate weight behind the pro-grooming faction opposing a bill banning discussion of sex in elementary schools, and DeSantis knee-capped them in a week.

    Though the losses from special tax breaks and privileges is going to hurt the bottom line, Disney has done far, far more damage to its brand for stepping into the cultural wars to embrace forcing radical transexism on a resisting American public. That’s going to be destroying shareholder value for years (if not decades) to come.

  • DeSantis Bonus: Christopher Rufo spoke at the signing ceremony:

  • Dana Loesch isn’t shedding any tears over The Mouse.

    Am I and are others supposed to feel bad because the most opportune time to end Disney’s corporate welfare exploits the momentum that Disney created against themselves?

    Because I don’t.

    Disney vociferously and hatefully opposed parents who didn’t want ideological activist teachers lecturing their K-5th grade kids about how they bang their significant others after hours — Disney accused parents of opposing this as literally killing gay people because teachers with fantasy pronouns can’t talk about genitals when kids should be learning math.

    The left hated corporations influencing issues because of Citizens United v. FEC until they realized they could push Disney to lobby for them and now they LOVE corporations again! Party! I’m confused — are corporations still evil? They can’t influence issues or push for candidates that aren’t Democrat and they have more rights to a child than the parents raising said child? We really need some consistency from the left here.

    When corporations act as agents of the state all bets are off. When a corporation’s actual heir, the CEO, and executives say on camera and on their own social media accounts (as Disney’s did) that parental rights erase gay people (I know, what?) and people who support parental rights in the classroom are murderers, all bets are off.

    Who is “gaslighting” whom, here? Where was the opposition to the heinous manner in which parents were smeared? Was that not Disney’s “revenge” for opposition?

    Disney chose the boss fight against taxpaying parents and they lost.

    Losing their corporate welfare isn’t revenge, it’s a reckoning.

  • Relevant tweets:

  • John Nolte: “Yes, Democrats Really Do Want to Groom Your Children.”

    The debate we’re having right now…

    THE LEFT: We don’t want to sexualize little kids behind the backs of parents. Stop saying that. It’s a lie!

    FLORIDA: We’re going to outlaw sexualizing little kids behind the backs of parents.

    THE LEFT: NOOOOooooooo!

    What kind of country are we living in where we even have to pass a bill that outlaws sexualizing kids aged four to eight in the classroom?

    What kind of country are we living in where Florida teachers are angry that they can’t discuss their personal lives with your little kids, much less discuss sex?

    What kind of country are we living in where the Walt Disney Co., a company built on the idea of preserving the innocence of children and teaching them lessons about honesty, hard work, and true love, is now openly bragging about feeding the little kids sexual propaganda?

    Of course, this is grooming.

    What else would you call it?

    What is the rationale for telling innocent little boys that they might be girls or gay or bisexual? What other rationale could there be for that other than to destroy their innocence, to turn them into sexual creatures, and warp their sexuality into something that can later be exploited?

    Behind the backs of parents!

    For the life of me, except for my second-grade teacher talking about the day John Kennedy was assassinated, I cannot remember a single teacher who ever discussed their personal life. A couple of times, I remember seeing a teacher outside of school, at the store or something, and how odd it was to realize they existed outside the classroom.

    The thing to keep in mind here is that this is not a “gay” thing.

    It’s not gay people looking to groom little kids.

    Plenty of gay people are as disgusted by this as anyone. In fact, this sick movement is a terrible disservice to gays. What you have here is the LEFT working overtime to bring to life the very worst stereotypes about homosexuals looking to recruit among the innocent.

    What you have here is Disney bringing to life these terrible stereotypes.

    But that doesn’t change the fact that the left is desperate to groom your kids, to sexualize them behind your back.

    Why?

    Well, a whole lot of leftists want to have sex with your kids, and want to normalize sex between kids and adults. The evidence of that is everywhere. Democrats know opening the southern border will mean the import of child sex slaves. And yet, Democrats still open the border. Democrats continue to release child predators and suspected predators. We’re about to be saddled with a Supreme Court Justice who shrugs at child porn. More than one left-wing publication has asked us to better understand and sympathize with child molesters. The left embraced Jeffrey Epstein for decades. The left-wing Lincoln Project shielded a suspected predator.

    The other reason for the grooming is political.

    Democrats are losing key parts of their coalition: the working class, Hispanics, and chunks of the black population. One way they see of making up those numbers is to create a lot of damaged and broken young people obsessed with their sexuality. It’s just a fact that neurotic, unhappy lunatics and narcissists who define themselves by what they do with their sex organs vote Democrat. So… Democrats want to damage your kids to create a whole lot more of them.

  • “EIGHT news stories about teachers committing sex crimes upon children. ALL TODAY.”
  • Snapshot of our current problems: “In Biden’s Annual Economic Report, The Word “Gender” Is Used 40 More Times Than The Word ‘Inflation.'”
  • CNN+ shuts down one month after launch. There’s not enough schadenfreude in the world. Let a thousand pink slips bloom…
  • Another story getting short shrift because this LinkSwarm is so overstuffed: “Taylor Lorenz Attacked Libs Of Tik Tok Because Corrupt Media’s Main Function Now Is To Destroy The Right, Not Understand Its Appeal.”
  • From Powerline comes two tales of endemic corruption. The first was Yale University employee Jamie Petrone admitting to stealing over $40 million in computer equipment. “So for years, 90 percent of the equipment (sub-$10,000) that Yale’s emergency medicine department paid for–more than $40 million worth–never showed up. It didn’t exist. And no one noticed.”

    That’s the smaller of the two scandals. The bigger:

    A second instance of corruption is the Feeding Our Future scandal in Minnesota. The scandal actually involves entities in addition to FOF, and altogether $460 million or more has been funneled through these agencies by the federal free food programs Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) and the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP). The whole thing turned out to be a criminal enterprise. Various crooks pretended to be feeding many thousands of non-existent Minnesota children. The fraud should have been obvious since, if you added up the numbers, a ridiculous percentage of all of the children in the state were supposedly getting free food through these newly-founded charities.

    The corruption occurred primarily, although not entirely, within Minnesota’s Somali community. Apparently spread sheets have been circulating among fraudsters showing the names and addresses of many thousands of Somali immigrants who can be listed as phantom beneficiaries of government programs. Here, like the Yale criminal, those who were in on the fraud have lived lavishly, with federal taxpayer money administered by the State of Minnesota paying for luxury cars, expensive homes, exotic vacations, and so on. Scott wrote here about a young Somali bride who was given a tray of gold worth $100,000 as a wedding gift by persons involved in the Feeding Our Future fraud.

    Such criminality is not subtle. Little care is taken to hide it. How can a handful of fly-by-night fraudsters steal hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. government and the State of Minnesota, and no one notices? As in Yale’s case, the answer is partly gross incompetence in Minnesota’s Tim Walz administration. But in the larger picture, government at all levels is rolling in so much dough that they don’t know what to do with it. A few hundred million is hardly worth checking up on.

    This goes toward proving my “Working Thesis,” that all new welfare state programs are designed to channel money into the pockets of crooks and left wing activists (to the extent that it’s possible to distinguish the two).

  • Don’t let the FBI ginning up the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot distract you from the fact that they tried to do the same thing in Virginia.

    But the government not only attempted to manufacture “terrorists” in the Whitmer kidnapping hoax—the same FBI operation also tried to coax a man in Virginia to participate in the same sort of plot against Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. That scheme didn’t fully materialize, but the FBI’s attempt to pull off a similar stunt in Virginia reveals just how far agents were willing to go to bolster FBI Director Christopher Wray’s false warning that domestic extremists planned to “kill and assassinate” public officials.

    In summer 2020, Dan Chappel, the main informant in the Whitmer fednapping who was compensated at least $60,000 by the FBI for his services, targeted a man named Frank Butler, a disabled veteran in his late 60s and an alleged militia member. Taking instructions from Jayson Chambers, one of his FBI handling agents, Chappel used the same playbook in Virginia.

    “Dan suggests to Frank that he engage in acts of domestic terror,” defense attorneys wrote in a joint motion filed last year in the Whitmer case. “Like the defendants in this case, Dan suggested to Frank that he attack the governor of Virginia.”

    Screenshots submitted into evidence show a jaw dropping exchange between Chappel and Chambers in August 2020. “Goin [sic] to call frank butler today,” Chappel texted Chambers, asking for direction on what he should say to his target.

    “Mission is to kill the governor specifically,” Chambers replied.

    Just as in the Whitmer plot, Chappel lured Frank Butler into attempting to build an explosive device. Another text exchange in September 2020 shows Chappel and Chambers discussing a “recipe” for a bomb that Chappel can provide to Butler. After passing along the information to Butler, Chappel texted Chambers to tell him Frank planned on purchasing bomb-making supplies. “Awesome. Excellent work,” Chambers told Chappel.

    Chappel also invited Butler to a field training exercise in Wisconsin during the last weekend in October, an excursion attended by some defendants in the Whitmer caper.

    “This event, like all the others,” defense attorneys wrote, “was conceived, planned, and conducted by the federal investigative team of agents and undercover informants working together to provide a stage upon which to manipulate their targets into acting out ostensibly incriminating behavior the government hoped to elicit in its bid to develop and then ‘interrupt’ the operation of a ‘domestic terrorist organization.’”

    Butler, who cannot drive due to disabilities, did not participate. And to date, he has not been charged with any crime.

  • News you might have missed from two weeks ago: “Kenosha County ravaged by BLM riots flips red after decades of Dem leadership.” (Hat tip: Red State.)
  • “Republicans are registering formerly Democratic voters at four times the rate that Democrats are making the reverse conversion in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, a warning sign for Democrats as they try to keep control of the U.S. Congress.” You mean inflation, riots, tranny pandering and talking to elementary children about gay sex aren’t winning issues? Do tell.
  • Speaking of which, Joe Rogan wonders why California schools were trying to preach “antiracism” to his 9-year old daughter.
  • “Seattle’s transit system struggles as riders refuse to pay. So few riders are paying, fares are currently covering just 5% of the system’s operating costs, a fraction of the 40% mark Sound Transit set as a requirement.” (Hat Tip: Dwight.)
  • Incestuous Dealings in Harris County Government Raise Alarms. Connections exposed between Democrat Commissioner Rodney Ellis and organizations receiving taxpayer money.”

    While most reporting on Harris County’s problems revolve around Democrat County Judge Lina Hidalgo, this citizen’s research suggests ties exist between Democrat County Commissioner Rodney Ellis (a former state senator) and certain organizations receiving taxpayer monies.

    Ellis’ influence, and the influence of at least one of these organizations, appears to reach all the way to Hidalgo’s office.

    Snip.

    To counteract shuttering the economy in 2020, Congress broke open a dam and flooded federal taxpayer monies nationwide. These monies flowed to state and then local governments for eventual distribution. Harris County’s cut from the 2020 CARES Act was $426 million.

    One organization the county commissioners gave some of these funds to was the Coalition for the Homeless. Ties were verified between Commissioner Ellis and this organization.

    Licia Green-Ellis, Ellis’ wife, is a partner of the Waterman Steele Real Estate Consulting Group. Another partner is Lance Gilliam, who is chairman of the Coalition for the Homeless. Gilliam donated to Ellis’ campaign in 2015, and he also donated to Hidalgo in 2018, 2019, and March and June of 2021.

    Hidalgo’s chief of staff, Alexander Triantaphyllis, is also on the coalition’s board.

    In April 2021, the coalition recommended commissioners allocate taxpayer monies toward “the rapid expansion of housing” for the homeless. This resulted in agreements between the county and multiple organizations, including a more than $1.2 million agreement with BakerRipley Community Developers. We’ll come back to them in a minute.

    The following month, commissioners ballooned funding for the housing program to more than $7 million, of which more than $3.6 million went to BakerRipley for the county’s “Rapid Rehousing” program.

    A lot more at the link. (Note: This piece came out just before the indictments came down.)

  • More Harris County shenanigans:

    That’s why the judge just recused herself.

  • New York City: Now that the pandemics over, everyone’s going to come back to our high-tax hellhole, right? People who used to work in NYC: LOL. Get Rekt!

    A high-tax, highly regulated city, New York has relied for the past 25 years on a growth formula of low crime, a stable social order, and an emphasis on high-value jobs at profitable companies for whom being in the city brought advantages that outweighed the costs. The result was a prosperous but hollow economy that featured well-paid jobs in finance, law, and technology alongside low-paid service-industry jobs necessary to support those workers, but lacked many of the middle-class jobs in manufacturing or financial back offices that the city once boasted.

    The pandemic has changed that calculus. The work-from-home movement has hit New York City’s office market—the backbone of its economy—right in the pocketbook. More than two years after the initial lockdowns that brought much of the economy to a standstill, only 38 percent of office workers have returned to their city jobs, which is below average for major cities. Employers have tried to get workers back to their Manhattan offices, only to be thwarted by Covid surges and resistance from employees who don’t want to return to working in person five days a week. A rise in violent crime and disorder hasn’t helped. Both the city’s current mayor, Eric Adams, and his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, as well as former governor Andrew Cuomo and successor Kathy Hochul, have at various times urged workers to return, but to little avail.

    The more that workers and companies discover they can accomplish through remote work, the greater the danger—because New York is by far the most expensive place to locate a worker in the country. Its overall cost of occupancy, including labor, utilities, and taxes, is 50 percent higher than the next most expensive American city, San Francisco, and three times as high as Dallas, Chicago, and Seattle. The gap is even larger with many smaller metro areas that seem poised for growth. One big component of these costs is taxes: the city and state together out-tax other competitors, taking as much as 45 percent more taxable income than the average of U.S. big cities and their states. No surprise, then, that even in the pandemic’s early stages, experts rated New York one of the places that might struggle the most to recover its jobs and residents.

    What are the Democrats who run New York (city and state) going to do to bring down high taxes? Jack and Squat.

  • Speaking of New York, a court just struck down their redistricting as Gerrymandering. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • In case you missed it, Pakistan’s Prime Minister was ousted two weeks ago. “Pakistan’s political opposition toppled Prime Minister Imran Khan in a no-confidence vote in Parliament early Sunday after several political allies and a key party in his ruling coalition deserted him.” He wasn’t the worst person to run Pakistan, but high inflation (even worse than ours) brought him down.
  • The new Pakistani Prime Minister is former opposition leader Shehbaz Sharif.
  • California’s corporate diversity law ruled unconstitutional. California’s law mandated that corporations stock their executive boards with members from various victimhood identity politics groups.
  • The trifecta! “Florida man arrested after cops find him in possession of drugs, guns and alligator.” Click through to see what a hard 31 looks like. (Hat Tip: Dwight.)
  • “Downtown Greek Restaurant Owner Escapes the Country, Leaving Workers and Rent Unpaid. That’s Simi Estiatorio, and the manager partner who fled the country is George Theodosiou. Read the link for the details. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Heh:

  • Nicolas Cage answers the Internet’s questions.
  • “Jen Psaki Walks Back Claims That She Ever Worked For Biden Administration.”
  • “Check Out These 9 Trans-Friendly Kids’ Shows Coming To Disney.” Including Avatar: The Last Genderbender.
  • Worst thing about Austin this time of year? All this pollen in the air. Really triggers the allergies…

  • LinkSwarm for December 31, 2021

    Friday, December 31st, 2021

    Greetings, and welcome to the last LinkSwarm of 2021!

    Remember how all those media pundits opined that 2021 couldn’t help but being better than 2020?

    Yeah, not so much.

    Assuming the official death tolls are accurate (probably not, but I doubt the methodology has changed from 2020 to 2021), there were approximately 375,000 deaths in the United States of America in 2020 from Flu Manchu. With some 821,000+ total deaths, more people have died this year than last year. So much for Joe Biden shutting down the virus…

    Joe Rogan’s interview with Dr. Robert Malone has evidently dropped, but I haven’t watched it yet. Maybe Saturday.

  • Ghislaine Maxwell has been convicted of sex-trafficking girls for Jeffrey Epstein in a story the Democratic Media Complex has done it’s best to pay as little attention to as possible.
  • Ron DeSantis vs. Critical Race Theory.

    Over the past year, DeSantis has emerged as one of the most articulate political spokesmen for the anti–critical race theory movement. His new policy agenda builds on successful anti-CRT legislation in other states but goes two steps further. First, it provides parents with a “private right of action,” which allows them to sue offending institutions for violations, gain information through legal discovery, and, if they win in the courts, collect attorney’s fees. Second, it tackles critical race theory in corporate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” training programs, which, DeSantis says, sometimes promote racial stereotyping, scapegoating, and harassment, in violation of state civil rights laws.

    At heart, the battle against critical race theory is a fight against entrenched bureaucracies that have used public institutions to promote their own racialist ideology. “This is an elite-driven phenomenon being driven by bureaucratic elites, elites in universities, and elites in corporate America, and they’re trying to shove it down the throats of the American people,” DeSantis said. “You’re not doing that in the state of Florida.”

    Following his speech, DeSantis invited me to address the crowd. I explained that the reason critical race theory has upset so many Americans is that it speaks to two deep reservoirs of human sentiment: citizens’ desire for self-government and parents’ desire to shape the moral and educational development of their children. Elite institutions have attempted to step between parent and child.

    DeSantis has deftly positioned himself as a protector of middle-American families. One of the guest speakers, Lacaysha Howell, a biracial mother from Sarasota, said that left-wing teachers tried to persuade her daughter that the white side of their family was oppressive. Another speaker, Eulalia Jimenez, a Cuban-American mother from the Miami area, said that left-wing indoctrination in schools reminded her of her father’s warnings about Communism in his native Cuba. Both believed that critical race theory was poison to the American Dream.

    As they begin their next session in January, Florida legislators have the opportunity to craft the gold standard for “culture war” policy. The governor’s team has worked with a range of interested parties, including the Manhattan Institute, which has crafted model language for prohibiting racialist indoctrination and providing curriculum transparency to parents. The battle is ultimately about shaping public policy in accord with public values. “I think we have an ability [to] just draw a line in the sand and say, ‘That’s not the type of society that we want here in the state of Florida,’” said DeSantis yesterday. The stakes are high—and all eyes are on Florida to deliver.

    (Previously.)

  • How the Democratic Media Complex managed to destroy what was left in the public’s trust in it:

  • “Washington State Democrats Want Decreased Penalties for Drive-By Shooters.” Because too many shooters are black. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • All the Republican candidates in Texas Donald Trump has endorsed for 2022. Including incumbents Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, Ken Paxton and Sid Miller, plus Dawn Buckingham for Land Commissioner.
  • Speaking of Texas:

  • China’s Xian locks down over Mao Tze Lung.
  • “Houston Grand Jury Indicts Four More Defendants in $35 Million CARES Act Fraud Conspiracy.”

    Earlier this month, a federal grand jury in Houston indicted four men on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, and money laundering in a scheme to rip off the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) by submitting over 80 false applications for forgivable loans and writing checks to relatives and fictional employees, among other fraudulent activities.

    The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) stated in a press release on December 15 that 29-year-old Hamza Abbas of Richmond, 55-year-old Khalid Abbas of Richmond, 55-year-old Abdul Fatani of Richmond, and 53-year-old Syed Ali of Sugar Land could be sentenced to up to 20 years on each count of wire fraud.

    The indictments against them are the most recent in an apparent scheme that prosecutors say involved 15 defendants from Texas and Illinois, all of whom are accused of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

    The DOJ stated that Khalid Abbas, Fatani, Ali, and another defendant, Houston resident Amir Aqeel, 53, have been charged with money laundering in the superseding indictment. The money laundering counts carry potential sentences of up to 10 years.

    Last year, a grand jury also indicted Aqeel on a charge of aggravated identity theft. The government accuses Aqeel of using stolen identities to apply for the PPP loans.

    According to the DOJ, several of the accused have already pleaded guilty for their involvement, including Siddiq Azeemuddin, 42, of Naperville, Illinois, Richard Reuth, 58, of Spring, and Raheel Malik, 41, of Sugar Land, all of whom entered their pleas in October. Houston residents Abdul Farahshah, 70, Jesus Perez, 31, and Bijan Rajabi, 68, pleaded guilty in late November.

    Rifat Bajwa, 53, of Richmond, Pardeep Basra, 52, of Houston, Mayer Misak, 41, of Cypress, and Mauricio Navia, 42, of Katy were also indicted last year on charges of participating in the conspiracy and committing wire fraud.

    Why, it’s almost like just about all the defendants share some characteristic in common. If only I could put my finger on it…

  • Speaking of criminals, did mentioned that a second CNN employee was being investigated for child sex allegations? “The allegations against Rick Saleeby, a former senior producer for Jake Tapper’s “The Lead,” appear to be connected to reporting by Project Veritas. Saleeby resigned from CNN this month.” It’s hard to keep the media pedophiles straight without a scorecard…
  • When does Biden apologize to Trump?
  • Aluminum is up 40% this year.
  • “Austin Office of Police Oversight Violated Department Contract, Arbitrator Rules.”

    The City of Austin’s director of the Office of Police Oversight (OPO), Farah Muscadin, abused her authority, a third-party arbitrator decided this week.

    In a 31-page decision, Lynn Gomez, the arbitrator, ruled that Muscadin and the OPO violated Article 16 of the Austin Police Department’s employment contract that was negotiated in 2018. Article 16 governs the parameters of civilian oversight of the department, which progressive groups lobbied hard for during the labor standoff.

    “Contrary to the city’s claim, Director Muscadin was not acting within the scope of her authority…[she] clearly was seeking to dictate some future outcome rather than simply making a recommendation as Art. 16 permits,” Gomez ruled.

    “[T]he evidence and arguments raise[d] by the city indicate that the city does not consider itself or OPO bound by Article 16’s provisions.”

    You may remember Muscadin from such hits as “I’m spending taxpayer money to push Critical Race Theory” and “defund APD and give the money to my radical leftwing cronies.” She should resign.

  • Has the Biden Amdenistration tipped its hand that considers Taiwan too strategically important to not defend it in the case of a Chinese attack?

    Ely Ratner, assistant secretary of defence for Indo-Pacific security affairs, told a Senate hearing three weeks ago that Taiwan was “critical to the region’s security and critical to the defence of vital US interests”. In words strikingly similar to MacArthur’s, he emphasised the island’s location “at a critical node within the first island chain, anchoring a network of US allies and partners”.

    This may well be remembered as the moment Washington came clean on its intentions regarding Taiwan. In Beijing at least, the statement is being read as dropping all pretence that the US could acquiesce to a unification of Taiwan with China.

    Wu Xinbo, director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in China, believes that US strategic thinking regarding Taiwan has always followed the lines laid out by MacArthur.

    Even after establishing diplomatic relations with China, the US “worked to ensure the continuation of a state of separation across the Taiwan Strait”, Wu said. “When we ask the US if they do not hope to see the unification of China, they deny that. But judging from the US’s concrete actions, it is clear that they indeed do not hope to see China unify. Ely Ratner has now said this out loud.”

    In Washington, too, some observers think the testimony allows little conclusion other than that the US should not allow Taiwan to become part of China under any circumstances.

    Hopefully true, but betting on Joe Biden’s stalwart fortitude is putting your hopes on an extremely weak horse…

  • Alexandria Ocasio Cortez spotted in Miami Beach while New York City Flu Manchu cases hit alltime highs. As always, Covid Theater rules are for the little people.
  • Incoming New York City mayor Eric Adams is keeping Bill De Blasio’s private employer vaccine mandate. Because even nominally sane Democrats still hate you and your freedom to say no.
  • Family Guy sticks it to China:

  • Everything we know about famous psychological testing is wrong.
  • Sometimes the inevitable does happen: Betty White dead at age 99, just 18 days shy of 100. Still a hell of a run…
  • Remembering that we also lost Norm Macdonald this year, here he is slamming Carrot Top.
  • For those who didn’t get enough Harry Reid bashing in my obituary, here’s a classic Dennis Miller rant on the late senator.
  • A Twitter thread on electronic warfare during The Battle of the Bulge. Why yes, this is relevant to my interests. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • The challenge of moving a 17 ton magnet.
  • Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia gets a new tower.
  • I really should have bought this for Dwight for Christmas.
  • The Critical Drinker is not thrilled at the latest Matrix film:

    Ultimately The Matrix Regenerations fails on just about every level possible. It fails to properly honor the past by leaving it well enough alone. It fails to tell a compelling new story, or add new ideas to the world it created. It fails to establish interesting new characters, or take old ones in a new direction. It fails to surpass the spectacle, energy and originality of a 20 year old film. And most of all it fails to deliver a compelling reason for its own existence. The Matrix Retaliations is a film that never should have been made in the first place.

  • Left-wing sponsors vs. right-wing sponsors:

  • “Pfizer Assures That Vaccine Is Almost As Safe For Kids As COVID.”
  • “After Conviction For Sex Crimes, Ghislaine Maxwell Announces New Job At CNN.”
  • Abandoned Christmas puppies find homes.
  • Happy New Year, everyone!

    Anti-CRT/SJW Roundup for November 16, 2021

    Tuesday, November 16th, 2021

    Was thinking about doing separate posts on several stories, and decided to shove them all into a roundup on the fight against Social Justice Warriors/Critical Race Theory/wokeness/etc. Because I’m just not doing enough roundups these days…

  • CRT-pushing, dossier-keeping, and possibly federal law breaking Jann-Michael Greenburg is out as president of the Scottsdale Unified School District.

    The Scottsdale Unified School District has elected a new interim president after allegations against President Jann-Michael Greenburg that he had distributed a “dossier” on some parents, including photos and personal finances.

    The SUSD board voted 4-1 at a Monday night meeting to elect Patty Beckman as interim president as parents gathered outside to call for Greenburg’s resignation.

  • Don’t let the left gaslight you on Critical Race Theory.

    The reality is that Critical Race Theory is being effectively smoked out. There was a time not so long ago when people actually tried to defend the use of CRT, like Marc Lamont Hill during his interview with Christopher Rufo.

    But now the playbook has changed. CRT is simply too toxic even to try to defend. This is why the National Education Association scrubbed Business Item #39 — which supported the use of CRT in K–12 schools across America — from its website in July. This is why the Biden administration removed the link to University of Georgia professor Bettina Love’s Abolitionist Teaching Network from the Department of Education’s website, claiming that the connection to the radical group (which aims to “disrupt Whiteness” in schools) was a mistake.

    Snip.

    [Defending CRT] would be to defend the “Color Line” exercise, a teacher training activity developed by Glenn Singleton’s Pacific Educational Group, which aims to help white educators identify their so-called “white privilege” so they can understand how this privilege is perpetuating white supremacy culture in K–12 schools as well as the rest of America. According to University of Alabama history professor David Beito, this exercise is a Maoist-style scheme that “publicly humiliate[s] dissenters by having them wear signs around their necks expressing shame for their ‘incorrect thoughts.'”

    It would be to support forcing third-graders to deconstruct their racial identities and rank themselves according to their power and privilege. It would be to teach educators that babies show the first signs of racism at three months old and that White children “remain strongly biased in favor of Whiteness” by age five. It would be to argue that the United States was founded on a Eurocentric, White supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal, homophobic, and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe. It would require teachers to locate themselves on an “oppression matrix” and accept that White heterosexual Protestant males are inherently oppressive and therefore must atone for their “covert White supremacy.”

    It would be to defend turning MLK’s “Dream” on its head, replacing judging a person by the “content of character” with judging a person by the color of his skin. It would be to defend replacing individualism with identity-based tribalism, with teaching children that race is the most important determinant of success, that meritocracy and American exceptionalism are evil, and that systemic racism is so deeply ingrained in our institutions that you are no longer the captain of your own ship.

    In other words, it would be to defend the indefensible.

    (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)

  • Among the places CRT is taught are Virginia schools.

    Throughout election night, as it became clear Republican Glenn Youngkin would win the Virginia governor’s race, numerous left-leaning media commentators insisted that critical race theory isn’t being taught in Virginia public schools.

    Various media personalities—some professing to be on the news side, others on the opinion side—repeated the assertion both before and after the election results came in.

    But a simple Google search would have shown these pundits that public documents from the Virginia Department of Education repeatedly mention the phrase “critical race theory,” as well as produced news stories about teacher training by consulting firms associated with critical race theory.

    Christopher Rufo, a contributor to City Journal and Fox News, is among those who have reported on the documents, as well as on Virginia counties implementing critical race theory into their curricula.

  • Here’s the Rufo thread referenced above:

  • Don’t believe in Critical Race Theory? You might get fired.

    How about firing anyone who won’t sign on to the racist, anti-American ideology of Critical Race Theory? Shockingly, that is now happening, all across corporate America. The current message is: believe in CRT, or more likely pretend to believe, or you are fired.

    The Upper Midwest Law Center, on whose board I serve, is representing several individuals who have been fired or demoted because they disagreed with Critical Race Theory. One of those plaintiffs is Chuck Vavra. Vavra was an engineer at Honeywell, which imposed mandatory Critical Race Theory-based training on its employees. The “curriculum” called America irredeemably racist and asserted that all whites are the same, and insisted that whites admit their inherent racism and status as evil oppressors, while blacks were characterized as victims, good people but intrinsically unable to lead successful lives due to white racism.

    Vavra objected to this bizarre Marxist world-view. The result? Honeywell fired him.

    It is notable that the “training” insisted upon by Honeywell was not a matter of compliance with federal civil rights statutes or other laws, nor did it have anything to do with Vavra’s job duties as an engineer. It was simply an effort to impose fealty to an extreme left-wing, anti-American agenda as a condition of employment at the company.

  • “North Dakota Becomes 13th State to Ban Critical Race Theory in Schools.”
  • Round Rock ISD is letting boys into girls restrooms in the name of transsexual rights.

    In the safe & suburban Central Texas city of Round Rock, a group of parents, staff, and students are raising red flags over the potentially dangerous environment at their local schools—and so far, district officials have only disregarded them.

    Round Rock Independent School District is situated in the northern suburbs of Austin, in a community long considered safe from the craziness of the state’s notoriously liberal capital city. Yet, based on a series of tips, Texas Scorecard has interviewed a handful of individuals experiencing a free-for-all locker room rule in the district’s schools; many of these individuals even know of school plans to place boys in girls’ hotel rooms during school trips.

    To protect the minors and their families from harassment or punishment, this report will refer to these students, parents, and responsible staff by pseudonyms.

    Two female high school students—referred to as Heather and Lauren—told Texas Scorecard about their first experiences in the troubling series of events.

    “I became aware of it about a month ago when I was getting dressed for school [in the locker room] out of my sweaty gym clothes, and I had just taken my shirt off,” said Heather, “when I noticed someone who looked a lot like a dude standing there using the sink and stuff. And I got really scared because I didn’t know that they were a biological male … so I quickly put my shirt back on then I immediately left with all my stuff.”

    Lauren relayed a similar story. “I remember I was going in [to the locker room] and I was getting changed when, out in the open, I saw an individual walk in who I know is a biological male,” Lauren said. “It just kind of really caught me by surprise; it caught me off guard. So, I just quickly got dressed and just got out really quickly.”

    Snip.

    Soon after, several parents got involved; for the sake of this story, we’ll refer to them as Crystal and Julie. They first sent an open records request to the district, asking for their bathroom/private facilities policy (with no response as of yet). They then sent their questions up the district food chain, first to a teacher (who replied they did not have the power to fix the situation), then to a high school principal, the school board, and finally the superintendent and his leadership team.

    “At Stone Bridge High School in Loudoun County, Virginia, where the school board’s policy on ‘gender expression’ provides a similar environment as presently experienced at RRISD schools, a ninth-grade girl was allegedly raped in a school bathroom by a so-called gender-fluid male student wearing a skirt,” wrote Julie to the school board.

    “Please take the time to craft, with parent input … a district-wide policy and action plan to address this dilemma.”

    Only two of the seven school board members—the same two who were the only ones fighting for parental rights and transparency in the district’s other recent tumultuous events—responded.

    “Yesterday Trustee [Mary] Bone and I both inquired to the superintendent, in writing, about this,” wrote RRISD Trustee Danielle Weston. “I seek to protect our students’ safety and do not want what happened in Loudon County to happen here.”

    Meanwhile, the parents and Lauren were able to meet with one of the district’s high school principals, who actually confirmed they will allow anyone inside any private room, including boys inside the girls’ dressing rooms.

    “That is what I’ve been told from [the legal department], that every student is permitted to use a restroom if they choose to,” the principal said.

    “So this policy comes from legal?” asked Julie.

    “Mhm,” the principal replied.

    Later in the conversation, Julie asked who in the district is creating the policy.

    “So does legal have a policy in place?” she asked.

    “No there’s no policy in place,” the principal replied. “The policy is this: Every one student at a time, every situation one at a time. And if the student chooses to use the restroom [of their choice], they’re going to be allowed to use that restroom.”

    The principal then suggested if they wanted to feel safer, the biological female students could make their own adjustments. He said they could go to a different locker room, change in a bathroom stall, go home, or even change inside a pop-up tent in the bathroom.

    You will be made to care, and you will be made to conform. How many fingers, Winston?

  • Texas Republican Gubernatorial challenger Don Huffines says that the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services is using Critical Race Theory in training.
  • Speaking of CRT in Texas, a pro-Critical Race Theory parent in the Fort Worth Independent School District told school board meeting attendees that “he has 1,000 soldiers ‘locked and loaded‘ for those who ‘dare’ question the need for race-based curricula.” Yeah, we saw some of those “soldiers” on display in Kenosha. They did not impress… (Hat tip: Gail Heriot at Instapundit.)