Kash Patel is following the money, and may soon release the answer to who’s funding and controlling domestic terrorists Antifa:
FBI Director Kash Patel tells Just the News that the bureau is “on the verge” of unmasking the command structure and financing for anarchist groups like Antifa that have unleashed unrest around America and has also identified potential new criminal activity related to the abuse of federal law enforcement and intelligence.
“We are looking at so many different leads on criminal activity by those who are in positions of power, and we’re not going to stop until every single one of those is fully exposed,” Patel said during a wide-ranging interview this week on the “Just the News, No Noise” television show.
When asked whether more indictments against those accused of weaponizing government may be ahead, he said: “the documents are provided either to Congress or the courts of law and we make every referral we can under the Department of Justice.
“These indictments that you’ve seen, and the ones that you’re going to see coming up here in this near future, are just the beginning,” he added.
The director, a close ally of President Donald Trump, has pressed his team to uncover tens of thousands of pages of documents long withheld from Congress that chronicle abuses by law enforcement and intelligence agencies in scandals spanning from Russiagate and Ukraine impeachment to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
Those documents have already led to the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly making false statements to thwart Congress during an investigation of news leaks and the indictment Thursday of former National Security Advisor John Bolton for the mishandling of classified information.
Patel asked Americans to be patient, saying some of the abuses of a weaponized government were systematically built over many years and are complex to unravel.
“I have to remind the audience of one thing. Everybody’s like, it’s seven months. What have you guys been doing? Well, they spent 20 years building this diseased temple of corruption,” he said. “It takes a little bit of time to defeat it and beat it down. I’m not asking you to trust me. I’m asking you to look at the work the men and women of the FBI have done so far in these seven, eight months, and just imagine what we’re going to do come the year’s end.”
Patel said one area where the FBI has made rapid progress is the tracking of financing and command structures of anarchist groups like Antifa that have fomented unrest in American cities, attacks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rounding up illegal immigrants and antisemitic movements on college campuses.
He said there are indications that some support may come from overseas enemies and U.S. nonprofit groups that have tax exemptions from the IRS.
“Look, the thing I can tell you is that money doesn’t lie, and the thing we’re doing at the FBI is following the money,” Patel explained. “And thanks to President Trump, we now have Antifa designated, rightfully so, as a domestic terror organization. And we have had multiple investigations going on.”
Patel said those probes are “mapping out the money, and we are using social media and the influencers that the President had here just this last week, because they’re the ones on the ground, getting us ground level intelligence, because law enforcement isn’t able to enter these spaces, and these people are brave enough to do it.”
Here’s Glenn Beck breaking down the various moving parts of Antifa, from the foot soldiers to the funders:
If you’ve been following the story on BattleSwarm (see here and here, just for starters), a lot of the names (George Soros, Tides Foundation, Alliance for Global justice, Open Society Foundations, ActBlue, etc.) are familiar, though he’s missing Arabella Associates, and Fidelity and Schwab are going to be a shock for some.
“Look, I’m I am not accusing anyone here. I’m just saying this is pretty much off the top of my head. I’m just showing the connections that have a very strong odor attached to them. And I’ve followed these people long enough to know this is the way it works.”
I’m hoping Patel has enough evidence to decapitate all the hydra heads once and for all.
A whole lot of despicable Democrats voted against remembering Charlie Kirk and denouncing political violence, a whole bunch of lefties are still lying about Kirk, Comey indicted, President Trump officially backs a complete Ukraine victory, a new American stealth fighter enters production, two murderous lefty scumbags die, and an infamous thirty-four year old Austin murder mystery is solved.
“The ‘Study’ You’re Citing About Right-Wing Violence Is Full Of Fake Data.”
After Charlie Kirk was assassinated last week, conservatives noted that most political violence comes from the left. The left bristles at this fact and has responded by dramatically padding the numbers to pretend the reverse is true.
Consider a Sept. 12 piece from The Economist claiming, “extremists on both left and right commit violence, although more incidents appear to come from right-leaning attackers.”
Right up front, the piece admits it used data “largely compiled by researchers whom sceptical (sic) conservatives would probably dismiss as biased.” The disclaimer is meant to inoculate The Economist’s audience to its sloppy reporting, as if challenges from conservatives will somehow prove The Economist’s accuracy.
Yes, readers should be beyond skeptical of the source in that piece, The Prosecution Project. Its website claims to “track[] and provid[e] analysis of felony criminal cases involving illegal political violence, terrorism, and extremism occurring in the United States since 1990.”
The founder and executive director of the Prosecution Project is Michael Loadenthal, although the links naming the website’s leadership were broken Friday, meaning no names were visible. Google had not yet scrubbed Loadenthal’s name from searches.
Loadenthal is an “openly anarchist Antifa-affiliated … researcher at the University of Cincinnati who, by his own admission, is a far-left violent extremist,” The Federalist reported in 2023.
So we have an Antifa-connected researcher with rabid bias against the right, held out as an expert on deciding who is extreme. It is like using a vegetarian to define which meat eaters are the most humane — none of them, says the vegetarian.
The Prosecution Project lists January 2024 charges against John Reardon of Massachusetts, who made antisemitic threats against synagogues and the Israeli Consulate. It notes, “Influenced by events in Gaza, he also said, ‘you do realize that by supporting genocide that means it’s ok for people to commit genocide against you.’” The Department of Justice never identified Reardon’s political affiliation, but The Prosecution Project’s own account seems to indicate he was a pro-Palestine fanatic, a cause typically associated with Democrats. Yet The Prosecution Project identifies Reardon’s crimes as “rightist” because they’re “identity-focused.”
The group also lists 2022 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act charges against Edmee Chavannes — even though “Chavannes was found not guilty.”
The Prosecution Project even includes the posting of racist stickers in its tracker, as if that’s comparable to terrorism or violence. One wonders if the group will treat Democrats’ desecration of Charlie Kirk memorials with the same seriousness.
Most crimes involving race or abortion businesses are blamed on the right in the data, with nothing to back up those claims. Yet these issues and others often cross over to the left. The Federalist has reported on the progressive anti-abortion movement, for example, and the left’s Marxist oppressor-versus-oppressed framework is manifestly racist.
Comb through the ridiculous data on The Prosecution Project’s website, and you will soon conclude it is worthless to everyone except leftist propagandists trying to downplay Charlie Kirk’s murder and flip the blame for violence in the U.S. to the right.
Similarly, a biased “study” by Alex Nowrasteh at the Cato Institute was debunked this week by Amber Duke at The Daily Caller.
Nowrasteh claims politically motivated violence is rare in the U.S., but that when it happens, “right-wing terrorists” are more often to blame than the left — that is, when you exclude the terrorists who killed 2,977 victims on Sept. 11, 2001, and exclude injuries, property damage, and people who were not killed. Thus, his criteria exclude the two assassination attempts on President Donald Trump, for example. Additionally, Duke found that some of the crimes Nowrasteh blamed on the right were at best questionable and at worst downright wrong.
Duke pointed to another lopsided study by the Anti-Defamation League, which also claims the right is to blame for increased political violence. Ryan James Girdusky unpacked those magic numbers and noted glaring omissions. For example, the ADL left the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson out of its study.
Despite the evidence all pointing to Kirk’s killer being on the left wing of the ideological spectrum, the conspiracy theory about a right-wing shooter was pushed by a host of Democratic members of Congress, high-profile left-wing activists, liberal social media influencers, and more.
The most common evidence-free claim on the left has been that the shooter was a follower of far right influencer Nick Fuentes.
Lot’s more quotes from various lefty idiots asserting this connection without proof at the link.
As each new detail trickled out, and the killer’s transgender associations became clearer and clearer, the hysterical spin and assertions of blunt unreality mounted. Cynical pros began inserting outright lies into the mix, as partisan myrmidons took up their work and used it in desperate, craven attempts to either spin facts in ridiculous ways (“his parents are Republicans!”) or simply pretend the facts weren’t “facts” at all. All of it was done with the intent of trying to will into existence — through the spread of fear, uncertainty, and doubt — an alternate narrative whose intended moral calculus amounted to, in so many words, Charlie Kirk was killed by his own team, and this is actually your fault.
So, no, I’m not about to move on just yet.
I could understand a certain amount of denialism at first, because I understand human nature. For those on the left who treat politics like a substitute religion — an increasing number of people in our irreligious age — this moment has been akin to seeing several of the central tenets of your faith publicly refuted. The revelation of the identity of the alleged shooter and the reports about his beliefs were arguably the worst possible scenario for the sorts of loud Democratic types who are deeply invested in the idea of the MAGA right as America’s true fever-swamp of hatred and violence.
I can understand ignorance as well, because I depend on documenting it for a job — the Carnival of Fools would have to fold up its tent without it. In the days before the suspect was caught, it was natural that desperate progressives who get their news from left-wing authorities would use that span of time — when the killer was still at large — to conjure their own arcane interpretive theories in defiance of the known evidence. I feel inevitable disgust at these sad attempts at spin — I know who publicly celebrated the attack on Kirk, after all, and it wasn’t anyone on my side — but again, it was expected.
But I can’t understand any of this after Tyler Robinson was caught on Friday morning. At that point, mere ignorance and wish-casting turned into an active disinformation campaign, and it was particularly appalling to see from people whose civic responsibility it is to know better. To take one example, how about the repellent Eric Swalwell? On Friday afternoon, in an audaciously sleazy bit of “partial storytelling,” the California congressman tweeted: “It doesn’t matter that Kirk’s killer was a straight white male. Or that he was from a Republican family that voted for Donald Trump. Violence has NEVER been the answer.”
If he thought this was a cute joke, he’s a moral reprobate. If he thought it was an effective deceit, he’s also a moral reprobate. I think it is thus fair to conclude that he’s a moral reprobate. The jury’s still out on his fellow California Democratic congressman Dave Min, however, who may simply be stupid. Min said on Saturday: “Now that the Charlie Kirk assassin has been identified as MAGA, I’m sure Donald Trump, Elon Musk and all the insane GOP politicians who called for retribution against the ‘RADICAL LEFT’ will now shift their focus to stopping the toxic violence of the RADICAL RIGHT.” (As it turns out, Dave? No, we won’t!)
How about Harvard Law professor — and Joe Biden legal adviser — Laurence Tribe? Tribe announced on Twitter that the killer “seems to have been ultra-MAGA, exploding the GOP/MAGA attempt to pin the blame for this tragedy on liberals.” (How he got that idea is anybody’s guess.) Later, he deleted the tweet and posted a non-apology accusing the right of “making things up” by associating the killer with transgender or left-wing causes. I can only tell you that once upon a time he had a fine legal mind.
I certainly can’t say the same for Heather Cox Richardson, the world’s most-followed Substacker. Richardson is a Temu Tribe, an oracle of the complacently progressive academic establishment, and demonstrated it once again by going on a podcast on Friday to claim that the killer was a “right-winger” and all those outraged conservatives online were now retreating “in a real hurry.” (Lest you think that was an error born of speaking off the cuff, Richardson put it in writing as well.)
Now that the gaslighting has become impossible to sustain, the left has moved on to its last line of defense: “Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed whom.” It will be a long time before I forget the five days I have just spent being gaslighted both by political operators as well as people who remain transparently in denial. I expected better of them. I held them only to the standards that I hold myself. It was a mistake.
“Trump golf club gunman [Ryan Routh] found guilty after assassination attempt; tries to stab self in court.” The left is sending us an endless parade of violent lunatics and losers.
One of former President Joe Biden’s top aides – Jeff Zients, told the House Oversight Committee on Thursday that an aide with his email credentials was green lighting some of the most controversial ‘autopen’ pardons, that Hunter Biden – who received an insane pardon himself – was involved in the pardon discussions, and that Joe Biden’s brain was pea soup.
According to Axios, Zients – one of the highest ranking officials from the Biden White House – confirmed that Joe Biden had difficulty remembering dates and names, and often required extra briefings to make decisions during the final years of his presidency.
Instead of having three meetings before making a decision, for example, Biden would want four.
Zients said Biden had long had trouble with names and dates, but acknowledged to investigators that the president’s memory of such facts got worse in the final years of his term.
Jill Biden, meanwhile, spoke with Zients about ‘managing Joe’ as Zients was readying himself to take on the role of Chief of Staff in early 2023 – urging him to adjust Biden’s schedule so he could get more rest and return to the White House residence earlier in the evening.
Longtime Biden aide and deputy CoS Annie Tomasini also spoke with Zients about limiting Biden’s schedule and shortening distances and stairs.
According to Fox News, Zients “admitted that President Biden’s speech stumbles increased as he aged,” adding “He also noted that the president’s difficulty remembering dates and names worsened over time, including during the administration.”
Also interesting – Zients told investigators that Hunter Biden was involved in discussions about presidential pardons towards the end of Biden’s term, which included the blanket pardons of several members of the Biden family issued during Joe’s final 24 hours in office. It had been previously reported by NBC News that Hunter was sitting in on White House meetings following the former president’s horrible performance during a June 2024 debate against Donald Trump.
And just like that millions of lefty sorts who piously sand “No one’s above the law!” for the ginned-up Trump indictments all automatically switched to “This is a dangerous precedent!” when it comes to indicting James Comey.
Former FBI Director James Comey has been indicted on criminal charges related to allegations that he lied to Congress during testimony in 2020 about whether he authorized a leak of information.
Comey is facing one count of false statements and one count of obstruction of justice, according to a release from the Department of Justice.
“No one is above the law. Today’s indictment reflects this Department of Justice’s commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people. We will follow the facts in this case,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.
President Trump reacted gleefully to the indictment in a statement shared to Truth Social.
“JUSTICE IN AMERICA! One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to is James Comey, the former Corrupt Head of the FBI.”
“Today he was indicted by a Grand Jury on two felony counts for various illegal and unlawful acts. He has been so bad for our Country, for so long, and is now at the beginning of being held responsible for his crimes against our Nation. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Comey’s indictment in Virginia federal court comes just days before the statute of limitations for the perjury charge was set to run out. The charges come five years after Comey testified on September 30, 2020, before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he never authorized anyone at the FBI to leak information to the press related to the investigations of either possible collusion between Trump and Russia or Hillary Clinton’s use of an unauthorized email system.
During the hearing, Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) asked Comey whether he had authorized leaks related to either investigation. Comey reiterated what he said in 2017 congressional testimony, that he had not.
Cruz argued that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had said Comey authorized at least one such disclosure, related to the Clinton investigation. But the Justice Department inspector general found in 2018 that McCabe had “lacked candor when he told Comey, or made statements that led Comey to believe, that McCabe had not authorized the disclosure and did not know who did.”
The charges also center in part on an October 2016 New York Times report, “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.”
The Times article was in response to reporting in Slate that Trump had established a communications back channel with the Kremlin, involving servers at Trump Tower in Manhattan and Alfa Bank, one of Russia’s largest financial institutions.
Hours after the Slate article was published, the Times report related the FBI’s conclusion that the back-channel claim was unfounded. The report also detailed that the bureau’s counterintelligence investigation of Russia’s malign activities in connection with the 2016 campaign were not linked to Trump and his campaign.
Special counsel John Durham probed the leaks to the Times in connection with the story as an unauthorized public disclosure (UPD) of classified information.
The February 2020 closing memorandum for the probe, obtained by veteran journalist Catherine Herridge, found there were two major government sources for the story: James Baker, FBI general counsel and a close adviser to Comey, and FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki. Baker told investigators that he was “under the belief” that he was “ultimately instructed and authorized to [provide information to the Times] by then FBI Director James Comey.”
However, Baker did not claim that Comey gave him a direct order. “Baker indicated that FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki instructed him (Baker) to disclose the information to the NYT, and Baker understood Rybicki was conveying this instruction and authorization from Comey.”
A Dallas U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility was the target of a shooting Wednesday morning that left two detainees dead, one person injured, and the suspect committing suicide at the scene.
According to the Dallas Police Department, law enforcement responded to a call at a Dallas ICE facility after reports that someone had opened fire from an adjacent building.
Two detainees were pronounced dead, with another being rushed to the hospital in critical condition with a gunshot injury.
The suspected shooter, a white male armed with a rifle on a roof, died by suicide as agents approached, FOX4 Dallas reported.
ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons spoke to CNN about the shooting as the event unfolded, saying that the scene is secure and the shooter is “down from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”
Bullets found had anti-ICE slogans written on them.
Why people who kept freaking out at Trump negotiating with Putin shouldn’t have. “Trump Says Ukraine Can Win Back All of Its Territory from Russia.”
President Donald Trump declared his belief Tuesday that Ukraine can win its war against Russia outright, an extraordinary shift in tone with significant ramifications for U.S. policy.
Trump shared his views on Truth Social after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.
“I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form. With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this War started, is very much an option,” Trump said.
Trump’s position is a 180-degree shift from his longstanding view that Ukraine would have to cede territory to Russia as a condition for ending the war. Moscow holds roughly a fifth of Ukraine’s territory after invading its neighbor three-and-a-half years ago. Russian forces have slowly made gains along the eastern part of Ukraine in what has become a grueling war of attrition with hundreds of thousands of estimated casualties.
Trump argued Russia is a “paper tiger” and suggested Russian people were not aware of the damage Russian President Vladimir Putin has done to their nation. He also praised the “Great Spirit” of Ukraine and said Ukraine could “maybe even go further” than reclaiming its original territory. Trump’s comments are a stark contrast from his past statements that argued Russia was winning the war and likened Zelensky to a dictator.
Trump promised the U.S. would keep sending weapons to NATO for the alliance to use in the way it sees fit. His comments will likely prompt a furious response from Putin and Russian forces in Ukraine. It also remains to be seen how Trump’s restraint-oriented cabinet members and political allies react to his unexpected shift.
As previously observed, Trump’s negotiating strategy works on persuasion and tit-for-tat strategies. Zelensky, after some early stumbles, is finally fully onboard with Trump, while Putin hasn’t offered anything in return to Trump’s overtures. That means that Zelensky gets all the carrots, and Putin gets all the sticks. Golly, who could have seen that one coming except everyone who’s actually watched Trump operate for the last ten years who isn’t suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome?
Ukraine launched another big drone strike, this one on the Saratov oil refinery in Bryanskaya Ulitsa, Saratov Oblast, the third time they’ve hit it since August.
Secretary of War Pete Hesgeth has summoned 800 generals and admirals from around the world to Washington D.C. without telling them what for. They’re going to be pretty surprised when he announces that he’s brought all of them there to talk about Amway…
23-year-old Hunter Nadeau was arrested on scene for shooting multiple victims at the Sky Meadow Country Club in Nashau, New Hampshire, Saturday night. A 59-year-old named Robert DeCesare was killed in front of his family. At least two others were injured.
Tom Bartelson of Pepperell, Massachusetts, is the witness in the video above. He was at his nephew’s wedding in a private room of the club when the gunman entered the building dressed in all black. The shooter yelled, “The children are safe!” and “Free Palestine!” before killing DeCesare. He then moved into the club restaurant and opened fire again.
Funny no matter what the leftwing cause, the solution seems to be murdering American citizens.
A once-celebrated Boston social activist has pleaded guilty to defrauding donors — including Black Lives Matter — out of thousands of dollars that she used as a personal piggy bank.
Monica Cannon-Grant, 44, pleaded guilty Monday to 18 counts of fraud-related crimes that she committed with her late husband while operating their Violence in Boston (VIB) activists group, according to the US Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts.
The activist scammed money — including $3,000 from a BLM group — while claiming it was to help feed children and run protests like one in 2020 over the murder of George Floyd and police violence.
Cannon-Grant also conned her way into getting $100,000 in federal pandemic-related unemployment benefits — which she used to pay off her personal auto loan and car insurance policy.
But she has now confessed to transferring funds to personal bank accounts to pay for rent, shopping sprees, delivery meals, visits to a nail salon — and even a summer vacation to Maryland.
At least 187 code packages made available through the JavaScript repository NPM have been infected with a self-replicating worm that steals credentials from developers and publishes those secrets on GitHub, experts warn. The malware, which briefly infected multiple code packages from the security vendor CrowdStrike, steals and publishes even more credentials every time an infected package is installed.
You may remember Crowdstrike from such hits as “we helped Hillary Clinton illegally erase her secret email server.”
Speaking of technology running amok: “OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws.” That sounds like the sort6 of cruel fact that should throw a kink in all of these AI company’s getting trillion dollar valuations but somehow won’t.
In California, 13 year old boy killed by sex-abusing, illegal alien soccer coach. The family of boy is “suing Los Angeles County and the City of Los Angeles for failing to perform a background check on the coach.”
Turns out that when conservatives said they were being unfairly censored due to Biden Administration pressure, they were right all along. “YouTube Lifts Ban on Censored Creators, Admits Biden Admin Pressure Was ‘Unacceptable.'”
Google is making major changes to YouTube’s free speech policies following pressure from House Republicans and shifts among its top competitors.
In a letter to House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), an attorney for Alphabet, Google and YouTube’s parent company, announced a series of changes to YouTube’s approach to free speech, including the return of banned creators to the platform and the implementation of a community notes system to replace third-party fact-checkers.
YouTube is rolling back its restrictive policies surrounding political speech, especially the Covid-19 pandemic and elections. The video platform said its reliance on public health authorities was well intentioned, but expressed regret at its impact on public debate on issues that were far from settled.
More broadly, YouTube admitted senior Biden administration officials conducted extensive outreach to YouTube to influence its approach to “misinformation” and Covid-19 content that did not violate YouTube’s policies.
“Senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies,” the letter reads.
While YouTube independently enforced its policies, Biden officials “continued to press the Company” to remove content that did not violate the platform’s policies. The letter calls out Biden and other administration officials for creating a “political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms” under the guise of “misinformation.”
President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order later this week declaring that an emerging deal involving the video-sharing app TikTok meets American security needs and constitutes a qualified divestiture under U.S. law, according to people familiar with the matter.
Under the deal, American tech company Oracle will serve as the app’s security provider, which will independently monitor the source code of the app as well as study how a U.S.-controlled copy of the TikTok content recommendation algorithm operates and interacts with phone features and updates.
Oracle will be required to “retrain” a leased duplicate TikTok algorithm…
So it will not necessarily be a Chinese spyware app any more, but will still be malware for your brain…
Good news from the border! “Texas, Southwest Region See ‘Historically Low’ Southern Border Apprehensions in August.”
Texas’ border jurisdictions are scrambling to manage thousands of pending Operation Lone Star cases after key state partners abruptly pulled out, leaving local officials to coordinate housing and transportation for defendants.
Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith told Texas Scorecard the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) and the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM), both of which helped provide housing for illegal crossers arrested under the border security initiative, are no longer handling those responsibilities.
The Del Rio Processing Center is reportedly shutting down, along with Val Verde County’s detention facility—the original epicenter of Operation Lone Star (OLS) prosecutions.
“We’re left holding the bag,” Smith said. “Counties are having to figure this out on their own without the infrastructure the state had in place.”
Smith said approximately half of all prosecutions tied to OLS in Kinney County have already been resolved, either through pleas or dismissals, but thousands of cases remain active.
According to numbers from the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, more than 2,600 felony cases have already been resolved. Nearly 2,000 cases are still pending, in part due to lengthy appeals.
Meanwhile, the Kinney County Sheriff’s Office has more than 700 outstanding warrants for alleged smugglers and another 1,400 warrants that have not yet been executed because of limited capacity to house and transport defendants.
Kinney County has contracts with about 10 jails across Texas—including some as far away as the Panhandle—but the county jail cannot hold a person beyond 72 hours, as it is considered a temporary holding facility. That has forced sheriffs and prosecutors into a patchwork system for transferring detainees, with major bottlenecks since TDCJ and TDEM stopped coordinating.
The Dolph Briscoe Unit in Dilley and the Segovia Unit in Edinburg, which had filled major housing roles, are no longer available, worsening the shortage.
Plus border counties have been avoid arresting women because they don’t have room for them in separate facilities.
Amazon settles a lawsuit for tricking people into signing up for Prime and making it nearly impossibility to cancel to the tune of $2.5 billion.
So where did President Trump get the crazy idea that using Tylenol during pregnancy could result in autism? A Harvard study. “Using acetaminophen during pregnancy may increase children’s autism and ADHD risk.”
Austin Yogurt Shop Murders finally solved? retired Austin detective John Jones fingered serial killer and rapist Robert Eugene Brashers (who died in a standoff with police in 1999) as the culprit. Brashers is a serial killer and rapist who committed at least three murders between 1990 and 1998 in the states of South Carolina and Missouri. He died in January 1999 by suicide during a standoff with police. Evidently a new type of DNA testing finally matched up Brashers as the culprit.
More scenes from The Fall Of England: “Muslim who shouted ‘I’m going to kill you’ while stabbing man is given suspended sentence by British court; victim charged instead.”
UK’s Labour government thought they could get away with some cost-free virtue signaling by recognizing “a Palestinian state.” Surprise! “UK could face claim for $2,700,000,000,000 in reparations for recognizing Palestinian state.”
Gov. Greg Abbott today announced a $5.5 million grant from Texas for the construction of a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Harris County — one of multiple projects approved under the Texas Jobs, Energy, Technology, and Innovation (JETI) program over the past year.
Abbott joined Eli Lilly and Company executives for a press conference on Tuesday afternoon in Houston to announce its creation of a nearly one million-square foot active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturing facility. The company estimated that it’ll produce around 600 new jobs and will invest more than $6.5 billion within the state.
The grant of $5.5 million towards Lilly’s new project was made possible through the JETI approval process, a property tax abatement program established through contentious legislation passed during the 88th regular legislative session.
House Bill (HB) 5, which was signed into law by Abbott in June 2023, replaced a 20-year-old initiative with a new economic incentive program. It created a pathway for school districts to grant companies a decade-long break in their property tax payments in exchange for relocation to their area. It limited the kinds of companies eligible to receive abatements and grants for projects in Texas, excluding renewable energy projects after negotiations proved its removal to be necessary for passage in the Legislature.
Let me reiterate my general opposition to government subsidies of business in almost all circumstances. Government shouldn’t be in the business of picking winners and losers. However, an end to subsidizing money-losing “renewable energy” sources that made the Texas Interconnect Grid less reliable is a big plus.
One of the first projects approved under JETI this year, also in Harris County, was to assist Summit Next Gen in opening “a world-class sustainable aviation fuel manufacturing and refining facility along the Texas Gulf Coast,” in January 2025. It’s expected to produce over $1.6 billion in capital investment for Texas.
In February, Abbott made two JETI expansion project announcements: one for a new Braven Environmental facility in Texarkana, estimated to rake in more than $145 million in investment for the state, and the other for Vinton Steel’s “advanced manufacturing facility that recycles ferrous scrap into new steel products.” Vinton is expected to invest over $229 million in the state and create an additional 180 new jobs.
Brazos Midland Processing LLC, also known as Brazos Midstream, was announced as an approved recipient in late August for a “300 million cubic feet per day natural gas processing plant” in Martin County, expected to create $185 million in capital investment.
At Tuesday’s announcement of the new Lilly project, Abbott reiterated that “Texas is the best state in America for doing business.”
And speaking of unreliable renewable energy subsidies: “$2.2 billion solar plant in California scheduled to be turned off after years of wasted money.” That would be Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert, the one that used mirrors to concentrate light onto a single tower, and which fried lots of birds every year. I’m surprised that it was still running, given how markedly unsuccessful it’s been at generating affordable energy years ago. But I may be confusing it with the similar (and similarly failed) Crescent Dunes project. That’s the one that suffered the molten salt leaks… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Dwight also brought news of the deaths of two murderous leftwing scumbags: Would-be Gerald R. Ford assassin Sara Jane Moore, and JoAnne Chesimard, aka “Assata Shakur”, of the Black Liberation Army, who murdered New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster. The latter died in Havana. Rot in hell, commie.
California attorney hit with $10,000 fine for brief filled with fake ChatGPT quotes. “The Los Angeles-area attorney fined last week, Amir Mostafavi, told the court that he did not read text generated by the AI model before submitting the appeal in July 2023, months after OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as capable of passing the bar exam.” The real fine should be no client ever willing to trust his lazy ass again..
This is pretty damn funny:
The White House has placed a photo of an auto-pen signature instead of a portrait of former President Biden on the “Presidential Walk of Fame” pic.twitter.com/4HRU7g8Vr8
“The radical Lower East Side shop that lured drug addicts to its storefront by offering free clothing, food and Narcan suddenly shut down Tuesday — sparking internal warfare and finger pointing.”
Without warning, Bluestockings Cooperative announced that it would permanently shut down after more than 26 years, stating that “daily operations are unfortunately no longer sustainable on multiple fronts.”
“This was our absolute last resort. On top of our crew’s ongoing struggle against the organized abandonment of New York City and the constant crises, the remaining worker-owner and staff are at the limits of what they can manage in terms of health, disability, and finances,” a statement posted to Instagram reads.
The Suffolk Street shop blamed the closure on its failure as a worker-owned cooperative to “come to consensus around the guiding principles and practices Bluestockings should embody” — adding that an inability to align on political and business operations directly led to the setbacks the business faced over the last two years.
“Of course, $12,000 a month in rent, thousands in utilities, and racist, classist violence from ‘neighbors’ certainly didn’t make our work any easier,” the statement continued.
Bluestockings came under intense outrage from its posh Lower East Side neighborhood, which transformed into a “zombie apocalypse” of strung-out junkies shooting up in broad daylight who were drawn to the bookstore’s free and indiscriminate services.
The self-described “radically inclusive” shop was a state-recognized Opiate Overdose Prevention Program and offered “harm reduction services” like Narcan, drug-testing strips and a used needle-drop off bin — which neighbors alleged enabled the junkies.
In recent years, Bluestockings plunged into around $100,000 in debt to its publishers and book distributors, according to reports.
Social justice is incompatible with both profit and basic human decency. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
A shocking budget surplus, the most boring phrase in politics makes a comeback, Trump tours Texas, Paxton slams a scammer, Soros backs the commie, more corruption from Democrats in New York and California, and Stellantis does what it does best: Ruins everything it touches. Plus a bit about Jeffrey Epstein.
I am sure that Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent don’t want to say “I told you so,” but…
Yes, according to CNBC the United States just posted some big economic dubs, with the budget hitting a surplus thanks to the tariffs that – one day, I am constantly assured – will tank the economy.
The U.S. government posted a surplus in June as tariffs gave an extra bump to a sharp increase in receipts, the Treasury Department said Friday.
With government red ink swelling throughout the year, last month saw a surplus of just over $27 billion, following a $316 billion deficit in May.
I just created a tag for “surplus”…
Back in the dim mists of time, someone at National Review noted that “Enhanced Rescission Authority” was possibly the most boring phrase in the English language. Boring or not, it’s now helping Trump cut the deficit.
Vice President JD Vance cast two decisive tie-breaking votes in the Senate on Tuesday to advance a $9.4 billion spending rescissions package backed by President Donald Trump. The measure, which would claw back federal funding from a range of programs, including the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and public broadcasters NPR and PBS, is now headed into a marathon floor debate.
The Senate twice deadlocked at 50-50 on procedural votes to begin debate on the controversial bill. In both instances, Vance stepped in to break the tie and push the measure forward. The rescissions package, approved by the House of Representatives last month, would eliminate approximately $8.3 billion from USAID and $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
Amid the destruction and mourning in Kerrville after the flooding disaster last week, President Donald Trump held a press conference with a number of Texas elected officials where they provided updates on ongoing recovery efforts.
“Well, this a tough one,” Trump somberly stated at the beginning of the press conference. “It’s hard to believe the devastation.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this.”
First Lady Melania Trump also spoke about the stories she has heard from families impacted by the floods.
“We are grieving with you. Our nation is grieving with you.”
Ahead of the Trump press conference, Gov. Greg Abbott announced that the federal government has updated the Presidential Disaster Declaration to include additional Texas counties eligible for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Individual Assistance program.
“We remain committed,” Abbott said during the roundtable, “we’re here for the long run.”
“We will maintain our operations to find everybody that we can, as well as ensure that we build this community from Hunt to Camp Mystic to Kerrville, to down below. We are committed for the long run, not just to rebuild, but to rebuild in a better way.”
At least 160 people remain missing since the floods. Abbott stated during a press conference earlier this week that 109 have been confirmed dead.
“Attorney General Paxton Demands Alleged Texas Flood Fundraising Scam Cease Operations. “In the wake of devastating floods across Central Texas on July 4, a plethora of fundraisers were launched in order to assist affected victims, volunteers, and first responders — one of which Paxton accuses of scamming Texans. Addressed to Tray Coppola, organizer of a GoFundMe marketed as supporting Kerrville flood victims, the letter from the Office of the Attorney General formally demands that he maintain and preserve all records for legal purposes.” Coppola responded to the accusations by screaming racism…
“Illegal From Weed Farm Where Minor Girls Worked Had Convictions for Attempted Rape, Child Molestation.” There’s no illegal alien scumbag whose crimes are too heinous for social justice Democrats hearts to bleed for.
Pay to play, California style: “Corporate Donors Gave Big to a Newsom Family Charity. Then the California Governor Took Their Side on State Issues.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom doesn’t typically get involved in disputes between rival Native American tribes. That changed last year, when Newsom used his office to try to block a small tribe from opening a casino in Northern California.
In August 2024, Newsom’s office sent a letter on his behalf to the Biden Interior Department urging it to reject a $700 million proposed casino project north of San Francisco by the Koi Nation, a tribe with fewer than 100 members. But the Biden administration approved the project anyway, so in May, Newsom sued the Trump administration in a last ditch effort to block the Koi Nation’s casino. Should Newsom get his way, it would be a major win for the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, a major California political donor which operates its own gambling compound just 15 miles away from its rival’s proposed site, which broke ground on a $1 billion expansion in 2023.
A little-known California government disclosure database may shed light on why Newsom took Graton Rancheria’s side in the high-stakes dispute.
In April 2024, a few months before Newsom sent his letter to the Biden Interior Department, the Democratic governor requested Graton Rancheria to contribute $500,000 to his wife’s charity, the California Partners Project. And in April 2025, one month before Newsom filed his lawsuit against the Trump administration, he again asked Graton Rancheria to contribute another $500,000 to his wife’s charity. The tribe cut those checks specifically at Newsom’s request, according to California’s “behested payments” database, which discloses whenever state elected officials request others to make donations on their behalf.
Waste and fraud, New York Governor Grannykiller style: “Governor Andrew Cuomo, before he was unceremoniously forced out of office, convinced state lawmakers to shell out over $100 million to purchase decorative LED lights to enhance the beauty of some of New York’s most iconic bridges…At least $108 million was spent on Cuomo’s “Harbor of Lights” project, which was supposed to install specialty LED lighting on several New York State bridges. The project was pitched as a way to boost tourism, but the lights ended up sitting unused in a warehouse for more than seven years until they were recently auctioned off for less than half a percent of the project’s overall cost.” Plus they paid millions to store them. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
In response to an open records request, the Harris County Housing & Community Development department revealed that it spent $2,071,676.21 in 2024 paying for legal services for illegal aliens.
The services are also available for illegal aliens with criminal records.
Harris County first spent $2,000,000 launching a program called the Immigrant Legal Services Fund (ILSF) in 2020 and has been making payments to the fund since then.
ILSF provides free legal representation in Harris County for people facing deportation from Houston-area detention centers.
Where is the enumerated statute that authorizes Harris County to spend money for illegal alien legal services?
Legal eagle Alan Dershowitz claims that the Trump administration isn’t hiding the names of the alleged pedophiles associated with Epstein; two judges are.
The Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the “blockbuster” story alleging a letter Trump wrote to Epstein for his 50th birthday included some tawdry elements previously worked for Main Justice (his only prior reporting experience listed in his bio).
Main Justice was Glenn Simpson’s wife’s publication. Simpson founded Fusion GPS, which was paid by Hillary Clinton/the DNC (through Perkins Coie) to produce the Steele Dossier at the center of the Russian hoax against Trump.
As the Democrats’ policies grew progressively more anti-American, the gang of hacks, DEI hires, and grifters that once proudly styled itself as the Party of Jefferson and Jackson did everything it could to make people think pointing out that increasingly obvious fact was both ridiculous and offensive. And so, ever fewer people have dared to do so, even as it became even more obvious that hating America and having a taste for Marxism went with being a Democrat like arrogance and self-righteousness went with being Barack Obama.
Now, however, it’s impossible to deny. The best and the brightest among young Democrats are all avowed socialists. The party would have chosen a socialist, Bernie Sanders, as its candidate for president in 2016 and likely also in 2020 if party top dogs hadn’t stepped in and arranged for the candidacy of someone who was at least outwardly more mainstream.
All the while, Democrats insisted their socialism was nothing to be worried about, but was of an extremely cuddly variety. One of the foremost among the party’s up-and-coming new socialists, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Swizzle Stick), maintains that what she has in mind isn’t the bad old socialism of the Soviet Union, Communist China, Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea and the rest, but a type involving more unicorns and moonbeams. “So when millennials talk about concepts like democratic socialism,” she explained, “we’re not talking about these kinds of ‘Red Scare’ bogeyman.” Yeah, tell all the victims of Stalin and Mao that it was just a “scare.” Those hysterical right-wingers were having the vapors over nothing.
Ocasio-Cortez continued, “We’re talking about countries and systems that already exist, that have already been proven to be successful in the modern world. We’re talking about single-payer health care that has already been successful in many different models, from Finland to Canada to the UK.” Great, but none of those countries are actually socialist. Foreign Policy pointed out in 2021 that “Nordic countries are often used internationally to prove that socialism works. It’s true that social democratic parties are enjoying success in this part of the world.” However, it’s not the kind of success that AOC would want to encourage: “Today, the Nordic social democrats have adopted stricter immigration policies, tightened eligibility requirements for welfare benefit systems, taken a tougher stance on crime, and carried out business-friendly policies.”
The brand of socialism that is getting more popular among U.S. Democrats is nothing like that. Instead, we have Zohran Mamdani, who will likely be the next mayor of New York, and has called for “seizing the means of production,” as well as transforming “housing from a private commodity to a public one.” And now there’s Omar Fateh, a candidate for mayor of Minneapolis, who also wants state-owned housing, along with wage rates set by the state. That’s not cuddly Scandinavian socialism. That’s Marxism. Do we have to have actual gulags on American soil to know where it leads?
The Communists are clearly the future of the Democrat Party. Arrayed against their spectre are the party top dogs, not because they’re against their ideology, but because they want to continue the illusion that their party still champions American values. There are still some rubes out there who can be fooled on this point.
Is Mamdani getting money from George Soros? Of course he is.
But in less than a decade, Soros’ ultra-woke grant-making network Open Society Foundation has indirectly funneled a combined $37 million to the Working Families Party and at least other nine left-wing groups whose endorsements and get-out-the-vote groundwork played a pivotal role in helping Mamdani upset ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary, the foundation’s records show.
Since 2016, the far-left, socialist-friendly WFP — which helped score Mandani the Democratic line by brokering cross-endorsement deals that squeezed out Cuomo — has pocketed a staggering $23.7 million from Soros through its nonprofit fundraising arm Working Families Organization Inc.
And at least another $13,944,005 went to the nine nonprofits and their offshoot fundraising entities — including the Make The Road Action ($3,515,00), and social justice nonprofits Community Voices Heard ($2,635,000) and Move On ($2.3 million), and the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace Acton ($650,000), according to records.
Russia will face severe sanctions and tariffs if the country does not sign a ceasefire deal to end the war with Ukraine in 50 days, a White House official confirmed to National Review. President Donald Trump made the announcement in the Oval Office Monday.
“We’re going to be doing very severe tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days,” he said.
The U.S. will impose secondary tariffs on the country at 100 percent, he said. The secondary tariffs would place monetary sanctions on countries that trade with Russia.
The president made the announcement during a meeting with Mark Rutte, secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Rutte has been coordinating European efforts to send more weapons to Ukraine to defend itself against Russian invasion. Under the arrangement, NATO would buy American weapons and pass them on to Kyiv. The president said the U.S. will send billions of dollars worth of weapons to Ukraine through NATO allies in this way.
“We are going to be sending them weapons, and they’re going to be paying for them,” Trump said.
Ukraine will get massive numbers of missiles, air defense systems, and ammunition through the deal, according to Rutte, who said Russian President Vladimir Putin should reconsider peace negotiations.
Undernews: “US Has Launched Over 50 Airstrikes In Somalia In 2025 But Virtually No MSM Coverage…AFRICOM said that the strikes targeted the ISIS affiliate in Somalia’s northeastern Puntland region, to the southeast of the port city of Bossaso.” The group is al-Shabaab, which is also affiliated with
Winning: “Trump Announces Trade Deal With Indonesia, Opening Entire Market to U.S.”
This morning I finalized an important Deal with the Republic of Indonesia after speaking with their Highly Respected President Prabowo Subianto. This landmark Deal opens up Indonesia’s ENTIRE MARKET to the United States for the first time in History. As part of the Agreement, Indonesia has committed to purchasing $15 Billion Dollars in U.S. Energy, $4.5 Billion Dollars in American Agricultural Products, and 50 Boeing Jets, many of them 777’s. For the first time ever, our Ranchers, Farmers, and Fishermen will have Complete and Total Access to the Indonesian Market of over 280 million people. In addition, Indonesia will pay the United States a 19% Tariff on all Goods they export to us, while U.S. Exports to Indonesia are to be Tariff and Non Tariff Barrier FREE. If there is any Transshipment from a higher Tariff Country, then that Tariff will be added on to the Tariff that Indonesia is paying. Thank you to the People of Indonesia for your friendship and commitment to balancing our Trade Deficit. We will keep DELIVERING for the American People, and the People of Indonesia!
“DOJ Fires Former FBI Director’s Daughter, Prosecutor Who Worked on Epstein, Diddy Cases. The U.S. Department of Justice has fired Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI director James Comey and a Manhattan federal prosecutor.”
Good news, everyone! “Department of Justice to Continue Bribery Case Against Congressman Henry Cuellar.” Despite the indictment, Cuellar managed to win reelection over Republican Myra Flores for the Texas 28th Congressional District in 2024. Flores is already raising money for a rematch.
56-year-old Adermis Wilson-Gonzalez, was arrested on June 29 by ICE. He was convicted of hijacking an airplane 22 years ago; the plane he attacked was reportedly flying from Cuba to Key West, Florida.
Among the convictions received by the four illegal aliens from Mexico — Arnulfo Olivares Cervantes, Luis Pablo Vasquez-Estolano, Jose Meza, and Javier Escobar Gonzalez — were offenses for homicide, possession of various illegal substances, sexual assault of a minor, driving while intoxicated, attempted murder, burglary, and unauthorized use of a firearm.
Interesting: “Almost 200 Texas Public School Districts Adopt Four-Day Week.”
In 2015, Kelly Sue DeConnick was praised for “saving comic books.” Instead, she almost killed them. No points for guessing her political agenda…
Steve Miller cancels concert tour due to “climate change.” So no more big old jet airliners for him, and he won’t keep rockin you, baby…
“Memorabilia dealer found dead after alleged $350 million counterfeit confession on Facebook. Brett Lemieux, 45 of Westfield, Ind., was the founder of noted sports memorabilia site MisterManCave, which he claimed sold more than four million counterfeit items.” Caveat emptor. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Democrats violently attack ICE agents for (checks notes) rescuing illegal alien children from a marijuana farm, an Antifa shooter is still at large, a commie funder may be on the run, a bit more on flooding, Jeremy Corbyn is splitting up Labour, miracle on 68th street, and something so meta it hurts.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Just missed this for last week’s LinkSwarm: “2016 Report on Russian Election Interference Was ‘Deliberately Corrupted’ by Top-Ranking Obama Officials. [CIA Director John] Ratcliffe said, ‘This was Obama, Comey, Clapper, and Brennan deciding “We’re going to screw Trump.”‘”
In May, CIA Director John Ratcliffe commissioned members of the agency’s Directorate of Analysis to conduct a “lessons-learned” review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russian interference in the presidential election. The review focused on the ICA’s most controversial judgment: that Russia had interfered in the U.S. presidential election to benefit then-candidate Donald Trump. This was precisely the impression the ICA’s authors intended to convey.
The New York Post’s Miranda Devine, the first journalist to obtain the review, summed up its findings as follows:
The review found that the ICA was deliberately corrupted by then-CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who were “excessively involved” in its drafting, and rushed its completion in a “chaotic,” “atypical” and “markedly unconventional” process that raised questions of a “potential political motive.”
…
Brennan’s decision to include the discredited Steele dossier, over the objections of the CIA’s most senior Russia experts, “undermined the credibility” of the assessment.
Brennan’s determination to include the Steele dossier in the ICA was especially significant given that he knew in July 2016 that it was nothing more than a collection of bogus stories commissioned by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign and conjured up by former British spy Christopher Steele and his sub-sources. And so did then-President Barack Obama.
We know that because in October 2020, Fox News reported that Brennan briefed Obama and others present during a July 28, 2016, Oval Office meeting on “Hillary Clinton’s purported ‘plan’ to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as ‘a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server’ ahead of the 2016 presidential election.”
According to the review, “the ICA authors and multiple senior CIA managers — including the two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia — strongly opposed including the Dossier, asserting that it did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards. … CIA’s Deputy Director for Analysis (DDA) warned in an email to Brennan on December 29 that including it in any form risked ‘the credibility of the entire paper.’”
Still Brennan insisted on including it. His response? “My bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”
The FBI also fought for the dossier’s inclusion. The review stated: “FBI leadership made it clear that their participation in the ICA hinged on the Dossier’s inclusion and, over the next few days, repeatedly pushed to weave references to it throughout the main body of the ICA.”
President Donald Trump accused Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday of spewing “bullsh**,” one day after Trump announced plans to send more weapons to Ukraine to help in its fight against the Kremlin.
“That was a war that should have never happened,” Trump said during a cabinet meeting in Washington, D.C., referring to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “A lot of people are dying and it should end.”
“We get a lot of bullsh** thrown at us by Putin if you want to know the truth. He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless,” he added.
Trump also said he is “looking at” further sanctions against Russia.
The president’s latest comments come after Trump had a phone call with Putin in which the U.S president expressed frustration at the lack of progress toward a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine and said he was “not happy” with Putin.
Hours after that call, Putin launched 550 drones and missiles against Ukraine, in what was the largest single aerial bombardment since Russia’s invasion was launched in 2022.
“He wants to go all the way, just keep killing people, it’s no good,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday, one day after the call.
Trump, on Monday, announced plans to send more weapons to Ukraine, backtracking on his administration’s earlier steps to pause military aid to the country.
Putin didn’t respond to the carrot, so now he’s going to get the stick.
Sudden Putin Death Syndrome strikes again: “Russian minister Roman Starovoit kills himself with Kremlin-gifted gun hours after being dismissed by Putin.”
News from late June you may have missed if you weren’t paying attention, because it got almost no coverage in the media: ‘Trump administration officials on Friday oversaw the signing of a U.S.-brokered peace agreement between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, a deal President Donald Trump said would end ‘one of the worst wars anyone’s ever seen.'”
For all the progressive hand-wringing about a so-called “hard-right Supreme Court,” the data point to something far more measured, even reassuring. Contrary to the narrative that this Court is gripped by ideological warfare, lurching from one 6–3 ruling to the next, the actual record shows a surprising degree of consensus. Indeed, roughly half of all decisions made by the current justices have been unanimous. This is not a Court at war with itself. It is, more often than not, a Court in agreement, even across the ideological spectrum.
Since Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the bench in 2022, the Court’s composition has remained stable, offering scholars and commentators a clear window into its decision-making dynamics. During the 2022 term, nearly 50% of the Court’s rulings were 9–0 decisions. The 2023 term followed closely, with approximately 44% of decisions unanimous. These are not mere statistical anomalies. They reflect a broader pattern that decisively undercuts the claim that the Court is narrowly partisan, dangerously lopsided, or fundamentally broken.
Has communist billionaire and NGO funder Neville Roy Singham fled the country?
“Neville Singham— the billionaire communist with ties to the CCP, who funded the LA riots and used immigration & Mexicans as a Trojan horse for communism— is hiding from our letter requesting testimony,” Rep. Luna wrote on X.
She said, “This poses an issue for delivering subpoena,” adding, “Therefore, if he decides to hide in CHINA, we will now be asking the State Dept. and Treasury to freeze his assets/visa.”
Faster, please. “State Dept. to fire 1,300-plus employees in dramatic reorganization plan.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ, who says that lots of DOJ employees are being let go as well.)
Nothing says how confident Democrats are this year like them pumping $20 million in SuperPAC money into a governor’s race. In New Jersey.
A Democratic super PAC is reserving more than $20 million in TV, digital, and streaming ads in New Jersey in an effort to tamp down Republican inroads in the state during and since the 2024 election and to keep Democratic control of the state’s governorship.
Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill hopes to replace Governor Murphy, who was blocked from running again due to term limits. She is running against Jack Ciattarelli, who is backed by President Trump. Mr. Ciattarelli lost to Mr. Murphy by three points in the last gubernatorial election.
A group backed by the Democratic Governors Association, Greater Garden State, says it is reserving the ad buys early to lock in lower prices and reserve prime ad inventory before airwaves get crowded closer to the November election.
The last time Republicans took the governor’s mansion there was 2009, when widespread dissatisfaction with how far left the newly-elected Obama was moving propelled Chris Christie to the office. Usually the party out of the White House does well in off-year elections, but Trump seems to be driving the enemy before him and hearing the lamentations of their women…
As in the months-long rioting of 2020, leftist politicos assume their street bandits will cause so much mayhem, violence, and chaos that Mr. Trump will either be forced to call out the troops (and thus “prove” he’s Hitler) or be too scared to — only to be blamed for the unrest, which could cost him the midterms.
Yet who or what drives the insane rages of these various armies of the left?
One is an obviously bleeding Democratic Party. Despite gushing about its new DEI, illegal alien, transgender, and Middle Eastern constituents, it has no political power. Its issues are mostly 30-70 losers.
It has little power in the House or Senate beyond fake-filibusters, performative outrage, or profanity-laced rants.
It lost the White House. The Supreme Court eventually nullified the illegality of left-wing district judges.
It does not trust the people, so plebiscites and ballot measures are mostly out.
Two, unlike his first term, Mr. Trump is addressing the causes, not just the symptoms, of the progressive project, whether on the border, crime, cultural issues, or foreign policy.
This time around, there are no John Boltons, no Rex Tillersons, no Alexander Vindmans, and no Anonymouses from the inside to thwart the Trump agenda.
The administration is loyalist and committed to addressing the root causes of the left-wing influence, not just its manifestations.
So, Mr. Trump has focused on leftist sacred cows like NPR, PBS, the elite campuses, the United States Agency for International Development, and the administrative state — all the inculcators and laboratories of leftist ideology.
Finally, the left is outraged that so far, the Trump counterrevolution is working.
The border is closed. Military recruitment has radically recovered.
The budget bill has passed. The Iranian nuclear threat has lessened. NATO is strengthening. The Middle East has a chance for calm.
Tariffs did not cause inflation. Deportations created more, not fewer, American jobs. Biological men will likely no longer be winning women’s athletic contests.
Add it all up, and the impotent left in all its orthodox and street manifestations has become unhinged.
And why not when it rightly fears that not just its power, but the very sources of its power, are in mortal danger?
Violent rioters clashed with federal immigration officers on Thursday after U.S. Customs and Border Protection raided two Southern California cannabis farms, one of which is now under investigation for child labor violations.
Ten illegal immigrant minors, eight of whom were unaccompanied, were rescued from the Camarillo Glass House farm. U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott confirmed that feds have put the farm under investigation for child labor violations.
“This is Newsom’s California,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security arrested dozens of illegal immigrants during the raid and “arrested multiple individuals for impeding [the] operation,” U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli said. The FBI is currently searching for one of those individuals, who appeared to shoot a firearm at law enforcement.
“People are welcome to protest . . . but they can’t impede us from doing our job, that’s a felony,” border czar Tom Homan said on Friday. “What happened in California is just another example of protesters becoming criminals and they’ve been emboldened by even members of Congress who compare ICE to Nazis.”
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) shipped thousands of viral samples to a lab in Wuhan over the course of a 10-year program even though it had no formal agreement with the lab in place, according to previously unreported documents.
The documents show that USAID funded the exportation of 11,000 samples from Yunnan Province, where some of the closest relatives of the COVID-19 virus circulate, to Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic, with no apparent plan for ensuring the samples were not misdirected to bioweapons and remained accessible to the U.S. government.
A $210 million USAID public health program called PREDICT, steered by the University of California-Davis, collected viral samples in countries throughout the globe but lacked long-term storage when funding dried up, according to rudimentary plans in 2019.
USAID’s sample dispensation plan for China is sparse: “No need [sic] information from Yunnan. They were never an official lab partner for PREDICT. All samples they helped collected [sic] are sent to, tested, and stored in Wuhan.”
The “lab” refers to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). WIV was a close partner of USAID contractor EcoHealth Alliance and a slated partner for a PREDICT-like program supported by the State Department. The lab has poor biosafety practices and ties to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). (RELATED: US Group Connected To Wuhan Lab Is Stonewalling Congressional Investigation Of Pandemic Origins, Committee Ranking Member Says)
One of the closest known relatives of the COVID virus is among the viruses sampled with USAID funding.
Len McCluskey has suggested trade unions will reconsider their support for Labour if Jeremy Corbyn launches a new political party. The former leader of Unite, who is a staunch supporter of Mr Corbyn, said thousands of union activists want an alternative to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s party.
Labour is wrangling with growing disaffection with Sir Keir’s leadership and the direction of his government. The PM’s flagship welfare reforms were gutted in a backbench rebellion, Sir Keir was forced into a U-turn on starting a grooming gangs enquiry and rowed back on axing Winter Fuel Allowance payments. He now faces another revolt among his own MPs over special needs provision in schools.
Divisions have also been exposed by the Government’s refusal to scrap the two-child benefit cap, which has angered left-wing Labour MPs. Last week, former Labour MP Zarah Sultana said she was to “co-lead the founding” of a new outfit with Mr Corbyn.
Mr McCluskey told GB News that if the new party proves to be credible, then he would join it, campaign for it and urge trade unions to back it.
The California Department of Education (CDE) on Monday rejected the Trump administration’s demands to keep men out of women’s sports.
The U.S. Department of Education (ED) in June announced it found California in violation of federal civil rights for allowing men to compete in women’s sports and access women’s spaces, such as locker rooms and restrooms. CDE apparently notified ED it would not be complying with the Trump administration’s proposed resolution, Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced on X.
The California department said it “respectfully disagrees” with the Office of Civil Rights’ (OCR) findings and added “it will not sign the Proposed Resolution Agreement,” according to the email posted by McMahon. The California Interscholastic Federation (CIF), which was also found in violation of the same law, told ED it “concurs” with CDE’s response.
“California has just REJECTED our resolution agreement to follow federal law and keep men out of women’s sports,” McMahon wrote in the X post. “Turns out [Democratic California] Gov. [Gavin] Newsom’s acknowledgment that ‘it’s an issue of fairness’ was empty political grandstanding.”
Former President Joe Biden’s physician and friend Dr. Kevin O’Connor declined to answer questions about Biden’s mental decline during his presidency.
O’Connor invoked his Fifth Amendment rights Wednesday and did not answer questions during a closed-door deposition with the House Oversight Committee.
“It’s now clear there was a conspiracy to cover up President Biden’s cognitive decline after Dr. Kevin O’Connor, Biden’s physician and family business associate, refused to answer any questions and chose to hide behind the Fifth Amendment,” said Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky).
“The American people demand transparency but Dr. O’Connor would rather conceal the truth. Dr. O’Connor took the Fifth when asked if he was told to lie about President Biden’s health and whether he was fit to be President of the United States.”
The panel is currently investigating the lengths to which Biden’s top officials covered up his worsening mental acuity and whether Biden’s presidential autopen was used without authorization.
O’Connor’s attorneys said he declined to answer questions because of physician-patient privilege and the pending criminal investigation by the Justice Department.
As Biden’s physician, O’Connor is a key witness for the investigation. Last year, he infamously gave Biden rave reviews in his presidential physical and said he was fit to hold the nation’s highest office. It also remains unclear why Biden’s “aggressive” form of prostate cancer was not diagnosed until after he left office.
Benjamin Hanil Song, 32, of Dallas, has six charges pending in relation to the ambush at the Prairieland Detention Center. Song is believed to have fired towards two correctional officers and one Alvarado Police Department officer.
His charges are listed in a criminal complaint document obtained by FOX 4 on Wednesday as three counts of attempted murder of a federal officer and three of discharging a firearm during, in relation to, and in furtherance of a crime of violence.
The suspect wanted in a recent ambush on an ICE facility is a long-time Antifa member, connected to several left-wing militant groups in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The FBI is searching for Benjamin Song, a 32-year-old from Dallas, who allegedly took part in an “organized attack” against an ICE detention center in Alvarado during Independence Day.
Song was a member of the militant Antifa group Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, and he had a history of left-wing radicalism.
He allegedly bought four guns used in the ICE facility ambush on July 4, which wounded an Alvarado police officer, as The Dallas Express reported. He reportedly hid in the woods near the scene for a day after the shooting, then fled.
The FBI is offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to Song’s arrest, and Gov. Greg Abbott announced July 10 that his office is offering a $10,000 reward.
“The targeted attacks against our federal law enforcement officers is a crime and must end,” Abbott said in the release. “Criminals such as Benjamin Hanil Song will be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Song’s radical activity goes much deeper than this incident.
He was a member of the violent Antifa group Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, known for intimidating people outside drag shows. Song faced a lawsuit for “battery, assault, stalking, and conspiracy” after a confrontation at a 2023 drag show, as The Dallas Express reported. During the event, Fort Worth Police busted violent members of Song’s group.
Song was also reportedly a member of the Socialist Rifle Association. A transgender suspect, accused of shooting and bombing a Tesla dealership, was part of the same organization.
He trained Antifa in firearms and combat in 2022, according to a video uncovered by journalist Andy Ngo.
As the far-left animals were cheering the tragic deaths of white Christian girls, the Austin Firefighters’ Association (AFA) came forward with accusations that Austin Fire Chief Joel Baker might have contributed to the tragedy.
AFA President Bob Nicks stated that the Fire Department turned down an informal request to have Austin firefighters deployed — some of whom have been trained in swiftwater rescue — on July 2 and again on July 3. The union voted unanimously on Tuesday to schedule a no-confidence vote regarding Chief Baker.
“Our guys sat on their a*ses while they’re hearing people [are] dying,” Nicks stated on Monday.
Baker is claiming he wasn’t aware of the two informal requests to have firefighters on the scene as the storm approached.
Why would Baker hold back his first responders? According to a blistering attack posted on Facebook by the AFA, he wanted to save money….
Austin’s KUT News is reporting that Baker has admitted to ordering the fire department to suspend deployments until the end of the fiscal year. Moreover, “The Austin firefighters union said Tuesday it will hold a vote of no confidence in the fire chief this week, accusing him of preventing crews from being deployed ahead of historic flooding that killed over 100 people in Kerr County.”
The National Education Association’s policymaking body voted this week to cut all ties with the Anti-Defamation League over the antisemitism watchdog’s defense of Israel.
The 7,000-member policymaking committee approved New Business Item 39, which says the nation’s largest labor union in the U.S. “will not use, endorse or publicize materials from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), such as its curricular materials or statistics.”
The committee explained its decision by saying, “Despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be.”
Proof, once again, that social justice is racist (and antisemitic) poison.
The New Business Item must receive final approval from the NEA executive committee. If passed, the measure would end a nearly 40-year relationship between the ADL and U.S. schools that has involved curriculum, programming and teacher training.
“With antisemitism at record high levels, it is profoundly disturbing that a group of NEA activists would brazenly attempt to further isolate their Jewish colleagues and push a radical, antisemitic agenda on students,” an ADL spokesperson told National Review.
The NEA is an extension of the Democrat Party’s ideological core, and they’ve gone all in on Palestinian victimhood and Jew-hatred.
Miracle on 68th Street: “New York City Goes Entire Day On July 4 With No Shootings Or Murders.”
Illegal ballot harvesting in Arizona? “Arizona State Representative Rachel Keshel (LD-17)…filed a complaint to the Attorney General, Kris Mayes, over potentially illegal election activities by Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA) on behalf of AZ-7 Democrat congressional candidate Adelita Grijalva, the daughter of the recently deceased Rep. Raul Grijalva.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Randall County Republican Party Chairman Kelly Giles has been indicted by a grand jury on allegations of election fraud that occurred in 2023.
According to the indictment, “while acting in his capacity as Randall County Republican Chair, [Giles] falsely certified on the Texas Secretary of State Candidate Filing System that his application and nominating petition were legally compliant for place on the 2024 Republican Primary Ballot for Randall County Republican Party chair.”
Giles faces a state felony charge for violating the Texas Election Code while acting in his capacity as an elected official.
Bid rigging collusion, Texas style. “Oak View Group LLC Chair and CEO Tim Leiweke has been indicted following an antitrust investigation that uncovered his alleged involvement in bid rigging for the construction of the University of Texas’ Moody Center. When OVG learned that the rival company, Legends Hospitality LLC, an entertainment venture partially owned by Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, was entering the bid for the construction and operation of the new facility, Leiweke offered the company a deal to drop its bid in exchange for lucrative subcontracts.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Good news for a change: “31 workers rescued from LA wastewater tunnel collapse 300 feet underground.”
How the town of Babcock Ranch in Florida was designed to avoid hurricane flooding, partially by including more wetlands.
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Chaos at the border and buying American military tech to oppose China are two of the themes this week:
8,000 illegal aliens await processing underneath the Del Rio bridge on the U.S./Mexican border.
Here’s a drone shot:
BREAKING: Our drone is back over the international bridge in Del Rio, TX. Per source, the number of migrants waiting to be processed has now swelled to approx 8,200. It was 4,000 yesterday AM. Doubled in one day. BP overwhelmed, & I’m told situation is “out of control” @FoxNewspic.twitter.com/ThJJJ0JWCT
Those illegal aliens are there because Democrats and the Biden Administration want them there, so they can turn those illegal aliens into Democratic Party voters via amnesty.
So damaging is that drone footage that the FAA has closed airspace over the bridge to prevent it:
NEW: We’ve learned that the FAA just implemented a two week TFR (Temporary Flight Restrictions) over the international bridge in Del Rio, TX, meaning we can no longer fly our FOX drone over it to show images of the thousands of migrants. FAA says “special security reason”. pic.twitter.com/aJrjAPO2Pz
This effort is just one part of a new partnership between the three countries, dubbed AUKUS, which is short for Australia-United Kingdom-United States, that also includes cooperation in other areas, including long-range strike capabilities, cyber warfare, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. President Biden said AUKUS would help all three countries work more closely together to help ensure peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region in the long-term.
On the whole, this is probably a good move to counter China, and I hear that Canberra was the driving force behind the agreement. All that said, the United States was already in formal alliances with the UK and Australia through other treaties, so it’s not anything like a tectonic shift.
Another sign of the new alliance: The UK is going to station new vessels in the Indo-Pacific. [Senior Royal Navy admiral Tony Radakin] “said that the Taiwan Strait is clearly ‘part of the free and open Indo-Pacific.'”
Naturally France pitched a snit fit over the deal because Australia cancelled a contract with French shipbuilder Naval Group. “This brutal, unilateral and unpredictable decision reminds me a lot of what Mr Trump used to do,” Le Drian told franceinfo radio. “I am angry and bitter. This isn’t done between allies.” Cry some more, Jean-Claude. But it isn’t like France was ever going to come to Australia’s aid in a dust-up with China, so the deal makes sense as drawing Australia closer to the regions remaining nuclear naval powers. (Russia can barely keep its own navy running these days.)
Speaking of possible China opponents buying American technology, Japan is buying more F-35s.
John Durham finally files an indictment over the Russian collusion hoax investigation. “Special counsel John Durham reportedly seeks a grand jury indictment against Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer at a Democratic-allied law firm closely linked to British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier.” That firm, of course, would be Perkins Coie, who you may remember from regular appearances in the Clinton corruption updates.
The Democrats of Texas have long, as in 30 years or more, believed that the Hispanic vote would eventually hand them total control of Texas forever. They believe they need not adjust their policies on faith, family, life, the Second Amendment, taxes — anything — because the party brand itself was enough. If it wasn’t, then they would resort to bullying. They could go all the way left to Wendy Davis and Karl Marx if they wanted to — and they have — and the Hispanic vote would save them.
But a funny thing happened along the way. People like state Rep. Aaron Peña switched parties on principle and others followed them. And more are following them. His daughter, Adrienne Peña-Garza, is quoted in this Texas Monthly story regarding how the Democrats operate when it comes to independent-minded folks like her father and herself.
Peña-Garza, the Hidalgo County Republican chair, said Hispanic South Texans, who have long been conservative, “have become liberated” to vote on their long-held beliefs. “People have been bullied into voting Democrat. If you got involved [in conservative politics], people said, ‘I’m not going to give you this contract; I’m not going to give you this job.’ But I think the bullying has backfired. People are more empowered and courageous.”
When I was reporting on border issues in Hidalgo County during my first stint with PJ Media, I’d hear about the bullying she mentions but it wasn’t provable. Rampant and endemic, but hidden with no paper trails. Tejanos and Tejanas started standing up to it a decade ago, some by running for office, others by working courageously together underground and actually going after some of the political criminality. People noticed. Groups like Hispanic Republicans of Texas and the Conservative Hispanic Society rose up to answer the call outside any party structure. One of the most popular and successful talk radio hosts in the Lone Star State is my friend Chris Salcedo, the “liberty-loving Latino.” The conservative juggernaut is heard expounding on the joys of freedom and how Democrats would take it away on the air every day in Houston and Dallas and nationally on NewsmaxTV.
People are noticing how embarrassingly paternalistic and out-of-touch the Democrats are when it comes to South Texas. They really don’t know Texas at all and haven’t bothered to understand.
Snip.
That’s because they’re not immigrants. Treating them as immigrants cancels their ancestors and their heritage. Tejanos have been in Texas for generations, from the time when it was part of the Spanish Empire. Badly misunderstood and under-reported is the fact that Tejanos are and have been part of the culture of Texas long before we Anglos showed up. By the time my ancestors arrived in Texas in the 1850s and 1860s, Tejanos had been building Texas for more than a century. They’re not immigrants in any sense of the word. They’re Texans and American citizens. They resisted elitist dictator Santa Anna, fought at the Alamo and San Jacinto, they’ve served in every major war defending the United States, they’ve won Medals of Honor and have state veterans homes named after them — and their communities are the most directly affected by the chaos that out-of-state Democrats tend to unleash on the border. They serve in the Border Patrol and the Coast Guard, and they work in the oil fields and own thriving businesses. Coyotes, cartels, drugs, and trafficking all affect Tejano communities first, while the rich Democrats who party at the Met are unaffected personally and weaponize the border as a racial cudgel. RGV citizens are not happy about that and they know whom to blame.
Gov. Greg Abbott visited Houston on Monday to sign new legislation he said would directly address lenient bail practices and rising crime in Harris County.
“Lives are being lost because the criminal justice system in Harris County is not working the way it should,” said Abbott.
Known as the Damon Allen Act, Senate Bill (SB) 6 is named after a state trooper who was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop on Thanksgiving Day 2017. Despite having a history of assaulting a law enforcement officer, the shooter was out on a $15,000 felony bond at the time of the murder.
Allen’s widow, Casey Allen, who has become an advocate for the reforms implemented by SB 6, joined Abbott at the Safer Houston Emergency Summit held by a coalition of ministry groups.
Noting that her husband had been killed by a “violent, repeat offender,” Mrs. Allen added, “The murderer still went to jail, and my life and my kids’ lives were forever changed by actions that can’t be taken back.”
The new law will create an online public safety report for judges and magistrates to access more complete information about a suspect’s criminal history before setting bail. In addition, SB 6 requires additional training for judges and magistrates, and prohibits the release of certain violent suspects or repeat suspects on personal recognizance (PR) bonds.
“Same FBI That Chased Russia Collusion Hoax for Years Covered Up Sexual Abuse of USA Gymnasts.” Why did James Comey’s FBI fail to investigate charges against Larry Nassar?
Now that the Biden EPA has rolled back the conflict-of-interest standards imposed by the Trump EPA on the agency’s outside scientific peer review panels, it has gone back to its old practice of stocking its peer review boards with agency research grant-recipient cronies who can be counted on to rubber-stamp whatever EPA wants to do. The Biden EPA most recently announced the particulate matter (PM) subpanel for the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC). As per below, 17 of the 22 members are current and/or former EPA grantees. The amounts associated with them as principal investigators are shown. Note the largest grantee (Lianne Sheppard, recipient of $60,032,782 in EPA grants) is, naturally, the chairman. Sheppard is also the chairman of the main CASAC panel as well as a member of EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB), a separate outside review panel. The Biden EPA needs a reliable multi-purpose rubber-stamper and that is Sheppard, an activist who sued the Trump EPA because it instituted conflict of interest rules under which she was ineligible to rubber-stamp agency wishes.
Here’s a UK funeral director who claims all the Flu Manchu deaths he’s seeing now are from vaccinations:
Take this with a grain of salt and in the interest of gathering data points.
What. The. Hell. “Apple threatened to kick Facebook off its App Store after a 2019 BBC report detailed how human traffickers were using Facebook to sell victims.” What’s a little sexual slavery compared to all those likes?
Busted!
It appears as though @LanceNBCSD, the assignment editor for the San Diego NBC affiliate, forgot to switch to his anti-Trump burner account… pic.twitter.com/XfAAQX31Ex
Investigators call into hospital asking for the name of the people featured in a news broadcast only to find out they weren't admitted to the hospital!
If you’ve been reading this blog, very little in Darryl Cooper’s piece (coming here via Glenn Greenwald) will be new to you. Everything here (the Russian collusion fantasy, the gaslighting, the massive Democratic Media Complex bias, the FISA abuse, the FBI corruption, etc.) has been covered before. However, Cooper’s value is in boiling down the obvious evidence of corruption in a way that everyone outside the Democratic Media Complex bubble can understand, as indicated by Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump both referencing the Twitter thread version.
The value of the Cooper piece is that it gets us all on the same page.
I’ve had the discussion often enough that I feel comfortable extracting a general theory about where these people are coming from.
Like my friend’s mother, most of them believe some or all of the theories involving fraudulent ballots, voting machines, and the rest. Scratch the surface and you’ll find that they’re not particularly attached to any one of them. The specific theories were almost a kind of synecdoche, a concrete symbol representing a deeply felt, but difficult to describe, sense that whatever happened in 2020, it was not a meaningfully democratic presidential election. The counting delays, the last-minute changes to election procedures, the unprecedented coordinated censorship campaign by Big Tech in defense of Biden were all understood as the culmination of the pan-institutional anti-Trump campaign they’d watched unfold for over four years.
Many of them deny it now, but a lot of 2016 Trump voters were worried during the early stages of the Russia collusion investigation. True, the evidence seemed thin, and the very idea that the US and allied security apparatus would allow Trump to take office if they really thought he might be under Russian blackmail seemed a bit preposterous on its face. But to many conservatives in 2016 and early 2017, it seemed equally preposterous that the institutions they trusted, and even the ones they didn’t, would go all-in on a story if there wasn’t at least something to it. Imagine the consequences for these institutions if it turned out there was nothing to it.
We now know that the FBI and other intelligence agencies conducted covert surveillance against members of the Trump campaign based on evidence manufactured by political operatives working for the Clinton campaign, both before and after the election. We know that those involved with the investigation knew the accusations of collusion were part of a campaign “approved by Hillary Clinton… to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.” They might have expected such behavior from the Clintons — politics is a violent game and Hillary’s got a lot of scalps on her wall. But many of the people watching this happen were Tea Party types, in spirit if not in actual fact. They give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday. They have Yellow Ribbon bumper stickers, and fly the POW/MIA flag under the front-porch Stars and Stripes, and curl their lip at people who talk during the National Anthem at ballgames. They’re the people who believed their institutions when they were told Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. To them, the intel community using fake evidence (including falsified documents) to spy on a presidential campaign is a big deal.
It may surprise many liberals, but most conservative normies actually know the Russia collusion case front and back. A whole ecosystem sprouted up to pore over every new development, and conservatives followed the details as avidly as any follower of liberal conspiracy theorists Seth Abramson or Marcy Wheeler. When the world learned of the infamous meeting between Trump campaign officials and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, it seemed like a problem and many Trump supporters took it seriously. Deep down, even those who rejected the possibility of open collusion worried that one of Trump’s inexperienced family members, or else a sketchy operative glomming onto the campaign, might have done something that, whatever its real gravity, could be successfully framed in a manner to sway a dozen of John McCain’s friends in the Senate.
Then, Trump supporters learned that Veselnitskaya was working with Fusion GPS, the political research and PR firm used by the Clinton campaign to formulate and spread the collusion accusations. They learned that the anti-Clinton information that was supposed to be the subject of the notorious meeting was provided by the same firm. They learned that she’d had dinner with Glenn Simpson, the owner of Fusion GPS, both the day before, and the day after the meeting. Needless to say, Trump supporters were skeptical of Simpson’s claim that Veselnitskaya’s meeting with Trump campaign officials never came up during either of their dinner dates, given that the content of the meeting was alleged to be the very treasonous, impeachable crime his firm was being paid to investigate and publicize.
There’s no need to relive all the details of the Russia collusion scam. The point is that conservatives were following it all very closely, in real time, and they noticed when things didn’t add up. After James Comey told Fox News’ Bret Baier that, even at the time of their interview in April 2018, he didn’t know who had funded the Steele dossier, conservatives noticed when the December 2019 DOJ Inspector General’s report showed that he had been informed of the dossier’s provenance in October 2016. And they asked themselves: Why would he lie? Lying to investigators about one’s knowledge of or involvement in a potentially criminal act is often taken as consciousness of guilt.
This was the bone that stuck in conservatives’ craw throughout the two years of hysteria over Russia. Why would Comey lie about knowing where the dossier came from? Why would the people involved claim to have seen evidence that never seemed to materialize? If the point of the Special Counsel is to take the investigation out of the hands of line investigators to avoid the appearance of political influence, why staff the office with known partisans and the same FBI personnel who originated and oversaw the case? Why was the relationship between Russian lawyer Veselnitskaya and Fusion GPS being dismissed as irrelevant? Why were people who must know better continuing to insist that the Steele dossier was originally funded by Republicans long after the claim had been debunked? Why wasn’t the media asking even these most obvious questions? And why were they giving themselves awards for refusing to ask those questions, and viciously attacking journalists who did ask them? These journalists are intelligent people — at least they present that way on television. Is it possible that these questions simply had not occurred to them? It seemed unlikely.
Many Trump supporters reasoned that it was simply not possible to carry on this campaign without some degree of coordination. That coordination perhaps did not take place in smoke-filled rooms (though they weren’t ruling it out), but at least through incentives, pressure, and vague but certain threats all well-understood by people who moved about in the same professional and social class, and who complained that they could “smell the Trump support” when they were unfortunate enough to have to patronize a Wal-Mart.
If there was a time when Trump supporters feared Robert Mueller’s goon squad, that time had passed by the 2018 midterm elections. Conservatives knew by then the whole case was bunk, and they were salivating at the prospect of watching him get chopped up by the likes of Jim Jordan and Devin Nunes. And he did.
The collusion case wasn’t only used to damage Trump in the polls or distract from his political agenda. It was used as an open threat to keep people from working in the administration. Taking a job in the Trump administration meant having one’s entire life investigated for anything that could fill CNN’s anti-Trump content requirement for another few days, whether or not it held up to scrutiny. Many administration employees quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees due to an investigation that was known by its progenitors to be a political operation. The Department of Justice, press, and government used falsehoods to destroy lives and actively subvert an elected administration almost from the start. Perhaps worst of all, some portion of the American population was driven to the edge of madness by two years of being told that American politics had become a real-life version of The Manchurian Candidate. And not by Alex Jones, but by intelligence chiefs and politicians, amplified by media organizations which threw every ounce of their accumulated credibility behind the insanity.
For two years, Trump supporters had been called traitors and Russian bots for casting ballots for “Vladimir Putin’s c*ck holster.” They’d been subjected to a two-year gaslighting campaign by politicians, government agencies, and elite media. It took real fortitude to stand up to the unanimous mockery and scorn of these powerful institutions. But those institutions had gambled their power and credibility, and they’d lost, and now Trump supporters expected a reckoning. When no reckoning was forthcoming – when the Greenwalds, and Taibbis, and Matés of the world were not handed the New York Times’ revoked Pulitzers for correctly and courageously standing against the tsunami on the biggest political story in years – these people shed many illusions about how power really operates in their country.
Trump supporters know – I think everyone knows – that Donald Trump would have been impeached and probably indicted if Robert Mueller had proven that he’d paid a foreign spy to gather damaging information on Hillary Clinton from sources connected to Russian intelligence and disseminate that information in the press. Many of Trump’s own supporters wouldn’t have objected to his removal if that had happened. Of course that is exactly what the Clinton campaign actually did, yet there were no consequences for it. Indeed, there has been almost no criticism of it.
Trump supporters had gone from worrying the collusion might be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to seeing proof that it was all a scam. Then they watched as every institution – government agencies, the press, Congressional committees, academia – blew right past it and gaslit them for another year. To this day, something like half the country still believes that Trump was caught red-handed engaging in treason with Russia, and only escaped a public hanging because of a DOJ technicality regarding the indictment of sitting presidents. Most galling, conservatives suspect that within a few decades liberals will use their command over the culture to ensure that virtually everyone believes it. This is where people whose political identities have for decades been largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed not only partisan, but all institutional boundaries. They’d been taught that America didn’t have Regimes, but what else was this thing they’d seen step out from the shadows to unite against their interloper president?
GOP propaganda still has many conservatives thinking in terms of partisan binaries. Even the dreaded RINO (Republican-In-Name-Only) slur serves the purposes of the party, because it implies that the Democrats represent an irreconcilable opposition. But many Trump supporters see clearly that the Regime is not partisan. They know that the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it had been a Tulsi Gabbard vs. Jeb Bush election. It’s hard to describe to people on the Left, who are used to thinking of American government as a conspiracy and are weaned on stories about Watergate, COINTELPRO, and Saddam’s WMD, how shocking and disillusioning this was for people who encouraged their sons and daughters to go fight for their country when George W. Bush declared war on Iraq.
They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the press is what radicalized them. Trump supporters have more contempt for journalists than they have for any politician or government official, because they feel most betrayed by them. The idea that the corporate press is driven by ratings and sensationalism has become untenable over the last several years. If that were true, there’d be a microphone in the face of every executive branch official demanding to know what the former Secretary of Labor meant when he said that Jeffrey Epstein “belonged to intelligence.” The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime these people are now seeing in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period.
This I have to disagree with. Conservative had long known of the media’s leftwing bias, and the open Obama adulation pretty much disabused any conservatives of the notion that the press was a neutral reporter of truth. The difference is that the Trump years showed the media wasn’t even bothering to try to hide that bias anymore, and were caught nakedly, blatantly manufacturing fake news to support their narrative. That’s the difference.
This is profoundly disorienting. Again, we’re not talking about pre-2016 Greenwald readers or even Ron Paul libertarians, who swallowed half a bottle of red pills long ago. These are people who attacked Edward Snowden for “betraying his country,” and who only now are beginning to see that they might have been wrong. It’s not because the parties have been reversed, and it’s not because they’re bitter over losing. They just didn’t know. If any country is going to function over the long-term, not everyone can be a revolutionary. Most people have to believe what they’re told and go with the flow most of the time. These were those people. I’m pretty conservative by temperament, but most of my political friends are on the Left. I spend a good deal of our conversations simply trying to convince them that these people are not demons, and that this political moment is pregnant with opportunity.
Many Trump supporters don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know with apodictic certainty that the press, the FBI, and even the courts would lie to them if they were. They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true. They watched the corporate press behave like animals for four years. Tens of millions of people will always see Brett Kavanaugh as a gang rapist, based on an unproven accusation, because of CNN. And CNN seems proud of that. They helped lead a lynch mob against a high school kid. They cheered on the most deadly and destructive riots in decades.
Conservatives have always complained that the media had a liberal bias. Fine, whatever: they still thought the press would admit the truth if they were cornered. They don’t believe that anymore. What they’ve witnessed in recent years has shown them that the corporate press will say anything, do anything, to achieve a political objective, or simply to ruin someone they perceive as an opponent. Since my casual Twitter thread ended up in the mouths of Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, I’ve received hundreds of messages from people saying that I should prepare to be targeted. Others don’t think that will happen, but even most of them don’t think it’s an irrational concern. We’ve seen an elderly lady receive physical threats after a CNN reporter accosted her at home to accuse her of aiding Kremlin disinformation ops. We’ve seen them threaten to dox someone for making a humorous meme.
Throughout 2020, the corporate press used its platform to excuse and encourage political violence. Time Magazine told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving – among others – leaders of the protests, local officials responsible for managing them, and members of the media charged with reporting on the events. They worked together with Silicon Valley to control the messaging about the ongoing crisis for maximum political effect. In case of a Trump victory, the same organization had protesters ready to be activated by text message in 400 cities the day after the election. Every town with a population over 50,000 would have been in for some pre-planned, centrally-controlled mayhem. In other countries we call that a color revolution.
Throughout the summer, establishment governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures, often over the protests of the state legislatures. It wasn’t only the mass mailing of live ballots: they also lowered signature matching standards, axed existing voter ID and notarization requirements, and more. Many people reading this might think those were necessary changes, either due to the virus or to prevent potential voter suppression. I won’t argue the point, but the fact is that the US Constitution states plainly that “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections… shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” As far as conservatives were concerned, state governors used COVID to unconstitutionally usurp their legislatures’ authority to unilaterally alter voting procedures just months before an election in order to help Biden make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system. Lawyers can argue over the legitimacy of the procedural modifications; the point is that conservatives believe in their bones – and I think they’re probably right – that the cases would have been treated differently, in both the media and in court, if the parties were reversed.
And then came the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Liberals dismiss the incident because, after four years of obsessing over the activities of the Trump children, they insist they’re not interested in the behavior of the candidate’s family members. But this misses the point entirely. Big Tech ran a coordinated censorship campaign against a major American newspaper while the rest of the media spread base propaganda to protect a political candidate. And once again, the campaign crossed institutional boundaries, with dozens of former intelligence officials throwing their weight behind the baseless and now-discredited claim that the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. That lie was promoted by Big Tech companies, while the true information being reported by The New York Post about the laptop’s contents was suppressed. That is what happened.
Even the tech companies themselves now admit it was a “mistake” – Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said it was an error and apologized – but the election is over, Joe Biden has appointed Facebook’s government regulations executive as his ethics arbiter, so who cares, right? It hardly needs saying that if The New York Times had Donald Trump Jr.’s laptop, full of pictures of him smoking crack and engaging in group sex, lots of lurid family drama, and emails with pretty direct discussions of political corruption, the Paper of Record would not have had its accounts suspended for reporting on it. Let’s remember that stories of Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact across the media spectrum and used as the basis for a multi-year criminal investigation, when the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its primary source.
The reaction of Trump supporters to all this was not, “no fair!” That was how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012 or Harry Reid’s lie that Romney paid no federal taxes. This is different. Now they were beginning to see, accurately, that the institutions of their country — all of them — had been captured by people prepared to use any means to exclude them from the political process. And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote. Trump got 13 million more votes than in 2016 – 10 million more than Hillary Clinton had gotten.
As election day became election night and the tallies rolled in, Trump supporters allowed themselves some hope. But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark around midnight, they knew.
Snip.
Trump voters were adamant that the governors’ changes to election procedures were unconstitutional. Everything in law is open to interpretation, but it doesn’t require a Harvard Law degree to read Article 1, Section 4 (quoted above) and come to that conclusion. But they also knew the cases wouldn’t see a courtroom until after the election, and what judge was going to make a ruling that would be framed as a judicial coup d’etat just because some governors didn’t go through the proper channels? Even a judge willing to accept the personal risk would have also to be willing to inflict the chaos that would follow on the country. Even a well-intentioned judge could convince himself that, whatever happened or didn’t happen, as a public servant he had no right to impose an opinion guaranteed to lead to mass violence – because the threat was not implied, it was direct. Some Trump supporters, unfortunately, thought the license for political violence applied to everyone; the hundreds of them now sitting in federal jails learned the hard way that it wasn’t true.
From the perspective of Trump’s supporters, the entrenched bureaucracy and security state subverted their populist president from day one. The natural guardrails of the Fourth Estate were removed because the press was part of the operation. Election rules were changed in an unconstitutional manner that could only be challenged after the deed was done, when judges and officials would be playing chicken with a direct threat of burning cities. Political violence was legitimized and encouraged. Major newspapers and sitting presidents were banned from social media, while the opposition enjoyed free rein to promote stories that were discredited once it was too late to matter. Conservatives put these things together and concluded that, whatever happened on November 3, 2020, it was not a free and fair democratic election in any sense that would have had meaning before Donald J. Trump was a candidate.
Trump supporters were led down some rabbit holes. But they are absolutely right that the institutions and power centers of this country have been monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to prevent them getting it.
The Virtual DNC starts today, voters are not sold on Slow Joe, Team Obama thinks he’s an idiot, he hates the Second Amendment, and we harvest a week’s worth of Kamala Harris bashing. Plus a whole bunch of the Babylon Bee. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
The virtual Democratic National Convention starts today. Finally, a political event that combines the dignity of a Zoom meeting with the raw excitement of a Zoom meeting.
Many of these voters prioritize the economy as their #1 issue in this election and continue to trust Trump on that issue, saying the economy was doing well before the pandemic.
In addition to improving the economy and trying to bring more jobs to the U.S., Jeff O. said he’s picking Trump because “I don’t think that Biden is mentally capable of being president.”
Matt T. described Biden as “up there in age” and “showing signs of dementia” as well as “a puppet” who is “controlled by a lot of people in the deep state.” He went on to define that term as “the lobbyists, the people that have the big money, the people that have influence on a lot of the politicians.”
As we enter the final 90 days of the November presidential campaign, a few truths are crystalizing about the “Biden problem,” or the inability of a 77-year-old Joe Biden to conduct a “normal” campaign.
Biden’s cognitive challenges are increasing geometrically, whether as a result of months of relative inactivity and lack of stimulation or just consistent with the medical trajectory of his affliction. His lot is increasingly similar to historical figures such as 67-year-old President William Henry Harrison, William Gladstone’s last tenure as prime minister, Chancellor Hindenburg, or Franklin Roosevelt in late 1944—age and physical infirmities signaling to the concerned that a subordinate might assume power sooner than later.
Snip.
So we are witnessing a campaign never before experienced in American history and not entirely attributable to the plague and quarantine. After all, the fellow septuagenarian Trump, with his own array of medical challenges, insists upon frenetic and near-constant public appearances. His opponent is a noncandidate conducting a noncampaign that demands we ask the question, who exactly is drafting the Biden agenda and strategy? Or, rather, who or what is Biden, if not a composite cat’s paw of an anonymous left-wing central committee?
When Biden speaks for more than a few minutes without a script or a minder in his basement, the results are often racist of the sort in the Black Lives Matter era that otherwise would be rightly damned and called out as disqualifying. If his inner racialist persona continues to surface, Biden’s insensitivities threaten to expose a muzzled BLM as a mere transparent effort to grab power rather than to address “systemic racism” of the sort the exempt Biden seems to exude.
Biden needs the minority vote in overwhelming numbers, as he realized in his late comeback in the primaries. But the continuance of his often angry, unapologetic racialist nonsense suggests that his cognitive issues trump his political sense of self-control.
The inner Biden at 77 is turning out to be an unabashed bigot in the age of “cancel culture” and thought crimes that has apparently declared him immune from the opprobrium reserved for any such speech.
For Biden, if any African American doesn’t vote for him, then “you ain’t black”—a charge fired back at black podcaster with near venom. Biden more calmly assures us, in his all-knowing Bideneque wisdom, that Americans can’t tell Asians in general apart—channeling the ancient racist trope that “they all look alike.”
In his scrambled sociology, blacks are unimaginatively monolithic politically, while Latinos are diverse and more flexible. Biden seems to have no notion that “Latino” is a sort of construct to encompass everyone from a Brazilian aristocrat to an immigrant from the state of Oaxaca, and not comparable to the more inclusive and precise term “African American.” Moreover, while the black leadership in Congress may be politically monolithic, there are millions of blacks who oppose abortion, defunding the police, and illegal immigration.
You could certainly see technocratic eye-rolling at times,” said Jen Psaki, the former White House communications director. Young White House aides frequently mocked Biden’s gaffes and lack of discipline in comparison to the almost clerical Obama. They would chortle at how Biden, like an elderly uncle at Thanksgiving, would launch into extended monologues that everyone had heard before.
Former administration officials treated Biden dismissively in their memoirs.
Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, who was known for his mind-meld with the president, wrote in his memoir that “in the Situation Room, Biden could be something of an unguided missile.”
Former FBI Director James Comey recalled in his book that “Obama would have a series of exchanges heading a conversation very clearly and crisply in Direction A. Then, at some point, Biden would jump in with, ‘Can I ask something, Mr. President?’”
Comey continued: “Obama would politely agree, but something in his expression suggested he knew full well that for the next five or 10 minutes we would all be heading in Direction Z. After listening and patiently waiting, President Obama would then bring the conversation back on course.”
Baggage, for starters. Enough baggage to fill a fleet of 747s. Tyler goes over much of it here and here.
Harris has been a, shall we say, problematic candidate from the get-go. Her tenures as both the district attorney in San Francisco and the attorney general of California left a lot to be desired. I wrote in a post early last year speculating that she may be her own toughest obstacle because of this:
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) is not only running against an ever-growing field of fellow Democrats for the 2020 presidential election, but also against what may prove to be a couple of far more formidable opponents: her own records as the district attorney of San Francisco and later the attorney general of California.
What’s problematic for Harris is that the people who have the most problems with her records are the very progressives she seeks to secure as her base.
A Capitol Hill friend of mine joked that Harris on the ticket might put California in play for the Republicans, which serves as a humorous segue to the next point here.
Conventional wisdom dictates that the out-of-power party’s nominee chooses a running mate that can deliver votes from a part of the country that the candidate needs.
Spoiler alert: California’s electoral votes were already Biden’s.
From a practical, electoral vote standpoint, Harris brings nothing to the ticket. The deep blue states that were already going to vote for der Bidengaffer are still going to vote for him. Does anyone really think that she is going win over hearts and minds in swing states?
Let us not forget that Harris is available for this gig because she was the biggest flop of the “top-tier” (her words) candidates to have to leave the race (no, Beto was never top-tier). She may have lasted until December of 2019 but I was already doing a Kamala campaign deathwatch in September on the Morning Briefing after the big Dem donors fled her in droves.
I saw in a tweet that he was forefronting the Charlottesville “fine people” hoax. On his first day of campaigning with his running mate, he led with that. I say “he,” but I don’t really believe it’s him. I think it’s more likely that he’s a foggy-minded figurehead, and other people have decided to frame the message like that. I consider these people — whoever they are — despicable. They have chosen quite deliberately to commit to a lie that is intended to make black people feel hated and they are doing it for political gain.
As my earlier post about the tweet says, I blogged in April 2019, “If Biden does not come forward and retract [a video relying on the Charlottesville hoax] and apologize and commit himself to making amends, I consider him disqualified. He does not have the character or brain power to be President.” Now, more than a year later, Biden has done the opposite. He’s doubled down on the lie and he’s making it the centerpiece of his campaign!
Somehow, despite the press blockade, word about Joe Biden has gotten out. Rasmussen got this stunning poll result: 59% of respondents don’t think Biden will be around to finish a four-year term, should he be elected. And it isn’t only Republicans who doubt that Biden will be well enough to serve out a term in office. Forty-nine percent of Democrats agree that if Biden wins, it is likely his vice-president will assume the office within four years. No wonder Biden’s handlers are pondering his Veep selection carefully!
Bear in mind that it is only August. Most people haven’t yet begun paying attention to politics. The public’s perception that Joe Biden is more or less incapacitated will only grow as voters see him in action and begin following events more closely. Of course, the Democrats want to make this year’s election a referendum on President Trump, whom they think they have fatally weakened with non-stop smears over the last four years. They might be right. But I seriously doubt that a majority of Americans will vote for a candidate whom they rightly see as suffering from seriously diminished capacities. Which raises once again the question whether Biden will actually be on the ballot in November.
Joe Biden isn’t leaving his Delaware home for the campaign trail anytime soon.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is gearing up to step into the spotlight when he announces his vice presidential pick and accepts the party’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention this month. But don’t expect a dramatic shift from Biden away from what Republicans tease is his “basement bunker” strategy to that of a news-cycle warrior in the months before Election Day.
When the coronavirus pandemic first shut down normal life in March, political observers immediately wondered how Biden would be able to campaign effectively while cooped up in his basement. A few months later, after he secured a new in-home studio, started a steady stream of digital events, and rose in the polls, Democrats warmed to his low-key campaign while letting President Trump deal with negative press. Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said in June that Biden is “fine in the basement.”
There was a sense, though, that eventually, in the heat of the fall campaign season, Biden would assume a higher profile in the daily news cycle.
But there are indications that the low-key style could be here to stay.
Snip.
His style is so understated lately that journalists have started hinting annoyance that Biden is not participating in tough national interviews. Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace said on-air last month that Biden is due for more press exposure. Following a tense interview Trump did with Axios’s Jonathan Swan, several journalists questioned whether the campaign would allow Swan to interview Biden.
All across America, little girls of alternatively Tamil and Afro-Caribbean descent, depending on which is most politically useful at the moment, who have been endlessly told by unspecified haters that they can never be nominated to be vice president, were inspired at Kamala Harris’ selection by whoever selected her on behalf of Grandpa Badfinger. Yes, if they hook up with a powerful married Democrat man, that initial connection can fuel their rise to power too.
Take that, all you modern-day Bull Connors (Connor was a Democrat, but shhhhhhh)! “I won’t cotton to them little girls of alternatively Tamil and Afro-Caribbean descent, depending on which is most politically useful at the moment, thinkin’ they can be vice president someday,” they drawl as they twirl their mustaches. Well, Kamala showed all the haters. Girls of that oddly specific demographic can be nominated to be vice president, and let’s take it one step further – they don’t even have to hook up with a powerful married Democrat man and fuel their rise to power via that initial connection to do it! Well, sure Kamala did, and so did the ethnically uninteresting Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit, but those little girls can do it themselves. Well, maybe if they are Republicans.
And speaking of Sarah Palin, it’s great to see that it’s once again bad to criticize a woman running for vice president.
Now, criticizing Kamala (pronounced “i wil pr?’ nouns h?r nam ene wa i dam wel plez”) Harris has been officially declared racist and cisgender and sexist, as well as sexist, cisgender, and racist, by The New York Times, all of pinko Twitter, and the Fredocons, so we better not criticize her. Got that? No criticism. You must just sit back and let the tsunami of excitement created by the nomination of this avaricious grasper wash over you.
A recap of how Biden got here. “Biden will be the oldest nominee either party has ever had, and would be the oldest occupant of the White House ever on the day he took the oath. But the younger voters who preferred [Bernie] Sanders did not turn out in significant numbers during the primaries, a fact Sanders himself acknowledged.”
Here’s a detailed breakdown of Biden’s hostility to the Second Amendment, including banning import of some AR-pattern rifles and regulating existing rifles.
Watch this. I happen to think it’s a pretty big deal that Kamala’s record is packed with instances where she denied potentially innocent inmates the right to prove their innocence with a simple DNA test.
“Rose McGowan Calls Out Kamala Harris Over Harvey Weinstein: ‘How Many Predators Bankroll You?‘ “Kamala Harris accepted $2,500 from Harvey Weinstein for her re-election campaign for California attorney general in 2014. Three years later, she received another $2,500 donation from Weinstein for her bid for the U.S. Senate.”
After nearly four solid years of CNN screeching about “speaking truth to power,” network staffers are poised to slink back into their usual habit of acting as pro bono spokespersons for the Democratic presidential ticket.
Pour out a cold one for the Golden Age of Journalism.
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, campaigned together for the first time this week, promising followers in a socially distanced gymnasium that they will return honor and order to the United States.
CNN employees responded to the campaign event with overwhelmingly positive reviews, singling out Harris’s performance as especially praiseworthy. Some hailed the senator’s allegedly extraordinary rhetorical talents. Some proclaimed the moment an especially historic one in American politics. Some theorized that President Trump must really be scared now. Others marveled simply at what a wonderful smile Harris has.
This is all on top of the fact that many of these same CNN staffers are already awestruck by how incredible and historic it is that Biden picked a woman of color to be his running mate.
“I thought Kamala Harris gave a fantastic speech,” said CNN senior political reporter Nia-Malika Henderson. “She absolutely nailed it. I think this is one of the finest performances I’ve seen her deliver in terms of a speech. She has tremendous range as a speaker.”
It goes on like that for quite a while, each sentence more reverential and cloying than the last.
All true. But did any expect otherwise? I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any member of the Democratic Media Complex who’s expressed the slightest reserve about Harris. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Heh:
The best part in all of this shitshow so far is Biden holding the iPhone upside down. pic.twitter.com/j18kuOTePv
Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., used the Kavanaugh nomination in 2018 as a springboard for her failed presidential campaign. Focusing on her support for abortion and position on the Senate Judiciary Committee that handled the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, Harris strongly opposed Kavanaugh’s nomination within moments of it being announced, and long before she had a chance to review his record.
She joined other Democratic presidential hopefuls on the steps of the Supreme Court the next day to further express her opposition. She ran 3,600 different advertisements on Facebook before the second round of hearings began in late September 2018.
“Her performance during the Kavanaugh circus stood out as particularly demagogic, cynical & abysmal,” wrote TownHall political editor Guy Benson.
Within a few seconds of the first hearings being gaveled to order, Harris interrupted the proceedings in an attempt to shut them down on procedural grounds, part of a coordinated attack that included attempts by hundreds of compensated activists to get arrested.
Harris, a former prosecutor, led a line of questioning that was an obvious attempt to put Kavanaugh in a perjury trap, albeit a trap he was able to avoid. Harris began by asking Kavanaugh if he had ever discussed Robert Mueller, the special counsel then investigating the Trump presidential campaign, with anyone.
Biden’s positions on tech. He gives lip-service to the corpse of net neutrality, but he has no problem sucking up to donors who hate it (like Comcast). Doesn’t sound like he wants to keep Trump tariffs on China either, which I’m sure will also please many big business donors…
Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ former National press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray criticized 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden for selecting Democratic California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate.
After the news broke that Biden selected Harris to be his running mate, Joy Gray labeled Harris as America’s “top cop” and blasted the Democratic party.
“We are in the midst of the largest protest movement in American history, the subject of which is excessive policing, and the Democratic Party chose a ‘top cop’ and the author of the Joe Biden crime bill to save us from Trump. The contempt for the base is, wow,” Joy Gray said.
Of course, the Social justice Warriors only think they’re the base. The fact Sanders got his ass kicked by Slow Joe proves otherwise…
Ouch!
When a woman uses her body to advance her career, she hurts other women who choose to advance their careers based upon merit and job performance. Any woman who supports Kamala Harris should understand this. #BidenHarrisLandslide2020#SundayMorning
The Biden mental competence story has now fully morphed into a Monty Python sketch about a dead parrot the owner insists is perfectly healthy. I can't even listen to people claiming Biden is perfectly fine without hearing a British accent.
Kamala Harris is that nasty woman at your husband’s work who looks down on you at the Xmas party because you have kids and who tries to hit on your husband to get ahead.
Idiot rioters and their identifying tattoos, more elected Democrats behaving badly, and a higher than usual helping of cute animals. Enjoy your Friday LinkSwarm!
Borepatch points out that U.S. Wuhan coronavirus deaths hit post-March lows. Also, all U.S. deaths are now far below the norms.
This was not just a bad flu. The data are crystal clear on that.
However, the data did not justify shutting down the economy. The data did not justify preventing you from saying goodbye to Grandma on her deathbed. The data did not justify prohibiting public gatherings at funerals. The data did not justify shutting down Sunday church. The data did not justify shutting down the schools. The data don’t justify mandatory mask wearing. The data don’t justify the hype.
George Soros-backed St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner, who charged Mark and Patricia McCloskey with felonies for using guns to protect their homes, illegally took several trips took several trips paid for by activist groups that she failed to disclose. Fair and Just Prosecution is the name of the activist group in question.
Tennessee Democratic state senator Katrina Robinson was charged with swindling $600,000 in federal funds to pay for her wedding and a lavish lifestyle.
“Say Her Name” is one of the slogans that activists have connected to this Louisville shooting, but if we want to understand why police shot Breonna Taylor, there is another name that needs to be said — Jamarcus Glover.
Glover is a 30-year-old narcotics trafficker who police say was dealing crack cocaine and marijuana out of a “trap house” on Elliott Avenue in Louisville’s west side. According to a police affidavit, detectives had Glover and his accomplice Adrian Walker under surveillance, and had seen their car — a red Dodge Charger with Mississippi plates — “make frequent trips” from the Elliott Avenue “trap house” to an apartment 10 miles away on Springfield Drive. Detective Joshua Jaynes wrote in the affidavit that Glover was using the Springfield Drive apartment as his mailing address; Jaynes said he had witnessed Glover pick up a postal package at the apartment; and, citing his “training and experience,” Jaynes stated his belief that Glover “may be keeping narcotics and/or proceeds from the sale of narcotics” at the Springfield Drive apartment. All of this was stated in an application for a search warrant of the Springfield Drive apartment where Breonna Taylor lived.
You see, Jamarcus Glover was Breonna Taylor’s ex-boyfriend. They broke up a couple years ago, according to a lawyer for Taylor’s family who said she maintained a “passive friendship” with Glover. This “friendship” apparently included allowing Glover to receive his mail at her apartment, and, although there is no evidence that Taylor was ever involved in Glover’s drug operation, the “training and experience” of Detective Jaynes led him to believe there must be some connection. This was convincing enough for Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Mary Shaw, who approved the so-called “no-knock” warrant for Taylor’s apartment, and also approved nearly identical warrants for the four other addresses linked to Glover’s drug operation, including the Elliott Avenue “trap house.”
Louisville police served all five warrants almost simultaneously, shortly after midnight on March 13. Glover was arrested at the Elliott Avenue address, but the raid on Taylor’s apartment went horribly wrong. Police Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, who was part of the five-man squad assigned to serve the warrant on the Springfield Drive address, said the squad was told in a preliminary briefing that this was a “soft target” because Taylor was believed to be alone in the apartment. Therefore, Sgt. Mattingly said, the decision was made for officers to knock on the door and announce themselves as police, despite the authorization for a “no-knock” entry. Sgt. Mattingly knocked for about a minute, he said, before the supervising lieutenant ordered them to “hit it,” using a battering ram to breach the door.
Inside the apartment, however, Breonna Taylor was not alone. She had a new boyfriend visiting her, and they were watching a movie in her bedroom. The boyfriend, Kenneth Walker (no relation to Glover’s accomplice Adrian Walker) had a legally owned pistol, and when he heard somebody pounding on the front door, he grabbed his weapon. Why? Because he was “scared to death,” believing that the person pounding on the door might be Taylor’s drug-dealer ex-boyfriend. Walker and Taylor emerged from the bedroom into the hallway of the apartment and, Walker said, Taylor called out, “Who is it?”
The next thing that happened, in Walker’s description of the incident, is the door “comes off its hinges” — the police are busting in, but he doesn’t know it’s the police. If you’re dating a drug dealer’s ex-girlfriend and somebody busts through your door at 12:30 in the morning, what do you do?
Walker fired a shot, hitting Sgt. Mattingly in the thigh, and Sgt. Mattingly immediately returned fire, getting off six shots. Two other officers also opened fire. In total, police fired at least 22 shots, none of which hit Walker, but Taylor was struck eight times and died on the scene. Although a grand jury indicted Walker on a charge of attempted murder of a police officer, that charge was dismissed in May at the request of Commonwealth’s Attorney Tom Wine.
Lest people think I always follow President Trump’s policy position, here’s another one I differ on: Russia shouldn’t be let back into the G7 as long as they’re occupying parts of Ukraine.
Speaking of super-genius rioters and tattoos, Edward Thomas Schinzing was arrested on federal arson charges in Portland thanks to the fact he was shirtless and had his own name tattooed across his back.
The Washington press corps seems engaged in a collective demonstration of the legal concept of willful blindness, or deliberately ignoring the facts, following the release of yet another declassified document which directly refutes prior statements about the investigation into Russia collusion. The document shows that FBI officials used a national security briefing of then candidate Donald Trump and his top aides to gather possible evidence for Crossfire Hurricane, its code name for the Russia investigation.
It is astonishing that the media refuses to see what is one of the biggest stories in decades. The Obama administration targeted the campaign of the opposing party based on false evidence. The media covered Obama administration officials ridiculing the suggestions of spying on the Trump campaign and of improper conduct with the Russia investigation. When Attorney General William Barr told the Senate last year that he believed spying did occur, he was lambasted in the media, including by James Comey and others involved in that investigation. The mocking “wow” response of the fired FBI director received extensive coverage.
The new document shows that, in summer 2016, FBI agent Joe Pientka briefed Trump campaign advisers Michael Flynn and Chris Christie over national security issues, standard practice ahead of the election. It had a discussion of Russian interference. But this was different. The document detailing the questions asked by Trump and his aides and their reactions was filed several days after that meeting under Crossfire Hurricane and Crossfire Razor, the FBI investigation of Flynn. The two FBI officials listed who approved the report are Kevin Clinesmith and Peter Strzok.
Clinesmith is the former FBI lawyer responsible for the FISA surveillance conducted on members of the Trump campaign. He opposed Trump and sent an email after the election declaring “viva the resistance.” He is now under review for possible criminal charges for altering a FISA court filing. The FBI used Trump adviser Carter Page as the basis for the original FISA application, due to his contacts with Russians. After that surveillance was approved, however, federal officials discredited the collusion allegations and noted that Page was a CIA asset. Clinesmith had allegedly changed the information to state that Page was not working for the CIA.
Meet the source for all the most salacious claims in the debunked Steele dossier: Russian-born habitual drunk Igor Danchenko, who used to work for the Brookings Institution.
From the “facts pulled out of our ass” department:
Other outlets have asked for this evidence too, and have similarly come up with nothing.
"Richmond officials have presented no direct evidence showing white supremacists organized the protest, encouraged violence or participated in any property damage."https://t.co/RJKpblJXi5
Well, every single gun nut in America has spent their entire adult life being continually mocked, insulted, and belittled by the left. You’ve done nothing but paint us as the bad guys.
In Hollywood, we’re always evil, stupid, violent, malicious, redneck, racist, murderers. That’s so ingrained in the liberal religion that when “ally” Harvey Weinstein was trying to get out of being a sleazy rapist, his repentance consisted of promising to make more movies about how the NRA is bad.
In the news, everything is always our fault. If there is a mass murder, we can always count on the vultures to swoop in and blame America’s gun culture. They flog it for weeks on end, 24/7 coverage, hoping for gun control. And if the identity of the shooter doesn’t fit the narrative, it drops off the news in mere hours.
And then at the local, state, and federal level, legally speaking, the left fucks us at every opportunity. You ban everything you can get away with. You ban things that literally make no sense. You ban shit just out of spite.
When we fight back against gun control laws, you declare we are stupid because only the police should have guns (hey, aren’t those the guys you are protesting right now?)
“Stupid racist rednecks! We live in a civilized society! Don’t you realize the police will protect us?” until when your democrat cities are on fire, and you call 911 and the operator tells you sorry, the police can’t come to your house right now, please try not to get murdered… How is that strict gun control working out for you?
Then you did everything in your power to chase gun owners out of your sainted liberal strongholds. You passed laws. You banned everything we like. Forced all the shooting ranges to close. Forced most of the gun stores to close. And just generally let us know that our kind is not welcome there.
But now you’ve started some shit, YOU want US to go into democrat cities, with democrat mayors, and democrat police chiefs enforcing democrat policies which cause strife among democrats, in order to get into gun fights on your behalf?
How fucking gullible do you think we are? 😀 Like holy shit. Damn dude!
Because we all know that literally 30 seconds after a gun nut blows away a government employee on your behalf, then all the national media coverage of the riots will instantly cease (sorta like the Corona Virus coverage did) and it’ll be back to the news breathlessly reporting about right wing extremist gun nuts, and all you useless fucks would go back to whining for more dumb ass gun control.
You’ve already thrown the black community under the bus, cheering as their neighborhoods get burned and yours are safe. Seriously, white liberals are the shittiest “allies” in history, and your moral foundation has the consistency of Play-Doh. Your moral compass is a wind sock.
Hey remember how Joe Biden swore up and down he wasn’t behind the Michael Flynn unmasking scandal? Well, guess what?
Former vice president Joe Biden appears on a declassified list of Obama administration officials who requested the unmasking of former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn.
The list, obtained by CBS News, shows that Biden’s office made its request to see Flynn’s identity on January 12, 2017 — the same day that Washington Post columnist David Ignatius broke news of Flynn’s calls with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. While the NSA says it “cannot confirm” that those listed personally saw the information, the list also names former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, former CIA director John Brennan, and former FBI director James Comey.
Wow, it’s like they got the band back together!
Power in particular sought to obtain Flynn’s redacted identity at least seven times, including twice before Flynn’s phone call with Kislyak, despite swearing under oath she “didn’t recall” doing so, which only makes sense if she’s suffering from Biden-levels of cognitive decline.
Here’s the actual list in convenient Tweet form:
SCOOP @CBSNews obtains @RichardGrenell notification to congress declassified “unmasking list” Flynn between late 2016 and January 2017 – Read 3 pages provided by NSA here pic.twitter.com/NozVpQlRn2
Deputy chief of mission Kelly Degnan (and Trump’s ambassador to Georgia…for now)
Director of Obama White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs Patrick Conlon
Principal deputy director of National Intelligence Stephanie O’Sullivan
Deputy director of National Intelligence for Intelligence Integration Michael Dempsey
Obama Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew
Acting assistant secretary of the Treasury Arthur “Danny” McGlynn
Acting deputy assistant of the Treasury Mike Neufeld
Deputy secretary of the Treasury Sarah Raskin
Undersecretary of the Treasury Nathan Sheets
Acting undersecretary of the Treasury Adam Szubin
NATO advisor Robert Bell
Defense adviser for Russia at NATO Lt. Col. Paul Geehreng
Deputy defense adviser for NATO James Hursh
Deputy chief of U.S. Mission at NATO Lee Litzenberger
Deputy secretary of Energy Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall
Permanent NATO representative Douglas Lute
Political officer at NATO Scott Parish
Political adviser at NATO Tamir Waser
Ambassador to Russia John Tefft
Ambassador to Turkey John Bass
Looks like it was easier to unmask General Flynn than it was to get tickets to Hamilton.
Why so many people at Treasury for an ostensible national security matter? Why so many at NATO? Did they think Flynn was going to sell Putin defense plans (presumably after killing moose and squirrel)?
Democrats and their allies, who like to pretend that President Obama’s only scandalous act was wearing a tan suit, are going spend the next few months gaslighting the public by focusing on the most feverish accusations against Obama. But the fact is that we already have more compelling evidence that the Obama administration engaged in misconduct than we ever did for opening the Russian-collusion investigation.
It is not conspiracy-mongering to note that the investigation into Trump was predicated on an opposition-research document filled with fabulism and, most likely, Russian disinformation. We know the DOJ withheld contradictory evidence when it began spying on those in Trump’s orbit. We have proof that many of the relevant FISA-warrant applications — almost every one of them, actually — were based on “fabricated” evidence or riddled with errors. We know that members of the Obama administration, who had no genuine role in counterintelligence operations, repeatedly unmasked Trump’s allies. And we now know that, despite a dearth of evidence, the FBI railroaded Michael Flynn into a guilty plea so it could keep the investigation going.
What’s more, the larger context only makes all of these facts more damning. By 2016, the Obama administration’s intelligence community had normalized domestic spying. Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, famously lied about snooping on American citizens to Congress. His CIA director, John Brennan, oversaw an agency that felt comfortable spying on the Senate, with at least five of his underlings breaking into congressional computer files. His attorney general, Eric Holder, invoked the Espionage Act to spy on a Fox News journalist, shopping his case to three judges until he found one who let him name the reporter as a co-conspirator. The Obama administration also spied on Associated Press reporters, which the news organization called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion.” And though it’s been long forgotten, Obama officials were caught monitoring the conversations of members of Congress who opposed the Iran nuclear deal.
Want to guess who TeamBiden is spinning the revelation? Would you believe that it’s all because of…racism?
Still more evidence that Tara Reade complained about Biden surfaces, plus stories of just how extensively Beijing Joe pandered to China. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Remember all those polls showing Biden up big over Trump? Fugitaboutit. “According to an extensive survey by the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government released in late April, only 34 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 say they have a favorable view of the former vice president, with just 8 percent saying they have a “very favorable” opinion of Biden. In the same survey, 47 percent of young people said they have an unfavorable view of Biden.”
The advantages for the Democrats in swapping in a different candidate should be obvious. While many, like DNC Chair Tom Perez, seem to be immune to embarrassment and can blithely ignore charges of hypocrisy, the public isn’t going to be so easily deceived. Holding Biden to the same standard that Brett Kavanaugh was (or at least giving the impression of doing that) would at least make them consistent.
But there’s more to the story than that. Without intending to do so, Tara Reade could wind up providing a plausible cover story for removing a candidate that has a lot more problems than one sexual assault allegation. The fact that Uncle Joe has been locked up in his basement by the pandemic is probably the only thing stopping his campaign from turning into even more of a trainwreck. The few live interviews he’s done recently have ranged from being mild and uninteresting to downright alarming when his mind appears to wander, he stumbles over his words and careens from one topic to another.
It just seems to be increasingly obvious that Joe Biden is well past his Best Sell By Date. And this is the guy that will have to go toe-to-toe with Donald Trump on the debate stage sooner or later. Swapping him out for someone younger, sharper, and preferably without a sexual assault scandal dogging their heels would probably pay big benefits.
More on the same subject. “By now, it can’t genuinely be disputed that Reade told others about being sexually harassed while working for Biden. And although the husband didn’t mention assault or Biden himself, others have said that Reade alleged assault by Biden.”
Reade says she didn’t use “sexual harassment” (or “rape”) in the original announcement because she “chickened out.”
Remember how New York unilaterally cancelled it’s Democratic presidential primary? A federal judge says “Not so fast.”
Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang challenged New York’s decision to cancel its Democratic primary, scheduled for June 23. The state chose to do so because it’s obvious former Vice President Joe Biden will win the nomination and the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, which has ravaged the state.
Judge Analise Torres ruled that New York must have its Democratic primary, finding the cancellation unconstitutional, and it must include “all qualified candidates.”
New York removed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) because he suspended his campaign in April. He wanted to stay on the remaining ballots to gain delegates as a way to pressure the Democratic Party to bend its platform to his radical ideas.
Tara Reade claims to be a loyal Democrat, and she might be doing her party a huge favor. Her accusation that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993 gives Democrats a plausible excuse to ditch the former vice president as their 2020 presidential nominee, thus sparing themselves a likely disaster in the fall campaign. To put it as bluntly as possible, Biden’s mental decline is so obvious as to be an embarrassment, as he stumbles in every interview, even with the most friendly journalists. Democrats and their friends in the media attempting to push Biden’s candidacy forward resemble nothing so much as the cast of the 1989 comedy Weekend at Bernie’s, hauling around their dead boss’s corpse and trying to pretend he’s still alive.
Many Democrats, of course, claim that Biden’s mind is unimpaired, or at least not bad enough to prevent him from defeating President Trump in November. Such Democrats apparently believe that Trump is so unpopular that doubts about Biden’s mental acuity will make no difference. This attitude is part of what can be called the “referendum” perspective on the fall campaign. Rather than seeing the election as a choice between two candidates, instead these Democrats expect voters to go to the polls to vote against the incumbent. The success of Democrats in the 2018 midterm election encourages this view, which was the subject of an Associated Press article over the weekend, reporting that “Biden campaign aides say they are bullish on the prospects of winning states Trump carried in 2016.”
Maybe so, but maybe these Biden campaign aides are just blowing smoke. It is impossible to believe they haven’t noticed that their candidate is a few fries short of a Happy Meal. Every TV interview provides further evidence that the 77-year-old Biden is non compos mentis.
The impossible dream: Making Joe Biden go viral (for reasons other than his Senior Moments). His team’s solution? Pure pablum. It’s the strategy that combines the honesty of a bank’s email laying out its Covid-19 strategy with the homespun forthrightness of an insurance company email announcing its Covid-19 strategy…
Is it any wonder that Democrats are starting to wonder if they’ve bought a pig in a poke, and just how to pawn him off on somebody else?
Just as bad for the Dems on the electability issue, a new poll shows that young voters — a key party constituency — just aren’t that into the 77-year-old who first ran for president before any of them were born. The Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Institute of Politics poll shows that “only 34 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 say they have a favorable view of the former vice president,” with just 8 percent at “very favorable.” Nearly half — 47 percent — said they have an unfavorable view of the former Veep.
Trump voters might skew older, but they’ll crawl over broken glass to vote for POTUS in November. A recent Emerson poll found that Trump has a 19-point advantage in the enthusiasm gap, 64%-45%.
After New York canceled its primary vote last week, we learned that while it would be both risky and difficult, it is still possible for Democrats to nominate someone other than Biden:
As of April 27, the former vice president has 1,305 of the 1,991 delegates needed to clinch a first-round coronation at the party’s convention. New York offered 320 delegates up for grabs, 274 pledged to the primary winner; a prize that would have brought Biden closer to the nomination.
If New York’s decision triggers other states to cancel their own primaries, it is entirely possible that Biden could arrive at the Democratic convention without a guarantee of the nomination.
Larger states with upcoming primary votes include Georgia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, plus a few medium-size states like Maryland, Indiana, Kentucky, and Louisiana. Pennsylvania and Indiana have already delayed their votes, but if they and a few others like them decide instead to cancel as New York did, then that would be a clear indication that the DNC has decided to shove Biden out onto an ice floe for an ignominious retirement from presidential politics.
Biden was winning the nomination largely because he was not the socialist Bernie Sanders, who terrified the Democratic establishment.
Biden was also not Michael Bloomberg. The multibillionaire former New York City mayor jumped into the race when Biden faltered and Sanders seemed unstoppable. But Bloomberg spent $1 billion only to confirm that he was haughty, a poor debater, and an even worse campaigner. He often appeared to be an apologist for China and seemed clueless about the interior of the United States.
The least offensive candidate left standing was Biden. Many Democratic primary voters initially had written him off as an inept retread, a blowhard, and an impediment to the leftward, identity-politics trajectory of the newly progressive Democratic party.
On the campaign trail, Biden insulted several voters, using insults such as “fat,” “damn liar,” and, weirdly, “lying dog-faced pony soldier.”
Long ago he spun tall tales about how in his youth he had taken on a Delaware street gang with a 6-foot chain or slammed a bully’s face into a store counter. More recently, he taunted President Trump with tough-guy boasts about taking him behind the proverbial gym and beating him up.
Biden has been unable to keep his hands off women. Even his supporters cringed when he was seen sniffing the hair, rubbing the shoulders or whispering into the ears of unsuspecting females, some of them minors. Stranger still, Biden waxed on about his commitment to the #MeToo movement. The handsy Biden has insisted that women who made accusations of sexual harassment must be believed.
The more House Democrats attacked Donald Trump for supposedly pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden’s wheeler-dealer son Hunter, the more Biden’s own suspect dealings with Ukraine surfaced. Such scrutiny followed from Biden’s boast, caught on video, that he had leveraged Ukraine by threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees unless a Ukrainian prosecutor was fired. That prosecutor had wanted to investigate the Ukrainian company for which Hunter Biden worked.
During the year-long rise, fall, and rise of his campaign, the 77-year-old Biden often appeared confused. He was occasionally unable to remember names, places, or dates. Biden would try to speak extempore but seemingly forget what he was trying to say.
The coronavirus epidemic and subsequent lockdown seemed to offer rest for Biden. But the more he recuperated from campaigning and sent out video communiques from his basement, the more he appeared to confirm that his problem was not simple exhaustion or age but real cognitive impairment.
With the Democratic nomination a lock, Biden assumed liberal reporters would allow him to campaign as a virtual candidate. They would forget his lapses and ignore prior controversies, including the sexual assault allegations by Tara Reade, a former aide.
At first, the media complied — as it always had with Biden’s troublesome habit of violating the personal space of women, his bizarre put-downs on the campaign trail, his exaggerated he-man stories, his mental lapses, and his dealings with Ukraine. Again, to the Democratic establishment, Biden was far preferable to Sanders. Had the socialist Sanders won the nomination, he likely would have wrecked the Democratic Party in 2020.
But Biden misjudged the liberal media. Reporters were at first willing to overlook his liabilities. But the more Reade persisted in her accusations and the more the media ignored them, the more embarrassing the media’s utter hypocrisy became. Journalists had torn apart Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh over allegations of sexual assault, after all.
So suddenly the press decided that Biden was no longer worth shielding. Yet the change of heart was not entirely for fear of appearing hypocritical. Rather, the media seems terrified of Biden’s increasingly obvious cognitive decline.
In other words, the media was most certainly not going to be degraded on behalf of a nominee who may no longer seem viable.
Meanwhile, Lisa Bloom says she believes Tara Reade but is voting for Biden anyway. “Shut up and vote for the rapist!”
Reade, at this point, has more people who she told around the time of the assault than Ford has had ever. She has more credibility than Ford ever had.
What is remarkable is not the leftwing pundits and Democrats who deny this. It is expected that the very Democrats who condemned Kavanaugh would try to obfuscate on this. What is remarkable is the media. Where is Ronan Farrow or the New Yorker or Jane Meyer or NBC News or the rest of them? The only prominent talking head who currently has a justification for silence is Michael Avenatti and that’s because he is in jail. The very people who tried to bring down Kavanaugh hiding behind the veneer of objective reporters are now no where to be found or are trying to throw up Potemkin Villages of obfuscation to avoid having to deal with Reade’s allegations.
If you realize that Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Joe Biden, and the laundry list of others were never about #metoo or sexual harassment or assault, but over whether or not people should be able to murder babies, you’ll understand the double standard. The Brett Kavanaugh attacks and Joe Biden defenses have never been about the patriarchy or power. They have always been about preserving the right to kill kids.
Democrats should see themselves in the mirror when they see Trump supporters. So long as their guy can beat the right, they’ll embrace whatever it is. They’ll never admit it, but they’ll know it is true even as they try to distinguish.
On January 5, 2017, a meeting was held in the Obama White House in the Oval Office. Both President Obama and Vice President Biden attended. This meeting, it turns out, was critical to the anti-Trump operation by the Obama administration, reports Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist. “It was at this meeting that Obama gave guidance to key officials who would be tasked with protecting his administration’s utilization of secretly funded Clinton campaign research, which alleged Trump was involved in a treasonous plot to collude with Russia, from being discovered or stopped by the incoming administration,” she wrote.
Also in attendance at this meeting was then-CIA Director John Brennan, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, then-national security adviser Susan Rice, then-FBI Director James Comey, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and other members of the national security council.
It was at this meeting that Barack Obama spoke with Yates and Comey about wiretapped conversations of Trump’s incoming National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the Trump transition, indicating that President Obama was directly knowledgeable of the efforts to surveil the Trump campaign and undermine the incoming administration.
It was 2012 and Joe was thinking about his future. A year earlier his best friend, Senator Chris Dodd, had left the Senate to run the MPAA. The MPAA was Hollywood’s trade association and the movie industry, reading its own writing on the wall, wanted into China, and was willing to sell its soul to make a deal.
Biden wanted Hollywood cash for a future presidential campaign.
Dodd had been one of the sleaziest figures in the Senate, even by the low standards of the era, eager to do favors for any well-heeled industry from finance to entertainment. His friendship with Biden gave him a direct pipeline into the Obama administration. And Dodd gave Biden a pipeline into Hollywood.
“Joe was our champion inside the White House,” Dodd later said.
Two years later, in 2014, Biden began an address to the MPAA by joking, “there have been the rumors all those years when Chris and I served in the Senate that although I was chairman, he controlled me.”
“We’ve just given new life to those rumors,” he continued, describing how he had left a meeting with Obama and Chancellor Merkel, telling Obama that he had to address the MPAA.
“There is no question that you’ve got the right guy with the right influence,” Biden concluded.
And that’s exactly what Biden had been proving in Los Angeles as he surrounded Xi with Hollywood tycoons, especially Jeffrey Katzenberg, a major donor to his 2020 campaign, and cut a deal with the Chinese thug to increase the quota of Hollywood movies allowed in by the Chinese Communist regime.
Funny how the sleaziest Democrats have such lucrative employment after they leave office. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Remember, Scott Adams pegged Harris as the veep pick back in December, despite the fact that “Adams thinks Harris is the worst candidate to ever be in any presidential race.”
Michigan Democratic Governor Grethen “Obergruperfuhrer” Whitmer says she’s “quite comfortable” in believing that Joe Biden is innocent because “he has a (D) after his name.” (I may be paraphrasing a tad…)
