Posts Tagged ‘iPhone’

The Semiconductors Tariff Yo-yo

Monday, April 14th, 2025

There’s been a lot of confusion over tariffs on Chinese semiconductors and electronics the last few days.

First came word that a lot of semiconductors and electronics will be exempt from the tariffs.

The Trump administration released new guidance late Friday night on its tariff on China, exempting electronic devices such as smartphones and laptops.

The guidance, posted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees collecting taxes on imports, could relieve some anxiety among consumers and tech giants like Apple and Microsoft, which manufacture many of their products in China, The Wall Street Journal reported. Around 20 electronic products — which also include memory cards and machines used to make flatscreens and tablets — will now be exempted from Trump’s massive “reciprocal” tariff on China. The exemption comes after the president increased the tariff on China in recent days in response to China’s retaliatory tariff on U.S. goods.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser, wrote on X, “These products are subject to the tariff under the original IEEPA [International Emergency Economic Powers Act] on China of 20 percent.” The IEEPA tariff was the first one Trump imposed on China after taking office in January. The tariff was levied on China, along with Canada and Mexico, in an attempt to “hold” the countries “to their promises of halting illegal immigration and stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into our country.”

The Trump administration has suggested that the tariff on China will encourage companies, including Big Tech companies, to manufacture their products on U.S. soil, arguing that the move would be better for the economy and national security.

“President Trump has made it clear America cannot rely on China to manufacture critical technologies such as semiconductors, chips, smartphones, and laptops,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Saturday, according to the Wall Street Journal. She added, “Companies are hustling to onshore their manufacturing in the United States as soon as possible.”

(Apple, meanwhile, has already made plans to avoid teriffs on Chinese electronics by moving production to India and flying planeloads of iPhones into the U.S. ahead of the tariff deadline.)

Next came word that the pause in semiconductor tariffs will only be a month or two.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday that the administration’s decision Friday night to exempt a range of electronic devices from tariffs implemented earlier this month was only a temporary reprieve, with the secretary announcing that those items would be subject to “semiconductor tariffs” that will likely come in “a month or two.”

“All those products are going to come under semiconductors, and they’re going to have a special focus type of tariff to make sure that those products get reshored. We need to have semiconductors, we need to have chips, and we need to have flat panels* — we need to have these things made in America. We can’t be reliant on Southeast Asia for all of the things that operate for us,” Lutnick told “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl.

He continued, “So what [President Donald Trump’s] doing is he’s saying they’re exempt from the reciprocal tariffs, but they’re included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a month or two. So these are coming soon.”

With all respect to President Trump and Secretary Lutnick, you can’t set up a new fab to manufacture semiconductors in America in two months. In fact, you’d be really hard-pressed to do it in two years. It usually takes a fab about three years to get up and running. Bosch took three years to get their 65nm fab in Dresden up and running, and Samsung broke ground on their Taylor fab in 2022 and it hasn’t entered production yet.

Setting up a semiconductor fabrication plant is much more difficult and time-consuming than setting up just about any other factory.

As I’ve mentioned before, you can’t just take an existing building and turn it into a fab, it has to be specially built from the ground up with exacting standards for cleanroom air filtering, concrete slab level uniformity, etc. You need extremely exacting air purity handling equipment, as well as a system for running de-ionized water throughout the plant. Then you need to purchase, install, bring up and qualify all the hundreds of pieces of semiconductor equipment necessary to run a modern fab. And 2-3 years is probably the lead time to get an ASML EUV stepper, if you’re going to be building a cutting edge fab. (If the goal is to reshore the semiconductor industry, then you probably need to build a lot of less-demanding fabs as well.)

I’m in favor of the Trump Administration using tariffs to bring other countries to the negotiating table to eliminate their tariffs on American goods, and for kicking China out of the global free trade order for repeatedly breaking the rules and just being general asshats. But a two-month difference in tariff implementation dates isn’t going to change the timeline for opening new semiconductor fabrication plants in America.


*Flat panel display manufacturing uses some of the same semiconductor processes to make displays. The technology is less demanding overall, but the substrate sizes are considerably larger. Because the feature size is less demanding, I imagine bring-up and qualification is somewhat quicker, but I’ve never worked on a flat panel display machine, so I have no idea how the lead time varies to obtain and install that equipment.

LinkSwarm For April 4, 2025

Friday, April 4th, 2025

Leftwing crooks attempt to cover their tracks, employment numbers are up, Trump’s tariffs already bring some quick action, Eric Three Phones beats the wrap, the criminal leftwing racketeers lined up against Telsa, and Tren de Aragua scumbags show up well the hell out in the countryside.

It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • A follow-up to an item in last week’s LinkSwarm: “Musk: U.S. Institute of Peace Attempted to Delete One Terabyte of Financial Data to ‘Cover Their Crimes.'”

    U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) officials attempted to delete one terabyte of financial data to “cover their crimes,” Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Chief Elon Musk alleged Monday.

    After President Donald Trump signed an executive order last month targeting USIP for reductions, DOGE visited the organization’s Washington headquarters, prompting a dramatic standoff.

    Prior to DOGE’s arrival, USIP employees reportedly barricaded themselves inside their offices and had to be physically removed by Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officers. At some point, USIP employees allegedly attempted to scrub damning records, but, according to Musk, the DOGE engineers were able to recover the entire archive.

    “They deleted a terabyte of financial data to cover their crimes, but they don’t understand technology, so we recovered it,” Musk posted on X.

    The recovered data includes detailed financial transfers tied to individuals and groups in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    USIP was receiving “$55M in congressional (taxpayer) funds” every year, the DOGE X account posted, adding that “prior management would sweep excess funds into its private Endowment” which has no congressional oversight.

    “In the past 10 years, USIP has transferred ~$13M to its private Endowment, mainly used for private events and travel,” DOGE posted on X.

    USIP contracts cancelled by the Trump administration, according to DOGE, include:

    – $132,000 to Mohammad Qasem Halimi, an ex-Taliban member who was Afghanistan’s former Chief of Protocol.
    – $2,232,500 to its outside Accountant, who attempted to delete over 1 terabyte of accounting data (now recovered) after new leadership entered the building
    – $1,307,061 to the Al Tadhamun Iraqi League for Youth
    – $675,000 for private aviation services

    Mohammad Qasim Halimi is the former Minister of Hajj and Religious Affairs in Afghanistan, according to the Doha forum. He is currently a member of the National Council of Ulema, the highest religious authority in Afghanistan. The National Council of Ulema is responsible for ensuring that all Afghan policies conform to Sharia law.

    The Al Tadhamun Iraqi League for Youth is a United Nations Democracy Fund (UNDEF) project that allegedly “works to strengthen youth participation in democratic processes” by “building a network of young activists to develop skills in leadership, negotiation and communication.”

    According to Foundation For Freedom Online (FFO) director Mike Benz, USIP had been “bribing Afghan Taliban warlords to keep the drugs flowing.”

    So graft, fraud, wire fraud, banking fraud, destruction of evidence, and supporting terrorism, all at the same time!

    No wonder they were trying to hide it…

  • US Payrolls Unexpectedly Soar To 228K, Above Highest Estimate.” Faster, please.
  • Trump’s tariffs are already bringing results. “Israel removes all remaining tariffs on US imports. Israel and the US signed a free trade agreement in 1985, and some 98% of goods are tax-free.”
  • Why Trump will win the tariff standoff.

    When Collins pressed him on whether such escalation could turn into a full-fledged trade war, [Treasury Secretary Scott] Bessent dismissed the idea. “Not a trade war. Depends on the country,” he said, before explaining that history favors the United States in such disputes.

    “Remember that the history of trade is, we are the deficit country. The deficit country has an advantage,” he explained. “[The others] are the surplus countries. The surplus countries traditionally always lose any kind of a trade escalation.”

    His message to foreign governments was clear: Acting hastily would be a mistake. “As a student of economic history or a professor of economic history, I’d advise against it,” he said. When Collins sought further clarification, he reinforced the point: “I would say that doing anything rash would be unwise.”

    Bessent’s remarks leave no doubt that Trump’s trade policies are rooted in historical precedent and strategic calculation. While globalists may panic, the Trump administration remains confident that America is in a stronger position than its trade partners. And history is on our side.

    Bessent’s message is clear: Trump knows exactly what he’s doing.

    Let’s hope so.

  • GM and Volvo announce that they’re already moving more production to the U.S.
  • One description of what Trump’s tariff strategy hopes to achieve.

    We absolutely want a strong economic and security alliance. It’s not going to be the whole world because China is going to have its own sphere as well, but what we wanna have within our sphere is a few things in the past the United States didn’t exactly ask for.

    We’re going to want balanced trade, where in the past we were happy to let the manufacturing go elsewhere. We’re going to want others to essentially own their own defense burdens … everybody take primary responsibility for their own defense.

    Snip.

    It’s not that Trump doesn’t want free trade, it’s that free trade doesn’t exist right now for the American people. It only exists in the starry-eyed fever dreams of Reaganite commentators who think that’s how the world actually works.

    “Reaganite” is the wrong word here, since Reagan’s trade strategy was specifically geared to help win the Cold War, which it did. Nor was Reagan a zero tariff fundamentalist, as shown by his policies on automobiles and steel. Zero tariff fundamentalism is more of a libertarian policy, where it was postulated to be beneficial even if the other side (like China) didn’t remove tariffs on their end. Trump obviously operates under different imperatives, and employs (as I’ve noted before) tit-for-tat game theory strategy.

    And if we’re talking about the Democratic Party’s theoretical conversion to post-Cold War free trade starting with Bill Clinton, then the proper term is probably neoliberalism, a word that bears a whole lot of additional baggage.

    Exports made by Americans are taxed by other countries while we let them import their cheap products for essentially free, giving Americans price cuts but making it impossible for American companies to compete unless they outsource production elsewhere. That is exactly what has happened over the last few decades and it has destroyed countless American towns.

    Trump’s whole schtick is to impose economic tit-for-tat in the hopes that other countries will drop their tariffs on U.S. goods. In that case, we actually get closer to free trade. It also allows us to invest in American manufacturing because we cannot rely on rising superpowers like China for all our industrial needs.

    Whether or not that strategy works is up for debate.

  • “Sen. Mike Lee Introduces Legislation to Ditch the TSA: ‘Too Much Groping, Too Little Benefit.'”

    The proposed measure would officially abolish the TSA three years after it is enacted into law and also would require the Departments of Homeland Security and Transportation to create and submit a reorganization plan to Congress.

    Tuberville echoed the frustrations expressed by Lee, calling the TSA “a bloated agency—riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars—that has led to unnecessary delays, invasive pat downs and bag checks, and frustration for travelers.”

  • Inside the leftwing NGO network pushing Tesla Takedown.

    As we first pointed out on Sunday morning, former Wall Street Journal journalist Asra Nomani unveiled one of the most comprehensive reports on the NGO network behind at least one Tesla Takedown protest.

    Nomani’s investigative report, which focused on 24 groups, revealed that these protests were far from organic and likely fueled by rent-a-protesters.

    Snip.

    In an article for the @FairfaxTimes, I wrote about how the local protests in Tysons, are a window into how the protests are AstroTurf, not “grassroots.” What this case reveals is the way that a multi-million dollar professional protest industry manufactures outrage in top-down political theater, agitprop, or agitation propaganda, and now criminal offenses.

    From a spreadsheet linked in that article, here are the NGOs behind the attacks:

    • 50501
    • ActionNetwork
    • Action Network Fund
    • ActUp New York Inc., ACT UP New York, the “AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power”
    • Climate Defenders
    • Climate Defenders Action Fund
    • Arizona – Coconino County Democratic Party
    • California – Aliso Niguel Democratic Club
    • California – California Democratic Party
    • California – Democratic Club Of Carlsbad
    • Florida – Broward County Democratic Party
    • Florida – Democratic Progressive Caucus of Palm Beach County Inc.
    • Florida – Osceola Young Dems
    • Florida – Rainbow Democrats of Central Florida
    • Illinois – Democratic Party of DuPage County
    • North Carolina – Durham County Democrats
    • Ohio – Eastside Cuyahoga Democratic Clubs
    • Texas – Harris County Democratic Party, Cypress-Tomball Democrats
    • Democratic Socialists of America
    • Disruption Project
    • Housing Works Inc., providing “assistance & expertise to homeless persons living with AIDS or HIV-related illnesses”
    • Indivisible Action
    • Indivisible Project
    • Mobilize.us, run by MobilizeAmerica Inc. – owned by EveryAction, the parent company of NGP VAN
    • MoveOnorg Civic Action
    • Not Above the Law Coalition — Coalition members as of 6/9/2023: American Oversight; Center for American Progress Action Fund; Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW); Common Cause; Congressional Integrity Project; Constitutional Accountability Center; The Criminalization of Poverty Project at the Institute for Policy Studies; Daily Kos; Defend Democracy Action Project; Defend the Vote Action Fund; DemCast USA; End Citizens United/Let America Vote; Fix Democracy First; Free Speech For People; Greenpeace USA; Indivisible; J Street; League of Conservation Voters; MoveOn; NextGen America; Our Revolution; People For the American Way; People Power United; Public Citizen; Public Wise; Secure Elections Network; Sierra Club; Stand Up America; Wisconsin Democracy Campaign; and The Workers Circle. SOURCE: press release
    • Planet Over Profit
    • Public Citizen Foundation
    • Public Citizen Inc.
    • Rise and Resist Inc.
    • Stand Up America Inc., established to “mobilize progressive Americans”
    • Swing Left, dedicated to “help Democrats win”
    • Tax Reformers LLC, running “TaxElon.us” (“an offshoot of TeslaTakedown.com”)
    • Third Act Initiative Inc.
    • Troublemakers
    • Voices Ignited
  • One of the bigwigs in the “Tesla Takedown” movement is none other than Disniformation Queen Nina Jankowicz.

    On Tuesday morning, former Biden administration “disinformation czar” Nina Jankowicz repeatedly refused to disclose who’s funding her new gig – the ‘American Sunlight Project’ – which cropped up after a stint at the USAID-funded UK-based Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) – for which she registered as a foreign agent while serving as their Vice President.

    To review – Jankowicz, who previously served as a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as part of the Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship, and was then selected to head the Biden DHS’s newly formed Disinformation Governance Board – which was quickly dismantled amid criticism over censorship under the guise of fighting disinformation.

    Four months later, she launched “The Hypatia Project” for CIR – where she was the Vice President until April 2024, at which point she co-founded the American Sunlight Project.

    Fast forward to this morning, Jankowicz was evasive when asked by Republicans during a congressional hearing on disinformation about her funding…

    As it turns out, Jankowicz’s co-founder at the American Sunlight Project is Carlos Alvarez-Aranyos, a “communications professional” who worked for the Biden DoD, and is “one of the people who launched the call for a boycott of Tesla.”

    Alvarez-Aranyos comes from a wealthy and prominent family in the Dominican Republic. His father, Luis Álvarez Renta, is a well-known Dominican financier. Carlos is a nephew of the renowned fashion designer Oscar de la Renta.

  • A mixed bag in April 1st elections. Republicans easily retained two congressional seats in Florida and won a voter ID ballot proposition in Wisconsin, but lost a Wisconsin Supreme Court race that Elon Musk and others had poured a lot of money into.
  • Democrats are suing Trump over limiting voting to U.S. citizens.

    In a lawsuit against the Trump administration filed in Washington, D.C. federal court, the Democratic National Committee said Trump exceeded his authority in the March 25 order by requiring voters to prove they are U.S. citizens, preventing states from counting mail-in ballots received after Election Day, and threatening to take federal funding away from states that do not comply.

    Snip.

    ‘The Executive Order seeks to impose radical changes on how Americans register to vote, cast a ballot, and participate in our democracy — all of which threaten to disenfranchise lawful voters and none of which is legal,’ according to the lawsuit, which was filed by longtime Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias and other lawyers at his firm.

    U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer and U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the leaders of the Democratic minorities in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, respectively, are also plaintiffs in the case.

  • Democrats are still all in on transing your kids. “New Colorado bill would penalize ‘misgendering’ in public places, use it as justification to take your kids away.”
  • “Migrant influencer” who bragged about squatting in Americans’ homes is deported. “Leonel Moreno, who encouraged illegal migrants to ‘invade abandoned houses’ in sick TikToks, was sent back to the narco state [Venezuela] this week, after President Trump resumed deportation flights to the country.”
  • The economic policy of the Democratic Party is grifterism.

    Like the Politburo of the former Soviet Union, the words of Democrats often bear little resemblance to the actions their words embody. “Equity” is an excellent example, as when Democrats say “equity,” they really mean highly inequitable policy solutions. Sometimes, however, Democrats deliberately fail to coherently describe the meaning of their actions, and then it becomes even harder to ascertain meaning. Such is the case with the basic economic policies of Democrats. Many on the right like to say that Democrats support socialism, but that’s not wholly true given how many capitalist components exist inside Democrat economic policies. Similarly, it is inaccurate to describe Democrat economics as being purely capitalistic because wealth redistribution is one of their core competencies. Some say that the Democrats enjoy government control of capitalist entities, rendering their economic persuasion fascist in nature. Yet, even that is inaccurate, given that fascist states view their economies as a source of nationalistic pride and strength, while Democrats tend to abhor nationalistic pride in the United States.

    It’s not socialism. It’s not capitalism. It’s not fascism. What, then, is the overarching label that explains the economic policies and priorities of Democrats and their leadership?

    It’s Grifterism. (I did not invent that word, or at least that’s what Google tells me. However, I believe I am the first author to ever use that term to describe a formal system of national economic governance, so I’m going to run with it.)

    Grifterism is, as the name suggests, a system run by and for the benefit of grifters. Webster defines the verb “grift” as “to acquire money or property illicitly.” Grifters have always been a part of human society, but it took the 21st-century Democratic Party to turn the idea into a comprehensive economic system. The best way to understand this system is to analyze the four classes of citizens upon which Grifterism relies, and into which all American citizens are divided one way or another: Billionaires, Productives, Dependents and, of course, Grifters.

    Snip.

    4. The Grifters: Well, we’re finally here. By now, you probably have a pretty good idea of what the Grifters are up to, but let’s be clear that this class consists of more than just government workers. The Grifter class includes all of the intelligentsia: the university professors, the traditional journalists, the lobbyists, the Hollywood elite, the “BigLaw” attorneys, and, most of all, the NGO crowd. Further, not every government worker is a Grifter—the military, the police, the justice system, and many other government offices that provide what economists call “Public Goods” all house highly necessary government employees. (Those employees are not Grifters—they are Productives, but unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of government workers are in fact Grifters.)

    But let’s get back to the NGOs (a term I use in this article interchangeably with non-profit entities), as they reveal the true level of perfidy perpetuated by the Grifters. If you have been paying attention for the last two months, you are probably aware that DOGE and brilliantly relentless and patriotic volunteer data analysts like Data Republican have uncovered the widespread prevalence of U.S. federal agencies taking your tax dollars and using them to fund dubious efforts by various NGOs. This wicked grift cycle goes like this: (1) Taxpayers pay taxes required because Grifters establish programs that require funding; (2) Congress approves such funding in the vaguest possible terms of intent and appropriates those funds to a federal agency run by Grifters; (3) the Grifters in that agency interpret Congress’ intent in the broadest manner possible and provide funds to NGOs that employ other Grifters with six-figure salaries; and (4) that NGO then engages in some sort of woke cause such as training transgender farmers—a cause very few taxpaying voters would vote for if they only knew about it.

    The cycle of grifting prospers beyond just NGOs: the universities receive taxpayer funding to indoctrinate our youth; the lobbyists curry favor with the Grifters to improve their business opportunities; the journalists cycle in and out of government, spreading the Grifter ethos as truth; Hollywood pays homage to it all, infecting American brains with woke ideas that Grifterism is noble; the BigLaw attorneys become rich navigating the vast regulatory schemes that are the lifeblood of Grifterism, and the members of the Grifter class constantly cycle in and out of the various organizations that benefit most from their economic parasitism.

    The Grifters are the only class of Grifterism that fully benefits from the corrupt system; in fact, the system exists by, for, and because of the Grifters—almost all of whom are voting for Democrat candidates who themselves wallow in the pig trough of Grifterism. “But wait!” you may say, “Government workers are not Billionaires, they are not wealthy. How is that a grift?” Grifters in government generally enjoy wages in excess of the national median income; they are entitled to retirement plans largely unheard of in the private sector; they have healthcare and other benefits that far exceed those of equivalent private workers; and, most of all, they enjoy job security that is unmatched by any other sector of American society. Most Grifters are unfirable—they have life tenure. Finally, they have the power to pull the strings of the entire Grifter class for their own benefit—back-scratching and beak-wetting are their secret ways of communication.

    It’s good to be a Grifter.

  • The Democratic Party remains stuck on stupid.

    The Democrats are obviously struggling with coming to terms with the rejection they faced last November. They’re always bad at introspection and taking responsibility for anything, but this is like nothing I’ve seen in all of my years in politics. It’s gotten to the point where I have to read at least one or two of the 2024 post mortems in the mainstream media every day to get my fix. Yeah, it’s a blast watching them not get it. The real joy for me, however, is seeing the myriad ways that they are finding to not come to the proper conclusions about why they lost.

    They’ve been so reluctant to face their Pandora’s boxful of problems that they didn’t even start making attempts until just before the second Trump term was underway. In days of yore, the Democratic National Committee would have called an all-hands-on-deck meeting for around 6 AM on the morning after the election to begin plotting how to win the next one. Not only that, the Dems would have some plans in their back pockets and some viable candidates for the future on their bench. That Democratic Party and political machine no longer exist.

    The reason for that is one that they will probably never admit to themselves. The decimation of its candidate bench and the party’s long-term planning ability can be laid squarely at the feet of the man who they worship above all others: His High Holiness the Lightbringer Barack Obama.

    Democrats had long been invested in identity politics but went all-in to the exclusion of anything else after Barack Obama won in 2008. As my friend Stephen Green mentioned a few times last year, the Dems sold an idea in 2008 rather than a candidate with a record. Of course, that was because Obama had no record to speak of at the time.

    They got kinda hooked on that.

    The party higher-ups and their media mouthpieces spent the next eight years hero worshiping and not attending to the mundane nuts and bolts of keeping a successful political machine running. While they were “oohing and aahing” over the emperor’s new clothes, the emperor was sucking the life out of the party’s future. Who needed a bench when all they had to do was anoint a candidate who checked off a “historic first” diversity box on his or her résumé?

    They were so invested in the diversity route that the DNC gamed the 2016 primary to make it nigh on impossible for anyone to beat Hillary Clinton — the candidate they’d unceremoniously thrown on the trash heap eight years earlier in favor of Obama because he checked off a higher-priority diversity box.

    None of the Democratic Party rules applied in 2020. The Dems went with Joe Biden because he was essentially an emotional support stuffed toy who made them feel better because he had a connection to Obama. Biden immediately got them back in the identity politics game by promising to pick a Black female running mate.

    We know the rest of this story.

    The real problem for the Democrats in 2024 wasn’t Joe Biden’s late exit or Kamala Harris’s short campaign — no combination of circumstances was going to enable either of them to beat Donald Trump. The Dems’ real problem is what the party is now about. Things like biological males competing in girls sports and hanging around in their locker rooms. Things like drag queen story hours in first-grade classrooms. Things like “Free Palestine” lunatics attacking synagogues.

    Things that they really haven’t backed off of after getting shellacked last year.

    So more social justice victimhood identity politics and more Orange Man Bad. That, abortion and gun control are pretty much all they have… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Bruen on the march: “Justice Dept. Investigates L.A. Sheriff Over Concealed Carry Permit Delays.”

    The Justice Department said it was investigating whether the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had violated the Second Amendment rights of residents through what it said was a pattern of long delays in issuing concealed carry permits.

    The department said the investigation, announced in a news release on Thursday, was part of a larger push to protect gun rights across the United States. It added that it could open similar investigations in “any other states or localities that insist on unduly burdening, or effectively denying, the Second Amendment rights of their ordinary, law-abiding citizens.”

    The Supreme Court has upheld Second Amendment rights in recent years, but, the Justice Department wrote in the announcement, some states “have resisted this recent pro-Second Amendment case law.”

    The department called California “a particularly egregious offender,” saying it had passed laws restricting the right to bear arms. It said some areas of California had also imposed excessive fees and lengthy wait times on concealed carry permits.

    The investigation follows a lawsuit filed in federal court in 2023 by gun rights advocates who claimed it had taken more than a year to obtain a concealed carry permit from the Los Angeles County Sheriff. Last year, a federal judge agreed that the Second Amendment rights of two individuals in the lawsuit had most likely been violated when the county made them wait 18 months before they received a decision on their permits. The Justice Department said it believed others had also experienced long delays in obtaining permits in the county.

    The Sheriff’s Department wrote in a statement that it respected the Second Amendment and that it was committed to processing all concealed carry permits, but it added that it was facing a “staffing crisis” and had a backlog of cases. It said it had around 4,000 applications to process, with only 14 people to review them.

    Last month, President Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to assess “any ongoing infringements” on Second Amendment rights in federal agencies across the country.

    “The Second Amendment is not a second-class right,” Ms. Bondi wrote in the news release announcing the investigation in Los Angeles, “and under my watch, the department will actively enforce the Second Amendment just like it actively enforces other fundamental constitutional rights.”

  • A victory in the war against lower court judicial overreach. “Supreme Court Shuts Down Activist Judge, Lets Trump Cut $250 Million In DEI Training For Teachers.”

    The Supreme Court on Friday overruled an activist judge in Boston, allowing the Trump administration to slash $250 million for more than 100 teacher training grants for DEI and other woke programs.

    In a 5-4 decision nine days after the request, the Supremes sided with the Trump administration’s emergency request to stay the court order by judge Myong J. Joun of the federal District of Massachusetts – who had ordered the Trump administration to “immediately restore” the “pre-existing status quo prior to the termination.”

    According to the ruling – which is likely to narrow the ability of district courts to halt agency actions involving grant function, Joun lacked authority to order the Trump admin to restore the funding.

  • The Supreme Court giveth, and the Supreme Court taketh away.

    The Supreme Court upheld the Biden administration’s regulations on “ghost guns” Wednesday, finding that guns assembled using at-home kits are subject to the same rules as traditional firearms, including requirements that they carry a serial number and that purchasers undergo a federal background check before buying them.

    The justices ruled 7-2 in Garland v. VanDerStok to preserve rules imposed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in 2022 to combat what the government called an explosion of “ghost gun” usage in criminal activity. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

    Second Amendment issues aside, the Supreme Court missed an opportunity to par back some post-Chevron regulatory overreach.

  • He’s outa there: “South Korean court removes president from office, says he violated duties. The Constitutional Court upheld the impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol over his martial law gambit. South Korea will elect a new president within 60 days.”
  • Dwight is usually the one covering the Eric “Three Phones” Adams corruption case, but since he’s traveling, I’ve got to step up and note that the case was dismissed.

    A Manhattan judge on Wednesday dismissed the federal corruption charges levied against New York City Mayor Eric Adams last fall, partially granting the Trump-era Department of Justice’s request to drop the case.

    U.S. District Judge Dale Ho, who presided over the Democratic mayor’s case in the Southern District of New York, permanently dismissed the charges in a highly anticipated decision.

    In February, the DOJ ordered federal prosecutors to stop pursuing the case and subsequently asked the judge to dismiss the case without prejudice. That would have allowed prosecutors to refile charges against Adams in the future if the DOJ wanted to do so.

    Ho dismissed the indictment with prejudice, meaning the prosecution cannot be revived based on the same evidence used in the original case.

    The DOJ’s move, spearheaded by former acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, sparked accusations that the Trump administration and Adams were engaged in a “quid pro quo” agreement, in which the mayor’s charges would have been dropped as a way of ensuring his cooperation with enforcing the White House’s immigration agenda. Adams denied the allegations of a quid pro quo.

    In his order, Ho wrote that dismissing the case without prejudice “would create the unavoidable perception that the Mayor’s freedom depends on his ability to carry out the immigration enforcement priorities of the administration, and that he might be more beholden to the demands of the federal government than to the wishes of his own constituents.”

    The Biden-appointed judge described that perception as “inevitable” and concluded that “it counsels in favor of dismissal with prejudice.”

    Adams requested a dismissal with prejudice, to which the DOJ did not object.

    In September, Adams was indicted on five counts of corruption related to his alleged acceptance of benefits, such as free luxury travel from Turkish officials, in exchange for pressuring city inspectors to open a new Turkish consulate building in Manhattan without a proper fire inspection. Adams pleaded not guilty.

    The New York City mayor has suggested his indictment was politically motivated because of his criticisms of the Biden administration’s lax immigration policies.

    Given that Adams was a Democratic mayor of New York City, my working assumption is that he’s dirty as sin in general, but not necessarily for this particular case. And it’s entirely possibly that the Biden Administration did indict him for daring to question open borders. Also, even if guilty, dismissing his charges might be justified in the same way that a mobster who turns state evidence gets their charges dismissed. (Honestly, three different iPhones seems like overkill. One iPhone and two burner phones for different dirty deals seems sufficient, unless you’ve got so much dirty going down that you need to use the Stringer Bell SIM card swap to keep all the balls in the air. On the other hand, were the FBI to raid my house for some reason, they too might seize three iPhones: One working, and two old, mostly broken models…)

  • But wait! Adams says that, while he’s still a Democrat, he’s running for re-election as an Independent. Maybe he figures (correctly) that his heretical questioning of The Message means he has no chance to win a Democratic primary…
  • EuroElites are hoping that lawfare can succeed there even though it failed against Trump: “French Court Sentences Marine Le Pen to Jail, Bars Right-Wing Presidential Hopeful from Running in 2027.”

    A French court on Monday sentenced right-wing leader Marine Le Pen to jail and barred her from seeking public office again for five years, preventing her from running in France’s 2027 presidential election after she was found guilty of embezzlement.

    A member of the French Parliament, Le Pen and others were accused of misusing 4.4 million euros, or $4.8 million, in European Parliament funds to pay staff who were working for her National Rally party. In violation of European Union regulations, the alleged embezzlement occurred between 2004 and 2016. She was found guilty alongside eight members of Parliament and twelve assistants. The French right-wing leader has denied any wrongdoing.

    Le Pen faces a prison sentence of four years, with two of those years suspended; a $108,000 fine; and ineligibility to run for office for five years, effective immediately. She is expected to appeal the ruling.

    But even if she does appeal, the political ban will likely remain in place unless she is victorious. Meanwhile, her prison sentence will be suspended during the appeals process. The ban doesn’t affect her parliamentary position.

    There’s widespread belief that “embezzlement” charges like this would never be employed against politicians that hew the EU line.

  • “Trump Warns Iran That Without a Nuclear Deal, ‘There Will Be Bombs.‘”

    Earlier this month, President Trump wrote to Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei saying he wanted to negotiate an end to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, emphasizing “I would prefer to make a deal, because I’m not looking to hurt Iran. . . . I’m not sure that everybody agrees with me, but we can make a deal that would be just as good as if you won militarily.” This weekend, the Iranians rejected direct negotiations but left the door open to indirect negotiations. This is all occurring as a quarter of the U.S. Air Force’s B-2 bombers are at the joint U.S.-United Kingdom military base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. A U.S. military conflict with Iran feels increasingly plausible.

    Snip.

    Northrop B-2 Spirits are what the U.S. Air Force uses when it needs to drop very powerful bombs in a very stealthy manner. Among those very powerful bombs is the Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP) Bunker-Buster, a 30,000 pound bomb that is described as “the most powerful and deeply burrowing non-nuclear bunker buster on earth.” In fact, the B-2 is the only plane that can carry a MOP.

    The MOP is exactly the sort of weapon you would use if you wanted to hit Iran’s underground nuclear facilities. On March 25, Iranian state media “showed Iranian Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Mohammad Baqeri and Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Aerospace Force commander, showing off what Iranian media said was an ‘underground missile city.’”

    (Howard Altman of The War Zone noted that from what viewers could see in the video, “The munitions are stored out in the open in long continuous tunnels and large caverns with no, or at least limited, blast doors or separated revetments. That could result in devastating consequences should the facility be breached in an attack. The lack of these protective measures could lead to an absolutely massive chain reaction of secondary explosions.”)

    As of May 2024, Iran has 42 declared facilities and at least 8 suspected facilities in its nuclear program.

  • Dozens of Suspected Tren de Aragua Gang Members Arrested Outside Austin.” The “outside” part is Dripping Springs, a town that used to be way the hell out in the country some 20 years ago but is now a exurb of Austin.

    Texas Department of Public Safety officers arrested over three dozen individuals—including suspected members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua—near Dripping Springs, a small town a half-hour west of Austin.

    Law enforcement also seized narcotics during the Tuesday raid and took nine minors into custody.

  • Followup: “New York Stock Exchange Texas Opens, Trump Media Group First Listing.”

    Texas continues to cement itself as a hub for capital investment with the opening of a new Lone Star State-based stock exchange on Monday.

    The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announced plans to establish its own exchange in Dallas back in February — which came on the heels of the Texas Stock Exchange being founded in June last year.

    “As the state with the largest number of NYSE listings, representing over $3.7 trillion in market value for our community, Texas is a market leader in fostering a pro-business atmosphere,” NYSE Group President Lynn Martin said in a press release at the time.

    Now, March 31 is opening day for the Texas-based New York Stock Exchange, which Martin said will “allow companies to capitalize on the pro-business dynamics in Texas.”

    The NYSE also announced that the first security to be listed on the Texas exchange will be the Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG).

    TMTG describes itself as a “social media and technology focused company” where its goal is to “end Big Tech’s assault on free speech by opening up the Internet and giving people their voices back.” Its most well known product offering is the social media platform TruthSocial.

    Headquartered in Florida, the company debuted on the NYSE in March 2024 under the ticker “DJT” and skyrocketed to a market valuation of at least $8.4 billion on an undiluted share basis during its first day of business; it currently sits around $4.37 billion in market capitalization.

    “We’re honored to become the initial listing for NYSE Texas, which is a great fit for TMTG as we diversify into financial services and other realms,” said TMTG CEO and Chairman Devin Nunes.

    “Texas provides a fantastic climate for business and entrepreneurship that aligns with TMTG’s mission. This listing, alongside our plans to reincorporate in Florida, shows we’re part of a growing movement to take our business to states that value free enterprise and personal freedom.”

    (Previously.)

  • Important financial safety tip: A Fintech app is not a bank.
  • “State Rep. Harrison Calls for End to UT Gender Studies Dept. After Attending ‘Transgender Conference.’”

    After attending a “transgender conference” at the University of Texas at Austin, State Rep. Brian Harrison is demanding an end to the school’s Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department.

    Harrison (R-Midlothian) is calling for the university to be defunded unless it terminates the department, along with its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

    “The Texas government has failed Texans, by weaponizing their tax dollars against them, their values, and their children, and I won’t stand for it, especially in light of what I recently discovered on my undercover visit to the University of Texas campus yesterday as they were hosting a transgender conference,” Harrison stated.

    He warned that if the programs are not immediately dismantled, he will attempt to strip UT Austin of taxpayer funding in the upcoming state budget.

    On Tuesday, Harrison shared photos captured at the 32nd Annual Emerging Scholarship in Women’s and Gender Studies Graduate Student Conference.

    One featured a banner promoting an art exhibit called “TRANSCENDENCE: A Century of Black Queer Ecstasy.” The banner shows two black men standing in front of a cross.

    The event agenda for day one of the conference included a lecture titled “Keeping Time: Queer-Crip Temporal Attunement Through Tarot.”

    Pamphlets and flyers throughout the library advertised “Resources for Trans Folks,” which primarily focused on the use of cross-sex hormones or mutilating surgeries used to appear like the opposite sex.

    One flyer directed students to UT’s University Health Services for medical transition procedures and to the UT School of Law’s Gender Affirmation Project for legal name and gender changes.

    The flyer was created by The Queer and Trans Student Alliance, which is an agency of the UT student government.

    Sounds like a good center to defund.

  • Ryan George gets meta and takes a step back.
  • “Libs Spell Out ‘Coexist’ With Burning Teslas.”
  • “Lego Introduces ‘California Home’ Set Where Kids Fill Out Permit And Wait 2 Years For Approval.”
  • Manufacturer Recalls Faulty Shopping Carts With 4 Functioning Wheels.”
  • Might as well jump…

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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





    Instant Analysis: Trump Tariff Effects On Semiconductors

    Wednesday, April 2nd, 2025

    President Trump announced his tariffs on countries, especially those that tariff goods from the United States.

    President Donald Trump on Wednesday imposed sweeping new tariffs on all imported goods and unveiled a detailed list of reciprocal duties targeting more than 60 countries, asserting that the move is necessary to combat trade imbalances and restore U.S. manufacturing.

    “This is Liberation Day,” Trump said during a Rose Garden ceremony, holding up a printed chart of countries and their new tariff rates. “For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike.”

    The tariffs, which he described as “reciprocal,” fulfill a key campaign pledge and are aimed at pressuring trade partners to lower their own barriers. The administration expects the new rates to remain in place until the U.S. narrows a $1.2 trillion trade imbalance recorded last year.

    But the extensive list of tariffs also threatens to upend the U.S. economy, as many — but not all — economists say they amount to taxes on American companies that will be passed down to consumers.

    Trump held up a chart while speaking at the White House, showing the United States would charge a 34 percent tax on imports from China, a 20 percent tax on imports from the European Union, 25 percent on South Korea, 24 percent on Japan and 32 percent on Taiwan.

    The centerpiece of the announcement is a 10 percent universal baseline tariff on all imports, effective immediately. For instance, Chinese imports are now subject to cascading tariffs of 10, 20 and 34 percent, for a total of 54 percent.

    In addition, Trump’s administration imposed country-specific reciprocal tariffs on nations it accuses of unfair trade practices — including India, Vietnam, and the European Union, in adding to China. The rates are calibrated at approximately half the rate those countries impose on U.S. goods.

    For example, China, which Trump said charges 67 percent in tariffs on U.S. goods when factoring in non-tariff barriers, will now face a 34 percent reciprocal tariff under the new system, in addition to the 10 percent baseline tariff and the 20 percent tariffs already in effect. Vietnam, assessed at 90 percent, will face a 46 percent tariff; India at 52 percent will now see 26 percent duties; and the EU, which imposes 39 percent, will be met with a 20 percent response, according to the White House chart.

    This is a “devil in the details” issue that has a lot of ramifications depending on how the directives are written. But several of those countries are big players in semiconductors, so here’s a quick and dirty look at winners and losers if those tariffs stay in place a significant amount of time.

    The main countries here, along with the reciprocal tariffs being applied to them:

  • Taiwan (32%)
  • South Korea (25%)
  • China (34%)
  • European Union (not a country, but they play one on TV) (20%)
  • Japan (24%)
  • Singapore (10%)
  • Israel (17%)
  • Save a few smaller, older fabs here and there, that’s pretty much 99% of semiconductor manufacturing, though Vietnam (46%) and the Philippines (17%) do a lot of semiconductor package assembly work, and the tariffs may apply to them, depending on wording.

    So let’s look at the business Losers and Winners in the space. (Note: You might find this post useful, as it defines some of the semiconductor industry terms used here.)

    Losers

  • TSMC: As the world’s biggest and most important chip foundry, the Taiwanese tariffs will hit TSMC hard. Their U.S. fab in Arizona isn’t ready for production yet, so all their chips will (theoretically) get hit with tariffs, assuming Trump doesn’t grant them a waiver because they’re already constructing a plant. But if they do go into effect, possibly even more heavily impacted will be:
  • TSMC customers, including Apple, Nvidia and AMD. All three get their very highest-end, cutting edge, sub-10nm chips fabbed there. For Apple, the M-series and A-series chips made there form the heart of all their Macs and iPhones. Likewise, Nvidia gets its highest end GPU/AI/etc. chips fabbed by TSMC. AMD’s most powerful CPU’s are also fabbed by TSMC, though some lower end chips are made elsewhere (like GlobalFoundries).
  • Tokyo Electron: Japan’s biggest semiconductor equipment manufacturer assembles pretty much all their equipment in their home country. 24% tariffs may make their equipment uneconomical compared to rivals Applied Materials and LAM Research.
  • South Korean DRAM manufacturers Samsung and SK Hynix: 25% tariffs will definitely impact sales in a market segment whose overall margins (robust in booms, and barely breaking even during busts) are thinner than others.
  • Every American electronics company that uses DRAM. Which is pretty much every American electronics company.
  • Every American AI boom company. Their data center costs are going up, while those of their foreign competitors are not.
  • Korean flat panel display manufacturers Samsung and LG Semicon, who between them control over 50% of the market.
  • Every American TV and monitor manufacturer, the vast majority of which have their devices manufactured overseas.
  • UMC: They’d fallen woefully behind TSMC for foundry work, and they won’t be winning much additional American business now.
  • Every company trying to build a sub-10nm fab in the U.S., as steppers from Netherlands-based ASML just got more expensive and the competition to obtain them might have increased.
  • Pretty much every fab in China just got more screwed…but they were pretty screwed (and trailing badly) before.
  • American fabless chip startups: Their costs for getting chips to market probably increased.
  • Winners

  • Applied Materials, LAM Research and KLA Tencor. Buying competing Tokyo Electron equipment just got more expensive, and a bunch of companies now have incentives to build fabs in America.
  • Intel: Assuming they’ve finally got their process technology sorted out (a big if), they’re well-positioned to take CPU market share from AMD and to grow their under-performing foundry business.
  • Micron (sort of): As the only American DRAM manufacturer, they can probably earn more per each chip produced domestically. But Micron has a lot of overseas fabs these days, and building new domestic DRAM fabs will take years.
  • GlobalFoundries: The costs of their global competitors just increased, so they can probably win more business for their domestic foundries…if they have the available wafer starts. But they have a lot of foreign fabs as well.
  • Samsung‘s US foundry business. Presumably the wafer starts for their Austin and Taylor fabs will see increased demand.
  • Maybe Texas Instruments, but I’m not sure how much mixed-signal and analog competition they have, and that’s their bread and butter.
  • Neutral

  • ASML: Being in the Netherlands and having TSMC as their biggest customer, you figure they’d be hurt, but no. You can’t get EUV steppers from anyone else, and I get the impression they’re building EUV steppers as fast as they possibly can already. Anyone building a cutting-edge fab will just have to pay more to get them.
  • Tower Semiconductor: Half their foundries are in Israel and half in the U.S., so I figure it’s a wash.
  • That’s my quick and dirty analysis. Of course, Trump is using tariffs like a battering ram to smash foreign tariffs, and if he’s immediately successful, there probably will only be minor hiccups in the global supply chain. But if not, a whole lot of disruption might lie ahead, and it usually takes a minimum of 3-5 years to bring a new fab online.

    LinkSwarm for February 28, 2025

    Friday, February 28th, 2025

    Pinkslipapalooza in BureaucratLand, more DOGE savings, the deportation machine gets cranked up, Apple invests in America. Plus some depths of human depravity.

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • “Federal Judge Rules In Favor Of Trump Government Layoffs.” “U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, who was appointed by Barack Obama, ruled that the labor unions which filed the lawsuit against the government layoffs had to take their case before the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) rather than a federal court.”
  • USAID Funneled $122 Million to Charities Tied to Designated Terrorists.”

    The now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development has funneled at least $122 million in approved grants to terror-tied aid charities, including an evangelical Christian group that in 2014 facilitated a $125,000 sub-grant to a Sudanese terrorist organization linked to al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden.

    USAID has long been complicit in funding humanitarian aid groups associated with designated terrorists, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. This is just one egregious example of the waste, fraud, and abuse within USAID that the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency are working to uncover.

    “There’s a fox loose in the henhouse of our foreign aid system—a system intended to uplift lives abroad that instead has funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to radical and terrorist-linked organizations,” Gregg Roman, executive director of the Middle East Forum, said in his testimony before House Oversight’s DOGE Subcommittee on Wednesday.

    The Middle East Forum published these findings in a years-long study earlier this month, as DOGE head Elon Musk started targeting USAID and its wasteful, often ideologically-driven spending.

    One organization, World Vision, was given $200,000 in taxpayer funding to direct toward the Islamic Relief Agency a decade ago. Of those funds, a $125,000 sub-grant was approved by the Obama administration. A whistleblower came forward to reveal the improper relationship between the two groups.

    The evangelical non-governmental organization claimed in 2018 it had no knowledge of the al-Qaeda affiliate’s terrorism ties. In 2010, two members of Islamic Relief’s U.S. branch pleaded guilty to money-laundering, theft of public funds, conspiracy, and other charges. Six years earlier, the Treasury Department designated Islamic Relief as a terror-financing organization.

    Despite the scandal, World Vision obtained $200 million in approved grants from USAID last year. It has received an estimated $2 billion since 2008.

    Additionally, Helping Hand for Relief and Development received a $78,000 USAID grant in 2023 even after USAID’s inspector general launched an investigation into a prior grant. The group held ties to Pakistan’s Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation, a designated terrorist organization that played a role in the 2008 Mumbai massacre.

    Helping Hand is partnered with the Unlimited Friends Association, a charity affiliated with Hamas and known for promoting violent antisemitism.

    Another Hamas-tied group, Bayader Association for Environment and Development, received its last USAID grant on October 1, 2023, just before the October 7 terror attack on Israel. Bayader previously featured senior Hamas officials, including the son of the late Ismail Haniyeh, who orchestrated the October 7 massacre.

    Other examples of aid groups involved in funding terrorists, sometimes knowingly, include the American Near East Refugee Agency, Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, and Tides Foundation.

    Is there no evil in the world George Soros doesn’t have his fingerprints on?

  • Surprise! Trump’s policies are hugely popular…even among Democrats.
    • 81% of Americans, including 70% of Democrats and 80% of Independents, support deporting illegal aliens who have committed crimes.
    • 76% of Americans support a “full-scale effort” to eliminate government fraud and waste.
    • 76% of Americans want to close the border and add extra security.
    • 69% of Americans, including half of all Democrats, want to ban men from women’s sports – and a similar number want the government to declare that there are only two sexes.

    And yet the Left has spent the last month railing against ICE arrests and DOGE audits while stumping for the right to castrate kids and let boys in girls’ restrooms.

    Some more key findings:

    • 70% of Americans said government should hire people “strictly on the basis of merit and objective evaluations.”
    • 79% of Americans said the government should make sure that categories “like race, gender, and religion” are not used to discriminate against applicants.
    • 66% of Americans, including more than a third of Democrats, think Democrats shouldn’t oppose everything Trump is doing out of the gate and help Trump eliminate government waste.
    • 58% of Americans say Trump is doing a better job than Biden.
  • How republicans have been so successful with getting Trump’s cabinet picks confirmed.

    Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) told Morning Wire that the Senate GOP “has not let up the pressure at all” on Democrats as Republicans ram President Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments through their confirmations.

    Senate Republicans, with their 53-47 majority, have cleared nearly all of the president’s most controversial picks after Kash Patel was confirmed to be the next FBI director in a 51-49 vote on Thursday. Mullin, who has gone to bat for each of Trump’s cabinet picks, told Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley that the confirmation process had gone smoothly thanks to Republican leadership that is laser-focused on supporting Trump’s agenda.

    “What you’ve seen is a new leader in the Senate with Leader [John] Thune. He is just 100 percent grinding the Democrats down from the get-go,” Mullin told Morning Wire.

    “And so once the president got confirmed and sworn into office on the 20th, what we did is we immediately started the clock on these nominees, and [we] haven’t stopped,” he added.

    The Republican senator from Oklahoma explained that the party didn’t wait for Trump to be sworn in on January 20 to push his nominees through the confirmation process. Since the new Republican-controlled Senate began on January 3, the GOP immediately went to work putting pressure on Democrats to speed up confirmations.

    Mullin said that Thune “has literally kept that clock running 24/7, seven days a week” on cabinet confirmations.

    After a cabinet nominee gets reported out of committee, “there’s a 24-hour soak,” followed by a 30-hour debate, he explained, adding, “On directors, like Kash Patel, when you invoke cloture on them, you have a two-hour debate. So while you still have a 24-hour soak, you only have two hours of debate on that person. So you can move those faster.”

    “Even when we’re not here, the Democrats will negotiate and say, ‘If you don’t make us stay over on the weekend, we’ll allow the clocks to run consecutively, even though we’re not here.’ So we’ll go ahead and invoke cloture on the next person,” Mullin told Morning Wire. “So when we get back here on Monday, we can confirm two people at once. That’s why we’re so far ahead — because Leader Thune has not let up the pressure at all, not one bit on the Democrats.”

    Sounds like Thune is a vast improvement over Cocaine Mitch…

  • “DOGE and EPA Work to Reclaim $67M in ‘Environmental Justice’ Grants.”

    The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working with the newly-established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cancel over $67 million in grants that had been issued by the Biden Administration.

    According to Fox News, the EPA is focusing on $77.1 million in spending that was earmarked by the Biden-era EPA for “environmental justice” grants, distributed to 20 different recipients. Although approximately $10 million has already been spent and is irretrievable, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the agency was able to successfully cancel $67.4 million in planned funding.

    “We will make sure every penny spent by EPA goes towards protecting human health and the environment, and Powering the Great American Comeback,” said Zeldin. “I am proud to partner with DOGE to restore fiscal responsibility and accountability in our government.”

    In response, the official X account for DOGE lauded the EPA cuts as “good work.”

    Among the canceled grants was a $4.2 million grant to San Diego State University Foundation, which planned to use the money to bring “environmental justice” to “tribal, indigenous, and Pacific Island communities.”

    Under Zeldin, the EPA has revealed that the previous administration’s EPA was freely giving at least $20 billion in taxpayer dollars, with the spending being determined solely by eight agency entities “at their discretion.” Among this spending was a $2 billion grant sent to Power Forward Communities, a far-left non-profit with ties to failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.

    We’re very fortunate that those on the left were too greedy and incompetent to keep rigging elections…

  • Tiffany Henyard, the crooked, free-spending mayor of Dolton, Illinois, got slaughtered in a Democratic primary this week. “[Jason] House won the primary with 3,896 votes (87.91%), compared to Henyard’s 536 votes (12.09%).”
  • “Whistleblower: There’s a Trans Cult Inside the NSA.”

    Christopher Rufo: Tell me about this culture and how it’s been spreading through the NSA. And talk to me about what it was like, even a year ago or a few months ago, before Trump reentered the White House.

    NSA Whistleblower: About ten years ago, they started doing the “employee resource groups”: African-American, veterans, Pride. It was just a meeting here and there, almost like a potluck—culture, food, a speech. Then it started to get more and more. Instead of just one day a month, it was one week a month, or the whole month. You could be hired as a mathematician, a staff officer, or system engineer, but you would spend your time going to these events and having meetings all day about it. They got themselves into position to help craft policy and started pushing the idea that if you want to get promoted, you have to participate in these events.

    And then everything became Pride. You would go to a training, and it would be about “privilege” and “how to be a better ally.” A lady would give classes on how to talk “gender-neutral” to people. You had analysts that didn’t want to do the reporting they were supposed to be doing because they were going to have to report on somebody’s “dead name.” They were having this crisis of conscience about reporting the adversary’s actual name because they thought it was their “dead name,” and they didn’t want to disrespect the person. It was like a cult that was hellbent on pushing gender ideology.

    Rufo: It seems like this is a clique of very activist male-to-female transgender agents. Tell me about this community.

    Whistleblower: There is a very small number of them, but they wield an enormous amount of power. And outside of the sick stuff, you also see a prevalent Marxist philosophy going on with these people in their chat rooms. They hate capitalism. They hate Christians. They’re always espousing socialist and Marxist beliefs.

    I know several people at the agency brought that up, like, “Hey, we’re here to fight for the U.S.A. and go after the adversaries.” And they just got hammered. They would just start coming out with “transphobe” and “homophobe” right away or calling you a “racist.” And that’s why a lot of folks are still hesitant to say anything, because you still have people at these agencies in those key spots. It infected everything.

    If this is true, intelligence head Tulsi Gabbard needs to purge the Puzzle Palace of all transculters and commies with a pink slip machine gun. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ. )

  • Bill Clinton advisors saying Democrats are screwed is nothing new, but this time it’s not James Carville.

    “It’s very hard to be optimistic about the Democrats,” the advisor to President Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign, Douglas Schoen, tells The New York Sun. The party is “totally off base.” Lacking a message, strategy, or leader, the pollster says President Trump may defy expectations in next year’s midterms.

    In a telephone interview, Mr. Schoen likened Mr. Trump to the boxing legend, Mohammed Ali, at his peak. He’s “moving so quickly, he has the Democrats totally unnerved,” he said. “They can’t hit him. They can’t find him. He’s way ahead of them.”

    Mr. Schoen, “exaggerating” for illustration, said the Ukraine War “could be settled and resolved before the Democrats develop a coherent position.” They’re “MIA,” with “no interesting voice.” He suggests governors take the lead, rather than Senator Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

    “There is nobody making policy,” Mr. Schoen said. “There is nobody with an overarching strategy.” That weakness is reflected in his Schoen Cooperman Research surveys. It “sort of tells you how off base the Democrats are” that their favorability is 31 percent versus Mr. Trump’s 53 percent.

    “The Democrats spent $2 billion on Kamala Harris,” Mr. Schoen said, “and her percentage was lower than where she started. It’s an inescapable conclusion that $2 billion bought Democrats nothing at all.” Mr. Trump dodged every uppercut, jab, and haymaker.

    Mr. Schoen said that Mr. Trump “gets the public mood” that “people are frustrated with government and angry about immigration.” The president also gets that Americans “want plain speaking and somebody outside the system.”

    Democrats, in Mr. Schoen’s view, aren’t counterpunching against these strengths. He sees them as “off-putting and scolding,” whereas on the other side, “people love” Mr. Trump. “His rallies and his approach were entertaining — and, in their own way, positive.”

    Mr. Schoen cites as another misfire the way Democrats went after Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees on “personal stuff rather than policy.” He adds: “It wasn’t, ‘We disagree with you on this,’ etc. It was all, ‘You had an affair, you were drunk, etc.’”

    In a flip from Mr. Schoen’s time in the Clinton White House, voters now judge Democrats, not Republicans, as focusing too much on “social issues” and personal lives. “Abortion,” Mr. Schoen said, “may be good in a midterm. It’s not going to win a presidential election.”

    Even modest gains next year could give Democrats control of one or both chambers of Congress, but Mr. Schoen has doubts. “I worry about 2026,” he said, “because I don’t see a message, a strategy at all — and the Republicans have a message and a strategy.”

  • “Apocalyptic environmentalism by Maryland’s far-left Democratic leadership in Annapolis has plunged the state into a severe energy crisis, with power bills doubling in some cases and 20% of households in Central Maryland now behind on payments.”
  • Soros DAs seem to love illegal alien criminals a whole lot more than they hate “gun violence.” “Two men arrested in a Feb. 5 gun and drug raid at a New York City auto repair shop were later released on reduced charges that may not lead to prosecution, according to police and court records – despite being suspected members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, which has been spreading violence across the country. Jose Tamaronis-Caldera, 27, and Richard Garcia, 33, were taken into custody after authorities seized a Glock handgun, two imitation pistols, and a significant amount of drugs.”
  • Obama IRS Targeted Conservatives, Biden IRS Leaked Taxpayer Data.” Of course they did.

    A new disclosure by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to the House Judiciary Committee reveals that, under the Biden administration, the IRS leaked the taxpayer information of more than 405,000 Americans–including President Trump.

    Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, began an inquiry into the leaks last year and with this latest disclosure has found that the scope of the leak was much larger than the Biden administration initially led the public to believe.

    The scandal began in late 2019 when an IRS contract worker named Charles (Chaz) Littlejohn, illegally accessed and stole tax returns and return information for President Trump and other wealthy Americans and then leaked that information to news outlets.

    Littlejohn pled guilty to the unauthorized disclosure in Oct 2023 and was sentenced to 5 years in prison.

    In April 2024, the IRS issued letters of notification to victims whose data had been leaked but the notifications prompted deeper questions into how many people’s data may have actually been disclosed.

    One month later, an IRS spokesman stated that “more than 70,000” taxpayers had been affected by the leak.

  • Turns out that when you put warfighters in charge of the Pentagon rather than social justice weasels, recruiting problems disappear.

    After years of struggling recruitment numbers — in 2022, the Army faced a shortfall of 15,000 recruits — the service celebrated record-breaking enlistment in December 2024 with nearly 5,877 recruits joining up.

    “@USArmy: @USAREC had their most productive December in 15 years by enlisting 346 Soldiers daily into the World’s greatest #USArmy!” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote in a post on X.

    A Navy spokesperson tells National Review the service has contracted 4,000 more sailors and shipped 5,000 more sailors to boot camp at this point in the fiscal year, which began in October, than the year prior. (Navy officials said last month it will take three years of meeting recruiting goals to recover from the Navy’s current 20,000 operational gaps at sea.)

    Hegseth and Senator Tom Cotton praised the “Trump effect” for the rise in recruiting numbers, though the trend does pre-date Trump’s election.

    “Army’s recruiting started getting better much earlier. We really started seeing the numbers, the monthly numbers, go up in February of 2024,” former Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told Fox News. “We were seeing sort of in the high 5000 contracts per month, and that accelerated, you know, into the spring all the way into August, when the Army really hit a peak.”

    Still, the record-setting December is nothing to sneeze at, and regardless of who would go on to win the 2024 election, the boost began as Biden prepared to exit the White House.

    Veterans tell National Review they feel confident the recruitment wave is here to stay, with prospective service members feeling more confident in our current commander in chief.

  • Hegseth is also purging the tranny lunacy from the ranks.

    The Department of Defense is giving the military branches 30 days to identify service members who identify as transgender in order to remove them from the armed forces.

    Pentagon senior leadership were notified in a Wednesday memo that they must begin setting up mechanisms for finding troops with gender dysphoria by March 26th to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order barring transgender-identifying people from the military.

    “The medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals who have a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria are incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service,” defense undersecretary for personnel Darin Selnick said in the memo…

    The Department of Defense recognizes the two sexes, male and female, and will only allow service members to be subject to standards based on their biological sex. Pronoun usage and access to facilities will be determined by biological sex, ensuring that males will not be allowed into female spaces for sleeping, changing, or bathing, the memo clarifies.

    Were it not for social justice madness, these essential truths wouldn’t even need to be explicated…

  • “Trump tops 50,000 migrant removals including fugitives who evaded justice for 20 years.”

    When immigration agents were first ordered to deport Ivan Oramas and Santos Maradiaga-Villalta, President George W. Bush was in the White House and the iPhone was a distant dream.

    That was over two decades ago—yet both men were arrested this week, according to federal data reviewed by DailyMail.com.

    They were among over 50,000 illegal immigrants removed so far, a Department of Homeland Security official revealed to DailyMail.com.

    News of their arrest was circulated Thursday in an internal immigration memo noting recent enforcement actions made by President Donald Trump’s administration.

    Oramas, 61, is a citizen of Cuba with a rap sheet including convictions for sexual battery and aggravated assault.

    His sexual battery case caused serious injury, according to his charges in the file.

    ICE Houston nabbed Oramas this week, enforcing a deportation order first handed down in October 2003—21 years overdue.

    Maradiaga-Villalta, a 40-year-old alien from Honduras, has convictions for smuggling aliens into the U.S. He was arrested recently by ICE in Phoenix. His first deportation order dates back to January 2006, a 19-year lapse in action.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Democratic Policies At Work: ‘Almost Half’ Of Seattle’s Homeless Population Is Not From Seattle.”

    A new study from the Discovery Institute’s Fix Homelessness reveals the devastating consequences of Seattle’s failed policies, which have not only failed to address homelessness but have actively worsened the crisis, according to 770 KTTH.

    Driven by progressive ideology rather than practical solutions, city leaders have fostered a system that attracts homeless individuals from outside the region while keeping them trapped in cycles of addiction, crime, and dependency.

    Rather than tackling the root causes, these policies have invited more homelessness, turning the issue into a manufactured disaster rather than a problem to be solved.

    The study reveals that nearly half of the city’s homeless population became homeless outside of Seattle or King County, drawn in by the city’s permissive policies—free tents, open-air drug use, and a refusal to enforce encampment laws. An overwhelming 86.6% were born elsewhere, and 80.2% didn’t even attend high school in the area.

    As in Austin, homeless programs in Seattle are not designed to solve the homeless problem, they’re designed to provide conduits of graft to the far left.

  • First drone intercepted with a laser in Russo-Ukrainian War.
  • Texas Joins Coalition Lawsuit Against New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act. The New York law seeks to penalize energy producers for emissions dating back to 2000.”

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, along with a coalition of 22 states and several industry groups, has initiated legal action against New York over its Climate Change Superfund Act.

    “New York’s law is nothing more than an unconstitutional shakedown of vital American energy industries that form the bedrock of our national economic independence,” said Paxton.

    The lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of the act, which seeks to impose significant financial burdens on energy producers for past greenhouse gas emissions.

    New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act, signed into law in December 2024, aims to collect approximately $75 billion over the next 25 years from oil and gas companies to fund “climate change adaptation” and infrastructure projects within the state. It retroactively holds energy producers accountable for emissions dating back to 2000, regardless of whether the companies operate within New York.

    New York is quite ambitiously stupid to cram two different unconstitutional provisions into a single law, adding a lack of jurisdiction cherry on top of an ex post facto sundae…

  • Transsexual madness is alive and well in the Democratic Party. “Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers introduces budget recommendation that replaces ‘mother’ with ‘inseminated person.'”
  • Jeff Bezos made liberal heads explode with an editorial shift at the Waswhington Post.

    Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is overhauling the paper’s opinion section and shifting its editorial stance towards defending personal freedom and free markets.

    Bezos emailed Washington Post employees Wednesday morning to inform them of the dramatic change and told them contrary opinions could be found elsewhere.

    “I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages,” Bezos wrote. “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars can be left to be published by others,” Bezos added.

    “There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.”

    Bezos’s announcement, which he posted on X after emailing it to Post staffers, also revealed that opinion editor David Shipley opted against staying on in the role given the section’s new direction.

    I think Bezos has figured out that WaPo has a bad infestation of social justice, and the cheapest way to get rid of it is to publically announce policy changes that encourage the SJW termite to quit…

  • Apple to invest $500 billion in America.

    The latest onshoring trend, spurred by President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports, has led to a major announcement from Apple. The company has embraced “Make America Great Again” with plans to hire 20,000 US workers to manufacture high-tech AI servers in the Heartland and invest hundreds of billions of dollars in new factories.

    Bloomberg reports Apple plans to unleash a tsunami of investments in the US, upwards of $500 billion over the next four years, including a new AI server manufacturing plant in Houston, Texas, and a supplier academy in Michigan.

    This disclosure comes just days after President Trump announced that Apple CEO Tim Cook plans to relocate manufacturing operations from Mexico to the US.

    He’s investing hundreds of billions of dollars,” Trump said after his meeting with Cook at the end of last week, adding that the executive is ramping up US investments because he wants to avoid tariffs.

    Earlier this month, Trump imposed a 10% US levy on Chinese imports, where Apple manufactures most of its iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other products. In a tit-for-tat effort, Beijing announced retaliatory tariffs on US goods shortly after.

    Apple’s $500 billion investment and promise to add 20,000 new US jobs over Trump’s second term is more evidence that corporate America is more willing to participate in onshoring efforts this time.

    I live less than a mile away from Apple’s Austin campus, so it would be nice if they could open some technical writer recs there…

  • On the other hand, somebody on Apple’s programming team needs firing for their shenanigans.
  • Connecticut puts a cannibal back on the streets.

    A man accused of cannibalism and murder has been granted conditional release, according to the Connecticut Psychiatric Security Review Board (PSRB).

    The board granted Tyree Smith’s release after a careful review of his clinical progress, officials said.

    He’s currently at Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown. Smith is accused of hacking a man to death with an axe in Bridgeport and eating part of the victim’s brain and an eyeball….Smith stood trial for the murder of Angel Gonzalez with an axe and consumed parts of the victim’s brain and eyeball in 2011. He was found not guilty because of insanity in 2013 and ordered confined to Whiting Forensic Hospital for 60 years.

    I apologize if you find this story…

    ( •_•)
    ( •_•)>⌐■-■
    (⌐■_■)

    unappetizing.

  • “East Texas Teacher Charged With Child Porn and Bestiality.”

    An East Texas teacher and her boyfriend have been arrested on child pornography charges.

    Authorities allege the couple had child sexual abuse images and video of her performing a sexual act on a male dog on their phones.

    Hillary Danielle Williams, 33, was arrested Saturday in Lufkin and charged with bestiality and possession with intent to promote child pornography.

    Her partner, 37-year-old Michael Scott McCary, was charged with possession of child pornography.

    Texas public schools seem to have let some real filthy degenerates teach kids…

  • “New Caney ISD Teacher, Coach Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison for Sex With Student. Samantha Cummings had sex with a 17-year-old female student at New Caney High School.”
  • Liberals are staging a boycott today in a vain attempt to prove they matter, so now would be a good day to buy something from Amazon or Walmart. In fact, today I went to Walmart for the first time in, I don’t know, probably over a year…
  • What happens when a Detroit water main breaks during a deep freeze? This.
  • The difficulty of restoring Se7en.
  • A drag race between a Koenigsegg Jesko and a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport. Just in case you were wondering which multi-million dollar hypercar you should buy…
  • Golfer 1, Gator 0.
  • Federal Judge Declares Constitution Unconstitutional.”
  • “Congressional Gridlock After DOGE Fires Only Government Employee With Key To Capitol.”
  • “Trump Claimed, Without Evidence, That 2+2 Makes 4. Not So Fast, Experts Say.”
  • Gobble, gobble/Gobble, gobble/We accept you!/One of us!

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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





    LinkSwarm for November 7, 2022

    Monday, November 7th, 2022

    Greetings, and welcome to a special Election Eve Monday LinkSwarm! My Internet is back up, and tomorrow night I will be liveblogging the election returns starting around 7 PM.
    

  • A red tsunami?

    For the past week or so, my back-of-the-envelope math envisioned a GOP House majority somewhere between 229 and 241, and I’m sticking to that. Give the Republicans the 212 seats in Cook Political Report, with two-thirds of the 35 races in the toss-up category, and you end up with 235 Republicans and 200 Democrats, so put those down as my final prediction numbers.

    Snip.

    With Bolduc, Laxalt, and Johnson winning, I come out to a 51–48 GOP advantage by the end of the week, with Walker and Warnock headed to a runoff. It wouldn’t shock me if Oz or Masters or both won, giving Republicans a 53- or 54-seat majority.

  • “Dem Strategist Admits Her Party ‘Did Not Listen to Voters’ and Will Lose Midterms.”

    On Sunday, Hilary Rosen, a longtime Democratic strategist, predicted on CNN’s “State of the Union” that her party will have a bad night on Tuesday because they did not listen to voters.

    “I’m a loyal Democrat, but I am not happy. I just think we did not listen to voters in this election, and I think we are going to have a bad night,” she said.

    She faulted the Democratic Party for ignoring voters’ concerns about the economy, and implored them to “stop talking about democracy being at stake.”

    “When voters tell you over and over and over again that they care mostly about the economy, listen to them,” she said. “Stop talking about democracy being at stake. Democracy is at stake because people are fighting so much about what elections mean. Voters have told us what they wanted to hear. I don’t think Democrats have delivered this cycle.”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
    

  • Republican senators release more details of Hunter Biden’s suspicious finances.

    Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson gave the federal prosecutor probing Hunter Biden a little nudge Wednesday — sending him more than 200 pages of bank records showing millions in transactions between the first son’s companies and Communist Chinese-tied entities.

    Snip.

    The senators’ analysis of banking records, first reported by Fox News, finds that between August 2017 and October 2018, $6 million was transferred to a company allegedly set up by Hunter Biden called Hudson West III, $5 million came from Northern International Capital, a [Chinese energy compan] CEFC affiliate, and $1 million was transferred from CEFC itself.

    From the pool of cash, $4.8 million was transferred from Hudson West III to other Biden companies, such as Owasco P.C. and Owasco LLC, and to a company associated with President Biden’s brother James, the Lion Hall Group.

    The bank records also show that Hunter Biden and his aunt and uncle, Sara and James Biden, went on a “spending spree,” in the senators words, after Hudson West III received the millions in payments from CEFC, through a line of credit that was opened.

    “We are also providing bank records showing that credit cards were collateralized by a $99,000 preauthorized withdrawal from Hudson West III,” Grassley and Johnson write, noting that the money was spent for airfare, at Apple stores, hotels, and restaurants, as they detailed back in 2020.

    Grassley and Johnson also mention two $3 million wire transfers sent to Robinson Walker LLC, another Hunter Biden-associated company; and by State Energy HK Limited, another CEFC affiliate, saying the purpose of those transfers “is unclear.” The Post reported on those mysterious transactions back in 2020.

    The senators also make reference to JiaQi Bao, Hunter Biden’s Chinese secretary, who reportedly pushed for “Uncle Joe” Biden to run for president and has been linked to the Chinese government. The bank transactions included in Grassley and Johnson’s letter show that Hunter Biden made payments to Bao totaling $29,795.84 after Hudson West III received the $6 million from the Chinese firms.

    Some names and entities will be familiar to BattleSwarm readers, but other bits are new.

  • Big ballot-havesting operation busted in Orlando, Florida.”

    Ballot harvesting, according to the California Democrats who’d like to take it national, is an innocent practice where union members and activists, some of them illegally present in the country, do voters the favor, see, of helping voters fill out their ballots and then collecting those ballots for them so that they need never go to the polls. They call it “a new service.” It’s part of their “make every vote count” agenda, and who could be against that?

    But out in Florida, where there’s still some semblance of objectivity, investigators found another story.

    According to the Washington Times:

    JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Florida’s newly created Office of Election Crimes and Security is requesting a criminal investigation into charges of ballot harvesting in Orlando, a Democratic stronghold in the critical swing state.

    Cynthia Harris, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for District 6 commissioner in Orange County, which includes Orlando, provided a sworn complaint to the election crimes office, alleging left-leaning organizations have been perpetrating a scheme to encourage residents in black neighborhoods to apply for mail-in ballots and to fill out those ballots, which she said have been collected by paid canvassers, and sometimes altered, all in violation of state law.

    In an interview with The Washington Times, Ms. Harris said she has video evidence of paid ballot harvesters operating in Orlando neighborhoods in both 2014 and 2017, and that the scheme has been going on for decades, continuing through the 2020 election and the 2022 primary.

    If voting fraud is this massive in Florida, how widespread and massive is it in states controlled by Democrats? (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • “Pennsylvania Supreme Court Orders Undated, Wrongly Dated Ballots To Not Be Counted…siding with national and state Republican groups in a lawsuit filed just over two weeks ago.”
  • “GOP Reps Go Public After Uncovering What Biden Gave to Soros-Backed Group.”

    Two members of Congress from Texas and one former Trump administration official who now serves in the Texas House of Representatives are asking for answers from the Biden administration after discovering that an open borders group funded by George Soros received millions of dollars in federal grant money last year.

    Alianza Americas, a nonprofit that says it is “committed to a human rights agenda for all people, with an emphasis on the inclusion and support of Latin American immigrant communities, and people on the move in Latin America,” received $7.5 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in February 2021, according to the Washington Examiner, and then another $1 million from the Health Resources and Services administration in July.

    Both organizations fall under President Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services organization, and both grants were to fund COVID relief and vaccination efforts.

    The group has also received nearly $1.4 million from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation from 2016 through 2020.

    Federal law prohibits government grant money from being spent on lobbying, but Alianza Americas may have violated that prohibition in its activities as a “political advocacy group,” according to a letter from former HHS Chief of Staff Brian Harrison.

  • Chicago teacher’s unions want to pass an Illinois state constitutional amendment that would basically let them run the state.

    If approved by Illinois voters in November, Amendment 1 will give government teachers’ unions an unfettered constitutional right to demand not just anything in their interests, but in what they see as the interests of every Illinoisan. The amendment is not limited to employee matters at the workplace.

    Don’t take my word for that. Look at the first sentence of the argument in favor of it as written in the official summary as published by the Illinois Secretary of State: “This amendment will protect workers’ and others’ safety.” [Emphasis added.]

    hat particular sentence is just about safety, but it shows the broad interpretation of the amendment beyond the workplace that government unions will assert. The language of the amendment itself supports that broad interpretation, and will extend to anybody’s “economic welfare,” which is pretty much everything.

    What will government unions, especially radical teachers’ unions, demand with that new constitutional right?

    The Chicago Teachers Union has long been quite open about its purpose. It sees itself as the vanguard of a national movement, led by unions like itself, that is textbook Marxism.

    That purpose is well documented. It goes beyond the radical curriculum they teach in schools and encompasses an entire rearrangement of how America works.

    Among the first things we wrote about on this site, ten years ago, was the role of the CTU and other teachers’ unions at a Marxism conference held that year:

    The event was teeming with teachers who spoke about the new found bond” between Socialism and teachers’ unions according to reports, and Chicago teachers were on the stage. Chicago Teachers Union [then] VP Jesse Sharkey spoke at one breakout session. Becca Barnes, a Chicago Teachers Union teacher and organizer with Chicago Socialists, proclaimed at the beginning of the conference that “the struggle here in the United States has entered a new phase. Nowhere have we pointed the way forward more clearly than here in Chicago with the teachers union strike….”

    Since then, militant radicalism has become still more firmly embedded in the CTU. That history is well documented – quite proudly by radicals themselves. The International Socialist Review, for example, lays out a good history of the CTU, saying the CTU “transcended a simple labor dispute and was transformed into a social movement, with the teachers fusing their struggle with that of the community they serve…joining in the Occupy Chicago movement that pointed out the root of societal problems—social and economic inequality.”

  • Shockingly, those who suffer the most from spiking urban crime hate defunding the police.

    A poll that shows ridiculously low support from black voters for defunding the police should be the final nail in the coffin for Democrats’ anti-law and order campaign of the last seven years.

    TheGrio.com commissioned a poll, along with the Kaiser Family Foundation, which found that 82% of black respondents want police funding either to be kept about the same (48%) or increased (34%). Only 17% wanted it decreased.

    It’s just like Kari Lake said in a recent confrontation with a reporter. If you go into most black neighborhoods and talk about defunding the police, they’ll look at you “like you’re the craziest person on the planet.” But it’s one thing for a white, conservative Republican to say it — it’s far more important to hear black respondents in a poll confirm it overwhelmingly.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Things that make you go “hmmmm“: “San Francisco DA Won’t Release Police Bodycam Video, 911 Calls From Paul Pelosi Attack.”
  • Great line in the middle of this Ben Shapiro election roundup video: “Andrew Cuomo came to kill all the old people and grab ass, and he ran out of old people.”
  • Twitter Is Still Censoring Conservatives.”
  • Remember all those stories of how bad it sucked for workers in Foxconn’s iPhone factory? It’s worse now.

    Hundreds and perhaps thousands of workers fled a Chinese manufacturing complex that accounts for 85% of iPhone assembly capacity. The mass migration, which began this weekend, called into question that country’s COVID-control measures and, more broadly, its reliability as a part of global supply chains.

    “Something snapped over the weekend,” Bloomberg News reports. Employees suddenly fled the Zhengzhou plant of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd., better known as Foxconn. Videos show, in what is now called the “Foxconn Great Escape” or the “iPhone Long March,” workers scrambling over high chain fences at the plant, known as “iPhone City.”

    To avoid detection, workers traveled through cropland by day. At night, they took to the roads. “Some people were walking amid wheat fields with their luggage, blankets, and quilts,” said a poster on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media platform. “I couldn’t help but feel sad.”

    Residents of neighboring areas rallied, for instance leaving water and provisions in the open on roadsides. Social media postings reported signs such as “For Foxconn workers returning home.”

    Truckers also pitched in. Risking criminal prosecution, they took workers in pick-up, dump, and flatbed trucks. One video shows a woman standing on the back of a big tank truck speeding down a highway in the rain.

    Workers fled Foxconn’s “closed loop” system, which isolated the plant from the rest of society. Inside the loop, the company went to great lengths to stop COVID. As a disease-control measure, it had ended canteen service on October 19, forcing workers to eat boxed food in dormitory-style sleeping quarters. Food was reportedly scarce, and conditions in the dorms rapidly deteriorated. On Sunday, Foxconn announced it would resume cafeteria dining.

  • Democrats want a “covid amnesty” so moms won’t destroy them at the ballot box.

    The political establishment—left and right—want desperately to move on, to pretend the last 30 months didn’t happen. With very few exceptions (Ron DeSantis, Kirsti Noem, Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, Ron Johnson, and a few others, later), they betrayed their core values. Many Republicans and so-called Libertarians quickly capitulated the primacy and importance of individual liberties. Whereas supposedly equality-loving democrats embraced policies that in no uncertain terms screwed women, children and the poor. The 2020 democrat campaign slogan might as well have been “protect the rich, infect the poor.” Or “only the rich need to learn.” They’d all very much like that you forget about that. They’d like to go back to the fights they know how to fight, the golden oldies that turn the bases out, and turn us against each other. But COVID policies turned the whole thing on its side, jumbling us all up and resulting in all sorts of hitherto unheard of alliances. And when your business is maintaining the status quo, that is very dangerous.

    Which is why Emily Oster is pleading for an amnesty.

    First, let’s be clear to whom Emily Oster is speaking. She’s speaking to the furious well-educated suburban women who are swinging towards Republicans in this cycle, even in the bluest of states. Because it was the bluest of states that were hit hardest by these policies. It was in blue states that the schools were closed longest, that the economic devastation was worst, that crime spiked the most, where masks were required longest. The damage done by these policies is at its beginning, not its end. Dr. Oster, would like women to believe that it was all just a mistake, a mis-understanding, and remember that it is the Republicans who are looking to limit the freedoms that really count. That while democrats had no problem sacrificing the well-being of our living children for three years in support political power, it is Republicans that pose the real threat.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Blue city blues: “Nearly 20% Of Seattle Shootings Happened Near Homeless Encampments.”
  • Man who used to get all his information on conservatives from the mainstream media realizes he’d been lied to.

  • Questions that shouldn’t even have to be asked: “Should Schools Notify Parents if Their Child Claims to Be Transgender?”

    Wendell Perez received a call from the elementary school that would alarm any parent. School officials told him that his 12-year-old daughter had attempted suicide in the school’s bathroom. He was told it was because she wanted to be a boy, with a male name and pronouns.

    Wendell couldn’t believe it. At home, his daughter hadn’t shown any signs of gender dysphoria or discomfort in being a girl. The Perez family is Catholic, and they raised their children with a biblical and scientific understanding of biological sex.

    But when Wendell and his wife Maria arrived at the school, they found out that school officials had been having confidential meetings with their daughter and discussing her discomfort with her gender. Wendell and Maria found out that teachers and staff at school had begun treating their daughter as a boy at school without their consent or knowledge. Wendell was told by staff that they didn’t share information about his daughter’s “transition” with him or his wife because of “confidentiality issues.”

    Whatever happened to in loco parentis? Or does that just not apply when there are radical transexual activists to mollify?

  • When it comes to school boards shoving radical transexism down students throats, it doesn’t just happen in big cities.

    When the school called his 14-year-old son to the principal’s office for refusing to say a female student was a boy, Matthew Duncan decided he’d had enough.

    When the school called his 14-year-old son to the principal’s office for refusing to say a female student was a boy, Matthew Duncan decided he’d had enough.

    “There was never a push towards dominance and control like it is now,” said Duncan. “You can’t voice your opinion.”

    In response, many families in Grants Pass have withdrawn their children from public school, enrolling them in private school or starting to homeschool, Grants Pass teachers, school administrators and parents told The Epoch Times.

  • Meanwhile, in a civilized state: “Florida Bans Puberty Blockers and Transgender Surgery for Minors.”
  • “Campaign Aide Threatens to ‘Punch You’ for Not Voting for Beto O’Rourke.”
  • Also, an O’Rourke rally too close to a voting location violated Texas law.
  • Still more Beto: “New poll shows Abbott gaining six points in eight weeks, 53/40.”
  • “More California companies moving headquarters out-of-state than ever before.” Texas once again tops the list of destination states, followed by Tennessee, Nevada, Florida and Arizona.
  • Life imitates Grosse Point Blank: “Man shot dead in NYC while bicycling to shoot someone else.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Democrat Nominee In Arkansas Arrested For Felony Terroristic Threatening. Law enforcement officials in the state of Arkansas arrested Diamond Arnold-Johnson, the Democrat nominee for Arkansas auditor, on Friday for first-degree terroristic threats.” Bonus:

    Arnold-Johnson’s husband was on trial in August for allegedly posting terroristic threats on Facebook, police said. During the trial, Arnold-Johnson, 32, admitted that she, not her husband, posted the threatening messages on Facebook that led to the criminal charges, KATV reported.

    A warrant was served for Arnold-Johnson’s arrest on October 13, but she refused to comply and a SWAT team was dispatched to resolve the matter.

    However, police made the decision to cancel using the SWAT team to force compliance from Arnold-Johnson in an apparent attempt to not risk an explosive situation happening right before an election.

  • The counterpoint to quiet quitting: Quiet firing.
  • I’m not much for baseball, but did want to note that the Astros won the World Series, and threw only the second No-Hitter in World Series history.”
  • Guy Who Decided To Ban The Babylon Bee Wondering If He Might Be In Hot Water.”
  • “Citizens Being Able To Vote The Ruling Party Out Of Power Is The End Of Democracy.”

    I cannot believe democracy is about to die in America, again.

    After years of living under a dictatorship, America rose from the ashes. Democrats took control of the Presidency, the House, the Senate, the university system, Big Tech, the entertainment industry, and major corporations – and thereby defeated fascism by seizing every major lever of power in the nation. With one-party rule established, and all of our critics silenced, democracy was once again free to flourish.

    Now, our dear democracy is under attack – by America holding a so-called “election” and allowing idiots to vote. Let us be clear about what the stakes are: if a single person I disagree with is elected in a free and fair election, democracy will be DEAD. If citizens have the power to simply vote the ruling party out of power – when I really like the current ruling party – all is lost.

  • “Galactic Empire Requests Amnesty For Anyone Who May Have Gotten Carried Away And Blown Up A Planet.”
  • Surf’s up: