Here’s a bit of news that was too large to shoehorn into yesterday’s LinkSwarm: “Feds Charge Sinaloa’s Governor, Senator, Mayor, & Other Top Officials With Running A Narco-State.”
Federal prosecutors in New York have charged ten current and former senior Mexican government officials — among them the sitting governor of Sinaloa, a sitting federal senator, the mayor of the state capital, and the state’s former secretary of public security — with conspiring to protect the Sinaloa Cartel’s most powerful faction in exchange for millions of dollars in drug money, in what may be the most sweeping corruption indictment ever brought against a sitting government in the Western Hemisphere.
For those unfamiliar with Mexican geography, Sinaloa is a state on the Pacific coast in central Mexico that extends from the Gulf of California to a little south past where the Baja peninsula ends.
The superseding indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York and unsealed Wednesday, charges all ten defendants with narcotics importation conspiracy — specifically, conspiracy to flood the United States with fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine — as well as conspiracy to possess machineguns and destructive devices in furtherance of drug trafficking.
One defendant, a municipal police commander, faces additional charges of kidnapping resulting in death: the alleged abduction and murder of a Drug Enforcement Administration confidential source, his relative, and a 13-year-old boy, carried out using a police patrol car.
The document does not describe a cartel that corrupted a government. It describes a government that became the cartel’s operating infrastructure.
In what appears to be the first instance in American legal history of the Justice Department indicting a sitting Mexican governor, prosecutors allege that Ruben Rocha Moya, 76, who has served as governor of Sinaloa since November 2021, did not simply accept cartel money. He allegedly made his deal with the Chapitos — the sons of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman — before he was ever elected, in a meeting guarded by Cartel sicarios armed with machineguns, and delivered on every term thereafter.
What makes the filing extraordinary even by the standards of major cartel prosecutions is the physical evidence prosecutors say they recovered: handwritten monthly bribe lists, seized in Mexico during the investigation, that record by name, alias, and official position which Sinaloa officials were being paid by the Cartel, and exactly how much.
That’s a classic crime film McGuffin right there.
The lists name defendants in this case. They are reproduced in the indictment as photographs. They are, in effect, the Chapitos’ payroll — and they show a government bought line by line.
“The Sinaloa Cartel is a ruthless criminal organization that has flooded this community with dangerous drugs for decades,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton. “No matter your title or position, we are committed to bringing you to justice.”
The indictment sets off what observers described as a political earthquake in Mexico — and poses a crisis of a different kind for President Claudia Sheinbaum, whose own party, Morena, counts at least three of the defendants among its members.
Morena is a leftish party that split off from the PRD, which in turn split off from the PRI that ruled Mexico for 70 years.
The charges land on the eve of formal renegotiations of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the trade pact central to Mexico’s export economy, a timing that reads less like coincidence than calculated maximum pressure.
Ioan Grillo, a veteran journalist and author who has spent decades covering Mexico’s cartels, noted Wednesday that Mexico’s foreign relations department received the extradition requests for Rocha Moya and the other Sinaloa officials the previous evening at 6 p.m. — meaning Sheinbaum had roughly 18 hours to prepare a response before the indictment became public. “She is in a very tough position,” Grillo wrote.
At the center of the indictment is Rocha Moya.
As governor, he oversees Sinaloa’s entire administrative apparatus, including all state and local police forces. Prosecutors allege his relationship with the Chapitos predates his election and was foundational to it. In early 2021, while still campaigning, Rocha Moya allegedly attended a meeting with Ivan and Ovidio Guzman at which he promised that if elected, he would install officials friendly to the Chapitos’ drug trafficking operations throughout the Sinaloa government. The Chapitos delivered on their side.
On election day in June 2021, sicarios acting on Ivan’s orders stole ballots and ballot boxes for the opposing party. They used a list of Rocha Moya’s opponents and their home addresses — provided to the Chapitos by co-defendant Enrique Diaz Vega — to kidnap and intimidate those opponents into abandoning the race. Officers of the Sinaloa State Police, whose commanders had been ordered to stand down, received emergency calls reporting armed men at polling stations, voters being directed at gunpoint toward favored candidates, and ballot boxes being stolen across Culiacan, Mazatlan, Navolato, and Elota.
After winning, Rocha Moya and his secretary general, Enrique Inzunza Cazarez — now a sitting federal senator — met again with the Chapitos under machineguns and confirmed their arrangement: in exchange for the Chapitos’ support, Rocha Moya would deliver effective control of the Sinaloa State Police to the Cartel. As governor, prosecutors allege, he has delivered on every term.
Inzunza Cazarez, now representing Sinaloa in Mexico’s federal senate, allegedly served as a direct physical courier between the Chapitos and Rocha Moya, conveying communications confirming the terms of their arrangement. Enrique Diaz Vega, who served as Sinaloa’s secretary of administration and finance from November 2021 to September 2024, allegedly handed the Chapitos the names and home addresses of Rocha Moya’s political opponents so the Cartel could threaten them out of the race before a ballot was cast.
The corruption ran deep into the state’s law enforcement apparatus.
Damaso Castro Zaavedra, Sinaloa’s deputy attorney general, allegedly received approximately $200,000 pesos — roughly $10,893 in U.S. dollars — every month. In exchange, he gave the Chapitos advance warning of planned operations, including identifying which drug labs were being targeted by the Drug Enforcement Administration so evidence could be destroyed or moved before raids began.
Two successive chiefs of Sinaloa’s Investigative Police — Marco Antonio Almanza Aviles and Alberto Jorge Contreras Nunez, known as “Cholo” — were both allegedly on the Chapitos’ monthly payroll throughout their tenures. Aviles allegedly accepted roughly $16,670 per month from a meeting at one of Ivan’s ranches in 2017 or 2018; in exchange, he issued arrest warrants for the Chapitos’ enemies on demand and ordered the release of cartel members arrested for drug trafficking.
Contreras Nunez, selected by Rocha Moya with explicit Chapitos approval and holding the position until approximately February 2026, accepted approximately $16,000 per month in cash and helped the Chapitos track down and kill their enemies. Gerardo Merida Sanchez, Sinaloa’s secretary of public security — overseeing the entire state police — allegedly accepted more than $100,000 in U.S. dollars in monthly cash bribes and in 2023 alone warned the Cartel in advance of at least ten raids on drug labs, allowing them to evacuate personnel, drugs, and equipment before police arrived.
Jose Antonio Dionisio Hipolito, known as “Tornado,” a deputy director and later commander of the Sinaloa State Police, allegedly accepted approximately $6,000 per month from at least 2012 through 2024, sold ammunition and assault rifle magazines to Chapitos members, had arrest paperwork altered to conceal that detained cartel members had been armed, and met personally with Ivan and Ovidio to receive a radio with instructions to stay in contact.
The most grave allegation in the indictment concerns October 2023, and it falls on Juan Valenzuela Millan, known as “Juanito,” a high-level commander in the Culiacan Municipal Police from approximately 2018 to 2024.
Millan allegedly accepted approximately $41,000 per month in cash — funds distributed among himself, his commanders, and more than forty other corrupt municipal officers — and gave the Chapitos unrestricted access to the intelligence, operations, and physical resources of the municipal police, including patrol cars and radios.
When Ivan Guzman and a senior Chapitos associate ordered the kidnapping and murder of Alexander Meza Leon, a confidential source providing information to the Drug Enforcement Administration about Chapitos drug trafficking operations, Millan’s officers carried out the abduction. In a marked patrol car, municipal police stopped Meza Leon and another victim on the street, detained them, and handed them directly to Cartel sicarios, who tortured and killed them. Among the victims killed was a 13-year-old boy. Additional civilians were subsequently kidnapped and murdered as the Chapitos sought to eliminate anyone associated with the source. Count Four of the indictment charges Millan alone with kidnapping resulting in death. Juan de Dios Gamez Mendivil, the current mayor of Culiacan, rounds out the list of defendants. He allegedly accepted more than $10,000 in U.S. dollars per month and shielded Chapitos operations across the city he governs.
Among the most remarkable pieces of evidence described in the indictment are physical documents prosecutors say they recovered from Mexico: handwritten monthly bribe lists maintained by the Chapitos’ plaza boss in Culiacan. Each month, prosecutors allege, the plaza boss received from the Chapitos a box of cash alongside a list specifying the name, alias, or official position of each official to be paid and the precise peso amount. Three such lists are reproduced as photographs in the indictment — each headed with a variation of “Gobierno” and a total figure, each with the names of defendants circled in red. They are, prosecutors say, the Cartel’s own records — a paper ledger of a purchased government, recovered in Mexico, showing the systematic monthly acquisition of Sinaloa’s law enforcement apparatus, position by position, peso by peso.
This is a huge problem for President Sheinbaum. As the Washington Examiner put it: “Imagine if Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), both close partners of President Donald Trump, were suddenly indicted for taking huge bribes from an international drug cartel operating out of Texas.”
The Examiner also notes “Following the 2017 U.S. incarceration of Sinaloa Cartel leader, Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, the organization entered a period of uneasy peace. However, following the July 2024 U.S. arrest of top leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia (perpetrated by one of El Chapo’s sons Joaquin Guzman Lopez in return for a reduced sentence), a faction under two of El Chapo’s sons (“Los Chapitos”) has been at war with a faction controlled by El Mayo’s son, Ismael Zambada Sicairos (‘Los Mayos’).”
What to do about powerful, heavily-armed Mexican drug cartels is a problem that has bedeviled pretty much every American administration since the collapse of the Medelin Cartel and Cali Cartels in the 1990s. Many of Sheinbaum’s predecessors were thought to be in the pockets of one or another of the cartels. Whatever the outcome of the current indictments, President Trump will no doubt use them as pressure points in negotiations with Mexico of issue of trade and China.
A former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official appointed as deputy chief of the Office of Financial Operations during the Obama administration – and who still holds a security clearance – was indicted on Friday on charges of agreeing to launder $12 million for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) – which was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization in February of this year.
At this point, every Obama or Biden alum that still has any sort of security clearance needs to be reviewed. Hell, maybe the Trump Administration just needs to yank them all and only restore them on a case-by-case basis.
Paul Campo, who oversaw the FBI’s money laundering operations and resigned in January 2016 ahead of Trump’s inauguration, laundered around $750,000 for the cartel by converting cash into cryptocurrency, and agreed to launder far more – totaling over $12 million, according to the indictment.
“I refuse to work for Trump! But I will work for a Mexican drug cartel!”
Campo’s home was raided by federal agents on Thursday.
Campo also provided a payment for around 220 kilos of cocaine on the understanding that the drugs had been imported into the USA, the indictment further states.
He was able to do this after spending 25 years at the DEA, rising to a high-level position which he used to sell himself to CJNG as someone who could;
give inside information on DEA operations
help them move drug money
help them avoid detection
and even advise on narcotics logistics
25 years in the trade and the first narco he approaches turns out to be a narc? That’s some mighty fine work, Lou.
Then again, maybe not. Maybe he was already working for other cartels. Or had merely approached them only to have them think he was too dim to trust.
Hank Schrader had more situational awareness than this guy.
In late 2024, Campo, along with a friend Robert Sensi, began conspiring with an undercover government source they believed was with the cartel. They allegedly discussed using drones packed with C-4 explosives for CJNG operation. When the undercover agent asked what they could do with the drones, Campo allegedly said “We put explosives and we just send it over there,” adding that six kilos of C-4 would be enough to blow up “the whole fucking…” [sentence trails off]
I’m starting to get a serious whiff of Walter Mitty here.
Campo also allegedly told the undercover source that, because of his past work inside DEA’s intelligence and financial units, he still had “connections” within the agency and could advise CJNG on how to evade detection. According to the indictment, he portrayed himself as someone who understood DEA investigative patterns, internal targeting systems, and the vulnerabilities of U.S. financial controls.
Both Campo and Sensi allegedly assured the undercover officer that they could convert cartel cash into cryptocurrency in a way that would appear legitimate, billing themselves as specialists capable of “getting money back” for clients whose assets had been seized by law enforcement.
A series of staged transactions followed
Beginning in early 2025, the DEA source delivered multiple bulk-cash installments to the defendants under the guise of CJNG proceeds—first $200,000 in Charlotte, North Carolina, then additional transfers totaling more than $187,000 over the following days. Campo and Sensi allegedly converted the funds into cryptocurrency and reassured the source that they would charge an 8% commission for future laundering.
According to prosecutors, the two men also repeatedly affirmed that they were prepared to launder significantly larger sums. During one meeting, Campo allegedly said he and Sensi could easily move “millions” for the cartel through real-estate transactions, prepaid cards, and crypto channels that would not be flagged by U.S. financial institutions.
By July 2025, the indictment states, the undercover source delivered an additional $276,000 that the defendants believed to be CJNG drug proceeds. A second cash drop occurred in September. Each time, prosecutors say, Campo pitched the source on expanding their partnership into a long-term laundering pipeline.
The most damning allegation involves narcotics trafficking.
In October 2025, the DEA source told Campo and Sensi that a shipment of more than 220 kilograms of cocaine had already entered the United States and required payment. Campo and Sensi allegedly agreed to help facilitate the transaction, with Campo telling the source that once the funds were converted and returned, CJNG would “release the shipment” and continue to work with them.
The indictment asserts that Campo, Sensi, and their co-conspirators were to receive 30% of the proceeds – roughly $1.5 million – for their role in the cocaine deal, and an additional fee for converting the remainder into cryptocurrency. Campo then allegedly urged the undercover source to “move the product now,” signaling they were ready to operationalize the narcotics pipeline.
A guy who specializes in money laundering should be able to get a job at any of thousands of banks. Yet his need for money was evidently so great that he tried to sell himself to the cartels.
Obama wasn’t exactly staffing his agencies with the best and brightest…
Back in the dim mists of time, under one of the Bush Administrations, I remember reading a National Review or Weekly Standard piece on immigration enforcement that threw in the line “Obviously we’re not going to be raiding job sites anymore,” and I remember doing a double-take. “Why not? They’re illegal aliens. Deport them and fine the company illegally hiring them, and then start arresting them if they do it again.” This was my first inkling that there were Republicans who though that illegal aliens entering the country was no big deal as long as they could get consumer goods a few cents cheaper.
The Hyundai Motor Group facility in Ellabell, Georgia, stretches across 3,000 acres of what was once sleepy farmland twenty miles outside Savannah. This $4.3 to $7.6 billion joint venture with South Korea’s LG Energy Solutions represents the largest single industrial investment in Georgia’s history, designed to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles and employ over 1,200 Americans. Republican Governor Brian Kemp had hailed it as a crown jewel of economic development, a testament to America’s ability to attract world-class manufacturing back to our shores. I’ll admit, on paper it looked like everything we’ve been asking for.
The sprawling construction site buzzed with activity until Thursday morning, when federal agents arrived with search warrants and a clear message about the difference between legal investment and illegal employment practices. Suddenly, all those rosy economic development photos didn’t tell the whole story.
In the largest single-site operation in Homeland Security Investigations history, federal agents arrested 475 illegal migrants working at the facility. Think about that number for a moment—475 people working illegally at a single site. The raid involved multiple agencies—HSI, ICE, FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS, and Georgia State Patrol—executing what officials described as the culmination of a months-long criminal investigation into unlawful employment practices.
That’s a regular alphabet soup of government agencies. Were the illegal aliens dealing drugs and guns? If not, I fear some lower level federal judge is going to order some illegal aliens freed because they were arrested by the ATF and not ICE. But it does show Trump47 isn’t afraid to use the manpower at his disposal to enforce federal law.
South Korean officials don’t seem to express any embarrassment over a Korean company hiring illegal aliens.
The South Korean foreign ministry expressed ‘concern and regret’ over the raid and sent a counselor and embassy officials to the location.
‘Our companies’ economic activities and our people’s rights should not be infringed unfairly in the US legal enforcement process,’ Lee Jae-woong, a spokesperson for South Korea’s foreign ministry, said on Friday, according to the Financial Times.
Or, hear me out, maybe Hyundai could obey the laws of the country they’re building their factory in.
When it comes to immigration enforcement,the Trump Administration isn’t just talking the talk, it’s walking the walk.
The Trump Administration guts two lefty slop buckets of graft, Israel lights up the Houthis big time, crazy tranny shooter might have been in satanic cult too crazy for the Church of Satan, Ukraine bombs the snot out of Russia’s oil infrastructure (again), Scotland and Germany continue to favor unassimilated Muslim immigrants over their own citizens, a secret Spinal Tap concert, and the full weight of Plano ISD comes down on a nefarious…a choir booster club?
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Another court win for Trump47. “Supreme Court Rules 5-4 That Trump Can Slash $783 Million In DEI Research Funding.”
The Trump administration is free to eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of research funding on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) following last week’s ruling by the United States Supreme Court.
In a 5-4 vote, the justices lifted an order from a federal court judge in Boston that blocked $783 million in cuts made by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on health research grants that were being used to advance DEI efforts as well as “gender ideology extremism.”
The Supreme Court was split on the 5-4 decision which marks another win for President Trump and clears the way for his administration to move forward with canceling hundreds of grants after U.S. District Judge William Young ordered the health-related grants restored in June.
Chief Justice John Roberts was among the dissenters in the high court’s decision and Justice Amy Coney Barrett voted with conservative majority to let the administration stop the grant funding.
Roberts and Barrett did land on the side of the dissent and allowed to stand a portion of the lower judge’s order that voided a number of NIH policies that targeted DEI programs at the direction of the White House.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick canceled an Biden administration agreement Monday to distribute billions of dollars for semiconductor research through a nonprofit set up and staffed by former political appointees, according to a letter obtained by The Post.
The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act provided for $11 billion in semiconductor research and development funding to be given out by the Commerce Department’s National Semiconductor Technology Center.
“Rather than establishing these operations within the Department, however, Biden Administration officials spent significant time, effort, and resources creating an unaccountable, outside entity–Natcast–to administer taxpayer funds,” Lutnick wrote Natcast CEO Deirdre Hanford.
Four days before Biden left office on Jan. 20, Lutnick noted, the Commerce Department agreed to set aside $7.4 billion in “advance payments” to Natcast after spending nearly two years setting it up and tapping administration officials, advisers and allies to fill out positions.
That arrangement both effectively removed the incoming Trump administration from being involved in the process and provided “virtually all” of Natcast’s funding — prompting incoming Departments of Justice and Commerce officials to take another look at the Sunnyvale, Calif., nonprofit.
“These actions do not just give the appearance of impropriety; they flout federal law,” Lutnick told Hanford, pointing out that no provisions in the CHIPS Act authorized an outside entity like Natcast to distribute semiconductor research funds.
“The GCCA [Government Corporation Control Act] plainly prohibits agencies from establishing a corporation to act as an agency without specific authorization, and the January 16, 2025, agreement does nothing other than set forth the terms of the Biden Administration’s attempt to do just that.”
Natcast’s selection committee included Biden White House alums like Jason Matheny, former deputy director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; and Kendra Wilkerson, the CEO of a nonprofit that “promotes greater equality for women and nonbinary professionals in technology fields,” according to the Biden Commerce Department.
Donna Dubinsky, another Natcast executive, worked as senior counselor to former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and signed off on the nonprofit’s 501(c)(3) status.
Susan Feindt, the Biden Commerce Department’s vice chair of its CHIPS Act advisory committee, is now the senior vice president of ecosystem development at Natcast.
Jeremy Licht, the former chief counsel on semiconductor incentives at the Biden Commerce Department, is now the general counsel at Natcast.
They weren’t robbing Peter to pay Paul, they were robbing you to line their own pockets. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller told reporters Monday that the Trump administration has uncovered a “massive scandal” in Washington D.C. involving the doctoring of crime statistics.
He said the alleged corruption is currently under investigation and said details of the corruption will soon be brought to light.
“The results will stun you,” he said.
Miller made the remarks in the Oval Office after President Trump signed a slew of new executive orders to end cashless bail throughout the United States and in the District of Columbia, prosecute the burning of the American flag, and additional measures to address crime in Washington D.C.
Miller said D.C. already had the worst crime statistics in the United States when “honestly measured,” but those stats “dramatically understated how bad it was.”
The White House advisor told reporters that murders and homicides were allegedly being reported as accidents instead of murders.
“This is how severe the manipulation of the crime data has been in the city and it will all be uncovered and it will all be brought to light,” he said.
For the past two weeks—since the D.C. crime crackdown began—the city has not seen a single murder or homicide.
“No police officer working in the city can remember a time in their lives when there has been no murders,” Miller asserted.
He said police officers have told him that members of the public have been thanking them for making D.C safe again.
“For the first time in their lives, they can use the parks, they can walk on the streets, you have people who can walk freely at night without worrying about being ribbed or mugged,” he said. “They’re wearing their watch again, they’re wearing jewelry again, they’re carrying purses again.”
Miller explained that D.C. residents had been forced to “change their who lives for fear of being murdered, mugged or carjacked.”
He added that Trump had freed the 700,000 residents of the city from “the rule of criminals and thugs.”
Miller credited Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Administrator Terrance C. Cole with discovering that street criminals in Washington D.C. have been “doing business directly with the transnational criminal cartels,” which are foreign terrorist organizations.
“So not only was the city being run by these criminal thugs, but they were working with some of the most dangerous terrorist organizations on the planet to traffic weapons and drugs into this city,” he explained.
Israel’s military conducted airstrikes on Yemen’s Houthi-controlled capital, Sanaa, on Sunday, targeting high-profile sites in a significant escalation of hostilities.
The strikes hit areas near the presidential palace, the Asar and Hizaz power plants, and Houthi facilities suspected of housing artillery, including ballistic missiles, according to regional reports.
The operation was a direct response to recent Houthi attacks on Israel, including projectile launches on Friday, a military source told the Jerusalem Post. While Israel has previously targeted Houthi infrastructure, its strikes have largely focused on the strategic port city of Hodeida, a critical economic and military hub. The shift to Sanaa signals a broader and more aggressive approach to the conflict.
At least two people were killed and five others injured, Al Masirah, a Houthi-affiliated media outlet reported, according to Al Jazeera.
“The attacks were carried out in response to repeated attacks by the Houthi terrorist regime against the state of Israel and its citizens, including the launch of surface-to-surface missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles towards the country’s territory,” the Israeli military said in a statement.
There’s video:
The exact moment Israel vaporized the entire leadership of Yemeni Houthis 👇
“Westman’s videos, posted hours before the shootings, may only suggest he used ‘very similar to the symbolism used by violent global satanic cults called Order of 9 Angles and 764.'” I reached out to a “left-hand path” guy I knew from science fiction for background, and he offered the following:
Many years ago Dr. Anton LaVey asked Micheal Aquino to write two “Lovecraftain Pieces” for the _Satanic Rituals — “Th Cermony of the Nine Angles”and “The Call to Cthulhu”.
Then back in the 1990s a weirdo (named Myall back in the day) claimed that family knew the REAL SECRET of the nine angles. It was mainly Neo_Nazy stuff — “Kill a Jew for Satan” The guy claimed 100s of followers and had several Orders he was running –my favorite was the “lesbian: Order of the Sapphic Satanists. He tried to join Islam and run an atisemetic Islamic Runic brotherhood that worshipped Azathoth. It did not go well. The ONA shows occasionally with anti-Jewish slogans.
According to this piece last year, 764 is a global Satanic child predator network.
The likely next mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, is, as President Donald Trump put it, a “100% Communist lunatic,” and so you won’t exactly be dumbfounded to learn that his advisors are a rogue’s gallery of political hacks and psychopaths the likes of which have not been seen since Chairman Mao sat down for a tete-a-tete with his fellow cultural revolutionaries. It’s clear that one way or another, once this clown moves into Gracie Mansion, New York City is in for it: skyrocketing crime, an inundation of illegal migrants, bankruptcy, the destruction of the city’s economic base — all that and more is on the table.
Fox News reported Thursday Mamdani’s “growing circle of influence is littered with activists who have espoused anti-Israel views and socialist principles as he attempts to dispel the narrative that he is too ‘radical’ to run the nation’s largest city.” Yeah, these advisors show that he is indeed far too radical to be mayor of New York, but that’s not likely to keep him from being elected.
Among those advisors is Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), which advocates ending “state support for detention, deportation, and mass incarceration.” Awawdeh insists that illegal migrants “deserve” healthcare, presumably at the expense of the American taxpayer. He has also ranted: “NO LISTEN… SEEKING ASYLUM AT THE BORDER IS A LEGAL RIGHT. ASYLUM SEEKERS ARE FLEEING FOR THEIR LIVES FROM VIOLENCE, PERSECUTION, & IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE. THE U.S. HAS A LEGAL OBLIGATION TO PROVIDE REFUGE. #WelcomeWithDignity”
A legal obligation to provide refuge for anyone fleeing any kind of difficulty? Do tell. Anyway, NYIC has “taken in $175,000 from the sprawling George Soros nonprofit network,” and if that connection of Soros to Mamdani is too tenuous for you, there is plenty more. Fox News reported on Aug. 14 that “A former top executive for liberal billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) between 2017 and 2020 is back in the spotlight amid reports highlighting his involvement with Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign and connecting Obama world to the campaign.”
The Soros exec in question is Patrick Gaspard, an old political hand on the left; the first campaign he worked on was Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential run. Gaspard “has served in several high-profile political positions, including advising former President Barack Obama’s historic 2008 campaign, serving as the Democratic National Committee’s executive director, and being tapped as the Center for American Progress (CAP) president in 2021.”
Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel, is set to face the rest of his life behind bars as the Trump administration ramps up its efforts to dismantle cartels.
Zambada, 75, confessed in a Brooklyn, New York, courtroom Monday that he had coordinated with Mexican officials to smuggle drugs into the U.S. for decades — and ultimately pleaded guilty to serving as principal leader of a continuing criminal enterprise and racketeering conspiracy.
The Trump administration has pledged to take down the cartels — and experts predict Zambada’s guilty plea paves the way for the Justice Department to launch more indictments against high-profile cartel members moving forward and exerts additional pressure on Mexico to comply with U.S. requests.
Russia may not have an oil industry at all when this war is over. Ukraine just hit two more oil refineries, Kuybyshevskiy in Samara and Afipsky in Krasnodar. “Multiple swarms hit this refinery, which makes Russia’s air defense look even more incompetent than usual.” It was also 1,000km away.
They also hit the Ust-Luga gas processing terminal near St. Petersburg with ten drones. “This terminal is responsible for processing stable gas condenscent in naphtha jet fuel fuel oil and distillates.” The location makes me wonder if a goodly portion was intended for the export market.
The map of Russian refineries reveals a key strategic problem. The main processing capabilities are in the European part of the country, whilst fuel consumption is rising in the far east. Fuel logistic chains for eastern regions span thousands of kilometers, creating additional costs and risks. Kilometer-long queues in cities are a direct result of the imbalance between western production and eastern consumption.
Harris County’s District Attorney Sean Teare has charged Yunhai Li, a 35-year-old former MD Anderson Cancer Center researcher, with attempting to steal and take proprietary cancer-related research back to China. This comes after multiple warnings about research security in Texas higher education.
While the Department of Transportation has owned the historic station since the 1980s, it has allowed a nonprofit, the Union Station Redevelopment Corporation, more control over the station year after year.
Now, the Department of Transportation says it plans to use a new deal with Amtrak and USRC to fund improvements to elevators, lighting, security and other repairs to the roof and several major systems.
“Scottish Girl Arrested For Using Knife And Axe To Ward Off Migrant Stalker.” She was defending her 12-year old sister from unassimilated would-be Muslim statutory rapists, so of course the police had to arrest her…
Last week, a Houston resident foiled a home invasion attempt by a couple criminals trying to impersonate the police. According to the news article:
“Police said the men told the homeowner they were serving a warrant. They were wearing bullet-proof vests, had badges around their necks and were wearing ski masks.”
The homeowner ended up shooting and killing both offenders.
There are many more tips in the article, but police don’t wear ski masks while serving a warrant…
“Texas Teacher Arrested on Federal Child Porn Charge…Robert Jerome Custer, 56, was arrested on a federal charge of accessing child sexual abuse material, commonly called child pornography. Custer previously worked as an educator and counselor in Palestine, Barksdale, Kingsville, and Abilene, according to a statement from the Texas Department of Public Safety.”
The German welfare state is no longer financially sustainable, Friedrich Merz said on Saturday.
The chancellor argued for a fundamental reassessment of the benefits system as spending continues to soar past last year’s record of €47bn (£40bn).
In a state-level party conference meeting on Saturday, Mr Merz said: “The welfare state as we have it today can no longer be financed with what we can economically afford.”
Once the export champion of Europe, Germany’s economy has slowed dramatically since 2017, with GDP growing by only 1.6 per cent since then versus 9.5 per cent for the rest of the eurozone.
Germany’s economy shrank by 0.2 per cent last year following a 0.3 per cent dip in 2023 – the first time since the early 2000s the economy has retreated two years in a row.
Industrial production fell under the Left-leaning “traffic light” coalition of Olaf Scholz and continues to slide under the new government, with GDP declining by 0.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2025.
Meanwhile, spending on social welfare has exploded, and is set to increase further this year as Germany’s population ages and unemployment rises. Although the majority of benefit recipients are German, large numbers are non-German citizens.
German elites will do anything to support its welfare state…except stop importing unassimilated Muslim immigrants. Just like all the rest of Europe’s elites. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
A decade after the radical left first started shoving tranny bathrooms down the public’s throat without debate, Texas is finally limiting bathrooms to biological sex.
“Mark Teixeira, Longtime Major League Baseball Player, Launches Texas Congressional Bid.” He’s running as a Republican for the 21st Texas Congressional District, where incumbent Chip Roy is running for Attorney General.
Having a meth habit is going to be disqualifying for a lot of jobs. Like District Attorney for Mariposa County. Thus it’s no surprise that DA Mike McAfee resigned…
Another electric bus company goes bankrupt. “Quebec-based Lion Electric, which the Biden administration awarded $159 million ‘to manufacture 435 school buses between 2022 and 2024,’ has fallen into bankruptcy.” (Previously.)
This is a weird story. “Moms Arrested for Running North Texas Choir Booster Club. Cleared of charges, moms still lost choir booster club money to the school district.”
Local authorities in Collin County, including a school district, have harassed three moms in a quest to control a school booster club and its funds, even going so far as to arrest them.
Plano Independent School District targeted the Jasper High School Choir Booster Club for control of its bank account after the mothers charged with running the independent organization insisted that the district pay for Jasper High School’s stage—as was the district’s responsibility.
The district had the Plano police arrest the booster club’s founders—Laura Cervantes, Krisinda Lingenfelter, and Maria Luisa King. Yet, after a Collin County grand jury failed to find enough evidence to prosecute these moms, a Plano municipal judge recently awarded the club’s bank funds to Plano ISD.
Also this: “Oral arguments were held on May 30 before Judge Paul McNulty, chief judge for the Municipal Court of Plano. Texas Scorecard was in attendance. Recording devices were banned from the trial and the booster club was denied its request to bring a court reporter.” Also, another judge involved in the case, Lisa Bronchetti, evidently wrote a bad check to the club but still failed to excuse herself.
Like I said, weird…
Newark Airport sucks. Objectively. One major culprit? God.
There’s been a lot of media articles that the runaway Texas House Democrats are going to cave, but it hasn’t happened yet. The Trump Administration continues to rack up success after success at the border, Ukraine hits more Russian oil facilities, once again Adam is full of Schiff, more illegal alien sex traffickers nabbed, and China finally picks on someone its own size.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said that the U.S.-Mexico border is experiencing “all-time lows” of illegal immigrant crossings after President Donald Trump’s administration ramped up efforts to secure the southern border.
On August 1, DHS released preliminary numbers for the month of July that report to show nationwide encounters are 90 percent lower than during the Biden administration, in addition to the “lowest single-day apprehensions in history” — on July 20, DHS reported just 88 apprehensions at the southern border and 116 across the country.
“History made, again. The numbers don’t lie — this is the most secure the border has ever been,” said DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. “President Trump didn’t just manage the crisis — he obliterated it. No more excuses. No more releases. We’ve put the cartels on defense and taken our border back.”
The numbers released from DHS reflect previous assessments made by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which said in July that nationwide apprehensions have hit a “new historic low” following a “dramatic shift” in policy focus since President Donald Trump entered office.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border have dropped to levels not observed since the 1960s.
Progress. “Trump Purges 275,000 Illegal Aliens From Social Security.”
Months after President Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum targeting illegal aliens and other ineligible individuals from collecting Social Security Act benefits, the president told reporters at the White House on Thursday afternoon that nearly 300,000 illegals have been removed from the government program that provides financial benefits to eligible citizen taxpayers and/or lawful permanent residents (green card holders).
“Last month, I signed the One Big Beautiful Bill, and allowed No Tax on Social Security for our great seniors … and to protect our benefits, we’ve already kicked nearly 275,000 illegal aliens off of the Social Security system,” Trump told reporters.
Recall that on April 15, the president signed a memorandum directing federal agencies to take immediate action to purge the Social Security system of illegals and fraudsters.
As Maureen Steele via American Greatness elegantly noted earlier this year, “We don’t need an executive order to bar illegals from Social Security – we need a government that obeys the law.”
Let’s not forget that the Biden-Harris regime facilitated the invasion of illegal aliens, allowing millions of these third-worlders to siphon dollars and essential services from citizens and lawful permanent residents – in what some have described as a classic Cloward–Piven strategy.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimated that taxpayers spend more than $182 billion annually to cover costs associated with 20 million illegal aliens and their children, which includes $66.4 billion in Federal expenses plus an additional $115.6 billion in state and local expenses.
The free lunch for the Democratic Party’s illegals is coming to an end.
A Democratic whistleblower told the FBI that Senator Adam Schiff authorized the leak of classified information related to the Russia collusion investigation in 2017 in an effort to discredit President Trump, newly-released documents show.
The whistleblower, who worked for Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee for more than ten years, first reported Schiff’s alleged behavior to the FBI in 2017, when Schiff was leading the committee’s Russian collusion investigation.
FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed on Monday that he had handed over the documents, first obtained by Just the News, to Congress. “We found it. We declassified it. Now Congress can see how classified info was leaked to shape political narratives – and decide if our institutions were weaponized against the American people.”
The FBI interviewed the whistleblower most recently in June 2023, at which point the unidentified intelligence officer said he had been part of an all-staff meeting called by Schiff in which the then-California representative “stated the group would leak classified information which was derogatory to President of the United States Donald J. TRUMP. SCHIFF stated the information would be used to Indict President TRUMP.”
“[The whistleblower] stated this would be illegal and, upon hearing his concerns, unnamed members of the meeting reassured that they would not be caught leaking classified information,” the report added.
The whistleblower expressed concerns that Schiff’s actions were “treasonous” and “illegal.”
District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer (Obama) wrote in his order that the government’s premise that unsealing the records would shed light on meaningful new information was “demonstrably false,” and that “unsealing the grand jury materials would not reveal new information of any consequence.”
“Contrary to the Government’s depiction, the Maxwell grand jury testimony is not a matter of significant historical or public interest. Far from it,” he wrote. “It consists of garden-variety summary testimony by two law enforcement agents. And the information it contains is already almost entirely a matter of longstanding public record.
Translation: Either it implicates powerful Democrats, or else we need to keep the issue alive to try to dirty up President Trump.
Truth: “White House Deputy Chief of Staff on Redistricting Battle: ‘We all know Democrats cheat.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is blasting Democrats for complaining about the current redistricting uproar and accuses them of stealing dozens of House seats by counting illegal aliens in the last census.
Miller told Newsmax that Democrats brought in tens of millions of “invaders” into the nation through their open borders policies to “rig the results of the census” and the apportionment of congressional seats.
Miller pointed out that even though Republicans won a landslide in the House popular vote, they only picked up a 4-seat majority due to Democratic gerrymandering, manipulation and rigging of congressional districts.
He contrasted the gains of this last election with the 2010 election, in which the Republicans won a much smaller majority in the popular vote, yet gained 63 seats in the House.
President Trump on Monday announced plans to place the Metropolitan Police Department under federal control and to deploy several hundred National Guard troops and more than 100 FBI agents to the streets of Washington, D.C., to assist local law enforcement in fighting crime.
“I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, squalor and worse,” Trump said during a press conference on Monday. “This is liberation day in D.C., and we’re going to take our capital back.”
“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people,” he said.
Trump said the murder rate in D.C. is higher than some of the “worst places” in the world, including Bogota, Colombia.
Trump has the authority to take over the Metropolitan Police Department under the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which includes a provision that grants him the ability to take over the department when there are “special conditions of an emergency nature.” As part of the federal takeover, Attorney General Pam Bondi will lead the department, while Terry Cole, the new DEA Administrator, will be the interim federal commissioner of the department.
On Friday, the Trump administration dispatched federal law enforcement officers to tourist hotspots around D.C. Trump has also threatened to federalize the district if crime rates do not fall and on Monday, he said he would send in the military, if needed.
Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded several DC police executive orders Thursday that restricted officers from arresting illegal migrants – vowing that the nation’s capital will not be a sanctuary jurisdiction under President Trump.
“DC will not remain a sanctuary city. Actively shielding criminal aliens will not happen,” Bondi declared in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity.
The attorney general’s comments came as she issued a new directive voiding commands issued – as recently as earlier Thursday – by DC Metropolitan Police Department Chief Pamela Smith.
Smith is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. “DC police chief [Pamela Smith] asks what ‘chain of command’ means after question from reporter.”
Hilarious news this week: “Two Chinese ships collide while chasing Philippine Coast Guard boat.” A Chinese Coast Guard ship collided with a Chinese Navy ship. And yes, there is video:
A power bill crisis is gripping parts of the U.S. Mid-Atlantic and is set to worsen, threatening to financially crush households as long-range forecasts point to a brutally cold winter. What began in Baltimore, Maryland – as first covered in our reporting one year ago- has now spread to New Jersey, where residents are furious over skyrocketing electricity costs.
The common denominator in both states? A disastrous green energy agenda, pushed by radical leftist lawmakers, is dismantling reliable and cheap fossil fuel power generation in favor of unstable solar and wind. This has unleashed a power bill armageddon on working-class and middle-class households, as well as mom-and-pop businesses, all while baseload power demand surges in the era of AI data centers.
Fox News is beginning to latch onto the power bill crisis theme, starting with coverage of New Jersey residents who are absolutely furious over exploding power bills. This new development could severely damage the state’s Democratic leaders in the upcoming elections.
This all started when New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities approved a 17 to 20% rate hike for power bills in June. Many residents were shocked when they opened their bills at the end of last month.
“$200 more, I know my electrical bill,” one Jersey woman told Fox News reporter CB Cotton, adding, “I was shocked. So to say the least, I’m very disappointed. This is killing us, and every time you turn around it’s something more. You only get little pleasures in life that you enjoy, and my air conditioner is one of them.”
Perhaps Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy’s decision to shutter the state’s nuclear and coal plants, without a one-to-one replacement for lost capacity on the grid, was a catastrophic error that is only now coming home to roost. He also prioritized offshore wind farms and other green energy projects, which have left the grid more fragile than ever.
“Just like the old gypsy woman every Republican ever said!”
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, disillusioned and even disavowed by Democratic leaders, is showing Republicans some love in the midterms. The union’s donations are evidence of a realignment that could outlast President Trump’s term unless Democrats embrace at least some union-friendly policies like tariffs.
Prior to 2024, the Teamsters backed almost no Republicans. This year, the Democrat, Republican, Independent Voter Education PAC gave the maximum, $5,000, to each of 22 House Republicans and backed several Senate candidates, Politico reports. They also gave $50,000 to the Republican Attorneys General Association.
After dumping millions into the 2024 election cycle and coming up short, Las Vegas Sands appears ready to roll the dice again.
New financial disclosures show that Texas Sands PAC, the Texas-based political arm of the casino giant, has more than $9 million in cash on hand heading into the upcoming election season. That money comes almost entirely from Miriam Adelson, the billionaire owner of Las Vegas Sands and majority owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Despite its name, Sands does not operate casinos in Las Vegas or anywhere in the United States; its operations are exclusively in China and Singapore.
While the group has largely held off on spending in recent months, records show it contributed $1.8 million to members of the Texas House during the 2024 cycle—$1.34 million to Republicans and $457,500 to Democrats. That spending mirrors the strategy the group employed last time: pour money into protecting lawmakers who supported its push to legalize casino gambling in Texas.
That effort didn’t go as planned.
Despite getting casino legislation to the floor of the Texas House in 2023, Sands watched its momentum collapse in the primaries. Voters rejected the very lawmakers who had sided with the casino giant. Former House Speaker Dade Phelan, the top recipient of Sands money, was forced into a runoff. Meanwhile, 14 Republican House members who voted for casino legislation either lost re-election or chose not to seek it.
Sands and Adelson attempted to salvage the cycle with a massive last-minute push. The Texas Defense PAC, funded entirely by Adelson, poured more than $7 million into runoff races in an effort to rescue Phelan’s allies. But again, the money didn’t translate into wins.
Now, Sands is recalibrating.
Although no major new contributions have been reported yet this cycle, those connected to the group have continued to work in some statewide campaigns.
Former State Sen. Kelly Hancock, who is now running for state comptroller, has hired John Jackson to run his campaign.
Until earlier this year, however, Jackson served as Sands’ head political consultant in Texas. He previously managed campaigns for Gov. Greg Abbott and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn.
Hancock did not respond to a request for comment on whether he supports the group’s efforts to bring government-monopoly casinos to Texas.
Neither Don Huffines or Christi Craddick—the other two candidates currently in the race—have casino operatives leading their campaigns.
Hancock is not the only one with senior staff tied to the casino operator.
Jordan Berry, a recent registered lobbyist for Sands, also serves as a campaign consultant to numerous candidates in the state legislature, including State Sen. Mayes Middleton (R–Galveston) in his campaign for attorney general. Berry’s lobby registration with all his clients ended on June 23.
City-owned Kansas City grocery store closesdespitebecause of millions of dollars in subsidies.
Not this shit again: “Judge Rules Against Little Sisters of the Poor in Obamacare Contraception Case.”
A U.S. district court decided on Wednesday to strike down a 2017 federal regulation that exempted religious employers from the Affordable Care Act’s mandate for employer-sponsored health insurance to cover the cost of contraception.
If the ruling holds, religious non-profit organizations such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, the defendants in the case, may now be required to file for an accommodation process with the government that still maintains employees’ access to contraception without the religious organization having to pay. For-profit employers would have access to no religious exemption from the mandate whatsoever.
Judge Wendy Beetlestone, chief judge for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, found that the Trump administration’s 2017 rule expanding religious exemptions from the contraception mandate was “arbitrary and capricious,” thus violating statutory authority. Consequently, she declared the rule vacated.
The left can’t stop attacking the Little Sisters of the Poor because it is intolerable to them that there is an legitimate source of moral authority apart from the state. Catholic nuns must be forced to pay for contraception (and abortions) as a token of their submission to social justice. Every. Knee. Must. Bend.
I know you’ll be shocked to learn that Beetlestone is an Obama appointee…
So on Monday, I get a text from my property management company saying that they’ve retained an outside security company to address the numerous complaints about loitering and drug sales in the neighborhood.
‘Beginning today, you will see these security personnel around the properties and in the neighborhood, goes on and on about procedures.’
Okay. Today’s Wednesday. It’s two days later, I get an email from my property management, and they said,
‘We’re disappointed to share that the security company that was hired has pulled out of the neighborhood. After a day and a half of doing recon and observing activity in the neighborhood, they decided the problems with crime exceed their resources to control. We will continue to work with organizations and neighborhood and explore other options to improve public safety and so on.’
Funny what happens when a Democrat-run locale decides to “defund the police” because a random black drug user died…
“Commissioner Ramsey Seeks Removal of Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo. Following a vote to censure Hidalgo, Ramsey said, ‘It is time to consider replacing Judge Hidalgo.'”
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo faced a historic 3-1 censure vote from the commissioners court after her proposed property tax increase was rejected. The vote followed accusations of disruptive behavior, prompting Republican Commissioner Tom Ramsey to call for her removal.
This is the first time a Harris County judge, the chief executive of the county, has been censured.
Lots of candidates (Democrats and Republicans) are lining up to run against Hidalgo next year.
United States Attorney Lesley A. Woods announced that five people were charged by complaint for a range of federal violations that center around their alleged conspiracy to engage in labor trafficking, sex trafficking, and harboring of aliens at several hotel locations across the Omaha metro area and into central Nebraska. The defendants own, operate and manage several hotels in the Omaha metro area located at the following locations where federal search warrants were executed in the early morning hours of August 12, 2025:
The AmericInn, 2920 S 13 Ct., Omaha;
The Inn (formerly Super 8), 9305 S 145th St., Omaha;
The New Victorian, 10728 L St., Omaha; and
Roadway Inn, 1110 Fort Crook Rd S, Bellevue, NE.
The five Nebraska men from Nebraska with very Nebraskan names were identified as:
Kentakumar Chaudhari, a/k/a Ken Chaudhari, age 36, of Elkhorn, NE;
Rashmi Ajit Samani, a/k/a Falguni Samani, age 42, of Elkhorn, NE:;
Amit Prahladbhai Chaudhari, a/k/a Amit, age 32, of Omaha;
Amit Babubhai Chaudhari, a/k/a Matt, age 33, of Omaha; and
Maheshkumar Chaudhari, a/k/a Mahesh, age 38, of Norfolk, NE.
Federal, state, and local law enforcement officers conducted a search of 14 premises, including homes and several “Brow and Lash” salons associated with the men.
During the operation, law enforcement officers rescued 10 minors from an alleged labor trafficking conspiracy that involved putting children under the age of twelve years old to work at the hotels for long hours with little to no pay. Seventeen adult victims were also rescued from the same conspiracy.
The US Attorney’s Office says at least one of the defendants were running a sex trafficking operation that sold both children and adults into prostitution. Sex trafficking was “not only allowed at the hotels … but also encouraged.” Prosecutors say hotel management and employees sexually abused the victims personally, as well as selling their victims out to others.
Drugs were also openly used and sold at the hotels, according to officials.
The Biden Administration went all-out to ensure that all 50 states got to enjoy that vibrant illegal alien diversity they imported…
An Arizona judge is reportedly planning to free an illegal alien who kidnapped and raped a girl from Kansas whom he brought all the way to Arizona.
The 14-year-old girl went missing on July 20, but authorities were able to track her cell phone and locate her in an Extended Stay America hotel in Chandler, Arizona. The kidnapper is a man named Cristian Leonardo Caal Mucu. When police arrived, the teenage girl was alone in the hotel room. What local media was reluctant to admit was that Caal Mucu is an illegal alien. And now this predator is set to be released on bail with only electronic monitoring.
More signs of the Biden Recession, the DOJ wants to put its thumb on the scale against Trump again, more Secret Service incompetence comes to light, more Kamala cringe, a bunch of lawsuit news, and a metric ton of Babylon Bee links. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
I keep thinking I’ll keep the LinkSwarms to shorter lengths, and the world continues not to cooperate.
The start of the third quarter saw a deterioration in business conditions at US manufacturers as new orders declined for the first time in three months, according to S&P Global.
This makes sense as we have seen ‘hard’ US macro data serially disappoint for three months.
S&P Global US Manufacturing PMI falls to 49.6 in July, dropping into contraction for the first time since Dec 2023.
ISM Manufacturing PMI plunged to 46.8 (48.8 exp) – weakest since Nov 2023 (near post-COVID lockdown lows)
The FBI is going to resume its coordination with social-media companies on content moderation ahead of the 2024 election, after the Supreme Court dealt a blow to free-speech advocates who argue the federal government’s close cooperation with Big Tech firms violates the First Amendment.
According to a Department of Justice memo drafted earlier this month, the FBI “will resume regular meetings in the coming weeks with social media companies to brief and discuss potential [Foreign Malign Influence] threats involving the companies’ platforms.”
By “Foreign Malign Influence,” what they mean, of course, is “the possibility of a Trump victory.”
The memo is featured in a report from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the effectiveness of the department’s information-sharing system for monitoring foreign threats to U.S. elections. National Review has reached out to the FBI for comment on the memo.
Horowitz recommended the DOJ increase its transparency around the policies it put in place to ensure information sharing does not trample on the First Amendment, and to ensure the coordination strategy evolves to keep up with ever-changing foreign threats. The report’s appendix says both of the recommendations have been taken up by the DOJ, and requests documentation of the FBI’s outreach to social-media companies over the coming months.
The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and local offices will be tasked with building relationships with social-media companies in areas under the purview of various FBI field offices. As part of this outreach strategy, FBI officials are being instructed to make companies aware of the new standard operating procedure for monitoring suspected foreign influence operations online.
I’m so old that I remember when the primary duty of the FBi was to solve crimes, not to aid the Democratic Party…
Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe was directly involved in denying additional security resources and personnel, including counter snipers, to former President Trump’s rallies and events – despite repeated requests by the agents assigned to Trump’s detail in the two years leading up to his July 13 attempted assassination, according to several sources familiar with the decision-making.
Rowe succeeded former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned last week after bipartisan calls following her widely panned testimony before the House Oversight Committee. But both Rowe and Cheatle were directly involved in decisions denying requests for more magnetometers, additional agents, and other resources to help screen rallygoers at large, outdoor Trump campaign gatherings.
It was Rowe’s decision alone to deny counter sniper teams to any Trump event outside of driving distance from D.C., these sources asserted.
Criminal negligence all the way down:
🚨🚨🚨 EXCLUSIVE: A Secret Service counter sniper sent an email Monday night to the entire Uniformed Division (not agents) saying he will not stop speaking out until "5 high-level supervisors (1 down) are either fired or removed from their current positions." The counter sniper… pic.twitter.com/0dg99EESQk
The Democratic Party ruling class’s bloodless coup of their own democratically elected presidential nominee, who also happens to be the nominal sitting president of the United States, is one of the most astonishing political developments of my lifetime. Joe Biden, though clearly physically and mentally impaired, has sought the presidency for quite literally longer than I have been alive. Biden had been defiant ever since the June 27 presidential debate debacle that he was not going anywhere, despite overwhelming pressure from party elites and sycophantic media lapdogs demanding he do precisely that. He has a Lady Macbeth-like wife who craves power, and he has a felonious son in desperate need of a presidential pardon.
Yet the coup succeeded. Biden became the first incumbent president to not seek reelection after his first term since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. Biden made the much-anticipated announcement—not with a solemn Oval Office address—three days later, and he didn’t even explain his decision. Rather, he issued a bedridden tweet from a personal, not even official, account. It’s the equivalent of divorcing your wife over text message. As if that weren’t crazy enough, the announcement came smack in the middle of a five-day period in which Biden was not publicly seen and during which he apparently experienced an unspecified medical emergency. Suspicious much?
The Democrats’ decision to coup their own president is a curious one, on the political merits.
Hold aside the galling hypocrisy of the purported party of “democracy” trying to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot under an outlandish constitutional theory while simultaneously attempting to bankrupt, prosecute and incarcerate him on equally spurious grounds. Hold aside the self-proclaimed party of “democracy,” feigning ignorance over how its overheated rhetoric laid the seeds for their political opponent’s recent near-assassination and its continuing to depict that opponent as an existential threat to the American constitutional order. And hold aside that purportedly “democratic” party deposing its own presumptive elected nominee—a stark reversal from its presidential primary, when party poobahs worked hard to shut out all viable competition. Somewhere in Minnesota, Dean Phillips would like a word.
Hold all that aside. Because even on its own terms, the coup of Biden for cackler-in-chief Kamala Harris is going to spectacularly backfire on the Democrats.
Already, Democrats and the corporate media have been working hard to “define” Harris for the American people. At times, this has included some rather dubious retconning, such as magically pretending she wasn’t the Biden administration’s appointed “border czar.” (She was.) But the even bigger problem for Democrats is that Harris is not an unknown commodity. On the contrary, she is a very well-known commodity—one who just happens to be about as popular with the American public as venereal disease.
Harris’ current average approval rating is under 38%, and an NBC News poll last June found her to be the single least popular vice president in American history—only 32% of Americans had a positive view of her, putting her 17 points underwater. Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign was an absolute dud, self-imploding well before the first primary votes were cast. And as recently as a month or two ago, Democratic elites were openly discussing whether she could still be dropped as Biden’s 2024 running mate. Funny how quickly one can go from the weakest link to the great savior of “Our Democracy.”
Practically, the path to winning 270 Electoral College votes still runs through the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It is frankly bizarre for Democrats to swap out the man who talks ceaselessly about his hardscrabble Scranton upbringing for a Californian who boasts the most left-wing voting record of any presidential nominee in modern history. Do Democrats really think Harris’ support for the Green New Deal and a national fracking ban will play well in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania or in the auto factories of Detroit? Will white working- and middle-class voters concerned about skyrocketing crime look favorably upon Harris’ enthusiastic support for the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, which racked up $2 billion worth of property damage?
Tucson-based World View, cofounded by now-U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly in 2012, received venture capital from Tencent — among the largest tech companies in China — both in 2013 and 2016. Tencent, like most Chinese tech giants, has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party….
Spy balloons partially funded by ChiComm ties? Like, how is this considered a totally normal business for a Senator to be in?
Not sure how much you can trust Seymour Hersh, but he says that Obama is the one who finally pushed Slow Joe out, threatening to invoke the 25th Amendment on him. He also says Obama is pulling Kamala’s strings. So there’s that.
Early in the morning, the FBI raided the home of Linda Sun, a former official for Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration. Sun served as Hochul’s deputy chief of staff for a year. Before that, she was the deputy superintendent for intergovernmental affairs and chief diversity officer under disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo. The federal officers searched the $3.5 million home, which resides in the exclusive neighborhood of North Shore.
That’s on top of a raid aimed at Winnie Greco, a top aide to New York Mayor Eric Adams.
While the left is trying it’s hardest to recast Kamala Harris as a moderate Democrat – quietly scrubbing her public record over the past 5 years – her actual positions have always been radical.
For starters, she’s on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, ban fracking and offshore drilling, defund the police, provide US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and ban private health insurance.
Meanwhile, during 2020 Democratic primary debate Harris said that if elected president, she would “ban by executive order the importation of assault weapons.”
She also said she would reinstate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status and DACA protection for illegal immigrants, and end other Trump-era immigration policies.
And in multiple speeches and interviews, Harris insisted America needed racial ‘equity’ as well as ‘equality.’ In other words, she endorses ‘equality of outcomes’ over ‘equality of opportunity.’
As The Federalist pointed out on Tuesday:
She Supported Bailing Out 2020 Rioters
Accused rapists, repeat offenders, and rioters alike benefitted in June 2020 when Harris encouraged her social media followers to donate to a bail fund dedicated to those arrested for their months-long, $2 billion siege of cities like Minneapolis. The vice president later lied about her involvement in the money-raising scheme.
She Put Other Countries’ Borders Before Her Own
Harris traveled thousands of miles away from the U.S. border invasion she was tasked with handling to deliver “peace and security” to the borders of Ukraine, which “is a country.”
She Proudly Enabled the Jussie Smollett Race Hoax
Harris called the staged hate crime an “attempted modern-day lynching.” She did not apologize even after Smollett was found guilty of felony disorderly conduct and making false police reports.
She Sponsored Legislation That Would Codify Abortion Through All Nine Months
As a senator, Harris was a proud co-sponsor of the original version of the “Women’s Health Protection Act,” which sought to codify abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
She’s Openly Anti-Catholic
As a senator in 2018, Harris smeared Brian Buescher, a nominee for the U.S. District Court in Nebraska, for his affiliation with the famous Catholic fraternal organization Knights of Columbus and its historically pro-life views.
Flip, meet flop, as Kamala Harris tries to walk back all her radical positions.
In 2019, Kamala Harris was rated the ‘most liberal’ Senator in a now-scrubbed rating from GovTrack. She’s on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, banning fracking and offshore drilling, defunding the police, providing US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and banning private health insurance.
According to the NY Times, “video clips of her old statements and interviews are being weaponized as Republicans aim to define her as a left-wing radical who is out of step with swing voters.”
“The archive is deep,” said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and ad maker who is working with David McCormick, the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, among other campaigns. “We will run out of time before we run out of video clips of Kamala Harris saying wacky California liberal things. I’m just not sure that the rest of this campaign includes much besides that.”
To that end, McCormick’s campaign has produced one of the first TV ads to attack Harris on her longstanding positions.
Yet, according to the Times, nevermind all that- Harris is now a reformed moderate – and has suddenly reversed course on virtually all of her most radical views.
On Friday, the Harris campaign announced that she no longer wants to ban fracking – a ‘significant shift’ from where she stood four years ago. She’s also reversed course on funding for border enforcement, no longer supports a single-payer health insurance program, and has walked back liberal fever dreams of a mandatory gun buyback.
She is no longer pushing for a single-payer health care system, and on Friday her campaign said she would maintain Mr. Biden’s pledge not to raise income taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. -NYT
Packing the Court? Nah…
On Monday, as Mr. Biden prepared a speech in Texas calling for term limits and ethics guidelines for Supreme Court justices, the Trump campaign resurfaced statements Ms. Harris made in 2019 saying she was “open to this conversation” about expanding the Supreme Court. Ms. Harris, in a statement released by her campaign, endorsed Mr. Biden’s proposal, which does not call for adding additional justices to the court.
According to Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank, Harris has ‘evolved’ into a Biden style centrist (if centrism is defined as letting 20+ million illegals into the country and cooking Americans with inflation).
“There’s a tremendous difference in changing one’s policy ideas and changing one’s principles,” said Bennett. “She has not changed her principles. She still thinks climate change is an existential threat — she just doesn’t think the Green New Deal is the way to address it.”
Sure Matt.
The Times also hints that Harris is essentially an idiot who didn’t really understand her own positions while running for president in 2020.
…during that race, Ms. Harris also often appeared as if she were not sure what she believed. In a CNN town-hall event the day after what was widely viewed as a successful campaign rollout in Oakland, Calif., she appeared tentative while discussing health care policy, eventually saying she would eliminate private health insurance and institute a single-payer health care program.
She would go on to propose an array of policies popular with progressives. She sought to increase pay for public-school teachers by an average of $13,500 through a bump in the estate tax.
She also called for an assault weapons ban and said she would sign an executive order mandating background checks for customers of any dealer who sold more than five guns in a year.
Minnesota governor Tim Walz is on the short list to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. This is almost laughable when you look at Walz’s record running the state government, which somehow manages to combine the honesty of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, the competence of former Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, and the sharp-eyed ethical-watchdog instincts of soon-to-be-former New Jersey senator Bob Menendez. A whole lot of shady and unethical people in Minnesota see the state government as a giant pile of money just waiting to be taken, with a sleepy guard in the form of the governor.
“J. D. Vance is weird.” Yeah, the modern Democratic Party is the last set of people who should be accusing others of weirdness…
“Did the Israelis just take out two key leaders in Iran’s proxy armies? Just hours after announcing that a strike in Beirut killed Hezbollah’s top military commander, the Iranian state media announced that Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh had been “martyred” in Tehran. Haniyeh had just arrived there to meet the newly elected president.” Reports say he stayed in the same room in the same complex every time he visited, so Israel managed to sneak a bomb under his bed several months ago…
“Canada’s standard of living is on track for its worst decline in 40 years, according to a new study by Canada’s Fraser Institute. The study compared the three worst periods of decline in Canada in the last 40 years – the 1989 recession, the 2008 global financial crisis, and this post-pandemic era. They found that, unlike the previous recessions, Canada is not recovering this time. Something broke. In fact, according to the Financial Post, since 2019 Canada’s had the worst growth out of 50 developed economies. Inflation-adjusted Canadian wages have been flat since 2016.” That’s what happens when you elect socialist asshats like Justin Trudeau.
Like the electoral blowout feared by national Democrats with Biden at the top of the ticket, Phelan’s abysmal record of the Texas House under his mismanagement resulted in a political disaster; more incumbent Republicans lost their primary re-election campaigns than any time in modern history.
Phelan himself is damaged goods, politically. He outspent his primary opponent by a 5-to-1 margin yet garnered a “win” of less than 700 votes in a race that saw a couple of thousand Democrats flip primaries, clearly to “help” him.
Everyone in the House knows that their defeated colleagues earned challengers because Phelan made them vulnerable… and then left them to go down in defeat.
But he is, for now, still the speaker… in name, anyway.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was publicly done with Phelan more than a year ago after the speaker and his cronies sent a deeply flawed, legally problematic, and factually vacuous “impeachment” of Attorney General Ken Paxton to be sorted out by the Senate.
The Democratic Party’s social justice agenda in action: “At least eleven transgender-identifying male felons are currently housed at a formerly women-only prison in Washington State. Many of them committed violent crimes against women and children before they entered the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW), colloquially known as ‘Purdy.'”
Speaking of which, the NFL’s $4.7 billion antitrust judgement was just overturned. “The jury’s damages verdict was otherwise unsupported by the evidence.”
“A Bakersfield College professor who was investigated and disciplined after he questioned the use of grant money to fund social justice initiatives at his school has agreed to a $2.4 million settlement to resolve his lawsuit.” Keep hitting them in the pocketbook…
Bungie games, of Destiny and Halo fame, just laid off a bunch of staff. Official line says 17% of the company, but elsewhere I’m hearing the true total is closer to 40%. Microsoft bought then spun out Bungie, and Sony bought them in 2022.
In the least anticipated team-up since Kathleen Kennedy and any Star Wars project, a Mexican Cartel drug cartel and Chinese underground bankers have formed an alliance.
A federal indictment has alleged an alliance between one of Mexico’s biggest drug cartels and Chinese underground bankers—who are accused of jointly conspiring to cover up more than $50 million in drug profits.
A Tuesday press release from the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs detailed the 10-count indictment, which charged 24 Los Angeles-based Sinaloa drug cartel associates with working alongside groups that have been linked to Chinese underground banking systems.
The name given to the federal government’s multi-year investigation was “Operation Fortunate Runner.” It ended with a superseding indictment of the group back in April, though it was only unsealed on Monday—revealing that the 24 individuals were each charged with one count of conspiring to perpetuate the distribution of cocaine and methamphetamine, one count of money laundering conspiracy, and one count of conspiring to operate an unlicensed monetary transmitting company.
“The superseding indictment alleges that a Sinaloa Cartel-linked money laundering network collected and, with help from a San Gabriel Valley, California-based money transmitting group with links to Chinese underground banking, processed large amounts of drug proceeds in U.S. currency in the Los Angeles area,” explains the DOJ press release.
“They then allegedly concealed their drug trafficking proceeds and made the proceeds generated in the United States accessible to cartel members in Mexico and elsewhere,” it continued.
Chinese and Mexican law enforcement agencies collaborated with the Justice Department to arrest fugitives who fled the United States to other countries after being indicted and initially charged last year.
Edgar Joel Martinez-Reyes, 45, is the lead defendant. According to reporting done by the Associated Press, prosecutors say that Martinez-Reyes played the part of manager—leading couriers who retrieved the drug cash from the Los Angeles area. Authorities say that he partnered with leaders of the Chinese money laundering operation and traveled to Mexico to negotiate contracts with the Sinaloa cartel.
Anne Milgram of the Drug Enforcement Administration said at a recent news conference, “This investigation shows that the Sinaloa Cartel has entered into a new criminal partnership with Chinese nationals who launder money for the cartels.”
Drug seizures at the unsecured southwest border have dropped over the past four years, although hundreds of thousands of pounds of illegal drugs have still been seized.
Meanwhile, there has been a rise in encounters with Chinese nationals.
According to data from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, the number of Chinese nationals encountered at the southwest border during fiscal year 2024 has already eclipsed the numbers of the previous three years.
In FY 2024, there have been 27,700 encounters with Chinese nationals from October to April, as their data for May has yet to be released. During the entire FY 2023, that number was 24,314—compared to only 2,176 in FY 2022 and 450 in FY 2021.
We’ve been wondering what all these Chinese nationals were doing pouring into America, and “Cartel Thug” seems to be among the possibilities.
How much Chinese authorities have cooperated with the DEA, given that there is wide suspicion that the Chinese government has given its blessing to flood America with fentanyl, remains to be seen. But given how widespread the practice of siphoning off money for other enterprises is the Chinese banking sector, it’s entirely possibly that Chinese authorities are actually cracking down on it. Plus the underground bankers may not be current on their CCP bribes.
Crime cartels in one country do frequently cooperate with the cartels in another, though we’re use to thinking of such cooperation working on ethnic lines (Sicilian mobs cooperating with the American mafia, or Mexican cartels working with Mexican Americans or illegal aliens.) But where there are large amounts of illicit money to be made, strange bedfellows bloom.
Theory: The people flooding into Europe are innocent families of refugees fleeing war. Reality: “young men [heaving] rocks at the authorities and showing up on YouTube videos shouting Allahu Akbar.”
“There is something shallow and decadent about a pontiff who prioritizes “climate change” even as every last Christian is driven from the Archeparchy of Mosul. What will they say of such a pope? That he fiddled with the thermostat while Rome burned?”
I increasingly think the Democrat/Muslim union has to do with old-fashioned relativism. Democrats don’t actually believe that women’s rights and gay rights apply to everyone; white people: sure. Arabs? Well, who am I to judge? And Muslims know this.
When Robby George is just dumbfounded as to why all these Muslims support the party of abortion on demand and gay marriage, the answer seems pretty clear to me: They’re supporting the party of abortion on demand and gay marriage for infidels
Another:
I think the issue is more that they see Muslims as a new potential mascot group that they can champion and therefore obtain that cheap sense of moral superiority that comes with riding in like a white knight. I think a lot of liberal attitudes towards minorities aren’t actually based on the good of the minorities, but how good it makes the liberals feel to champion them. Muslims are (as of now) a tiny, insignificant minority. They’re mostly kinda swarthy, so the “it’s racism” meme is easily transferable, and a significant chunk of liberals loathe Christianity.
“This is America: You can go to the bookstore and buy yourself copies of everything from The Basketball Diaries to The Motorcycle Diaries to The Turner Diaries.”
On the other hand, the DEA can just take your money without a trial.
Verizon buying AOL. Remember when AOL was important enough to merge with Time Warner as an equal?
So former Smashing Pumpkins front man Billy Corgan is going to form a tranny wrestling league? The proposal seems as ill-conceived as his entire post-Melon Collie career…
Think UK Muslim child rape stories couldn’t possibly get any more creepy or depressing? A gang in Croydon targeted Down Syndrome girls. (Hat tip: JihadWatch.)
Speaking of Democrats and the Senate, there are bruising primary battles heating up up between the party’s corrupt wing and the party’s insane wing. (Sure, National Journal uses the words “pragmatic liberal” and “progressive,” but we all know what they mean.) (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Different jobs, different perks. If you work at a high tech start-up, you may get free snacks and catered meals. If you work at the DEA, you might get orgies with prostitutes paid for by drug lords.
