Jeff Childers has an interesting piece on the Democrat Party’s self-inflicted “polycrisis,” when all the Party’s myriad bad decisions and extremist positions all come home to roost at the same time.
If you listen closely to the wind blowing through Washington, D.C., you might hear a faint, high-pitched whining sound. That is not the sound of cicadas fluttering through the cherry blossoms. That is the sound of the Democrat Party realizing that the check has finally arrived, and their credit card was declined. Last month, the Washington Post broke a story that perfectly captures the Democrat Party’s woebegone state:
The DNC expected big money after big Democratic wins. It never came.
The Democratic National Committee has scaled back some of its plans as donors remain reluctant to give, despite candidates’ recent victories.
Ruh-roh.
For the last few years, despite occasional bouts of truth bursting through the costume’s seams, corporate media has generally assured everyone that the Democratic Party is in fine fettle. Sharp as a tack. It is, they say, like a double-decker bus packed with a coalition of highly educated coastal elites, powerful unions, a motivated gang of highly diverse grievance groups, plus legions of narcissistic white boomers who somehow still believe that NPR is the best way to learn what’s going on in the world.
But underneath the hood, the engine was smoking, the transmission was held together by duct tape, and the bus driver was staring blankly at the dashboard trying to remember what to do when it makes that weird noise. The passengers argued about whether the bus should be renamed to something more trans-inclusive, whether to start with a land acknowledgment, and whether that weird noise was actually a microaggression.
Now, the bus has completely stalled out, parked on the side of the highway, and the passengers are sitting inside waiting for someone else to come fix it.
Corporate media is desperately trying to conceal what historians and political scientists call a “polycrisis.” As defined by historian Adam Tooze (and the World Economic Forum, which considered it an opportunity instead of a problem), a polycrisis happens “where disparate crises interact such that the overall impact far exceeds the sum of each part.” It describes where the political ground is destabilized from so many different directions at once that policymakers ultimately become paralyzed, usually while forming another gold-star committee to consider funding a new study on the destabilization.
Tooze explained, “In the polycrisis, the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”
Snip.
But amid all those examples, the modern Democratic polycrisis stands out as uniquely spectacular. It’s experiencing the political equivalent of getting audited by the IRS on the same day your Pekinese chews through your internet cable and then your roof caves in right after you opened the insurance cancellation notice.
All the insiders know it. Trad-media is doing its level best to distract and obfuscate, but some recent headlines are flashing red: On April 9th, Bloomberg warned that “Michigan Shows Democrats’ Identity Crisis Up Close.” On March 15th, Axios reported that “Democrats face a post-Trump identity crisis for 2028.” On March 30th, the NDSMC Observer simply called it “The Democratic party’s identity crisis.”
“The Democratic Party has an aura of ineffectiveness,” NDSMC wrote. “This is an existential threat.” The main problem, according to the author, is that the party is now only about opposing Trump— which manifestly is not working. So, the author argued, “with that opposition, there needs to be an alternative message. Something that voters can get behind. An idea. A value. Not the lack of values. Not just anti-MAGA.”
Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, agreed. “You can’t win a presidential election on opposition alone,” he told Axios. Democrats (not MAGA) are fractured. “Democrats are deeply divided over what they’d do if they returned to power,” Axios said. They intend to run against Trump in the 2026 midterms, but realize that won’t work in 2028, when Trump is terming out.
Democrats must “build a message predicated on values rather than reactions,” the NDSMC author fretted, “lest they doom themselves to a future of perpetual minority status, forever living in the shadow of the MAGA right.” But what screamed from the pages was that the author had no suggestions for a message. Not one.
The reason he didn’t is the same reason the Democrats cannot fix this problem. It’s a structural problem broken beyond repair.
Identity crises are the worst. A person or group questioning their very identity is a sinkhole of potential disaster. It’s like the Democrat Party is bored with being a stay-at-home dad named Benjamin, and yearns to move to Las Vegas, change its name to Mercedes, get that special surgery, and become a stripper.
It would be bad enough if identity were the only crisis Democrats were facing. Let’s dissect the anatomy of this rapidly approaching fast-motion disaster.
A polycrisis isn’t just a regular old run of bad luck. It is a structural failure. In any normal political cycle, a party could lose an election, suffer a fundraising dip, or deal with pushback against an unpopular leader. Or even all three. Those problems are manageable. You just replace the leader, change the messaging, and pretend you never actually supported the things you supported yesterday.
But in a polycrisis, the mechanisms for fixing the problems also break. The disease and the cure become indistinguishable. That’s what Democrats face. They are currently trapped in a perfect storm of intersecting, overlapping, cannibalistic calamities, each feeding and feeding off the others.
Democrats core problem is that their party has become an “odd coalition” of wildly divergent interest groups united by only one thing: opposition to Donald Trump. The so-called “No Kings” movement is the problem’s purest expression. No Kings is a hot mess of a tire fire, a janky collection of unrelated grievance groups, united only by deliberately vague policy positions— because articulating any specific proposal would immediately expose that half the coalition actively despises the other half.
When a political party has no articulable platform besides “we are not the other guy,” a polycrisis is not just possible. It becomes mandatory.
Snip.
The 2024 election exposed the fracture for all to see. Kamala Harris won 80% of the Black vote— solid, but a massive 10-point drop from Joe Biden’s 90% in 2020. President Trump secured 20% of the Black vote, the highest level of support from that demographic since George W. Bush in 2000. The shift was even more extreme among Hispanic voters, where Trump narrowed the gap to a mere 3 points, as compared to Biden’s 25-point margin four years earlier.
The shift among young men is particularly stark. Men under 50 split evenly (49% to 48%) between Trump and Harris, erasing a 10-point Democrat advantage from 2020.
Instead of addressing these defecting voters’ concerns, factions within the Democrat party are doubling down on purity tests, which I’ve previously labeled as the “purity spiral.” In Michigan, for instance, progressive Democrats punished the Harris campaign over the administration’s handling of Gaza, proving that for some factions, “wallowing in the illusion of purity” was more important than building a winning coalition. (That’s from last month’s Detroit News.)
The Detroit News wrung its bony hands over the fruits of the state’s recent Democrat primary nomination results, which produced far-left candidates whose views “raise serious questions about their electability.”
Recent polling by the Manhattan Institute confirmed the disconnect. The Democrat party is essentially three blocs: Moderates (47%), Progressive Liberals (37%), and a “Woke Fringe” (11%). The median Democrat actually wants border security and safe streets, but the party is held hostage by the 11% who think math is racist, there’s an infinite number of genders, and Karl Marx was on the right track but just didn’t try hard enough.
The problem is even worse than Childers makes it out to be. Where are the “Progressive Liberals” willing to call out the radical woke left on their insane agenda? Nowhere, that’s where. They’re scared to death of being called racist and dragged on Twitter. To deviate even slightly on, say, transing children or letting ICE deport illegal alien rapists, is to invite brutal reprisals ranging from ostracism to termination of employment.
Or being shot by a woke lunatic because you’re a “fascist.”
Moreover, after their long march through the institutions of the left, the levers of power for the Democrat Party apparatus and their Academic/Media Complex/NGO fellow travelers are all in the hands of social justice warriors. Any “Progressive Liberals” with any sort of power are in their 70s or older, and how many of those supposed “47% Moderates” are actually speaking up against the radical agenda? John Fetterman? Bill Maher? Stephen A. Smith? They’re so few and so far outside what today’s Democrat Party considers “acceptable discourse” that we can name them individually. Indeed, the online woke left is already calling all three “fascists.”
Snipping over Childers’ talk of the Democrat “gerontocracy,” since so many are part of those “moderates” losing their grip on power within the Party.
Perhaps the most under-appreciated aspect of the polycrisis is the perplexing psychological condition of the Democrat base. Studies consistently show that liberals report significantly lower levels of happiness and psychological well-being compared to conservatives. Maybe building an identity out of imminent global climate destruction and looming, ever-present fascism was a bad idea.
Progressivism is literally driving them insane.
According to the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, conservatives outnumber liberals 51% to 20% among those reporting “excellent” mental health, while liberals outnumber conservatives 45% to 19% among those reporting “poor” mental health. Read that again— nearly half of liberals self-report having poor mental health. Shocker.
On a 100-point happiness scale, even childless conservatives scored a 63; while childless liberals scored a dismaying 48. So weird.
Perhaps the most under-appreciated aspect of the polycrisis is the perplexing psychological condition of the Democrat base. Studies consistently show that liberals report significantly lower levels of happiness and psychological well-being compared to conservatives. Maybe building an identity out of imminent global climate destruction and looming, ever-present fascism was a bad idea.
Progressivism is literally driving them insane.
According to the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, conservatives outnumber liberals 51% to 20% among those reporting “excellent” mental health, while liberals outnumber conservatives 45% to 19% among those reporting “poor” mental health. Read that again— nearly half of liberals self-report having poor mental health. Shocker.
On a 100-point happiness scale, even childless conservatives scored a 63; while childless liberals scored a dismaying 48. So weird.
Childers is right on the insanity but outdated on some of the components. We’re already seeing an abandonment of global warming talking points among the woke. Trump is their apocalypse. There are too many intersectionality shibboleths to keep straight for woke brains to keep green catechisms in mind. Another possibility is that blacks, Hispanics, and all those Muslim illegal aliens they’ve imported obviously don’t give a rat’s ass about any of it.
Running a modern political campaign requires astronomical amounts of money. For years, Democrats relied on two massive funding streams: small-dollar digital donations via ActBlue, and a sprawling network of government-funded NGOs. Both are now collapsing.
I wonder how much of ActBlue was ever real and not simply foreign and NGO money laundering.
Last month, the Washington Post reported that the Democratic National Committee is facing a massive cash crunch as “top donors have been slow to open their wallets.” The DNC had assured party officials that their resounding 15-point victory in the Virginia governor’s race would open the floodgates. “But big checks did not flood back,” leaving DNC Chairman Ken Martin presiding over a financial and leadership crisis.
Left unsaid: Wealthy Jews in New York used to make up a significant fraction of the Democrats’ fundraising network, but they’ve all been tossed overboard in the name of demonizing “the 1%” and pandering to all the Muslims Democrats (not to mention political parties in Europe) have insisted on importing.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has taken a sledgehammer to the NGO complex. DOGE first targeted USAID, leading to the elimination of over 5,000 programs. These programs were rife with fraud and political grift, with taxpayer money flowing through dizzying arrays of cut-out corporations to Democrat coffers. Musk bluntly explained, “This is one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world— government-funded NGOs.”
The broader recent crackdowns on Medicare fraud, autism services, and daycare funding are systematically cutting off the federal spigot that has long nourished progressive advocacy groups and political operatives. The “blue laundromat” is being condemned, and the DNC is suddenly discovering that running a political party requires actual money and real fundraising, which tends to be harder than making backroom deals with Somalian cartels.
Section on lawfare blowback and indicting Dem corruption skipped, since there seem to be plenty of examples in every LinkSwarm.
An entirely separate problem for Democrats is the collapse of the legacy media infrastructure that has for decades carried water for the progressive platform. Trust in mass media has hit a record low of 28 percent. Viewers are migrating to alternative media, mostly conservative or conservative-adjacent podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience.
Corporate media is shifting rightwards. Within the last six months or so, conservative billionaires Larry and David Ellison acquired Warner Brothers (which owns CNN), independent commentator Bari Weiss was installed as editor-in-chief at CBS News, Jeff Bezos’ new head of the Washington Post fired 13 “climate reporters,” and the list goes on. Furthermore, as you well know, X (formerly Twitter) under Musk’s ownership allows uncensored conservative content…
The Democratic Party’s traditional megaphone is on the fritz. The batteries are running out. Which means they can no longer just scream “racist!” at their political problems and expect them to go away. They can no longer rely on corporate media to promote their narratives and psyops.
They are going to have to work harder to earn audience attention— but their problems are multiplied since they can’t enunciate clear policy positions anyway. They must feel like an aggressive drunk who dominated the barroom conversation through brute force until new management made him take it outside. Now nobody listens, and everybody feels better. And it’s much quieter inside.
Most of the argument on how the contradictions of slavery destroyed the Whig Party snipped.
Like the Whigs, today’s Democrat Party faces a similar irreconcilable fracture line. Not just one. Several of them. Immigration, police funding, and trans “rights” are all solid examples. All of them are potentially slavery questions for the loose Democrat coalition. If the DNC takes a strong position on any of those issues, it will forever fracture the coalition. That’s why they can’t commit.
Take immigration, for example. The progressive wing views open borders and amnesty as a moral imperative rooted in anti-racism. But Democrats’ working-class wing —especially unions, black, and hispanic voters, who are currently all defecting to the GOP— views unrestricted immigration as direct economic competition that drives down wages and overwhelms local resources.
The immigration question cleaves the coalition along lines that cannot be papered over with vague language about “comprehensive reform.” Every time the party tries to stake out a middle position, it simultaneously enrages multiple factions.
Progressives accuse leadership of fascism; the working class accuses leadership of abandonment.
The Whigs were destroyed not by a single catastrophic defeat, but by a slow accumulation of contradictions that ultimately made the coalition mathematically impossible to maintain. Then, snap. That is precisely the dynamic of a polycrisis, and it is precisely what the Democrats are facing now.
In complex systems theory, a polycrisis does not resolve itself gradually. It builds pressure until it reaches a tipping point— a threshold where a final small change —the proverbial camel’s straw— triggers an abrupt, potentially irreversible transformation or collapse.
For the Democratic Party, the 2026 midterms represent that tipping point. They face a brutal structural map, needing four seats to retake the Senate. Midcycle redistricting, wildly exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais decision striking down minority-majority districts, has scrambled the House battlefield more thoroughly than eggs on a Waffle House grill.
But the most profound implication of where the polycrisis is going, and what it will make politically possible, can best be understood through the Hegelian dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
The thesis is the current, chaotic, decentralized election system with late counting, mail-in ballots, harvesting, permissive voter rolls, and weak ID requirements. Democrats’ viability depends on that system, and they will fight to the political death to preserve it.
The Hegelian antithesis is the current crisis— the ongoing federal investigations in Georgia, Arizona, and elsewhere, combined with aggressive crackdowns on non-citizen voting and the stalled SAVE America Act, which would mandate ID, citizenship, and strict voter purges.
If the DOJ’s investigations produce credible convictions of election workers or political figures, it will shatter whatever remaining trust exists in the system. The synthesis is the solution that comes next, having been made politically possible by the thesis/antithesis dynamic. In this case, it will probably take the shape of a comprehensive federal elections bill. Maybe the SAVE Act. Maybe something bigger.
Here I think Childers is probably wrong. I think most Democrats have internalized the understanding that their Party is cheating nine ways to Sunday (even if they’d never admit it), and they simply don’t care. Trump is The Devil, and The Devil must be fought by any means necessary. Never mind that the idea that Trump (and by extension all Republicans) is some sort of racist monster is a laughable delusion engendered by the Southern Poverty Law Center literally subsidizing Nazis and the KKK. The idea that Republicans are Evil Racists and that Democrats are The Good People forms a bedrock in their political identities, and they’ll cling to it with religious fervor. Reason had nothing to do with them adopting the social justice worldview and reason cannot talk them out of it.
Thus Democrats will never support the SAVE Act or anything like it as long as the woke mind virus runs the Party. (A much bigger and thornier question is why old-line congressional Republicans refuse to support any strategy that threatens to implement it.)
No, the only path for Democrats out of the social justice wilderness is for their own Trump-like figure to come from outside the Party to cleanse the Augean stables of Obamaism entirely. Right now, Democrats don’t have such a Trump, and their entire SJW-ruled party apparatus stands ready to ensure their hands are never removed from the Party levers of power they’ve dedicated their entire adult life to controlling. The hard left is willing to lose an infinite number of elections rather than relinquish control. Just look to the lengths they took to keep Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. entirely off the 2024 Presidential ballot, and for a Democrat Trump to appear, he would need to be at least a hundred times better known than RFK Jr.
So I think Childers’ idea of how Democrats might solve the polycrisis is misguided, but his description of that crisis has admirable breadth.
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.”
The Apple Weather app is finally catching up with the National Weather Service and, holy crap, things are not looking good:
Austin Weather forecast 1/23/26
Yeah, it’s going to get above freezing, so the city will run again, but I’ve got to keep my plants inside for a week or more. Any any potential power loss is really gonna suck. Here’s that Austin energy outage map again.
My own 401K travails and money woes continue. I did receive the money I tried to transfer to my checking account in December. But I had only split it up to get half of it into 2025 for tax purposes. I was also going to have to transfer more more into my bank account this month to cover my property taxes. They assured me would only take a day to transfer funds after my IRA got set up. Surprise! It might be a day for most people, but because my phone doesn’t receive text messages, I had to request they send me a check, which is going to take 15 days. (Funny how they seem to be able to transfer money in instantaneously, but you have to jump through hoops to get your own money in 2+ weeks.) Yesterday, I had to sell some silver rounds to cover the last bit of property taxes and living expenses for two weeks (including a vet appointment for my two dogs). Fortunately, silver is at at an all-time high. I sold mine when it was just under $100 an ounce, and now it’s over $103.
Oh, yeah, some other stuff happened this week: More Minnesota fraud, more California fraud, Don Lemon joins the KKK (as a subject of federal scrutiny), more commie ties for left wing agitators, more of Russia’s shadow fleet comes a cropper, and William Shatner eats cereal.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Just like we already knew: “California: Newsom’s ‘National Model’ for Homeless Wracked by Fraud.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom has made reducing the homelessness crisis in California a top priority, saying the scale of the state’s efforts is “unprecedented” and calling for the continued expansion of his signature effort – Project Homekey – that has already cost $3.75 billion.
But in a state with more than 181,000 homeless individuals, or about one-third of the U.S. total, Homekey has been marred by failures and scandals, including a lack of government oversight and accountability as well as a federal investigation into allegations of fraud in Los Angeles.
Lack of government oversight isn’t a bug for Governor Hairgel, it’s a feature.
Newsom, who appears to be preparing for a presidential bid in 2028, could make Homekey, which he calls a “national model,” a talking point in his campaign. The state claims the program has created almost 16,000 permanent housing units that will serve over 175,000 people. But since the state doesn’t track outcomes – whether people placed in housing saw their lives improve or if they returned to the streets – the program’s effectiveness is unclear, according to a critical 2024 state auditor’s report.
“[Our budget] is bloated with homeless spending, a bottomless pit and taxpayer boondoggle that doubles down on failure year after year,” the Republican-turned-Democrat Los Angeles Councilwoman Traci Park said at a meeting in May. “Hundreds of millions of dollars on bridge homes and Homekeys and interim housing sites, and no one can even tell us which ones are operational.”
What is clear is that homelessness in California has skyrocketed in the five years Homekey has been in place, growing by more than 20%, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. That’s an increase of some 36,000 people between 2019 and 2024.
Homekey has been touted by officials as a more cost-effective way to house the homeless. By hiring developers to convert excess motel and hotel rooms and other existing structures into permanent housing, the costs are two to three times lower than building new units, according to the auditor’s report.
But with huge contracts available to developers and very little oversight of their activities, some of that cost savings was lost to fraud, according to federal prosecutors. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli for the Central District of California launched a fraud and corruption task force to find out where the money went, and in October filed criminal charges involving two developers who allegedly defrauded the system.
My guess is that not a single leftwing activist in California will be indicted by the state government for their own role in the fraud…
The videos coming out of Minneapolis, of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers apprehending illegal immigrants in the streets while having to fight off aggressive and sometimes violent anti-ICE activists, are the predictable result of a Democrat strategy that amounts to nullification.
I mean nullification in the historical sense, like the Nullification Crisis of 1832 when South Carolina declared federal tariffs to be null and void within the boundaries of the state, and President Andrew Jackson threatened to send in the U.S. Army to enforce federal law.
What the Democrats of South Carolina did back then is essentially what the Democrats of Minneapolis are doing today, fomenting a 21st century nullification crisis by making it nearly impossible to enforce federal immigration law in the territory under their jurisdiction. Trump, who has ordered 1,500 active duty troops stationed in Alaska to prepare for a possible deployment to Minnesota, is well within his rights (and within historical precedent) to respond in the same vein as Jackson did to what amounts to a nullification crisis.
Indeed, the whole point of so-called sanctuary laws is to make it difficult or impossible to enforce federal immigration laws — to nullify them. Sanctuary policies like the ones operative in Minneapolis (and many other Democrat-controlled cities) prohibit state and local law enforcement from working with federal immigration authorities.
Under normal circumstances, when an illegal immigrant commits a crime the local authorities notify federal immigration officials before the offender is released, so that ICE can take custody and begin the process of deportation. The handover occurs between law enforcement agencies in a controlled, orderly, safe manner.
But in places where Democrat lawmakers have created sanctuary jurisdictions, local law enforcement is barred from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement in this way. Instead of handing over illegal immigrants to ICE, the police simply release them. That means ICE agents have to go out into the community, into neighborhoods and businesses, to track down and arrest illegal immigrant criminals wherever they might be.
This is obviously a much more volatile and dangerous way to enforce federal immigration law. And in Minneapolis, it’s even more volatile and dangerous thanks to anti-ICE activists and vigilante mobs attempting to disrupt, impede, and in some cases attack ICE agents. Indeed, it’s a recipe for violent clashes between ICE and anti-ICE mobs. A cynic might say that’s the entire point, to make federal immigration enforcement as chaotic and tense as possible in hopes of exactly the kind of confrontations that led to the death of Renee Good, the woman who was fatally shot earlier this month when she tried to ram an ICE agent with her vehicle.
The goal of fomenting such mayhem is straightforward: to thwart the enforcement of federal immigration law. Keep in mind, ICE is not doing anything beyond the scope of federal law in Minneapolis. It is not exercising any new or novel powers not authorized under federal statute. As Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander in charge in Minneapolis said at a press conference this week, the operations and tactics of Border Patrol and ICE agents in the city are “born out of necessity” but are nevertheless “legal, ethical, and moral.”
“Our operations are lawful. They’re targeted. They’re focused on individuals who pose a serious threat to this community. They are not random and they are not political,” he said. The “necessity” Bovino refers to is that which has arisen as a direct result of Democrat sanctuary policies. Ordinarily, we wouldn’t see the very public, visible ICE operations now underway in Minneapolis and other sanctuary cities simply because criminal illegal aliens would be transferred to federal custody by local law enforcement.
But that’s not happening because Democrats don’t like federal immigration laws. Since they don’t have the political power to change them, they have decided, like Democrats in South Carolina in the 1830s, simply to declare them null and void in their territory.
I would suggest Minnesota Democrats should reconsider before Trump decides to do to Minneapolis what Sherman did to Savannah in 1864, but knowing Minneapolis, all he probably needs to do is hand out gasoline and matches to the #BlackLivesMatter/Somali set and let them burn it down themselves…
A collection of far-left activist groups — including the Democratic Socialists of America, major labor unions, explicitly Communist groups, and a CCP-linked protest network — have all organized a strike scheduled for Friday which aims to “shut down” schools and businesses statewide in Minnesota in an effort to push ICE out.
The planned shutdown was announced early last week — “ICE Out of MN: Day of Truth and Freedom” — include plans for a large-scale march in Minneapolis and a day of “no work, no school, no shopping.”
The radical Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), the left-wing BreakThrough News media outlet, and the Manhattan-based Marxist revolutionary People’s Forum are all involved in either promoting or organizing the Minnesota shutdown effort. Just the News previously reported on how these and other radical activist groups have leadership links or financial ties to a funding network backed by wealthy businessman and self-avowed communist Neville Singham.
The GOP-led House Oversight Committee voted this month to subpoena Singham for information about this sprawling activist network. The Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the Revolutionary Communists of America, and the Twin Cities chapter of the Communist Party USA — all avowedly Marxist groups — are also listed as co-sponsors of the Friday protest.
The DSA — which helped propel Zohran Mamdani to Gracie Mansion in NYC — including the national organization and the local Minnesota chapter — are listed as backing the anti-ICE effort scheduled for Friday.
Major labor unions such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) are listed as co-hosts of the shutdown effort, while the United Auto Workers (UAW) also endorsed the strike.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon told conservative podcaster Benny Johnson that former CNN host Don Lemon has been put “on notice” by the Justice Department and could face charges under federal civil-rights laws, including the Ku Klux Klan Act, for his role in storming a church service in Minnesota. Lemon allegedly joined a far-left mob that was on the hunt for a pro-ICE pastor at a St. Paul church.
“The Klan Act is one of the most important federal civil rights statutes. Its a law that makes it illegal to terrorize and violate the civil rights of citizens. Whenever people conspire to do this, the Klan Act can be used,” Dhillon told Johnson.
Dhillon continued, “Everyone in the protest community needs to know that the fullest force of the federal government is going to come down and prevent this from happening and put people away for a long time.”
“There is zero tolerance for this kind of illegal behavior and we will not stand for it,” she emphasized.
Johnson wrote on X, “DOJ confirms Don Lemon has zero ‘journalism’ protections against FACE Act violations. Lemon was fully aware of the violations and may face KKK Act conspiracy charges.”
But others got indicted. “FBI Arrests Left-Wing Activist Who Led Mob of Protesters into Minnesota Church.”
Federal authorities have arrested the woman who led an anti-ICE mob into a Minnesota church last week.
Nekima Levy Armstrong is facing charges related to violating the FACE Act, which prohibits interfering with the exercise of religion at a place of worship.
Minutes ago at my direction, HSI and FBI agents executed an arrest in Minnesota. So far, we have arrested Nekima Levy Armstrong, who allegedly played a key role in organizing the coordinated attack on Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a post on X.
“We will share more updates as they become available. Listen loud and clear: WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP,” she added.
Armstrong led a group into the Cities Church in St. Paul on Sunday, believing that one of the church’s pastors works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Dozens of demonstrators interrupted the service shouting, “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good.”
Armstrong is a civil rights lawyer and “scholar-activist,” according to her website. She previously played a key role in organizing boycotts against Target over its decision to walk back its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, according to Fox News.
Homeland Security Secretary Krisit Noem announced on Monday that immigration officers have arrested more than 10,000 illegal immigrants in Minnesota.
“PEACE AND PUBLIC SAFETY IN MINNEAPOLIS!” Noem exclaimed in a post to X. “We have arrested over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens who were killing Americans, hurting children and reigning terror in Minneapolis because Tim Walz and Jacob Frey refuse to protect their own people and instead protect criminals.”
The figure includes about 3,000 “criminal illegal aliens” arrested by federal authorities in just the last six weeks, the secretary said.
Snip.
“There is MASSIVE Fraud in Minneapolis, at least $19 billion and that’s just the tip of iceberg,” Noem asserted in the same post. “Our Homeland Security Investigators are on the ground in Minneapolis conducting wide scale investigations to get justice for the American people who have been robbed blind.”
Indeed.
“Abbott Offers State Assistance to HUD for Fraud Identification Program. HUD Secretary Turner identified $5 billion in potentially erroneous payments.”
Gov. Greg Abbott has volunteered Texas assistance to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in identifying fraud in federal housing programs after the agency identified at least $5 billion in potentially erroneous payments last year.
According to a letter sent to HUD Secretary Scott Turner on Monday, Abbott offered state participation in a pilot fraud identification program through the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA).
“We will gladly work with you to develop fraud-prevention measures that ensure federal taxpayer funds, like those in the rental-based assistance programs, are not taken advantage of by bad actors,” wrote Abbott.
Turner, a former Texas state representative who was appointed by President Donald Trump to head HUD last year, published a financial analysis of the agency that warned of fraud and a lack of internal controls.
Using AI, HUD reported finding more than 30,000 deceased persons either actively enrolled in a rental assistance program or who had received assistance after they died.
Turner’s financial report also warned that his staff had identified examples of non-compliance with standards of internal controls under the Biden administration.
“The reviews determined that under the prior Administration, HUD experienced a deterioration in financial controls and governance and identified a material weakness affecting internal controls and financial governance across multiple program offices.”
Multiple federal agencies launched or extended investigations in Minnesota after new revelations of widespread fraud in the state last month. Last week, Abbott directed the Texas Workforce Commission and the Health and Human Services Commission to investigate potential childcare fraud in Texas.
A member of the violent Latin Kings gang was arrested after allegedly stealing government property from an FBI vehicle vandalized during unrest in Minneapolis Wednesday night, federal authorities said.
Fox News confirmed that Raul Gutierrez, 33, was arrested Thursday in a joint operation involving the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
The FBI said multiple government vehicles were vandalized and broken into Wednesday night in Minneapolis while agents were responding to a reported assault on a federal officer, adding that federal property was stolen from inside the vehicles.
“One individual who allegedly stole federal government property out of an FBI vehicle in Minneapolis last night has been arrested,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X, adding that the suspect was a member of the Latin Kings gang with a violent criminal history. “FBI personnel are continuing to pursue other subjects involved. There will be more arrests.”
Is their any doubt the left will treat this gang banger scumbag as a hero?
A few weeks ago, I noted that California was losing over $160 million due to improper management of its commercial driver’s license program.
And well, Governor Gavin Newsom asserted his current budget would only have a $2 billion deficit, the state’s shortfall is actually estimated to be over $17 billion according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
The budget reports a $2.9 billion deficit, described as a “modest shortfall” by Department of Finance staff. This estimate differs markedly from the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) projection of a $17.6 billion deficit—a gap of $14.7 billion. According to department staff, the governor’s proposal incorporates $31.5 billion in additional revenues not included in the LAO forecast and excludes the risk of a stock market downturn that the LAO elected to factor into its analysis. Overall, the state budget totals $348.9 billion, including $248.3 billion in General Fund expenditures and $23 billion in total reserves.
Now, the gap may even widen.
California is facing federal demands to repay more than $1 billion in Medicaid funds that Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), says were improperly used for health care for illegal aliens.
The Trump administration is planning to claw back over $1 billion in federal Medicaid dollars it says are being spent by blue states on healthcare for illegal immigrants, including some with violent criminal records for murder and rape.
A preliminary audit by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that, over the last few years, mostly during 2024 and 2025, California; Washington, D.C.; Illinois; Washington; Colorado; and Oregon improperly spent a combined $1,351,204,127 in federal Medicaid funds to help pay for healthcare for illegal immigrants.
While federal Medicaid dollars are supposed to be prohibited broadly from being used to cover healthcare for illegal immigrants, they can be used by states for emergency treatment regardless of a patient’s citizenship or immigration status.
While 5 other states were also investigated for illegal alien-oriented Medicaid abuses, California was by far the most egregious.
Virginians asked for it, and if the flurry of bills introduced in the 72 hours since Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s inauguration pass — and with a Democratic supermajority, they likely will — residents of the Old Dominion are going to get it “good and hard.” If enacted, these proposals would raise taxes substantially, shorten sentences for violent criminals, and erode election integrity statewide.
Virginia voters delivered Spanberger a landslide victory in November over her Republican opponent, then–Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears. Despite presenting herself as a moderate during the campaign, Spanberger’s congressional voting record — nearly 100% aligned with the Democrats’ progressive agenda — suggested her governance would be anything but.
Let’s start with the tax increases: HB979 would create two new tax brackets. Currently, Virginians are taxed at 5.75% for all income over $17,000. If this bill passes, residents earning between $600,000 and $1 million will be taxed at 8%, and those earning over $1 million will pay 10%.
Before anyone argues that these taxpayers can well afford it, remember that this group includes farmers, small businesses, and sole proprietors — many of whom are about to be “crushed” by the impact.
The advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform sounded the alarm on the proposed new taxes in a piece titled Democrats Pounce On Virginia Taxpayers. ATF noted, “Under unified Democrat control, Virginia is poised to become a tax-hiking outlier in a region full of states that are phasing out their income taxes.”
The article highlights some of the most shocking tax proposals now being advanced by state Democrats.
HB 378 – Imposes a 3.8% net investment income tax on individuals, trusts, and estates beginning in taxable year 2027. If enacted, HB 378 would raise VA’s top marginal income tax rate on portfolio and passive income to 9.55%.
HB 900 – Authorizes sales tax hikes in various transportation districts, imposes a new tax on each and every retail delivery in Northern Virginia (Amazon, Uber Eats, FedEx, UPS, etc.), similar to the one imposed in Minnesota by Gov. Tim Walz (D).
HB 919 – Imposes a firearm and ammunition tax equal to 11% percent of the gross receipts from the retail sale of any firearm or ammunition by a dealer in firearms, firearms manufacturer, or ammunition vendor, as such terms are defined in the bill.
HB 978 – Extends the retail sales and use tax to dry cleaning, landscaping, and other previously exempt services.
Democrats now control the legislature and Governor’s office in Virginia.
Here are just a few of the bills they’ve introduced
– New 4.3% sales tax on Uber Eats, Amazon, etc deliveries.
– New sales tax on admissions to a wide variety of businesses.
– Create two new higher tax…
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 19, 2026
NEW retail and sales taxes coming to Virginia introduced by Virginia Democrats in a single bill:
“Levies the retail sales and use tax on the following services: admissions; charges for recreation, fitness, or sports facilities; nonmedical personal services or counseling; dry… pic.twitter.com/ki96Ngpj6T
— NOVA Campaigns (@NoVA_Campaigns) January 19, 2026
This legislative blitz has something for everyone — including convicted criminals in the state.
HB863 would “eliminate mandatory minimum sentencing for rape, manslaughter, assaulting a law enforcement officer, possession and distribution of child pornography, and all repeat violent felonies.”
Funny how Democrats are now objectively and reflexively pro-rape…
Here at Davos, I’ve heard numerous versions of this sentiment: “We Europeans/Canadians stood up to Trump and forced him to retreat. This is a major victory for the rules-based international order.”
This is a very wrong take. The reality is that Trump won Davos, hands down. And not only did he win it; he owned it. I have never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important.
Snip.
Davos Man—I should say Davos Person—worries a lot more about such things than he—they—used to. The latest edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report, which is based on surveys of business executives and academics, ranks “geoeconomic confrontation” and “state-based armed conflict” as the No. 1 and No. 2 risks most “likely to present a material crisis on a global scale in 2026.” On a two-year time horizon, geoeconomic confrontation remains top of the list. Asked to characterize “the global political environment for cooperation on risks in the next decade,” 68 percent of respondents picked a “multipolar or fragmented order in which middle and great powers contest, set, and enforce regional rules and norms.”
All of this is just a series of Davosy euphemisms for the one big risk that Davos Person fears above all others: Donald Trump. This is funny when you consider last year’s mood, which—in the wake of Trump’s reelection—was very bullish about the United States under Trump 2.0. “Almost everyone at Davos is long U.S., short EU,” I wrote in these pages this time last year. “The new Davos consensus is that Europe cannot get its economic act together and never will, whereas America is rocking and rolling, and if you don’t own the big U.S. tech stocks, then the FOMO may kill you.”
My long-standing contrarian rule is that the Davos consensus is always wrong. In last year’s case, I added, Davos Person should be very careful what they wished for. Sure enough, in 2025 European stocks outperformed U.S. stocks. And, of course, Trump 2.0 has turned out to be every good European’s worst nightmare.
In the run-up to Davos 2026, Trump did his utmost to wind up Europe’s elite, not to mention Canada’s. On social media and in interviews, he insisted that he was determined to get Greenland for the United States. “Greenland has to be acquired,” he wrote on the eve of his arrival in Switzerland. “Denmark and its European allies have to DO THE RIGHT THING.” He did not rule out military action. He threatened to impose new 10 percent tariffs on all countries that resisted. And he posted memes of maps of Denmark (and Canada) cloaked in the Stars and Stripes and an AI-generated image of himself planting an American flag on “Greenland—U.S. Territory Est. 2026.”
To stoke up the crowd ahead of the president’s arrival, Trump’s cabinet members chimed in. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s anti-European trash-talking so enraged the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, that she stormed out of a Davos dinner. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent drolly wondered if European leaders might unleash their “most forceful weapon,” the “dreaded European working group.”
Snip.
This was vintage Trump, part real-estate pitch, part reality TV. “All we’re asking for is to get Greenland,” he riffed, “including right, title, and ownership, because you need the ownership to defend it. You can’t defend it on a lease. Legally, it’s not defensible that way, totally. And number two, psychologically, who the hell wants to defend a license agreement or a lease[?]”
As for the haters, “Canada lives because of the United States,” Trump declared. “Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.” And: “Here’s the story, Emmanuel. The answer is you’re going to do it. You’re going to do it fast. And if you don’t, I’m putting a 25 percent tariff on everything that you sell into the United States. And a 100 percent tariff on your wines and champagnes.”
Except that, almost as an aside, Trump then called the whole Greenland thing off. “We never ask for anything [from NATO],” he rambled, “and we never got anything. We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force where we would be, frankly, unstoppable. But I won’t do that. Okay? Now everyone’s saying, ‘Oh good.’ That’s probably the biggest statement I made because people thought I would use force. I don’t have to use force. I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force.”
Later that evening, following a “very productive meeting” with NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, Trump announced on Truth Social that he would not impose the additional tariffs on European countries he had threatened. He and Rutte had “formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region.”
Snip.
The problem with all of this is the premise that Trump ever seriously meant to annex Greenland or to impose new tariffs on the Europeans. Why would he when a) the United States already enjoys (under a 1951 treaty with Denmark and a 2004 agreement with Greenland) all the military access to the frigid island it could every possibly need, while the Danes pay for the heavily subsidized inhabitants of the island; and b) Trump means what he says on Truth Social only about half the time, according to The Wall Street Journal’s recent analysis of 2,700 substantive Truth posts. I’ll say it again: Half the time he’s bluffing. And it was the same when he was on Twitter in series one.
Snip.
Ten years ago, Europeans made the mistake of taking Trump neither seriously nor literally. Now they make the opposite mistake of treating him both seriously and literally. But, as Saleno Zito explained nearly 10 years ago, the correct approach is to take him seriously but not literally. The fact that Trump carries out only around half the threats he makes on social media is a feature, not a bug—and it’s certainly not a sign of weakness. It is a deliberate tactic designed to leave counterparties uncertain. On this occasion, Trump was bluffing, and the administration never had the remotest intention of imposing new tariffs on Europe, much less taking military action to annex Greenland.
So Trump asked for the moon, threatened to disastrous sanctions on his negotiating counterparts, and then settled for what he actually wanted all along.
Cue the tiny violins: “Eric Swalwell Could Be Ineligible for Governor or Face Jail Time.”
Eric Swalwell’s political ambitions just hit a major snag. Swalwell, most famous for public flatulence and bedding a Chinese spy, wants to be the next governor of California, but he is now the target of a court challenge that could blow his entire gubernatorial campaign out of the water before it even gets started.
The accusation? He doesn’t actually live in the state he wants to govern.
Conservative activist and filmmaker Joel Gilbert dropped a legal bomb on January 8, filing a petition in Sacramento Superior Court arguing that Swalwell is constitutionally barred from seeking the governor’s office.
Gilbert has a strong case.
California’s constitution requires gubernatorial candidates to live in the state for five years before the election. Gilbert says Swalwell has been living in Washington, D.C., not California, which makes him legally ineligible to run for office.
“Swalwell is ineligible to run for governor of California because the California constitution requires that a candidate live in the state for five years before an election,” Gilbert told PJ Media. “Swalwall has no home address in California; that’s why he committed perjury on his candidate statement form 501 by providing his attorney’s office for his home address. Swalwell has a sworn Deed of Trust on his Washington, D.C. home where he declared that location as his primary residence.”
The complaint gets more interesting from there.
Public records searches allegedly show that Swalwell has no ownership or lease of any California property — his congressional financial disclosures from 2011 through 2024 back this up, listing zero California real estate holdings. When Swalwell filed his campaign paperwork on December 4, he listed an address on Capitol Mall in Sacramento. The problem is that the address isn’t a residence; it’s the office of his Sacramento lawyer, Greenberg Traurig, located in a high-rise.
Swalwell owns a $1.2 million, six-bedroom home in northeast Washington, D.C., where he lives with his wife, Brittany Watts, and their three kids. Mortgage documents from April 2022 list that D.C. property as his “principal residence.”
There are really only two possibilities here, according to Gilbert: Swalwell either committed mortgage fraud — a serious crime that could result in prison time — or he’s ineligible to run for governor.
New Labor Department filings reveal the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers’ union, has been channeling millions in taxpayer dollars to far-left political outfits, including Soros-backed networks and shadowy activist groups.
Instead of bolstering education, these funds are propping up anti-American causes, from anti-Israel protests to rigging electoral maps.
The bombshell underscores the deep rot in union leadership, where public money meant for schools is weaponized against conservative values and national security.
The filings, obtained by Fox News Digital, paint a damning picture of misdirected priorities. “The NEA’s last fiscal year report showed it sent $300,000 to the 1630 Fund, the liberal dark money group Fox News has been reporting on extensively, and in most cases exclusively — Tens of thousands of dollars to the (George Soros’) Tides Foundation Network,” according to the report.
These aren’t voluntary donations from union members’ pockets—these are taxpayer dollars funneled through the system. The Tides Foundation has ties to anti-Israel activism, while the Sixteen Thirty Fund operates as a hub for progressive dark money, influencing elections without transparency.
The NEA didn’t stop there, the report notes, adding it “was also involved in several state issues. It backed a campaign to end standardized testing in Massachusetts and fight gerrymandering in Ohio, to the tune of half a million dollars for each of those and it sent hundreds of thousands of additional money to groups committed to racial and education justice movements.”
One of the biggest payouts was a whopping $3.5 million to Education International, a global teachers’ federation where NEA President Becky Pringle serves as vice president. Critics call it a cozy self-dealing arrangement, with American tax dollars flowing offshore to international agendas.
The subpoenas went to the offices of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, according the outlets, including Reuters, the New York Times and Fox News, which cited anonymous sources.
The subpoenas come days after the Department of Justice announced it was launching an investigation into Walz and Frey in connection with a suspected conspiracy to impede federal immigration enforcement in the state.
I am hoping there are also subpoenas in the works for several years of their bank records, to see how much they participated in the Somali fraud…
Over the past several days, it appears that Minneapolis police officers have quietly kind of quit in another way.
From Alpha News:
Around 100 Minneapolis police officers could soon be off duty for weeks to months from an already critically understaffed police department, and just as the city faces a serious public safety crisis with protesters inciting confrontations with the surge of federal agents working in the city.
Multiple sources confided to both Alpha News senior reporter Liz Collin and to Crime Watch Minneapolis that 60 to 100 officers from the Minneapolis Police Department have applied or plan to apply for the state’s new paid leave program. The Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) program was signed into law by Gov. Tim Walz during the 2023 DFL trifecta and went into effect on the first of this year.
This won’t end well: “Japanese Yields Soar To All Time High After PM Takaichi Calls Snap Election Seeking More Spending, Less Taxes.” Doubling down, yet again, on Abenomics, won’t solve Japan’s continuing problems.
New York has finally ended its nearly decade-long campaign to force Catholic nuns and other religious ministries to fund abortions.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty announced on Tuesday that New York agreed to enter into a settlement with their clients after a lengthy court battle over a state abortion mandate that went to the Supreme Court twice. Plaintiffs in the case, Roman Catholic Diocese v. Harris, included a group of Catholic and Anglican nuns, Catholic dioceses, Christian churches, and faith-based social ministries.
“For nearly a decade, New York bureaucrats tried to strong-arm nuns into paying for abortions because they serve all those in need,” said Lori Windham, senior counsel at Becket and an attorney for the religious groups. “At long last, the state has given up its disgraceful campaign. This victory confirms that the government cannot punish religious ministries for living out their faith by serving everyone.”
In a press release, AG James, who had previously worked to shut down the NRA because she disagreed with its politics, announced that she had closed down Betar, a pro-Israel group , for appearing at synagogues to defend them from Muslim mobs, for claiming that “that all devout Muslims ‘hate America’, and for making derogatory remarks about Islam and Gaza.
Did Howard University not cover the unconstitutionality of viewpoint discrimination back when James was obtaining her law degree there? (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Nick Shirley sat down with YouTuber Andrew Callaghan, and caught Callaghan deceptively editing the interview just like the MSM does.
Microslop 365. “Microsoft has invested tens to hundreds of billions of dollars into AI, okay? And so AI is not allowed to be the problem. And so it has to be you.”
William F. Buckley once observed that any group that wasn’t explicitly conservative would inevitably move left over time. A corollary seems true of Jewish foundations as well, as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List-funded Righteous Persons Foundation is now funding anti-Israel organizations.
That the foundation established by Stephen Spielberg using funds from his Holocaust drama, “Schindler’s List,” has become a cash well for progressive groups that vilify Israel is a shonda. The charity was born from Mr. Spielberg’s conviction that the movie’s profits — “blood money” he called them — belonged not to him but to the people whose murder he chronicled on film. He committed $150 million to the cause.
The so-called Righteous Persons Foundation started out well enough. It adopted a mission “to recover and make accessible Jewish stories from the past, and to help build a contemporary Jewish community predicated on meaning, joy, and a responsibility to help repair our world.” It funneled money to supporting Holocaust survivors, preserving testimony, and ensuring the lessons of the Nazi’s genocide of the Jews would not be forgotten.
Yet, as our Novi Zhukovsky reports, its financing of such worthy groups began to dwindle — then eventually ran dry. The last donation to the United States Holocaust Museum came in 2019. The same year marked its final gift to a legal fund, Bet Tzedek, that provides pro bono legal services to Holocaust survivors. Since 2020, the foundation has funneled a modest $125,000 to Holocaust projects, according to calculations by Front Page magazine.
Where did the money go instead? To groups like T’ruah. It identifies itself as a rabbinic human rights organization that has received some $650,000 from the foundation to organize street blockades in protest of the war in Gaza and to accuse Israel of intentionally starving Palestinians — even after Israel adopted 10-hour daily pauses to facilitate humanitarian aid. Its chief executive called Israel’s beeper attack on Hezbollah a “war crime.”
Then there’s Bend the Arc, which collected $1.2 million while blaming American support for Israel for driving antisemitism at home and while endorsing in New York a mayoral candidate who refuses to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Another $900,000 went to Jews United for Justice, an opponent to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which recognizes anti-Zionism’s link to Jew hatred.
It’s hard to believe that Mr. Spielberg, a Jew himself, expects to move the needle in the ways of preventing another Holocaust by demonizing Israel and undermining the Jewish people’s connection to the state.
Spielberg should overhaul and restaff his foundation to avoid funding anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli activity.
What good is a Jewish foundation if it caves to the institutional antisemitic bias of the radical social justice left?
Illegal aliens continue raking in welfare benefits, the #SchumerShutdown continues, a look at the Democrats’ foreign paymasters, a jihad attack thwarted, cartels are enslaving American Indians in California in the name of weed, some Joe Rogan interviews, Nasty Nancy bows out, Kill Bill returns to theaters, and Bass Pro Shop Fight Club.
It’s astounding, the things we learn when the money runs out and governments actually have to start prioritizing for a change. As the Schumer Shutdown drags through Week Five with no end in sight, the country’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — aka “food stamps” — ran out of money on Saturday. And given who was taking, it’s a miracle that there was any money left at all.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins reported yesterday that earlier this year, “we told every state to send us their SNAP data so we could make sure illegal immigrants aren’t getting benefits meant for American families. 29 states stepped up. 21 blue states refused — and two SUED US FOR ASKING!”
That’s because we’re spending billions on benefits to illegal aliens.
My guess is that the Center for Immigration Studies — which bills itself as “low-immigrant” yet “pro-immigration” — was being a bit ironic with this headline: Illegal Immigrants To Be Hit Hard As SNAP and WIC Benefits Expire.
The organization’s 2023 analysis of government data showed that “households headed by illegal immigrants make extensive use of the welfare system, particularly food assistance programs.” CIS estimated that 59% of households headed up by an illegal are on one or more welfare programs, whether it’s cash, food assistance, Medicaid, or housing.
Read that again. We’re giving cash, food, healthcare, and housing to people who aren’t even supposed to be here.
Millions of them, in fact. Even though I could have sworn that Democrats insisted up and down that sort of thing never happened. No wonder 21 blue states didn’t want Rollins looking at their books.
Houston, we have a problem. A very expensive problem.
His suggestions: Require proof of citizenship for all welfare benefits, and ban junk food from purchase with EBT.
The Schumer Shutdown continues. Democrats offered a one year ObamaCare extension and Republicans told them to get stuffed. Republicans should counter-offer an extension of the subsidies for American citizens…but none for illegal alien, plus states are required to submit their benefits database so illegal aliens can be kicked off the program and deported. That would make it even more painfully clear Democrats favor illegal aliens over citizens when they refuse…
Foreigners not only are paying to promote liberal causes and by extension liberal candidates but foreigners are running their own candidates. The Squad has a couple of them and Minneapolis is about to get a Somali mayor.
Foreigners are funding the Indian who was born in Uganda and sent to New York City at some point. Now he’ll a jihadist-friendly communist—but if justice prevails, he may end up in prison instead of being in City Hall.
The New York Post reported last week, “Zohran Mamdani was hit with two criminal referrals Tuesday filed by a campaign finance watchdog accusing the lefty socialist of accepting illegal contributions from foreign donors.
“The Coolidge Reagan Foundation filed the referrals—alleging Mamdani may have violated the Federal Election Campaign Act and New York Election Code—with the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office on Tuesday.
“The referrals were filed after The Post reported earlier this month Mamdani’s campaign raked in nearly $13,000 in contributions from at least 170 donors with addresses outside the U.S.—including one from his mother-in-law in Dubai.”
Ed Morrissey:
The Democrat Party has turned into the Globalist Party. Their constituency isn’t American voters; it’s the international cognoscenti, who want an America that submits to the “global community.” That is why Democrat leaders do not adapt their policies and positions to the clear consensus in the American electorate, because they have already adapted to constituencies outside the United States.
That isn’t the only institution orienting itself away from American constituencies, and for the same reason. Over the last several decades, Academia has seen billions of dollars flow into its coffers from places like China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. There too, the money has pushed institutions to indoctrinate students into radical-Left globalist values and agendas. Universities have largely stopped providing foundational Western-civilization values and education in favor of revisionist propaganda about Western imperialism and colonialism. This in turn colors all of the institutions into which radicalized graduates enter and rise within those structures.
Jonah Goldberg, from 2009 (back before Trump broke his brain):
Liberalism has openly yearned to “Europeanize” American social policy for decades. Liberals point to European health-care systems, union rules, tax policies, industrial policy, foreign policy, and even sexual mores, and say: “We need to be more like them.”
This is a very old story. The founders of modern liberalism, led by Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts, were quite open about their effort to adopt a more European approach to political economy. The progressive leader William Allen White said in 1911: “We were parts, one of another, in the United States and Europe. Something was welding us into one social and economic whole with local political variations. It was Stubbs in Kansas, Jaures in Paris, the Social Democrats in Germany, the Socialists in Belgium, and I should say the whole people in Holland, fighting a common cause.”
But it was FDR’s New Deal that truly aimed to “assimilate the American into the ‘European’ political experience,” according to historian Daniel Boorstin.
After years of Democrats telling the American people that former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a thriving system, the glaring truth revealed now during the government shutdown is that not only has the ACA resulted in widespread fraud and allegations of kickbacks to insurance companies, the American people are footing the bill for subsidies to hide the fact that Obamacare is broken.
“Everything Obama told us was a complete lie,” E.J. Antoni told John Solomon during a special report on the government shutdown sponsored by the Association of Mature American Citizens.
Antoni, who serves as chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, continued: “When he said, ‘If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.’ No you couldn’t. Obamacare made a lot of those health care plans illegal. He said, ‘If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.’ No, it forced a lot of doctors out of business, and it forced a lot of doctors to no longer take most insurance.”
President Barack Obama repeatedly promised Americans during the rollout of the ACA — commonly known as Obamacare — that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” a claim intended to reassure Americans about the ACA’s impact on existing healthcare arrangements. However, millions of people lost access to their preferred and established physicians due to narrowed insurance networks and cancellations of plans which did not comply with the law’s new requirements, leading even left-leaning PolitiFact to name it the “Lie of the Year” in 2013.
Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Mich., revealed the latest scandal within Obamacare. Bergman, speaking to Just The News, laid out the timeline for subsidies which were meant to lighten the burden for Americans but when unused, were pocketed by the insurance companies.
Bergman explained that “In 2010, the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act. Then in 2014, ACA premium tax credits became available, meant to help families earning 100 to 140% of the federal poverty level – that was designed to help those folks. In 2021, through the ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act), Democrats temporarily extended and expanded those subsidies to everyone, regardless of income, for one year. In 2022, the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act), they extended the expansion again, but only through January 1 of 2026.”
Bergman emphasized that the expiration imposed by Democrats implicitly meant that the extension was not meant to be permanent. That extension expires and is what Democrats have shut down the government over. As Bergman puts it, “They’re blaming us, the Republicans, for letting their own temporary extensions expire.”
The largest surprise regarding these subsidies, is that they haven’t been going directly to patients. They’ve been going to insurance companies, according to Bergman. “Insurance companies’ profits right now are up something like 240+ percent. There’s something morally wrong with that. Not only is it shamefully wrong, but morally wrong.”
Bergman did not name any specific insurance companies.
“Millions of these so-called ghost enrollees, people who are technically eligible, but are unaware of it, never use these subsidies. The insurers pocket the difference.”
OpenSecrets reported that in 2012, the health insurance industry donated roughly $9.6 million to Democrats. In 2024, the industry donated almost $40 million to Democrats.
Five people between the ages of 16 and 20 were arrested Friday, CBS News has learned. Authorities say they were inspired by a former member of the Michigan Army National Guard who was arrested in May for allegedly planning an ISIS-inspired attack against a U.S. Army site in suburban Detroit.
(Just a reminder that Detroit suburbs like Dearborn Heights are majority-Muslim.)
The men were inspired by another “Michigan man” who was arrested in May:
Ammar Abdulmajid-Mohamed Said, 19, was accused of providing support for a planned attack on the U.S. Army’s Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command facility at the Detroit Arsenal.
Democrats have been importing unassimilated Muslims into America for, what, 30 year now? 40? Who initiated the plan, and why?
Over 1,500 alleged criminal illegal aliens were arrested during a 10-day operation in Southeast Texas — including documented gang members, a convicted murderer, and over a dozen sexual offenders.
The Houston branch of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducted the operation between October 22 and 31, arresting a total of 1,505 alleged criminal illegal aliens.
Among the arrests were 17 “documented gang members,” including an alleged Mexican Mafia gang member, who was convicted for raping and impregnating his minor sister and is wanted in Honduras for murder. A suspected MS-13 gang member was also among the arrested, after he “ran inside a local washateria, climbed through the ceiling panels to get on the roof and became wedged in a sign on the side of the building,” before being captured by Houston ICE.
Forty “aggravated felons” were reported as being among the 1,505 arrested, as were 13 sexual predators.
One of the arrested is Vongphachan Phothisome of Laos, who was convicted of sexual exploitation of a child. Similarly, an illegal alien from Honduras, Rony Andy Martinez Lopez, was convicted of “lewd and lascivious acts with a minor and cruelty towards a child.”
A comparable week-long operation conducted by Houston ICE in early September yielded about half the arrests as this October one, with 822 alleged criminal illegal aliens arrested last month.
Native American sovereignty and California’s policies that shield illegal immigrants have allowed Mexican drug cartels to swoop in on tribal lands of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, a confederation of several tribes, the sheriff said.
The valley, known for illegal marijuana grows on tribal lands, is remote and surrounded by forested mountainous terrain. It’s a patchwork of tribal lands and those sold off to private owners years ago.
[Mendocino County Sheriff Matt] Kendall, 56, grew up here in the 1970s. During the drive to Covelo, an isolated town in the valley, he talks about how the times have changed over the decades.
“Back in the ’60s and ’70s, it was a beautiful place—a lot of freedom here,” he said. “When we were kids, we’d be riding our horses and having fun. Every kid in this valley had a horse. We’d go out to the river. All of us had summertime jobs, hauling hay and cutting firewood.”
His nostalgic journey ends abruptly as he passes a burned-out building with murals of missing women on its walls—a stark reminder of the violence that plagues the valley. Other banners along the road display their names and faces, including that of Khadijah Rose Britton, a native American woman who, according to the FBI, was last seen in Covelo being kidnapped at gunpoint in 2018.
Today, Kendall says, “there’s a little bit of farming, and then just tons and tons of marijuana, and pretty much all of it is illegal.”
“We see a lot of Hispanics here when there is no work, no sawmill jobs, no grapes, no vineyards and not much logging. They’re all here taking orders to grow marijuana, and a lot of it’s happening on tribal lands.”
He estimates up to 80 percent of the illegal marijuana in Mendocino County is grown on tribal lands, based on aerial surveillance and satellite imagery revealing a vast network of illegal grow ops.
A blow against tranny madness. “Supreme Court Reinstates Trump Admin Requirement That Passports Reflect Biological Sex.”
Joe Rogan interviews Elon Musk, again. I have not remotely watched all three hours of it, but I don’t rule out posting clips from it in the future.
Speaking of Musk, Telsa shareholders just approved a $1 trillion pay package for him, assuming he hits certain metrics over the next decade. My guess is that’s a whole lot of pie in the sky, even for him…
Speaking of three hour Joe Rogan interviews, he did one with Billy Bob Thorton that just dropped. I’m sure I’ll watch all of that one as well…
Nancy Pelosi announces her retirement. She was able to force the abomination that was ObamaCare over the line, and grab a lot of taxpayer-funded pork for Democrats, but it’s doubtful her terms as Speaker resulted in lasting achievements for Democrats. She was bad, but if another Democrat manages to be Speaker in my lifetime, my default assumption is that they’ll be much, much worse…
A Washington Parish grand jury in Louisiana has indicted Democratic Bogalusa, Louisiana Mayor Tyrin Z. Truong on charges of malfeasance in office, public intimidation, and theft, according to the Bogalusa Daily News.
The indictment is part of what officials describe as an ongoing multi-agency investigation involving federal, state, and local authorities. Prosecutors allege Truong intentionally carried out his official duties unlawfully and knowingly allowed other city employees to ignore theirs. His arraignment is scheduled for November 10, 2025.
According to prosecutors, the case centers on claims that Truong misused Bogalusa taxpayer funds to pay a personal legal debt from a 2023 Louisiana public records lawsuit in which a judge ruled that Truong personally owed attorney fees and penalties after refusing to release public documents.
When the Bogalusa City Council denied his request to use public money, prosecutors say Truong threatened retaliation, vowing to overwhelm council members with records requests. Investigators allege he then pressured a city insurance vendor to issue a check labeled as a “reimbursement,” had it deposited into a city account, and ordered another check for the same amount to be written to himself.
Rookie mistake. Graft pros always have the check written to an intermediary cutout who withdraws the money and pays them in cash…
In 2022, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) announced a plan to give $715 million in taxpayer cash and tax incentives to lure Gotion, a Chinese battery maker, to rural central Michigan. She did it in the midst of a reelection campaign so she could fire off a press release claiming credit for 2,600 “good-paying jobs.”
She didn’t mind the fact that this proposed one-square-mile plant would be located less than 100 miles from an Army and National Guard training facility called Camp Grayling. The real irony is that the U.S. military has been training the Taiwanese military at Camp Graying for years to repel a Chinese invasion. Our governor was going to pay the CCP to operate a plant in the middle of the state. Genius!
Local residents rose up. Yes, of course, because they objected to the possibility of Chinese spies roaming around their community. But also because they resented the way in which the project was unveiled. Elected officials signed nondisclosure agreements with economic development agencies and then said they were legally bound from sharing details with the residents footing the bill.
The more questions citizens had, the more obstinate company, township, and state officials became. Green Charter Township is made up of normal people: farmers, small business owners, and the like. James Chapman, the chief project proponent and former township supervisor, quickly lost his patience in meetings and yelled at the rubes who had the temerity to attend and voice their opinions. They would yell right back. The massive project, shrouded in arrogant secrecy, bitterly divided the small community.
It reached a boiling point when township officials who were supporting the project either resigned or were overwhelmingly recalled. A new board was elected, and they went about doing the due diligence that taxpayers expect elected officials to pursue for such an expensive and disruptive project.
The CCP-linked company sued the new board, driving up massive legal bills for the tiny community. The company didn’t want to wait for environmental approvals, tearing down trees and homes. The community continued fighting, even employing President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Trump publicly opposed the project. Vance held a campaign rally across the street.
When they took office in January, they changed former President Joe Biden’s scam electric vehicle mandates, and the whole racket collapsed. It was the beginning of the end for the Gotion project.
Last week, the state of Michigan announced it was withdrawing the promise of $175 million in taxpayer cash, although $50 million had already been delivered. It’s unclear whether taxpayers will receive an accounting of where that money went.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Voting fraud alert. “North Carolina Republicans say texts show that local Democrats are paying for people’s votes.”
The North Carolina Republican Party referred an alleged vote-buying scheme to the State Board of Elections for investigation on Friday, claiming that a voter had been offered $100 to vote for Democratic candidates in the Wilmington City Council election.
‘This is a troubling allegation and an egregious affront to our democracy and an attempt to buy votes in exchange for cash,’ NC GOP Chair Jason Simmons said in a press conference. ‘The North Carolina Republican Party stands committed and steadfast in its determination for free, fair and transparent elections.’
“FAA Orders Flight Cuts at Texas Airports as Democrat-Led Shutdown Deepens. The FAA will cut flights by 10 percent at 40 of the nation’s top airports due to staffing shortages among air traffic controllers.”
The Department of Energy (DOE) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recently signed Addendum No. 9 to their 2019 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), paving the way for faster follow-on licensing of advanced nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel technologies.
This agreement, signed Oct 24th and effective immediately, comes as major concerns have been raised by reactor development companies and industry observers regarding the double work that may be required of developers when they bring their tested products over to the NRC. Demand for clean, reliable energy by data centers and major industrial companies has created a stronger need for change in the path to reactor design commercialization, with companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon signing long-term offtake agreements with reactor operators Constellation, NextEra, and Talen.
The addition to the MOU comes from the directives out of Trump’s executive orders signed back in May of this year. From section 5.d of the executive order “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission”:
“Establish an expedited pathway to approve reactor designs that the DOD or the DOE have tested and that have demonstrated the ability to function safely. NRC review of such designs shall focus solely on risks that may arise from new applications permitted by NRC licensure, rather than revisiting risks that have already been addressed in the DOE or DOD processes.”
Surprisingly, the DOE and NRC took the executive order one step further and included a streamlined licensing process for nuclear fuel facilities as well. It becomes less surprising when we remember the current administration has highlighted multiple times the desire to reduce the reliance on foreign nuclear fuel supplies. Even with the Russian uranium import ban, the US is still importing over a fifth of the required enriched uranium from Russia through last year. The US government is looking to expand the domestic capacity of every step in the fuel chain as quickly as possible.
Faster, please.
“Top 20 Theories on Why the EU Committed Cultural Suicide.” They’re not mutually exclusive. And the piece needs an entry for cultural relativism/Frankfurt School and a Gramscian “war of position” against civil society.
Digital media hasn’t become the antidote to television. Digital media, empowered by the serum of algorithmic feeds, has become super-television: more images, more videos, more isolation. Home-alone time has surged as our devices have become more bottomless feeds of video content. Rather than escape the solitude crisis that Putnam described in the 1990s, we now seem to be more on our own. (Not to mention: meaner and stupider, too.)
It would be rash to blame our berserk political moment entirely on short-form video, but it would be careless to forget that some people really did try to warn us that this was coming. In Amusing Ourselves to Death1, Neil Postman wrote that “each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.” Television speaks to us in a particular dialect, Postman argued. When everything turns into television, every form of communication starts to adopt television’s values: immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity. In the glow of a local news program, or an outraged news feed, the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol. When everything is urgent, nothing is truly important. Politics becomes theater. Science becomes storytelling. News becomes performance. The result, Postman warned, is a society that forgets how to think in paragraphs, and learns instead to think in scenes.
Snip.
Short-form video is indistinguishable from what today’s youth consider the definition of American success. For five straight years, Gen Z has told pollsters that the thing they most want to be when they grow up is an “influencer.”
When literally everything becomes television, what disappears is not something so broad as intelligence (although that seems to be going, too) but something harder to put into words, and even harder to prove the value of. It’s something like inwardness. The capacity for solitude, for sustained attention, for meaning that penetrates inward rather than swipes away at the tip of a finger: These virtues feel out of step with a world where every medium is the same medium and everything in life converges to the value system of the same thing, which is television.
I’m not free from guilt myself. I only turn on my TV one day a week, but I watch waaaaaaay too much YouTube. (Previously.) (Hat tip: Greg Ellifritz via Dwight.)
GM to iPhone users: Drop dead. “General Motors is dropping Apple CarPlay and Android Auto support across all of its brands—Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC.”
“Microsoft just revealed that OpenAI lost more than $11.5B last quarter.” “If Microsoft owns 27 percent of OpenAI, it stands to reason under equity accounting that it bears 27 percent of OpenAI’s losses. Microsoft’s admission that it shaved $3.1 billion off its net income to account for its share of OpenAI losses therefore suggests OpenAI lost about $11.5 billion during the quarter.”
“Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL: THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR unites Volume 1 and Volume 2 into a single, unrated epic—presented exactly as he intended, complete with a new, never-before-seen anime sequence.”
Coming to theaters in December. If I wasn’t in financial turtle mode, I’d probably go out and see it…
President Trump wins another huge (and hugely favorable) trade deal for America, more Obama/Clinton skullduggery exposed, a whole lot of sick perverts get arrested, Nigel Farage plays Cassandra, Russia gets hammered by both Ukraine and God, plus an unusually high amount of hypercars and Star Trek.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Winning: “Trump strikes massive trade deal with EU on energy, arms, tariffs.”
The United States has reached a trade deal with the European Union after President Donald Trump pressured the group of nations, as well as others, to open up trade with the US using the threat of tariffs.
While being joined by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Trump detailed the plans for the deal. “The European Union is going to agree to purchase from the United States $750 billion worth of energy.”
“They are going to agree to invest, into the United States, $600 billion more than they’re investing already. So they’re investing a large amount of money. … They’re agreeing to open up their countries to trade at zero tariff,” Trump added. “So that’s a very big factor, opening up their countries. All of the countries will be opened up to trade with the United States at zero tariff, and they’re agreeing to purchase a vast amount of military equipment.”
The president added that the number for the military equipment is not exact, and then also said the EU imports to the US will have a “straight across tariff of 15 percent” on automobiles and other goods. The tariffs on EU goods were previously in the single digits on average, according to the New York Times. The EU had hoped to reach an agreement for 10 percent across the board on tariffs.
The Very Best People repeatedly told us that President Trump’s tariff strategy would inevitably plunge us into a trade war and send the economy into a recession, if not a recession. It turns out, once again, that Trump has far better grasp of negotiating strategy than they do.
When Mr. Trump first unveiled his reciprocal tariffs, virtually all the important foreign countries flocked to make a deal with him; they ignored Communist China.
Why is that? Because America’s the greatest country in the world. With the best economy.
And nobody trusts the Chinese to do anything, much less honor a trade deal.
What’s more, Mr. Trump and his team have already made a number of deals with the United Kingdom, the European Union, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, and South Korea.
Talks with Mexico are constructive and will be extended.
We can’t be sure, but it’s likely that the China talks will be extended.
In general, Mr. Trump is charging a very modest 15 percent or 20 percent fee as the price for doing business with the greatest economy in the world.
That modest fee could generate something like $400 billion a year in tariff revenues.
And here’s his new wrinkle: vast foreign direct investment into America
For example, $600 billion from the EU, and perhaps another $600 billion from Japan. Maybe $750 billion from EU energy purchases. Think clean burning LNG produced by America’s first in the world energy industry.
Direct investment pledges of as much as $5 trillion or $6 trillion coming from governments and companies all around the world — including the Middle East. And even in Asia — with South Korea putting up $350 billion.
We’ll learn more about how this direct investment is going to work, but the point is — the stimulus from all of that vastly outweighs any fiscal drag from the mostly moderate reciprocal tariff rates.
That’s Mr. Trump’s brand-new wrinkle. And it’s a very clever ploy.
FBI Director Kash Patel found a trove of sensitive documents related to the origins of the Trump – Russia probe buried in multiple ‘burn bags’ in a secret room inside the bureau, sources told Fox News Digital.
Sources told Fox News Digital that the ‘burn bag’ system is used to destroy documents designated as classified or higher.
Sources told Fox News Digital that multiple burn bags were found and filled with thousands of documents.
Sources exclusively briefed Fox News Digital on some of the contents of the classified annex — including that the U.S. intelligence community had credible foreign sources indicating that the FBI would play a role in spreading the alleged Trump – Russia collusion narrative — before the bureau ever launched its controversial Crossfire Hurricane probe.
A source familiar with the contents of the classified annex told Fox News Digital that while it may not have been exactly clear in the moment what the intelligence collection meant, with the benefit of hindsight, it predicted the FBI’s next move ‘with alarming specificity.’
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt took members of the press corps to task over their refusal to cover newly released evidence that shows Hillary Clinton approved the Russian collusion hoax against Donald Trump.
Leavitt’s comments come on the heels of a newly declassified appendix to the Durham Report that exposes a reported Clinton campaign plan to falsely accuse President Trump of collusion with Russia.
Leavitt chided members of the press, telling them, “This is a story that every outlet in this room should be covering,” and that “This is further evidence that Hillary Clinton approved the Russia Hoax against President Trump. Her campaign financed it.”
Leavitt added that “the FBI and the CIA were both weaponized to accelerate this hoax against then-candidate and former president Trump.”
The Press Secretary told reporters that, “The president wants to see justice served and he trusts the Attorney General and the Department of Justice to implement that justice and hold these people accountable.”
The so-called “Durham annex” to John Durham’s Special Counsel report was released yesterday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and brings previously classified information to light regarding the Clinton campaign’s plans to falsely tie Trump to Russia.
In a press release, Grassley said, “History will show that the Obama and Biden administration’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were weaponized against President Trump. This political weaponization has caused critical damage to our institutions and is one of the biggest political scandals and cover-ups in American history. The new Trump administration has a tremendous responsibility to the American people to fix the damage done and do so with maximum speed and transparency.”
Travel back in time to the year 2021 and you might find yourself in the middle of a bizarre debate over the virtues of “cancel culture”. At the time the political left was aggressively trying to secure long term power within the US through a multi-pronged psychological offensive – A war on the minds of the masses designed to force Americans into submission.
A big part of their strategy relied on the fundamentals of Cultural Marxism: The combination of Marxist mob tactics, artificial consensus and the exploitation of minority grievances as a vehicle for controlling speech. This was the rise of the “woke movement” to the halls of government.
The root of their power was not martial. In fact, the political left is weak and largely astroturf with minimal ability to project power in a physical way. If conservatives wanted to destroy them tomorrow the task would be relatively easy. We don’t because many of us still have hope that our problems can be solved through peaceful discourse.
What the leftists did have at their disposal was a massive institutional apparatus of government agencies, corporations, Big Tech and NGOs. The full might of the establishment cabal was on their side, which meant they had the means to enforce “cancel culture” and silence their ideological opponents.
I don’t think there has ever been a psychological war on a population that was more pervasive and tyrannical. Not since Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China has a citizenry been under such a siege by their own government. The fact that we survived this event, defeated the onslaught and actually grew a grassroots anti-woke movement without the use of social media forums is truly mind blowing.
Very few people today realize the level of victory that was achieved. We thwarted perhaps the largest 4th Generation “mind war” ever devised and we did it without any institutional access. We won by simple truth and word of mouth.
Another tool that the leftists and globalists used was the mobilization of illegal migrants, gays and minorities as a shield against criticism or counter-protest. If conservatives and moderates fought back with superior debate or our own protest groups, we were immediately accused of racism, xenophobia and homophobia. Merely presenting an opposing view to the progressive machine was considered an act of evil.
Large contingents within all of these groups were happy to go along with the agenda for numerous reasons.
First and foremost, DEI allowed them to easily game the system. They could snatch up grants, subsidies, welfare, and leapfrog over more talented and more intelligent competitors in education and business simply because of their “marginalized status”.
Secondly, the system under progressives was two-tier; leftists activists, illegals and minorities were given preferential protection while breaking the law and causing chaos. Conservatives were labeled terrorists for any act of defiance. We were banned from the largest web platforms. Some of us were targeted by the online mob and lost our jobs. Others were “de-banked” and threatened with ostracism from the economy. Still others were imprisoned.
This imbalance of the law bred a culture of entitlement, especially within the LGBT cult and the black community. Illegal aliens were given carte blanche to enter the country and feed like parasites. Not only that, but they were treated like heroes coming to save the US from “population decline” and “labor shortages”.
They all participated in the game willfully and joyfully. They were ALL part of the problem. But, of course, none of them ever thought the party would end or that they might end up facing consequences for their behavior. They joined in the feeding frenzy without considering the inevitable clap-back.
The primary argument that leftists would often use to defend the application of cancel culture was that there was “no such thing as cancel culture”, only the righteous utilization of “consequence culture”. This was, of course, a misdirection. The word “consequence” suggests that a person deserves punishment for wrongdoing and that the leftists canceling him (or her) have the right to do so.
Cancel culture was never about justice or karma, it was about suppression of anyone who disagreed with the political left. A corrupt group of psychopathic people with no support from the majority is in no position to dole out consequences. They can dole out harassment and intimidation, but not justice.
In recent months, however, I think these people are finally beginning to understand what “consequence culture” really is and clearly they don’t like it.
We told them over, and over, and over again that the left wouldn’t like it when the “new rules” they were creating got applied to them. And here we are.
Annals of human depravity: “FBI, DOJ arrest ringleaders of dark web child porn exploitation networks with over 120,000 users.”
The Justice Department has announced the results of Operation Grayskull, a sweeping joint investigation with the FBI that dismantled four dark web sites dedicated to child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The operation has so far resulted in 18 convictions across multiple federal districts and significant sentences for offenders involved in the distribution and advertisement of CSAM.
One of the most notable sentences came last week, when Thomas Peter Katsampes, 52, of Eagan, Minnesota, was sentenced to 250 months in prison, lifetime supervised release, and ordered to pay $23,000 in restitution. Katsampes pleaded guilty in February to conspiracy to advertise and distribute child pornography. According to court records, he joined one of the dark web sites in 2022, actively advertised and distributed CSAM, including material depicting prepubescent children, and eventually became a site moderator responsible for enforcing posting rules and advising others on sharing illegal content.
The Houston branch of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested 214 illegal aliens who have either been charged with or convicted of child sex offenses over the past six months — more than it arrested in all of Fiscal Year 2024.
Among the five illegal aliens captured and highlighted in an ICE press release published on Monday, four were from Mexico and were deported back there following their arrests. Forty-eight-year-old Jorge Zebra received convictions for two counts of sexual assault of a minor as well as “sexual indecency” with a minor. He was returned to Mexico in March.
Mexicans Sergio Rolando Galvan Guerrero and Jesus Gutierrez Mireles were convicted for “aggravated sexual assault of a child” as well as for Driving While Intoxicated.
Jose Guadalupe Meza, who’s been deported four other times, was convicted of both sexual assault of a child and theft. Meza was deported to Mexico on June 25.
The lone criminal from El Salvador was Manuel Antonio Castro-Juarez, who was convicted for both sexual assault of a child as well as illegal entry, twice. He’ll be sent back to El Salvador for the third time, but is in ICE custody until necessary proceedings are completed.
“Former Texas National Guardsman Convicted of Smuggling Aliens. Mario Sandoval now faces up to 10 years in federal prison.”
A Houston-based former member of the Texas National Guard who once served on the front lines of Operation Lone Star is now facing up to 10 years in prison after a federal jury convicted him of human smuggling.
Mario Sandoval, a 27-year-old Houston resident and former national guardsman, was deployed to the U.S.-Mexico border as part of Operation Lone Star, the Texas-led initiative launched in 2021 to curb illegal immigration. The operation mobilized both the Texas National Guard and Department of Public Safety.
Despite being released from his official orders, Sandoval remained in the Rio Grande Valley and, in July of last year, began smuggling illegal aliens north of the immigration checkpoint. Jurors were shown text messages confirming Sandoval’s coordination in the smuggling operation—including his role arranging drivers and alerting others to law enforcement locations. Surveillance footage also placed him near the checkpoint during the times those messages were sent.
Sandoval was discharged from the Texas National Guard in October 2024. Although he claimed the texts were taken out of context and that no conspiracy existed, a jury found him guilty after a one-day trial and less than an hour of deliberation.
“We live increasingly in a lawless Britain… most people think that Britain has become lawless”, Farage remarked Monday at a press conference to launch a new law and order policy platform.
“We’re actually facing, in many parts of our country, nothing short of societal collapse,” Farage warned, adding “People are scared to go out to the shops, scared to let their kids out. That is a society that is degraded, and it’s happening very, very rapidly.”
Farage further suggested that Britain should leave the European Court of Human Rights in order to restore effective criminal deterrence.
Farage maintains that the ECHR undermines the country’s ability to deport foreign criminals, terrorists, and illegal migrants, thereby weakening criminal deterrence.
He contends that exiting the system would remove legal barriers imposed by foreign judges, and allow the UK to swiftly remove dangerous individuals, free up prison space, reduce taxpayer burdens, and send a strong message that crime by non-citizens will result in certain expulsion.
This, in his view, would restore effective deterrence by ensuring consequences are enforced without interference, discouraging both criminal activity and illegal immigration.
Among a range of policies he outlined to avoid a descent into societal collapse, Farage suggested outsourcing hardened criminals to foreign jails and a hard-line three-strikes and you’re out rule, meaning after three convictions there would be no more rehabilitation for offenders.
He noted that one of the most egregious aspects of the collapse is that the government is obsessed with drilling it into the British people that everything is getting better when citizens can see the rampant degradation all around them.
“Huge numbers of law-abiding, taxpaying Britons have also lost respect for the police but in a different way. The idea, the concept that we’re living in a system of two-tier policing and two-tier justice under two-tier Keir has really taken hold,” Farage urged.
Farage noted that crimes such as shoplifting and drug taking have been allowed to become a part of everyday life in cities, and that one in three Londoners have now been victims of mobile phone theft.
He vowed that his party will work to halve crime in five years if elected to parliament by becoming “the toughest party on law and order and on crime that this country has ever seen”, and instituting “zero tolerance policing.”
Farage also floated the idea of Army run centres for repeat petty criminals to be held in and made to undergo a program of reform.
He pointed to Rudy Giuliani’s tenure as Mayor of New York City as an example of how to restore law and order in a broken down society.
The Tories could have been the party of border control and tough on crime policies, but their feckless wet leadership pissed the opportunity away.
Ukrainian troops also landed on the Tendrovo Spit, a long sandbar south of Kherson. I’m including this one because it includes a closer look at some of Russia’s drone jamming equipment.
Here’s some great outside-the-box thinking: A wounded Ukrainian soldier behind enemy lines was rescued by a drone lowering an E-bike to him.
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh: “‘Crisis’ at Media Matters, As It Cuts Staff, Struggles to Pay Legal Bills.” Golly, a whole lot of lefty outlets seem to be in trouble now that Trump47 is eliminating the graft at places like USAID… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
What too much winning looks like: “The Corporation for Public Broadcasting will shut down by September’s end, the private non-profit that is funded almost entirely by Congress announced on Friday.”
Soros-funded prosecutor = brothel boom in Fairfax County. “How did the state’s largest municipality, a wealthy and highly educated suburb of Washington, D.C., become a sanctuary county for pimps, madams, and whorehouse operators? All signs point to the Commonwealth’s attorney, self-styled progressive prosecutor Steve Descano.””County Supervisor Pat Herrity said that about 80 to 100 ‘illicit massage businesses’ are ‘operating in plain sight today’ in the county.”
The latest event that’s now too dangerous to attend: Jazz festivals, as a crowd of black people beat two white people unconscious. Then Cincinnati Police Chief Teresa Theetge tried to downplay the attack saying that the assault was taken “out of context.”
Candace Taylor, 35, of Slidell, was arrested Monday after investigators found she underreported her income to qualify for the program. The Louisiana Bureau of Investigation launched its probe after a complaint from the state health department.
The Fox News report says court records say Taylor ran six businesses that brought in over $9.5 million between 2020 and 2024. Bank records show deposits of $480,994, including more than $325,000 linked to her businesses.
“From 2021 through 2024, Ms. Taylor continued to transfer tens of thousands of dollars between her personal and business accounts, with personal inflows consistently exceeding the eligibility thresholds for Medicaid,” the affidavit states.
Despite this, Taylor allegedly kept renewing her benefits—most recently claiming $4,000 in monthly income without disclosing she owned the business.
Authorities say her spending included $45,086 in Audi vehicle payments, a $100,000 wire to an exotic car dealer, and $13,000 for a 2022 Lamborghini Urus. She also allegedly withdrew multiple six-figure cashier’s checks for property, cosmetic surgery, jewelry, and luxury services.
Unless it was very hot or very crashed, there’s no way she paid $13,000 for a Lamborghini Urus, as those things go for over $200,000. Maybe that was a down payment…
Progress on civil rights: “California Law Requiring Background Checks for Ammo Declared Unconstitutional.”
But the Democrat Party’s desire to disarm law-abiding American citizens never rests. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy filed a bill to raise the National Firearms Act tax to $4,709. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Entertainment economics: Stephen Colbert isn’t worth $20 million a year. but South Park is worth over $1 billion.
“Texas Democrat Candidate Flips Out During Hearing, Winds Up Getting Arrested.” “Isaiah Martin’s attempt to filibuster the redistricting hearing ended in cuffs as he was dragged away from the microphone by a capitol security official.” Martin is currently running in a special election for the 18th Congressional District following the death of Shelia Jackson Lee, and is currently polling at 3%.
Robert Conquest once noted that “The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.” This is perhaps the simplest way to understand the hard left’s relentless takeover of the Democratic Party in general, and jihad-friendly social Zohran Mamdani winning the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City.
Little-known Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani upset former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo for the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City on Tuesday night. The governor conceded the race shortly after 10 p.m., though ranked-choice voting totals have yet to be tabulated.
Self-described democratic socialist Mamdani led Cuomo by more than seven percentage points late Tuesday night, with almost 90 percent of the votes counted. Mamdani had 43.5 percent of the vote, with the former governor trailing at 36.3 percent when he conceded.
“Tonight was not our night,” Cuomo said in his remarks. “Tonight was Assemblyman Mamdani’s night.”
He went on to say Mamdani ran a great campaign and connected with New Yorkers, inspiring them to come out and vote. Cuomo made no official statement but left the door open to run as an independent in the general election in November.
A winner was not expected until as late as next week under the city’s ranked-choice voting system. The race is New York’s second mayoral primary election using ranked-choice voting, which means voters pick and rank up to five candidates. A candidate needs to receive 50 percent of the first-choice votes to win on the first count.
If no candidate emerges as the first choice of the majority of voters, the race goes to an instant runoff. The last-place candidates are eliminated until one candidate is left with more than 50 percent of the vote. If a voter’s first choice is out of the running, his vote counts for his second choice. Elimination rounds continue until there are two candidates remaining and one gets more than 50 percent of support.
Cuomo and Mamdani emerged as front-runners in early voting leading up to Election Day in the field of eleven candidates to challenge incumbent New York City Mayor Eric Adams. The field included Cuomo; Mamdani; City Comptroller Brad Lander; Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker; Scott Stringer, the former comptroller; State Senator Zellnor Myrie; former Assemblyman Michael Blake; and the financier Whitney Tilson, among others.
Adams is running for reelection as an independent amid public uproar over his indictment on corruption charges, so he bypasses the primary.
“We are not running against anyone, they’re running against us,” Frank Carone, adviser to Mayor Adams, said Tuesday night. “We’re very confident that when the time comes in November, Mayor Eric Adams will be reelected.”
Adams will face the winner of the primary, along with Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa and independent Jim Walden, in the general election, which won’t use ranked-choice voting.
Granny Killer Cuomo is certainly an odious choice, but Mamdani combines all the most extreme hard left opinions of recent memory into one deeply unappealing package.
He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, with a list of campaign promises that revisits nearly every discredited left-wing fantasy of the past decade: universal health care, rent freezes, the use of “social workers” as opposed to policing to control urban violence, etc.
In the past, Mamdani said of the NYPD: “Defund it. Dismantle it.” Because evidently the sleazy, high-crime NYC of the 1970s and 80s before Giuliani cleaned up the place is the “authentic” city Democrats desire.
His most prominent campaign initiative is a promise to eliminate city bus fares, a fantasy which would, if implemented, blow a hole in the MTA’s budget and inevitably lead to service reductions. He has also advocated the eventual implementation of a $30 minimum wage.
New York City need only look at the fate of Chicago — with its ultraprogressive and despised mayor, Brandon Johnson — for a truer vision of the sort of future Mamdani is advertising. Instead, we oppose Mamdani’s moral unworthiness: He is worse than a democratic socialist; he is — as evidenced by an adult life’s worth of political actions — a deeply committed pro-Hamas activist and advocate for the abolition of Israel.
Mamdani has stated repeatedly — including during a recent mayoral debate, when pressed directly on the issue by both Cuomo and the moderator — that he does not believe Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. Invoking (by now) familiar code language, he instead argues that Israel can only exist “as a state with equal rights” — that is to say, the “right of return.” A week ago, in an interview, Mamdani refused to condemn use of the phrase “globalize the intifada” — universally understood as a call to bring Hamas’s particular tactics of “resistance” to the Western world — and doubled down by favorably comparing the term to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Mamdani seems to be the answer if the question is “Some wealthy Jewish donors are still contributing to the Democratic Party. How do we stop that?” One can easily imagine that Mamdani’s desire to “globalize the intifada” will result in turning a blind eye to antisemitic violence in a city with the world’s largest population of Jewish citizens outside Israel, or letting Jewish businesses be looted without consequence, the same way so many Soros-backed DAs have refused to prosecute similar crimes elsewhere. Or if he’s real serious about fighting “the Zionist entity,” maybe he’ll order Israel diplomats arrested so they can be shipped off to the Hague for “war crimes” trials.
Mamdani also wants to open city-owned grocery stores, because bringing the efficient service of the people running the DMV to retailing food is just a supergenius idea. John Catsimatidis, the owner of New York’s Gristedes supermarket chain, says that he’ll likely just close up shop if that happens. “You can’t fight city hall.”
There’s still a chance that Mamdani loses in the general election to current mayor Eric Adams or Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa. But such an outcome depends on new Yorkers making rational political decisions, which has historically been a very poor betting proposition…
This week brought not one, but gully washers to the Austin area, so now I’m fighting a war against a zillion millipedes climbing the walls to invade every nook and crevice of my home, so I’ve been spraying a lot of pesticide around windows. A Supreme Court win for Trump, lots of budget wrangles, a look at the burgeoning Democrat Party civil war, antifa finally gets investigated, and more Harvard-bashing from the Babylon Bee.
The Supreme Court on Friday sided with the Trump administration – allowing them to revoke temporary legal status granted to over 500,000 immigrants by the Biden administration.
In a 7-2 vote, the court granted an emergency application filed by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem that ends the Biden program which granted 532,000 people from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua permission to temporarily live and work in the United States.
This Part 1 report will focus on the George Soros-funded NEO Philanthropy which is funding and orchestrating a massive, nationwide illegal immigration scheme through NEO’s the Four Freedoms Fund.
In the 2024 election, NEO Philanthropy’s Four Freedom Fund sought to raise $5 million to help illegal immigrants stay in the country in the event of a victory by Donald Trump.
A Capital Research report shows NEO Philanthropy and its advocacy sibling received $21 million from the Soros Network to support “advocacy on Latinx rights and empowerment,” change policy in North Carolina, register voters and fund get-out-the-vote efforts among “historically disenfranchised voters” (read: likely Democrats), and boost the Movement for Black Lives.
The Four Freedoms Fund is a donor collaborative of NEO Philanthropy. The Fund primarily focuses on pushing left-of-center immigration policies, including “legalization of undocumented immigrants” through a path to citizenship and comprehensive immigration reform legislation. The Fund is critical of what it calls “anti-immigrant ordinances” created by conservative legislators, including deportations by U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE).
NEO Philanthropy (formerly Public Interest Projects) is a New York-based nonprofit that serves as a fiscal clearinghouse for left-of-center causes. The group serves as a vehicle for left-of-center foundations to pool resources, hosts donor-advised funds, and sponsors various advocacy projects.
The organization is the fiscal sponsor of left-of-center entities, including the Funders Committee on Civic Participation, a voter mobilization group. Disbursing grant money remains one of NEO’s primary functions; NEO Philanthropy gave close to 60 percent of its total expenditures as grants.
Inside Philanthropy described NEO as “an intermediary that doesn’t have its own resources for grantmaking.” The group receives funding from major left-of-center donors institutions including the Atlantic Philanthropies, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Gill Foundation, the Pew Trusts and the Carnegie Corporation, among others. The organization and similar left-of-center groups that engage in “nonpartisan” voter registration have received criticism for appearing to favor the registration of voters exceptionally likely to vote for Democrat candidates.
According to a 2016 report, an Obama administration appointee managed a fund that George Soros used to bankroll election-related activities likely increasing the number of “voters of color” and “improving odds” of electing preferred candidates.
Karen Narasaki, a commissioner of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, managed the Soros-backed NEO-linked Shelby Response Fund. Narasaki worked as a corporate attorney at Russia Collusion hoax conspirator Perkins Coie in Seattle.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis slammed Congressional Republicans on Tuesday over their lack of action on cutting the government waste and abuse identified by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Back in March, Congress passed the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025, which maintained funding for USAID at the FY 2024 level, effectively extending existing funding for the purportedly “rogue agency” through September 30, 2025.
The “Big Beautiful Bill,” which narrowly passed in the House of Representatives last week, reportedly includes $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, including the largest-ever welfare reform.
But because it is a reconciliation bill, Senate rules limit the cuts to “mandatory” spending only, such as Medicaid and Food Stamps, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller explained on X. The DOGE cuts are overwhelmingly discretionary, not mandatory, so they are not addressed in the Big Beautiful Bill.
Many conservatives have expressed disappointment that Republicans have failed to codify any meaningful cuts in wasteful discretionary spending, as identified by DOGE, in separate bills. Meanwhile, the director of the National Economic Council promised last week that “way more spending cuts” are coming later this year.
In a post on X, DeSantis put the heat on Republicans to do just that, pointing out that DOGE Chief Elon Musk “took massive incoming,” which included “attacks on his companies” and “personal smears” while leading the DOGE effort. “He became public enemy #1 of legacy media around the world,” DeSantis wrote. “To see Republicans in Congress cast aside any meaningful spending reductions (and, in fact, fully fund things like USAID) is demoralizing and represents a betrayal of the voters who elected them,” the governor added.
“House Republicans plan to tee up its first Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut bill next week targeting foreign aid, National Public Radio (NPR) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) revealed on Wednesday.” Call me thick, but I just don’t see how Republicans can beat a Democratic filibuster without reconciliation, and I don’t think they can use that for this bill.
Hispanic moderates increasingly resemble white moderates politically. They are voting their ideology and political views not their group identity. This is further illustrated by examining Hispanic moderates’ more specific political views.
1. Hispanic moderates think the Democrats have moved too far left. In a 2024 YouGov survey for The Liberal Patriot and Blueprint, three in five Hispanic moderates agreed the Democratic Party had moved too far left on economic issues and about the same felt they’d moved too far left on “cultural and social issues.”
2. Hispanic moderates are hawkish on illegal immigration. In the same survey, more of these voters thought “America needs to close its borders to outsiders and reduce all levels of immigration” than believed “people around the world have the right to claim asylum and America should welcome more immigrants into the country.” Most Hispanic moderates endorsed a combination of border security and more legal immigration.
Also in that survey, net support (support minus oppose) among Hispanic moderates for a proposal to “use existing presidential powers to stop illegal migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border” was 59 points (63 percent to 4 percent). Similarly, Hispanic moderates supported by 36 points restricting “the ability of migrants who illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum.” And they backed deputizing “the National Guard and local law enforcement to assist with rapidly removing gang members and criminals living illegally in the United States” by 34 points.
3. Hispanic moderates are tough on crime and supportive of law enforcement. Hispanic moderates supported by 53 points a proposal to “increase funding for police and strengthen criminal penalties for assaulting cops.” These voters even supported by 17 points a draconian proposal to “change federal law so that drug traffickers can receive the death penalty.”
4. Hispanic moderates are opposed to Democrats’ stance on transgender issues. In a 2023 YouGov survey for The Liberal Patriot, voters were offered the following three choices:
States should protect all transgender youth by providing access to puberty blockers and transition surgeries if desired, and allowing them to participate fully in all activities and sports as the gender of their choice;
States should protect the rights of transgender adults to live as they want but implement stronger regulations on puberty blockers, transition surgeries, and sports participation for transgender minors; or
States should ban all gender transition treatments for minors and stop discussion of gender ideology in all public schools.
The first position here, emphasizing availability of medical treatments for trans-identifying children (euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming” care) and sports participation dictated by gender self-identification, is unquestionably the default position of the Democratic Party. Indeed, to dissent in any way from this position in Democratic circles is still enough to earn one the sobriquet of “hateful bigot”—or worse. Yet less than a fifth of Hispanic moderates (19 percent) endorse this position. Nearly twice as many of these voters endorse the strictest position: that medical treatments for transgender children should simply be banned, as should discussion of gender ideology in public schools. And 45 percent favor the second position, advocating stronger regulation on puberty blockers, transition surgeries, and sports participation for transgender minors. Together, the latter two positions make it four-to-one among Hispanic moderates against the Democratic position.
5. Hispanic moderates want cheap, reliable energy not a renewables revolution. Cost and reliability is what Hispanic moderates really care about when it comes to energy. Given four choices of their energy policy priorities in a 2024 YouGov climate issues survey for AEI’s Center for Technology, Science and Energy, 49 percent of these voters said the cost of the energy they use was most important to them. Another 25 percent said the availability of power when they need it was most important. Together that’s 74 percent of Hispanic moderates prioritizing the cost or reliability of energy. In contrast, just 21 percent thought the effect on climate of their energy consumption was most important. (Another 4 percent selected the effect on U.S. energy security).
Unsurprisingly given this pattern, it turns out that Hispanic moderates just don’t care very much about the climate change issue. In the survey, voters were asked to assess their priorities for the government to address in the coming year. Among 18 options, climate change ranked 14th, beating out only global trade, drug addiction, racial issues, and the problems of poor people.
In terms of general energy strategy, when presented with a choice among three options—a rapid green energy transition, an “all of the above” energy policy, and emphasizing fossil fuels—Hispanic moderates strongly prefer an “all of the above” approach to energy policy including oil, gas, renewables, and nuclear. Only a fifth support a rapid transition to renewables—actually less than support flat-out stopping the renewables push. Hispanic moderates’ preference for an “all of the above” energy strategy is reinforced by their answers to a binary question asking if they preferred using a mix of energy sources versus phasing out fossil fuels. The overwhelming judgement: 71 to 29 percent against eliminating fossil fuels.
So Democratic Party policy falls into two categories for moderate Hispanics: The ones that are low priority, and the ones they actively hate.
The Democratic Party is indeed in trouble, and once Jeffrey Blehar gets past the requisite NRO anti-Trump sneers, he correctly fingers the social justice culprits.
The Democratic Party is being pulled apart by horses: On one hand, the party is increasingly held in contempt by once reliable voter demographics (Hispanics, African Americans, working-class men) as out-of-touch elitists taking orders from the Ivy League and the progressive ultra-left. On the other hand — and just as relevantly — the party is crippled from within by that same hard-left faction, which has held the ideological whip-hand over Democrats’ social agenda for a decade now.
These people are the problem. The inflexibly ratcheting social demands of the progressive activist/academic elite are the reason Democrats are in enormous trouble and will be even after Trump is forgotten. And these people are both practically and (more importantly for Democratic politics) morally entrenched within the party at all levels except the top strategic layer. They will not concede power easily, if at all. A civil war thus brews in the Democratic Party’s intellectual/activist wing against its reform-minded moderates. (Grab your popcorn.)
I’m not sure that the entire cadre of “reform-minded moderates” with any appreciable role within the party itself could fill a high school basketball arena. Within the ranks of the DNC itself, I doubt they could fill a Denny’s. But the corrupt wing of the party has indeed come to the realization that the policies of the insane wing are so unpopular that the corrupt wing is in danger of longer being able to rake off its usual graft, hence the crisis. Too bad for them that they’ve essentially ceded the Party’s entire ideological apparatus to the insane wing, and the predominately over-60 corrupt wing has no viable way to change course or purge their own institutions.
Another obvious example beckons: The hilarious plight of David Hogg, the whippet-faced punk set to be voted out of his newly acquired vice chairmanship at the Democratic National Committee next month for being a mutinous weasel, is emblematic of how the Democratic Party is currently consuming itself in internecine war. Hogg, recall, was essentially given the gig by a bunch of older, clueless Democratic Party grandees who voted for him in the hopes he would help bring disaffected young progressives back into the fold. Instead Hogg understands himself to be working not for the Democratic Party, but rather for the progressive movement — hence his announcement that he would use his position and powers to support primary challengers to insufficiently woke Democratic incumbents.
The future looks even more grim for the Democrats for structural reasons. The 2030 census is expected to subtract a swath of House seats (and thus electoral votes) from California and New York, in favor of red states like Florida and Texas. While this bodes ill for remaining Republican incumbents in those states (who can expect to be brutally redistricted away by 2032), it bodes in many ways even worse for the remaining Democrats, who will be left fighting over the division of a shrinking pie.
Understand: A significant number of those currently angry with the Democrats are angry at them for their failure to resist Donald Trump volubly enough, not for being too far to the left. These are the people Democrats absolutely must carry reliably as part of any victorious national coalition, given their preponderance within the party electorate. They will make demands accordingly. If anything, expect the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in its biggest states to lean even more progressive in years ahead as the moderates lose internal battles for position.
There are no Democrat moderates, only Zuul. Assuming Zuul is a 400-pound, purple-haired tranny screaming about Gaza…
After five years of letting Antifa run wild in the Pacific northwest, the FBI is finally investigating.
The FBI has indicated it will investigate the attack on a Christian group and the cops who came to intervene after a Memorial Day weekend melee in Seattle.
After the attack and outrageous response by Seattle’s Mayor Bruce Harrell, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino issued this statement: “We have asked our team to fully investigate allegations of targeted violence against religious groups at the Seattle concert. Freedom of religion isn’t a suggestion.”
I claimed in this must-read background story, Seattle Attack Offers More Proof That Antifa Thugs Are Just Democrat Anti-Christian Shock Troops, exactly what the title says, and that these anti-Christian attacks are nothing new. Further, after watching these groups for years, I can attest that the Seattle and Portland Antifa groups intermingle and help each other out, as Andy Ngo points out above.
Hopefully the current investigation will also target their finding sources and start bringing RICO charges against the entire terrorist network. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“[Texas] House Passes Immigration Enforcement Bill Mandating Local ICE Cooperation. Lawmakers approved legislation requiring counties with jails to enter into immigration enforcement agreements with the federal government.”
President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders designed to fast-track the development and deployment of advanced nuclear reactors on Friday culminating a dramatic policy shift aimed at revitalizing the U.S. nuclear energy sector.
Flanked in the Oval Office by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Trump declared nuclear power “a hot industry” and praised it as “very safe and environmental.”
Burgum called it “a huge day for the nuclear industry,” and added, “Mark this day on your calendar. This is going to turn the clock back on over 50 years of over regulation of an industry.”
These orders aim to strip away what the administration describes as decades of regulatory overreach that have stifled innovation and stagnated the industry. “America’s greatness has always come from innovation,” Burgum said. “We led post-World War Two in all things nuclear. But then we’ve been stagnated. We’ve choked it with over regulation.”
The first of Trump’s executive orders directs the Department of Energy (DOE) to accelerate research and development, speed up reactor testing at national labs, and initiate a two-year pilot program for reactor construction.
A second order clears regulatory hurdles for the DOE and the Department of Defense (DOD) to build reactors on federal land — efforts that will bypass the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) entirely by using the agencies’ own regulatory authority.
The Trump administration has intensified the U.S.-China trade war by suspending exports of critical American technologies to China, including jet engine parts, semiconductor design software, specialized chemicals, and industrial machinery. The move follows Beijing’s recent decision to restrict shipments of rare earth minerals to U.S. firms. In a further escalation, Washington also announced plans to begin revoking visas for Chinese students in sensitive research fields.
Snip.
Adding to the trade tensions, sources familiar with the matter told The New York Times overnight that the U.S. Commerce Department had suspended certain export licenses allowing U.S. companies to supply engine parts and technology to China’s state-owned aircraft manufacturer, Comac (Commercial Aircraft Corp of China).
Comac has stockpiled engines and parts in anticipation of potential trade restrictions. Still, over time, the move could significantly undermine China’s aviation. The company’s C919 passenger jet—its flagship jet to challenge rival Boeing and Airbus—relies heavily on GE Aerospace–Safran’s LEAP engines.
Keep in mind that certain semiconductor parts had already been embargoed under Biden. A complete embargo of semiconductor parts is going to screw China’s semiconductor industry, as some of those parts simply can’t be sourced locally, to say nothing of losing access to trained maintenance techs, software upgrades, etc.
Ukraine claimed credit for two explosions in Vladivostok, which is on Russia’s Pacific coast and is a whopping 6,800km from Ukraine.
Saudi Arab wants you to know that he stands with Israel because Palestinians suck:
An Arab man from Saudi Arabia in a message to Palestinians:
"Who are you trying to fool? You have no land and no case. This land belongs to Israel for the people of Israel. You Palestinians are evil in any country you set foot on!"
California starts backing away from letting boys compete in girls events. Timidly and halfheartedly, to be sure, but something vaguely resembling progress. Gavin Newsom’s secret 2028 presidential race polling must show that tranny pandering is killing him in any general matchup…
A bill to make Daylight Savings Time permanent has passed both the Texas house and senate and heads to Governor Greg Abbott’s desk to be signed, but can’t take effect until federal law changes to accommodate it.
MSNBC’s new prime time lineup, which debuted on May 5th, failed to connect with viewers in its first three weeks as the network saw its audience decline to near record lows – especially in the key 25-54 age demographic.
Overall for May, MSNBC dropped 41% in the primetime demo and 34% in the total day demo compared to May of 2024. In total viewers, the network was down 33% across total day and 24% in prime time. MSNBC’s total day demo viewership sank to 49,000 average viewers and 73,000 in prime time – its second worst ever showing for a month behind January of 2025.
Fox News was the only of the big three networks to see year-over-year gains for May, up 21% in total viewers and 22% in total day demo viewers compared to 2024. In prime time, Fox gained 23% in total viewers and was up 32% in the demo.
CNN was down 24% in total day viewers and 27% in the daytime demo, while in prime time the network dropped 18% in total viewers and 21% in the demo. CNN’s prime time average came in at only 426,000 total viewers, compared to Fox News’s 2.5 million viewers and MSNBC’s average of 877,000 viewers.
Why would you even bother to advertise on MSNBC? 79,000 is less people than fill a big college football stadium on a Saturday…
Speaking of CNN, the red-pilling of Jake Tapper continues apace. His son is a gamer and high school football player who wants to be a policeman, so naturally lefty sorts immediately assumed he was a racist.
And despite his book tour, Tapper’s ratings are down as well. Why, it’s like viewers believe Tapper will continue to lie to protect Democrats in the future…
100% of studio headed by woman who won’t hire white people laid off.
The city of Austin wants to spend $5.8 million on art about hybrid plant women for an airport expansion.
The Austin City Council is set to vote again on art for the airport expansion. After postponing the vote because of outrage for using out of town artist. Well they're back at it. 🧵 1/5 Item 1 the biggest chunk: Saya Woolfalk not to exceed $5.8 million is out of NYC pic.twitter.com/SiApWQVc4P
In 2018, Liangbing Hu, a materials scientist at the University of Maryland, devised a way to turn ordinary wood into a material stronger than steel. It seemed like yet another headline-grabbing discovery that wouldn’t make it out of the lab.
“All these people came to him,” said Alex Lau, CEO of InventWood, “He’s like, OK, this is amazing, but I’m a university professor. I don’t know quite what to do about it.”
Rather than give up, Hu spent the next few years refining the technology, reducing the time it took to make the material from more than a week to a few hours. Soon, it was ready to commercialize, and he licensed the technology to InventWood.
Now, the startup’s first batches of Superwood will be produced starting this summer.
“Right now, coming out of this first-of-a-kind commercial plant — so it’s a smaller plant — we’re focused on skin applications,” Lau said. “Eventually we want to get to the bones of the building. Ninety percent of the carbon impact from buildings is concrete and steel in the construction of the building.”
To build the factory, InventWood has raised $15 million in the first close of a Series A round. The round was led by the Grantham Foundation with participation from Baruch Future Ventures, Builders Vision, and Muus Climate Partners, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.
InventWood’s Superwood product starts with regular timber, which is mostly composed of two compounds, cellulose and lignin. The goal is to strengthen the cellulose already present in the wood. “The cellulose nanocrystal is actually stronger than a carbon fiber,” Lau said.
The company treats it with “food industry” chemicals to modify the molecular structure of the wood, he said, and then compresses the result to increase the hydrogen bonds between cellulose molecules.
“We might densify the material by 4x and you might think, ‘Oh, it’ll be four times strong, because it has four times the fiber.’ But it’s actually more like 10 times stronger because of all these extra bonds that get created,” Lau said.
The result is a material that has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better.
Some grains of salt are probably in order here, as this sounds just a little too good to be true, and there are always concerns about material longevity. But materials science is constantly advancing, so maybe this actually will pan out.
“Elon Musk Leaves Job Of Making Government More Efficient For Much Easier Job Of Sending Humans To Mars.”
Democrats still want to trans your kids, censorship shellgames squashed, Google is declared a monopoly, socialists behave badly, more illegal alien depravity, some 2026 contenders jump in, pie-in-the-sky plans for high speed rail in Texas bite the dust, more Cybertruck drag-racing, and a Very Good Boy indeed.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Yes, Democrats are still all in on transing your kids. “Dad shares horrifying story of his daughter being groomed and transitioned behind his back at school.”
Just yesterday, a dad named Dustin Gonzales in the Jeffco Public School District of Colorado spoke at a school board meeting and shared a heartbreaking story that’s now all too familiar: his daughter was groomed by teachers and gender-transitioned behind his back.
Dad claims his daughter changed her gender identity secretly with a school therapist, who kept him in the dark about it.
The school didn’t ask me or inform me, they replaced me. By the time I found out, I was already labeled ‘the problem.’ My objections weren’t treated as concerns, they were treated as opposition. my voice was dismissed as ‘hateful,’ my presence undermined.
The father claims the school then got the therapist and an investigator involved, to separate the girl from her dad.
I’m here to make sure what happened to me, to my family, never happens to another parent in this district.
The father is now at risk of losing his daughter as a result of a new Colorado bill that would take kids away from parents who aren’t “affirming.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has just killed the Biden administration’s last-ditch effort to shelter the government’s Ministry of Truth, the Global Engagement Center (GEC).
In a new op-ed published by The Federalist (a target of the GEC along with yours truly), Rubio writes;
GEC was supposed to be dead already. But, as many have learned the hard way, in Washington, D.C., few things ever truly die. When Republicans in Congress sunset GEC’s funding at the end of last year, the Biden State Department simply slapped on a new name. The GEC became the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R-FIMI) office, with the same roster of employees. With this new name, they hoped to survive the transition to the new administration.
Today, we are putting that to an end. Whatever name it goes by, GEC is dead. It will not return.
Alphabet’s Google illegally dominates two markets for online advertising technology, a judge ruled on Thursday, dealing another blow to the tech giant and paving the way for U.S. antitrust prosecutors to seek a breakup of its ad products.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, found Google liable for “willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power” in markets for publisher ad servers and the market for ad exchanges which sit between buyers and sellers.
The decision clears the way for another hearing to determine what Google must do to restore competition in those markets, such as sell off parts of its business at another trial that has yet to be scheduled. It is the second court ruling that Google holds an illegal monopoly, following a similar judgment in a case over online search.
Publisher ad servers are platforms used by websites to store and manage their digital ad inventory. Along with ad exchanges, the technology lets news publishers and other online content providers make money by selling ads. Those funds are the “lifeblood” of the internet, Brinkema wrote.
“In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” Brinkema wrote.
However, antitrust enforcers failed to prove a separate claim that the company had a monopoly in advertiser ad networks, she wrote.
U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi called the ruling “a landmark victory in the ongoing fight to stop Google from monopolizing the digital public square.”
“A 13-year-old boy in California was allegedly sexually abused and murdered by his soccer coach and, as it turns out, the soccer coach was an illegal alien. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has lodged a detainer with the Los Angeles County jail for Mario Edgardo Garcia-Aquino, a 43-year-old Salvadoran citizen living unlawfully in the United States, the agency confirmed Wednesday to the Daily Caller News Foundation. Garcia-Aquino is accused of killing 13-year-old Oscar ‘Omar’ Hernandez, a San Fernando Valley, California, resident found dead earlier in April.”
Evidently the cartels have expensive taste. “A federal grand jury has charged two men who allegedly tried to smuggle five high-caliber sniper rifles to Mexico last month, and prosecutors are seeking the forfeiture of the firearms, five .50-caliber Barrett long guns and four magazines for .50-caliber bullets. Wednesday’s charges of unlawful smuggling of goods from the United States stem from the March 12 arrest of Oscar Sanchez Gonzalez and Arturo Martinez Aguilar as they allegedly attempted to drive to Mexico over the Calexico West port of entry.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Smith says people asking him to run is an indictment of the Democratic Party.
“I have no choice, because I’ve had elected officials, and I’m not going to give their names, elected officials coming up to me. I’ve had folks who are pundits come up to me. I’ve had folks that got a lot of money, billionaires and others that have talked to me about exploratory committees and things of that nature. I’m not a politician. I’ve never had a desire to be a politician,” Smith told ABC News’ “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl.
Smith reiterated that because of the number of people asking him to consider a run, he has to leave the door open.
Smith usually strikes me as a moderately annoying “hot take” artist, but he has been condemning the Democrat Party about their lurch to the right on several issues, and has discussed that with the likes of Dave Rubin. Smith has no business running for President, but would be immediately be a more sane alternative than anyone else named as a Democratic front-runner.
When police raided a factory in Georgia, they found dozens of Chinese nationals being kept in near slave-like conditions, and authorities say they were pressed into service by a forced labor trafficking ring.
Last month, agents from several agencies raided Wellmade Industries in Cartersville, Georgia, 40 miles north of Atlanta, and what they found shocked them, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Federal officials said that around 60 Chinese nationals were being held in tiny rooms and forced to work long hours in the flooring manufacturing plant. The exploited workers at Wellmade are just a few of the many exploited workers the Trump administration has rooted out.
ICE Homeland Security Investigations Atlanta Special Agent in Charge Steven N. Schrank said the conditions these workers were living in was “horrific,” and noted that he and his fellow agents were investigating eight other locations for similar offenses.
Three Wellmade Industries officers were arrested, including company owner, Zhu Chen, his nephew, Jiayi Chen, and company associate Jian Jun Lu.
At the bond hearings for the suspects, assistant district attorney Austin Waldo claimed that officials of the company immediately confiscated the workers’ travel and ID documents as soon as they arrived at the plant to make it harder for them to leave.
Well, this would have made my Nvidia roundup had it dropped a day earlier, and not in a good way. “Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang boarded a private jet to Beijing shortly after the U.S. Commerce Department announced new export licensing requirements for the company’s H20 AI chips for the Chinese market. Once there, Huang met with the head of a Chinese state-backed trade body, where he reaffirmed Nvidia’s commitment to the Chinese market despite a deepening trade war.”
Baltimore student: “Hey, doesn’t Maryland law require a United States flag in every classroom?” Baltimore County Board of Education: “Hey, you’re suspended and we’re calling the cops on you.”
The East Plano Islamic Center’s planned development faces continued scrutiny from Texas officials.
U.S. Sen. John Cornyn is calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate EPIC for potential religious discrimination.
In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, Cornyn expressed concern that a “master-planned ‘community of thousands of Muslims’” could violate the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by discriminating against Christians, Jews, and other non-muslim minorities.
“Religious discrimination, whether explicit or implicit, is unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments,” wrote Cornyn. “Religious freedom is a cornerstone of our nation’s values, and I am concerned this community potentially undermines this vital protection.”
Sanity in the UK: “U.K. Supreme Court Rules Males Don’t Qualify as Women Under Anti-Discrimination Law, in Landmark Ruling.”
The United Kingdom’s supreme court ruled Wednesday that males who identify as women do not fall qualify as women under anti-discrimination law, a monumental decision that will have major consequences for British law.
The high court defined “woman” based on sex rather than gender identity, keeping it within the bounds of scientific reality rather than giving into the demands of left-wing activists. The ruling specifically addressed the question of whether transgender-identifying males who obtain a gender recognition certificate — a legal document acknowledging them as women — enjoy the same protections extended to females under Britain’s 2010 Equality Act, an anti-discrimination law that covers nine protected characteristics and applies to various sectors of British life.
“The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological women and biological sex,” said Lord Patrick Hodge, deputy president of the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court, in announcing the ruling.
Bad news: A house exploded two miles from me. I actually heard it, and thought that one of my dogs had run into a wall or something. Worse news: The house belonged to Sara Felix, who I know from the Austin science fiction community, and her husband was in the house at the time. The silver linings are that he’s now out of surgery, though badly burned, and that the family hadn’t actually moved into the house, and were still living in their old house in the same general area.
When your band name stops being ironic: “New Pornographers Drummer Joe Seiders Arrested for Possession of Child Porn.” I have a few of their albums I bought 15 years ago. I considered embedding “Breakin’ the Law” for ironic effect, but it’s a lousy song. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
A foster mom in Missouri is facing multiple charges of abuse and is accused of trading a teenage girl she was guardian of for a pet monkey, authorities said.
Brenda Ruth Deutsch, 70, of Lincoln County, was charged with two counts of abuse or neglect of a child and one count of endangering the welfare of a child, according to Lincoln County Prosecutor Mike Wood. She was taken into custody last weekend.
Deutsch has fostered more than 200 children for about 15 to 20 years, Wood told NBC News.
While it’s tempting to chalk this up to more “annals in human depravity,” given the age of the alleged perp, I have to wonder if some mental illness/senility/Alzheimers was involved.
Anderson Ronaldo Reyes Giron — a member of the “Most Wanted” list — was taken into custody on April 2 by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) and the Texas Highway Patrol for charges related to deadly conduct from shooting a firearm in Travis County, as well as theft of property in Williamson County. He’s originally from Honduras, from which he came illegally, and was arrested by the Austin Police Department in August 2024 for the afore-listed charges before being let out on bail.
Thanks again, Austin.
“Governor Greg Abbott, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), and the Texas National Guard continue to work together with the Trump Administration to secure the border; stop the smuggling of drugs, weapons, and people into Texas; and prevent, detect, and interdict transnational criminal activity between ports of entry,” a press release from Abbott’s office stated upon announcement of Giron’s arrest.
Giron has been wanted since February 2025 when Travis County issued a warrant for his arrest following the firearm violation, and then when Williamson County similarly filed a warrant after his theft incident.
Former Texas Congresswoman Mayra Flores has officially thrown her hat into the ring to challenge the indicted Congressman Henry Cuellar (R-TX-28) and his 20-year-plus tenure representing Texas’ 28th Congressional District in Washington, D.C.
“I am deeply honored to announce my candidacy for Congress—a chance to serve the people and uphold the values that make our nation great,” Flores posted on X upon announcement of her challenge to Cuellar’s seat.
The first female Mexican-born former congresswoman, Flores comes to the drawing board with experience in Texas elections — first scoring a seat in a special election to represent the Lone Star State on the federal stage after Democratic Congressman Filemon Vela resigned in 2022, allowing her to flip the historically Democratic 34th Congressional District. Flores flipped parties from Democratic to Republican in the early 2000s, primarily citing pro-life motivations.
She also ran against Rep. Vicente Gonzalez twice (D-TX-34), losing first in the 2022 general election and second in 2024, although she notched her numbers up significantly the second time around — losing the election by a 2 percent margin.
Cuellar maintained his seat during the 2024 general election against Republican candidate Jay Furman with nearly 52 percent of the vote — a race rumored as potentially dangerous for Cuellar due to his indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that year after an FBI investigation in 2022 for alleged bribery and money laundering in coordination with his wife, Imelda Cuellar, and the country of Azerbaijan.
TX-28 favors Democrats with a rating of D-51% per The Texan’s Texas Partisan Index, although President Donald Trump made history in the district during the November election — winning Webb County’s presidential vote, the first Republican president to claim victory there in a century.
Until Flores’ announcement, the only other notable contender for Cuellar’s seat was Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina, who flipped parties in December 2024.
For more on Cueller’s indictment, see here and here.
“With Attorney General Ken Paxton officially running for U.S. Senate against Sen. John Cornyn, the race to replace him is heating up. After former U.S. Attorney John Bash became the first to enter the race, State Sen. Mayes Middleton has now launched his own campaign for Texas attorney general, pitching himself as a conservative fighter ready to take the reins.” I regularly get press releases from Middleton’s office, and he seems a pretty solid conservative.
The U.S. Department of Transportation officially terminated a $63.9 million federal grant intended for the planning and development of a high-speed rail line between Dallas and Houston.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the move will save taxpayers millions while allowing Amtrak to focus on improving existing operations.
Personally, I’d kill Amtrack and hand the assets to the states to subsidize if they felt like.
Originally pitched as a private venture, the Texas Central Railway project aimed to connect two of Texas’ largest cities with a 205-mph bullet train, promising a 90-minute travel time.
The project has faced strong opposition from landowners and lawmakers since it was proposed in 2009.
As cost estimates soared from $12 billion to over $40 billion, the project became increasingly reliant on federal funding.
Duffy was blunt in his assessment: “Underwriting this project is a waste of taxpayer funds and a distraction from Amtrak’s core mission of improving its existing subpar services.”
“If the private sector believes this project is feasible, they should carry the pre-construction work forward, rather than relying on Amtrak and the American taxpayer to bail them out,” Duffy added.
State Sen. Charles Schwertner (R-Georgetown) posted on X, “Thank you to President Trump and Secretary Duffy for standing up for taxpayers and terminating the $63.9 million grant to Amtrak for the proposed high-speed rail project between Houston and Dallas.”
Even the $10 billion version was a boondoggle that wouldn’t have made money and required taxpayer subsidies to stay afloat, and more likely never would have been completed anyway. High speed passenger rail works in Japan because they already had high urban density and an existing rail system and culture to support it. Texas has none of those things, and even if it was built it would never be profitable here (or just about anywhere else).
And just to drive the point home: The highest density high speed rail in Japan seats 1,634 passengers. Assume passengers pay $100 a ticket each way, the train is entirely full, and the Texas high speed rail train runs six times a day (all optimistic and unlikely assumptions), 365 days a year, and you get $357,846,000 a year in gross revenue, which means, even without the including the cost to run the train, it would take just under 112 years to make back the initial investment.
Despite his new position as a vice chair of the DNC, gun control weasel David Hogg wants to primary old Democrats. In this particular task I wish the little weasel the best of luck.
This is your mayor on social justice. “The mayor of South Fulton faces an eviction action at an Atlanta apartment complex, Fulton County court documents show, adding another development to what’s been a turbulent year so far for the city leader. Mayor Khalid Kamau, who has gone recently by Mayor Kobi, has had eviction proceedings initiated against him in Fulton County Magistrate Court by an apartment complex at 6200 Bakers Ferry Rd. Court documents show the complex filed to initiate eviction after alleging Kamau failed to pay rent in March.”
Snip.
Documents show the amount of past due rent was listed at $1,663.77. A late fee of $100, utilities of $39.77 and “other fees” amounting to $175 are also being sought.
Kamau has been at odds in recent weeks and under scrutiny from the South Fulton City Council over his spending and alleged “abuse” of the position.
He in turn has defended himself from what he has termed the City Council’s “overreach” after his access to city buildings was revoked and his budget frozen in February, and said he has faced resistance from the council throughout his tenure.
The move by the city council came after reports on the mayor’s trips — which spanned four continents in four months — as well as updates at City Hall that included a film studio and refurbished conference/pool table room. The City Council voted to redistribute several pieces of new electronic equipment to the city IT department and send back the film studio.
I know you’ll be shocked, shocked to learn that Kamau is a Democratic Socialist…
Your feel-good dog story of the week: A dog named Buford kept a two-year old boy safe after the latter wandered seven miles from his home. Another article states that Buford is an Anatolian Pyrenees.
I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.
Greetings, and welcome to the Friday LinkSwarm! This one will be huge, since I didn’t do one last week. Biden pardons his crackhead/bagman son, Holman is serious about deporting illegal aliens, Trump taps some Texans,
Did you hear that, after swearing up and down that he would never pardon his son Hunter Biden, Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter Biden? “Joe Biden’s pardon covers the time period from January 1, 2014 to December 1, 2024, relieving his son of any crimes he “may have committed or taken part in” over an 11 year period.” Wow, it’s almost like Joe was running a pay-for-play foreign influence peddling operation and Hunter was his bagman…
Not only is Donald Trump returning to the White House, not only do Republicans have 53 Senate seats and about 220 seats to control the House of Representatives, but Republicans now control almost 55 percent of state legislative seats nationwide. Republicans won control of the Michigan state house of representatives, and the Minnesota state house of representatives shifted from a 70–64 Democratic advantage to a 67–67 tie. (Rough year for Tim Walz all around.) Twenty-three states have Republican governors and GOP-controlled state legislatures, just 15 states have the Democratic equivalent, and twelve states have divided governments.
If the election of Trump came as a shock to Democrats, it is perhaps even more shocking that, at least for now, a solid majority of Americans are giving the incoming president the benefit of the doubt. The latest Economist/YouGov poll found 51 percent of Americans have a very or somewhat favorable opinion of Trump, the highest level going back at least as far as the start of his first term as president. For a long, long stretch, that number was around 40 percent.
This weekend a CBS News poll found that 59 percent of Americans approve of how Trump is handling the transition. Perhaps this figure reflects that Trump’s announced cabinet picks have something for everyone. For hawks, there’s Marco Rubio. For doves and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, there’s Tulsi Gabbard. For those who see the Covid vaccines as “a gift from God,” there’s the surgeon general nominee, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat. For those who hate vaccines and erroneously believe they cause autism, there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. For those who love dogs, there’s attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, who adopted a dog abandoned during Hurricane Katrina. For those who hate dogs, there’s Kristi Noem.
That CBS poll also found that “there seems to be a sense of exhaustion, as fewer than half of Democrats feel motivated to oppose Trump right now.” And who can begrudge Democrats exhaustion after an election cycle that arguably started a week after the midterm elections? Saul Alinsky warned in Rules for Radicals, “A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.”
Evidently nine years of Trump Derangement Syndrome can be exhausting…
You’re in the country illegally, you’re not off the table. I mean we’ve been looking for fugitives. There’s over a million illegal aliens in this country who got due process at great taxpayer expense, were ordered removed by a judge, and failed to leave.
We’ll be moving on to those who may not be a criminal, may not be a fugitive, but they entered this country illegally, which is a crime. And they’re here illegally and they’re not off the table.
Denver mayor Mayor Mike Johnston says he’s going to resist the enforcement of immigration law in his city. Homan: Get ready to go to jail.
Speaking of people who should be going to jail for blocking immigration enforcement: “California Allegedly Threatens Police Officers Over Deportation Compliance. CA mayor: The State of California “is threatening to take pensions and charge police officers with felonies if they comply with federal deportation laws.”
Bill Wells, the mayor of El Cajon, California, claimed in a Monday post on X that the State of California “is threatening to take pensions and charge police officers with felonies if they comply with federal deportation laws. While the Trump administration is working to enforce immigration laws, California seems intent on blocking these efforts.”
Wells makes it clear that El Cajon, a city of approximately 100,000 people located 17 miles east of San Diego, is not a sanctuary city and that his police officers “are being put in an impossible position.”
Maybe Homan can start preparing an indictment against Gavin Newsom.
It’s insulting when members of the working class, which the Democratic Party has lost entirely in our lifetimes, to insist the economy is doing great. A 12-pack of Bounty is $40. Rich folks don’t feel that…
I think telling them that the Nasdaq is gangbusters is further insulting. It’s insulting, the biggest unforced error of the Biden administration, by far, was the border. To tell people that it’s not a problem is insulting. For the working class to see incoming migrants getting welcome bags, debit cards, and motel rooms is probably insulting as well …
They handed out camo hats that said ‘Harris-Walz’ the Democrats were kind of charmed by that. Their party has gone quinoa and the rest of America is eating at Cracker Barrel … it was an ironic use of something that millions of Americans put on their heads to start their day every day.
Harvard University’s celebrated pollster John Della Volpe has a message for the new leader of the Democratic Party: Move fast with proven solutions for voters who are hurting, or the party is doomed.
“Millions of Americans aren’t shifting right — they’re walking away. They’re abandoning a Democratic Party and democratic system they believe abandoned them first. This isn’t realignment — it’s abandonment,” the pollster known for his surveys of the youth vote said.
In a memo to the incoming leader of the Democratic National Committee posted on his Substack, “JDV on Gen Z,” Della Volpe was blunt in his assessment of the nation and the 2024 election. The bottom line for the Democrats, he said, is that it needs a massive reinvention and focus on kitchen-table issues and less on wokeness.
“This post-election analysis should not start with the question about moving left or right. It must begin by filling the vacuum of unaddressed daily struggles before it gets filled with something else. The typical response will be to fill that vacuum with new policies, messages, or words. But that’s precisely backward. Before we can talk about solutions, we need to rebuild trust. Before we can restore trust, we need to listen. Really listen,” he wrote.
Corporate media outlets have buried, downplayed, or otherwise shelved a new study which reveals that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) policies cause people to become ‘hostile’ – essentially seeing racism where none exists.
The new study from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and Rutgers University found that people exposed to DEI talking points about race, religion and gender form integroup hostility and authoritarian attitudes towards others.
“What we did was we took a lot of these ideas that were found to still be very prominent in a lot of these DEI lectures and interventions and training,” said NCRI Chief Science Officer Joel Finkelstein, a co-author of the study. “And we said, ‘Well, how is this going to affect people?’ What we found is that when people are exposed to this ideology, what happens is they become hostile without any indication that anything racist has happened.”
Researchers exposed 324 participants to two sets of reading material; a racially-neutral text about corn, or the writings of race-baiters Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DiAngelo. The participants were then exposed to a racially neutral scenario in which a student was rejected from college.
President Donald Trump’s return to power earlier this month was remarkable—among other reasons—for the breadth of the coalition that powered it. As Armin Rosen has documented for Tablet, by many measures Jews swung toward Trump, particularly in pivotal precincts. But they were just part of a minority-group wave: Exit polling and precinct analysis suggest large increases in the Black, Hispanic, and Asian vote for Trump.
Although Trump did not win outright majorities of any of these groups, Harris’ underperformance still marks a remarkable shift. The president slandered as a racist and antisemite outperformed prior Republicans among minorities of all types: Why?
One easy answer, of course, is the uniform rightward swing of the electorate, fueled by anger over inflation, an uncontrolled border, and Harris’ barely hidden far-left views. And future elections will probably see some bounce back.
But this argument misses the longer trend: Minority voters, once Democratic stalwarts, have been inching toward the GOP for decades. As the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch has showed, the GOP share of the nonwhite vote has been rising on and off since the 2000s. That mirrors trends among Jews: Over the past several elections, the Democratic share of the Jewish vote has shrunk, from around 80% in the 1990s and 2000s to around 70% in the 2010s and 2020s.
As the Jewish demographer Milton Himmelfarb famously wrote, Jews earn like Episcopalians, but vote like Puerto Ricans. If Puerto Ricans and Jews are both moving right, though, then maybe they’re moving right for similar reasons. Explanations that rely on Democratic antisemitism or affection for socialism are special pleading. The neater explanation is that the same social forces are pushing Black, Hispanic, Jewish, and other minority voters toward the Republicans.
Why are minority groups moving right? As a body of political science argues, the answer is the breakdown of the social institutions that kept them voting for group over ideology. Among Jews, a similar, albeit reversed, phenomenon might be happening: The collapse of Jewish communal life might be giving Jews permission to break from the old ideological consensus.
If that’s true, though, it has profound implications for the political future—of the Jews and everyone else.
In a sense, the question is not why minority voters are moving right, but why they have stayed left for so long. After all, Black and Hispanic Democrats are more moderate ideologically than their white Democrat peers. And the ideological gap between white and nonwhite Democrats has only grown in recent years—implying Black and Hispanic voters should be more willing to swing between parties. Yet in 2020, for example, 60% of Black voters who identified as conservative voted for Joe Biden, compared to 9% of white conservatives. Why?
The conventional explanation for this phenomenon is what political scientists call “linked fate,” the tendency of group members to see their individual well-being as linked to the overall well-being of the group, and so to consider group interest in making electoral decisions. Even if a Hispanic voter would prefer conservative policies, for example, she may still vote for the Democrats under the theory that Hispanic group interest is served by doing so. Such thinking is most common among Black Americans, but has been shown to explain Latino voting behavior as well.
The sense of linked fate, though, is in part socially constructed. Minority voters don’t consider their fates to be linked in a vacuum—they reach that conclusion thanks, in part, to the work of social institutions. In their recent book Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior, political scientists Ismail White and Chryl Laird look specifically at Black political identification, including with the Democratic Party. They argue that Blacks’ lopsided support for Democrats is driven by social pressure from the broader Black community.
“The steady reality that Black Americans’ kinship and social networks tend to be populated by other Blacks,” White and Laird write, “means they persistently anticipate social costs for failing to choose Democratic politics and social benefits for compliance with these group expectations.” They show in survey evidence and experiments that Black voters change their behavior when around other Black people—a proxy for the effect of social pressure in general. This “social constraint” strategy helps ensure that Black voters vote their racial identity, even when doing so is apparently at odds with their ideology.
Though it may sound unusual, this is a perfectly rational political strategy for minority groups in a large, pluralistic democracy. Being able to deliver lopsided group margins is one way a minority group’s leaders can curry favor with a party. Indeed, White and Laird identify tendencies toward social constraint among “Southern whites, white evangelical Christians, trade union members, and certain localized racial and ethnic groups.” Social constraint is not necessarily an exception—to the extent that any group has its own political interests, it has a reason to suppress dissent in the ranks.
Can the “social constraint” model explain Jewish voting patterns? As I’ve argued previously, one way to understand Jews’ strong support of Democrats is our unusually strong ideological commitments. Since at least the 19th century, Jews in America have been more left wing than the general public. And they associate those values with their identity. When asked by Pew what things were most essential to being Jewish, a majority of respondents listed “working for justice/equality” as a key component of their identity, with an even larger majority among the non-Orthodox.
But ideology, like partisanship, can be socially constructed. Jews have a strong sense of in-group identity, with 85% saying they have “a great deal” or “some” sense of belonging to the Jewish people. Most Jews have at least some close friends who are Jewish; 29% say all or most of their close friends are Jewish. And Jews are highly concentrated geographically, with roughly half of American Jews living in the New York, Los Angeles, Miami, or Philadelphia metropolitan areas alone.
Collectively, those facts suggest that—like Blacks, and other ethnic minorities—Jews’ “kinship and social networks tend be populated by” other Jews. Even in the non-Orthodox world, a Jewish person’s interactions with both fellow Jews and Jewish institutions may serve to reinforce his ideological commitments. After all, what right-leaning Jew has not been once or twice told his views are a shanda?
If social pressures produce in-group conformity among minority voters, then it stands to reason that they produce ideological conformity among Jews, too. But what happens to that conformity when the social pressures start to break down?
If you wanted to pack the history of the 21st century thus far into a single sentence, you could do worse than “20th-century social institutions collapsed.” As political scientist Robert Putnam has repeatedly argued, Americans have seen a steady decline in “social capital,” the network of interpersonal relationships that provide them informal means of individual security and advancement. The families, churches, and community groups which sustained that capital are in more or less continuous decline. That decline, though, has meant not just a reduction in the available stock of social capital, but also in those institutions’ ability to shape behavior—in their ability to impose social constraint.
Decades of unwillingness to enforce immigration laws were driven by the desire of some for cheap, controllable labor, and of others for a new client class that would shift political power to the Democratic Party. The culmination of that process under Biden became entwined with the identity of the party and its ideological activists who sincerely believe that national borders are an expression of racism and that turning away foreigners who want to move here illegally is immoral. The belief in unlimited, lawless immigration has become a litmus-test issue for the activist left, like hostility to the existence of law enforcement itself.
And because most voters naturally consider that insane, we now see broad public support, including among first-generation migrants, for “mass deportation” and an electoral mandate for what the president-elect has promised will be the “largest deportation effort in American history.”
Restoring credibility after decades of deceit will take time, cost money, get tied up in courts, and inevitably involve an unfortunate measure of human suffering, the images of which will be ruthlessly exploited for political purposes by the media and the interests they serve. But it’s neither the Manhattan Project nor the D-Day landings—it’s simply a matter of enforcing existing law consistently and without apology, which is the legal and popular mandate the American people have given the incoming administration.
Herewith a look at what’s likely to be involved.
When your tub is overflowing, you first turn off the tap. Mass impunity at the border will be the first thing to stop, because there’s no point to deporting people if it’s easy for them to return.
What drove the crisis under Biden was a policy of catch-and-release—millions of border-jumpers were simply waved into the country by a Border Patrol that the current administration turned into the equivalent of Walmart greeters. The illegal migrants told their friends back home, and more came. Human-trafficking cartels turned it into a massive business.
There are two ways to end catch-and-release: 1) detain illegal border-crossers until they can be repatriated, or 2) if they make an asylum claim, ensure that they wait across the border in Mexico for their court dates.
Option 1 will require a significant increase in spending and logistical assistance from the U.S. military. The Biden administration has consistently reduced DHS’s detention capacity, closing government-owned facilities and canceling contracts with private firms and county jails. That pattern will have to be reversed.
Option 2 is cheaper and easier, but requires Mexico’s consent, because the country has no obligation to take back non-Mexican migrants, which account for the majority of attempted crossings. In late 2018, this option was instituted as the “Migrant Protection Protocols” (commonly known as “Remain in Mexico”); Mexico went along with it after President Trump threatened punishing tariffs on its exports to the U.S.
It was successful almost overnight. In January 2021, Biden canceled the program.
Despite the fact that Mexico’s new president is more of a conventional leftist than her predecessor, she is likely to be cooperative with the new Trump administration’s demands to restore Remain in Mexico, given that the U.S.-Mexico trade agreement is up for review in 2026. Access to the U.S. market is far more important to Mexico than any rhetorical solidarity with foreigners using its territory as a means of entering the U.S.
These and other measures (such as “safe third country” agreements requiring migrants to have applied for asylum in one of the countries they passed through before reaching the U.S. border) will succeed in stabilizing the border. But what about those already here? Sending back people who’ve just recently snuck across the border is one thing, but finding and removing those already in the interior is something else altogether.
The Biden administration has released into the country close to 6 million foreigners with no legal right to enter, and another 2 million are believed to have eluded the overwhelmed Border Patrol, the so-called gotaways.
They join a large illegal population already here, though because of constant churn in the illegal population (people returning home, dying, or obtaining a green card), these numbers can’t simply be added to prior estimates. Census Bureau data suggests there are now at least 14 million total illegal aliens—given the imprecision of such estimates, the real number could easily be 15 or 16 million, though higher numbers bandied about by some Republican politicians of 30 or 40 million are implausible.
The opponents of immigration enforcement want to make this seem like an insuperable problem. The American Immigration Council, the think tank of the immigration lawyers’ lobby, has estimated it would cost close to a trillion dollars over a decade to return the illegal population to their home countries.
Vice President-elect Vance addressed this counsel of resignation and surrender by likening the problem to “a really big sandwich. It’s 10 times the size of your mouth. How are you possibly going to eat the whole thing?”
His answer:
you take the first bite and then you take the second bite, and then you take the third bite. Let’s start with the first million who are the most violent criminals, who are the most aggressive. Get them out of here. First prioritize them, and then you see where you are, and you keep on taking bites of the problem, until you get illegal immigration to a serviceable point.
Starting the deportation effort by focusing on criminals is both politically astute and simplest to manage. The Biden administration has reduced deportations of criminals by 67% compared to Trump I, so there’s nowhere to go but up. Criminal aliens are picked up every day by police in the normal course of their duties for all manner of nonimmigration crimes. Taking them off the hands of local law enforcement—either as an alternative to prosecution or after they’ve completed their sentences—is a no-brainer.
Read the whole thing. The people who say it’s impossible are simply lying because they don’t want it done.
“California’s fast food industry shed more than 6,000 jobs after Democratic lawmakers passed a bill mandating a $20 minimum wage for most fast food and counter service restaurants in the state.”
President-elect Donald Trump has begun to fill out his cabinet with new names coming each week, and two recent nominations have strong ties to Texas.
Nominated to be Secretary of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Trump has tapped former member of the Texas Legislature, Scott Turner.
Turner served as a member of the Texas House from 2013 to 2017 — he challenged then-House Speaker Joe Straus, but ultimately lost his run for the gavel.
Trump in his first administration appointed Turner to head the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council.
The 2025 President’s Budget has requested $72.6 billion for HUD and $185 billion over 10 years for “affordable housing investments.”
Another recent Texan to be nominated for the upcoming Trump cabinet is President and CEO of America First Policy Institute Brooke Rollins.
A native of Glen Rose, Rollins has been chosen as the nominee to become the next Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
“Brooke’s commitment to support the American Farmer, defense of American Food Self-Sufficiency, and the restoration of Agriculture-dependent American Small Towns is second to none,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial.
Rollins held previous positions in the first Trump administration, as well as being president of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
I like Turner’s starch in running against Straus, and Rollins helped turn TPPF into a think tank power house, so both seem like good picks for Trump. And you’ve got to balance out all the Floridians somehow…
Democrat megadonor John Morgan says Kamala was clueless and thought she was Obama. Plus: Barron Trump is smarter than Kamala’s entire team, because he urged his father to go on Joe Rogan.
Meanwhile, Russia abandoned its Tartus Naval base and its Khmeimim airbase in Syria.
And now Syrian rebels are on the outskirts of Homs, the last big city before Damascus itself. If they take it, it will essentially split Assad-controlled Syria into two parts.
Imagine there’s a link here to the Biden Administration strong-arming Israel into a ceasefire with Hezbollah, only for Hezbollah to start breaking the treaty in, what, an hour?
Russia’s been reduced to using Ladas to attack Ukrainian positions. For those unfamiliar with the name, that’s a brand of Soviet/Russian automobiles. So no armor and precious little reliability…
Dade Phelan bows out of the Texas House Speaker’s race. This was after he lost another House ally ahead of Saturday’s GOP caucus speaker vote. State Rep. Trent Ashby announced he was supporting State Rep. David Cook’s bid. “These endorsements bring Cook’s total public commitments to 48, giving him a majority within the 88-member Republican caucus.”
Sex trafficking busts in Montgomery county (immediately north of Harris County).
Montgomery County Constable Ryan Gable announced that a three-day operation this month resulted in numerous arrests associated with prostitution, child trafficking, and drug offenses.
The constable’s office collaborated with the Houston Police Department and received support from the Human Trafficking Rescue Alliance (HTRA) and the Houston Metro Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force to successfully carry out this operation.
During a Friday morning press conference, Gable explained working with ICAC was essential, as the internet has become a major platform for those who exploit children and traffic victims for sexual purposes. The partnership between HTRA and ICAC investigations enabled the use of digital forensics and online tracking to uncover trafficking networks. The three-day investigation, dubbed Operation Safe Haven, resulted in numerous arrests and the recovery of one victim.
The operation’s results include:
Seven arrests for prostitution.
Three arrests for promotion of prostitution.
Four arrests for online solicitation of a minor (including the capture of a registered sex offender).
One arrest for child trafficking.
One arrest for unlawful possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
One arrest for evading law enforcement.
One arrest for possession of a prohibited weapon.
Two arrests related to drug offenses.
One juvenile recovered.
“An illegal alien from Guatemala has been arrested in Massachusetts and charged with raping a child. Mynor Stiven De Paz-Munoz, 21, entered the country illegally in the Eagle Pass area in September 2020. He was arrested in Boston by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this month.”
“California assistant principal charged with molesting 8 elementary school children….David Lane Braff Jr., 42, was charged Friday with 17 counts of “lewd acts” on children under the age of 14. The alleged abuse occurred between 2015 and 2019 while Braff was employed as a counselor at McKevett Elementary School in Santa Paula. At the time of his arrest, Braff was serving as an assistant principal at Ingenium Charter Middle School in Los Angeles.”
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. “‘Defund The Police’ Activist Charged With Misusing Over $75,000 Donations On Vacations & Shopping Sprees…”Brandon Anderson misused charitable donations to fund lavish vacations and shopping sprees, and the Raheem AI board of directors let him get away with it.”
Progress: “Southwest Airlines Agrees To End DEI Employment Practices In Response To Lawsuit.”
Nothing of value was lost obit: Liberian rebel Prince Johnson, who (among other atrocities) cut off Samuel Doe’s ears, cooked them, and then served them to Doe. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
While other companies are running away from wokeness, Geico (which used to be a refuge from Progressive’s leftism) is forcing it down employees throats.
SCOOP: Employees at @Geico are being forced to complete mandatory training courses instructing them to provide their pronouns when engaging with customers and how to deal with being misgendered.
Yet another company pushing gender ideology nonsense. We the people want this… pic.twitter.com/rkBj7lJc63
