Huge Supreme Court win, Ukraine switches from Wildberries to Ozon warehouses, yes, DSA are damn dirty commies, more Second Amendment progress, Ted Cruz’s book on Clarence Thomas is out, Aussie gets 15 years for shooting a carnival air gun, remembering Dolly, and the NFL finally takes the Pro-Bowl to a farm in the country.
The Supreme Court just handed President Trump a massive victory in the fight to secure America’s elections. The justices cleared the way for his executive order restricting mail-in voting to move forward, and after months of Democrat officials trying to bury the policy in court, the administration finally has room to breathe.
This is a big deal.
The SAVE America Act is still stalled in the Senate, blocked by Democrats who aren’t even hiding the fact they have zero interest in verifying that voters are who they say they are. Trump’s executive order just got a green light from the nation’s highest court anyway. Election integrity doesn’t have to die in the legislative graveyard to make progress.
Trump signed the executive order, called “Ensuring Citizenship Verification And Integrity In Federal Elections,” in March 2026. It directs his administration to build lists of eligible voters and orders the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people on those lists. The Postal Service laid out its implementation plan last week, but the clock is ticking. Some states start sending mail ballots in just a few weeks, leaving the administration little time to get this right before the midterms. More court challenges remain possible.
The victory is real, but it’s not the finish line.
Mail balloting has been a target of Trump’s for years, and for good reason. The Heritage Foundation has long argued that mail-in ballots are more susceptible to fraud, coercion, and chain-of-custody problems than in-person voting. Anyone who lived through the 2020 presidential election, one of the most disputed elections in history, watched that vulnerability play out in real time.
It’s official: California just criminalized publicly exposing fraud.
our tax dollars are paying for fraud, and if someone like Nick Shirley exposes this fraud he, not the fraudster, could get in trouble.
More from Nick:
These politicians need the fraud to continue and they sadly use immigrants to do so often. They fund nonprofits and NGOs with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars every year for immigration services, including free healthcare, and have now made ‘immigration support service providers’ essentially a protected class in California.
For example, if I film a hospice or a ‘learning center’ with no patients receiving millions through Medicaid and the owner gives me a paper saying I cannot publish the video, I cannot publish it. If I publish it to expose them and they claim it caused them ‘fear’ or a third party threatens them, I face a minimum $4,000 civil fine plus the legal fees of the individual or group suing me.
This bill was created by the Attorney General’s wife and co-sponsored by CHIRLA, a nonprofit that has received over $80,000,000 in taxpayer dollars for ‘immigrant support services.’ Do you understand how this works yet? When the fraud is exposed, they create new laws to protect the fraudsters and penalize those who expose it.
By signing this bill, the Governor and California politicians expose themselves as the corrupt politicians they are. This is not the end; the fight has just begun. More to come soon; this is far from over.
An unconstitutional prior restraint First Amendment violation that will be struck down instantly the first time California tries to enforce it.
If it weren’t for voter fraud, welfare state fraud, crazy trannies, violent criminals and pandering to radical Islamic anti-Semites, the Democrat Party wouldn’t have any business model at all…
“Our goal is Communism,” David Jenkins, a member of DSA’s National Political Committee, said in 2023.
DSA member Cea Weaver is New York City’s tenant tsarina. She posted via X in December 2017, “Elect more communists.” The next year, she demanded: “Seize private property.”
Weaver’s boss is Mayor Zohran Mamdani. In his Jan. 1 inaugural address, he stated: “I was elected as a democratic socialist, and I will govern as a democratic socialist.” He told a DSA Zoom call in 2021: The “end goal” should be “seizing the means of production.” Mamdani also said, “The abolition of private property … is preferable to what is going on right now.” These comments loudly echo Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ cornerstone collectivist text “The Communist Manifesto.”
The magnificently named Darializa Avila Chevalier rode Mamdani’s endorsement all the way to the Democrat nomination for New York’s 13th Congressional District.
“I’m a democratic socialist,” she boasted June 29 on MS Now. She also wants to “seize the means of production,” as she advised in a not-quite-deleted September 2019 X post. She confessed that December: “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag.” In April 2020, she wrote: “Most of the theory I have read is communism but the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me.” The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine preserved 3,657 such messages that Chevalier thought she had erased.
For months, the assumption that the Strait of Hormuz was Tehran’s ultimate card dominated commentary on the war.
As a narrow waterway through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and a substantial share of liquefied natural gas had historically passed, it appeared to be a chokepoint Iran could close or severely disrupt at will. It did not need to destroy every tanker. Hitting a small percentage with drones, cruise missiles, speedboats, or mines would spike insurance rates, deter crews and companies, and effectively shut the strait without continuous physical control.
This idea was not new for 2026. It had long been a feature of the Iranian strategic posture, treated as both a military instrument and a political myth-proof that even under pressure Tehran retained a decisive lever over the global energy system. Parts of the Western media and independent analysts amplified the same narrative.
Relying on incomplete open-source shipping data, especially once vessels began sailing dark, many concluded that the United States had been caught unprepared and lacked a realistic path to reopen the waterway. Hormuz, they argued, was effectively closed or closable at Iran’s discretion. That framing was powerful, but also incomplete.
The assumption that Iran’s detection and targeting system could not be dismantled without dramatic escalation proved wrong. Under the U.S. Central Command, also known as CENTCOM, and with significant involvement from the Fifth Fleet and Air Force components, the United States ran a sustained effort to degrade the sensors Iran needed to find and hit ships.
Iran relied on mobile truck-mounted radars, drones, cruise missiles, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) speedboats, and naval mines. Inside the narrow strait, ships move in relatively predictable lanes. Iran combined active radars with passive electro-optical and infrared cameras on elevated terrain and islands such as Qeshm, Larak, and Abu Musa.
Mobile radars would radiate briefly to locate shipping, then shut down and move before anti-radiation missiles could arrive. Once a ship’s approximate position was known, strike systems could be sent to search.
The vulnerability was that every radar emission could be detected. American aircraft responded systematically with anti-radiation missiles while visual and intelligence efforts located the passive sensors. This was the core of what some involved called “draining the swamp.”
Iran had redundancy, but the number of sensors was finite. Hundreds of precision strikes gradually reduced Iran’s ability to see traffic in the strait. As the detection layer thinned, the effectiveness of the strike systems declined with it.
Parallel efforts neutralized mines with unmanned vessels and declared the southern lane near Oman largely clear. Convoys moved under escort, often at night with the automated information system (AIS) off. Arleigh Burke-class destroyers with Aegis radars and standard missile (SM)-family interceptors formed the backbone; drones and Apache helicopters armed with laser-guided rockets provided additional cover. American ships also engaged IRGC speedboats that closed on the convoys.
On the commercial side, the United States addressed insurance barriers. In early March, President Donald Trump directed the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to provide political risk insurance and guarantees for maritime trade.
The DFC, working with the Treasury and CENTCOM, established a revolving reinsurance facility of roughly $20 billion-later expanded with private partners including Chubb-focused on hull, machinery, and cargo cover. Early uptake was limited. As Iranian success rates fell, more vessels joined.
Results have been significant. CENTCOM has reported assisting well over a thousand commercial vessels and moving hundreds of millions of barrels since the spring. Independent trackers often showed lower numbers because much of the traffic sailed dark. Pre-war throughput was 20 million to 21 million barrels per day.
Flows through Hormuz remain below that, but combined with the Abu Dhabi-Fujairah pipeline and Saudi Arabia’s pipeline to Yanbu in the Red Sea, volumes recovered enough to keep oil prices in the $85 to $95 range-elevated, but far from the predicted catastrophe.
Followup: “Satellite Imagery of Multiple Ozon Warehouses Destroyed by Ukraine.”
“Big Blast as Drone Storage is Hit By Drone & Project 05060 Patrol Boat Destroyed in Crimea.”
“Ukraine Destroys Rare Su-33 (First Destroyed), MiG-29 and Orion Attack Drone At Anapa Airport.” This was just the other side of the Kerch Straight Bridge. The Su-33 is normally a carrier based aircraft, but since Russia’s only aircraft carrier has been out of service since 2017, they’re doing much desk landing these days.
The surprise visit by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency to Moscow this week was to deliver a warning to Russia not to attack NATO countries, according to people briefed on the visit.
The trip was spy-agency chief John Ratcliffe’s first publicly known visit to the Russian capital. It followed new U.S. intelligence assessments, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, that Russian President Vladimir Putin could try to test the resolve of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with a limited assault on an allied country in the next few years.
U.S. officials are concerned that Putin, squeezed in Ukraine and under pressure at home, could launch an assault ranging from a cyberattack to a small-scale land incursion, likely on a Baltic nation, the Journal reported.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice conceded that Americans are allowed to carry in Postal Service buildings.
Snip.
On August 18, a federal judge ruled against Biden’s “ghost gun” ban, saying it violates multiple parts of the Constitution….Judge Reed O’Connor ruled Biden’s “Ghost Gun” rule violates the 2nd and 5th Amendments,
Decision by decision, the Second Amendment is being upheld and gun rights expanded.
More progress: “CDC restores info showing how many good guys with guns stop bad guys after Biden removed it.”
Concerning: “Maryland felony cases against Zizian trans death cult members abruptly suspended. After 18 months of prosecution, Maryland abruptly put its cases against three Zizian trans cult members on indefinite hold. Officials have not publicly explained why.”
The cases against cult leader Jack “Ziz” LaSota and subordinates Michelle “Jamie” “Alex” Zajko and Daniel “Hastur” Blank were made inactive on Aug. 14; All scheduled future trial dates were canceled.
LaSota, Zajko and Blank were arrested together following a national manhunt on Feb. 16, 2025 in rural western Maryland. They were found with a cache of weapons in their two box trucks. They had spent years moving around the country as members of the Zizians, a radical transgender cult who has been linked to at least eight violent deaths.
The three initially faced only misdemeanor trespassing, firearms and obstruction charges after an elderly Frostburg-area property owner reported that they had arrived in box trucks and asked to camp on his property.
Authorities later added charges involving the alleged illegal possession and carrying of concealed and loaded firearms.
LaSota, a biological male who identifies as a woman and uses the name “Ziz,” is the founder and ideological leader of the Zizians. The group is made up of transgender vegan extremists, several of whom have elite educational backgrounds in science and mathematics. Members embraced an esoteric ideology combining leftist transgender politics, anarchism, rationalism and veganism.
Snip.
Though the state charges have been suspended, LaSota is being held on a federal detainer request on a federal indictment of being a fugitive from justice in possession of firearms and ammunition. On Tuesday, he was transferred into federal custody at the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia.
Zajko, meanwhile, is awaiting extradition to Pennsylvania. She was charged in June with murdering her adoptive parents, Richard and Rita Zajko, on New Year’s Eve 2022. The case had gone cold for years before the surprise announcement by prosecutors in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.
Authorities allege Zajko traveled from Vermont to her childhood home in Chester Heights on the night of her 30th birthday and participated in the execution-style killings.
Bad news for justice in Colorado: “Former Colorado Bureau of Investigation DNA analyst Yvonne Missy Woods pleaded guilty to four felonies — cybercrime, perjury, attempting to influence a public official, and forgery, after facing 102 felony charges tied to misconduct in 58 cases dating back to 2008. Woods worked at CBI for 29 years, from January 1994 to November 2023, and was qualified as an expert witness more than 500 times. A routine audit in late 2023 uncovered anomalies in her work; an internal investigation found she purposefully deleted DNA data to skip required testing steps. Retesting of roughly 3,000 affected cases cost the state an estimated $11 million. Among the high-profile cases she handled was the 2003 Kobe Bryant sexual assault investigation. ”
“ICE Arrests 1,328 Illegal Aliens in DC, Virginia, Maryland in 14 Days. Of those arrested, almost 400 illegal immigrants had criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, including a Salvadoran national wanted in Richmond, Virginia, on a murder warrant.”
“Other crimes included rape, sexual assault, kidnapping, DUI, robbery and attempted murder.” Also: “They also arrested members of MS-13, 18th Street Gang, and Tren de Aragua gangs.” MS-13 and Tren de Aragua we’ve covered here before. According to Wikipedia, “The 18th Street Gang, also known as Eighteen St, Barrio 18, Mara 18, or simply 18 in North America, is a multi-ethnic (largely Mexican and Central American), street gang from Los Angeles, California. It is one of the largest street gangs in Los Angeles, with 30,000–50,000 members between the United States, Mexico, and Central America.” Evidently they’re enemies with MS-13.
“Lottery Boss Appears in Court over $95 Million Scandal. Former Texas Lottery Executive Director Gary Grief faces a first-degree felony charge of abuse of official capacity tied to the controversial 2023 jackpot.”
Former Texas Lottery Executive Director Gary Grief appeared in a Travis County courtroom Friday morning as the criminal case stemming from the controversial 2023 Lotto Texas jackpot moves forward.
Grief appeared alongside his attorney before District Judge Dayna Blazey in the 167th District Court. Prosecutors and attorneys representing the entity formerly known as the Texas Lottery Commission were also present.
Court records show Grief waived formal magistration Friday. Another hearing concerning his personal-recognizance bond was set for October 16.
Shortly after Friday’s proceedings, Travis County District Attorney José Garza formally announced that a grand jury had indicted both Grief and the now-defunct Texas Lottery Commission for abuse of official capacity.
The indictments were handed down April 21.
According to Garza’s office, the charges stem from the April 22, 2023, Lotto Texas drawing and allege that the commission, along with high-level management officials Ed Rogers and Clay Kidd, intentionally and knowingly misused government resources.
The DA’s office alleges the conduct was authorized by Grief, who was serving as the commission’s executive director at the time.
The indictment concerns the drawing in which a New Jersey-based lottery purchasing operation acquired nearly every possible number combination and won a $95 million jackpot.
Grief faces a first-degree felony charge of abuse of official capacity involving $300,000 or more.
The whole affair stinks to high heaven, and I have to think at least some Lotto Commission employees were in on it.
“Judges Recommend Regulators Reject Proposed 765-kV Line. The Public Utility Commission must now decide whether to accept the judges’ recommendation to reject the proposed multibillion-dollar transmission line projects.” “The judges concluded the utilities [Oncor and the Lower Colorado River Authority Transmission Services Corporation] did not establish that the projects are necessary and failed to comply with notice requirements designed to give affected landowners a chance to participate before the application was filed.”
The plot thickens. “Iowa Attorney General Says She’s Taking California to the Supreme Court Over Paramount-Warner Bros.”
Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird wrote in an op-ed for The Daily Wire that she is suing California for leading the charge in the lawsuit against the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger.
“California is once again trying to be the country’s regulator. And once again California is defying common sense to raise costs around the country,” Bird wrote. “That makes this a dispute between states, and the Constitution says those can only be heard in the U.S. Supreme Court.”
“Australian man faces 15 years in prison for using toy gun to win carnival prize for daughter.” He was an ex-felony prohibited from using guns, but getting busted for a carnival air rifle seems way, way excessive.
How Simon Whistler runs his YouTube channels. He outsources everything except direction and presentation, expands his winners and ruthlessly culls his losers. It’s smart business, but largely antithetical to what I watch YouTube for. (Previously.)
Weirdly enough, the animated film Lesbian Space Princess seems to be hated by everyone. See, a film with that title could be highly profitable in porn…
Two Seattle residents filed recall charges against Mayor Katie Wilson on Tuesday, August 11, alleging she has neglected her legal duty to maintain public safety and peace in the city.
Melinda Jacobson and Dale Osterud submitted the charges to the King County Elections Office, accusing Wilson of dereliction in addressing crime, gun violence, open-air drug activity and related issues across multiple neighborhoods during her first eight months in office. The filing also criticizes her decision to seek the resignation of Police Chief Shon Barnes.
The charges are the initial step under Washington state law for seeking a recall of an elected official. The charges must undergo technical review by the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. If these meet requirements, prosecutors will prepare a ballot synopsis for King County Superior Court, where a judge will determine whether the allegations meet the legal standard of misfeasance, malfeasance or violation of the oath of office. Only then could proponents circulate petitions.
If approved, organizers would have 180 days to gather roughly 70,000 valid signatures from registered Seattle voters — equal to 25% of the total votes cast in the previous mayoral election. Sufficient verified signatures would trigger a special recall election.
Wilson, a democratic socialist and former community organizer who co-founded the Transit Riders Union, took office January 1, 2026, after narrowly defeating incumbent Bruce Harrell in the November 2025 election by less than 1 percentage point, the closest Seattle mayoral contest by margin since 1906.
The recall filing comes amid fallout from a July 26 shooting at the Bite of Seattle festival at Seattle Center, where three people were killed and others wounded in what police described as a possible gang-related exchange of gunfire involving multiple suspects, including a 15-year-old who was charged and a 19-year-old suspect who died at the scene. City officials faced criticism over delayed and inconsistent public communications after the incident.
Wilson accepted Barnes’ resignation on July 30 and appointed Deputy Chief Andre Sayles as interim chief. The charges call the move a “hasty, rash decision” that created instability in the department, arguing Barnes had provided stability, improved recruiting and community engagement. Wilson has cited communication gaps between her office and the department as a factor.
Presumably Barnes wanted to fight crime rather than let it flourish, something that’s anathema to “Democratic” socialists.
The recall requirements are steep, and Seattle is a notoriously leftist city, so it’s quite possible the attempt will fall short, leaving Wilson to continue providing an abject lesson to the rest of the nation of what not to do.
Finally, an SPLC arrest, Iran is broker than broke, a crazy commie loses despite a huge poll lead, more Russian Wildberries, ships, and conveys blow up, more of that voting fraud that never happens, and Israel dirtnaps more Hamas scumbags.
Authorities in California arrested Heidi Beirich, a former chief financial officer (CFO) at the Southern Poverty Law Center, on fraud charges.
The indictment alleges Beirich helped funnel money to white supremacist groups through informants. She also supposedly had a romantic relationship with one of them.
From CNN:
The woman, Heidi Beirich, previously ran the SPLC’s project tracking hate groups in the US and allegedly “oversaw payments of donors’ money” to people inside of these hate groups, according to the indictment. Prosecutors say she shared a bank account with one of those sources, which included funds from the SPLC’s payments.
“I believe she was part of the effort to open bank accounts in completely fictitious companies’ names and make payments to individuals for reasons that that were not accurate as as described,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a news conference Wednesday. “This is exactly what we said would happen in a case like this, which is that our investigators and the US attorneys and the agents working the case will can keep on working it even after the initial indictment.”
Oh yeah, Blanche was confirmed as Attorney General. Maybe should have had a link on that, but, eh.
The grand jury indictment against the SPLC came down in April 2026, including 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
“In order to covertly pay the individuals, the SPLC opened bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities,” the DOJ wrote in a press release. “The covert nature of the accounts allowed the SPLC to disguise the true nature, source, ownership, and control of the fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid the individuals. In order to keep the scheme going, the SPLC made a series of false statements related to the operation of the accounts.”
Beirich is “Employee-2” in the indictment, who worked as SPLC’s director of intelligence between 2012 and 2019.
SPLC said America had a racism problem. It did. It was the SPLC…
Not a whole lot of kinetic news out of Iran this week, but there are additional signs that the Islamic Republic of Iran’s economy is cracking.
Despite the bluster from Iranian officials on social media, it should come as no surprise that the country is not doing well economically. From the beginning of the conflict to current day, Iran has been dealt an estimated $270 billion to $300 billion in total damage due to a steady barrage of strikes, including numerous infrastructure targets from bridges, highways, railways, airports, etc.
The three-month-long US blockade on Iran’s oil exports have also taken a toll, with national oil output dropping from 2.2 million bpd to less than 300,000 bpd. It is likely that there has been some long term damage to the regime’s oil wells and they have lost approximately $6 billion in oil revenues so far.
With a general information blackout in place, getting a proper estimation of the damages can be difficult. However, in recent months many Iranian leaders and media sources have indicated a dangerous shift in the stability of the country. The situation has become so volatile that citizens are reportedly turning to theft in order to get their hands on basic necessities including food.
Iranian newspaper Jahan-e Sanat has reported increased theft of basic groceries over recent months, with store workers linking the trend to rising poverty. Related reports say meat is in short supply, there is reduced consumption of staples, subsidy shortfalls, and broader poverty pressures.
Analysts note that while full state collapse or famine has not yet occurred, the combination of high food inflation, currency weakness and job losses is placing severe strain on households. Iran’s President, Masoud Pezeshkian, seemed to confirm the decline last week when he noted that the country was facing economic “difficulties and problems,” while claiming the enemy was trying to provoke protests.
At Iran’s 33rd Conference on Monetary and Banking Policies (around June 2026), he questioned why people wake up to find their purchasing power has fallen and stated there are “hundreds of ways to overcome the economic impasse.” He noted that policymakers take people’s money and “return it with reduced value.”
Central Bank Governor Abdolnaser Hemmati presented a recovery roadmap and acknowledged an ongoing GDP contraction. He stated that “the combination of war and cruel sanctions has posed serious challenges to the country’s economy. Most importantly, people’s livelihoods have been severely affected because various sectors of the economy have been impacted by sanctions.”
He also cited inflation at around 53%, which appears to be a underestimation of the real currency destruction taking place.
Government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani has discussed infrastructure damage (e.g., bridges, tunnels, gas and electricity capacity losses), adjustments to gasoline rations, and challenges with subsidy payments disrupted by banking issues or cyberattacks.
These admissions are often wrapped in claims of resiliency despite the crisis, but the biggest danger (inflation) has yet to fully play out. SCI data for the Persian month of Khordad (ending ~June 21, 2026) showed overall year-on-year inflation of 88.6% (up from pre-escalation levels around 50%). Food inflation reached 134%, with oils/fats at 278%, red meat/poultry at 178%, and bread/cereals at nearly 139%.
The rial hit record lows of around 1.5–1.9 million per USD at various points during the war. This has amplified import costs and eroded purchasing power.
Crippling infrastructure damage and currency devaluation might help to explain Iran’s desperate insistence on charging tolls in the Strait of Hormuz. If their oil industry is facing a multi-year setback and damage to infrastructure is extensive, tolls on shipping through the strait may be their only source of economic recovery.
There seems to be just enough juice left in the Corrupt Wing of the Democrat Party to rise up and defeat the very worst candidates of the insane wing, as Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong lost.
Yesterday, faced with a potential gubernatorial nominee who hates a bunch of American holidays, Wisconsin Democrats pulled it together and got just enough votes to nominate Milwaukee County executive David Crowley instead of the DSA candidate, Francesca Hong. As of this writing, Crowley has a bit more than 313,000 votes, and Hong has a bit more than 310,000. The Associated Press called Crowley the winner at 2:34 a.m. local time.
Keep in mind, recent polling had Hong with a lead of 18 to 29 percentage points.
7 months ago Francesca Hong voted against a bill that made it illegal for teachers to groom their students for sexual purposes
Here’s what happened: A 30-year-old teacher messaged a 13-year-old student of his every day for six months and talked about how he wanted them to be together, she had a nice body, and he was jealous when she talked to other boys. He also sent her pictures of himself lying shirtless in bed
So the cops arrested him but when they went to charge him, they realized nothing he did was actually illegal. They never made sexual contact and no pictures were exchanged that were explicit enough to qualify under Wisconsin state law. This guy was actively trying to rape a 13-year-old student and there was no law forbidding his conduct
He wound up being charged with a bunch of disturbing the peace charges and only spent six months in prison for spending half a year abusing his authority as a teacher to manipulate a 13-year-old girl into having sex with him. He is not a convicted felon – since all the charges were misdemeanors – and is not on the sex offender registry
The Wisconsin State Assembly responded to this by drafting a bipartisan bill that made it a felony to engage in any course of conduct clearly and obviously intended seduce or lure a child into engaging in sexual acts or exchanging illicit images. It passed 193-6 and was signed into law by the Democratic governor. Francesca Hong voted no.
4 months later the first person was charged under the new law. He was 36-year-old man who met a developmentally disabled 16-year-old in a public park when she was 13 and spent the next three years trying to manipulate her into running away from home so he could make her his live-in sex slave.
To recap: Earlier *this very year* Franesca Hong was one of only six people to vote against a bill that made it illegal to take affirmative action designed to lure a minor into sexual acts and the very first person the bill Hong voted against was used to arrest was a guy who tried to rape an underage girl with Down Syndrome
Marxist streamer Hasan Piker has emerged as an increasingly visible, if unofficial, spokesman for the Democratic Socialists of America’s rapidly expanding political action network. He campaigned for Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong while cultivating close ties with socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
From an electoral-risk perspective, Piker is becoming a liability for Democrats. His far-left, anti-American rhetoric provides Republicans with what we called “a gift” last week. Even Hillary Clinton warned on Friday that the GOP’s “anti-communist messaging is very effective.”
Piker calls on his followers to “kill capitalists”:
Hasan Piker calls on his followers to kill capitalists:
“Yeah kill them! KiII those motherfuckers and murder those motherfuckers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood, dude.”
Piker: “We want more immigrants to come into your countries and then they’re gonna f**k your sisters and then your daughters. We’re here to destroy the White Race, Bitch.”
Hasan Piker says he wants to FLOOD illegals into the United States so they can "f*ck your sisters and daughters" to "destroy the white race"
I am demanding the Democratic Party voice PUBLICLY that they denounce Hasan Piker's comments.
A federal appeals court has delivered another victory for Texas’ landmark 2021 election integrity law—the same legislation that prompted Democrat lawmakers to flee the state in an unsuccessful attempt to block its passage.
The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday reversed a lower court ruling that blocked nine provisions of Senate Bill 1, including requirements related to voter identification for mail ballots and assistance provided to voters.
The three-judge panel sharply criticized the lower court’s handling of challenges to the law.
“In short, we have been playing an exhausting game of Whac-A-Mole to correct the district court’s mishandling of this case,” Judge Andrew Oldham wrote after recounting a series of previous Fifth Circuit decisions reversing or staying rulings against SB 1.
Oldham opened the opinion with an equally forceful defense of mail-in voting safeguards.
“It has long been established that mail-in ballots are prone to fraud,” wrote Oldham, adding that voting by mail “jeopardizes election integrity and democracy itself.”
Passed by the Legislature in 2021, SB 1 established new safeguards, including requiring voters casting ballots by mail to provide an identification number or Social Security number that matches state records.
The law also established procedures for voters to correct defective mail ballots and imposed requirements on individuals assisting voters, including an oath that they did not coerce or intimidate the voter and disclosure of their relationship to the voter.
The legislation became the centerpiece of a months-long political battle at the Texas Capitol.
Democrat lawmakers first broke quorum near the end of the 2021 regular legislative session to kill an earlier version of the election legislation. When Gov. Greg Abbott called lawmakers back into a special session, more than 50 House Democrats left Texas for Washington, D.C., again denying the chamber a quorum.
The effort ultimately failed, and lawmakers returned to Austin. SB 1 was subsequently approved by the Legislature and signed into law by Abbott.
The decision is the latest in a series of Fifth Circuit victories for the state over challenges to SB 1.
In 2025, the appeals court reversed separate permanent injunctions against provisions of the law challenged under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the latter ruling in June.
Earlier this year, the Fifth Circuit also reversed another permanent injunction against SB 1 provisions challenged under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) unsealed a two-count indictment charging 11 individuals for orchestrating a massive, decade-long marriage fraud network that arranged over 1,000 sham marriages.
Federal prosecutors described the operation as one of the largest marriage fraud prosecutions in U.S. history, spanning “from 2016 through July 2026 and generating tens of millions of dollars in illegal revenue.”
The criminal scheme primarily aimed to secure fraudulent green cards and lawful permanent residency for foreign nationals, predominantly citizens of the People’s Republic of China, the DOJ noted.
According to the 21-page indictment unsealed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the defendants marketed their services through social media, word of mouth and targeted advertising.
Foreigners reportedly paid the enterprise up to $100,000 each to facilitate a fake marriage and process green card applications. In turn, the network recruited U.S. citizens to act as spouses, paying them up to $30,000 per arrangement, while recruiters pocketed commissions of around $5,000 for every participant enrolled.
Federal officials explained further how the syndicate functioned as a “full-service” operation designed to systematically evade federal immigration checks. Facilitators hired officiants and photographers, staged wedding ceremonies — sometimes at local restaurants where participants wore traditional attire to fabricate authenticity — and generated fake documentation.
Ukraine hits “multiple Black Sea Fleet ships at Novorossiysk, including a Project 22160 patrol ship, a Kilo-class submarine, and the Admiral Makarov, an Admiral Grigorovich class frigate, as well as grain export terminal facilities.
Ukraine destroys a train carrying North Korean ballistic missiles some 6,000 miles away on the Transiberian Railroad. Depending on where on the Transiberian Railroad it was hit, that could put a real crimp on Russian logistics coming from China, one of its last lifelines.
Russian oil refinery 6,500km away from Ukraine goes up in flames, but it probably wasn’t a Ukraine strike.
That thing that never happens happened again. “Non-citizen sex offender given green light to vote by Dearborn poll officials.”
OMG [O’Keefe Media Group]’s undercover journalists investigated two Michigan registered voters identified as non-U.S. citizens in federal court and DHS records. One of them, Afshin Masheli, is identified in federal court records as an Iranian national and non-U.S. citizen. DHS has previously featured Masheli on its publicly released “Worst of the Worst” list, which highlights noncitizens arrested by ICE for serious criminal offenses. According to United States District Court records, Masheli is a registered sex offender.
OMG proved that at Masheli’s assigned polling location, election workers confirmed a voter registration under his name appeared in the poll book and stated that a registered voter listed there could cast a ballot. Our undercover journalist spoke to Afshin Masheli himself and Masheli said he planned to vote later that day.
Our investigation also identified another registered voter, Fazlollah Haritash, whose federal records identify him as a non-U.S. citizen. Public court records and Michigan’s public sex offender registry showing the criminal convictions, and the registry lists him as incarcerated. At the polling location associated with Fazlollah Haritash’s voter registration, an election worker confirmed that a voter registration under his name appeared on Michigan’s voter rolls.
More tax incentives to hire foreigners over Americans. “Employers Using J1 Student Visas for Seasonal Work Pay NO Social Security Taxes.”
When a company hires J1 student temporary or season employees, they do not have to pay the 7.5% FICA or Social Security tax on the wages.
If a company hires a seasonal American student, they have to pay the 7.5%. If the company hires a foreign student, they don’t. This creates a perverse incentive for private equity firms, companies or corporations to hire foreign seasonal workers…
Apparently, this is now the common approach within the hospitality industry to save money and increase profit from payrolls. Unfortunately, this approach puts young Americans at a disadvantage when seeking summer or short-term seasonal employment.
For fiscal Year 2025: The U.S. State Department processed 506,142 applications and successfully issued 451,803 J-1 visas.
Among the recent criminal sentencings and convictions:
— Jacob Daniel Terrazas, 31, of Paramount, Calif., was sentenced July 22 to ten months in federal prison “for throwing chunks of cinderblock at Border Patrol agents and injuring one of them during a protest that turned violent,” according to a Justice Department press release. Terrazas pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of simple assault on a federal officer.
— Yachua Mauricio Flores, 23, a Mexican illegal immigrant living in Los Angeles, was sentenced August 3 to 37 months in federal prison “for pouring two bottles of lighter fluid onto a burning California Highway Patrol (CHP) vehicle and throwing an electric scooter over a freeway overpass near officers during an anti‑immigration law enforcement riot in a downtown Los Angeles,” according to a Justice Department press release.
— Ismael Vega, 42, from Los Angeles, was sentenced July 27 to 37 months in federal prison “for throwing rocks and ignited debris at California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers trapped underneath a downtown Los Angeles freeway overpass … during a violent anti-immigration law enforcement protest last year,” according to a Justice Department press release. Vega pleaded guilty to one count of obstructing, impeding, and interfering with law enforcement during a civil disorder.
On Friday, the IDF disclosed the recent elimination of Hamas company commander Muhammad Mushtaha, who committed atrocities on October 7, 2023, and kept several Israelis in captivity. “The IDF now confirms the elimination of the terrorist Muhammad Bassam Muhammad Mushtaha, who was struck two weeks ago in the northern Gaza Strip,” the military said in a statement on Friday. “Muhammad Mushtaha served as a company commander in the Shati’ Battalion in the Hamas terrorist organization׳s military wing.”
Snip.
On Thursday, an Israeli airstrike killed another Hamas commander who took part in the October 7 Massacre. The Israeli Air Force (IAF) “struck in the area of Gaza City and eliminated the terrorist Jamal Mahmoud Abu Kamil, a commander in the Hamas terrorist organization who infiltrated Israeli territory during the October 7th Massacre,” the IDF announced on Friday. ”
From Dwight comes the heartwarming story of Gina LaPlaca, former mayor of Lumberton Township in New Jersey, who, with her husband Jason Carty, was indicted for voting fraud, namely collecting fraudulent signatures to compete in a Democrat primary…only to come in third of three.
Brandon Herrera and Wes Virdell buy silencers. “GOA Members to Make History with First Suppressor Transfers Without NFA Registration Since 1934.”
Ann Coulter: “Google AI will NOT cite The Daily Mail.” Specifically, Google will not find a 2013 Daily Mail article about Trayvon Martin and drug use, even if you search for the exact name of the article. The Ministry of Truth is hard at work hiding those pesky facts from you. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Well: “Jason Arday, ex-Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism, found dead in UK week after investigation launched.” (Previously.) (Hat tip: Dwight.)
One of the videos showed an alleged assault that was reported on July 30. The video appeared to show [Diquan] Hunt punch a woman on a sidewalk off East Boulevard in Charlotte’s South End before running away.
The person suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries. It was not immediately clear why Hunt punched her, but it does appear to be random.
In the video, it appears you can hear Hunt say to a woman passing by, ‘Don’t wave to me.’ Hunt appeared to hit the woman and can be seen standing over her, screaming at her and asking her, ‘You still talking?’
Hunt was taken to a local medical facility for treatment. He will be transferred into the custody of the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office once he is released and charged with assault with a deadly weapon.
Bonus: “This is Hunt’s tenth arrest since 2023.” Of course Mecklenburg County DA Spencer Merriweather is a Democrat…
Bad guy threatens gas station clerk after being denied alcohol because he didn’t have ID. Good guy with gun: DELETED. Bonus: Perp’s name: “Ofa’tangikivaha Angilau (a classic Utah name right there).”
“Bitcoin Red Team Says AI Is Finding Critical Exploits Across Core Projects. A volunteer security effort says it has scanned 150 Bitcoin repositories, disclosed more than a dozen vulnerabilities, and is building an open-source AI platform to automate software security reviews.”
Royce White, the Rockets draftee turned Republican congressional candidate has declared for the WNBA, along with ex-NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom. How far is the WNBA willing to go to tie itself into knots rather than offend the radical left by just declaring that no one with XY chromosomes can play in the WNBA?
Various leftists, including Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, are now claiming that you can’t drag them for past statements because “Woke 1 was crazy.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) debuted a new phrase on Sunday meant to distinguish the current rise of socialism in the Democratic Party from the “woke” cultural peak of 2020 that featured calls from Democrats to defund the police during the COVID-19 pandemic.
While speaking with Jonathan Karl on ABC’s This Week, the prominent socialist and potential 2028 presidential candidate was asked about Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong’s prior support for abolishing prisons and canceling Thanksgiving.
“My understanding is that Francesca Hong has made clear her present stances to her electorate,” she said before confirming to Karl that Hong has “moved away from” these positions. “And I have a local city councilman who has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’ and I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”
To which I can only reply: No. Fucking. Way.
“You can’t ding us for our past madness, you can only believe the obvious lies we’re dispensing now.”
You don’t get to back away from your past lunatic statements because you still believe in all that bullshit.
There was no “Woke 1.0,” just a continuous racialist, anti-Western Civilization, anti-rational, anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, anti-Republican movement whose roots stretch back into the Comintern, Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, carried forward into the Port Huron Statement, the Weather Underground, the campus radicals of the 1960s and their long march through academia and other western institutions, special campus victimhood identity politics carve-out departments for blacks, Hispanics, radical feminists and “Queer Theory,” into the political correctness of the 1980s that blossomed into the poisonous flowers of social justice, radical transsexism, Palestinian- and Islamo-felia and anti-Israel animus that has turned into full-blown antisemitism, and a radical fringe in the Democrat Party that metastasized to its core under Obama and President Autopen. AOC’s Democratic Socialists of America and their fellow-travelers were all on-board with their lunacy every step of the way.
And that lunacy included a cancel culture that sought to debank, deplatform and disemploy anyone bucking its ideological dictates, all of which had achieved a crazy level of hatred and groupthink long before the madness of 2020. That bumped the social justice hubris up another notch when The Science™ made it a a moral imperative to keep normies locked in their homes and firing them for refusing a vaccine while prominent Democrats felt free to visit the expensive restaurants and salons of their choice. Then everything turned on a dime when #BlackLivesMatter rioted over a dead criminal, and the social justice sorts demanded that we “defund the police” so they could get their sticky fingers on money going to law enforcement while Soros-backed DAs did everything in their power to get criminals back on the street to continue victimizing law-abiding citizens. And then President Autopen threw open the borders to let tens of millions of illegal aliens flood into the country.
And throughout it all, the SJW/DSA types were onboard with all of it, every step of the way. There was no “woke 1.0,” there was only the same madness taking on new forms.
You didn’t regret it then and you don’t regret it now, you only regret getting caught. You thought your control of the Democrat Party, the mainstream media and the halls of academia would let you impose policies opposed by 85% of Americans by force majure, that the moral purity of your virtue signaling would let you sweep all before you as inevitable historical processes validated your Will to Power clothed in the triumphalist language of “the moral arc of history.”
It didn’t happen that way.
The Tea Party happened. Then Trump happened, The Mule derailing your inevitable, preordained triumph. Then your hand-picked candidates like Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams came up short, keeping you from cementing the Democrat voting fraud machine in those two states. Then Elon Musk bought Twitter, and your attempt to lock anyone opposed to social justice lunacy out of the public square failed. Then followed the Twitter Files, revealing for all the extent to which you went to establish a global censorship regime to silence political opposition. You were happy to have a boot stamp on a human face forever, as long as you were the one wearing it.
No, you don’t get to just go “Whoopsie! Mistakes were made!” and expect to waltz away from your unpopular bullshit without any of it sticking to you, especially now that the DSA has thrown the mask off and gone full Commie, admitting it wants to destroy America’s constitutional government of ordered liberty by getting rid of the Electoral College, the Senate, and a independent President and Supreme Court.
No, you don’t get any grace for the bullshit you spewed, especially since you used that bullshit to destroy people for refusing to bend the knee to your sick religion, from people fired for refusing to use your idiotic pronouns to California still forcing men into women’s prisons.
You don’t regret any of the pain you inflicted on normies, you only regret not getting to inflict more of it. You still view yourself as the natural anointed rulers of those benighted rubes in JesusLand.
You don’t get forgiveness as long as you continue trying to force social justice and communism down America’s throat.
More Iran War spin cycle, Ukraine hits more oil refineries and Wildberries, more welfare state fraud, more Fauci follies, more Democrats behaving badly, and one anime lover does something really, really stupid.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
(Note: Somehow an unfinished version of this got published and one of Bluehost’s little timeouts temporarily prevented me from unpublishing it…)
I should have a link on Iran here, but as far as I can tell it’s the same cycle: 1. Iran attacks neighbors or a ship transiting the Strait of Hormuz, 2. U.S. pounds the snot out of them, 3. President Trump announces we’re close to a deal with Iran, 4. Iran announces usual lies (deal gives them complete control over the strait, U.S. promises to hand them a big pile of money, President Trump promises to pray to Mecca five times a day, etc.). Set spin cycle to repeat next week.
Why go to war with Iran now? When we have so many problems to solve — still — at home, and with the midterms looming?
If you just said “Because Israel” go and sit down. No, sit ALL THE WAY DOWN. And stay there, quietly, while the adults talk. You’ve been sold a fable by people who would love to split up that alliance in order to destroy both countries piecemeal. And yes, a lot of the people in this country you trust are in the pay of those people or alternately truly vulnerable to manipulation.
Yes, Israel is at war and has been at war. Not out of some desire of being a local hegemon — after all, they gave back a lot of territory in the early 2000s in the hope of buying peace for their people for all the good it did them — but because they would like to survive. And even then, they were soft-handed to the point of insanity until they got the wake up call of 10/7. Not responding to that wake up call would have been suicidal. Apparently they are not that. This makes them neither an evil scheming nation nor manipulators of US politics. Go sit all the way down, and think shame you allowed the likes of China and Russia and dissatisfied Arab elements (now their leadership is becoming marginally saner) to manipulate you.
However, our war with Iran has nothing to do with Israel except insofar as Israel has provided able support in it, taking down the “Hamas fighters” Iran would have sent against us when we moved against Iran.
And if you think that Trump just up one morning and decided to go to war with Iran because he’s just that crazy, you have the president completely wrong. He had a public persona that is a little unpredictable. This I think is intentional just as I think Reagan’s “the bombing will now begin” was “accidentally open mike.” If you believe that, I have some bridges to sell you. They might be underwater, but great property.
Trump’s philosophy of government is “Make money, not war.” And I don’t mean making money for himself, though setting the US as the leader of the economic world definitely will end up in his children and grandchildren being richer. And ours too, think on. What I mean is that he uses money the way other presidents used war. He makes it profitable to be on good terms with the US, rather than beating people into not hurting us. By and large, it works.
Until you come to something like Iran. An “Islamic Republic” established with heavy propping by the USSR and still used as a proxy by Russia (and China. And every bad actor who wanted to use them.)
None of which would be an immediate problem, necessitating war. The world is full of crazy little countries, armed to the teeth and with evil intentions towards everyone starting with their own people.
Except for three things: 1- Iran’s evil intent is real and proactive. They declared war on us (And yes, Israel, but remember Israel is “little Satan” to our “Big Satan.”) They’re not just squatting on their territory, murdering their own people and muttering “touch me and you’ll die.” They actively want to eliminate us. (And Israel, but honestly, mostly us.) They believe a final, massive war, will bring about their end times and paradise for the faithful. And they are, yes, sincerely religious. At least the leadership. 2-They either had a nuke, or were very close to having one, and as we have learned through their bombing every one and their cousins, they actually and for real had delivery means. To the US? who knows? And anyway, with a nuke and open borders, there are many means of delivery. 3- Pallets of cash given to them by Obama, which greatly accelerated the nuclear program. Which we supposedly have maybe thoroughly degraded. Maybe. Apparently the terrain and capacity of the Iranians…. it’s difficult to ascertain that, or to be sure they won’t be up to their games next week absent thorough regime change.
In other words, our war with Iran right now is very simple: Because the enemy gets a vote. And so do others who would love to be the enemy if we give them an opening and who are now at BEST “adversaries”.
Because if we give in to the “peace at all costs” people we’ll likely go back in a year or two. And if two who knows who’ll be in charge or what they’ll use “war time emergency” to do. Remember the covidiocy?
Now imagine that we have Kamala, or G-d forbid AOC in charge when Iran hits NYC or Chicago, or Denver, or any of our big cities. Or three or four of them.
Imagine millions dead, and the US suddenly on a war footing. Imagine what a “Democratic socialist” would do in an environment 10 times what the post 9/11 fervor was, when speaking out against war is political and perhaps physical suicide. Or, you know, you don’t have to imagine. Go and study the unvarnished presidencies of Woodrow Wilson or FDR and you’ll KNOW.
Beyond the fact that China is running out of time to make with aggression. Their demographics don’t support a long wait to go to war with us. They must do it soon. But to do it now would be suicide. To do it after Iran hits us with a nuke and we’re in disarray (particularly, if G-d forbid we have a Democrat in charge.) … golden opportunity. (And don’t tell me there’s no chance of a democrat in 2028. The right is riven by discord being sown by enemies domestic and foreign, and a lot of duckies on the right fall for it every single time.)
THAT is why we are at war with Iran now. And why Trump is doing it (he said he couldn’t risk a president he couldn’t be sure of facing this, remember?) right now, regardless of political price. Because undoing the damage that Obama wrought is essential if we are to thrive or even — just — to survive as a nation.
The DOJ Fraud Division, U.S. Attorney’s Office, and Pennsylvania Attorney General today announced criminal charges against 19 defendants, including owners and employees of home care companies, for their alleged participation in various fraud schemes involving over four million dollars in claims to Medicare and Medicaid.
The Pennsylvania Attorney General also announced a plea agreement involving the final defendant in a previously-charged 21 defendant case involving over $1.7 million in claims.
Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald of the Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, U.S. Attorney David Metcalf for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and senior federal and state officials hold a press conference announcing a significant health care fraud takedown and a new Anti-Fraud Initiative in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Commie Jihadi wins. “Abdul El-Sayed Wins Michigan Democratic Senate Primary. With 99% of the votes counted, El-Sayed defeated Haley Stevens 48.5% to 47.5% (14,893 votes).”
The Associated Press called the Michigan Democratic primary for socialist and anti-Israel candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
With 99% of the votes counted, El-Sayed defeated Haley Stevens 48.5% to 47.5% (14,893 votes).
El-Sayed’s victory is a major defeat for the Democratic establishment.
Members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) or endorsed by the socialists have won House primaries in Colorado and New York. Most Democrats brushed aside concerns that the socialists have started taking over the party despite those victories.
Will the Democrat party change its position now that El-Sayed won a statewide primary?
El-Sayed loves to hang out with far-left streamer Hasan Piker, who thinks America deserved 9/11.
The socialist claimed he never said he wanted to defund the police, but CNN dug up a 2020 interview where he said, “I believe we do need to defund the police.” People even discovered El-Sayed deleting past social media posts with anti-police rhetoric.
He also holds the usual socialist ideas: High taxes, Medicare for All, abolish ICE, open borders, etc.
Of course, El-Sayed hates Israel and AIPAC. He admitted that he struggles “with the question of whether Israel should exist as a Jewish state.”
El-Sayed wouldn’t say anything about Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death because many Muslims in the state are sad.
Given that this and many other clips of El-Sayed have gone viral since he won the primary earlier this week, it might be dawning on Piker that the Islamic vote in Dearborn isn’t going to be enough to carry a statewide election.
Today on X, he was furious again, but this time in his attempt to backpedal from one of his most infamous statements: that America ‘deserved’ 9/11.
this is unbelievably disingenuous, I'VE personally apologized for the words that i used BACK IN 2019. every candidate i've appeared alongside has done this. we all know this is a cynical way to justify associating the 1st muslim senate candidate with "islamic style terrorism" https://t.co/PqCAgXPJbw
Oh yes, because 2019 was so long ago, and saying that “America deserved 9/11” was so uncontroversial back in those dim, misty days of 2019. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Meta fined $567 million for harming the mental health of kids. And that was just in New Mexico…
“Huge Drone Strike on Petrochemical Plant and Ufa Oil Refinery: Huge Fire. [I]n Nizhnekamsk, Tatarstan, a massive fire is seen in the industrial zone of Nizhnekamskneftekhim after an explosion, probably due to a system overload after a series of UAV attacks on the industrial zone. ”
The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on Thursday advanced a resolution to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress.
The eight-to-five party line vote came in response to Fauci repeatedly invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination at a hearing last week to avoid Republicans’ questions regarding diary entries previously released by the committee. Those documents revealed the former head of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases gave the lab-leak hypothesis for the origin of the coronavirus more credit in private than he did in public at the beginning of the pandemic.
Something is at war with us, us being regular citizens who want things to work and to be left alone. We’re slow to react because we think in terms of nations. Our enemies are mafias that wear governments like a cloak to defeat our eyes and fly our flags to disarm our minds. So I think the way to think about Anthony Fauci sitting there in front of this committee today is we are governed by mafias. He is a made man. I think he’s just clearly a made man. And that means we don’t have the ability to touch him.”
This could get spicy: “Paxton Investigates Financial Ties Behind Childhood Vaccine Recommendations. The attorney general is seeking information about how the nation’s largest pediatric group develops its vaccine guidance.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating how a pediatricians’ association determines its vaccine recommendations and whether financial incentives have influenced its guidance.
Founded in 1930, the American Academy of Pediatrics has helped shape childhood vaccination recommendations nationwide and has worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on its childhood vaccine schedule since 1995.
“If the American Academy of Pediatrics is giving medical guidance that is fueled by financial incentives, we will expose and put an end to this unlawful behavior,” Paxton said.
Earlier this year, Paxton launched investigations into multiple vaccine providers, examining whether they failed to disclose bonuses and other financial benefits tied to the number of vaccines administered.
He also accused pediatricians of denying care based on vaccination status and attaching physicians’ wages or employment to vaccine quotas.
Nearly three years after the October 7 massacre, the Israeli military and security forces continue to hunt down and eliminate the terrorists responsible. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) scored major operational success over the weekend, taking out several senior Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists involved in the attack.
The IDF, supported by the Shin Bet security agency, killed a commander of Hamas’s Nukhba terrorist force who invaded Israel on October 7, 2023. A strike in central Gaza “eliminated the terrorist Abdallah Adnan Taha Abu al-Tayf, a Nukhba commander in Hamas’ military wing,” the IDF announced. “The terrorist infiltrated Israeli territory during the October 7th Massacre. Throughout the war, he actively participated in combat against IDF troops.”
In a separate strike, the “IDF eliminated the terrorist Jalal Tsubeih, a commander in the Daraj Tuffah Battalion of Hamas’ military wing,” the military disclosed in the same statement.
An October 7 hostage taker and commander of Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s (PIJ) Central Gaza Brigade was also killed in a recent Israeli strike, the IDF revealed on Monday.
The slain terrorist, Mahmoud Fatair, kidnapped 19-year-old Rom Braslavski. Rom was tortured and sexually assaulted by PJI terrorists during his long captivity. According to the BBC in November 2025, he “was sexually assaulted during his two years in captivity in Gaza.”
TPPF: “Flock Cameras Are An Assault On Your Constitutional Freedoms.”
Texans have a special way of dealing with infringements on privacy and the freedoms we enjoy.
Unregistered drones surveying our properties out in the sticks? That’s what the 12-gauge home defense system is for. Red light cameras that often prioritize revenue and control over public safety? The Texas legislature passed a law to ban that. Waiting for a glacially slow U.S. Congress to pass a Digital Bill of Rights? Federalism makes clear we had to take matters into our own hands.
Clearly, Texans understand that privacy is a fundamental prerequisite to being free—and that’s on both sides of the aisle. Polling conducted by my organization, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, suggests 9 out of 10 Texans believe as much. So it comes as no surprise that ire over Flock and similar Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) is shared by activists and advocates on both sides of the aisle.
And it also means the Texas Legislature will almost certainly do something about it next session.
ALPRs are not a new concept. Like more than one surveillance program, it began as an effort to combat terrorism, providing a novel method that allowed law enforcement to forego visual inspection and the time-consuming process of obtaining warrants and registration information. American police departments began using rudimentary ALPRs in the 2000s, arguing they “enhance their enforcement and investigative capabilities…[and] expedite the tedious and time-consuming process of comparing vehicle license plates with vehicles of interest.”
Whether unsophisticated ALPRs in the early days were a worthwhile investment is up for debate.
Proponents of Flock will point to the long history of this technology’s existence as reason to not fret over the current political landscape, but I’m not interested in that red herring. The reality is that technological shifts from simple contrast algorithms to advanced AI, pixelated cameras to high resolution photos that can capture clear shots in all conditions, and wide-angle lenses that can capture four or more times the number of lanes and cars as older cameras, have given rise to the narrative of mass surveillance.
To put into plain English, a police force in New York once boasted of capturing the license plates of 10,000 vehicles in a day; whereas a 2020 California state auditor report revealed that Sacramento’s Police Department recorded 24 times that amount, with close to 250,000 photos captured daily.
Proponents will quickly assert that these cameras only capture license plates, vehicle characteristics, distinguishing features (bumper stickers and license plate frames), and time and direction. But much like with brokers harvesting and selling your online data, it is not the individual data point has inherent value. It’s the fact that there is a stunning arsenal of these data-siphoning cameras across the nation, connecting all of those data points to generate a larger, far more invasive picture than a single snapshot in time. And this is precisely why there has been a well-documented cadre of police officers making use of this database to monitor their wives, exes, or random strangers.
As author and researcher Matthew Crawford puts it in reference to digital surveillance writ large, “The appeal, surely lies in not having to do things that we normally do for ourselves. The convenience may be worth the price; that’s for each of us to decide. But to do so with open eyes, one has to understand what the price is.”
If we are relying on an opaque, cherry-picked narrative of what personal information ALPRs can capture, how it is stored, the motive for retaining certain data, and whom it is ultimately sold or transferred to, we can’t possibly be informed enough to know the price of “enhanced safety.” Even worse, none of us even clicked “accept” to the terms of service while driving down I-35. So not only do we not know the price, we have no say in the matter.
“NY Socialist Can’t Pay Rent, Wants to Write State Budget.”
New York Socialist Brian Romero has not yet reached Albany, but he has already launched his first public spending initiative: covering his own rent.
Romero, the Democratic nominee for New York’s 34th Assembly District, launched a GoFundMe asking supporters to cover his rent and groceries while he waits to take office. The campaign sought $2,000 and collected more than $1,000 from 13 donors before disappearing Friday.
The timing was apparently a coincidence. Romero pulled the fundraiser shortly after the New York Post started asking questions.
Romero is not exactly facing a difficult general election. He won 66 percent of the Democratic primary vote, and Republicans did not bother fielding a candidate in a deep-blue Queens district. Once sworn in, he will collect a $142,000 annual salary plus a $203 daily allowance while the Assembly is in session.
But first, socialism needed a little crowdfunding.
“Now, defenders are embracing the prompt injection, too. ‘Context bombing’ tricks hacking agents into shutting down before they can do harm.'”
Prompt injections, the malicious commands attackers embed into content to entice large language models to follow them, have been attackers’ go-to tool for turning AI platforms against their users. A well-phrased command sneaked into an email or calendar invitation is often all it takes to cause the LLM to exfiltrate sensitive data or follow other harmful actions.
Now, defenders are embracing the prompt injection, too.
Researchers from Tracebit on Monday said they found that placing prompt injections alongside passwords, cryptographic keys, and other secrets stored on Amazon Web Services was often all that was needed to shut down attacks from AI hacking agents. The prompts direct the attacking LLM to perform an action forbidden by its guardrails, the safety barriers AI developers erect to prevent it from taking harmful actions. The LLM responds by shutting down.
Examples are a prompt that orders the LLM to provide steps for developing inhalable Anthrax spores, or, in the case of LLMs from Chinese developers, make references to the iconic Tank Man from the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Once the LLM encounters these forbidden commands, it no longer follows its existing commands. The researchers have named the technique context bombing.
Man foolishly threatens Texas Governor Greg Abbott over: A.) Deporting illegal aliens, B.) Eliminating wasteful government programs, or C.) Access to anime.
A Houston man faces a criminal case in Travis County for, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety, threatening the Governor’s Office over a law the man allegedly said prevented him from watching an anime.
Joseph Roy Ozment, 35, faces one third-degree felony count of terroristic threat against a public servant. KXAN has reached out to his court-appointed counsel for comment.
According to an affidavit written by a DPS special agent, Ozment allegedly called the Governor’s Office on the afternoon of July 25. DPS claims Ozment left the following voicemail (KXAN has redacted the profanity in the transcript provided by DPS):
“I don’t know which one of you sons of b—-es passed this motherf—ing bill to get this damn s— blocking my motherf—ing anime, but you whole a– motherf—ers need to unpass this s—. Y’all are f—ing ridiculous with your b—- a–es. My Google account says I’m f—ing over the age of 18, and your dumba– is passing these dumba– laws. I’m a f—ing stab every godd— one of you b—-es. Unlock my f—ing anime.”
The call was made from a cell phone that DPS claimed was registered to Ozment.
The affidavit does not say which anime Ozment tried to watch or how he attempted to watch it.
Most major anime streaming websites, such as Crunchyroll, HIDIVE and Yomi, remain available to access for Texans. KXAN double-checked this Thursday.
While the state legislature has not banned anime, two laws come to mind that could have impeded the caller’s access.
The first is a 2023 state law requiring adult websites to verify the age of any visitor before allowing access to content. In response, several pornographic streaming websites simply blocked all access from devices in Texas.
Another law is Texas’ app store age verification law. It requires a similar age verification process for smartphone users who want to download software from an app store such as Google Play. There’s currently ongoing litigation over the law’s constitutionality, but the law is in effect until that concludes.
In the voicemail, the caller said their Google account says they’re older than 18 years old. That would cover the app store requirements. It wouldn’t apply to pornographic websites, which are required to have users upload their photo ID.
One stands amazed at the stupidity of a man who thinks threatening the Governor will somehow restore his ability to spank his monkey to tentacle porn.
Given the difficulties of illustrating this item with anything remotely tasteful, I’m going with an, ah, “story adjacent image.”
Cambridge academic Jason Arday, accused of plagiarism, has the a record of serial lying that would make Jon Lovitz’s Patholical Liar blush.
Running a single marathon is a great achievement. Running 30 marathons is a spectacular feat. Running 30 marathons in 35 days is something only a world-class athlete could achieve. But running 30 marathons in 35 days, and running the final nine of those marathons with a broken leg – that’s an impossible feat that would require superhuman powers. But that is exactly what Jason Arday has claimed to achieve. But that’s not all, Jason Arday’s incredible feats aren’t just limited to running nearly 240 miles on a fractured leg without medical intervention, he also claimed to have run 600 miles in six days on a treadmill (without any evidence), played both football and snooker at a professional level (a boast that was apparently taken out of context), raised over £5.5 million for charity (but can’t name a single donor), managed to go 15 years with a barely a wink of sleep, and even appeared on the famous television documentary series Seven Up! – which originally premiered a whole 21 years before he was even born. This is the story of Cambridge University’s youngest-ever black professor, who was appointed as Professor of the Sociology of Education in 2023.
Snip.
We are meant to believe that a boy who was completely non-verbal due to autism and global developmental delay until age 11 and who was unable to read or write until 18, then went on to earn a PhD by the age of 29. This means that in just 11 years Jason managed to learn basic literacy and catch up on all those years of missed schooling, complete an undergraduate degree (which typically takes 3 years), complete two separate Master’s degrees (typically taking 1-2 years each), complete a PGCE teacher training qualification (taking 1 year) and then write a 100,000-word PhD dissertation (taking typically 3-4 years). In just over a decade, Jason had not only learnt to read and write, but condensed 12 years of higher education into a near record-breaking period of time that would prove his hyper-accelerated cognitive processing abilities were second to none. And he did it all whilst working multiple jobs and without sleeping
How did multiple UK institutions not detect Arday’s outrageous lies? Simple: Jason Arday is black.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has released its survey of the written policies of 493 colleges and universities and evaluated their compliance with First Amendment standards, which included 21 Texas institutions of higher learning.
Of the 379 four-year public institutions and 114 private institutions, FIRE gave each campus a red, yellow, or green light rating based on how their written regulations on student expression restrict free speech.
Red light institutions have at least one policy that both “clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech or bars public access to its speech-related policies by requiring a university login and password for access.” Nearly a quarter of the private schools evaluated received a red light rating, compared to roughly 10 percent of public universities.
Overall, red light ratings made up 13.2 percent of schools surveyed, down approximately 1.5 percent from last year. Since FIRE’s first report 20 years ago, red light ratings have dropped by 55 percentage points from 68.6 percent in 2006.
Rice University and the University of Texas (UT) at Dallas both received a red light rating for one of their harassment policies.
Snip.
The Texas colleges and universities that received a yellow light rating are:
It seems that people who thought they were Democrats are finally waking up to the fact that the party has left them.
First up: Bill Maher, who’s not down with the Dem’s open commie turn:
“Right before we left, Vice President JD Vance was on the show and I told him that if the Democratic Party keeps going in the direction of the DSA, my vote was in play.”
“Not a week goes by where I don’t read about some newly chosen exciting new face in the Democratic Party, and then when that face opens its mouth, the Communist Manifesto or some other crazy shit comes out.”
“New York Mayor Mamdani once tweeted Karl Marx’s words exactly. They’re not trying to hide it. Their most popular influencer, Hasan Piker, thinks communism is so groovy. He laments the fall of the two of the mostmurderous regimes in history, the Soviet Union and Chairman Mao’s China. Mamdami’s aid, his top aid, Cea Weaver, said, ‘If you don’t believe in the government’s sacred right to seize property, it’s over.’ And ‘Impoverish the white middle class.'”
“One of the new soon-to-be Democratic Congress people, Darializa Chevalier, supports seizing all properties from landlords, and said ‘seize the means of production.’ Mamdami has said the end goal is ‘seizing the means of production.’ I think they want to seize the means of production. Now maybe you missed that in school or missed school altogether, but that’s communism. That’s communism, which we tried and it doesn’t work.
“The DSA itself has switched. Even 5 years ago, it shunned communists. That changed. Things change. Now, the coalition within the DSA called the Marxist Unity Group is in ascendance. And I must take them at their word when their words include, ‘Our commitment is to the long-term struggle for a fully liberated, classless society in a word, communism.’ What do they have to do? Tweet out, ‘Elect more communists?’ [laughter] Oh, yeah. Cea Weaver did that.”
“Yes, my vote is in play. I’m not voting for anyone who thinks the wrong side won the Cold War or cheers for the Intifada like it’s the World Cup.”
“Last month, two Democratic congressmen released an open pledge they wanted their fellow Democratic members to sign. It said, ‘We are capitalist, not socialist. We want safety, not lawlessness. We are proud, not ashamed of America. These should not be hard words for a congressional Democrat to sign on to. You know how many did? Eight. Eight out of a 212.”
“Guys, really, there’s got to be an easier way to lose the swing states.”
“No, this nonsense is not where most Democratic politicians are right now. But it’s also becoming a raging Fyre Festival in the party that neither is anyone putting out. People are actually getting elected now who literally don’t think we should have police or prisons or borders. And again, they’re not lying about who they are. The media is.”
“Ask Miss Chevalier about the border. She says, ‘Yes, literally abolish the border.'”
“This crowd literally wants to get rid of our form of government, the Senate, but also, and I quote, replace the president and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress. Yeah, no biggie. Just taking the very essence of our government, which is three branches checking each other and canning two and a half of them. Who could be this nuts? I’ll tell you who. morons who are still wearing COVID masks in 2026.”
“Since the far left, the far far left is overwhelmingly made up of affluent, ultra-woke white people. You raised your kids wrong. You told your precious brats that every brain fart was genius. And now those brain farts are becoming Democratic Party policy.”
“Francesca Hong, yet another major Democratic candidate who’s all in on abolishing abolishing the police and is running for governor of Wisconsin says, ‘I think that my perfect world would be a world without prisons because we all see the humanity in one another and then we know nobody’s disposable.’ Well, murder victims are.”
“So many liberals shit themselves every time Trump puts gold on something in the Oval Office. ‘Oh, it’s historic.’ And the separation of powers isn’t?”
“Get your head out of your ass. I would vote for Sarah Palin before this shit.”
“This is Evan Barker, a former Democrat activist and someone who basically got kicked out of the Democrat party for not being woke enough.”
“Now, I realize that in the year of our Lord 2026, saying, ‘Oh, the Democrats are crazy. The Democrats are mental,’ is not actually terribly incisive political commentary. However, it’s always different when you’re on the outside compared to when you’re on the inside. And getting the inside story is actually more revealing, because of course from the outside there are a bunch of things about the situation we just weren’t aware of that it’s nice to be aware of.”
“And I again, I realize this isn’t terribly shocking to hear, but it’s the level of anti-white hatred that clearly manifested at every level of the Democrat party that Evan Barker kept just running straight face into. just the shocking amount and the explicit racial hierarchies that the Democrats of color were bringing to every circumstance, every interaction, every meeting, every, you know, instance of having to do work in the Democrat Party, loaded with race, completely loaded with it.”
“If you were white, well, this was entirely to your disadvantage.”
[Quoting from the book]: “Almost all Democratic operatives, regardless of their type, paroted the same lines to each other. It was common for us to call Republicans racist almost daily, convincing each other that the alt-right was absolutely terrifying. A force that literally wanted to murder us.”
“This is quite interesting because I’ve met a lot of Republicans in my time. I’ve been to America well probably more than a dozen times for quite long periods of time, weeks at a time. I’ve spent a lot of time meeting some quite important people in in on in the American right. And they’ve not all been the same. They’ve actually all said mostly different things to me. I mean, a lot of them have like, you know, similar views on economics maybe. But they don’t all just parrot the same lines verbatim. They will say different things even if they’re heading in the same direction. But often you’ll get this wide range of opinion on well basically any subject. I mean admittedly you know there’s a certain band that this opinion is within, but it’s not just the same wrote lines repeated over and over at all.”
“The Democrat Party, and I don’t use this lightly. You’ll know that I’ve done lots of work on reading about cults in the past. It genuinely seems to take on the pattern of a cult. And that’s what we see out of Evan Barker’s book here.”
[Quoting from the book]: “A mixed race woman “decided to go after me, sending my boss an email. quote, ‘This is not the first time an entitled white woman has spoken to me disrespectfully, and I suppose it will not be the last. I am not the only person of color she has spoken disrespectfully to on this team. Evan’s problematic mannerisms have been noticed by multiple people and not just me, and that’s clearly a way of trying to drag down a person that you think is somehow your competitor…Nabila didn’t like that I was assertive, that I didn’t automatically defer to her for being a woman of color, and that I spoke to everyone in the same way regardless of their oppression status.”
“Evan, you aren’t a Democrat. You are never a Democrat. You’re a normal person trying to do normal things. If you don’t believe in oppression statuses for and hierarchies of color, then you are not a part of this team. And I’m surprised it took them so long to kick you out.”
Race card victim woman says they should take “diversity, equity, and inclusion training.”
“Now, processing is a huge part of cult mentality. So a processing session is when someone in authority essentially patrols the boundaries and orthodoxy of the cult. So, a person in the cult who is problematic, who is and they talk to outsiders or doing whatever they’re doing that’s wrong, they sit and have essentially one-on-one interviews, and it’s kind of inquisition-like where they’ll ask them questions and, you know, take the narratives they give and try and poke holes in them and try and make them feel essentially a kind of gaslighting, and try and make them understand that they are in some way a bad person for challenging the orthodoxy of the cult. And that is what diversity, equity, and inclusion training is.”
Only one candidate she worked for kept in touch with Evan. “She wanted to talk to me about her dating life and have me set her up on dates but she refused to date white men. She said she was physically repulsed by them.”
“The same woman told me she ate magic mushrooms once with Texas Congressman Greg Caesar in a field. Was he also on some drug induced journey to heal the wounds inflicted by white people?”
“And in 2024, she put out a video saying that she’s becoming disillusioned with the Democrats. It went viral. She went to see a therapist on this. Mental, right? So she scheduled a Zoom call with her psychiatrist.”
“And so the the therapist was like, ‘Well, the the Democrats are right. Obviously, look, I understand your frustration with the Democrats, but Evan, it’s crucial for a stable society that Trump does not get back into the White House. That concern outweighs everything else right now. I mean, what’s done is done. You can’t change your decision, but I’m not saying it was wrong, but it’s possible that it was.'”
“And again, this feels very much like cultlike processing. Okay? Now, someone with authority, you’re going to subject yourself to that, and they’re going to sit there and essentially tell you that you are the bad person. You are wrong because you’re endangering the project. Your dissent endangers the project. So, you are not allowed to think outside of the boundaries of the barriers of this cult. You, in fact, need to confess your own sins. You need to accept that you are the bad person. You are the problem here and you need to essentially submit yourself fully to the authority of the leader of the cult.”
More and more former Democrats are coming to see how poisonous, insane and cult-like the party they previously aligned with has become. Will enough voter share their disillusionment?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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…
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.
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.
“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.
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.
The Spanish government and its partners openly state that the reason for legalising more than half a million migrants is to "defeat the far right." This is literally weaponised demography. They took the most conspiratorial interpretation of the "Great Replacement" that is not…
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.”
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
RFK, Jr. presses the pause button for medicaid payments over Democrat fraud, we pound Iran some more, Ukraine sinks floating cranes and sets giant logistics hubs aflame, and a punk rock auction.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have paused more than $1 billion in Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota due to fraud concerns.
“That includes more than $887 million for California and over $200 million for Minnesota,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a press conference. “If those states want that money, they need to provide documentation that these payments are legitimate.”
“In Minnesota and California, our reviews are going back to just over the last few years, turned up the same recurring theme again and again every single quarter: Claims in these same high-risk categories that the states have not yet been able to document fully and acceptably to the federal government. Claims that are unresolved and claims that smell like fraud. And if it smells like fraud, we’re not paying for it anymore.”
RFK Jr. says HHS loses $100,000,000,000 a year to theft.
He found some thieves would bribe poor people with flat screen TVs to get their patient numbers and enroll them in hospice.
Then they would proceed to bill Medicaid “$6,000 a month FOREVER.”
RFK JR: “We shut down 800 hospices. You know what a hospice is? Where you’re going to die. Typically, if you go to a hospice, you leave within 18 days because your dying is terminal.”
“We started looking at these hospices in Los Angeles, and the people never died. Two or three years later they were there, and we’re paying $6,000 a month.”
“We found a hotel room with 29 hospices in it. I mean a hotel, every room was a hospice, and none of them had any patients. They were just addresses.”
“The guys who own them, they were Estonians and Armenians and people from Eastern Europe who were getting the patient numbers. They were stealing them from doctors’ offices.”
“They were also going into poor neighborhoods in Los Angeles and they’d say to the people, ‘We’ll give you this $375 flat-screen TV. You give us your patient number and we’re going to enroll you in this hospice. You don’t ever have to go. We’re just going to enroll you,’ and then we’ll charge Medicaid $6,000 a month forever. And the guy never dies, of course, because he was never sick.”
“We didn’t get a single call from a congressman or from a business owner saying, ‘Oh, you shut down my hospice and all these patients are on the street.’ None of them, because they were all crooked and they knew they were crooke
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces successfully completed the 13th straight night of strikes against Iran, July 23, at 9 p.m. ET.
CENTCOM targeted Iranian military command centers, drone storage facilities, communication networks, coastal surveillance sites, and maritime capabilities to further diminish the threat Iran poses to civilian mariners and commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz.
The international waterway remains open for transit despite recent attacks from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Commercial vessels continue to freely navigate the strait with U.S. military support.
I’m noticing a couple of dogs that aren’t currently barking: Hezbollah and Hamas. It turns out that when your paymaster is broke, running out of missiles and getting the snot blown out of them, they don’t have a lot of time, money and attention to lavish on helping their two catspaws murder Jews…
When President Donald Trump talked about some of the things China has done to literally steal our democracy by seeing to it that, in 2020, its Manchurian candidate was elected in the form of a semi-comatose Joe Biden, many of the things he mentioned had already been in the news, but they may not have been covered by the legacy media.
Case in point: Trump mentioned in his July 16 address to the nation that China stole TikTok data to create fake U.S. driver’s licenses.
If you follow conservative media, you may have known this. If you get your news from the legacy media, you most likely didn’t know it, and if you heard it now, you won’t believe it. That’s the group Trump was targeting in his address. His national address strategy was to speak past the legacy media and to begin the process of planting the seeds of the truth in the minds of those who rely on the CNNs, ABCs, and NBCs of the world.
Strategically, Trump is now trying to break through the information barrier that the legacy media and the left have created to keep the majority of Americans in the dark on what’s really happened to corrupt our elections.
A year ago, Brooke Singman published a lengthy piece on the Fox News website that detailed just how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) executed its TikTok data theft scheme. Her primary source for the story was the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).
The Senate Judiciary Committee launched its own investigation into this after the FBI had announced its own investigation in July 2025. As Singman reported, the CCP allegedly worked to get “fake driver’s licenses to Chinese sympathizers in the U.S. who would cast a vote for candidate Biden.”
It is not clear how successful the CCP was in getting its ballots for Biden to count.
In July 2025, a Grassley spokesperson told Fox News, “Chairman Grassley is in receipt of an FBI document (response) to a request he made based on legally protected whistleblower disclosures…. The document alleges serious national security concerns that need to be fully investigated by the FBI.”
As stated in that document, the intent of the alleged scheme was for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to produce and export fraudulent U.S. driver’s licenses to Chinese sympathizers in the U.S., so as to create “tens of thousands of fraudulent mail-in votes for US Presidential candidate Joe Biden, in late August 2020.”
According to the document at the center of these investigations, by August 2020, “the Chinese government had produced a large amount of fraudulent United States driver’s licenses that were secretly exported to the United States,” Fox News reported.
The fraudulent drivers licenses would allow tens of thousands of Chinese students and immigrants sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party to vote for US Presidential Candidate USPER Joe ((Biden)), despite not being eligible to vote in the United States… China had collected private US user data from millions of TikTok accounts, to include name, ID and address, which would allow the Chinese government to use real US persons’ information to create the fraudulent driver’s license, the document states.
Reporting on the investigation indicates that the fake IDs included true ID numbers and the true addresses of U.S. citizens, which made the fraud difficult to detect.
“China planned to use the fraudulent driver’s licenses to account for tens of thousands of mail-in votes,” according to the document.
New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill spurned the Department of Justice’s request for information on the nearly 6,600 noncitizens who were improperly added to the state’s voter rolls, raising the ire of Trump administration officials who are making election security a priority heading in the November midterms.
The move follows Sherrill’s announcement on Tuesday that thousands of noncitizens had been added to New Jersey voter rolls, with 400 individuals casting ballots. Later that day, the DOJ requested the names, addresses, nationalities, and registration locations of the 6,600 non-citizens who were marked as voters, even though they identified themselves as noncitizens. Noncitizens convicted of voting in U.S. elections can face criminal penalties including deportation.
“Ensuring that U.S. citizen’s votes are not illegally diluted by noncitizen’s votes is of paramount importance,” the letter from the DOJ stated.
Sherrill voiced concerns that the information would be misused by the DOJ.
“We are not in the practice of turning this kind of personally identifying data over to the federal government because we have seen them weaponize it,” Sherrill said at an event on Thursday.
And by “weaponize” she means “Keeping our precious illegal aliens from voting for Democrats and/or deporting them.” You know, enforcing the law.
Here’s Melat Kiros, a “democratic” socialist activist, explaining the party’s plan to fundamentally change America by electing people from the “Global South”….
That’s the explicit plan from the DSA.
Mass immigration, elect immigrants to office Mamdani and Ilhan Omar-style, and have them fundamentally change what America is.
On February 2, 2021, a national targeting security specialist at U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center circulated a referral to colleagues across the agency. The subject was Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, scheduled to land at John F. Kennedy International Airport three days later aboard Qatar Airways flight 701 from Doha, arriving 2:25 p.m. He was returning from the World Health Organization’s mission to Wuhan investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
The referral asked that Daszak be considered for a Tactical Terrorism Response Team examination – a secondary inspection that can include questioning and a review of electronic devices. Which, now we know, never happened.
Senator Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released the underlying records Monday. They show CBP flagged Daszak as “an extremely high person of interest,” built out a formal targeting event, and then stood down two days before his flight at the request of the FBI’s New York Field Office.
It’s bad enough that Zohran Mamdani has become the leader of the new Democratic Party, having been anointed by none other than its King, Barack Obama. But now, their shining new star, Hasan Piker, is not even bothering to hide behind the words “Democratic Socialist.” He’s gone full-blown Commie.
These pitiful cosplay revolutionaries are not a match for Donald Trump, who can flick them off his jacket like a piece of lint, but he only has a few more years left, and the Democrats are collapsing into an even more fanatical cult. They have no one to blame but themselves.
Mamdani had made big promises to “arrest Benjamin Netanyahu” if he ever came to New York as a “war criminal.” But he had to backtrack on that because he doesn’t have the authority to do so because Trump smacked him down.
He still calls on the Federal Government to make the arrest. To me, he looks like someone who believes he’s the alternative president in our virtual Civil War, like a would-be Jefferson Davis.
Snip.
Hasan Piker is now riding high on his newfound fame and glory. He proudly displays the front page of the New York Times with the Twin Towers ablaze after 9/11 and has said on streaming that the US “deserved” it, later clarifying that our foreign policy was bad enough that we should be attacked.
Hasan Piker is dangerous because he is so stupid. He’s so stupid, he doesn’t even seem to know the horrific atrocities under Mao. He showed up at a recent Democratic event wearing a Mao costume.
Hasan Piker, like Zohran Mamdani, like all of the Manson family girlies who fawn all over them, were raised in American schools amid Critical Race and Gender Theory, the so-called “real history” they indoctrinated our kids with. Now we are seeing the fruits of their labor.
It’s Joseph McCarthy’s ultimate nightmare finally realized. Maybe it wasn’t true that the military was infested with Commies, but if it came back to today, he’d see evidence of infiltration everywhere, from culture to academia to politics.
If the Democrats go Full Commie thanks to the stalking horse of Social Justice, then it really will be time to stock up on ammunition. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
For those who know, rigged elections do happen in the Americas. They’ve been happening for years in Nicaragua, ever since the Sandinistas brought Daniel Ortega to power in the 1980s.
Many young people will have forgotten that there was massive enthusiasm for the Sandinistas across the international left. Five years ago, Quillette ran a wonderful piece about the support for Sandinistas found across the American left. It’s amazing how many leftists of the 1980s who went for the Sandinistas have stayed with us: Bernie Sanders, Bill de Blasio.
The poor in Nicaragua are in a wretched condition. Ortega effectively made himself president for life when he exceeded the country’s constitutional limits on his office. This week, he finally announced plans for the abolition of elections. He explained in a public rant that this was necessary to stop “the traitors.”
The only thing missing was Ortega announcing that he had to end elections “to save our democracy.”
I was writing about this commie scumbag back in college, and he’s long overdue to be dirtnapped. Maybe after we’ve finished with Venezuela, Iran and Cuba…
“Two Democratic Senate candidates have received backlash for accepting donations from a Democrat megadonor with former ties to Jeffrey Epstein. James Talarico and Sen. Jon Ossoff, D- Ga., who is running for re-election, have both received donations from Reid Hoffman, a billionaire who has admitted to spending time on Epstein’s Caribbean island.” It’s always OK when they do it…
“University of Houston Poised To Eliminate 40 Percent of Core Curriculum.” Which is a good thing, since the “core curriculum” items being eliminated are absolute social justice bullshit.
As first reported by the Houston Chronicle, UH officials are currently finalizing a proposal to bring before University of Houston System regents at the August board meeting.
The Chronicle reported that approximately 100 courses are on the chopping block. Examples include:
Black Liberation Theology
Black Liberation Studies
Intro to LGBT Studies
Intro to Women’s Studies
Latino Leadership, Activism, and Organizing
Mexican American Urban Communities
Sexuality and Society
The Chronicle further reported that while UH will eliminate core eligibility for coursework explicitly grounded in grievance studies, government and history coursework discussing “histories for specific demographics” was not impacted.
The review in question is required under Senate Bill 37, a measure state lawmakers passed in 2025. The new law also requires boards of regents to conduct a review of all general education curricula every five years.
General education requirements are a set of courses all students must complete, regardless of major. Higher education authors Jason Brennan and Phil Magness have criticized these mandates as a subsidy for economically unsustainable programs that frequently protect woke curricula from accountability.
Eliminate them all and lay off those teaching them.
Ukraine has agreed on a plan to acquire 16 Rafale fighter jets from France together with the accompanying weapon systems, French President Emmanuel Macron said at a press conference here late Monday following a meeting of the group of countries that have pledged support to Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Macron agreed on a roadmap between their two countries that also includes the acquisition of a first batch of SAMP/T NG air-defense batteries, complementing systems and their missiles to be delivered in coming weeks, Macron said. France will also provide radar systems and additional missiles, the president said.
The countries further approved licensing agreements for production in Ukraine of the AASM glide-bomb kit, the Aster 30 air-defense interceptor that arms the SAMP/T system as well as the SCALP/Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missile, Macron said.
Don’t get too excited, though. “The first Rafale jets are expected to fly in Ukrainian skies as early as 2028 or 2029.”
Concerning news: “U.S. Reaches 41 New World Screwworm Cases as Sterile Fly Production Continues Rollout.”
Primary news: “Trump-backed candidates, including ex-Giants, Jets kicker Jay Feely, easily win Arizona primaries — socialist House hopeful gets smoked.”
A full slate of Republican candidates endorsed by President Trump, including former NFL kicker Jay Feely, emerged victorious Tuesday in Arizona’s primary elections while a Democratic socialist House hopeful suffered a crushing defeat.
Feely, who played for six teams — including the Jets and Giants — during his 14 seasons as a pro, defeated former state lawmaker Joseph Chaplik in the Grand Canyon State’s 1st Congressional District, which covers northeastern Maricopa County and is the wealthiest in Arizona.
The 1st District seat is being vacated by Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.), who opted to run for governor. Democrats have targeted the district as a key flip opportunity as they try to regain the House majority after four years out of power.
Feely, a former CBS football analyst who was endorsed by Trump in January, touted his close ties to the president on the campaign trail.
“Who can call [Trump] and who can get him to answer? That’s me,” he said during a primary debate last month. “He will take my call and he will listen. I have the ability to have the ear of the president.”
In the Democratic primary, former state Rep. Amish Shah led onetime TV journalist Marlene Galán-Woods by 6.9 percentage points with 84% of the expected vote in, but the race had yet to be called as of Wednesday morning.
In the open 5th District, Trump-backed former Pinal County sheriff Mark Lamb topped construction contractor Daniel Keenan by nearly 17 percentage points.
Lamb, who rose to prominence for taking on Mexican cartels smuggling drugs across the border and into Arizona, will head to the midterms as the heavy favorite over Democratic nominee Elizabeth Lee in the solidly red district.
Snip.
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who has represented the 5th District since 2017, opted not to seek another term and ran in the GOP gubernatorial primary instead.
That decision paid off handsomely as Biggs, with the support of Trump, topped Schweikert Tuesday night by nearly 60 percentage points.
Snip.
In the 4th District, centered in the Phoenix suburbs of Tempe and Mesa, incumbent Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.) swamped Democratic socialist primary challenger Kai Newkirk by 30 percentage points.
Newkirk, who accused Stanton of being too supportive of Israel and corporations and slammed the congressman’s vote in favor of the Laken Riley Act mandating illegal immigrants who are arrested, charged or convicted of “burglary, theft, larceny or shoplifting” be held by immigration authorities.
Food contamination news: “Nearly 1.6M eggs from Texas farms recalled for possible Salmonella contamination.”
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a statement on Wednesday detailing the voluntary recall of 1,589,577 dozen eggs from Midwest Poultry Services, L.P., which may be contaminated with Salmonella Enteritidis.
Midwest Poultry Services said that as of Wednesday, it was not aware of any illnesses related to the eggs.
The identifying codes printed on the left or right sides of the carton P-1950 or 0840962 with a Julian date between 157 and 184 are recalled, according to the FDA report. They were available to consumers at Kroger stores in Texas and Louisiana, as well as Brookshire Grocery locations across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Mississippi. The full list of products that have been recalled is provided in the FDA’s announcement.
“Judge puts temporary pause on Paramount-Warner Bros. merger.” “U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of the Northern District of California issued a temporary restraining order barring Paramount from closing the transaction, a corporate tie-up that would unite two movie studios, two streaming platforms and two news organizations under the control of David Ellison, the son of billionaire technology tycoon Larry Ellison.” I know you’ll be shocked to learn that Martínez-Olguín was appointed by “Joe Biden.”
Missed this from a couple of months ago: “Every Single Horse Running In The 151st Kentucky Derby Is Related To Secretariat.”
“Astronomers announce the discovery of space sugar.
Using the Yebes 40-m and IRAM 30-m radio telescopes, the astronomers scanned the molecular cloud G+0.693−0.027, a chemically rich region located roughly 8,200 parsecs (26,745 light-years) from Earth near the Milky Way’s center.
They picked up 12 sets of radio emission lines that matched the predicted spectral fingerprint of erythrulose, a four-carbon sugar with the chemical formula C4H8O4.
‘Erythrulose, with 14 atoms in its structure, represents the largest non-cyclic molecular species identified so far in the interstellar medium, and the first detected molecule containing four oxygen atoms,’ they said.
Potter and Potter have an auction for “Skaters, Punks & Rebels: A Countercultural Cross-Section” next month. Probably not bidding on anything, but man, a 1983 concert with Black Flag, Fear and Circle Jerks would have been something to behold…
So here’s a video arguing that, since humans are primates, doing a deadhang improves a whole lot of muscle groups. It says most people struggle to do ten seconds at first. Since I don’t have a chinning bar, that’s not an exercise I can do at home, so I did two separate ten second hangs last Saturday on park equipment while I was out walking my dogs. Result: A few hour later my left wrist was in quite a bit of pain, but that faded over a day. This Saturday I think I’ll go for 12 seconds…but only once.
Two important speeches (from President Trump and Secretary of State Rubio) on leftwing threats to America, more welfare state fraud uncovered by Nick Shirley, Ukraine continues to hit Russian ships at will, multiple marine drone attacks, TSMC has a good week (and pledges to invest more money in America), Apple sues OpenAI, and Bruce Sterling compares AI to jazz.
Trump announced a massive declassification of documents showing how exposed our election system is to hacking and foreign interference. Top White House aides and intelligence agency chiefs have all reviewed and authenticated the documents.
The documents highlight major areas of concern. Starting in 2020, Beijing carried out the largest-ever compromise of election data. Some 220 million American voters’ files were meddled with by Chinese intelligence services. China signed a data exploitation unit for this project.
Members of the Deep State within the IC worked to suppress and downplay the scope and impact of China’s election interference. U.S. spy agencies discovered that the voter data breach in 18 states was bought, stolen, or hacked by China. That breach was kept hidden; Trump, who was still president at the time, was not informed, nor was Congress. The line was that the 2020 election was the most secure in history.
CIA reported in mid-2018 that the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements opposed to Trump. In mid-2019, China’s approach was to undermine domestic confidence during the first Trump presidency. The Chinese government aimed to identify anti-Trump reporters and pay them large sums of money to produce stories that cast Trump in a negative light.
The FBI obtained raw intelligence indicating that China’s activities included efforts to produce illegal ballots for Joe Biden. These were kept out of the presidential briefing. One analyst admitted to intentionally downplaying Chinese election activities. Another official stated she was running a shadow government to keep intelligence on China’s election interference away from the media and the White House. Numerous burn bags have been found.
Americans were lied to about the security of our election systems, including voting machines. They’re highly susceptible to attack. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and non-state actors have the ability to compromise our election infrastructure.
Michigan police raided a Democrat GOTV organization and were so concerned they contacted the FBI in Detroit. The documents state that canvassers signed voter registration forms in other people’s names, registered nonexistent individuals, and got paid based on the number of applications they produced. The FBI believed crimes were committed, but the Biden DOJ slow-walked and suppressed the case.
Today at 9:40 p.m. ET, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) completed its latest major wave of strikes against Iran.
U.S. forces, including fighter jets, aerial drones, and warships, launched precision munitions that hit dozens of Iranian military targets such as coastal surveillance and air defense sites, military logistics infrastructure, and maritime capabilities. This was the sixth consecutive night of U.S. strikes against Iran.
At the Commander in Chief’s direction, CENTCOM is further degrading Iranian military capabilities and holding Iran accountable for recent attacks on commercial shipping.
More than 50,000 U.S. service members are operating across the Middle East and remain vigilant, lethal, and ready.
“U.S. forces resumed the naval blockade against vessels transiting to and from Iranian ports and coastal areas today [July 14] at 4 p.m. ET,” the command posted to social media on Tuesday.
“There are currently more than 20 U.S. Navy warships and hundreds of military aircraft operating across the Middle East. American forces remain vigilant, lethal, and ready,” the statement continued.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has requested that senior officials from more than 60 countries convene in Washington next Thursday to discuss the alarming rise of transnational far-left terrorism, according to a Washington Post report.
Snip.
The initiative is intended to expand intelligence sharing, law-enforcement cooperation and potential terrorist designations targeting militant groups with alleged ties to Antifa.
Administration officials have discussed whether foreign-terrorism links could unlock broader investigative and surveillance powers against US-based far-left revolutionaries that are a part of subversion networks.
The problem is that countries have been addressing far-left revolutionaries as a domestic threat, but in fact it’s transnational.
State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said the upcoming event is in response to the rise of the radical left. He said far-left terrorism is “an old threat re-emerging with strong transnational links and new convergences.”
“Because this threat has not been adequately addressed in the past, each engagement, designation, or security assistance program creates a compounding effect supporting countermeasures at home and abroad,” Pigott said in a statement.
In November, the State Department designated four European far-left groups as foreign terrorist organizations and directed agencies to investigate networks accused of fomenting political violence. One of the militant groups in Germany is called Antifa Ost. Two more were in Greece and one in Italy.
During the Antifa roundtable at the White House last October, Seamus Bruner, Director of Research at the Government Accountability Institute, briefed the president and his cabinet on a complex network of dark-money NGOs and activist groups fueling unrest nationwide via the permanent protest-industrial complex.
“We have identified dozens of radical organizations, not just the decentralized Antifa organizations, but dozens of radical organizations that have received more than $100 million from the Riot Inc investors,” Bruner told Trump.
Jihadists attacks and plots in the United States are down by two-thirds since ISIS’s peak. The number of people killed by jihadist terrorism in Europe dropped by roughly 97 percent from the year 2015 to the year 2024. In other words, to a very great extent, our counterterrorism strategy has worked. The threat has not disappeared, of course. It will continue to exist, particularly so long as we tolerate immigration systems that imports these threats directly into our respective homelands. But this threat has been severely diminished. The world looks very different today because of it.
For far too long, however, our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot – a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left. Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy. It’s treated this way by many in the press, by many in academia and our universities, and by many of our legacy institutions. You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference. In spite of the clear and the undeniable reality, in spite of the objective numbers and statistics, in spite of the fact that in this room today there are representatives from across the political spectrum, we will hear this organized – that this kind of organized violence and terror will be dismissed. It will be dismissed as a partisan fiction.
A whole industry grew up in our countries around the study of extremism. We have think tanks and fellowships and journals and consultancies, with the unspoken understanding among them that the only kind of political violence that was a true threat to our system – I’m sorry – that only one kind of political violence was a true threat to the system. A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil. It is. But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary – well, that’s just merely a tragic excess of idealism. Perhaps its means were misplaced or overzealous, but its ends were virtuous and just. That’s the implication of how they treat it.
For years, this extraordinary ideological prejudice was embedded in the way we talked about political violence and extremism. It was repeated again and again, until it was accepted as the neutral and objective baseline, so entrenched – so entrenched in the mainstream conventional wisdom that it came to be regarded as an apolitical fact. It is the reason why, here in my country, so many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression so long as they served a left-wing cause.
It is why during those George Floyd – so-called George Floyd – riots in the summer of 2020, as criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through American great – America’s great cities and nearly brought the country to its knees, city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror. It is the reason for the now infamous image – and you all recall this – of a news anchor from a very prominent agency – a news anchor standing in a neighborhood consumed in flames; meanwhile the chyron on the bottom read that the protests were mostly peaceful. This was something worse than a double standard. Left-wing violence was not just excused; it was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself. That era has to end.
“Move over, Somali Learing Centers! Nick Shirley and Dr. Oz just visited Asian “adult daycares” and found a whole bunch of fraud.” “We uncovered over $190,000,000 in fraud as these fraudsters use the elderly and needy to commit fraud through adult and personal home care scams in NYC. Your tax dollars are paying for elderly Koreans and Chinese to play ping pong and do tai chi, while the fraudsters give $ kickbacks to those who enroll.”
“I Watched the DSA Go Crazy. The Democrats May Be Next. The anti-democratic far Left is using the same strategy that helped them capture the Democratic Socialists of America.”
How worried should Democrats be about the Democratic Socialists of America? In the wake of a series of DSA victories in New York City, Jonathan Chait raised the alarm in The Atlantic, writing that as the group has risen in power, it has also grown “more hostile to the [Democratic] party, more illiberal, and more dogmatic.” Long-time DSA members, including former staff member and thought leader David Duhalde and socialist magazine publisher Nathan J. Robinson, pushed back, dismissing Chait as someone who doesn’t know or understand the DSA.
Well, I know the DSA, and as someone who was a member and served in local leadership, I can say that Chait has it right: today’s DSA is not a harmless organization. It includes disciplined, radicalized networks that have methodically expanded their power over the last decade in pursuit of extremist goals.
As the Democratic Party grapples with the DSA’s growing influence and extremism, it would do well to recognize that the same dynamic underway now—first accommodation, then capture, then surrender to insurgent radicals—already played out on a smaller scale within the DSA itself. The only defense is to out-organize it.
For decades, the DSA was mostly composed of a cohort of aging Boomers left over from its founding in 1982. It prioritized open debate and political tolerance. Following in the tradition of founder Michael Harrington, members viewed the DSA not as a revolutionary vanguard but as a reformist bridge to mainstream labor-liberalism, and they prioritized parliamentary process and pluralism.
But in the mid-2010s, the character of the organization began to change. I was in Boston at the time and witnessed the last days of the “old” DSA. New, younger members began to enter the organization, while Senator Bernie Sanders and the socialist magazine Jacobin grew their followings.
As the DSA’s cultural power expanded and it began to amass electoral victories, more leftists of varying extremist commitments were drawn in. This was an explicit strategy called “the big tent,” advanced by the then-DSA Jacobin Left. In August 2025, DSA delegates voted to remove a constitutional provision barring Leninists from entry. The provision was already a dead letter.
The old DSA’s high-mindedness became its fatal weakness. Veteran members assumed the younger generation played by the same rules of persuasion, but the newcomers’ goal was not to win arguments—it was to transform the institution and its politics.
As the organization grew, it began to profess more extreme ideas—and demand that its members do the same. First there were the purity tests of Black Lives Matter and BDS, then apologia for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and support for Hamas and its atrocities.
The new DSA—with the help of hype-man Hasan Piker—advanced these agendas with what American labor leader Walter Reuther called “the Communists’ highly developed technique of name-calling and character assassination.” The Harringtonites fought back, but their efforts came far too late, and many prominent members of the older generation eventually left.
In a sense Jake Altman is wrong. The Democrat Party has largely already been captured by allied forces under the guise of “social justice” at the same time the commies were taking over the DSA, and were able to do it for much the same reasons: “no enemies on the left”, along with a heaping bowlful of white guilt.
A coalition of state financial officers said it uncovered roughly $225 million in alleged fraud across America’s schools over the past six years, identifying nearly 90 cases involving embezzlement, fake invoices, inflated enrollment, bid-rigging and kickbacks.
In a new report obtained exclusively by Fox News Digital, the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF) and Open the Books analyzed every Education Department Office of Inspector General (OIG) Semiannual Report to Congress issued between Oct. 1, 2019, and March 31, 2026, revealing alleged fraud across 24 states and Puerto Rico.
Some other examples snipped.
In Texas, former Houston Independent School District Chief Operating Officer Brian Busby and contractor Anthony Hutchison allegedly orchestrated a fraud scheme of more than $6 million, involving school construction and grounds maintenance contracts in exchange for cash bribes and hundreds of thousands of dollars in home renovations.
A federal jury found Busby and Hutchison guilty of conspiracy, bribery, filing false tax returns, and witness tampering, with Hutchison also convicted on seven wire fraud counts, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas.
“Bureaucratic bloat, insider dealing, and poor oversight prompted Governor Abbott and the Texas Education Agency to intervene in HISD and appoint new leadership,” HISD Superintendent Mike Miles told Fox News Digital. “School funding was being squandered, the quality of schools had deteriorated, and the majority of students’ education was being neglected. That is no longer the case. Since June 2023, we have made it a priority to eliminate waste and most importantly, now every decision we make is focused on closing student achievement gaps, preparing students for the future, and supporting teachers.”
More proof that Democrats in office are scumbags all the way down. “Swalwell pal Sen. Ruben Gallego had sexual relationships with two House staffers, sources reveal to The Post.”
Arizona Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, engaged in sexual relationships with at least two House staffers and his “very flirtatious” habits with others may come back to haunt him, The Post has learned.
The 46-year-old lawmaker admitted to the two relationships — both with aides to Texas Democrats — to one source while a second person said they had recently learned of the romantic entanglements.
A third source confirmed one of the dalliances, both of which are said to have been consensual and occurred during Gallego’s decade representing Phoenix in the House.
So he’s just an adulterer, not a rapist (as far as we know). Does this put him in the top half of senate Democrats for morality? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“Marine Drones Hit Two Russian Tankers: Magyar Hit 11 More Ships.” I’ve arranged these from most recent to least recent, which is all of five days ago.
“American Marine Drone Hits Iranian Submarine Repair Facility & Submarine at Bandar Abbas.” The drone used to attack the facility was the Corsair, manufactured by Austin company Saronic. Speaking of which:
“Sea Drone Company Saronic Announces $3.2 Billion Texas Shipyard. The company says the project is aimed at strengthening U.S. shipbuilding as autonomous vessels play an increasingly prominent role in modern warfare.”
Austin-based defense technology company Saronic, known for building autonomous watercraft, announced plans to invest more than $3.2 billion in a new shipyard at the Port of Brownsville that is expected to create 10,000 jobs.
Gov. Greg Abbott joined Saronic CEO Dino Mavrookas Thursday at the company’s Austin headquarters to announce the project, known as Port Alpha.
The shipyard’s initial phase will occupy more than 800 acres, with the potential to expand to more than 4,000 acres. Saronic plans to break ground this year and begin producing ships in 2028.
“The initial phase of Port Alpha will more than double America’s shipbuilding capacity today and will make it the largest shipyard in the country,” said Mavrookas.
Port Alpha will be designed for advanced manufacturing, software-based production, and autonomous vessels.
Mavrookas framed the project as a response to the decline of American shipbuilding and the increasing maritime capabilities of China.
“Today, China is now outbuilding the United States in shipbuilding capacity 230 to one,” he said.
“A nation that cannot build ships cannot project power, cannot protect its supply chains, and cannot defend its interests,” Mavrookas added. “We are at that moment right now. Port Alpha is our answer.”
Saronic designs and manufactures autonomous vessels for the U.S. military, including the Corsair, Mirage, and Marauder.
This is good news for American drone manufacturing (and shipbuilding). However, on a personal level, I note that Saronic has had the same technical writing position open for most of this year. Indeed, I’ve applied for it multiple times when listed, but gotten no contacts save form replies. Maybe with all their new activity they’ll finally be hiring…
Former Obama staffer accused of stealing from colleagues to fund drug habit.
Adam Fetcher, 42, was let go from his role as Chief Communications Officer for the City of Minneapolis last week amid a police probe, The Minnesota Star Tribune reported.
According to the outlet, Fetcher, who earned $186,495 a year in his role, is accused of stealing cash and credit cards from three of his colleagues and racking up fraudulent charges in smoke shops.
Fetcher’s drug of choice was Kratom, “a substance which is used to manage opioid withdrawal.”
U.S. Rep. Chip Roy wants the Trump administration to crack down on legal immigration after last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision thwarting a presidential executive order to address birthright citizenship.
In a letter to the Trump administration, Roy (R–Austin) said that while the administration works to secure the nation from illegal immigration, the current level of legal immigration should be reassessed to ensure that the “economic opportunities, cultural and social cohesion, or security” of American citizens is not negatively impacted.
Expressing concern about increasing pressure on housing, schools, and healthcare services, Roy wrote that the “American people deserve transparency so we can ensure our immigration system puts American workers, taxpayers, and communities first.”
According to the congressman, the U.S. takes in approximately one million legal immigrants each year because of the Immigration Act of 1990. This accounts for roughly 34 million immigrants over the last 35 years. He also explained that more than 10 million nonimmigrant visas are issued to visitors such as guest workers, foreign students, and tourists.
Roy went on to cite an analysis of last year’s Current Population Survey (CPS) by the Center for Immigration Studies, which highlighted legal and illegal immigrant totals of “53.3 million and 15.8 percent of the total U.S. population in January 2025.”
Ashrafuzzaman Khan, a former top official of the Islamic Circle of North America in Queens, New York, personally slaughtered seven university professors as the chief executioner of Jamaat-e-Islami’s Al Badr death squads during the 1971 Bangladesh massacre. Despite being convicted in absentia of war crimes, he helped build one of America’s largest Muslim organizations and continues to live freely in the United States.
Here’s a weird Texas crime story: “Lavaca County Justice of the Peace Commits Suicide Following Arrest for Compelling Prostitution, Sexual Assault. Travis Hill had been a fugitive since Monday, when he failed to appear for a pre-trial appointment.” Lavaca County is in south central Texas between Houston and Seguin on highway 90.
A Lavaca County justice of the peace who was arrested earlier this month on felony charges committed suicide on Thursday as law enforcement agents attempted to arrest him a second time.
Precinct 2 Justice of the Peace Travis Mitchell Hill was arrested July 11 on first- degree felony charges of compelling prostitution, second-degree sexual assault, and solicitation of prostitution, but reportedly had been released on bond.
Usually, compelling prostitution is upgraded to a first-degree felony when the victim is a minor.
The Lavaca County Sheriff’s Office was made aware of allegations against Hill six weeks ago, but since Hill was an elected official and a practicing criminal defense attorney, Lavaca County Attorney James Reeves recused himself and referred the case to the Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG). The Texas Rangers were leading the investigation.
Hill did not appear for a pre-trial appointment Monday, when he was supposed to receive an ankle monitor. The U.S. Marshal’s Office was assisting local law enforcement with locating him on Thursday.
According to a statement issued by Reeves, Hill was located Thursday evening “at a remote location in Gonzales County, Texas. During law enforcement’s encounter with Mr. Hill, he committed suicide.” No other details were provided.
“Hill was appointed as justice of the peace in 2011 by the Lavaca County Commissioners Court. He had reportedly previously run as a Democrat for Lavaca County district clerk in the March 2011 primary, but switched to the Republican Party sometime later.” There are no more details about the charges against him online that I can find.
Follow-up: Remember the killing of Tory-turned-reform MP Ann Widdecombe in last week’s LinkSwarm? Turns out the suspect arrested is probably a commie. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.
“Houston Man Killed by ICE, Hailed as Father Chasing ‘American Dream,’ Had Meth in His Car.” That would be illegal alien Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who tried to run over an ice agent in his truck.
Unexpected headlines: “A tech company is repurposing its sexbots into AI teachers’ aides and they’re already being used in at least one New York state school.”
As Flock cameras are installed across the nation, citizens are growing more concerned about the potential privacy violations posed by automatic license plate readers.
On Friday, U.S. Rep. Keith Self wrote on X that “[i]f transparency is now considered a threat, we’ve already drifted too far from the principles of a free Republic,” responding to an article about Flock’s CEO, who said that it is “terroristic” for the public to want to know where the company’s automatic license plate readers are being installed.
Flock cameras do not act like traditional license plate readers. Powered by AI, they capture details such as the make and model of a passing vehicle, as well as any unique or identifying features such as dents, scratches, stickers, and aftermarket parts.
The ALPRs also capture data on vehicles, regardless of whether they have been implicated in a crime. Police departments do not need a search warrant to access Flock data, heightening concerns about Fourth Amendment violations.
“TSMC posts record revenue in second quarter on AI demand.” “Revenue in the April-June period of this year came in at T$1.27 trillion ($39.62 billion), according to Reuters calculations, slightly above a T$1.264 trillion LSEG SmartEstimate drawn from 20 analysts.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
We’re living in an Age of AI. Why was there a “Jazz Age”? Why did jazz create an “Age”? Why was there this period between the Great War and the Great Depression, where a new form of music was very important, and people around the world cared about it?
You can theorize about jazz. You can say that there were social reasons: that jazz was fun and new and sexy, and women wanted to wear short skirts and dance the Charleston.
Or you could say that jazz was infrastructural — that music from the town of New Orleans could be recorded, and exported, and transmitted on the radio. There were new forms of mass media, so it was easier to spread a viral fad, around the world. So, that somehow explains jazz.
Or you could say that jazz was political — that there was an oppressed class of black people living under apartheid, and jazz musicians and composers were making their voices heard.
Or you could say that the Great War had just ended, and it was followed by a plague of flu that killed even more people than the worst war in history. You might say that jazz was a method for musicians to rescue mankind by changing the subject. Jazz was strange and extreme, because it was denying and avoiding the trauma of a lost generation. With more trauma — depression and war — well on the way.
It’s pretty clear to me that the generation of AI — and it’s been going on for ten years, it’s a generation — has a lot of that unspoken Jazz Age anguish. It’s a vivid displacement activity for a lost and troubled era.
I’m a novelist, so I notice the peculiar emotional expressions here. I notice things like AI burnout, AI psychosis, unhealthy relations with imaginary boyfriends and girlfriends, AI fakes, stock market bubbles, and the fear of missing out. That stark fear. So much fear. The fear of missing that golden chance. Also, the fear that AI is real this time, and is really happening. The apocalyptic terror that AI will lead to the destruction of the world.
This is not the cyberpunk dystopian dark side of AI. This is the propulsive force of AI. It’s the restless and itchy drive that forces you to leave your apartment and rush downtown to the jazz club.
Why do you go? The jazz club is not a place for the angels. You might drink bootleg liquor there and become an alcoholic. Or you might get in a fight, or catch a venereal disease. There’s cocaine and marijuana there. Someone might mug you and take your purse or wallet. But also, in New York, Duke Ellington is playing! In Paris, Django Reinhart is playing! It may be a wild scene, but you’re crazy not to go!
This is the high summer of AI. The scene is red hot. I’ve been aware of AI for my entire, extensive lifetime, and it’s never been this technically intense and this deeply felt. Rational people, with education and money and power and experience, are cracking up in public. They’re losing their heads over it. Billionaires, captains of industry, politicians, military, spies. Worldwide. Old and young, men and women.
It’s a craze.
I’m very interested in it. I follow its every little up and down. It is so far out and science fictional that it might have been built just to entertain elderly cyberpunk writers. I do not invest in it. I’m not selling any of it to you. I don’t use it much personally. It isn’t changing my life — not much as yet. I’m not afraid of it. I don’t even think it will last. It’s defining an era, an era which is ten years old and counting, but something else will show up. AI is not a fraud, or pretense, or a fake. It’s a real and powerful technology and we’re never going back to the way things were. I recognize all that, but also, I take consolation in continuity.
More Medicare scammers captured, Trump wins multiple border security cases at the Supreme Court, the Supremes also drive a stake through a vampire, Ukraine hits a whole lot of bridges in occupied Crimea, dirty commies win Dem primaries in New York, and Tom Scott looks at some furry workers.
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel announced that another suspect on the T White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud’s new Most Wanted Fraudsters list has been apprehended.
Patel posted on X Saturday that Herbert Leon Kimble, 60, was arrested in the Philippines thanks to the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) task force led by Vice President JD Vance and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
“In just over two weeks, this is the second Most Wanted Fraudster arrested on the FBI’s list led by Vice President Vance and the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud,” wrote the director. “Herbert Leon Kimbel was apprehended in the Philippines and is now back in the United States, on the run since 2024 after he allegedly orchestrated a $1.2 billion healthcare fraud conspiracy that targeted the Medicare system – particularly elderly victims – from 2014-2019.”
Kimble of Chicago, Illinois, is accused of targeting Medicare in a “large-scale healthcare fraud conspiracy” via “the improper marketing and distribution of durable medical equipment (DME), particularly orthopedic braces.”
According to the FBI, from 2014 to 2019, he operated a scheme in which victims — often elderly — would be unnecessarily prescribed orthopedic braces for pain relief by telemedicine providers via call centers in the Philippines.
DME suppliers affiliated with Kimble would then bill Medicare for reimbursement, resulting in over $1.2 billion in Medicare charges.
On April 4, 2019, in the District of South Carolina U.S. District Court, he pled guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States, to make a false claim to a department of the United States, to commit mail fraud, to commit wire fraud, to commit healthcare fraud and to offer kickbacks and bribes in connection with the scheme.
He subsequently failed to appear for his sentencing hearing on August 27, 2024, resulting in the issuance of a federal arrest warrant that same day, charging him with failure to appear.
The FBI offered a reward of up to $150,000 for information leading to his arrest and conviction.
Kimble is the second individual on the most wanted list that has been apprehended.
Last week, Said Abdullahi Ereg, 47, was also arrested after he surrendered to authorities in connection with an alleged $4 million scheme involving the Federal Child Nutrition Program during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ereg ran a grocery and deli in Minneapolis sponsored by Feeding Our Future. He was initially issued a federal arrest warrant in January 2024 and was indicted in June 2024 by a federal grand jury for conspiracy involving wire fraud and money laundering.
The FBI’s Most Wanted Fraudsters list can be found here.
The Supreme Court this morning, in a pair of 6–3 opinions written by Justice Samuel Alito, gave the Trump administration’s border policies two more big wins. Both pared back humanitarian bases for admitting people into the country. Mullin v. Doe allowed the administration to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations granted by the Biden administration — specifically for Haitians and Syrians, but the decision’s logic, which bars judicial review of revocations, would seem to compel the same outcome for Venezuelans. Mullin v. Al Otro Lado allowed immigration officials to prevent people from reaching the border to present asylum claims, because the law allows those claims to be presented by an alien who “arrives in the United States.”
Along with Tuesday’s decision in Blanche v. Lau, which strengthened the government’s power to exclude criminal aliens prior to their convictions, this was a clean sweep for immigration hard-liners. That may take some of the sting out of the Court’s pending decision in Trump v. Barbara, which could come as soon as Monday and is expected to be a loss for Donald Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship.
In the backdrop of Mullin v. Doe are the divergent attitudes of the Biden and Trump administrations toward TPS, but the actual ground of battle, as our editorials have emphasized, is the language of the TPS statute and whether courts should take the written law seriously.
The TPS statute, enacted in 1990, allows the president to designate particular countries as unsafe because of war, natural disasters, epidemics, or other temporary crises and therefore give their nationals temporary protection to stay within this country. Before the statute’s enactment, presidents would sometimes grant such protection as a discretionary matter but with no statutory authorization and, in effect, no rules. In that sense, TPS is like the 1977 tariff statute at issue in Learning Resources: It was designed to provide rules of the road for the executive to follow in responding to emergencies. Prior to 1990, the judiciary had treated these executive decisions as exercises of discretion that courts could not review.
Of course, nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program. For some countries, TPS has been continually in force now for decades, making a mockery of the “temporary” designation. Somalia has had a TPS designation for 35 years, and Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador have been so designated for more than 25 years. Haiti received a TPS designation because of an earthquake 16 years ago.
The statute is written to reflect broad executive discretion. The secretary of homeland security “may” grant TPS to nationals of a particular country based on a series of statutory criteria but is under no obligation to do so. Several of the criteria explicitly reference conditions “temporarily” existing in the foreign country. By contrast, the statute requires TPS to be terminated if the secretary finds that the home country “no longer continues to meet the conditions for designation.” The law thus contemplates ongoing review — the secretary is mandated to conduct a new review at least once every 18 months — and DHS violates the law if it extends TPS when the conditions justifying it no longer exist.
That may be particularly important when a foreign tyranny is suddenly toppled and replaced by a new government, as has happened recently in both Syria and Venezuela. Syria’s designation was applied in 2012 because of the civil war that sought to topple the Assad regime, which ended with Assad’s departure in late 2024. Once TPS is revoked, the affected foreign nationals are given 60 days before they must either leave the United States or secure some other legal basis to stay. The 60-day provision was designed by Congress to accommodate the reliance interests of foreigners here temporarily, who have been given work permits but who knew from the outset that shelter on American shores was explicitly temporary.
The Biden administration tried to lock in its successor on these inherently fluid, temporary foreign policy assessments by granting TPS extensions, in some cases just days before Joe Biden left office. For example, Alejandro Mayorkas, the impeached-but-not-tried secretary of homeland security, extended TPS for Venezuela on January 17, 2025. By contrast, the Trump administration has terminated every TPS it has reviewed, 13 of them so far. Trump has been quite open about this as a deliberate policy.
Can courts review TPS designations? Congress didn’t think so. We know that because Congress said so in terms that could hardly be more explicit: “There is no judicial review of any determination of the [secretary of homeland security] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.” The TPS litigation that has been ongoing since the outset of the second Trump term has dragged on this long because multiple lower court judges (including the Ninth Circuit) decided to judicially review what Congress said explicitly they may not judicially review. As Alito noted, judicial orders stopped Trump from ending TPS for Haiti, Syria, Venezuela, Burma, and Ethiopia and also prevented Trump from ending TPS for Haiti during his first term, in 2018.
Alito began with whether the law written by Congress means what it says, and his opinion is almost comical in attempting to take seriously the ridiculous contention that it doesn’t. “This text is clear, and its plain meaning is very broad,” he noted, and he explained why the word “determination” means decisions that the secretary is empowered and in some cases required to make.
“Supreme Court Drives a Stake Through Hawaii’s ‘Vampire Rule.'”
IAt stake was a Hawaiian statute, Act 52, that inverted the usual presumption that governs public access to generally accessible private property, but only where firearms are concerned. Prior to the passage of Act 52, Hawaiians who were able to obtain carry permits (which, before Bruen, was effectively impossible) were allowed to enter any generally accessible private space while carrying a firearm — unless the property owner explicitly signaled otherwise. After Act 52, Hawaiians with carry permits were allowed to enter any generally accessible private space while carrying a firearm only if the property had signaled that it was acceptable. (Gothic lore holds that vampires must be explicitly invited to enter one’s home before they may cross the threshold. Hence: “vampire rule.”)
As the Court correctly noted, this change — which was made directly after Bruen, and which shifted only the rules governing firearms, and no others besides — was explicitly designed to impede “the ability of law-abiding citizens to exercise the right Bruen recognized as they go about their daily lives.” That being so, it fell.
Writing for the majority, Justice Alito recorded that:
At common law, opening up private property to the general public implies a “license to all persons to enter,” meaning that “no person is a trespasser by merely entering therein” unless the property owner has given “due notice” that such a person is banned.
“Hawaii’s shift from the common-law rule,” Alito concluded, “unquestionably imposes a new and significant burden on the exercise of the right recognized in Bruen.”n a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court has struck down Hawaii’s “vampire rule” as a violation of the Second and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. This was the right result, and, once again, it is a disgrace that the decision was not unanimous.
During briefs and at oral argument, Hawaii offered up three main defenses of its law. The first defense was that it has historically had much stricter firearms laws than much of the rest of the United States. Alito dealt with that one quickly:
As the plurality explained in McDonald, the Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States. 561 U. S., at 784–785. It cannot give way to “the spirit of Aloha” in Hawaii, contra, State v. Wilson, 154 Haw. 8, 27, 543 P. 3d 440, 459 (2024), any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple (Bruen) or the Windy City (McDonald).
Aloha, “spirit of Aloha.”
No, Hawaii, you can’t argue that “Historically, Hawaii has ignored the constitution” as an excuse to ignore it further…
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the sentencing eight “North Texas Antifa Cell” operatives to a total of 450 years in prison on Tuesday for their various roles in the July 4, 2025 attack on the Prairieland U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Detention Center in Alvarado.
“Testimony and other evidence at trial established that the defendants were members of a North Texas Antifa Cell, part of a larger militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups primarily ascribing to an ideology that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and the system of law,” a June 23 DOJ press release said.
On July 4 of last year, the Antifa members dressed in dark clothing with head and face coverings, forming a “black bloc” in order to conceal their identities and make them indistinguishable from each other. Evidence revealed they had 11 firearms, body armor, and 11 “military-grade first aid kits with tourniquets and other items to treat gunshot wounds to the scene of the attack.”
They began shooting fireworks and vandalizing vehicles and a guard shack at the property. Alvarado police officers responded to a 9-1-1 call about the attack. Ringleader Benjamin Song was heard on a bodycam recording yelling, “Get to the rifles!” — after which the group opened fire on the officer, hitting him in the neck.
Many of the Antifa members were arrested near the scene, but Song escaped and was not arrested until July 15.
The DOJ said this is the “first sentencing of defendants affiliated with Antifa following President Donald J. Trump’s executive order designating the group as a Domestic Terrorist Organization in September 2025.”
In March, nine of the Antifa members were convicted for “their roles in rioting, using weapons and explosives, providing material support to terrorists, obstruction, and the attempted murder of an Alvarado police officer.”
Of the nine, eight were sentenced on Tuesday, including Song, who received the harshest sentence of 100 years in prison for the attempted murder of the officer. Evidence from the trial showed that Song acquired and distributed firearms to the co-defendants and “recruited members at gun ranges and combat sessions he conducted, as well as from various ideologically aligned groups.”
Maricela Rueda was sentenced to 70 years; Cameron Arnold, Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Bradford Morris, and Elizabeth Soto to 50 years each; and Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada to 30 years.
Ines Soto was granted a continuance and will be sentenced on July 1, along with seven co-defendants who all pleaded guilty to one count of providing material support to terrorists: Seth Sikes, Nathan Baumann, Joy Gibson, Susan Kent, Rebecca Morgan, Lynette Sharp, and John Thomas.
Seven others who pleaded guilty to providing support to the terrorists will be sentenced on July 1.
Fauci, as NIAID director, directed millions in U.S. taxpayer funds (via Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and other entities) for gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan.
Fauci had close relationships with intelligence-community leaders and provided hand-picked NIAID-funded scientists as advisors, which was used to promote a natural-origin narrative and downplay the lab-leak theory. Fauci played a direct role, even meeting with the CIA to assist in a coverup.
Fauci LIED to Congress in 2024 when asked about his involvement in these schemes (there is a long trail of evidence proving this).
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released declassified documents to support her claims, which can be found here.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that signal repeaters on the territory of Belarus that had been helping Russian drones strike Ukraine ceased operating on 22 June….
“Based on the available information reported to me by the Commander-in-Chief [of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Oleksandr Syrskyi] and intelligence services, the relevant signal repeaters stopped operating on the territory of Belarus on 22 June. I don’t know yet whether they have been dismantled, to be honest. But we are working on this, and I am keeping a very close eye on the situation and receiving daily reports. It is a fact that the signal repeaters are not operating today.”
On 19 June, Zelenskyy issued an ultimatum to self-proclaimed Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, giving him a week to dismantle the signal repeaters used to adjust Russian drone strikes on Ukrainian cities, or Ukraine would do it itself.
Old and busted: Russia puts heavy air defense around Putin’s vacation palace. The new hotness: Russia torn down the palace. Puzzling.
Things went from bad to worse for Democrats on Thursday afternoon after a judge in Virginia issued a preliminary injunction on the “assault firearms” and high-capacity magazine ban that was set to go into effect in the Commonwealth on July 1. The judge from Lancaster County, located in the Northern Neck of Virginia, ruled that the Virginia State Police (VSP) cannot enforce the bans through December 31, 2026 or until a final order is issued.
The lawsuit was brought against the superintendent of the VSP by the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL) and Gun Owners of America (GOA), who took well-deserved victory laps on social media.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s endorsement proved influential in three key congressional primary races on Tuesday, as his favored progressive candidates prevailed over opponents more closely aligned with the Democratic establishment.
New York State Assemblywoman Claire Valdez and Harlem community organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier, both of whom were also backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, won races in New York’s seventh and 13th congressional districts, respectively. Meanwhile, former city comptroller Brad Lander, a progressive former DSA member, pulled off an impressive upset over incumbent Representative Dan Goldman in NY-10. Lander is a Jewish progressive who left the DSA in 2023 after it held a pro-Palestinian rally just one day after Hamas’s terror attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023.
Lander and Goldman, who is also a Jewish Democrat, both made their stances on the Israel-Hamas war a key part of their respective campaigns. Lander, who sits to the left of Goldman politically, had criticized his opponent for failing to take a tougher stance on Israel.
Avila Chevalier prevailed over incumbent Representative Adriano Espaillat despite her status as the most controversial of the three Mamdani-backed progressives. While Espaillat is the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus “who has over the years built a political machine of his own in upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx,” according to Politico, Avila Chevalier is a first-time candidate who was well known in Harlem for her pro-Palestinian activism but whose unearthed social media posts made her a political liability for the DSA. Those posts included messages blasting Democratic politicians, including one 2021 post in which she wrote “f*** Kamala Harris,” and others against an array of topics from the police to Israel and private property.
Mamdani, for his part, said he wasn’t aware of her past comments when he endorsed her, but he did not pull his endorsement nonetheless.
The mayor also endorsed Valdez in her bid to assume the seat left open by retiring Representative Nydia Velázquez. The outgoing Democratic congresswoman had endorsed Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso as her replacement. Mamdani and the DSA’s decision to endorse a different candidate led to a falling out with Velázquez, who had been an early supporter of Mamdani’s mayoral run.
In late May Chinese leaders travelled to the Zhoushan National Oil Reserve and discovered the nation’s strategic oil reserves weren’t there. For over a year, the disruption of oil supplies from Venezuela and Iran had left Chinese oil reserves reduced. Despite that, government documents indicated that China still had 1.2 billion tons of oil reserves. That’s equivalent to 8,756,117,022 barrels.
China’s strategic oil reserve, to the surprise of the government officials who went to verify the reserves in May, was instead composed of water, sludge, various debris and overflow from nearby sewer lines.
Because the Americans dominated global energy supplies, the Chinese oil reserve served as a major cushion to any disruptions to Chinese oil imports from the Persian Gulf, especially Iran whose main customer was China. Under America’s global energy stranglehold, Chinese crude oil stockpiles have reached the verge of collapse at the slightest exposure.
The current Chinese vulnerability stems from the American disruption of Venezuelan oil exports to China and more recently a similar situation with Iranian oil exports to China.
China’s strategic oil reserve was insurance against disruptions in Venezuelan and Iranian imports. With its oil reserves revealed as a sham, China finds itself in a desperate situation. What happened to Chinese oil? It was soon discovered that corrupt government officials and oil reserve personnel had sold the oil and pocketed the proceeds. The local buyers were often operators of small, locally owned refineries that turned the oil into commercial products that were sold throughout China. Most of these oil criminals then fled, often leaving China for sanctuary states that would welcome any affluent Chinese and their new wealth. The only winners were a few conniving Chinese and the Americans, who continued to dominate the global energy system.
Important tip: If you’re a Bexar County judge and you’re given an official YouTube channel to livestream your court proceedings, don’t use it for your book club.
“Woman who emptied Knicks trashcan on street — then stole it — is fired from JPMorgan Chase, was DEI exec.” Shocked face engaged. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
The Lock-Picking Lawyer: “I didn’t think it was possible, but somehow Master Lock has now tarnished its name even more with a brand new line of padlocks.” Evidently the Elite line isn’t.
