I’d been staying away from covering the Platner story…
No, not that one.
…outside of the LinkSwarms because pretty much everyone was covering the story. But now that commie scumbag Nazi tattoo guy is multiple rape accusations commie scumbag Nazi tattoo guy, Democrats are shocked, shocked that he’s a scumbag.
In Platner’s version of events, he only found out that his tattoo was a Nazi symbol after hearing that opposition researchers were looking into it, at some unspecified date before the October 20 Pod Save America podcast. And then, two days later, he announced he had gotten another tattoo to cover it up. He insists Lyndsey Fifield is lying when she says that years earlier, he had called it “my Totenkopf.” He insists his former political director was lying when she said he had told her he had a “problematic” tattoo in the summer of last year.
Here’s the part that stuck with me: If you had found that you had accidentally gotten a tattoo of the Nazi regime over your heart, how many traffic laws would you break getting to a place to get it removed? Or would you just grab a steak knife and try to cut it off immediately?
A man who doesn’t think getting a symbol of the SS concentration camp guards tattooed over his heart is that big of a deal, and just a routine snafu . . . is not as opposed to Naziism as he wants everyone to think.
Every couple of weeks, we would find out that some other part of Platner’s carefully crafted initial image was poppycock. His whole campaign was built on his working-class image, but he attended an elite boarding school in Connecticut. The only customer of his oyster business was his mother’s restaurant. He bought his house with a $200,000 loan from his father, not with “support from the VA” as he had claimed. On the campaign trail, Platner kept insisting that Susan Collins had sent him to Iraq, but she voted to authorize military force in 2002 and he enlisted in 2004 and volunteered for three tours over eight years.
And then the post-tattoo scandals piled up. He blamed his choice of tattoo on the culture of the U.S. military. His Reddit comments about rape victims and black people would have gotten any other figure instantly canceled a few years ago. He called himself a communist, in the long-ago era of . . . 2021.
He’d been sexting with lots of women on Kik, but he insisted none of them were underage. Fifield described how Platner “regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.”
After each disturbing revelation, other Democrats and media interviewers would ask Platner if there were any other skeletons in his closet, any other unpleasant chapters from his past the public ought to know about. Every time, Platner said he had no other dark secrets.
Democrats lined up to endorse him.
Anybody with eyes could see that this guy, at minimum, had been a world-class creep.
Snip.
We’ve seen Democrats circle the wagons around scandal-plagued figures before. But usually, those figures had done a thing or two to inspire or “earn” that reflexive loyalty and shameless excuse-making.
Platner’s growing list of unsavory accusations kept getting longer, and . . . he had just shown up a few months ago. He was just some guy who had just arrived on the scene. He had never run anything; his harbormaster job was, in his own words, a “very, very part-time job.” (The town actually left the position vacant from February 2022 to April 2023.) He hadn’t helped get any bills passed, he hadn’t led the fight for any particular cause. He was just some guy who ranted about how “Senator Collins is bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu,” claimed John Fetterman was a “stooge for AIPAC,” and who accused Israel of committing genocide. Platner didn’t have a lot to say on foreign policy, but he sure made clear that he believed that Israel was evil and controlled Washington. Something of an odd strategy if you want to dispel suspicions that you ever had any youthful dalliances with neo-Naziism.
The term “gaslighting” gets thrown around way too frequently in our political culture; sometimes it’s effectively used as a synonym for lying. But this . . . this felt like an unprecedented, large-scale gaslighting effort. A lot of the mainstream media coverage of Platner felt like a weird, coordinated effort to convince the people of Maine that the scuzziest guy the Democratic Party could find was as solid and reliable as the Brawny Paper Towel Man.
Jon Favreau, one of the Pod Save America hosts, told his followers at the end of April, “Graham Platner isn’t just our best and only chance to beat Susan Collins, he’s a good, decent man who’s struggled and grown and is always trying to do better. I hope everyone with reservations takes a little time to get to know the real-life version of him, not what the algorithm throws in our faces.” I refer you to My Cousin Vinny.
On Monday night, Favreau was singing a dramatically different tune. “Platner needs to drop out ASAP — these are awful, credible allegations. Said on the pod after the (also credible) June NYT story that his biggest problem going forward would be credibility. It’s now abundantly clear that he just hasn’t been honest about his past and can’t be trusted as a candidate for office.”
Why did people trust Platner, Favreau? Because you told them he was a good and decent man!
This morning, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg concedes she was completely fooled by the hype around Platner:
Last October, when stories about Platner’s tattoo and Reddit posts first broke, I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I wrote that he was “nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online.” If anything, he seems to be significantly worse.
I do not say this lightly: If Platner fooled you, maybe you should find something to do with your life besides writing columns about politics. Because the U.S. political landscape is full of creeps, cretins, con artists, crooks, and cads of every kind, and it always will be. If the media has any useful role to play in our system, it is to look beyond the spin and the campaign-crafted image and to tell the world who these candidates really are, warts and all, so the electorate can make an informed choice.
Despite Chinese marching band quantities of red flags, Democrats lined up like good little drones to do the Will of the Party and endorse Platner. Scott Jennings:
All of the things that have been stated, it was all out in the public and people like Ro Khanna, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Tim Walz, the Bulwark, Pod Save America, all these people came together to overlook it all, to explain it all, to rationalize it all.”
“He was vetted. People knew all these things and a whole bunch of Democrats in Maine showed up and voted for him anyway. And a bunch of donors from around the country sent him money anyway.”
“I agree with Alyssa’s question. What changed? Why are you bailing on Graham Platner now?!”
“You already signed off on Nazi tattoo, a self-described communist, somebody who’s had rape fantasies, somebody who has been on a social media platform known as a playground for predators.”
“And on and on and on and on and on.”
“And the difference between this accuser and the previous one is simply this, she’s a liberal. It’s okay, I guess, for Democrats that their candidate’s assault conservatives.”
“But he broke into someone’s house. And apparently, according to her, raped her. And because her politics are correct, they can now believe it.”
“All of this whole thing is disgusting. But to say that they hadn’t vetted him, or that they didn’t know about all this is totally false.”
Of course, this isn’t the first scumbag Democrats embraced. Remember Bill Clinton’s endless “Bimbo Erruptions” couldn’t derail his nomination, just like serious sex offense allegations by Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey couldn’t derail his presidency, nor did the eventual Monica Lewisnky revelations. Prior to Bill Clinton, a President cheating on his wife with an intern in the White House, lying about it to the American public, then getting caught lying about, would not have been considered a survivable scandal. The press was outraged that Clinton had made a fool of them…but not so outraged that they demanded his resignation. After all, he was a Democrat.
More recently, another Democrat the Party assured us was a fine, upstanding citizen was in the news again. Remember would-be Florida governor Andrew “gay meth orgy” Gillum? Well, he was just arrested in Alabama for…wait for it…meth.
Andrew Gillum, the former Florida Democratic rising star and 2018 nominee for governor, was arrested in Alabama last week on possession of methamphetamine and other drug charges, according to police.
Gillum was arrested just before 11 p.m. on July 2 by local police officers in Daphne, Ala. He is accused of having the drugs in his car on U.S. Highway 98 and Walmart Drive, near a Walmart in the Gulf Coast city west of Mobile, Ala., and east of the Florida Panhandle, according to records from the Daphne Police Department.
According to the arrest report obtained by PEOPLE, Gillum allegedly possessed three grams of methamphetamine, eight “pre-rolled marijuana joints,” a bong, three pipes and other drug paraphernalia.
From narrowly missing his chance at the Florida Governor’s Mansion to getting high in an Walmart parking lot in Daphne, Alabama is quite a fall. Nor is Daphne that close to Tallahassee, where Gillum was once mayor, being a good three and a half hours down I-10, so it’s a mystery what he was doing there. Cheaper male prostitutes?
Do Democrats only nominate scumbags because they can’t find any decent men to run for office, or does being a Democrat politician inevitably make you a scumbag?
More Blue State welfare fraud uncovered, some of which gets shipped overseas, more Russian oil refineries knocked out of action, a CIA operative with a fortune in gold, and trouble at a Texas dam. Plus: Puppies!
Food stamps and food pantries are intended to keep struggling Americans fed.
What we found is that, in some communities, that food never reaches an American table. Instead, it gets shipped overseas and sold for profit.
The scheme works like this. Residents in cities like Lawrence, Massachusetts collect food through two channels: purchasing it at local markets using EBT cards, and picking it up for free from food banks and churches. That food is then packed into large blue barrels, dropped off at shipping companies, and sent by container ship to the Dominican Republic. Once it arrives, it is sold for profit in local stores. The people doing this see nothing wrong with it. In many cases, they do it openly.
According to a local that assisted us with this story, this fraud has been happening for over a decade.
Over the course of several weeks, Muckraker Foundation traced the full pipeline from food pantry lines in Lawrence, Massachusetts, through shipping warehouses in New York, to store shelves in Santo Domingo. This is what we found.
Lawrence is a small city about 30 miles north of Boston. It has the highest concentration of Dominican immigrants of any city in Massachusetts, and the highest rate of SNAP enrollment in the state.
John has been delivering goods in Lawrence for over 11 years, six days a week, 35 stops a day. He knows the community intimately.
“I’ve been witnessing the Dominican residents going to food bank lines and collecting non-perishable goods,” he told us, “and then packing it in barrels and in boxes, and then they ship it back to the Dominican Republic.”
“California Assembly passes “Stop Nick Shirley Act” to prevent people from uncovering fraud.”
If the bill passes the state senate, “it would become criminal to film and reveal information on taxpayer-funded immigration services like healthcare, which would include daycare, and hospices; it also covers counseling services, translation services, and immigration legal services.”
How is this not prima facia evidence that collecting fraud and graft is the highest priority of the Democrat Party?
And speaking of Democrats protecting fraud: “Seattle socialist mayor will NOT investigate fraud at Somali-run daycare centers, calls it attack on immigrants.”
Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson said the city has no intention of investigating fraud claims in taxpayer-funded social programs, claiming the concerns are an effort to target immigrant communities rather than address legitimate financial irregularities.
In an interview with KOMO News, Wilson was asked if she had authorized the Seattle Police Department or the city’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs to investigate fraud charges involving daycare providers, particularly those in Somali and other immigrant communities. The mayor responded: “No.”
“This whole issue is not really about fraud,” said Wilson. “It’s about dividing and conquering.”
Translation: We can’t let people investigate fraud as long as Democrats are the ones raking off the graft. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
During a Wednesday cabinet meeting, Small Business Administration Chief Kelly Loeffler accused the Biden administration of concealing a staggering amount of fraud tied to the federal government’s pandemic-era Paycheck Protection Program. She claimed that rather than aggressively working to recover the funds, officials tried “to hide and forgive and sweep under the rug” roughly $200 billion in “fraudulent PPP loans.” The explosive allegation, if substantiated, would represent one of the largest fraud scandals in government history.
Loeffler told colleagues that small business owners are “hit particularly hard by fraud because they’re some of our biggest taxpayers in the country.” She continued:
Think about it. At the SBA, we found $200 billion in fraudulent PPP loans that the Biden administration tried to hide and forgive and sweep under the rug.
We’ve turned the first $22 billion of that over to Treasury for collection and to DOJ for prosecution. Our inspector general is already announcing that people are going to jail.
…
We’ve announced that 140,000 people have been barred from ever getting SBA loans again — defrauding the government of about $9 billion. So we are going to continue our work under the great leadership of Vice President Vance and appreciate the partnership because it’s really accelerated our ability to get the job done.
She later posted a video of her remarks on X along with the following statement: “During the Biden Admin, PPP and EIDL [the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan program] became some of THE MOST defrauded federal programs in U.S. history – robbing honest small business owners and taxpayers of vital pandemic relief, to the tune of $200 billion. … Under the leadership of @POTUS, the SBA is delivering long-awaited accountability for every criminal fraudster that the last Administration tried to forgive or sweep under the rug.”
If you subtracted fraud, madness and spite from social justice and the Democrat Party, you’d have almost nothing left.
Three oil tanks hit which were in between the units. Then hits on the connecting pipelines and the loading cranes as well surrounding the unit. Additionally, two additional oil tanks here were hit as well. So this was a pretty massive strike. As a result of this, it’s been estimated that between 90 to even 100% of the refinery’s processing capacity is out.
A war that looked like it was a grinding stalemate being fought to the last Russian or Ukrainian is looking increasingly like one that Ukraine is actually winning.
Ukraine’s tactical victories on the battlefield, as impressive as they are, won’t ensure victory. And as fascinating and gruesome as the videos of first-person drones on the battlefield are, those only explain why Ukraine is able to hold Russian advances back, and the modest gains on the battlefield Ukraine has made in retaking small bits of occupied territory.
Ukraine has mastered drone warfare on the battlefield, and even more importantly, has built an incredibly resilient and innovative system that adjusts hardware, software, and tactics at a blistering pace that Russia could not hope to achieve with its clunky and corrupt procurement and training systems. That explains Ukraine’s increasingly solid tactical position; unpredictably, Ukraine is now its own most important weapons supplier, and is now teaching the rest of the world how modern warfare is conducted on the ground.
But Russia can take a punch in the same way that Andre the Giant could. Ukraine needs strategic victories, and until, ironically, Trump weaned them off the teat of the West to the extent they were dependent completely on the West, all Ukraine could do was fight at the tactical level, guaranteeing a stalemate.
At the same time that Trump reduced American aid, he also allowed Ukraine to take the gloves off and to put Russian assets in Russia at risk, and the results are stunning. Not only have the tactical battle lines extended into Russia, making logistics infinitely harder, but Ukraine is now systematically dismantling key parts of Russia’s economic engine and weapons production facilities.
Virtually all major oil refineries in central Russia have been forced to halt or scale back fuel output following Ukrainian drone attacks in recent days, according to official data and sources.
The combined capacity of refineries that have fully or partially halted operations exceeds 83 million metric tons per year, or around 238,000 tons per day. That accounts for around one quarter of Russia’s total refining capacity, according to data and sources who spoke on condition of anonymity…
One of Russia’s largest refineries, Kirishi, with capacity of 20 million metric tons per year, has been fully shut since May 5, according to the sources.”
If you regularly read the LinkSwarm, most of this will be familiar to you. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Here’s a strange story with some disturbing implications: “FBI arrests former CIA official over $40 million worth of gold bars stashed at Virginia home.”
The FBI arrested a former CIA official last week after investigators discovered hundreds of gold bars hidden at his home in Virginia, according to court documents reported by NBC News on Wednesday.
The official, identified as David Rush, was charged with criminal theft of public money in a complaint filed last week in the Eastern District of Virginia. He has also been accused of lying to employers about his background for nearly two decades.
The CIA and FBI confirmed Rush’s arrest to the outlet in a joint statement and said CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred Rush for a criminal investigation.
“After a CIA internal investigation identified potential violations of the law, CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred the information to the FBI for a law enforcement investigation,” the statement said. “The FBI is working closely with our partners at the CIA and the Department of Justice as we continue to investigate this matter fully. We are committed to following the facts, ensuring accountability, and pursuing justice in accordance with the law.”
The arrest comes after the FBI raided Rush’s home in Virginia on May 18, where law enforcement officers found more than 300 gold bars, which are estimated to be worth more than $40 million combined, according to the New York Times.
The court papers do not indicate why Rush kept so much gold, but it comes after he requested and received “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses,” which the CIA was later unable to locate.
“Work-related expenses.” What sort of “work-related expenses” involve tens of millions of dollars in gold bars? Bribing officials? Buying cocaine?
Faster, please. “US Probe of Embattled UN Gaza Relief Agency Expands to 1,500 Staffers Suspected of Hamas Ties: UNRWA Could Soon Be Labeled a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.'” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Texas’ Supreme Court has ordered a Travis County judge to quit avoiding a critical question in the fight over Austin’s troubled rail construction plan, known as Project Connect.
In a May 22 ruling, the Court said trial courts can’t simply refuse to rule on jurisdictional challenges to avoid triggering appeals. Chief Justice James Blacklock didn’t mince words, writing that “nothing about this scenario is as it should be.”
The ruling clarifies that courts may not ignore jurisdictional challenges while proceeding to trial, something that will be relevant to a similar case in which the City of McKinney is suing its own citizens to expeditiously validate its airport expansion bonds.
In 2020, Austin voters approved Proposition A, which authorized a property tax increase to fund Project Connect. The original plan promised 20.2 miles of light rail, subway, rapid bus routes, and connections to the airport.
The City of Austin formed a corporation called Austin Transit Partnership (ATP) to implement the project and issue the bonds.
However, the project was significantly scaled back by 2022.
What remained was a 9.8-mile surface line with no subway and no airport link. Community members argued the new plan constituted a “bait and switch,” since voters never approved the scaled-down version.
This led a group of taxpayers to file a lawsuit in 2023 to stop ATP’s bond issuance.
In response, the City of Austin and ATP filed a lawsuit against its own citizens under the Texas Expedited Declaratory Judgement Act (EDJA), seeking to validate the bonds and throw out any legal challenges they may face—including the pending taxpayer lawsuit.
This little-known law allows bond issuers—including cities—to file an expedited declaratory bond-validation lawsuit against a very broad group of defendants, including all taxpayers, property owners, or residents whose rights might be affected by the bonds.
The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) is automatically served in EDJA cases and is tasked with informing the court whether the bonds comply with Texas law.
“Issuing authority” details snipped.
Last week, Texas’ Supreme Court ruled in the OAG’s favor, finding that a jurisdictional challenge must always be addressed before proceeding to the merits.
“Proceeding to trial without first resolving the State’s challenge to the court’s authority to do so was an abuse of the district court’s otherwise broad discretion to manage the progress of the case,” reads the opinion.
Chief Justice James Blacklock did not hold back in writing the opinion of the Court.
“Nothing about this scenario is as it should be,” wrote Blacklock. “A court may not withhold a ruling on the government’s properly presented plea to the jurisdiction in order to prevent the government from appealing. And the government may not appeal from an interlocutory order that does not exist.”
The Court therefore construed the OAG’s petition for review as a petition for writ of mandamus that would order the lower court to issue a ruling on the jurisdictional challenge.
“The writ will issue only if the court does not do so. The judgment of the court of appeals is undisturbed,” wrote Blacklock.
Now, the trial court must rule on the OAG’s jurisdictional challenge. If the court denies the plea, the OAG gets an automatic appeal that pauses everything. If the court grants it, ATP’s bond validation suit gets tossed.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a resolution outlining the locations of drop boxes for the upcoming early-voting period without consulting Recorder Justin Heap.
The board approved the resolution while it continues to deal with an ongoing lawsuit with Heap about who runs specific election functions.
In April, a judge ruled in favor of Heap, saying the board members need to hand over control of specific election functions to his office.
The board sought a stay of the motion, but the Arizona Superior Court denied it. The board then announced it was appealing the lower court’s decision.
Snip.
Heap said he was not consulted before the board approved the resolution Wednesday on drop-box locations.
“The law is not optional,” he said. “The court has already ruled that the Board does not possess unlimited authority over election administration, yet the Board continues attempting to exercise powers Arizona law assigns to the recorder.”
He also said: “Voters deserve lawful, professional election administration, not political gamesmanship and last-minute public ambushes.”
How are they supposed to manufacture votes for Democrats at the last minute without controlling the boxes?
“MSNOW Senior Washington Correspondent [Eugene Daniels] Thinks Abortion and Trans Kids Are ‘Kitchen Table Issues.’ ‘When you talk about whether or not people can have access to healthy abortions—safe abortions, that is a kitchen table issue, right?'”
Shelby Campbell…is a candidate in Michigan’s Democratic primary for the 13th Congressional District, which includes portions of Detroit and some of its suburbs.
She has built her campaign around provocation — relying on edgy rhetoric, inflammatory stunts, and degrading online content to attract attention. Just in time for Memorial Day weekend, she released a new video urging voters to “quit thanking the troops for sacrificing their lives” for their country.
Snip.
I don’t want to thank these men and women who join the military because they had no other option. Like, they didn’t want to go to school. They didn’t have the resources. They don’t have the knowledge. They don’t have people to like, love them. And, [yawning] they go into the military. Military preys on more rural populations.
She evidently learned nothing from John Kerry’s presidential campaign…
Did Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey honor America’s fallen warriors on Memorial Day? No. He honored George Floyd.
“Come meet the all Native American ICE troop ‘The Shadow Wolves.'” “ICE apparently has an all American Indian squadron who patrol the Mexican border in the Sonoran Desert. Their job is primarily to use native tactics to track down and stop narcos and human traffickers on the southern border.”
“Texas woman says she was arrested for making Facebook posts about town’s water quality.” “Jennifer Combs says she would complain on Facebook about the brown water coming out of her faucet in Trinidad, Texas, and then every time the police would show up afterwards. Eventually, she says, she was arrested.” Sounds like a clear First Amendment violation.
Chicago: “39 people shot, 5 cops seriously injured at black teen ‘takeovers’ during Memorial Day weekend.”
“26-year-old man arrested over bomb and death threats targeting Erika Kirk.” “Jacob Wenske, 26, was arrested Wednesday night in San Antonio…Wenske was charged with two third-degree felony counts of making a terroristic threat with the intent to impair public service, create public fear of serious bodily injury and influence government conduct, legal filings revealed.”
Livingston Dam in Texas, where Houston gets most of its drinking water, is deteriorating.
A food emergency: “Some of Texas’s oldest barbecue joints close as meat prices skyrocket Even the state’s most celebrated restaurants are struggling to remain open as costs climb, with no relief in sight.”
Jobs are down, more Minnesota fraud uncovered, a bunch of military action outside the Persian Gulf, an Austin jihad shooter, Noem gets the Old Yeller treatment, Bill Clinton remains Bill Clinton, and Microsoft, amazingly, manages to get even worse.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Also consider this your “Iran Strikes: Day 7” update with a smattering of news as well. There are reports that Kurdish forces have entered Iran from Iraq, but I’m not seeing sufficient evidence for that yet.
Interesting chart showing Iran has likely “blown its wad” on missiles and drones, as day by day fewer and fewer are being launched.
Update Numbers as of Mar. 6, 12.00 AM The numbers are rounded and compiled from various media reports, with a margin of error of ±10% 15% **Corrected previous Post there was a Mistake https://t.co/eDlVfc3nzApic.twitter.com/UiHAU0yNHe
The Supreme Court upheld the standard for reviewing asylum cases, keeping it in the hands of immigration agencies.
Yes, even the leftist justices agreed. 9-0.
“We granted certiorari to determine whether the Court of Appeals applied the appropriate standard of review under the INA [Immigration and Nationality Act],” wrote Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson. “We conclude that the statute requires application of the substantial evidence standard to the agency’s conclusion that a given set of undisputed facts does not constitute persecution.”
Top officials in Minnesota were made aware of fraud concerns surrounding government assistance programs as early as 2019 but failed to take action as billions of dollars were stolen and warnings piled up.
Former Minnesota state officials testified to the House Oversight Committee that Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison were first informed that the state’s social services programs had been compromised by widespread fraud in 2019 and 2020, according to a new report from the committee.
“Testimony obtained by the Committee reveals that Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison were aware of widespread fraud in social service programs, lied about their knowledge of the fraud, and retaliated against employees who dared to raise concerns. Instead of protecting vulnerable Americans, they handed over billions in taxpayer dollars to fraudsters and threw their own state employees under the bus,” said House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky.).
Several different entities and state-level programs are implicated in Minnesota’s fraud scandal. The most prominent program is Feeding Our Future, which fraudsters targeted during the Covid era to steal $300 million from the Minnesota Department of Education that had been designated to provide food to poor children. Feeding Our Future is now dissolved and dozens of defendants have been convicted in connection with the scheme since 2022.
According to the committee report, Minnesota Department of Education officials first received allegations of fraud against Feeding Our Future from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2019. The USDA alleged Feeding Our Future was created with forged signatures and misled sponsored food distribution sites about certain federal requirements. Minnesota officials dismissed the allegations at the time. By April 2020, Walz and Ellison’s offices were briefed about the Minnesota Department of Education’s concerns regarding Feeding Our Future, Assistant Commissioner Daron Korte testified to the committee. State officials contacted the USDA about Feeding Our Future in late 2020, but the agency’s inspector general did not act, a failure that emboldened the scammers at Feeding Our Future.
The Oversight Committee report asserts that Minnesota officials could have suspended payments to Feeding Our Future but chose not to because of potential litigation and racism accusations. Minnesota officials blamed the USDA and Feeding Our Future for perpetuating the large-scale fraud. In March 2021, the Minnesota Department of Education stopped payments to Feeding Our Future, but resumed payments voluntarily the following month after a court hearing on the matter. A court order was never issued requiring the payments, contradicting Walz’s 2022 assertion to the contrary. The lack of a court order was confirmed during the course of the Oversight Committee’s investigation.
In early 2019, Walz’s administration became aware of fraud tied to two programs administered by Minnesota’s Department of Human Services, former agency commissioner Tony Lourey testified. Another former commissioner, Jodi Harpstead, testified that Walz’s administration believed fraud connected to a child care program run out of the Department of Human Services had already been resolved. But the Oversight Committee report references two auditor reports showing otherwise, both of which were issued in 2019. The Department of Human Services lacked fraud mitigation mechanisms and felt pressure to get money out the door to justify state appropriations, the committee found. Despite credible allegations of fraud, the agency failed to act on the warnings and unilaterally stop making payments to the social services programs in question.
The Oversight Committee’s report is based on testimony from nine top current and former state officials, documents and communications, and briefings with federal and state officials. The Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office recently speculated that the interwoven fraud schemes totaled nearly $9 billion in misallocated funds. Of the fraud defendants, 85 percent of them come from Minnesota’s Somali-American immigrant community. Social services programs that provide food, child care, housing, and special education have all come under scrutiny as federal investigators unravel the fraud scheme.
I know it’s been easy to overlook in all the other military news this week, but Afghanistan and Pakistan have been going at it as well, though only at a border skirmish level rather than a full-scale conflict. Since the Pakistani ISI helped create the Taliban, this is what’s known as “blowback.”
Rene Campos, a registered sex offender, is seeking elected office in California – launching a campaign for Fresno City Council amid fierce backlash and renewed questions about whether someone with his record should hold public office.
Campos was arrested in 2018 following a cyber tip to the Central California Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. He was found in possession of child sex abuse material, according to court records. In 2021 he entered a no-contest plea to a single misdemeanor charge of possessing and controlling child pornography/child sex abuse material (likely under California Penal Code § 311.11). He served only one month in prison and a two year probation period.
Campos describes himself as a gay man who is running for office on the platform of “reduced crime and rehabilitation.”
Possession of child pornography is typically treated as a felony, even in a woke haven like California. How the Fresno candidate was able to make a deal for a misdemeanor charge and spend only one month in prison is a mystery, but this does help to confirm ongoing suspicions that California’s legal system is falling into steep decline.
California is notoriously soft on child sex abusers. Recently, a Sacramento parole board released Daniel Allen Funston, who was convicted in 1999 of sixteen counts of kidnapping and child molestation after a horrific crime spree in Sacramento County, during which he kidnapped, raped, and beat eight children ages 3 to 7.
Funston was originally sentenced to three consecutive life terms plus 20 years, but was set free at age 64 due to a California elderly inmate program (maybe he’ll run for office, too).
Data from 2022 shows that the Golden State released over 7000 child sex offenders after less than one year of incarceration. Interestingly, “digital blocks” were added to the Megan’s Law website that prevent more recent analysis.
Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger is demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement provide warrants before violent illegal criminals are turned over to federal authorities, following the stabbing of a Virginia woman by an illegal immigrant with a long and violent criminal history.
Abdul Jalloh was charged with second-degree murder after Stephanie Minter was brutally stabbed in the neck at a Virginia bus stop. Jalloh had previously been charged more than 40 times, including for egregious crimes such as aggravated assault, malicious wounding, and rape. Prosecutors dropped 20 of the 43 charges against Jalloh. The Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office said the charges were dropped because Jalloh often chose victims who did not have permanent addresses, making the proceedings more difficult.
The Department of Homeland Security said Jalloh is an illegal immigrant from Sierra Leone. He entered the United States in 2012.
“ICE previously lodged a detainer against Jalloh in 2020, and he was granted a final order of removal by a judge who found he could be removed to any country other than Sierra Leone,” DHS said in a statement. “This case illustrated the importance of third country removals to get criminal illegal aliens out of the U.S.”
Spanberger insists that in order for Virginia to work with federal authorities, ICE must provide a signed judicial warrant, regardless of the alien’s criminal history. DHS requested cooperation with Virginia and Spanberger to deport Jalloh following his alleged involvement in the fatal stabbing.
“We are calling on Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger and Virginia’s sanctuary politicians to commit to not releasing this murderer and violent career criminal from their jail without notifying ICE,” Deputy Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said in a statement. “This illegal alien’s murder of an innocent, beautiful American woman came less than 24 hours before Governor Spanberger’s demonization of ICE law enforcement. This heinous criminal is a perfect example of why we need cooperation from sanctuary jurisdictions and the importance of third country removals for the safety of the American people.”
What the Trump administration has done on the DEI front represents the beginning of a general reorientation of our politics away from wokeness. One need only survey what prominent leaders of the Left are saying about the political price the Democratic Party has paid on that score. What they are saying indicates a large political change, even if the Dems prove incapable of unmooring themselves from woke politics for the near future.
The first sign of this reorientation is a general shift in the popular mindset: the spell of woke politics has broken. This matters because it was always the way in which woke politics commanded assent in the citizens’ hearts and minds that was crucial. That assent has been questioned or denied now in a broad way, with the backing of public authority (Supreme Court decisions, executive orders, agency directives), and with widespread public support. Wokeness’s public hectoring, punitiveness, and censoriousness, and the extremism of many of its positions on the issues, is unpopular at the level of 70–30 or 80–20 opinion poll divides.
We ought to be confident, therefore, that the broken spell of wokeness augurs a permanent shift in our public life. What that means precisely, however, depends very much on how we understand wokeness and what is done going forward to ensure that woke excess does not return. Now, if, as many say, wokeness was the product of cultural Marxism (Christopher Rufo and a host of followers) or postmodernism (Jordan Peterson and another host of followers), then all that needs to be done is to combat bad ideas. On these interpretations, our universities in particular, and other cultural institutions where the influence of such ideas holds sway, need our attention. Certainly, cultural Marxism and postmodernism represent bad ideas, and the world would be a better place without their influence.
But if what wokeness represents above all is the explosive power of the civil rights revolution and the influence of an aggressive leftist interpretation of anti-discrimination politics, as another band of interpreters claims (I among them), then the task ahead is much bigger and much more difficult.
Trump’s anti-DEI measures, on this view, would represent only the first step in a broader campaign of civil rights reform. One could look long and hard without seeing much in the way of evidence for any such thing so far. Are these current efforts against DEI an illusion, a brief moment of political opportunism that will recede as public hatred of wokeness recedes—only to return in a few years when the next wave of anti-discriminatory passion rises up?
I don’t think that worry is justified. The anti-DEI campaign to date will have enduring consequences because even if it is not yet clear that what is at stake in DEI is civil rights politics, the current reorientation can only have the effect of raising our awareness of the role of anti-discrimination in our public life. This has begun on the all-important moral plane of civil rights politics. Precisely by breaking the spell of its puritanical commands, our anti-woke moment is reworking something essential to civil rights politics. Because public morality is the crucial filter of the human mind, a shift at this level will change what we see, what we think, and what we think we can say. Anti-woke sentiment, backed by changes in the law, is providing a moment of political, cultural, and mental freedom that will necessarily lead, after many decades during which this was not possible, to a general reappraisal of the moral power and the meaning of the civil rights revolution.
Sources have identified the alleged gunman as 53-year-old Ndiaga Diagne to Nexstar’s KXAN and The Associated Press…
Diagne is originally from Senegal, according to multiple people briefed on the investigation. One of the people told the AP that Diagne came to the U.S. in 2006 and was a naturalized U.S. citizen…
Austin mass killer captured on video wearing ‘Property of Allah’ hoodie during rampage.
“Dallas Democrats Decide To Let DA Creuzot Go. With no Republican in the race, Democrat primary winner Amber Givens will become Dallas County’s next district attorney.” Creuzot was yet another Soros-backed DA, so maybe Dallas Democrats are ever so slowly moving back to sanity.
I’m just going to embed this Asmongold clip of Bill Clinton’s Jeffrey Epstein deposition without comment.
President Trump announced Thursday that Senator Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.) will replace Kristi Noem as Homeland Security Secretary.
The announcement comes after Noem struggled to stand up to a public grilling by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who pressed the former South Dakota governor on Tuesday about a $220 million ad campaign contract that was subcontracted to one of her longtime allies. Trump was furious at Noem for insisting during the hearing that he had personally approved the contract and began floating Mullin’s name as a potential replacement, National Review first reported early Thursday.
Mullin will replace Noem effective March 31. It’s unclear whether Trump plans to nominate Mullin to serve in the position permanently or whether he will serve in an acting capacity, sparing him the necessity of Senate confirmation.
“I am pleased to announce that the Highly Respected United States Senator from the Great State of Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin, will become the United States Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS), effective March 31, 2026,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The current Secretary, Kristi Noem, who has served us well, and has had numerous and spectacular results (especially on the Border!), will be moving to be Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas, our new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere we are announcing on Saturday in Doral, Florida. I thank Kristi for her service at ‘Homeland.’”
Already under significant scrutiny due to bipartisan criticism of her handling of Trump’s deportation agenda, Noem ran into further trouble this week during a series of hearings in which multiple lawmakers, most notably Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, asked her to explain why the agency had awarded a $220 million contract to a firm that was founded just days before, without ever opening up the bid to a competitive process. Kennedy also pointed out that part of that ad campaign was subcontracted to a strategy firm owned by Ben Yoho, the husband of former DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin.
A $220 million no-bid ad contract isn’t just wasteful, it’s actively criminal.
More defeats for the gambling lobby: “Two House Chairs Defeated by Challengers. State Reps. Cecil Bell and Stan Kitzman were ousted by Kristen Plaisance and Dennis Geesaman respectively.”
Plaisance ran on a platform of fiscal responsibility, securing Texas’ elections, and defending state sovereignty.
Bell’s campaign and allied groups—including the Las Vegas Sands–backed casino lobby and Texans for Lawsuit Reform—reportedly spent more than $1 million attempting to defend the incumbent.
Bell, who chairs the Intergovernmental Affairs Committee, had been censured by the Montgomery County Republican Party last year.
Incumbent State Rep. Stan Kitzman of Brookshire has been defeated by Dennis “Goose” Geesaman for the GOP nomination for House District 85. Kitzman served as chair of one of the House’s subcommittees on appropriations.
Geesaman, a pilot and Air Force Academy graduate, retired as a Lt. Colonel. He served five terms on the Flatonia City Council and later served as mayor.
While Texans for Lawsuit Reform and casino-funded PACs backed Kitzman’s reelection campaign, Geesaman ran on a platform of ending magnets for illegal immigration, DOGE-ing Texas, and supporting parental rights.
Kitzman also recently came under investigation for his paid work for a local governmental entity while serving in the Legislature.
Kitzman also voted to impeach Paxton, so I think we’re well rid of both of them.
The war against tranny madness continues. “Paxton Opinion Targets Therapists Behind Child ‘Psychological Transitioning.’ Psychiatric providers who help facilitate prohibited treatments may be barred from receiving public funds and could risk losing their licenses.”
Samsung Electronics America Inc. is one of five companies that have been accused by Attorney General Ken Paxton of collecting and monetizing consumers’ viewing data on smart TVs.
Following the agreement, Samsung will now make changes to not only halt the collection of viewing data without consent, but also update their TVs to include disclosures and consent screens.
Heard from some state agency people that this was coming: “Texas Dismantles DEI-Oriented HUB Network. The comptroller’s office has ended race- and sex-based preferences in state contracting.” Good.
“Former Warren Campaign Worker Says the U.S. Must Be ‘Abolished’ to Atone for Death of Ayatollah Khamenei…Calla Walsh, the communist activist who campaigned for Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, Bernie Sanders, and others, said the only way to exact “justice” is the complete deconstruction of the U.S. and Israel.” What percentage of the ideological core of the Democrat Party are actively communist?
One thing that reportedly helped kill Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Brothers: GOP congressmen visiting Netflix headquarters and discovering tampons in the men’s room.
Microsoft seems to be going from bad to worse: “Microsoft Copilot to hijack your browser… for your own convenience, embeds Edge into AI assistant, ignores questions about opt-in.”
Microsoft is rolling out a Copilot update to Windows Insiders that embeds web browsing directly into the assistant, opening links in a side panel rather than launching your default browser.
The plan is that users of the Copilot app in Windows will show content in the assistant’s window “so you don’t lose context.”
Copilot will also (with permission) have access to the context of tabs opened in that conversation, so the assistant can look across them when responding to user prompts. Opened tabs will be saved with the conversation so that they can be returned to, and, if a user chooses to enable it, passwords and form data can be synchronized.
Enabling password and form data synchronization might give some users pause for thought, particularly after the Windows Recall fiasco, but users worried about Redmond slurping data should probably consider an alternative to Windows anyway.
At first glance, it looks like embedding Edge into Copilot via the WebView2 control is an attempt to steer the user away from their default browser. Convenient, yes. Good for competition, possibly not. We asked Microsoft whether this would be an opt-in experience and which browser was being used, but, other than acknowledging receipt of our questions, the company did not respond.
It looks like this is going to be limited to corporate users for now, but launching web links without user control strikes me as a huge attack vector for malicious code. (Previously.)
New Zealand “Lesbian Navy Captain Faces Court Martial After $100M Ship Ran Aground, Caught Fire, Sank.” Since that happened all the way back in 2024, they’re certainly not rushing to justice…
Apple has some new computers out, so here’s M5 Pro vs. M5 Max benchmarks. My trailing edge consumer ass is still on an Intel-based MacBook Pro…
“Japanese companies are paying older workers to sit by a window and do nothing—while Western CEOs demand super-AI productivity just to keep your job.” Seems like there should be a happy medium between those two extremes…
Will Venezuela’s leaders play ball with President Trump? Signs point to yes.
At a moment Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and his wife Flores are set to appear before a New York federal judge on various drug-trafficking and gun-running related charges, his VP and now apparently Interim President Delcy Rodriguez is offering a huge olive branch.
This is unsurprising given the staunchly socialist, pro-Maduro number two under the ousted president is herself under immense pressure from Washington, and still facing down the barrel of Uncle Sam’s gun – or rather the collective might of the Pentagon’s persisting US naval blockade just off Latin America’s coast.
he’s quickly expressed her willingness to cooperate with the United States on the future of Venezuela, in a significant shift in tone following Maduro’s Friday into Saturday morning ‘shock’ abduction by US special forces.
“We consider it a priority to move towards a balanced and respectful relationship between the US and Venezuela,” Rodriguez wrote on Telegram Sunday.
And more than that, her following words convey willingness of Caracas to bend the knee: “We extend an invitation to the US government to work together on a cooperation agenda, aimed at shared development, within the framework of international law, and to strengthen lasting community coexistence,” she stated.
Snip.
President Trump has warned that if authorities in Venezuela fail to cooperate, the United States would carry out a second strike on Venezuela, noting that any decision to deploy ground troops there would depend on how the situation develops and how Venezuela responds.
So cooperate with the United States in transition to a Democratic, non-Socialist government (and presumably retire to seized mansions with shares of their ill-gotten loot), or get droned. This should be an easy choice…
So who’s in charge of Venezuela now? President Trump says we are.
President Donald Trump said the United States will “run” Venezuela until a peaceful transition of power is executed, following an operation carried out in the Latin American country early Saturday morning that successfully captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.
“We’re going to run this country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” Trump said from Mar-a-Lago during a press conference. “We want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela, and that includes many from Venezuela that are now living in the United States and want to go back to their country. It’s their homeland.”
Asked on Saturday who would be running the country, Trump said that they would be designating people but that, “for a period of time,” it would largely be those standing behind him at the press conference — apparently meaning Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine.
The United States is in Venezuela, and will remain in the country until a “proper transition can take place,” Trump said.
General Caine said the attack was known as “Operation Absolute Resolve.” The president clarified that no American lives or military equipment were lost during the operation, and the embargo on Venezuelan oil also remains in full effect.
Just how dominant America’s military was in carrying out the operation is covered by this France24 clip:
“Only the US can carry out this kind of mission, so far from home at such a scale and with such coordination.”
“At least they’re the only country to have proved that they can still do it.”
“And now when we hear that jargon from Dan Caine about air and space support providing layering effects. That’s not just firepower, but it’s everything that’s needed to protect those helicopters as they went into that highly defended capital city and got out again. This requires not just the latest in satellite technology, high-tech jamming, stealth drones, but also just months of old school intelligence, fighter jet platforms that have been tried and tested over decades, and of course, sheer numbers just to provide that operational redundancy.”
The U.S. also managed to blackout Caracas during the attack.
“We can assume that the Space Force obviously provided latest state-of-the-art mapping to their forces, and potentially threw Venezuelan tracking off the scent as well. The Americans would have also used their EA-18G Growler aircraft which we know were involved. They have highly sophisticated jamming technology. The F-35s that were used can also use electronic warfare capabilities and jamming. So that could well have knocked out a lot of the Venezuelan radar.”
Combined arms are hard, but no one does them as well, or has the sheer reach, of the United States military.
The public narrative, stitched together from US statements and multiple reports, looks like this: months of planning, a narrow window, a rapid “snatch” mission at a heavily protected residence, and a fast exfiltration under fire.
Thank to reporting by the New York Times, we know the CIA has been on the ground in Venezuela for some time. They were almost certainly collecting the intelligence necessary for this exact operation.
US officials described a five-hour operation with more than 150 aircraft launching from roughly 20 bases across the Western Hemisphere, with a helicopter-borne ground force as the core maneuver element.
If those numbers are accurate, this was not a raid. This was a joint campaign compressed into one night.
Start with the centerpiece: USS Iwo Jima.
A quick aside: When I was in high school in Texas, I was a member of the Air Force junior ROTC. We were invited to march in three Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans, and we stayed aboard the USS Iwo Jima while we were there.
A Wasp-class LHD is a Swiss Army knife that swims. It gives you a flight deck, fuel, maintenance, command spaces, medical capacity, and the ability to surge rotary-wing sorties without asking anyone’s permission to use their runway.
If you want to push helicopters into a denied or semi-denied area and pull them back out fast, a big-deck amphib is the kind of platform you park nearby.
That matters because the reported “tip of the spear” was US special operations aviation. Multiple reports point to a large contingent of 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment or SOAR helicopters, also called the Night Stalkers, involved.
The 160th’s whole personality is flying low, at night, in bad weather, into places that don’t want them there, and bringing your people home anyway.
For reference, it was the Night Stalkers who played a critical role in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden (Operation Neptune Spear).
I’ve personally ridden with the Night Stalkers at Fort Campbell while in the Army… They can do some crazy shit with helicopters. I should note that I was not special forces, I was just hitching a ride as a grunt.
In Venezuela, those helicopters carried US Army Delta Force soldiers along with FBI agents who would perform the actual snatch (or kill if Maduro resisted).
Some readers might be wondering what the difference is between Delta Force and a group like the US Navy SEALs.
Well, first of all, SEALs always have a promising career in Hollywood waiting for them after their service… Or a lucrative book deal. Fucking prima donnas.
Delta are the “quiet professionals”.
Jokes aside, Delta Force and SEAL teams are both elite Tier 1 special mission units under JSOC, handling complex counterterrorism, hostage rescue, and direct action missions, but differ in their backgrounds and specializations. Delta excels in land-based, covert operations, while SEAL Team Six (DEVGRU) retains maritime roots, training SEALs for sea-based operations.
SEALs could have easily performed this operation and they may have been involved, but my initial sources are telling me it was Delta.
Reports from multiple outlets confirm that FBI Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) agents, physically executed the takedown of Nicolás Maduro inside Caracas.
That pairing, America’s most elite special mission unit (Delta) and its most capable federal law enforcement strike team, is unusual but not unprecedented.
It signals one important thing: Washington wanted Maduro alive and in custody, not vaporized.
Delta Force, formally known as 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (Airborne), is the Army’s top-tier counterterrorism and direct action unit. Their bread and butter isn’t messy firefights or holding ground, it’s surgical raids, high-value target snatches, and hostage rescue under conditions that would make most mortals short-circuit.
If a door needs breaching in a palace defended by an armored brigade, Delta is who goes through it.
The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, meanwhile, exists in that strange intersection between domestic law enforcement and tactical counterterrorism. They’re federal agents first but trained to the same operational standard as their military counterparts.
When American leadership needs a mission with law enforcement optics like arrest warrants, indictments, legal custody, the HRT adds the thin blue veneer that separates an extradition from an invasion.
In practice, the operation probably looked like this: Delta cleared the perimeter and neutralized armed resistance. HRT followed close behind, securing the detainees and beginning immediate chain-of-custody procedures to satisfy Justice Department requirements.
The Night Stalkers with their Delta/FBI contingent were supported by an impressive stack of US military hardware: F-22s, F-35s, F/A-18s, EA-18s, E-2s, B-1 bombers, Sentry, and “numerous” remotely piloted aircraft.
F-22s are air dominance and high-end insurance. They deter or swat down any manned aerial response, and they do it before the other side’s pilots finish their climb.
F-35s are the quiet burglars. They sniff emitters, map threats, and cue strikes. If you want to dismantle air defenses quickly, you bring the jet that was built to hunt radars. We currently don’t know how many air defense systems the F-35s removed, but I’m sure we will learn more in the coming days.
F/A-18s and EA-18Gs are the Navy’s workhorses for strike and electronic attack. The Growler exists to turn an air defense network into a migraine.
An E-2 Hawkeye is the Navy’s “baby Sentry” airborne battle management. It gives the air picture, deconflicts assets, and helps keep fratricide from becoming the main headline.
B-1s presence signals: if you escalate, we will flatten the area. They also provide standoff fires and a psychological effect that Venezuelan air defenders will be aware of.
E-3 Sentry is the quarterback.
I doubt B-1s were on call, but the presence of the other assets seems logical. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
Suchomimus has a detailed look at exactly where U.S. forces landed near Maduro’s bunker to capture him, and what Venezuelan military equipment they took out in the process:
Among those taken out was a Russian 9K37 Buk SAM system. “Russian air defense systems proving to be just as useless in Venezuela as they are in Ukraine and Russia.”
“There were some reports a few weeks back that Russia tried to bulk up Venezuela’s air defense by sending two S300 launchers and two book SAM systems, as well as up to a dozen to SAM systems as well….And all for naught. The American operation was a complete success, with zero American aircraft shot down.”
Did Chinese radar also fail?
🚨Beijing’s Shield Fails! Venezuela’s “Strongest Air Defense in South America” Collapses in U.S. Military Action
For years, the Venezuelan military poured vast sums into acquiring Chinese-made military equipment, building what it claimed was the “most modern” defense system in… https://t.co/hsoDv1np6Vpic.twitter.com/OdZdNnEzJ7
— Inconvenient Truths — Jennifer Zeng Reports (@jenniferzeng97) January 3, 2026
How are ordinary Venezuelans taking Maduro’s capture? They’re celebrating:
Heh:
Look, Maduro got a free helicopter ride AND a landing, so I don’t want to hear any complaints from the rest of the Commies.
Triggernometry adds some background on just how much socialism in Venezuela sucks:
Plus this: “Nicholas’s Maduros’s nephews were captured by the DA in Haiti with kilos of cocaine. They were brought here. They went to trial. They were declared guilty. And then Biden pardoned them and sent them back.”
Maybe part of the eventual settlement with Venezuela can include banks records for all regime payments to American politicos…
While Venezuelans hit the streets in wild celebration, popping bottles and celebrating freedom, Democrats in Washington, D.C., clutched their pearls and went into full meltdown mode, accusing Trump of getting us into a war and violating the Constitution.
“Trump’s unilateral operation last night was an illegal act of war without Congress’s authorization,” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) claimed.
“Maduro is a brutal dictator who has oppressed the Venezuelan people, but our constitution does not yield for bad people. If Congress is to survive as an institution, the Republican majority must join us exercising our power to hold this administration accountable for this flagrant violation of the constitution.”
He wasn’t the only Democrat to claim that Trump acted illegally.
“Without authorization from Congress, and with the vast majority of Americans opposed to military action, Trump just launched an unjustified, illegal strike on Venezuela,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) claimed.
“He says we don’t have enough money for healthcare for Americans—but somehow we have unlimited funds for war??”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also chimed in.
“President Trump’s unilateral military action to attack another country and seize Maduro — no matter how terrible a dictator he is — is unconstitutional and threatens to drag the U.S. into further conflicts in the region,” she argued.
“The American people voted for lower costs, not for Trump’s dangerous military adventurism overseas that won’t make the American people safer.”
Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) similarly accused Trump of getting the United States into an “illegal” war.
“This war is illegal, it’s embarrassing that we went from the world cop to the world bully in less than one year,” he said.
But these claims don’t hold water.
“Trump does not need congressional approval for this type of operation,” explains constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley. “Presidents, including Democratic presidents, have launched lethal attacks regularly against individuals. President Barack Obama killed an American citizen under this ‘kill list’ policy. If Obama can vaporize an American citizen without even a criminal charge, Trump can capture a foreign citizen with a pending criminal indictment without prior congressional approval.”
You know who else hates Maduro’s capture? The current leaders of China, Russia and Iran.
President Trump’s historic intervention in Venezuela offers needed hope to friends of freedom around the world and nervous traders in the oil market.
A pro-America, free-market government could unleash the country’s oil potential and lower energy prices around the globe. This is bad news for the Kremlin and clerics in Iran, who need high oil prices to perpetuate their regimes.
For decades, Venezuela’s socialist leaders have plunged their country into a black hole of poverty. Populist leader Hugo Chavez promised his voters unlimited riches. Nicolás Maduro, Chavez’s hand-picked successor, turned those hopes into an economic nightmare.
Chavez and Maduro seized the infrastructure of American oil firms in their country and ran the national economy into the ground. Under Maduro’s rule, the economic decline in Venezuela has been worse than the Great Depression in the US.
In the 1930s, America’s GDP declined by 30%.
Under Maduro, Venezuela’s economy has shrunk by about 75%, and Moscow and Beijing have been circling like vultures.
Last year, China purchased around 568,000 barrels per day from Venezuela; and Beijing needs Venezuela to fuel its economy. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has been keen to keep the Maduro regime as a proxy in the Western Hemisphere.
The loss of Maduro in Caracas, who has welcomed Russian weapons and support to prop up his wobbly regime, is a major blow to Moscow. It also sends a powerful message to dictators around the world who look to America’s rivals as an alternative to US leadership: When the chips are down, Putin and Xi Jinping can’t help you.
While Maduro was in power, both Putin and Xi were eager to include oil-rich Venezuela in their “Axis of Aggressors.”
Trump abruptly changed the geopolitical balance by putting Maduro in handcuffs. He can now put more pressure on Beijing and box out Moscow’s hopes for a sustained partnership with Caracas.
The clerics in Tehran are also worried. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps needs Venezuela to enable its sanctions-evasion schemes that were in place under Maduro. Worse, the ghost tanker fleet that serviced the IRGC out of Venezuela is now in jeopardy. And with the prospect of increased Venezuelan oil exports, there’s a potential opportunity to put a squeeze on all remaining Iranian oil.
Funny how often Democrats are on the save wavelength as the dictators in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran when it comes to opposing Donald Trump’s foreign policy successes…
I had to disable the ancient Word Press Stats package that stopped working and was screwing up my dashboard. So I lost all my blog hit history, which is irksome, as I received more than five million hits. On the plus side, it seems to save drafts much more quickly, and it also seems to be recording more views than the old stats did. I also wonder if the old stat package was responsible for some of the slow load times people occasionally experienced.
This week: More Charlie Kirk assassination fallout, more Ukrainian oil infrastructure strikes, Fani Willis gets permabanned, Planned Parenthood want to trans your children, the Democrat party’s racism problem, Lina Hidalgo calls it quits, more of that voting fraud that doesn’t exist, and YouTube screws up, then refuses to admit it
Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk, was living with his transgender romantic partner in the leadup to the assassination, Utah Governor Spencer Cox confirmed to CNN.
The roommate was “a male transitioning to female,” Cox said, noting that “this partner has been incredibly cooperative, had no idea this was happening, and is working with investigators right now.”
Snip.
While officials have not yet released the name of the roommate, public records show that Lance Twiggs, a 22-year-old, reportedly in the process of transitioning from male to female, lives at the same address as Robinson. The Post reported that a family member of Twiggs confirmed they were living together.
Cox told the Wall Street Journal that the suspect was “deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology.”
Robinson was also evidently a furry. So a gay tranny-loving furry killed Charlie Kirk. Some things are beyond parody…
“Anyone Who Blames ‘Both Sides’ After Charlie Kirk’s Murder Is A Liar And Coward.”
the Official Party of Wanton Assassination is busy making the case that there is extreme political violence “on both sides.” Immediately after the shooting, buffoonish Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, and Elizabeth Warren marched out to the microphones with convoluted messages about coming together and stopping violence on both sides.
By now, the drumbeat of bothsidesism in the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination has become a cacophony. “Bothsidesism” is what I am calling the irresistible urge for morally corrupt politicians (on both sides!) and journalists to lay half the blame for Kirk’s brutal murder at the feet of the right.
In fact, the worst Bothsiders — even worse than the sneering Democrats who can barely contain their glee that Kirk is dead, even as they scold us for not being interested in “unity” — are sniveling Republicans and so-called conservatives.
“There are monsters in your midst too,” intoned The New York Times’ David French, who persists in claiming to be conservative.
As proof, they will present their list of “right-wing violent attacks.” To give this barebones list more heft, they will go as far back as the Oklahoma City bombing, as that cretinous GOP Sen. James Lankford did on CNN. Lankford even had the gall to open his interview with Dana Bash by bringing up “white supremacy.” On Fox and Friends, Ainsley Earhardt tried to bait Trump into conceding that there are extremists on the right, too. Thank God he refused to take it.
This outrageous formulation must be crushed into dust, immediately. There is no moral equivalency. The Bothsiders are on the wrong side.
Why are Bothsiders wasting time blaming the right after a vicious murder committed by a leftist? Shouldn’t they be vociferously defending the innocent? The answer is that they’re cowards. They are too scared to call out Democrats for creating, supporting, and ignoring the evil that has taken root in their party.
Instead of courageously calling out their friends, colleagues, coworkers, and media allies, these pathetic Republican Bothsiders will spout long lists of examples of “right-wing political violence.” This allows them to avoid doing what has to be done: laying bare the left’s deep hatred of conservatives that has been allowed to fester for decade after decade.
By insisting that “both sides” are guilty of violence, they are giving the vicious left a way out. It’s a lifeline — a magical force field that immediately exonerates them. Democrats can then neatly avoid having to address the malevolent violence and hatred in so many of their voters. When it’s “both sides,” you get to escape accountability. When it’s “both sides,” the guilty get to escape a hard look in the mirror.
And just to belabor the point, here is why nearly everyone on the right is so united about political violence as a left-wing problem. First, Matt Walsh posted a short list of all the left-wing violence the right has had to endure in just the past few years:
BLM riots
Antifa
Church shootings
Trump assassination attempt [two of these!]
Pro life pregnancy center fires
Tesla vandalism
Attacks against ICE agents
Attacks against police
Attacks against federal courthouses
Allow me to add to this: multiple transgender shootings and threats by transgender activists. Plus, don’t any of these Bothsiders remember that our cities turned into a nightly warzone of fires, shootings, and Molotov cocktails from 2020-2021? It got so bad outside the White House that the president had to be moved to a secure location.
Don’t forget “Punch a Nazi” and “Punch a TERF” rhetoric either. Yes, men who identify as transgender, some of the most violent of the various Democrat shock troops, have attacked women as TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, for years.
And we endure plenty of ancillary political violence. It was left-wing violence that forced Kyle Rittenhouse into a trial for self-defense. It was left-wing violence that forced Daniel Penny into a trial for being a hero. It was left-wing violence that wrecked countless statues, monuments, and businesses.
Just days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the left is working overtime to hide the truth and create fantasies about his death.
Specifically, leftists alleged that conservatives were going to “pounce” on the death to wage protests and boost radical agendas in the manner of what followed George Floyd’s death.
Here are some of the lies that such a ridiculous narrative entails.
One, Charlie Kirk is not conservatives’ George Floyd. There were no mass riots after his death of the sort that followed Floyd’s demise.
Floyd’s death was used by the left to justify five months of rioting, arson, murder, looting, and attacking police officers.
The postmortem respect for Kirk’s singular life was not characterized by $2 billion in property damage, the torching of a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic church, 35 deaths, and 1,500 injured law-enforcement officers.
Instead, thousands of people peacefully joined his Turning Point USA organization and promised to redirect their lives toward peaceful political engagement.
Two, after Kirk’s death, no prominent Republican or conservative is encouraging ongoing mass (and often violent) protests in the manner of high-profile leftists like Kamala Harris.
Snip.
Three, Charles Kirk was not George Floyd. He was a law-abiding, religiously devout, political organizer, happily married with two children. Kirk was a media figure and head of a huge 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose brand was calmly debating students who disagreed with him.
Floyd should not have died while in police custody. But Floyd’s comorbidities were many. When arrested, he was under the influence of fentanyl and methamphetamine, with a heart condition and recent Covid infection.
He was a career felon, with eight previous criminal convictions, who had in the past staged a violent home-invasion robbery and pointed a knife at the abdomen of one of the female occupants.
In contrast, when Kirk was killed, he was not on drugs. He was not resisting police officers. And he was not trying to pass counterfeit currency. Instead, he eschewed violence and tried to engage in polite dialogue with students of different views.
Four, Kirk was not, as alleged by the left, murdered by a right-wing shooter. His death was not an example of right-on-right violence. Just the opposite was true. The shooter, Tyler Robinson, was on record with his family expressing hatred for the conservative Kirk.
Robinson engraved his bullets with both Antifa-like “anti-fascist” messaging and transgender references. He lived with his transgender partner, who was a leftist. Robinson’s aim was to end Kirk’s peaceful conservative career because he hated his politics and popularity and feared his influence.
Five, the left used the death of Floyd to promote its hard-left and otherwise unpopular agenda—defunding the police, cashless bail, decriminalization of theft, and DEI mandates. It manipulated outrage, chaos, and months-long violence to ram through radical cultural and top-down legal changes that otherwise had little popular support.
“The Fake News Media, Democrats and Radical Left are Lying about Charlie Kirk. They use their lies to justify and excuse Charlie Kirk’s brutal murder and their culpability for it for winding up the radical leftist fringe with their violent rhetoric.”
Leftist political violence is on the rise with Fake News Media, Democrat politicians, activists and the far left using more and more radical, violent rhetoric. I wrote about the violent rhetoric (and leftist political violence) on this substack, several times (see also here and here). I also observed previously that the far left consider political violence a tool and that the violent rhetoric serves to “trigger” the radical leftist fringe into acting out violence. The visceral response Americans had to the brutal assassination of Charlie Kirk only days ago made the media, Democrats and their enablers “circle the wagons” and start fabricating lies and misinformation about Charlie Kirk. I debunk a couple of the nastier lies in this article.
Snip.
AT NO TIME did he say “black women” lack brain processing power. He said several prominent liberal women who admitted they were assisted by affirmative action were admitting they lacked the “brain processing power to be taken really seriously.”
The comments at issue were made on the July 13, 2023 episode of Charlie Kirk’s podcast. During the show, Charlie discusses affirmative action. Affirmative action was a particularly hotly debated topic at the time due to the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard wherein SCOTUS found the use of race-based affirmative action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
After the Supreme Court’s opinion in Harvard a number of prominent black Democrats publicly supported affirmative action and stated they were personally assisted in their careers by affirmative action. Among these were the late Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat Congresswoman from Texas, former First Lady Michelle Obama and former MSNBC correspondent Joy Reid.
Snip.
The Charlie Kirk Called for Stoning Gay People LIE
Literally hours after his murder, prominent leftists started circulating false claims that Charlie Kirk advocated for or supported stoning gay people to death. Chief among the purveyors of this misinformation was famous author (and radical leftist) Stephen King.
Snip.
Did Charlie Kirk “Advocate” for Stoning Gays?
No, of course not. In fact, Charlie Kirk advocated repeatedly for caring for gay people and encouraged and supported gay conservatives. (This link is to a gay conservative Charlie supported. His video is worth watching and includes video of Charlie Kirk answering questions from gay people.)
Charlie Kirk was a Christian and believed in the Bible. Based on Scripture, Charlie knew homosexuality was a sin. Naturally, this enraged the far left. To justify or excuse Charlie’s murder the far left FABRICATED the claim that Charlie Kirk “advocated” for “stoning gays.” All Charlie Kirk did was reference Scripture. Here is what happened.
Charlie Kirk and Jack Posobiec hosted a podcast called Thoughtcrime. During a Thoughtcrime episode on June 8, 2024, Jack and Charlie (along with a couple of other frequent conservative contributors to the show) discussed a social media personality named Miss Rachel and her endorsement of Pride month (gay pride). Miss Rachel’s social media and blogging content focuses largely on kids and parenting. Miss Rachel made a post about suppoting Pride month and invoked the Bible in the process, citing the admonitions on the Book of Matthew to “love your neighbor.” Miss Rachel implied, but did not expressly say, anyone who is against Pride Month, is not being a good Christian.
In response, Charlie Kirk pointed out you love someone by “. . . by telling them the truth and not by confirming or affirming their sin.” He then suggested Miss Rachel read the rest of the Scriptures and pointed out the Book of Leviticus calls for a man who lays with another man to be stoned, making the point Miss Rachel was cherry-picking Bible verses. He also pointed out the Bible says to love God, one must love his law and that the Book of Leviticus lays down God’s law about sex.
“Stephen King himself agreed his own post was untrue and apologized for the post.”
The Fake News Media, the Democrats and the left generally are in panic mode working to spread lies about Charlie Kirk in an effort to blunt public opinion against their radical, violent rhetoric and leftist violence. These two lies are the worst in my view. There are many more other lies being spread about Charlie Kirk by the left. Keep that in mind as you read any media reports.
Florida’s Commissioner of Education Anastasios Kamoutsas reminded teachers and administrators that they can be fired for violating the state’s code of ethics. “An educator who is designated with ensuring the health, safety and welfare of students in schools making comments celebrating violence at a school is very concerning.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
More transtifa news: “The man who pleaded guilty to attempting to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh identifies as a transgender woman, according to newly revealed court documents. In a recent court filing, Nicholas Roske’s defense attorneys call their client “Sophie” and explain in a footnote that they will use female pronouns to refer to him ‘out of respect.'”
A few years back we got really serious about studying cash transfers, and rigorous research began in cities all across America. Some programs targeted the homeless, some new mothers and some families living beneath the poverty line. The goal was to figure out whether sizable monthly payments help people lead better lives, get better educations and jobs, care more for their children and achieve better health outcomes.
Many of the studies are still ongoing, but, at this point, the results aren’t “uncertain.” They’re pretty consistent and very weird. Multiple large, high-quality randomized studies are finding that guaranteed income transfers do not appear to produce sustained improvements in mental health, stress levels, physical health, child development outcomes or employment. Treated participants do work a little less, but shockingly, this doesn’t correspond with either lower stress levels or higher overall reported life satisfaction.
Homeless people, new mothers and low-income Americans all over the country received thousands of dollars. And it’s practically invisible in the data. On so many important metrics, these people are statistically indistinguishable from those who did not receive this aid.
Read on for more detailed methodologies, but the results (or lack thereof) are consistent with all other experiments of this type, all the way back to the SIME/DIME experiments of the late 1960s. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
The State Department announced Wednesday its decision to close the remnants of the Global Engagement Center, an office the Biden administration rebranded last year after it came under scrutiny for contributing to the censorship of conservatives online.
“The United States has ceased all Frameworks to Counter Foreign State Information Manipulation and any associated instruments implemented by the former administration,” principal deputy spokesperson Tommy Pigott said in a statement, referring to the Global Engagement Center’s new title.
“The Framework, initially launched by the GEC to counter so-called disinformation, devolved into tools for political censorship instead of protecting Americans from foreign adversarial propaganda,” he added.
“Through free speech, the United States will counter genuine malign propaganda from adversaries that threaten our national security, while protecting Americans’ right to exchange ideas.”
The Biden administration reshuffled the GEC into the Frameworks to Counter Foreign State Information Manipulation after congressional Republicans defunded the GEC in 2024. Republican lawmakers shut down the GEC after widespread backlash among conservatives against the agency over the pressure it put on social media companies to censor disfavored points of view.
The State Department’s move followed through on Secretary Marco Rubio’s directive earlier this year to close the unit and end the practice of government-sponsored censorship.
Disgraced Georgia DA Fani Willis permabanned from prosecuting Trump. “The denial of certiorari to Ms. Willis’s appeal of her suspension from the election interference case she brought against Mr. Trump and 18 others is a decisive victory for the 47th president. The high court’s four-to-three decision ends Ms. Willis’s time atop the case, which was terminated because of her secret romance with her special prosecutor, Nathan Wade.”
More food inflation? Except for beef, I’m not seeing price spikes the way I saw 2020-2022.
There’s a rare public spat going on between Governor Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick over THC regulation.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has responded to Gov. Greg Abbott’s hemp-derived THC executive order (EO), saying that “on this issue, we disagree.”
A staunch supporter of an outright ban on THC in Texas, Patrick said in his Friday press release that via the EO, Abbott “intentionally or not, has sent a signal to the THC industry that they have a state seal of approval on the current THC market.”
Abbott’s EO, which comes after his veto of the THC ban in Senate Bill 3 at the end of the regular session and then two special sessions where the Legislature was unable to come to an agreement on regulation, directs the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC) and Department of State Health Services (DSHS) with prohibiting the sale of hemp-derived THC products to “minors” — but does not explicitly state a specific age.
The EO also directs DSHS to conduct a review of existing agency rules that deal with total THC content in products, labeling requirements, and record-keeping.
Abbott told The Texan in July that he wants to see a 21-year age limit on the sale of hemp-derived THC products, an age he had mentioned in his veto proclamation.
Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller joined Vice President JD Vance, who hosted The Charlie Kirk Show earlier, following Kirk’s assassination last Wednesday by what has been described as a “radical left, ANTIFA-adjacent creep” with a radicalized transgender partner.
Miller told Vance, “Which is that we need to have an organized strategy to go after the left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country.”
It appears that Miller has correctly identified the dark-money-funded NGO world as fueling this madness, and that an urgent all-of-government approach is necessary.
More on the subject from Jason Curtis Anderson of One City Rising:
It’s encouraging to see the White House focus on the violent, revolutionary arm of the radical left, but targeting small organizations alone won’t solve the problem.
We need a multi-agency coordinated effort, and it must confront the dark-money network of foundations that prop them up.
We also must begin ruthlessly regulating and enforcing the tax-exempt 501(c)(3) system, where the revolution against the West operates. To qualify for tax-exempt status, a group is supposed to serve the public good.
Yet many qualify on flimsy claims of promoting social, racial, or climate justice and then devote themselves to protests and flag-burning.
They are a cancer on society, and the longer we wait, the more it will metastasize.
It’s also alarming how closely far-left radicalization mirrors Islamist radicalization. The stages are strikingly similar: Introduction to ideology, Obsession with ideology, Belief that violence is justified, Acts of violence on behalf of the ideology.
Planned Parenthood’s online “gender affirming care” lesson for students as young as middle-schoolers suggests using “liquid filled condoms” to mimic a penis and provides instructions on how to circumvent safeguards if “you’re looking for hormones without extra gatekeeping.”
Sex Ed To-Go is an online program with free sex-education lessons in Spanish and English developed by Planned Parenthood for teachers and students, ranging from topics like sexually transmitted diseases to “handling break-ups.” The new module titled “Gender Affirming Care,” created by Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest, is designed for students in eighth grade and above. The lesson plan explains gender-related terminology, explores “types of things people can do to help their body and appearance match their gender identity,” directs students on finding “resources,” and details “how to support someone who is transgender, non-binary, or transitioning.”
Conversely, University President Mark Welsh is out at Texas A&M.
Mark Welsh, president of Texas A&M University, is stepping down effective September 19. Announced by Chancellor Glenn Hegar and the Board of Regents, the news follows weeks of mounting controversy over Welsh’s leadership.
Welsh’s resignation caps a period of public uproar sparked by his handling of a children’s literature course that included instruction on introducing LGBT and gender identity material to children as young as three.
The situation came under public scrutiny after State Rep. Brian Harrison (R–Midlothian) released audio of a student objecting to the curriculum and subsequent allegations that the student was kicked out of class for expressing concerns about transgender indoctrination. Initially, Welsh defended the professor involved but later reversed himself—firing the instructor and removing the department head and dean from their posts.
Despite these actions, criticism intensified from lawmakers and activists, who accused Welsh of ambivalence and being slow to address the controversy.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick publicly called for further accountability, stating Welsh “did not handle the recent situation … as he should have,” while Harrison said Welsh “must be fired for forcing radical trans indoctrination on students.”
Sadly, trans indoctrination in education is something squishy Republicans dragged their heels on fighting in the past. That’s no longer the case, and I suspect that anyone in Texas who thinks its a good idea to use trans indoctrination on kids is soon going to find themseleves on the receiving end of a pink slip.
“We got too progressive, I believe,” said JoJo Burgess, the black Democratic mayor of Washington, Pennsylvania, a small city in steel country. He’s also a steelworker trying to claw back some of the steel country for Democrats.
Burgess argued that the Democrats’ problems are Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and identity politics, including gender ideology. Clairton Mayor Rich Lattanzi, also a Democrat and a former steelworker, basically agreed.
“It’s almost like the Democrats forgot the people they are representing,” Lattanzi told the Washington Examiner.
In 2000, Al Gore won Fayette, Washington, and Greene counties, all steel and coal country south of Pittsburgh, by 10 points, which was the norm. More recently, President Donald Trump carried all three counties by 30 points.
Burgess told the Washington Examiner he believes steel country Democrats were done in by a one-two punch. First, former President Barack Obama won the presidency, and Burgess said he believes white rural Democrats didn’t want to be in a party headed by a black man. He said the second blow was self-inflicted in 2016, adding “one of the biggest problems that we had with the Democratic Party — that’s Bernie Sanders.”
Burgess said he believes Sanders got so much attention that party leadership felt they had to tack left to embrace it.
“We got too progressive, I believe. And you got the progressives that picked up on that, like the AOCs [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and people like that,” Burgess said. “Listen, I’m not gonna say that they’re bad, but sometimes some of the shit that some of these guys say: it’s just it’s too extreme and it don’t make sense.”
He added that one example is “gender stuff.”
“Whenever the LGBQTIA community comes out and says, ‘We’re getting treated just like black people,’ no, you’re not,” Burgess said. “As black people, we have no choice. In that community, you do have a choice, and you do know what you sign up for when you take on that role. Do I believe that you’re discriminated against? Yes. Do I believe you should be protected against it? Absolutely.”
However, Burgess totally rejected the idea that boys who identify as girls should be able to compete as girls, and he said he believes Democrats harm themselves by taking the other side.
Lattanzi said when the Democratic establishment hosts an event in steel country, it plays its identity-politics games and tries to stay away from the working-class white guy who stereotypically embodies this region.
“They’re out there looking for minorities, gays, and lesbians,” Lattanzi said.
Lots of interesting takeaways there, but this was a big one: “white rural Democrats didn’t want to be in a party headed by a black man.” Emphasis added. And that’s in 2008, which suggests racism lingered on in the rural Democratic Party much longer than in the Republican Party or America as a whole. See also: The Myth of the Southern Strategy.
Things that make you go “Hmmmm: “The EU Paid-Off €600,000 To Friendly Media Outlets Right After European Elections.”
One European politician, MEP Petr Bystron, has revealed that the EU commission has provided Financial support to the American investigative network Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) right after the 2024 EU elections. Major German news outlets like Spiegel, Zeit, and Süddeutsche Zeitung belong to the group, which is the world’s largest network of investigative media.
These outlets are known for their hit pieces on conservative and right-wing parties, often at opportune times. Notably, Spiegel and Süddeutsche Zeitung’s reporting in 2019 on the Ibiza Affair scandal — which involved an undercover video of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) party’s leader — led to the toppling of the Austrian government at the time, which included the FPÖ. Many critics believed that due to the sophistication of the operation, which included an undercover actress, intelligence services may have played a role.
The OCCRP group was founded in 2006 and is most well known for publishing the “Panama Papers” and the “Azerbaijan Laundromat” evasion scandals.
After a massive flow of U.S. money was cut off to key European establishment outlets and NGOs, Brussels is stepping in to fill the gap. Namely, the Trump administration ended the massive levels of funding headed towards foreign organizations, particularly from USAID, which allowed them to pump out pro-EU and left-wing content to wide swathes of the population across Europe.
The OCCRP group has received an extraordinary amount of money from U.S. taxpayers and other U.S. sources. According to French outlet Mediapart, the group received nearly $50 million from U.S. sources, but these funders were not just generous donors. They also could dictate editorial agendas and veto staff appointments.
Two journalists from NDR, a German state media network, questioned just how independent the OCCRP is in a 2024 report.
The two determined that a significant portion of the money was coming from American funds, particularly from USAID. OCCRP was funneling content and material to German media outlets like Spiegel, Zeit, and Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Since the revelations, Alternative for Germany (AfD) MEP Petr Bystron has officially requested the EU Commission to provide information about whether it also provides financial support to OCCRP. The response revealed that the organization has received €600,000 since November 2024 as part of an EU project to “strengthen” journalism.
Known as the NEXT-U project, it aims to support European journalists and media organizations with training and tools for investigative journalism. The commission defends the grants, stating that the taxpayer money is transparently distributed and adheres to journalistic standards.
Bystron argues that the ample amount of money amounts to an influence operation.
“OCCRP media outlets like Der Spiegel received over 600,000 euros from the EU directly after the EU elections. These very media outlets manipulated the last EU elections through massive campaigns,” he said in an interview with Berliner Zeitung, which published the exclusive story first.
The AfD MEP stated that the aim was to discredit conservative, right-wing politicians who are critical of the EU.
I first met Charlie Kirk when he was just 18 years old, in my friend’s living room. Fresh out of high school, even then, he had a vision for Turning Point USA—a dream to energize young people, inspire them, and get them involved. He started in his parents’ garage, and that vision grew into something extraordinary.
From the beginning, Charlie stood out. He was brilliant, bold, courageous, and joyful. He was a happy warrior.
Like so many across the country, I struggled to comprehend the news of his death.
He was assassinated for speaking the truth, for sharing his heartfelt beliefs, for daring to open conversations across the political spectrum. And his absence leaves a gaping hole in our nation’s soul.
Snip.
When I think back on Charlie’s life and all that he accomplished by the age of 31, I’m struck by how profoundly he influenced our nation. He had a gift, and few have done more for America’s youth.
Yes, he encouraged young Americans to go to the polls. He engaged in open discussion. He wanted to know young people’s hearts.
But most importantly, he was good for our country because he wanted to revive the souls of Americans.
Charlie wanted people to know the Lord, and he wanted to be remembered most for his courage in faith. He was one of the most important Christian evangelists and apologists of modern times.
Charlie sought out those who disagreed with him, and he was happy to listen to their arguments—respectfully and civilly—and to engage them on substance.
And he made an unbelievable difference in the lives of young people, inspiring millions across America and across the world.
The Indiana Supreme Court on Thursday permanently banned Judge Matthew J. Elkin of Howard County from judicial service following findings of judicial misconduct.
Chief Justice Loretta Rush wrote the rare decision to oust a county judge, and the other four justices on the Indiana Supreme Court agreed.
Elkin, a Republican who served in Howard Superior Court in Kokomo, was found to have engaged in misconduct by failing to disqualify himself from cases involving former clients, making inappropriate comments to court participants, and favoring certain litigants over others.
Yeah, the failure to disqualify is a huge no-no. Never let it be said that I don’t report actual Republican corruption when it happens.
Aw, how does it feel? “Rolling Stone Hit With Layoffs Amid Ongoing Staff Reductions at Penske.”
According to [Oliver] Darcy, among the affected Rolling Stone staffers are executive digital director Lisa Tozzi, chief television critic Alan Sepinwall and copy chief Steven Pearl. As of this writing, none of them have commented publicly.
Following months of speculation about her future plans, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo announced this week she will not seek a third term as chief executive of Texas’ largest county.
“I am still in office until December 2026, and I’ve got the work cut out for me and that’s not even, knock on wood, counting any emergencies that might arise,” Hidalgo said during an interview with ABC 13 in Houston. “After that, I don’t know. I don’t know what I will do. I know that I’m not running for office this cycle. I can say that with confidence, and I know that I will stay in public service.”
First elected in 2018 in the down-ballot “Beto wave” of victories for Democrats, Hidalgo won with less than 50 percent of the vote against incumbent Republican Judge Ed Emmett. Prior to taking the reins as chief executive of Harris County, the 27-year-old had worked as a medical interpreter at the Texas Medical Center in Houston and volunteered for the Texas Civil Rights Project. A graduate of Stanford University, Hidalgo previously worked for international media group Internews in Indonesia.
Hidalgo’s surprise victory handed Democrats control of the commissioners court, with whom she initially worked well to usher in a slew of reforms to the county’s management of flood mitigation, infrastructure, and criminal justice systems; an administrative restructuring of county government; and the launch of new social programs. Lauded as a rising political star, the young judge drew the attention of national media for her promotion of progressive policies in a reliably Republican state.
Despite multiple controversies during her first term — including her efforts to release violent criminal suspects from the county’s jail during the COVID-19 pandemic and indictment of several staffers over an alleged vaccine outreach bid-rigging scheme — Hidalgo narrowly won a second term in 2022, but has since increasingly clashed with fellow Democratic commissioners and often exhibited erratic behavior.
During a swearing-in ceremony after the 2022 election, Hidalgo accused fellow Democratic commissioners of trying to cut her out of the program. Later that year she alleged that she had been “groped” in the commissioners court meeting room. Months later, Hidalgo took a lengthy leave of absence while she sought in-patient treatment for depression.
Since returning to her office Hidalgo has increasingly clashed publicly with Commissioners Adrian Garcia (D-Pct. 2) and Lesley Briones (D-Pct. 4), while largely maintaining her alliance with Commissioner Rodney Ellis (D-Pct. 1).
The fractures on the commissioners’ court erupted earlier this year when Garcia and Briones joined the lone Republican Commissioner Tom Ramsey (R-Pct. 3) in support of raises for law enforcement but refused to support Hidalgo’s proposal for a tax increase to continue a pilot daycare program launched with federal COVID-19 relief funds in 2022.
Good news for the exit of an unqualified leftist who did much harm while she was there.
Jimmy Kimmel yanked off the air indefinitely for Charlie Kirk comments, mainly implying the shooter was MAGA rather than a lefty and for using Kirk’s death as an excuse to segway into still more Trump bashing. Evidently affiliate stations and advertisers stated they would no longer air or advertise on the show after that. I think media companies are finally figuring out just how tired ordinary Americans are of the far left, social justice hatefest on late night TV.
Analysis: True. “The Left is angrier about Kimmel getting fired for lying about an assassination than the assassination itself.”
A woman accused of running an illegal ballot harvesting scheme during the 2022 General Election was arrested in Starr County, Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Wednesday.
A grand jury indicted Modesta Vela of Roma after a yearlong investigation into ballot harvesting operations targeting numerous senior citizens in South Texas. She was arrested on September 4, marking her fourth arrest since 2010.
“Due to the findings of this investigation, a grand jury issued a true bill indictment against Vela for intentionally and knowingly influencing a Texan’s vote in the presence of the ballot during the voting process, which is an offense punishable as a state jail felony,” according to Paxton’s office.
Ballot harvesting—sometimes referred to as “ballot trafficking”—typically involves a third party illegally collecting and handling voters’ ballots in order to influence elections.
In South Texas, these third-party ballot harvesters are known as politiqueras.
Investigators with the Office of the Attorney General said Vela’s activities focused on Texans over the age of 65, a group often targeted in such cases due to their automatic eligibility for mail-in voting.
Paxton reiterated his longstanding position that election fraud is an ongoing threat in Texas.
“Though liberals and the left-wing media like to pretend otherwise, we know that election fraud is real and a serious threat,” said Paxton. “Criminals trying to steal our elections and rig the democratic process will be found, arrested, and prosecuted. Modesta Vela was trying to take advantage of voters and broke the law by illegally ballot harvesting and targeting a Texan seeking to engage in our elections. Now, it’s time for Vela to answer for her actions in court.”
The investigation followed a complaint filed in late 2022 by Project Red Texas, alleging Vela was involved in ballot harvesting operations in Starr County.
A popular Ohio barbecue restaurant is facing major backlash after one of its co-owners called conservative activist Charlie Kirk a “piece of s—” in a social media post after his assassination.
Shortly after Kirk, 31, was shot Wednesday while speaking at a campus event in Utah, Aaron Sharpe, co-owner of Lucius Q in Cincinnati, commented on a Facebook post from someone offering prayers for the husband and father of two.
“Good riddance,” Sharpe wrote in a post that is no longer publicly visible but has been circulated widely online in screenshots. “What a piece of s—,” he added.
On Wednesday evening, Sharpe doubled down on Facebook, posting, “Don’t you dare come at me with your hypocrisy. … If you think that threats of social media attacks on me or my business will in any way keep me silent about what I believe, you are sorely mistaken….”
On Thursday, several of Lucius Q’s business partners announced they had cut ties with the restaurant. Lucius Q later announced it had parted ways with Sharpe.
Remember how everyone swore that the idea Democrats were going to use the Pacific Palisades fire as an excuse to build public housing was just a conspiracy theory? Guess what?
The amount of unbelievable partisan graft DOGE is uncovering at USAID and elsewhere is so staggering even Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein are gobsmacked by its massive scope.
Joe Rogan: “I don’t think I really grasped it until Elon’s six wizards, he brought in some young wizards to go in there and go over the books, and they are just finding crazy shit.”
Rogan listened to a leftwing podcast, and “they weren’t even talking about all of this corruption and all this obvious buying of influence. Instead, they were talking about aid overseas and how people are going to starve and—”
Bret Weinstein: “It’s mindboggling. I’m just I’m upset at the general pattern of a failure to recognize how right those of us who hypothesized that there was a racket that had overtaken our entire governance structure. We turned out to be absolutely right about this and no one’s going to mention it.”
JR: “It’s very strange that the media is ignoring it especially the leftwing media. It’s just too big of a win for the right, and so they’re just ignoring it.”
BW: “This was a mechanism used to funnel money to all sorts of things that we didn’t vote on that don’t make sense in light of our constitutional structure….I obviously have concerns like everybody else about where this train takes us, but seeing that structure broken up is it’s a huge relief.”
JR: “They gave $27 million to the George Soros prosecutor fund. So our own government is funding this left-wing lunatic who is hiring the most insane prosecutors, who are letting people out of jail who commit violent crimes.”
BW: “And that’s that’s exactly how this racket worked, is that the ability to tax the American public and then effectively get us to pay for being propagandized, for being surveilled, that’s the game.”
BW: “I don’t think any reasonable person could be unhappy that we are exiting that era.”
JR: “I’m going to read off some of the things that this guy Kenna Coda the Great on Twitter uh listed. This is off the Jesse Waters show: $20 million for Iraqi Sesame Street, $2 million for Moroccan pottery classes, $1 million to tell Vietnam to stop burning trash, $27 million to give gift bags to illegals. $27 million. $330 million to help Afghanis grow crops. Wonder what those crops are.”
JR: “$200 million on an unused Afghani dam, $250 million on an unused Afghani road. This is wild. I mean some of this stuff is really, really crazy.”
BW: “And you know USAID is of course riddled through whatever international madness it is that caused us to open our Southern border and facilitate an invasion through the Darian Gap.”
BW: “It almost feels like it can’t be real, like it can’t have been this close to the surface, and yet here are.”
JR: “I think the number that I’ve read was $600 million every two months to ship been illegals.”
BW: “Basically we had a shadow apparatus functioning, and it involves all kinds of things. It involves payoffs to people who didn’t deserve them. It involves contracting to, uh, entities. that were necessary to get the work done.”
JR: “We were always wondering like why is our debt so high, why is the national debt so high. Like, why is our deficit so insane? Well, this is.”
JR: “$40 billion for electric car ports eight ports have been built.”
BW: “I think it was apparent that whatever had taken over our system wasn’t interested in the well-being of average people, that it was interested in the power of the state to take people’s resources and redistribute them, and that really is what’s been going on for most of our adult lives.”
JR: “And it’s also important to note that this progressive, left-leaning, radical left arm of the government, of the country, was manufactured. Yes, it’s all manufactured, it’s all manufactured and supported. It’s not organic.”
BW: “The cover story that what we were up to was righting past wrongs was so pernicious and pervasive, that it was hard to get our footing to challenge it. But it it shouldn’t really be surprising that that movement wasn’t organic. Of course, it was induced. It was a cover story for theft, and and we’re going to be waking up to the magnitude of that theft for quite some time. I think this is going to take years.”
JR: “When you get to the bottom of all this, it’s going to be insane, because they haven’t even got to the Medicaid yet, they haven’t even got to the medical stuff. There’s so much they haven’t even tapped into, where they think the real motherload of fraud is.”
Rogan mentions that Elizabeth Warren swore up and down that she never got money from pharmaceutical companies or PACs, and community notes proved she received millions. “She’s a fucking liar.”
BW: “I don’t think the Democrats understand that it’s over, and that there was a vast infrastructure that made their feeble arguments viable. And that infrastructure is now collapsing. People are far more aware, and their lives aren’t going to function anymore.”
JR: “It was really about control and money. It had nothing to do with helping people, making people better.”
Rogan notes that there were more than 55,000 NGOs used to launder payouts to Democratic Party causes.
The Biden economy is still sucking, the arsonist who helped set LA ablaze was (of course!) an illegal alien, a Tik-Tok triptych, Dan Patrick announces a staggering warchest, WaPo walloped, Stacey Abrams is busted, and Americans are told “no thanks” by Chinese RedNote users.
The bad news for American workers doesn’t end there. “1 in 5 postings on Greenhouse are ‘ghost jobs.'”
There were many reasons why they did it. Some did it for the same reason Biden’s administration did: To make their company look like it was doing better than it was. Some post them just in case there is a unicorn out there with magical qualifications.
But the most frustrating reason was the final one:
Some hiring managers even admitted they post fake jobs to keep their own employees on their toes, saying they want workers to feel ‘replaceable’ so they will work harder.
“LA County Arson Suspect is Illegal Immigrant Repeat Offender Protected By California’s Sanctuary State Policies.” Because of course he is. “The suspect, Juan Manuel Sierra-Leyva, is a Mexican national who has already been convicted of multiple crimes, but because California is a sanctuary state, he is unlikely to be deported, the New York Post reported.”
Just days after reports that she’d planned to can her fire chief, Kristin Crowley, after she publicly criticized the level of funding she’d received from the city, Bass is facing intense criticism yet again from a memo up on a city website, which shows that just months ago, the chief practically begged city hall to stop its budget-cutting spree on fire response.
The memo, which was dated Nov. 18, was written to the fire commissioners, according to the Washington Free Beacon. That’s a five-person board appointed by Bass.
In Crowley’s memo, she urged the commissioners to let Bass and the city council know how dire the situation was.
“In many ways, the current staffing, deployment model, and size of the LAFD have not changed since the 1960s,” Crowley wrote.
A federal judge in Texas has found that American Airlines violated both federal law and their fiduciary duty to their employees by using the company’s 401(k) plan to push ESG. Let a thousand lawsuits bloom.
Texas Republican Lt. Governor Dan Patrick is loaded for bear. “Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick posted ‘over $33.5 million’ cash-on-hand for his re-election campaign in 2026.”
Ron DeSantis continues to drive the enemy before him and hear the lamentations of their women. “United Teachers of Dade, Florida’s largest teachers union, failed to meet the requirements of a new state law that requires at least 60% of union members pay dues.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Keir Starmer’s Labour government has been trying to give away the Chagos Islands, despite them being the home to vital U.S. military base Diego Garcia. Fortunately, someone has slammed the breaks on the deal until Trump is in office.
Big drone attack from Ukraine against Russia, with reportedly over 200 drones used.
“WaPo’s Pulitzer-winning cartoonist, who portrays Republicans as groomers and predators, arrested for possession of child porn. Washington Post cartoonist Darrin Bell arrested for possession of child pornography.”
But it’s not all bad news for Bezos! TDS sufferer Jennifer Rubin quit.
Remember Stacey Abrams, the black female Georgian Beto? The mediocrity whose fawning media profiles never turned into actual election victories? Well, “Stacey Abrams Group Hit with Largest Fine in Georgia History for Violating Campaign Finance Law.”
A Democratic advocacy group founded by former Representative Stacey Abrams and once led by Senator Raphael Warnock were fined $300,000 on Wednesday for breaking Georgia’s campaign finance law.
Georgia’s ethics commission found that the New Georgia Project and its affiliated action fund raised $4.2 million and spent $3.2 million to support Abrams during the 2018 election cycle when she ran for governor. The groups failed to disclose those partisan contributions in violation of state campaign finance law. Abrams ultimately lost to Republican Brian Kemp, who defeated her again in 2022.
The two entities agreed to pay a $300,000 penalty, the largest fine in the commission’s 38-year history, in two $150,000 installments for 16 instances of illegal activity. The punishment is aimed at the groups, not Abrams and Warnock directly.
The New Georgia Project failed to register as an independent campaign committee and failed to file campaign finance reports of contributions and spending in 2018, showing their support for Abrams and other Democratic candidates.
In 2019, the groups committed the same offense without disclosing $646,000 in contributions and $174,000 in spending to support a voter referendum for Gwinnett County’s citizens to join the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority system. Despite the nonprofit’s efforts, voters rejected the referendum.
Just like Beto…
You didn’t expect Ken Paxton to let Biden leave office without one last lawsuit. “Texas Sues Biden Administration Over ‘Unlawful’ Methane Tax. Along with 22 other states, Texas is seeking to bar the final rule from taking effect on January 17.”
Turns out Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin didn’t bother to tell the chain of command that he was having major surgery. Or that he was hopped up on goofballs afterwards…
Not the Bee: “Asked what he’ll talk about at Mar-a-Lago, John Fetterman says, “I demand that I need to be made Pope of Greenland.” Fetterman seems to be the rare Democrat with a sense of humor…
A whole lot of Democrats still seem hot for dumping Slow Joe after his disasterous debate showed his obvious cognitive decline. There’s just one tiny problem: Every polled Democrat loses to Trump by even more.
A series of prominent Democrats were tested in a head-to-head ballot against Donald Trump:
Vice President Kamala Harris: 49% Trump, 43% Harris, 8% undecided
Senator Bernie Sanders: 48% Trump, 42% Sanders, 10% undecided
California Governor Gavin Newsom: 48% Trump, 40% Newsom, 12% undecided
Former Vice President Al Gore: 47% Trump, 42% Gore, 11% undecided
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: 48% Trump, 41% Clinton, 11% undecided
Senator Elizabeth Warren: 49% Trump, 39% Warren, 13% undecided
Secretary of State* Pete Buttigieg: 49% Trump, 39% Buttigieg, 12% undecided
The usual poll caveats apply, and the sample size of 1,370 is a bit low for a nationwide poll. But the crosstabs do show more Democrats than Republicans sampled, which makes things look even worse for Biden’s chances.
The other caveat: The Sacred Spouse of Lightbringer McLegTingle wasn’t polled. She’s denied she’s interested in running, though swathes of media types are slavering over a potential candidacy, so I’ll have both of the the Bill Burr rants cued up.
Finally, the DNC would never, ever, ever let Bernie Sanders get nominated, because that would mean an entirely new set of grifters kicking the current snouts out of the trough and inserting their own.
If this poll is to be believed, then Democrats might as well roll with Biden, despite his brain being mush, because he still has the best chance to beat Trump.
And that’s all that matters to them.
*Yes, that was still up today. Last time I checked, Buttigieg was Secretary of Transportation (and doing a lousy job).
The Biden family and its business associates created a complicated web of more than 20 companies, according to bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee — a system, GOP lawmakers say, that was meant to conceal money received from foreign nationals.
Sixteen of the companies were limited liability companies formed during Joe Biden’s tenure as vice president, the committee said in a press conference on Wednesday. The Biden family, their business associates, and their companies received more than $10 million from foreign nationals’ and their related companies, the records show. These payments occurred both while Biden was in office as vice president and after his time in office ended.
In what Representative Nancy Mace called an act of “financial gymnastics,” many payments were routed from foreign companies to the Biden family’s business associates’ companies which then doled out payments to the Bidens in incremental payments to different bank accounts in an alleged attempt to hide the source of the funds.
At least nine Biden family members received payments, according to committee chairman James Comer. That includes Hunter Biden; James Biden; James Biden’s wife, Sara Jones Biden; the late Beau Biden’s wife, Hallie Biden; Hunter Biden’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle; Hunter Biden’s wife, Melissa Cohen; and “three children of the president’s son and the president’s brother.”
Much of the money came from Chinese nationals and companies with ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Multiple Biden family members received money after it passed through an associate’s account. Comer said of the countries the Biden family was influence peddling in, China is “the most reputable.”
The committee revealed Wednesday that records suggest the Biden family and its associates’ business dealings in Romania “bear clear indication of a scheme to peddle influence” from 2015 to 2017.
At the time, then-Vice President Biden spoke out against Romanian corruption while the Biden family received more than a million dollars from a company controlled by a Romanian national, Gabriel Popoviciu. Popoviciu, who has been accused of corruption, sent the money through a Biden family associate, according to the committee. Sixteen of the seventeen payments involved in the deal occurred while Biden was still in office. The money “stops flowing from the Romanian national soon after Joe Biden leaves the vice presidency,” Comer said.
The Bidens also received “millions of dollars from China,” with Comer saying it is “inconceivable that the president did not know” about the payments.
Comer said the information revealed Wednesday is the result of subpoenas to four different banks and stressed that the committee is still early in its investigation and believes there are as many as 12 banks with records relevant to its investigation.
Naturally, the mainstream media are doing their very best to ignore these revelations…
You might have noticed a meme floating around the media about how Britons could become “no better off than people living in Poland”. “If the UK continues with the same level of growth it has seen for the last decade,” writes Sam Ashworth-Hayes, “Poland will be richer than Britain in about 12 years’ time”:
It sounds like an absurd idea that in 2040 we might see complaints in the Polish press about a flood of British plumbers undercutting wages, or Brytyjski Skleps lining the rougher areas of Warsaw, but it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.
This talking point has also appeared in the Telegraph, the Express and the Financial Times. It often comes with a sense of vague alarm and bewilderment. Poland? The post-communist place? Don’t they live entirely off vodka and potatoes? Don’t they have horses clippety-cloppeting down the streets selling women’s underwear pinched off a truck in Germany? Poland?
Having lived in Poland for nine years, I can say that I am not at all surprised by these projections. To be clear, that is all they are — projections. A lot can change in nine years, in Britain and in Poland.
Still, I think a lot of British people would be surprised by how much better things can be in the land of Lech Wałęsa and John Paul II. Equally, a lot of Polish people would be surprised by how much worse things can be in Britain — given that a lot of Poles of my acquaintance appear to think that getting rich in the U.K. is as easy as walking outside with a wheelbarrow and catching the banknotes that rain down from the sky.
Britain has had minimal economic growth for years. Poland has long been enjoying some of the highest economic growth in Europe. It even emerged from the pandemic better off than other European nations with, as Paweł Bukowski and Wojtek Paczos wrote for the LSE, “a relatively lax approach to economic lockdown and a bit of sheer luck”.
Institutions often seem to work better as well. I can generally visit a GP on the day I call. Britons often have to wait for more than a week. Maternal mortality is higher in the UK — and infant mortality is about the same, despite Britain being much richer overall. Actually, Polish life expectancy as whole is just a touch shorter than British life expectancy, despite the nation having a lot more smokers.
Polish kids have ranked higher on the PISA education rankings than British kids — ranking, indeed, the third highest in Europe in science and maths, and the fourth in reading comprehension. Poland is a more peaceful place than Britain, with murder and rape generally being rarer (granted, statistics in the latter case are famously difficult to trust). Terrorism, for reasons I leave to the reader, has been almost non-existent in Polish society.
Some Polish achievements are more difficult to quantify. In Britain, the 20th century was marked by a curious habit of ripping down beautiful buildings and constructing ugly ones. Poland, meanwhile, has been beautifully renovating and reconstructing many of its urban spaces, pursuing a philosophy of “preservation meets modernisation”. Warsaw and Kraków are famous enough, but travellers could also visit lovely towns and cities like Wrocław, Toruń and Gdańsk — or my own, Tarnowskie Góry.
Also, Poland seems to have actual conservatives who aren’t afraid to push for the right policies, instead of timid functionaries scared of their own shadow.
Last quarter, Disney+ lost 2.4 million subscribers. But this quarter is different! This quarter, Disney+ lost 4 million subscribers.
Related. “They got these ulterior motives, and you know, it’s about this this sort of political shit. And, yeah, I guess that’s part of it. But a lot of it is just these guys are just fucking stupid.”
Biden goes all Nuremberg Rally, more transexual madness, Gibson’s Bakery wins final victory, states subcontract their energy policies to crazy California, and more really stupid criminals. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
You would think that Biden’s team might have better sense than to dress his set like it’s Darth Maul’s bedroom:
That was the most demagogic, outrageous, and divisive speech I have ever seen from an American president. Joe Biden essentially declared all those who oppose him and his agenda enemies of the republic. Truly shameful. pic.twitter.com/ZcJX2BbZlt
What happens when people in the federal government are incompetent and refuse to do their job? Usually nothing. Or they get promoted. But in Florida? Governor DeSantis fires their asses.
On Friday, Governor Ron DeSantis announced that he would be suspending four members of the Broward County School Board for their “incompetence, neglect of duty, and misuse of authority” at Marjory Stonemason Douglass High School.
In a press release, the governor’s office stated that Patricia Good, Donna Korn, Ann Murray and Laurie Rich Levinson had been suspended following the recommendations of the Twentieth Statewide Grand Jury. DeSantis has been particularly active in education, going as far as endorsing school board members in their races across the state, and enacting laws on curriculum transparency and parental rights.
“Even four years after the events of February 14, 2018, the final report of the Grand Jury found that a safety-related alarm that could have possibly saved lives at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School ‘was and is such a low priority that it remains uninstalled at multiple schools,’ and ‘students continue to be educated in unsafe, aging, decrepit, moldy buildings that were supposed to have been renovated years ago,’” the press release states.
“These are inexcusable actions by school board members who have shown a pattern of emboldening unacceptable behavior, including fraud and mismanagement, across the district,” the press release continued.
“It is my duty to suspend people from office when there is clear evidence of incompetence, neglect of duty, misfeasance or malfeasance,” said DeSantis. “The findings of the Statewide Grand Jury affirm the work of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas School Safety Commission. We are grateful to the members of the jury who have dedicated countless hours to this mission and we hope this suspension brings the Parkland community another step towards justice. This action is in the best interest of the residents and students of Broward County and all citizens of Florida.”
In their place, DeSantis has appointed Torey Alston, former Commissioner of the Broward County Board of County Commissioners and President of Indelible Solutions, Manual “Nandy” A. Serrano, member of the Florida Sports Foundation Board of Directors, Ryan Reiter, a US Marine Corps Veteran and Director of Government Relations for Kaufman Lynn Construction, and Kevin Tynan, Attorney with Richardson and Tynan, who previously served on the Broward County School Board and South Broward Hospital District, to take the suspended members’ places.
Rachel, a Brooklyn mom with a gender-dysphoric child…went undercover as a pre-teen in the chat, searching for resources for detransitioners. She found none.
Instead, she opened a “Pandora’s box” of sexually perverse content, aggressive gender re-assignment referrals, adults encouraging minors to hide their transitions from their parents, and many troubled kids in need of psychological counseling. She shared screenshots of the chat with National Review.
Rachel says she looked to the Trevor Project in desperation, “when I thought my child was going to kill herself.” The organization frequently claims that LGBT youth are more than four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers. It claims to be a refuge for these people with its crisis services including TrevorLifeline, TrevorText, and TrevorChat.
Under the advice of a “highly credentialed” medical and mental-health team, Rachel and her husband decided to socially transition their child a few years ago, she told National Review. After that, her child was hospitalized three times for self-harm and suicidality, including at least one suicide attempt. In New York, due to a ban on psychotherapy, so-called gender affirmation was the only legal option they could pursue, she said.
They were at their wit’s end, until her spouse sat her down and presented her with a PowerPoint, showing statistics that people who transition are, by a huge factor, much more likely than the general public to commit suicide.
“My jaw hit the floor. I said, ‘Oh my God we’ve been lied to’,” she says.
Since then, Rachel, a lifelong Democrat and feminist, has been dedicated to exposing the child gender-transition craze, which she argues is driven by “predatory medicine” incentivized by the government.
In TrevorSpace, she got a bird’s-eye view of the progressive non-profit giant that is claiming to save young lives but is really driving them further into existential rabbit holes, depravity, and potential danger, she said.
She documented kids talking about how to buy binders, an undergarment that constricts breasts, behind their parents’ backs. “I know the way people usually do this is by ordering it to a friend’s house or something of the sort, but I don’t have anyone to do that with,” wrote a girl whose account says she’s under 18. “I have money and know where I want to get it from and all that. I just need a means of getting it.” Another user suggested she have the binder sent to a post office where she could pick it up without her parents’ knowledge. Other users were referred to eBay to purchase a packer, or an artificial appendage meant to mimic a penis.
When people sign up for TrevorSpace, they have the option of placing themselves within the age ranges of “under 18” or “18-25.” The community is open to people 13-24, according to the site. There is no system in place to confirm a person’s age, Rebecca says and National Review confirmed. She also said she noticed entries from people claiming to be over 25 too, as well as guest accounts with no age listed.
Other teens, presumably girls transitioning to boys, testified to the effectiveness of Minoxidil, an over-the-counter medication that stimulates facial hair growth. “Can I get and use Minoxidil without my parents knowing?” a girl asked.
The kids Rachel followed on TrevorSpace spanned a diverse spectrum of gender disorientation, some confident in their belief that they were the opposite sex and some just gender curious. But, as Rachel observed, they were all pointed in one direction: gender transition. In a significant number of cases, adults gave minors this validation.
Gibson’s Bakery finally wins complete victory in their case, as Ohio’s Supreme Court refused to hear Oberlin College’s appeal. “It means the Gibsons now can collect approximately $36 million.”
Another day, another high profile Kamala Harris aide leaving. “Herbie Ziskend, a senior communications adviser, announced that he is leaving Harris’s side for the West Wing, where he will be the new White House deputy communications director.”
French tax agency deploys AI to find high ranking government official who are embezzling. Ha, just kidding! They’re using it to find and tax unreported pools.
The last Luftwaffe raid against the UK happened April 21, 1945, less than two weeks before Hitler committed suicide, and some three weeks before VE Day. The planes took off from occupied Stavanger, Norway, and it didn’t work out well for the Germans…
