President Donald Trump cracked a joke about wanting to take a psychedelic during a White House event touting the benefits of the drugs.
The president made the remark at a Saturday morning event in the Oval Office, where he signed an executive order to “accelerate medical treatments for serious mental illness,” including the therapeutic benefits of LSD, psilocybin, ecstasy, and other psychedelics.
In attendance was the popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, who has advocated for the treatments but has also recently been fiercely critical of Trump’s war in Iran.
Trump touted the success of the psychedelic drug ibogaine—a Schedule I controlled substance—and cited a study in which he said participants experienced an “80 to 90 percent reduction in symptoms of depression and anxiety within one month.”
I’d like to see the actual study. A whole lot of studies show one thing, and then a better, larger study comes down the line in a year or two that contradicts the first. Many studies said “Marijuana is great for treating X!” and now we’re getting other studies that show “Probably not.”
“Can I have some, please?” Trump quipped, prompting the room to erupt in laughter. “I’ll do whatever it takes…I don’t have time to be depressed. If you stay busy enough, maybe that’s what works too, that’s what I do.”
Rogan, who endorsed Trump for president in 2024, said the executive order came about after he sent Trump a text message about psychedelic therapies.
Veteran organizations and psychedelic advocates have long contended that the ibogaine, which is made from a shrub native to West Africa, has great promise for hard-to-treat conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and opioid addiction.
All I know about ibogaine comes from Hunter S. Thompson talking about Edmund Muskie possibly using it in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. I do not think this qualifies me as any kind of expert.
Retired Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, who has written about his struggles with depression and PTSD in the memoir Lone Survivor, told Trump how ibogaine changed his life “for the better.”
“You’re going to save a lot of lives with it,” Luttrell told Trump. “I’d like to say how grateful I am to have had the opportunity to go through the program and receive the Ibogaine.”
“I want to tell everybody how this happened,” Rogan explained. “I sent President Trump some information… the text message that came back: ‘Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval? Let’s do it,’” Rogan claimed. “It was literally that quick.”
Am I worried that Joe Rogan can get policy changed by texting the President? A whole lot less than if it were George Soros or Neville Roy Singham doing it for a Democratic president. Rogan has at least rejected woke madness and is willing to listen to evidence.
In a grander scheme of things, I’m not worried about limited legal use for psychedelic drugs because the Constitution doesn’t designate regulating drug use as an enumerated power of the federal government in the first place. As such, federal drug prohibition is unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment. Unless it involves interstate commerce, federalism and subsidiarity leave drug regulation up to the states.
Here’s an Asmongold video on the press conference:
At the very least, hopefully we should get some good data on whether psychedelics like ibogaine are actually effective in treating PTSD and other disorders. Maybe they’ll help, and maybe they won’t.
You can’t get good data on what you’re not allowed to study.
I said I might be putting up some segments from the latest Joe Rogan interview with Elon Musk, and this segment, where he talks about the California homeless industrial complex, sounds like he’s been reading BattleSwarm.
I’ve elided some of Musk’s verbal tics (“likes,” “uhs” and repeated words) in the interest of clarity and readability.
Joe Rogan: “And then you guys [California] spent $24 billion on the homeless and it got way worse.”
Elon Musk: “Yes. Like the homeless population doubled or something.”
EM: “People don’t understand the homeless thing because it it sort of prays on people’s empathy.”
EM: “The homeless industrial complex is really, it’s dark, man. [That] network of NGOs should be called the drug zombie farmers.”
EM: “When you meet somebody who’s totally dead inside shuffling along down the street, with a needle dangling out of their leg…”
EM: “Homeless is the wrong word. ‘Homeless’ implies that somebody got a little behind in their mortgage, payments and if they just got a job offer, they’d be back on their feet.”
EM: “You see these videos of people that are just shuffling, they’re on fentanyl. They’re taking a dump in the middle of the street, and they’ve got like open sores and stuff. They’re not like one job offer away from getting back on their feet.”
EM: “This is not a homeless issue. Homeless is, it’s a propaganda word.”
EM: “These sort of charities, [they] get money proportionate to the number of homeless people, or number of drug zombies.” So their incentive structure is to maximize the number of drug zombies, not minimize it.
EM: “That’s why they don’t arrest the drug dealers, because if they arrest the drug dealers, the drug zombies leave.”
JR: “So they’re in coordination with law enforcement on this?”
EM: “Yeah.”
JR: “So how do they how do they have those meetings?”
EM: “They’re all in cahoots. When you find this, it’s such a diabolical scam.”
EM: “San Francisco has got this tax this gross receipts tax. It’s not even on revenue, it’s on all transactions, which is why Stripe and Square and and and a whole bunch of financial companies had to move out of San Francisco…you’re taxed on any money going through the system in San Francisco. So Jack Dorsey pointed this out, and they had to move Square from San Francisco to Oakland, I think. Stripe had to move from San Francisco to South San Francisco, different city.”
EM: “That money goes to the homeless industrial complex. So there’s billions of dollars that go, as you pointed out, billions of dollars every year that go to these non-governmental organizations that are funded by the state. It’s not clear how to turn this off. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone situation.”
EM: “So they get this money, the money is proportionate to the number of homeless people, or number of drug zombies.”
EM: “When you add up all the money that’s flowing, they’re getting close to a million dollars per homeless drug zombie. It’s like $900,000 or something, some crazy amount of money, is going to these organizations. So they want to keep people just barely alive. They need to keep them in the area, so they get the revenue. So that’s why they don’t arrest the drug dealers, because otherwise the drug zombies would leave. But they don’t want [them] to have too much, if they get too much drugs and then they die. So they’re kept in this sort of perpetual zone of being addicted, but just barely alive.”
So the homeless industrial complex is farming homeless drug zombies as a cash crop in San Francisco. Once you understand this, a whole lot of otherwise inexplicable policies start to make sense. The shocking revelation here, that local law enforcement is in on the deal and that’s why they don’t arrest the drug dealers, makes sense, but I’d really like to see supporting evidence for it.
This is the sort of thing Republicans in congress should hold hearings on and get sworn testimony on the records. I’d also like to see DOGE-level forensic audits of the government agencies sending the money, and the NGOs spending it, to find out where all the zombie drug farming money is going…
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…
🚨 "I am pleased to inform our many U.S.A. Patriots that I am designating ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION…" – President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/irLHCkrX1n
The man arrested for Charlie Kirk’s murder thought he was stopping hate. In actuality, he united the country against his own leftwing hate … and gave the president the standing to arrest all his associates as terrorists.
I’m hope this will give the Trump Administration the tools to subpoena, back-trace and freeze terrorist funding coming from various NGOs, including a wide variety of Soros, Singham, MacArthur and Rockefeller hydra heads.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane to cover the myriad violent felonies the commie losers of Antifa have committed over the years:
They attacked journalist Andy Ngo in Berkeley and Portland.
This is just a Greatest Hits package of Antifa scumbaggery. This post could easily be ten times as long…
(Note: While doing this roundup, I noticed that a lot of the sources I linked to prior to 2020 are no longer good. With linkrot, the stability of online digital data seems several orders of magnitude less permanent than ink printed on paper…)
I started this post to roundup reactions to the Charlie Kirk assassination, and it’s grown to enormous size due to the large number of ugly-souled leftists celebrating his murder. So let’s wade into the filth, and the reactions (and consequences) therefore.
When there’s a killing the left always tries to assign the killer to the right. We’re used to it. And the vast majority of the right always overwhelmingly condemns the killer.
Only this time all the moderate normie republicans out there saw MILLIONS of liberals celebrate and justify the brutal murder of a man… all because that man held beliefs similar to theirs. Beliefs that regular Americans consider completely normal and common sense.
These normal folks were going about their day, then they saw some shocking brutality, and before they could even process it all their liberal friends were dancing in the blood and gleefully justifying it. “He deserved it for believing X and Y.” And that normal person realized that they also believe X and Y, so them getting murdered would be just as celebrated too. At best they saw a “Murder is bad, BUT… he deserved it for believing X and Y.”
And the lights go on.
It doesn’t matter how hard the left scrambles to put the shooter in some particular ideological bucket to cover their asses and take no blame (as usual), because regular America saw how fucking gleeful libs were when somebody just like them dies horribly, and they realized that the left wants them dead. Not metaphorically. They want you to die. Some of us have known this for a long time because we pissed off the left somehow previously, but for the regular folks coming to that understanding is a life changing moment.
Democratic representative and “Squad” member Ilhan Omar reminds, yet again, that she’s simply a horrible person. “Kirk was a reprehensible human being.”
The TEA will be referring all posts that contain the “vile content” to its Educator Investigations Division, as the posts could be in violation of the Educators’ Code of Ethics and potentially result in a reprimand, suspension, or permanent dismissal.
One standard in the code of ethics includes that the educator “shall be of good moral character and be worthy to instruct or supervise the youth of this state.”
“While the exercise of free speech is a fundamental right we are all blessed to share,” the letter states, “it does not give carte blanche authority to celebrate or sow violence against those that share differing beliefs and perspectives.”
The letter directs Texas school superintendents to share potential violations and “inappropriate content” with the TEA’s Misconduct Reporting Portal.
A number of recorded such incidents involving Texas educators have circulated online, showing disparaging comments about Kirk’s assassination.
“A Middle Tennessee State University employee has been fired after commenting about conservative speaker and influencer Charlie Kirk’s death on social media, the university confirmed….University spokesman Jimmy Hart said Sept. 11 that the fired employee is Assistant Dean of Students Laura Sosh-Lightsy.”
Asmongold gathers several examples of brain-dead leftists celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder, including employees of Blizzard, Bungie, Sucker Punch Productions and Wizards of the Coast, some of whom have already been fired:
FA: Texas Tech student Camryn Giselle Booker celebrated Kirk’s death, interrupted a vigil, and actually assaulted other students. FO: “Texas Tech confirmed to Texas Scorecard that Booker is no longer enrolled.”
There was a video of a nose-ringed girl who literally mimed to the “He had it coming” part of “Cell Block Tango” from the musical Chicago, and then starting bawling out because every one of her close friends said she was a shitty, horrible person for doing so. Did this make her stop in a moment of self-reflection to consider that she was, in fact, a shitty person? No. She was bawling because she now had to cut ties with all her friends. She seems incapable of self-reflection.
The hate orgy on BlueSky was so bad that the management of that infamous hive of scum and villainy had to step in and tell them to cut that shit out, that it violated their terms of service.
Plus Tranny developer/comic creator Gretchen Felker Martin (that’s the ugly in the thumbnail) got canned over celebrating the murder.
Despite that, some lunatics on BlueSky are now calling for J. K. Rowling to be murdered as well.
Others on the list include “podcaster Joe Rogan, Harry Potter author JK Rowling, conservative political commentators Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh, among others.”
Ugly-souled rappers Bob Vylan celebrate the murder:
This clip of Bob Vylan mocking Charlie Kirk on stage makes my blood boil
Too damn much news out this week. Biden’s “boom” is busted, Charlie Kirk’s assassin is caught, Israel dirtnaps top Hamas kingpins in Qatar, the curse of BlueSkyism, more illegal alien perverts sexually abusing children, more of the evil George Soros funds, and California’s “Jay Leno Bill” dies in committee. Plus some Prog Rock.
The U.S. economy probably added close to a million fewer jobs in 2024 and early 2025 than previously reported, the latest sign that the labor market, until recently a bright spot in the economy, may be weaker than it initially appeared.
The revised data was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as part of a longstanding annual process known as benchmarking. But the big downward adjustment comes at an awkward moment for the agency, just weeks after President Trump fired its top official following a separate set of negative revisions last month.
The data released on Tuesday showed that employers added 911,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months through March than had been indicated in the monthly payroll figures. That implies the economy added only about 850,000 jobs during that time — half as many as previously reported.
Police have identified the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s assassination as Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah man who authorities say became more political ahead of the shooting and recently expressed animosity toward Kirk.
Robinson, who is believed to have acted alone, came to the attention of the authorities after he contacted a family friend following the assassination, Utah Governor Spencer Cox revealed during a Friday morning press conference. That friend reported Robinson to the local sheriff’s office and Robinson’s father, a veteran police officer, then orchestrated his surrender to authorities at his home in Washington County, Utah.
The alleged gunman is expected to face at least three felony charges, including aggravated murder, obstruction of justice, and felony discharge of a firearm causing serious bodily injury, according to a probable cause affidavit obtained by NBC News. Cox said state law requires authorities to file the charging documents within three days.
Robinson appears to have become more political ahead of the shooting and criticized Kirk by name at a recent dinner, a family member of Robinson’s told authorities. Robinson said Kirk was “full of hate” and accused him of “promoting hate,” Cox said, though the affidavit, released later, indicates another family member may have made those remarks.
Robinson’s arrest comes after authorities had recovered a high-powered bolt action rifle they believe was used in the assassination, along with unspent rounds that were engraved with antifascist writing.
“Hey fascist, catch,” read the engraving on one round. Another round was engraved with the message “Bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao,” a reference to a song favored by resistance movements and revolutionary anti-capitalist partisans.
This is who they chose to kill: the affable man whose main act was having good-faith political debates with college students. The man who, since fatherhood, was turning more toward Christianity as both a purpose and a theme. He was a partisan to be sure, but he was nowhere near the outer limits of the American tradition, especially given his relentless fixation on Lincolnian persuasion as a stabilizing force in a slowly disintegrating polity. The ones who kept losing debates with him didn’t feel that way, of course, but they were only the instrument, not the object, of his work. The object was the millions of Americans who watched, learned, and saw who won again and again—and decided that they wished to side with the winner.
In this way, Charlie Kirk was perhaps the closest thing to Socrates in the American public square. The leftist intellectuals who sneered at him—the rube peddling his simple lines, his crass sophistry, his heartland aw-shucks certainties—would guffaw at the parallel, but it is no less true. He argued—amiably, fairly, relentlessly—until they couldn’t stand it any longer. And like Socrates, they had him killed.
Also like Socrates, his students will now do more for his cause after his martyrdom than they ever did during his life. The Socratic vindication was in his deification through literature at the pens of Plato and Xenophon. Millennia later, everyone remembers the philosopher, but vanishingly few know who ended his life.
The armies of Charlie Kirk, martyr, will be much more vast: not a handful of Athenians but millions of Americans. Their work will not be in philosophical literature but in the politics of the years to come. Whatever benefit accrues to the Republican Party is merely incidental. We are now in the realm of fundamental politics, which is concerned with the nature of the nation and the wielding of power for the common good. The generation of Americans that Charlie Kirk molded will be drawing conclusions about both from his life and his death alike.
After President Trump told Fox & Friends hosts that Charlie Kirk’s assassin is “in custody,” he went on to comment about radical leftist organizations, stating, “We are going to look into Soros. It looks like a RICO case.”
Recall that on Wednesday night, just hours after Kirk’s assassination, President Trump addressed the nation from the Oval Office, calling it a “dark moment for America.” He vowed to crack down on radical left movements across the country that have fueled chaos and even death this year.
Then on Thursday night, Texan News reporter Cameron Abrams wrote on X that Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and two dozen others in Congress called for a select committee on “the money, influence, and power behind the radical left’s assault on America and the rule of law.”
Just weeks ago, Trump stated on Truth Social that George Soros and his radical leftist son, Alex Soros, “should be charged with RICO because of their support of violent protests.”
Around that time, the “dark money” leftist NGO network operated by Arabella Advisors reportedly lost one of its top funding sources: Bill Gates.
Civil terrorism expert Jason Curtis Anderson of One City Rising states:
After the political assassination of Charlie Kirk, President Trump is interested in pursuing a RICO case against George Soros, America’s primary financier of far-left NGOs. What will likely be revealed is a complex web of dark money that observers have warned about for 20 years but never acted on.
At the center of this web are the various George Soros Open Society Foundation legal entities—four separate tax-exempt charities and one 501(c)(4) dark-money channel. Next are the Tides Foundation organizations, funded primarily by the Pritzker family, which include three separate tax-exempt charities and one 501(c)(4) dark-money channel. Following them are the Rockefeller Foundation nexus, NEO Philanthropy, the Ford Foundation, and a host of similar operations, including the Singham network. Collectively, these entities form America’s dark-money ecosystem. They fund permanent protests, bail demonstrators out of jail, finance legal efforts to sue local governments and police departments, influence immigration policy, promote drug decriminalization and criminal-justice reforms, and help elect district attorneys who decline to prosecute crime. On top of all of this, they also have entities like the Working Families Party that elect local politicians.
The money flows from donations to tax-exempt charities into non-tax-exempt 501(c)(4)s, and then trickles down to local groups. From there, funds reach the most radical organizations, which can’t even qualify for 501(c)(3) status and are instead “fiscally sponsored” by parent organizations. Because of this fiscal-sponsorship loophole, the books of these groups remain opaque. Everything from terror financing to protests-turned-riots connects in some way to these foundations.
The revolution against the West is, in effect, a network of tax-exempt charities operating as a powerful parallel government that no one ever voted for. It must be stopped before it’s too late.
A look into Soros-funded terrorist networks is long overdue. Here’s hoping a lot of indictments, bank account freezes and billions in civil forfeiture claims are forthcoming.
Your reminder that the social justice left are horrible people:
Right on cue deranged leftists are celebrating Charlie Kirk being shot
Bluesky, the Twitter spinoff that was once billed as a kinder, gentler alternative to what is now known as X, probably isn’t on death’s door. But after a burst of growth around the election, it’s shrinking and steadily declining in influence, even as other corners of the left thrive during Trump’s second term.
Snip.
Even on a logarithmic scale — on a linear scale, the graph is boring, because everything but Twitter would pretty much just be a flat line — the gulf between X and the other platforms is clear. And since the election, Bluesky has lost ground. More precise data based on the number of unique “likers”, “posters” and “followers” at Bluesky tracks a similar curve, with an initial peak around the election and a secondary peak after Trump’s inauguration but persistent erosion since then. The number of unique posters at Bluesky peaked at just under 1.5 million on Nov. 18, 2024 but has since fallen to an average of about 660,000 on weekdays and 600,000 on weekends: in other words, a drop of more than half.
The decline in Bluesky’s number of unique daily followers is even more substantial. They topped out at 3.1 million on Nov. 18 last year, but are now just under 400,000 per day: almost a tenfold decline. So while a dedicated troupe of Bluesky regulars are still skeeting up a storm, they’re gaining less and less traction, preaching only to the converted.
Snip.
Bluesky was initially popular with Twitter refugees who disliked Musk’s takeover of the platform, some of whom proclaimed that Elon had unleashed the “gates of hell” by restoring banned accounts or predicted that the platform would implode due to a shortage of engineering talent. I suppose I have no problem with this; ironically, the first post in Silver Bulletin history is entitled “In case Twitter goes to zero”. (I wanted a hedge in case it did, although if we’re being honest, I also had one eye out the door as ABC News was beginning to dismantle FiveThirtyEight.) However, this also self-selected for a certain type of user, adherents of an attitude that I call “Blueskyism”.
Blueskyism should not be mistaken for general left-of-center political views. Google search traffic for Bluesky over the past year is highly correlated with Kamala Harris’s vote share, but has some other skews: controlling for the Harris vote, it’s (statistically) significantly higher in states with a large white population and where the percentage of people with advanced degrees is higher. Bluesky is disproportionately popular in D.C., but also in crunchy white states like Vermont and Oregon. Search traffic for Twitter/X over the same period shows the same bias toward highly educated states, but less toward Harris voters4 and actually an inverse correlation with the white population share. (X gets more search traffic in more diverse states.)
Demographics alone only go so far in explaining Blueskyism, however. It’s not a political movement so much as a tribal affiliation, a niche set of attitudes and style of discursive norms that almost seem designed in a lab to be as unappealing as possible to anyone outside the clique.
Emphasis added. Snip.
Some of the most annoying people on the platform have exited for Bluesky.
As compared to other people with a similar level of public prominence — so not heads-of-state or celebrities or NFL quarterbacks — I was a “trending topic” on Twitter as often as just about anyone for a period from roughly 2018-2021. Matt Yglesias and Maggie Haberman also come to mind as other people who share this particular “honor”, which is not a welcome one: it means you’re the main character of the day, the person that other people have decided to dogpile upon.
There’s still some of this. If you tweet about election-related stuff, there is a pervasive tendency to “shoot the messenger” from partisans when the polls aren’t going their way. But much less than there once was: no more of the dogpiles for exceptionally strange reasons that I couldn’t even explain to my IRL friends.
And that’s because this behavior — I guess you could call it harassment but I’m a big boy and I can take it — consistently came from a relatively narrow group of power users, birds of a feather who flocked together, people who could demonstrate their fidelity to the group by picking on the main character. On Bluesky, exactly the same people — and I do mean exactly — attack exactly the same perpetual enemies, but to roughly 1/60th the size of the audience.
So I feel freer using Twitter these days for jokes, memes, and tongue-in-cheek ideas that aren’t meant to be taken entirely seriously, intended to be read as though they’re written in comic sans.
Snip.
What really matters in elections is simply being popular and winning over new converts. Blueskyism, with its intolerance for dissent, is the opposite of that.
Because, yes, while this is personal for me, annoyingness matters in politics.
Snip.
The three essential characteristics of Blueskyism.
The first essential characteristic: Smalltentism
Aggressive policing of dissent, particularly of people “just outside the circle” who might have broader credibility on the center-left. Censoriousness, often taking the form of moral micropanics that designate a rotating cast of opponents as the main characters of the day. Self-reinforcing belief in the righteousness of the clique, and conflation of its values with broader public sentiment among “the base”.
A healthy political movement, you’d think, would welcome people who agree with them on 70 percent of issues, particularly if it sees Trump as an existential threat to democracy and wants a broad coalition against him. Blueskyists do literally almost the exact opposite: their biggest enemies are people on the center-left like me and Yglesias and Ezra Klein. Or center-left media institutions like the New York Times, which are often viewed as more problematic than Fox News.
This aggressive policing of boundaries might at least have been tactically smart during the miraculous Blue Period when Twitter was afflicted with Blueskyism. Yglesias, say, is followed by a lot more Democratic staffers than Ben Shapiro or some actual conservative is.
But now that Blueskyism is losing the battle of ideas, it just draws the tent narrower and ensures that it will remain obscure. There’s nothing more Blueskyist than this, literally creating a “list of shame” of Bluesky posters who remain active on Twitter.
And sometimes, Blueskyists even make violent threats toward people who disagree with them. For instance, the journalist Billy Binion says he recently “logged onto Bluesky to find thousands of people screaming at me, many of whom were telling me to kill myself” after having posted that “billionaires should exist”. There’s some of that on every social media platform, unfortunately, and I’m not going to make assertions about the relative frequency on Bluesky without taking some more comprehensive approach to the question. It certainly shouldn’t have a reputation for civil discourse, however, and this may help to explain the high rate of exits from the platform.
The second essential characteristic: Credentialism
Appeals to authority, particularly academic authority. Centering of the suitability of the speaker based on his or her credentials and/or identity characteristics (standpoint epistemology) as opposed to the strength of his or her arguments, accompanied by the implicit presumption to claim to be speaking on behalf of the entire identity group.
Although Blueskyism is small, its practitioners mostly consist of people within the professional-managerial class: (over)educated blue-state liberals, perhaps people who have drawn the short straw of elite overproduction. You can see that in the demographic data, or in the attitude site management takes: the platform literally just banned people from Mississippi because of a dispute over age verification.
And Bluesky has become relatively popular among academics, which I regard as a problem on various levels. The Democratic Party has already forgotten how to talk to large groups of voters like young men, who have become considerably less likely to complete college than young women. Meanwhile, the experts have made a lot of mistakes, and sometimes the reason is because they’ve become self-serving in pursuit of social media validation or blinded by political partisanship. Increasingly often, I’ll see academics engage in incredibly sloppy argumentation and this seems to be correlated with recent exposure to Bluesky. Because Bluesky is so small, it has a highly specific signature. It’s like if you have some toxic persona on the periphery of your friend group; someone starts speaking in a particular way that you just know they recently hung out with George or Gina.
While academic credentials are one way to gain credibility under Blueskyism, they aren’t the only one. Even though the Google search data suggests that the platform is disproportionately white, an alternative is to claim to speak on behalf of a disadvantaged group. I swear to God, I’m not trying to make this about “wokeness” but there is overlap there.
Perhaps the most prominent example of Blueskyism creeping into real life is when a group of left-leaning public health professionals, who often took a bullying approach during Twitter’s Blue Period, went out of their way to rationalize mass protests after George Floyd was murdered in 2020. Personally, I think it was perfectly fine to join in on these protests; political expression is important (and these protests were usually outdoors and masked). But I also think a lot of other things, like sending your children to school or visiting your dying relatives in the hospital, would have risen to this threshold also, and this group specifically used their credentials to endorse the Floyd protests after having campaigned for those other activities to be prohibited.
Indeed, this controversy recently resurfaced on Bluesky. After Brian Schatz, the Democratic senator from Hawaii, wrote sympathetically in response to a Sean Trende tweet that recalled the hypocrisy of endorsing the protests, he and other “Dem elected/staff/consultants” were blamed on the platform for being “awash in right-wing brainrot.”
The third essential characteristic: Catastrophism
Humorless, scoldy neuroticism, often rationalized by the view that one must be on “war footing” because the world is self-evidently in crisis. Sublimation of personal anxiety as a substitute for political activism or material solutions to the crisis, with expressions of weariness and pessimism signaling virtue and/or savviness.
Although the first two characteristics already limit the appeal of Blueskyism, this makes it worse. Even people who might otherwise be sympathetic to Bluesky have noticed how impossible it is to get away with a joke on the platform, one of the things that X sometimes13 still has going for it. The Bernie-era, Chapo Trap House strain of left-wing discourse also at least had a caustic if sometimes juvenile humor streak. Blueskyism does not.
Instead, the prevailing Blueskyist attitude is often something like this — that we’re in the midst of a “late stage capitalist hellscape” and that you have to be “delusional” to have any amount of hope or optimism”.
Most people outside of Bluesky don’t think like this. Although literally almost zero Democrats are happy with the state of the country, overwhelming majorities of Americans are happy with how their personal lives are going and are able to compartmentalize politics away or recognize that other things matter in life, too.
Conclusion: “A subculture like Blueskyism that sees depression as a rational and even virtuous response is going to select for a lot of miserable people. And misery likes company. So the Blueskyists gather in a corner, exchanging tales of woe, while the rest of us slink away.”
Though there is the usual Silver hemming, hawing and sifting things into ever-finer categories (not to mention his willful denial that “wokeness” is an actual thing, despite so carefully delineating some of its most central characteristics, and his dismissal of the Twitter Files), it’s still worth reading the whole thing. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Rich Hamas honchos throught they could hang out safe in Qatar while their footsoldiers died in Gaza. Wrong.
Israel carried out a strike on senior Hamas leaders in Qatar’s capital, Doha, on Tuesday afternoon.
Qatar quickly accused Israel of “reckless” behaviour and breaking international law after the attack on a residential premises in the city.
The Israel Defense Forces claimed to have targeted those “directly responsible for the brutal October 7 massacre”.
Snip.
According to the Israeli military, it conducted a “precise strike” targeted at Hamas senior leaders in Qatar using “precise munitions”.
Israeli media says the operation involved 15 Israeli fighter jets, firing 10 munitions against a single target.
Qatar has hosted Hamas’s political bureau since 2012 and has played a key role in facilitating indirect negotiations between the group and Israel since the 7 October attacks.
Hamas said members of the group’s negotiating delegation in Doha were targeted but survived the strike. However Hamas said six others, including a Qatari security official, were killed.
According to Hamas, those killed were:
Humam Al-Hayya (Abu Yahya) – son of chief negotiator al-Hayya
Jihad Labad (Abu Bilal) – director of al-Hayya’s office
Abdullah Abdul Wahid (Abu Khalil)
Moamen Hassouna (Abu Omar)
Ahmed Al-Mamluk (Abu Malik)
Corporal Badr Saad Mohammed Al-Humaidi – Qatari internal security forces
“Trump is enjoying his highest approval rating of either term right now according to a DailyMail/J.L. Partners poll. He’s sitting at a solid 55% approval rating.”
Once again, the Supreme Court has stepped in to prevent a rogue district judge from hamstringing the executive branch in performing core executive functions under Donald Trump. And once again, the Court’s conservative majority has dispatched this order without explanation, over an angry and overwrought dissent from the Court’s liberals. This time, however, Justice Brett Kavanaugh stepped up to explain what was going on.
The Court’s order this morning in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo stayed an August 1 order by district judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong-
That name sounds like it came out of a Monty Python skit.
-of the Central District of California, a Biden appointee and former Obama Justice Department official. The order will thus have no effect unless and until the Ninth Circuit rules in the case — perhaps only a brief reprieve, given that the Ninth Circuit previously declined to stay Judge Frimpong’s initial temporary restraining order in the case.
The crux of the case is whether the government may stop individuals in Los Angeles on suspicion of being illegal immigrants on the basis of four factors: “(i) presence at particular locations such as bus stops, car washes, day laborer pickup sites, agricultural sites, and the like; (ii) the type of work one does; (iii) speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent; and (iv) apparent race or ethnicity.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent noted that the order attempted to enjoin Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) only from stops based solely on those four criteria, but as Kavanaugh noted, there are inherent problems in the judiciary trying to prospectively micromanage law enforcement in such fashion: “Even if the Government had a policy of making stops based on the factors prohibited by the District Court, immigration officers might not rely only on those factors if and when they stop [the lawsuit’s named] plaintiffs in the future,” and “the District Court’s injunction threatens contempt sanctions against immigration officers who make brief investigative stops later found by the court to violate the injunction. The prospect of such after-the-fact judicial second-guessing and contempt proceedings will inevitably chill lawful immigration enforcement efforts. . . . Judges are not appointed to make those policy calls.” As Kavanaugh added, particular plaintiffs do not have standing to enjoin the government in advance from stops that may or may not involve them and may or may not, depending on the circumstances, violate the Fourth Amendment.
The Department of Homeland Security launched Operation Midway Blitz on Monday to combat the influx of illegal immigration Chicago has seen under Democratic Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.
DHS said that the program was created in honor of Katie Abraham, a college student who was struck and killed by a Guatemalan national in a drunk driving hit-and-run accident in Illinois.
“DHS is launching Operation Midway Blitz in honor of Katie Abraham who was killed in Illinois by a criminal illegal alien who should have never been in our country. This operation will target the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens in Chicago,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “For years, Governor Pritzker and his fellow sanctuary politicians released Tren de Aragua gang members, rapists, kidnappers, and drug traffickers on Chicago’s streets — putting American lives at risk and making Chicago a magnet for criminals.”
During Joe Biden’s term, an estimated 233,000 unaccompanied children crossed the border and were completely lost.
The Trump admin has now found 22,638 of these children.
But many of them have suffered unbelievable horrors:
John Fabbricatore, HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement senior advisor, said to Fox News:
We found children who have been raped. We’re talking about debt bondage, where children are being made to work off debt, trafficking debt. We’re talking about children that were brought into situations and then treated like sexual slaves.
So far, 27 of the children Biden lost have been found dead, often from murder or drug overdose.
Children are in horrific environments, just environments that they should not be in, where the sponsor is a heroin dealer and that child winds up dying of a heroin overdose.
Iryna Zarutska was a 23-year-old Ukrainian who fled the war in her country for Charlotte, North Carolina.
Over the weekend, police released video of her being stabbed in the neck by a violent career criminal.
Iryna got on the train, sat down, and immediately went “condition white” (looking at her phone without paying attention to her surroundings).
Let this be a reminder that, if you’re in public, you need situational awareness at all times.
In the blink of an eye, her throat was slashed and she was bleeding out over the floor of the train.
Despite the horror of the crime, the media has remained ostensibly quiet.
The lack of any mention whatsoever of Iryna Zarutska’s murder despite her being a Ukrainian refugee reminds me of USAID’s call for media organizations to “collaborate” and “agree policies on strategic silence.” https://t.co/AkH4dxxrjtpic.twitter.com/nK6NbqvV4j
The optics are incredibly awful for the entire Democratic Party machine.
The brutal killing of Iryna Zarutska (Ukrainian refugee) on a commuter train in North Carolina highlights not only the willingness of leftist corporate media to cover up news stories that jeopardize their woke narratives but also the broader failure of so-called criminal justice reform, which appears to have shockingly backfired and become a major public safety threat. Adding to the mounting outrage, a leftist magistrate judge released the schizophrenic monster on cashless bail (before he killed Zarutska) – another failure point. And then there’s this: far-left nonprofits accelerated the push for disastrous criminal justice reforms.
It’s now widely known that Decarlos Brown Jr., 34, Zarutska’s killer, had been previously arrested 14 times in North Carolina for crimes ranging from assault to firearms possession, and whose own mother admitted he was schizophrenic and should never have been allowed back on the streets, was recently released on cashless bail (before he killed Zarutska) by a progressive magistrate judge despite a two-decade violent crime spree.
But the failures don’t stop with local leftist politicians and rogue progressive judges (or magistrate judges) who embrace woke and enabled criminal justice reform from hell. They extend much deeper – into the shadowy world of the dark-money-funded nonprofit industrial complex, which poured millions of dollars into Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, to push for “reducing the jail population.”
“Another factor in the death of Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte’s light rail–the left-wing MacArthur Foundation giving Mecklenburg county a $3.3 million grant to reduce the jail population. Specifically as part of racial equity aims,” Daily Wire’s Megan Basham wrote on X.
Basham noted, “Like Soros’ Open Society, the MacArthur Foundation incentivizes local municipalities to make residents less safe by leaving threats like Decarlos Brown on the streets.”
[Yordanis] Cobos-Martinez has a prior criminal history of:
False imprisonment in CA (unknown disposition)
Indecency with a child in Texas (dismissed)
Grand theft of vehicle in Florida (dismissed)
Carjacking & false imprisonment in CA (acquitted on carjacking, convicted of false imprisonment).
Disturbing surveillance video shows Cobos-Martinez allegedly kicking and picking up the victim’s severed head in the motel parking lot as it drips blood…
“Russian Oil Tanker in Primorsk Set on Fire by Drones & Smolensk Oil Depot Hit.” Primorsk is a good 1,000km from the Ukrainian border, up near Finland.
The Trump administration announced Wednesday that an unprecedented law enforcement operation has busted a Chinese-based fentanyl drug and money laundering conspiracy, resulting in charges against 22 Chinese nationals, four Chinese pharmaceutical companies and three U.S. citizens.
FBI Director Kash Patel described Operation Box Cutter as a “first-of-its-kind” law enforcement action targeting the threat posed to the American public by China-manufactured precursor chemicals used in the production of fentanyl.
“We’re done playing whack-a-mole,” he said during a press conference in Cincinnati, Ohio.
“We didn’t arrest a couple of people. We charged an enterprise-wide system in mainland China to include dozens of individuals and banks and companies that are responsible for making these lethal precursors and shipping them here.”
The Dayton, Ohio, grand jury five-count indictment unsealed Wednesday focuses on a Tipp City, Ohio, resident, 39-year-old Eric Michael Payne.
At this rate, with President Donald Trump being one of the most decisive presidents in history, statistics show that his endorsement could undoubtedly lead a candidate to victory.
As Ian Vallencillo, commissioner of Sweetwater, Florida, told the Washington Examiner, Trump is one of “the most popular political figures,” stating that voters “overwhelmingly support Trump’s picks.”
At this rate, with President Donald Trump being one of the most decisive presidents in history, statistics show that his endorsement could undoubtedly lead a candidate to victory.
As Ian Vallencillo, commissioner of Sweetwater, Florida, told the Washington Examiner, Trump is one of “the most popular political figures,” stating that voters “overwhelmingly support Trump’s picks.”
The commissioner is right.
Candidates endorsed by Trump have lost, but very rarely. Former Republican North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson conceded his gubernatorial election against an incumbent after receiving Trump’s approval, partly over a scandal that engulfed the news cycle days before the election.
Similarly, former presidential candidate and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) lost his reelection bid, over years of controversy, anti-Trump skepticism, and a failure to get the Republican Party in the White House in 2012.
During the 2024 federal and gubernatorial election cycles, Trump endorsed 306 candidates. Eighty-nine percent of those candidates now occupy the office they ran for. In the 2022 election cycle, Trump endorsed 195 candidates, 83% of whom were sworn in to office a few months later.
One of those key endorsements includes the key race of Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA), who unseated a longtime incumbent, former Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, by a 0.5% margin.
Similarly, in the same election cycle, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) won his Senate race against former Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, who had been in office since 2007.
The year before that, after former California GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy resigned from Congress in 2023 following a motion for him to step down as speaker of the House from a Trump-endorsed representative, California Assemblyman Vince Fong was elected soon after receiving the nod from the president.
Similarly, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), who was challenged by a local Democratic advocate, won his third term soon after Trump endorsed him.
The latest scandal involves a web of shell companies, family members on mysterious payrolls, and taxpayer money that somehow found its way into campaign coffers. Multiple federal agencies are now investigating what appears to be a deliberate scheme to circumvent campaign finance laws through a maze of LLCs and nonprofits. The numbers are staggering: millions in taxpayer funds allegedly embezzled, hundreds of thousands in unreported campaign contributions, and a trail of financial breadcrumbs leading through family businesses.
The politician at the center of this storm? Democratic Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida.
Cherfilus-McCormick had won her seat after campaigning against the corruption of her predecessor, Alcee Hastings.
Today, Cherfilus-McCormick finds herself drowning in exactly the kind of investigations she once condemned. The Federal Election Commission has launched a formal probe into her campaign’s alleged violations, while the Office of Congressional Ethics has found “probable cause” that she accepted illegal campaign contributions. The schemes are breathtaking in their audacity: her husband and sister-in-law running an LLC that funneled $725,000 through a nonprofit that then paid her campaign vendors. A political consultant with direct access to these funds, making payments on her behalf while she pretended not to know.
But here’s where my blood really starts to boil. Before entering Congress, Cherfilus-McCormick was CEO of Trinity Health Care Services, a family company that received a $5 million “overpayment” from Florida’s emergency services department – supposedly due to a misplaced decimal point. Instead of immediately returning the taxpayer money, investigators allege she began moving it between family businesses, including companies where she held major stakes. The state had to sue to get its money back.
As expected. “James Talarico Launches Democrat Bid for U.S. Senate. Talarico has positioned himself as one of the more left-wing voices in the Texas Legislature.”
Remember how Adam Carolla said the Palisades fire would used as an excuse for a land grab by the Democrats running Los Angeles and California? Guess what? “Iconic Malibu restaurant is told it can’t rebuild after Palisades Fire.”
An Alpha News reporter participated in a ride-along with ICE agents during the arrest. Wilson Tindi, a Kenya native, pled guilty to sexually assaulting a sleeping woman in Minneapolis in 2014 after breaking into her home. A judge ordered Tindi to be deported, but a federal judge later overturned this ruling. ICE released him after 18 months.
After his release, Tindi became a chief audit officer at Minnesota’s education department. He was later fired after his past became known, raising questions about how he was ever hired in the first place.
Among the most high-profile and controversial legislation passed was a handful of social issue bills — in particular, one establishing civil cause of action against chemical abortion pill providers, and another separating publicly-funded private spaces by biological sex. The former came with its fair share of backdoor negotiations and amendments before it was successfully carried through both chambers, as was the case for multiple priorities of Abbott’s.
One issue which faced an untimely end in the Legislature was the attempted regulation of hemp-derived THC products. Ultimately, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, House Speaker Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock), and Abbott were unable to reach an agreement on Wednesday.
Collateral damage from the death of print magazines. “Publishers Clearing House Winners Say They Are No Longer Receiving Their Lifetime Payments.”
It seems that some leftwing Texas school nurses are practicing malicious compliance.
Texas Education Agency Updates First Aid Guidelines After Controversy Over Withheld Medical Care
The TEA updated their guidance to allow schools to provide “first aid” without parental consent.
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has released updated guidelines for how Texas public schools should approach the implementation of Senate Bill (SB) 12, known as the “Parent Bill of Rights,” after recent reports of school nurses not providing first aid to students.
One aspect of SB 12 that caused distress and confusion among lawmakers, parents, and schools alike is the requirement for school districts to receive documentation of notice and consent from parents for their child to receive “medical, psychiatric, and psychological treatment.”
State Rep. Jeff Leach (R-Allen) posted a letter on social media he had sent to TEA Commissioner Mike Morath last week regarding “concerns with the implementation” of SB 12 after reports of how “some school districts are taking an ‘all or nothing’ approach” to the new policy requirements, which has resulted in “band-aids” and “ice packs” being withheld from children.
Following the publication of the letter, which was also signed by the bill author state Sen. Brandon Creighton (R-Conroe), reports of children not being treated for certain “general care” services began being made public.
“After a thorough review was conducted of the video recordings of the statements, it became clear to me that their actions amounted to serious professional and personal misconduct,” Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse stated late Wednesday. “Conduct that advocates for inciting violence is directly contrary to the values of Texas State University. I cannot and will not tolerate such behavior.”
“As a result, I have determined that their actions are incompatible with their responsibilities as a faculty member at Texas State University,” Damphousse continued. “Effective immediately, their employment with Texas State University has been terminated.”
Damphousse was referring to Tom Alter, who was previously an associate professor of history at Texas State.
Alter had been exposed making comments calling for the overthrow of the U.S. government.
The European Commission has suffered a major defeat in court over its plans to make large tech platforms pay it to enforce the Digital Services Act.
Meta and ByteDance’s TikTok took the European Commission to court after it presented them with a “supervisory fee” equal to 0.05 per cent of their yearly global net income. The bill was to cover the EU executive’s expenses in monitoring their compliance with the Digital Services Act.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) gives the European Commission oversight of very large online platforms and search engines—ones with more than 45 million EU users a year. To fund this oversight, the Commission has said it will charge these providers an annual fee, based on their average monthly users.
The Commission adopted rules saying how it would set these fees on 2 March 2023. The next month, on 25 April, it classified Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok as very large platforms. That November, it finalised the 2023 fees for each.
In two decisions 10 September, the Court of Justice of the EU determined the Commission’s supervisory fees on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok were void for procedural grounds.
To set the 2023 fees, the Commission decided to calculate each platform’s average monthly users using a methodology based on third-party data it attached to each decision.
However, the Court ruled that this methodology for calculating fees should have been established through a delegated act–a process which involves the European Parliament and Council.
The judges said it was incorrect for the European Commission to determine the fees using implementing decisions it devised on its own authority alone.
Jay Leno’s star power wasn’t enough to persuade a California legislative committee to pass a measure to allow owners of classic cars like him to be exempted from the state’s rigorous smog-check requirements.
The Assembly Appropriations Committee on Friday blocked Bakersfield Republican Sen. Shannon Grove’s Senate Bill 712 from advancing for a full vote. Leno had testified in support of the measure in Sacramento earlier this year.
The committee’s members and its powerful Democratic chairperson, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks of Oakland, did not provide a reason for killing the bill during Friday’s hearing, which quickly and with little fanfare announced the fate of 260 other bills that had been placed on the committee’s so-called “suspense file.” Seventy other bills also were killed without explanation.
The Senate and Assembly’s appropriations committees, which both met Friday and rejected hundreds of bills, are supposed to be the gatekeepers for bills proposing to spend taxpayer money. But the committees’ suspense files are where hundreds of politically touchy bills die quietly each year with only a few insiders knowing the real reasons.
Random meme stolen from Facebook:
So I don’t think I’ll be watching all of the Joe Rogan podcasts with Carrot Top or Charlie Sheen, but I suspect I’ll be watching snippets from them, and felt I should make you aware of their existence…
For some reason, all three Top Gear/Grand Tour presents have decided they need to come out with their own gin.
Ten musical pieces you know, but not the names of. I already knew a good number, but a few were new, and a couple of others I didn’t know under their original language name.
It’s been an expensive month. I had to get a new dishwasher, quarterly home and car insurance payments were due, and my dog Avery has enlarged lymph nodes that my vet and I are hoping is just due to her current bad bout of allergies (hence buying a lot of medicine) and not cancer. I’ll find out in a couple of weeks. Fingers crossed.
The Russiagate Hoax gets investigated, more WINNING, Iran’s nuke program confirmed to be toast, Colbert vs. Math, Gen Z workers get roasted, and The Case of Too Much Moose Meat.
The Department of Justice announced on Wednesday the creation of a so-called strike force to investigate allegations advanced by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that former President Barack Obama and members of his administration led a “treasonous” conspiracy to promote the false claim that Trump colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election.
The task force announcement came hours after Gabbard released a previously classified House Intelligence Committee report that said the conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s was interested in aiding Trump was based on “one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports.”
The DOJ strike force will assess the legal options it can take in response to the “alleged weaponization of the intelligence community.”
“Our facilities have been damaged, seriously damaged, the extent of which is now under evaluation,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed in a Fox News “Special Report” interview on July 21.
Later in the interview, Araghchi conceded that “the facilities have been destroyed,” referring to nuclear enrichment sites that were targeted by the U.S. military on June 22. President Donald Trump authorized the strikes amid a nearly two-week aerial war between Iran and Israel.
I’m sure this will completely end any discussion of the effectiveness of the strike in the comments…
The Iranian nuclear sites were bombed 24 days ago. Despite high-profile figures making predictions of near-apocalyptic consequences of that action, the Iranian retaliation, so far, consisted of a missile strike on a geodesic dome used for communications at the Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar. Parnell said the Iranian response “did minimal damage to equipment and structures on the base.”
(If you think you’re having a tough day, imagine being a salesman for the air-defense systems purchased by the Iranian regime. Israel dismantled Iran’s air defenses within 48 hours. Zohar Palti, former head of intelligence for the Mossad, told Sky News, “This is shocking in a way. This is amazing. We thought that it would be much harder. It was much more fast than we anticipated.” Despite claims from the Iranian government, there are no confirmed shootdowns of Israeli or U.S. planes.)
This morning, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany agreed to restore tough U.N. sanctions on Iran by the end of August if there has been no concrete progress toward a new nuclear deal.
Today, Benjamin Baird, the director of MEF Action at the Middle East Forum, writes at NR, “Congress has already introduced much of the legislation needed to bring the ayatollah to his knees, and committee chairmen need only hold markup hearings to advance these bills and send them to the House and Senate floors.” This legislation would enact crushing sanctions on key parts of the Iranian economy, place an economic stranglehold on Iran’s remaining proxies, rescind Biden-era loopholes, and undermine the Iranian regime’s ability to censor information.
The year 2025 has been a terrible one for the Iranian mullahs, and we’re not even in August yet.
Snip.
“Across every branch of the U.S. armed forces, military recruitment has significantly increased since President Trump took office . . . the Army hitting its goal four months early and the Navy doing so three months early. The Air Force and Space Force have both achieved their recruiting goals three months ahead of schedule.”
Speaking of foreign economies, the official numbers from the Chinese government tell us they’re easily withstanding the trade war and tariffs. But Reuters reports that once you look closer, the Chinese economy is showing signs of strain:
Contract and bill payment delays are rising, including among export champions like the autos and electronics industries and at utilities, whose owners, indebted local governments, have to run a tight shop while shoring up tariff-hit factories.
Ferocious competition for a slice of external demand, hit by global trade tensions, is crimping industrial profits, fueling factory-gate deflation even as export volumes climb. Workers bear the brunt of companies cutting costs.
Falling profits and wages shrank tax revenues, pressuring state employers like Zhang’s to cut costs as well. In pockets of the financial system, non-performing loans are surging as authorities push banks to lend more.
The New York Times warns that China’s “local governments are swimming in debt after decades of building airports, train stations and bridges.” (And if you’ve been reading our Thérèse Shaheen, you know that modern China is beset by four walls closing in on them — environmental degradation, runaway debt, the inherent flaws of a centrally planned economy, and demographics of an aging and declining population.)
Closer to home, the U.S. unemployment rate is 4.1 percent, low by historical standards. The U.S. has 7.8 million job openings. Inflation ticked up a bit last month, to 2.7 percent, which is not great (and a likely consequence of the tariffs), but it’s still down from the 3 percent number in January. The stock market has won back all of its big losses from the spring, and the NASDAQ closed at another all-time high yesterday.
Plenty more winning at the link.
Remember in last week’s LinkSwarm how Alan Dershowitz claimed two federal judges were blocking access to Jeffery Epstein information? Well:
A federal judge in Florida on Wednesday denied a request from the Trump administration to unseal grand jury transcripts from an investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Separately, the House Oversight Committee has issued a subpoena for Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s long-time associate, in an attempt to obtain further details about his high-profile clients.
Chairman James Comer of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform issued the subpoena Wednesday to Maxwell for a deposition at a federal correctional institution in Tallahassee, Florida, on August 11. Representative Tim Burchett made the motion for Comer to subpoena Maxwell, who was convicted for her role helping Epstein solicit minors for prostitution, in a Tuesday House subcommittee hearing. The motion was adopted by voice vote.
Snip.
United States District Judge Robin Rosenberg denied the request in a 12-page opinion Wednesday, saying she could not legally release the transcripts under the guidelines that govern grand jury secrecy set by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit because the government had not requested the grand jury’s findings for use in a judicial proceeding. She further stated that the legal standard for transfer of the petition to another district was not met in this case.
Reeling from their 2024 election loss, Democrats are scrambling to reconnect with the working class—yet their brilliant strategy of embracing socialist and communist candidates, doubling down on un-American woke ideology, shielding criminal illegal aliens, and supporting dark-money NGOs that fuel insurrectionist behavior like the Los Angeles riots—isn’t a comeback plan but just political suicide.
The party of leftist social justice warriors is cracking under the weight of its own failures. Woke culture is imploding, “green” fantasies are backfiring, and nowhere is this more evident than in the Democrat stronghold states of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, where the retirement of stable, affordable fossil fuel power in favor of unreliable solar and wind is driving up energy costs to the highest in the nation this summer and breaking the pocketbooks of working-class families they claim to champion.
Energy policies should balance three key objectives: affordability, reliability, and environmental sustainability — often referred to as the “energy trilemma.” Yet Democrats rammed through climate policies that torched two objectives, affordability and reliability for the environment.
According to the latest EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook for July, the average summer wholesale power prices across the PJM, NYISO, and ISO-NE grids are the highest in the nation. These prices now far exceed those in Texas’ ERCOT, the U.S. average, and even the traditionally high-cost West Coast markets. The blame is squarely focused on the Democrats’ initiative to decarbonize power grids.
“Oh, Look, Another Little-Known Democrat Who’s Going to “Turn Texas Blue.'”
Here we go again. Politico declares that Democratic Texas State Representative James Talarico “might turn Texas blue,” in large part because he recently was a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Talarico is thinking of running for Texas’s U.S. Senate seat in 2026.
This is a couple months after Politico wrote about the “eye-catching showing of support” Democrats had for Senate candidate Colin Allred, who lost to Ted Cruz by about 960,000 votes in the 2024 Senate race. And about seven years after Politico wrote “Beto-Mania Sweeps Texas.” And the August 2013 “Game On” cover of Texas Monthly. And . . . well, you get the idea.
You know what a Texas Democrat must do to get members of the national mainstream media to write that they have a chance to win that deep red state? Just show up, apparently.
Of course Talarico is making all the usual moderate noises Texas Democrats make when they’re trying to run statewide, and which he would almost certainl;y abandon if elected, like all Democrats seem to. He has a lifetime Freedom Index score of 4%.
In the last midterm, 8 million Texans voted; in the last presidential election, 11 million Texans voted. If turnout is 8 million, and a Democrat is behind by “just” five percentage points, he’s trailing by “just” 400,000 votes.
And yet cycle after cycle, we get not only credulous coverage saying a Democrat could win Texas — sotto voce conceding it is unlikely — last year you could easily find left-of-center columnists who were willing to go on the record predicting Allred would beat Cruz. Again, Cruz won by 959,492 votes or about 8.5 percentage points. It wasn’t close, and it was never close. Every cycle, the “Democrats could win Texas this year” coverage turns out to be pure wishcasting, as farfetched and unlikely as Trump’s quadrennial prediction that he will win his home state of New York.
According to a DHS report, those arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement include individuals guilty of murder, rape, and pedophilia.
“Over the weekend, our brave ICE agents arrested more depraved criminal illegal aliens, including murderers, rapists, and three child pedophiles. These are the types of barbaric criminals our ICE law enforcement is arresting and removing from American communities every day,” said DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
McLaughlin said that despite the rise in assaults against ICE officers, they continue to put their lives on the line to make American communities safe.
DHS highlighted the arrests of nearly a dozen individuals. Among those apprehended is 58-year-old Jose Arinaga-Ramirez, who is in the U.S. unlawfully from Mexico and was arrested in San Antonio by ICE Dallas. He has been convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child.
ICE Dallas also reports that Ramirez has a criminal history of resisting arrest, driving while intoxicated, and has two convictions for illegal re-entry.
Gilmer Vertiz-Bustemante, 37, another illegal alien from Mexico, was arrested by ICE Houston and has a murder conviction in Tarrant County.
Several other ICE field offices across the nation also reported the arrests of illegal aliens guilty of similar crimes, including ICE Los Angeles, ICE Philadelphia, and ICE Boston.
As if stealing their aid money wasn’t enough, LA and California government officials are letting squatters take over the burned lots of fire victims. “Local independent journalist Luke Melchior recently checked out the Palisades and gave this report that squatters are setting up entire campsites, even RVs, on the property of fire victims who are still waiting on permits to rebuild. It’s terrible what’s happening to these people. It begins to make more sense when you learn about a proposed bill in California, which will allow the state to buy up these properties to be used for low-income housing.”
Winning. “U.S. Olympic Committee Quietly Bans Men from Women’s Sports in Compliance with Trump Executive Order.”
You can be like Chris Hayes, Brian Stelter, Vox, The New Republic, Adam Schiff, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other progressives, and choose to believe you live in a world where the ending of The Late Show is a sinister plot by spineless, cowardly corporate executives who are terrified of irking President Trump and who desperately want the Federal Communications Commission to approve the merger of CBS’ parent company, Paramount Global, with Skydance Media. (And, it should be noted, Colbert’s choice to turn the show into a four-nights-a-week version of the speaker list at the quadrennial Democratic National Convention.) That is a dramatic world, with noble heroes and dastardly villains, plotting against the interests of the public, punishing a brave comedian, smashing dissent, and bending the knee in obedience to a ruthless, vindictive, power-mad president.
Or you choose to believe you live in a world where the ending of the show is a reflection of the fact that CBS was losing $40 million each year on the show, as the Wall Street Journal reports today. And as much fun as it would be to blame Colbert for being greedy and making the show unprofitable with his $20 million per year salary, with numbers like that, the show would still be unprofitable even if he worked for free.
Reuters adds, “the show’s ad revenue plummeted to $70.2 million last year from $121.1 million in 2018, according to ad tracking firm Guideline.” If a show’s ad revenue gets nearly cut in half over a six-year period, that is a serious and worsening problem, and an indication that it isn’t a reflection of a one-year blip or temporary economic pressures.
The real problem with CBS’s Late Show isn’t that it needed Letterman to survive, or even that CBS’s recent lawsuit payout to Donald Trump left Paramount/CBS looking to quickly cut a cool $16 million from their operating budget. The Late Show deserved to die simply because it got swallowed by the media trends surrounding it: Colbert used his star power to turn it into a watered-down variant on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. (Or, more often, and infinitely more damningly, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.) He became irrelevant.
Lately, he just doesn’t seem to be bothering at all. NR contributor Becket Adams hilariously noted how many of Stephen Colbert’s guests since taking the helm — on CBS, on a marquee-brand late-night talk show meant primarily to highlight Hollywood’s latest effluvia — have been better suited for The Maddow Report than late-night broadcast entertainment. “Where will I go now for lighthearted, fun celebrity interviews of, uh, CNN staffers, obscure federal administrators, and failed gubernatorial candidates?” Becket asks.
Stacey Abrams helpfully chimed in to salute Colbert on his way out the door, noting that she had appeared four times on the show — which, as Dominic Pino assesses, is a remarkable “2-to-1 exchange rate between Late Show appearances and number of elections lost to Brian Kemp.” And the just-so story to cap it all off: Who was the young Hollywood celebrity joining Stephen Colbert on the day he announced his cancellation? None other than that buxom starlet Adam Schiff, Democratic senator from California — for the full hour.
What is there to say? This was supposed to be a goofy, winkingly subversive late-night comedy show. With Colbert at the helm it has turned into Theme Time Therapy Hour for aging liberals who just want to watch a little TV in bed before turning out the light. “Political comedy” talk shows have infamously been the death of late-night comedy, the substitution of “clapter” in place of “laughter,” which is much harder to earn in any media era, and particularly one dominated by censorious progressive sensibilities. Their ratings trajectories have long since been clear. Why didn’t Colbert ever just try to be funny instead?
Because he’d rather garner the seal-clapping seal of approval for #CorrectThought.
One harbinger of the coming social justice warrior-initiated culture war was Democrats trying to shove tranny bathroom regulations down people’s during the Obama days. Well, returning to sanity is on the current Texas Special Session agenda.
Legislation separating biological males from women’s private spaces and vice versa is set to take the stage once again in the Texas Capitol as one of Gov. Greg Abbott’s items for this year’s first special session after a similar bill died in committee during the regular session.
The “Texas Women’s Privacy Act,” or House Bill (HB) 239, was filed during the 89th regular session by state Rep. Valoree Swanson (R-Spring) — resembling a nearly identical piece of legislation filed in 2017 that was also brought up during a special session, although it ultimately failed to pass.
Swanson filed HB 32, the special session version of the “bathroom bill,” on July 14. Identical to the legislation filed during the regular session, it seeks to establish a “statewide standard” for “private spaces” such as locker rooms or bathrooms in publicly-funded facilities such as prisons or domestic violence shelters. It stated that they “must be designated based on biological sex as stated on a person’s original birth certificate.”
“Belton ISD Teacher Faces Federal Child Porn Charges. Belton High School teacher Pietro Giustino is charged with possessing child sexual abuse material including depictions of minors engaged in sexual intercourse.”
“Three Big Drone Strikes Hit Novocherkassk: Railway, Power Plant and Telecoms Building.” Ukraine has been on a tear hitting infrastructure targets throughout Russia.
I don’t know about you, but I didn’t have war between Thailand and Cambodia on my 2025 bingo card. Thailand is a “Major Non-NATO Ally” of the United States, whereas Cambodia is an ally (some say puppet) of China.
“Vance Slams Microsoft For Firing Americans While Applying For H-1B Visas…I don’t want companies to fire 9,000 American workers and then to go and say, ‘We can’t find workers here in America.’ That’s a bullshit story.”
While the Democratic Party increasingly embraces socialist and Marxist-leaning policies, such as the seizure of private property, this idea of government-funded grocery stores appears disconnected from both fundamental economic realities and historical precedent.
Nowhere is this more evident than in East Kansas City, where a nonprofit operates a grocery store on government land that has become a symbol of failure, plagued by the smell of rot and empty shelves.
Local media outlet KSHB 41 Kansas City toured Sun Fresh Market at 3110 Wabash Ave (31st & Prospect) on the city’s Eastside. The store opened in 2018 as part of a multi-million dollar public-private revitalization of the Linwood Shopping Center. Operated by Community Builders of Kansas City, a nonprofit focused on urban development, the store has since become a massive reminder that while socialism may sound great on paper, in practice, it can be an absolute disaster.
KSHB 41’s Alyssa Jackson reported that her news team received a tip from a viewer about empty shelves throughout the dairy section, meat department, bakery aisle, and deli counter.
In capitalist countries, food waits for people. In socialist countries, people wait for food.
The U.S. Agency for Global Media sponsored hundreds of visas over a number of years for foreign journalists to come work for its subsidiary Voice of America, some of which were awarded to employees tied to Chinese state media, according to records reviewed by Just the News.
The agency’s hiring of more than 400 foreign journalists, from about 2009 to the end of the Biden administration, raises questions because of the liberal use of J1 cultural exchange visas, which are not designed for use as a general work authorization.
So Obama started importing communist Chinese and Biden continued it.
Sig Saur’s P320 issues just got a whole lot worse. “An Air Force command is pausing its use of a Sig Sauer pistol following a fatal incident.” The M18 is military version of the P320. (Hat tip: Karl rehn at KR Training.)
Edwin J. Feulner, founder and longest-serving president of the Heritage Foundation, died yesterday at 83. He is survived by his wife, Linda, and their two children.
Feulner founded Heritage in 1973 alongside Paul Weyrich and Joseph Coors. Since his passing, Republican politicians and conservative institutions have remembered him as a courageous and wise defender of truth.
Snip.
Feulner served for 37 years as Heritage’s president before he moved into an advisory role.
“His unwavering love of country and his determination to safeguard the principles that made America the freest, most prosperous nation in human history shaped every fiber of the conservative movement—and still do,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts said. “Whether he was bringing together the various corners of the conservative movement at meetings of the Philadelphia Society, or launching what is now the Heritage Strategy Forum, Ed championed a bold, ‘big-tent conservatism.’”
Though it’s become yet another ossified inside-the-beltway institution, in its heyday under Fuelner, Heritage was a force to be reckoned with The Reagan Revolution probably isn’t half as effective without the studies and policy guides Heritage produced, including the various Mandate for Leaderships.
They FaceTime at their desks, show up in sweats or other inappropriate office attire, and expect a promotion by lunchtime. Some of them even bring their parents to job interviews.
To put it mildly, their older coworkers aren’t impressed. The latest crop of Gen Z workers is attempting to redefine workplace norms, and they’re running into some resistance along the way.
There are several possible explanations for why Gen Zers are struggling to adapt to the corporate workplace. Perhaps it’s because they’re the first generation to grow up entirely online. Or maybe it stems from a lifetime of being coddled—made to feel exceptional by parents, teachers, and other adults. The disruption of remote learning during the pandemic certainly didn’t help. Whatever the cause, many Gen Zers are entering the workforce with little understanding of how to behave in a professional environment.
And yet companies don’t want to hire older workers, either. Make up your mind!
A look at UK’s superheavy “Tortoise” tank, which never saw combat because World War II ended. I saw the one they have at Bovington, and it is indeed massive.
President Trump (and parents) rack up Supreme Court wins, more Iran nuke damage assessments, a whole lot of Democrats want to die on the hill of taxpayer subsidies for mutilating your children, and some fast cars. Plus a weird assortment of violent lunatics.
The Supreme Court on Friday handed the Trump administration a win by limiting the ability of federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions blocking the president’s agenda.
The justices ruled 6-3 along ideological lines in Trump v. Casa, siding with the Trump administration’s challenge to the scope of nationwide injunctions issued against Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. The Court did not, however, weigh-in on the legality of the birthright-citizenship order itself.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion, finding that universal injunctions exceed the authority Congress has given to federal courts. Barrett was joined by the Court’s five other conservative justices.
The High Court ruled that lower courts cannot prevent the federal government from enforcing its policies against nonparties to the specific case they’re ruling on. For the time being, the justices have partially halted the nationwide injunctions against Trump’s executive order. They halted the injunctions in areas where their authority is too broad and prevent the executive branch from developing public guidance related to Trump’s executive order.
They punted on birthright citizenship, but a win is a win, and hopefully lower courts will now stop trying to reimport convicted and deported illegal alien felons.
Suchomimus has clear satellite images of the damage Operation Midnight Hammer did to the Isfahan and Natanz nuclear complexes.
UN Nuclear Watchdog Chief: ‘Night and Day’ Difference Between Iran’s Nuclear Capabilities Before and After US Strikes. ‘It is clear that there is one Iran—before June 13, nuclear Iran—and one now,’ says IAEA’s Rafael Grossi.
The U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities set back the Islamic Republic’s program “significantly,” the head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog organization said Tuesday.
“I think the Iranian nuclear program has been set back significantly, significantly,” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general Rafael Grossi said in a Fox News interview. He noted that “it is clear that there is one Iran—before June 13, nuclear Iran—and one now,” describing the difference as “night and day.”
Just before the Tuesday afternoon interview, the IAEA revealed that it detected “extensive damage at several nuclear sites in Iran, including its uranium conversion and enrichment facilities.” That damage caused a radioactive release, according to the organization.
“Our assessment is that there has been some localized radioactive as well as chemical release inside the affected facilities that contained nuclear material—mainly uranium enriched to varying degrees—but there has been no report of increased off-site radiation levels,” Grossi said in the IAEA statement. The organization observed “two impact holes from the U.S. strikes” at Iran’s Natanz enrichment site above “the underground halls that had been used for enrichment as well as for storage,” according to the statement, in which Grossi also said he saw “extensive damage at several nuclear sites in Iran, including its uranium conversion and enrichment facilities.”
After a week’s worth of pounding from the Israel Defense Forces, the Iranian regime was disoriented and defenseless, helplessly exposed to Israeli and American air superiority, like a turtle flipped on its shell and baking underneath the pitiless desert sun. Now was the time to finish the job, not two weeks from now, after (what was left of) the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps command structure had time to regroup.
So we finished the job. It was the right thing to do. In fact, I will go further than that: If Donald Trump’s finest moment as a politician is forever destined to be that dark day when he arose bleeding from an assassin’s bullet to throw a reassuringly defiant fist to a terrified crowd, then there is good reason to think that Saturday will ultimately rank second. Not because of any one image or moment from the day’s events — although Trump’s charmingly direct invocation of the Creator at the end of his press conference (“I just want to say, we love you, God,”) has immediately entered my bedtime prayer rotation — but because of the foreign policy legacy it has the potential to represent.
I operate by rather simple logic, myself. The Iranian regime — whose unofficial motto is “Death to America,” and which openly calls for the destruction of Israel, our sole true ally in the region — seeks a nuclear weapon to achieve this goal. I have yet to see anyone other than Ben Rhodes, or those quietly receiving funding from Qatar, argue that Iran should be allowed to acquire or build one. That point having been settled, the question then turns to what cost would be worth paying in order to prevent such a thing from happening.
If the price is merely a few bombs from a B-2, then the question is easily answered. Iran’s nuclear program has either been destroyed permanently or set back decades. The mullahs are very upset, as one imagines murderous religious fanatics tend to be, but also seemingly powerless to do much more than cause a temporary economic ruction by laying mines across the Strait of Hormuz. (Note: In a late-breaking development after this piece had gone to press, Trump announced last night that he had in fact brokered a cease-fire between Iran and Israel.)
This is an unalloyed victory for the forces of sanity and civilization. To those who point to the inevitability of unforeseen “blowback,” I will remind you that Iran and its proxies have been engaging in low-level conflict with America for well over a decade now — who do you think was funding and training the people killing our boys in Iraq and Afghanistan all those years? — and now it is free to try its hand at more of the same, if it wishes, this time without a looming nuclear threat to back it up. America has come out ahead on this in concrete, measurable, and hugely valuable geostrategic ways.
Most importantly of all, none of this would have happened if Kamala Harris were president. Think about that for a moment; think about the road not taken. One can only speculate about hypotheticals, but . . . c’mon now. Look into your heart, you know it to be true. Imagine a President Harris, sitting uneasily atop a Democratic coalition barely held together at the seams: Would she have encouraged Netanyahu in his initial campaign against Iranian military and nuclear assets? Would she have provided the final air support and ordnance necessary to get the job done? With people such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, David Hogg, and Zohran Mamdani calling the shots among large segments of her base?
To ask the question out loud is to answer it: no. For that reason alone, it is no exaggeration to say that the shape of the world perceptibly turned for the better on the outcome of last November’s election. You can draw a straight line between Donald Trump’s winning the 2024 race and Iran’s nuclear weapons program now being best described as a series of variably sized craters. If you supported Donald Trump and voted for him in 2024, you should feel proud of it today: Saturday is the most obvious evidence yet of why your vote mattered.
It is hard even to digest the incredible train of events of the last few days in the Middle East.
Iran had been reduced to an anemic, performance-art missile attack on our base in Qatar—the last Parthian shot from a terrified regime, desperate for an out—and a ceasefire.
Iran would have been better off not launching such a ceremonial but ultimately humiliating proof of impotence.
Even worse for the theocracy, Iran’s temporary reprieve came from the now magnanimous but still hated Donald Trump.
So ends the creepy mystique of the supposedly indomitable terror state of Iran, the bane of the last seven American presidents over half a century.
For Supreme Leader Khamenei, it was hard to swallow that U.S. bombers got their permission to fly into Iranian airspace from the Israeli air force.
A good simile is that Trump put a pot of water on the stove, told Iran to jump in, put the lid over them, then smiled, turned up the heat—and will now let them stew.
As postbellum realities now simmer in Iran, the theocracy is left explaining the inexplicable to its humiliated military and shocked but soon-to-be-furious populace. All the regime’s blood-curdling rhetoric, apocalyptic threats against Israel, goose-stepping thugs, and shiny new missiles ended in less than nothing.
A trillion dollars and five decades’ worth of missiles and centrifuges are now up in smoke. That money might have otherwise saved Iranians from the impoverishment of the last fifty years.
How about the little Satan Israel, to which Iran for nearly 50 years promised extinction?
Israel had destroyed Iran’s expeditionary terrorists, Iran’s defenses, its nuclear viability, and the absurd mythology of Iranian military competence. And worse, Israel showed it could repeat all that destruction when and if it is necessary.
So, the most hated regime in the world crawled into the boiling pot because it looked around in vain for someone to void Trump’s ultimatum for a cease and desist.
But there were no last-minute saviors to rescue them.
The dreaded decades-long Iranian nuclear threat?
It is either gone for now, or if it resurfaces, it will be again far easier to vaporize at will than to rebuild a lost trillion-dollar investment.
Russia? Its former Obama-Kerry re-invitation back into the Middle East lasted only a decade.
It will now cut its losses like it did with the vanished Assad kleptocracy in Syria. Putin exits the Middle East not entirely displeased that his lunatic Iranian client did not get a bomb—but did get its just desserts. A tense Middle East tends to prop up Russian export oil prices.
Did China come to the mullahs’ aid?
No, they were not shy about ordering their Iranian lackey to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, through which 50 percent of Chinese-purchased oil passes.
For President Xi, the Iranians are treated as little more than Uyghurs with oil.
The world decided that it was tired of a half-century of crybully terrorism, empty nuke threats, mindless mobs screaming scripted banalities, cowardly murdering, and medieval theocrats threatening the general peace.
So, the world turned its back on Iran. And with a wink and nod, it let Israel and the U.S. do what they must.
We recently learned of a previously concealed tranche of documents likely to shed new light on the past decade of American political controversies. This potentially earth-shaking information is known as “Prohibited Access.”
It was only recently discovered that the FBI’s information system, called Sentinel, had a level of access previously unknown to anyone outside the Bureau and known only to a select few inside. In essence, this was a concealed cache used to hide documents the FBI wanted hidden from discovery.
There is one part of the Sentinel system that is devoted to classified and confidential information, termed “Restricted Access.”
It turns out there is a higher, more secretive level called “Prohibited Access.” To any outside observer or investigator, it would appear that there was no record of Prohibited Access information, even though the existence of Restricted Access documents would be shown.
Accordingly, when prosecutors like John Durham or investigators such as Congressman James Comer were investigating various potential misdeeds, they would not have learned of the existence of documents relevant to their investigation that were kept in Prohibited Access.
Although it remains unclear, there is reasonable suspicion that even FBI Inspector General Michael Horowitz was not aware of this document cache. Alternatively, Horowitz may have known about it but also may have agreed to keep its existence secret, a dismaying possibility for one charged with enlightening Congress and the public.
Logic tells us that, broadly, there could be only two related purposes for this concealed tranche because it prevents those investigating the FBI or its favored parties from even knowing about the existence of the documents; such suggests concealment of information inculpatory to the senior levels of the FBI and/or its favored politicians, as well as exculpatory information about the targets of its biased investigations.
If, by way of a wild hypothetical example, James Comey and Andrew McCabe broke laws to make an innocent Donald Trump appear guilty of “Russian Collusion,” they would not wish a trail of their ugly misconduct to see the light of day, nor reveal proof of Trump’s innocence.
Pam Bondi and Kash Patel should shine a lot of disinfecting sunlight here.
Winning: “Supreme Court Allows States to Cut Off Medicaid Funding to Planned Parenthood.”
The Supreme Court is allowing South Carolina to cut off Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood, a win for pro-lifers that will likely clear the way for red states across the country to stop taxpayer dollars from funding abortion.
The justices ruled 6-3 along ideological lines Thursday to permit South Carolina to cut off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion for the Court, siding with the state against a private challenge brought by the abortion provider and a patient.
The plaintiffs in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic argued that Medicaid patients should be free to sue in order to choose their own health-care providers, while the state claimed they lacked the right to sue.
“By rejecting Planned Parenthood’s lawfare, the Court not only saves countless unborn babies from a violent death and their mothers from dangerously shoddy ‘care,’ it also protects Medicaid from exposure to thousands of lawsuits from unqualified providers that would jeopardize the entire program,” said Katie Daniel, director of legal affairs at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
The 1965 Medicaid Act grants patients the ability to choose a willing and qualified provider. Medina dealt with whether patients have the right to sue to go to their preferred provider and whether Planned Parenthood qualified as a provider. Planned Parenthood operates two clinics in the state and argued the case was about healthcare access, not abortion.
South Carolina stopped allowing Planned Parenthood to participate in its Medicaid program in 2018 because of state law barring the public funding of abortion. The move was immediately blocked in court in response to a challenge brought by Julie Edwards, a South Carolina woman who claimed she preferred Planned Parenthood for gynecological care and needed Medicaid coverage.
“States should be free to fund real, comprehensive care and exclude organizations like Planned Parenthood that profit off abortion and distribute dangerous gender-transition drugs to minors,” said Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel John Bursch. The Alliance Defending Freedom represented the South Carolina Department of Health in the case.
Abortion is not “woman’s health care” and should not be treated as such.
SB 12 includes a prohibition on schools assisting in the “social transitioning” of students and also restricts the instruction of “sexual orientation or gender identity,” while providing that it does not “limit a student’s ability to engage in speech or expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment … that does not result in material disruption to school activities.”
In a press release Monday, the ACLU of Texas, along with Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT), called SB 12 “one of the most extreme education bans in the country.”
“This ban on education harms Texas schools by shutting down important discussions and programs that mention race, ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual orientation,” Brian Klosterboer, senior staff attorney for ACLU Texas, stated in the press release.
“Students should be free to learn about themselves and the world around them, but S.B. 12 aims to punish kids for being who they are and ban teachers from supporting them.”
Another Supreme Court win: “Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Maryland Parents in Challenge to Mandatory LGBTQ Curriculum.” Which part of “Get your groomer hands off children” was unclear?
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement recently carried out a multi-state operation targeting eleven Iranian nationals in the U.S. illegally as the threat of Iranian terror cells attacking the U.S. intensifies.
Over the last 48 hours, federal agents arrested the eleven Iranians and a U.S. citizen who harbored an illegal immigrant from Iran, a Department of Homeland Security official told NR.
“Under Secretary Noem, DHS has been full throttle on identifying and arresting known or suspected terrorists and violent extremists that illegally entered this country, came in through Biden’s fraudulent parole programs or otherwise,” DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.
“We have been saying we are getting the worst of the worst out—and we are. We don’t wait until a military operation to execute; we proactively deliver on President Trump’s mandate to secure the homeland.”
ICE agents arrested former Iranian army sniper Ribvar Karimi in Alabama on June 22. Karimi possessed an Iran army identification card upon his arrest and is currently being held in ICE custody. He entered the U.S. in October 2024 under a K-1 marriage visa but never updated his immigration status.
In Houston, ICE agents arrested Behzad Sepehrian Bahary Nejad, an illegal alien who was armed with a loaded pistol at the time of his arrest. Nejad was previously arrested in August 2017 for assaulting a family member and had a final order of removal prior to his latest arrest. Also in Houston, ICE arrested Hamid Reza Bayat, who a judge had ordered removed from the U.S. 20 years ago. Bayat was convicted twice on drug charges and again for driving with a suspended license.
In Tempe, Arizona, where they nabbed Mehrzad Asadi Eidivand, an Iranian convicted of threatening a law enforcement officer and possessing a firearm as an illegal alien, and U.S. citizen Linet Vartaniann for threatening law enforcement and harboring Eidvand. The pair were arrested after ICE obtained a search warrant and they now face federal charges.
Likewise, ICE arrested two Iranian nationals living together in Colorado Springs, Mahmoud Shafiei and Mehrdad Mehdipour. Shafiei was ordered removed decades ago and has criminal convictions related to drug crimes, and arrests for assault and child abuse. Border patrol encountered Mehdipour in June 2023 and processed him for expedited removal. Both are now in ICE custody as they undergo removal proceedings.
Another Iranian national ICE nabbed is Mehran Makari Saheli, a former member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps who was located in St. Paul, Minnesota. Sahei was previously convicted for being a felon in possession of the firearm and was illegally staying in the U.S. after a judge ordered him removed in 2022.
ICE agents arrested several other Iranian nationals in numerous other states and localities, almost all of whom had criminal convictions for various offenses and are now in federal custody.
How many Democrat district judges had decisions half-written forbidding deportations when the Supreme Court decision came down?
Moderate Democrats, business leaders, and Republicans — concerned about the prospect of a Mayor Zohran Mamdani — are plotting ways to keep the Democratic Socialist out of Gracie Mansion.
Shocked by the 33-year-old state assemblyman’s upset win in the Democratic mayoral primary last night against a former New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, these Cuomo backers, reluctant Cuomo backers, independents, and Republicans say the only way to beat Mr. Mamdani is to all back one candidate.
“The horse they’re going to back is Eric Adams,” a grocery store magnate and former Republican candidate for New York City mayor, Jon Catsimatidis, tells The New York Sun. “He is backed by the White House, by Washington, and he’ll make sure crime is cleaned up.”
When asked what that means for the Republican nominee for mayor, Curtis Sliwa, whom Mr. Catsimatidis employed at his radio station, the billionaire replied, “He’ll clean up the crime.”
Mr. Catsimatidis ended the call. He didn’t respond to a text asking if he is personally planning to back Mr. Adams. He said to tune into his radio show this evening.
Mr. Catsimatidis told the press earlier this month that he may sell his grocery store empire or move his business out of the city if Mr. Mamdani becomes mayor.
Always with the trannies: “Zohran Mamdani Wants To Spend $65 Million on Medical Gender Treatments for Minors and Adults.”
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist candidate for New York City mayor, has quietly proposed channeling tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to pay for medical gender-transition treatments for residents of all ages – including for minors. This city spending would counteract the sustained assault on these medical interventions – coming from the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans – which threatens treatment programs even within blue cities and states.
The controversial method of providing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sometimes gender-transition surgeries — such as breast removal — to minors in particular is now at the apex of the culture wars. It has also become a flashpoint in Democrats’ battle to redefine themselves in the wake of their brutal losses in the November election.
Authorities in Austin, Texas, have arrested Brian Johnson, known online as the social media influencer “Liver King,” according to jail records.
He faces one charge of terroristic threat, a Class B misdemeanor.
Snip.
The so-called Liver King rose to viral fame with social media posts depicting a barbarian-like “ancestral lifestyle,” including the consumption of raw animal organs, as depicted in the recent Netflix documentary “Untold: The Liver King.”
His persona and the story behind the physique fell apart in December 2022, however, when he admitted in a YouTube video to using steroids.
Speaking of crazy, violent lunatics: “51-year-old Adam Christopher Sheafe has now confessed to crucifying and killing Pastor William Schonemann in Phoenix in the early hours of Easter Sunday, 2025.”
“U.S. Department of Justice Closes Investigation into Muslim-Centric EPIC City, No Charges Filed.” As I’ve mentioned before, while investigation was certainly warranted, right now EPIC City looks more like a failed speculative real estate venture than an actual Muslim city in the offing, especially now that the developers have sworn up and down that they won’t discriminate against buyers based on religion. Awful nice of them to agree to obey the law…
This is breach of contract action against Mr. Biden for unpaid legal fees,” reads the complaint filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia by Winston & Strawn LLP – which notes that the 55-year-old bagman-in-chief hired the firm “to represent him in several complex matters, including criminal trial in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware,” and that the firm provided him “with extensive legal services in those matters which generated a substantial amount of fees.”
According to the law firm, Hunter has dodged “repeated” efforts to collect those fees.
“Morrissey cancels Stockholm show, saying he and band are ‘travel-weary beyond belief’, citing “’bsolutely zero music industry support’ for full Scandinavia tour.”
“No label will release our music, no radio will play our music … and yet our ticket sales are sensational. What does this tell us about the state of Art in 2025?”
Last year, he said he had bought back the rights back to the album, as well as his 2014 record ‘World Peace Is None Of Your Business’. He later told Medium that “there are two albums” that he has completed but is unable to release, the other being ‘Without Music, The World Dies’.
“The second one was re-recorded in France in late 2023, and given a new title. We scrapped half of the tracks and we recorded six new ones, and so it is not the album from the beginning of 2023.”
He added: “Labels say that they are both fantastic high-quality pop albums but they say that they can’t release them because they don’t want the wrath of The Guardian making their lives hell. The harassment campaign against me by The Guardian is worldwide knowledge now, and it is effective in the sense that labels do not want to become involved with this Gotcha! Journalism.”
Evidently Morrissey figured out that unlimited, unassimilated Muslim immigration to the UK was a bad idea way back in 2019. Obviously The Guardian must punish him for his #wrongthink.
I’m not a Morrissey fan, and a significant percentage of my impression of him is everyone from MST3K to Mojo Nixon making fun of him. I can certainly see a musician cancelling a show due to exhaustion, and Morrissey is no spring chicken. But as for “zero music industry support,” dude, it’s 2025. Major labels don’t support anyone unless they can own your entire output, or at least get their sticky fingers into every possible revenue stream. Just pay to have your own CDs pressed and sell them at your (evidently successful) shows.
Israeli’s strike on Iran may be shocking to some, but I remember talking to co-workers about the possibility literally two decades ago. The Ayatollah Khomeini made the complete destruction of Israel a stated policy goal at the very outset of the Iranian revolution. Multiple Israeli PMs and American Presidents have made it clear to the Islamic Republic of Iran that they would not be allowed to produce nuclear weapons. Now the mullahs are reaping the whirlwind. And the strikes are still going on. As of this writing, there have been at least nine waves of Israeli strikes on Iran.
Other news: Trump racks up more legal victories, somebody SWATs the head of the FBI, more illegal alien felons deported from Houston, and a couple of callbacks to the 1970s. Plus a whole lot of bullet lists.
“It’s a complete embarrassment for the air defense here. Zero confirmed interceptions of missiles and aircraft so far.” Which is what you would expect after Israel took out Iran’s shitty Russian SAM systems. Not to mention the fact that Iran’s most capable fighter aircraft are pre-revolutionary F-14s…
WILD FOOTAGE! Mosaad had bulit an entire drone facility deep inside Iran, which was activated as the IAF struck with 200 aircraft. The drones took out many surface-to-air missile launchers and ballistic missiles aimed at Israel. The entire Iran now has zero air defenses left. pic.twitter.com/x9IxtfiO1V
If you’ve followed the Middle East at all over the past few decades, you’ve understood that the region was on a path to a conflict — the mullahs in Iran kept inching closer to a functioning nuclear weapon, and Israel — and multiple American presidents — kept declaring that that outcome was unacceptable and had to be prevented at all costs. On June 12, 2025, the Israeli military did something about it. Read on.
Last night’s Israeli air strike was surprising, but also inevitable.
Israel could not live in a world where the Iranian regime had nuclear weapons — or to put it another way, once the mullahs in Tehran had a nuclear weapon, Israel was certain to die, it was just a matter of when. It was just about inevitable that the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism — the primary sponsor of Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Yemen’s Houthis, among others — would sooner or later use those weapons against Israel.
If America were hit by half-dozen nuclear bombs, the effects would be devastating, but America would still function and carry on. If Israel were hit by six nuclear bombs — say one each in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and three other targets of your choice — it would likely cease to exist as a state. Almost three-quarters of Israelis live in cities. Israel’s land area is smaller than New Hampshire.
Two months ago I gave Iran a 60 day ultimatum to “make a deal.” They should have done it! Today is day 61. I told them what to do, but they just couldn’t get there. Now they have, perhaps, a second chance!
Also:
Two Israeli officials claimed to Axios that Trump and his aides were only pretending to oppose an Israeli attack in public — and didn’t express opposition in private. “We had a clear U.S. green light,” one claimed.
The goal, they say, was to convince Iran that no attack was imminent and make sure Iranians on Israel’s target list wouldn’t move to new locations.
Netanyahu’s aides even briefed Israeli reporters that Trump had tried to put the brakes on an Israeli strike in a call on Monday, when in reality the call dealt with coordination ahead of the attack, Israeli officials now say.
While mainstream news outlets, cable networks and social media obsess over Elon Musk’s latest antics, they have neglected a far more important story — the Trump administration is accumulating a significant catalogue of appeals court and SCOTUS victories. Last Friday alone three more wins were added to the list. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the White House may exclude AP from its press pool while SCOTUS stayed a district court order requiring DOGE to heed a Freedom of Information Act request and ruled that it can access Social Security Administration records.
These rulings follow a spate of similar wins last month. On May 30, the Supreme Court stayed a district court ruling that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem couldn’t revoke former President Biden’s parole of 532,000 non-citizens. On May 29, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit stayed a U.S. Trade Court ruling that President Trump’s tariffs are somehow unlawful. On May 22, SCOTUS stayed a district court order reinstating two Biden administration officials fired by Trump. On May 19, SCOTUS stayed a district court ruling that Secretary Noem does not possess the legal authority to terminate the temporary protected status of 350,000 Venezuelan non-citizens.
The seven cases noted above do not exhaust the list of the Trump administration’s wins. During April the administration won three Supreme Court cases. On April 17, Justice Elena Kagan declined to stay a deportation order involving four Mexican nationals without referring the case to the full court. On April 8, SCOTUS stayed a district court order to reinstate 16,000 fired federal employees. On April 7, the Court vacated a district court order blocking deportations pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act. This particular ruling, combined with two others, led the editors of the Wall Street Journal to conclude that the Supreme Court was sending a message to the district courts:
President Trump is exercising executive power in aggressive and often novel ways, and opponents are suing to stop him. But in a trio of recent orders, the Supreme Court has sent lower-court judges an important reminder that they must still respect judicial rules and procedures. A 5-4 majority handed Mr. Trump a partial victory Monday by allowing his Administration to continue deporting Venezuelans believed to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang under the Alien Enemies Act.
The same radical leftists who love burning down cities during their “peaceful protests” are looking to do the same thing this Saturday.
The pro-open-borders riots that have set parts of Los Angeles on fire and have spread to other U.S. cities, including New York, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, were anticipated more than a year ago by Democratic Party operatives gaming out ways to destabilize a second Donald Trump administration. Press reports and war-game scenarios from early 2024 predicted domestic unrest caused by the Trump administration’s arrest and deportation of illegal aliens. Consequently, according to the forecasts, the president’s decision to use the military to quell the violence triggers a crisis at the Pentagon and threatens to split the leadership of the U.S. armed forces.
Whether those scenarios were simply Democratic Party fan fiction or early evidence of a genuine plot to destabilize the government in the event Trump was reelected is likely to become clearer this Saturday. Trump has scheduled a large military parade in the nation’s capital for June 14—the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary, Flag Day, oh, and Trump’s birthday—while his adversaries have planned for a massive nationwide anti-deportation protest the same day. If the point is to overwhelm the capacities of local law enforcement agencies across the country, the administration may have no choice but to mobilize National Guard units and regular troops, like those now on the streets of Los Angeles. And it is the mass mobilization of the U.S. military in American cities, according to the 2024 scenarios, that prompts a crisis in the administration.
According to border czar Tom Homan, the ICE raid that sparked the mayhem in Los Angeles wasn’t detailed to catch illegal aliens, but to serve warrants for a cartel’s money-laundering operation. But to Americans left and right, the protests are about open borders. The Democratic Party base broadly supports the policy, or lack of one, with the radical left leading the violence, and relatively normal Democratic voters believing that it’s a betrayal of American values to refuse anyone a shot at the American dream. Trump voters, on the other hand, expect the president to fulfill his campaign promise to deport tens of millions of illegal aliens. Therefore, Trump couldn’t ignore the riots, even if they directly affected only those who oppose him on open borders, and virtually everything else.
Plans to destabilize the second Trump term have been in the works for at least a year and a half, and the Pentagon was virtually announced as home-base of the next anti-Trump plot.
Copied link
The FBI is investigating “any and all monetary connections responsible for these riots.” But some of the funding streams are already evident—they’re the usual sources of left-wing activist groups and donors, like the Neville Roy Singham-funded Party for Socialism and Liberation—which is to say that money isn’t the crucial factor. For instance, Elon Musk’s shutdown of USAID, which former administrator Samantha Power had used as a slush fund to advance progressive causes here and abroad, emptied only the public sector’s progressive piggy bank. America is teeming with private-sector donors, from “disruptive” tech billionaires to the wan and loveless heiresses who are keen to spend their inheritance on violence that impoverishes others. In America, no leftist will ever go hungry.
The crucial issue is never money but leadership. That top figures and institutions of the Democratic Party have lined up behind the protests already suggests we’re not dealing simply with supposedly fringe elements on the far-left flank of the party. In fact, the operatives who in 2024 gamed out this latest anti-Trump effort are among the party bosses who ran the plot against the president during his first term. Among others, there’s Marc Elias, the Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer who paid for the dossier falsely alleging Trump’s ties to Russia; Mary McCord, a former Barack Obama Justice Department official who oversaw federal law enforcement’s unlawful investigation of the Trump circle; and Rosa Brooks, a former Obama Pentagon official who led the Transition Integrity Project, a 2020 war-game exercise forecasting how Trump was likely to contest the flagrant irregularities that would mark that year’s election and shape its aftermath. TIP was also a communications campaign, feeding press reports that outlined what the Democratic Party and allied institutions—including the court system and Congress—were preparing in order to stop the Republican leader and his supporters.
It seems the same Obama-led crew that’s been targeting Trump since 2015 is still running the same op.
DataRepublican has more info on those funding the protests (with your tax dollars):
🚨 JUST RELEASED: Follow the Money Behind the No Kings Rally 🚨
DataRepublican has launched an interactive, open-source map showing how your tax dollars flow to organizations involved in the No Kings rally.
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform is about to focus its investigative powers on Neville Roy Singham, the pro-China Marxist multimillionaire behind many of the destructive far-left demonstrations plaguing the United States in recent years.
The Committee is reportedly issuing a formal document request to Singham over his alleged financial support of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL)—an extremist Marxist group that has been helping to organize violent anti-ICE riots in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
As the main funder of The People’s Forum, Singham, 71, has also bankrolled the “Free Palestine” protests that erupted after 1,400 innocent Israelis were slaughtered by Hamas on October 7, 2023. The People’s Forum works closely with other organizations in Singham’s network, including PSL and the ANSWER Coalition, all of which have been involved in the anti-Israel protests and anti-ICE riots.
PSL describes itself as a revolutionary socialist party that believes “only a revolution can end capitalism and establish socialism.”
The group supports the Communist Party of China (CCP) and argues that “militant political defense of the Chinese government” is necessary to stave off “counterrevolution, imperialist intervention and dismemberment.”
Trump has shifted the Overton window in the culture away from woke, and it’s hard to imagine it shifting all the way back.
Corporations aren’t going to play ball again the way they did after the death of George Floyd. Trump could well lose his legal battle with Harvard and other schools, but they’ve admitted that they need to change. DEI and other race-conscious policies may go subterranean under different rubrics, although that, in itself, is a sign of weakness. Black Lives Matter has been discredited by scandal, and “anti-racism” now feels more like a relic than the hot new thing.
Let’s hope so, but the left’s embrace of wokeness seems essentially religious (or “religious substitute”) in nature, and religions are notoriously hard to stamp out…
The Wagner Group is bugging out of Mali in favor of new Russian military backed “Africa Corps.”
The Russian Wagner Group formally withdrew from Mali, as the Kremlin continues to transition control of its military operations in Africa to the Ministry of Defense–backed Africa Corps. The shift to more overt Russian state military involvement in Africa creates myriad domestic and geopolitical risks for the Kremlin. Russia may accordingly adapt its engagement in Africa to the detriment of its current and prospective partnerships.
According to this Warfronts (AKA Simon Whistler) video, Wagner is leaving because the Jama’at Nusrat al Islam (JNIM) jihadis have been kicking their ass using motorcycle-based battleswarm tactics, which are well suited for sparsely inhabited, mostly desert environments like Mali.
Harris County gives up on its socialist guaranteed income program.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has deported 142 criminal aliens from the Houston area to Mexico.
Among them were eight known gang members, 11 convicted child predators, and one individual who had entered the country illegally 21 separate times.
Collectively, the group illegally entered the country 480 times and accumulated 473 criminal convictions for a wide range of serious crimes, including:
11 convictions for child sex crimes
76 convictions for driving while intoxicated (DWI)
43 convictions for aggravated assault and domestic violence
22 convictions for human smuggling
ICE Houston Field Office Director Bret Bradford said, “Unfortunately, this is not an anomaly. For the past few years, there has been virtually no deterrent to illegal entry into the country.”
As a result, millions of illegal aliens, including violent criminals, child predators, transnational gang members, and foreign fugitives, have poured into the U.S.
Among the most egregious cases:
Benito Charqueno Zavala, 60, was convicted of continuous sexual abuse of a child and is one of the 11 convicted child predators deported.
Johnny Urbina Carillo, 37, was convicted of sexually exploiting a minor and had prior convictions for cocaine possession and illegal reentry.
Luis Angel Garcia-Contreras, 40, a documented member of the Sureños 13 gang, had illegally entered the U.S. 21 times and had four convictions for illegal entry.
Aaron Reitz, a former deputy attorney general under Ken Paxton and recent Trump administration appointee, announced his campaign for the Republican nomination for Texas attorney general.
Reitz made the announcement Thursday, a day after resigning as assistant attorney general for legal policy under Pam Bondi in the Department of Justice. He previously served as Paxton’s deputy attorney general for legal strategy and as chief of staff to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
“We are in a fight for the soul of Texas, our nation, and Western civilization itself,” said Reitz in a campaign statement. “This is no time for half-measures or untested cowards.”
“As Attorney General, I’ll use every ounce of legal firepower to defend President Trump, crush the radical Left, advance the America and Texas First agenda, and look out for everyday Texans,” he added.
State senator Mayes Middleton is already in the race.
Finally, an excuse to dig out this classic meme from the depths of time.
Forty electric busses burn in Philadelphia. “They were parked in such a way that there was NO chance for firefighters to do anything. They could[n’t] get close to the fire. The buses were parke[d] so close together that a fire in 1 bus was almost guaranteed to destroy a bunch of them. And with electric buses mixed in, whatever caused the fire, toxic fumes were going to be released.”
Richard Hammond drives the new Morgan Supersport. I’m not a candidate to spend £125,000 on a two seater sports car, even if it were available in the U.S., but that really is a nice looking car.”
The world’s first American Pope, India and Pakistan trade blows, Israel hits Syria again, Trump’s tariffs bring trade deals, more leftwing waste uncovered, Starbase becomes a real city, and a surprising amount about Disney.
Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elected by the College of Cardinals to succeed the late Pope Francis on Thursday, taking the papal name Pope Leo XIV.
Prevost, 69, is a native of Chicago. He is the 267th Pope of the Roman Catholic Church and the first American Pope in the Church’s history. A former prefect of the influential Dicastery for Bishops, Pope Leo XIV spent decades as a missionary in Peru. Leading up to the conclave, he was considered a compromise candidate and one of the frontrunners because of his missionary work and Vatican experience.
French Cardinal Dominique Mamberti, another rumored candidate for the Papacy, announced Pope Leo XIV’s election on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica to a roaring crowd. The newly elected Pontiff appeared to be emotional during the blessing he delivered from the balcony as he re-introduced himself to the world. Eagle-eyed observers noticed the Pope wore traditional garments for his introductory remarks, but he broke with custom by initially reading his speech from a piece of paper.
Pope Leo XIV paid tribute to Pope Francis in his speech while reiterating the Church’s missionary zeal and charitable heart. He also touched on the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and peace in his address.
“We have to seek together to be a missionary church, a church that builds bridges and dialogue, always ready to accept, like this great piazza, with its arms, we have to show our charity, presence and dialogue with love,” he said.
Pope Francis elevated Prevost to Bishop of Chiclayo in Peru in 2015 and named him a Cardinal in 2023 after the Church played an important role in maintaining stability in Peru amid political crises. He became prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops in January 2023, making him responsible for the appointment of Bishops, an enormously powerful role within the Church.
Ordained in 1982, Prevost received an undergraduate degree from Villanova University in 1977 and then obtained a Master of Divinity from the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. He went off to Rome for degrees in canon law at the Pontifical College of St. Thomas Aquinas before joining the Augustinian mission in Peru in 1985.
“With today’s election of His Holiness, Pope Leo XIV, I cannot help but reflect on what his Augustinian papacy will mean to our University community and our world. Known for his humility, gentle spirit, prudence and warmth, Pope Leo XIV’s leadership offers an opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to our educational mission,” said Villanova president Rev. Peter Donohue.
He spent a notable portion of his career at the Augustinian seminary in Trujillo until returning to Chicago in 1999 to oversee the Augustinian province. Prevost later led the Augustinian order for two terms from 2001 to 2013 until he went back to Peru.
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The new Pope’s name, Leo, suggests a spiritual connection to Pope Leo XIII, a 19th century Pope known for his combination of supporting workers rights and opposing communism.
Let’s hope he keeps up that “opposing communism” tradition…
More union graft off the taxpayer: “Senate DOGE Caucus Leader Uncovers Federal Employees Cashing Taxpayer Checks While Doing Union Work.”
In fiscal year 2019, the Office of Personnel Management reported that federal employees spent 2.6 million hours on union activities, costing taxpayers $135 million. The Biden administration temporarily halted OPM’s data reporting, but the Trump administration resumed it after a request from Ernst.
“Through the course of the past 10 years and studying government efficiency and fraud, waste, and abuse, we have uncovered the issue of taxpayer-funded union time. It’s where we see federal employees—and they can legally do this right now—work during their regular workday, and do that as taxpayer-funded dollars going to their paycheck, but they’re not actually working on their duties as a federal employee,” [Sen. Jodi] Enrst said during a panel discussion on government bureaucracy at the The Hill & Valley Forum this week. “What they’re doing is working for their union, maybe to increase their wages or increase their benefits, on the taxpayers’ dime.”
Ernst also sounded off on “egregious” examples of federal employee misconduct. “Federal employees who were caught, you know, one taking a bubble bath when he was on a Zoom call with other employees—he got ratted out, of course. Those that are on the golf course, we get those all the time,” senator said. Even more shocking cases included a HUD employee who was in prison for driving drunk during work hours, unbeknownst to her supervisor, and a remote worker who ran a full-time business while his mother answered his work emails.
“Somehow her supervisor did not know she was in jail,” she explained about the HUD employee, adding, “And one of the most egregious was one federal employee that was working remotely that had started his own business, full-time business, and during the work hours, his mother was responding to his emails.”
Last month, Ernst introduced the Taxpayer-Funded Union Time Transparency Act to revealed just how much federal employee unions are subsidized by tax dollars after the Biden administration paused the public release of the figures. Rep. Scott Franklin (R-FL) introduced companion legislation in the House of Representatives.
The graft thickens. “Foreign Aid Official Who Resisted DOGE Took Secret Payments After Steering Africa Money To Friend.”
A foreign aid official who refused the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to his agency’s financial records may have had a reason to keep auditors out: he steered illicit contracts to a friend who sent him secret payments, according to a law enforcement affidavit obtained by The Daily Wire.
Mathieu Zahui, chief financial officer of the African Development Foundation, refused to grant DOGE access to its books and told the White House that the agency would not acknowledge President Donald Trump’s appointee as chairman of the board. After a dramatic showdown in March, DOGE physically took over the building with U.S. Marshals, but control of the agency is now the subject of a lawsuit objecting to “swooping in with DOGE staff, demanding access to sensitive information systems” — an objection that reads differently in light of the criminal probe.
For years, workers at the small, USAID-adjacent federal agency focused on Africa have told oversight bodies about allegations of self-dealing, procurement violations, and mysterious offshore bank accounts, many of them involving Zahui. But little was done about it, several told The Daily Wire.
One action that raised eyebrows was Zahui’s insistence on directing both grants and contracts to a company in Kenya called Ganiam Ltd. According to spending records, it was awarded nearly $800,000 in contracts without competition. For example, a one-year, $350,000 contract for “transport, travel, relocation” services was executed in March 2020, when few people were traveling or holding conferences because of coronavirus.
According to a search warrant application uncovered by The Daily Wire, USAID’s inspector general established by August 2024 that the company’s owner had secretly wired money to Zahui’s personal bank account at times that matched up with the federal contracts. To date, the Department of Justice has not charged either man with a crime.
Ganiam Ltd. is owned by Maina Gakure, whom Zahui has known for decades. Both worked at the Department of Veterans Affairs in San Diego and later moved to Fairfax, Virginia. Gakure had been in charge of awarding contracts at the VA, then created his own company designed to get government construction contracts by taking advantage of a minority preference program. It was called Ganiam LLC and was based out of a house in Virginia. Gakure similarly created a company based in Kenya called Gakure Ltd. The African Development Foundation is permitted by law to give grants only to African entities.
Overseas aid is just a gigantic bucket of graft for Democratic Party grandees. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
The Trump administration’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 seeks to eliminate over $15 billion in funding associated with Biden’s expensive and inane “Green New Deal” initiatives, specifically targeting “clean energy”, the “climate crisis”, and environmental programs.
The White House said the energy budget proposal cancels more than $15 billion in carbon capture and renewable energy funding from the bipartisan infrastructure law that former President Joe Biden, a Democrat, signed in 2021. It also proposes to cancel $6 billion from that law for EV chargers.
“The Biden Administration spent more than three years implementing these programs, but built only a small number of chargers because it prioritized over-regulating and ‘climate justice’ goals,” the White House said. “EV chargers should be built just like gas stations: with private sector resources disciplined by market forces.”
The plan reorients Energy Department funding toward research and development of technologies that could produce an abundance of oil, gas, coal and critical minerals, nuclear reactors and advanced nuclear fuels, the White House said without further details.
Winning. “Supreme Court Allows Trump to Enforce Transgender Military Ban.”
Over the last three years, Minh Phuong Ngoc Vong, a U.S. citizen, pulled down $970,000 working at a nail salon in Bowie, Maryland.
But Vong wasn’t just filing nails.
He was also filing applications at U.S. tech companies for IT and development jobs, some of which had government contracts requiring security clearance. However, Vong wasn’t performing any of the duties at those jobs; he was outsourcing all his work virtually to China and North Korea.
This alone is sketchy. But the reason he was caught shows the true severity of the crime.
An unnamed Virginia-based tech company wanted to include him on a job that needed more security clearance, but when they submitted his credentials to the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency for a secret clearance, he was flagged as having another job with security clearance, namely working with the Federal Aviation Administration.
The Virginia company fired him for having more than one job, but when the CEO showed his picture to the lead-developer, they realized that the man they hired was not the same one who was showing up to virtual meetings and doing the work.
As a result of Vong’s fraudulent misrepresentations, these government agencies unknowingly granted Vong’s co-conspirators access to sensitive U.S. government systems, which they accessed from China.
My respect for the hustle ends at creating gaping security holes for the commies.
Following India’s attack on terrorist bases in Pakistan, both countries have launched escalating attacks on the other.
Friday has seen the border conflict between India and Pakistan escalate once again, with The New York Times describing that it has escalated to the most expansive military clashes in decades. Entire large expanses of border zones are swarming with drones overhead – a first in the history of the long-running rivalry.
“There were reports of nonstop barrages along the border overnight into Friday, as well as reports of attacks by Pakistan into the Indian city of Jammu, a part of Kashmir,” the Times report says, citing that drone attacks have been exchanged along India’s entire western border.
India’s Operation Sindoor has not just avenged the deaths of the 26 people in the Pahalgam attack, but also had a far-reaching impact on the global fight against terrorism. The Indian Armed Forces’ precision strikes on Wednesday reportedly killed Abdul Rauf Azhar, the operational head of Jaish-e-Mohammad and mastermind of the IC-814 hijacking.
Azhar was involved in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. Hence, yesterday’s strikes on nine terror hubs in PoK and Pakistan delivered justice to the American-Jewish journalist.
Suchomimus says that India’s missile strikes were quite precise.
An aside: As of this writing, there’s not a single entry on this Indo-Pakistani conflict on The Institute for The Study of War’s homepage. Look guys, I know you’re busy with Ukraine, Iran, and China, but given that this is a war between two nuclear-armed nations that just went hot, do you think you could spare an analyst or two to, you know, study it?
President Donald Trump and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a historic trade deal between the two countries on Thursday that Trump says will include billions of dollars of increased market access for American exports, including beef, ethanol and other farm products.
The president, speaking from the Oval Office, said the details of the deal with Britain will be finalized in the coming weeks, but said the close U.S. ally has agreed to “eliminate numerous non-tariff barriers” under the agreement, which Trump touted as a “great deal for both countries.”
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the deal would create $5 billion of opportunity for U.S. exports after Britain identified products it was importing from other countries that it could instead purchase from the U.S.
Trump said the deal will also include a “historic” economic security component and said that Britain will “fast track” American goods through its customs process.
Under the deal, the U.K. will still be subject to Trump’s 10 percent baseline tariff that he has imposed on all countries.
Lutnick said the U.S. has agreed to lower its 25 percent tariff on imports of British cars to just 10 percent. He also indicated Rolls Royce engines and plane parts will be imported tariff-free, while Britain is set to buy $10 billion of Boeing airplanes. Meanwhile, tariffs on British steel exports will drop from 25 percent to zero.
If all that weren’t enough, “Israel carried out waves of airstrikes against terrorists and military targets in Syria, including the capital city of Damascus, after jihadists — reportedly backed by the new Islamist regime — launched attacks on the country’s non-Muslim Druze minority, killing at least 100 people in two days of fighting.”
According to the 20-page document, Schiff may have violated Maryland Code §7-401 and California’s Election and Tax Codes, including statutes that mirror the allegations recently leveled against New York Attorney General Letitia James—particularly in the realms of mortgage and insurance fraud.
According to the complaint, “In 2009, Adam Schiff’s residence and voting registration was called to question in a House Ethics Committee hearing. Adam Schiff, despite claiming to live and represent the people in the state of California, filed and reaffirmed through refinancing documents, his primary residence at 8204 Windsor View Terrace, Potomac Maryland, 28054.”
The complaint further alleges, “Adam Schiff is on the record having acknowledged the mortgage document filings [of Maryland as his primary residence] during a House Ethics hearing in 2009… He made the claim of ‘mistake,’ thereby acknowledging the appearance of possible mortgage fraud.”
But the complaint doesn’t stop there. It outlines a disturbing pattern of what Maryland law defines as a “pattern of mortgage fraud,” involving repeated false representations of Schiff’s primary residence across multiple properties and years. Under Maryland Code §7-407(c), such conduct could constitute a felony punishable by up to 20 years imprisonment or a $100,000 fine—or both.
Rules are for the little people…
“The Army cancels the M10 Booker, a ‘light tank’ that was too heavy.” I always thought the Booker suffered from “neither fish nor fowl” syndrome, and that was before the Russo-Ukraine War’s use of drones necessitated a radical rethink of the deployment of armored vehicles on the battlefield. (Hat tip: : Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Friedrich Merz was elected chancellor of Germany after facing a historic loss in the Bundestag. In the second round, 325 lawmakers voted for Merz, bringing him past the 316-vote threshold. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has already demanded that Merz step down and call for new elections following his loss in the first round.
Merz’s initial loss marked a historic moment, as it was the first of its kind in post-war Germany.
The result came as a major upset, as Merz was widely expected to win, thanks to a coalition deal involving his party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU); its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU); and the Social Democratic Party (SPD).
Evidently continuing unchecked, unassimilated Muslim immigration remains the highest priority of Europe’s ruling elites.
Romania’s prime minister will resign on Monday after a conservative opposition leader who aligned himself with Donald Trump scored a resounding first-round victory in the Black Sea nation’s presidential election.
Bloomberg reports, that Marcel Ciolacu informed coalition partners of the decision to submit his resignation in a meeting Monday in Bucharest, according to people familiar with the decision who spoke on condition of anonymity. The government will be led by an interim premier until coalition parties choose Ciolacu’s successor. There are no current plans for an early election.
The prime minister’s decision was a response to the electoral defeat of the coalition’s preferred candidate in Sunday’s first-round contest, in which George Simion of the ultranationalist Alliance for the Union of Romanians secured more than 40%.
He’ll face off against Nicusor Dan, the centrist mayor of Bucharest.
Trump’s new NIH director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is wasting no time reforming the corrupt NIH.
As a part of a general phase-out of some animal testing, Trump’s appointees have closed the last remaining Fauci-supported and funded beagle lab on the NIH campus.
We all remember the infamous experiments funded by Fauci’s NIH that forced beagles to have their faces eaten by sand flies, with their vocal cords cut to take away their ability to cry in pain:
Western Carolina University is not changing its Title IX policy to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive action after the school was embroiled in a dispute last year over a male attempting to use women’s bathrooms.
WCU administrators refused to update their Title IX policy to comply with Trump’s order restoring sex segregation to federally funded colleges and universities and have instead continued to allow males in women’s spaces, according to public records provided to National Review by right-leaning campus watchdog group Speech First.
“For years, advocates have worried that Title IX procedures on campus have become weaponized – and these emails highlight that such concerns are indeed well-founded,” said Nicole Neily, acting executive director of Speech First.
“Universities across the country are actively ignoring and resisting the Trump Administration on Title IX, which underscores the need for strong action from both Congress and the executive branch to provide clarity for administrators and safety for women and girls.”
Far left college administrators don’t get to unilaterally redefine the statutory definition of “woman.”
The Harris County District Attorney’s Office (HCDAO) announced Friday that four felony charges pending against former Harris County Health Director Barbie Robinson had been dropped.
“After an exhaustive review of the evidence concluded by career prosecutors, the HCDAO has determined that the State cannot prove any of the charged offenses beyond a reasonable doubt and that pursuing this case is not in the interests of justice,” according to an official statement from HCDAO.
Robinson was fired from her post last September, and in November former District Attorney Kim Ogg announced Robinson would be charged with misuse of official information. In December, HCDAO charged Robinson with additional felonies, including tampering with a government record and two counts of fraudulent securing of document execution.
The charges stemmed from allegations that Robinson used her private email to coordinate with International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) officials regarding a $31 million contract to craft a social services program called Accessing Coordinated Care and Empowering Self Sufficiency (ACCESS). IBM would later successfully bid to create the ACCESS project for the county.
Before beginning her work for Harris County, Robinson served as the director of the Sonoma County Department of Health Services where she also worked with IBM to create a nearly identical program.
According to emails obtained by the Texas Rangers, Robinson exchanged emails with IBM officials shortly after she was hired by Harris County. Communications included discussion of “sole-source” contracts that could be exempted from competitive bids.
In July 2021, the county paid IBM $45,000 to put on a workshop to discuss the ACCESS program, and in November 2021 Robinson continued to use her personal email to coordinate with the company to craft a scope of work document in the weeks before the county issued a public request for proposals.
Robinson had also drawn scrutiny in 2024 for communications surrounding a $6 million contract awarded to DEMA, a California-based company selected to run Harris County’s Holistic Assistance Response Teams.
Scoring documents obtained by the Houston Chronicle showed that DEMA won the contract by a fraction of a point over a state-funded agency with experience in responding to 911 calls.
Early in 2021, Robinson had been instrumental in bringing DEMA to operate COVID-19 testing sites in Harris County. That year, DEMA CEO Michelle Patino offered her a contract for legal consulting, even though Robinson is not a practicing attorney.
The county has since severed ties with DEMA.
Of course, Soros-backed social justice warrior Sean Teare defeated Ogg in the Democratic primary last year.
“Sean Combs Was Once Celebrated at the Met Gala. He’s Now on Trial. He was lauded by Anna Wintour, was a regular guest at the gala, and his influence on the current exhibition is undeniable.” Diddy is the perfect poster boy for the Met Gala: A self-interested hedonist flaunting his wealth under the guise of virtue signaling.
Woke backlash has struck yet again and this time it’s among car giants Jaguar Land Rover who are currently on the search to replace their advertising agency after its controversial rebrand. Jaguar’s rebrand video went viral for all the wrong reasons back in December last year and were criticised for their new look which was described as “the biggest change in Jaguar’s history – a complete reinvention for the brand”. Despite the Jaguar vehicle being noticeably absent in the brand’s new relaunch video, other iconic brand images were left out too, including Jaguar’s classic leaping-cat icon.
This was replaced with futuristic pink moonscape images, dotted with boulders and included a cast of diverse and eccentrically-dressed models. The result of this rebrand, however, was met with harsh backlash with many devoted Jaguar Land Rover lover’s not shy about their dismay towards the car company, resulting in Jaguar now launching a review for a new global creative account.
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But despite their best efforts to appeal to all, the results were met with loss particularly among its sales which plunged by more than 25% in 2024.
The brand also recorded selling 33,320 cars in the same year – a stark drop from the 61,661 that were sold in 2022 and 161,601 sold in 2019.
Funny how literally everyone but Jaguar leadership saw this coming.
Plus-size far left Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker dresses up for Star Wars Day and promptly gets roasted. “Sith Lard” and “Boba Fat” are two of the better ones…
Metaphor alert: Sovereignty defeats Journalism. Not since philly Eight Belles came up lame and had to be euthanized on the track during Hillary Clinton’s run against Obama in 2008 has there been such a potent horse-racing metaphor for the current moment…
Disney strongly supports the gay community…so it’s building its newest park in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The UAE criminalizes homosexuality. The Ministry of Education, I kid you not, “explicitly prohibits discussing gender identity, homosexuality or any other behavior deemed unacceptable to the UAE’s society’ in class.”
Islam is the state religion. Sharia is the source of law.
Sharia law…so same-sex sexual activity is punishable by death.
Consistency and integrity are for the little people…
Random person in New York City: “I tripped! I’m suing the property owner and New York City government!” City government: “Hey, we don’t own anything there. Take us off the suit.” Property owner: “Oh, you don’t own anything? Well, I looked at the deed map, and you’re right. So I’ve put up a fence over the sidewalk and the street parking the map says I own.” City: “No fair! Now we’re fining you!”
