More of the Democrat election fraud that doesn’t exist, more Democrat welfare state fraud, a commie scumbag gets indicted, Ukraine returns to hammering Russia’s oil infrastructure, a very busy week for Kash Patel, the BBC wants us to sympathize with Muslims who enable child rape, and the best bagels in America are found in…Dallas?
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
“Left’s election fraud denials crumble as DOJ exposes two-decade-long California cheating scheme. FBI Director Kash Patel says prior administrations looked the other way on election cheating but ‘those days are over.'”
Despite evidence to the contrary, liberal voting activists have spent years minimizing cheating concerns and portraying those who want to investigate such problems as “election deniers.”
But the FBI and the departments of Justice and Homeland Security are now systematically exposing electoral fraud – from non-citizen voting to ballot-box-stuffing schemes that are turning the table in epic fashion.
The latest strike came Monday when a longtime voting activist in California reached a deal with federal prosecutors to admit to illegally paying homeless people to sign election petitions and paying people to register to vote. The two-decade scheme allegedly leveraged the Democrat-run state’s lax mail-in voting system, which sends ballot forms to everyone whether they ask for them or not.
The felony charge and plea deal announced Monday against Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, 64, of Marina Del Ray, Calif., not only signals an investigation into others, it likely will provide legal fodder to the Justice Department’s efforts to force California to turn over its voter registration database to look for other abuses.
That case, and others like it against blue states, are working their way through the federal courts in a major initiative led by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.
Prosecutors said Armstrong spent two decades collecting ballot registration forms, including in California’s high-profile voter initiatives. On occasion, Brown targeted homeless people on Skid Row in Los Angeles, offering them money to fill out forms, and even sometimes letting them use her own address to put on the forms.
The plea deal mentioned Armstrong was paid by “coordinators” to gather signatures for ballots, and she used some of that money to enlist people to register to vote and sign petitions.
“Because her coordinators only paid for signatures attributable to registered voters, Armstrong endeavored to ensure the people who signed her petitions were registered voters,” the DOJ said in announcing the plea deal.
“Armstrong regularly paid and offered to pay individuals cash, usually in amounts between $2 and $3, to induce them to sign her petitions,” DOJ said, adding in January she “knowingly and willfully paid another person to register to vote. She paid the person for the purpose of causing that person to register to vote in federal elections.”
Democrats have hundreds of ways to cheat in elections, and one by one the Trump Administration is shutting them down and prosecuting the perps.
A vast improvement: “Trump administration had full year of zero border releases.”
While campaigning in 2024, President Donald Trump pledged to fix the nation’s broken immigration system, a system exacerbated by the rogue incompetence of the Biden administration. Now, after 18 months into his second term, Trump has maintained his excellence in border security and upheld his campaign promise regarding illegal immigration, as the Trump administration has achieved a year of zero releases at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Whereas the Biden administration wantonly permitted, if not outright encouraged, border security agencies to release illegal immigrants into the United States, Trump has ensured such ineptitudes would not happen under his watch. After innocent victims such as Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, Jocelyn Nungaray, and many others were murdered by violent illegal immigrants, the Trump administration utilized every possible avenue to ensure that such atrocities would not recur. The first barrier to accomplishing this was limiting border releases.
It is a remarkable success that shows the country’s border security issues stem from failed leadership and a failed president. Biden’s atrocious border policies made the country more dangerous. Trump’s policies made the country safe again. It’s a success that should not go unrecognized.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin touted the historic feat in a press release.
“Twelve straight months of ZERO releases at the border. Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, we are delivering the most secure border in American history,” Mullin said. “The days of catch and release are over. We are enforcing the nation’s laws and sending illegal aliens back to their home countries.”
Today – 15 individuals have been indicted for over $90 million in an alleged massive healthcare fraud scheme in Minnesota, after a sweeping FBI investigation with @TheJusticeDept
and our Interagency Partners.
These charges involve the two LARGEST Medicaid fraud cases ever charged in this district and first-of-their kind charges involving 7 additional Medicaid programs.
As alleged, the defendants defrauded Minnesota public healthcare resources for tens of millions, targeting programs such as Housing Stabilization Services, Child Care, Medicaid programs, Individualized Home Supports (IHS), and more.
In one case, defendants even developed a scheme worth over $40 million to target the Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention (EIDBI) – an autism healthcare program – paying kickbacks to parents who fraudulently used autism centers to diagnose children with autism regardless of medical necessity, and billing for services not actually provided. This not only defrauded taxpayers, but robbed valuable resources from families truly in need.
President Trump gave this law enforcement team a mandate to investigate and systematically dismantle this exact kind of public fraud in America – which grossly abuses and mismanages money from hardworking American taxpayers – and that’s exactly what we’re doing. Today’s indictment in a massive moment in this effort.
Gavin Newsom is, in many ways, the most corrupt governor in America.
By that, I don’t mean that he spends his time and effort skimming off the top to put money in his own pockets. I have no evidence that he does, although an awful lot of money flows to and through the fingers of his wife. His personal wealth is not staggering by California standards—estimated at a few tens of millions of dollars—and he has it through his relationship with the Getty Oil family. Sort of a nepo-baby once removed.
His corruption is more in the style of Putin—using power to make others rich and indebted to him, and he has pillaged the coffers of the City of San Francisco and the State of California in order to do so. The ultimate goal is ultimate power, and his path to that power has been to leverage the power he has gained at each step up the ladder to enrich a group of allies who will, in turn, fund his rise further.
In 2023 Newsom was given a bill to sign that would have required private insurers to cover hearing aids for children. Many other states require insurers to cover them.
According to NY Post, Newsom vetoed the bill and decided instead to have the state provide the hearing aids. The result was $23 million spent on hearing aids for 300 people. About $76,000 a person. About 20,000 children in CA still need hearing aids.
Well done Gavin.
The scale of Newsom’s corruption is almost beyond comprehension. California, if it were its own country, would have the fourth-largest economy in the world. Its economy is about twice the size of Russia’s, and its state budget is about 50% larger than Russia’s, despite having no war to fund against Ukraine or anybody else besides the taxpayers of California.
That gives a lot of room for corrupt spending, especially when nobody is looking to uncover it.
The other day, I took a look at Newsom’s Baby 2 Baby free diaper program, which is an obvious scam, paying highly inflated prices for cheap Mexican diapers to an NGO run by friends of his wife, who all make nice salaries.
The United States has indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro, a senior Trump administration official confirmed. A federal grand jury in Florida indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro along with five other defendants, according to court filings made public Wednesday.
The charges mark a major escalation in a long-running US legal case tied to the 1996 downing of two civilian aircraft, an incident that killed four people and has remained a flashpoint in US-Cuba relations for decades.
Castro, 94, served as Cuba’s defense minister at the time of the shootdown before becoming president in 2008, following the illness of his brother Fidel Castro. Fidel Castro died in 2016.
Remember that the commie rulers have a secret corporation (GAESA (Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A.) that allows them to rob Cubans blind. “How is it possible for a military company to control 40% of the national economy, accumulate $14.5 billion in bank deposits, not publish financial statements, avoid paying taxes in foreign currency, and not be accountable to the National Assembly?”
Hope you enjoyed your Victory Day parade, Vlad. “Moscow Attacked By Drones: Oil Depot, Microchip Factory & Airport All Hit.” The chip factory is Angstrem, which was reportedly running some very ancient process technology indeed. But I bet a bunch of what they could produce was used by the Russian military.
Gary Grief, the former executive director of the Texas Lottery Commission, has been re-indicted in connection with a rigged jackpot following the dismissal of a prior indictment.
A summons was issued one day after Texas Scorecard originally reported that an initial indictment against Grief had been quietly dismissed by the Travis County District Attorney’s office.
The reissued indictment, a carbon copy of the first, and the new summons come amid ongoing scrutiny of the handling of the high-profile case.
Travis County District Attorney José Garza told Texas Scorecard Thursday he could not currently comment on the matter, but that his office would release more information on the case soon.
Before the latest indictment came to light, Gov. Greg Abbott called the initial dismissal “incomprehensible.”
Snip.
Court records posted to X by Dylan McKim with KXAN-AUSTIN indicate that not only was Grief summoned, but the Texas Lottery Commission itself is named. A separate indictment identifies Ed Rogers and Clay Kidd alongside Grief as “managerial agents” acting on behalf of the agency.
Notably, Ryan Mindell, Grief’s right-hand man at the Texas Lottery Commission in 2023 and his short-lived successor, is not currently summoned in connection with the case. Mindell quit the commission after lawmakers called for his removal during the 2025 legislative session.
The original indictment against Grief was secured in April 2026 on a first-degree felony charge of abuse of official capacity involving more than $300,000, stemming from a rigged $95 million jackpot.
The charge came after a year-long investigation by the Texas Rangers into Grief’s controversial authorization of third-party companies that resold lottery tickets on behalf of customers, effectively enabling the online sale of Texas lottery tickets without legislative approval.
During the 2023 legislative session, Grief misled members of the Senate about resellers operating openly in Texas. The practice was ultimately outlawed during the 2025 legislative session after revelations that couriers facilitated bulk purchases, leading to a $95 million Lotto Texas jackpot win in April 2023 that was reportedly rigged by an international gambling syndicate.
Farmer and former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein prevailed over Representative Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) in a closely watched primary race on Tuesday evening, bringing to an end the most expensive U.S. House primary on record.
Massie, who has represented Kentucky’s fourth district since 2012, is one of several lawmakers to lose a seat this cycle thanks to a retribution campaign Trump has undertaken against legislators who have dared to cross him.
The bad blood between Massie and Trump dates back to the president’s first term. As early as 2020, Trump called the Kentucky Republican a “third-rate grandstander” after Massie voted against the president’s Covid-19 relief package.
While Trump and Massie seemed to make amends, with Trump endorsing Massie for reelection in 2022, the president’s second term has seen the pair butt heads repeatedly over a slew of issues, from the Iran war to tariffs.
Trump on Monday blasted Massie as an “obstructionist and a fool.”
Massie, who also controversially opposed Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” worked with Democratic Representative Ro Khanna of California to advance a bill in Congress to compel the Trump administration to release government files on deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Massie’s opposition to U.S. aid to Israel and his vote against a resolution condemning antisemitism made him a target of not only the president but the Republican Jewish Coalition and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as well. Both groups have spent more than $4 million on anti-Massie ads.
You can stray from the party on an issue or two and still survive, but when you make a habit of working with Democrats against stated Republican priorities time after time, expect a reckoning.
Republicans have one thing going for them in the midterms: Fat stacks of cash.
The Republican National Committee ended the month of April with more cash on hand than at any other point in the group’s history, as closely contested midterm elections draw near and the fate of Republicans’s majority in the House and Senate hang in the balance.
The RNC raised $18.6 million in April, bringing its total cash on hand to $123.8 million, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
“Republicans have the candidates, resources, and momentum needed to win the midterms, but we cannot let up now,” RNC Chairman Joe Gruters said in a statement. “Democrats will spend whatever it takes to try to stop President Trump’s America First agenda, which is why the RNC is already investing aggressively in our ground game and election integrity operation, including deploying 34 State Directors and Election Integrity Directors across 17 key battleground states to drive turnout and secure victories this November.”
Democrats lie to everyone, including themselves: “Harris Campaign Didn’t Go Negative Enough on Trump, DNC Autopsy Concludes.”
A newly-released Democratic National Committee report looking back at how the party lost the 2024 election concludes that then-Vice President Kamala Harris lost, in part, because she failed to focus sufficient negative attention on President Trump.
“The national campaign did not effectively drive Trump’s negatives, and the White House did not effectively support Vice President Harris over three and half years to improve her standing before the candidate switch,” reads the autopsy, written by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, who was asked by the DNC to investigate why the party failed to wing big in 2024.
Rivera goes on to suggest that Democrats failed to remind Americans why they disliked Trump in his first term.
“The idea Trump’s negatives were ‘baked in’ is a major failure of analysis and reality, given how his favorability has cratered less than a year into this term,” he adds.
Rivera’s finding that Harris wasn’t sufficiently negative is curious given that Harris and her surrogates incessantly depicted Trump as a threat to democracy who revealed his true colors on January 6.
Harris attacked Trump repeatedly during the campaign, calling her opponent “increasingly unhinged and unstable” and telling CNN that she believed he was a fascist who wanted “unchecked power.”
Party officials interviewed hundreds of Democrats in all 50 states to create the report. Democrats had asked DNC Chairman Ken Martin for months to publicly release the findings, but Martin chose to do so only after being “presented with CNN’s reporting about much of its contents,” according to the outlet, which first obtained the nearly 200-page report.
The report is littered with notes drafted by DNC editors pointing out that many of Rivera’s claims are unsubstantiated and/or contradict publicly available reporting.
Yay think? It wasn’t the fact that, oh, Harris was a cringingly bad candidate, that Biden was an ambulatory corpse whose headless administration was a disaster for ordinary Americans thanks to inflation and letting a flood of illegal aliens enter the country, or that actual voters hate transsexual madness and social justice lunacy? But no, telling the truth would offend the Party’s toxic cadres of intersectional grievance mongers. They’d rather lie to themselves and continue to lose rather than being dragged on BlueSky.
This trucker is in Eden, Ohio, and just parked at a truck stop where he got a bite to eat at an Indian restaurant.
(Sikh Indians now own 20% of all trucking businesses in North America.)
He says foreign truckers are being hit HARD after the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that logistics companies can be held liable for hiring unsafe drivers.
None of ‘em can get loads out of Ohio today. And I was talking to the Iman guy while I was in there at the Punjabi place getting something to eat, and he said that the reason they they can’t get freight out of Ohio today is because the freight workers won’t work with them anymore.
Apparently, what has happened, is yesterday they had the Supreme Court ruling that brokers could be held liable for accidents with carriers with red flags. Apparently, the trickle trickle-down effect happened like THAT.
A leftist might look at this and say it’s racist. An “inequitable” number of carriers with foreign drivers are being excluded??
Well, as it turns out, these truckers just so happen to be the ones that are the least safe.
I was looking up a few of these DoT numbers for these guys, and they do have pretty substantial track record of unsafe behavior – accidents, high out-of-service rates, things like that.
Many foreigners, even illegals, have been able to game the system, getting CDLs issued by Democrat-led states like New York and California even though they are not qualified. CDL schools run by migrants have participated in this fraud for years.
Meanwhile, the number of deaths involving 18 wheelers on U.S. roads has risen 50% in just the last 15 years. Thanks to SCOTUS, that might reverse very quickly in the near future.
As a bonus, Americans will have a chance to get back into a trucking industry that’s excluded them in favor of cheap, unsafe, illegal labor!!
The FBI announced on Wednesday that they were shutting down a scam call center in India which has defrauded hundreds of elderly Americans out of millions of dollars.
Snip.
Former CEO Adam Young, 42, of Miami, FL, and former CSO Harrison Gevirtz, 33, of Las Vegas, NV, admitted to operating a business that provided telecommunications-related services, including telephone numbers, call routing services, call tracking, and call forwarding services, to customers they knew were engaged in tech-support fraud schemes. Young and Gevirtz each pleaded guilty to misprision of a felony, in violation of federal law. They are scheduled to be sentenced on June 16, 2026. The sentences imposed will be determined by a federal district judge after consideration of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors …
Indian citizens Sahil Narang, Chirag Sachdeva, Abrar Anjum and Manish Kumar, were convicted of charges related to telemarketing fraud schemes based in the Republic of India that targeted and defrauded Americans of millions of dollars, many of them vulnerable to fraud schemes due to age or infirmity. The investigation also contributed to the conviction of another individual, Jagmeet Singh Virk, in the U.S. District Court for the Norther [sic] District of California. The investigation further revealed that call centers based in India utilized Young and Gervitz’s business to route their ‘tech fraud’ scheme calls and, in some instances, advised those fraudsters on methods intended to reduce complaints and prevent account terminations.
Now if they could just shut down every Indian company pretending to be an American company (a plague among temporary and contract work firms), that would greatly improve the situation for American job seekers.
“Texas Children’s Hospital Agrees to Create Detransition Clinic, Pay $10 Million in ‘Historic’ Settlement. The agreement stems from a years-long investigation into alleged Medicaid fraud tied to sex-change procedures on minors.”
A years-long controversy surrounding gender mutilation procedures at Texas Children’s Hospital have culminated in a sweeping settlement with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that will force the hospital to pay $10 million, fire five doctors, halt “gender-transition” procedures, and create the nation’s first “Detransition Clinic.”
According to Paxton’s office, the settlement resolves allegations that Texas Children’s improperly billed Texas Medicaid for sex-change interventions using false diagnosis codes despite longstanding state policy prohibiting Medicaid coverage for such procedures.
Under the agreement, Texas Children’s will establish a multidisciplinary clinic intended to provide care to patients who previously underwent “gender-transition” procedures. The hospital will fully fund the clinic for at least five years, with services provided free of charge to patients.
The settlement also requires Texas Children’s to terminate and permanently revoke privileges for five physicians accused of performing the procedures. The hospital further agreed not to provide “gender-transition” services moving forward and to adopt new ethics and compliance measures.
We asked the sick leftwing freaks not to mutilate children in the name of their perverse social justice religion, and they just couldn’t help themselves.
[sigh]: “Federal Judge Again Blocks Texas Law Allowing Arrest and Deportation of Illegal Immigrants.”
Just one day before a controversial Texas law on illegal immigration was set to take effect, a federal judge granted a new injunction saying most of the law would not pass constitutional muster before the U.S. Supreme Court.
U.S. District Judge David A. Ezra, who blocked implementation of Texas Senate Bill (SB) 4 in 2024, opined that the law “threatens the fundamental notion that the United States must regulate immigration with one voice.”
Approved by lawmakers in 2023, SB 4, filed by Texas Sen. Charles Perry (R-Lubbock), established a criminal offense for illegal entry into the state from a foreign nation, and provided a mechanism for judges to order offenders to return to their nation of origin.
Implementation was delayed until the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a pending lawsuit last month on the grounds that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue, clearing the way for the law to take effect on May 15.
Earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Texas Civil Rights Project filed a new challenge on behalf of two unnamed individuals who said they could be arrested and subject to SB 4’s provisions.
Ezra’s injunction applies to four provisions of SB 4: criminal penalties for re-entry without authorization; authorizing magistrates to order deportation; criminalization of failure to comply with a Texas magistrate’s deportation order; and SB 4’s requirement that magistrates continue a prosecution even when a person has a pending immigration case under federal law.
In his opinion released last week, Ezra noted that while federal authorities can elicit help with immigration enforcement actions from state and local law enforcement, SB 4 would clash with precedent set in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling in Arizona v. United States.
The offences mainly took place in Dewsbury and Batley, north Kirklees, and involved three girls.
One was just 12 years old when the offences started in 1995. They ended in 2003.
The trials began in 2023 and the perps were convicted and sentenced in 2024 through late 2025. The reason we are only learning their sentences now is because there was a court-ordered ban on reporting (they can do this in England)
Reporting restrictions had been put in place to ‘safeguard the fairness and integrity of the court process.’
Translation: They were to ensure the safety of Labour poll numbers from outraged Britons…
California is the land of expensive, useless bureaucracies, which Democrats allow to do nothing but impose more regulations on Californians.
In 2023, California created a fast-food council to micromanage fast-food restaurants from wages to working conditions. The council, the first of its kind in the United States, exists to justify California’s fast-food minimum wage hike, which jumped to $20 an hour, and the council has the ability to increase over the coming years. By now, you know how this went: Fast-food restaurants shut down, cut jobs, cut worker hours, raised prices, or did some combination of those things.
More notably, though, the council that is required to meet at least twice a year does not really exist. The last subcommittee meeting for the council took place in February 2025. It has now been over a year since the council has done anything, and even then, it could not be bothered to gather all nine members. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) plucked the council’s chairman for a different state appointment after that last subcommittee meeting, and it hasn’t gathered since.
Despite this, the council was still allocated $1.1 million from the state budget.
Fender won a lawsuit (by default) in Germany, and now it’s suing every guitar maker in the world that makes guitars that look even remotely like Stratocasters. “The decision to enforce the EU-based ruling on US builders marks a huge development in the case, and the outcome of such legal battles could very well reshape the guitar industry as we know it.” I rather suspect this strategy isn’t going to work out well for them…
Google is about to ruin the Internet. “Google is changing its search engine to focus on AI recommendations and NOT links to websites, according to its Google I/O presentation. And it’s a wrap. That’s it for the free and open internet. Niche publications and independent voices will likely get completely shut out of organic search as the internet becomes pay-to-win.” Another reason to stick to DuckDuckGo.
And speaking of science fiction first editions, I’m going to be sending a new book catalog out next week. Drop me a line if you want a copy.
Critical Drinker reviews Pragmata, mostly enjoys it. If the terminally online left hadn’t freaked out about this game, I doubt I ever would have heard about it…
Once again, the Babylon Bee is doing straight up reporting from LA: “New Polls Show Dead Heat Between ‘Make Everything Worse’ Candidate And ‘Fix Everything’ Candidate.”
Happy Halloween! Biden’s FBI turned January 6 investigations into a vast monitoring program aimed at Republicans, the Schumer Shutdown continues, a whole of disturbing illegal alien sex offenders, Milei wins again in Argentina, Russian floating crane does what Russian ships do best, the autopen scandal deepens, and one really weird gun.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Arctic Frost was an operation by the Biden FBI to use the half-assed January 6 riot to turn the federal government into a Stasi aimed at Republicans, including “Nearly 200 Subpoenas Targeting 400 GOP-Linked Individuals, Entities.”
The Biden-era FBI’s “Arctic Frost” investigation into President Trump and the broader GOP’s role in the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot was more wide-ranging than previously known, according to newly released documents showing the bureau issued nearly 200 subpoenas targeting more than 400 Republican entities and individuals as part of the probe.
Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) released records on Wednesday showing 197 subpoenas were issued to individuals and businesses during the FBI’s “Arctic Frost” investigation targeting 430 GOP individuals and entities. He obtained the records through protected whistleblower disclosures.
Financial institutions, Trump-aligned political organizations and operatives, conservative think tanks, and payroll companies were among the subpoena recipients, according to a list compiled by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Federal investigators sought communications between the targeted individuals and media companies, prominent Trump-world officials, and legislative staff. The investigative efforts also encompassed MAGA fundraising efforts and donors.
Several GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the panel Grassley leads as chairman, spoke at a press conference Wednesday afternoon unveiling the new information.
“What is revealed in those 1700 pages of documents, those 197 subpoenas, is nothing short of a Biden administration enemies list,” Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) said.
ohnson said he knew most of the 38 individuals from his state on the Biden administration’s “enemies list” and urged his fellow lawmakers to assist the Trump administration with getting to the bottom of the FBI’s conduct.
“This extended far beyond President Trump and extended to President Trump’s supporters not only here in the United States Senate but more broadly,” Senator John Cornyn (R., Texas) lamented.
“Merrick Garland was a member of Joe Biden’s cabinet. He was willing to do whatever Joe Biden and his political operation wanted him to do, including destroying President Trump,” Cornyn added.
The “Arctic Frost” investigation looked into the role President Trump played in the Capitol riot. The probe eventually morphed into special counsel Jack Smith’s Washington, D.C., criminal case against Trump. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland and then-FBI Director Christopher Wray personally signed off on the investigation when it was launched in 2022, according to a decision memo Grassley divulged last week.
Snip.
A ninth GOP Senator, Ted Cruz of Texas, was also targeted during the “Arctic Frost” investigation, Axios first reported. Several of the GOP lawmakers in the FBI’s crosshairs promoted Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential election being stolen from him. The attempts by Trump’s allies to contest the 2020 election formed the basis of Smith’s D.C. criminal case and criminal prosecutions in the swing-states Trump lost to former President Biden. Numerous individuals targeted in “Arctic Frost” later faced criminal charges for their failed attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
“Jack Smith was a fundamentally corrupt prosecutor. This was a political enemies list from the beginning,” Cruz said. “This is an executive who believes it is justified spying on their opponents in the legislature because they convinced themselves the ends justified the means.”
Smith attempted to subpoena AT&T to obtain Cruz’s cellphone communications and the company’s legal counsel declined to comply, Cruz said. He praised the company for standing its ground against Smith’s attempt to gain his phone records. Cruz said that Washington, D.C., federal Judge James Boasberg signed an order prohibiting AT&T from informing Cruz of the subpoena for a year because of the potential for Cruz to destroy evidence or intimidate witnesses.
And Cruz has sent me three fundraising emails based on it this week alone.
Victory in Portland. “Antifa Retreats From Portland ICE Facility After Police Dismantle Encampment.”
The decentralized anti-fascist warriors in the Portland-area cell, aligned with the radical Democratic Party, were in full retreat overnight after officers from the Portland Police Department cleared out their encampment in front of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the Portland metro area.
Nick Shirley, who is an independent journalist and who met with President Trump at the White House earlier this month for a round table on Antifa, wrote on X, “ANTIFA HAS BEEN DISMANTLED IN PORTLAND After 140 days of controlling and camping on this street in Portland, Antifa has officially been cleared out as the police FINALLY stepped in and cleared the encampment.”
“Inside the encampment, they had loads full of medicine, medical gear, party supplies, a fridge, BBQ, etc ANTIFA’s 140 days of control have officially come to an end,” Shirley said, with an accompanying video showing inside the encampment that housed gender-confused purple-haired people who hate the Western world and capitalism.
Federal Reserve drops interest rates by a quarter point. Feel the excitement…
Democrats have badly weakened their party with left-leaning ideas and rhetoric, growing only with self-described “white liberals” while losing ground with other voters, according to a new center-left group’s report shared first with Semafor.
The group, called Welcome, consulted hundreds of thousands of voters over six months for its broad findings, including that 70% of voters think the Democratic Party is “out of touch.” Most voters, the group found, believe the party over-prioritizes issues like “protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans,” and “fighting climate change” while not caring about “securing the border” or “lowering the rate of crime.” (Welcome began as a PAC in 2022, then founded a nonprofit with the same name for political research.)
Elected Democrats will receive copies of the report after its Monday publication, followed by events to promote it in DC and New York. The report urges party members to abandon some of the progressive language about race, abortion, and LGBTQ issues that Democrats began using after the 2012 election — and recommends the nomination of more candidates willing to vote with Republicans on conservative immigration and crime bills.
“The Democratic Party had better listen — for the good of our nation,” former Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos, who ran the party’s House campaign committee when it lost seats in 2020, wrote in her endorsement of the report.
Inspired by The Politics of Evasion, an influential 1989 paper that inspired the party’s more centrist shift under Bill Clinton, the 70-page Deciding to Win document argues that Democrats must be “willing to break with unpopular party orthodoxies.” Its prescription for getting the party out of its current wilderness isn’t simple: avoidance of “both a pivot to corporate centrism and the pursuit of progressive ideology purity.”
Greg Schultz, who managed Joe Biden’s 2020 primary campaign but was replaced for the general election, worked with Welcome to shape the report.
“For the last 20 years, Democrats have just misunderstood how you actually win elections,” he told Semafor. “I thought Biden had proven in the 2020 primary that the base of the Democratic Party is a 58-year old woman without a college degree. But when you hear people in DC say ‘the base,’ they mean white intellectuals that live in a few coastal cities.”
The report directly challenges Democrats’ predilection for the interests of “highly educated and affluent voters,” arguing that their influence “may be responsible” for the party’s closer association with left-wing politics.
Sort of sounds like Weigel’s friends are finally noticing what Republicans were saying at least as far back as Obama’s first term. But wait!
“We have much to learn from the relentless focus of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani” on those fronts, the authors write.
The risk they see is in Democrats moving left on other progressive policies, which even some in the party establishment have done while criticizing Mamdani and other democratic socialists. From 2013 to 2024, between the beginning of Barack Obama’s second term and the end of Joe Biden’s sole term, the report offers clear metrics to show how the party changed its language and gave support to left-wing bills that had little chance of passage.
So they only want the Democrat Party to be a little bit pregnant with socialism and social justice. Yeah, good luck with that, heretic. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Two rogue Democrat judges think they can bypass the executive and judiciary branches and order specific programs funded during the Schumer Shutdown. “On Friday, US District Judge John McConnell of Rhode Island announced that he would order the US Department of Agriculture to distribute a pool of contingency funds ‘as soon as possible.’ While minutes before, Boston US District Judge Indira Talwani ruled that the US government must announce by Nov. 3 whether they would authorize at least partial funding for the program using around $6 billion in contingency funds – and if so, when will they do it.”
Mexican authorities in August, with the use of DNI intelligence, captured an infamous human trafficker who would lure pregnant women to steal their babies and organs.
She would then sell the stolen babies and organs on both sides of the border, which is how the United States got involved.
Aguilar was part of the Jalisco New Generation drug cartel.
California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pimp shield law, pushed by Democratic legislator Rep. Scott Weiner, has helped foster a disturbing new sex market on Figueroa Street in Los Angeles, featuring prostitutes as young as 12 and 13 years old. For far too long, the “kiddie stroll,” as it’s known, has gone unreported because major media outlets refused to cover it, allowing it to flourish under the watch of Democratic politicians.
But now it’s time to shine a light in the darkness and expose the truth about what’s happening to these poor young girls and why nothing has been done to bring the harrowing evil to an end.
An article from the New York Times Magazine is finally covering this horrific scene in Los Angeles, though they’ve conveniently neglected to cover anything concerning the prostitution law Newsom’s administration passed.
“For the 77th Street Division, which covers the northern half of the Figueroa Corridor, prostitution had always been a problem. But in recent years, the officers had seen the magnitude of child sex trafficking explode,” wrote reporter Emily Baumgaertner Nunn.
“Gangs that had long sold drugs began to take advantage of Figueroa’s lucrative opportunity. With a dozen girls, one trafficker could easily make $12,000 a night. ‘Drugs are sold once and gone forever, but girls can be resold indefinitely,’ said [police sergeant Alvaro] Navarro, who had been in the division for two decades. Motel owners who noticed the parades of customers but feared the gangs’ retribution kept quiet,” Nunn continues.
There’s little doubt that much of the silence and fear of gang retaliation for speaking out against this vile form of human trafficking stems from the lack of police presence on California streets, particularly in Los Angeles. Democrats in the state slashed funding for police and tied officers’ hands, making it harder to pull these girls — who are just children — out of sex trafficking.
In fact, Nunn points out that the sex-trafficking unit in the city was disbanded due to budget cuts, which means each division within the police department has fewer resources available to tackle the issue. There are supposed to be a total of six investigators looking into human trafficking. Now there’s only one.
Children suffer abuse in ways too sick and twisted to imagine, and thanks to anti-cop policies from radical leftists trying to appease minorities for votes, leaders ignore it instead of acting. This is truly a miscarriage of justice. It’s immoral and evil.
“Their jobs grew even more challenging when California repealed the law allowing the police to arrest women who loitered with the intent to engage in prostitution. The repeal, known as SB 357, was intended to prevent profiling of Black, brown, and trans women based on how they dressed. But when it was implemented in January 2023, the effect was that uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them.
Now officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each girl was underage — but with fake eyelashes and wigs, it was nearly impossible to tell. One girl told vice officers that her trafficker had explained things succinctly: ‘We run Figueroa now,’ he said,” Nunn writes in her article.
By the end of 2023, the city attorney started referring to Figueroa as the “Kiddie Stroll” because many of the girls working the street were under 13.
The Democrat Party is now objectively pro-rape and pro-pedophilia.
“ICE continues arresting ‘worst of the worst‘ illegal migrants accused of sexual crimes.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Tuesday told Just The News exclusively that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are continuing to arrest the “worst of the worst” illegal migrants, despite a government shutdown.
The latest arrests include illegal migrants who have been convicted of crimes such as lewd and lascivious acts on a minor, aggravated criminal sexual assault with bodily harm, aggravated kidnapping and possession with the intent to distribute.
Monday’s arrests include a Cuban illegal migrant in Florida who was convicted of lewd and lascivious act on a minor, a criminal illegal migrant from Mexico, convicted of aggravated criminal sexual assault with bodily harm, and aggravated kidnapping in Illinois, and an illegal migrant in Tennessee who was convicted of sexual assault.
“Nothing—not even the Democrats’ government shutdown—will slow us down from arresting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens,” Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “Yesterday, the brave men and women of ICE arrested pedophiles, rapists, and kidnappers. These are the types of predators ICE is taking off of America’s streets every single day. DHS will stop at nothing to make America safe again and remove these violent illegal offenders from our streets.”
Another illegal migrant from Mexico, identified as Adan Martinez-Gonzalez, was arrested in Texas after being convicted of aggravated kidnapping. Mexican illegal migrant Nicanor Hernandez-Gutierrez was apprehended by ICE and was previously convicted of possession with intent to distribute a quantity exceeding five kilograms of cocaine.
Former DOE nuclear engineer Matt Von Swol notices something that’s been floating around for years; the insane number of minorities (mexicans and blacks) who are booked as “WHITE” when they get arrested – something which obviously manipulates ‘inconvenient’ crime stats – something that TPUSA’s Andrew Kolvet noted have been “widely corrupted to serve a racist agenda.’
“I searched through thousands of arrests in my county and every single Hispanic individual who has been arrested is labelled as “WHITE”” Van Swol posted on X.
We cannot trust crime stats in America. They have been widely corrupted to serve a racist agenda. https://t.co/UEpwDbnv2F
It’s axiomatic in Washington, D.C., that changes that are undertaken by administrative action alone are easy to reverse.
There’s no doubt that if a Democratic president wins next time, he or she will undo much of what Trump has done through executive action, but will he or she be able to take it all the way back to where it was before?
I don’t think so. It will certainly be goodbye to the Gulf of America and the Department of War, and ICE raids will stop immediately. But Trump has struck blows against long-standing progressive priorities that were pursued in a piecemeal fashion, meant to build up and become irreversible over time. On these, it will be hard for the left to recover — in other words, Trump has broken the progressive ratchet.
How does the ratchet work? It begins with small, unobjectionable, or perhaps even salutary steps, coupled with assurances that potential downsides or extreme outcomes will never come about. Then, over time, incremental moves are made in the same direction until the unreasonable policy that we’d been assured would never happen is entrenched reality.
It is the work of decades, and it depends on no one ever pushing things back in the other direction (that would be reactionary) and everyone’s accepting the endpoint as a fait accompli.
To wit: First, women flying in combat roles. Then, women in ground combat roles, with the proviso that training and standards will stay the same. Then, gender-normed physical fitness tests and lower standards for everyone.
First, race-neutral civil rights laws, then temporary affirmative action, then permanent quotas and set-asides, then a widespread corporate and educational architecture devoted to promoting racialist practices and ideology.
First, respect and rights for gay people, then respect and rights for trans people, then everyone in America having to designate their pronouns, people getting shamed and fired for “misgendering” trans people, “gender-affirming” surgeries for minors, males competing in female sports, and the active encouragement of nonconforming sexual identities in the schools.
Trump has yanked the other way so far on these ratchet issues that it’s not clear when or how the left can get them back to the status quo ante.
It took so long to get there in the first place that snapping back to politicized training standards, pervasive DEI, or the most outlandish forms of the trans agenda will be very difficult.
Also, the sense of inevitability that the ratchet created, and the sense of helplessness on the part of opponents, has now been shattered.
Finally, there’s the problem that plausible deniability has been lost. The ratchet allowed for radical social change to be sheathed in incrementalism and in the righteousness of the starting point — DEI was on a continuum with civil rights; watered-down physical standards on a continuum with the inclusion of women in combat roles who needed no special accommodation.
Now, a revanchist Democratic administration would have to proceed directly to the most controversial and unpopular parts of the left’s agenda.
Top Biden administration officials misused executive authority and took actions without then-President Joe Biden’s authorization as his mental acuity declined, a House investigation found.
President Biden’s inner circle hid the extent of his mental decline from the American people and exercised executive authority by abusing the presidential autopen and taking advantage of a lax chain-of-command, according to a report released Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee.
“The Biden Autopen Presidency ranks among the greatest scandals in U.S. history. As President Biden declined, his staff abused the autopen and a lax chain-of-command policy to effect executive actions that lack any documentation of whether they were in fact authorized,” the report reads.
“The Committee has found that there was, in fact, a cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline and that there is no record demonstrating President Biden himself made all of the executive decisions that were attributed to him,” the report adds.
The Biden White House worked to conceal the extent of his mental decline through scripted messaging, controlled public appearances, and limited access. Staffers controlled Biden’s daily activities, appearances, and workload to prevent the public from seeing his diminishing mental capacity, the report says.
For the most part, Biden’s staff dismissed the possibility that the American people were concerned about his mental faculties. In a similar manner, Biden’s staff attributed his disastrous June 2024 debate performance to a bad cold and minimized Biden’s struggles on that fateful night.
The Oversight Committee investigated the coverup of Biden’s mental capacity with a specific focus on the Biden administration’s autopen usage at the end of his term. According to the committee, Biden officials used presidential authority and initiated executive actions without direct authorization from Biden himself, including using the autopen to sign executive orders without written approval.
Top Biden administration officials misused executive authority and took actions without then-President Joe Biden’s authorization as his mental acuity declined, a House investigation found.
President Biden’s inner circle hid the extent of his mental decline from the American people and exercised executive authority by abusing the presidential autopen and taking advantage of a lax chain-of-command, according to a report released Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee.
“The Biden Autopen Presidency ranks among the greatest scandals in U.S. history. As President Biden declined, his staff abused the autopen and a lax chain-of-command policy to effect executive actions that lack any documentation of whether they were in fact authorized,” the report reads.
“The Committee has found that there was, in fact, a cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline and that there is no record demonstrating President Biden himself made all of the executive decisions that were attributed to him,” the report adds.
The Biden White House worked to conceal the extent of his mental decline through scripted messaging, controlled public appearances, and limited access. Staffers controlled Biden’s daily activities, appearances, and workload to prevent the public from seeing his diminishing mental capacity, the report says.
For the most part, Biden’s staff dismissed the possibility that the American people were concerned about his mental faculties. In a similar manner, Biden’s staff attributed his disastrous June 2024 debate performance to a bad cold and minimized Biden’s struggles on that fateful night.
The Oversight Committee investigated the coverup of Biden’s mental capacity with a specific focus on the Biden administration’s autopen usage at the end of his term. According to the committee, Biden officials used presidential authority and initiated executive actions without direct authorization from Biden himself, including using the autopen to sign executive orders without written approval.
National Review previously reported on internal emails showing the White House’s process for deciding on commutations for violent criminals was chaotic and insular. The Biden administration did not consult with the families of the victims of the violent criminals as part of its clemency process.
Another instance the report mentions is the pardons Biden issued in the final hours of his presidency to members of his family. No records exist for the in-person meeting that led to the decision to grant those pardons.
Rather, Zients verbally authorized the use of the autopen after an aide of his transmitted the decision to issue the pardons. Zients did not know who actually applied the autopen and did not confirm with President Biden that he approved the pardons. The aide sent an email on Zients’s behalf expressing approval of the Biden family pardons.
If Biden didn’t issue the pardon, the pardon is invalid.
Free marketeers have good reason to cheer, or at least sigh with relief, with Milei’s party doing well in the Argentinian midterm elections…
In the middle of the month, this newsletter explained why the Trump administration traded $20 billion in U.S. dollars for the equivalent amount in Argentinian pesos. The Argentinian currency, which had already lost a lot of its value, was dropping perilously over fears President Javier Milei’s party might lose the midterm elections and the country would revert to its previous reckless big-spending habits. The currency trade, spearheaded by U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, represented an economic lifeline to Argentina and a metaphorical bet that Milei’s party would do well in the midterms, and keep the country on a smaller-government, more free-market-oriented path.
Secretary Bessent, collect your winnings. From the Wall Street Journal:
With nearly 99 percent of votes counted, Milei’s Freedom Advances party won almost 41 percent of the national vote, more than doubling its representation in Congress. That means his party and allies secured at least one-third of the seats in both chambers — the critical threshold that allows Milei to preserve his veto power and defend his sweeping decrees.
The result, stronger than most polls had predicted, gives Milei fresh political momentum after months of unrest over deep spending cuts and a grinding recession last year. It also shores up his standing with Washington and the International Monetary Fund, which have tied future financial support to the survival of his austerity experiment. Market analysts expect Argentine bonds and the peso to rally when trading opens Monday, reflecting relief that Milei still has political traction after taking office two years ago.
“Ukrainian drones hit the Mariysky oil refinery in Mari El, the Stavrolen chemical plant and the Novospasskoye oil depot.”
Greece sends Ukraine the big guns. “Greece is transferring 60 U.S.-made M110A2 203mm self-propelled howitzers to Ukraine, along with 150,000 shells and thousands of Zuni rockets.”
Finally: “Texas Higher Ed Board Officially Bans In-State Tuition for Illegal Aliens.” Rick Perry was a very conservative governor in many ways, but backing subsidized tuition for illegal aliens was one of his stupidest ideas.
Ken Paxton takes a scalp. “Dallas Doctor Surrenders License After Texas AG Sues For Prescribing Gender Transition Drugs To Minors.” “Paxton announced on Oct. 24 that Dr. May C. Lau has given up her state medical license but that the legal case over her alleged violation of Texas’s ban on gender transition treatment for minors is still ongoing.”
“California’s Retirement Fund Lost 71% Of $468M Investment In Clean Energy And Won’t Say How.” “According to state records analyzed by the Center Square, the CalPERS Clean Energy & Technology Fund (CETF), launched in 2007, has seen its value fall from a total commitment of $468.4 million to $138 million as of March 31, 2025. That represents a loss of more than $330 million, even after paying $22 million in fees and costs to private equity managers.” I’m sure the right pockets got lined. For Democrats, losing taxpayer money is ephemeral, but virtue signaling is forever.
Oklahoma: “State Rep. Ajay Pittman suspected of embezzling campaign funds, forgery, court records show.” Guess the party.
The Peace President keeps on winning. “President Trump participates in a peace treaty, trade and critical mineral agreement signing with the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Cambodia and the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Thailand.”
“A staffer for Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey was hit with drug trafficking charges after authorities intercepted eight kilograms of cocaine being delivered to a state office building. LaMar Cook, who has served as deputy director of Healey’s western Massachusetts office since 2023, was charged with trafficking over 200 grams of cocaine, unlawful possession of a firearm, and unlawful possession of ammunition related to the bust, Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni announced Wednesday. Multiple parcels containing about 21 kilograms of cocaine have been seized by Massachusetts State Police throughout the investigation into Cook.” Why yes, eight kilos of Peruvian Marching Powder is indeed more than 200 grams. Indeed, that’s the sort of quantity that might keep Hunter Biden supplied into the spring…
Biden’s autopen pardons are the gift that keeps giving. “Thirty-one-year-old Khyre Holbert—a convicted felon whose 20-year crack cocaine and firearm-possession sentence was commuted by former President Joe Biden at the end of his term—was slapped with a felon in possession of a firearm and ammunition charge following his alleged participation in a shooting in Omaha, Nebraska.”
Slam Frank is “Holocaust victim Anne Frank reimagined as a pansexual Latina with non-binary lover and neurodiverse family in controversial NYC musical.” Maybe NYC deserves Mamdani…
The left doubles down on crazy, Trump gets creative in cutting more foreign aid, we start kicking illegal aliens out of public housing, Google skates on monopoly remedies, more Russian refineries go boom, Ryan George examines ghost jobs, and the crazy story behind a classic American film.
From the indigenous LGBT woman’s land acknowledgement that opened the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting in Minneapolis to reaffirming the party’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, Democrats sent a clear signal to Americans: Despite last year’s electoral drubbing and the dismal polling that has followed, they have no intention of recalibrating.
One speaker told attendees that migrant crime and carjackings “don’t matter to that many Americans.” She sees President Donald Trump’s crackdown on crime as a “power grab” and a “political liability.”
Remarks from DNC Chairman Ken Martin showed they’ve learned nothing from their defeat or their time in the wilderness. “I’m sick and tired of this Democratic Party bringing a pencil to a knife fight,” he said. “We cannot be the only party that plays by the rules anymore. We’ve got to stand up and fight. We’re not going to have a hand tied behind our back anymore.”
Does Martin even hear himself?
After an alleged transgender person opened fire during a worship service at a Minneapolis Catholic School on the third day of the meeting, killing at least two children and wounding 17 other people, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey made a remarkable statement to reporters: “I have heard about a whole lot of hate that’s being directed at our trans community. Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community, or any other community out there, has lost their sense of common humanity.”
The reality is that Democrats have been ignoring the rules since Trump declared his candidacy in 2015. After failing to prevent his victory, they sought to undermine his presidency. They used lawfare to try to jail and bankrupt him, and even tried to remove his name from the ballot in several states. It turned out the public noticed, and a majority of voters rejected those tactics at the ballot box.
Dan Turrentine, cohost of the 2WAY Network podcast The Morning Meeting, once worked for the DNC. He attended the first day of the summer meeting and later told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham that his party “keep[s] doing the same thing over and over again,” which he notes is “the definition of insanity. And as a Democrat, it’s maddening that we’re still not serious.”
“We haven’t lost 4.5 million voters, nor is our brand at a historic low, because we don’t fight hard enough,” he told Ingraham. “It’s because we remain completely culturally disconnected and we have absolutely no agenda.”
He concluded, “We are not in good shape.”
Turrentine was citing a recent analysis from the New York Times showing that, over a four-year span, Democrats lost 2.1 million registered voters while Republicans gained 2.4 million. Multiple polls now suggest the party’s approval rating is in free fall, and its policies are increasingly out of step with everyday Americans.
But rather than course-correct, Democrats appear to be doubling down, clinging to a sense of moral virtue while defending principles most Americans reject. The result is a party that no longer even pretends to represent the working-class voters it once championed. Instead, it now serves a narrow circle of progressive elites concentrated in coastal cities and urban enclaves.
Without the sword of Damocles hanging over Trump’s head in the form of a weaponized Department of Justice, an aggressive FBI, and the ever-leaking Mueller team, as was the case during his first term, Democrats now find themselves operating from a position of weakness. Unable to rein him in, aside from occasional blows delivered by district court judges, Trump now sits firmly in the catbird seat.
President Donald Trump on Aug. 28 proposed the cancellation of $4.9 billion in appropriated funds for foreign aid spending, using a maneuver that could effectively bypass the congressional approval process normally required to rescind the funds.
The funds were allocated to the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development—which is in the process of being closed by the Trump administration—during the Fiscal Year 2025 appropriations process.
Under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, the government must make a rescission request to Congress, which then has 45 days to approve the cancellation of appropriated funds. A “pocket rescission,” however, refers to such requests made within 45 days of the end of the fiscal year, which is Sept. 30. In these cases, the funds are withheld during the 45-day congressional review period, and if Congress doesn’t act before the fiscal year ends, the funds expire.
“Last night, President Trump cancelled $4.9 billion in America Last foreign aid using a pocket rescission,” the Office of Management and Budget, a cabinet-level agency in the Executive Office of the President, wrote on X on Aug. 29.
Pocket rescissions are uncommon, and the last one attempted was in 1983, when President Ronald Reagan sought to cut $2 million appropriated to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Trump, during his second term, has successfully requested some rescissions from Congress. A rescissions bill canceling $9.4 billion in funding for foreign aid and public broadcasters was approved by Congress in July.
Rescission requests, when presented to Congress, may be enacted through legislation with simple majorities voting in favor in both houses, meaning that the minority has no leverage to stop or alter the process. Democrats in Congress, who are the minority in both houses, have thus protested against Trump’s rescissions, but often to no avail.
For all that stocks are soaring, we’re still feeling the effects of the Biden Recession. “Putrid Payrolls: Job Growth Collapses To Just 22K, Unemp Rate Rises To 4.3% Putting 50bps Rate Cut In Play.”
Ahead of today’s jobs report, consensus was that a print between 40K and 100K is largely priced in and greenlighting a 25bps rate cut by the Fed in two weeks, and that we would need a real outlier number for the Fed to either cut 50bps… or not hike. Well, we got a real outlier when moments ago the BLS reported that in August the US added only 22K jobs, a big drop from the upward revised 79K (from 73K previously) but more importantly June was revised from 27K to -13K, ushering in the first negative jobs print since 2020.
The systemic falsification of economic data to boost Biden has left the economy in a much bigger hole than most people realize.
No longer will illegal aliens be able to leave citizenship boxes blank or take advantage of HUD-funded housing, riding the coattails of hardworking American citizens,” [Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott] Turner wrote.
The secretary stressed that weak enforcement under previous administrations left thousands of American families on waiting lists.
“Currently, HUD only serves one out of four eligible families due, in part, to the lack of enforcement of prohibition against federally funded assistance to illegal aliens,” Turner continued.
HUD warned that noncompliance could lead to an “examination” of federal funding. Turner told Fox News’ Charles Hurt on Jesse Watters Primetime that Washington, D.C., has already been placed on notice and that more than 3,000 other public housing authorities will face the same requirements.
“American citizens will be prioritized,” Turner said.
No one should come to America to go on welfare, period. So this is a good start, but not as good as completely eliminating subsidized housing entirely.
Anger is boiling over in the UK pressure cooker, and it is hard to see anybody in power finding the courage to use the steam release valve before it explodes. On the issue of immigration, it now boils down to the state vs its citizens.
What began as a flag protest–English people putting up the St George’s flag as an act of defiance against government indifference to their anger–has spread to Wales and Scotland. Larger and larger crowds are gathering, and confrontations with police are becoming common.
It seems that Keir Starmer’s Labour government would rather risk actual outright revolt that deport unassimiliated Muslim rapists. The real question is why. (Hat tip: Irons in the Fire.)
“Trump Administration Warns 40 States To Remove ‘Gender Ideology’ From Sex Education Or Lose $81 Million.” If the purpose of sex education is to prevent out-of-wedlock births, it doesn’t seem to have been a rousing success. Maybe schools should eliminate it altogether.
Today, the decade-long campaign to stop big tech from dominating our society took a significant step backwards, as the judge hearing the search case against Google, Amit Mehta, chose not to meaningfully constrain the firm’s illegal behavior. And to engage in such deferential behavior, he openly ignored Supreme Court precedent.
You don’t have to take it from me. It’s Mehta who last year found Google to have violated the law. “Google is a monopolist,” he wrote, “and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.” It’s also Mehta who found the Supreme Court mandated what he called the “remedial objective” in monopolization cases, to “terminate the illegal monopoly.” But, Mehta wrote, “remedies designed to eliminate the defendant’s monopoly—i.e., structural remedies—are inappropriate in this case.”
So there we go. Mehta understood the law mandates he terminate Google’s monopoly, but he just decided against doing so.
Snip.
So what’s Mehta’s actual remedy? To understand that, we have look at the root of Google’s monopoly, as Mehta saw it. I characterized the case as follows, that the search giant had “bought up all the shelf space for search engines, aka paid Apple and browsers like Mozilla to be the default search provider instead of any of its rivals. It created Chrome so it could control that channel of distribution, and it bought Android for the same reason.” The goal of the remedy that the Antitrust Division sought was to terminate that monopoly, confiscate the fruits of its illegal behavior, and make sure monopolization would not recur. Here’s what I noted the DOJ sought:
The DOJ asked to remove the defaults that automatically place Google as the search choice for most browsers, an end to search-related payments, a spinoff of the Chrome browser which was itself a big search access point, as well as regulation of the mobile operating system Android. It also asked for syndication of Google’s search results and data to approved rivals, which is a way of forcing Google to not enjoy the illegal “fruits” of its monopoly by offering rivals some access to the secret sauce.
There were other requests, but those were the big ones. So what did the judge do? Mehta rejected both a Chrome spinoff and regulation of Android, since that’s a structural separation and he got nervous about that. But more insanely, he didn’t even say that Google had to stop paying Apple $20B+ a year to be the default search engine, it just had to limit such default payment agreements to one year terms. Mehta found that Google was doing illegal things to maintain its monopoly, but he didn’t force the company to stop doing those illegal things.
Why not? Well, he said that new companies like OpenAI had emerged to potentially challenge Google, and he didn’t want to, and I’m not kidding, hinder Google’s ability to compete with them. (“It also weighs in favor of “caution” before disadvantaging Google in this highly competitive space.”).
Beyond that, Mehta wrote that “cutting off payments from Google almost certainly will impose substantial—in some cases, crippling— downstream harms to distribution partners, related markets, and consumers, which counsels against a broad payment ban.” Here he’s talking about… Apple. Yes there are others, but Mehta could have blocked the contract with Apple, and let the other payments continue. But he didn’t. Mehta even wrote that if he restores competition in search, it could hurt Apple’s ability to invest in making phones better. It is quite problematic for a judge to refuse to break an illegal monopoly on the premise that an adjacent non-relevant market might be harmed. I can’t emphasize how crazy that is, it’s like, as my colleague Nidhi Hegde stated, finding someone guilty for bank robbery and then sentencing him to write a thank you note.
Google has been abusing it’s monopoly position for a long time now, and deserves much harsher than a slap on the wrist. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Chalk up a win for the First Amendment. “California’s ‘Deepfake’ Election Ad Ban Is Unconstitutional, Federal Court Rules. ‘Just as the government may not dictate the canon of comedy, California cannot pre-emptively sterilize political content.'”
“St. Louis cop-killer released on bond after paying only $5,000…Accused of shooting and killing an off-duty campus police officer in 2008, Brandon Levy was inexplicably allowed to walk after being required to pay only 10% of a $50,000 bond set by the court.” Thanks a lot, Associate Circuit Judge Michael Colona. I know you’ll be shocked to learn he’s a Democrat.
On that same theme: “Following reports that Texas was not complying with a presidential executive order requiring English proficiency for commercial truck drivers, Gov. Greg Abbott has directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to enforce the requirement for the safety of all drivers.”
Florida just ended all vaccine mandates. Mixed feelings. There is zero reason for children to be forced to take vaccines for Flu Manchu, but skipping polio vaccines is probably a mistake. Still, Florida is a laboratory for democracy. Nobody is forced to skip vaccines, now they merely have a choice. Let’s see if autism experiences a drop in Florida a decade hence…
They also hit the Ryazan oil refinery, again. “Ukraine has so far reduced about 20% of Russia’s refining capacity in the past month or so. This won’t add to that because this refinery was already offline. This is Ukraine doing its new tactic of just constantly hitting the refineries as often as possible to ensure that they remain offline.”
“Electromagnetic Weapon Destroys Drone Swarm In Seconds.” “Defense contractor Epirus quietly tested its latest electromagnetic weapon, Leonidas, against a swarm of 49 quadcopters, neutralizing them in seconds at Camp Atterbury, Indiana.” We previously talked about that system here.
“Pennsylvania Democrat County Commissioner Arrested In Massive Multi-State Drug Bust.” “Lehigh County Commissioner Zachary Cole-Borghi, a Democrat, was arrested at Bethlehem City Hall where he worked as an open records officer. The charges: possession of marijuana and possession with intent to deliver a pound of marijuana.” While you should definately move to a state where the devil’s cabbage is legal to do that sort of thing, the email teaser for this story (“Top Democrat Arrested in Massive Drug Bust”) did rather over-promise and under-deliver…
Ryan George tackles ghost jobs. Since I’m looking for a job (still), I can tell you that there are a lot of them out here…
Universal Music Group continues to attack Rick Beato…even to the point that they’re violating YouTube’s terms of service.
Looks like a clip job. “Kawhi Leonard reportedly paid $28 million for ‘no-show job’ with Clippers as way to get around salary cap, NBA investigating.”
President Trump wins another huge (and hugely favorable) trade deal for America, more Obama/Clinton skullduggery exposed, a whole lot of sick perverts get arrested, Nigel Farage plays Cassandra, Russia gets hammered by both Ukraine and God, plus an unusually high amount of hypercars and Star Trek.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Winning: “Trump strikes massive trade deal with EU on energy, arms, tariffs.”
The United States has reached a trade deal with the European Union after President Donald Trump pressured the group of nations, as well as others, to open up trade with the US using the threat of tariffs.
While being joined by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Trump detailed the plans for the deal. “The European Union is going to agree to purchase from the United States $750 billion worth of energy.”
“They are going to agree to invest, into the United States, $600 billion more than they’re investing already. So they’re investing a large amount of money. … They’re agreeing to open up their countries to trade at zero tariff,” Trump added. “So that’s a very big factor, opening up their countries. All of the countries will be opened up to trade with the United States at zero tariff, and they’re agreeing to purchase a vast amount of military equipment.”
The president added that the number for the military equipment is not exact, and then also said the EU imports to the US will have a “straight across tariff of 15 percent” on automobiles and other goods. The tariffs on EU goods were previously in the single digits on average, according to the New York Times. The EU had hoped to reach an agreement for 10 percent across the board on tariffs.
The Very Best People repeatedly told us that President Trump’s tariff strategy would inevitably plunge us into a trade war and send the economy into a recession, if not a recession. It turns out, once again, that Trump has far better grasp of negotiating strategy than they do.
When Mr. Trump first unveiled his reciprocal tariffs, virtually all the important foreign countries flocked to make a deal with him; they ignored Communist China.
Why is that? Because America’s the greatest country in the world. With the best economy.
And nobody trusts the Chinese to do anything, much less honor a trade deal.
What’s more, Mr. Trump and his team have already made a number of deals with the United Kingdom, the European Union, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, and South Korea.
Talks with Mexico are constructive and will be extended.
We can’t be sure, but it’s likely that the China talks will be extended.
In general, Mr. Trump is charging a very modest 15 percent or 20 percent fee as the price for doing business with the greatest economy in the world.
That modest fee could generate something like $400 billion a year in tariff revenues.
And here’s his new wrinkle: vast foreign direct investment into America
For example, $600 billion from the EU, and perhaps another $600 billion from Japan. Maybe $750 billion from EU energy purchases. Think clean burning LNG produced by America’s first in the world energy industry.
Direct investment pledges of as much as $5 trillion or $6 trillion coming from governments and companies all around the world — including the Middle East. And even in Asia — with South Korea putting up $350 billion.
We’ll learn more about how this direct investment is going to work, but the point is — the stimulus from all of that vastly outweighs any fiscal drag from the mostly moderate reciprocal tariff rates.
That’s Mr. Trump’s brand-new wrinkle. And it’s a very clever ploy.
FBI Director Kash Patel found a trove of sensitive documents related to the origins of the Trump – Russia probe buried in multiple ‘burn bags’ in a secret room inside the bureau, sources told Fox News Digital.
Sources told Fox News Digital that the ‘burn bag’ system is used to destroy documents designated as classified or higher.
Sources told Fox News Digital that multiple burn bags were found and filled with thousands of documents.
Sources exclusively briefed Fox News Digital on some of the contents of the classified annex — including that the U.S. intelligence community had credible foreign sources indicating that the FBI would play a role in spreading the alleged Trump – Russia collusion narrative — before the bureau ever launched its controversial Crossfire Hurricane probe.
A source familiar with the contents of the classified annex told Fox News Digital that while it may not have been exactly clear in the moment what the intelligence collection meant, with the benefit of hindsight, it predicted the FBI’s next move ‘with alarming specificity.’
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt took members of the press corps to task over their refusal to cover newly released evidence that shows Hillary Clinton approved the Russian collusion hoax against Donald Trump.
Leavitt’s comments come on the heels of a newly declassified appendix to the Durham Report that exposes a reported Clinton campaign plan to falsely accuse President Trump of collusion with Russia.
Leavitt chided members of the press, telling them, “This is a story that every outlet in this room should be covering,” and that “This is further evidence that Hillary Clinton approved the Russia Hoax against President Trump. Her campaign financed it.”
Leavitt added that “the FBI and the CIA were both weaponized to accelerate this hoax against then-candidate and former president Trump.”
The Press Secretary told reporters that, “The president wants to see justice served and he trusts the Attorney General and the Department of Justice to implement that justice and hold these people accountable.”
The so-called “Durham annex” to John Durham’s Special Counsel report was released yesterday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and brings previously classified information to light regarding the Clinton campaign’s plans to falsely tie Trump to Russia.
In a press release, Grassley said, “History will show that the Obama and Biden administration’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were weaponized against President Trump. This political weaponization has caused critical damage to our institutions and is one of the biggest political scandals and cover-ups in American history. The new Trump administration has a tremendous responsibility to the American people to fix the damage done and do so with maximum speed and transparency.”
Travel back in time to the year 2021 and you might find yourself in the middle of a bizarre debate over the virtues of “cancel culture”. At the time the political left was aggressively trying to secure long term power within the US through a multi-pronged psychological offensive – A war on the minds of the masses designed to force Americans into submission.
A big part of their strategy relied on the fundamentals of Cultural Marxism: The combination of Marxist mob tactics, artificial consensus and the exploitation of minority grievances as a vehicle for controlling speech. This was the rise of the “woke movement” to the halls of government.
The root of their power was not martial. In fact, the political left is weak and largely astroturf with minimal ability to project power in a physical way. If conservatives wanted to destroy them tomorrow the task would be relatively easy. We don’t because many of us still have hope that our problems can be solved through peaceful discourse.
What the leftists did have at their disposal was a massive institutional apparatus of government agencies, corporations, Big Tech and NGOs. The full might of the establishment cabal was on their side, which meant they had the means to enforce “cancel culture” and silence their ideological opponents.
I don’t think there has ever been a psychological war on a population that was more pervasive and tyrannical. Not since Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China has a citizenry been under such a siege by their own government. The fact that we survived this event, defeated the onslaught and actually grew a grassroots anti-woke movement without the use of social media forums is truly mind blowing.
Very few people today realize the level of victory that was achieved. We thwarted perhaps the largest 4th Generation “mind war” ever devised and we did it without any institutional access. We won by simple truth and word of mouth.
Another tool that the leftists and globalists used was the mobilization of illegal migrants, gays and minorities as a shield against criticism or counter-protest. If conservatives and moderates fought back with superior debate or our own protest groups, we were immediately accused of racism, xenophobia and homophobia. Merely presenting an opposing view to the progressive machine was considered an act of evil.
Large contingents within all of these groups were happy to go along with the agenda for numerous reasons.
First and foremost, DEI allowed them to easily game the system. They could snatch up grants, subsidies, welfare, and leapfrog over more talented and more intelligent competitors in education and business simply because of their “marginalized status”.
Secondly, the system under progressives was two-tier; leftists activists, illegals and minorities were given preferential protection while breaking the law and causing chaos. Conservatives were labeled terrorists for any act of defiance. We were banned from the largest web platforms. Some of us were targeted by the online mob and lost our jobs. Others were “de-banked” and threatened with ostracism from the economy. Still others were imprisoned.
This imbalance of the law bred a culture of entitlement, especially within the LGBT cult and the black community. Illegal aliens were given carte blanche to enter the country and feed like parasites. Not only that, but they were treated like heroes coming to save the US from “population decline” and “labor shortages”.
They all participated in the game willfully and joyfully. They were ALL part of the problem. But, of course, none of them ever thought the party would end or that they might end up facing consequences for their behavior. They joined in the feeding frenzy without considering the inevitable clap-back.
The primary argument that leftists would often use to defend the application of cancel culture was that there was “no such thing as cancel culture”, only the righteous utilization of “consequence culture”. This was, of course, a misdirection. The word “consequence” suggests that a person deserves punishment for wrongdoing and that the leftists canceling him (or her) have the right to do so.
Cancel culture was never about justice or karma, it was about suppression of anyone who disagreed with the political left. A corrupt group of psychopathic people with no support from the majority is in no position to dole out consequences. They can dole out harassment and intimidation, but not justice.
In recent months, however, I think these people are finally beginning to understand what “consequence culture” really is and clearly they don’t like it.
We told them over, and over, and over again that the left wouldn’t like it when the “new rules” they were creating got applied to them. And here we are.
Annals of human depravity: “FBI, DOJ arrest ringleaders of dark web child porn exploitation networks with over 120,000 users.”
The Justice Department has announced the results of Operation Grayskull, a sweeping joint investigation with the FBI that dismantled four dark web sites dedicated to child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The operation has so far resulted in 18 convictions across multiple federal districts and significant sentences for offenders involved in the distribution and advertisement of CSAM.
One of the most notable sentences came last week, when Thomas Peter Katsampes, 52, of Eagan, Minnesota, was sentenced to 250 months in prison, lifetime supervised release, and ordered to pay $23,000 in restitution. Katsampes pleaded guilty in February to conspiracy to advertise and distribute child pornography. According to court records, he joined one of the dark web sites in 2022, actively advertised and distributed CSAM, including material depicting prepubescent children, and eventually became a site moderator responsible for enforcing posting rules and advising others on sharing illegal content.
The Houston branch of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested 214 illegal aliens who have either been charged with or convicted of child sex offenses over the past six months — more than it arrested in all of Fiscal Year 2024.
Among the five illegal aliens captured and highlighted in an ICE press release published on Monday, four were from Mexico and were deported back there following their arrests. Forty-eight-year-old Jorge Zebra received convictions for two counts of sexual assault of a minor as well as “sexual indecency” with a minor. He was returned to Mexico in March.
Mexicans Sergio Rolando Galvan Guerrero and Jesus Gutierrez Mireles were convicted for “aggravated sexual assault of a child” as well as for Driving While Intoxicated.
Jose Guadalupe Meza, who’s been deported four other times, was convicted of both sexual assault of a child and theft. Meza was deported to Mexico on June 25.
The lone criminal from El Salvador was Manuel Antonio Castro-Juarez, who was convicted for both sexual assault of a child as well as illegal entry, twice. He’ll be sent back to El Salvador for the third time, but is in ICE custody until necessary proceedings are completed.
“Former Texas National Guardsman Convicted of Smuggling Aliens. Mario Sandoval now faces up to 10 years in federal prison.”
A Houston-based former member of the Texas National Guard who once served on the front lines of Operation Lone Star is now facing up to 10 years in prison after a federal jury convicted him of human smuggling.
Mario Sandoval, a 27-year-old Houston resident and former national guardsman, was deployed to the U.S.-Mexico border as part of Operation Lone Star, the Texas-led initiative launched in 2021 to curb illegal immigration. The operation mobilized both the Texas National Guard and Department of Public Safety.
Despite being released from his official orders, Sandoval remained in the Rio Grande Valley and, in July of last year, began smuggling illegal aliens north of the immigration checkpoint. Jurors were shown text messages confirming Sandoval’s coordination in the smuggling operation—including his role arranging drivers and alerting others to law enforcement locations. Surveillance footage also placed him near the checkpoint during the times those messages were sent.
Sandoval was discharged from the Texas National Guard in October 2024. Although he claimed the texts were taken out of context and that no conspiracy existed, a jury found him guilty after a one-day trial and less than an hour of deliberation.
“We live increasingly in a lawless Britain… most people think that Britain has become lawless”, Farage remarked Monday at a press conference to launch a new law and order policy platform.
“We’re actually facing, in many parts of our country, nothing short of societal collapse,” Farage warned, adding “People are scared to go out to the shops, scared to let their kids out. That is a society that is degraded, and it’s happening very, very rapidly.”
Farage further suggested that Britain should leave the European Court of Human Rights in order to restore effective criminal deterrence.
Farage maintains that the ECHR undermines the country’s ability to deport foreign criminals, terrorists, and illegal migrants, thereby weakening criminal deterrence.
He contends that exiting the system would remove legal barriers imposed by foreign judges, and allow the UK to swiftly remove dangerous individuals, free up prison space, reduce taxpayer burdens, and send a strong message that crime by non-citizens will result in certain expulsion.
This, in his view, would restore effective deterrence by ensuring consequences are enforced without interference, discouraging both criminal activity and illegal immigration.
Among a range of policies he outlined to avoid a descent into societal collapse, Farage suggested outsourcing hardened criminals to foreign jails and a hard-line three-strikes and you’re out rule, meaning after three convictions there would be no more rehabilitation for offenders.
He noted that one of the most egregious aspects of the collapse is that the government is obsessed with drilling it into the British people that everything is getting better when citizens can see the rampant degradation all around them.
“Huge numbers of law-abiding, taxpaying Britons have also lost respect for the police but in a different way. The idea, the concept that we’re living in a system of two-tier policing and two-tier justice under two-tier Keir has really taken hold,” Farage urged.
Farage noted that crimes such as shoplifting and drug taking have been allowed to become a part of everyday life in cities, and that one in three Londoners have now been victims of mobile phone theft.
He vowed that his party will work to halve crime in five years if elected to parliament by becoming “the toughest party on law and order and on crime that this country has ever seen”, and instituting “zero tolerance policing.”
Farage also floated the idea of Army run centres for repeat petty criminals to be held in and made to undergo a program of reform.
He pointed to Rudy Giuliani’s tenure as Mayor of New York City as an example of how to restore law and order in a broken down society.
The Tories could have been the party of border control and tough on crime policies, but their feckless wet leadership pissed the opportunity away.
Ukrainian troops also landed on the Tendrovo Spit, a long sandbar south of Kherson. I’m including this one because it includes a closer look at some of Russia’s drone jamming equipment.
Here’s some great outside-the-box thinking: A wounded Ukrainian soldier behind enemy lines was rescued by a drone lowering an E-bike to him.
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh: “‘Crisis’ at Media Matters, As It Cuts Staff, Struggles to Pay Legal Bills.” Golly, a whole lot of lefty outlets seem to be in trouble now that Trump47 is eliminating the graft at places like USAID… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
What too much winning looks like: “The Corporation for Public Broadcasting will shut down by September’s end, the private non-profit that is funded almost entirely by Congress announced on Friday.”
Soros-funded prosecutor = brothel boom in Fairfax County. “How did the state’s largest municipality, a wealthy and highly educated suburb of Washington, D.C., become a sanctuary county for pimps, madams, and whorehouse operators? All signs point to the Commonwealth’s attorney, self-styled progressive prosecutor Steve Descano.””County Supervisor Pat Herrity said that about 80 to 100 ‘illicit massage businesses’ are ‘operating in plain sight today’ in the county.”
The latest event that’s now too dangerous to attend: Jazz festivals, as a crowd of black people beat two white people unconscious. Then Cincinnati Police Chief Teresa Theetge tried to downplay the attack saying that the assault was taken “out of context.”
Candace Taylor, 35, of Slidell, was arrested Monday after investigators found she underreported her income to qualify for the program. The Louisiana Bureau of Investigation launched its probe after a complaint from the state health department.
The Fox News report says court records say Taylor ran six businesses that brought in over $9.5 million between 2020 and 2024. Bank records show deposits of $480,994, including more than $325,000 linked to her businesses.
“From 2021 through 2024, Ms. Taylor continued to transfer tens of thousands of dollars between her personal and business accounts, with personal inflows consistently exceeding the eligibility thresholds for Medicaid,” the affidavit states.
Despite this, Taylor allegedly kept renewing her benefits—most recently claiming $4,000 in monthly income without disclosing she owned the business.
Authorities say her spending included $45,086 in Audi vehicle payments, a $100,000 wire to an exotic car dealer, and $13,000 for a 2022 Lamborghini Urus. She also allegedly withdrew multiple six-figure cashier’s checks for property, cosmetic surgery, jewelry, and luxury services.
Unless it was very hot or very crashed, there’s no way she paid $13,000 for a Lamborghini Urus, as those things go for over $200,000. Maybe that was a down payment…
Progress on civil rights: “California Law Requiring Background Checks for Ammo Declared Unconstitutional.”
But the Democrat Party’s desire to disarm law-abiding American citizens never rests. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy filed a bill to raise the National Firearms Act tax to $4,709. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Entertainment economics: Stephen Colbert isn’t worth $20 million a year. but South Park is worth over $1 billion.
“Texas Democrat Candidate Flips Out During Hearing, Winds Up Getting Arrested.” “Isaiah Martin’s attempt to filibuster the redistricting hearing ended in cuffs as he was dragged away from the microphone by a capitol security official.” Martin is currently running in a special election for the 18th Congressional District following the death of Shelia Jackson Lee, and is currently polling at 3%.
Jordan Peterson had Winston Marshall (a musician formerly of Mumford & Sons) on his podcast.
One of the things they talked about is why Democrats never go on podcasts.
Winston Marshall: “Kamala Harris. Some people have really called her as being dumb, and if you listen to what she said through the election, you’d be like ‘Maybe she’s an idiot,’ but it might be that she wasn’t actually that dumb, it was that she wasn’t bright enough, in that she had so many different factions and trying to keep this whole operation going that she was censoring herself from losing the wrong people, whether it was the woke side of her party, or the the more conservative side of her party, she couldn’t quite have the dialogue to to pull it all together.” I think we need to read “more conservative” as “not entirely insane.”
He then segues into an analogy with UK politics that’s not quite correct. Conservative Democrats can’t “go over to reform” because there is no “Reform Party” in the USA that isn’t a moribund husk, and America’s two party election system yields dynamics that are fundamentally different from the UK’s parliamentary system.
Jordan Peterson: “There’s a reason Harris didn’t go on any podcast. A couple of reasons. The first is that the Democrats are so clueless when it comes to the alternative media that they might as well be living in 1970.”
JP: “We invited, by we I mean a group of major podcasters. We’ve invited Democrats to speak with us. We’ve offered formal invitations repeatedly for eight years, and we mediated those invitations through one of the Democrats central political messengers, and they got the invite, and we couldn’t find one who would do it. Not one.”
WM: “They’re anti-pluralist. Which, by the way, they accuse the populists of being anti-pluralist. But if you look at Trump’s coalition, it’s pluralist.”
WM: “I heard your interview with Dean Phillips, and what he’s describing is a totalitarian party.” Phillips is the former Democratic congressman from Minnesota who got frozen out by the DNC when he ran against Biden’s husk for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2024.
JP: “Oh, absolutely. And it’s worse than that.”
JP: “The reason Harris didn’t go on podcasts, apart from the fact that the Democrats are completely clueless about the alternative media [is] that a Democrat won’t say anything that hasn’t been workshopped. And the reason for that is they don’t want to offend anyone. Well, if you’re not going to offend anyone, you’re going to say the most anodyne things. Which, of course, Harris always sounds like she’s talking to kindergarten children.”
JP: “You might say well that’s the level at which she’s capable of conducting discourse, and that might be true. But there is this additional element of the absolute inability of the Democrats to say anything that would say offend their most sensitive progressive junior staffer.”
WM: “That’s not happening just in the Democrat party, that’s been happening in the progressive movement, basically all American liberals are have this censoring, this idea that hurty words end up in genocide.”
JP: “You’ve seen firsthand that proclivity for cowardly virtue signaling in the entertainment industry…this is starting to fragment. I mean, Hollywood is in catastrophically dire straits. The projections are now that 50% of live theaters will close in the US in the next three or four years.”
Peterson is talking to Democrats, trying to find Democrats with leadership talents to go on podcasts. “It would be real useful for the Trump team to have some opposition that wasn’t insane.”
JP: “Podcasts brutally punish people who won’t speak freely.”
Marshall notes that the social justice left is doubling down, as shown by the furor that greeted Oliver Anthony (“Rich Men North of Richmond”). “They’re always virtue signaling and say it’s all about the working people. Here was your hero on a plate. They didn’t just ignore him, they wrote all these hit pieces like ‘right-wing influencers have found their new hero.'”
Marshall also notes the attacks on The Sound of Freedom. “The attacks from the media were just utterly shocking. Here was a film exposing child sexual exploitation, here was a film exposing the most evil thing really that you could imagine, [and] their response was to slander [Tim] Ballard with all these accusations, call it conspiratorial, say it’s a 4chan film. They just did everything they can to take it down, and even then it made a fortune, slayed at the box office.”
Marshall hopes that we’re at the end of the censorious social justice era. I have my doubts. Social justice seems to infect the parts of the brain used for religious belief, indeed functions as a substitute religion, and religious convictions are immune to logic.
More Biden jobs number fakery, more green graft exposed, everyone knew about Slow Joe, the DNC butchers David Hogg, Gun Jesus weighs in on Sig Saur, and Shoeless Joe gets a shot at redemption.
The Biden administration’s phony jobs boom just went up in smoke. For months, it paraded numbers around like everything was fine, telling Americans the economy was roaring back, that job creation was on fire, and that “Bidenomics” was working. But the truth, long suspected by anyone trying to pay the bills, is now confirmed by the government’s own data: those jobs never existed.
According to new figures released this week, the 399,000 jobs the Biden team claimed were created between July and September of last year have completely vanished. Not only did the economy not add those jobs, but it also lost 1,000 private-sector jobs during that period.
“This more accurate dataset was just released by the BLS for the third quarter of last year,” EJ Antoni, a research fellow and the Richard Aster Fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, explains over at Townhall. “In stark contrast to the monthly job reports showing an increase of 399,000 jobs during the third quarter, these new numbers show a decline of 1,000 private-sector jobs.”
Nearly 400,000 phantom jobs were quietly wiped off the books. And this isn’t just a one-time discrepancy. Month after month during Joe Biden’s term, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) published inflated job estimates, only to revise them downward later, long after the headlines had already done their PR damage for the White House.
Antoni breaks it down further: “Under Biden, these revisions were abnormal in magnitude and direction, being revised down with unusual frequency.” No kidding. In fact, the BLS’s more comprehensive annual benchmark, released earlier this year, revised down Biden’s job numbers from March 2023 to March 2024 by a jaw-dropping 598,000 jobs.
That’s not just bad math; that’s deception on a national scale.
The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GRF), passed as part of the “Inflation Reduction Act” in 2022, has proved to be a cornucopia of graft for Biden’s Democratic Party favorites and green non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
The GRF rushed $20 billion in grants out the door in the waning days of the Biden administration to just six organizations. As The Free Press reports, the EPA employees charged with vetting the NGOs who were to receive that $20 billion raised numerous objections to the grants. Despite their concerns, the money was doled out.
We’re just now finding out how corrupt the process of throwing $20 billion to the Democratic Party’s friends actually was.
I’ve written extensively about former Georgia candidate for governor Stacey Abrams’ ties to one NGO that received $2 billion from the GRF despite having only $100 in the bank when they applied for the grant. The $20 billion fund became a one-stop shop for climate graft as hundreds of smaller non-profits joined coalitions of grifters to get millions of dollars despite many having no experience handling that kind of money.
The Free Press obtained documents that include the reviews of the applications for grants from the organizations requesting money from the GRF. Some of them are eye-openers.
One of the reasons for the grant review is for the grantee to justify expenses, including the salaries of top executives. The federal employee who reviewed the application for Power Forward Communities, the Stacey Abrams-linked NGO that was selected to receive $2 billion, questioned the salaries and estimated expenses in the grant application.
“For such an important section, it was pithy, though not always in a good way. Many of the costs were just presented, but little or no explanation as to why they are reasonable. I would have preferred they omitted the travel discussion and explained why they need to pay the CEO $800,000, growing to $948,000 in year 7. And chief operation officer $455,000 per year.”
Anyone who has ever completed an application for a government grant knows that this is a slipshod job that wouldn’t pass muster with any number of federal agencies. But Biden’s EPA just handed $2 billion taxpayer dollars to these incompetent bozos.
Another nonprofit, Appalachian Community Capital, applied for $1 billion from the fund, even though it had never managed anywhere near that much money. In 2023, the latest year for which it has filed tax forms, it spent less than $4.5 million. Two reviewers noted this lack of experience in their comments, saying “The amount of money managed under previous agreements was much less than what is being proposed under this grant opportunity.”
A reviewer also noted that Appalachian Community Capital planned to use $215 million to finance 600 zero-emission vehicles and $105 million to finance 700 charging stations. “This is $358,333 per EV vehicle,” the reviewer wrote, adding that $150,000 per charging station “seems too high.”
Appalachian Community Capital was ultimately granted $500 million from the EPA.
The reviewers were from several different agencies, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of the Treasury, and the EPA. A panel of judges based their recommendations for grant approval on the written application and a 40-minute interview.
Not surprisingly, the criteria for receiving the funds included “equity and environmental justice” and “labor and equitable workforce.” They could have been groups of serial killers and still gotten a grant if they were woke enough.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has vowed to recover the $20 billion after a secretly recorded video made by Project Veritas showed a former EPA employee likening the deployment of the funds to “throwing gold bars” off the Titanic. He added that the goal was to “get the money out as fast as possible” before the Trump administration took over.
Meanwhile, the litigation over the $20 billion continues. Late last month, Politico obtained government emails in which an EPA lawyer noted the Trump administration could be on the hook for billions of dollars in damages if the court finds that the EPA has no legal grounds to recoup the grant money or block it from being disbursed to the nonprofits.
“We gave them everything they needed to provide for their independence,” Biden said of Ukraine, “and we were prepared to respond more aggressively if Putin moved again.”
Hogwash.
It was only in late February of last year — just about two years to the day from the outset of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine — that the Biden administration reluctantly dropped its objection to providing Kyiv with long-range ordnance for use in Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS). Biden wouldn’t authorize the use of that ordnance against Russian targets outside the Ukrainian theater for another nine months. Indeed, the former president didn’t consent to providing Ukraine with ATACMS at all until September 2023, even though Ukraine had requested access to those platforms from the start of Russia’s campaign of conquest.
That story — one defined by the Biden administration’s persistent self-doubt and halting, qualified, often insufficient support for Ukraine’s cause, only to be abruptly reversed after the damage had already been done — repeated throughout the war. The same sequence of events describes the administration’s withholding and eventual reluctant provision of High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), heavy artillery, tanks, fixed-wing aircraft, cluster munitions, antipersonnel mines, and so on.
The administration’s first thought was always about how the Russians would respond to America’s furnishment of weapons platforms and ordnance that Moscow was already using on Ukraine’s battlefields. The Biden administration’s concern wasn’t irrational, but the president and his subordinates refused to revisit their assumptions. Moscow would draw a red line, Washington would observe that red line, and when that red line was crossed without broader incident, the White House would move on to obsess over the next illusory red line. Biden declined to revise this doctrine even when it became obvious that Russia’s table-pounding objections to America’s support for Ukraine would amount to just that.
Biden failed to deter Russia’s war. Indeed, it responded to months of provocative indications that Putin was ready to attack by rewarding the Russian despot with bilateral summitry. And when Putin’s forces poured over the Ukrainian border anyway, the former president didn’t just fail to hand over “everything they needed to provide for their independence.” Rather, the administration provided Ukraine with just enough to prevent it from being wholly subsumed into the Russian Federation — and that only after losing an unnecessarily public argument with itself.
In fact, we can safely conclude that the Biden administration never trusted the Ukrainians to provide for their own defense. Instead, the president signaled to the Kremlin that the U.S. would not respond to a “minor incursion” into Ukrainian territory, and his instinct in response to Moscow’s full-scale invasion was to establish a Ukrainian government in exile. “The fight is here,” Volodymyr Zelensky said in his famous rejection of Biden’s pusillanimity. “I need ammunition, not a ride.”
Mass delusion gripped the entire Democratic Party, and they talked themselves into believing they could carry a senile president over the reelection finish line, Weekend at Bernie’s–style, if everyone just tried hard enough to gaslight the public. And as far as we can tell, at no point did any of them pause to contemplate the potential consequences for the country.
There’s something grimly satisfying about the bitter recriminations laid out in the concluding pages of Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s new book Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, as the Democrats grapple with the fact that their own leaders misled them about the reality of the 2024 presidential race every step of the way.
Three weeks after Election Day, top Kamala Harris campaign staffers appeared on Pod Save America and contended their internal polling always showed the vice president trailing. “It was hard for Democratic voters to tell what was real,” Allen and Parnes write. “They had been led to believe that Joe Biden was in fighting shape. But he wasn’t. They had been led to believe he was locked in a dead-heat race with Trump. But he wasn’t. They had been led to believe that [Kamala] Harris was in a position to win. But she wasn’t. And now they were being led to believe she never had a chance. That wasn’t really true, either.”
And in the preceding 287 pages, we keep getting anecdotes indicating things had gone terribly, glaringly, obviously wrong in the Democrats’ world, but no one wanted to admit it and confront the problems.
After his disastrous debate performance, President Biden attempted to reassure a group of unnerved Democratic governors by telling them he would no longer plan to appear at events past 8 in the evening. Allen and Parnes say one governor later quipped, “Somebody better tell the Chinese when they can attack us, because I don’t want them to wake him up.”
If the president can’t physically or mentally function well in the evening hours, why is he still president? How would he handle a sustained emergency like the Cuban Missile Crisis, where he’d need to make tough decisions after long days?
Allen and Parnes describe Biden aides calling up doubtful Democratic donors before his withdrawal and threatening them, “You want her? Look at her polling. No one wants her. Forget it.” One donor tells the authors, “They were aggressively saying that we would wind up with the vice president and that would be a mistake.” The argument that Harris is a self-evident disaster was characterized by Biden staffers as their “ace in the hole.”
If nominating Harris was such an obvious catastrophe . . . why was she vice president? At any moment, the 82-year-old Biden could keel over or have an aneurysm, and she would be the nominee anyway. For that matter, didn’t anybody on the president’s staff foresee any potential downside to trashing the veep?
If, as Allen and Parnes report, in the weeks leading up to the debate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was so nervous that he couldn’t sleep at night and his aides had to remind him to eat, wasn’t that a glaring sign that this guy wasn’t ready to be a heartbeat away from the presidency? The duties of the vice-presidency include tasks even more intimidating than debating JD Vance.
No one in any position of leadership in the Democratic Party in 2024 should have been there. None of them were up to the task before them.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday aimed at lowering prescription drug prices, instituting a “most favored nation’s policy” that would push drug companies to charge Americans the same price other nations pay.
Trump signed a similar measure during his first term to institute price controls for fifty drugs paid for with Medicare Part B, but a court blocked its implementation, ruling that the administration had skipped key administrative steps in trying to institute the proposal.
Monday’s executive order is broader in scope, focusing on all prescriptions drugs where the price disparities between the U.S. and foreign nations are the widest. But according to the White House, this executive order is not focused on a particular class of pharmaceutical drugs.
The order — which is likely to run into legal challenges as well — is in keeping with the administration’s broader trade war strategy, which relies on a suite of policy tools to address what officials say is an uneven global economic playing field.
“What’s been happening is we’ve been subsidizing other countries throughout the world,” Trump said on Monday morning before signing the executive action. “Our country is the highest drug prices anywhere in the world, by sometimes a factor of five, six, seven, eight times.”
I have no idea what the ramifications of this may be, but it will be fun to watch Democrats try to explain why driving down Big Pharma prices is bad…
She’s now in the “find out” phase: “Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan was indicted by a federal grand jury earlier this week on charges of obstruction and and concealing a person of arrest, for which she faces up to six years in prison if convicted.’
Another week, another Trump win in court. “Federal Judge Rules IRS May Share Illegal Alien Data With DHS.”
The order by U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich came amid a lawsuit by Centro de Trabajadores Unidos, an immigrant-rights aid group, against Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
“At its core, this case presents a narrow legal issue: Does the Memorandum of Understanding between the IRS and DHS violate the Internal Revenue Code? It does not,” Friedrich wrote in his order.
“(Note: Friedrich, a Trump appointee, is a woman, so that would be her order.)” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Trump ends sanctions on Syria. We’ll see if the new government can respond to carrots and put their jihadi past behind them. They probably won’t, but nothing else has worked in Syria (except backing the Kurds), so the risk is pretty low.
Illegal aliens admitted across the border in April 2024: 68,000. In 2025: Four.
More good news: “ICE Arrests 422 in Houston Sweep, Including Murder and Arson Suspects.”
The felonious, anti-democratic Democratic National Committee has decided to purge the odious, gun-grabbing fetus David Hogg from his vice-chairmanship, and National Review‘s Jeffrey Blehar is here to chortle.
The Parkland shooting survivor bootstrapped his way from anti-gun youth activist to recent election as one of the vice-chairs of the Democratic National Committee — and all this despite having forearms that look like they were carved out of balsa wood. But instead of being the easily controlled patsy the DNC’s grandees and voters expected, Hogg promptly began using the DNC’s fundraising lists and prestige to raise money for his own outside super PAC — one designed to take down “asleep-at-the-wheel” Democratic incumbents. Keep in mind that most Democratic incumbents sleep (and sometimes at the wheel) in a perpetual cold sweat about being primaried by the next wave of “Squad”-like radical lefties; now their own vice-chairman is promising to help unseat them. (The calls to get them out of the House are coming from inside the house.)
Snip.
The DNC has instead approved a resolution challenging the validity of Hogg’s election on pretextual grounds and is set to nullify the race later this month and bounce the little chiseler out of office altogether. He got too greedy with his power too fast. As both farmers and politicos will tell you: Pigs get fed, but hogs and Hoggs alike get slaughtered.
As much as I enjoy making jokes about the Democratic Party nullifying its own democratic internal processes because democracy elected the wrong person, I speak as an adult when I say Hogg had it coming, and then some. His pitch to “firewall” himself away from races where he is fundraising for enemy insurgents was the sort of farcical fantasy-world pitch that could only come from a spectacularly self-centered youth, one who believes his personal project is more important than the corporate enterprise he has joined. As another current vice-chair says in the piece, “it is not the DNC’s job to create a firewall for one officer — it is the officer’s responsibility to create a firewall.”
And the way the Democratic National Committee is doing it is so splendidly pathetic that I can barely believe my good fortune. Remember: The DNC voted for Hogg as vice-chair a mere three months ago. Upon what grounds do they propose to undo that vote? (“Behaving like a traitorous weasel” was apparently insufficient under current DNC bylaws.) Upon grounds of wokeness, as it turns out.
It’s always nice to have a splendid reminder of the sort of work the NRO crew used to be able to do before their terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome made so much of it unreadable.
House Republicans took major step on Wednesday afternoon towards codifying President Donald Trump’s efforts to protect children from transgender procedures during a marathon markup session for the “one, big, beautiful bill” working its way through Congress.
After a 26-hour budget hearing, the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed a provision from Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) that would block federal dollars funding transgender procedures. This means that Medicaid, Affordable Care Act, and Children’s Health Insurance Program money will no longer be allowed to fund procedures like removing the breasts of girls who identify as boys or putting children on cross-sex hormones, if the provision makes it through the rest of the reconciliation process.
Crenshaw receives a lot of criticism from conservatives, some of it justified, but he’s done well here.
Chris Rufo unearths documented evidence that Harvard, as a policy, systemically and illegally discriminated against white men in hiring. This is no longer a “cutting off aid” concern, this is a “people need to good to jail for violating people’s civil rights” matter.
More protections for lawful gun owners. ‘Texas senators have approved a measure strengthening the state’s protections for justified use of force or deadly force in self-defense situations. Senate Bill 1730, filed by State Sen. Bob Hall (R–Edgewood), passed 26-3-2 on Monday. The measure would prevent a claimant from recovering civil damages for personal injury or death if a grand jury has declined to pursue, thrown out, or acquitted the defendant of criminal charges. In addition, if the claimant is found to be prohibited from seeking civil action, the proposal would require them to pay court costs and the defendant’s attorney fees.”
“Texas House Approves Bill Expanding State Medical Cannabis Program. The bill expands the medical conditions that allow access to the Texas’ medical cannabis program.”
The Texas Compassionate Use Act, enacted in 2015, allows physicians to prescribe low-dose THC for patients with specific medical conditions such as incurable neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
With HB 46, TCUP will be expanded to new qualifying medical conditions, including glaucoma, traumatic brain injuries, Crohn’s disease, or any terminal illness or condition where a patient is receiving hospice or palliative care. The bill will also allow for “medication” that is “aerosolized” or “vaporized,” and the TCUP program will be expanded to include veterans “who would benefit from medical use to address a medical condition.”
The legislation also expands access by increasing the number of dispensing licenses, authorizing satellite locations across all public health regions.
[Rep. Ken] King adopted a perfecting amendment that would “grandfather” in existing satellite TCUP locations, revise the THC content limits to exceed the “one percent by weight” provision, and establish timelines for approving medical inhalation devices.
Rep. Tom Oliverson (R-Cypress) also had his amendment adopted, which will require physicians prescribing low-THC cannabis to report prescription data to the Texas State Board of Pharmacy.
The states that have experimented with uncontrolled complete legalization of marijuana seemed to have suffered a lot of harmful effects, from sketchy potheads in broken RVs trashing formerly respectable neighborhoods to state and national forests trashed by illegal grow operations, maybe because a lot are also one-party Democratic soft-on-crime blue states and deep blue cities. Oklahoma, which isn’t, has suffered from Chinese mob control of the marijuana trade. Whatever it’s flaws, Texas extremely slow medical marijuana legalization program seems to have at least avoided those problems.
Patrick McGee has a new book out, Apple in China, that’s getting a lot of attention. “The two numbers that really stick out at me are that the number of people they have trained in China since 2008 is 28 million.” I think there’s a real story there, but i also think those numbers are grossly inflated. Apple wasn’t the only company shifting contract manufacturing to China, and that 28 million only makes sense if you count every employee at every company in China that had any role in producing any part for Apple, which is (to put it mildly) an extremely tendentious claim.
“In a historic, sweeping decision, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred on Tuesday removed Pete Rose, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and other deceased players from Major League Baseball’s permanently ineligible list…Manfred ruled that MLB’s punishment of banned individuals ends upon their deaths.” (Hat Tip: Dwight.)
More DOGE uncovered fraud, Trump yanks security clearances for a lot of swamp creatures, the Democratic Party goes all in on antisemitism, good luck getting an MRI in Canada, Warner Bros Discovery is considering a sale that’s absolutely loony, and a member of the Very, Very, Very Heavy Brigade takes on a Tesla.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
For all the talk of trump not allowing a peaceful transfer of power, it’s lefty Biden appointees who are thwarting democracy.
On Friday, the Board of Directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace informed the group’s president, George Moose, that he was relieved of his duties. The same day, Moose’s replacement, Kenneth Jackson, arrived at the office for the congressionally funded nonprofit to assume his new role.
There was one problem: Moose refused to go.
A source intimately involved in the situation told The Daily Wire that Moose put the building on lockdown when Jackson and his team were en route. When they arrived, they were astonished to find that the doors were locked and they were unable to gain entry.
“They treated us, quite frankly, like criminals,” a person who was with the group shared with The Daily Wire.
Jackson encountered similar behavior on Monday. He was ultimately able to enter USIP with the help of the Metropolitan Police Department, and ordered all unauthorized personnel to leave — including Moose, who confirmed to The Daily Wire that he was escorted out by police.
When Jackson and the rest of his group were finally able to get into the building, they found things in turmoil. The shades were drawn, with white noise playing when they arrived. USIP employees were using walkie talkies to communicate within the building, according to the person who was with Jackson. As of Tuesday, none of the phone systems in the building were working, nor were the elevators, and the internet was down, The Daily Wire has learned.
“I’ve never seen something so broken,” the source familiar with the situation told The Daily Wire. Moose did not respond to inquiries into whether he and his colleagues tampered with these systems.
Colin O’Brien, the chief security officer at USIP under Moose, told The Daily Wire on Tuesday evening that the systems likely were not working because the building had been placed on lockdown at Moose’s orders, meaning that all the systems would shut down. O’Brien and other employees were told to exit the building, and he said he hadn’t been in contact with anyone on Tuesday, though he believes he is still employed by USIP.
O’Brien said that Moose ordered that members of DOGE were not to be admitted into the building, and that members of USIP were under the impression that there was an ongoing dispute with DOGE about who the leadership of the USIP was — “something that, in my understanding, was going to be litigated,” he said. He disputed the notion that DOGE had the authority to enter the building.
This story, based on accounts from individuals who were on the scene as Jackson attempted to gain access to the organization he’d been put in charge of, shows how federally-funded bureaucrats worked to sabotage operations to stop the Trump administration from taking control.
Moose, who allegedly “barricaded” himself in his office until police arrived, has told the media that members of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) broke into the office without warning. But a review of events and internal emails show not only that USIP leadership blocked Moose’s replacement from entering the building, but that it was preparing to resist changes for weeks ahead of their arrival.
Elon Musk, the world’s most successful businessman and President Donald Trump’s top White House adviser, said this week that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has uncovered shocking cases of fraud within the federal government.
Musk made the remarks during a Monday meeting with the president and his cabinet secretaries.
“One case of fraud was with the Small Business Administration, where they were handing out loans—$330 million worth of loans—to people under the age of 11,” Musk said. “I think the youngest, Kelly, was a 9-month-old who got a $100,000 loan.”
“That’s a very precocious baby we’re talking about here,” Musk quipped.
SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler followed up Musk’s remarks by saying, “We’re tackling the fraud, waste, and abuse at the agency.”
“We’ve seen, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud go unprosecuted, so we’re taking that on,” she said. “We have a zero-tolerance policy for fraud, and we continue to crack down on it and make sure people are held accountable.”
Trump said that they have found “far too much” fraud, waste, and abuse in the government over the last couple of months.
“It’s pure fraud,” he said. “We like to use the words ‘waste’ and ‘abuse’ because they sort of sound good, but many of these things are pure fraud.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) said this week that the state was returning nearly $900 million to the federal government, something it tried to do repeatedly during the Biden administration.
“For years, Florida has been trying to return federal funds to the federal government due to the ideological strings attached by the Biden Administration—but they couldn’t even figure out how to accept it,” DeSantis said in a post on X.
The governor said that he met with Elon Musk on Friday and the rest of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team and was able to return the money.
“We got this done in the same day,” DeSantis said. “Other states should follow Florida in supporting DOGE’s efforts!”
The governor posted the letter that he sent to the U.S. Treasury Department alerting them that the state was formally returning $878,112,000.00 in taxpayer dollars to the federal government “as part of DOGE’s efforts.”
The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced on Wednesday that non-permanent residents will no longer be eligible for Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgages, National Review has learned, part of a broader effort by the administration to ensure that American citizens are prioritized under taxpayer-funded housing programs following massive flow of illegal immigration under former President Joe Biden.
FHA loans offer government-insured mortgages to ensure that lower-income individuals have access to home ownership. While illegal immigrants are technically ineligible to obtain FHA-backed home loans under U.S. law, HUD’s announcement will strengthen enforcement mechanisms to ensure that illegal immigrants are not abusing the program in the future. It is unclear how many illegal immigrants have obtained FHA-backed loans.
“FHA does not retain citizenship or residency data from the loan application and therefore does not maintain information on the number of non-permanent residents who have received FHA-insured loans under past policies,” General Deputy Assistant Secretary for Housing Jeffrey D. Little wrote in a March 26 mortgagee letter shared exclusively with National Review. “This update ensures that FHA’s mortgage insurance programs are administered in accordance with Administration priorities while fulfilling its mission of providing access to homeownership.”
The new policy will also prohibit government-backed mortgages for non-permanent residents moving forward. “Currently, non-permanent residents are subject to immigration laws that can affect their ability to remain legally in the country,” Little wrote in the March 26 memo. “This uncertainty poses a challenge for FHA as the ability to fulfill long-term financial obligations depends on stable residency and employment.”
HUD’s revised residency requirements for FHA-backed loans, which take effect on May 25, will apply to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients as well as individuals who are pending asylum or pending refugee status, according to HUD, since there is no guarantee that their residency status will be renewed under the current administration.
The new policy eliminates the “non-permanent resident” category entirely from the FHA’s Single Family Title I and Title II programs, and reverses a Biden-era policy which allows FHA loans for DACA recipients who provide a valid Social Security Number and work eligibility status.
I wonder if these programs were abused for helping illegal aliens buy homes in Colony Ridge.
Others named in the list are retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, former White House Russia expert Fiona Hill, former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic Norman Eisen, former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, and lawyer Mark Zaid.”
Can anyone really say America is less safe because the people on that list no longer have access to classified information?
What the support for Mahmoud Khalil, Hasan Piker and Rasha Alawieh really shows.
A few days after the anniversary of Oct 7, the New York Times reported that Columbia University Apartheid Divest officially endorsed terrorism against Jews and withdrew an apology by one of its members for threatening to kill Jews.
Over the past weeks, the paper and the entire Democratic Party, including 103 members of Congress, the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the Jewish Democratic Council of America led by Kamala’s former foreign policy advisor, went all in on fighting for Mahmoud Khalil, a leader in CUAD who had defended terrorism, from being deported.
The signatories to a letter standing up for a Syrian national who had taken part in a pro-terrorist group’s harassment of Jewish students and faculty included half of House Democrats, not only extremists like AOC and Rep. Ilhan Omar, but Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking House Judiciary Democrat, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with multiple House Democrats of Jewish ancestry and those who represent large Jewish districts including Rep. Jerrold Nadler in New York, as well as Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove and Rep. Laura Friedman who holds down Sen. Adam Schiff’s old seat, in the LA area. The same Democrat politicians who had remained silent when Jewish students and faculty were being terrorized on campuses in their areas now rushed to the barricades for a member of a group that had openly celebrated the murder of Jews.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest is a front group for the college’s suspended Students for Justice in Palestine chapter which reacted to the first anniversary of Oct 7 by promoting a statement from a Maoist publication, “October 7th was Not ‘Barbaric’ or ‘Unfortunate’—It was Strategic and Anti-imperialist” and hailed the “moral, military, and political victory of the Operation”. This is what the Democrats who condemn Trump’s proposed deportation of a CUAD leader as “authoritarian” now support. Not just terrorism: but the mass murder of Jews.
Now, Democrats rallied once more in support of Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese Hezbollah supporter, traveling to America on a visa who was refused entry into the United States.
According to Customs and Border Protection, Alawieh (pictured above) had deleted Hezbollah materials on her phone, attended the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and claimed that she followed Nasrallah’s teachings “from a religious perspective.”
Hezbollah is not only responsible for the murder of Jews, but the barracks bombing in Beirut which killed 220 Marines, the kidnapping and brutal torture of Colonel William R. Higgins, who was castrated and skinned before his body was dumped near a mosque, and the vicious killing of Robert Stethem, a Navy diver, during an airline hijacking when, as a stewardess described, “They were jumping in the air and landing full force on his body. He must have had all his ribs broken… they put the mike up to his face so his screams could be heard by the outside world.”
“A visa is a privilege not a right—glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied. This is commonsense security,” the Department of Homeland Security warned. Democrats fundamentally disagree with that position.
Judge Leo Sorokin, a Clinton appointee, barred the Hezbollah supporter from being deported, and then demanded to know why she had not been allowed into the country. Instead of reporting that Rasha Alawieh had visited a terrorist group’s event responsible for the murder of hundreds of Americans, the media claimed she had been visiting her family in her country.
Rep. Gabe Amo, along with other Dems, have stated that they intend to continue fighting for her
Brown University, which employed Alawieh and is under investigation for antisemitism, responded by urging foreign employees like her not to travel abroad because of “travel bans, visa procedures and processing, re-entry requirements” they might conceivably run afoul of if they support terrorists and the mass murder of Americans and Jews.
In the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz hyped Hasan Piker, a Muslim influencer on the video game streaming platform Twitch, as the best hope for the Democrats winning over “bros” and “young men” .Somewhere in the middle of the article, after mentioning his dog’s name and his support for ‘non-binary’ people, gets around to briefly mentioning his “soft-pedalling the brutality of Hamas, or the Houthis, or the Chinese Communist Party” and being named “Antisemite of the Year” as a minor detail before pivoting to a discussion about a possible Hasan reality show.
And to Democrats today, such things are minor details, less important than anything else.
Piker, has said, “it doesn’t matter if rapes f***ing happened on Oct. 7, like that doesn’t change the dynamic for me even this much” while holding up his fingers slightly apart. “The Palestinian resistance is not perfect.” And he’s been featured on CNN, invited to the DNC, and Democrats, from Rep. Ro Khanna to AOC to Sen. Ed Markey appeared on his podcast. Buttigieg has been trying to get on. Expect most other Democrats aspiring to run in 2028 to do likewise.
This week, the Texas Legislature took steps to strip power from the Texas Lottery Commission, possibly setting the agency up for abolition, and Las Vegas Sands’ casino plans suffered a setback in Irving at the hands of outraged citizens.
On Monday, State Sen. Mayes Middleton (R-Galveston) laid out Senate Bill 1721 in the State Affairs Committee. It would transfer the administration of bingo games in Texas from the Lottery Commission to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation.
Snip.
When introducing his measure to ban lottery couriers operating in Texas, State Sen. Bob Hall (R-Edgewood) noted that on a hierarchy of administration complexity, bingo and lottery are at the bottom of the totem pole.
During a September 2024 Sunset Commission hearing, State Sen. Judith Zaffirini (D-Laredo) noted that revenues to the state before and after the lottery was created remained flat. The state is not likely to lose money if the lottery goes away.
At two separate hearings this week in Irving, citizens showed up in force to oppose a planning variance to build a casino. Ultimately, Sands asked the city council to pull the language allowing the construction of a casino from the development request.
Sands currently operates no casinos in America and derives most of its revenue from China.
The mess at the Lottery Commission probably deserves a separate post…
In his lengthy announcement post on social media, McGregor voiced his opposition to the European Union (EU) Migration Pact, which the bloc has mandated that Ireland must ratify by June 12th, 2026. The pact would relax Ireland’s border security and make it easier for illegal aliens to claim asylum.
“Between now and 12 June 2026, several pieces of legislation have to be passed by both Houses of the Oireachtas and then signed by the President,” McGregor explained. “The next presidential election must take place by 11 [November] 2025.”
“Who else will stand up to Government and oppose this bill? Any other Presidential candidate they attempt to put forward will be of no resistance to them. I will!” McGregor declared.
He also said that, as president, he would pursue a nationwide referendum on the Migration Pact, allowing the people of Ireland to decide for themselves whether or not the country should be forced to abide by the deal.
In celebrating the life of Tony Dolan, President Reagan’s chief speechwriter, the most remarkable fact is that he was executing a strategy he conceived to defeat the Soviet Union.
In numerous conversations in the speechwriting office—long before any foreign policy experts dared to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet Union itself, Tony said that he knew how to defeat the Soviets.
As a young journalist in his hometown of Stamford, Connecticut, he had exposed organized crime that, he said, had entirely corrupted the city. Tony was relentless, ultimately breaking the mob’s power and becoming one of the youngest journalists to win the Pulitzer Prize. He said that the same method would bring down the Soviets, an entirely corrupt system, another form of organized crime. Tell the truth about them; expose them as evil; let everyone—especially those in power—hear them described as what they are. It was his conviction that President Reagan, by speaking with moral clarity about the Soviets, could hasten their collapse.
In his essay How the United States Won the Cold War, Warren Norquist identifies the rhetorical moral battle, “demoralizing the Soviets and generating pressure for change,” as one of seven crucial components in the US victory over the USSR.
Tony later wrote in the Wall Street Journal that for criminal regimes, there is “one weapon they fear more than military or economic sanction: the publicly-spoken truth about their moral absurdity, their ontological weakness.”
Snip.
The Reagan administration, internally, was a battlefield of competing visions that came to a head over presidential speeches. Once the president said something, it became the official policy—which made speechwriting a critical front in these internal struggles. The battle cry of conservatives in the administration was, “Let Reagan be Reagan.” In that struggle, Tony was unwavering. He would not wobble when West Wing power players tried to intimidate him. He was himself an exceptionally skilled political infighter—usually scheming, always charming, and with a spine of coiled steel.
From the outset of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Tony helped to chisel out the rhetorical space in which the speechwriters could give voice to President Reagan’s resolve that the outcome of the Cold War would be, “We win, they lose.”
And it was not only combative phrases. At times it was subversive speech, as in Reagan’s 1981 Univ. of Notre Dame speech drafted by Tony: “The West won’t contain communism; it will transcend communism. … it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”
Or his 1982 speech in London, the Westminster address, “… one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: of all the millions of refugees we’ve seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward, the Communist world. Today, on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east—to prevent their people from leaving. … What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy, which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”
California announces it will need another seven billion dollars in taxpayer money not to build a high speed rail. But I’m sure all the consultant graft will be channeled into the proper left-wing pockets… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Canadian woman gets a referral from her doctor to get an MRI to see if she has a brain tumor. So now she has an appointment for one. In 2026.
Carole Stewart Keeton McClellan Rylander Strayhorn (to use all the names she was known under), former Democratic mayor of Austin, Republican Railroad Commissioner and Comptroller of Texas, has died. In a way her career was emblematic of a certain kind of moderate politician in Texas at the time, with a huge realignment from the Democratic to the Republican Party, a change that started with John Connally, picked up speed with Phil Gramm and Rick Perry, and continues into this day with Hispanic office holders still switching over. Speaking of Perry, she was one of two prominent female Republican moderate officeholders (Kay Baily Hutchinson being the other) who destroyed their careers trying to unseat Perry from the Governor’s Mansion.
Is Warner BrothersTime WarnerAOL-Time WarnerWarnerMedia Warner Bros. Discovery putting Loony Tunes for sale? What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
Guy who did the Vegas Tesla bomby/turns out to be a dirty Commie.
Annals of criminal genius: 5-foot-2, 449-pound dumbass drives his 4-wheeler into an Tesla. “Demarqeyun Marquize Cox was arrested after one of his alleged attacks was recorded by the Tesla he purposely ran into, police in Texarkana, Texas announced.” And yes, there’s video:
I’m pretty much over my cold, except the occasional cough and continued draining of the Strategic Mucus Reserve.
The USAID revelation continues, with every left-wing, anti-American cause getting their snout into the trough of taxpayer money. Plus blows against the illegal alien and tranny pander brigades. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Second Amendment advocates have long know that “Everytown for Gun Safety” was, like all the other branches of the Brady Bunch hydra, pure Astrotruf, but thanks to database revelations, we now know that taxpayers were footing the bill.
Have you ever heard of NEO Philanthropy? They’re a left-wing group that has been around for more than 40 years. NEO wants folks to believe it is a partnership between “changemakers and funders.” They claim to provide “resources to groups accelerating change.” Race, gender and DEI are huge for them, but guns are a problem.
An incredible website database has outed NEO Philanthropy’s actual duties, and those of thousands of other similar groups. NEO, it turns out, is nothing more than a middleman. It receives money and funnels some of it to Everytown for Gun Safety as well as other leftwing, anti-gun groups.
The website database is called DataRepublican.com, and it will forever change the way nonprofits handle their funding, especially those on the left.
Snip.
On Wednesday, pro-gun official Hannah Hill “exposed taxpayer money flowing to Bloomberg gun control orgs.”
The next day, she used the website to link USAID funds that went to Everytown, Giffords and more gun-control organizations.
👀 Yesterday, @hannahhill_sc exposed taxpayer money flowing to Bloomberg gun control orgs.
Today, @DataRepublican's tool helped 2A advocates link USAID funds to Everytown, Giffords & more.
George Soros got his nose in the trough as well. Who was bankrolling the campaign to appoint pro-crime Soros DAs? You were.
Beginning about a decade ago, George Soros began funding campaigns for people who became known as the “Soros prosecutors.” Local prosecutorial races, which once had a few thousand spent on them, suddenly started seeing hundreds of thousands, and even millions of dollars pouring in, totaling about $50 million to elect 75 prosecutors nationwide.
Every one of those prosecutors is a radical leftist who immediately set about remaking the local justice system in accordance with leftist values: Criminals are victims of the system and should not be prosecuted; Republicans are enemies of the people and should be prosecuted. Some of these prosecutors are wreaking havoc on a scale that doesn’t make the news; others have done such horrible things that their names hit the headlines:
Kim Gardner, the woman who used false charges to destroy Eric Greitens, Missouri’s Republican governor, and whose tenure was distinguished by slandering the police, violating open records laws, persecuting the McCloskeys for defending their property against BLM rioters, discriminating against employees on racial grounds, and letting the most egregious criminals walk free.
Lawrence Krasner, the Philadelphia DA who just promised to prosecute the pardoned January 6ers. He couldn’t name a crime, though. He seemed to be operating on the Lavrentiy Beria principle of “show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”
Andrew Warren, the Florida prosecutor who announced that he would no longer prosecute entire categories of criminal activities because he didn’t like the Florida laws. Governor Ron DeSantis fired him.
George Gascón, a District Attorney who managed to break both the San Francisco and Los Angeles criminal justice systems. He was finally voted out of office in L.A. this past November.
Kimberly Foxx, the Cook County Chicago prosecutor who turned the criminal justice system into a revolving door, creating a staggering wave of violence in already beleaguered Chicago.
And then there’s Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg, who brought an utterly spurious and quite obviously political case against Donald Trump for allegedly criminal hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.
Without exception, the Soros prosecutors, most of whom received money from the Tides organizations, have been disastrous for their communities and, in Bragg’s case, for America as a whole. (Although one could argue that Bragg’s manifest political persecution of Donald Trump helped return Trump to the White House, which, to date, has been an incredibly good thing.)
Thus, there’s a straight line from Soros to Tides to corrupt prosecutors.
But what does this have to do with USAID? Well, back in October 2020, when no one was paying too much attention (COVID, BLM, the election), and USAID-funded mainstream media outlets were busy quashing stories that harmed Democrat interests, USAID was Funding the Tides Center:
Nearly $170 million in government grants has passed through a liberal dark money behemoth that houses numerous left-wing groups, including the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, tax forms show.
The taxpayer-funded grants were disbursed to groups through the Tides Center, a San Francisco-based nonprofit incubator that wealthy liberal donors use to bankroll progressive causes. A number of radical left-wing groups have fallen under the auspices of the Tides Center, which acts as a “fiscal sponsor” to nonprofits by providing its 501(c)(3) tax and legal status. This arrangement lets the groups under its umbrella avoid registering with the IRS.
[snip]
[Scott] Walter [president of the Capitol Research Center] noted that the Tides Center’s recipient profile on USASpending.gov, which posts government grants, shows $34 million in federal funding since 2008. The grants were primarily from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Health and Human Services.
And Stephen Green discovered that USAID was also funding #BlackLivesMatter so they could help burn down your city.
More than $1.3 billion in taxpayer funds from the Biden administration ended up helping groups that sponsored or committed terrorism.
Federal watchdog reports and other documents show former President Joe Biden’s aid programs funneled the money toward a network of terrorism in the Muslim world — largely by reversing Trump-era policies.
Snip.
The Biden administration gave $1,053,400,000 in taxpayer money to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which claims to help war-afflicted Palestinian civilians but is tied to terrorists fighting Israel, according to U.S. and Israeli intelligence. Biden reversed a Trump-era ban on UNRWA funding in 2021 but brought back the ban last year after Israel accused UNWRA workers of participating in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
Intelligence officials later revealed that more than 1,000 UNRWA employees, or around 10%, were linked to the groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, according to documents found on the bodies of dead terrorists and other evidence. A dozen took part in the Oct. 7 massacre, including a Hamas commander who was teaching in elementary school for UNRWA and led a siege against an Israeli kibbutz that killed almost 100 people.
UNWRA’s schools have long used curriculum for Palestinian children that glorifies terrorists and martyrdom, a March 2023 report from UN Watch found.
The curriculum comes from the Palestinian Authority (PA), a governing body in the West Bank that the Biden administration considered more friendly to American interests than Hamas. The PA also made a profit from Biden’s presidency despite its program that pays Palestinians and their families as a reward for acts of terror against Jews.
Trump and Congress passed a law in 2018 blocking economic support funds for the PA due to its program. Trump later paused all remaining funding for the PA before Biden took office and resumed it.
The Biden administration in part revived the economic support fund that Trump’s law restricts. The State Department claimed in documents from 2021 that “most” of the money did not “directly benefit the PA” in violation of the law. However, officials sent $265 million straight to the PA for its “security forces and justice sector institutions” throughout Biden’s presidency, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Under Biden, the PA agreed to pay more than $97 million to reward the perpetrators of the Oct. 7 attacks, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups.
They literally never denied a payment in their entire career.
So Treasury official David A. Lebryk resigned rather than testifying. Sounds like he should be subpoenaed and/or indicted…
Another media beneficiary of USAID taxpayer subsidies: Christianity Today. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and also render unto Caesar what is God’s…as long as Caesar is paying you enough.
You’ve never heard of the “Zizians,” and neither had I until this afternoon, but you’re probably going to be hearing a lot more about them now that this weirdo California cult has been connected to the shootout in Vermont last week that left a Border Patrol agent dead. Credit to Andy Ngo for putting together the pieces of this bizarre puzzle. When the shootout went down in Vermont on January 20, the initial reports were very thin, but piece by piece, we’ve learned more about the two suspects, Teresa Youngblut, a 21-year-old from Seattle, and Felix Bauckholt, a math genius from Germany who had worked in the financial industry on an H1B visa. About seven months ago, Youngblut’s parents had reported her missing, saying she had cut off contact with them and they were concerned she might be in a coercive relationship. The police didn’t do anything, saying that as an adult, she couldn’t be considered a runaway.
Youngblut and Bauckholt showed up in Vermont a couple of weeks ago and attracted suspicion because they were wearing black “tactical” gear and Youngblut had a pistol in a visible holster. Eventually, this led to an attempted traffic stop on I-91 in which both Youngblut and Bauckholt pulled pistols. Bauckholt was killed in the resulting shootout, but Younglut survived and will face charges.
The Department of Justice will ensure that, consistent with law, ‘sanctuary jurisdictions’ do not receive access to Federal funds from the Department,’ Bondi’s first-day memo says.
‘Consistent with applicable statutes, regulations, court orders, and terms, the Department of Justice shall pause the distribution of all funds until a review has been completed, terminate any agreements that are in violation of law or are the source of waste, fraud, or abuse, and initiate clawback or recoupment procedures, where appropriate.’
It’s no secret that Chicago has forsaken its own low-income residents to virtue signal as a so-called ‘sanctuary city’ for illegal immigrants – to the point where local residents have been excoriating city officials during official meetings, and major businesses such as Ken Griffin’s Citadel moved to Miami due to the city devolving into “Afghanistan.”
Now, the Trump DOJ is suing Chicago, the state of Illinois, local officials over laws creating said ‘sanctuary,’ and have accused the defendants of impeding federal immigration enforcement efforts. In their complaint, the DOJ has asked a judge to declare the state and local measures unconstitutional due to the federal government’s supremacy.
One of the laws challenged by the Wednesday lawsuit prohibits officials from complying with federal immigration detainers and providing certain information about noncitizens.
“The challenged provisions of Illinois, Chicago, and Cook County law reflect their intentional effort to obstruct the Federal Government’s enforcement of federal immigration law and to impede consultation and communication between federal, state, and local law enforcement officials that is necessary for federal officials to carry out federal immigration law and keep Americans safe,” reads the lawsuit.
Named in the case are Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D), Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D), as well as the city’s police superintendent and other city officials.
The case, filed in federal court in Chicago, marks one of the first major cases brought by the Trump administration in such a case, and comes after the Wednesday confirmation of Attorney General Pam Bondi, who issued a same-day memo restricting sanctuary cities from accessing DOJ funds.
The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it, and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangers, unexploded bombs, and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.
Trump’s affinity for beachfront property aside, I don’t see how rebuilding Gaza is a proper use of American tax dollars.
Sudden Putin Death Syndrome strike again. “Russian singer who donated to Ukraine and called Putin an ‘idiot’ mysteriously falls to his death from a window.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Kamala Harris team lied about Joe Rogan’s attempt to get her on his show. Of course they did. The whole campaign was built on lies and an attempt to install Harris in the White House without enduring any scrutiny from voters.
Speaking of which, remember when CBS swore up and down they didn’t deceptively edit the Kamala Harris video They lied.
Winning. “President Trump Signs Executive Order Barring Men from Women’s Sports.”
On Wednesday, National Girls and Women in Sports Day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order barring men from women’s sports through Title IX, withholding funding from universities that insist on allowing male athletes to encroach on women’s competition.
The order will also empower women who are forced to compete against men to sue their schools and directs the Department of Homeland Security to deny visa applications from foreign athletes who identify themselves as the opposite sex in order to compete in the U.S.
At the signing ceremony, Trump specifically cited the importance of protecting female athletes at the upcoming 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles and the World Cup.
“My administration will not stand by and watch men beat and batter female athletes. We’re just not going to let it happen,” Trump said.
J.K. Rowling had something to say about it as well:
Congratulations to every single person on the left who’s been campaigning to destroy women’s and girls’ rights. Without you, there’d be no images like this. pic.twitter.com/mzR7l5k1OW
Our vile media: “Newsweek runs puff piece on gender transition of man who held family hostage, raped them, and killed their kids.
More dictates from the Texas House Cabal: “Speaker Burrows Confirms House Rules Were Written by Democrat Lawyer. The new rules mandate that all House committee vice-chairs be Democrats and expand their authority.”
Follow-up: Charges against Aaron Dunn and Wallis Nader, two of the Lina Hidalgo’s aides indicted for vote rigging, have been been dismissed by the Texas Office of the Attorney General, and a third against Alex Triantaphyllis is expected to be dismissed as well, though it’s unclear why.
Because I’m such a helpful, big-hearted fellow, I’m going to start a series where I tell Democrats how to find their way out of their current slough of despond. But since I’m so very, very tired of their useless shit, and of them making the same mistakes over and over again, I’m going to give said advice in a way that brutally goosesteps all over their precious feel-feels, ensuring that they will stop reading reading it in a fit of blind rage, which will in turn make them incapable of learning from it, ensuring that they continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.
I’m tricksy that way.
This first big lesson: Abandon the fucking idiot woke social justice warrior bullshit
All of it.
ALL. OF. IT.
That’s going to be the overarching lesson for the first few of these. But because there’s so much social justice bullshit, I’m going to have to break these lessons up to cover different types of social justice warrior bullshit.
Lesson the First: Abandon your transsexual madness.
Cut out all the transsexual bullshit. Sex is not a social construct. There are two sexes, male and female. If you have XY chromosomes, you are male. If you have XX chromosomes, you are female. A man cannot make himself into a woman by any means, and certainly not by simply declaring he’s a woman. Stop pretending otherwise. Stop pretending that “gender” is “fluid.” Stop pretending that a few odd genetic corner cases give you permission to pretend a man wearing a dress is a woman. Stop enabling mental illness. We’re not playing anymore.
Get your fucking child-mutilating hands off children. If you insane, mentally ill perverts want to mutilate your own damn body, fine. Not my circus, not my monkeys. But when you start mutilating the genitalia of children and start sterilizing children for life, fuck you and every one of your virtue-signaling comrades and expect to lose every election between now and the heat death of the universe.
Stop putting men pretending to be women into women’s prisons. Democrats go to great lengths to assure the public they’re against rape, but when it comes down to preventing rape or enabling their virtue signaling, Democratic prison officials across the country have decided they’re just fine and dandy with rape. Just as with UK’s Labour government being just fine with systemic child rape of British women by unassimilated Muslim immigrants in the Rotherham et. al. scandals being an acceptable price to pay for more “multicultural” voters, so too the Democratic Party seems to think repeated rape of incarcerated women by male felons claiming to be woman is necessary for the greater glory of “social justice.”
Stop asking government to pay for “sex change operations” for illegal aliens and convicted felons. Remember how Kamala Harris’ promise to pay for sex changes for illegal aliens in 2020 came back to bite her in the ass in 2024. Like I said, if you freaks want to pay to mutilate yourself, we don’t give a rat’s ass. But when ordinary people are having trouble paying for food because of the lingering inflation from the Biden Recession, they get angry when you use their tax dollars to pay for idiot virtue-signaling bullshit. Ditto Julian Castro’s absurd pimping of “transgender abortion.”
Cut out the bullshit euphemisms. Mutilating a child’s genitalia isn’t “gender affirming care,” it’s evil perversion we will hold you to account for performing. Likewise:
Stop pretending that refusing to indulge in the mentally ill delusion that someone is a different sex than the one they were born with is “literally killing them.” “Do what I say or I’ll kill myself” has never been a morally acceptable threat, and studies show that mutilating people in the name of “gender affirming care” doesn’t decrease the risk of suicide. Quite the opposite: “The results of this study indicate that patients who have undergone gender affirmation surgery are associated with significantly higher risks of suicide, self-harm, and PTSD compared to general population control groups.”
Stop demanding pronouns. That means you, corporate American. We’re not playing your woke bullshit games any more, and if you keep trying to force that down our throats, expect to see employees, customers and federal contracts all dry up.
Stop pandering to the non-existent “modern” transsexual shopper. All their weird breast-binding and size 14 women shoe needs can probably be served by a single mail order house somewhere in New York or San Francisco. Pull that virtue signaling crap out of your store and put in merchandise that people actually want. That means you, Target. And if you’re aiming that shit at children, expect to see ordinary Americans actively work to see that you go bankrupt.
Stop letting men play women’s athletics. The average man is stronger and faster than the average woman, and among athletes this male advantage is even more greatly pronounced, and in contact sports like boxing the advantage is so overwhelming that pretending otherwise creates an active danger to the life and health of a woman trying to compete against a biological man. The Biden Administration’s perversion of Title IX has already been found unconstitutional and is deeply unpopular among the parents of girls participating in high school and college athletes. Why is the Democratic Party so obsessed with alienating vast swathes of the American voting public in order to pander to the laughable delusions of a small number of low value males who are incapable of beating other men and need to wrest some sort of sick gratification from beating smaller and weaker girls by pretending to be female?
Remember, Democrats, Step 1 is admitting you have a problem. Wokeness and social justice in general, and transsexual madness in specific, are a battleship-anchor around your neck. The sane majority of ordinary Americans are more than happy to see it drag you down to the bottom of the ocean, but self preservation would suggest you just might want to consider pulling your head out of your ass, changing course, and leaving the freakshow of transsexual madness behind.
Eric Weinstein sat down with the Triggernometry guys (Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster) to talk about the 2024 election and the Democrat Party’s radical diversion from “Democracy.”
Eric Weinstein: “A certain kind of base reality is too difficult to deny.”
Konstantin Kisin: “Well, if you keep losing elections, it’s too difficult to deny.”
EW: “They’ve lost one just now, but this is going to be a very consequential one. First of all, it puts JD Vance, who I consider a friend, on deck. Man is that guy smart and good, combines all sorts of aspects of progressivism. I think he ran a campaign with Donald Trump as a loyal number two, but JD is a powerhouse in and of himself.”
EW: “I think he could run a campaign that would just be irresistible to all sorts of people.”
EW: “I would like to just point out that you could easily have 12 years coming off of this election, and you could have a Supreme Court that was completely dominated by Donald Trump and JD Vance, and it will transform the country. So this is a very consequential election to have screwed up.”
EW: “Obama doesn’t matter.”
EW: “The Clintons are highly degraded.” I think he means as a political force, but the other way works as well.
EW: “This was such a bad story that no one knew how to defend it, and I also think that Kamla Harris’s apparent drop in IQ is due to the fact that nobody can explain the Democratic Party. It’s a series of horse trades and intellectual half measures. It doesn’t have any coherence.”
EW: “Are you the party of sweetness and light? Are you the party of the working class? Or are you really the party of the transgendered and financial billionaires worried about the carried interest exemption? It just didn’t make any sense, and there was no way to defend it and still got close to 50% of the popular [vote] because so many people are dependent on these narratives.”
Francis Foster: “To me the Democrat Party [is] divorced from reality in so many different ways. They talk about being Democratic, but Kamala Harris didn’t go through any primary. They just appointed her.”
EW: “You can’t say democracy is on the ballot. There’s no primary.”
EW: “The thing that inspires us, that gets us to put our right hand over our heart, is the idea of a government by, of, and for the people not perishing from this Earth.”
EW: [The idea] “it’s perfectly legal, perfectly permissible, to just select a candidate [is] an abomination.”
EW: “You’ve installed a candidate who was the worst candidate available, until she became America’s sweetheart, and the whiplash from that period of time just forced the Machinery to to reveal itself.”
FF: “And it seems like that’s one of the logical fallacies within the Democrat Party, but it’s just one after another after another.”
EW: “We’ve been through, like, a North Korean brainwashing experiment, and we can’t believe that this happened. It’s just so bad, and every single person of any kind of originality of thought or independence of mind rejects it.”
Weinstein notes that creative people in the trades (electricians, truckers, etc.) were never sucked into the woke mindset, because their jobs require them to be based in unforgiving reality. It was only among academics, PhDs and corporate workplaces that the woke virus spread. “That’s what’s going to have to collapse.”
