More Somali fraud in Minneapolis, Democrats have always been at war with Hamas, the Caspian Sea is no longer safe for Russian assets, Texas tops the U-Haul destination list (again), MST3K gets sold, and Scott Adams departs this simulation.
FA phase: “Somali Suitcase Stash: Feds say $130 million moved from Ohio airport to Minnesota on way overseas.”
Federal agents investigating a Somali immigrant operation that moved massive amounts of cash in suitcases from the Minneapolis airport to overseas have uncovered a new leg of the courier journey: the Columbus, Ohio airport.
Homeland Security Department officials told Just the News that Transportation Security Administration officers tracked and flagged about $136 million in bulk cash in outbound luggage at the passenger checkpoints at John Glenn Columbus International Airport since November 2023.
The cash movements were made by U.S. citizens of Somali origin who flew out of the Columbus airport en route to either the airports in Minneapolis or Atlanta, and the couriers always declared the cash as legally required on documents, officials said.
“Typically, when they go to Minneapolis, they drop off the cash and then a subsequent courier travels abroad from Minneapolis to Dubai through Amsterdam,” one official familiar with the investigation told Just the News on Tuesday, speaking only on condition of anonymity.
The officials said they appear to have uncovered a massive cash movement operation that gathered money from multiple Somali immigrant communities in the West, Midwest and South that eventually brought luggage filled with currency to Minneapolis for flights overseas.
Just the News reported exclusively last week that TSA detected nearly $700 million in cash in luggage leaving the Minneapolis airport in 2024 and 2025, frequently headed on a route to Amsterdam and then Dubai where U.S. officials lost the tracking. The TSA agents routinely alerted investigators during the Biden years, but there was little interest in probing the money movements further until President Donald Trump took office last year.
Find Out phase beginning: “Congress moving quickly to investigate cash-in-luggage exodus from U.S. airports. Sen. Rand Paul also revealed that federal agents are probing the massive cash transfers that move through a network centered in the Minneapolis airport.”
Federal agents investigating a Somali immigrant operation that moved massive amounts of cash in suitcases from the Minneapolis airport to overseas have uncovered a new leg of the courier journey: the Columbus, Ohio airport.
Homeland Security Department officials told Just the News that Transportation Security Administration officers tracked and flagged about $136 million in bulk cash in outbound luggage at the passenger checkpoints at John Glenn Columbus International Airport since November 2023.
The cash movements were made by U.S. citizens of Somali origin who flew out of the Columbus airport en route to either the airports in Minneapolis or Atlanta, and the couriers always declared the cash as legally required on documents, officials said.
“Typically, when they go to Minneapolis, they drop off the cash and then a subsequent courier travels abroad from Minneapolis to Dubai through Amsterdam,” one official familiar with the investigation told Just the News on Tuesday, speaking only on condition of anonymity.
The officials said they appear to have uncovered a massive cash movement operation that gathered money from multiple Somali immigrant communities in the West, Midwest and South that eventually brought luggage filled with currency to Minneapolis for flights overseas.
And the fraud isn’t limited to Minnesota: “Two scammers plead guilty to $68M Brooklyn adult day care fraud scheme.”
Two Brooklyn scammers pleaded guilty on Thursday to defrauding a whopping $68 million from the state’s controversial Medicaid home care program by paying health care kickbacks for services they didn’t provide at three Big Apple businesses.
Manal Wasef and Elaine Antao, both 46, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit health care fraud for referring Medicaid recipients to two Brooklyn social adult day cares and a home health company in exchange for illegal kickbacks and bribes, the US Department of Justice announced on Thursday.
The latest iteration of the Democratic Party’s color-revolution-style operation was on full display in recent days as tensions erupted following the fatal shooting of a left-wing activist by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent during a federal enforcement sweep in Minnesota. This incident demonstrates that the protest industrial complex, funded by left-wing billionaires, has been on standby, waiting for a catalyzing event to ignite mass mobilization.
MSM, the Democratic Party, and left-wing nonprofits are working hard to manufacture another ‘George Floyd’-type protest or riot by omitting key context about the woman shot and killed by an ICE agent. They conveniently left out her social justice “warrior” role in Minneapolis, including her reported involvement with “ICE Watch” and other operations to disrupt ICE raids in the sanctuary city. These details matter because MSM attempted to manufacture an outrage news cycle, while nonprofits create artificial multi-city protests aimed at shifting public opinion on ICE operations nationwide.
More find out: “Trump Threatens To Invoke Insurrection Act As Left-Wing Chaos In Minneapolis Spreads.”
This is a good question: “Why did all the Dems suddenly become anti-Hamas over the weekend?”
Something very weird happened with the Democrats this past weekend.
I first noticed when I saw this post on X from Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois which was, let’s just say, not exactly subtle.
Apropos of apparently nothing, we’re getting a Shabbat Shalom from Pritzker on a random Friday night. That by itself that would be odd, but whatever.
A whole lot of Democrats followed suit in their 180:
Videos like that are a dime a dozen. If you’ve followed the anti-Israel campus protests over the past 2 years, you’ve seen leftwing mobs openly supporting Hamas proudly and loudly. Democrat politicians, meanwhile, have unequivocally supported the Palestinian Authority and Gaza Health Ministry, which are controlled entirely by Hamas. The support was so strong and so unanimous that Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania made headlines for breaking party lines with his support of Israel!
Legal Insurrection on a similarly mysterious flip. “Having Flipped Against Hamas, Dem Pols In Unison Now Back Iranian Protesters.”
Something’s happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.
We covered how Democrats politicians in unison and contrary to every message they’re sent since the October 7 Massacre, declared that public support for Hamas was unacceptable and antisemitic. We asked, What’s Behind the Democrats’ Sudden Pivot on Hamas and Antisemitism?
The talking points just dropped.
Now they’re condemning Hamas.
The Democrats are pure phonies. pic.twitter.com/TUzc1ocsAJ
— Gina Milan (@ginamilan_) January 10, 2026
I think it’s an election set up, they are going to use the “Woke Right” against Republicans not only in the 2026 midterms, but particularly if JD Vance is the Republican nominee in 2028. His proximity and friendship with Tucker Carlson and the Groypers will be a major Democrat theme, but that can’t work unless Democrats switch gears from their anti-Israel, pro-Hamas — and yes antisemitic — persona.
So they are up so to something. No one believes they had a change of heart.
And now Democrats have come out supporting the protesters in Iran, despite doing everything dating back to Obama to keep the Mullahs in power.
Snip.
Little history on AOC and Iran:
-She condemned Trump for killing top Iranian regime terrorist Qassem Soleimani
-She condemned Trump for blowing up Iran’s nuclear facilities
-She co-sponsored legislation to prevent the U.S. military from taking action against Iran
Did Iran’s check to Soros bounce? Or does Iran’s hyperinflation and currency collapse mean that they can no longer keep paying off useful idiots?
This account from a Venezuelan security guard loyal to Nicolás Maduro is absolutely chilling—and it explains a lot about why the tone across Latin America suddenly changed.
Security Guard: On the day of the operation, we didn’t hear anything coming. We were on guard, but suddenly all our radar systems shut down without any explanation. The next thing we saw were drones, a lot of drones, flying over our positions. We didn’t know how to react.
Interviewer: So what happened next? How was the main attack?
Security Guard: After those drones appeared, some helicopters arrived, but there were very few. I think barely eight helicopters. From those helicopters, soldiers came down, but a very small number. Maybe twenty men. But those men were technologically very advanced. They didn’t look like anything we’ve fought against before.
Interviewer: And then the battle began?
Security Guard: Yes, but it was a massacre. We were hundreds, but we had no chance. They were shooting with such precision and speed… it seemed like each soldier was firing 300 rounds per minute. We couldn’t do anything.
Interviewer: And your own weapons? Didn’t they help?
Security Guard: No help at all. Because it wasn’t just the weapons. At one point, they launched something—I don’t know how to describe it… it was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move.
Interviewer: And your comrades? Did they manage to resist?
Security Guard: No, not at all. Those twenty men, without a single casualty, killed hundreds of us. We had no way to compete with their technology, with their weapons. I swear, I’ve never seen anything like it. We couldn’t even stand up after that sonic weapon or whatever it was.
Interviewer: So do you think the rest of the region should think twice before confronting the Americans?
Security Guard: Without a doubt. I’m sending a warning to anyone who thinks they can fight the United States. They have no idea what they’re capable of. After what I saw, I never want to be on the other side of that again. They’re not to be messed with.
Interviewer: And now that Trump has said Mexico is on the list, do you think the situation will change in Latin America?
Security Guard: Definitely. Everyone is already talking about this. No one wants to go through what we went through. Now everyone thinks twice. What happened here is going to change a lot of things, not just in Venezuela but throughout the region.
Judicial Watch sued in 2025 to clean up Oregon’s voter rolls.
Confirmed by Portland’s Willamette Week, Secretary of State Tobias Read is now cleaning up those records, and the scope of the clean-up is HUGE.
That process could lead to the cancellation of as many as 800,000 registrations. That’s the number of voters Read says are currently classified as ‘inactive’ on the voter rolls. To be clear, inactive voters do not receive ballots, but their names remain on the rolls.
The cleanup comes as Oregon’s first-in-the-nation vote-by-mail system is under intense scrutiny. President Donald Trump, who blamed mail-in ballots, among other bogeymen, for his defeat in 2020, has amplified historical criticism of Oregon’s system.
There’s nuance here. Essentially, because these voters haven’t cast a ballot in a certain number of years, they no longer get a handy-dandy mail-in ballot sent directly to their home.
That doesn’t mean, however, that they can’t vote, or that they haven’t been involved in some level of electoral shenanigans.
There are reportedly 167,000 people who haven’t voted since 2017 and will be taken off the rolls beginning this month. Another 640,000 are classified as inactive and will be reviewed after that.
Remember that in 2024 President Trump only lost Oregon by some 320,000 votes…
For the first time in 50 years, the U.S. experienced negative net migration in 2025 because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal border crossings and heightened deportation efforts, an enormous victory for the White House as it faces renewed backlash against its heavy-handed enforcement tactics.
The U.S. had net migration of -10,000 to -295,000 due to a combination of deportations, self-exits, and a significant drop in illegal immigration resulting from increased border security measures, according to a new Brookings Institution analysis. Those numbers represent a significant victory for President Trump, whose successful campaign focused primarily on his vow to reverse the record illegal immigration numbers facilitated by President Biden’s lax border policies.
Brookings observes a decline in green cards issued, refugee inflows, temporary visas, paroles and notices to appear, and entries without encountering a border official in 2025 due to the Trump administration’s stricter approach. Those trends will likely continue in 2026 as the administration tightens green card eligibility, further limits visa issuances, and continues to reject applications for asylum or refugee status.
The State Department announced Wednesday that it would pause immigrant visa processing from 75 countries “whose migrants take welfare from the American people at unacceptable rates,” the latest in a series of moves designed to decrease immigration from impoverished countries.
Funny what you can do when you actually obey the law and implement the desires of actual citizens rather than Democrat Party elites…
President Donald Trump put another dent in the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement, withdrawing the United States from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and 65 other international organizations dedicated to climate and social justice.
Trump’s order caps a recent trend in which many corporations have also canceled their decades-long commitments to left-wing global alliances, undermining what had been a highly influential worldwide movement that once included the world’s largest nations and companies.
According to a White House statement, Trump’s Jan. 7 executive order directs “all Executive Departments and Agencies to cease participating in and funding 35 non-United Nations (UN) organizations and 31 UN entities that operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty.”
On Jan. 8, the U.S. Treasury Department announced it would no longer provide funding to the Global Climate Fund, which financed many of the U.N.’s climate initiatives. The United States originally joined more than 190 other nations in the UNFCCC in 1992, when the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty.
This was followed by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, in which countries committed to CO2 limits and reduction targets, and the 2015 Paris Agreement, which accelerated national governments’ commitments and spending to reduce global temperatures. The U.S. Senate did not ratify either of these subsequent accords.
Thereafter, a number of net-zero corporate alliances emerged to align the private sector with climate initiatives. At its peak, this network included financial and corporate alliances, such as the Net Zero Banking Alliance, the Net Zero Insurance Alliance, the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, and others.
These alliances operated under the umbrella of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, a U.N.-backed multi-trillion-dollar coalition. The Glasgow Alliance focused on financial institutions because they were not only financiers but also dominant shareholders of publicly traded corporations, and thus a critical means of leverage over the private sector.
Net Zero Asset Managers members, for example, included BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, the world’s largest asset managers. These three firms alone are collectively the largest shareholders in more than 40 percent of publicly traded U.S. firms, and 88 percent of the S&P 500, according to a study by George Mason University business professors Sebahattin Demirkan and Ted Polat.
Over the past several years, however, members have begun to exit these organizations amid a conservative backlash and allegations of conflicts of interest and collusion. Much of this backlash occurred in conservative U.S. states, where Republican lawmakers, treasurers, and attorneys general launched boycotts and antitrust investigations of banks and fund managers accused of colluding against oil, gas, and coal companies and of violating their fiduciary duties to investors.
Vanguard quit Net Zero Asset Managers in 2022, and BlackRock quit in January 2025, after which the initiative announced it was suspending activities. In 2023, half of the Net Zero Insurance Alliance’s members quit en masse, facing risks of antitrust prosecution.
“Huge Missile/Drone Strike on Atlant Aero Drone Factory in Taganrog.” “This has been hit twice before.”
They hit the Nevinnomyssk Azot chemical plant with drones, and it’s been hit before. “It has the only units in Russia for the production of methylacetate and high purity acetic acid.”
Ukraine attacks four tankers with drones in the Black Sea. One wonder how much of Russia’s shadow fleet is even left…
Cargo ship Rona, possibly carrying weapons from Iran to Russia, sinks in the Caspian Sea. Looking at that rust bucket, you can well believe it sank without any help from Ukraine. Also, shouldn’t the mullahs be saving those weapons to use on their own people?
Despite breathless headlines warning of a robot takeover in the workforce, a new research briefing from Oxford Economics casts doubt on the narrative that artificial intelligence is currently causing mass unemployment. According to the firm’s analysis, “firms don’t appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale,” suggesting instead that companies may be using the technology as a cover for routine headcount reductions.
In a January 7 report, the research firm argued that, while anecdotal evidence of job displacement exists, the macroeconomic data does not support the idea of a structural shift in employment caused by automation. Instead, it points to a more cynical corporate strategy: “We suspect some firms are trying to dress up layoffs as a good news story rather than bad news, such as past over-hiring.”
he primary motivation for this rebranding of job cuts appears to be investor relations. The report notes that attributing staff reductions to AI adoption “conveys a more positive message to investors” than admitting to traditional business failures, such as weak consumer demand or “excessive hiring in the past.” By framing layoffs as a technological pivot, companies can present themselves as forward-thinking innovators rather than businesses struggling with cyclical downturns.
In a recent interview, Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli told Fortune that he’s seen research about how, because markets typically celebrate news of job cuts, firms announce “phantom layoffs” that never actually occur. Companies were arbitraging the positive stock-market reaction to the news of a potential layoff, but “a few decades ago, the market stopped going up because [investors] started to realize that companies were not actually even doing the layoffs that they said they were going to do.”
When asked about the supposed link between AI and layoffs, Cappelli urged people to look closely at announcements. “The headline is, ‘It’s because of AI,’ but if you read what they actually say, they say, ‘We expect that AI will cover this work.’ Hadn’t done it. They’re just hoping. And they’re saying it because that’s what they think investors want to hear.”
“Trump greenlights Bill proposing 500% tariff over Russia oil trade. US Senator Lindsey Graham said the Russia sanctions bill will allow US President Donald Trump to punish countries that ‘buy cheap Russian oil, fueling Putin’s war machine.'” This seems aimed at India in particular.
The struggle over control of information, censorship, and economic dominance in the digital space is increasingly becoming a fundamental civilizational question. That the European Union now sees not only the EU Commission but also national governments and security apparatuses siding with information diktats, against the fundamental principle of free speech, sends a dangerous signal to the world. The EU has effectively withdrawn from the circle of freedom-oriented state actors.
Into this picture fits a recent report from Italy. A tweet by the founder and CEO of the internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, has caused a stir.
Yesterday a quasi-judicial body in Italy fined @Cloudflare $17 million for failing to go along with their scheme to censor the Internet. The scheme, which even the EU has called concerning, required us within a mere 30 minutes of notification to fully censor from the Internet any… pic.twitter.com/qZf9UKEAY5
Prince reports that Cloudflare has been hit with a $17 million fine by a — as he calls it — clandestine cabal in Italy. The accusation: Cloudflare refused to participate in an Italian censorship mechanism at the behest of this group.
Specifically, this concerns a system controlled by the Italian media authority AGCOM (Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni) called the “Piracy Shield.” This blocking system is officially aimed at combating illegal sports and media streaming services. The main targets are the economic interests of major players such as Italy’s Serie A football league, Sky Italia, DAZN, Mediaset, and other large European media and rights corporations.
Private actors, comparable to the so-called “Trusted Flaggers” now familiar in Germany, operate on behalf of the Italian media sector within this system. They report websites, IP addresses, or suspicious domains to the Piracy Shield. The authority then compels internet service providers and infrastructure operators like Cloudflare to implement the corresponding blocks within just 30 minutes. Every advertising minute counts; piracy is indeed a dangerously significant economic factor. The question is: How do states and affected companies enforce copyright? Do they operate under the rule of law and avoid collateral damage, such as backdoor state censorship?
According to Prince, all of this happens without a judicial order or prior review, bypassing due legal process entirely. The measures affect not only allegedly illegal content but also deeply intrude into the technical infrastructure of the internet.
“A middle school band director in the Abilene Independent School District has been busted for possessing child sexual abuse material. Lance Carl Mosley was arrested and charged with possession of child pornography.”
“U-Haul Growth Index: Texas Back on Top as No. 1 Growth State of 2025. Florida ranks 2nd for net gain of one-way customers; California last for sixth year in a row.” (Hat tip: Ted Cruz on Facebook.)
Life in deep blue Seattle: “McDonald’s rolls out store ‘no door’ policy – and bans ALL diners from eating in…The McDonald’s restaurant is located in downtown Seattle and it has been nicknamed ‘McStabby’s.’ And, it is situated in an area that has been plagued with crime in recent years.” This is your city on Democrats…
Yes, Democrats are totally rational: “Nebraska Democrat, best known for filibustering trans surgery ban, rips down America 250 exhibits at Capitol.”
Cartoonist, author and political commentator Scott Adams died Tuesday after a battle with prostate cancer. He was 68.
His ex-wife and caregiver, Shelly, made the announcement on Adams’ livestream Tuesday morning.
“Unfortunately, this isn’t good news,” Shelly said. “Of course, he waited ’til just before the show started, but he’s not with us anymore.”
Shelly read aloud a “final message” that Adams “wanted to say” on the livestream.
“If you’re reading this, things did not go well for me,” the message began. “I have a few things to say before I go. My body fell before my brain. I am of sound mind as I write this January 1, 2026.”
After speaking about Christianity, Adams’ message said, “For the first part of my life, I was focused on making myself a worthy husband and parent as a way to find meaning. That worked — but marriages don’t always last forever, and mine ended in a highly amicable way. I’m grateful for those years and the people I came to call my family.”
Snip.
In his last decade and a half, however, Adams achieved wide influence through his business advice and political analysis.
His 2013 best seller, “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big,” is one of the most influential and entertaining business books of recent years.
In it, Adams introduced the concept of using systems, rather than goals, to achieve success in life. He also advised readers to accumulate skills — a “talent stack” — rather than traditional credentials.
In 2015, Adams began commenting on politics after observing the first Republican presidential primary debate. When then-candidate Donald Trump responded to a moderator’s question that accused him of mistreating women by interjecting, “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” Adams took notice.
A trained hypnotist, Adams predicted that Trump, then a huge underdog, would win the nomination — and the presidency.
Adams drew ridicule for his bold claim. But he looked increasingly prescient as Trump dispensed with his opponents, the Republican establishment and — eventually — Hillary Clinton.
Adams used what he called the “persuasion filter”: Rather than judging whether political rhetoric was true or false, he simply evaluated it based on whether it was persuasive.
Snip.
While he excelled at explaining Trump’s tactics to a growing audience of Trump-supporting fans, Adams was also interested in explaining how Democrats, and the left-leaning media, interpreted events.
He explained that the country was often watching “two movies on one screen,” and argued — with great empathy for his opponents — that voters who felt genuinely frightened by Trump’s ascent had been led into an emotional cul-de-sac by cynical leaders.
Snip.
While he excelled at explaining Trump’s tactics to a growing audience of Trump-supporting fans, Adams was also interested in explaining how Democrats, and the left-leaning media, interpreted events.
He explained that the country was often watching “two movies on one screen,” and argued — with great empathy for his opponents — that voters who felt genuinely frightened by Trump’s ascent had been led into an emotional cul-de-sac by cynical leaders.
Leftists suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome forget just how funny and influential Dilbert was, and would have done much better listening to Adams’ explanation of how Trump works than their continuing full bore freakout. But that wouldn’t let them assuage their wounded ego with the certainty that they’re simply smarter and better people than Trump and his his deplorable followers in JesusLand…
Radial Entertainment, the entertainment company formed from the merger of Shout! Studios and FilmRise, has obtained full ownership over the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” brand from creator Joel Hodgson’s Alternaversal.
“MST3K” had been jointly owned by Alternaversal and Shout! Studios since late 2015. Radial’s purchase includes all brand assets and intellectual property and follows nearly two decades of Shout!’s multichannel distribution of “MST3K” content. The amount of the final buyout was undisclosed.
Also: “Hodgson will remain involved with the property as brand ambassador and consultant.”
I hope they can keep it going and not screw it up…
New woke Star trek is such garbage people won’t even watch it for free. “Paramount only hit 1,300 live viewers during free YouTube premiere.”
ObamaCare bites the dust, Eurocensors try grind Twitter under its bootheel, a lot of Ukrainian drone and missile strikes, Keir Starmer’s fingerprints are all over lots of censorship efforts, some homegrown Austin fraud, and the history of human occupation of north America just got a radical update.
On Thursday afternoon, the Senate rejected extending Obamacare subsidies, refusing to let taxpayers mask the skyrocketing costs of health insurance premiums caused by Barack Obama’s 2010 signature legislation.
“Senators rejected a Democratic bill to extend the subsidies for three years and a Republican alternative that would have created new health savings accounts — an unceremonious end to a monthslong effort by Democrats to prevent the COVID-19-era subsidies from expiring on Jan. 1,” the Associated Press reported. “Ahead of the votes, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York warned Republicans that if they did not vote to extend the tax credits, ‘there won’t be another chance to act,’ before premiums rise for many people who buy insurance off the ACA marketplaces.”
Just a reminder that Schumer and the Democrats got absolutely nothing from their shutdown stunt. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Europe is ramping up its war on free speech by targeting X with fines for not submitting itself to censorship regulations demanded by the European Union.
The EU levied a fine of $140 million against X, the first-ever penalty under Europe’s Digital Services Act. Europe decided that the website’s blue checkmark symbol is misleading, that it won’t give Europe access to data that will help it investigate free speech on the platform, and that it does not have a proper catalog of the ads available on the platform for Europe to examine.
This has been part of a two-year pressure campaign against X, as Europe does not believe in free speech, and X CEO Elon Musk has reduced the level of censorship on the platform. Europeans can claim that this isn’t about free speech but “transparency” all they want, but the 2023 investigation opened into X was focused on “disinformation” and “illegal content.” Now, Europe wants access to a list of X’s advertisers, wants its “researchers” to have access to the website’s algorithm to scrutinize “algorithmic bias” and “hate speech,” and to alter how the website runs with respect to its blue checkmark system.
“Note the Soros connection. As Mike Benz has repeatedly highlighted, the co-mingling of Soros and the Blob is real.”
Revelations that aren’t even shocking anymore: “Black Lives Matter Director Spent Millions in Donations on Homes, Shopping, Vacations, Indictment Alleges.”
Oklahoma City Black Lives Matter Executive Director Tashella Sheri Amore Dickerson has been charged with 20 counts of wire fraud and five counts of money laundering after allegedly spending millions in donations on personal indulgences.
Dickerson took over as the director of Black Lives Matter OKC (BLMOCK) in 2016 and since 2020 has raised more than $5.6 million for what donors believed was a national bail fund. The bail fund was also supplemented by grants through the Community Justice Exchange, Massachusetts Bail Fund, and Minnesota Freedom Fund.
The indictment alleges that from June 2020 to October 2025, Dickerson used at least $3.15 million in bail fund donations and grant money to supplement her lifestyle. Dickerson allegedly embezzled the funds to pay for personal shopping sprees, $50,000 in food and grocery delivery, trips to Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, as well as a personal vehicle and six Oklahoma City properties registered in her name.
The indictment explains that Dickerson allegedly used interstate wire communications to send false reports to Alliance for Global Justice, a fiscal sponsor to BLMOCK, which only permitted the group to use its funds in ways compliant with its 501(c)3 nonprofit status. Dickerson, however, did not disclose how she was allegedly using the funds for personal gain.
If convicted, Dickerson faces up to 20 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine per count of wire fraud. For each count of money laundering, she faces ten years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000, or twice the amount of criminally derived property.
So was there any #BlackLivesMatter director who wasn’t using donated money as their personal piggy bank?
The scientific journal Nature has retracted a paper published in April 2024 that overestimated the economic effects of climate change and influenced central banks worldwide to create risk management scenarios.
The article predicted a 62% drop in worldwide economic output by 2100 if carbon emissions were to continue without reduction.
On Wednesday, the three scientists who worked on the study retracted it, citing “substantial” issues with the paper.
The climate study’s findings were undermined by an article published by a separate team of economists earlier this year in Nature, calling into question problems with the data for Uzbekistan that skewed the climate study’s conclusions.
According to the New York Post, if the numbers for the Central Asian nation were excluded from the data set, the projected economic decline of 62% would actually be a far less catastrophic 23%.
The problem is that the faulty numbers, which was nearly 3 times typical estimates, had generated headlines and excitement among policymakers around the world including the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Bank.
The study was also used last year, to model the expected impact of climate change by the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS).
The NGFS is a worldwide network of central banks and financial supervisors with more than 150 members across nearly 90 countries.
Members of the NGFS include the People’s Bank of China, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England – and, until earlier this year, the Federal Reserve.
The climate study’s authors, Maximilian Kotz, Anders Levermann and Leonie Wenz of the Potsdam Institute in Germany, reviewed and amended their paper over the summer in light of the discrepancy and the retracted the study after acknowledging that their errors were “too substantial for a correction.”
“Oopsie! Sorry to make you destroy your economy over nothing!”
“Clandestine Campaign To Defund ZeroHedge, The Federalist & Breitbart Traced To Kier Starmer Operation.”
Very early into the COVID-19 pandemic, ZeroHedge suggested that a little-known Chinese lab in Wuhan might know something about the novel coronavirus sweeping the globe. As a result, and as you know, we were subject to an intense demonetization / deplatforming campaign that included getting kicked off of Twitter, PayPal, Facebook and other platforms, dropped by our advertisers, and targeted by MSM hit pieces which colluded with foreign ‘watchdogs’ to inflict maximum damage.
These same groups also targeted outlets including The Federalist and Breitbart over various reporting, which suffered similar fates.
Now, thanks to a new book by investigative journalist Paul Holden that builds on reporting by Matt Taibbi, Paul Thacker and others, we learn that the origin of these campaigns, launched years before the pandemic, was none other than UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer’s political machine, which began targeting left-wing outlets speaking critically of Starmer such as The Canary, and then went after conservative outlets in America – just in time for the 2020 US election.
Documents and internal accounts, many drawn from newly disclosed materials, reveal a coordinated project that operated behind a veil of anonymity, misdirection, and unreported political financing.
This murky operation known as the Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN) was launched and resourced through a think tank, Labour Together, that would later be fined for failing to declare £739,000 in donations between 2018 and 2020. Said funds helped underpin this clandestine anti-media strategy which affected news outlets from the UK to the United States.
At the center of the effort was Morgan McSweeney, a political strategist who has since become Starmer’s chief of staff and, according to public commentary by prominent journalists, one of the most powerful unelected figures in the modern Labour Party.
The newly disclosed materials reveal that SFFN was not in fact some grassroots, anonymous activist collective it claimed to be, but a political weapon forged by senior Labour figures and funded by millionaire donors, including individuals active in pro-Israel political advocacy.
The goal: destabilize independent media ecosystems aligned with Labour’s left under Jeremy Corbyn, elevate Starmer’s leadership bid, and delegitimize outlets – domestic and foreign – that threatened the faction’s consolidation of power.
Publicly, SFFN claimed to be run by anonymous activists. Privately, it was shaped by McSweeney and operated from the same small office suite in South London that housed Labour Together.
SFFN ultimately migrated under the umbrella of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an organization that grew out of a corporate shell once controlled solely by McSweeney.
British political operative and CCDH head Imran Ahmed
CCDH would later present SFFN as one of its signature initiatives.
Three Fronts of a Political Offensive
The documents reported by Holden reveal a three-part strategy that reshaped the British political landscape – and reverberated into U.S. media and politics. In a nutshell, this is how the sausage was made:
Destabilizing Jeremy Corbyn’s Leadership
SFFN’s narrative interventions were designed to amplify an “antisemitism crisis” that dogged Corbyn, boosting controversies and legitimizing a media ecosystem hostile to Labour’s left. This influence work aligned directly with the political interests of the centrist faction preparing for a post-Corbyn future.
Engineering Starmer’s Rise
Labour Together later claimed credit for helping deliver Starmer’s 2020 leadership victory, with McSweeney acting as his campaign chief. After Starmer won the July 2024 general election, McSweeney formally became chief of staff, solidifying the faction’s institutional dominance.
Silencing Dissenting Media
SFFN’s most aggressive project was an astroturf campaign against media outlets perceived as ideological threats. Targets spanned both the left (such as The Canary and Evolve Politics) and the right, as noted above.
In each case, the tactic was the same: identify advertisers appearing on targeted sites, publicly shame them through social media threads, and provide tools – including downloadable blocklists – to automatically exclude those outlets from programmatic advertising networks. The effort succeeded in devastating the business model of some targets; others survived but saw sustained pressure.
Corbyn is a dirty commie fossil who would have been a disaster as PM, but it looks like Starmer is a far nastier piece of work.
More UK rape gang coverup: “A former Metropolitan Police officer was accused of being involved in a London paedophile ring while serving with the force, but the case was ‘brushed under the carpet’ and ‘covered up,’ an LBC investigation has discovered.”
The Met launched a criminal investigation at the time into the allegations made by one of the complainants. She said the officer had abused her multiple times as a child and shared her with other “important men” at a hotel in Park Lane in central London. LBC understands the other men included an MP and a judge.
The victim also claimed that the officer targeted other “pretty girls” who were in the care system over several years.
LBC can reveal the officer was allowed to retire as a Custody Sergeant while under investigation. In 2012, officers under criminal investigation could only retire with permission from a senior officer.
LBC used to be London Broadcasting Company. (Hat tip: Instapundit.”)
The U.S. seized a large oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela as it traveled to Cuba.
“As you probably know, we’ve just seized a tanker on the coasts of Venezuela, large tanker, very large, largest one ever seized, actually, and other things are happening, so you’ll be seeing that later, and you’ll be talking about that later with some other people,” President Donald Trump said at the White House.
President Trump: “As you probably know, we just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela — a large tanker, very large.” pic.twitter.com/I51NenxoIP
— CSPAN (@cspan) December 10, 2025
One reporter asked Trump what would happen to all the oil.
“We keep it, I guess,” responded Trump.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the FBI, DHS, and the Coast Guard, with help from the Defense Department, executed the search warrant:
Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations, and the United States Coast Guard, with support from the Department of War, executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran. For multiple years, the oil tanker has been sanctioned by the United States due to its involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations. This seizure, completed off the coast of Venezuela, was conducted safely and securely—and our investigation alongside the Department of Homeland Security to prevent the transport of sanctioned oil continues.
Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations, and the United States Coast Guard, with support from the Department of War, executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran. For multiple… pic.twitter.com/dNr0oAGl5x
— Attorney General Pamela Bondi (@AGPamBondi) December 10, 2025
The U.S. placed sanctions on Venezuela’s oil company years ago.
More blue city fraud: “Austin Energy employee allegedly paid $980K to ‘fictitious vendors,’ city auditor says.”
The Austin City Auditor’s Office released a report Tuesday accusing a local couple, both of whom previously worked for the city, of defrauding the city for approximately $980,000 by sending payments to allegedly fictitious businesses.
The report focuses on the alleged actions of Mark Ybarra, who worked as a facility service specialist for Austin Energy. He was issued a city credit card by his superiors for the procurement of necessary tools and materials, the audit said.
According to the report, he used the card to “pay fictitious vendors approximately $980,000 and fraudulently reported these transactions in City records.”
“The falsified invoices he submitted were ultimately discovered by his management in Austin Energy. Some of the fictitious vendors used contact information like addresses that connected them to relatives of Mark Ybarra, or Mark himself,” reads an email to KXAN from the auditor’s office.
According to the city auditor’s report, Ybarra allegedly made payments to 22 fictitious businesses using the card. He resigned from his job in October 2023.
A grand jury indicted Ybarra on Aug. 23. He now faces a felony charge of theft greater than $300,000.
His wife, former Austin Watershed Protection employee Ambrosia Ybarra, “refused to answer questions” from city auditors. She was indicted on Sept. 15 and charged with felony theft between $150,000 and $300,000. She resigned from her job in November, the report states.
Paramount looks at the proposed Netflix-Warner Brothers merger and says “not so fast.”
Paramount Skydance has made another offer to buy Warner Bros Discovery as it seeks to trump a rival plan from Netflix to buy the company’s studio and streaming networks.
Paramount, which is backed by the billionaire Ellison family, said it was making a direct offer to shareholders of $30 (£22.50) per share to scoop up the whole of Warner Bros, including its traditional television networks.
It said its proposal was a “superior alternative” to Netflix’s, delivering more cash upfront to shareholders and greater prospect of approval by regulators.
I don’t think either of them have the best interests of movie viewers at heart…
Speaking of Netflix, remember Carl Rinsch, the director hired to produce a science fiction TV show who instead took the money and plowed it into cryptocurrency? Guilty on all counts.
“Hundreds of Porsches in Russia were rendered immobile last week, raising speculation of a hack, but the German carmaker tells The Register that its vehicles are secure. According to reports, local dealership chain Rolf traced the problem to a loss of satellite connectivity to their Vehicle Tracking Systems (VTS). This meant the systems thought a theft attempt was in progress, triggering the vehicle’s engine immobilizer. Porsche HQ was unable to help or diagnose the nature of the problem.”
Draw Mohammed winner Bosch Fawstin write to say that Patreon has frozen his account and gives different answers as to why. If anyone has a good contact there you might drop him a line. He also put up a PayPal link for donations.
Scottish comedian and actor Stanley Baxter, who also served the British Army in Burma during World War II, has died at age 99. (Previously.)
Illegal aliens continue raking in welfare benefits, the #SchumerShutdown continues, a look at the Democrats’ foreign paymasters, a jihad attack thwarted, cartels are enslaving American Indians in California in the name of weed, some Joe Rogan interviews, Nasty Nancy bows out, Kill Bill returns to theaters, and Bass Pro Shop Fight Club.
It’s astounding, the things we learn when the money runs out and governments actually have to start prioritizing for a change. As the Schumer Shutdown drags through Week Five with no end in sight, the country’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — aka “food stamps” — ran out of money on Saturday. And given who was taking, it’s a miracle that there was any money left at all.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins reported yesterday that earlier this year, “we told every state to send us their SNAP data so we could make sure illegal immigrants aren’t getting benefits meant for American families. 29 states stepped up. 21 blue states refused — and two SUED US FOR ASKING!”
That’s because we’re spending billions on benefits to illegal aliens.
My guess is that the Center for Immigration Studies — which bills itself as “low-immigrant” yet “pro-immigration” — was being a bit ironic with this headline: Illegal Immigrants To Be Hit Hard As SNAP and WIC Benefits Expire.
The organization’s 2023 analysis of government data showed that “households headed by illegal immigrants make extensive use of the welfare system, particularly food assistance programs.” CIS estimated that 59% of households headed up by an illegal are on one or more welfare programs, whether it’s cash, food assistance, Medicaid, or housing.
Read that again. We’re giving cash, food, healthcare, and housing to people who aren’t even supposed to be here.
Millions of them, in fact. Even though I could have sworn that Democrats insisted up and down that sort of thing never happened. No wonder 21 blue states didn’t want Rollins looking at their books.
Houston, we have a problem. A very expensive problem.
His suggestions: Require proof of citizenship for all welfare benefits, and ban junk food from purchase with EBT.
The Schumer Shutdown continues. Democrats offered a one year ObamaCare extension and Republicans told them to get stuffed. Republicans should counter-offer an extension of the subsidies for American citizens…but none for illegal alien, plus states are required to submit their benefits database so illegal aliens can be kicked off the program and deported. That would make it even more painfully clear Democrats favor illegal aliens over citizens when they refuse…
Foreigners not only are paying to promote liberal causes and by extension liberal candidates but foreigners are running their own candidates. The Squad has a couple of them and Minneapolis is about to get a Somali mayor.
Foreigners are funding the Indian who was born in Uganda and sent to New York City at some point. Now he’ll a jihadist-friendly communist—but if justice prevails, he may end up in prison instead of being in City Hall.
The New York Post reported last week, “Zohran Mamdani was hit with two criminal referrals Tuesday filed by a campaign finance watchdog accusing the lefty socialist of accepting illegal contributions from foreign donors.
“The Coolidge Reagan Foundation filed the referrals—alleging Mamdani may have violated the Federal Election Campaign Act and New York Election Code—with the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office on Tuesday.
“The referrals were filed after The Post reported earlier this month Mamdani’s campaign raked in nearly $13,000 in contributions from at least 170 donors with addresses outside the U.S.—including one from his mother-in-law in Dubai.”
Ed Morrissey:
The Democrat Party has turned into the Globalist Party. Their constituency isn’t American voters; it’s the international cognoscenti, who want an America that submits to the “global community.” That is why Democrat leaders do not adapt their policies and positions to the clear consensus in the American electorate, because they have already adapted to constituencies outside the United States.
That isn’t the only institution orienting itself away from American constituencies, and for the same reason. Over the last several decades, Academia has seen billions of dollars flow into its coffers from places like China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. There too, the money has pushed institutions to indoctrinate students into radical-Left globalist values and agendas. Universities have largely stopped providing foundational Western-civilization values and education in favor of revisionist propaganda about Western imperialism and colonialism. This in turn colors all of the institutions into which radicalized graduates enter and rise within those structures.
Jonah Goldberg, from 2009 (back before Trump broke his brain):
Liberalism has openly yearned to “Europeanize” American social policy for decades. Liberals point to European health-care systems, union rules, tax policies, industrial policy, foreign policy, and even sexual mores, and say: “We need to be more like them.”
This is a very old story. The founders of modern liberalism, led by Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts, were quite open about their effort to adopt a more European approach to political economy. The progressive leader William Allen White said in 1911: “We were parts, one of another, in the United States and Europe. Something was welding us into one social and economic whole with local political variations. It was Stubbs in Kansas, Jaures in Paris, the Social Democrats in Germany, the Socialists in Belgium, and I should say the whole people in Holland, fighting a common cause.”
But it was FDR’s New Deal that truly aimed to “assimilate the American into the ‘European’ political experience,” according to historian Daniel Boorstin.
After years of Democrats telling the American people that former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a thriving system, the glaring truth revealed now during the government shutdown is that not only has the ACA resulted in widespread fraud and allegations of kickbacks to insurance companies, the American people are footing the bill for subsidies to hide the fact that Obamacare is broken.
“Everything Obama told us was a complete lie,” E.J. Antoni told John Solomon during a special report on the government shutdown sponsored by the Association of Mature American Citizens.
Antoni, who serves as chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, continued: “When he said, ‘If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.’ No you couldn’t. Obamacare made a lot of those health care plans illegal. He said, ‘If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.’ No, it forced a lot of doctors out of business, and it forced a lot of doctors to no longer take most insurance.”
President Barack Obama repeatedly promised Americans during the rollout of the ACA — commonly known as Obamacare — that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” a claim intended to reassure Americans about the ACA’s impact on existing healthcare arrangements. However, millions of people lost access to their preferred and established physicians due to narrowed insurance networks and cancellations of plans which did not comply with the law’s new requirements, leading even left-leaning PolitiFact to name it the “Lie of the Year” in 2013.
Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Mich., revealed the latest scandal within Obamacare. Bergman, speaking to Just The News, laid out the timeline for subsidies which were meant to lighten the burden for Americans but when unused, were pocketed by the insurance companies.
Bergman explained that “In 2010, the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act. Then in 2014, ACA premium tax credits became available, meant to help families earning 100 to 140% of the federal poverty level – that was designed to help those folks. In 2021, through the ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act), Democrats temporarily extended and expanded those subsidies to everyone, regardless of income, for one year. In 2022, the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act), they extended the expansion again, but only through January 1 of 2026.”
Bergman emphasized that the expiration imposed by Democrats implicitly meant that the extension was not meant to be permanent. That extension expires and is what Democrats have shut down the government over. As Bergman puts it, “They’re blaming us, the Republicans, for letting their own temporary extensions expire.”
The largest surprise regarding these subsidies, is that they haven’t been going directly to patients. They’ve been going to insurance companies, according to Bergman. “Insurance companies’ profits right now are up something like 240+ percent. There’s something morally wrong with that. Not only is it shamefully wrong, but morally wrong.”
Bergman did not name any specific insurance companies.
“Millions of these so-called ghost enrollees, people who are technically eligible, but are unaware of it, never use these subsidies. The insurers pocket the difference.”
OpenSecrets reported that in 2012, the health insurance industry donated roughly $9.6 million to Democrats. In 2024, the industry donated almost $40 million to Democrats.
Five people between the ages of 16 and 20 were arrested Friday, CBS News has learned. Authorities say they were inspired by a former member of the Michigan Army National Guard who was arrested in May for allegedly planning an ISIS-inspired attack against a U.S. Army site in suburban Detroit.
(Just a reminder that Detroit suburbs like Dearborn Heights are majority-Muslim.)
The men were inspired by another “Michigan man” who was arrested in May:
Ammar Abdulmajid-Mohamed Said, 19, was accused of providing support for a planned attack on the U.S. Army’s Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command facility at the Detroit Arsenal.
Democrats have been importing unassimilated Muslims into America for, what, 30 year now? 40? Who initiated the plan, and why?
Over 1,500 alleged criminal illegal aliens were arrested during a 10-day operation in Southeast Texas — including documented gang members, a convicted murderer, and over a dozen sexual offenders.
The Houston branch of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducted the operation between October 22 and 31, arresting a total of 1,505 alleged criminal illegal aliens.
Among the arrests were 17 “documented gang members,” including an alleged Mexican Mafia gang member, who was convicted for raping and impregnating his minor sister and is wanted in Honduras for murder. A suspected MS-13 gang member was also among the arrested, after he “ran inside a local washateria, climbed through the ceiling panels to get on the roof and became wedged in a sign on the side of the building,” before being captured by Houston ICE.
Forty “aggravated felons” were reported as being among the 1,505 arrested, as were 13 sexual predators.
One of the arrested is Vongphachan Phothisome of Laos, who was convicted of sexual exploitation of a child. Similarly, an illegal alien from Honduras, Rony Andy Martinez Lopez, was convicted of “lewd and lascivious acts with a minor and cruelty towards a child.”
A comparable week-long operation conducted by Houston ICE in early September yielded about half the arrests as this October one, with 822 alleged criminal illegal aliens arrested last month.
Native American sovereignty and California’s policies that shield illegal immigrants have allowed Mexican drug cartels to swoop in on tribal lands of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, a confederation of several tribes, the sheriff said.
The valley, known for illegal marijuana grows on tribal lands, is remote and surrounded by forested mountainous terrain. It’s a patchwork of tribal lands and those sold off to private owners years ago.
[Mendocino County Sheriff Matt] Kendall, 56, grew up here in the 1970s. During the drive to Covelo, an isolated town in the valley, he talks about how the times have changed over the decades.
“Back in the ’60s and ’70s, it was a beautiful place—a lot of freedom here,” he said. “When we were kids, we’d be riding our horses and having fun. Every kid in this valley had a horse. We’d go out to the river. All of us had summertime jobs, hauling hay and cutting firewood.”
His nostalgic journey ends abruptly as he passes a burned-out building with murals of missing women on its walls—a stark reminder of the violence that plagues the valley. Other banners along the road display their names and faces, including that of Khadijah Rose Britton, a native American woman who, according to the FBI, was last seen in Covelo being kidnapped at gunpoint in 2018.
Today, Kendall says, “there’s a little bit of farming, and then just tons and tons of marijuana, and pretty much all of it is illegal.”
“We see a lot of Hispanics here when there is no work, no sawmill jobs, no grapes, no vineyards and not much logging. They’re all here taking orders to grow marijuana, and a lot of it’s happening on tribal lands.”
He estimates up to 80 percent of the illegal marijuana in Mendocino County is grown on tribal lands, based on aerial surveillance and satellite imagery revealing a vast network of illegal grow ops.
A blow against tranny madness. “Supreme Court Reinstates Trump Admin Requirement That Passports Reflect Biological Sex.”
Joe Rogan interviews Elon Musk, again. I have not remotely watched all three hours of it, but I don’t rule out posting clips from it in the future.
Speaking of Musk, Telsa shareholders just approved a $1 trillion pay package for him, assuming he hits certain metrics over the next decade. My guess is that’s a whole lot of pie in the sky, even for him…
Speaking of three hour Joe Rogan interviews, he did one with Billy Bob Thorton that just dropped. I’m sure I’ll watch all of that one as well…
Nancy Pelosi announces her retirement. She was able to force the abomination that was ObamaCare over the line, and grab a lot of taxpayer-funded pork for Democrats, but it’s doubtful her terms as Speaker resulted in lasting achievements for Democrats. She was bad, but if another Democrat manages to be Speaker in my lifetime, my default assumption is that they’ll be much, much worse…
A Washington Parish grand jury in Louisiana has indicted Democratic Bogalusa, Louisiana Mayor Tyrin Z. Truong on charges of malfeasance in office, public intimidation, and theft, according to the Bogalusa Daily News.
The indictment is part of what officials describe as an ongoing multi-agency investigation involving federal, state, and local authorities. Prosecutors allege Truong intentionally carried out his official duties unlawfully and knowingly allowed other city employees to ignore theirs. His arraignment is scheduled for November 10, 2025.
According to prosecutors, the case centers on claims that Truong misused Bogalusa taxpayer funds to pay a personal legal debt from a 2023 Louisiana public records lawsuit in which a judge ruled that Truong personally owed attorney fees and penalties after refusing to release public documents.
When the Bogalusa City Council denied his request to use public money, prosecutors say Truong threatened retaliation, vowing to overwhelm council members with records requests. Investigators allege he then pressured a city insurance vendor to issue a check labeled as a “reimbursement,” had it deposited into a city account, and ordered another check for the same amount to be written to himself.
Rookie mistake. Graft pros always have the check written to an intermediary cutout who withdraws the money and pays them in cash…
In 2022, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) announced a plan to give $715 million in taxpayer cash and tax incentives to lure Gotion, a Chinese battery maker, to rural central Michigan. She did it in the midst of a reelection campaign so she could fire off a press release claiming credit for 2,600 “good-paying jobs.”
She didn’t mind the fact that this proposed one-square-mile plant would be located less than 100 miles from an Army and National Guard training facility called Camp Grayling. The real irony is that the U.S. military has been training the Taiwanese military at Camp Graying for years to repel a Chinese invasion. Our governor was going to pay the CCP to operate a plant in the middle of the state. Genius!
Local residents rose up. Yes, of course, because they objected to the possibility of Chinese spies roaming around their community. But also because they resented the way in which the project was unveiled. Elected officials signed nondisclosure agreements with economic development agencies and then said they were legally bound from sharing details with the residents footing the bill.
The more questions citizens had, the more obstinate company, township, and state officials became. Green Charter Township is made up of normal people: farmers, small business owners, and the like. James Chapman, the chief project proponent and former township supervisor, quickly lost his patience in meetings and yelled at the rubes who had the temerity to attend and voice their opinions. They would yell right back. The massive project, shrouded in arrogant secrecy, bitterly divided the small community.
It reached a boiling point when township officials who were supporting the project either resigned or were overwhelmingly recalled. A new board was elected, and they went about doing the due diligence that taxpayers expect elected officials to pursue for such an expensive and disruptive project.
The CCP-linked company sued the new board, driving up massive legal bills for the tiny community. The company didn’t want to wait for environmental approvals, tearing down trees and homes. The community continued fighting, even employing President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Trump publicly opposed the project. Vance held a campaign rally across the street.
When they took office in January, they changed former President Joe Biden’s scam electric vehicle mandates, and the whole racket collapsed. It was the beginning of the end for the Gotion project.
Last week, the state of Michigan announced it was withdrawing the promise of $175 million in taxpayer cash, although $50 million had already been delivered. It’s unclear whether taxpayers will receive an accounting of where that money went.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Voting fraud alert. “North Carolina Republicans say texts show that local Democrats are paying for people’s votes.”
The North Carolina Republican Party referred an alleged vote-buying scheme to the State Board of Elections for investigation on Friday, claiming that a voter had been offered $100 to vote for Democratic candidates in the Wilmington City Council election.
‘This is a troubling allegation and an egregious affront to our democracy and an attempt to buy votes in exchange for cash,’ NC GOP Chair Jason Simmons said in a press conference. ‘The North Carolina Republican Party stands committed and steadfast in its determination for free, fair and transparent elections.’
“FAA Orders Flight Cuts at Texas Airports as Democrat-Led Shutdown Deepens. The FAA will cut flights by 10 percent at 40 of the nation’s top airports due to staffing shortages among air traffic controllers.”
The Department of Energy (DOE) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recently signed Addendum No. 9 to their 2019 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), paving the way for faster follow-on licensing of advanced nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel technologies.
This agreement, signed Oct 24th and effective immediately, comes as major concerns have been raised by reactor development companies and industry observers regarding the double work that may be required of developers when they bring their tested products over to the NRC. Demand for clean, reliable energy by data centers and major industrial companies has created a stronger need for change in the path to reactor design commercialization, with companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon signing long-term offtake agreements with reactor operators Constellation, NextEra, and Talen.
The addition to the MOU comes from the directives out of Trump’s executive orders signed back in May of this year. From section 5.d of the executive order “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission”:
“Establish an expedited pathway to approve reactor designs that the DOD or the DOE have tested and that have demonstrated the ability to function safely. NRC review of such designs shall focus solely on risks that may arise from new applications permitted by NRC licensure, rather than revisiting risks that have already been addressed in the DOE or DOD processes.”
Surprisingly, the DOE and NRC took the executive order one step further and included a streamlined licensing process for nuclear fuel facilities as well. It becomes less surprising when we remember the current administration has highlighted multiple times the desire to reduce the reliance on foreign nuclear fuel supplies. Even with the Russian uranium import ban, the US is still importing over a fifth of the required enriched uranium from Russia through last year. The US government is looking to expand the domestic capacity of every step in the fuel chain as quickly as possible.
Faster, please.
“Top 20 Theories on Why the EU Committed Cultural Suicide.” They’re not mutually exclusive. And the piece needs an entry for cultural relativism/Frankfurt School and a Gramscian “war of position” against civil society.
Digital media hasn’t become the antidote to television. Digital media, empowered by the serum of algorithmic feeds, has become super-television: more images, more videos, more isolation. Home-alone time has surged as our devices have become more bottomless feeds of video content. Rather than escape the solitude crisis that Putnam described in the 1990s, we now seem to be more on our own. (Not to mention: meaner and stupider, too.)
It would be rash to blame our berserk political moment entirely on short-form video, but it would be careless to forget that some people really did try to warn us that this was coming. In Amusing Ourselves to Death1, Neil Postman wrote that “each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.” Television speaks to us in a particular dialect, Postman argued. When everything turns into television, every form of communication starts to adopt television’s values: immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity. In the glow of a local news program, or an outraged news feed, the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol. When everything is urgent, nothing is truly important. Politics becomes theater. Science becomes storytelling. News becomes performance. The result, Postman warned, is a society that forgets how to think in paragraphs, and learns instead to think in scenes.
Snip.
Short-form video is indistinguishable from what today’s youth consider the definition of American success. For five straight years, Gen Z has told pollsters that the thing they most want to be when they grow up is an “influencer.”
When literally everything becomes television, what disappears is not something so broad as intelligence (although that seems to be going, too) but something harder to put into words, and even harder to prove the value of. It’s something like inwardness. The capacity for solitude, for sustained attention, for meaning that penetrates inward rather than swipes away at the tip of a finger: These virtues feel out of step with a world where every medium is the same medium and everything in life converges to the value system of the same thing, which is television.
I’m not free from guilt myself. I only turn on my TV one day a week, but I watch waaaaaaay too much YouTube. (Previously.) (Hat tip: Greg Ellifritz via Dwight.)
GM to iPhone users: Drop dead. “General Motors is dropping Apple CarPlay and Android Auto support across all of its brands—Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC.”
“Microsoft just revealed that OpenAI lost more than $11.5B last quarter.” “If Microsoft owns 27 percent of OpenAI, it stands to reason under equity accounting that it bears 27 percent of OpenAI’s losses. Microsoft’s admission that it shaved $3.1 billion off its net income to account for its share of OpenAI losses therefore suggests OpenAI lost about $11.5 billion during the quarter.”
“Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL: THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR unites Volume 1 and Volume 2 into a single, unrated epic—presented exactly as he intended, complete with a new, never-before-seen anime sequence.”
Coming to theaters in December. If I wasn’t in financial turtle mode, I’d probably go out and see it…
Bill Maher noted how Democrats are in danger of going the way of other “ghost brands” like Sears and Playboy.
“A ghost brand, that’s a company or a store that like Sears still exists, but only as a pathetic shell of its former self.”
“I fear the Democratic party is at risk of becoming a ghost brand too. Like Sears, it used to be mighty and ascendant and popular. Sears once accounted for 1% of the entire American economy and 41% of the appliance market and built the country’s tallest tower. Democrats once controlled Congress and the Supreme Court, or were at least competitive.”
“The Democrats have their lowest rating in 35 years. 63% unfavorable. What happened? I don’t know.” This is a lie. Maher knows that social justice is killing the Democrat Party, he just doesn’t want to say it.
“What happened to Sears? It used to be synonymous with the American Dream because it kept faith with what the customer wanted.” This is a reductio ad absurdum, as the American Dreams mean a whole lot more than the ability to buy decent material goods.
“Did we love Sears? No. But that was besides the point. You just went. It was like an Avatar movie that sold tools. It used to be where your family bought everything from school clothes to appliances to your family Christmas portrait.”
“Sears used to have 3,500 stores and now it has five.”
“Same thing happened to Playboy, except in silk pajamas and a captain’s hat.”
“For for 66 years, Playboy magazine was also a fact of American life. Sears sold your father a mattress and Playboy was what he hid under it.”
“Plus real journalism. You could read an interview with Carter while enjoying photos of bush.”
“But but then it started messing around with the formula. Like the Democratic Party, Playboy decided they didn’t need straight men anymore. They put transgender women and gay men on the cover and predictably sales, like their subscribers penises, collapsed.”
“The staff began using terms like intersectionality, sex positivity, and privileging. And in response, Playboy readers use terms like, ‘No thanks, get the fuck out of here, and buy-bye.'”
Cracker Barrel analogy snipped.
“It reminded me of when Chuck Schumer said in 2016 that for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we’re going to pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philly, Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Yeah, how’d that work out?”
“But at least Cracker Barrel had the sense to immediately say, ‘Oh sorry.’ and put the sling blades back on the wall. Democrats don’t seem to be doing that. They still seem to want to be that upscale store that impresses celebrities.”
Description of how Barney’s went from a solid discount clothing store to a wannabe upscale failure snipped.
“And I’m not making this up just because it’s Halloween, but after Barney’s closed for good in 2020, it became, yes, a Spirit Halloween.”
“I’m just saying Democrats need to get their shit together, because America needs two political parties, not one party and one Halloween store.”
What’s doing in the Democrats is what did in Playboy: Intersectionality, transgenderism, supporting illegal aliens over American citizens, and the entire post-modern social justice woke-mind-virus zoo. They went from seeing blue collar workers as the backbone of the party to seeing them as icky carriers of hetronormative toxic masculinity, patriarchy and white privilege. Donald Trump, alone of all the 2016 Republican presidential candidates, saw those same voters as a key ingredient into making Republicans into America’s natural majority party.
But unlike Sears or Playboy, there’s a limit to how much the free market can correct a self-destructive ideology. The woke are absolutely sure of their unshakable virtue, and seizing and maintaining control of the Democrat Party is far more important to them than pleasing mere voters. Social Justice Democrats believe they’re on “the right side of history,” and like Tareyton smokers, they’d rather fight than switch. Or, as poor Charlie Kirk found out, they’d rather kill the “Nazis” that oppose their policies than consider the possibility that they’re wrong.
Texas Democrats went through a similar struggle in the 1960s through 1990s. Liberals knew that if they were ever to take control of the party, they would have to drive conservatives out of the Party, so they convinced conservatives they had to leave the Democrats and vote in Republican primaries, as documented in Wayne Thorburn’s Red State. This they accomplished, but somehow seemed to think Texans would just continue voting Democrats in year after year.
And that’s why Democrats haven’t elected anyone statewide in Texas in over 30 years.
Come Tuesday, New York City Democrats will quite likely elect a Jew-hating communist rather than consider the possibility that their ideas are not just wrong, but evil. And thus the party will take yet another lurch toward electoral ghost brand irrelevance.
And they’re a whole lot less popular and innovative than Spirit Halloween…
Happy Halloween! Biden’s FBI turned January 6 investigations into a vast monitoring program aimed at Republicans, the Schumer Shutdown continues, a whole of disturbing illegal alien sex offenders, Milei wins again in Argentina, Russian floating crane does what Russian ships do best, the autopen scandal deepens, and one really weird gun.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Arctic Frost was an operation by the Biden FBI to use the half-assed January 6 riot to turn the federal government into a Stasi aimed at Republicans, including “Nearly 200 Subpoenas Targeting 400 GOP-Linked Individuals, Entities.”
The Biden-era FBI’s “Arctic Frost” investigation into President Trump and the broader GOP’s role in the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot was more wide-ranging than previously known, according to newly released documents showing the bureau issued nearly 200 subpoenas targeting more than 400 Republican entities and individuals as part of the probe.
Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) released records on Wednesday showing 197 subpoenas were issued to individuals and businesses during the FBI’s “Arctic Frost” investigation targeting 430 GOP individuals and entities. He obtained the records through protected whistleblower disclosures.
Financial institutions, Trump-aligned political organizations and operatives, conservative think tanks, and payroll companies were among the subpoena recipients, according to a list compiled by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Federal investigators sought communications between the targeted individuals and media companies, prominent Trump-world officials, and legislative staff. The investigative efforts also encompassed MAGA fundraising efforts and donors.
Several GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the panel Grassley leads as chairman, spoke at a press conference Wednesday afternoon unveiling the new information.
“What is revealed in those 1700 pages of documents, those 197 subpoenas, is nothing short of a Biden administration enemies list,” Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) said.
ohnson said he knew most of the 38 individuals from his state on the Biden administration’s “enemies list” and urged his fellow lawmakers to assist the Trump administration with getting to the bottom of the FBI’s conduct.
“This extended far beyond President Trump and extended to President Trump’s supporters not only here in the United States Senate but more broadly,” Senator John Cornyn (R., Texas) lamented.
“Merrick Garland was a member of Joe Biden’s cabinet. He was willing to do whatever Joe Biden and his political operation wanted him to do, including destroying President Trump,” Cornyn added.
The “Arctic Frost” investigation looked into the role President Trump played in the Capitol riot. The probe eventually morphed into special counsel Jack Smith’s Washington, D.C., criminal case against Trump. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland and then-FBI Director Christopher Wray personally signed off on the investigation when it was launched in 2022, according to a decision memo Grassley divulged last week.
Snip.
A ninth GOP Senator, Ted Cruz of Texas, was also targeted during the “Arctic Frost” investigation, Axios first reported. Several of the GOP lawmakers in the FBI’s crosshairs promoted Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential election being stolen from him. The attempts by Trump’s allies to contest the 2020 election formed the basis of Smith’s D.C. criminal case and criminal prosecutions in the swing-states Trump lost to former President Biden. Numerous individuals targeted in “Arctic Frost” later faced criminal charges for their failed attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
“Jack Smith was a fundamentally corrupt prosecutor. This was a political enemies list from the beginning,” Cruz said. “This is an executive who believes it is justified spying on their opponents in the legislature because they convinced themselves the ends justified the means.”
Smith attempted to subpoena AT&T to obtain Cruz’s cellphone communications and the company’s legal counsel declined to comply, Cruz said. He praised the company for standing its ground against Smith’s attempt to gain his phone records. Cruz said that Washington, D.C., federal Judge James Boasberg signed an order prohibiting AT&T from informing Cruz of the subpoena for a year because of the potential for Cruz to destroy evidence or intimidate witnesses.
And Cruz has sent me three fundraising emails based on it this week alone.
Victory in Portland. “Antifa Retreats From Portland ICE Facility After Police Dismantle Encampment.”
The decentralized anti-fascist warriors in the Portland-area cell, aligned with the radical Democratic Party, were in full retreat overnight after officers from the Portland Police Department cleared out their encampment in front of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the Portland metro area.
Nick Shirley, who is an independent journalist and who met with President Trump at the White House earlier this month for a round table on Antifa, wrote on X, “ANTIFA HAS BEEN DISMANTLED IN PORTLAND After 140 days of controlling and camping on this street in Portland, Antifa has officially been cleared out as the police FINALLY stepped in and cleared the encampment.”
“Inside the encampment, they had loads full of medicine, medical gear, party supplies, a fridge, BBQ, etc ANTIFA’s 140 days of control have officially come to an end,” Shirley said, with an accompanying video showing inside the encampment that housed gender-confused purple-haired people who hate the Western world and capitalism.
Federal Reserve drops interest rates by a quarter point. Feel the excitement…
Democrats have badly weakened their party with left-leaning ideas and rhetoric, growing only with self-described “white liberals” while losing ground with other voters, according to a new center-left group’s report shared first with Semafor.
The group, called Welcome, consulted hundreds of thousands of voters over six months for its broad findings, including that 70% of voters think the Democratic Party is “out of touch.” Most voters, the group found, believe the party over-prioritizes issues like “protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans,” and “fighting climate change” while not caring about “securing the border” or “lowering the rate of crime.” (Welcome began as a PAC in 2022, then founded a nonprofit with the same name for political research.)
Elected Democrats will receive copies of the report after its Monday publication, followed by events to promote it in DC and New York. The report urges party members to abandon some of the progressive language about race, abortion, and LGBTQ issues that Democrats began using after the 2012 election — and recommends the nomination of more candidates willing to vote with Republicans on conservative immigration and crime bills.
“The Democratic Party had better listen — for the good of our nation,” former Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos, who ran the party’s House campaign committee when it lost seats in 2020, wrote in her endorsement of the report.
Inspired by The Politics of Evasion, an influential 1989 paper that inspired the party’s more centrist shift under Bill Clinton, the 70-page Deciding to Win document argues that Democrats must be “willing to break with unpopular party orthodoxies.” Its prescription for getting the party out of its current wilderness isn’t simple: avoidance of “both a pivot to corporate centrism and the pursuit of progressive ideology purity.”
Greg Schultz, who managed Joe Biden’s 2020 primary campaign but was replaced for the general election, worked with Welcome to shape the report.
“For the last 20 years, Democrats have just misunderstood how you actually win elections,” he told Semafor. “I thought Biden had proven in the 2020 primary that the base of the Democratic Party is a 58-year old woman without a college degree. But when you hear people in DC say ‘the base,’ they mean white intellectuals that live in a few coastal cities.”
The report directly challenges Democrats’ predilection for the interests of “highly educated and affluent voters,” arguing that their influence “may be responsible” for the party’s closer association with left-wing politics.
Sort of sounds like Weigel’s friends are finally noticing what Republicans were saying at least as far back as Obama’s first term. But wait!
“We have much to learn from the relentless focus of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani” on those fronts, the authors write.
The risk they see is in Democrats moving left on other progressive policies, which even some in the party establishment have done while criticizing Mamdani and other democratic socialists. From 2013 to 2024, between the beginning of Barack Obama’s second term and the end of Joe Biden’s sole term, the report offers clear metrics to show how the party changed its language and gave support to left-wing bills that had little chance of passage.
So they only want the Democrat Party to be a little bit pregnant with socialism and social justice. Yeah, good luck with that, heretic. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Two rogue Democrat judges think they can bypass the executive and judiciary branches and order specific programs funded during the Schumer Shutdown. “On Friday, US District Judge John McConnell of Rhode Island announced that he would order the US Department of Agriculture to distribute a pool of contingency funds ‘as soon as possible.’ While minutes before, Boston US District Judge Indira Talwani ruled that the US government must announce by Nov. 3 whether they would authorize at least partial funding for the program using around $6 billion in contingency funds – and if so, when will they do it.”
Mexican authorities in August, with the use of DNI intelligence, captured an infamous human trafficker who would lure pregnant women to steal their babies and organs.
She would then sell the stolen babies and organs on both sides of the border, which is how the United States got involved.
Aguilar was part of the Jalisco New Generation drug cartel.
California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pimp shield law, pushed by Democratic legislator Rep. Scott Weiner, has helped foster a disturbing new sex market on Figueroa Street in Los Angeles, featuring prostitutes as young as 12 and 13 years old. For far too long, the “kiddie stroll,” as it’s known, has gone unreported because major media outlets refused to cover it, allowing it to flourish under the watch of Democratic politicians.
But now it’s time to shine a light in the darkness and expose the truth about what’s happening to these poor young girls and why nothing has been done to bring the harrowing evil to an end.
An article from the New York Times Magazine is finally covering this horrific scene in Los Angeles, though they’ve conveniently neglected to cover anything concerning the prostitution law Newsom’s administration passed.
“For the 77th Street Division, which covers the northern half of the Figueroa Corridor, prostitution had always been a problem. But in recent years, the officers had seen the magnitude of child sex trafficking explode,” wrote reporter Emily Baumgaertner Nunn.
“Gangs that had long sold drugs began to take advantage of Figueroa’s lucrative opportunity. With a dozen girls, one trafficker could easily make $12,000 a night. ‘Drugs are sold once and gone forever, but girls can be resold indefinitely,’ said [police sergeant Alvaro] Navarro, who had been in the division for two decades. Motel owners who noticed the parades of customers but feared the gangs’ retribution kept quiet,” Nunn continues.
There’s little doubt that much of the silence and fear of gang retaliation for speaking out against this vile form of human trafficking stems from the lack of police presence on California streets, particularly in Los Angeles. Democrats in the state slashed funding for police and tied officers’ hands, making it harder to pull these girls — who are just children — out of sex trafficking.
In fact, Nunn points out that the sex-trafficking unit in the city was disbanded due to budget cuts, which means each division within the police department has fewer resources available to tackle the issue. There are supposed to be a total of six investigators looking into human trafficking. Now there’s only one.
Children suffer abuse in ways too sick and twisted to imagine, and thanks to anti-cop policies from radical leftists trying to appease minorities for votes, leaders ignore it instead of acting. This is truly a miscarriage of justice. It’s immoral and evil.
“Their jobs grew even more challenging when California repealed the law allowing the police to arrest women who loitered with the intent to engage in prostitution. The repeal, known as SB 357, was intended to prevent profiling of Black, brown, and trans women based on how they dressed. But when it was implemented in January 2023, the effect was that uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them.
Now officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each girl was underage — but with fake eyelashes and wigs, it was nearly impossible to tell. One girl told vice officers that her trafficker had explained things succinctly: ‘We run Figueroa now,’ he said,” Nunn writes in her article.
By the end of 2023, the city attorney started referring to Figueroa as the “Kiddie Stroll” because many of the girls working the street were under 13.
The Democrat Party is now objectively pro-rape and pro-pedophilia.
“ICE continues arresting ‘worst of the worst‘ illegal migrants accused of sexual crimes.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Tuesday told Just The News exclusively that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are continuing to arrest the “worst of the worst” illegal migrants, despite a government shutdown.
The latest arrests include illegal migrants who have been convicted of crimes such as lewd and lascivious acts on a minor, aggravated criminal sexual assault with bodily harm, aggravated kidnapping and possession with the intent to distribute.
Monday’s arrests include a Cuban illegal migrant in Florida who was convicted of lewd and lascivious act on a minor, a criminal illegal migrant from Mexico, convicted of aggravated criminal sexual assault with bodily harm, and aggravated kidnapping in Illinois, and an illegal migrant in Tennessee who was convicted of sexual assault.
“Nothing—not even the Democrats’ government shutdown—will slow us down from arresting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens,” Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “Yesterday, the brave men and women of ICE arrested pedophiles, rapists, and kidnappers. These are the types of predators ICE is taking off of America’s streets every single day. DHS will stop at nothing to make America safe again and remove these violent illegal offenders from our streets.”
Another illegal migrant from Mexico, identified as Adan Martinez-Gonzalez, was arrested in Texas after being convicted of aggravated kidnapping. Mexican illegal migrant Nicanor Hernandez-Gutierrez was apprehended by ICE and was previously convicted of possession with intent to distribute a quantity exceeding five kilograms of cocaine.
Former DOE nuclear engineer Matt Von Swol notices something that’s been floating around for years; the insane number of minorities (mexicans and blacks) who are booked as “WHITE” when they get arrested – something which obviously manipulates ‘inconvenient’ crime stats – something that TPUSA’s Andrew Kolvet noted have been “widely corrupted to serve a racist agenda.’
“I searched through thousands of arrests in my county and every single Hispanic individual who has been arrested is labelled as “WHITE”” Van Swol posted on X.
We cannot trust crime stats in America. They have been widely corrupted to serve a racist agenda. https://t.co/UEpwDbnv2F
It’s axiomatic in Washington, D.C., that changes that are undertaken by administrative action alone are easy to reverse.
There’s no doubt that if a Democratic president wins next time, he or she will undo much of what Trump has done through executive action, but will he or she be able to take it all the way back to where it was before?
I don’t think so. It will certainly be goodbye to the Gulf of America and the Department of War, and ICE raids will stop immediately. But Trump has struck blows against long-standing progressive priorities that were pursued in a piecemeal fashion, meant to build up and become irreversible over time. On these, it will be hard for the left to recover — in other words, Trump has broken the progressive ratchet.
How does the ratchet work? It begins with small, unobjectionable, or perhaps even salutary steps, coupled with assurances that potential downsides or extreme outcomes will never come about. Then, over time, incremental moves are made in the same direction until the unreasonable policy that we’d been assured would never happen is entrenched reality.
It is the work of decades, and it depends on no one ever pushing things back in the other direction (that would be reactionary) and everyone’s accepting the endpoint as a fait accompli.
To wit: First, women flying in combat roles. Then, women in ground combat roles, with the proviso that training and standards will stay the same. Then, gender-normed physical fitness tests and lower standards for everyone.
First, race-neutral civil rights laws, then temporary affirmative action, then permanent quotas and set-asides, then a widespread corporate and educational architecture devoted to promoting racialist practices and ideology.
First, respect and rights for gay people, then respect and rights for trans people, then everyone in America having to designate their pronouns, people getting shamed and fired for “misgendering” trans people, “gender-affirming” surgeries for minors, males competing in female sports, and the active encouragement of nonconforming sexual identities in the schools.
Trump has yanked the other way so far on these ratchet issues that it’s not clear when or how the left can get them back to the status quo ante.
It took so long to get there in the first place that snapping back to politicized training standards, pervasive DEI, or the most outlandish forms of the trans agenda will be very difficult.
Also, the sense of inevitability that the ratchet created, and the sense of helplessness on the part of opponents, has now been shattered.
Finally, there’s the problem that plausible deniability has been lost. The ratchet allowed for radical social change to be sheathed in incrementalism and in the righteousness of the starting point — DEI was on a continuum with civil rights; watered-down physical standards on a continuum with the inclusion of women in combat roles who needed no special accommodation.
Now, a revanchist Democratic administration would have to proceed directly to the most controversial and unpopular parts of the left’s agenda.
Top Biden administration officials misused executive authority and took actions without then-President Joe Biden’s authorization as his mental acuity declined, a House investigation found.
President Biden’s inner circle hid the extent of his mental decline from the American people and exercised executive authority by abusing the presidential autopen and taking advantage of a lax chain-of-command, according to a report released Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee.
“The Biden Autopen Presidency ranks among the greatest scandals in U.S. history. As President Biden declined, his staff abused the autopen and a lax chain-of-command policy to effect executive actions that lack any documentation of whether they were in fact authorized,” the report reads.
“The Committee has found that there was, in fact, a cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline and that there is no record demonstrating President Biden himself made all of the executive decisions that were attributed to him,” the report adds.
The Biden White House worked to conceal the extent of his mental decline through scripted messaging, controlled public appearances, and limited access. Staffers controlled Biden’s daily activities, appearances, and workload to prevent the public from seeing his diminishing mental capacity, the report says.
For the most part, Biden’s staff dismissed the possibility that the American people were concerned about his mental faculties. In a similar manner, Biden’s staff attributed his disastrous June 2024 debate performance to a bad cold and minimized Biden’s struggles on that fateful night.
The Oversight Committee investigated the coverup of Biden’s mental capacity with a specific focus on the Biden administration’s autopen usage at the end of his term. According to the committee, Biden officials used presidential authority and initiated executive actions without direct authorization from Biden himself, including using the autopen to sign executive orders without written approval.
Top Biden administration officials misused executive authority and took actions without then-President Joe Biden’s authorization as his mental acuity declined, a House investigation found.
President Biden’s inner circle hid the extent of his mental decline from the American people and exercised executive authority by abusing the presidential autopen and taking advantage of a lax chain-of-command, according to a report released Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee.
“The Biden Autopen Presidency ranks among the greatest scandals in U.S. history. As President Biden declined, his staff abused the autopen and a lax chain-of-command policy to effect executive actions that lack any documentation of whether they were in fact authorized,” the report reads.
“The Committee has found that there was, in fact, a cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline and that there is no record demonstrating President Biden himself made all of the executive decisions that were attributed to him,” the report adds.
The Biden White House worked to conceal the extent of his mental decline through scripted messaging, controlled public appearances, and limited access. Staffers controlled Biden’s daily activities, appearances, and workload to prevent the public from seeing his diminishing mental capacity, the report says.
For the most part, Biden’s staff dismissed the possibility that the American people were concerned about his mental faculties. In a similar manner, Biden’s staff attributed his disastrous June 2024 debate performance to a bad cold and minimized Biden’s struggles on that fateful night.
The Oversight Committee investigated the coverup of Biden’s mental capacity with a specific focus on the Biden administration’s autopen usage at the end of his term. According to the committee, Biden officials used presidential authority and initiated executive actions without direct authorization from Biden himself, including using the autopen to sign executive orders without written approval.
National Review previously reported on internal emails showing the White House’s process for deciding on commutations for violent criminals was chaotic and insular. The Biden administration did not consult with the families of the victims of the violent criminals as part of its clemency process.
Another instance the report mentions is the pardons Biden issued in the final hours of his presidency to members of his family. No records exist for the in-person meeting that led to the decision to grant those pardons.
Rather, Zients verbally authorized the use of the autopen after an aide of his transmitted the decision to issue the pardons. Zients did not know who actually applied the autopen and did not confirm with President Biden that he approved the pardons. The aide sent an email on Zients’s behalf expressing approval of the Biden family pardons.
If Biden didn’t issue the pardon, the pardon is invalid.
Free marketeers have good reason to cheer, or at least sigh with relief, with Milei’s party doing well in the Argentinian midterm elections…
In the middle of the month, this newsletter explained why the Trump administration traded $20 billion in U.S. dollars for the equivalent amount in Argentinian pesos. The Argentinian currency, which had already lost a lot of its value, was dropping perilously over fears President Javier Milei’s party might lose the midterm elections and the country would revert to its previous reckless big-spending habits. The currency trade, spearheaded by U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, represented an economic lifeline to Argentina and a metaphorical bet that Milei’s party would do well in the midterms, and keep the country on a smaller-government, more free-market-oriented path.
Secretary Bessent, collect your winnings. From the Wall Street Journal:
With nearly 99 percent of votes counted, Milei’s Freedom Advances party won almost 41 percent of the national vote, more than doubling its representation in Congress. That means his party and allies secured at least one-third of the seats in both chambers — the critical threshold that allows Milei to preserve his veto power and defend his sweeping decrees.
The result, stronger than most polls had predicted, gives Milei fresh political momentum after months of unrest over deep spending cuts and a grinding recession last year. It also shores up his standing with Washington and the International Monetary Fund, which have tied future financial support to the survival of his austerity experiment. Market analysts expect Argentine bonds and the peso to rally when trading opens Monday, reflecting relief that Milei still has political traction after taking office two years ago.
“Ukrainian drones hit the Mariysky oil refinery in Mari El, the Stavrolen chemical plant and the Novospasskoye oil depot.”
Greece sends Ukraine the big guns. “Greece is transferring 60 U.S.-made M110A2 203mm self-propelled howitzers to Ukraine, along with 150,000 shells and thousands of Zuni rockets.”
Finally: “Texas Higher Ed Board Officially Bans In-State Tuition for Illegal Aliens.” Rick Perry was a very conservative governor in many ways, but backing subsidized tuition for illegal aliens was one of his stupidest ideas.
Ken Paxton takes a scalp. “Dallas Doctor Surrenders License After Texas AG Sues For Prescribing Gender Transition Drugs To Minors.” “Paxton announced on Oct. 24 that Dr. May C. Lau has given up her state medical license but that the legal case over her alleged violation of Texas’s ban on gender transition treatment for minors is still ongoing.”
“California’s Retirement Fund Lost 71% Of $468M Investment In Clean Energy And Won’t Say How.” “According to state records analyzed by the Center Square, the CalPERS Clean Energy & Technology Fund (CETF), launched in 2007, has seen its value fall from a total commitment of $468.4 million to $138 million as of March 31, 2025. That represents a loss of more than $330 million, even after paying $22 million in fees and costs to private equity managers.” I’m sure the right pockets got lined. For Democrats, losing taxpayer money is ephemeral, but virtue signaling is forever.
Oklahoma: “State Rep. Ajay Pittman suspected of embezzling campaign funds, forgery, court records show.” Guess the party.
The Peace President keeps on winning. “President Trump participates in a peace treaty, trade and critical mineral agreement signing with the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Cambodia and the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Thailand.”
“A staffer for Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey was hit with drug trafficking charges after authorities intercepted eight kilograms of cocaine being delivered to a state office building. LaMar Cook, who has served as deputy director of Healey’s western Massachusetts office since 2023, was charged with trafficking over 200 grams of cocaine, unlawful possession of a firearm, and unlawful possession of ammunition related to the bust, Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni announced Wednesday. Multiple parcels containing about 21 kilograms of cocaine have been seized by Massachusetts State Police throughout the investigation into Cook.” Why yes, eight kilos of Peruvian Marching Powder is indeed more than 200 grams. Indeed, that’s the sort of quantity that might keep Hunter Biden supplied into the spring…
Biden’s autopen pardons are the gift that keeps giving. “Thirty-one-year-old Khyre Holbert—a convicted felon whose 20-year crack cocaine and firearm-possession sentence was commuted by former President Joe Biden at the end of his term—was slapped with a felon in possession of a firearm and ammunition charge following his alleged participation in a shooting in Omaha, Nebraska.”
Slam Frank is “Holocaust victim Anne Frank reimagined as a pansexual Latina with non-binary lover and neurodiverse family in controversial NYC musical.” Maybe NYC deserves Mamdani…
Senate Democrats, lead by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, keep blocking a continuing resolution that would reopen large swathes of the federal government because they insist on continuing ObamaCare subsidies for illegal aliens. To this end, they’ve voted to keep the government shut down thirteen times. Republicans all voted to reopen the government, as well as “Democratic Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania” and “Independent Sen. Angus King, who caucuses with Democrats.” That makes the Republican bill to reopen the government the bipartisan bill.
In response to Democratic senators keeping the part of the government that supplies them with free food shut down, several Democrats on Tik-Tok, many visible obese, are threatening to loot grocery stores. Like the many businesses burned down during the #BlackLivesMatter/#Antifa riots of 2020, the businesses so looted would no doubt be stores in deep blue areas of deep blue cities, meaning the people they would overwhelmingly be harming would likely be other Democrats. (Or people too apathetic to vote. Or non-voting felons.)
Now, I am making the assumption that the people pledging to commit crimes to support their perceived absolute right to free stuff from American taxpayers are, in fact, Democrats. There may indeed be a few down-on-their-luck Republicans impacted by the lingering effects of the Biden Recession that have had to rely on government handouts to feed their children, but they don’t seem like the type threatening to break the law. I’m also assuming those would-be looters are not Libertarians, as none of them strike me as the sort to have Milton Friedman books in their apartments.
So unless Republicans give in on subsidizing illegal aliens, Democrats will continue to hurt Democratic voters by refusing to let the federal government subsidize food for Democrats.
Hell of a plan there, Chuck.
But it’s clear that the crazy Tik-Tokers will be getting free food one way or another. if they carry through on their threats, many of them might be getting fed via their three hots and a cot down at the local hoosegow…
The Schumer Shutdown continues, “No Kings” rallies turns out to be a shuffling parade of elderly white dorks, Ukraine continues destroying Russia’s oil infrastructure, that Dutch chip company seizure has bigger ramifications than I anticipated, Canada wants to steal people’s homes, an NBA gambling scandal erupts, and you have a chance to buy a painting from the Iron Lady Collection.
Senate Democrats killed a bill proposed by GOP Sens. Ron Johnson (WI) and Todd Young (IN) that would have paid government essential workers during the extended shutdown.
It failed 54-45. It needed 60 votes to advance.
Only Democrat Sens. John Fetterman (PA), Raphael Warnock (GA), and Jon Ossoff (GA) voted with the Republicans.
“Democrats have voted down the stopgap bill 12 times.”
“How Did California Spend Billions on Homelessness Only for It to Get Worse? Two New Criminal Cases Offer a Clue.” Honestly, the first sentence supplies its own answer even without the second.
How did California manage to spend $24 billion in taxpayer money to address homelessness over the past years, only for the problem to get substantially worse?
The state has not offered any explanation since that figure was revealed in a state audit released earlier this year. But the arrest of two California men on Thursday suggests that at least some of the money may have been stolen through fraud.
Cody Holmes, the former chief financial officer at a downtown Los Angeles-based developer of affordable housing, was arrested on a federal criminal complaint charging him with mail fraud. In a separate case, Steven Taylor is accused of defrauding lenders to aid his property-flipping business. He is charged with seven counts of bank fraud, one count of aggravated identity theft, and one count of money laundering.
The arrests come as part of a larger federal investigation into homelessness funding fraud in the Golden State.
“Accountability begins today,” said acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli when he announced the arrests on Thursday. He said the two cases are part of a pattern of the larger misappropriation of billions in state funds meant to combat homelessness.
An audit released by the state in April revealed that California has spent more than $24 billion over the past five years to address the state’s homelessness crisis. The acting U.S. attorney formed a Homelessness Fraud and Corruption Task Force earlier this year to investigate where those tax dollars have gone.
“The two criminal cases announced is only the tip of the iceberg and we intend to aggressively pursue all leads and hold anyone who broke any federal laws criminally liable,” Essayli said.
Holmes, 31, is accused of fraudulently obtaining $25.9 million in state grant money for Shangri-La Industries, the developer of affordable housing for which he served as CFO. That money was intended to be used to purchase, construct, and operate homeless housing in Thousand Oaks under a state project called “Homekey.”
Holmes allegedly knowingly submitted inflated, fake bank records to the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), to falsely prove the company had the capacity to fulfill homeless housing projects. However, authorities say the bank accounts that Holmes said contained these funds did not exist.
Holmes is now accused of using more than $2 million in state grant money to pay credit card bills that he was associated with, including purchases at luxury retailers.
HCD had previously paid millions of dollars to Shangri-La to buy, build, and operate housing for the homeless in Redlands and King City, among other California cities.
If convicted, Holmes faces up to 20 years in federal prison.
Meanwhile, Taylor, 44, is accused of using fake bank statements and false cash representations to obtain loans and lines of credit to operate his real estate business from August 2019 to July 2025.
The Brentwood man is also accused of lying to lenders about his intended use of various properties. He allegedly lied to the lender behind his purchase of a Cheviot Hills property, telling the lender he intended to renovate and use the property himself. However, he apparently had already contracted to sell the property, which he bought for $11.2 million thanks to a loan acquired through the use of fake bank statements. He was contracted to sell the property to a homeless housing developer who was purchasing the property with public funds from the city of Los Angeles and the state of California for $27.3 million in a double-escrow transaction hidden from the victim lender and others.
If convicted, Taylor would face up to 30 years in federal prison for each bank fraud count, up to ten years in federal prison for the money laundering count, and a two-year prison sentence for the aggravated identity theft count.
I’m sure this is only the tip of the Homeless Industrial Complex iceberg…
Speaking of homeless industrial complex fraud: “FBI raids homes of Charlotte activist Cedric Dean in health care fraud investigation.”
The FBI raided the home of Cedric Dean, a well-known community activist in Charlotte’s Palisades neighborhood, on Thursday.
The search is part of a federal investigation into an alleged multi-million dollar health care fraud scheme, according to federal court documents released to Queen City News.
A spokesperson for the FBI confirmed on Thursday that agents were “engaged in court-authorized investigative activity,” but did not offer further details.
Court documents obtained by QCN reveal that Dean and his company, Cedric Dean Holdings, are accused of fraudulently billing Medicaid for mental health services that were never provided. Investigators said Dean targeted vulnerable people, including those experiencing homelessness, in exchange for their Medicaid information, offering food or temporary shelter in return.
Dean allegedly submitted inflated or false claims to Medicaid, sometimes using fake diagnoses, and paid staff and recruiters through services like CashApp. Authorities said his company billed roughly $1 million per month and operated without enough staff to actually provide care.
“They’ve lost culture… Calling someone a Democrat is an insult,” Travis noted, adding “Calling someone a Kamala voter is an insult. This is white, black, Asian, Hispanic: young men across America are over the BS that they saw at this No Kings rally.”
“Look at the dance. These are huge dorks. They have no power. They are losers. No one wants to hang out with them,” Travis continued, pointing to the event as emblematic of the party’s disconnect.
“They’re old, 1960s protesters who now are on the side that they used to protest against. They don’t realize that the world has shifted around them and they are awkward lunatics,” he further emphasized.
No Kings? They don’t mean it, as they rebranded as “No Tyrants” in countries with monarchies.
“Ukraine hit Russia’s Novokuybyshevsk refinery in Samara, one of Rosneft’s key plants, processing 8.8M tons of crude annually, about 3% of Russia’s total refining capacity,” some 1,000km from Ukraine.
Hamas is carrying out the terms of the ceasefire every bit as well as you would expect. “After Attack on Troops, Israel Hits Hamas Terror Targets in Gaza BBC. Hamas carried out ‘multiple attacks against Israeli forces beyond the yellow line.'”
Israel struck terrorist targets in southern Gaza after Hamas terrorists attacked its troops located inside the agreed ceasefire line, violating the U.S.-brokered agreement. “The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out airstrikes in the Rafah area on Sunday morning in response to violations of the ceasefire by Hamas,” the Israeli TV channel i24NEWS reported.
In response to Hamas’s action, the Israeli military targeted terror tunnels used in the sneak attacks. “Earlier, an IED or anti-tank explosion struck near an IDF engineering vehicle in the same area,” the broadcaster added. “Reports from Gaza indicate the strikes targeted Hamas positions shortly after the terror group fired an anti-tank missile at IDF forces.”
Trump’s genius wasn’t getting an agreement that would bring lasting peace for all time, it was getting the remaining living hostages out before Hamas inevitably violated the ceasefire.
“Palestinian illegal alien arrested by FBI for participating in October 7th terror attack.” “The complaint described the man, identified in court documents as Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi, as an operative for a paramilitary group in Gaza that has fought alongside Hamas.” Naturally, the media refers to him as “Louisiana Man.”
“Haitians who replaced American workers in tiny Pennsylvania town will be unemployed as factory shuts down.” “Many of these migrants were employed by a meatpacking plant known as Fourth Street Barbecue, also operating under the name Fourth Street Foods. They displaced native-born workers, drained local resources, and wired their paychecks overseas to third-world countries.”
One day after German tabloid newspaper Bild reported that Volkswagen had suspended production of the Golf at its Wolfsburg factory due to a worsening semiconductor shortage caused by a supply stoppage of Nexperia chips, the Dutch chipmaker, recently seized by the Netherlands government, warned Japanese automakers on Thursday that it may no longer be able to guarantee chip supply. The chip crisis spreading from Europe to Japan has set off alarm bells across the industry.
Bloomberg reports that the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association (JAMA) has confirmed that its members, Toyota, Nissan, and Honda, have received warnings from Nexperia about chip supply woes and are working with customers to mitigate disruptions.
JAMA cautioned that chip shortages could have a “serious impact” on global auto production and urged governments to reach a “prompt and practical solution.”
“The chips manufactured by the affected manufacturers are important parts used in electronic control units, etc., and we recognize that this incident will have a serious impact on the global production of our member companies,” JAMA wrote in a statement, adding, “We hope that the countries involved will come to a prompt and practical solution.”
There’s something weird going on here. Any global manufacturing giant worth it’s salt should have second-source contingency plans for such lowly parts as semiconductor discretes. Even in Europe, there are other discrete manufacturers like Infineion and STMicroelctronics. Somebody (or a whole lot of somebodies) dropped the ball here.
“In just 7 minutes, thieves allegedly mounted a ladder, stole priceless jewels from the Louvre and fled on motor scooters.” No painstaking disarming of the alarm system? No sophisticated computer intrusion? No hanging from a cable to avoid triggering the floor alarm? Just smashing windows and cases with brute force? The ghosts of a century’s worth of French screenplay writers sigh in disappointment…
Welcome to Richmond, British Columbia, a suburb of Metro Vancouver.
This is a letter the city sent to residents to notify them that their home might belong to the natives who once camped there 200 years ago.
Please take note that the recent BC Supreme Court decision of Cowichan Tribes v Canada, 2025 BCSC 1490 made some very important decisions which could negatively affect the title to your property. A briefing paper prepared by City of Richmond staff is attached for your reference.
If you look at the draft map attached to the briefing, your property is located within the Claim Area outlined in green. For those whose property is in the area outlined in black, the Court has declared aboriginal title to your property which may compromise the status and validity of your ownership – this was mandated without any prior notice to the landowners. The entire area outlined in green is claimed on appeal by the Cowichan First Nations.
Snip.
A liberal female judge issued an 863-page ruling ordering that private properties, some of which have been in families for generations, must return to the hands of a nomadic tribe that once loosely lived on the land hundreds of years ago, long before anyone who is currently alive was ever born.
This matter was so important to the judge and other liberal allies that it was the “longest trial in Canada’s history.” It is also seen as setting a precedent for confiscating property across the nation.
Now you know why the radical left keeps pushing those bullshit “land acknowledgements.”
A tenured professor at the University of Texas at Austin says he was dismissed from his senior administrative post due to “ideological differences,” marking the latest shake-up in Texas’ statewide effort to reform higher education and curb campus DEI influence.
Last week, Art Markman posted that UT leadership had dismissed him in late September as academic affairs senior vice provost.
Climate activist David Bookbinder admits its a shakedown. “Essentially, the tort liability is an indirect carbon tax. You sue an oil company, an oil company is liable, the oil company then passes that liability on to the people who are buying its products.”
NBA gambling scandal: “ESPN is reporting the arrest of Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups. Also arrested: Terry Rozier, guard for the Miami Heat.”
Billups, an NBA Hall of Famer, has been charged with partaking in an alleged illegal poker ring tied to the Bonanno, Genovese and Colombo crime families, sources told The Post.
A total of 31 people across the country are charged with running rigged games, which took place in Manhattan, the Hamptons and Las Vegas, sources said.
The players involved were being paid by mobsters to play in card games fixed with technology and card shuffling machines to give the house the advantage, sources familiar with the case said.
The athletes were told to take a dive when they had to and win when they were told. It didn’t appear as if they were attempting to pay off any debts, sources said.
Rozier is being charged with point-shaving.
Director Blue has a lot more details about the mob guys running the games, and the sophisticated technologies used, like special contact lenses to read marked cards, cryptocurrency money laundering and x-ray tables.
The Critical Drinker walks through every Disney Star Wars film, how much they cost, and how much they made or lost. Since they received substantial tax credits for filming in the UK, they evidently had to submit real numbers rather than the usual Hollywood Accounting bullshit. The Force Awakens evidently cost $638.9 million to make, which would probably rank it as the most expensive film of all time.
Before we get started, let’s get this classic meme out of the way:
The it, in this case, is federal layoffs due to the Schumer Shutdown. Democrats refused a continuing resolution because they insist that illegal alien health care subsidies must be part of any deal. Trump has told them to get stuffed and started laying off highly liberal, highly unionized federal workers.
The White House has begun laying off a “substantial” number of government employees, OMB Director Russ Vought announced Friday on X.
Can confirm RIFs have begun and they are substantial,” an OMB spokesperson told POLITICO, adding “These are RIFs not furloughs.”
The news comes on the 10th day of the government shutdown after Senate Democrats insisted on maintaining Obama-era benefits that include illegal immigrants, and both sides of the aisle have repeatedly failed to pass subsequent packages to fund the government.
According to the report, the layoffs have hit agencies including: Interior, Homeland Security, Treasury, EPA, Commerce, Education, Energy, HHS and HUD.
Several of those agencies shouldn’t even exist, so keep cutting.
On Thursday, Trump said his administration would target programs backed by Democrats – saying during a cabinet meeting: “We’re only cutting Democrat programs, I hate to tell you, but we are cutting Democrat programs,” adding “We will be cutting some very popular Democrat programs that aren’t popular with Republicans, frankly.”
The move follows an OMB memo leaked two weeks ago which ordered Trump administration officials to prepare to carry out reduction-in-force (RIF) plans during the shutdown, targeting employees that aren’t legally required – OR, those which conflict with Trump’s priorities.
Democrats are, of course, freaking out, but what did they expect when they launched the shutdown? The sequence of events unfolded thusly:
Trump: If you hand me this sword, I’m going to stab you with it.
Democrats: (Hands Trump a sword.)
Trump: (Stabs them.)
They’ve tossed Trump into the briar patch, and now he’s happily building a string of high priced condos there.
One wonders what congressional Democrats were thinking when they undertook this course of action. Did they actually believe their Trump Always Chickens Out talking points? Did that idea not die when our B-2s obliterated ChinaIran’s nuclear program? Did they believe he would apply the same bracketing strategy of alternating loosening and tightening of pressure he applied to foreign countries to them?
They clearly haven’t been paying attention to how President Trump negotiates when he has a clear upper hand: He’s willing to threaten the opposing party’s most cherished asset and escalate until the cows come home. He knows that control of the federal bureaucracy is one of the ways Democrats keep steering the country left despite Republican administrations. He also knows that, just as in the past, the American public blames whoever has blocked a clean resolution for shutdowns. He also knows that subsidizing illegal alien healthcare is deeply unpopular with American voters. Given all that, he has all the incentive in the world to keep purging Democrats from federal employment ranks, and cutting welfare state agencies down to the bone. For Trump it’s win-win, and for Democrats its lose-lose.
The fact they undertook this course of action despite every day of the shutdown making their situation worse suggests that not only is the party’s far left social justice ideological core in the driver’s seat, but that Trump Derangement Syndrome is now their primary motivating factor. Oppose Trump, no matter the cost, even if it actively hurts traditional allies (like labor unions and federal bureaucrats) and the party’s ostensible goals.
Despite Trump’s many virtues as President, he’s never been known as a budget cutter. But Democrat intransigence has finally made him one.
Welcome to day three of the Schumer Shutdown! January 6 was an entirely Fed operation, Hegseth reads the brass the riot act, the Trump Administration claws back some taxpayer dollars, Ukraine hits more Russian oil refineries, Tricolor’s numerous scams, a couple of hacking attacks, Fiddy gets 50, and a Beatles demo tape leads to lunch with Sir Paul.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The “FBI disclosed to Congress that there were 275 ‘plain clothes’ agents interspersed with the crowd that gathered at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.” So it was a Fed operation top to bottom. And, of course, they lied about it to congress. I guess calling “Operation MAGA Entrapment” would have been too obvious…
There are some familiar names in this Jason Curtis Anderson list of organizations setting America on fire, but a few new ones as well.
If I were investigating the organizations who are setting America on fire, I’d start here:
Foundations:
1. Open Societies 2. Tides 3. The Neville Roy Singham funds
-Community Justice Exchange -Unity & Justice Fund -Peoples Support Foundation -United Community Fund -Arc of…
-The People’s Forum
-Party for Socialism & Liberation
-Answer Coaliton
-Code Pink
-Tricontinental Institute
-Breakthrough News
-International People’s Assembly
-Venceremos Brigade
2. PAL Action
3. Palestinian Youth Movement
4. Within Our Lifetime
5. Stop Cop City
6. Samidoun (still no arrests)
7. SJP
8. National Lawyers Guild
9. DSA (planning to disrupt military supply chain)
10. AROC (blocks ports)
11. Alliance for Global Justice
12. Dissenters
13. Indivisible
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gathered hundreds of the nation’s top military leaders in Quantico, Virginia Tuesday morning to lay out his vision for restoring the military’s “warrior ethos” by rolling back the left-wing indoctrination that’s taken hold at the Pentagon in recent years.
Warning the assembled generals to “do the honorable thing and resign” if they rejected his message, Hegseth called out the leaders for allowing physical fitness standards to slide while diverting valuable time and resources towards politically fashionable causes related to race, gender, and the environment.
“No more identity months, DEI offices, no more dudes in dresses,” Hegseth said. “No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction, or gender delusions. We are DONE with that sh**.”
The secretary announced that female physical fitness standards will be eliminated from combat roles, reiterating a directive that was first issued in March.
“I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape or in combat units with females who can’t meet the same combat arms physical standards as men,” the Pentagon chief said.
All soldiers in combat roles, regardless of gender, must now meet the male physical fitness standards, Hegseth said, “because this job is life or death.”
“Each service will ensure that every requirement for every combat MOS, for every combat arms position, returns to the highest male standard only,” Hegseth said.
Basic physical fitness standards will also be applied to the highest ranking officers.
“It’s unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon, and leading all around the world. It’s a bad look, and it’s not who we are!” Hegseth said. “You need to meet the height and weight standards.”
“Today, at my direction, every member of the Joint Force at every rank is required to take the PT test twice a year, as well as meet height and weight requirements twice a year. EVERY year of service.”
Summary: ““The military has been forced by foolish and reckless politicians to focus on the wrong things.”
Analysis: True.
At least the shutdown did give us this:
President Trump is trolling Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries over their obsession with giving free healthcare to criminal aliens
One story that broke a bit late to include in last week’s LinkSwarm is the Des Moines school district superintendent who turned out to be an illegal alien with a deportation order. With further digging, it seems that Guyana-born Ian Roberts lied about pretty much his entire list of academic accomplishments.
So, he went to St. John’s with his student visa, but got his EdD from an online university no one has heard of and has a plethora of other universities listed without degrees attached.
In addition to this largely inflated and apparently fabricated professional record, Powell notes that there are some dubious awards Roberts claims which are unverifiable as well as claims to police and military service which are hard to confirm.
So who hired him? Would you believe board chair Jackie Norris, former Chief of Staff to Michelle Obama?
More: “Head of Iowa school district arrested for avoiding deportation, found with handgun after chase.”
In a 6-3 vote last Friday, the United States Supreme Court has granted the Trump administration’s emergency appeal to withhold nearly $4 billion in foreign aid funds appropriated by Congress.
The ruling by the conservative majority of the court permits the White House to withhold the funds through a pocket rescission under the Impoundment Control Act.
The move also permanently stays a lower court’s order by U.S. District Judge Amir Ali who had ruled that the administration’s freezing of the funds was likely illegal and that Congress would have to approve the decision to withhold the funding.
The lower court ruling had been temporarily blocked by Chief Justice John Roberts on Sept. 9 after a federal appeals court had declined to put Ali’s ruling on hold.
A tweet from the Department of State celebrated the ruling as a win for the president’s America First foreign policy and for Secretary of State Marco Rubio and lauded the administration’s efforts to rein in what it called, “wasteful, woke, and weaponized foreign assistance and international organization spending.”
Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought announced that nearly “nearly $8 billion in funding for climate-related projects, which he labeled as ‘Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda,’ is being canceled.”
So Keir Starmer, the man who refuses to stop importing unassimilated Muslim illegal aliens into the UK, now says they can only solve the illegal alien problem by imposing a mandatory digital ID on all citizens, without which they will not be permitted to work. “The government said the digital ID would be held on people’s mobile phones and become a mandatory part of the checks employers have to make when hiring staff. Over time, it would also be used to provide access to services such as childcare, welfare and access to tax records.”
So the Syrian immigrant who shot up a Manchester synagogue was named Jihad Al-Shamie. You put that in a novel and your editor would reject it as being too on-the-nose. (Hat tip: Stphen Green at Instapundit.)
Would-be Brett Kavanaugh assassin Nicholas Roske sentenced to eight years in prison. Prosecution asked for 30.
“ICE sting at Dallas strip club nabs 41 illegal aliens, rescues sex-trafficking victims.” “ICE busted into the Chicas Bonitas Cabaret and discovered that a tip they received was correct: Illegal aliens were sex trafficking girls to dance at this strip club. Out of 41 illegal aliens, 29 illegally worked at the club. Five were previously convicted criminals.”
“Plano Private School Teacher Gets 20 Years for Sex Crimes Against Student. Jacob Allred pleaded guilty to sexually exploiting a 15-year-old girl at Great Lakes Academy, which specializes in students with learning disorders.”
Virginia Democrats are using the power of the legal system to protect a transgender sex offender from being prosecuted for his crimes. The policy is in line with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger’s views.
Democratic leaders in Fairfax County, the largest county in Virginia, have repeatedly refused to prosecute Richard Cox, a man who has allegedly regularly exposed himself to women and girls in the girls’ locker rooms at two high schools and a recreation center. Cox is being charged for his crimes in Arlington County, where a detective testified he had child pornography and a Fairfax County children’s swim class schedule on his phone.
Republican Jack Ciatterelli has brought the race to a dead heat between himself and Democrat Mikie Sherrill.
But that’s not all.
AFTER this poll was taken, more news broke about Sherrill’s less than stellar record at the United States Naval Academy.
“A cheating scandal in the Naval Academy prevented her from walking at graduation.” Evidently her friends cheated and she refused to testify against them.
“Tricolor Auto’s Failure Has It All – ESG, Woke Capital, Illegal Immigration, Securities Fraud, Government Diversity Programs, BlackRock, etc.”
Tricolor Auto Group, the nation’s seventh largest used car dealer (and 3rd biggest in Texas and California), just filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy – e.g. liquidation. Its target customer had been illegal aliens, and with President Trump deciding to start enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, there has suddenly been a major “market correction” in that market segment. Not only has the customer base largely evaporated, but so have loan repayments, which Tricolor also serviced.
The “tri colors” that the name references are the colors of the Mexican flag – red, white, and green.
While the sudden loss of customers and loan repayments was the catalyst that caused the final collapse of Tricolor, its failure has revealed so much more, including securities fraud, Wall Street ESG gimmickry, race-based federal programs, etc.
Tricolor has securitized more than $2 billion of its very high risk auto loans over the past seven years. The most recent issuance was in June of this year, with JP Morgan Chase and other money center banks peddling more than $200 million of “social bonds” to credulous investors. These securities are certified as “social bonds” by the US Treasury’s CDFI (“Community Development Financial Institution”) program because Tricolor focuses on selling its cars and financial services to underserved communities, specifically Spanish-speaking non-citizens. Tricolor’s CEO, Daniel Chu, was quoted by Barron’s in 2022 as stating, “No one else is providing meaningful dollar credit to an illegal immigrant.”
As documented in this recent Barron’s article (“Tricolor Files for Bankruptcy, The Auto Lender Was Once an ESG Favorite,”) “Financial institutions until recently touted their social bond purchases as part of their commitment to ESG—or environmental, social and governance—principles. BlackRock took a $90 million stake in Tricolor in 2021 as part of its Impact Opportunities Fund focusing on businesses and projects owned, led by, or serving members of minority groups.” Of course BlackRock was involved.
You may recall that a major contributor to the financial crash of 2008 was Wall Street wizards packaging up a bunch of sub-prime mortgages, securitizing them, and then selling those “mortgage backed securities” to investors as something other than perfumed garbage. That is effectively what Tricolor has been doing with its auto loans, with the help of Wall Street.
In a Tricolor press release from March of this year titled “Tricolor Closes $328 Million Securitization to Advance Financial Inclusion at Scale in Underserved Communities,” CEO Chu stated, ”By providing deserving people with access to reliable, affordable transportation, Tricolor, which operates across six states and ranks as the third largest used auto retailer in Texas and California, helps move them into the financial mainstream and reverse systemic financial inequities in America.” Like the other securities issuance I referenced, JP Morgan Chase also promoted these odious securities, along with Barclay’s and Fifth Third Bank.
Per Car Dealership Guy, Tricolor’s bonds have collapsed to a value of 12 cents on the dollar, virtually wiping out the investors who bought those bonds. But as bad as this all sounds so far, it’s actually worse. There was massive fraud by Tricolor, which is causing losses to all parties who did business with it.
The banks who were packaging Tricolor’s securities also had lines of credit extended to Tricolor. There was a recent regulatory filing by Fifth Third Bank revealing that it was booking a $200 million impairment (loss) for fraud involving one of its customers. In this filing, Fifth Third disclosed that there was “recently discovered alleged external fraudulent activity at a commercial borrower,” and that it “is working with the appropriate law enforcement authorities in connection with this matter.” Barron’s confirmed that this commercial borrower was Tricolor. JP Morgan Chase also has about $200 million in loans outstanding to Tricolor, so it too will almost certainly be booking a massive impairment charge for this unrecoverable debt.
Some of the news reports about the Tricolor fraud state that collateral was “double pledged,” meaning that unbeknownst to the banks lending money to Tricolor, the collateral they thought was backing up their loans was also pledged to other banks.
Tricolor was also the servicer of its “buy here – pay here” loan portfolio, remitting collected payments to the banks who securitized their loans. From my experience dealing with fraud in this arena, it is quite likely that there was some level of kiting / ponzi scheme at work, and a constant inflow of new debt was necessary to keep servicing old debt that was not supported by actual assets.
Working in Tricolor’s favor to perpetuate the fraud was the aura of woke virtuosity that kept the money flowing in, which also helped shield Tricolor from appropriate due diligence by those same woke banks throwing money at it.
Working against Tricolor was President Trump’s immigration enforcement. The Department of Homeland Security issued this press release earlier this week: “Over 2 million Illegal Aliens Out of the United States in Less than 250 days.”
Funny how, after the company’s disasterous social justice rebrand, Keir Starmer’s Labour government bailed out Jaguar/Range Rover to the tune of £1.5 billion after a hack attack, despite the company being owned by India-based Tata.
I had to disable the ancient Word Press Stats package that stopped working and was screwing up my dashboard. So I lost all my blog hit history, which is irksome, as I received more than five million hits. On the plus side, it seems to save drafts much more quickly, and it also seems to be recording more views than the old stats did. I also wonder if the old stat package was responsible for some of the slow load times people occasionally experienced.
This week: More Charlie Kirk assassination fallout, more Ukrainian oil infrastructure strikes, Fani Willis gets permabanned, Planned Parenthood want to trans your children, the Democrat party’s racism problem, Lina Hidalgo calls it quits, more of that voting fraud that doesn’t exist, and YouTube screws up, then refuses to admit it
Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk, was living with his transgender romantic partner in the leadup to the assassination, Utah Governor Spencer Cox confirmed to CNN.
The roommate was “a male transitioning to female,” Cox said, noting that “this partner has been incredibly cooperative, had no idea this was happening, and is working with investigators right now.”
Snip.
While officials have not yet released the name of the roommate, public records show that Lance Twiggs, a 22-year-old, reportedly in the process of transitioning from male to female, lives at the same address as Robinson. The Post reported that a family member of Twiggs confirmed they were living together.
Cox told the Wall Street Journal that the suspect was “deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology.”
Robinson was also evidently a furry. So a gay tranny-loving furry killed Charlie Kirk. Some things are beyond parody…
“Anyone Who Blames ‘Both Sides’ After Charlie Kirk’s Murder Is A Liar And Coward.”
the Official Party of Wanton Assassination is busy making the case that there is extreme political violence “on both sides.” Immediately after the shooting, buffoonish Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, and Elizabeth Warren marched out to the microphones with convoluted messages about coming together and stopping violence on both sides.
By now, the drumbeat of bothsidesism in the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination has become a cacophony. “Bothsidesism” is what I am calling the irresistible urge for morally corrupt politicians (on both sides!) and journalists to lay half the blame for Kirk’s brutal murder at the feet of the right.
In fact, the worst Bothsiders — even worse than the sneering Democrats who can barely contain their glee that Kirk is dead, even as they scold us for not being interested in “unity” — are sniveling Republicans and so-called conservatives.
“There are monsters in your midst too,” intoned The New York Times’ David French, who persists in claiming to be conservative.
As proof, they will present their list of “right-wing violent attacks.” To give this barebones list more heft, they will go as far back as the Oklahoma City bombing, as that cretinous GOP Sen. James Lankford did on CNN. Lankford even had the gall to open his interview with Dana Bash by bringing up “white supremacy.” On Fox and Friends, Ainsley Earhardt tried to bait Trump into conceding that there are extremists on the right, too. Thank God he refused to take it.
This outrageous formulation must be crushed into dust, immediately. There is no moral equivalency. The Bothsiders are on the wrong side.
Why are Bothsiders wasting time blaming the right after a vicious murder committed by a leftist? Shouldn’t they be vociferously defending the innocent? The answer is that they’re cowards. They are too scared to call out Democrats for creating, supporting, and ignoring the evil that has taken root in their party.
Instead of courageously calling out their friends, colleagues, coworkers, and media allies, these pathetic Republican Bothsiders will spout long lists of examples of “right-wing political violence.” This allows them to avoid doing what has to be done: laying bare the left’s deep hatred of conservatives that has been allowed to fester for decade after decade.
By insisting that “both sides” are guilty of violence, they are giving the vicious left a way out. It’s a lifeline — a magical force field that immediately exonerates them. Democrats can then neatly avoid having to address the malevolent violence and hatred in so many of their voters. When it’s “both sides,” you get to escape accountability. When it’s “both sides,” the guilty get to escape a hard look in the mirror.
And just to belabor the point, here is why nearly everyone on the right is so united about political violence as a left-wing problem. First, Matt Walsh posted a short list of all the left-wing violence the right has had to endure in just the past few years:
BLM riots
Antifa
Church shootings
Trump assassination attempt [two of these!]
Pro life pregnancy center fires
Tesla vandalism
Attacks against ICE agents
Attacks against police
Attacks against federal courthouses
Allow me to add to this: multiple transgender shootings and threats by transgender activists. Plus, don’t any of these Bothsiders remember that our cities turned into a nightly warzone of fires, shootings, and Molotov cocktails from 2020-2021? It got so bad outside the White House that the president had to be moved to a secure location.
Don’t forget “Punch a Nazi” and “Punch a TERF” rhetoric either. Yes, men who identify as transgender, some of the most violent of the various Democrat shock troops, have attacked women as TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, for years.
And we endure plenty of ancillary political violence. It was left-wing violence that forced Kyle Rittenhouse into a trial for self-defense. It was left-wing violence that forced Daniel Penny into a trial for being a hero. It was left-wing violence that wrecked countless statues, monuments, and businesses.
Just days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the left is working overtime to hide the truth and create fantasies about his death.
Specifically, leftists alleged that conservatives were going to “pounce” on the death to wage protests and boost radical agendas in the manner of what followed George Floyd’s death.
Here are some of the lies that such a ridiculous narrative entails.
One, Charlie Kirk is not conservatives’ George Floyd. There were no mass riots after his death of the sort that followed Floyd’s demise.
Floyd’s death was used by the left to justify five months of rioting, arson, murder, looting, and attacking police officers.
The postmortem respect for Kirk’s singular life was not characterized by $2 billion in property damage, the torching of a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic church, 35 deaths, and 1,500 injured law-enforcement officers.
Instead, thousands of people peacefully joined his Turning Point USA organization and promised to redirect their lives toward peaceful political engagement.
Two, after Kirk’s death, no prominent Republican or conservative is encouraging ongoing mass (and often violent) protests in the manner of high-profile leftists like Kamala Harris.
Snip.
Three, Charles Kirk was not George Floyd. He was a law-abiding, religiously devout, political organizer, happily married with two children. Kirk was a media figure and head of a huge 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose brand was calmly debating students who disagreed with him.
Floyd should not have died while in police custody. But Floyd’s comorbidities were many. When arrested, he was under the influence of fentanyl and methamphetamine, with a heart condition and recent Covid infection.
He was a career felon, with eight previous criminal convictions, who had in the past staged a violent home-invasion robbery and pointed a knife at the abdomen of one of the female occupants.
In contrast, when Kirk was killed, he was not on drugs. He was not resisting police officers. And he was not trying to pass counterfeit currency. Instead, he eschewed violence and tried to engage in polite dialogue with students of different views.
Four, Kirk was not, as alleged by the left, murdered by a right-wing shooter. His death was not an example of right-on-right violence. Just the opposite was true. The shooter, Tyler Robinson, was on record with his family expressing hatred for the conservative Kirk.
Robinson engraved his bullets with both Antifa-like “anti-fascist” messaging and transgender references. He lived with his transgender partner, who was a leftist. Robinson’s aim was to end Kirk’s peaceful conservative career because he hated his politics and popularity and feared his influence.
Five, the left used the death of Floyd to promote its hard-left and otherwise unpopular agenda—defunding the police, cashless bail, decriminalization of theft, and DEI mandates. It manipulated outrage, chaos, and months-long violence to ram through radical cultural and top-down legal changes that otherwise had little popular support.
“The Fake News Media, Democrats and Radical Left are Lying about Charlie Kirk. They use their lies to justify and excuse Charlie Kirk’s brutal murder and their culpability for it for winding up the radical leftist fringe with their violent rhetoric.”
Leftist political violence is on the rise with Fake News Media, Democrat politicians, activists and the far left using more and more radical, violent rhetoric. I wrote about the violent rhetoric (and leftist political violence) on this substack, several times (see also here and here). I also observed previously that the far left consider political violence a tool and that the violent rhetoric serves to “trigger” the radical leftist fringe into acting out violence. The visceral response Americans had to the brutal assassination of Charlie Kirk only days ago made the media, Democrats and their enablers “circle the wagons” and start fabricating lies and misinformation about Charlie Kirk. I debunk a couple of the nastier lies in this article.
Snip.
AT NO TIME did he say “black women” lack brain processing power. He said several prominent liberal women who admitted they were assisted by affirmative action were admitting they lacked the “brain processing power to be taken really seriously.”
The comments at issue were made on the July 13, 2023 episode of Charlie Kirk’s podcast. During the show, Charlie discusses affirmative action. Affirmative action was a particularly hotly debated topic at the time due to the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard wherein SCOTUS found the use of race-based affirmative action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
After the Supreme Court’s opinion in Harvard a number of prominent black Democrats publicly supported affirmative action and stated they were personally assisted in their careers by affirmative action. Among these were the late Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat Congresswoman from Texas, former First Lady Michelle Obama and former MSNBC correspondent Joy Reid.
Snip.
The Charlie Kirk Called for Stoning Gay People LIE
Literally hours after his murder, prominent leftists started circulating false claims that Charlie Kirk advocated for or supported stoning gay people to death. Chief among the purveyors of this misinformation was famous author (and radical leftist) Stephen King.
Snip.
Did Charlie Kirk “Advocate” for Stoning Gays?
No, of course not. In fact, Charlie Kirk advocated repeatedly for caring for gay people and encouraged and supported gay conservatives. (This link is to a gay conservative Charlie supported. His video is worth watching and includes video of Charlie Kirk answering questions from gay people.)
Charlie Kirk was a Christian and believed in the Bible. Based on Scripture, Charlie knew homosexuality was a sin. Naturally, this enraged the far left. To justify or excuse Charlie’s murder the far left FABRICATED the claim that Charlie Kirk “advocated” for “stoning gays.” All Charlie Kirk did was reference Scripture. Here is what happened.
Charlie Kirk and Jack Posobiec hosted a podcast called Thoughtcrime. During a Thoughtcrime episode on June 8, 2024, Jack and Charlie (along with a couple of other frequent conservative contributors to the show) discussed a social media personality named Miss Rachel and her endorsement of Pride month (gay pride). Miss Rachel’s social media and blogging content focuses largely on kids and parenting. Miss Rachel made a post about suppoting Pride month and invoked the Bible in the process, citing the admonitions on the Book of Matthew to “love your neighbor.” Miss Rachel implied, but did not expressly say, anyone who is against Pride Month, is not being a good Christian.
In response, Charlie Kirk pointed out you love someone by “. . . by telling them the truth and not by confirming or affirming their sin.” He then suggested Miss Rachel read the rest of the Scriptures and pointed out the Book of Leviticus calls for a man who lays with another man to be stoned, making the point Miss Rachel was cherry-picking Bible verses. He also pointed out the Bible says to love God, one must love his law and that the Book of Leviticus lays down God’s law about sex.
“Stephen King himself agreed his own post was untrue and apologized for the post.”
The Fake News Media, the Democrats and the left generally are in panic mode working to spread lies about Charlie Kirk in an effort to blunt public opinion against their radical, violent rhetoric and leftist violence. These two lies are the worst in my view. There are many more other lies being spread about Charlie Kirk by the left. Keep that in mind as you read any media reports.
Florida’s Commissioner of Education Anastasios Kamoutsas reminded teachers and administrators that they can be fired for violating the state’s code of ethics. “An educator who is designated with ensuring the health, safety and welfare of students in schools making comments celebrating violence at a school is very concerning.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
More transtifa news: “The man who pleaded guilty to attempting to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh identifies as a transgender woman, according to newly revealed court documents. In a recent court filing, Nicholas Roske’s defense attorneys call their client “Sophie” and explain in a footnote that they will use female pronouns to refer to him ‘out of respect.'”
A few years back we got really serious about studying cash transfers, and rigorous research began in cities all across America. Some programs targeted the homeless, some new mothers and some families living beneath the poverty line. The goal was to figure out whether sizable monthly payments help people lead better lives, get better educations and jobs, care more for their children and achieve better health outcomes.
Many of the studies are still ongoing, but, at this point, the results aren’t “uncertain.” They’re pretty consistent and very weird. Multiple large, high-quality randomized studies are finding that guaranteed income transfers do not appear to produce sustained improvements in mental health, stress levels, physical health, child development outcomes or employment. Treated participants do work a little less, but shockingly, this doesn’t correspond with either lower stress levels or higher overall reported life satisfaction.
Homeless people, new mothers and low-income Americans all over the country received thousands of dollars. And it’s practically invisible in the data. On so many important metrics, these people are statistically indistinguishable from those who did not receive this aid.
Read on for more detailed methodologies, but the results (or lack thereof) are consistent with all other experiments of this type, all the way back to the SIME/DIME experiments of the late 1960s. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
The State Department announced Wednesday its decision to close the remnants of the Global Engagement Center, an office the Biden administration rebranded last year after it came under scrutiny for contributing to the censorship of conservatives online.
“The United States has ceased all Frameworks to Counter Foreign State Information Manipulation and any associated instruments implemented by the former administration,” principal deputy spokesperson Tommy Pigott said in a statement, referring to the Global Engagement Center’s new title.
“The Framework, initially launched by the GEC to counter so-called disinformation, devolved into tools for political censorship instead of protecting Americans from foreign adversarial propaganda,” he added.
“Through free speech, the United States will counter genuine malign propaganda from adversaries that threaten our national security, while protecting Americans’ right to exchange ideas.”
The Biden administration reshuffled the GEC into the Frameworks to Counter Foreign State Information Manipulation after congressional Republicans defunded the GEC in 2024. Republican lawmakers shut down the GEC after widespread backlash among conservatives against the agency over the pressure it put on social media companies to censor disfavored points of view.
The State Department’s move followed through on Secretary Marco Rubio’s directive earlier this year to close the unit and end the practice of government-sponsored censorship.
Disgraced Georgia DA Fani Willis permabanned from prosecuting Trump. “The denial of certiorari to Ms. Willis’s appeal of her suspension from the election interference case she brought against Mr. Trump and 18 others is a decisive victory for the 47th president. The high court’s four-to-three decision ends Ms. Willis’s time atop the case, which was terminated because of her secret romance with her special prosecutor, Nathan Wade.”
More food inflation? Except for beef, I’m not seeing price spikes the way I saw 2020-2022.
There’s a rare public spat going on between Governor Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick over THC regulation.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has responded to Gov. Greg Abbott’s hemp-derived THC executive order (EO), saying that “on this issue, we disagree.”
A staunch supporter of an outright ban on THC in Texas, Patrick said in his Friday press release that via the EO, Abbott “intentionally or not, has sent a signal to the THC industry that they have a state seal of approval on the current THC market.”
Abbott’s EO, which comes after his veto of the THC ban in Senate Bill 3 at the end of the regular session and then two special sessions where the Legislature was unable to come to an agreement on regulation, directs the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC) and Department of State Health Services (DSHS) with prohibiting the sale of hemp-derived THC products to “minors” — but does not explicitly state a specific age.
The EO also directs DSHS to conduct a review of existing agency rules that deal with total THC content in products, labeling requirements, and record-keeping.
Abbott told The Texan in July that he wants to see a 21-year age limit on the sale of hemp-derived THC products, an age he had mentioned in his veto proclamation.
Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller joined Vice President JD Vance, who hosted The Charlie Kirk Show earlier, following Kirk’s assassination last Wednesday by what has been described as a “radical left, ANTIFA-adjacent creep” with a radicalized transgender partner.
Miller told Vance, “Which is that we need to have an organized strategy to go after the left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country.”
It appears that Miller has correctly identified the dark-money-funded NGO world as fueling this madness, and that an urgent all-of-government approach is necessary.
More on the subject from Jason Curtis Anderson of One City Rising:
It’s encouraging to see the White House focus on the violent, revolutionary arm of the radical left, but targeting small organizations alone won’t solve the problem.
We need a multi-agency coordinated effort, and it must confront the dark-money network of foundations that prop them up.
We also must begin ruthlessly regulating and enforcing the tax-exempt 501(c)(3) system, where the revolution against the West operates. To qualify for tax-exempt status, a group is supposed to serve the public good.
Yet many qualify on flimsy claims of promoting social, racial, or climate justice and then devote themselves to protests and flag-burning.
They are a cancer on society, and the longer we wait, the more it will metastasize.
It’s also alarming how closely far-left radicalization mirrors Islamist radicalization. The stages are strikingly similar: Introduction to ideology, Obsession with ideology, Belief that violence is justified, Acts of violence on behalf of the ideology.
Planned Parenthood’s online “gender affirming care” lesson for students as young as middle-schoolers suggests using “liquid filled condoms” to mimic a penis and provides instructions on how to circumvent safeguards if “you’re looking for hormones without extra gatekeeping.”
Sex Ed To-Go is an online program with free sex-education lessons in Spanish and English developed by Planned Parenthood for teachers and students, ranging from topics like sexually transmitted diseases to “handling break-ups.” The new module titled “Gender Affirming Care,” created by Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest, is designed for students in eighth grade and above. The lesson plan explains gender-related terminology, explores “types of things people can do to help their body and appearance match their gender identity,” directs students on finding “resources,” and details “how to support someone who is transgender, non-binary, or transitioning.”
Conversely, University President Mark Welsh is out at Texas A&M.
Mark Welsh, president of Texas A&M University, is stepping down effective September 19. Announced by Chancellor Glenn Hegar and the Board of Regents, the news follows weeks of mounting controversy over Welsh’s leadership.
Welsh’s resignation caps a period of public uproar sparked by his handling of a children’s literature course that included instruction on introducing LGBT and gender identity material to children as young as three.
The situation came under public scrutiny after State Rep. Brian Harrison (R–Midlothian) released audio of a student objecting to the curriculum and subsequent allegations that the student was kicked out of class for expressing concerns about transgender indoctrination. Initially, Welsh defended the professor involved but later reversed himself—firing the instructor and removing the department head and dean from their posts.
Despite these actions, criticism intensified from lawmakers and activists, who accused Welsh of ambivalence and being slow to address the controversy.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick publicly called for further accountability, stating Welsh “did not handle the recent situation … as he should have,” while Harrison said Welsh “must be fired for forcing radical trans indoctrination on students.”
Sadly, trans indoctrination in education is something squishy Republicans dragged their heels on fighting in the past. That’s no longer the case, and I suspect that anyone in Texas who thinks its a good idea to use trans indoctrination on kids is soon going to find themseleves on the receiving end of a pink slip.
“We got too progressive, I believe,” said JoJo Burgess, the black Democratic mayor of Washington, Pennsylvania, a small city in steel country. He’s also a steelworker trying to claw back some of the steel country for Democrats.
Burgess argued that the Democrats’ problems are Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and identity politics, including gender ideology. Clairton Mayor Rich Lattanzi, also a Democrat and a former steelworker, basically agreed.
“It’s almost like the Democrats forgot the people they are representing,” Lattanzi told the Washington Examiner.
In 2000, Al Gore won Fayette, Washington, and Greene counties, all steel and coal country south of Pittsburgh, by 10 points, which was the norm. More recently, President Donald Trump carried all three counties by 30 points.
Burgess told the Washington Examiner he believes steel country Democrats were done in by a one-two punch. First, former President Barack Obama won the presidency, and Burgess said he believes white rural Democrats didn’t want to be in a party headed by a black man. He said the second blow was self-inflicted in 2016, adding “one of the biggest problems that we had with the Democratic Party — that’s Bernie Sanders.”
Burgess said he believes Sanders got so much attention that party leadership felt they had to tack left to embrace it.
“We got too progressive, I believe. And you got the progressives that picked up on that, like the AOCs [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and people like that,” Burgess said. “Listen, I’m not gonna say that they’re bad, but sometimes some of the shit that some of these guys say: it’s just it’s too extreme and it don’t make sense.”
He added that one example is “gender stuff.”
“Whenever the LGBQTIA community comes out and says, ‘We’re getting treated just like black people,’ no, you’re not,” Burgess said. “As black people, we have no choice. In that community, you do have a choice, and you do know what you sign up for when you take on that role. Do I believe that you’re discriminated against? Yes. Do I believe you should be protected against it? Absolutely.”
However, Burgess totally rejected the idea that boys who identify as girls should be able to compete as girls, and he said he believes Democrats harm themselves by taking the other side.
Lattanzi said when the Democratic establishment hosts an event in steel country, it plays its identity-politics games and tries to stay away from the working-class white guy who stereotypically embodies this region.
“They’re out there looking for minorities, gays, and lesbians,” Lattanzi said.
Lots of interesting takeaways there, but this was a big one: “white rural Democrats didn’t want to be in a party headed by a black man.” Emphasis added. And that’s in 2008, which suggests racism lingered on in the rural Democratic Party much longer than in the Republican Party or America as a whole. See also: The Myth of the Southern Strategy.
Things that make you go “Hmmmm: “The EU Paid-Off €600,000 To Friendly Media Outlets Right After European Elections.”
One European politician, MEP Petr Bystron, has revealed that the EU commission has provided Financial support to the American investigative network Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) right after the 2024 EU elections. Major German news outlets like Spiegel, Zeit, and Süddeutsche Zeitung belong to the group, which is the world’s largest network of investigative media.
These outlets are known for their hit pieces on conservative and right-wing parties, often at opportune times. Notably, Spiegel and Süddeutsche Zeitung’s reporting in 2019 on the Ibiza Affair scandal — which involved an undercover video of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) party’s leader — led to the toppling of the Austrian government at the time, which included the FPÖ. Many critics believed that due to the sophistication of the operation, which included an undercover actress, intelligence services may have played a role.
The OCCRP group was founded in 2006 and is most well known for publishing the “Panama Papers” and the “Azerbaijan Laundromat” evasion scandals.
After a massive flow of U.S. money was cut off to key European establishment outlets and NGOs, Brussels is stepping in to fill the gap. Namely, the Trump administration ended the massive levels of funding headed towards foreign organizations, particularly from USAID, which allowed them to pump out pro-EU and left-wing content to wide swathes of the population across Europe.
The OCCRP group has received an extraordinary amount of money from U.S. taxpayers and other U.S. sources. According to French outlet Mediapart, the group received nearly $50 million from U.S. sources, but these funders were not just generous donors. They also could dictate editorial agendas and veto staff appointments.
Two journalists from NDR, a German state media network, questioned just how independent the OCCRP is in a 2024 report.
The two determined that a significant portion of the money was coming from American funds, particularly from USAID. OCCRP was funneling content and material to German media outlets like Spiegel, Zeit, and Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Since the revelations, Alternative for Germany (AfD) MEP Petr Bystron has officially requested the EU Commission to provide information about whether it also provides financial support to OCCRP. The response revealed that the organization has received €600,000 since November 2024 as part of an EU project to “strengthen” journalism.
Known as the NEXT-U project, it aims to support European journalists and media organizations with training and tools for investigative journalism. The commission defends the grants, stating that the taxpayer money is transparently distributed and adheres to journalistic standards.
Bystron argues that the ample amount of money amounts to an influence operation.
“OCCRP media outlets like Der Spiegel received over 600,000 euros from the EU directly after the EU elections. These very media outlets manipulated the last EU elections through massive campaigns,” he said in an interview with Berliner Zeitung, which published the exclusive story first.
The AfD MEP stated that the aim was to discredit conservative, right-wing politicians who are critical of the EU.
I first met Charlie Kirk when he was just 18 years old, in my friend’s living room. Fresh out of high school, even then, he had a vision for Turning Point USA—a dream to energize young people, inspire them, and get them involved. He started in his parents’ garage, and that vision grew into something extraordinary.
From the beginning, Charlie stood out. He was brilliant, bold, courageous, and joyful. He was a happy warrior.
Like so many across the country, I struggled to comprehend the news of his death.
He was assassinated for speaking the truth, for sharing his heartfelt beliefs, for daring to open conversations across the political spectrum. And his absence leaves a gaping hole in our nation’s soul.
Snip.
When I think back on Charlie’s life and all that he accomplished by the age of 31, I’m struck by how profoundly he influenced our nation. He had a gift, and few have done more for America’s youth.
Yes, he encouraged young Americans to go to the polls. He engaged in open discussion. He wanted to know young people’s hearts.
But most importantly, he was good for our country because he wanted to revive the souls of Americans.
Charlie wanted people to know the Lord, and he wanted to be remembered most for his courage in faith. He was one of the most important Christian evangelists and apologists of modern times.
Charlie sought out those who disagreed with him, and he was happy to listen to their arguments—respectfully and civilly—and to engage them on substance.
And he made an unbelievable difference in the lives of young people, inspiring millions across America and across the world.
The Indiana Supreme Court on Thursday permanently banned Judge Matthew J. Elkin of Howard County from judicial service following findings of judicial misconduct.
Chief Justice Loretta Rush wrote the rare decision to oust a county judge, and the other four justices on the Indiana Supreme Court agreed.
Elkin, a Republican who served in Howard Superior Court in Kokomo, was found to have engaged in misconduct by failing to disqualify himself from cases involving former clients, making inappropriate comments to court participants, and favoring certain litigants over others.
Yeah, the failure to disqualify is a huge no-no. Never let it be said that I don’t report actual Republican corruption when it happens.
Aw, how does it feel? “Rolling Stone Hit With Layoffs Amid Ongoing Staff Reductions at Penske.”
According to [Oliver] Darcy, among the affected Rolling Stone staffers are executive digital director Lisa Tozzi, chief television critic Alan Sepinwall and copy chief Steven Pearl. As of this writing, none of them have commented publicly.
Following months of speculation about her future plans, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo announced this week she will not seek a third term as chief executive of Texas’ largest county.
“I am still in office until December 2026, and I’ve got the work cut out for me and that’s not even, knock on wood, counting any emergencies that might arise,” Hidalgo said during an interview with ABC 13 in Houston. “After that, I don’t know. I don’t know what I will do. I know that I’m not running for office this cycle. I can say that with confidence, and I know that I will stay in public service.”
First elected in 2018 in the down-ballot “Beto wave” of victories for Democrats, Hidalgo won with less than 50 percent of the vote against incumbent Republican Judge Ed Emmett. Prior to taking the reins as chief executive of Harris County, the 27-year-old had worked as a medical interpreter at the Texas Medical Center in Houston and volunteered for the Texas Civil Rights Project. A graduate of Stanford University, Hidalgo previously worked for international media group Internews in Indonesia.
Hidalgo’s surprise victory handed Democrats control of the commissioners court, with whom she initially worked well to usher in a slew of reforms to the county’s management of flood mitigation, infrastructure, and criminal justice systems; an administrative restructuring of county government; and the launch of new social programs. Lauded as a rising political star, the young judge drew the attention of national media for her promotion of progressive policies in a reliably Republican state.
Despite multiple controversies during her first term — including her efforts to release violent criminal suspects from the county’s jail during the COVID-19 pandemic and indictment of several staffers over an alleged vaccine outreach bid-rigging scheme — Hidalgo narrowly won a second term in 2022, but has since increasingly clashed with fellow Democratic commissioners and often exhibited erratic behavior.
During a swearing-in ceremony after the 2022 election, Hidalgo accused fellow Democratic commissioners of trying to cut her out of the program. Later that year she alleged that she had been “groped” in the commissioners court meeting room. Months later, Hidalgo took a lengthy leave of absence while she sought in-patient treatment for depression.
Since returning to her office Hidalgo has increasingly clashed publicly with Commissioners Adrian Garcia (D-Pct. 2) and Lesley Briones (D-Pct. 4), while largely maintaining her alliance with Commissioner Rodney Ellis (D-Pct. 1).
The fractures on the commissioners’ court erupted earlier this year when Garcia and Briones joined the lone Republican Commissioner Tom Ramsey (R-Pct. 3) in support of raises for law enforcement but refused to support Hidalgo’s proposal for a tax increase to continue a pilot daycare program launched with federal COVID-19 relief funds in 2022.
Good news for the exit of an unqualified leftist who did much harm while she was there.
Jimmy Kimmel yanked off the air indefinitely for Charlie Kirk comments, mainly implying the shooter was MAGA rather than a lefty and for using Kirk’s death as an excuse to segway into still more Trump bashing. Evidently affiliate stations and advertisers stated they would no longer air or advertise on the show after that. I think media companies are finally figuring out just how tired ordinary Americans are of the far left, social justice hatefest on late night TV.
Analysis: True. “The Left is angrier about Kimmel getting fired for lying about an assassination than the assassination itself.”
A woman accused of running an illegal ballot harvesting scheme during the 2022 General Election was arrested in Starr County, Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Wednesday.
A grand jury indicted Modesta Vela of Roma after a yearlong investigation into ballot harvesting operations targeting numerous senior citizens in South Texas. She was arrested on September 4, marking her fourth arrest since 2010.
“Due to the findings of this investigation, a grand jury issued a true bill indictment against Vela for intentionally and knowingly influencing a Texan’s vote in the presence of the ballot during the voting process, which is an offense punishable as a state jail felony,” according to Paxton’s office.
Ballot harvesting—sometimes referred to as “ballot trafficking”—typically involves a third party illegally collecting and handling voters’ ballots in order to influence elections.
In South Texas, these third-party ballot harvesters are known as politiqueras.
Investigators with the Office of the Attorney General said Vela’s activities focused on Texans over the age of 65, a group often targeted in such cases due to their automatic eligibility for mail-in voting.
Paxton reiterated his longstanding position that election fraud is an ongoing threat in Texas.
“Though liberals and the left-wing media like to pretend otherwise, we know that election fraud is real and a serious threat,” said Paxton. “Criminals trying to steal our elections and rig the democratic process will be found, arrested, and prosecuted. Modesta Vela was trying to take advantage of voters and broke the law by illegally ballot harvesting and targeting a Texan seeking to engage in our elections. Now, it’s time for Vela to answer for her actions in court.”
The investigation followed a complaint filed in late 2022 by Project Red Texas, alleging Vela was involved in ballot harvesting operations in Starr County.
A popular Ohio barbecue restaurant is facing major backlash after one of its co-owners called conservative activist Charlie Kirk a “piece of s—” in a social media post after his assassination.
Shortly after Kirk, 31, was shot Wednesday while speaking at a campus event in Utah, Aaron Sharpe, co-owner of Lucius Q in Cincinnati, commented on a Facebook post from someone offering prayers for the husband and father of two.
“Good riddance,” Sharpe wrote in a post that is no longer publicly visible but has been circulated widely online in screenshots. “What a piece of s—,” he added.
On Wednesday evening, Sharpe doubled down on Facebook, posting, “Don’t you dare come at me with your hypocrisy. … If you think that threats of social media attacks on me or my business will in any way keep me silent about what I believe, you are sorely mistaken….”
On Thursday, several of Lucius Q’s business partners announced they had cut ties with the restaurant. Lucius Q later announced it had parted ways with Sharpe.
Remember how everyone swore that the idea Democrats were going to use the Pacific Palisades fire as an excuse to build public housing was just a conspiracy theory? Guess what?
