Conflicting economic signals, more Democrat fraud uncovered, more criminal illegal aliens deported, Ukraine sinks more Russian ships and ignites more Russian oil refineries, more Winning, more media companies still try to cling to woke (but Victoria’s Secret wises up), and videos that will break your brain. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Personally, it’s been an eventful week. I opened an IRA to move money into from a 401K so I can move some of it to my checking, but it always takes longer than they promise. And my dog managed to catch a skunk, who seemed to spray directly into his mouth from the way he was frothing. So I bought some carpet stuff to get the second-hand Eue de Skunk out of my carpets. (From the description of other people whose dogs have been skunked, I don’t think he got much of a dose except in his mouth and on his head, so I suspect I haven’t had it as bad as some people.)
The closely watched employment report from the Labor Department on Friday painted an upbeat picture of the jobs market. The economy added 93,000 more jobs in March and April than previously estimated and the unemployment rate held at 4.3% for a third consecutive month.
But: “Tech job cuts surge, hitting a nearly two-year high. Big Tech in May announced the most job cuts in almost two years — more than 38,000 in total, according to new data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The tech sector has announced 123,653 cuts in 2026, a 65% increase over the same period last year.” So the economy is doing great! Except for the part of it that could hire me…
Russ Vought at OMB has just overhauled $1 TRILLION in federal grants by adding: Strict E-Verify requirements, English-language rules, and political appointee oversight to ensure taxpayer dollars go to American citizens first.
Vought’s new proposal replaces automatic payouts with “pay for performance” standards. Grants can now be terminated for waste, fraud, underperformance, or pushing anti-American priorities like DEI, gender ideology, or Green New Scam programs.
No more blank checks and fraud complaints go STRAIGHT to inspectors general and U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro within 10 days.
Sounds like a great start, but the fact that the federal government is handing out $1 trillion in grants seems like a problem in and of itself…
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin says he has made several criminal referrals after uncovering a major political enrichment scandal that routed billions in Biden-era green energy grants to Democrat cronies. “It’s about self-dealing,” Zeldin tells Just the News.
Zeldin said he has canceled or stopped about $29 billion in EPA grants – including one for $2 billion to a nonprofit tied to longtime Georgia Democrat election activist and failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams – after unmasking a series of pass-through groups used to route taxpayer monies to the politically connected.
“As you look through all of these pass-through entities, you’re seeing so many connections to former Obama and Biden administration officials and Democratic donors, people who were former Cabinet members, other high-ranking administration officials,” he said during a wide-ranging interview Monday on the John Solomon Reports podcast.
Zeldin: “Blatant waste and abuse.”
Zeldin said he has referred several of the transactions to the EPA inspector general, the agency’s chief watchdog, and the Justice Department for possible prosecution or further investigation. “Those referrals have been made,” he said.
Zeldin said some of the allegations have their roots in legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act, when Congress and the White House were all in Democrat hands. “They included all of this funding in this so-called Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. And then they would work with these different agencies of the Biden administration to get it out to their unqualified friends. The whole thing just feels criminal,” he said. “[…] This is clearly something that falls into the category of blatant waste and abuse.”
Zeldin has repeatedly singled out the Biden administration’s $2 billion grant to Power Forward Communities, a nonprofit tied to the former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abrams. The funds were awarded in 2024 to finance “residential decarbonization,” which was an effort to replace gas furnaces and other appliances with electric ones.
Abrams reportedly “played a pivotal role” in establishing the group, according to Fox News.
The award came under scrutiny after it was revealed Power Forward Communities had reported only $100 the year before the award. The Trump administration’s EPA announced in February 2025 it was taking measures to get the money back as part of an overall effort to claw back funding rushed out the door in the final days of the Biden administration.
There doesn’t seem to be a single federal agency the Democrat Party didn’t treat as a giant bag of graft.
“SCOTUS Allows Alabama Congressional Map Likely to Net GOP House Seat. Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District, currently represented by Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures, is now widely viewed as a likely Republican pickup.”
The Supreme Court ruled 6–3 on Tuesday night that Alabama may use a congressional map drawn in 2023 for this year’s elections, reversing a lower federal court’s decision that the plan unlawfully diluted the voting power of black residents.
This ruling reduces the number of majority-black congressional districts in the state from two to one and is widely expected to give Republicans one additional House seat in the upcoming midterm elections.
“Superseding Indictment Alleges SPLC Funded ‘Ku Klux Klan garments’ and ‘Cross-Burning Events.’ Asserts wide-ranging wire and bank fraud ‘to disguise the true nature, source, ownership, and control of the fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid’ to extremist group members SPLC supposedly was fighting.”
From the Introduction to the Superseding Indictment:
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s (“SPLC”) stated mission included the dismantling of white supremacy and confronting hate across the country. However, unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the National Alliance. The SPLC’s paid informants (“field sources”) engaged in the active promotion of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website. The SPLC also had a field source who was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Virginia. That field source made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. In order to covertly pay its field sources, the SPLC opened bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities. The covert nature of the accounts allowed the SPLC to disguise the true nature, source, ownership, and control of the fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid the field sources. In order to keep the scheme going, the SPLC made a series of false statements related to the operation of the accounts.
The Superseding Indictment summarizes the structure of SPLC’s alleged fraudulent operation:
10. Starting in the 1980s, the SPLC began operating a covert network of individuals who were either associated with violent extremist organizations or who had infiltrated such organizations at the SPLC’s direction. These individuals were referred to by some high-level employees within the SPLC as the “field sources” or the “Fs.” Upon entering into an agreement with an F, the SPLC assigned each F a unique number. The SPLC assigned these numbers in chronological order. The SPLC then paid the Fs with donor money.
11. Between in or about 2010 through in or about 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled approximately $4.1 million dollars in tax-exempt donor funds to a series of fictitious accounts described hereinafter. The general purpose of these fictious accounts was to pay Fs who were either leading or affiliated with multiple violent extremist organizations. Fs used the money donors gave to the SPLC to, among other things:
a. Attend extremist group rallies across the country;
b. Host extremist group rallies throughout the country;
c. Grow existing chapters of extremist groups;
d. Create new chapters of extremist groups;
e. Recruit new individuals into extremist groups;
f. Make donations to extremist group leaders;
g. Purchase materials for cross burnings;
h. Purchase materials to make Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods;
1. Create racist paraphernalia that extremist groups sold at rallies;
J. Publish extremist literature used in the recruiting of more members; and
k. Pay everyday living expenses, which allowed the Fs to focus on their extremistgroups rather than seeking other employment.
12. Certain SPLC employees knew that Fs used donors’ money to actively recruit new members and grow their violent extremist organizations.
There allegedly were fictitious entities set up to conceal what SPLC was doing:
15. To secretly funnel donors’ money to the Fs, employees at the SPLC, including a person who would become the SPLC’s Chief Financial Officer (“Employee-I”) and the person who would become Director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project (“Employee-2”) among others, opened and/or modified a series of bank accounts at Bank-I and Bank-2 in the name of various fictitious entities, including the following:
a. Center Investigative Agency (“CIA”);
b. Fox Photography;
c. North West Technologies (“North West Tech”);
d. Tech Writers Group (“Tech Writers”);
e. Rare Books Warehouse (“Rare Books”);
f. Imagery Ink;
g. J&J Electronics;
h. Kelly ‘s Marine; and
1. Turner Personnel
16. These fictitious entities were never incorporated, had no bonafide employees, and conducted no legitimate business.
More at the link. But it certainly sounds like they were breaking a whole host of laws, including deceptive trade practices, and possibly tax fraud.
“Multiple Drone Strikes on ST-68 Radars, Pantsir SAM System and Big Logistics Hub.” There have been a lot of reports about how Ukrainian attacks are wrecking logistics well back of the front lines, and I should probably do a separate post on that when I have the time.
“Mala Tokmachka. Here, Ukrainians completely broke Russian forces who have now spent a historically long time trying to capture a tiny village.” “These repetitive assaults have been producing mounting casualties for more than four years now.” “The battle for the tiny Mala Tokmachka has turned into the longest battle in history, even exceeding the Siege of the major town of Leningrad in the Second World War, which lasted eight hundred and seventy-two days and was an important turning point and a win for the Soviets.”
“Latest ICE roundup nabs pedophiles, violent criminals. Under the Trump administration, DHS has sought to implement the president’s mass deportation agenda to remove as many as 22 million illegal aliens from the U.S.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday unveiled the latest alien criminals in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody, which included pedophiles and persons convicted of violent crimes.
Snip.
Topping the list was Carlos Sanchez-Benitez of El Salvador, who was convicted for second-degree vehicular manslaughter.
Lauro Javier Miron-Tapia of Mexico was convicted for lewd acts with a minor child under 14 years old.
Daniel Alexis Casasola-Rivera of Mexico was convicted for a lewd act with a child under 14 years old.
Nun Hawi Tuam of Myanmar was convicted for aggravated sexual battery.
Franklin William Orellana-Maya of Honduras was convicted for sexual assault.
Yermy Hernandez-Castro of Honduras was convicted for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
Geovanny Gonzalez-Gonzalez of Nicaragua was convicted for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, battery by strangulation.
Ivan Jayasi of Mexico was convicted for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon.
Mario Zendejas-Gomez of Mexico was convicted for fourth-degree assault, obstructing law enforcement, and no contact order violation.
Miguel Sosa of Cuba was convicted for cocaine trafficking.
Oriol Mora-Arroyo of Mexico was convicted for attempted trafficking of a schedule II-controlled substance and carrying a concealed gun.
Juan Flores-Archaga of Honduras was convicted for third-degree burglary: illegal entry with intent to commit a crime.
Jhonathan Perla-Bonilla of Honduras was convicted for strongarm robbery and burglary of occupied conveyance.
Alexei Marti-Martinez of Cuba was convicted for grand theft.
Pedro Wladimir Contreras-Perez of Ecuador was convicted for larceny and licensing violation.
All of the UK seems furious over the death of Henry Nowak from stab wounds in police custody after his attacker accused his victim of being racist. “Police handcuffed Nowak, who had been stabbed by Sikh immigrant Vickrum Digwa, believing the Sikh man’s claim that Nowak had made a racist remark. Nowak told police he had been stabbed and couldn’t breathe, but officers simply left him on the ground as he lost consciousness and died.” So just like George Floyd, except Nowak was a real victim rather than a career criminal high on fentanyl.
The House Judiciary Committee said that it has uncovered new funding links between the Biden administration and left-wing groups that oppose the Israeli government, as well as groups with ties to terrorist organizations
A May 29 committee memorandum, which JNS obtained exclusively and which was addressed to committee members from the Republican-led committee staff, addresses “new information about the Biden-Harris administration helping to fund protests against the Netanyahu government.”
It alleges that U.S.-based organizations, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Tides Network, “provided over $5 million to groups that funded radical anti-Israel protests in the U.S. and Israel, and supported multiple terrorist-linked NGOs.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the committee, told JNS that the funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the State Department and other federal agencies raised questions about the misuse of federal dollars.
“You’re taking taxpayer money, you’re supposed to be doing good work,” the congressman said. “Why in the heck is it going to groups that are pro-Hamas?”
“Our government is sending American tax dollars to NGOs that are undermining our ally—our best ally—the State of Israel,” he told JNS. “That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”
The memo provides new details, after the committee released the initial findings of its investigation in 2025.
It describes a web of financial connections, in which the Biden administration “provided grant funds to groups that contributed directly and indirectly to the judicial reform protests that sought to undermine the Israeli government.”
“Documents suggest that the Jewish Communal Fund, and its grantees, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and PEF Israel Endowment Funds, may have violated their tax-exempt status by funding groups engaged in radical anti-government campaigns in Israel,” the memo says.
“Another U.S. government grantee, Abraham Initiatives, similarly led anti-government protests in Israel and, according to a 2023 audit, the organization failed to comply with anti-terrorism procedures in a USAID-funded program,” per the memo.
Between 2016 and 2022, the Tides Network received $30 million from USAID, while Abraham Initiatives received about $2.05 million in government funds between 2018 and 2021.
Some of the money that the Biden administration provided to these groups was intended for projects unrelated to Israel.
In the case of Tides, the $30 million went to “a civil development program in regions of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific.”
The report argues that money intended for one project freed these organizations to fund activism in Israel to oppose the judicial reform efforts of the Netanyahu government.
“Money is fungible,” Jordan told JNS. “It’s tough to track exactly, but it looks like some of this money was also then being run through one or two NGOs, winding up on college campuses to promote all the crazy antisemitic, anti-Israel stuff on campuses.”
“Even worse yet, it looks like some of it maybe even funded organizations that had links to terrorism,” he said.
In one example, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA) “received millions of dollars in grants from the Biden-Harris Administration’s USAID, State Department and Department of Defense,” the committee memo says.
RPA then donated $557,000 to its “affiliate and partner,” the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), per the memo.
RBF, in turn, has “donated $190,000 to Defense for Children International Palestine, an Israel-designated terrorist organization with ties to the U.S.-designated terrorist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,” according to the memo.
RBF has also made donations to Jewish Voice for Peace, one of the main organizers of anti-Israel demonstrations in the United States, and to Alliance for Global Justice, a U.S.-based non-profit that the committee alleges has provided funding to the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network.
The Biden administration designated Samidoun as a front for the PFLP in 2024.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled his administration’s new housing initiative on Tuesday to considerable fanfare. The plan, titled “Block by Block,” aims to build 200,000 new affordable housing units and preserve or stabilize another 200,000 over the next decade.
The administration’s website describes “Block by Block” as “a sweeping blueprint to tackle New York City’s deepening housing crisis with the urgency and scale the moment demands. Spanning the full breadth of housing policy, from new construction to tenant protections to public housing, homeownership and worker protections, the plan lays out a comprehensive strategy to make New York City more affordable for working people.”
The reality is that this plan would significantly expand the power and protections afforded to renters, fulfilling a promise Mamdani made repeatedly on the campaign trail.
It would also impose steep penalties on landlords who allow their buildings to fall into disrepair and, in some cases, even transfer ownership of neglected properties.
The mayor smiled broadly as he announced his administration’s astounding plan to seize and redistribute properties owned by neglectful landlords — a proposal taken right out of the Marxist playbook.
“Through our new citywide campaign, Fix the City, we will focus on the worst landlords in New York City,” the mayor said, to much applause. “When necessary we will take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers.”
He continued, “And for buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we will work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards – stewards that include community land trusts, nonprofits or even the tenants themselves.”
If you’re wondering how low the administration might actually set the bar for “neglect,” and what new regulations and/or coercive tax measures it may impose on current property owners to achieve its goals, you’re not alone.
And how much of this “neglected” property belongs to his political enemies?
173 House Democrats vote against resolution honoring police amid rising attacks
House Democrats split over a resolution backing law enforcement as assaults on officers surged last year.
Just 29 House Democrats on Wednesday voted for a GOP-authored measure paying tribute to the “extraordinary sacrifice” law enforcement officers make and criticizing the defund the police movement for jeopardizing public safety.
Meanwhile, 173 Democrats voted with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., against the resolution, while every GOP lawmaker present supported it.
7News confirmed that a man accused of sexually assaulting a woman in the stairwell of an Arlington parking garage is in the country illegally.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis told 7News Reporter Nick Minock that Cristobal Liobardo Vasquez-Sanchez is from El Salvador and had prior charges for rape, sexual assault, property damage, drug possession, and larceny.
Sounds like a good candidate for deportation back to El Salvador’s notoriously fun gang prison.
Speaking of tattooed Democrat lunatics, “Dem congressional candidate charged with terrorist threats after pulling gun on government officials.” “Kirill Basin, 40, allegedly threatened two Maui County workers during the terrifying incident at around 9:30 a.m. on Friday before fleeing the building in Wailuku, Civil Beat reported. The longshot candidate for Hawaii’s 2nd Congressional District was arrested at his home around 12:30 p.m. on a terrorist threatening in the first degree charge.”
Talafreakco.exe: “I’ve never seen a politician memorize his lines like James Talarico and it’s creepy as heck.”
This guy thinks God is non-binary and loves abortion and transing the kids in the name of Jesus, but this right here is the creepy cherry on top of the leftwing cake:
There’s being a robot, and then there’s … this. Do you think Talarico plugs himself into his charging unit at night, or does someone do it for him?
And the cherry on top is you know that he’s absolutely lying about those random “I’m not a Democrat” voters coming up to him…
Disgraced Ex-California Dem Rep. Eric Swalwell is so sleazy that he’s even involved in secondhand sleaze: “Rep. Jimmy Gomez’s mystery makeout IDed as Eric Swalwell’s chief of staff.”
The mystery woman Rep. Jimmy Gomez admitted to making “mistakes” with is his best buddy Eric Swalwell’s former chief of staff, The Post can reveal.
The married California Democrat had an 11-month-old child at home when he was caught in a moment of passion with Swalwell’s minxy congressional aide Yardena Wolf three years ago.
Gomez, the founder of the Dads Caucus in Congress, confessed Tuesday in a statement that he cheated on his wife after The Post’s reporting on the encounter with Wolf, which kicked off a House Ethics Committee investigation, yielding fresh tips on his conduct.
Wolf, at the time 29, and Gomez, then 48, were spotted having an intimate moment against a car outside a party at Swalwell’s home north of the Capitol in the summer of 2023 — about two years into her tenure as Swalwell’s top staffer.
There’s also this: “[Wolf] co-founded an AI fundraising company with Swalwell in 2024.” That’s evidently Findraiser.AI. “Findraiser uses AI to search your donor database so you don’t have to.” Creating a tag for it now so I’ll have it ready when the inevitable scandal hits… (Hat tip: Dwight, in comments.)
A rebuke for the media types who accuse Republican voters of mindlessly doing Trump’s bidding: “Zach Lahn, who went viral for confronting Obama in 2009, beat Trump’s pick for Iowa governor.”
Lahn took down multiple established GOP politicians, including Randy Feenstra, who had the coveted Trump endorsement. Lahn had an endorsement from TPUSA and MAHA Action, but was not expected to win. He also won the coveted … Steak ‘n Shake endorsement?
Lahn strongly promoted the message of “Iowa First,” with a focus on agricultural pesticides, health, and Chinese influence. He also rejected outside funding (the internet is noting in particular that he rejected funding from AIPAC).
I wouldn’t necessarily count AIPAC backing as pro or con, save for the fact that they’ve backed some real squishy moderate Republicans lately (Dan Crenshaw and Tony Gonzales come to mind).
This is bad news: A confirmed case of New World Screwworm in south Texas.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins says a single confirmed case of New World screwworm is contained, as state and federal officials move quickly to quarantine the area.
During a Thursday press call, Rollins reported that the single screwworm case was confirmed in a three-week-old beef calf on Wednesday in La Pryor, south of Uvalde. The U.S. Department of Agriculture immediately created a unified incident command team with the Texas Animal Health Commission and deployed the USDA Animal and Plant Health and Inspection Service to the area.
A 20-kilometer control zone was established around the detection site, and an expedited, targeted release of 4 million sterile New World screwworm flies a week is planned for the immediate area.
Texas State Veterinarian Dr. Lewis Dinges told the press that his staff have reported that the infested calf is improving and they have not found any other infested animals on the premises. There has also been no recent movement of animals onto or off the premises.
Dinges encouraged Texans to monitor their animals as often as possible and keep a close eye on any open wounds.
A quarantine has been issued on all warm-blooded animals within the control zone.
“Animals will still be able to move,” said Dinges. “We just need to make sure that they are moving safely and not moving the screwworm with it.”
It’s a nasty, nasty critter, and extreme measures are justified in keeping it from spreading.
The departure triggered immediate criticism of New Jersey’s tax and regulatory environment. Michele Siekerka, president and CEO of the New Jersey Business and Industry Association, called the announcement “not surprising, but it is no less sad.” Siekerka pointed to New Jersey’s 11.5% corporate tax rate — the highest in the nation, confirmed by the Tax Foundation’s 2026 state comparison — and noted that the number of Fortune 500 companies headquartered in New Jersey has declined from 22 in 2018 to 15 in 2025.
“These are the results of decades of anti-business policies in the state,” Siekerka said. “These are not accidents, nor are they coincidences.”
Assemblyman John Azzariti, a Republican representing the 39th District, was more pointed: “Texas didn’t win Samsung by accident. They won because they have spent years creating an environment where businesses want to invest, grow and create jobs. Meanwhile, New Jersey continues to raise costs, add regulations and send the message that employers are little more than a revenue source for government.”
Azzariti cited a pattern: in addition to Samsung, Mercedes-Benz USA, Honeywell, Hertz, and Sealed Air have all departed the state.
Speaking of relocating to Texas: “ExxonMobil Receives Shareholder Approval for Texas Move . The approval comes after Attorney General Paxton filed a lawsuit against a shareholder advisory firm that attempted to discourage the move.”
“Murder charge dropped for Arkansas sheriff nominee who killed teen daughter’s rapist.” No jury in the world…well, at least outside California and London. “The case against Aaron Spencer was dismissed by a judge on Thursday afternoon after law enforcement lost a dash camera memory card that may have captured the fatal October 2024 shooting of 67-year-old Michael Fosler.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Two Republicans and two Democrats in the Senate and House of Representatives are co-sponsoring proposed legislation designed to protect the Fourth Amendment’s bar of warrantless government searches and seizures of private citizens’ email content.
“The Fourth Amendment is clear: the government must get a warrant before searching an individual’s private property, including written communications. As today’s world has grown increasingly digital, that principle should apply just as strongly to an email inbox as it does to a desk drawer or file cabinet,” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) said in a jointly issued June 2 statement.
“That’s exactly why I’m proud to cosponsor the Email Privacy Act — to ensure our freedoms carry into the digital world and that all communications are protected as the Founders intended. Congress must pass this commonsense legislation, so Americans’ rights are fully respected in the 21st century,” Davidson added.
Under current statutes, law enforcement authorities such as the Department of Justice (DOJ) are able to acquire email content that is at least 180 days old, thanks to the now-outdated storage capacity limits in force when Congress passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in 1986 and in subsequent amendments….
Joining the Ohio Republican in the House in co-sponsoring the Email Privacy Act are Rep. Suzan Delbene (D-Wash.), Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
Usually when the Evil Party and the Stupid Party get together to pass a bill, it’s both Evil and Stupid, but this sound like the rare case where they’re working on something that’s actually needed.
Heh:
🚨 LMAO!! President Trump just dropped this absolute GEM: He's filling the newly improved Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with leftist tears
“Things From Another World — the cult-favorite comic and collectibles chain owned by Dark Horse Comics — is shutting down all of its stores after 46 years in business.” Unmentioned in the article is that Dark Horse was bought by Swedish gaming company Embracer Group in 2022, and they’re busy Borging Dark Horse with a bunch of other media companies for an anticipated spinoff called “Fellowship Entertainment” with a bunch of Lord of the Rings licensed companies.
Should we seriously consider the possibility that Claude, or any large language model, might be conscious? And if it has feelings, is it capable of receiving moral instruction?
No. Absolutely not. Generative AI is harmful enough when we understand it as a conventional technology, but if we confuse fluency at generating text with consciousness or moral agency, we’re at risk of assigning responsibility to entirely the wrong parties whenever anyone uses a chatbot.
Ted (who is a very smart cookie) then goes into great detail why they’re not conscious.
Rick Beato on the Fender disaster. “If you were to go to any music store, Guitar Center, and pull a Fender Strat off the shelf and go play it at a gig, well, I wouldn’t recommend it, because the chances of it playing well are extremely low. That’s why there are so many other companies like Sire, PRS, Charvel, tons of companies that make Strat style guitars that are far better than normal Fenders that you buy at your local Guitar Center.”
Now that Ken Paxton is officially the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, we can finally turn our full attention to the absolute freakshow the Democrats have selected to run against him.
In case you hadn’t noticed, James Talarico is an cringey weirdo who is deeply out of step with the state he wants to represent. So here’s a roundup.
After cruising to the Democrat nomination for U.S. Senate in March, James Talarico now appears focused on a different challenge: convincing Texas general election voters he is more moderate than the progressive activist Republicans have spent years watching online.
Republicans are already framing the effort as a “moderate media makeover” ahead of what is expected to become the most expensive Senate race in U.S. history.
During an interview with CBS News the day after Paxton won the Republican Senate runoff, officially setting the general-election matchup, Talarico was asked about his assertion that there are six sexes and a 2021 statement in which he said, “God is non-binary.”
“What did you mean by that?” the interviewer asked. “Do you regret describing it that way?”
“God can’t be defined by human categories,” replied Talarico. “There are some statements I’ve made that I regret. Ken Paxton is intentionally clipping my cringey comments.”
Yeah, because he said them. Why are they cringey? Because they reflect Talarico’s empty-headed, far-left social justice warrior blatherings. If he didn’t mean them, why did he say them? Was he lying then, or is he lying now? Or is he, like so many Democrat politicians, simply “post-truth” and willing to say anything he thinks people want to hear?
In one recent appearance on the Texas Take podcast, Talarico attempted to downplay his past support for gun control measures, insisting that “I’m not interested in taking anyone’s guns.”
I seem to remember a lot of similar statements from Colorado and Virginia Democrats who, after getting elected, immediately started trying to take people’s guns.
Republicans quickly pointed to prior comments and legislation they argue tell a different story.
In a 2020 appearance as a surrogate for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, Talarico said it “encourages violence against black sons and daughters” when President Donald Trump allows “weapons of war on our streets and in our classrooms.”
Republicans have also highlighted legislation backed by Talarico that sought additional restrictions on handgun sales and concealed carry permitting requirements.
Among the measures Republicans pointed to were proposals that would have imposed additional regulatory burdens related to handgun licensing, mirroring states like California and New York.
You know, the same measures the Supreme Court has said are unconstitutional.
Talarico has similarly attempted to dismiss Republican attacks over his past climate activism.
On the Texas Take podcast appearance, Talarico argued Republicans fabricated claims that he was vegan.
However, in a 2022 campaign video Talarico announced his campaign would “go vegan” as part of efforts to combat what he described as an “existential climate crisis.”
I would wager that veganism is even a pander too far for most Texas Democrats. It’s like Talarico is trying to run for California State Rep from Big Sur or the Castro District.
The issue intersects with another difficult political vulnerability for Democrats in Texas: oil and gas policy.
In another recent podcast appearance with Democrat congressional candidate Bobby Pulido, Talarico attempted to position himself as supportive of the Texas energy industry.
“The idea that politicians in Washington think they can eliminate this industry is something we had to fight against, something we have to fight against in our own party,” said Talarico.
Republicans quickly countered by resurfacing climate proposals and activist rhetoric previously associated with Talarico, including legislation aimed at dramatically reducing statewide emissions and past activism promoting climate change curriculum mandates in public schools.
Conservatives online also circulated previous comments from Talarico discussing efforts to inspire a “new generation of climate activists,” as well as his participation in demonstrations inspired by activist Greta Thunberg.
He’s just a grab bag of every bad idea to ooze out of the radical left over the past half-century. Like Pete Buttigieg or Gavin Newsom, one gets the impression that Talarico is an empty vessel with no actual personality beyond plasticity to conform to whatever leftwing activist nonsense is the current Will of the Party.
For most of the 21st century, the Great White Whale in the Democrats’ fever dream has been their “Turn Texas Blue” fantasy. In recent memory, this has given us such luminaries as Wendy Davis and the fakest fake Latino in the history of fake Latinos, Beto O’Rourke.
On the one hand, I am usually a big fan of these efforts because they’re such monumental wastes of money for the Democrats. The Texas races become national affairs, and Dem donors from all over the country hemorrhage cash that could be spent on winnable contests elsewhere.
On the other hand, I know how good the Democrats are at playing the long game. I never rule out the possibility of them eventually getting what they want, no matter how long it takes.
This year’s Turn Texas Blue drama star is James Talarico. Talarico has positioned himself as a throwback Dem moderate, a departure from the present-day Dem craziness. It’s completely disingenuous, but the Democrats’ flying monkeys in the mainstream media are dutifully playing along with the charade.
Here are some examples of this wingnut’s lunacy from a post that my HotAir colleague Beege Welborn wrote:
ICYMI
Here is a small sampling of James Talarico psychotic statements.
There is no way anyone can convince me Texans will vote for this freak over Paxton. pic.twitter.com/3FaHC5LAvq
Let me pull out these genuine nuggets of Talarico weirdness so we have them down in text form.
“Jesus Christ himself was a radical feminist.”
“The American flag is such a complicated symbol for most of us.”
“God is non-binary.”
“You can’t call yourself a Christian and reject the stranger seeking asylum at our southern border.”
“Our trans community needs abortion care too.”
“Modern science recognizes that there are many more than two sexes. In fact, there are six.”
“Prophetic voices like Jesus have helped me reckon with my own whiteness.” I’m no theologian, but I’m pretty sure that a fundamental tenant of Christianity is there there are no “prophetic voices like Jesus.” As the singular Redeemer of mankind, he is not comparable to “other prophets,” even those of the Old Testament, because other prophets are not the Light and the Way.
There are a couple more, but I think you get the idea. It’s like he heard the most cringey social justice pandering from all the failed 2020 Democratic presidential candidates and went “Hey, I want to try that in Texas!” Hence the Babylon Bee headline “Democrats Denounce ‘Dirty Trick’ Of Playing Videos Of James Talarico Saying Things.”
I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise at this point, but the “theology expert” running for the U.S. Senate in Texas may be a huge weirdo.
Sure, you knew he called God non-binary, he daydreams about trans kids, and he’s David French’s ideal of a Christian in the public square, but that’s not all of James Talarico’s problems.
Yes, if your school has banned pornography for kids don’t worry, Talarico stocks it in his church’s library right between Left Behind Kids and Jesus Calling. Oh, and Talarico was raised in this church, has preached there several times, and remains closely associated with it.
Yeah, anyone who checked out this book from this church should have their hard drive checked immediately.
Here’s the Daily Wire with the treasure trove of oppo research:
Books found in the St. Andrew’s catalog include the book ‘Gender Queer,’ which includes illustrations of oral sex and masturbation, and the book ‘All Boys Aren’t Blue,’ which discusses anal rape and incest.
‘This Book Is Gay,’ has a chapter on the ‘ins and outs of gay sex,’ while the book ‘Becoming Nicole’ tells the story of a gender-confused teen boy who identifies as a girl with the support of his family. In ‘The Courage to Be Queer,’ the author claims that ‘God is queer.’
Other books in the church catalog include ‘This Book is Gay,’ ‘Trans Kids, Our Kids: Stories and Resources from the Frontlines of the Movement for Transgender Youth,’ ‘Called OUT: The Voices and Gifts of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Presbyterians,’ ‘The Courage to Be Queer,’ and ‘Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family.’
James Talarico believes that Christians are called to embrace progressive social views on everything from abortion to gender.
The Texas Senate candidate’s conception of Christian moral teaching, which he tirelessly promotes as the foundation of his campaign, seems to have been shaped by the church he has attended since childhood, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.
The minister of St. Andrew’s, the Reverend Jim Rigby, often brings politics into his sermons, frequently criticizing the Trump administration from the pulpit. His April 26 sermon, delivered a day after the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, is a striking example. “There was an assassination attempt,” he told his congregation, “and I know a lot of people have mixed feelings” — he paused, and laughter rippled across the congregation — “but it’s really, really important if we’re going to be the healing agents of the world, to recognize that violence isn’t going to get rid of the problem that we have.”
St. Andrew’s church leadership passed an official resolution against Christian nationalism on Tuesday, shunning the narrative that America has a Christian founding. The leaders promote the idea that the United States has fundamentally corrupt roots, primarily in the unjust acquisition of Native American lands and enslavement of black Americans.
Advertised as Sunday school classes in St. Andrew’s news bulletin, the church’s summer “adult education” sessions are used to promote these ideas. The May 15–21 bulletin introduces one such class: “Christianity today, especially the American version, has discovered some interesting ways to ignore the message of Jesus,” it reads. The study aims to answer financial, political, ethical, and legal questions about Christopher Columbus and is rooted in sources like “art, Bible, Church documents, guest speakers, U.S. federal law, and the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Snip.
Throughout its studies and sermons, the church refuses to use terms for God that its members call “feudal” — words such as “Lord” or “King.” They have also rewritten hymns to be “inclusive” and read from the “Inclusive Bible” during services. During a Scripture reading from Galatians 5, for example, St. Andrew’s PowerPoint slide clarifies that “the word ‘kindom,’ often used by mujerista theologian Ada Maria Isasi–Diaz, replaces ‘kingdom’ because it represents an egalitarian realm and emphasizes our familial relationship with each other.”
Another primary feature of this so-called inclusivity is the omission of any gendered language about God. On the church’s “Inclusive Language” web page, the church’s leaders connect what they call “sexist theology” to a culture of rape, and the leaders are specifically perturbed by the thought of little girls perceiving God as a “he” because they believe God is higher than gender. Talarico, a seminary student and Texas state legislator, has himself promoted this “genderless” conception of God on the floor of the Texas state house, calling God “nonbinary” during a debate.
Now we know where the “cringe” first took root.
Children’s education at St. Andrew’s takes the form of “inclusive” Sunday school curriculum and an expansive library of “banned books.” Members of the church insist that St. Andrew’s library collects these so-called banned books, a term they use to refer to texts that have been barred from school libraries because they promote a particular political view or deal with sensitive topics such as sexuality. Beyond the books already on its shelves, the church has a wish list through Bookshop.org with a range of shocking titles.
Two of these books, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 and Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, celebrate Palestinian activism.
Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth suggests that the history of the Alamo was blown out of proportion to create “a historic Anglo narrative” that distracted Americans from the so-called true origin of this conflict: Mexico’s efforts to abolish slavery.
Another one of these books, The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why, criticizes the concept of human exceptionalism and advocates for nonhuman rights — including the rights of animals and artificial intelligence.
There are also several books that discuss transgenderism and even one, Marley’s Pride, advertised for its “glossary of terms to help adults answer kids’ questions about the LGBTQ+ community.”
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Speaking of Talarico’s religion, this Not The Bee piece literally popped into my Inbox while I was already proofing this.
Texas state Rep. James Talarico opened a legislative session with a heretic prayer, invoked old Communist-adjacent phrase h/t @reddit_lies who spotted it on Reddit; I tracked down the original video.
The prayer addresses God as ‘holy mystery’ with ‘so many names’ — Torah, Quran, Gita, Dharma — treating all religious traditions as equally valid expressions of the same God.
Jesus is described as ‘a barefoot rabbi’ who ‘expressed’ God’s love… one expression among many implied.
The closing line: ‘build a new world in the shell of the old.’
That phrase has a specific origin. It comes from the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) Preamble, written in 1905. It’s syndicalist labor movement language. Not explicitly Communist – but they wanted to abolish capitalism and the state all the same.
Yeah, I didn’t have “Channeling the Wobblies” on my 2026 Senate Race checklist.
“The Democrats’ Greatest Fear: The GOP Will Turn James Talarico Into a Creepy, Unmanly Weirdo.” I’m omitting the opening segment on how Democrats institutionally hate men and children.
The Dems can’t win elections without a loyal army of unmarried women — and they can’t drive ’em to the polls without selling ’em juicy red meat on the campaign trail.
Yet the same red meat that motivates unmarried women will further alienate married men, married women, AND unmarried Gen Z men.
So the Democrats settled on a novel strategy: They’ll still cater to unmarried women… but deliver their message via an “avatar” who cosplays as a macho dude.
That’s the holy grail for the Dems: A man who thinks and behaves exactly like a radical feminist, yet looks and sounds like a rough-and-tumble Alpha male.
It’s the strategy behind Graham Platner’s senatorial bid in Maine. (‘Cause what could be more manly than a Nazi tattoo?) It was the strategy behind Kamala Harris’ V.P. selection of “America’s coach,” Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.). And it’s the strategy behind their latest scheme to turn Texas blue, the Senate campaign of the Dems’ current “it boy,” James Talarico. There’s a lot riding on Talarico’s unique brand of masculinity.
But the Dems are already fretting about Talarico’s masculinity being (ahem) neutered.
From The 19th: “Republicans Want to Make the Texas Senate Race About Manliness”
Republicans are focusing on one question in one of November’s top races: Is the Democrat a real man?
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who clinched the GOP’s nomination for U.S. Senate on Tuesday night, released a new ad Wednesday — his first of the general election — accusing his opponent, state Sen. James Talarico, of being too “low-T for Texas.” “Low-T” is a reference to testosterone levels and often used as an insult by influencers in the so-called manosphere, who say low testosterone makes someone weaker.
Talarico has all the manly testosterone of Boy George wearing a frilly mini-dress to a Village People karaoke night at a Fire Island cabaret during Pridefest.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the architect of President Donald Trump’s immigration policy and one of his top advisers, picked up on a similar line of attack, posting on the social media platform X on Wednesday that Democrats had nominated the “their first transgender senate candidate.” Talarico is cisgender and identifies as an LGBTQ+ ally; he is in a relationship with a woman.
“She’s from Canada! You wouldn’t know her.”
According to this report, “Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico’s mysterious beau is a vegan political lobbyist who previously worked as his chief of staff, The Post has learned. Brianna Menard, 30, describes herself as a “committed vegan,” yoga buff and cat mom who likes “dancing the night away” at local gay bar Cheer Up Charlies in Austin.”
Oh, a girlfriend who just happens to like hanging out at a gay bar.
It’s hard to think of a list of candidate traits and positions less likely to appeal to Texas voters at large. But team Talarico is evidently embracing the freakshow reputation. “Talarico Campaign Embraces ‘Talafreako’ Nickname Tied to Far-Left Positions. Paxton coined the nickname while criticizing Talarico’s progressive positions. The Democrat’s campaign is now selling it on T-shirts.”
As Republicans seek to highlight Democrat James Talarico’s record on transgender issues, immigration, and other progressive causes ahead of November’s U.S. Senate election, the lawmaker’s campaign is embracing one of the nicknames those positions have earned him.
The Talarico campaign recently began selling merchandise bearing the phrase “I’m a Talafreako,” a reference to a nickname used by Republican nominee Ken Paxton during his runoff victory speech.
“He goes by a few names that you may all have heard of,” Paxton told supporters. “Some people know him as Tofu Talarico, some people call him Six Gender Jimmy. I’ve even heard some people call him James Talafreako.”
Paxton then explained the reasoning behind the nickname, pointing to Talarico’s positions on immigration and transgender issues.
“He wants open borders, and even said a welcome mat should be at our southern border,” said Paxton. “He’s a threat to our children. He wants boys in girls’ sports, gender mutilation surgery performed on kids.”
Paxton also referenced a comment from Talarico in which the Democrat said “trans kids” were among the things he loved most outside his family and friends.
Now the campaign’s online store features apparel prominently displaying the nickname.
There are times and places where this sort of “embrace the label” jujitsu might work, but I rather doubt that a statewide election in Texas is one of them.
Let’s end with two more Babylon Bee pieces: “Democrats Hopeful Average Texas Voter Wants To Ban Steak And Thinks God Is Gay.”
“Beto, but gayer” or “Tim Walz, but weirder” strike me as very poor personas to get elected just about anywhere or any time, but especially not Texas in 2026.
President Donald Trump endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over incumbent U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) on the second day of early voting for their U.S. Senate Republican primary runoff.
“Ken is a true MAGA Warrior who has ALWAYS delivered for Texas, and will continue to do so in the United States Senate,” Trump stated in a Truth Social post.
“John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough,” Trump added.
Paxton responded shortly after Trump’s announcement, stating via an X post, “I am incredibly honored to have President Trump’s COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT.”
“No one has ever fought harder for the American people than President Trump, and I look forward to championing his America First agenda in the Senate!”
Cornyn and Paxton headed to a runoff after the March 3 primary election resulted in them being the top two candidates, although neither collected a majority, with Congressman Wesley Hunt (R-TX-38) knocked out of the contest.
Early voting for the primary runoff began on Monday and will conclude on Friday. Election day is on May 26.
Trump’s endorsement in the race was long-awaited, as he has repeatedly teased the possibility of one and suggested both candidates are strong supporters of his — a claim the two have intentionally aimed to prove in their campaigning.
Paxton already had a substantial lead over Cornyn, but this drives the final nail into Cornyn’s coffin. He’s toast. The fat lady isn’t warming up in the wings, she’s already climbed into her 2009 diesel-powered Jetta and driven back to Dusseldorf. Ken Paxton will be the official Republican nominee and can start concentrating on beating the truly strange Democrat nominee James Talarico in November.
Most of yesterday’s primary races went exactly as you would expect, but there were a few surprises among the results, so let’s dig in.
At the top of the ticket, incumbent John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton head to a runoff for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate. Right now, Cornyn is leading Paxton by less than 1.5%, which isn’t a very comfortable position for a longtime incumbent, and I suspect there are plenty of Wesley Hunt voters dissatisfied with Cornyn.
For much of the count, scandal-plagued U.S. 23rd Congressional District incumbent Tony Gonzales led challenger Brandon Herrera by a slight margin, but with 96% of the vote in, Herrera leads Gonzales by just under a thousand votes. Herrera almost knocked off Gonzales in 2024, but with undeniable evidence that Gonzales had an extramarital affair with a staffer who killer herself, Gonzales is clearly toast. He should save everybody a lot of time, money and embarrassment and not only bow out of the race, but resign his congressional seat in disgrace so Gov. Greg Abbott can appoint Herrera to replace him for the remainder of his current term as well.
Speaking of Abbott, both he and Lt. Governor Dan Patrick cruised to easy victories, Abbott with 82% of the vote against ten opponents, Patrick with 85% of the vote against three.
In the closely-watched Attorney General race, State Senator Mayes Middleton and U.S. Congressman Chip Roy are headed to a runoff, with Middleton leading by over 150,000 votes. That’s a pretty big gap for Roy to make up.
In the three-way Comptroller race, Don Huffines won outright over Kelly Hancock and Christi Craddick. It’s tempting to think that President Trump’s endorsement of Huffines lifted him to an outright win rather than a runoff, except:
President Trump also endorsed incumbent Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller over challenger Nate Sheets, but Sheets won by 5%. I think this may be the only case where an Abbott-endorsed candidate defeated a Trump-endorsed candidate, unless I’m overlooking a down-ballot race.
Indeed, it was a rare outright victory for Abbott endorsed or appointed candidates this cycle, as Abbott appointees Aaron Reitz (Attorney General) and Kelly Hancock (Comptroller) both went down to defeat.
As predicted, Gina Hinjosa easily secured the right to be slaughtered by Greg Abbott in the Governor’s race, defeating Chris Bell and seven other candidates.
With 48% of the vote, Vikki Goodwin looks headed to a runoff with Marcos Velez in the Lt. Governor’s race.
With 48.1% of the vote, Nathan Johnson looks headed for a runoff in the Attorney General race with Joe Jaworski.
With 48% of the vote, Sarah Eckhardt looks headed to a runoff with Savant Moore in the Comptroller race.
It’s always possible the underdogs in those races might just save themselves time and money and drop out.
The Democrat primary turnout totals should be a wake-up call for the Texas GOP. Usually they run far behind Republican numbers, but this year they’re about at parity, an ominous sign for an off-year election with a Republican in the White House.
Those were the races I was paying attention to. If you noticed others with interesting results, feel free to share them in the comments below.
Everyone favors Voter ID except Democrats trying to cling to power, America’s big stick gets bigger, Trump’s tariffs hit a setback at the Supreme Court, another insane tranny shooter, Ukraine recaptures more land from Russia, another Pulitzer Prize winning leftist pedo, more Paxton lawsuits, and a new party rises on the right in the UK.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
On the personal front, I may need to buy a new dryer. We’ll see what the repairman says Monday…
Are voter ID requirements considered a controversial idea in the eyes of US citizens? If you watch the establishment media or follow leaders in the Democratic Party then you might think bills like the SAVE Act are the end of freedom as we know it. However, outside the echo chambers of DNC propaganda, the vast majority of Americans have no problem whatsoever with people proving their US citizenship before they vote in local and federal elections.
The widespread support for voter ID is undeniable. Surveys from the past year including those from Pew and Gallup show that, regardless of party or ethnicity, Americans citizens want elections to be protected from manipulation through mass illegal immigration.
A Pew Research Center survey from August 2025 found that 83% of Americans favor requiring all voters to show government-issued photo ID to vote. This includes:
95% of Republicans
71% of Democrats
Only 16% of people oppose it.
A Gallup poll from 2024 shows 84% support for requiring photo ID to vote, with 98% of Republicans, 84% of independents and 67% of Democrats in approval.
A recent CNN segment featuring number cruncher Harry Enten confirms that the backing for the SAVE Act is also dominant regardless of ethnicity: 85% of white voter, 82% of Latino voters and 76% of black voters all want voter ID. It’s difficult to find many issues which the American public universally supports at this level.
Democrat leaders, however, don’t care that the majority of their own base wants voter ID laws. Party officials and the left-wing media have engaged in a shameless propaganda campaign designed to frighten the public into opposing the SAVE Act, despite their previous platforms defending majority rule.
That’s because they view voter integrity laws as an existential threat to their power. If they can’t cheat, they can’t win…
The big stick gets bigger. “Ford Carrier Group Enters Mediterranean To Join Biggest US Build-Up Since 2003 Iraq War.”
Open source monitors as well as US and Middle East media have confirmed that the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, has entered the Mediterranean Sea, having sailed passed the Strait of Gibraltar on Friday.
This is the second carrier strike group expected to soon operate directly in the CENTCOM area of responsibility, amid the massive military build-up and pressure campaign against Iran. It was sent from the Caribbean earlier this month, extending its planned deployment.
The USS Mahan Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, which is accompanying the USS Gerald R. Ford, is also now crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, maritime tracking analysis shows.
The aircraft carrier will likely take several more days to reach the Middle East and be poised to operate against Iran – so it looks to be in place by start of next week.
According to Bloomberg and other outlets, the US has now amassed the biggest force in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. There is administration talk of “limited strikes” – but clearly Washington is getting ready for all escalation scenarios.
The Supreme Court (6-3 in a majority opinion written by CJ Roberts) has ruled that Trump’s tariffs exceeded his authority.
We decide whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) authorizes the President to impose tariffs.
***
The President asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope. In light of the breadth, history, and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorization to exercise it. IEEPA’s grant of authority to “regulate . . . importation” falls short. IEEPA contains no reference to tariffs or duties. The Government points to no statute in which Congress used the word “regulate” to authorize taxation. And until now no President has read IEEPA to confer such power. We claim no special competence in matters of economics or foreign affairs. We claim only, as we must, the limited role assigned to us by Article III of the Constitution. Fulfilling that role, we hold that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.
Trump says he has alternative means to impose tariffs. “Effective immediately, all national security tariffs under Section 232 and existing Section 301 tariffs remain in place… Today, I will sign an order to impose a 10% global tariff under Section 122 over and above our normal tariffs already being charged.”
In the past 12 months (January 2025 to January 2026) there are fewer foreign-born workers employed and more native-born workers in jobs. The time period roughly corresponds to the first year of Pres. Trump’s second term.
The murder-suicide at a Rhode Island hockey rink on Monday is just the latest in a recent string of murders allegedly carried out by self-identifying transgender perpetrators or by those seemingly inspired by transgender ideology.
Robert Dorgan — who police say shot and killed his ex-wife and one of their sons during a high school hockey game this week — had previously insisted he believed he was actually a transgender woman despite being a man. A local TV station said that “An unnamed woman, who identified herself as Dorgan’s daughter, has since come forward, telling WCVB that her father ‘has mental health issues.'”
“He shot my family and he’s dead now,” she reportedly said. Dorgan, who killed himself after the murders on Monday, had also expressed pro-Nazi sentiments, and according to The New York Post, was adorned with “vile neo-Nazi tattoos.”
He is only the most recent example of high-profile attacks linked to transgender perpetrators or transgender ideology, including mass shootings at Christian schools, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the attempted assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Progress: “Major Manhattan Hospital, Massachusetts Health Care System End ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Minors.”
Setback: “Judge Orders California Hospital to Resume Gender Transition Procedures for Minors.” Democrats seem to love mutilating children too much to give it up.
“Kansas’ governor vetoed a bill that banned men from the women’s room. The legislature overrode her.” “Even in an uber-red state, Democrat governors are still going to toe the party line.”
Scott Pinkser thinks Trump’s deal with India spells doom for the Russian economy, because they won’t allow those shadow fleet tankers to continue on to China. Quoting Peter Zeihan:
If the Russians have lost their single largest source of income, that will manifest on the battlefield. The Chinese may be supplying the Russians with all the gear that they can pay for, but the key thing there is: pay for.
And if the Russians can’t [pay], then a drone war where the Russians can’t get enough drones is one where the Russians start losing territory.
Price of cucumbers double in Russia. I’m mildly fascinated by those per-country yearly cucumber consumption numbers. 12 kilograms about 26 pounds a year, which doesn’t seem high if you’re including pickles, as that’s only one small jar of pickles every other week. But China’s 55 kilograms a year works out to two pounds a year per person. That’s a lot of damn cucumbers…
Democracy dies in protecting sex offenders that check the right boxes:
Wow I missed that Wesley Lowrey, the ex-WaPo reporter who won a Pulitzer and wrote a famous editorial urging journos to forgo objectivity in lieu of ‘moral clarity,’ was chased out of his journalism professorship for multiple sexual assault allegations.
Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing Dallas officials, accusing them of defying a voter‑approved mandate to boost police funding under Proposition U.
Proposition U, approved by Dallas voters in November 2024, amended the city charter to require at least 50 percent of “excess” annual revenue be directed to public safety. The charter language earmarks those dollars first for the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System, then for increasing officer pay and growing the force to at least 4,000 sworn officers.
Paxton’s lawsuit, filed in a Dallas County district court, targets the City of Dallas, City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert, and Chief Financial Officer Jack Ireland Jr. for allegedly underfunding public safety in violation of the charter.
The attorney general argues that city officials “acted beyond their legal authority” by using an improper calculation of excess revenue that drastically reduced the amount legally owed to police priorities.
For the 2025–26 fiscal year, the city’s own projections reportedly show about $220 million in excess revenue above the prior year. But Ireland told the Dallas City Council that excess revenue totaled only $61 million—roughly a quarter of that amount—after excluding large categories of city income from the calculation.
Paxton’s filing notes that the city did not cite any state or federal law restricting the use of the excluded revenue, which would be required to legally omit those funds from the Proposition U formula.
Because of this narrower calculation, the proposed city budget allocates far less money to police pensions, officer pay, and hiring than voters required, Paxton says. The lawsuit contends that Dallas’ current hiring plan leaves the department hundreds of officers short of the 4,000‑officer minimum mandated in the charter amendment.
Paxton’s lawsuit also points to another provision of Proposition U that city officials allegedly ignored altogether. The charter requires Dallas to hire an independent third‑party firm each year to conduct a police compensation survey comparing Dallas officer pay and benefits to those of other major North Texas departments.
According to information obtained by the state, no such survey was conducted, despite the charter’s mandatory language. That failure, Paxton argues, makes it impossible for city leadership to honestly claim they are meeting the voter‑approved requirement to make Dallas police pay competitive in the region.
Blue city functionaries hate funding the police because the hard left can’t get any of their sticky fingers into that pile of money…
Two former Harris County Tax Office employees and two local business owners are facing first-degree felony charges in connection with what authorities say was a coordinated vehicle registration fraud operation.
Court filings allege the group worked together to process registrations and title transfers that bypassed required state safeguards, collecting bribes in exchange for pushing transactions through the system.
Adriana De La Rosa, 43, owner of Bella’s Multiservices in South Houston, has been arrested. Oswaldo “Oz” Perez, 51, who is affiliated with the same business, remains wanted.
Former tax office employees Sarah Ambria Anderson, 31, and Renisha Touche Wilkins, 35, were also charged. Both were dismissed from their positions in April 2024.
Investigators allege the activity centered on the Scarsdale branch of the Harris County Tax Office, where nearly 200 questionable transactions were processed. According to reporting from KPRC 2, the employees allegedly accepted cash and gifts in exchange for overriding verification requirements tied to insurance coverage, emissions inspections, and residency. Some vehicles were allegedly coded as tax-exempt, allowing customers to avoid paying required fees.
Authorities further allege that Anderson charged approximately $300 per transaction and transported paperwork in a personal binder to avoid detection.
The case reportedly began after employees in another Texas county noticed Bella’s Multiservices promoting vehicle registration stickers on TikTok and Facebook. Social media posts advertised expedited service and claimed inspections were not necessary. That tip prompted an internal review, which eventually led to a criminal investigation.
This is not known as “keeping a low profile.” One wonders if they might also be charged as accessories for Grand Theft Auto.
The first priority is to control who comes to our country, and more importantly, who stays in our country. Restore Britain will not just stop mass immigration; we will reverse it.
Every single illegal migrant will be securely detained, and then deported. The message will be unrelenting: If you are in this country without permission, you will be removed. For the foreseeable future, far more people must leave Britain than arrive.
If a foreign national is unable to speak English, lives in social housing, claims benefits, refuses to work, fails to integrate, commits crime, or even actively hates our way of life and wishes to do us harm, then they must leave, or be made to leave…
Restore Britain will make our communities safe again for women and children. That I promise you. If that means millions go, then millions go.
We’re constantly told that the economy needs vast swaths of low-skilled migrants. We know that’s simply not true. What we need is to get millions of healthy Brits back into work – a radical overhaul of how welfare is delivered. Protecting those in genuine need, but not funding healthy shirkers to live off the back of hard working men and women. If you can work, you must work. It really is that simple.
There seems to be a lot of enthusiasm for Restore Britain, given their willingness to tackle the illegal alien invasion head on. The irony is the reform leader Nigel Farage looks poised to go from a fringe figure on the right to being ,i>outflanked on the right without ever being elected Prime Minister…
The face of evil: “This Karen called CPS on students’ parents because they chartered a TPUSA chapter at school…A liberal woman in Maryland, Nancy Krause, is facing mass calls to be charged after she weaponized CPS against Calvert County high school students for starting a TPUSA chapter at their school.”
I hope they sure her for every penny she has, and then some.
Stephen Colbert and James Talarico are lying about Trump blocking an interview. CBS merely told Colbert there were equal time considerations for such an interview, and that he might have to interview other Texasw Democratic senate candidates like Jasmine Crockett.
After text messages obtained by news media appeared to corroborate prior reports alleging that U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX-23) engaged in a relationship with his now-deceased regional director, Regina Ann Santos-Aviles — which would violate U.S. House rules — her husband has now come forward in a tell-all interview affirming the claims.
Gonzales, however, continues to deny the allegations and now says he is being “blackmailed” following a settlement request from the husband’s attorney.
Santos-Aviles died months after her husband discovered the affair and confronted Gonzales in what authorities ruled a suicide by self-immolation.
The story has set off a bombshell of controversy, with the most recent evidence being released at the beginning of early voting for the March primary election, where Gonzales faces three challengers in the GOP primary.
Santos-Aviles served as Gonzales’ regional director based in Uvalde, overseeing constituent affairs across 11 of the congressional district’s 23 counties near Texas’ southern border.
Emergency responders found her in the backyard of her home on the night of September 13. A gasoline can was nearby where she laid severely burned. She was taken to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead the next day.
News of the affair was first reported by Current Revolt, which was met with silence by Gonzales until an interview with the Texas Tribune wherein he claimed the reports were not true.
Fast forward, and the San Antonio Express News obtained text messages between Santos-Aviles and another former staffer that purportedly show her writing,“I had an affair with our boss.”
This prompted Gonzales’ main opponent in the GOP primary, Brandon Herrera, to call for his resignation, saying an affair would have violated House rules.
“Tony Gonzales must resign. He not only broke House ethics rules by having an adulterous affair with a member of his congressional staff and by using taxpayer money to fund the affair, but he also broke trust with the public by insisting that the initial reporting of the affair was false,” Herrera wrote in a press statement.
Speaking of Texas politicians behaving badly, here’s a story that doesn’t cover anyone in glory.
After personal details about U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt were posted online by a senior John Cornyn advisor, the Houston Republican has filed a police report documenting what some are describing as a possible crime under federal or state law.
Cornyn advisor Matt Mackowiak posted images of documents late last week that purportedly listed Hunt’s address, Texas driver’s license number, and the last four digits of his Social Security number. What Mackowiak seems to have designed as a last-minute attack on Hunt has turned a spotlight on Cornyn’s struggle to remain relevant with Texas voters ahead of the March 3 Primary Election.
Mackowiak, who runs Save Austin Now and was head of the Travis County GOP, is someone I know casually. We followed each other on Twitter before my suspension there, and we’ve bumped into each other at various events. As a political consultant/head of Potomac Strategies Group, Mackowiak has worked for some pretty squishy, swampy Republicans.
Cornyn is being challenged by Attorney General Ken Paxton and Hunt for the GOP nomination. Most public polling has consistently shown Paxton leading the field, followed by Cornyn and Hunt. Recent polls have shown Hunt closing that gap. The “doxxing” of Hunt by a senior Cornyn advisor has led some to suggest that perhaps the incumbent’s polling is even worse.
“The only reason you direct fire at someone behind you in the polls is you thinking their momentum will overtake you,” explained a political consultant not working the race. “Whether Cornyn is worried or not, Mackowiak’s actions make their campaign look desperate.”
Yeah, that was pretty stupid of Mackowiak. His post was evidently designed to ding Hunt over some provisional ballot he wasn’t entitled to file in 2016, and frankly my care meter isn’t even twitching. A three-term incumbent attacking a third place candidate does indeed reek of desperation. That said, in my (admittedly limited) understanding of federal laws on personally identifiable information is that none of that stuff quite qualifies as actual PID, so the Hunt campaign is probably going to see that criminal complaint dismissed.
In one of his more unanticipated endorsements, Trump threw his support behind Republican candidate Alex Mealer in her bid for Congressional District (CD) 9, against state Rep. Briscoe Cain (R-Deer Park) and seven other GOP primary candidates.
The district, currently held by U.S. Rep. Al Green (D-TX-9), was heavily impacted by the GOP-favored redistricting map that passed the Texas Legislature during the summer of 2025 — legislation initiated at the White House’s request and voted for by Cain in the Texas House. CD 9 is one of the five congressional districts expected to flip from blue to red in 2026, with a majority of the current CD 9 folded into the new boundaries of the Democratic stronghold of CD 18, where Green is now running instead.
Trump stated in his endorsement of Mealer, “A West Point Graduate, and Combat Decorated Army Bomb Squad Officer, Alex knows the Wisdom and Courage required to Defend our Country, Support our Military/Veterans, and Ensure PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH.”
Cain was supported by Trump for re-election to the Texas House in a mass endorsement issued by the president for House Republicans who voted to pass education savings accounts legislation. The endorsement did not include any members’ pursuit of an alternative office.
According to a recent survey, Mealer leads the Republican primary for CD 9 with 34 percent of the vote, followed by Cain at 26 percent. When the poll was taken there were 10 candidates in the race, but one, Dwayne Stovall, ended his campaign on Tuesday and endorsed Dan Mims.
Among the other endorsements announced by Trump via Truth Social posts on Monday night was for Jon Bonck in his bid for CD 38, left open by U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt’s (R-TX-38) run for U.S. Senate against incumbent U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Republican primary.
Bonck is up against nine other Republican candidates, including businesswoman Shelly deZevallos, businessman Larry Rubin, and Tomball Independent School District President Michael Pratt. The district’s partisan makeup did not alter after redistricting, remaining at R-65%, per The Texan’s Texas Partisan Index (TPI).
“Jon Bonck is an incredible Candidate,” Trump said in his endorsement.
“He is supported by many MAGA Patriots, including Senator Ted Cruz [(R-TX)], Congressmen ‘Doc’ Ronny Jackson [(R-TX-13)], Brandon Gill [(R-TX-26)], Jim Jordan [(R-OH-4)], and Tim Burchett [(R-TN-2)], among others.”
“A successful Business Executive, Jon knows the America First Policies required to Create GREAT Jobs, Cut Taxes and Regulations, Promote MADE IN THE U.S.A., Unleash American Energy DOMINANCE, and Champion our Nation’s Golden Age,” Trump added.
Trump also endorsed Carlos De La Cruz, brother of Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz (R-TX-15), in his bid for CD 35. The district is currently represented by U.S. Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX-35), but went from a TPI rating of D-70% to R-55% due to redistricting — drawing in a number of Republican candidates eyeing the new GOP-favored seat.
“A Brave, 20 Year Air Force Veteran, and now, as a successful Businessman, Carlos has a Proven Record of Success — He is a WINNER!” Trump posted.
“In Congress, Carlos will work tirelessly to Grow the Economy, Promote our Amazing Farmers and Ranchers, Cut Taxes and Regulations,” he continued, with similar language used in his several other endorsements that night.
He also endorsed in the race to replace retiring U.S. Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-TX-8), throwing his support behind attorney Jessica Hart Steinmann, who served as the director for the Office of Victims of Crime in the U.S. Department of Justice during Trump’s first presidential term.
Steinmann, now with an edge up, is running in a field with five other Republican candidates, including U.S. Army veteran Nick Tran, Deddrick Wilmer, Jay Fondren, and Stephen Long. Businessman Brett Jensen suspended his campaign following Trump’s endorsement.
Trump said of Steinmann, “As a former appointee in my First Term, and now, as a Highly Respected Attorney, Jessica continues to prove that she has the Wisdom and Courage necessary to uphold our Constitution, and ensure LAW AND ORDER.”
Good news: “The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced that the VA will no longer report veterans to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) solely because they have been assigned a fiduciary to assist them with their finances. Further, the VA is working with the FBI to remove all the names of veterans who have been unjustly reported to NICS under this guise.
Former Democratic Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson died. Oddly enough, President Trump had good things to say about him.
Well, I didn’t know Jackson, so I’ll always consider him a race-hustling poverty pimp who ran a shakedown operation. He’s probably among the five people most responsible for strained race relations in modern America, behind Obama, George Soros, Al Sharpton and Ibram X. Kendi.
Less frequently recalled is the distress Jackson’s rise caused within the American Jewish community during the 1980s. For many identifiable Jews, and especially for Orthodox Jews, his candidacy was not merely another political development but a moment of rupture. His reference to Jews as “Hymie” and to New York City as “Hymietown” was not dismissed as a careless aside. It was recognized as an anti-Jewish slur, and it left a lasting mark, even becoming the subject of an Eddie Murphy Saturday Night Live skit that captured the moment with uncomfortable precision, as comedy often can.
The episode revealed how quickly old language could reemerge, even from figures celebrated as moral leaders within liberal politics. Jackson’s campaigns compelled Jewish institutions to confront questions about alliance, dignity, and communal security that they had long preferred to manage discreetly. They did more than provoke private discomfort; they produced public argument. On the pages of Jewish newspapers, the debate unfolded in real time, week by week, as each issue went to print, and it was not confined to the usual institutional voices. Orthodox writers, in particular, entered the conversation with a directness that many establishment Jewish leaders found unwelcome but that the moment required.
Three figures responded with unusual clarity. Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, writing in The Jewish Week; Dr. Marvin Schick, writing in The Jewish World; and Rabbi Meir Kahane, writing both in The Jewish Press and in the periodical Kahane: The Magazine of the Authentic Jewish Idea all confronted the Jackson candidacy directly. Each treated Jackson’s candidacy not as an isolated controversy but as a diagnostic moment, asking what it revealed about Black-Jewish relations, the credibility of coalition politics, and the judgment of Jewish leadership itself. They disagreed about almost everything, but they shared one conclusion: The assumptions that had governed Jewish political alliance since the 1960s were beginning to fray.
The desire of western liberal elites to import unassimilated Muslims into the country would pretty much break those assumptions apart.
Dallas officials aren’t the only ones Paxton sued this week: “Texas Sues Temu for Deceptive Marketing and CCP‑Linked Data Harvesting.”
Attorney General Ken Paxton is escalating his campaign against China‑linked tech companies, filing a new lawsuit targeting one of the most downloaded shopping apps in the United States, Temu.
Paxton’s suit names PDD Holdings, Inc. and WhaleCo Inc., the companies behind Temu, alleging they deceptively market the platform as a simple discount marketplace while secretly using it as a vehicle for aggressive data harvesting.
Though PDD moved its principal executive offices from Shanghai to Dublin, Ireland, it still maintains significant operations in China, and Temu has rapidly grown to more than 80 million active users in the United States as of late 2023.
According to the lawsuit, the Temu app is not just a shopping tool—it runs “dangerous software functions” that are “completely inappropriate” for a normal e‑commerce platform.
Paxton characterizes Temu as a digital “trojan horse” capable of bypassing security protocols and creating backdoor access into a user’s private data, all while presenting itself as a harmless way to buy “affordable great products.”
The attorney general alleges that when Texans use Temu, they are unknowingly exposing themselves to a serious digital security threat.
The Temu security threat has been known for a while. Security-aware shoppers will have to forgo such great products as this:
Kurt Schlichter has a word of warning to dog-hating Muslims thinking of moving to the west:
2/16/26 – On Dogs And Those Who Hate Them
Some of us have lived in Muslim countries and understand how they treat dogs, @jaketapper. During one of my deployments, we had to inform the locals, in no uncertain terms, that no, they would not conduct their annual dog cull. In other… https://t.co/eVWowrKwkH
“This is not open to debate. We’re going to keep our dogs as we always have. If you come to our civilization, you’re going to respect our pets, or there’s going to be trouble. John Wick is the moderate position on this issue.”
A fungus among us: “Dangerous superbug spreads in US hospitals…Candida auris infections reported in more than half of US states as healthcare facilities struggle with containment.”
“Western Digital is completely sold out of hard drive production capacity through 2026 due to massive demand from—” (You know exactly what’s coming next, don’t you?) “—AI data centers.”
While his fellow Democrats are assaulting ICE agents over deportations of illegal alien felons, Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico is kicking it old school by breaking out a bottle of Grandad’s Olde Class Warfare. Talarico just debated primary rival Jasmine Crockett, where he directed his ire against billionaires.
The debate was hosted by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). After hosting the two candidates, the AFL-CIO declined to endorse in the race.
Snip.
In their opening and closing remarks, the two candidates stuck to their respective themes thus far in the race: Talarico with his pitch for unity, loving one’s neighbor, and billionaires’ negative impact on society, and Crockett with her frequent use of the word “fight,” citing her many viral moments chewing out Republicans, the need for authenticity, and her experience as a public defender.
Snip.
Talarico kicked off with similar lines as can be seen on his campaign website and that he’s pitched at various rallies: uniting against billionaires.
He said, “Before I was a legislator, I was a public school teacher on the West Side of San Antonio, one of the poor ZIP codes in the entire state of Texas. On the west side, I learned that the real fight in this country is not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom. We will not win this race in November with the same old politics of division.”
“Billionaires want us looking left and right at each other, so we’re not looking up at them. We are building a people-powered movement to beat them,” he added.
You may remember the social justice left previously declaring that mathematical abstraction, the 1%, was the source of all evil, as part of Obama’s battle-space preparation against Mitt Romney for 2012. Evidently that was just too broad of a class enemy for Talarico. Now he’s setting his sights on the 1% of the 1% of the 1%, at the same time so many are fleeing California’s proposed wealth tax and coming to Texas to open up new factories and create jobs. I bet he’s still smarting over Elon Musk backing Trump.
The Texas Democratic primary for U.S. Senate heated up on Friday with former U.S. Rep. Colin Allred directly criticizing his rival, state Rep. James Talarico, for the first time, calling him out for accepting donations from casino magnate and megadonor Miriam Adelson while railing against billionaires’ influence in politics.
“I like James, but when I see him say that he’s running against billionaires, but then when nobody was looking, his top donor was Miriam Adelson … That contributes to the cynicism that folks might experience,” Allred said during an event at The Texas Tribune Festival.
Snip.
During his 2024 reelection campaign for the Texas House, Talarico accepted $59,000 from Texas Sands PAC, a pro-gambling group funded by Adelson. Talarico has also accepted donations from billionaire Charles Butt, the H-E-B chairman who supported candidates from both parties opposed to private school vouchers.
What are mere scruples when there’s all that sweet, sweet gambling money available to stuff into your campaign’s maw?
Though this rank hypocrisy clashes with Talarico’s performative piety, it’s par for the course for Democrats, who decry billionaires while funding their leftwing street operations through the likes of George Soros and Neville Roy Singham.
Because our billionaires are beyond reproach, and it’s always OK when we do it.
The Democratic side of the 2026 Texas Senate got a shake-up just five hours before the filing deadline, when U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett filed for the race right after Colin Allred dropped out.
Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (D-TX-30) has made official her long-awaited run for U.S. Senate — entering the mix with several other high-profile Republican and Democratic challengers to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), about five hours before the filing deadline.
Her filing on Monday afternoon followed several campaign shifts as the filing deadline on Monday night approached, including former Congressman Colin Allred (D-TX-32), who dropped his bid for U.S. Senate despite having been last year’s nominee for the same position the morning prior to Crockett’s campaign launch.
You may remember Allred from such hits as “I lost to Ted Cruz by over 900,000 votes“; which, being only 8.5% of the vote, was actually quite respectable by post-Betomania standards.
Crockett is a regular in national news headlines, often highlighted for sparring with other similarly-robust GOP members and for her unfiltered rhetoric typically targeted at the Republican Party’s leadership.
She flirted with a potential run for the U.S. Senate as various candidates jumped into the race, including Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Congressman Wesley Hunt (R-TX-38), and Democratic candidates Allred and state Rep. James Talarico (D-Austin). Crockett indicated on numerous occasions that she’d only consider jumping into the ring for U.S. Senate if she was shown general election polling that proved she has a path to victory, and teased the possibility on various media hits leading up to Monday night.
I suspect that people outside of the state haven’t heard of Talarico, who fills the Beto O’Rourke mold as a white guy with a vaguely Hispanic name. But he’s clearly the anointed choice of Texas Democratic Party insiders, to the point that he has been out-fundraising Allred (the man who raised over $94 million in his futile attempt to oust Ted Cruz last year) by more than $1 million, which was probably a contributing factor in Allred dropping out.
Among the polls in the field measuring Crockett’s potential success in the race was one released in early October, conducted by both the University of Houston and Texas Southern University. It found that in a four-way primary matchup between Crockett, Talarico, O’Rourke, and the now-null Allred, Crockett led the Democratic field with 31 percent, with Talarico and O’Rourke tied behind her.
It also showed her as a viable general election candidate when placed against Republicans Cornyn, Paxton, and Hunt — ranging from a six-point deficit to as low as a two-point deficit when placed in a hypothetical November 2026 general election against each of the three. Her best shot at winning the general appeared to be against Paxton, who held only a two-percent lead against her. Hunt led against her at five percent, while Cornyn proved to be the most difficult at six percent.
Usual poll caveats this far out apply.
Per reporting from CNN over the weekend, Allred, Talarico, Beto O’Rourke, and Congressman Joaquin Castro (D-TX-20) conducted a meeting to plan a statewide slate of Democratic candidates — to which Crockett was not invited — but it yielded no concrete plan and concluded with no set U.S. Senate candidate.
Does rather suggest that Crockett is on the outside looking in, doesn’t it?
The reaction from inside the Democratic tent was twofold. First came cheers about her stardom and visions of her being the one to flip the seat. Second came frustration about her high negatives and potential to crash and burn on the general election ballot in an R-58% state, per The Texan’s Texas Partisan Index.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, reactions to her candidacy only took one form: elation.
Republicans now have their foil in Texas, serving much the same purpose as Zohran Mamdani does nationwide going into next year. The National Republican Congressional Committee instantly put out messaging hitting border Congressman Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX-34) as Crockett’s “best friend.”
The Crockett-Talarico winner will face either U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), Attorney General Ken Paxton, or Congressman Wesley Hunt (R-TX-38), who are currently bloodying each other up over in the GOP primary.
Republicans in Texas — who are staring down the barrel of a very difficult midterm cycle — would be overjoyed for Crockett to be the Democratic name at the top of the ticket in November.
Indeed.
Someone who believes that 80% of crime comes from white supremacists suggests a candidate way out of touch with the Texas electorate, and a hothouse flower more suited to the confines of her overwelmingly Democratic black majority south Dallas district than someone suited to run statewide.
The Texas Democrat political establishment fears a wipeout of down-ballot candidates if they nominate a “terminally online” lefty candidate like Crockett at the top of the ticket. Long before she jumped into the race, they had already picked Talarico as their designated candidate. A Texas state rep who’s checklist positions aren’t a world away from Crockett’s, he still presents quite a different cultural profile as a “Presbyterian seminarian.” The “Christian nationalists” he rails against may be as thin on the ground as Crockett’s white supremacists, but someone who actually speaks the language of Christian belief is quite a different profile than the social justice warriors the national party has been lionizing.
Can he win in November? Barring a Great Depression-level economic crisis, no. Neither can Crockett. It’s simply a matter of protecting down ballot races, as Crockett is so far to the left of the Texas electorate that she might face a Wendy Davis style wipeout against whichever Republican captures the nomination.
Crockett’s has also jumped into the race very, very late. When O’Rourke ran against Ted Cruz, he jumped into the race April of the year before, not December. It will be very hard to build out a statewide campaign organization in a mere three and half months. It will also be hard to hire the best staffers, as the vast majority will already have signed on with other candidates in other races. And it’s likely most of the big in-state Democrat money was already betting on Talarico, and that seems unlikely to change.
She may be able to tap out-of-state lefty donors. But, then again, they may be tired of sending their money to Texas to die without noticeable effect. Also, unlike O’Rourke, there’s not enough time to write a million fawning magazine profiles of her, assuming half the magazines that fluffed O’Rourke are even still publishing.
Also, say what you want about O’Rourke, he did the work, “campaigning hard all across the state with a grueling personal appearance schedule that rivaled similar hard work put in by Cruz in his winning 2012 race. He also built out a competent campaign infrastructure and a national fund-raising apparatus to channel in the huge sums of cash national Democrats were throwing into the race.” I have my doubts that Crockett will prove overly capable in either of these areas.
I’ve long assumed that Talarico was the state Democratic Party’s favored` candidate based on the highly unscientific but usually accurate metric that a few yard signs had popped up in my neighborhood for him and no one else. Thus far, I see no reason Crockett’s entry into the race should change that assumption.
Too damn much news out this week. Biden’s “boom” is busted, Charlie Kirk’s assassin is caught, Israel dirtnaps top Hamas kingpins in Qatar, the curse of BlueSkyism, more illegal alien perverts sexually abusing children, more of the evil George Soros funds, and California’s “Jay Leno Bill” dies in committee. Plus some Prog Rock.
The U.S. economy probably added close to a million fewer jobs in 2024 and early 2025 than previously reported, the latest sign that the labor market, until recently a bright spot in the economy, may be weaker than it initially appeared.
The revised data was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as part of a longstanding annual process known as benchmarking. But the big downward adjustment comes at an awkward moment for the agency, just weeks after President Trump fired its top official following a separate set of negative revisions last month.
The data released on Tuesday showed that employers added 911,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months through March than had been indicated in the monthly payroll figures. That implies the economy added only about 850,000 jobs during that time — half as many as previously reported.
Police have identified the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s assassination as Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah man who authorities say became more political ahead of the shooting and recently expressed animosity toward Kirk.
Robinson, who is believed to have acted alone, came to the attention of the authorities after he contacted a family friend following the assassination, Utah Governor Spencer Cox revealed during a Friday morning press conference. That friend reported Robinson to the local sheriff’s office and Robinson’s father, a veteran police officer, then orchestrated his surrender to authorities at his home in Washington County, Utah.
The alleged gunman is expected to face at least three felony charges, including aggravated murder, obstruction of justice, and felony discharge of a firearm causing serious bodily injury, according to a probable cause affidavit obtained by NBC News. Cox said state law requires authorities to file the charging documents within three days.
Robinson appears to have become more political ahead of the shooting and criticized Kirk by name at a recent dinner, a family member of Robinson’s told authorities. Robinson said Kirk was “full of hate” and accused him of “promoting hate,” Cox said, though the affidavit, released later, indicates another family member may have made those remarks.
Robinson’s arrest comes after authorities had recovered a high-powered bolt action rifle they believe was used in the assassination, along with unspent rounds that were engraved with antifascist writing.
“Hey fascist, catch,” read the engraving on one round. Another round was engraved with the message “Bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao,” a reference to a song favored by resistance movements and revolutionary anti-capitalist partisans.
This is who they chose to kill: the affable man whose main act was having good-faith political debates with college students. The man who, since fatherhood, was turning more toward Christianity as both a purpose and a theme. He was a partisan to be sure, but he was nowhere near the outer limits of the American tradition, especially given his relentless fixation on Lincolnian persuasion as a stabilizing force in a slowly disintegrating polity. The ones who kept losing debates with him didn’t feel that way, of course, but they were only the instrument, not the object, of his work. The object was the millions of Americans who watched, learned, and saw who won again and again—and decided that they wished to side with the winner.
In this way, Charlie Kirk was perhaps the closest thing to Socrates in the American public square. The leftist intellectuals who sneered at him—the rube peddling his simple lines, his crass sophistry, his heartland aw-shucks certainties—would guffaw at the parallel, but it is no less true. He argued—amiably, fairly, relentlessly—until they couldn’t stand it any longer. And like Socrates, they had him killed.
Also like Socrates, his students will now do more for his cause after his martyrdom than they ever did during his life. The Socratic vindication was in his deification through literature at the pens of Plato and Xenophon. Millennia later, everyone remembers the philosopher, but vanishingly few know who ended his life.
The armies of Charlie Kirk, martyr, will be much more vast: not a handful of Athenians but millions of Americans. Their work will not be in philosophical literature but in the politics of the years to come. Whatever benefit accrues to the Republican Party is merely incidental. We are now in the realm of fundamental politics, which is concerned with the nature of the nation and the wielding of power for the common good. The generation of Americans that Charlie Kirk molded will be drawing conclusions about both from his life and his death alike.
After President Trump told Fox & Friends hosts that Charlie Kirk’s assassin is “in custody,” he went on to comment about radical leftist organizations, stating, “We are going to look into Soros. It looks like a RICO case.”
Recall that on Wednesday night, just hours after Kirk’s assassination, President Trump addressed the nation from the Oval Office, calling it a “dark moment for America.” He vowed to crack down on radical left movements across the country that have fueled chaos and even death this year.
Then on Thursday night, Texan News reporter Cameron Abrams wrote on X that Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and two dozen others in Congress called for a select committee on “the money, influence, and power behind the radical left’s assault on America and the rule of law.”
Just weeks ago, Trump stated on Truth Social that George Soros and his radical leftist son, Alex Soros, “should be charged with RICO because of their support of violent protests.”
Around that time, the “dark money” leftist NGO network operated by Arabella Advisors reportedly lost one of its top funding sources: Bill Gates.
Civil terrorism expert Jason Curtis Anderson of One City Rising states:
After the political assassination of Charlie Kirk, President Trump is interested in pursuing a RICO case against George Soros, America’s primary financier of far-left NGOs. What will likely be revealed is a complex web of dark money that observers have warned about for 20 years but never acted on.
At the center of this web are the various George Soros Open Society Foundation legal entities—four separate tax-exempt charities and one 501(c)(4) dark-money channel. Next are the Tides Foundation organizations, funded primarily by the Pritzker family, which include three separate tax-exempt charities and one 501(c)(4) dark-money channel. Following them are the Rockefeller Foundation nexus, NEO Philanthropy, the Ford Foundation, and a host of similar operations, including the Singham network. Collectively, these entities form America’s dark-money ecosystem. They fund permanent protests, bail demonstrators out of jail, finance legal efforts to sue local governments and police departments, influence immigration policy, promote drug decriminalization and criminal-justice reforms, and help elect district attorneys who decline to prosecute crime. On top of all of this, they also have entities like the Working Families Party that elect local politicians.
The money flows from donations to tax-exempt charities into non-tax-exempt 501(c)(4)s, and then trickles down to local groups. From there, funds reach the most radical organizations, which can’t even qualify for 501(c)(3) status and are instead “fiscally sponsored” by parent organizations. Because of this fiscal-sponsorship loophole, the books of these groups remain opaque. Everything from terror financing to protests-turned-riots connects in some way to these foundations.
The revolution against the West is, in effect, a network of tax-exempt charities operating as a powerful parallel government that no one ever voted for. It must be stopped before it’s too late.
A look into Soros-funded terrorist networks is long overdue. Here’s hoping a lot of indictments, bank account freezes and billions in civil forfeiture claims are forthcoming.
Your reminder that the social justice left are horrible people:
Right on cue deranged leftists are celebrating Charlie Kirk being shot
Bluesky, the Twitter spinoff that was once billed as a kinder, gentler alternative to what is now known as X, probably isn’t on death’s door. But after a burst of growth around the election, it’s shrinking and steadily declining in influence, even as other corners of the left thrive during Trump’s second term.
Snip.
Even on a logarithmic scale — on a linear scale, the graph is boring, because everything but Twitter would pretty much just be a flat line — the gulf between X and the other platforms is clear. And since the election, Bluesky has lost ground. More precise data based on the number of unique “likers”, “posters” and “followers” at Bluesky tracks a similar curve, with an initial peak around the election and a secondary peak after Trump’s inauguration but persistent erosion since then. The number of unique posters at Bluesky peaked at just under 1.5 million on Nov. 18, 2024 but has since fallen to an average of about 660,000 on weekdays and 600,000 on weekends: in other words, a drop of more than half.
The decline in Bluesky’s number of unique daily followers is even more substantial. They topped out at 3.1 million on Nov. 18 last year, but are now just under 400,000 per day: almost a tenfold decline. So while a dedicated troupe of Bluesky regulars are still skeeting up a storm, they’re gaining less and less traction, preaching only to the converted.
Snip.
Bluesky was initially popular with Twitter refugees who disliked Musk’s takeover of the platform, some of whom proclaimed that Elon had unleashed the “gates of hell” by restoring banned accounts or predicted that the platform would implode due to a shortage of engineering talent. I suppose I have no problem with this; ironically, the first post in Silver Bulletin history is entitled “In case Twitter goes to zero”. (I wanted a hedge in case it did, although if we’re being honest, I also had one eye out the door as ABC News was beginning to dismantle FiveThirtyEight.) However, this also self-selected for a certain type of user, adherents of an attitude that I call “Blueskyism”.
Blueskyism should not be mistaken for general left-of-center political views. Google search traffic for Bluesky over the past year is highly correlated with Kamala Harris’s vote share, but has some other skews: controlling for the Harris vote, it’s (statistically) significantly higher in states with a large white population and where the percentage of people with advanced degrees is higher. Bluesky is disproportionately popular in D.C., but also in crunchy white states like Vermont and Oregon. Search traffic for Twitter/X over the same period shows the same bias toward highly educated states, but less toward Harris voters4 and actually an inverse correlation with the white population share. (X gets more search traffic in more diverse states.)
Demographics alone only go so far in explaining Blueskyism, however. It’s not a political movement so much as a tribal affiliation, a niche set of attitudes and style of discursive norms that almost seem designed in a lab to be as unappealing as possible to anyone outside the clique.
Emphasis added. Snip.
Some of the most annoying people on the platform have exited for Bluesky.
As compared to other people with a similar level of public prominence — so not heads-of-state or celebrities or NFL quarterbacks — I was a “trending topic” on Twitter as often as just about anyone for a period from roughly 2018-2021. Matt Yglesias and Maggie Haberman also come to mind as other people who share this particular “honor”, which is not a welcome one: it means you’re the main character of the day, the person that other people have decided to dogpile upon.
There’s still some of this. If you tweet about election-related stuff, there is a pervasive tendency to “shoot the messenger” from partisans when the polls aren’t going their way. But much less than there once was: no more of the dogpiles for exceptionally strange reasons that I couldn’t even explain to my IRL friends.
And that’s because this behavior — I guess you could call it harassment but I’m a big boy and I can take it — consistently came from a relatively narrow group of power users, birds of a feather who flocked together, people who could demonstrate their fidelity to the group by picking on the main character. On Bluesky, exactly the same people — and I do mean exactly — attack exactly the same perpetual enemies, but to roughly 1/60th the size of the audience.
So I feel freer using Twitter these days for jokes, memes, and tongue-in-cheek ideas that aren’t meant to be taken entirely seriously, intended to be read as though they’re written in comic sans.
Snip.
What really matters in elections is simply being popular and winning over new converts. Blueskyism, with its intolerance for dissent, is the opposite of that.
Because, yes, while this is personal for me, annoyingness matters in politics.
Snip.
The three essential characteristics of Blueskyism.
The first essential characteristic: Smalltentism
Aggressive policing of dissent, particularly of people “just outside the circle” who might have broader credibility on the center-left. Censoriousness, often taking the form of moral micropanics that designate a rotating cast of opponents as the main characters of the day. Self-reinforcing belief in the righteousness of the clique, and conflation of its values with broader public sentiment among “the base”.
A healthy political movement, you’d think, would welcome people who agree with them on 70 percent of issues, particularly if it sees Trump as an existential threat to democracy and wants a broad coalition against him. Blueskyists do literally almost the exact opposite: their biggest enemies are people on the center-left like me and Yglesias and Ezra Klein. Or center-left media institutions like the New York Times, which are often viewed as more problematic than Fox News.
This aggressive policing of boundaries might at least have been tactically smart during the miraculous Blue Period when Twitter was afflicted with Blueskyism. Yglesias, say, is followed by a lot more Democratic staffers than Ben Shapiro or some actual conservative is.
But now that Blueskyism is losing the battle of ideas, it just draws the tent narrower and ensures that it will remain obscure. There’s nothing more Blueskyist than this, literally creating a “list of shame” of Bluesky posters who remain active on Twitter.
And sometimes, Blueskyists even make violent threats toward people who disagree with them. For instance, the journalist Billy Binion says he recently “logged onto Bluesky to find thousands of people screaming at me, many of whom were telling me to kill myself” after having posted that “billionaires should exist”. There’s some of that on every social media platform, unfortunately, and I’m not going to make assertions about the relative frequency on Bluesky without taking some more comprehensive approach to the question. It certainly shouldn’t have a reputation for civil discourse, however, and this may help to explain the high rate of exits from the platform.
The second essential characteristic: Credentialism
Appeals to authority, particularly academic authority. Centering of the suitability of the speaker based on his or her credentials and/or identity characteristics (standpoint epistemology) as opposed to the strength of his or her arguments, accompanied by the implicit presumption to claim to be speaking on behalf of the entire identity group.
Although Blueskyism is small, its practitioners mostly consist of people within the professional-managerial class: (over)educated blue-state liberals, perhaps people who have drawn the short straw of elite overproduction. You can see that in the demographic data, or in the attitude site management takes: the platform literally just banned people from Mississippi because of a dispute over age verification.
And Bluesky has become relatively popular among academics, which I regard as a problem on various levels. The Democratic Party has already forgotten how to talk to large groups of voters like young men, who have become considerably less likely to complete college than young women. Meanwhile, the experts have made a lot of mistakes, and sometimes the reason is because they’ve become self-serving in pursuit of social media validation or blinded by political partisanship. Increasingly often, I’ll see academics engage in incredibly sloppy argumentation and this seems to be correlated with recent exposure to Bluesky. Because Bluesky is so small, it has a highly specific signature. It’s like if you have some toxic persona on the periphery of your friend group; someone starts speaking in a particular way that you just know they recently hung out with George or Gina.
While academic credentials are one way to gain credibility under Blueskyism, they aren’t the only one. Even though the Google search data suggests that the platform is disproportionately white, an alternative is to claim to speak on behalf of a disadvantaged group. I swear to God, I’m not trying to make this about “wokeness” but there is overlap there.
Perhaps the most prominent example of Blueskyism creeping into real life is when a group of left-leaning public health professionals, who often took a bullying approach during Twitter’s Blue Period, went out of their way to rationalize mass protests after George Floyd was murdered in 2020. Personally, I think it was perfectly fine to join in on these protests; political expression is important (and these protests were usually outdoors and masked). But I also think a lot of other things, like sending your children to school or visiting your dying relatives in the hospital, would have risen to this threshold also, and this group specifically used their credentials to endorse the Floyd protests after having campaigned for those other activities to be prohibited.
Indeed, this controversy recently resurfaced on Bluesky. After Brian Schatz, the Democratic senator from Hawaii, wrote sympathetically in response to a Sean Trende tweet that recalled the hypocrisy of endorsing the protests, he and other “Dem elected/staff/consultants” were blamed on the platform for being “awash in right-wing brainrot.”
The third essential characteristic: Catastrophism
Humorless, scoldy neuroticism, often rationalized by the view that one must be on “war footing” because the world is self-evidently in crisis. Sublimation of personal anxiety as a substitute for political activism or material solutions to the crisis, with expressions of weariness and pessimism signaling virtue and/or savviness.
Although the first two characteristics already limit the appeal of Blueskyism, this makes it worse. Even people who might otherwise be sympathetic to Bluesky have noticed how impossible it is to get away with a joke on the platform, one of the things that X sometimes13 still has going for it. The Bernie-era, Chapo Trap House strain of left-wing discourse also at least had a caustic if sometimes juvenile humor streak. Blueskyism does not.
Instead, the prevailing Blueskyist attitude is often something like this — that we’re in the midst of a “late stage capitalist hellscape” and that you have to be “delusional” to have any amount of hope or optimism”.
Most people outside of Bluesky don’t think like this. Although literally almost zero Democrats are happy with the state of the country, overwhelming majorities of Americans are happy with how their personal lives are going and are able to compartmentalize politics away or recognize that other things matter in life, too.
Conclusion: “A subculture like Blueskyism that sees depression as a rational and even virtuous response is going to select for a lot of miserable people. And misery likes company. So the Blueskyists gather in a corner, exchanging tales of woe, while the rest of us slink away.”
Though there is the usual Silver hemming, hawing and sifting things into ever-finer categories (not to mention his willful denial that “wokeness” is an actual thing, despite so carefully delineating some of its most central characteristics, and his dismissal of the Twitter Files), it’s still worth reading the whole thing. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Rich Hamas honchos throught they could hang out safe in Qatar while their footsoldiers died in Gaza. Wrong.
Israel carried out a strike on senior Hamas leaders in Qatar’s capital, Doha, on Tuesday afternoon.
Qatar quickly accused Israel of “reckless” behaviour and breaking international law after the attack on a residential premises in the city.
The Israel Defense Forces claimed to have targeted those “directly responsible for the brutal October 7 massacre”.
Snip.
According to the Israeli military, it conducted a “precise strike” targeted at Hamas senior leaders in Qatar using “precise munitions”.
Israeli media says the operation involved 15 Israeli fighter jets, firing 10 munitions against a single target.
Qatar has hosted Hamas’s political bureau since 2012 and has played a key role in facilitating indirect negotiations between the group and Israel since the 7 October attacks.
Hamas said members of the group’s negotiating delegation in Doha were targeted but survived the strike. However Hamas said six others, including a Qatari security official, were killed.
According to Hamas, those killed were:
Humam Al-Hayya (Abu Yahya) – son of chief negotiator al-Hayya
Jihad Labad (Abu Bilal) – director of al-Hayya’s office
Abdullah Abdul Wahid (Abu Khalil)
Moamen Hassouna (Abu Omar)
Ahmed Al-Mamluk (Abu Malik)
Corporal Badr Saad Mohammed Al-Humaidi – Qatari internal security forces
“Trump is enjoying his highest approval rating of either term right now according to a DailyMail/J.L. Partners poll. He’s sitting at a solid 55% approval rating.”
Once again, the Supreme Court has stepped in to prevent a rogue district judge from hamstringing the executive branch in performing core executive functions under Donald Trump. And once again, the Court’s conservative majority has dispatched this order without explanation, over an angry and overwrought dissent from the Court’s liberals. This time, however, Justice Brett Kavanaugh stepped up to explain what was going on.
The Court’s order this morning in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo stayed an August 1 order by district judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong-
That name sounds like it came out of a Monty Python skit.
-of the Central District of California, a Biden appointee and former Obama Justice Department official. The order will thus have no effect unless and until the Ninth Circuit rules in the case — perhaps only a brief reprieve, given that the Ninth Circuit previously declined to stay Judge Frimpong’s initial temporary restraining order in the case.
The crux of the case is whether the government may stop individuals in Los Angeles on suspicion of being illegal immigrants on the basis of four factors: “(i) presence at particular locations such as bus stops, car washes, day laborer pickup sites, agricultural sites, and the like; (ii) the type of work one does; (iii) speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent; and (iv) apparent race or ethnicity.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent noted that the order attempted to enjoin Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) only from stops based solely on those four criteria, but as Kavanaugh noted, there are inherent problems in the judiciary trying to prospectively micromanage law enforcement in such fashion: “Even if the Government had a policy of making stops based on the factors prohibited by the District Court, immigration officers might not rely only on those factors if and when they stop [the lawsuit’s named] plaintiffs in the future,” and “the District Court’s injunction threatens contempt sanctions against immigration officers who make brief investigative stops later found by the court to violate the injunction. The prospect of such after-the-fact judicial second-guessing and contempt proceedings will inevitably chill lawful immigration enforcement efforts. . . . Judges are not appointed to make those policy calls.” As Kavanaugh added, particular plaintiffs do not have standing to enjoin the government in advance from stops that may or may not involve them and may or may not, depending on the circumstances, violate the Fourth Amendment.
The Department of Homeland Security launched Operation Midway Blitz on Monday to combat the influx of illegal immigration Chicago has seen under Democratic Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.
DHS said that the program was created in honor of Katie Abraham, a college student who was struck and killed by a Guatemalan national in a drunk driving hit-and-run accident in Illinois.
“DHS is launching Operation Midway Blitz in honor of Katie Abraham who was killed in Illinois by a criminal illegal alien who should have never been in our country. This operation will target the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens in Chicago,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “For years, Governor Pritzker and his fellow sanctuary politicians released Tren de Aragua gang members, rapists, kidnappers, and drug traffickers on Chicago’s streets — putting American lives at risk and making Chicago a magnet for criminals.”
During Joe Biden’s term, an estimated 233,000 unaccompanied children crossed the border and were completely lost.
The Trump admin has now found 22,638 of these children.
But many of them have suffered unbelievable horrors:
John Fabbricatore, HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement senior advisor, said to Fox News:
We found children who have been raped. We’re talking about debt bondage, where children are being made to work off debt, trafficking debt. We’re talking about children that were brought into situations and then treated like sexual slaves.
So far, 27 of the children Biden lost have been found dead, often from murder or drug overdose.
Children are in horrific environments, just environments that they should not be in, where the sponsor is a heroin dealer and that child winds up dying of a heroin overdose.
Iryna Zarutska was a 23-year-old Ukrainian who fled the war in her country for Charlotte, North Carolina.
Over the weekend, police released video of her being stabbed in the neck by a violent career criminal.
Iryna got on the train, sat down, and immediately went “condition white” (looking at her phone without paying attention to her surroundings).
Let this be a reminder that, if you’re in public, you need situational awareness at all times.
In the blink of an eye, her throat was slashed and she was bleeding out over the floor of the train.
Despite the horror of the crime, the media has remained ostensibly quiet.
The lack of any mention whatsoever of Iryna Zarutska’s murder despite her being a Ukrainian refugee reminds me of USAID’s call for media organizations to “collaborate” and “agree policies on strategic silence.” https://t.co/AkH4dxxrjtpic.twitter.com/nK6NbqvV4j
The optics are incredibly awful for the entire Democratic Party machine.
The brutal killing of Iryna Zarutska (Ukrainian refugee) on a commuter train in North Carolina highlights not only the willingness of leftist corporate media to cover up news stories that jeopardize their woke narratives but also the broader failure of so-called criminal justice reform, which appears to have shockingly backfired and become a major public safety threat. Adding to the mounting outrage, a leftist magistrate judge released the schizophrenic monster on cashless bail (before he killed Zarutska) – another failure point. And then there’s this: far-left nonprofits accelerated the push for disastrous criminal justice reforms.
It’s now widely known that Decarlos Brown Jr., 34, Zarutska’s killer, had been previously arrested 14 times in North Carolina for crimes ranging from assault to firearms possession, and whose own mother admitted he was schizophrenic and should never have been allowed back on the streets, was recently released on cashless bail (before he killed Zarutska) by a progressive magistrate judge despite a two-decade violent crime spree.
But the failures don’t stop with local leftist politicians and rogue progressive judges (or magistrate judges) who embrace woke and enabled criminal justice reform from hell. They extend much deeper – into the shadowy world of the dark-money-funded nonprofit industrial complex, which poured millions of dollars into Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, to push for “reducing the jail population.”
“Another factor in the death of Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte’s light rail–the left-wing MacArthur Foundation giving Mecklenburg county a $3.3 million grant to reduce the jail population. Specifically as part of racial equity aims,” Daily Wire’s Megan Basham wrote on X.
Basham noted, “Like Soros’ Open Society, the MacArthur Foundation incentivizes local municipalities to make residents less safe by leaving threats like Decarlos Brown on the streets.”
[Yordanis] Cobos-Martinez has a prior criminal history of:
False imprisonment in CA (unknown disposition)
Indecency with a child in Texas (dismissed)
Grand theft of vehicle in Florida (dismissed)
Carjacking & false imprisonment in CA (acquitted on carjacking, convicted of false imprisonment).
Disturbing surveillance video shows Cobos-Martinez allegedly kicking and picking up the victim’s severed head in the motel parking lot as it drips blood…
“Russian Oil Tanker in Primorsk Set on Fire by Drones & Smolensk Oil Depot Hit.” Primorsk is a good 1,000km from the Ukrainian border, up near Finland.
The Trump administration announced Wednesday that an unprecedented law enforcement operation has busted a Chinese-based fentanyl drug and money laundering conspiracy, resulting in charges against 22 Chinese nationals, four Chinese pharmaceutical companies and three U.S. citizens.
FBI Director Kash Patel described Operation Box Cutter as a “first-of-its-kind” law enforcement action targeting the threat posed to the American public by China-manufactured precursor chemicals used in the production of fentanyl.
“We’re done playing whack-a-mole,” he said during a press conference in Cincinnati, Ohio.
“We didn’t arrest a couple of people. We charged an enterprise-wide system in mainland China to include dozens of individuals and banks and companies that are responsible for making these lethal precursors and shipping them here.”
The Dayton, Ohio, grand jury five-count indictment unsealed Wednesday focuses on a Tipp City, Ohio, resident, 39-year-old Eric Michael Payne.
At this rate, with President Donald Trump being one of the most decisive presidents in history, statistics show that his endorsement could undoubtedly lead a candidate to victory.
As Ian Vallencillo, commissioner of Sweetwater, Florida, told the Washington Examiner, Trump is one of “the most popular political figures,” stating that voters “overwhelmingly support Trump’s picks.”
At this rate, with President Donald Trump being one of the most decisive presidents in history, statistics show that his endorsement could undoubtedly lead a candidate to victory.
As Ian Vallencillo, commissioner of Sweetwater, Florida, told the Washington Examiner, Trump is one of “the most popular political figures,” stating that voters “overwhelmingly support Trump’s picks.”
The commissioner is right.
Candidates endorsed by Trump have lost, but very rarely. Former Republican North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson conceded his gubernatorial election against an incumbent after receiving Trump’s approval, partly over a scandal that engulfed the news cycle days before the election.
Similarly, former presidential candidate and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) lost his reelection bid, over years of controversy, anti-Trump skepticism, and a failure to get the Republican Party in the White House in 2012.
During the 2024 federal and gubernatorial election cycles, Trump endorsed 306 candidates. Eighty-nine percent of those candidates now occupy the office they ran for. In the 2022 election cycle, Trump endorsed 195 candidates, 83% of whom were sworn in to office a few months later.
One of those key endorsements includes the key race of Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA), who unseated a longtime incumbent, former Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, by a 0.5% margin.
Similarly, in the same election cycle, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) won his Senate race against former Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, who had been in office since 2007.
The year before that, after former California GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy resigned from Congress in 2023 following a motion for him to step down as speaker of the House from a Trump-endorsed representative, California Assemblyman Vince Fong was elected soon after receiving the nod from the president.
Similarly, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), who was challenged by a local Democratic advocate, won his third term soon after Trump endorsed him.
The latest scandal involves a web of shell companies, family members on mysterious payrolls, and taxpayer money that somehow found its way into campaign coffers. Multiple federal agencies are now investigating what appears to be a deliberate scheme to circumvent campaign finance laws through a maze of LLCs and nonprofits. The numbers are staggering: millions in taxpayer funds allegedly embezzled, hundreds of thousands in unreported campaign contributions, and a trail of financial breadcrumbs leading through family businesses.
The politician at the center of this storm? Democratic Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida.
Cherfilus-McCormick had won her seat after campaigning against the corruption of her predecessor, Alcee Hastings.
Today, Cherfilus-McCormick finds herself drowning in exactly the kind of investigations she once condemned. The Federal Election Commission has launched a formal probe into her campaign’s alleged violations, while the Office of Congressional Ethics has found “probable cause” that she accepted illegal campaign contributions. The schemes are breathtaking in their audacity: her husband and sister-in-law running an LLC that funneled $725,000 through a nonprofit that then paid her campaign vendors. A political consultant with direct access to these funds, making payments on her behalf while she pretended not to know.
But here’s where my blood really starts to boil. Before entering Congress, Cherfilus-McCormick was CEO of Trinity Health Care Services, a family company that received a $5 million “overpayment” from Florida’s emergency services department – supposedly due to a misplaced decimal point. Instead of immediately returning the taxpayer money, investigators allege she began moving it between family businesses, including companies where she held major stakes. The state had to sue to get its money back.
As expected. “James Talarico Launches Democrat Bid for U.S. Senate. Talarico has positioned himself as one of the more left-wing voices in the Texas Legislature.”
Remember how Adam Carolla said the Palisades fire would used as an excuse for a land grab by the Democrats running Los Angeles and California? Guess what? “Iconic Malibu restaurant is told it can’t rebuild after Palisades Fire.”
An Alpha News reporter participated in a ride-along with ICE agents during the arrest. Wilson Tindi, a Kenya native, pled guilty to sexually assaulting a sleeping woman in Minneapolis in 2014 after breaking into her home. A judge ordered Tindi to be deported, but a federal judge later overturned this ruling. ICE released him after 18 months.
After his release, Tindi became a chief audit officer at Minnesota’s education department. He was later fired after his past became known, raising questions about how he was ever hired in the first place.
Among the most high-profile and controversial legislation passed was a handful of social issue bills — in particular, one establishing civil cause of action against chemical abortion pill providers, and another separating publicly-funded private spaces by biological sex. The former came with its fair share of backdoor negotiations and amendments before it was successfully carried through both chambers, as was the case for multiple priorities of Abbott’s.
One issue which faced an untimely end in the Legislature was the attempted regulation of hemp-derived THC products. Ultimately, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, House Speaker Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock), and Abbott were unable to reach an agreement on Wednesday.
Collateral damage from the death of print magazines. “Publishers Clearing House Winners Say They Are No Longer Receiving Their Lifetime Payments.”
It seems that some leftwing Texas school nurses are practicing malicious compliance.
Texas Education Agency Updates First Aid Guidelines After Controversy Over Withheld Medical Care
The TEA updated their guidance to allow schools to provide “first aid” without parental consent.
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has released updated guidelines for how Texas public schools should approach the implementation of Senate Bill (SB) 12, known as the “Parent Bill of Rights,” after recent reports of school nurses not providing first aid to students.
One aspect of SB 12 that caused distress and confusion among lawmakers, parents, and schools alike is the requirement for school districts to receive documentation of notice and consent from parents for their child to receive “medical, psychiatric, and psychological treatment.”
State Rep. Jeff Leach (R-Allen) posted a letter on social media he had sent to TEA Commissioner Mike Morath last week regarding “concerns with the implementation” of SB 12 after reports of how “some school districts are taking an ‘all or nothing’ approach” to the new policy requirements, which has resulted in “band-aids” and “ice packs” being withheld from children.
Following the publication of the letter, which was also signed by the bill author state Sen. Brandon Creighton (R-Conroe), reports of children not being treated for certain “general care” services began being made public.
“After a thorough review was conducted of the video recordings of the statements, it became clear to me that their actions amounted to serious professional and personal misconduct,” Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse stated late Wednesday. “Conduct that advocates for inciting violence is directly contrary to the values of Texas State University. I cannot and will not tolerate such behavior.”
“As a result, I have determined that their actions are incompatible with their responsibilities as a faculty member at Texas State University,” Damphousse continued. “Effective immediately, their employment with Texas State University has been terminated.”
Damphousse was referring to Tom Alter, who was previously an associate professor of history at Texas State.
Alter had been exposed making comments calling for the overthrow of the U.S. government.
The European Commission has suffered a major defeat in court over its plans to make large tech platforms pay it to enforce the Digital Services Act.
Meta and ByteDance’s TikTok took the European Commission to court after it presented them with a “supervisory fee” equal to 0.05 per cent of their yearly global net income. The bill was to cover the EU executive’s expenses in monitoring their compliance with the Digital Services Act.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) gives the European Commission oversight of very large online platforms and search engines—ones with more than 45 million EU users a year. To fund this oversight, the Commission has said it will charge these providers an annual fee, based on their average monthly users.
The Commission adopted rules saying how it would set these fees on 2 March 2023. The next month, on 25 April, it classified Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok as very large platforms. That November, it finalised the 2023 fees for each.
In two decisions 10 September, the Court of Justice of the EU determined the Commission’s supervisory fees on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok were void for procedural grounds.
To set the 2023 fees, the Commission decided to calculate each platform’s average monthly users using a methodology based on third-party data it attached to each decision.
However, the Court ruled that this methodology for calculating fees should have been established through a delegated act–a process which involves the European Parliament and Council.
The judges said it was incorrect for the European Commission to determine the fees using implementing decisions it devised on its own authority alone.
Jay Leno’s star power wasn’t enough to persuade a California legislative committee to pass a measure to allow owners of classic cars like him to be exempted from the state’s rigorous smog-check requirements.
The Assembly Appropriations Committee on Friday blocked Bakersfield Republican Sen. Shannon Grove’s Senate Bill 712 from advancing for a full vote. Leno had testified in support of the measure in Sacramento earlier this year.
The committee’s members and its powerful Democratic chairperson, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks of Oakland, did not provide a reason for killing the bill during Friday’s hearing, which quickly and with little fanfare announced the fate of 260 other bills that had been placed on the committee’s so-called “suspense file.” Seventy other bills also were killed without explanation.
The Senate and Assembly’s appropriations committees, which both met Friday and rejected hundreds of bills, are supposed to be the gatekeepers for bills proposing to spend taxpayer money. But the committees’ suspense files are where hundreds of politically touchy bills die quietly each year with only a few insiders knowing the real reasons.
Random meme stolen from Facebook:
So I don’t think I’ll be watching all of the Joe Rogan podcasts with Carrot Top or Charlie Sheen, but I suspect I’ll be watching snippets from them, and felt I should make you aware of their existence…
For some reason, all three Top Gear/Grand Tour presents have decided they need to come out with their own gin.
Ten musical pieces you know, but not the names of. I already knew a good number, but a few were new, and a couple of others I didn’t know under their original language name.
Trump tackles mail-in ballot fraud, the Democrat Party sinks (and sinks, and sinks), millionaires and billionaires pump money to the same lefties who decry them, a kangaroo verdict gets slapped down, a platoon of swamp creatures get smacked down, Ukrainian drones are producing gas shortages in Russia, Lebanon declares itself Iranian influence-free, a heavyweight joins the Texas AG race, Dade bows out, a neo-Nazi expertly trolls the German justice system, and Facebook’s AI wants to have sexytime with your children.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The next voting fraud vector President Trump is ready to tackle: mail-in voting fraud.
President Donald Trump has been warning for years that mail-in ballots and voting machines are riddled with vulnerabilities that invite fraud and undermine trust in elections. We’ve discussed these vulnerabilities here at PJ Media extensively, and now Trump is taking action on them. On Monday morning, President Trump announced on Truth Social that he will issue an executive order to put an end to mail-in ballots before the 2026 midterms and restore “honesty and integrity” to America’s elections.
In a lengthy post on Truth Social, Trump announced, “I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.” He argued that such machines cost “Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.”
Trump said the United States stands alone in continuing to use widespread mail-in voting. “We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED,” he wrote.
The president made clear that he intends to act quickly, pledging to use executive authority to move the plan forward. “WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections,” Trump said.
Snip.
In 2021, Democrats in Congress tried to ram through a series of radical bills — the Freedom to Vote Act, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the For the People Act — that would have federalized state elections and permanently undermined election integrity. These schemes included universal mail-in ballots, counting votes up to ten days after Election Day, automatic voter registration, granting felons the right to vote, and even laying the groundwork to abolish the Electoral College altogether. It was a brazen attempt to lock in Democrat power forever by destroying the safeguards that protect free and fair elections.
Trump’s announcement proves that election integrity will be a central priority of his presidency as the 2026 midterms approach.
Some think Trump will run into states rights issues. We’ll see…
A federal appeals court handed the Trump administration a decisive 2-1 victory Wednesday, ruling that the president can proceed with cutting nearly $2 billion in previously approved foreign aid payments. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned a lower court’s order that had required the administration to continue sending taxpayer funds abroad.
How the Working Families Party sells itself as “grassroots” — with IRS-documented, publicly admitted “common control” revealing it’s really a Soros-financed political money washer.
In New York politics, there’s one machine that towers above the rest. No, not the Democratic Party—it’s the Working Families Party, the most powerful minor party in America. Its name sounds wholesome enough—who doesn’t support “working families”? But behind that branding lies a $2 billion tax-exempt laundromat that’s anything but local, grassroots, or honest.
Take Zohran Mamdani, their current belle of the ball.
Easy answer: Zohran Mandani is the product of a grassroots washing syndicate of 501c3 and 501c4 entities funded by George Soros and Silicon Valley billionaires. He is their manufactured product.
Easy answer: Zohran Mandani is the product of a grassroots washing syndicate of 501c3 and 501c4 entities funded by George Soros and Silicon Valley billionaires. He is their manufactured product.
After winning his race, he announced on NBC: “I don’t think we should have billionaires.” Hilarious considering Mamdani’s “grassroots” revolution was fueled by over $2 million in PAC and organizational spending, much of it courtesy of the very billionaire class he allegedly opposes.
This is the theater of modern politics: denounce wealth while being powered by it. And the actors know their audience. They’ve learned that if you slap “grassroots” on the packaging, voters won’t check the label.
But let’s check it anyway.
The money trail revealed in Sam Antar’s breaking report is straightforward enough. Soros donates to the Open Society Institute, a $4.5 billion “charity” that enjoys generous tax deductions. OSI then transfers millions to other “charities” like Tides Foundation, which mysteriously claims to run a $350 million operation with zero employees. From there, the money “converts” into political cash: Tides passes funds to the Working Families Organization, a 501(c)(4), which then wires millions to PACs that bankroll candidates like Mamdani.
What you have is billionaire money dressed up in “working families” clothing, masquerading as the will of the people while being anything but.
Drawing on data from the nonpartisan data firm L2, the New York Times’s Shane Goldmacher conducted an in-depth analysis of the changes in these numbers over the past few election cycles. His findings paint a stark picture for the Democratic Party. It is in the midst of what he calls a “voter registration crisis,” with the party “hemorrhaging voters long before they even reach the polls.”
Goldmacher first looked at how these figures shifted between 2020 and 2024. In the span of four years, Democrats lost roughly 2.1 million registered voters across the 30 states and the district that track party affiliation, while the GOP gained approximately 2.4 million.
As the map below shows, Democrats fell behind in each one of these states. This includes blue states such as California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Rhode Island, as well as the swing states of Arizona, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
NEW at NYT: The Democratic Party is facing a voter registration crisis in red, blue and battleground states alike — losing ground to the GOP everywhere.
My deep dive into the numbers and what it reveals about the party's brand.
The shift in Pennsylvania has been dramatic. In November 2020, Democrats held a registration advantage of 517,310 active voters. Today, that margin has shrunk to just 53,303.
A similar scenario has played out in North Carolina, where Democrats once enjoyed a 400,000-voter edge. Their lead now stands at less than 17,000.
Goldmacher noted that, in percentage terms, Democrats’ advantage over Republicans narrowed from nearly 11 points in 2020 to just over 6 points in 2024.
President Donald Trump was still able to win because so many Democratic votes are concentrated in deep-blue strongholds such as California and New York. By contrast, large red states such as Texas don’t allow voters to register by party affiliation — and thus aren’t reflected in the data.
In some cases, Democrats still retained an edge over Republicans (such as in Pennsylvania). But the majority of new registrations in other states, such as Florida, shifted from Democrats to the GOP. Goldmacher expects more states to follow.
Moreover, between 2018 and 2024, new young voters have shifted noticeably toward the Republican Party. In 2018, 66% of voters under 45 registered as Democrats, but by 2024 that share had fallen to just 48%.
Goldmacher reported that, last year, for the first time since 2018, new voter registrations nationwide favored Republicans over Democrats.
That was a long time ago and today Democrats’ image is significantly worse and over a wider range of cultural issues than it was back then. The animus toward the party among working-class voters has reached epic proportions and Democrats appear clueless on how to overcome that. The reigning theories seem to be talking more about economics (“kitchen table issues” or, more daringly, “abundance”), insisting they’re “fighters” and cussing a lot. Damon Linker gets to the heart of how absolutely hopeless this approach is.
[W]hat liberals need to do to defeat right-wing populism…[is] to moderate on culture. That means on policies and moral stances wrapped up with the old culture war (like trans and other gender-related issues) as well as in other areas of policy that have a strong cultural valance—like crime, immigration, and DEI. This isn’t just necessary because Democratic positions on these issues are unpopular at the moment. It’s also crucial because culture is more fundamental than politics: It sends a signal to voters about where a politician or party stands on base-level moral questions. When voters become convinced that a specific politician or party has bad (or just sufficiently different) moral judgment, they lose trust in that politician or party. And then other, more superficial policy commitments don’t matter…
The area surrounding the Texas-Arkansas border has been solidly Republican for a while, but the Biden people wanted to demonstrate that federal dollars are available to all, regardless of political leanings, and they hoped they might be able to tilt the area’s partisan alignment a bit back toward the Dems if those dollars were used to jump-start a solar-panel-construction industry in the region, creating jobs and boosting the local economy in other ways…The money arrived, but in the 2024 election, the region voted even more overwhelmingly for Donald Trump than it had in the previous two election cycles…The effort failed because the voters in Texarkana, like voters in rural and exurban communities around the country, have learned to distrust the Democrats on fundamental issues of morality and culture, making them disinclined to trust them on anything else…
The way to [reach these skeptical voters] is for the party to make an effort to distance itself from the leftward cultural stances associated with its most animated progressive activists, but also often affirmed by many millions of well-educated upper-middle-class white and often female professionals. Since people fitting this description frequently hold top jobs in the Democratic Party itself, this is a hard ask…
This, I’m convinced, is the top challenge facing liberalism and the Democratic Party today.
Exactly. This is the top challenge facing the Democrats today. Yet they are shockingly M.I.A. in dealing with it. Democrats overwhelmingly would rather do anything than do what is needed: two, three many Sister Souljah moments. Consider how Democrats have handled culturally-inflected issues since their 2024 election defeat.
Trans? A few peeps, quickly slapped down by the Groups and party activists.
Immigration? Everything Trump’s doing is wrong. We’ll only cooperate with federal law enforcement when we feel like it.
Crime? Not a problem. Everything’s going great—especially in D.C.! Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries: “The crime scene in D.C. most damaging to everyday Americans is at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.” Trump’s turning D.C. into a police state!
Race? DEI is wonderful and we’ll defend it to our dying breath. Same thing with racial preferences. Those who oppose these policies are racists and white supremacists.
The list could go on. Using the traditional 0-10 Sister Souljah scale, where zero is doing nothing at all, 5 is barely adequate, and 10 is what Bill Clinton did, I’d give today’s Democrats a 1 for the occasional grudging admission in interviews and the like that maybe the Democrats have overdone their noble commitments a little bit (though of course their heinous opponents are 100 percent wrong). And the 1 might be generous.
Teixeira is 100% right on the problem, and on Democrats complete inability to address the problem. Sister Souljah is the Democratic Party. The insane wing is in the process of driving out the last remnants of the Corrupt Wing, the latter of which foolishly believes that actually winning elections is somehow more important than the perpetual virtue signaling festival to remind those inbred redneck freaks of JesusLand that Democrats are the Good People, and anyone who disagrees is a hetronormative racist transphobic white supremacist who must be cancelled at all costs.
Social Justice controls the ideological core of the Party hook, line and sinker. Opposing social justice is heretical #WrongThink that must be punished. Social justice warriors cannot be argued out of their convictions by logic, as logic had nothing to do with forming them. Social justice is a religious imperative, and the only way to free the party from the grip of social justice is to burn it to the ground. The Democrat Party needs to go the way of the Whigs. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced Tuesday that she will be revoking security clearances for 37 current and former intel officials for allegedly abusing the public’s trust by manipulating information and conducting political activities.
The officials on Gabbard’s list includes former top aides to Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who was involved with a discredited intelligence assessment that claimed Russia favored once-and-current President Donald Trump to win the 2016 election over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Gabbard has accused the 37 officials accused of politicizing and weaponizing intelligence, failing to safeguard classified information, or other instances of failing to follow standards.
Andrew Cedar: Former Senior Director for Global Engagement at the National Security Council
Andrew P. Miller: Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs
Benjamin A. Cooper: Associate Scholar in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute
Beth E. Sanner: Former Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Mission Integration
Brett M. Holmgren: Former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research
Charles A. Kupchan: Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and former Senior Director for European Affairs at the National Security Council
Christopher Center: Former intelligence analyst and official
Corinne A. Graff: Former Senior Advisor at the United States Institute of Peace
Dipreet K. Sidhu: Former intelligence and policy official
Edward Gistaro: Former National Intelligence Officer for Europe
Emily J. Horne: Former Spokesperson and Senior Director for Press at the National Security Council
Harry Hannah: Former intelligence official
Heather R. Gutierrez: Former intelligence analyst
Jamie S. Jowers: Former intelligence and policy advisor
Jeffrey M. Prescott: Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture
Joel T. Meyer: Former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Strategic Initiatives at the Department of Homeland Security
Joel Willett: Former CEO of Cybermedia Technologies
John W. Ficklin: Former Senior Director for Records and Access Management at the National Security Council
Julia S. Gurganus: Former National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia
Julia Santucci: Former Director for Egypt at the National Security Council
Loren DeJonge Schulman: Former Deputy Director of Studies at the Center for a New American Security
Luke R. Hartig: Former Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council
Maher B. Bitar: Former Coordinator for Intelligence and Defense Policy at the National Security Council
Mark B. Feierstein: Former Assistant Administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean at USAID
Mary Beth Goodman: Deputy Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
Megan F. Doherty: Former Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Middle East at USAID
Michael P. Dempsey: Former Acting Director of National Intelligence
Perry Blatstein: Former intelligence analyst
Richard H. Ledgett: Former Deputy Director of the National Security Agency
Samantha E. Vinograd: Former Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention at the Department of Homeland Security
Sarah S. Farnsworth: Former intelligence official
Shelby L. Pierson: Former Intelligence Community Election Threats Executive
Stephanie O’Sullivan: Former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence
Thomas W. West: Former Special Representative for Afghanistan
Thom X. Nguyen: Former intelligence analyst
William J. Tuttle: Former intelligence official
Yael Eisenstate: Former Vice President of Global Affairs at the Anti-Defamation League
I’m including the entire list here because I think it’s important to name and shame. Also, having this posted and tagged lets me keep track when one of those swamp creatures pops up in a new role, and helps track the corruption of previously important institutions (I’m looking at you, ADL).
Speaking of swamp creatures: “Kash Patel’s FBI raids John Bolton’s home, office in probe over sending classified documents to family.” Bolton reminds me of Mark Felt, Watergate’s “Deep Throat,” in that both stabbed metaphorical knives in the President they served over being denied the influence and deference they felt they deserved. Bolton was actually a pretty good UN ambassador, where he served the useful function of scaring the shit out of America’s foreign enemies. Alas, he Peter Principled himself to National Security Advisor, where he never got on the same page with Trump’s unorthodox (but effective) diplomacy.
“LaToya Cantrell, the mayor of New Orleans, has been indicted on Federal charges….The indictment alleges that [Cantrell] and Jeffrey Paul Vappie, a member of her Executive Protection Unit (EPU), developed a personal relationship in October 2021. To conceal their relationship and maximize their time together, they allegedly created a scheme to defraud the City of New Orleans by engaging in personal activities while Vappie was on duty and being paid for providing protection.” They were canoodling on the taxpayer’s dime. (Previously: “It’s the mayor’s exorbitant travel spending that has people up in arms. She traveled to sister cities Ascona, Switzerland, and Juan Antibes-les-Pins on the French Riviera this summer, costing the City of New Orleans close to $45,000, including first-class international airfare with lie-flat seating.”)
“The Unecha pumping station which is part of the Druzhba pipeline has been hit for the second time this week by drones.” This is near to the border with Belarus.
“Unprecedented Shift In Lebanon’s Attitude Towards Iran: Our Government’s Decision To Disarm Hizbullah Stands; We Will Not Tolerate Your Intervention In Our Internal Affairs; Relations With Lebanon Must Be Conducted Via State Institutions, Not Via Hizbullah,” MEMRI, August 14, 2025:
On August 13, 2025, during his visit to Lebanon, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, heard unequivocally from Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam that Lebanon is no longer under Iranian patronage and will not tolerate Iranian dictates or interference in its internal affairs.
Larijani’s visit came amid tension between the two countries that followed the historic August 5 decision by the Lebanese government to disarm Hizbullah by the end of the year – a decision that sparked rage in Hizbullah’s patron Iran. Iranian officials, among them Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, as well as Ali Akbar Velayati, top advisor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and Iraj Masjedi, deputy commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Qods Force, expressed their vehement opposition to the Lebanon’s sovereign decision, claiming that it reflected not the will of the Lebanese people but only Israeli and American aspirations. These senior Iranian officials voiced support for Hizbullah’s refusal to comply with the demand to disarm, and warned that Hizbullah could thwart this plan because it had already rebuilt itself following the war with Israel and is now “at the height of its powers.” They added that Iran would support the organization in this matter.
Lebanon was quick to respond to these statements, perceiving them as direct and blatant interference in its domestic affairs. In a notable response, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry issued, unprecedentedly, not one but two harsh condemnations of “the violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty, unity, and stability.”
More condemnation and criticism came from the anti-Hizbullah and anti-Iran camp in Lebanon, which called on the Lebanese government to take diplomatic measures against Iran, such as expelling the Iranian ambassador and even severing relations with Iran, in addition to filing a complaint with the UN Security Council.
Israel’s decision to crush Iran’s terrorist catspaws continues to reap benefits across the region.
The Texas Attorney General’s race just got a major shake up.
Conservative firebrand and U.S. House Freedom Caucus member Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX-21) will run for Texas attorney general, the four-term legislator told The Texan.
“It has been my honor to represent the 21st Congressional District of Texas — the best part of the best state in the greatest country in the history of the world. I am particularly proud of our work to deliver on President Trump’s agenda and fight to drain the swamp. I could do it forever and be fulfilled professionally. But representatives should not be permanent,” Roy said in a release.
“And my experience watching Texans unite in response to the devastating Hill Country floods made clear that I want to come home. I want to take my experience in Congress, as a federal prosecutor, and as First Assistant Attorney General to fight for Texas from Texas.”
Roy’s 21st Congressional District stretches from Austin to San Antonio and west of Kerrville. During the devastating Hill Country flooding last month that killed over 130 people, Roy, who represents the area, was on the ground in the community more than most other state officials responding to the disaster.
He joins a field that includes state Sens. Mayes Middleton (R-Galveston) and Joan Huffman (R-Houston), as well as former Department of Justice appointee Aaron Reitz. Polling released by Texas Southern University on Thursday morning, which did not include Roy, put Huffman at 12 points, Middleton at eight, and Reitz at seven with nearly three-quarters of respondents undecided.
Previously Ted Cruz’s chief of staff before getting elected to congress, Roy has to be considered the immediate favorite to win the Republican nomination.
Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party stripped the party’s endorsement of radical leftist Minnesota state Sen. Omar Fateh in the Minneapolis mayoral race over “brazen cheating.” The emerging election cheating scandal hilariously occurred amongst Democrats. Awkwardly, this comes from the same party of woke leftists that insists U.S. elections are the “safest in the world” and free from manipulation. Clearly, this corrupt party that serves progressive elites – not the working class – wants a do-over in this local election.
On Thursday, Minnesota DFL chair Richard Carlbom wrote in a statement, “After a thoughtful and transparent review of the challenges, the Constitution, Bylaws & Rules Committee found substantial failures in the Minneapolis Convention’s voting process on July 19, including an acknowledgement that a mayoral candidate was errantly eliminated from contention.”
Carlbom added, “Now it’s time to turn our focus to unity and our common goal: electing DFL leaders focused on making life more affordable for Minnesotans and holding Republicans accountable for the chaos and confusion they’ve unleashed on Minnesotans.”
A series of challenges were submitted to the Minnesota DFL after last month’s convention, citing serious issues with the electronic voting system and raising questions about election integrity in Fateh’s endorsement over incumbent Jacob Frey. The Minneapolis DFL also recognized it had erroneously eliminated DeWayne Davis after the first round of voting due to 176 undercounted votes.
Funny how Democrats swear up and down that there’s absolutely no voting fraud…until they accuse a fellow Democrat.
Trump is calling on Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook to resign over mortgage fraud allegations, namely claiming two separate homes as her primary residence.
Moribund lefty legacy outlet MSNBC is rebranding as MS NOW. Until that woke hive of scum and villainy is entirely purged, no sane American will ever trust it.
“Texas Is Preparing To Cut Off Power To Data Centers During Grid Emergencies.” Well, yeah. If it’s data centers or people’s homes and apartments, people should generally win. Data centers should have backup power and orderly shutdown procedures, not to mention redundant arrays of backups and rotating off-site backups…
Texas Democratic State Rep. James Talarico (TX-50) decries the effects of money on politics while taking “a whopping $59,000 in donations from a billionaire’s PAC last year. The Texas Sands PAC, which is pushing for the Lone Star State to legalize casino gambling, gave Talarico the donations to encourage him to lead that initiative.”
“Senator launches investigation into Meta over allowing ‘sensual’ AI chats with kids.” It seems that all the billions Facebook has been sinking into AI has only made the world worse. Much like Facebook itself…
Flesh-eating bacteria is on the rise again. Avoiding swimming in the ocean or eating raw oysters seems to be the key to avoiding it.
Dwight has a swell obit up for RAF Flight Lt. John Cruickshank, a Catalina pilot who was so shot up by a U-boat, with blood soaking through his flight suit, that his crewmembers thought he wouldn’t make it on the five hour flight home. Not only did he make it back to help land the plane, he lived to be 105.
“U.S. Agriculture Secretary Rollins, Gov. Abbott Announce $850 Million to Combat New World Screwworm Threat. Hundreds of millions will be appropriated by the federal government to build a sterile fly facility.”
German neo-Nazi claims to be a woman so he can serve his time in a women’s prison. ‘Sven Liebich, who now goes by ‘Marla-Svenja,’ was convicted of “slander and incitement to hatred’ and lost his bid to appeal. Now that he’s headed to jail, he has suddenly identified as a woman, despite previously calling transgender people ‘parasites.'” Liebich appears to be an actual neo-Nazi rather than just an AfD member, and neo-Nazis are scum, but you have to admire the brazenness of the hustle, especially not even bother to shave off his mustache, and actually demanding kosher meals.
The redistricting wars escalate to previously unseen heights, Paxton launches investigation of Democratic orgs backing the quorum busters, Ukraine hits a lot more Russian infrastructure, another spite prosecution from Travis County’s Soros-baked DA, and Saturday Night Live is just as profitable as NBC’s other late night shows.
President Donald Trump has directed the Commerce Department to conduct a new census that excludes illegal immigrants from its population count.
“I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024,” Trump said in a Truth Social post Tuesday morning. “People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS.”
The Constitution mandates a census be conducted every ten years to apportion congressional districts. Since the first census was conducted in 1790, the count has reflected each state’s total population, including noncitizens.
It’s unclear whether Trump can instruct that illegal aliens be excluded from the census without the approval of Congress, as Article I Section 2 of the Constitution empowers the legislature to determine when and how censuses are conducted.
When Trump tried to end the practice of counting illegal aliens in the census in his first term, he argued that the executive branch has discretionary power to determine who qualifies as a U.S. resident for apportionment purposes. The move faced legal challenges and was ultimately overturned by Joe Biden before it could take effect.
Because House districts are apportioned “according to [states’] respective Numbers,” high-immigration states could lose congressional seats and electoral votes if illegal immigrants are not counted in the census. If noncitizens had been left out of the 2020 census, California, Florida, and Texas would have each lost a congressional seat, and Alabama, Minnesota, and Ohio would have retained one seat each they otherwise would have lost, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.
Maybe this is a cunning ploy to force Democrats to argue before the Supreme Court that illegal aliens count as 3/5ths of a person…
Meanwhile, in Texas, the redistricting battle is white-hot following the latest Democratic State Representative’s quorum break. “AG Paxton Launches Investigation Into Soros-Funded Texas Majority PAC. This is the second investigation launched by Paxton in as many days seeking information from groups alleged to be supporting the Texas House Democrat quorum break.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced the launch of a formal investigation into Texas Majority PAC—funded by leftist billionaire George Soros—for its “role in potentially unlawful financial coordination and bribery of Democratic legislators who fled Texas to break quorum.”
The Texas Majority PAC was founded by former staffers from Robert “Beto” O’Rourke’s unsuccessful campaign for governor and has since gained national attention. The PAC is largely funded by leftist billionaire George Soros. Latest reports indicate it has around $600,000 cash-on-hand.
Paxton described the PAC as “radical,” with a mission aligned with other left-leaning organizations aiming to influence Texas politics.
Paxton alleges that the PAC played a “coordinating role” in assisting with illegal fundraising operations and possibly bribing Texas House members. These actions, Paxton maintains, may have incentivized lawmakers to abandon their legislative responsibilities, an act that—if financially rewarded—could constitute bribery under state law.
“If Texas lawmakers are bowing to the Soros Slush Fund rather than the will of the voters, Texans deserve to know. Getting financial payouts under the table to abandon your legislative duties is bribery,” Paxton stated. “Texas Majority PAC’s actions seem to indicate that it may be using its Soros-funded resources to break the law and fund the illegal abandonment of public office. If that’s the case as determined by this investigation, there will be a heavy price to pay.”
As part of the ongoing investigation, Paxton’s office has issued a formal Request to Examine to Texas Majority PAC seeking documents and records related to the alleged activities.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is launching an investigation into Beto O’Rourke’s organization Powered by People for allegedly “bankrolling” the Texas House Democrats’ ongoing quorum break.
The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) asserts that according to “public reports,” Powered by People is potentially one the top funders of the recent quorum bust by Texas Democrats, who left the state in protest to House Republicans’ proposed redistricting map — alleging racist motivations and unconstitutional actions.
Paxton said in a press release on Wednesday afternoon, “Any Democrat coward breaking the law by taking a Beto Bribe will be held accountable. Texas cannot be bought.”
“I look forward to thoroughly reviewing all of the documents and communications obtained throughout this investigation,” he said.
The OAG ordered on Tuesday that all quorum-breaking House Democrats must return by Friday morning when the House gavels in, per House Speaker Dustin Burrows’ (R-Lubbock) declaration, or else face removal from the membership.
Did they return? They did not. Hence:
“Paxton Files Texas Supreme Court Petition to Declare 13 Democratic House Seats Vacant.”
The Texas House again failed to meet a quorum on Friday afternoon, and now Attorney General Ken Paxton is taking additional legal action against 13 Democratic members that fled to other states.
Paxton has targeted state Reps. Ron Reynolds (D-Missouri City), Vikki Goodwin (D-Austin), Gina Hinojosa (D-Austin), James Talarico (D-Austin), Gene Wu (D-Houston), Lulu Flores (D-Austin), Mihaela Plesa (D-Dallas), Suleman Lalani (D-Sugar Land), Chris Turner (D-Grand Prairie), Ana-Maria Rodriguez Ramos (D-Richardson), Jessica Gonzalez (D-Dallas), John Bucy (D-Austin), and Christina Morales (D-Houston).
This follows Abbott petitioning the Texas Supreme Court to vacate Wu’s seat.
I’m in Bucy’s district (TX-136), so I could theoretically run for his seat, assuming I was a glutton for punishment…
The petition was filed with the Supreme Court of Texas (SCOTX), with the intention to have their seats declared vacant.
“Because Respondents have abandoned their offices as State Representatives, the Attorney General, on behalf of the State, seeks a declaration that those positions are vacant.”
The petition goes on to state that because the Democratic members named in the suit “have announced that they refuse to perform the duties of their offices, they have abandoned them, and this Court should declare their offices vacant.”
It adds, “These actions aim to prevent the Legislature from exercising the legislative power conferred on it by the Texas Constitution, Tex. Const. art. III, § 1, depriving the people of Texas of a functioning government and, if allowed to continue, would create ‘an absolute supermajoritarian check on the legislature’s ability to pass legislation opposed by a minority faction.’”
“Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we must zoom out if we are to understand the pattern that we are gathered here to explore, because the pattern is larger than federal health agencies and the COVID cartel. If we do zoom out and ask, what are they hiding?”
“The answer becomes as obvious as it is disturbing. They are hiding everything. It will be jarring for many to hear a scientist speak with such certainty. It should be jarring. We are trained to present ideas with caution as hypotheses in need of a test. But in this case, I have tested the idea, and I am as certain of it as I am of anything. We are being systematically blinded.”
“It is the only explanation I have encountered that will not only describe the present, but also, in my experience, predicts the future with all but perfect accuracy. The pattern is a simple one. You can see it clearly and test it yourself. Every single institution dedicated to public truth-seeking is under simultaneous attack.”
“They are all in a state of collapse. Every body of experts fails utterly. Individual experts who resist or worse in an attempt to return their institutions to sanity, they find themselves coerced into submission. If they won’t buckle, they are marginalized or forced out.”
“Those outside of the institutions who either seek truth alone or who build new institutions with a truth seeking mission face merciless attacks on both their integrity and expertise. often by the very institutions whose mission they refuse to abandon. There is a saying in military circles, once is a mistake, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action.”
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will publicly announce on Thursday its new proposed rule banning Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements to hospitals that provide sex-trait modifications to minors, National Review has learned.
If finalized, the rule — “Medicare and Medicaid Programs; Hospital Condition of Participation: Prohibiting Sex Trait Modifications for Children” — will “effectively end sex-trait modifications for minors nationally,” a senior administration official told NR.
Thursday’s announcement marks the beginning of the process of convening meetings with Health and Human Services officials to flesh out the language and formalize the rule. CMS sits under HHS.
So no longer will our tax dollars be spent mutilating children. Progress!
The Austin-American Statesman does some actual investigation of Austin city government, and actually finds a bit of improper waste and fraud.
Austin’s top administrator, City Manager T.C. Broadnax, continued what had become a costly habit: charging lunches to his city credit card on a near-daily basis.
Broadnax, one of the highest-paid city managers in the country with an annual salary of $488,800, expensed about 150 lunches during his first year on the job at a cost of about $3,300, according to an American-Statesman review of city discretionary spending. His go-to spot was Sweetgreen, a pricey salad chain where he averaged $20 per order.
Broadnax is not the only city leader who regularly dined on taxpayer dollars in what appears to be a violation of city policy, the Statesman review found. And the spending went beyond food.
The review covered food and travel spending records from the City Manager’s Office and City Council offices from May 2024 to May 2025 — the first year of Broadnax’s tenure — and found charges for business-class flights, high-end dinners and retirement parties costing thousands of dollars.
The Statesman also tallied thousands of dollars spent on snacks and beverages, protein shakes and even chewing gum.
Overall, the review painted a picture of a widespread culture of lavish spending at City Hall among both the city’s top appointed executives and elected leaders who approve the budget.
Experts who reviewed the newspaper’s findings and city spending policies said many charges likely violated internal rules or common ethics guidelines.
“Bring a sandwich for Christ’s sake,” said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University.
If that’s the worst they found, I’d suggest they never scrutinized Austin’s homeless services…
Ukraine hit two Russian oil refineries, including Novokuibyshevsk oil refinery in Samara and one in Ryazan.
And two more , one in Kstovo as well as the Adler oil depot in Sochi.
And another, this one the Afipsky oil refinery, where they evidently hit the cracking/fractional distillation tower, the most essential part of an oil refinery.
And another railyard, namely Tatsinskaya railroad yard in Rostov.
Hackers attacked Russia’s Aeroflot, cancelling lots of flights. All transportation options in Russia seem chancy these days…
A state audit found that a Sacramento area charter school received more than $180 million in funding it was not eligible for, engaged in wasteful spending, and assigned teachers to classes they did not have the credentials to teach.
The report from the California State Auditor found that Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools did not meet the conditions set for its funding and also did not comply with state law in calculating daily attendance.
The auditor also claims that Twin Rivers Unified School District failed to provide sufficient oversight of the charter school.
According to the audit, Highlands receives K-12 funding despite serving adult students under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. According to the school’s website, it serves adults ages 22 and up at no cost, providing a high school diploma program, English language classes and career technical education.
“By not offering the required amount of instruction at the schoolsite, requiring students to attend class at the schoolsite for the minimum amount of time required by law, or meeting requirements for nonclassroom-based instruction, HCCS was not eligible to receive the $177 million in K–12 funding it received in fiscal years 2022–23 and 2023–24. Further, Highlands received more than an estimated $5 million in overpayments, of which $3.5 million is in addition to the $177 million in disallowed funding, by not complying with state law in calculating its average daily attendance,” the audit states.
The audit also alleges that Highlands engaged in “questionable transactions,” including violating prohibitions against gifts of public funds, not seeking board approval for some contracts and purchases, lacked clear hiring and compensation policies, hired and promoted unqualified individuals and in one instance, entered a contract for mentor services with the spouse of a Highlands director.
The auditor’s report also indicates poor student performance under Highlands.
“HCCS had a graduation rate of 2.8 percent in fiscal year 2023–24,” the audit noted. “CDE determined that Highlands’ schools’ graduation rates were so low that they dropped the overall statewide graduation rate for the 2023–24 school year by more than half of a percentage point, from 87 percent to 86.4 percent.”
One possible reason for the poor student performance, the audit posits, is the student-to-teacher ratio, which was about 51 students for every one teacher.
Euroweenies: Lift the seige of Gaza or we’ll recognize a Palestinian state. Israel: I guess we’ll just have to occupy all of Gaza.
“Majority of Senate Dems Vote to Block Arms Sales to Israel.” Hatred of Israel (and, indeed, all Jews) is a central belief for the Democrat Party’s ideological core.
Vice President JD Vance has weighed in on the left’s demented response to American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney ads and their unhinged claims that the “good jeans” pun is really Nazi eugenics propaganda.
“My political advice to the Democrats is continue to tell everybody who thinks Sydney Sweeney is attractive is a Nazi,” Vance joked in an appearance on the “Ruthless” podcast Friday.
“That appears to be their actual strategy,” Vance further highlighted, adding “It actually reveals something pretty interesting about the Dems, though.”
Which is that you have like a normal, all-American beautiful girl doing like a normal jeans ad, right?” The Vice President continued, “To try to sell, you know, sell jeans to kids in America, and they have managed to so unhinge themselves over this thing.”
“You guys, did you learn nothing from the November 2024 election?” An exasperated Vance asked.
“Like, I actually thought that one of the lessons they might take is we’re going to be less crazy,” he continued.
“The lesson they have apparently taken is we’re going to attack people as Nazis for thinking Sydney Sweeney is beautiful,” Vance urged.
“Great strategy, guys. That’s how you’re going to win the midterms. Especially young American men,” he further emphasised.
“Their course correction lasted about 30 seconds,” Ruthless co-host Josh Holmes chimed in.
“That’s right, [it] lasted 30 seconds, somehow has gotten even crazier,” Vance responded, adding “it’s just so much of the Democrats is oriented around hostility to basic American life.”
Judge Carlos Barrera has refused to move former Army Sergeant Daniel Perry’s “deadly conduct” case from Travis County’s criminal court despite concerns that he cannot be guaranteed a fair jury trial.
A Travis County jury had previously sentenced Perry to 25 years in prison for murder after District Attorney Jose Garza prosecuted Perry for shooting and killing an armed Black Lives Matter protester. The event occurred in July 2020 during a protest in downtown Austin. Gov. Greg Abbott pardoned Perry in May 2024.
However, even if a person is pardoned for a felony, they can still be prosecuted by the county attorney for additional misdemeanors stemming from the same incident.
Thus, Perry is still being prosecuted for his actions, this time for “deadly conduct,” a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. Travis County Attorney Delia Garza’s Office—which is prosecuting Perry for this lesser charge—claims that the use of his vehicle leading up to the 2020 altercation endangered bystanders. Perry was driving for Uber at the time of the event.
Soros-backed DA Jose Garza evidently finds it intolerable that an armed citizen was allowed to exercise their right to self-defense against a leftist member of a “protected class,” double-jeopardy be damned…
SNL loses money? “CNBC revealed SNL, Fallon and Meyers lose a combined $100 million a year, Thompson said, ‘(Lorne Michaels) cant keep doing that forever.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Loni Anderson, RIP. Whatever her personal life (she was married four times, divorced three, and Burt Reynolds complained that she almost sucked his bank account dry), she was great on WKRP in Cincinnati.
In the end, Black said he was able to settle the conflict and postpone any bloodshed without any deaths by simply explaining the situation to Obama and Clinton.
At publishing time, the body of Vinny Black had reportedly been found dumped in a ditch on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., with authorities quickly ruling his death a suicide.
