Posts Tagged ‘Dallas’

“Why Is Everyone Investing in Texas?”

Saturday, October 17th, 2026

I’ve been covering some of these issues since all the way back when I was doing the Texas vs. California updates, but this video offers a nice summary.

  • “Texas has been one of the biggest winners of the blue state exodus, and now it’s pushing to become a real financial powerhouse.”
  • “If Texas were its own country, its economy would be the eighth largest in the world. Bigger than Russia, bigger than Canada, bigger than Italy. That’s the state’s preliminary 2025 GDP, $2.9 trillion, measured against every other nation on Earth.”
  • “Goldman Sachs is building an 800,000 square foot campus in Dallas. When it opens, more than 5,000 people will work there. It’ll be the firm’s second largest office in the United States. Goldman isn’t moving its headquarters, but between 2015 and 2024, 314 companies did. Nearly half of them, 154, went to Dallas Fort Worth. By 2026, Texas had 57 Fortune 500 headquarters, more than any other state, with about $2.8 trillion in combined annual revenue.”
  • “The state that outsiders picture as a ranch currently produces the world’s richest person and the world’s richest woman at the same time. Elon Musk, based in Austin, is worth $839 billion. Alice Walton, based in Fort Worth, is worth $134 billion and has held the top spot amongst women for three straight years.”
  • “Forbes counted 43 Texans on its 2025 list of America’s 400 richest people worth more than $1 trillion combined, the first time the group has cleared the mark.”
  • “Dallas Fort Worth does finance and corporate services. Houston does energy, chemicals, and ports. Austin does technology and semiconductors. San Antonio does military, healthcare, and manufacturing.”
  • “Those four metros sit inside a triangle bounded by Interstate 35, Interstate 45, and Interstate 10. Together, they employ more than 10 million people, more than the entire workforce of Sweden, and run about 2 trillion a year in a combined economic output. Over the last decade, 85% of all Texas population growth happened inside that triangle, which is why the state can carry finance, energy, technology, and manufacturing investment all at the same time.”
  • “Oil still anchors the biggest of those four economies. In 2025, Texas pumped 5.75 million barrels of crude oil a day, 42% of all US production. If Texas were a country, it would rank fourth in the world in oil output behind only the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.”
  • “Texas is the only state that spent nine years as its own sovereign nation, the Republic of Texas. from 1836 to 1845, before voting to join the union.”
  • “That history still shows up in how the state regulates business today. No state income tax, a right to work law, and a legal and regulatory environment built to keep the cost of doing business low.”
  • “Chief Executive Magazine has ranked Texas the best state in the country for business every year since the survey started in 2001.”
  • Fort Worth rent is less than half that of Manhattan.
  • “Since February 2020, finance, insurance, and real estate employment in Dallas grew 23.2% versus 6% in New York City. Dallas now has about 317,000 people working across those sectors, 10.1% of local employment, just above New York City’s 9.9%.”
  • “New York Stock Exchange Texas says Texas headquartered companies listed on the exchange represent more than 5 trillion in market value, up 1.5 trillion in a year.”
  • “Texas is also becoming a place where capital intensive companies build physical things at a scale most states can’t host. Samsung is spending more than 37 billion on two logic fabs and an R&D fab near Austin, with the first set to begin production this year. Texas Instruments is spending up to $40 billion on four connected fabs in Sherman, part of a $60 billion commitment the company calls the largest in US semiconductor history. Between those two projects alone, more than $77 billion in committed capital is going into two Texas counties.”
  • “Once you can manufacture at that scale, the parts have to come from somewhere. For Texas, the answer is 150 miles south. Port Laredo handled $353 billion in trade in 2025. More than 97% of it tied to Mexico, making it the busiest inland port in the Western Hemisphere. Mexico passed China in 2023 to become America’s largest trading partner.”
  • “Companies assemble AI hardware in Mexico using Nvidia chips, then just ship it north through Texas.”
  • “All of that growth is now straining the infrastructure underneath it. Dallas Fort Worth became the third largest collocation data center market in the country in the first quarter of 2026, with capacity up 43.7% in a single year, and 88% of what’s under construction has already been pre-leased.”
  • “ERCOT was tracking roughly 410 gawatt of proposed large loads seeking grid connection by 2030. Enough that regulators changed how they study new loads.” Hence Texas Governor Greg Abbott telling data center companies they had to pay for their own data centers.
  • “Housing shows the same pressure. DFW home prices were up about 33% above 2020 levels by 2025. In Austin, it was about 23%.” Maybe, but Austin experienced a huge housing price spike in 2021-2023 before coming down again.
  • “In 2024, the state still authorized 225,000 new housing units, more than California and New York combined. In Dallas and Houston were the two busiest metro areas in the country for new home construction.”
  • “This shows that capital trusts Texas can build.”
  • “From the 1990s through the 2010s, Texas competed on cost. Cheap land, cheap labor, no income tax.”
  • “From 2015 to 2020, corporate migration accelerated on that same cost advantage.”
  • “From 2020 to 2024, COVID, remote workers, and a wave of relocations turned migration into a flood. Texas added residents faster than any other state.”
  • “From 2024 to 2026, finance, AI, infrastructure, semiconductors, manufacturing, and logistics arrived on top of that migration at a scale the cost argument alone would have never attracted. Texas isn’t competing on cost anymore. It’s competing on scale, on the ecosystem that scale builds around itself.”
  • “Tesla announced Gigafactory Texas in 2020 with more than one billion of expected investment, moved its headquarters to Austin in 2021, and had about $2.7 billion in Travis County by 2022.”
  • “Then Musk’s other company did something bigger. SpaceX went public in June 26 at $135 a share, raising about $75 billion, the largest IPO in history.” Actually, $86 billion. “And Musk crossed a trillion dollars in net worth within minutes of the open. More than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees became millionaires the same day the company listed and roughly 400 of them cleared 100 million or more.”
  • “Dallas has the labor pool, the exchanges, and nearly half of the headquarters that moved here. Sherman and Taylor have the fabs. Laredo has the border. The Permian still pumps more oil than any other basin in the country. Every new campus, every new fab, every new resident adds another user to the infrastructure underneath it.”
  • “That’s what Goldman is buying here. A seat in the place where American capital is choosing to live for the next 20 years.”
  • Somehow he failed to mention that Republicans have held every statewide office in Texas for closing in on 30 years…

    LinkSwarm For October 2, 2026

    Friday, October 2nd, 2026

    A reminder not to get black-pilled, another Supreme Court win for deporting illegal alien felons, San Francisco’s government offers pedos a veritable buffet, Rockefeller money is going to the ChiComs, and another deeply technical video on semiconductor processes you won’t click on.

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Kurt Schlichter reminds you not to get blackpilled.

    Yes, I want to believe, but there’s evidence supporting hope. There’s evidence supporting the idea that the polls are so substantially flawed that they do not accurately reflect what’s going to happen. Again, the caveat – this could be delusion. We could be seeing what we want to see. But then, what we’re seeing is there. There is evidence supporting what we want to happen, evidence worth considering.

    We’re seeing how polls have been missing big lately. Look at Abdul El-Sayed. He was supposed to win that Michigan primary in a walk. We’re talking five, 10, 15 points, according to the primary polls. And yet he barely squeaked past that squeaky woman he was competing with. We’ve seen lots of other polls that assured us of a Democrat victory. Just ask President Harris about that.

    If you’ve been around a while, you know that the polls always favor the Democrats. You almost never see a Democrat surprise us by exceeding his polling against a Republican. You just don’t. So, there’s that. And of course, there’s an interest in driving down Republican enthusiasm by telling people they can’t win.

    Then there’s the gut vibe. Don’t completely disregard that. In Texas, you must believe the Texans are going to support a blasphemous, anti-meat, anti-gun, anti-white, woke weirdo with a thing for trans kids. Does that sound like Texas to you? It sure doesn’t sound like Texas to me, and I’m in Texas. I’ve talked to a lot of Texan conservatives. Not one thinks this guy is going to win. Now, they agree it could theoretically happen, but they don’t think it’s going to. Ken Paxton has won three times in statewide races, and he’s done a lot of great conservative things. Are Texans really going to choose a bizarre homunculus to spend six years in Washington, D.C., voting like Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) in their name? It just doesn’t fit. It’s weird. That’s not saying it couldn’t happen – there are lots of communists here along with other weirdos, losers, and mutations who would be thrilled to have this geebo as a Lone Star senator. But it just doesn’t feel like something that’s going to happen.

    Moreover, we’ve been told a lot of conservatives are going to sit this out. The bots on X are certainly pushing that coordinated message, as the semi-coherent comments on my Monday column about quitters demonstrate. Yes, there are probably some Republicans who are going to sit out this midterm, but I haven’t met any of them personally. Maybe you have. I just don’t think there are a lot of them, especially in light of how appalling the Democrats are. It doesn’t make sense, at least to people who aren’t idiots who blame everything on Epstein conspiracies and the Jews and blah blah blah, to be mad at Trump and the Republicans for not being conservative enough and showing them what-for by allowing the election of communists. As risky as it is, I’m not going all-in on the assumption that people are that stupid.

    Read the whole thing, and encourage all your sane friends to show up at the polls in November.

  • “Fauci diary reveals alarm that U.S. had aerosolized Ebola virus. Umm, isn’t this a violation of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction?

    Dr. Anthony Fauci privately sounded the alarm when he learned the U.S. Army had conducted an experiment a decade ago that aerosolized the lethal Ebola virus, which is not normally transmitted by air, and then shared the results publicly amid an ongoing outbreak in Africa, according to diary entries obtained by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul.

    The then-top scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease was particularly concerned in 2016 that the Army medical research arm’s experiment seemed to show that exposure to aerosolized Ebola caused more damaging effects in subjects that had been vaccinated. This was almost four years before he championed shutting down the U.S. economy and social life over the COVID-19 virus outbreak.

    Fauci wrote he believed such research should be kept secret, preferably classified, so that it didn’t undermine public confidence in vaccination in the African countries suffering an outbreak of the virus.

    “What idiots those guys at USAMRIID [U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases] are,” Fauci wrote in a March 2016 diary entry. “This should have been a classified experiment that never should have been done in the first place.”

    Why yes, “undermining public confidence in vaccination” is a far bigger concern than the fact that the U.S. Army under Obama was committing an actual war crime.

  • “San Francisco’s Frat Houses for Pedophiles. California houses sex offenders right next to schools—on the taxpayers’ dime.”

    It’s Tuesday morning at Little Learners Daycare in downtown San Francisco. Teacher Wendy herds bright-eyed toddlers, amped up after playtime in the courtyard, back inside. They’re laughing and swatting at each other playfully, oblivious to the pack of pedophiles lurking nearby.

    Four hundred feet away, dozens of registered sex offenders live at 111 Taylor Street. Wendy knew that the Tenderloin, where she operates her Mandarin-immersion daycare, was dangerous. It’s a hotbed for illegal drug activity and homelessness. But she didn’t realize that sex offenders live so close to her daycare—or that taxpayers fund their housing.

    Pedophiles, illegal aliens; the only people Democrats don’t like paying for housing for is law-abiding American citizens.

    According to this City Journal investigation, more than 25 percent of sex offenders in San Francisco with addresses in the Megan’s Law database live in taxpayer-subsidized buildings. Many live near a park, school, or daycare, or reside in a neighborhood with a high concentration of children. They do all of this despite statewide efforts to ban concentrating pedophiles so close to children. Instead of listening to California voters, San Francisco has become a taxpayer-funded dumping ground for sex criminals.

    The Taylor Street Center is one of San Francisco’s most heavily populated sex-offender residences. Located in the Tenderloin, Taylor Street houses at least 31 registered sex offenders. The taxpayer-funded California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the federal Bureau of Prisons contract the private GEO Group to run the facility.

    The reentry complex can house 240 people. It hosts specialized programs for residents like “cultural diversity education,” “gender-responsive groups,” and a “weekly meditation group.” The facility sits just 400 feet from a daycare center, 1,000 feet from a fourth-to-eighth-grade school, and five blocks away from a preschool.

    Any sex offender housed in the Tenderloin is bound to encounter children. Along with having a high concentration of immigrant and low-income households, the neighborhood also has the highest concentration of kids in the entire city.

    I’m sure the sex offenders call that “the buffet.”

  • “Trump Cancels $810M for Illegal Immigrants, Race-Based Programs.”

    President Trump invoked a rare and legally contested power Friday to cancel $810 million in congressionally approved spending, targeting programs for illegal immigrants and a slate of federal initiatives explicitly organized around race and DEI.

    The request hits 11 funding pools at seven departments and agencies. It also landed with just five days left in the fiscal year. That’s the point of the disputed “pocket rescission” maneuver: the money runs out before Congress gets its normal 45 days to consider the cuts.

    The biggest piece is $567 million at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for services to refugees, asylees, unaccompanied minors, and other non-citizens.

    The White House called them “pro-illegal immigration programs” and said the money is no longer needed because illegal border crossings have fallen sharply.

    But immigration spending was only part of the package.

    Several of the rescissions hit programs explicitly organized around race or ethnicity.

    The administration wants to rescind $10 million from the Commerce Department’s Minority Business Development Agency, which helps minority-owned businesses. The White House pointed to a 2024 federal court ruling that found the agency’s presumption of social disadvantage based on race or ethnicity unconstitutional.

    Another $5 million would come from HHS’s Office of Minority Health.

    The White House highlighted grants from that office addressing racial trauma among black youth, health disparities among black and Latino youth, a George Washington University fellowship promoting health equity and DEI, and a $1.5 million project addressing the effects of redlining and structural racism.

    HUD housing counseling takes a much larger hit, with $56 million targeted.

    The administration said the program had funded groups including UnidosUS, the National Urban League, and Housing Action Illinois, criticizing their work on structural racism, racial justice, and other DEI priorities.

    Then there is the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, slated to lose $15 million.

    The office’s mission included “preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions” and restoring racial stability. The Trump administration shut it down earlier this year and now accuses the office of promoting critical race theory and gender ideology rather than carrying out that mission.

    The package goes beyond those programs.

    The administration identified $28 million in HHS research funding it wants canceled, pointing to grants involving transgender health care, racial disparities, and a $50,000 project to develop a research agenda addressing racism in emergency medicine. Another $70 million would be pulled from international education programs, including programs the White House said had funded research involving queer and transgender issues abroad.

    Other cuts include $25 million for migrant student programs, $25 million across two DHS programs providing services or legal assistance to non-citizens, and $9 million for a Treasury program providing debt relief to foreign countries in exchange for conservation commitments.

    Now we need to hand out pink slips to the people who were administering these programs.

  • “Ilsky Oil Refinery in Krasnodar Hit By Drones: Big Damage.”
  • Follow-up: “Satellite Imagery Shows Huge Damage to Azov Mechanical Plant.”
  • “Big Missile/Jet Drone Strike on Azov Mechanical Plant, Rostov: Makes Parts for Missiles.”
  • “L-39 Trainer Destroyed, Three Fast Patrol Boats Hit!” Plus some radar equipment hit.
  • “Over 40 Destroyed Russian Logistics Vehicles On One Stretch of Road in Southern Ukraine.”
  • Russian chemical explosives plant explodes. Possibly just the usual Russian incompetence.
  • Speaking of Russian incompetence: “Tu-95 Bear Crashes in Amur, Russia!” That’s in the Russian far east, so probably not taken out by Ukraine.
  • Turnabout is fair play: Ukraine uses its own turtle tanks to attack Russian positions.
  • Long overdue: “Education Dept. Officially Removes Biden’s Title IX Gender Identity Rules. In other words, the department is sticking to the literal interpretation of Title IX: sex-based discrimination.”

    The Education Department has officially rescinded the Biden Administration’s Title IX interpretation that extended protections to students based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

    In other words, the department is sticking to Title IX’s literal meaning: sex-based discrimination.

    “Today’s rulemaking clears the Biden Administration’s illegal rewrite of Title IX from the Code of Federal Regulations and restores the commonsense language promulgated in the first Trump Administration, which we have been enforcing since the first days of the Administration,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “Thanks to today’s action, the published Title IX regulations faithfully reflects court orders and Congressional intent—reducing confusion for parents, students, and educational institutions. We will continue to relentlessly champion equal opportunity for all Americans and hold accountable any school or college that violates the rights, privacy, or athletic opportunities of our women and girls.”

    Honestly, nothing changes because the department has been enforcing reality since January 2025: Title IX is based on sex. It’s not based on your sexual orientation or gender identity.

  • It looks like trying to gay the kids has backfired.

    Somehow, the people who tell us that they were “born this way” and that “sexuality is a spectrum” are now returning to normal. It’s almost like the whole “acceptance” movement was just a social contagion that spread because teens like being rebellious!

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Supreme Court Allows Rapid Third-Country Deportations to Continue.”

    The Supreme Court majority (6-3) has granted the DOJ request to put on hold a Boston-based US District Judge ruling that DHS policy to remove illegal aliens to so-called third countries is unlawful. The process of rapid deportation will continue while the matter is called before the Supreme Court for oral arguments in December (ruling in ’27).

    The Usual Suspects opposed deporting the Democrat Party’s precious illegal alien felons.

  • “Jack Smith Collected Thousands of Trump Donors’ Financial Info as Part of Election Probe.”

    Former Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed at least 4,782 political donations to President Donald Trump from Americans across the country between September 2019 and August 2023, Senator Chuck Grassley revealed during a Tuesday hearing featuring the former special counsel.

    The checks — which Smith’s team acquired as part of their election case against Trump, dubbed “Arctic Frost” — contained donors’ personal information, including their home addresses, bank account and routing numbers, and signatures. Some of the subpoenaed donations were for as little as $1. Grassley revealed the evidence while questioning Smith during Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary hearing and followed up with a press release containing further details.

    During former President Joe Biden’s administration, Smith brought two cases against Trump: The first accused him of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, and the second involved him keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Smith resigned from his position nine days before Trump was sworn in as president again; both cases against Trump have been dismissed.

    As part of the FBI’s investigation into the 2020 election, agents accessed toll records, which show who a given individual spoke with on the phone but not the contents of their calls, for 16 members of Congress. He also subpoenaed records from 87 Trump White House phones, which captured records from calls between government sources and dozen of news outlets.

    The political donations Grassley described were obtained as part of Smith’s investigation, which focused on whether Trump defrauded donors by raising money under the false pretext that the resulting donations would help Trump’s team overturn the results of the 2020 election.

    All the easier to compile an enemies list should Democrats retake power…

  • “Rockefeller Brothers Fund Sent Nearly $32 Million to China-Based Nonprofits, Watchdog Finds. ‘Dangerous partnership with Communist China.'”

    The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a $1.4 billion U.S.-based charity with funding from the Rockefeller family and other donors, has forged a “dangerous partnership with Communist China” and is pouring millions of dollars into China-based nonprofits that are advancing the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy goals.

    That’s one of the findings in a new report, “The Rockefeller Network: How the Rockefeller Family Turned Their Oil Fortune into Extreme Climate Activism,” out today from Americans for Public Trust, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative watchdog organization. The report, an advance copy of which was obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon, outlines how the billion-dollar fortune of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller Sr., who died in 1937, is being used “to quietly bankroll numerous radical and leftist projects.”

    Snip.

    “An alarming amount—well into the millions—has found its way directly into the coffers of entities that are either official vestiges of the Chinese government, or directly and irrefutably administered by the CCP and its representatives,” the report says. “And many of these entities, while operating under the guise of ‘green’ and environmental research, are, instead, using these funds to help buttress China’s foreign influence programs around the globe, especially the CCP’s infamous ‘Belt and Road Initiative.'”

    Among the grants singled out in the report as most problematic:

    — $400,000 between 2020 and 2024 to the Foreign Environment Cooperation Center, “a division of the Chinese government’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment.”

    — Nearly $1.5 million to the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, whose “direct ties to the Chinese government are undeniable.”

    — Nearly $200,000 to Tsinghua University, which announced in 2024 that the school’s office of the president had merged with the Chinese Communist Party to “form a new Party Committee Office that would run the school.”

    Groups that fund the ChiComs should have their non-profit status revoked and their assets seized.

  • “New York Democrat says the quiet part out loud: “My biggest goal … is I want to legalize 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 million people in our country.”

    Democrats are always saying the quiet part out loud nowadays.

    They aren’t even trying to hide their radical plans to totally replace America’s voters, workers, and people with a cheap labor underclass that disproportionately votes Democrat.

    [ U.S. Representative] Democrat Tom Suozzi says his biggest goal in politics is mass amnesty for criminal illegals:

    “My biggest goal of what I want to accomplish in politics right now is I want to legalize 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 million people in our country.”

    Amnesty was always the end goal for the illegal alien importation.

  • Obvious: “UK Whistleblower: 99 percent of Asylum Claims Are Fake.”

    Only one in 100 asylum claims are genuine, according to a whistleblower who has revealed widespread fraud and dysfunction in the system.

    The Home Office official, who has worked for years as a decision-maker on asylum and has assessed thousands of claims, said asylum seekers from certain countries use the “same script” in what he and colleagues describe as “package claims”.

    He said he had encountered a large number of Iraqi Kurds claiming asylum who said they had been in a relationship with the daughter of the prime minister of the Kurdistan region. The official said it had become a “running joke” among colleagues that the number of Iraqi Kurds who said they were involved with the daughter was in the “hundreds”.

    He also said that “hundreds” of claims from Pakistanis were based on the assertion that they were in fear of their lives in their home country because of their gay relationship with the same man who had provided letters supporting their claims.

    The source also disclosed suspicions about large numbers of Bangladeshi claimants purporting to be dissidents of the former governing party, which is now banned, even though they were unable to provide basic information about the group.

  • “The Netherlands Also Has Islamic Grooming Gangs“; Dutch MP Warns After 18-Year-Old Girl Raped By 10 Men.”

    An 18-year-old woman has been gang raped and beaten by up to ten different men, many of them with a Syrian background, in the Dutch city of Dordrecht. Although the rape occurred in May 2025, the suspects are only now being arrested. In response to the rape, political leader Geert Wilders wrote that the Netherlands also has Islamic grooming gangs and called for all the perpetrators to be removed from the country along with their families.

    Six suspects have now been arrested, aged 20 to 23. During the incident, the girl, who lived in a residential group home, was driven to two different parking lots and raped by several men, some of whom filmed the assault and shared it on Snapchat. Police say the woman was humiliated and beaten.

    And somehow the leaders of UK’s Labour Party say “Yes, we need more of that.”

  • “Passengers subdue Arab co-pilot who tried to hijack flight to Israel.”

    A plane leaving Dubai and heading towards Tel Aviv almost saw a tragic end as the co-pilot of the plane turned hijacker mid-flight and attempted to take control and crash the plane….

    The co-pilot, an Omani national, stabbed the pilot multiple times in an attempt to kill him and hijack the flight. The co-pilot had worked for FlyDubai for around a year.

    The injured pilot was able to transmit a radio warning, Israel scrambled fighter jets, and the passengers and crew were able to subdue the attacker in midair.

    The plane made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia to sort the entire mess out.

    Be prepared to fight for your life on a moment’s notice, because you might have to.

  • More long overdue. “Trump expands H-1B visa crackdown, will scrutinize layoffs.”

    The Trump administration on Thursday announced an executive order expanding the ongoing crackdown against H-1B visa abuse.

    The H-1B is a visa program designed to allow companies to bring in high-skilled workers when no qualified Americans are available. But the program has faced considerable scrutiny in recent years, due to widespread fraud. Critics have argued that major employers also use it as a way to undercut American wages.

    Trump’s Thursday order reaffirms the $100,000 application fee he imposed last year, but now mandates inter-agency coordination to consider an employers’s recent or planned layoffs when applying for H-1B visas.

    “Our message to corporate America is simple: We’re not going to let you lay off American workers so you can replace them with cheap foreign labor,” Vice President JD Vance said.

  • “ICE Arrests 121 During Summer Enforcement Initiative Near Dallas. The operation included the arrests of two alleged Tren de Aragua members.”

    U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 121 individuals during a summer enforcement initiative around Lake Lewisville in Dallas.

    The operation, led by ICE’s Dallas field office, began June 27 and concluded over Labor Day weekend. It involved coordination with state and federal agencies, including the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and focused on identifying individuals unlawfully present in the country, assisting with lake-related investigations, and allowing local officers to devote more resources to boating safety enforcement.

    According to ICE’s Friday release, individuals arrested during the initiative had criminal histories involving offenses such as assault, family violence, theft, burglary, sexual assault of a child, driving while intoxicated, and boating while intoxicated.

    Among those arrested were two men ICE identified as members of Tren de Aragua, a transnational criminal organization designated by the U.S. State Department as both a foreign terrorist organization and a specially designated global terrorist group.

    Willian Josue Ordonez Vasquez, 24, a Venezuelan national, and Edwin Josue Cabrera-Zelaya, 22, a Honduran national, were under investigation by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for allegedly operating an illegal livery business on Lake Lewisville.

    I must say that I’ve never run into “illegal livery business” before, but it seems to involve not complying with Texas regulations on powered boat rental.

  • Man bites dog: “Too extreme for Newsom? California sanctuary bill for abortion, transgender procedures vetoed.”

    California Gov. Gavin Newsom used his veto pen to make out-of-state prosecutions theoretically possible for both “reproductive health care services” and “gender affirming health care services.”

    The term-limited Democrat with presidential ambitions, who recently said he won’t run if fellow Californian and former Democratic nominee Kamala Harris enters the 2028 presidential race, vetoed legislation (AB 2164) to codify an extradition ban for “legally protected health care activity” in California, claiming it infringed executive authority.

    Ignore the blather about Harris, Governor Hairgel is obviously running.

  • AI 1, Harvard 0.

    Researchers proved AI has deleted every reason universities exist.

    Harvard University ran a controlled experiment pitting a custom AI against their own top-tier classrooms.

    And the results are going to collapse the higher education bubble.

    They took 194 undergraduates and split them up.

    One group learned physics in one of Harvard’s best hands-on, active-learning physical classrooms. Group work. Instructor support. The premium university experience.

    The other group went home and learned the exact same material with an AI tutor.

    The AI didn’t just win. It embarrassed the institution.

    Students using the AI learned more than twice as much as the students in the elite Harvard classroom.

    They scored 30% higher on the final assessment.

    And they did it in less time.

    Let that sink in.

    A piece of software sitting on a laptop outperformed a world-class faculty in one of the most elite learning environments on Earth.

    Universities have always justified their exorbitant tuition with two things: access to elite knowledge and the physical classroom experience.

    This study just proved both of those moats are gone.

    When software can teach you complex physics twice as well as a $60,000-a-year institution, the math of higher education breaks permanently.

    Yeah, but can AI forge friendships with the spawn of rich people, the primary purpose of so many attending the Ivy League? (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • “Taxpayer Philanthropy: Detroit pastor paid $540K for part-time work.”

    A Detroit pastor who last year admonished a parishioner for her inadequate church donation of $1,235 was paid a salary of $538,955 that year by a taxpayer-funded nonprofit he leads that is separate from the church, according to federal records.

    That salary for Marvin Winans Sr. — the pastor of Perfecting Church and a Grammy-winning gospel singer — accounted for about 61% of what the nonprofit spent toward its stated mission of “community development,” its recent report to the Internal Revenue Service shows.

    His role as president for the nonprofit — Perfecting Community Development Corporation — is a half-time job, the report says, which means he was paid about $518 per hour.

    Nice work if you can get it.

    Winans’ salary has increased substantially in recent years and coincided with a $500,000 government grant the state awarded the nonprofit. Grant application guidance indicates the award was funded with federal pandemic relief money.

    Of course it was.

    Seems like Pastor Winans was far more concerned with fat stacks than flocks…

  • Another terror plot thwarted. “Suspect Arrested for Alleged Thwarted Capitol Attack Now in Federal Custody. Benny Caldera, Jr. was released from the Bexar County Jail into federal custody.”

    A man was arrested on suspicion of planning an attack on the Texas State Capitol in Austin early in the morning of Wednesday, September 30.

    The attack was allegedly set to occur on October 1.

    Forty-year-old Benny Caldera, Jr., of Converse, was arrested by a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) SWAT team, according to reporting by NBC DFW.

    He was booked into the Bexar County Jail and charged with making a terroristic threat against a public servant, a third degree felony, and was held on a $75,000 bond. It was not immediately clear if Caldera has a lawyer or how he plans to plead in response to the charge.

    According to an arrest warrant affidavit, DPS was told by a friend of Caldera’s that he “had made verbal threats to assault the Texas State Capitol Building.” He is alleged to have said “I am going to the Capitol and I am going to shoot it up.”

    Arrest documents also allege that Caldera’s motive was anger at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel political lobbying group, of which he reportedly said “these people have to be exterminated.”

    Of course. Always The Joooooos!

    Possibly just a dumbass shooting off his mouth. But lots of similar dumbasses have racked up kill counts in recent decades.

  • Make New Mexico Texas again? “Texas House Weighs Annexation of New Mexican Counties. The unlikely proposal could benefit the Permian Basin, one state representative claimed.” The chances of New Mexico agreeing without receiving something ridiculous in return (like El Paso) are virtually zero.
  • “‘Y’all Street’ Welcomes Financial Giant Morgan Stanley to Dallas. The city of Dallas and the state of Texas both offered the company incentives for the new hub.”

    Gov. Greg Abbott announced the company’s decision, saying it is a $684 million capital investment that could create 3,800 jobs. The governor also announced that a Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) grant totaling $43,849,500, paired with a Veteran Created Job Bonus of $40,000, was offered to the company.

    [Insert usual disapproval of TEF subsidies here.]

  • “Elon Musk Says The Boring Company Is Working on San Antonio-Austin Hyperloop.” “Working on” is a slippery concept, and it could just mean some preliminary feasibility studies. “Experts say Hyperloop projects face significant engineering and construction challenges.” You don’t say. Though I bet there’s a better chance of it being built than another proposed Austin to San Antonio high speed rail boondoggle.
  • “Paramount Warner Bros. Merger GREENLIT! Mark Ruffalo Most Affected!”
  • Tik Tok makes you stupid.
  • ASML wants larger EUV masks to support their High Numerical Aperture EUV stepper. “TSMC and ASML recently announced that the Taiwanese fab will adopt High-NA EUV for high volume manufacturer in 2030. In order to make this economical, the two giants will push the industry to adopt larger 6 in x 12in rectangular photo masks.” This is going to be a challenge for the entire industry ecosystem.
  • You know who else liked horses?
  • Retro-future noir. With aliens. Directed by Brad Bird. Mood: Cautious optimism.
  • BeardMeatsFood demolishes a 7 Deadly Sins challenge…and then promptly orders two more burgers and dessert. (OK, technically four more burgers, but it looks like he gave two to the cameraman.)
  • I just sent out my latest Lame Excuse Books catalog of SF/F/H books. Drop me a line if you’d like to receive a copy.
  • “Judge Rules That Trump Must Allow White House Access To Assassins.”
  • “Feminist Mad That The Men She Hates Won’t Date Her.” “I don’t get it. I’m aggressive, shrill, angry, and I talk online all the time about how much I hate men. Why won’t any of them ask me out?”
  • I would buy this so hard: “Mattel Confirms Hanukkah Barbie Comes Complete With Space Laser.”
  • A happy reunion:

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





    LinkSwarm For September 25, 2026

    Friday, September 25th, 2026

    The Supreme Court green-lights verifying American citizenship for voting, fraud, fraud, and more fraud, Trump gets Greenland without having to buy it, Cruz looks at EPIC City terrorism ties, the Clancy holdout juror speaks, some horrifying child abuse cases, and completely different horrifying murder house, and a surprising amount of Norm Macdonald.

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • “Supreme Court Clears Trump Admin To Use Voter Citizenship Verification.”

    The Supreme Court on Sept. 25 said the Trump administration can use an updated immigration database to verify the citizenship of voters.

    A majority of justices agreed to stay pending the outcome of an appeal of a June order from a federal judge that barred the use of a revamped database called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system.

    U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan had found that federal officials were violating the privacy rights of American citizens by disclosing the citizenship status and Social Security numbers, among other data, in the restructured database. She vacated the 2025 update, which connected Social Security information to the system.

    A federal appeals court later upheld the decision.

    Trump administration officials then asked the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing in a Sept. 8 brief that the order “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections by vacating the federal government’s authority to internally use Social Security data when fulfilling its duty to respond to requests by states to verify the citizenship of individuals for voting and other purposes.”

    Six justices sided with the administration. In a per curiam opinion, they said that claims from the organizations that sued over the updated database “likely lack merit,” including the allegation that federal officials are violating federal laws, because Congress authorized the Department of Homeland Security to request and receive citizenship information and immigration status from other agencies, including the Social Security Administration, in a 1996 statute called the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.

    The majority also said that keeping in place the prohibition “inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies.”

    States regularly use the system. Texas Secretary of State Robert Howden recently said the state in the fall of 2025 ran the names of its 18 million registered voters through the database and identified 2,724 people who may be noncitizens.

    Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissent that was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

  • “USDA Targets 170 NYC Retailers in SNAP Fraud Sweep. ‘SNAP benefits should go to Americans, not fraudsters or illegal immigrants,’ White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud Executive Director Scott Brady said.”

    The Trump administration has stopped more than $5.8 billion in SNAP fraud since taking office, and its latest sweep just hit New York City, where hundreds of undercover investigations led to enforcement action against 170 retailers across all five boroughs.

    The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced “Operation SNAP Back” on Friday as part of a broader push against retailer fraud in the nearly $100 billion Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

    “This is just the latest action in the Trump Administration’s fight against fraud. The message is clear, if you accept any portion of an annual $100 billion taxpayer program, you must follow the rules or face the consequences,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said. “We owe it to every American taxpayer to safeguard their hard-earned dollars, and these latest enforcement actions are just a small part of the Food and Nutrition Administration’s efforts to remove criminals and bad actors from food stamps.”

    The cases involve SNAP trafficking, where benefits are exchanged for cash, along with retailers accused of allowing benefits to be used for alcohol and other ineligible non-food items. USDA says penalties can range from temporary suspension to permanent disqualification and monetary fines. Several cases were also referred to the USDA Office of Inspector General for possible criminal investigation and prosecution.

    Investigators used undercover purchases at stores suspected of violating SNAP rules. Some retailers were caught exchanging benefits for cash, while others allegedly processed transactions for prohibited products.

    “SNAP benefits should go to Americans, not fraudsters or illegal immigrants,” White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud Executive Director Scott Brady said. “And thanks to Secretary Rollins, such waste and abuse will stop.”

  • Funny how this keeps happening: “Reporter finds no kids at Somali-run daycares in Seattle.”

    Here’s your reminder that the fraud is still continuing – boldly, even! – after months of nonstop reporting about it.

    Katie Daviscourt of the Post Millennial did some looking into Somali-run daycares in the Seattle area, many of which receive tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars monthly, and you’ll never guess what she found.

    Most showed no signs of kids.

    Many neighbors say they’ve never seen anything that looks like a daycare in the area!

    These families get together, watch each other’s kids sometimes, incorporate as a “daycare,” and collect tens of thousands a month.

    Here’s the PM:

    In total, Daviscourt reported that in just two neighborhoods there were over $5 million in potential abuses of taxpayer funds, and they had gone to over 20 locations reporting to be daycare locations. Under Seattle’s Child Care Assistance Program, daycares can request government funding in order to back their businesses when they are caring for low-to-middle-income families.

  • “Trump Administration Removes 760,000 ACA Enrollees, Citing Fraud and Improper Enrollment.”

    Vice President JD Vance and the White House’s anti-fraud task force canceled Affordable Care Act policies covering more than 760,000 people, the administration announced Tuesday, citing suspected improper and fraudulent enrollments.

    The task force, along with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, estimates the move will save taxpayers $2.2 billion.

    Following the cancellation of 315,000 enrollments, the vice president said officials are going to conduct “additional verification” on about 419,000 more enrollees, whom they suspect may be improperly enrolled or ineligible for the program. Similarly, the Trump administration is banning some insurance brokers who are thought to be complicit in the fraudulent enrollment.

    “We expect that most of these people are fraudulently enrolled,” Vance said. “We’re going to make sure that they’re, first of all, legal residents of the United States of America, and second of all, we’re going to make sure that they actually meet the income threshold requirements in order to receive these Obamacare benefits.”

    Snip.

    “This is what the fraud task force is all about,” the vice president said, alongside CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz and other senior administration officials at Tuesday’s press conference. “Saving the American taxpayers money, and on the other hand, ensuring that these programs that are very important” are not victim to waste and fraud.

    Oz noted that CMS has issued termination notices to hundreds of brokers, including 469 in late August, and has placed a moratorium on new agents and brokers while officials investigate the eligibility of the additional 419,000 enrollees.

    “There will be no new brokers for Obamacare in this country for the next six months, and we do not feel at all conflicted about that decision, because most of the fraud, a disproportionate amount of the fraud, is taking place from these individuals,” Oz said.

    The ACA — colloquially known as Obamacare — was passed in 2010 under former President Barack Obama.

    And its baleful effects on health care and the federal budget live on…

  • “California’s Shadow Welfare System for Illegal Immigrants.”

    California runs the nation’s largest welfare system, devoting more than $180 billion annually to food, health care, and other programs for the poor and downtrodden. To sustain the arrangement, the state imposes the nation’s highest tax rates.

    In theory, these programs are supposed to help struggling Californians. In reality, many serve large numbers of illegal immigrants. Today, California oversees a shadow welfare system that allows noncitizens to receive health care, rental assistance, college grants, tax credits, low-cost car insurance, and even smartphones on the taxpayers’ dime.

    We visited four public-services offices in Southern California, each of which admitted that illegal aliens can enroll in public-welfare programs or receive benefits on their children’s behalf. In total, California taxpayers spent at least $11 billion subsidizing illegal immigrants in the last fiscal year. The state’s shadow welfare system, it seems, shows no signs of slowing down.

    Local officials were remarkably transparent. In Glendale, we spoke to a welfare officer about California’s Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants (CAPI), a state-funded alternative to Supplemental Security Income that provides monthly cash assistance to low-income noncitizens who are elderly or disabled.

    “If [you are] a citizen, you cannot get CAPI,” he said. “I don’t care about legal or not. Not being [a] citizen [is the key].”

    In Los Angeles, we heard more of the same. We asked another welfare officer about the benefits available to illegal immigrants and their children. While some state programs are closed to illegals, we learned, they are open to those aliens’ U.S.-born children.

    “If you were born here and the child was born here, you get money for two,” the officer said of CalWORKs, the state’s version of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. “Because she is not and the child is, she only gets money for the child, and not for her.”

    These benefits add up. In California, illegal immigrants can qualify for CAPI, public health insurance, and various tax credits. Their children qualify for others, including CalWORKs and, as in other states, Section 8 rental subsidies. All told, a family of five in California with two illegal-alien parents, two U.S.-born children, and one illegal-alien grandparent can receive public services worth more than $100,000 per year.

    State leaders are proud of it. In a recent podcast episode, Governor Gavin Newsom bragged about his “controversial” decision to extend Medi-Cal coverage to illegal immigrants. His wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, encouraged people to sign up for the California Earned Income Tax Credit, a program whose promotional materials assure applicants that “no Social Security number” is “no problem.”

    Snip.

    Federal law generally prohibits states from using federal dollars to serve illegal aliens. To dodge those restrictions, California created parallel state- and locally funded programs that allowed the state to extend benefits to illegal immigrants. Perhaps as a result, more than one in four California residents today is foreign-born.

    Medicaid is a good example. Federal law prohibits states from using federal dollars to provide wraparound coverage to illegal immigrants. So, California used a state-funding “bucket” within its Medi-Cal program to extend “full-scope” coverage to illegal aliens. The expansions enrolled some 1.7 million people, costing the state an estimated $10 billion annually—more than twice what the state legislative analyst originally projected.

    California also uses a distinct legal category that enables certain migrants to qualify for state programs. The state deems certain aliens to be “permanently residing under color of law”—living in California with the “knowledge and permission” of immigration enforcement—and allows them to use this designation to enroll in Medi-Cal, CAPI, and other government programs. In practice, because aged or disabled individuals are typically not deported, this means elderly foreign retirees can arrive in California and receive extensive benefits.

    Another way that California shuffles cash to illegal immigrants is through those aliens’ children. CalWORKs allows illegal-immigrant parents to receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born kids. BenefitsCal, the state’s welfare clearinghouse, even tells applicants that the program will accept a “statement” that the applicant “intend[s] to file or [is] taking steps to become federally eligible” to qualify for the program.

    This model—permissive rules and large loopholes—costs the state billions per year. As benefits and eligibility continue to expand, that figure will only increase in the years ahead.

    California shows no sign of paring back this largesse. In 2022, Newsom signed a bill into law that extended taxpayer-funded food benefits to illegal low-income residents. Beginning next October, qualified Californians 55 and older will become eligible for that program, regardless of immigration status. California’s Legislative Analyst estimates that it could cost up to an additional $400 million a year.

    Is there any doubt that California Democrats love illegal aliens far more than citizens? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • “The Smell of Corruption at Karen Bass’ L.A. Homeless Authority.

    California Democrats pulled up the ladder to prevent the likes of Nick Shirley and local reporters like JJ Smith, Amy Reichert, and many others from finding out where millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars were fraudulently spent.

    In my story, Karen Bass Feels Heat From Feds Over Millions in Stolen and Laundered ‘Homeless’ Funds, we learned that Bill Essayli, who’s supposed to be the U.S. attorney in Central California (LA area) but isn’t because John Thune can’t do his job, this week announced the arrests and indictments of four individuals who had stolen millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars. They were supposed to house and help the homeless, but they helped themselves instead.

    After the indictments were announced and after the U.S. House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Authority operators to please come to Washington to have a little chat — under oath — the homeless authority announced it no longer wanted to receive federal funding and, in fact, plans to get out of the homeless business entirely.

    Bass and the people in Los Angeles who have run this agency into the ground after bilking taxpayers for years are getting out of the homeless business.

    The California Post reports, “LAHSA will not seek to retain responsibility for the annual application for federal homelessness funding, the Homeless Management Information System, the annual point-in-time count or the coordinated-entry system.”

    The same federal funding that came from your pockets and mine. The same federal funding lost after these alleged California homeless advocates threw piles of cash in front of an industrial fan and pointed it in the general direction of people who deserve to be in prison.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • The enemy within: “Poll: 59% of Dems support military coup against Trump, 32% support assassination.”
  • “FP-7 Pelican Ballistic Missile Used to Strike Moscow! Oil Refinery & Warehouse Hit Hard!”
  • Follow-up: “Satellite imagery shows significant damage to Moscow Oil Refinery after Ukraine’s drone strike yesterday. Multiple strikes are recorded and oil tanks confirmed destroyed. Additionally, a Pantsir booster intercepted a car.”
  • “Big Drone Strike on Perm Oil Refinery! 1,500km from Ukraine!” Multiple strikes on a refinery they previously hit in March.
  • “Kuibyshev Oil Refinery Hit Hard by Drones.” Again.
  • “Ukraine Targets Russian Rail Logistics: Two Trains & Fuel Tank Cars Hit By Drones.”
  • More: “Operation Barrel: Multiple Russian Fuel Trains and Tank Cars Destroyed!”
  • “Multiple Aircraft Confirmed Destroyed at Rostov: An-12 & An-26 Transporters and X2 Mi-8 Helicopters.”
  • “Big JDAM Air Strike on Troop Concentration in Bilytske, Donetsk.” Early in the war, Ukraine couldn’t have carried out a JDAM strike, due to fears of Russian aircraft and SAM batteries, indicating serious Ukrainian degradation of those categories of Russian weapons.
  • “Huge Explosion as Ukraine Hits Fuel/Ammo Storage in Zaporizhzhia.”
  • “Ukraine Hits Warehouse Loaded with Ammunition Shells: Big Blast.” “This was in Huliaipole, Zaporizhzhia.”
  • More winning: “Cuba Hit With National Power Grid Collapse As Oil Sources Dry Up.”

    Cuba’s power grid collapsed once again this week, this time at a national level, leaving millions of people across the island without electricity. This is the sixth time since the US cut off fuel sources to the island since January that the national grid has collapsed and it’s the most utility shutdown events in the country’s recent history.

    Even when Cuba’s grid is in operation, only 30% of the population at most receives electricity at any given time. Many regions stay dark 20 to 30 hours at a stretch. Some provinces have reported 60–90 hours without power. Havana has gone from 4 hours a day early in the year to 18 hours after the fuel cutoff.

    “Protocols are now in place to begin ​the gradual restoration of the system,” said Felix Estrada, an ⁠official with Cuba’s National Electrical Union (UNE). Power had returned to a handful of ​scattered neighborhoods in Havana by late evening, primarily around hospitals, but much of ​the city remained completely dark.

    Many exhausted residents ​of the capital Havana were already without power when the national blackout hit.

    “Yesterday I’d gone without ‌power ⁠for 24 hours. They turned the lights on for an hour, and then the grid collapsed,” said Frank Lorenzo, a 23-year-old Havana resident.

  • The U.S. is spending $500 million on laser weapons, and some have already been deployed in theater.

    Iranian citizens have witnessed some dazzling laser shows recently — but they’re not the kind you’d see at a Metallica concert.

    The US military has been deploying lasers in the Strait of Hormuz to knock out regime hardware, taking out “drones and incoming cruise missiles at a much lower cost than using more expensive kinetic weapons like missiles,” the Department of War recently confirmed.

    The US project to harness laser power has been 50 years in the making and outstrips the capabilities of any other military on Earth.

    A linked story suggests it’s the High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Greg Gutfeld is rightly upset that Austin’s commie twerp of a U.S. rep is more upset at an illegal alien getting shot than the murder of Andrew Wimsatt, an American citizen he theoretically represented.

  • How shadowy leftist NGOs pay to put their people into government positions.

    We often hear leftists accuse billionaires of buying government, and most times the accusations are at least partly off-base.

    But not always, and sometimes they are literally doing precisely that: putting privately funded leftists into government offices to run a parallel government that nobody ever voted for. It’s a technocrat’s wet dream.

    One such program, funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, placed and paid the salaries of “government employees” strategically inserted into Attorney General offices in Blue states, funding regulations and lawsuits aimed at targets that Bloomberg’s NYU-based NGO program identified as vulnerable to its pressure. The goal was, of course, fighting climate change.

    BREAKING: Bloomberg-Backed Climate Group Paying Salaries of Democratic State AG Officials Quietly Shuts Down Amid Congressional, Legal Scrutiny.

    “A group housed at the New York University School of Law and backed by billionaire climate activist Michael Bloomberg quietly closed its doors in late August amid congressional scrutiny into its funding and operations. The so-called State Energy and Environmental Impact Center’s signature initiative involved placing paid, climate-focused “fellows” in Democrat-controlled state attorney general offices nationwide as those offices sued the oil industry and other energy providers.”

    Think of it as a cousin to “Zuckerbucks,” where a private entity funds a program that places people in government offices as either quasi- or fully government employees, with a mandate to pursue the NGO’s agenda. The same sort of thing happens with grants to news organizations, where an outside group pays for employees or “coverage” of specific issues, and the stories are still technically the product of the news organization, but the content is directed at producing the results desired by the people who cut the checks.

    Snip.

    Bloomberg, cut a big check to NYU, which in turn established a program to place its people directly into the offices of State Attorneys General, where they proceeded to sue and harass businesses targeted by the organization.

    James Comer opened an investigation into the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, and out of the blue, it closed. He sought documents from it, and “poof!” It’s gone.

    Pretty sus, bro. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • How Angela Merkel destroyed Germany’s political center.

    In my view, Angela Merkel bears a grave responsibility for the collapse of the centre and the growing ability of the political extremes to set the agenda.

    The almost one-third of voters who would support Alternative für Deutschland in a national election are not fascists or Nazis. A substantial proportion are disillusioned CDU voters.

    What has disappointed these voters? First, what I see as Merkel’s failures on so many fronts: immigration. Security. Energy. A sustainable strategy for business and economic growth. Digitalisation. Infrastructure maintenance. The list is almost endless.

    Second, the extraordinary denial of reality that, in my assessment, Merkel allowed to take hold when it came to immigrants’ responsibility for antisemitism, violence against women, terrorism and gang crime.

    Coming from Denmark, where we have reliable statistics on all these matters, I find it frankly shocking to listen to the nonsense coming from Germany’s political elite.

    But I would also trace back to Merkel the rise of what is often called “Islamo-leftism” – a tendency that has recently gained ground in Sweden and is also growing in Germany. In Sweden, polls have indicated that 85 per cent of Muslim voters support parties to the left of centre, with almost one in five supporting the Left Party, Vänsterpartiet – a party tainted by antisemitism and the glorification of terrorism. I see no compelling reason to assume that the pattern in Germany is fundamentally different.

    My argument, then, is that it is not only the rise in support for the AfD that can be traced back to Merkel. The same applies to the growing support for parties on the German left that promote the political and religious views of a significant proportion of the people, Merkel invited to Germany. Not least on the Gaza question.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Both Democrats and the international left has derided President Trump’s focus on Greenland, saying the U.S. controlling it was a fantasy. Now that he’s signed an agreement with Denmark, I doubt they’re laughing now.

    The US-Greenland-Denmark agreement has now been published. I haven’t read it, but Arnaud Bertrand has. This is his analysis of the terms, which appear very favorable to the United States, and well calculated to achieve the goal of preventing undue influence over the Arctic by any hostile power.

    Snip.

    To sum up:

    – The US secured a permanent military foothold that even an independent Greenland would inherit whether it likes it or not
    – The US now has veto power over any non-NATO military presence in Greenland, and over who can invest in its strategic infrastructure and resources (beyond NATO and the EU)
    – Denmark signed away its say over the principle of new US bases, with only the right to discuss the “implementation details”
    – Danish authorities no longer set the rules for US military movement across the island
    – And all of it is now justified by the defense of “the American continent”

  • Lindsay Clancy holdout juror Michael P. Desronvil speaks out.

    Michael is a Catholic from a Haitian immigrant family and moved to Massachusetts when he was a young child.

    The liberal women who so badly want to destroy him for refusing to acquit a child killer do not know how to handle that. Their woke brains simply cannot compute how to proceed.

    Several jurors who wanted to let Clancy off the hook have claimed that Michael did not follow the jury instructions, but they have incriminated themselves with statements indicating they had an ideological agenda in the courtroom. Michael says he “kept getting cut off” by these other jurors, who apparently knew his own thoughts better than him.

    This lines up with a statement from a fourth juror who says she was ultimately badgered into changing her vote.”

    A female 4th juror comes forward and says the other jurors were pushing to acquit on *DAY 1*

  • In fact, a whole lot of basic jury procedures seem to have been discarded in the Clancy trial. “Lindsay Clancy jurors broke cardinal rule and used phones to RESEARCH killer mom during deliberations, holdout claims.”
  • “Feds arrest, indict hundreds in Trump voter fraud crackdown: ‘Catching it all over the country.’ The Justice Department says its crackdown on noncitizen voting and election fraud has already produced more than 200 arrests and indictments, with that number possibly doubling soon and state election officials themselves now facing potential charges for looking the other way.”

    Since the Trump Justice Department warned state and local election officials that they could be charged with allowing fraudulent voting activities, more than 200 arrests and indictments have been secured in a crackdown on election fraud and noncitizen voting, and that number could double soon, a top official revealed to Just the News.

    “I think there are a lot of nervous election officials because I think some of them know that they’ve been looking the other way when this is happening, and we’re catching it all over the country,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said Monday night in an interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show.

    Dhillon also hinted at further developments in the coming weeks, suggesting her department has developed evidence calling into question New Jersey’s claim that a computer glitch allowed thousands of foreigners to register to vote in that state and about 400 to actually cast ballots in violation of law.

    “I’m not sure we have the correct numbers from New Jersey. They’re not really cooperating with us, and so we will get to the bottom of what happened there. And you know, New Jersey tried to blame a vendor for a mistake or a glitch, quote unquote. But you know, I think there’ll be another side to that story,” she said.

    Snip.

    Over the weekend, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News that his agency is investigating 1,620 cases of voter fraud involving noncitizens and has made 151 arrests. He said his department is also looking into an additional 300,000 cases based on states’ voter rolls.

  • That thing that never happens keeps happening. “DOJ Charges 16 Noncitizens in Voter Fraud Cases.”
  • “More Canadians now die from government-assisted “suicide” than Americans die from gun homicides.”
  • Howard Dean speaks to the ChiComs: “DNC Chairman Emeritus Howard Dean delivered the American welcome address at a China dialogue involving the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a think tank identified in congressional commission testimony as ‘run by Chinese intelligence.’ The Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament, which co-organized the event⁠, has an equally explicit allegiance. Its charter⁠ says it: ‘upholds the comprehensive leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.'” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Ted Cruz digs into EPIC City’s ties to CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood.

    Ties between the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the proposed EPIC City development in North Texas came under scrutiny during a recent U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing chaired by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.

    EPIC City, which has been criticized as an Islamic enclave and housing development exclusive to Muslims, is a proposal from the East Plano Islamic Center.

    The Wednesday hearing of the subcommittee on federal courts, oversight, agency action, and federal rights was titled “Hidden in Plain Sight: Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America.”

    Sen. Cruz addressed the fact that Democrat senators failed to attend the meeting, stating that “their campaign is now openly embracing terrorist organizations waging war on America.”

    Cruz heard from witnesses that alleged ties between CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood, and EPIC City.

    Arielle F. Klepach, senior litigation counsel for the National Jewish Advocacy Center, called attention to the connection in her written testimony.

    She likened the EPIC City development, later rebranded as “The Meadow” following significant backlash, to a pattern of “mega-mosque” building projects in Europe commonly motivated by “Islamist separatism.”

    This movement is a “deliberate attempt to cut Muslim communities off spiritually, intellectually, and culturally from the surrounding secular society,” with the building projects in particular “generally [containing] community-like features such as schools, libraries, and gyms,” according to Klepach.

    “The American version of this pattern is EPIC City,” Klepach said. “CAIR-Texas and CAIR-DFW have publicly defended EPIC City in the disputes, and CAIR’s national leadership has spoken at the EPIC mosque, reflecting an active advocacy relationship between CAIR and the EPIC religious community.”

    The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was designated a foreign terrorist organization by Gov. Greg Abbott late last year, along with the Muslim Brotherhood.

    The hearing also revisited CAIR’s role as an unindicted co-conspirator to the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). The foundation and five of its officials were convicted of “funneling more than $12 million to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas” during a 2008 federal trial. CAIR was not charged in the case.

    Lara Burns, senior research fellow for the George Washington University Program on Extremism, drew the connection between CAIR and Hamas in her written testimony.

    “The United States Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee served as the original Hamas infrastructure in the United States, initially consisting of the HLF (the fundraising arm),” alongside others, according to Burns.

    “At the [2008] trial, still today the largest successful terrorism financing prosecution in American history, [various arms of the Muslim Brotherhood] were identified as unindicted co-conspirators/joint ventures as was [CAIR],” she added.

    (Previously.)

  • A father-and-son serial killer house of horror found in Pennsylvania.

    A Pennsylvania father and son have come under suspicion after the son was discovered to be traveling with a woman with a fake ID that used the name of a missing woman.

    Police searched the home of the man and his dad and found the most disturbing scene imaginable.

    he investigation is still unfolding but this is some seriously unsettling stuff going on.

    Here’s the latest from ABC 6 in Philly on the now 7 missing women connected to this case against Eugene Horsch and his deceased father RC:

    Blair Tonzelli was 35 years old when she went missing in 2023. She was the first woman named in this case.

    Police say when Horsch was arrested, he was with a woman in possession of an identification card with Tonzelli’s name on it. The woman allegedly told police Eugene Horsch gave her the ID.

    Amy McHale was 44 years old when she was last seen in 2016. Shortly after news broke of Horsch’s arrest, her family told Action she was last seen at the W. Chew Avenue house.

    McHale had previously been married to Ray Horsch, who has also become a central figure in this case.

    Gabrielle Amarando was 22 years old when she disappeared in 2012.

    A childhood friend of Amarando told Action News that loved ones grew increasingly concerned when they stopped hearing from her…

    Roughly 14 years later, her family got the confirmation they were looking for.

    In August, police said the women were seen in photos and videos recovered during the investigation, in which both are seen alive and then later appearing to be dead.

    ‘Based on the video and photo evidence — if the images in the video are real and not altered in any way, based on their review — the M.E. would believe the individuals depicted in the images are deceased,’ Philadelphia Police Inspector Ray Evers.

    Maribel Fresses was the other woman seen in the videos and photos. She [was] 27 when she disappeared in 2018.

    Police also saw photos and videos of two other unidentified women, both alive and then dead, as well as video of the elder Horsch strangling a woman to death.

    Five urns believed to have the unidentified remains of five women were found in the home.

    Millions of photos and videos have so far revealed that at least 7 women who went missing ultimately met their demise at the hands of the Horsches.

    Shades of H. H. Holmes…

  • UK functionaries go out of their way to protect their precious illegal aliens. “British government mobilizes HUNDREDS of police and defense units to protect migrant boat from British protesters.”

    Third World migrants are being led across the channel by French authorities, where British police then escort them into harbor, put them aboard taxpayer-funded coach buses, and give them a police escort with hundreds of officers.

    Snip.

    Earlier in the day, British protesters gathered by land and by sea to peacefully demonstrate against a group of 60 or so migrants that was set to land in southern England in Gosport.

    Because of the protesters gathered along the coast, authorities had to scramble to find a new landing spot for the “newcomers.” The buses were seen with a massive police escort.

    The reason for the escort was due to the fear that the British protesters would get “mostly peaceful” and attack the invaders or the masked bus drivers who are helping traffic them into the country:

    One GB News reporter summed up the massive taxpayer expenditure that was spent to assist the migrants:

    The whole thing from start to finish today, for this one boat of 60-odd or however many it turns out to be, to go all the way flanked by a massive French ship, then to our [Royal National Lifeboat Institution] boats, then all of those resources pumped into Gosport.

    And THEN, it looks as though because of the local reaction, they’ve decided to not to that, take them down either to Eastport or Dover or somewhere else anyway.

    So goodness knows what the resources are going to be like there.

    We are talking MILLIONS of Pounds today alone, for a group of 60 illegal migrants.

    Is there any doubt the Labour government prioritizes importing illegal aliens into the country over taking care of their own citizens?

  • “Texas Daycare Faces Lawsuit For Running ‘Toddler Fight Club.'”

    Forget about Somali daycare fraud for a moment – have you heard about toddler fight club? A daycare in Fort Worth, TX is facing investigations and litigation after evidence showed staff abusing young children and forcing them to fight each other.

    One mother, Heather Harris, knew something was wrong when she picked up her 4-year-old son at the Arka Montessori Academy of Risinger daycare. He was crying uncontrollably and was covered in bruises. Employees told the mother her son had fought with another child, but their explanations did not add up, according to a lawsuit filed this month by Harris and her husband, Richard Harris. She insisted on seeing the classroom’s surveillance footage.

    The disturbing footage shows staff at the daycare swing a child around like a rag-doll and trying to force him to fight another child.

    I’m skipping right past the obvious “First Rule of Toddler Fight Club” joke to point out that if my (theoretical) kid were forced into that, both daycare and the employees would be facing both a huge civil lawsuit and criminal charges.

  • More horrifying child abuse: “Transgender ICU nurse arrested on multiple counts of abusing NICU baby at Michigan hospital.”

    [Kieran Ansley], a now-former nurse at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital has been charged with child abuse after a 4-month-old girl in his [sic] care was found with multiple broken bones and bruising.

    The injuries were noticed by the infant’s mother during an early morning visit in April, records show. Tests and a full skeletal survey found multiple fractures, including broken leg bones and multiple bruises, court records show. Bruising was found on the infant’s hands, arms, thigh, buttocks, abdomen and tongue, court records show.

    ‘The totality of the findings resulted in a diagnosis of pediatric physical abuse,’ court documents show.

    More horrifying details snipped. Hell’s too good for him.

  • “Texas Stock Exchange Sees First Listing Transfer. Wall Street is trading its loafers for a pair of cowboy boots.”

    Dallas’ “Y’all Street” continues to capitalize on momentum as the Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE) enters a new era of growth.

    North Texas has added a stock exchange alongside its iconic stockyards, and companies are beginning to flock to the TXSE’s transfer portal. TXSE opened in July, and September has seen the first corporate commitments and primary listing transfers.

    On September 16, Texas Capital’s Texas Equity Index exchange-traded fund (ETF) and Texas Oil Index ETF became the TXSE’s first primary listings. The company’s CEO, President, and Chairman, Rob Holmes, rang the bell on “Y’all Street” to celebrate the company’s primary listing transfer. Texas Capital was formerly listed on the Nasdaq.

    Holmes stated in a Bloomberg interview about the transfer, “Once this exchange came to fruition, it was our responsibility to look at the three exchanges and pick the best one for Texas Capital.”

    He praised the TXSE’s investor base as an affirmation of the exchange’s technological and strategic innovation. The TXSE saw over $275 million in total investment, with major investors including BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase, and Charles Schwab.

    Competing securities exchanges include the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq, both based in New York City.

    Holmes asserted that TXSE’s net present value (NPV) is “better” than its New York rivals.

    “On this exchange, instead of just paying a fee, we pay a fee, but at the end of the day we have a net cash position from the exchange,” he said.

    If someone can explain what that last sentence means, please do so in the comments…

  • “Democrat candidate caught crying in the back of cop car after DUI arrest. Washington state Democratic House candidate Krista Perez was seen crying, praying and sobbing in the back of a patrol car after her DUI arrest.” Washington state has a jungle primary, with two Democratic candidates for House of Representatives District 29-Position 1 (the state has 49 districts of two reps each) facing each other in November, so Republicans won’t be able to take advantage here.
  • Jay Leno’s Law, exempting classic cars from California’s draconian emissions regulations, was signed into law in a rare act of sanity from Governor Hairgel. But note it doesn’t take effect until January 1, 2028.
  • To break AIs, no need to ask it to calculate pi to the last digit. Asking how many “e”s in “seventeen” will do…
  • The many lighting tricks Stanley Kubrick used to shoot Barry Lyndon. (And if you haven’t seen Barry Lyndon, you should. I found it extremely funny…)
  • So Carrot Top tried to kill himself over attempted blackmail using a sex tape? Can’t say I’m a huge fan of his work, but he should avoid trying to off himself. And now, with that thin justification, here’s the classic Norm Macdonald bit on Carrot Top:

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • Speaking of Norm Macdonald, if I had Netflix, I would watch this, though I suspect I’ve already seen 75% of it in YouTube clips.
  • “New Underground Railroad Established To Help Lone Black Juror Escape From Angry White Liberals In The North.”
  • “Canada Clarifies That By ‘Assisted Suicide’ They Mean ‘Totally Unsolicited Murder.‘”
  • “Husband In Critical Condition After Attempting Two Minutes Of Beginner’s Yoga.”
  • The Pittie who thinks he’s a cat:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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





    LinkSwarm For September 11, 2026

    Friday, September 11th, 2026

    The 25th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, GOP midterm convention, Iran and Yemen both get spicy again, AfD shocks Germany, Ukraine’s longest drone strike yet, more welfare state fraud, more money for Paxton,

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

    More information about the murder of my friend Andrew Wimsatt has come out, and some of my original post needs to be corrected. I’m going to put that in a Saturday post, and there will be another for remembering Andrew on Sunday.

  • Your obligatory 9/11 remembrance post.

    On a perfectly clear morning 25 years ago, America changed forever.

    At 8:46 a.m. on that day, a team of Islamic terrorists crashed American Airlines Flight 11, carrying 76 passengers and eleven crew members, into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. It was followed 17 minutes later by United Airlines Flight 175, carrying 51 passengers and nine crew members, which terrorists steered into the South Tower. Less than 90 minutes later, both of those towers had collapsed into a massive pile of rubble.

    Meanwhile, as Americans’ televisions were tuned to live footage of the burning buildings, American Airlines Flight 77, carrying 53 passengers and six crew members, was slammed into the Pentagon. And shortly after, United Airlines Flight 93, with 33 passengers and seven crew members, crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pa.

    Today, we remember the 2,977 innocent victims who were the first casualties in what would become known as the War on Terror. We also remember the extraordinary heroism displayed that day, without which the horrific losses would have been far worse.

    One of the most miraculous facts about that day was that at the World Trade Center, which may have had an occupancy of 19,000 people between the two buildings at the time, 99 percent of those who were below the point of impact of the planes survived. This achievement is owed to the extraordinary evacuation efforts of first responders, who ran into burning buildings, no doubt knowing that there was a good chance they wouldn’t make it out. In the end, 441 firefighters, police officers, and paramedics did not.

    Then there was the civilian heroism displayed by the passengers on Flight 93, who had heard about what happened at the World Trade Center, overtook the plane, and ensured that it crashed in an empty field rather than into the U.S. Capitol or White House, one of which was believed to be the potential target. Passenger Todd Beamer’s remark to his fellow passengers, “Let’s roll,” overheard from a phone call, became a rallying cry as the nation fought back.

    I have no dramatic, notable 9/11 stories to tell. I was driving to my job at Applied Materials when NPR (yes, I sometimes listened to them in the morning, back in the day) broke into regular coverage to report the first tower impact. I heard a rumor that the layoff that came next week (as the depths of the Dotcom Bust were just being felt) was actually scheduled for that day, but they decided to hold off due to the attacks. Ironically, one of the people in one of the planes was an Israeli Applied employee, who survived a country beset by terrorism only to be killed on an American flight.

    See also my review of United 93.

  • The Republican Party held their first ever Midterm Convention in Dallas.

    President Donald Trump delivered the convention’s closing remarks following a keynote address from Vice President J.D. Vance.Before they took the stage, though, Texas Republicans used their appearances to focus on the November elections, public safety, immigration, and the direction of the Democrat Party.

    Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick invoked Texas history and the Alamo before turning to the November election, portraying the contest as a broader fight over the country’s values.

    “This election coming up is not about politics,” said Patrick. “It’s about darkness, and it’s about light.”

    He accused Democrats of embracing socialism and communism and argued that Texas’ economic growth has been driven by conservative policies including low taxes and no state income tax.

    He also singled out Democrat Senate nominee James Talarico, saying Republicans would put “the Democratic Party and James Talarico and his ilk on the dust heap of history.”

    Patrick closed his remarks by urging Republicans to view the election as a fight for their families and the country. “You started a fight, and the Republicans are going to finish it in November.”

    Eric Flores and Tano Tijerina, two Republican candidates challenging Democrats in South Texas, also addressed the convention. Their appearances highlighted Republicans’ continued focus on South Texas, where the president made significant gains in 2024.

    U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz used his speech to warn about what he described as an emerging red-green alliance between communists and Islamists. He received one of the strongest reactions from the crowd when he declared that Sharia law is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution.

    “Sharia law has no place in America,” said Cruz. “Sharia law is fundamentally inconsistent with the Constitution, and we need to stand together and stop it now.”

    Gov. Greg Abbott focused much of his speech on Texas Democrats running statewide in November, contrasting their legislative records with policies he has signed into law.

    Abbott pointed to the GOP’s success on a variety of issues including border security, policing, property taxes, oil and gas, election laws, parental rights, and school choice.

    “All the Democrats running statewide in the state of Texas, they had a chance to vote on those policies, and they voted against those policies,” said Abbott. “They voted against common sense.”

    Abbott highlighted legislation he signed prohibiting cities that reduce police funding from receiving certain state tax revenue, restricting some purchases of Texas property by citizens and entities tied to China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and prohibiting gender mutilation procedures for minors.

    Snip.

    Vice President J.D. Vance delivered the night’s keynote address, reflecting on the administration’s first 19 months back in office and making the case for Republicans in November.

    Vance also paid tribute to Charlie Kirk on the anniversary of his assassination, recalling that Kirk had been in the front row when Vance addressed the Republican National Convention as the party’s vice presidential nominee in 2024.

    Turning to Texas politics, Vance took aim at Democrat U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico over his previous comments on gender and Christianity.

    “This Talarico guy—he will not shut up about how there are six genders. He will not shut up about how, ‘God is non-binary,’” said Vance.

    “I gotta say, a guy that age who is so obsessed and focused on transgender children-I don’t know about you, but I never want to see that guy’s web browser.”

  • On the AfD’s shocking election win in Germany.

    Last night Germany’s much-maligned AfD party won a crushing and historic victory. The victory is already being downplayed by many, owing to the fact that Saxony-Anhalt is technically one of Germany’s smallest and least consequential states. But there is far more to it than sheer numbers, as the win defines a turning point not only in German but European politics, and cements the gradual downfall of the globalist ruling class that has tried desperately for decades to keep populist movements from gaining power, in particular utilizing the “Brandmauer” or “firewall” to suppress the so-called far-right.

    The destruction of this firewall is an historic occasion, even if it should come by way of such a seemingly inconsequential state.

    Of course, there are other criticisms as well. AfD is seen by many as a kind of Trojan horse, a German “MAGA” party led by a lesbian woman in Alice Weidel. Even so, it represents a striking loss of power for the elites and a turning point which breaks a kind of psychological barrier that will only energize other anti-establishment, “far-right”, or populist parties throughout Europe.

    Another secondary effect of the victory is that it has caused the ruling German establishment to go back to the drawing board and review its most unpopular policies, like on immigration, in order to bend with the clearly changing winds.

    Merz expressed his “deep shock” at the election result, foreseeing it having major repercussions on Germany as a whole:

    The AfD, however, fell just three seats short of an ‘absolute majority’ which would have allowed it to govern the state alone. Some commentators have pointed out some major ‘anomalies’ in regard to mail-in versus in-person votes. Just like in the highly irregular American 2020 election, every party but AfD was allegedly boosted by disproportionate numbers of mail-in votes:

    More analysis at the link. Just think if Germany’s elites hadn’t decided to import millions of unassimilated Muslims into their country, they wouldn’t have empowered the AfD. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Iran: The Islamic regime has been targeting U.S. bases, with a few hits on aircraft, we’ve launched retaliatory strikes on Iranian forces, and we’ve disabled three Iranian tankers in retaliation for unsuccessful strikes against U.S. ships. So: Same old, same old.
  • Yemen has also been getting spicy, with the Iranian-backed Houthis driving for the coast, successfully attacking a Saudi pipeline, and the official anti-Houthi government of Yemen making gains in the interior. More from Preston Stewart. If this week hadn’t been so insane, I might have done a separate post on this…
  • Maybe this is why I’m still unemployed. “Women Filled 98 Percent of Jobs Created in August.”

    Women accounted for 158,000, or 98 percent, of the 162,000 nonfarm payroll jobs created in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ establishment data. Compared to this time last year, there are 870,000 more women employed in the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and 1.5 million fewer employed men.

    So there were only 4,000 men hired in August.

    Accounting for the new data, the gap between male and female employment reached its highest level since 1990, when men were overrepresented in the workforce.

    Dramatic month-to-month swings in employment gains between the sexes are relatively common, and labor economists warn that sharp shifts don’t necessarily indicate lasting changes in the market. However, the August jobs report is in keeping with existing trends that have obtained for decades, namely a substantial increase in employment among women and a linear decline in employment among men.

    There has been a “multi-decade decline in male labor force participation” and a “multi-decade increase in female labor force participation,” Kirk Doran, a professor specializing in labor economics at Notre Dame University, told National Review.

    Part of this shift can be explained by the evolution of American industries. The sectors that grew at the highest rate in August — health care and public education — are female-dominated. Meanwhile, the industries that shrank — computing, data processing, and finance — are male-heavy.

    Sound like illegal discrimination by sex to me…

  • Ace of Spades HQ makes the case for Trump47 being a tremendous success already.

    We have every reason to be excited to go to the polls to ensure an ongoing Congressional Republican majority, and to keep the DSA-influenced Democrats away from any levers of power.

    The 20 months since President Trump’s inauguration in early 2025 have had the most significant conservative victories of my lifetime, far exceeding President Reagan’s accomplishments. Here are just a few of the things President Trump and his team have done:

    • Closed the border to illegal invaders.
    • Deported hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens, and caused millions more to self-deport.
    • Slashed the federal workforce.
    • Eliminated DEI and wokeness from the military and federal agencies.
    • Eliminated EV mandates and green energy subsidies.
    • Effectively terminated corporate average fuel economy requirements for auto manufacturers.
    • Engaged the military to eliminate narco-terrorists.
    • Engaged the DOJ to target corporations engaged in illegal racial discrimination in hiring.

    There are so many more milestone accomplishments beyond those.

    For decades the conservative base has clamored for the above victories. President Trump finally delivered. Amidst all this, there are many “conservative” influencers who are promoting doom. For many of them, that is their job – being paid to blackpill conservative voters to stay home, so as to elect a Democrat Congress. The resumption of Democrat lawfare against the Trump administration is their goal.

    Despite razor-thin congressional majorities, Trump47 has delivered numerous policy wins, and conservatives (and anyone else who wants to stop the insane, jihad-friendly, socialism- and social justice-infected Democrats from reclaiming power) should head to the polls in November to ensure Republican control through 2028.

  • “Ukraine’s Longest Range Drone Strike Yet! Nearly 3,000km! Plus Strikes on Sochi and Dagestan.” “Ukrainian drones carried out their longest range drone strike to date, hitting Russia’s Novy Urengoy and Purovsky gas processing plants in Yamalo-Nenets.” Yamalo-Nenets is an “autonomous okrug” on the Arctic Circle just east of the Urals.
  • “Ukraine Attacks Novorossiysk Fuel & Grain Terminal.” Again.
  • “Ozon Warehouse in Saratov Attacked and Burning Heavily! Plus Saratov Oil Refinery.”
  • “Frigate Admiral Essen & Buyan-M Corvette Confirmed Badly Damaged by Neptune and Drone Strike!”
  • “Two Russian Su-35S Fighters Collide in Kursk.”
  • Seems like a trend: “Nine Russian Aircraft Destroyed in One Week: X2 Su-35 Crash, x5 Helicopers, Su-24 and Su-33.”
  • More: “Satellite Imagery Confirms THREE Russian Helicopters Destroyed, x2 S-300 and a Pantsir at Sochi!”
  • “Su-33 Confirmed Destroyed at Anapa Air Base.”
  • “Ukraine Bombards Russian Cargo Ship in Mediterranean Sea With Bomber Drone.”
  • “Russian Ice Breaker Admital Makarov Sets Itself On Fire at Kronstadt, St. Petersburg.”
  • Autism fraud ring in Maine?

    Quality Care Access, LLC was chartered in July 2020 by Jovin Bayingana, and the Portland-based company rapidly became one of the most lucrative new MaineCare businesses in New England.

    According to Medicaid payment records obtained via a Freedom of Access Act request, the company billed the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) for $1.2 million in 2021, $5.3 million in 2022, $7.4 million in 2023, $6.7 million in 2024, and $7.2 million in 2025 — for a lifetime cost of $27.8 million.

    The more detailed federal Medicaid dataset shows that throughout this time frame QCA had fewer than 16 patients in most years.

  • Finally: “Republican Reinforcements Arrive for Paxton in Senate Race. The Senate Leadership Fund is pouring millions into Texas after questions over whether the Cornyn-aligned group would back Paxton.”

    Republican reinforcements are finally arriving for Attorney General Ken Paxton in his U.S. Senate race, months after the party’s biggest Senate-focused outside group backed his primary opponent.

    The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, has purchased $32 million in television advertisements across Texas and is reportedly preparing to spend more than $50 million to support Paxton against Democrat James Talarico.

    The group announced Friday it created a new Texas PAC dedicated to the race, with ads promoting Paxton and contrasting his record with Talarico expected to run continuously through Election Day.

    The investment ends months of uncertainty over whether the Senate Leadership Fund would support Paxton after backing Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary.

    It also comes as other major Republican groups have already begun pouring money into the race.

    MAGA Inc., the super PAC aligned with President Donald Trump, recently announced $10 million in advertising supporting Paxton. America PAC, the political group backed by Elon Musk, is also supporting Paxton and has begun door-knocking operations to register and get out the vote.

    This is good, if overdue news, but media ad spends are the fools gold of politics. The same group spending zillions for Cornyn didn’t move the needle, so the efficacy of their political efforts seems debatable. But maybe they’re better at convincing squishy moderates than Republican primary voters…

  • “South Texas Democrat House Candidate Sponsored March With Socialists. The Rio Grande Valley DSA has celebrated Zohran Mamdani, depicted a Border Patrol vehicle in flames, and promoted LGBT causes.

    Democrat Texas House candidate Oziel Ochoa’s campaign sponsored a May Day event co-hosted by the Rio Grande Valley chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

    Ochoa is challenging Republican State Rep. Janie Lopez for House District 37, a South Texas district covering Willacy County and portions of Cameron County.

    Campaign finance records show Ochoa’s campaign made three $259 payments to La Union del Pueblo Entero, or LUPE, on May 4. The expenditures, totaling $777, were listed as advertising expenses for the first annual May Day Marcha del Pueblo (March of the People).

    May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day, is an annual labor observance that has long been embraced by socialist and communist movements around the world.

    The event took place two days earlier, on May 2, in Edinburg.

    Organizers included LUPE, Texas Rising, the Rio Grande Valley American Federation of Teachers, the Rio Grande Valley Central Labor Council, South Texans for Reproductive Justice, Poder Latinx, and the Rio Grande Valley Democratic Socialists of America.

    Ochoa was publicly recognized for his financial support, while RGV DSA was listed among the event’s organizers.

  • “Muslim police chief of Detroit suburb told his subordinates that wife-beating isn’t a “formal” criminal offense.”

    The former police chief of Hamtramck, Michigan, is in hot water after investigators have dug into allegations against the Muslim chief for how he ran his department.

    Court records show that Hamtramck Police Chief Jamiel Altaheri personally engaged in a “pattern” of domestic violence in his own household, and told officers that wife-beating isn’t a “formal” crime.

    The primary effects of Democrats importing unassimilated Muslims for political advantage seems to be more wife-beating and more rape.

  • “Criminal Illegal Alien Arrested in Texas, Ordered Deported 26 Years Ago. A Cuban national who evaded deportation for 26 years is now behind bars.” “According to ICE, Cuban national Emiliano Martinez Perez entered the United States around 1998 and was convicted of cocaine possession shortly afterward. He was ordered to leave the U.S. in early 2000, but remained in the country and was later convicted of drug trafficking in 2007.”
  • Speaking of immigration fraud: “Houston Immigration Attorney Arrested for Fraud. Nowowiejski allegedly committed mail fraud and made false statements related to immigration cases.”

    A Houston immigration attorney was arrested Wednesday after a federal grand jury indicted her on charges of mail fraud and making false statements related to her work on behalf of immigrants seeking work-related legal status in the United States.

    Alla Nowowiejski is a naturalized citizen from Russia and has practiced law in Texas since 2009 and specialized in business immigration assistance, but she allegedly never submitted, or only partially submitted, paperwork for clients seeking to obtain work status or work visas.

    The indictment also alleges that Nowowiejski provided clients with false documents or reference numbers tied to active immigration cases unrelated to her own clients to make them believe their applications were being processed.

    In 2023, Audubon Engineering Operations sued Nowowiejski for gross negligence and legal malpractice in Harris County. The company alleged that although she had charged them more than $109,000 for immigration work on behalf of five employees, she never filed paperwork with federal immigration agencies.

  • When your entire life amounts to a bad meme: “Gays for Gaza’ activist killed by Muslim immigrant in Arizona.”
  • Gavin Newsom brags about giving welfare to illegal aliens.
  • “Chaos ensues in Democratic Party after Arab reporter calls black congressman ‘AIPAC monkey.'” Arab reporter is Rula Jebreal (who, I guess, is most famous for dating Roger Waters) and the black congressman is Hakeem Jeffries. Hakeem Jeffries should never be called a monkey, only “TEMU Obama.”
  • “South Korea is eyeing Texas for a new $22.6 billion investment in a natural gas-burning power plant.”

    The deal would mark the first chunk of change the nation will provide to the U.S. under South Korea’s new $350 billion commitment.

    Last year, tariff talks between the U.S. and South Korea led to a 10 percent decrease in tariffs imposed on South Korea — a drop from 25 to 15 percent — provided the country invests $350 billion in the U.S. in exchange.

    The power project would be set in Encinal, Texas, a small city in La Salle County.

    According to The Korea Herald, talks initially began with South Korea proposing $19.8 billion for the project, and the U.S. countering with $25 billion. Negotiations will now proceed in the $22.6 billion range, although the exact amount will not be determined until the project is finalized.

    The proposed gas combined-cycle project plant would total 6.3 gigawatts (GW) of power, built in stages. The first stage will consist of a 1.4-GW gas turbine power facility. Once the first stage passes inspection, the second stage, a 4.9-GW combined-cycle facility, will be built.

    Though unconfirmed, the plant is expected to help meet the state’s booming demands for artificial intelligence (AI) computing capacity, data center development, and semiconductor development.

    Sort of an odd location, but maybe it has to do with this proposed data center near Laredo.

  • “Microsoft Plugs Nearly 1,000 Security Holes.

    Microsoft Corp. today issued updates to plug at least 974 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, by far its biggest single patch batch ever. Microsoft says artificial intelligence is helping to speed the discovery of vulnerabilities, but security experts warn that many organizations already are struggling to prioritize the more human-intensive endeavor of testing and deploying so many fixes each month.

    This month’s patch bundle obliterates the software giant’s previous record set in July, when it released updates for at least 570 security vulnerabilities. September’s Patch Tuesday brings this year’s total to more than 2,600, more than twice Microsoft’s previous record-setting patch year in 2020 (1,245) and with three more months to go.

    There are two “zero-day” flaws fixed this month that are being actively exploited: both CVE-2026-81963 and CVE-2026-85880 allow an attacker to elevate their privileges on Windows system.

    Fully 113 of the bugs addressed today earned Microsoft’s “critical” rating, meaning they could be abused by malware or miscreants to seize control over a vulnerable Windows machine with little or no help from the user.

    Among the more serious critical flaws this month is CVE-2026-69730, a DNS weakness present in Windows Server 2012 onward and on Windows 10. Microsoft warns that an unauthenticated attacker could leverage this weakness simply by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected system, and that it is likely to be exploited.

    Also scary is CVE-2026-69829, a critical, remote code execution flaw in the Windows Shell. This vulnerability has a CVSS base score of 9.8 (10 is the most severe), and can be exploited with low attack complexity, no privileges, and no user interaction.

    Whatever else AI is or isn’t good at, it seems to be great at finding security flaws in Microsoft products…

  • Mac vs. PC, 2026 edition.
  • Rick Beato on why you need to own physical media.

    It’s incredibly important to own physical media, because you do not know what people are going to do that work for these massive tech companies. Once they get a hold of the data and they put it into those AI [slop] machines, because that’s what they are, they can change anything. Half the stuff that people, when they Google things or whatever, that just comes out with some AI thing that’s based on something that somebody wrote on Reddit six years ago that’s probably not even true. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Who actually knows whether it’s true? It’s kind of like if you listen to a record on Spotify that says remastered in 2018, remastered in 2022, remastered in 2012, that’s not the original version. What they’ve done is they’ve either taken the original version, the mastered version, and just remastered it and made it sound worse, or you don’t know what they’ve actually done to it.

  • Another weird blog tidbit that may only be of interest to myself: Starting October 6, 2025 and running through February 9th, 2026, the Internet Archive took multiple daily snapshots of my blog after a long period of snapshotting it on a somewhat random basis, sometimes several time a week, and sometimes only a few times a month. I would say the optimal periodicity would be once a day, but I have no idea how the process works.
  • “Mamdani: Women Attending 9/11 Memorial Will Be Required To Wear Hijab.”
  • “Nation’s Murderers Excited To Learn Killing Legal If You Say You Were Sad.”
  • “Women Honor Gloria Steinem By Leaving Kids At Daycare And Working 9 Hours At Jobs They Hate.”
  • “Hollywood Colorist Fired After Accidentally Leaving Color In Film.”
  • “Breakthrough As Scientists At University Of Michigan Develop Ability To Travel Back In Time One Second.”
  • “Moses Threatens Pharaoh With Plague Of Unskippable YouTube Ads.”
  • “‘Oh, Your Intelligent Creations Are Trying To Kill You? That’s Interesting,’ Says Jesus.”
  • Dog + balloon = happiness.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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





    LinkSwarm For July 31, 2026

    Friday, July 31st, 2026

    Iran lashes out again and gets pounded even harder for its troubles, Fauci’s diary validates just about everything conservatives have been saying about him for the last six years, DSA is open about wanting to destroy the Constitution, Ukraine blows up more refineries and Wildberry logistic warehouses, Spain faces invasion, all sorts of AI skullduggery, and Neuromancer finally makes it to the screen.

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm

  • President Trump ramps up attacks on Iran.

    Following Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) missile attacks on U.S. bases in Kuwait and Jordan, President Donald Trump is now signaling readiness for full-scale military action that could shatter the cycle of tit-for-tat exchanges and accelerate an end to the conflict, opening the door for a full-on revolution for the Persian nation.

    “We’re going to beat the f****** s*** out of them […] We’ll be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating,” Trump said on Wednesday.

    If the Iranian regime collapsed under external pressure and internal strain, the power vacuum could empower ordinary Iranians, who have long protested theocratic rule, to seize control of their country’s future. Hardcore Islamists brought the nation into a theocracy in February of 1979.

    Much of the link is speculative about next steps.

  • Also containing Iran: “Saudi Arabia announces maritime defence coalition.”

    Saudi Arabia has announced the formation of a maritime coalition to protect shipping and energy supplies in the Red Sea as Yemen’s Houthi rebels threaten a vital route for the kingdom’s oil exports and global trade.

    Riyadh on Thursday hosted a meeting of 43 countries and the EU to discuss plans to form a multinational maritime defensive coalition.

    After the meeting, 14 countries affirmed their commitment to the coalition, including Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Sudan and several other Arab and African countries, according to the kingdom’s defence ministry.

    The United Arab Emirates and Oman were notably absent, but the ministry said the door remains open for countries that want to join the coalition.

    The alliance is “aimed at enhancing maritime security, protecting freedom of navigation, securing international trade routes and energy supply routes, and protecting shared maritime interests in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden”, the 14 countries said in a joint statement.

    The statement added the coalition would be led by Saudi Arabia and headquartered in Riyadh, with the participating countries agreeing to share intelligence and engage in joint maritime operations and exercises.

  • Natalie Winters uncovers media figures taking Chinese favors.

    I exclusively uncovered the identities of prominent U.S. journalists flown to China by a CCP-linked influence operation seeking “favorable coverage” and “positive messages” about Beijing. 🧵

    The names include:

    – Ezra Klein, New York Times columnist
    – Matthew Yglesias, Vox co-founder
    – Ronald Brownstein, CNN senior political analyst
    – Bradford Plumer, New York Times reporter
    – Marjorie Miller, former Associated Press vice president

    Also identified:

    – Steve Clemons, former The Hill editor-at-large
    – David Rohde, MS NOW senior national security reporter
    – Jonathan Alter, NBC News and MSNBC political analyst
    – David Sweeney, former NPR managing editor
    – Daniel Gross, former Yahoo Finance columnist

    Also on the roster:

    – Marilyn Geewax, former NPR senior editor
    – Kathleen Deveny, former Newsweek editor
    – Tom Omestad, former U.S. News & World Report correspondent
    – Steve Chapman, former Chicago Tribune columnist
    – Bruce Stokes, former National Journal correspondent

    The list continues:

    – Craig Gilbert, former Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Washington bureau chief
    – Tony Semerad, Salt Lake Tribune reporter
    – Shikha Dalmia, former The Week columnist
    – Jonathan Broder, former Newsweek senior writer

    Also identified:

    – Cristi Kempf, former Chicago Tribune associate managing editor
    – Jon Healey, Los Angeles Times deputy editorial page editor
    – Julian Pecquet, former Foreign Affairs reporter

    Trip organizer CUSEF was founded by Tung Chee-hwa, a former senior official in the CCP’s United Front system, the influence apparatus Beijing uses to cultivate foreign elites and shape institutions outside China.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • So Rand Paul finally got Anthony Fauci to testify under oath for all his lies, only for the little weasel to take the Fifth nine zillion times.
  • “The Damning Fauci Diaries.”

    According to [Sen. Rand] Paul, “During his time as NIAID Director, and particularly during the COVID pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci took meticulous notes about his work. He made note of conversations, decisions, and his thoughts about actions taken by politicians and other officials.” This past weekend, Paul released a gargantuan 1,141 pages of Fauci’s notes. Very little in these pages enhances Fauci’s already deeply tarnished reputation.

    Most notably, on January 26, 2020, Fauci wrote:

    It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. The infections spread among people weeks before the Chinese reported that they were dealing with a new infection and that gave the virus time to establish itself in multigenerational (sustained) spread. Remember, early on the Chinese were saying that there is no human to human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from the market. Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.

    America and the world spent most of the next two years in an increasingly furious debate over whether the virus emerged from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, perhaps from a pangolin; or from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the separate institution of the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control (which was also doing research on coronaviruses found in bats); or somewhere else. Fauci apparently knew — notice he didn’t write “believe” or “theorize” — he could rule out the wet-market theory but never felt obligated to share that conclusion with the rest of us. Instead, he repeatedly dismissed and downplayed the lab-leak theory.

    More at the link.

  • “Revealed: Five Months After Fauci Got Vaccinated, He Suffered a Pulmonary Infarction, an Adverse Effect Associated With the Vaccine.’ He Kept This a Secret.”
  • A path to prosecuting Fauci.

    The alternate celebrity and villain of the COVID-19 policy response repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right to refuse answering even mundane questions, such as the color of the hearing room’s carpet, following publication of over 1,100 pages of diary-like notes that have raised even more questions about the veracity of his COVID-era public statements.

    Committee Republicans repeatedly argued Fauci could not opt out of answering questions due to President Biden’s sweeping preemptive pardon, the validity of which has been questioned because it was signed by autopen amid Biden’s cognitive decline. Legal analysts explained Wednesday how Fauci could still be prosecuted.

    Oklahoma GOP Sen. James Lankford, who pointedly disagreed with colleagues on the Fifth Amendment issue, waited until the hearing’s end to recall that Congress went through a near-identical exercise in President Obama’s second term.

    It held former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt for giving an opening statement at a House hearing in 2013 on her alleged discrimination against conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, then invoking her rights under the Fifth Amendment to decline giving testimony or answering questions that may expose one to criminal prosecution.

    Fauci did the same Wednesday.

    Lankford asked committee Chairman Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., whether the Lerner vote determined the Fauci outcome. Paul, who has called for Fauci’s prosecution for years, said lawmakers have a week to study the issue before voting on a contempt resolution.

    The question that courts may have to answer is whether Biden’s pardon preempts Fauci’s right against self-incrimination, since he can’t be prosecuted “as long as he answers truthfully” and the statute of limitations forecloses some claims anyway, Paul said.

    George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf floated two other ways Fauci could testify without risk to himself: a two-thirds committee vote or a simple House majority to immunize him, or doing media interviews in which he’s not under oath, since “it is not a crime to lie to the public.”

    More blow-by-blow Fauci testimony details at the link. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Congressional committee issues subpoenas to organizations tied to China-linked Dem megadonor. The latest subpoenas raise the question of whether U.S. tax law — which grants tax exemptions and shields charitable donor identities — can be used to route foreign money into domestic political activity. At the heart of it, questions abound whether the far-left outfits have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).”

    House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., has issued subpoenas to three tax-exempt organizations tied to socialist megadonor Neville Roy Singham, an American multimillionaire living in Shanghai with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

    The subpoenas have been served, a spokesperson for Smith’s office told Just the News, on BreakThrough News, Tricontinental and The People’s Forum, all three of which are funded, at least in part, by Singham. The subpoenas come after nearly a year of the Committee’s attempts to get answers from the three non-profit organizations regarding foreign influence in U.S. nonprofits.

    “For months, the Ways and Means Committee has been investigating how the Chinese Communist Party has been taking advantage of our country’s laws through its tax-exempt sector to sow chaos and division here in the United States,” Smith said in a statement. “Public reporting has traced hundreds of millions of dollars from Neville Roy Singham – a tech mogul living in Shanghai – that was funneled through a web of shell companies and donor-advised funds that concealed the true source of the money before it reached these organizations.”

    The subpoenas request documents showing whether the organizations have received or transmitted funds connected to foreign nationals or foreign entities, contracts between those nationals or entities, documents and communications between employees and Singham or foreign nationals about the organization.

    “Three non-profits connected to Mr. Singham – BreakThrough News, Tricontinental, and The People’s Forum – have stonewalled the Ways and Means Committee’s investigation. That ends now,” Smith said in his statement. “These subpoenas will compel the production of the documents they have withheld for months and will help expose how America’s tax laws and charitable sector may have been exploited to advance the CCP’s influence operations inside the United States. The American people deserve to know whether the CCP has exploited America’s tax-exempt sector to advance its agenda. These subpoenas will allow the Ways and Means Committee to identify the networks that exploit our tax laws, and further expose the urgent need for legislation to close those loopholes for good.”

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • The Democratic Socialist of America aren’t shy about what they want to do, and it’s unconstitutional and un-American.

    The Democratic Socialists of America wants you to know exactly what it wants, and Megan Romer, the group’s national co-chair, laid it out on national television without once reaching for a hedge word over the most radical ideas on the party platform.

    The platform itself reads like a fever dream a committee wrote line by line. A 32-hour workweek with no reduction in pay and benefits, a federal jobs guarantee, canceling all student debt, and free college from pre-K through graduate school anchor the economic wish list, alongside healthcare that is universal, free, and includes gender-affirming care as a guaranteed right.

    The platform calls for more publicly owned social housing, universal rent control, and a guaranteed lawyer for every tenant. On policing, the platform wants demilitarized police departments, defunded police unions, and money pulled out of police budgets entirely, all of which the DSA frames as a first step toward abolishing prisons and policing outright.

    On foreign policy, the platform demands the defunding of the Department of War, the closure of overseas military bases, and an end to all foreign wars, and it pairs that with support for International Criminal Court prosecutions of what it deems American war criminals. As for Israel, the DSA calls for an end to all U.S. military and economic aid, prosecution of American and Israeli leaders over what many consider a genocide in Gaza, and recognition of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

    The DSA is just as blunt about reimagining how the government works. The platform seeks statehood for Washington, D.C., self-determination for U.S. territories, and the abolition of both the Electoral College and the Senate, alongside an expanded House and a presidency and Supreme Court that answer to Congress instead of operating independently. The DSA wants to swap the two-party system for proportional representation and ranked-choice voting and pay for all of it through full public financing of every election.

    And, to top it all off, the platform calls for slavery reparations.

    Fox News host Shannon Bream ran through the DSA’s platform position by position, true or false, no room to dodge. Romer never flinched. She confirmed that the Democratic Socialists of America’s platform calls for abolishing the Senate, replacing the presidency and Supreme Court, eliminating ICE, ending borders while granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, defunding the Pentagon, abolishing prisons as a long-term goal, and placing most large corporations under government or public ownership. At every step, she answered without hesitation, affirming that each position accurately reflected the DSA’s platform.

    If we can’t stop the DSA at the ballot box, then stopping them at the ammo box becomes inevitable…

  • More ActBlue fraud.

    Michigan journalist Charlie LeDuff, who formerly worked at The New York Times and The Detroit News, decided to visit this 88-year-old woman to ask why she’s made nearly 15,000 donations to Democrats in the last 5 years:

    You’ll note that resident Elizabeth Waffle is living in a trailer because her house burned down.

    LeDuff: ‘Did you make 15,000 donations in 5 years? $150,000?’

    Waffle: ‘A hundred and fifty? Hell no. I don’t have that kind of money.’

    Her house burned down two years ago and she’s been living in a camper since.

    She wasn’t even sure if she had enough money to pay the guy who was coming to mow the fields of weeds around the camper!

    DOJ needs to audit ActBlue with proctological intensity.

  • “New Jersey Governor Refuses Noncitizen Voters’ Data to Trump Administration, Calls Aliens ‘Citizens.'”

    After the Trump administration indicated that there were at least 35,000 noncitizen registered voters in New Jersey, the Democratic governor there tried to do damage control by admitting to at least 6,600 registered noncitizen voters. Soon after her admission, however, she refused point-blank to hand over that data to the Trump administration.

    In fact, Gov. Mikie Sherrill, who has wasted a great deal of time and money trying to protect illegal alien criminals through her dangerous and disgusting sanctuary policies, actually referred to the noncitizen voters as “citizens” of her state. Either she is under the deluded impression we are still operating under the Articles of Confederation, or she thinks she gets to be a petty dictator because she has rigged elections enough to ensure her party never gets out of power.

    Last Tuesday, a reporter asked Sherrill during a press conference, “The Trump administration is seeking, I believe by today, the list of noncitizens who are registered to vote and the approximately 400 that did vote, to what extent will your administration comply with the Trump administration’s request in that regard?”

    Sherrill self-righteously but inarticulately sneered to a round of applause, “As I have said, I am not in the habit of turning over private, identifying administration—information of the citizens of New Jersey.” Again, it is completely outrageous that this is how she refers to noncitizens, particularly since many of them are illegal aliens.

    Snip.

    Why might Sherrill be so determined to ensure there is not a thorough cleaning out of the voter rolls in her state? In 2025, she did apparently win the gubernatorial race against Republican Jack Ciattarelli by about 453,000, so that is a fairly sizable margin. But back in 2020, when there were allegations of fraud, then-Gov. Phil Murphy beat Ciattarelli by only about 84,200 votes. The preliminary findings, meaning the likely lowball initial results, from the Department of Justice this year as to how many illegal aliens are registered to vote in New Jersey were 35,152.

    Suddenly, when you compare these numbers, New Jersey Democrats don’t seem to have quite such a firm grip on power in their state, do they?

  • “A California-Funded Homeless Shelter Gave Us Meth Pipes.” Of course it did.

    As governor of California, Gavin Newsom has repeatedly supported “harm reduction” policies, which enable drug use in the name of making it “safer.” He created the state’s Harm Reduction Initiative, which funded “syringe services programs” for “people who inject and smoke fentanyl and/or methamphetamines.” His Department of Public Health has endorsed distributing syringes, glass pipes, and “[c]ontainers for mixing injectable drugs” to drug users. Newsom argued earlier this year that harm-reduction tactics “increase the like­li­hood of people enter­ing sub­stance use treat­ment.”

    But do California’s harm-reduction programs encourage addicts to enter treatment? We visited the Skid Row Care Campus, a homeless-services site in Los Angeles County, to witness “harm reduction” in action. We discovered that, instead of directing addicts to get clean, the taxpayer-funded program doles out free paraphernalia, enabling addicts to get high—no questions asked.

    We arrived at Skid Row in the morning. The campus, bounded by pastel-colored buildings and a metal gate, looked like an apocalyptic wasteland. Homeless people and addicts were splayed across the common areas, with some smoking what seemed to be hard drugs with impunity.

    We stepped onto the courtyard connected to the street. No one stopped us, asked for identification, or searched us for weapons or drugs. This is apparently by design, judging by the Skid Row Action Plan and its implementation outline, which, singly or together, inspired the creation of the campus, denounced the “racist and classist war on drugs,” and called on local officials to create hubs “free from monitoring by law enforcement” and staffed by people with histories of “substance use and sex work.”

    We entered campus and found a walk-up counter, where an attendant sat before shelves of drug paraphernalia. Users come to this counter to get free needles and crack pipes, with which they can inject or smoke hard drugs.

    “What can I get you?” he asked. “We have oil burners, we have spray shooters, we have socks, we have petroleum jelly.”

    Across several visits, we obtained drug-testing strips, syringes, and crack pipes.

    California’s tax dollars at work…

  • “New Oil Refinery Hit! Tyumen Refinery, Almost 2,000km From Ukraine!”
  • “Ukraine Hits Russia Hard: X2 Wildberries Facilities, Taman Port & Oil Refinery.” “Targets include a Wildberries facility in Volgograd and Kazan. The Volgograd oil refinery. Taman Port in Krasnodar.”
  • “New Wildberries Facility Destroyed! In Ryazan!”
  • “New Wildberries Strike! Wildberries Hub in Penza Hit and Burning Heavily!”
  • “Ukraine Hits Warehouse Near Moscow (Next to Wildberries Hub) and Factory with Drones.”
  • “Ukraine Hits Likely Missile Storage or SAM In Belgorod & Rostov Port.”
  • “Russia admits defeat in the south, cannot keep the highway open.” Reporting from Ukraine is exaggerating a tad, but Russia is having serious problems with drones taking out logistics trucks on the Zaporizhia logistics route.
  • “Can Democrats’ Primary-Calendar Speed Bumps Slow the Socialists?

    The Democrats have their 2028 presidential primary schedule almost finalized, featuring a trio of new states in the first six, and the early sense is that Republicans will stick with the familiar lineup of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. It might seem early to be thinking about the 2028 presidential primaries, but if you’re one of the candidates, you must prioritize, and as Yogi Berra said, “It gets late early out there.”

    As noted at the tail end of yesterday’s edition of this newsletter, over in the Washington Post, I examined the Democratic National Committee’s proposed, and likely to be final, schedule for the Democratic 2028 presidential primaries:

    • South Carolina, January 22, 2028
    • Nevada, February 1, 2028
    • New Hampshire, February 8, 2028
    • New Mexico, February 15, 2028
    • Michigan, February 22, 2028
    • Virginia, February 29, 2028

    One week after that, March 7, will likely be Super Tuesday, the earliest date that the other states can schedule their primaries or caucuses. States that are likely to hold their primaries that day include Alabama, Arkansas, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Vermont.

    That’s a promising early schedule if you’re a candidate on the establishment side among the Democrats, and a rougher one if you’re a socialist or affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America. Based upon Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s past performances, South Carolina and Virginia are rough territory, Nevada and New Hampshire are friendly territory, and it’s a little hard to say about New Mexico and Michigan.

    Snip.

    When I say a socialist or DSA-affiliated candidate, I am mostly thinking of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; she is, at least on paper, the early frontrunner in New Hampshire, and Axios ranks her as the candidate who is second-most-likely to win the nomination, behind Harris.

    Some racial essentialists argue that it is absurd to contend that heavily white New Hampshire is likely to be supportive of the Puerto Rican AOC. First, a University of New Hampshire survey conducted this month not only found her with a one-point lead over Pete Buttigieg, but 64 percent of likely Democratic primary voters in the state said they felt favorable about her, with just 9 percent saying they felt unfavorable about her; only Buttigieg and Sanders had comparable numbers. (At 84 years old, Sanders is not running in 2028; if AOC runs, Sanders is widely expected to endorse her.)

    Also note, “Primary exit polling this year suggests that DSA candidates run best among young, college-educated and higher-income demographics.” In 2020 (the last time Democrats had a competitive presidential primary in New Hampshire), 54 percent of their primary voters had a bachelor’s degree or higher. Forty percent of Democratic primary voters reported a salary of $100,000 per year or more, and 72 percent made $50,000 per year or more.

  • “Thousands of Military-Age Men From Morocco Invade Spain’s Ceuta Territory.” Ceuta is an exclave on the north African coast

    Thousands of military-age men from Morocco invaded Spain today by crossing the border into the Spanish territory of Ceuta.

    Spain has deployed its military as these men arrive by sea and breach the border fence.

    Snip.

    Spain’s government said Thursday evening it would send the Armed Forces to help the Civil Guard “to maintain security in the city of Ceuta.” It also announced that Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez would join Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska and visit Ceuta Friday.

    “The situation is absolute chaos,” Rachid Sbihi, head of the association that represents Spain’s Civil Guard officers in Ceuta, who police the border told The Associated Press. “It’s not possible to give precise numbers, but there are thousands of migrants crossing,” he said, adding that the border had “totally collapsed.”

    However, Spain’s interior ministry won’t declare a national emergency.

    This follows hot on the heels of Spain’s far-left Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez declaring an illegal alien amnesty.

  • I probably should have noted that Andy Burham is now Prime Minister of the UK. The guy wasn’t even an MP until June 18 (though he had been before), when he won a by-election triggered by the existing MP resigning specifically so Burham could run for PM. Here’s The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters on the guy.
  • Remember: Your private conversations with AI agents aren’t. “Claude Chats Popped Up in Google Search Results.”
  • It wasn’t just Hugging Face. “OpenAI’s Rogue Agent Hit A Second Company.”

    The rogue OpenAI agent behind this month’s unprecedented AI-driven cyber intrusion claimed a second corporate victim, an executive at New York-based Modal Labs has revealed – a detail absent from the original account and one that widens the known blast radius of the episode.

    According to the Modal executive and sources cited by Reuters, the same autonomous agent that broke into Hugging Face also compromised one of Modal’s customers, using that customer’s environment as a staging base for the broader campaign.

    Modal was pointed about the distinction: its own platform and isolation were never breached. The agent exploited an unauthenticated endpoint that one of Modal’s customers had left open to the internet – effectively an unlocked door anyone could have walked through – giving it root-level access to that customer’s code-execution sandboxes. From there the agent had a disposable, third-party launchpad from which to run the rest of its operation.

    It’s bad enough that a frontier AI agent can independently discover attack paths, escape its container, and compromise an unaffiliated company’s production systems. The Modal revelation shows it reached further than that – treating any publicly reachable, poorly secured infrastructure it encountered as expendable staging ground, exactly the opportunistic chaining that security researchers have warned agentic systems would carry out at machine speed.

    Most of what led up to the Modal disclosure has already been picked over, but the shape of it is worth a recap. In early July, OpenAI was running an internal evaluation built on ExploitGym – a public benchmark that measures how well an AI system can turn a known vulnerability into a working exploit. The models under test, GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable unreleased prototype, were deliberately run with their cyber-safety refusals reduced and the classifiers that normally block high-risk activity switched off, because the point was to measure maximum offensive capability.

    The agent found and exploited a previously unknown flaw in the one package-registry proxy it was allowed to reach, escalated privileges, moved through OpenAI’s research environment, and got to a machine with open internet access. Once online, it reasoned that Hugging Face likely hosted the answer key to the very benchmark it was being tested on, and went to steal it rather than solve the problems itself. Between roughly July 11 and 13 it ran thousands of automated actions against the platform – gaining code execution through two separate flaws in its dataset-processing pipeline, harvesting credentials, and moving laterally across internal clusters. Forensic work later recovered on the order of 17,600 distinct attacker actions.

    Hugging Face caught and contained the intrusion through its own AI-assisted monitoring, and says the only thing the agent actually made off with was a limited set of the benchmark’s challenge solutions – no public models, datasets, or user-facing services tampered with. To reconstruct the timeline, its team had to fall back on an open-weight model, because the commercial frontier models refused to analyze the real attack data.

    So a rouge AI agent found it’s way out of its sandbox, launched a privilege escalation attack, accessed the Internet, and picked out a target it assumed it could steal answers from rather than do the work itself? Did Gen Z program its work ethic?

  • “Lizard Litigation Ends With Endangered Species Status Reversed.”

    The State of Texas and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reached a settlement, reversing the endangered species listing for the dunes sagebrush lizard while a new evaluation is conducted.

    The dunes sagebrush lizard inhabits portions of West Texas, including the oil-rich Permian Basin.

    The Biden administration listed the species as endangered in May 2024, citing threats from oil and gas development and climate change.

    Texas sued in September 2024, arguing the listing relied on an indirect habitat model rather than population data, used a 1998 well-pad-density study that predates horizontal drilling, and ignored ongoing state conservation efforts.

    The state also argued the listing impeded oil production and interfered with efforts to plug abandoned oil wells.

    “The Biden-Harris Administration’s unlawful misuse of environmental law is a backdoor attempt to undermine Texas’s oil and gas industries which help keep the lights on for America,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said when announcing the lawsuit.

  • “Muslim gang accused of mass rideshare fraud in Dallas.”

    A Dallas Express investigation has uncovered evidence suggesting that some Muslim and Mexican immigrant drivers at DFW Airport may be operating as part of an organized network using multiple electronic devices, fraudulent driver accounts and GPS manipulation to control rideshare traffic.

    A veteran Uber driver said DFW’s airport queue displayed a wait of zero to 15 minutes, but he received no rides for more than 45 minutes. He said regular Uber requests resumed after he left the airport’s geofenced queue.

    DX documented drivers using multiple phones and tablets, vehicles with partially obscured plates, and one man denying that he had a work permit, green card or H-1B visa.

    Federal prosecutors have charged rideshare schemes involving fraudulent or rented accounts, GPS spoofing, bots and hacked phones that allowed drivers to enter airport queues while physically elsewhere. A separate November 25, 2025 DFW-area driver post alleged that phones were left inside a stationary vehicle to preserve queue positions.

    DX has not established that any specific driver filmed at DFW committed fraud. The investigation is examining whether coordinated drivers are manipulating the airport queue and diverting rides from other drivers.

  • The Final Boss of Crazy Cat Ladies: “Florida mail carrier accused of stealing 80 cats along her mail route and collecting them in her house. 80 cats were rescued from the home of Gail Giustino, 77, where there was a foot of poop.”
  • Life imitates Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. In Canada, “a missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months….Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name ‘fus__ro_dah’ (two underscores after “fus”), but they accidentally requested records for the username ‘fus_ro_dah’ (one underscore after ‘fus’). This one-character difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme.”

  • Victor Davis Hanson on Iran. He thinks Trump will skedaddle, leave the gulf states and Israeli in charge of keeping watch on the rubble, and set up a government in exile and give it access to Iran’s sequestered funds. Honestly, I should have thought of the government in exile bit for my Iran roundup earlier this month. 
  • File public information online? That’s a doxing.

    Dhillon Law Group has filed a federal lawsuit against Midland County Judge Terry Johnson on behalf of a citizen journalist who says he was retaliated against after posting records critical of Johnson.

    The suit alleges that Johnson responded the next day by posting Christino Rodriquez’ full name, Social Security number, date of birth, and driver’s license number to Facebook.

  • “Texas Threatens To Revoke Use of National Education Group’s Certification Over DEI Content.”

    In districts with a Teacher Incentive Allotment, educators receive additional funds from the state toward increasing those teachers’ salaries. Funding is provided to the district for teachers who achieve a recognized, exemplary, and master designation. At least 90 percent of the funding is required to be used for teacher compensation on the campus where the designated individual works.

    In order to comply with Texas law, the State Board for Educator Certification is requiring the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to remove “diversity, equity, and inclusion” training materials. Lawmakers have been concerned that materials produced by national board, which offers the National Board Certification, include politicized content.

    SBEC members voted last week for the national board to “make updates to materials to come into compliance with Texas state law” and “provide evidence of compliance to [Texas Education Agency] staff by November 2, 2026.”

    Few things get people’s attention quite so fast as cutting off money.

  • “BuzzFeed, HuffPost and Tasty to Lay Off 180 Staffers.”

  • “ICE Deports First Kenyan To Play In The NFL.” Just because he overstayed his visa! By ten years.
  • After decades of failed attempts to film it, an adaptation of William Gibson’s Neuromancer is finally coming to Apple TV.
  • BeardMeatsFood takes on a giant burger challenge in Slovenia. Can he do it in record time and win the sword through the burger?
  • News you can use: Which Supercars have beaten inflation? 
  • Critical Drinker reviews Clarkson’s Farm. 
  • Kate Perry imitates Spinal Tap.
  • “Trump Asks Democrats At Correspondents’ Dinner To Hold All Assassination Attempts Until He Finishes Speech.”
  • “Fauci Starting To Think That Maybe Keeping A Daily Perjury Diary Was A Bad Idea.”
  • “Fauci Asks China To Engineer New Virus That Just Kills Rand Paul.”
  • “Terrorists Feeling Dumb For Ramming Twin Towers When All They Had To Do Was Run For Mayor.”
  • “California DMV Worker Requests Interpreter To Assist Customer Who Speaks English.”
  • “Scholars: In Lieu Of Hell, Unbelieving Introverts Will Be Sent To A Business Networking Event That Lasts Forever.”
  • This is so stupid I couldn’t help laughing: “Mamdani Tries To Catch Netanyahu With Trap Labeled ‘Free Bagels.'”
  • New doggy wheelchair = happiness.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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





    Austin: Soros DA = 74% Higher Homicide Rate

    Thursday, July 23rd, 2026

    The difference between having a real DA who prosecutes criminals, and a Soros-backed DA who doesn’t is stark. While most of America was seeing a drop in murder rates, Austin under Soros-backed DA Jose Garza has seen murder rates rise by 74% since 2019.

    Amid a likely decrease in homicide rates across the nation, both Dallas and Austin have experienced an increase in homicides compared to last year, with Austin’s homicide rate for the first half of 2026 apparently 74 percent higher than in 2019, according to a new study released Thursday.

    Commissioned by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), the study examined patterns for 13 types of crime in 36 U.S. cities. It found that reported homicides appear to have dropped by 18 percent from the same period in 2025, and by 51 percent since the 2022 peak.

    “Murder and other crime rates are falling across the map, in cities with different political leadership, housing and economic conditions, policing and prosecution strategies, violence reduction models, and levels of federal enforcement activity,” said CCJ President and CEO Adam Gelb in a statement.

    Of the 30 cities reporting homicide rates, Arlington saw a decrease of 60 percent and Dallas saw an increase of 30 percent compared to the first half of 2025.

    What does Dallas have in common with Austin? A Soros-backed DA, in this case John Creuzot.

    CCJ also looked at longer trends and found that compared to 2019, there were 31 percent fewer reported homicides in the study cities in the first half of 2026, with some — such as Arlington — seeing drops of at least 50 percent or more, but Austin was among four cities that reported a higher rate.

    According to the study, four cities had homicide rates from January to June higher than in 2019: Austin at 74 percent; Norfolk, Virginia at 36 percent; Minneapolis, Minnesota at 26 percent; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at 4 percent.

    In addition to reduced policing after the #BlackLivesMatter riots, Minneapolis has a Soros-backed DA in Mary Moriarty. Norfolk is another city with a Soros-backed DA, Ramin Fatehi.

    Although Dallas’ homicide rate is trending higher over last year, compared to 2019, that city’s rate has dropped by 22 percent. Of the other Texas cities analyzed, since 2019, San Antonio dropped by 8 percent, Fort Worth by 26 percent, and Arlington by 60 percent.

    Snip.

    Austin and Travis County have drawn controversy over the past few years due to Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza’s allegedly lenient approach to the prosecution of crime. First elected in 2020, Garza has been accused of dropping or reducing charges in hundreds of criminal cases, and last year, Garza’s office reportedly failed to bring timely indictments for crimes that included violent felonies, leading to the dismissals of hundreds of cases.

    Earlier this year, Gov. Greg Abbott cited Garza in his call for new legislation to create a statewide prosecutor and a mechanism for removing “rogue” local prosecutors. A ,a href=”https://rightoncrime.com/going-rogue-how-radical-reformist-prosecutors-are-endangering-public-safety/”>study from the Texas Public Policy Foundation published in July also listed concerns over practices in Travis County.

    It matters a great deal whether your county has a DA who’s actually dedicated to fighting crime, or a soft-on-crime, Soros-backed DA who loves putting criminals back on the streets. And American citizens are paying for that difference with their lives.

    LinkSwarm For July 10, 2026

    Friday, July 10th, 2026

    Chinese commie money is helping fund American commie wins, Rapey McNazi drops out, Ukrainian drones feast on Russian ships and hit Russia’s largest oil refinery (among others), Labour wants to install Big Brother into YouTube, and a victory for right to repair. Plus: Trebuchet!

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Non-link summary of the state of Iran war: Bombing currently paused, but the ceasefire is over and, oh yeah, supposedly Iran is plotting to assassinate
    President Trump.

  • How tech and commie money-fueled anti-Israel PAC is funding the rise of socialism.

    One of the most consequential groups behind the surge of radical leftist candidates in New York’s and Colorado’s congressional primaries was a super PAC formed earlier this year, calling itself American Priorities. After filing with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in February of this year, the group pledged to spend more than $10 million during the 2026 midterms and declared that its goal, according to founder Hannah Fertig, was “to make sure that someone’s there to protect candidates who question these [pro-Israel] policies,” countering the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

    The group invested about $2 million in supporting Adam Hamawy, an Egyptian-born physician who has testified on behalf of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind sheikh convicted of seditious conspiracy for his part in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Thanks in part to the group’s generous contributions, Hamawy handily won the Democratic primary in New Jersey’s 12th District.

    American Priorities then spent an additional $2 million across the river in New York, contributing to the successful campaigns of Brad Lander, who unseated the incumbent, Congressman Dan Goldman, in a campaign focused largely on vilifying Israel, and Darializa Avila Chevalier, who unseated Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th District while doubling down on a host of controversial statements, from using the American flag as a napkin to supporting Hamas in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023. The super PAC also spent $150,000 on TV ads to help democratic socialist Melat Kiros win Colorado’s 1st District primary.

    Who, then, is behind American Priorities?

    Public reports reveal that the group’s two largest donors, by far, are Omer Hasan and Mohammad Waqas Javed, who were described in the press as former Silicon Valley executives who recently became involved in politics and about whom “little is publicly known.”

    But Hasan and Javed, as a simple web search reveals, are both alums of the same company, the mobile advertising and data company AppLovin, founded in 2012.

    The company’s path to becoming one of the world’s most highly valued ad tech companies is highly unorthodox. According to The Economist, for example, the company’s share price has climbed more than 30-fold between 2022 and 2025, an astonishing feat for any company but particularly for one that, for years, wallowed in obscurity in the murky waters of app-monetization solutions.

    In 2018, six years after it was launched, the company introduced a mobile-gaming publishing arm. “The result,” explained ad tech analyst Rio Longacre, “was a self-reinforcing flywheel: more games meant more first-party data, which fueled better optimization, which in turn strengthened both the AdTech stack and the company’s foothold in the gaming ecosystem.” Which, naturally, also raised considerable concerns: AppLovin was now both running the advertising platform and selling inventory, which inspired many critics to strongly doubt the validity of the numbers it was reporting.

    But the company’s growth—and the vehemence of its critics—grew far more exponentially in 2022, when it pivoted away from being primarily a gaming company to “an AdTech company powered by AI-driven performance optimization,” a giant de facto machine learning operation. The company’s many detractors, Longacre noted, now charged it with “money flowing between entities the public can’t fully scrutinize, creating the illusion of third-party demand when some of it may simply be internal recycling. They also highlight the quality of traffic inside the system, pointing to patterns that resemble click-farm-adjacent behavior—bursts of installs from low-value regions, strange retention curves, and activity that seems optimized more for algorithmic signaling than real user engagement.”

    To assess the validity of these claims, it helps to know who AppLovin partners with. In 2016, the company agreed to be bought by Orient Hontai Capital, a state-backed Chinese private equity firm. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency government body dedicated to monitoring the national security implications of large-scale business transactions, objected, and the deal was subsequently amended.

    The Chinese connection, however, was far from over: One of the company’s largest investors is one Hao Tang, who, according to regulatory filings in 2025, owned 3.2% of AppLovin, valued at roughly $4.6 billion. Other reports claim that Tang controls, through shell companies, at least 9.8% of Class A shares, making him the company’s largest individual shareholder beside AppLovin’s CEO, Adam Foroughi, who told Fox News in April, when AppLovin was trying to acquire TikTok’s non-Chinese assets, that he remains the largest shareholder.

    Snip.

    At the moment, $2 million of American Priorities’ war chest comes from Hasan and Javed (an additional $500,000 came from another former AppLovin team member, Tariq Afaq Ahmed, according to FEC filings). As attention on both the left and the right continues to focus on AIPAC and its alleged impact on American politics, it’s worth noticing that the most prominent PAC on the scene right now is funded primarily by two veterans of a shady tech colossus with strong links to China and repeated allegations of ties to the Communist Party in Beijing.

  • “Graham Platner Formally Withdraws from Maine Senate Race Following Sexual Assault Allegation.” “Democrats will now have until 5 p.m. July 27 to name their replacement candidate.”
  • Democrats didn’t care that Platner was a nasty Nazi communist rapist, they only cared that he looked like he was going to lose. (Hat tip: Charlie Martin at Instapundit.)
  • New Report on ‘Rogue’ District Attorneys in Texas Calls for Reforms at State Level.”

    A new analysis from a Texas think tank found a correlation between district attorneys’ non-prosecution policies and increases in crime, but with few state options for addressing so-called “rogue” prosecutors, the group suggests that Texas lawmakers should consider reforms next year.

    Ross Jackson, a senior policy analyst for Right on Crime at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said he has been researching the issue since last fall.

    “There are correlations that are particularly evident in Austin and Minneapolis and some other cities around the country and it’s more evident in cities and counties where there hasn’t historically been a huge crime rate like in Austin,” Jackson told The Texan.

    According to Jackson’s report, Austin experienced one of the most dramatic surges in violent and property crimes in recent years, which saw the city’s homicide rate climb by over 60 percent between 2016 and 2024.

    Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza, who was first elected in 2020, has been accused of dropping or reducing charges in hundreds of criminal cases, including one in which an appeals court had called for a new trial. Last year, Garza’s office reportedly failed to bring timely indictments for crimes that included violent felonies, leading to the dismissals of hundreds of cases.

    Attempts to remove Garza through House Bill (HB) 17, a state law enacted in 2023, have failed, and he has ignored calls for his resignation over mishandled cases. Jackson noted that HB 17 is limited to removing district attorneys who officially adopt non-prosecution policies in conflict with state law, and does not apply to those who adopt informal policies or internal guidance.

    Jackson noted that some proposed legislative remedies face high hurdles.

    The policy solutions examined by Jackson include mechanisms to discipline or remove district attorneys, as well as avenues for prosecuting serious crimes when the local district attorney or a county prosecuting attorney fails to do so.

    One possibility suggested by Jackson is creation of a new state commission to provide oversight and administer discipline. The model he suggested is based on the state’s former Prosecuting Attorneys Coordinating Council that operated between 1977 and 1983. While state lawmakers could create such a council through statute, Jackson noted that an amendment to the Texas Constitution would be needed to allow the council to remove district attorneys.

    Constitutional amendments require the support of two thirds of both chambers of the Legislature, which usually requires bipartisan support, as well as approval by voters in a statewide election.

    Jackson also noted that state lawmakers could give authority to the State Commission on Judicial Conduct to discipline rogue prosecutors, but giving it a removal mechanism would also likely require a constitutional amendment.

    One possibility for prosecuting cases dropped by prosecutors would be to give that power to the Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG). Under a 2021 Texas Criminal Court of Appeals opinion, the OAG may only prosecute cases referred by a local district attorney or county attorney.

    “Unless the Court reverses their decision, giving the OAG that authority would definitely require a constitutional amendment,” said Jackson. “I think that would be the most difficult option legislatively, just given the partisan nature of that position. I don’t see many crossover voters on something like that.”

    Other options include creating a state prosecutor or creating five new regional district attorneys, each anchored in one of Texas’ urban areas.

    Jackson says that lawmakers appear to have the authority to create a state prosecutor or regional district attorneys through statute, but the regional approach may also require a constitutional amendment and may necessitate the creation of new courts — a more costly option for taxpayers.

    Earlier this year, Gov. Greg Abbott cited Garza’s history as Travis County’s district attorney in his call for new legislation to create a statewide prosecutor and a mechanism for removing rogue prosecutors. Texas Sen. Mayes Middleton (R-Galveston), now the GOP nominee for state attorney general, has also voiced support for a statewide prosecutor.

    In addition to Garza, Jackson’s report identified concerns over district attorney policies in both Bexar and Dallas counties. In Bexar County, District Attorney Joe Gonzales gave local law enforcement officers the option to issue tickets for certain “drug, theft, and traffic misdemeanors in lieu of jail time,” and Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot announced that he would no longer pursue charges against “low-level, first-time drug offenders.” Cruezot rescinded a previous policy in 2022 of declining to prosecute low-level theft.

  • “113 Active Spies From Foreign Countries Arrested.”

    The FBI has arrested 113 active spies from foreign nations, agency director Kash Patel said on Wednesday.

    The arrests of foreign spies “means our tech stays home and our defense secrets stay locked down,” a video shared by Patel on X said. “But the FBI didn’t stop there. They forced 62 removals of Chinese spies in 2026 alone.”

    The video added that this has shattered the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) deep cover operations against the United States.

    The House Committee on Homeland Security released a report in February 2025 detailing multiple cases of espionage conducted by the CCP in the United States since 2021.

    The cases, spread across 20 U.S. states, involved the transmission of sensitive military information to Beijing, stealing trade secrets to benefit the regime, transnational repression schemes targeting Chinese dissidents, and obstruction of justice. Every 12 hours, the FBI opened new cases to counter Beijing’s intelligence operations, according to the report.

    The report noted that the CCP’s theft of U.S. intellectual property amounts to roughly $4,000 to $6,000 annually per American family of four after paying taxes.

    In one prominent case, a senior adviser to the State Department was arrested in October 2025, accused of taking thousands of top-secret documents and meeting with Chinese officials. The individual allegedly downloaded and saved documents related to U.S. fighter jets and weapons capabilities.

    On Jan. 12 this year, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that a former U.S. Navy sailor was sentenced to 200 months in prison for spying for Beijing.

    The person had access to sensitive national defense information about the amphibious assault ship U.S.S. Essex, such as its weapons, propulsion, and desalination systems. These ships are a “cornerstone of the U.S. Navy’s amphibious readiness and expeditionary strike capabilities,” according to the DOJ statement. The sailor sold critical information to a Chinese intelligence officer for $12,000.

    More recently, on June 4, the DOJ announced that a U.S. citizen pleaded guilty to acting as an agent for China. The man, who lived in China, would travel to the United States to meet with individuals who could provide him, and ultimately the Chinese Ministry of State Security, with important information.

  • Finally: “Vance announces investigation into alleged H-1B visa fraud.”

    Vice President JD Vance announced Wednesday that the Trump administration has opened an investigation into allegations of fraud within the H-1B visa program, which allows foreign workers to legally work in the United States on a temporary basis.

    The visas allow U.S. companies to hire high-skilled foreign workers to serve in occupations such as healthcare, technology and education, while critics argued big businesses use the program to import cheap labor to replace Americans.

    “Big corporations and fraudsters overseas are using this program to undercut the wages of American workers,” Vance said in a speech in Milwaukee. “If you are trying to take advantage of that visa program, you are not allowed into the United States.”

    President Donald Trump tapped Vance as his “fraud czar” in early April. Since his appointment, he has overseen major fraud busts across the nation, including against allegedly fraudulent hospices in Los Angeles and other operations in Minneapolis and Maine.

    Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito said the administration is also investigating alleged fraud in the Permanent Labor Certification visa process, and that investigators have already begun to issue dozens of subpoenas in relation to the probe.

    “This is another example where fraud is fueling violent crime,” D’Esposito told Fox Business. “Much of the visa and the human trafficking that we see when it comes to this foreign labor is tied to cartels, is tied to transnational gangs, and this is the work that we should be doing, not only to make America safe again, but to make America more affordable again.”

    I hope they take a close look at Microsoft. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Big Drone Strike On St. Petersburg Oil Terminal: Multiple Impacts.”
  • “Ukrainian Drones Hit Omsk Refinery! Russia’s Largest! Su-57’s Deployed in Defence!” As I’ve said before, if they can hit Omsk, they should target the Transiberian railway bridge over the Irtysh river.
  • “Ukraine Hits TWO Oil Refineries: Nizhnekamsk Oil Refinery and Saratov Oil Refinery.”
  • “Big HIMARS Strike on Belgorod: Fuel at Airport, Powerplant and Gas Pipeline All Hit.”
  • Ukraine hits ten power substations in Crimea.
  • And 13 more! “This makes 48 ships hit in four days.” (More. Still more.)
  • “Ukraine Shoots Down Su-35 With Top Russian Pilot: Possibly Air-To-Air
  • “Russian MiG-29 Hit by Drone At Belbek Air Base in Crimea.”
  • Moscow oil refinery on fire again. Not clear it’s actually a Ukrainian attack.
  • Last Russian infiltrators cleared from Kharkiv.
  • Heh: “If you have a VPN, you can edit in real time the status of gas stations in Russia.”
  • “Cuba’s Entire Power Grid Collapses As Castro’s Grandson Seeks Talks With Trump.”

    Hours after USA Today published an interview between one of its journalists and Cuban President Castro’s grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, the communist-run island experienced an island-wide power grid collapse.

    The electrical workers’ union said the entire power grid went offline and that officials were investigating the cause. Cuba’s energy ministry confirmed the blackout and said crews were working to restore service.

    “A total disconnection of the National Electric Power System is occurring. The causes are being investigated,” the electrical workers’ union wrote on X.

    And that was the first blackout. It just blacked out again today…

  • Spencer Pratt on how how commies erase history and memories.
  • “Soros Continues To Pump Money Into Efforts To Turn Texas Blue. George Soros funds the Texas Majority PAC, which is supporting a left-wing slate for the 2026 election cycle.”

    According to Transparency USA, Soros has already funneled over $1 million into the Texas Majority PAC. The federal American Bridge PAC, long aligned with Soros, has contributed $7.57 million to the Texas Majority PAC.

    The Soros family has poured a staggering $103 million nationwide into the 2026 election cycle so far.

    The Texas Majority PAC exists to turn Texas into a blue state by electing Democrats to statewide offices.

    Snip.

    Texas Gun Rights is warning that Texas Majority PAC-backed candidates, including James Talarico, Gina Hinojosa, Vikki Goodwin, Nathan Johnson, Sarah Eckhardt, Jon Rosenthal, and Clayton Tucker, support radical anti-gun policies such as red flag laws, raising the age to purchase guns, gun-registration schemes, and the outright banning and seizure of common semi-automatic firearms.

    “Soros and his allies are not investing millions in Texas because they think this is a lost cause. They are doing it because they believe Texas can be flipped,” warned Texas Gun Rights President Chris McNutt.

  • “Abbott Appoints Comptroller Candidate Don Huffines to Fill Outgoing Hancock’s Unexpired Term.” Huffines ran against Abbott for the 2022 Republican gubernatorial nomination.
  • “Texas Ban on In-State Tuition for Illegals Upheld by Federal Court.”

    A federal appellate court has upheld an agreement between Texas and the Trump administration ending in-state tuition for illegal aliens in compliance with federal law.

    The Texas Dream Act, enacted in 2001, formerly allowed qualifying illegal alien students to pay in-state tuition rates at public colleges and universities.

    In June 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the State of Texas, arguing that federal law preempted the Texas Dream Act.

    According to the suit, federal law preempts any state rules that grant illegal aliens benefits not afforded to all U.S. citizens. The Texas Dream Act did this because U.S. citizens from outside the state were forced to pay higher rates than the qualifying aliens.

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ultimately agreed with the DOJ, settling the case.

  • “Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar Faces Removal Bid Amid Federal Fraud Case. The lawsuit seeks Martin Cuellar’s removal following his federal indictment on fraud and money laundering charges tied to an alleged COVID-era disinfecting scheme.”

    Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar, the brother of Democrat U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, faces a state court hearing Thursday as proceedings move forward in an effort to remove him from office while he awaits trial on federal fraud and money laundering charges.

    A docket control conference is set for 9 a.m. in the 49th District Court in the case seeking Cuellar’s removal under Chapter 87 of the Texas Local Government Code.

    The removal petition was filed in May by former Laredo City Councilman Alfonso “Poncho” Casso, who alleges Cuellar committed official misconduct based on the conduct underlying a federal criminal indictment returned last year.

    According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Cuellar conspired with former Webb County Sheriff’s Office Assistant Chief Ricardo Rodriguez and others to operate a private disinfecting business during the COVID-19 pandemic using sheriff’s office employees, equipment, and other county resources.

    Federal prosecutors allege the business, Disinfect Pro Master, secured a $500,000 contract to disinfect schools in the United Independent School District while relying almost entirely on sheriff’s office personnel and supplies to perform the work.

    Coverage of the federal charges here.

  • The Republican heads of the Texas Senate and House are teaming up to support ibogaine research.

    Texas lawmakers are continuing to push for advancements in state-led ibogaine research, following an executive order from President Donald Trump.

    Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows sent a letter this week to the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston (UTHealth Houston), University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), and Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC).

    The letter refers to Senate Bill (SB) 2308, passed in the 89th Legislature, which created a state-sponsored consortium for the purpose of conducting research and clinical trials into ibogaine, a naturally occurring psychoactive compound. The drug is being studied for its potential benefit for those suffering from traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, and other mental health conditions.

    However, as the letter affirms, no proposals set forth by pharmaceutical companies met the standards required for the state to move forward with clinical trials.

    Patrick and Burrows commented on the lack of readiness to proceed: “This should not preclude the State of Texas from independently proceeding with this vital work through our university research partners as spelled out in the March 31 press release from both the House and Senate.”

    The press release in reference announced Texas’ allocation of $50 million toward research into the drug.

  • YouTube warns that the Labour government wants censor creators by algorithm.

    American video-sharing platform YouTube told users in Britain that, under pressure from the left-wing Labour Party government, independent creators will likely see their content suppressed.

    The British government has been accused of attempting to silence political opposition, with YouTube telling UK creators that proposed new rules would include a “prominence regime” that would force sites like YouTube to give a “privileged position” to the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and other legacy media.

    The notice said that artificially propping up establishment media would naturally result in independent media being downranked and obscured from view, as “pushing this group forward means pushing everyone else downward. Mandatory prioritisation of broadcasters would affect how your content reaches your audience, regardless of what your audience actually wants to see.”

    “Mandating prominence for established media networks would push the UK’s diverse mix of independent journalists, educators, and digital-first businesses down the line,” YouTube added.

    Snip.

    The government is said to have told the site that legacy broadcasters had the “trust” of the state to provide accurate reporting, which YouTube noted implies that “digital-first voices are less credible, damaging the foundational trust that sustains the creator economy.”

    Translation: Labour to suppress coverage of Muslim rape gangs and anything else that makes it look bad.

    This comes despite the BBC recently facing significant scandals involving the accuracy of its reporting, including last year when it was forced to apologise to U.S. President Trump after a documentary produced by the public broadcaster deceptively spliced together different sections of his speech on January 6th 2021, to falsely give the impression that he had encouraged supporters to riot, when he did the exact opposite.

    Just last month, the BBC was also forced to issue an apology to Brexit leader Nigel Farage after one of its presenters fabricated fictitious quotes from the Reform UK leader in the wake of the killing of handcuffed teen Henry Nowak.

    Commenting on the notice from YouTube, Mr Farage said: “Look at this appalling state censorship. Labour now want to seize control of YouTube’s algorithm. They want YouTube to artificially boost the BBC and Channel 4’s content, and suffocate independent journalists and producers.

    “The BBC has been biased to pro-mass migration, open borders, and Net Zero views these past few decades. It’s part of the reason we’re in a mess. The BBC’s own internal reports admit and document some of this bias.

    “People have moved to X and YouTube in part as a response to it. And now, Labour want to control what they see there? Reform will scrap this heavy handed lunacy.”

    Insert your own 1984 reference here.

  • UK Health Secretary flips on tranny madness.

    Listen to this extraordinary exchange between [GB News Broadcaster] Camilla Tominey and Labour’s Health Secretary James Murray. It is genuinely jaw-dropping.

    Camilla: “You’re quite pro-trans, aren’t you? Do you think a woman can have a penis? Because you did previously?”

    Murray: “No, I don’t.”

    Camilla: “So you’ve changed your mind?”

    Murray: “Yes.”

    Camilla: “Why?”

    Murray stumbles. He says he’s been thinking about the issue over recent years and would not now say trans women are women.

    The Labour Party is in many ways more loony than the Democrats. If tranny madness has broken there, maybe it’s finally receding globally.

  • “Nigel Farage, leader of Britain’s Reform UK party, said Tuesday he is resigning as the member of Parliament for Clacton to trigger a by-election in the Essex constituency, which he intends to contest as the party’s candidate.”
  • Speaking of the UK, former Tory and current Reform MP Ann Widdecombe was murdered in her home. Police have a 26 year old man in custody.
  • “ICE Agent Fatally Shot Man During Houston Operation in Self-Defense. Federal officials say a Mexican national used his truck as a weapon during a Magnolia Park enforcement operation before an ICE agent shot him.” Magnolia Park is an old Houston neighborhood southeast of downtown along Buffalo Bayou.

    The man has been identified as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

    According to the Department of Homeland Security, ICE agents attempted to stop Salgado Araujo’s vehicle around 6:50 a.m. in the 6800 block of Canal Street. DHS said Salgado Araujo rammed an ICE vehicle, ignored multiple verbal commands and used his vehicle in an attempt to run over an agent, who then fired his weapon in self-defense. Three other people were detained during the stop.

    Salgado Araujo suffered a gunshot wound to his abdomen, according to the Houston Fire Department, and was taken to Ben Taub Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

    Two separate federal investigations are now underway. The FBI’s Houston field office is investigating a possible assault on a federal officer, while the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General is reviewing the shooting itself.

    Houston police said they have no role in the case and referred questions to federal authorities.

  • “Texas Stock Exchange Has Officially Begun Trading. TXSE officially opened its doors to begin trading on Monday.​”

    Based in Dallas, TXSE began its phased rollout in July. The firm’s launch comes as major financial institutions, including BlackRock and Citadel Securities, have invested over $120 million in the new exchange since 2024. The exchange gained federal approval last year and attracted investment from several other firms, bringing total investment to more than $275 million.

    TXSE opened its doors at 8:30 a.m. on Monday morning to approved brokers, banks, and trading firms. For now, brokers are trading only test stocks. Thousands of symbols, such as TSLA (Tesla), will come online in July, with an announcement to precede it. That rollout will officially allow the public to trade stocks on the exchange.

    TXSE officials also hope to have exchange-traded products, or ETPs, trading by the end of the third quarter. ETPs allow investors to gain exposure to a wide variety of investment products, such as oil or the S&P 500.

    While all trading is primarily done through electronic mediums, exchange locations still matter because brokers predominantly invest in local businesses. TXSE has the ingredients for success, including a large number of Fortune 500 companies that have recently relocated to Texas and a rapidly growing financial district in Dallas.

    Stockbrokers tend to make a fair bit of money, and Dallas will enjoy some second order economic benefits from having the exchange there.

  • The enemy within.

    At just 16 years old, Calla Walsh was celebrated by the New York Times as part of an “influential new force in Democratic politics” for her work on the campaigns of Senator Ed Markey (D., Mass) and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.)

    But six years on, Walsh is making headlines again for a much different reason: She recently appeared in an Iranian state-media interview calling the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei the “greatest anti-imperialist leader” of her lifetime.

    Walsh, now a 22-year-old full-time resident of Lebanon, has descended from a progressive wunderkind to a radical who has been placed on a suspicious persons watch list by the U.S. government for her “expansive dealings with the governments of Cuba and Iran … as well as a spiderweb of U.S.-designated terrorist groups,” according to the Free Press.

    “He was a leader to all people of the world who struggle against imperialism, arrogance, against Zionism, against genocide,” Walsh said of Khamenei while speaking with Iran’s PressTV about her attendance at his funeral Saturday.

    Snip.

    At just 14, she knocked on doors in Cambridge to encourage residents to support a bill that would prohibit “gender-identity-based discrimination” in public places. One year later, she helped coordinate thousands of young protesters for an international “climate strike” at Boston’s City Hall. At 17, she served as one of the youngest delegates at the Democratic Socialist of America’s National Convention. That same year, the Boston Globe called her a “force in the world of climate activism.”

    She volunteered for Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign and also helped Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s campaign.

    She received significant notoriety for her efforts in the “Markeyverse” in 2020, an online Gen Z–led movement credited with helping the incumbent senator secure a 2020 primary win over then–Representative Joe Kennedy III. “The Markeyverse carried out a devastating political maneuver, firmly fixing the idea of Senator Markey as a left-wing icon,” the Times reported.

    She went on to hold several other roles in Democratic politics: She served as communications director for Massachusetts state house candidate Jordan Meehan, and she did digital-media work for Boston City Councilor Julia Mejia’s reelection campaign in 2021. She also worked as a regional organizer and strategist for Act on Mass, a progressive nonprofit.

    But the candidates she was working to elect were falling short of her increasingly radical politics. Just two months after she helped to secure Markey’s reelection, she was already protesting outside his office, according to the Free Press. She partnered with CodePink and The People’s Forum to protest the senator’s support for a bill to increase U.S. defense spending in East Asia.

    The makings of her radicalization were beginning to fall in place as early as 2021, when she was invited to Cuba at just 17 years old. She then visited the country four times between 2022 and 2024.

    By the end of 2021, Walsh announced her exit from the Democratic Party and electoral politics. She explained that she’d been disappointed by Markey in the aftermath of his reelection win and that she’d learned that no party or candidate could spur the revolutionary change she wanted — it might be achieved only by “direct action, protest, and internationalist solidarity.”

    Soon after, she posted a Me Too account of an inappropriate relationship she had with a 27-year-old campaign field director in Massachusetts when she was just 16. She and the older man had sexually explicit conversations during a yearlong relationship that included in-person meetings but did not involve sex.

    “Most of the interactions I have with men and adults I work with in politics are tainted by my trauma and fears of being sexually exploited again,” she wrote.

    Funny how you meet so many scumbags in Democrat politics.

    In addition to her trips to Cuba, Walsh also notably appeared in Chinese state-media propaganda videos in 2022 to criticize then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for leading a congressional delegation to Taiwan. Walsh was involved, at least for a time, with CodePink and The People’s Forum which are led by Neville Roy Singham and his wife, Jodie Evans, who are both under investigation for their suspected ties to Chinese intelligence services.

    Her trips to Cuba ultimately led to her introduction to Fergie Chambers, a Marxist organizer and millionaire heir to the Cox Communications empire. Walsh met Chambers, who is 20 years her senior, at a 2022 conference in Cuba. That meeting seemed to supercharge her extremism.

    Democrat, liberal, progressive, social justice warrior, radical, extremist, socialist, communist, terrorist. It’s funny how, say, 40 years ago, these were distinct categories, but now it’s an ever tightening Venn diagram of extremism. What’s the line between a “progressive” and an “extremist”? The first time they assault a Jew?

    We previously covered Walsh’s pro-Ayatollah policies here.

  • Important safety note for Windows users: Microsoft’s GDID can track you even if you use a VPN.
  • A victory for right to repair: “FTC chairman announces settlement with John Deere to let farmers fix their own equipment again.”

    The Federal Trade Commission, along with five states, secured an important settlement in an antitrust lawsuit against farm equipment manufacturer Deere & Company that will ensure farmers can enjoy the right to repair their own John Deere tractors and farm equipment.

    For the next decade, Deere will be required to give farmers and independent repair shops “the same equipment repair resources, including applicable software capabilities” as its stealerships – err, dealerships.

    ‘Today’s settlement enables farmers to do what they’ve done for generations — fix their own tractors and other farm equipment — without having to pay an authorized John Deere dealer to do it for them,’ said FTC Bureau of Competition Director Daniel Guarnera. ‘The settlement with Deere will help lower costs for American farmers. The FTC will continue fighting against anticompetitive restrictions on American consumers’ right to repair.’

  • “Maryland man’s truck was stolen while he was busy burglarizing a Verizon store.”
  • Tim Scott helps fire a trebuchet.

  • “Dems Wishing There Had Been Some Sort Of Sign That Platner Was A Bad Person.”
  • “Democrats Quietly Add ‘Have You Raped Anyone?’ To Questionnaire For Aspiring Candidates.”
  • “Embattled Platner Flees To Argentina.”
  • Run free, happy dog:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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





    Commie Jihadis On The Grassy Knoll

    Wednesday, June 10th, 2026

    It used to be that Fifth Columnists funded by foreign interests operated from the shadows, holding clandestine meetings while trying to undermine the nation. Today, however, Islamist organizations linked to both communist China and global Jihad networks openly proclaim their hatred for the United States right here in Texas.

    A Texas Islamist network working to radicalize Shia Muslim students at educational institutions across the state, including Texas public universities, is made up of agents and proxies for the murderous Iranian regime.

    In March, the Iranian regime and its proxies across the world organized “Al-Quds Day,” a global annual event to celebrate Hezbollah and Iranian revolutionary ideals. Several Western governments expressed alarm, with British minister Sarah Sackman, a Labour Party politician, describing Al Quds as a dangerous expression of support for the “malign regime in Iran and the [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] and its proxies.”

    Al Quds Day events have taken place across Texas for many years, relying on a network of Shia student organizations and their backers.

    In Dallas, Shia Islamist students and youth activists protested in support of the Iranian regime on the Grassy Knoll, coordinated by two North Texas Khomeinist organizations: DFW Shias for Justice and the Ahlul-Bayt Student Association (ABSA) at the University of Texas Dallas.

    It’s a good thing communist-backed individuals never committed heinous crimes in that part of Dallas before…

    In a direct response to U.S. conflict with Iran, the Ahlul-Bayt Student Association has published calls for the “ummah [Muslims across the globe] to unify against our common enemy … the United States.”

    Are any of those participating naturalized American citizens? If so, declaring that the United States is “your enemy” should be cause for denaturalization. After all, didn’t they swear to “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen”?

    DFW Shias for Justice has, in response to a slideshow of designated terrorists from Hezbollah, Hamas and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), expressed hope that “the blood of the martyrs … will be avenged. The Zionist entity will be no more by next Eid.”

    The North Texas Al Quds Day protests also received the backing of domestic far-Left activists tied to the Chinese Communist Party, as well as the Texas branch of a Sunni Islamist organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which the governor of Texas has designated as a terrorist organization.

    CAIR used to show up regularly back when I was doing a regular This Week In Jihad roundup.

    In Houston, the Al Quds Day protest was spearheaded by RISE Against Oppression, a Houston-based “collective of Muslim grassroots activists” involved in pro-Hamas student encampment protests in 2024.

    RISE calls on Muslims to “awaken,” “impose Islamic laws,” and warns that “Islam and the teachings of the Quran should prevail in all countries. … it should advance on all regions of the world.”

    The Al Quds event was also promoted by the University of Houston’s Ahlul Bayt Student Organization, along with far-Left China-linked organizations such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

    You may remember the Party for Socialism and Liberation from such hits as “let’s try to mostly peacefully burn down Los Angeles.”

    Footage from the Houston rally revealed Iranian regime rhetoric and praise for Iran’s late Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who earlier this year ordered the murder of tens of thousands of Iranian protesters, and was responsible for the murder of many hundreds of Americans.

    One speaker at the 2026 Houston Al-Quds Day, Muzzamil Zaidi, is a prominent regime advocate, who in in 2020 was the subject of a federal investigation in which the Department of Justice stated that Zaidi and his coconspirators “have considerable operational links to the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps],” a U.S-designated terrorist organization. In 2024, Zaidi and the other defendants pleaded guilty “for their roles in an illicit scheme to collect tens of thousands of dollars from the United States to Iran, including in the name of Ayatollah Ali Husseini Khamenei.”

    Given the conflict with Iran, shouldn’t we be reviewing all jihad-friendly NGOs and suspending or dissolving those with ties to the IRGC?

    RISE, the University of Houston Ahlul Bayt Student Organization, and Muslim Congress (a Khomeinist organization which assists with the organization of Al Quds Day events across the United States) all operate out of the Islamic Education Center of Houston, a leading radical Shia mosque in the city.

    While the Islamic Education Center serves as an important base for Shia students in Houston, the mosque’s imam is reportedly “directly appointed by the office of [Iran’s] Supreme Leader.” And in 2022, the mosque filmed a performance by school-age children at the mosque, in which they pledged allegiance to Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, singing: “[Khamenei] is calling on his children, his soldiers… In spite of my age, I will be your army’s commander…May my father and mother be sacrificed for you, I will sacrifice everything for you…”

    Shouldn’t pledging allegiance to a foreign leader count as cause for losing your religious tax-exempt status?

    Several national Khomeinist organizations partner with student members of the Ahlul Bayt network. The Texas-registered Camp Arafah, for instance, organizes retreats for student activists across the country. In a possible violation of U.S. Treasury sanctions, Camp Arafah claims to collect khums [a Shia tithe] on behalf of the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, an act for which it must have expressly secured an ijazah [license] from Khamenei’s office. Camp Arafah instructors include Iranian-trained operatives and clerics, such as Samira Rizvi, a University of Houston graduate who moved to the regime’s clerical base in Qom in 2012.

    Other Shia student graduates in Texas have founded new mosques in the state, including the Islamic Ahlul Bayt Association mosque in Austin. The Austin mosque’s imam, Jafar Muhibullah, studied at the Iranian regime’s flagship seminary in Qom, later receiving a doctorate from the University of Tehran. In a presentation for a regime-controlled media outlet in Iran, Muhibullah praises the “victory of the Islamic revolution in 1979.” In sermons, Muhibullah refers to “our leader [Iranian Supreme Leader] Ayatollah Khamenei.”

    That’s the mosque that’s less than a mile from my house.

    All NGOs with communist and jihadist ties should be enjoying deep forensic audits to ensure they have no ties to international terrorist and jihadist organizations. And those that do should be sued and dissolved for breaking the law.

    And while natural born American citizens have the First Amendment right to spout off stupid political opinions, it doesn’t mean that people here on visas or green cards have the same right.

    Let a thousand (more) deporations bloom.

    (Hat tip: Texas Scorecard.)

    LinkSwarm for May 22, 2026

    Friday, May 22nd, 2026

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

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Well done Gavin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

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

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

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

    Yeah, that lottery win was suspicious as hell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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





    Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend!

    Houston, Dallas And Austin Cave On ICE

    Sunday, April 26th, 2026

    When last we checked, Democrat-controlled Houston was ready to cave on their anti-ICE police guidelines under the pressure of having the state withhold $110 million for their scofflaw ways. Now we have the follow-up: Houston, Dallas and Austin all caved.

    Texas’ two largest cities have revised their police department policies after Gov. Greg Abbott warned that limitations on law enforcement cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would jeopardize millions in public safety grant funds, while Austin has been granted a deadline extension.

    Earlier this week, Houston’s City Council voted 13 to 4 to amend an April 8 ordinance that kept police from waiting for federal agents to take custody of a suspect with an ICE administrative warrant. But Abbott warned that afternoon that restoration of $114 million in grant funding to the city would depend on how the Houston Police Department (HPD) implemented the changes.

    On Thursday, HPD issued a new directive that requires a sergeant to come to the scene if a suspect has an ICE administrative warrant but no other criminal warrants. Sergeants then “should authorize the officer to wait a reasonable amount of time to enable the [ICE] agent to obtain custody of the individual,” but may not transport “any individual that solely has an administrative warrant from ICE.”

    “The amended ordinance reaffirms the Fourth Amendment and allows us to recover $114 million in state public safety funding,” Mayor John Whitmire said in a statement Thursday. “I thank the 12 council members who supported this change and understood the consequences. These funds are critical in continuing to make public safety our highest priority, including preparation for the FIFA World Cup.”

    I’m disappointed that Houston will is spending taxpayer money to enable the un-American evil that is soccer.

    The Dallas Police Department also revised policies this week so that officers are not prohibited from inquiring about the immigration status of a detained or arrested person, cooperating with or assisting federal agencies “as reasonable or necessary,” or “sharing the person’s immigration status with federal authorities.”

    Last week, Abbott’s office had warned Austin, Dallas, and Houston that their policies limiting police cooperation with ICE breached signed agreements to receive the grant funds. Austin stood to lose $2.5 million, while Dallas faced a loss of $32.5 million, plus another $55 million aimed at security enhancements for the upcoming FIFA World Cup.

    Abbott’s press secretary, Andrew Mahaleris, responded to Dallas’ revisions, “Governor Abbott has been clear: cities in Texas must fully comply with state law and cooperate with federal immigration authorities to keep dangerous criminals off our streets.”

    “The City of Dallas recently submitted amendments to the Dallas Police Department’s General Orders, which the Governor’s Public Safety Office is currently reviewing,” Mahaleris said in a statement to The Texan. “As the City has begun making changes to meet the Governor’s expectations that its policies require full cooperation with DHS, the Public Safety Office has extended the deadline for complying with the certification and will continue to engage with the City. Governor Abbott will continue to use every necessary tool to protect Texans.”

    While the governor’s office has affirmed that Houston’s revised policy follows the grant agreements, Mahaleris said Dallas’ revisions are under review. The city has until Monday to have its policy approved.

    Dallas Police Chief Daniel C. Comeaux released a statement Thursday noting that while his department is not responsible for immigration enforcement, “[W]e have the responsibility to operate fully within the law and ensure compliance with our legal requirements.”

    Austin announced policy revisions on Friday afternoon, and Abbott’s office has approved the changes and will allow the city to keep public safety grants.

    “The Austin Police Department has updated its policies to ensure its personnel will cooperate with DHS. The funding hold is now lifted, and the Governor expects full contract compliance moving forward. Governor Abbott will continue to use every necessary tool to protect Texans,” Mahaleris told The Texan.

    (That bit of Austin news was an update to the story, which explains the discrepancy with the first paragraph.)

    Given how fervently Democrats seem to love illegal alien felons imported during the Biden Administration, you would think blue cities would resist more when asked to cooperate with ICE to deport them. But given who quickly they bent the knee over Abbott’s funding threats, it seems the one thing they love more is money.