In my original post on my friend Andrew Wimsatt’s murder, I was relying on early accounts of the crime, and thus said a few things that turned out to be wrong.
Here’s the high level summary of corrections:
In the original post, I said Andrew was a CHL/LTC holder who “likely would have survived his assault had he been carrying that day.” The early reports I was relying on didn’t make clear that he was sitting on a park bench when his assailant snuck up behind him and stabbed him in the neck.* I had the impression he was still walking when the attack occurred. Obviously, in such a situation Andrew wouldn’t have had time to draw his weapon to stave off the attack.
I originally wrote that Benedict Ogbodiegwu, Andrew’s alleged attacker, “does not appear to have been released on bail for previous offenses in Travis County.” This may technically be true, but I didn’t think to search the Williamson County judicial database, where it shows he has had one felony and multiple misdemeanors dismissed.
But evidence has emerged that his attacker wasn’t just known as a crime risk, but a mental health risk as well:
Many are quick to blame revolving-door justice, but the Benedict Ogbodiegwu case—the man charged with murdering Andrew Wimsatt—is a criminal justice failure of a slightly-different sort. He wasn't a violent repeat offender.
Ogbodiegwu was ruled incompetent for trial last Feb and…
Many are quick to blame revolving-door justice, but the Benedict Ogbodiegwu case—the man charged with murdering Andrew Wimsatt—is a criminal justice failure of a slightly-different sort. He wasn’t a violent repeat offender.
Ogbodiegwu was ruled incompetent for trial last Feb and sent to restoration. Then, his competency hearing scheduled for May was cancelled, and in April his theft charge was dropped.
Was he sane enough to walk free, like nothing ever happened? Obviously not. So, what did the system miss? How does mental health treatment, ordered specifically to restore competency for trial, lead to zero accountability instead of that trial?
A good question.
More complete details of the (be forewarned) grisly crime have emerged:
The affidavit says that a woman had reported finding Wimsatt’s body at around 11:15 a.m. Sept. 7 in a park in the 2400 block of Chandler Creek Boulevard, near Double File Trail Elementary. The woman told law enforcement she had found him near a park bench with significant injuries and called 911.
Video footage obtained from the neighborhood HOA showed a white man in a button-down shirt and dark shorts sitting on the bench at about 10:55 a.m. that morning.
A couple of minutes later, a black man with a knife in his hand is seen coming up behind the other man, later identified as Wimsatt, and beginning to stab him in the neck while wrapping his other arm around him. Wimsatt is seen on video attempting to push the man off, but is unable to.
Wimsatt was stabbed several more times and left on the ground when the suspect wiped the blade on his shift and ran from the scene towards the pool area. More video footage showed the suspect running north of the pool and towards N AW Grimes Boulevard.
Video from before the attack led investigators to a water fountain near the basketball court where they were able to lift a palm print.
The suspect was in a black shirt with red writing, grey sweatpants and dark shoes and had medium-length braids with light-colored tips and a dark goatee.
A canvass of local businesses and homes revealed that the suspect had visited a McDonald’s on E. Palm Valley Boulevard hours after the attack in a different set of clothes. Video footage from the restaurant also showed the man getting into a red SUV in the parking lot.
Detectives identified the SUV as belonging to Ogbodiegwu’s family and registered at a home less than a mile on foot from the park.
Another canvass around the home uncovered surveillance footage showing a black man walking west in the same clothes as the man in the HOA footage at about 10:22 a.m. He also appeared to have an object in his left pocket. He is then seen returning eastbound at about 11:05 a.m.
Snip.
A search of the area did not uncover any new evidence, but a residential search warrant did, with detectives finding a white trash bag inside an outdoor garbage can containing the black shirt, grey sweatpants and black shoes the man in the video was wearing and a 5.5 inch knife with a wooden handle. The sweatpants had red stains on them and the blade tested presumptive positive for blood, says the affidavit.
Despite Ogbodiegwu’s prior history of possible mental illness, he seemed to be cognizant enough to ditch his blood-stained clothes and murder weapon and then enjoy a meal at McDonald’s after his violent murder of a complete stranger.
One thing I have not found in local news reports is that Ogbodiegwu attempted to “behead” Andrew, as some farther flung outlets have reported. This appears to be a too-many-steps removed exaggeration of an already horrific crime. (Edited to Add: A correction to the correction: Though it doesn’t mention “beheading,” the Statesman article does mention the perp “sawing” at Andrew’s neck. It sucks to have to add graphic details in the name of accuracy.)
I felt the need to post this update because many people used the original post as a source, and I fear the original mistakes have already been fed into numerous AI databases, possibly beyond the reach of human correction.
Barring some major new revelation, I hope this is the last post I have to write on the murder itself. Tomorrow I hope to have a post up celebrating Andrew’s life and posting some of the many tributes that have poured in from people who knew him.
*I originally ended this sentence with “like a cowardly little bitch,” but I fear this would have marred the objective tone were media outlets to use this post as a source. Though I still feel this description is totally accurate.
New York Times seems very upset we might win in Iran, the economy adds more jobs (or, as I call it in my house, Passover), ActBlue employees keep invoking the Fifth, the left still wants to trans your kids, a mistrial for Murder Mom, and the unwritten rules of the Internet.
Conditions in the Strait of Hormuz are coming unstuck in ways that advance American interests, although the situation remains stalemated.
CNN reported late last week that “Iran is losing much of its control over the critical waterway” as the U.S. Navy quietly but effectively transits oil-laden tankers out of the strait under Iranian noses. In concert with the oil and petroleum products escaping the region via overland pipelines, Donald Trump’s energy secretary indicated that energy exports from the region are now approaching pre-war levels.
CNN couldn’t independently verify the administration’s figures. Nor could the Wall Street Journal. But to a certain extent, that is to be expected from a covert operation like the one the U.S. is engaged in. “Many ships are crossing the strait at night with their transponders off, making them hard to track by radio signal or satellite imagery,” the Journal reported Monday. The report’s headline warns that industry trackers “can’t find” the exports the White House touts, but the body of the article notes that some of those trackers’ estimates about what could be coming online run “closer to the administration’s numbers,” albeit only recently.
Even if it only backed into the policy of economic strangulation that it’s applying to the Islamic Republic, the Trump administration is finally seeing it produce some positive results. Naturally, then, it’s incumbent on the president to surrender to the Iranians while he still can. At least, that’s the argument Rosemary Kelanic brought to the pages of the New York Times.
Kelanic, the director of Defense Priorities’ Middle East program and a contributor to the Quincy Institute’s “Responsible Statecraft” blog, contends at the outset of her Monday op-ed that “defeat” is now America’s “least bad option.” The U.S. has little choice but to quit the field, allowing Iran to control and toll an international waterway. But it’s not clear why America must give up now.
As Kelanic admits, the war has shown that, even if the U.S. “cannot completely open” the strait, Iran “cannot completely close” it either. Why should they be bequeathed an unprecedented level of sovereignty over an international maritime chokepoint that they could not capture on their own? Kelanic doesn’t say. She does, however, dwell on America’s challenges.
The geography of the strait ensures that it is “impossible to decisively defeat” Iranian harassment initiatives. Modern technology, like cheap missiles and drones, creates “endemic risk of crossing Hormuz that even a negotiated deal with Tehran would not eliminate.” That sounds like a rationale for abandoning the negotiations that will, by Kelanic’s own admission, fail to produce a durable (much less desirable) outcome.
Indeed, the author doesn’t even attempt to strike a more-in-sorrow tone when arguing for America’s capitulation. The United States is struggling with an irreparable shortage of munitions, she suggests. And even if America’s ordnance stocks were brimming, its people have no stomach for a long-duration mission to “sneak oil through Hormuz.” In fact, the voting public may even resent the political class’s resistance to an Iranian tolling regime that extracts funds primarily from foreign pockets. After all, “those countries could pay their own way.”
The U.S., Kelanic adds, has little slack in its economy — quite unlike the less “oil-intensive” economies of China and Russia. That’s a kick that Kelanic has been on for some time. And she has a point when it comes to China, albeit one that was overstated at the outset of Operation Epic Fury; China’s energy position today is sustained by its consumption restrictions, its oil reserves, and its “shift toward coal.” By contrast, the argument that Russia can easily absorb a fuel shock is betrayed by the evidence of your own eyes.
At no point does Kelanic acknowledge the buffers in the American economy. The “shale revolution,” the Journal’s Greg Ip observed, “has turned the U.S. into a net exporter of petroleum and major exporter of liquefied natural gas.” That might account for some of “the recent resilience of world oil markets,” which Kelanic admits “surprised many.”onditions in the Strait of Hormuz are coming unstuck in ways that advance American interests, although the situation remains stalemated.
CNN reported late last week that “Iran is losing much of its control over the critical waterway” as the U.S. Navy quietly but effectively transits oil-laden tankers out of the strait under Iranian noses. In concert with the oil and petroleum products escaping the region via overland pipelines, Donald Trump’s energy secretary indicated that energy exports from the region are now approaching pre-war levels.
CNN couldn’t independently verify the administration’s figures. Nor could the Wall Street Journal. But to a certain extent, that is to be expected from a covert operation like the one the U.S. is engaged in. “Many ships are crossing the strait at night with their transponders off, making them hard to track by radio signal or satellite imagery,” the Journal reported Monday. The report’s headline warns that industry trackers “can’t find” the exports the White House touts, but the body of the article notes that some of those trackers’ estimates about what could be coming online run “closer to the administration’s numbers,” albeit only recently.
Even if it only backed into the policy of economic strangulation that it’s applying to the Islamic Republic, the Trump administration is finally seeing it produce some positive results. Naturally, then, it’s incumbent on the president to surrender to the Iranians while he still can. At least, that’s the argument Rosemary Kelanic brought to the pages of the New York Times.
We can’t let American win in Iran because that might help Trump.
Good news! “Economy Adds 162,000 Jobs in August 2026.”
The August 2026 jobs report blew all expectations out of the water.
Economists expected the economy to add only 53,000 jobs.
Well…the report shows the economy added 162,000 jobs:
Food services and drinking places: +59,000
Local government education: +42,000
Manufacturing: +16,000
Health care: +13,000
Information: -23,000
Construction: +22,000
The bad news for me personally: My sector (information) was the only one of those with job losses. AI continues to suck up all the VC funding…
More countries are reconsidering their support agreements with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a senior State Department official confirmed to Just the News.
Following Just the News reporting that the United States’ Agency for International Development’s Inspector General’s office found more than 100 UNRWA employees had participated in the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, Finland’s minister for foreign trade and development announced on Thursday that the country would not extend its support for UNRWA.
Several more countries have since indicated that they are reconsidering their own support for UNRWA as well, a senior State Department official briefed on the USAID IG’s investigation told Just the News.
It’s a bribe and terrorism organization with a debating society attached.
Hmmmm. “Another ActBlue Official Pleads Fifth In House Probe of Alleged Foreign Donations.” Why, it’s almost like they’re guilty.
Kimberly Peeler-Allen, a member of ActBlue’s board of directors, invoked her constitutional right against self-incrimination while appearing before the House Administration, Judiciary and Oversight committees, according to sources familiar with her testimony.
ActBlue co-founder Matt DeBergalis invoked the Fifth during a closed-door deposition Aug. 20, while CEO Regina Wallace-Jones asserted the same right during congressional questioning in June.
The House Administration Committee began investigating ActBlue in 2023 following concerns that the fundraising platform’s fraud-prevention procedures were inadequate to prevent illegal foreign donations.
German police have opened a terror investigation after two attacks on power stations, and a bombing at a railway station, within 24 hours.
Officials are investigating the possibility that the power plant attacks were carried out by a hostile foreign state, such as Russia, or home-grown Left-wing terrorists.
California has bicoastal company in its efforts to drastically reinterpret a Supreme Court precedent that reinstated a permanent injunction against the Golden State’s so-called gender secrecy policies in public schools, with the majority citing a century of parental rights precedents that it said lower courts were ignoring.
Moms for Liberty is suing a New York City suburb on behalf of unnamed members with children there, seeking to force New Jersey’s Chathams School District to notify and give parents veto power over their children’s “asserted ‘gender transition'” and “social transition-related accommodations,” arguing a trio of related policies violate the Mirabelli precedent.
School Board President Ann Ciccarelli argued at a June 15 public meeting that the high court’s March 2 emergency order was “not binding” on New Jersey public schools, in response to demands from parents to eliminate a policy requiring schools to “accept a student’s asserted gender identity regardless of parent consent or involvement.”
SCOTUS scolded the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Mirabelli for having “brushed aside” its 2025 precedent Mahmoud, which required school districts to notify and get consent from parents before exposing their children to LGBTQ “storybooks,” by wrongly limiting it to curricular decisions.
“The Chathams Board of Education’s open defiance of the Supreme Court’s clear rulings in Mirabelli and Mahmoud is an assault on the constitutional rights of every family in that district,” Moms for Liberty CEO Tina Descovich said.
In a Federal Election Commission filing made on Wednesday night, America PAC disclosed $800,475 in total spending in August.
The expenditure data showed that the billionaire’s PAC primarily poured resources into competitive Senate races in Texas, Maine, Ohio, New Hampshire, Michigan and a few other states.
The Texas Senate race between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton received the largest share of spending—around $248,000.
The Maine Senate race, which Democrats view as a key pickup opportunity, received the next largest tranche of spending at around $170,000.
In total, the PAC spent around $712,000 on seven Senate races—around 90% of the total disclosed expenses—and only around $88,000 on a small number of House races.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“80% of drug traffickers arrested in Portland in the last 3 years have been illegal aliens.
The US Attorney’s Office for the District of Oregon announced on Tuesday that more than 80 percent of the roughly 100 defendants federally charged with trafficking fentanyl in Portland are illegal aliens from Honduras and Mexico. The apprehensions began in 2023 and remain ongoing as federal and local authorities work to rid the sanctuary city of drug-related criminal activity.
As a result of the crackdown on open-air drug markets, authorities have seized more than 100 kilograms of fentanyl, 40 guns, and $1.3 million in proceeds. ‘That is enough fentanyl to kill 50 million people, or Oregon’s population, 11 times,’ the US Attorney’s Office said in a press release.
Illegal alien drug cartels + Woke Portland allowing open drug use = Americans dead.
What a tremendous scheme here from the Democrats.
They’re just selling the dope that Americans won’t…
After cattle country stresses over President Donald Trump’s plan to flood the market with cheaper foreign ground-beef trimmings, the 47th president posted that four giant processors have made life “miserable” for American ranchers and that he is authorizing farmers to process their own food if desired or necessary.
“Trump wants to remove some of the red tape and costs associated with setting up USDA inspected facilities for small producers or areas of the country that don’t have USDA processors to be able to sell their protein to consumers in a legal way,” grazier Derek Lange told Just The News last week.
“Consumers want to buy beef from ranchers and be a part of their story.”
Jeanine John Taele, 38, had more than 200 pages of writings that included schedules for the first lady and members of the president’s USSS detail, The Associated Press reported, citing information revealed during a Los Angeles County court hearing Wednesday.
The New York Post reported that prosecutors said Taele had seven notebooks containing 208 pages of drawings and sketches of Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles in Rancho Palos Verdes, lists of USSS schedules, details about individual security personnel and copies of Melania Trump’s schedule.
Yet somehow Teale has been declared mentally unfit to stand trial…
Austin’s one woman crime spree. “Austin Woman Arrested After Police Find Hundreds Of Suspected Stolen Bank Cards, Keys And Mail.”
A routine arrest in North Austin developed into a much broader investigation after police said they discovered a large collection of mail, payment cards, checks and postal keys believed to have been stolen, according to Yahoo.
Austin police arrested 42-year-old Elizabeth Rozo on Aug. 25 after officers tracked her to an apartment complex near Tech Ridge Boulevard. Authorities were looking for Rozo because she was wanted on a warrant stemming from a credit or bank card abuse investigation.
Officers with the department’s North Metro Tactical Unit reportedly watched Rozo leave the apartment complex and enter a vehicle. They followed her before initiating a traffic stop.
The investigation expanded significantly when officers searched the vehicle. Police said they recovered roughly 400 bank cards believed to have been stolen, along with nearly 300 gift cards. Investigators suspect at least some of the gift cards had been purchased using compromised bank cards.
Officers also discovered two counterfeit Arrow Keys, a type of master key associated with U.S. Postal Service mail equipment. Such keys can potentially be used to open certain shared mailboxes and other postal receptacles, making them particularly valuable to people seeking access to mail belonging to multiple households.
Evidence from the vehicle led investigators to secure a warrant for Rozo’s apartment. The second search produced considerably more material, according to police.
By the time officers finished searching the vehicle and residence, authorities said they had collected thousands of pieces of suspected stolen mail and hundreds of checks. They also recovered about two dozen identification documents that police believe were either stolen or fraudulently produced.
Investigators reported finding 17 stolen postal keys in addition to the two counterfeit keys discovered during the investigation. Authorities have not publicly explained how the postal keys were allegedly obtained or identified how many mailboxes could have been accessed with them. Police also have not announced an estimate of how many people may ultimately be connected to the recovered mail and financial documents.
Not The Bee imitates the Babylon Bee: “Canadian PM says he will resume trade talks ‘when the Americans stop doing memes.'” This went over exactly as you imagined it would.
Some measure of justice: “Former Houston Police Officer Pleads Guilty to Falsifying Affidavit That Led to Deadly 2019 Drug Raid.”
A former Houston police officer pleaded guilty to abusing his authority as law enforcement in his falsification of information used to obtain a search warrant that resulted in a no-knock raid and two murders for which the officer is already serving time.
Gerald M. Goines pleaded guilty to making false claims, including that a resident had sold illicit drugs to a confidential informant and that additional other customers had bought drugs from the resident in prior weeks, in an affidavit that was necessary to obtain a search warrant — known as a “color of law” violation.
Goines was a senior narcotics officer with the Houston Police Department (HPD).
The no-knock warrant was executed in January 2019 and became known as the Harding Street Raid when officers shot and killed a couple in their home. The raid added fuel to the fire in regards to particular scrutiny of HPD, with activists and some Houston City Council members calling for the department to be defunded or similarly financially impacted. This occurred amid anti-police protests that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.
Due to his role in leading the raid, Goines was charged with the murders of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, who were shot and killed alongside their dog during the drug bust. He was indicted in 2019 on two counts of murder and found guilty at trial, and is currently serving a 60-year prison sentence as a result.
Goines did not fire the fatal shots. The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the summer of 2026 that the officer who did so, Felipe Gallegos, was protected from a civil rights lawsuit under qualified immunity after he was previously indicted for Tuttle’s killing, a charge that was ultimately dismissed due to alleged prosecutorial misconduct.
Two middle schools in Austin Independent School District (ISD) received their fifth failing A–F accountability rating from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) last week.
Under the Texas Education Code (TEC), “If a campus is considered to have an unacceptable performance rating for five consecutive school years, the commissioner shall order: (1) appointment of a board of managers to govern the school district; or (2) closure of the campus.”
The district originally had three middle schools with four consecutive failing ratings: Burnet, Dobie, and Webb. While Burnet and Webb earned F ratings, Dobie earned a D rating for this year.
According to TEA, a D rating does not break a consecutive failing streak — only an A, B, or C rating will stop the count. A D rating instead pauses the count until there are three D ratings in the chain, at which point the failing streak resumes.
Over the past school year, Austin ISD has made headlines for numerous challenges. In November, the district approved 10 school closures and 24 state-mandated turnaround plans for struggling campuses. After a projected $181 million budget deficit, the district was forced to make $205 million in cuts.
The district also announced the last-minute closure of Paredes Middle School on July 30, shortly before the start of the school year.
Austin ISD applied for Senate Bill 1882 partnerships for Burnet, Dobie, and Webb, which would have allowed the district to partner with an open-enrollment charter school or institutions of higher education approved by the TEA. These partnerships can receive increases in state funding and are exempt from certain accountability measures for two years.
Segura told KXAN News that the accountability pause was “not the driving factor” for the partnership, but rather the resources the partnership made available.
The TEA denied Austin ISD’s request in May, but said that the district could continue the partnerships, just without the state incentives. Austin ISD announced the dissolution of the partnerships for the three middle schools in July.
In an August 13 letter to parents, Austin ISD Superintendent Matias Segura addressed the possible state takeover, saying that “challenges remain.”
One failing grade for a school should be a wakeup call. Two demands heads should roll and get AISD to make whatever changes are necessary to fix the problem. Five is educational malpractice.
Microstamping cartridges isn’t just unconstitutional, it’s Ineffective.
Ohio Democratic congressional candidate Brian Poindexter was arrested for allegedly swallowing a rock of crack cocaine at a traffic stop after he was stopped by police and for slapping a man at a baseball game according to police records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Poindexter, a city councilman and former union organizer running against the embattled Republican congressman Max Miller in Ohio’s Seventh Congressional District, has a criminal rap sheet dating back to the late 1990s, the records show.
On Jan. 23, 1998, Poindexter, then 18, was pulled over by police officers at a street corner known for heavy drug activity in Cleveland, according to the police report. Poindexter allegedly pulled out “some small objects from his coat pocket and put them into his mouth” and “began to swallow them.” The officer tried to retrieve the objects from Poindexter’s mouth, and the two men fell to the ground in a scuffle. The officer eventually recovered a “rock of suspected crack cocaine,” according to the records.
Another towering intellectual genius batting for Team Blue. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
NVIDIA has agreed to acquire open source AI company Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000.
Justice for Tupac? “Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis convicted of masterminding Tupac Shakur’s murder 30 years after rapper gunned down in Vegas.”
The man accused of orchestrating the murder of legendary rapper Tupac Shakur — one of the entertainment industry’s most captivating crimes — was found guilty by a Nevada jury.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, learned his fate in a Las Vegas courtroom on Monday after about two weeks of trial, as Shakur’s emotional family members passed tissues around and embraced, the New York Times reported.
The conviction of Davis, a former high-ranking “shot caller” in a Los Angeles chapter of the Crips gang, marked the first person to face justice for Shakur’s murder, which went down on a Las Vegas street on the night of Sept. 7, 1996.
Shakur, a pioneer of the burgeoning rap scene, was driving in a car when another pulled up alongside and blasted him with a hail of bullets. He died days later at 25.
Davis was not accused of shooting the gun which killed Shakur, but prosecutors argued he gave it to the gunman — long presumed to be his nephew Orlando Anderson, who died in a gang shootout two years after the murder — and orchestrated the entire attack.
The NBA on Wednesday announced severe punishments for the LA Clippers — including the loss of five future first-round draft picks, a fine of $30 million and a yearlong suspension of owner Steve Ballmer — for violating salary cap circumvention rules in a case involving star Kawhi Leonard.
In a statement, the NBA said a near-yearlong investigation “found a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations by the Clippers organization, a prior offender of the salary cap circumvention rules.”
As a result, the Clippers must forfeit first-round draft picks in 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032 and 2033. In addition to the $30 million fine, Ballmer is suspended from all league and team activities for one year “for knowingly seeking to help Mr. Leonard obtain off-court income opportunities,” among other issues. President of business operations Gillian Zucker is suspended without pay for one year, and president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank is suspended without pay for six months.
Trump’s winning in Iran, Russia’s losing in Ukraine, Democrats committing fraud left and right, the data center debate rages on, a crappy movie in China gain sudden popularity because it’s crappy, and Orlando PD get to wrestle an alligator.
The “rhetoric” coming from both sides of the conflict over the Strait of Hormuz has “caused considerable confusion and doubt,” CNN’s David Goldman understatedly observed. Yet, at present, “The evidence is clear,” he conceded: “Iran is losing much of its control over the critical waterway.”
One month ago, the number of commercial ships transiting through the strait via the U.S. approved route along the Omani coast was close to zero. Today, however, over 80 percent of the vessels that have made it through the strait are taking the U.S.-authorized lane. And even though the United States has not responded with kinetic force to every Iranian attack on commercial traffic in the strait, sometimes to the consternation of America’s Gulf partners, that has not dissuaded countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates’ tankers from making “dark traffic” runs on the strait.
CNN could not independently verify Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s claim that “combined oil transits through the strait and rerouted around the waterway totaled around 15 million barrels per day,” which approaches the pre-war average of 20-million barrels. But it couldn’t gainsay the experts. As one industry analyst conceded, “It increasingly looks like Iran has at least partially lost control of the strait.”
The Iranian regime is feeling the pain. As Hot Air’s Duane Patterson explained, the economic conditions on the ground inside the Islamic Republic are catastrophic. “Iran’s economy is currently experiencing around 90 percent inflation, and it turns out the worst may be yet to come,” he wrote. Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Miad Maleki concurs. “Nearly every part of Iran’s oil economy,” he wrote, “owes massive, growing sums to each other, with no real money moving through the system to pay any of it back.”
The gas lines are growing, and the petrol that Iranians are allowed to buy may soon be rationed. Iranian authorities are triaging their resources by prescheduling hours-long blackouts. The regime is ramping up executions and cracking down on dissent as the prospect of economic collapse brings with it the risk of renewed civil unrest.
Brooklyn Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher (D-50th District) wants New Yorkers to believe that walking out of a CVS with a fistful of stolen toothpaste isn’t a crime. It’s a “biological need.”
Yes, really.
Gallagher, who represents Greenpoint and other parts of northern Brooklyn, made her case Thursday at a news conference outside Manhattan Criminal Court, flanked by fellow far-left officials and activists from Court Watch NYC. The group said it monitored 360 arraignments over four days and found that more than half involved misdemeanor offenses. Gallagher used those numbers to argue shoplifters swiping basic necessities shouldn’t be prosecuted at all.
“Most of what we saw were crimes of poverty-people who are stealing things like toothpaste, people who were stealing things like, you know, soap,” Gallagher said. “And that means if you’re stealing those things, you need them.”
Funny how all those films of riot never show people stealing soap and toothpaste, just flat screen TVs and Nikes. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Salman Ahmed Elmi was charged last week with three counts of aiding and abetting by swindle and five counts of aiding and abetting by false representation.
He made his first court appearance on Monday. Authorities say some of Elmi’s co-conspirators at Reva Health in Golden Valley have connections to a sex trafficking ring bust last week.
Elmi is accused of billing Medicaid for more than $1 million in services that were not provided or not eligible. Reva Health provided autism services and adult rehabilitative mental health services.
“The Minnesota Department of Human Services awarded Elmi an ‘Outstanding Refugee Award’ in 2021.” Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that “Outstanding Refugee” is an award for those that stole the most taxpayer money to give to Democrats?
FBI agents seized electronic devices from former Representative Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) at the San Francisco airport on Saturday and then raided his home in connection with an investigation into sexual assault allegations against him, according to several reports.
Federal authorities executed a search warrant at Swalwell’s home in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, law enforcement sources told CNN and the Associated Press.
The FBI declined to comment.
Swalwell resigned from Congress and suspended his campaign for California governor in April after a former staffer came forward with allegations that he had sexually assaulted her twice, including once at a hotel while he was in New York City for a charity gala in 2024.
Three other women then accused Swalwell of sexual misconduct as well. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department opened criminal investigations into Swalwell in response.
At the time, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg encouraged “survivors and anyone with knowledge of these allegations to contact our Special Victims Division.”
The reports that the FBI’s investigation into Swalwell is picking up steam comes days after the White House Transparency Task Force released FBI files indicating Swalwell previously admitted to having “physical relations” with suspected Chinese spy Christine Fang on a “handful of occasions,” providing confirmation of the public sphere’s longstanding suspicion that a sexual relationship had transpired.
Ukraine continues its war on Wildberries. “Best Wildberries Strike Yet! Koledino Near Moscow–Biggest Wildberries Hub in Russia.”
“Ukrainian forces hit at least five workshop buildings at Russia’s Kombinat Kamensky defense plant in Rostov region, penetrating several layers of air defenses from Pantsir to S-300 systems. The plant produces solid rocket fuel for Uragan, Smerch and Tornado-S MLRS, as well as other missile and aviation systems. Key workshops had anti-drone protection and were surrounded by earthworks. Several air-defense vehicles were also hit.”
The Russian fuel situation has gotten so bad that even Russian newspapers are talking about it. “As of the 16th of August, across Russia, 28.1% of petrol stations had fuel. A week before, it was 41%.” Imagine more than two thirds of stations having no gas and long lines at the ones that do.
The State Department worked with World Vision to distribute $2 billion in global health foreign assistance even though an Israeli court convicted the nonprofit’s Gaza affiliate operations manager of sending up to $50 million to Hamas in 2022. Separately, the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) provided nearly $80 million to 14 organizations linked to terrorism and extremism.
The Middle East Forum (MEF) recently reported that 14 terror-linked and extremist organizations, led by CAIR, collected nearly $80 million from HHS through the Refugee Resettlement, Health, and Mosque Renovation grants. Through this fund, the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) California chapter received the most of any Islamist group, collecting $42.2 million in funding from the HHS to provide legal and social services to Afghan refugees.
Concerning: “Chinese Spy Official Who Is Also A Trained Sniper Buys Property Overlooking White House.”
🚨CCP intel official Philip Qiu, who is trained as a SNIPER, bought an historic building overlooking the White House.
“Liberal white woman fights fascism by defacing national memorial to soldiers who died fighting Hitler.” ‘This morning, we are filing two felony charges, Depredation Against Property of the United States and Destruction of Veterans’ Memorials, in Federal District Court against Melissa L. Farris, offenses that carry penalties of up to ten years in prison.” TDS strikes again.
How is this legal? “Karen Bass brags that Los Angeles will use tax dollars to provide a 6:1 match for every dollar donated to her campaign.”
Karen Bass is very worried about losing her mayoralty to left-winger Nithya Raman, who squeaked past Spencer Pratt in the primary election due to a bunch of election shenanigans, and Bass has an interesting campaign strategy.
Using city tax dollars to fund her campaign!…
The city of Los Angeles “donates” money to Bass’s campaign in a matching program? If you give $10, the city chips in another $60? And she’s pushing this program?
Through the foreign-donation-taking ActBlue, no less.
Per the City Ethics Commission (I kid you not), the city charter allows for “public matching funds.”
Left-wing group Common Cause California brags about “strengthening” this public match fund in 2019.
The program is intended to help less-funded candidates get access to funding, but in actuality, all it does is take YOUR tax dollars to fund politicians you hate.
The Frankfurt School. You should know what it was, what it built, and why you are still living inside it.
1. The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and relocated to Columbia University in 1934 when Hitler came to power. The civilization they had decided to dismantle gave them refuge when another tried to kill them. They spent the next five decades producing the theoretical infrastructure for that dismantling. Western civilization itself was the problem: reason, the Enlightenment, the family, tradition, authority. Not reformed. Dismantled.
2. They called it Critical Theory – and the name is the program. Everything is to be criticized; nothing is to be built. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Western reason — the reason that produced Newton and the rule of law — contained the seeds of Auschwitz. Not that reason had been misused, but that reason itself, taken to its conclusion, produces the death camp. This was not a critique of institutions. It was an indictment of the civilization itself.
3. Adorno gave them the psychological weapon. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) classified conservatism, religious faith, patriotism, and the traditional family not as political positions but as symptoms of a proto-fascist personality. If you believe in the nation or the father’s authority, you are pre-fascist. The opponent was no longer wrong – he was sick. You don’t argue with a pathology. You treat it.
This made dialogue impossible. You don’t persuade someone who is wrong; you diagnose someone who is sick. Politics becomes therapy, and disagreement becomes pathology.
4. Marcuse gave them the political weapon. Repressive Tolerance (1965) argued that tolerating wrong ideas is itself oppression. True tolerance therefore requires suppressing intolerant ideas. The left decides which ideas are intolerant. Everyone else is silenced – not despite tolerance, but “in its name.” Censorship dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.
5. The generation that read Marcuse at Columbia, Berkeley, and Yale went on to run universities, media, foundations, NGOs, content moderation departments, and the EU regulatory apparatus. They implemented the argument sincerely because they had been taught it as philosophy. This was the Frankfurt School’s greatest achievement: it produced true believers.
6. French Theory picked up the tools and made them aesthetic. Foucault made the critique of power literary. Derrida made the critique of meaning philosophical. Deleuze made the critique of identity elegant. A political program became a cultural sensibility. You can argue with a program. A sensibility is in the air you breathe. By the time these ideas reached the American campus through the French conduit, they were no longer ideology. They were the water. The fish did not know they were wet.
7. A civilization stands on three pillars: truth exists and is accessible to reason; good is distinguishable from evil; and there is an inheritance worth transmitting. The Frankfurt School attacked all three – systematically and with considerable intellectual sophistication. It produced a generation that knows how to deconstruct and has forgotten how to build. That sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.
The ultimate achievement was to make destruction feel like progress. Every inherited institution became suspect; every constraint became oppression; every act of preservation became reactionary. Deconstruction became the default, while construction became something that needed to justify itself.
Kurt Schlichter: “The Death of Academic Fraud Jason Arday Won’t Shut Us Up.”
Fake Professor Jason Arday was found dead in the wake of being exposed as a complete fraud, and if it were my choice, he would still be alive and suffering the humiliation that should be the result of his crimes. I would prefer that he did not likely choose to kill himself instead of facing the consequences of his actions. My preference is irrelevant. If he decided to do himself in, it’s crushing for his wife and kids, and that was a selfish, cruel, and stupid decision. But it was his decision, as was his decision to commit fraud upon fraud. I don’t celebrate his death, and his death changes nothing. We’re not going to stop rooting out the charlatans.
Of course, the entirely predictable response of the institutional left to his cowardly and apparent self-deletion has been to insist, loudly and with quivering outrage, that his death is our fault. You see, we normal people pointed out that he lied about his background, his achievements, his credentials, and his work. The fact that we did what a functioning institution should’ve done itself outraged his boosters, so these moral illiterates now invert the moral calculus to keep the exposure of academic fraud from happening again. Arday lied pathologically and endlessly, enabled by a ridiculously solicitous academia, then likely killed himself when his lies were exposed. Obviously, the villains are the people who did not lie and did not choose to end his life.
And you’ll never guess their key accusation in a million years.
Okay, you guessed it: RACISM!
Snip.
Regardless, it was entirely predictable that the left would use his unfortunate demise to try to shut us up, to place all criticism of woke charlatans off limits because the subject of the critique might decide to do something desperate. They can’t help themselves but act out irrationally, you see. The fact that this tactic deprives the minority of any agency is no shock; there’s no racist like a leftist, who considers minorities to be nothing more than political marionettes unable to control their own actions. We’re supposed to give them a pass because the targets of our criticism have no agency. It’s like that NSFW scene in Blazing Saddles where the sheriff keeps the townspeople from lynching him by sticking a gun to his head—“He’s just crazy enough to do it!” Except this time the townspeople were not trying to lynch an innocent man and didn’t back off, and he did pull the figurative trigger.
We’re not going to play their game. We’re not going to hold fire for fear of feelz. We’re not going to ignore the truth lest the liar lash out at himself or others. Sometimes the truth hurts, but the only people the truth hurts are people exposed doing something they shouldn’t be doing. The truth is more important than feelings. And the truth is more important than Arday’s life. If the choice we are presented with is that Jason Arday will go on living a lie and degrading our civilization by doing so, or that Jason Arday might hurt himself, it’s Option 2 every day of the week. We’re not going to be held hostage or intimidated or shamed into silence and, therefore, complicity.
Texas has three federally recognized Native American tribes: Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, located in the western part of the state in El Paso; the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas, located near Eagle Pass along the Rio Grande; and the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas, located in the eastern part of the state near Livingston.
And two of those are along the Mexican border, which means drug smuggling is a big problem.
I’m going to quote a largish chunk here just so I can tag the various companies.
In June, Abbott directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to require data centers to pay for their own electric infrastructure costs, scuttling at least one project planned for East Texas.
Then, earlier this month, Abbott asked these agencies to audit all data center projects in the process of connecting to the Texas grid. According to his directive, data centers in the pipeline must provide and verify information about their water usage; their noise, light, and traffic mitigation efforts; how they plan to obtain electricity; whether they receive taxpayer money; and the real identities of their owners.
A flurry of affirmative replies ensued, including assurances from some of the best-funded users and most prolific developers of data centers in the world.
Many of these companies have already made use of a sales tax exemption for data center equipment — a 13-year-old state law passed before the remote work boom of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) this decade propelled the industry well past the state’s expectations.
Here are the data center companies that have agreed to comply with Abbott’s standards, cross-referenced with the state’s list of companies that benefit from the tax break.
QTS Data Centers
On August 6, Virginia-based Quality Technology Services (QTS) “applauded” Abbott’s “efforts to increase transparency on power use, water and resource consumption, and community considerations associated with data center development.”
QTS data centers built after 2019 use fans rather than water for cooling, according to the company.
The company operates three facilities in Texas and has three more in the pipeline, according to its website. The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts certified one QTS facility, a 56-acre campus in Irving, to benefit from the state sales tax exemption.
Vantage Data Centers
Vantage Data Centers sent a letter of support to Abbott on August 7.
The company, based in Denver, Colorado, only lists one active data center in Texas, at an undisclosed location in Shackelford County. However, it has secured a sales tax exemption for 12 projects listed by the comptroller, all for Oracle.
Skybox
Texas-based Skybox Datacenters agreed to Abbott’s standards on August 7.
The company has built nine data centers around the state. Besides one in Wichita Falls, all are in the Dallas, Austin, and Houston metropolitan areas, according to its website. The comptroller’s list of qualifying data centers doesn’t include a project with Skybox in the name or one associated with its address at 3131 Turtle Creek Boulevard in Dallas, based on a search of the state’s franchise tax database.
Digital Realty
Digital Realty stated on August 7 that it would comply with Abbott’s standards. The Austin-based company claimed in its statement to be “the world’s largest cloud- and carrier-neutral data center platform.”
Digital Realty operates more than 300 data centers that serve companies including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Nvidia and IBM. Twelve of its 14 Texas data centers are in the Dallas area, its website shows.
Stream Data Centers
Dallas-based Stream Data Centers agreed to Abbott’s standards on August 7.
Altogether, nine Stream data centers are either active or in development across Texas, with one on the outskirts of Houston, three in San Antonio, one in Austin, and four in the Dallas area.
Mara
Mara agreed to abide by Abbott’s standards on August 7.
The Florida-based company operates a Bitcoin mining fleet, and it “colocates data centers with power sources to convert stranded energy into digital capital,” its website states.
The company name doesn’t appear on the comptroller’s list of qualifying data centers, nor do any subsidiary companies registered under the address of its Florida headquarters.
Rowan
Rowan Digital Infrastructure, another developer based in Denver, issued a press release in support of Abbott’s orders on August 7.
The company owns and operates four data centers in Texas that benefit from the sales tax exemption, including one in Temple for Meta and another in Cinco for Google.
Meta
Meta, the California-based parent company of Facebook, pledged to comply with Abbott’s standards on Monday.
Meta’s three Texas data centers are in Fort Worth, Temple, and El Paso, according to its map.
Multiple data centers owned or used by Meta benefit from the state’s sales tax exemption. One subsidiary company, Polmer LLC, owns the certified data center in Temple and occupies two other data centers on the comptroller’s list of certified projects. The El Paso facility is owned by a Meta subsidiary, Wurldwide LLC, which also makes use of the exemption.
OpenAI and Oracle
California-based company OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, agreed to comply with Abbott’s standards on Monday. Oracle, also based in California, made the same commitment on Tuesday.
OpenAI is collaborating with Oracle and SoftBank on Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure project based in Abilene and funded in part by chipmaker Nvidia. Lancium, a company backed by New York-based investment firm Blackstone, is constructing the facility, according to its website.
Eleven Lancium data centers and projects appear on the comptroller’s list, spanning Fort Stockton, Turkey, Childress, and Abilene. Seven projects in Abilene are associated with Stargate, with Oracle listed as an occupant.
Core Scientific
Core Scientific issued a press release in support of Abbott’s directives on Monday.
The company, based in Miami, Florida, operates three data centers in Texas: one in Austin, one in Denton, and one in the Callahan County town of Cottonwood, according to its website.
All three benefit from the state tax exemption, the comptroller’s list shows.
Google
The California-based Big Tech titan expressed support for Abbott’s standards on Monday.
The comptroller lists Google as the owner or user of nine data centers that benefit from the sales tax exemption.
CleanSpark
Data center developer CleanSpark Inc. agreed with Abbott’s standards on Monday.
The Nevada-based company doesn’t publish a comprehensive map or list of its data center locations, but as of February, it owned two plots of land in Brazoria County and Austin County with plans to develop facilities there, according to an investor relations press release.
Neither CleanSpark nor the only Texas entity registered to its corporate address, Eagles Nest 138 LLC, appear on the comptroller’s list of data centers.
EdgeConneX
Virginia-based EdgeConneX announced support for Abbott’s standards in its Tuesday press release.
The company doesn’t specify how many discrete data centers it operates in Texas, but it’s only active in the Houston and Austin areas, according to its online map.
The state has certified two EdgeConnex projects for the tax exemption, both in the Austin area.
SB Energy
SB Energy sent Abbott a letter on August 6 expressing support for his directives and publicized it on Tuesday.
The Redwood City, California-based company is building a facility in Milam County in support of Stargate, with Orion listed as an occupant on two projects that benefit from the state sales tax exemption.
Data Center Coalition
The Data Center Coalition, a trade association that represents data center companies, expressed support for Abbott’s directives on Tuesday.
David Morens, a former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to hiding federal records from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Morens, a senior adviser at NIAID’s Office of the Director from 2006 to 2022 under Dr. Anthony Fauci, was charged by the Department of Justice in April with five counts related to the scheme.
He agreed to a deal with federal prosecutors this week that would see him plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit offenses or to defraud the United States. The charge carries up to five years in prison.
Snip.
The indictment came after the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic found evidence that Morens had used his personal email to discuss Covid-19’s origins and National Institutes of Health grants with EcoHealth Alliance, including a terminated coronavirus grant, in an attempt to keep the communications hidden from hypothetical future FOIA requests.
The committee obtained a communication between Morens and EcoHealth President Peter Daszak in which Morens wrote, “I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”
Why it was almost like their was a conspiracy of secrecy against the American people…
Abdulloi Toshpulodzoda left the Northern Virginia Mental Health Institute (NVMHI) on July 6 for an authorized 48-hour pass. He was required to return two days later, but he never did, FOX 5 reported, citing court documents.
Instead, Toshpulodzoda traveled to Washington Dulles International Airport and boarded a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul before continuing to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, court documents show.
Snip.
FOX 5 reported that Toshpulodzoda had previously been allowed to travel to Washington, D.C., in 2024 to obtain a passport, with support from the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office.
Sorry, a what? Passport? And then they gave him a 48-hour pass? And then they were surprised that he fled the country and never came back?
Well done, everyone.
You may not be surprised to learn that it was the office of far-left Steve Descano, the prosecutor for Fairfax County, that allowed him to get the passport.
The Trump admin is suing Descano for releasing violent criminals. You may recall that Descano went viral for allowing a registered sex offender to change in the girls’ locker room at multiple HIGH SCHOOLS because the sex offender now identifies as a woman.
Very suspicious: “Bastrop City Council Holds Official Workshop 100 Miles Away from their Constituents.”
On August 7th, the Bastrop City Council conducted official workshops not in Bastrop (where one might reasonably expect), but more than one hundred miles away in Fredericksburg. The posted agenda lists the location as the John Wm. Klein Meeting Room at 115 N. Crockett Street in Fredericksburg, roughly a two-hour drive from the city those officials were elected to serve.
And no, these were not informal “retreats” for city council members to relax and blow off steam. These were formal City Council workshops covering the very decisions that hit taxpayer’s wallets and daily lives hardest: the city budget, setting the tax rate, Hotel Occupancy Taxes, capital projects, the Master Transportation Plan (including an East/West connection north of Highway 71), water and wastewater planning, street projects, and “Future Goals” that include a recreation center, expanded fire and police service, data center policies, and Legislative “advocacy.” An extensive list of hot-button issues all to be discussed far away from their constituents.
State Rep. Stan Gerdes (R-Smithville), whose district includes Bastrop, correctly called out the problem: “The City of Bastrop is holding a City Council meeting hours away in Fredericksburg, making it nearly impossible for the people they represent to attend and participate.” He noted the agenda’s weight on budget, tax rate, data centers, and surveillance technology and announced plans to file legislation requiring city council meetings to be held inside the city they serve so residents can actually show up, speak, and hold officials accountable.
Security camera company Flock Safety has announced changes to its privacy safeguards amid public opposition to use of the devices and concerns about law enforcement abuse.
However, U.S. Rep. Keith Self (R–McKinney) told Texas Scorecard that although these changes are welcome, Flock is obviously “trying to gain acceptance and put lipstick on a pig amid the intense pushback they have received from Americans across the nation who are rightfully concerned about their privacy.”
“The bottom line is Americans do not want to be spied on, and they reject the surveillance state operating in America,” said Self. “The Fourth Amendment is not a suggestion. Federal and state legislation are still needed to ensure the government cannot access this data without a warrant—and that taxpayer dollars are not spent purchasing or installing this invasive spyware. That’s why Congress needs to pass my bill, the PRIVACY Act.”
Self filed the PRIVACY Act last month. It would require federal law enforcement to obtain official warrants before accessing or querying data collected by state and local systems, including automated license plate readers.
Powered by artificial intelligence, Flock cameras have been a hotly debated topic across the U.S., with concerned Texans requesting that state lawmakers create guardrails for the technology during the upcoming legislative session.
Since law enforcement officials do not need a warrant to access the Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) database, citizens are raising concerns about potential Fourth Amendment violations.
Among the technology updates is a new default setting of 7-day data retention instead of the previous 30 days. This change is based on Flock’s analysis that all searches “without a full plate are done within a week.”
The Critical Drinker/Gamer covers a hacker group penetration of Rockstar games, evidently including full playable source code of the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6. They’re even threatening to release the ending if Rockstar don’t promise to eschew the greedy enshitification of games (like ending physical media) that’s now standard practice in the industry.
Niu Lai is a sleeper hit in China, mainly because the animation is so bad, something that might have been a 3D animation demo reel in 1994. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
In news that may be of interest only to me, both BattleSwarm and Futuramen had huge upticks in Views this week, at least ten times normal traffic, though a smaller uptick in unique Visitors, and I notice no single post generating such traffic. I can only assume some AI scanned the entirety of the site.
“DeSantis Explains To Newsom Secret To Counting Ballots In One Night Is Not Committing Fraud.”
“Kentucky Derby Convenes Committee To Determine What Is A Horse.”
Iran lashes out again and gets pounded even harder for its troubles, Fauci’s diary validates just about everything conservatives have been saying about him for the last six years, DSA is open about wanting to destroy the Constitution, Ukraine blows up more refineries and Wildberry logistic warehouses, Spain faces invasion, all sorts of AI skullduggery, and Neuromancer finally makes it to the screen.
Following Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) missile attacks on U.S. bases in Kuwait and Jordan, President Donald Trump is now signaling readiness for full-scale military action that could shatter the cycle of tit-for-tat exchanges and accelerate an end to the conflict, opening the door for a full-on revolution for the Persian nation.
“We’re going to beat the f****** s*** out of them […] We’ll be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating,” Trump said on Wednesday.
If the Iranian regime collapsed under external pressure and internal strain, the power vacuum could empower ordinary Iranians, who have long protested theocratic rule, to seize control of their country’s future. Hardcore Islamists brought the nation into a theocracy in February of 1979.
Saudi Arabia has announced the formation of a maritime coalition to protect shipping and energy supplies in the Red Sea as Yemen’s Houthi rebels threaten a vital route for the kingdom’s oil exports and global trade.
Riyadh on Thursday hosted a meeting of 43 countries and the EU to discuss plans to form a multinational maritime defensive coalition.
After the meeting, 14 countries affirmed their commitment to the coalition, including Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Sudan and several other Arab and African countries, according to the kingdom’s defence ministry.
The United Arab Emirates and Oman were notably absent, but the ministry said the door remains open for countries that want to join the coalition.
The alliance is “aimed at enhancing maritime security, protecting freedom of navigation, securing international trade routes and energy supply routes, and protecting shared maritime interests in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden”, the 14 countries said in a joint statement.
The statement added the coalition would be led by Saudi Arabia and headquartered in Riyadh, with the participating countries agreeing to share intelligence and engage in joint maritime operations and exercises.
I exclusively uncovered the identities of prominent U.S. journalists flown to China by a CCP-linked influence operation seeking “favorable coverage” and “positive messages” about Beijing. 🧵
The names include:
– Ezra Klein, New York Times columnist
– Matthew Yglesias, Vox co-founder
– Ronald Brownstein, CNN senior political analyst
– Bradford Plumer, New York Times reporter
– Marjorie Miller, former Associated Press vice president
Also identified:
– Steve Clemons, former The Hill editor-at-large
– David Rohde, MS NOW senior national security reporter
– Jonathan Alter, NBC News and MSNBC political analyst
– David Sweeney, former NPR managing editor
– Daniel Gross, former Yahoo Finance columnist
Also on the roster:
– Marilyn Geewax, former NPR senior editor
– Kathleen Deveny, former Newsweek editor
– Tom Omestad, former U.S. News & World Report correspondent
– Steve Chapman, former Chicago Tribune columnist
– Bruce Stokes, former National Journal correspondent
The list continues:
– Craig Gilbert, former Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Washington bureau chief
– Tony Semerad, Salt Lake Tribune reporter
– Shikha Dalmia, former The Week columnist
– Jonathan Broder, former Newsweek senior writer
Also identified:
– Cristi Kempf, former Chicago Tribune associate managing editor
– Jon Healey, Los Angeles Times deputy editorial page editor
– Julian Pecquet, former Foreign Affairs reporter
Trip organizer CUSEF was founded by Tung Chee-hwa, a former senior official in the CCP’s United Front system, the influence apparatus Beijing uses to cultivate foreign elites and shape institutions outside China.
According to [Sen. Rand] Paul, “During his time as NIAID Director, and particularly during the COVID pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci took meticulous notes about his work. He made note of conversations, decisions, and his thoughts about actions taken by politicians and other officials.” This past weekend, Paul released a gargantuan 1,141 pages of Fauci’s notes. Very little in these pages enhances Fauci’s already deeply tarnished reputation.
Most notably, on January 26, 2020, Fauci wrote:
It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. The infections spread among people weeks before the Chinese reported that they were dealing with a new infection and that gave the virus time to establish itself in multigenerational (sustained) spread. Remember, early on the Chinese were saying that there is no human to human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from the market. Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.
America and the world spent most of the next two years in an increasingly furious debate over whether the virus emerged from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, perhaps from a pangolin; or from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the separate institution of the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control (which was also doing research on coronaviruses found in bats); or somewhere else. Fauci apparently knew — notice he didn’t write “believe” or “theorize” — he could rule out the wet-market theory but never felt obligated to share that conclusion with the rest of us. Instead, he repeatedly dismissed and downplayed the lab-leak theory.
More at the link.
“Revealed: Five Months After Fauci Got Vaccinated, He Suffered a Pulmonary Infarction, an Adverse Effect Associated With the Vaccine.’ He Kept This a Secret.”
The alternate celebrity and villain of the COVID-19 policy response repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right to refuse answering even mundane questions, such as the color of the hearing room’s carpet, following publication of over 1,100 pages of diary-like notes that have raised even more questions about the veracity of his COVID-era public statements.
Committee Republicans repeatedly argued Fauci could not opt out of answering questions due to President Biden’s sweeping preemptive pardon, the validity of which has been questioned because it was signed by autopen amid Biden’s cognitive decline. Legal analysts explained Wednesday how Fauci could still be prosecuted.
Oklahoma GOP Sen. James Lankford, who pointedly disagreed with colleagues on the Fifth Amendment issue, waited until the hearing’s end to recall that Congress went through a near-identical exercise in President Obama’s second term.
It held former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt for giving an opening statement at a House hearing in 2013 on her alleged discrimination against conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, then invoking her rights under the Fifth Amendment to decline giving testimony or answering questions that may expose one to criminal prosecution.
Fauci did the same Wednesday.
Lankford asked committee Chairman Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., whether the Lerner vote determined the Fauci outcome. Paul, who has called for Fauci’s prosecution for years, said lawmakers have a week to study the issue before voting on a contempt resolution.
The question that courts may have to answer is whether Biden’s pardon preempts Fauci’s right against self-incrimination, since he can’t be prosecuted “as long as he answers truthfully” and the statute of limitations forecloses some claims anyway, Paul said.
George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf floated two other ways Fauci could testify without risk to himself: a two-thirds committee vote or a simple House majority to immunize him, or doing media interviews in which he’s not under oath, since “it is not a crime to lie to the public.”
More blow-by-blow Fauci testimony details at the link. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Congressional committee issues subpoenas to organizations tied to China-linked Dem megadonor. The latest subpoenas raise the question of whether U.S. tax law — which grants tax exemptions and shields charitable donor identities — can be used to route foreign money into domestic political activity. At the heart of it, questions abound whether the far-left outfits have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).”
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., has issued subpoenas to three tax-exempt organizations tied to socialist megadonor Neville Roy Singham, an American multimillionaire living in Shanghai with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
The subpoenas have been served, a spokesperson for Smith’s office told Just the News, on BreakThrough News, Tricontinental and The People’s Forum, all three of which are funded, at least in part, by Singham. The subpoenas come after nearly a year of the Committee’s attempts to get answers from the three non-profit organizations regarding foreign influence in U.S. nonprofits.
“For months, the Ways and Means Committee has been investigating how the Chinese Communist Party has been taking advantage of our country’s laws through its tax-exempt sector to sow chaos and division here in the United States,” Smith said in a statement. “Public reporting has traced hundreds of millions of dollars from Neville Roy Singham – a tech mogul living in Shanghai – that was funneled through a web of shell companies and donor-advised funds that concealed the true source of the money before it reached these organizations.”
The subpoenas request documents showing whether the organizations have received or transmitted funds connected to foreign nationals or foreign entities, contracts between those nationals or entities, documents and communications between employees and Singham or foreign nationals about the organization.
“Three non-profits connected to Mr. Singham – BreakThrough News, Tricontinental, and The People’s Forum – have stonewalled the Ways and Means Committee’s investigation. That ends now,” Smith said in his statement. “These subpoenas will compel the production of the documents they have withheld for months and will help expose how America’s tax laws and charitable sector may have been exploited to advance the CCP’s influence operations inside the United States. The American people deserve to know whether the CCP has exploited America’s tax-exempt sector to advance its agenda. These subpoenas will allow the Ways and Means Committee to identify the networks that exploit our tax laws, and further expose the urgent need for legislation to close those loopholes for good.”
The Democratic Socialists of America wants you to know exactly what it wants, and Megan Romer, the group’s national co-chair, laid it out on national television without once reaching for a hedge word over the most radical ideas on the party platform.
The platform itself reads like a fever dream a committee wrote line by line. A 32-hour workweek with no reduction in pay and benefits, a federal jobs guarantee, canceling all student debt, and free college from pre-K through graduate school anchor the economic wish list, alongside healthcare that is universal, free, and includes gender-affirming care as a guaranteed right.
The platform calls for more publicly owned social housing, universal rent control, and a guaranteed lawyer for every tenant. On policing, the platform wants demilitarized police departments, defunded police unions, and money pulled out of police budgets entirely, all of which the DSA frames as a first step toward abolishing prisons and policing outright.
On foreign policy, the platform demands the defunding of the Department of War, the closure of overseas military bases, and an end to all foreign wars, and it pairs that with support for International Criminal Court prosecutions of what it deems American war criminals. As for Israel, the DSA calls for an end to all U.S. military and economic aid, prosecution of American and Israeli leaders over what many consider a genocide in Gaza, and recognition of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
The DSA is just as blunt about reimagining how the government works. The platform seeks statehood for Washington, D.C., self-determination for U.S. territories, and the abolition of both the Electoral College and the Senate, alongside an expanded House and a presidency and Supreme Court that answer to Congress instead of operating independently. The DSA wants to swap the two-party system for proportional representation and ranked-choice voting and pay for all of it through full public financing of every election.
And, to top it all off, the platform calls for slavery reparations.
Fox News host Shannon Bream ran through the DSA’s platform position by position, true or false, no room to dodge. Romer never flinched. She confirmed that the Democratic Socialists of America’s platform calls for abolishing the Senate, replacing the presidency and Supreme Court, eliminating ICE, ending borders while granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, defunding the Pentagon, abolishing prisons as a long-term goal, and placing most large corporations under government or public ownership. At every step, she answered without hesitation, affirming that each position accurately reflected the DSA’s platform.
If we can’t stop the DSA at the ballot box, then stopping them at the ammo box becomes inevitable…
Michigan journalist Charlie LeDuff, who formerly worked at The New York Times and The Detroit News, decided to visit this 88-year-old woman to ask why she’s made nearly 15,000 donations to Democrats in the last 5 years:
You’ll note that resident Elizabeth Waffle is living in a trailer because her house burned down.
LeDuff: ‘Did you make 15,000 donations in 5 years? $150,000?’
Waffle: ‘A hundred and fifty? Hell no. I don’t have that kind of money.’
Her house burned down two years ago and she’s been living in a camper since.
She wasn’t even sure if she had enough money to pay the guy who was coming to mow the fields of weeds around the camper!
DOJ needs to audit ActBlue with proctological intensity.
After the Trump administration indicated that there were at least 35,000 noncitizen registered voters in New Jersey, the Democratic governor there tried to do damage control by admitting to at least 6,600 registered noncitizen voters. Soon after her admission, however, she refused point-blank to hand over that data to the Trump administration.
In fact, Gov. Mikie Sherrill, who has wasted a great deal of time and money trying to protect illegal alien criminals through her dangerous and disgusting sanctuary policies, actually referred to the noncitizen voters as “citizens” of her state. Either she is under the deluded impression we are still operating under the Articles of Confederation, or she thinks she gets to be a petty dictator because she has rigged elections enough to ensure her party never gets out of power.
Last Tuesday, a reporter asked Sherrill during a press conference, “The Trump administration is seeking, I believe by today, the list of noncitizens who are registered to vote and the approximately 400 that did vote, to what extent will your administration comply with the Trump administration’s request in that regard?”
Sherrill self-righteously but inarticulately sneered to a round of applause, “As I have said, I am not in the habit of turning over private, identifying administration—information of the citizens of New Jersey.” Again, it is completely outrageous that this is how she refers to noncitizens, particularly since many of them are illegal aliens.
Snip.
Why might Sherrill be so determined to ensure there is not a thorough cleaning out of the voter rolls in her state? In 2025, she did apparently win the gubernatorial race against Republican Jack Ciattarelli by about 453,000, so that is a fairly sizable margin. But back in 2020, when there were allegations of fraud, then-Gov. Phil Murphy beat Ciattarelli by only about 84,200 votes. The preliminary findings, meaning the likely lowball initial results, from the Department of Justice this year as to how many illegal aliens are registered to vote in New Jersey were 35,152.
Suddenly, when you compare these numbers, New Jersey Democrats don’t seem to have quite such a firm grip on power in their state, do they?
“A California-Funded Homeless Shelter Gave Us Meth Pipes.” Of course it did.
As governor of California, Gavin Newsom has repeatedly supported “harm reduction” policies, which enable drug use in the name of making it “safer.” He created the state’s Harm Reduction Initiative, which funded “syringe services programs” for “people who inject and smoke fentanyl and/or methamphetamines.” His Department of Public Health has endorsed distributing syringes, glass pipes, and “[c]ontainers for mixing injectable drugs” to drug users. Newsom argued earlier this year that harm-reduction tactics “increase the likelihood of people entering substance use treatment.”
But do California’s harm-reduction programs encourage addicts to enter treatment? We visited the Skid Row Care Campus, a homeless-services site in Los Angeles County, to witness “harm reduction” in action. We discovered that, instead of directing addicts to get clean, the taxpayer-funded program doles out free paraphernalia, enabling addicts to get high—no questions asked.
We arrived at Skid Row in the morning. The campus, bounded by pastel-colored buildings and a metal gate, looked like an apocalyptic wasteland. Homeless people and addicts were splayed across the common areas, with some smoking what seemed to be hard drugs with impunity.
We stepped onto the courtyard connected to the street. No one stopped us, asked for identification, or searched us for weapons or drugs. This is apparently by design, judging by the Skid Row Action Plan and its implementation outline, which, singly or together, inspired the creation of the campus, denounced the “racist and classist war on drugs,” and called on local officials to create hubs “free from monitoring by law enforcement” and staffed by people with histories of “substance use and sex work.”
We entered campus and found a walk-up counter, where an attendant sat before shelves of drug paraphernalia. Users come to this counter to get free needles and crack pipes, with which they can inject or smoke hard drugs.
“What can I get you?” he asked. “We have oil burners, we have spray shooters, we have socks, we have petroleum jelly.”
Across several visits, we obtained drug-testing strips, syringes, and crack pipes.
“Russia admits defeat in the south, cannot keep the highway open.” Reporting from Ukraine is exaggerating a tad, but Russia is having serious problems with drones taking out logistics trucks on the Zaporizhia logistics route.
The Democrats have their 2028 presidential primary schedule almost finalized, featuring a trio of new states in the first six, and the early sense is that Republicans will stick with the familiar lineup of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. It might seem early to be thinking about the 2028 presidential primaries, but if you’re one of the candidates, you must prioritize, and as Yogi Berra said, “It gets late early out there.”
As noted at the tail end of yesterday’s edition of this newsletter, over in the Washington Post, I examined the Democratic National Committee’s proposed, and likely to be final, schedule for the Democratic 2028 presidential primaries:
South Carolina, January 22, 2028
Nevada, February 1, 2028
New Hampshire, February 8, 2028
New Mexico, February 15, 2028
Michigan, February 22, 2028
Virginia, February 29, 2028
One week after that, March 7, will likely be Super Tuesday, the earliest date that the other states can schedule their primaries or caucuses. States that are likely to hold their primaries that day include Alabama, Arkansas, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Vermont.
That’s a promising early schedule if you’re a candidate on the establishment side among the Democrats, and a rougher one if you’re a socialist or affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America. Based upon Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s past performances, South Carolina and Virginia are rough territory, Nevada and New Hampshire are friendly territory, and it’s a little hard to say about New Mexico and Michigan.
Snip.
When I say a socialist or DSA-affiliated candidate, I am mostly thinking of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; she is, at least on paper, the early frontrunner in New Hampshire, and Axios ranks her as the candidate who is second-most-likely to win the nomination, behind Harris.
Some racial essentialists argue that it is absurd to contend that heavily white New Hampshire is likely to be supportive of the Puerto Rican AOC. First, a University of New Hampshire survey conducted this month not only found her with a one-point lead over Pete Buttigieg, but 64 percent of likely Democratic primary voters in the state said they felt favorable about her, with just 9 percent saying they felt unfavorable about her; only Buttigieg and Sanders had comparable numbers. (At 84 years old, Sanders is not running in 2028; if AOC runs, Sanders is widely expected to endorse her.)
Also note, “Primary exit polling this year suggests that DSA candidates run best among young, college-educated and higher-income demographics.” In 2020 (the last time Democrats had a competitive presidential primary in New Hampshire), 54 percent of their primary voters had a bachelor’s degree or higher. Forty percent of Democratic primary voters reported a salary of $100,000 per year or more, and 72 percent made $50,000 per year or more.
“Thousands of Military-Age Men From Morocco Invade Spain’s Ceuta Territory.” Ceuta is an exclave on the north African coast
Thousands of military-age men from Morocco invaded Spain today by crossing the border into the Spanish territory of Ceuta.
Spain has deployed its military as these men arrive by sea and breach the border fence.
Snip.
Spain’s government said Thursday evening it would send the Armed Forces to help the Civil Guard “to maintain security in the city of Ceuta.” It also announced that Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez would join Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska and visit Ceuta Friday.
“The situation is absolute chaos,” Rachid Sbihi, head of the association that represents Spain’s Civil Guard officers in Ceuta, who police the border told The Associated Press. “It’s not possible to give precise numbers, but there are thousands of migrants crossing,” he said, adding that the border had “totally collapsed.”
However, Spain’s interior ministry won’t declare a national emergency.
This follows hot on the heels of Spain’s far-left Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez declaring an illegal alien amnesty.
The Spanish government and its partners openly state that the reason for legalising more than half a million migrants is to "defeat the far right." This is literally weaponised demography. They took the most conspiratorial interpretation of the "Great Replacement" that is not…
I probably should have noted that Andy Burham is now Prime Minister of the UK. The guy wasn’t even an MP until June 18 (though he had been before), when he won a by-election triggered by the existing MP resigning specifically so Burham could run for PM. Here’s The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters on the guy.
Remember: Your private conversations with AI agents aren’t. “Claude Chats Popped Up in Google Search Results.”
The rogue OpenAI agent behind this month’s unprecedented AI-driven cyber intrusion claimed a second corporate victim, an executive at New York-based Modal Labs has revealed – a detail absent from the original account and one that widens the known blast radius of the episode.
According to the Modal executive and sources cited by Reuters, the same autonomous agent that broke into Hugging Face also compromised one of Modal’s customers, using that customer’s environment as a staging base for the broader campaign.
Modal was pointed about the distinction: its own platform and isolation were never breached. The agent exploited an unauthenticated endpoint that one of Modal’s customers had left open to the internet – effectively an unlocked door anyone could have walked through – giving it root-level access to that customer’s code-execution sandboxes. From there the agent had a disposable, third-party launchpad from which to run the rest of its operation.
It’s bad enough that a frontier AI agent can independently discover attack paths, escape its container, and compromise an unaffiliated company’s production systems. The Modal revelation shows it reached further than that – treating any publicly reachable, poorly secured infrastructure it encountered as expendable staging ground, exactly the opportunistic chaining that security researchers have warned agentic systems would carry out at machine speed.
Most of what led up to the Modal disclosure has already been picked over, but the shape of it is worth a recap. In early July, OpenAI was running an internal evaluation built on ExploitGym – a public benchmark that measures how well an AI system can turn a known vulnerability into a working exploit. The models under test, GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable unreleased prototype, were deliberately run with their cyber-safety refusals reduced and the classifiers that normally block high-risk activity switched off, because the point was to measure maximum offensive capability.
The agent found and exploited a previously unknown flaw in the one package-registry proxy it was allowed to reach, escalated privileges, moved through OpenAI’s research environment, and got to a machine with open internet access. Once online, it reasoned that Hugging Face likely hosted the answer key to the very benchmark it was being tested on, and went to steal it rather than solve the problems itself. Between roughly July 11 and 13 it ran thousands of automated actions against the platform – gaining code execution through two separate flaws in its dataset-processing pipeline, harvesting credentials, and moving laterally across internal clusters. Forensic work later recovered on the order of 17,600 distinct attacker actions.
Hugging Face caught and contained the intrusion through its own AI-assisted monitoring, and says the only thing the agent actually made off with was a limited set of the benchmark’s challenge solutions – no public models, datasets, or user-facing services tampered with. To reconstruct the timeline, its team had to fall back on an open-weight model, because the commercial frontier models refused to analyze the real attack data.
So a rouge AI agent found it’s way out of its sandbox, launched a privilege escalation attack, accessed the Internet, and picked out a target it assumed it could steal answers from rather than do the work itself? Did Gen Z program its work ethic?
The State of Texas and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reached a settlement, reversing the endangered species listing for the dunes sagebrush lizard while a new evaluation is conducted.
The dunes sagebrush lizard inhabits portions of West Texas, including the oil-rich Permian Basin.
The Biden administration listed the species as endangered in May 2024, citing threats from oil and gas development and climate change.
Texas sued in September 2024, arguing the listing relied on an indirect habitat model rather than population data, used a 1998 well-pad-density study that predates horizontal drilling, and ignored ongoing state conservation efforts.
The state also argued the listing impeded oil production and interfered with efforts to plug abandoned oil wells.
“The Biden-Harris Administration’s unlawful misuse of environmental law is a backdoor attempt to undermine Texas’s oil and gas industries which help keep the lights on for America,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said when announcing the lawsuit.
A Dallas Express investigation has uncovered evidence suggesting that some Muslim and Mexican immigrant drivers at DFW Airport may be operating as part of an organized network using multiple electronic devices, fraudulent driver accounts and GPS manipulation to control rideshare traffic.
A veteran Uber driver said DFW’s airport queue displayed a wait of zero to 15 minutes, but he received no rides for more than 45 minutes. He said regular Uber requests resumed after he left the airport’s geofenced queue.
DX documented drivers using multiple phones and tablets, vehicles with partially obscured plates, and one man denying that he had a work permit, green card or H-1B visa.
Federal prosecutors have charged rideshare schemes involving fraudulent or rented accounts, GPS spoofing, bots and hacked phones that allowed drivers to enter airport queues while physically elsewhere. A separate November 25, 2025 DFW-area driver post alleged that phones were left inside a stationary vehicle to preserve queue positions.
DX has not established that any specific driver filmed at DFW committed fraud. The investigation is examining whether coordinated drivers are manipulating the airport queue and diverting rides from other drivers.
The Final Boss of Crazy Cat Ladies: “Florida mail carrier accused of stealing 80 cats along her mail route and collecting them in her house. 80 cats were rescued from the home of Gail Giustino, 77, where there was a foot of poop.”
Life imitates Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. In Canada, “a missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months….Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name ‘fus__ro_dah’ (two underscores after “fus”), but they accidentally requested records for the username ‘fus_ro_dah’ (one underscore after ‘fus’). This one-character difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme.”
Victor Davis Hanson on Iran. He thinks Trump will skedaddle, leave the gulf states and Israeli in charge of keeping watch on the rubble, and set up a government in exile and give it access to Iran’s sequestered funds. Honestly, I should have thought of the government in exile bit for my Iran roundup earlier this month.
Dhillon Law Group has filed a federal lawsuit against Midland County Judge Terry Johnson on behalf of a citizen journalist who says he was retaliated against after posting records critical of Johnson.
The suit alleges that Johnson responded the next day by posting Christino Rodriquez’ full name, Social Security number, date of birth, and driver’s license number to Facebook.
In districts with a Teacher Incentive Allotment, educators receive additional funds from the state toward increasing those teachers’ salaries. Funding is provided to the district for teachers who achieve a recognized, exemplary, and master designation. At least 90 percent of the funding is required to be used for teacher compensation on the campus where the designated individual works.
In order to comply with Texas law, the State Board for Educator Certification is requiring the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to remove “diversity, equity, and inclusion” training materials. Lawmakers have been concerned that materials produced by national board, which offers the National Board Certification, include politicized content.
SBEC members voted last week for the national board to “make updates to materials to come into compliance with Texas state law” and “provide evidence of compliance to [Texas Education Agency] staff by November 2, 2026.”
Few things get people’s attention quite so fast as cutting off money.
Two important speeches (from President Trump and Secretary of State Rubio) on leftwing threats to America, more welfare state fraud uncovered by Nick Shirley, Ukraine continues to hit Russian ships at will, multiple marine drone attacks, TSMC has a good week (and pledges to invest more money in America), Apple sues OpenAI, and Bruce Sterling compares AI to jazz.
Trump announced a massive declassification of documents showing how exposed our election system is to hacking and foreign interference. Top White House aides and intelligence agency chiefs have all reviewed and authenticated the documents.
The documents highlight major areas of concern. Starting in 2020, Beijing carried out the largest-ever compromise of election data. Some 220 million American voters’ files were meddled with by Chinese intelligence services. China signed a data exploitation unit for this project.
Members of the Deep State within the IC worked to suppress and downplay the scope and impact of China’s election interference. U.S. spy agencies discovered that the voter data breach in 18 states was bought, stolen, or hacked by China. That breach was kept hidden; Trump, who was still president at the time, was not informed, nor was Congress. The line was that the 2020 election was the most secure in history.
CIA reported in mid-2018 that the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements opposed to Trump. In mid-2019, China’s approach was to undermine domestic confidence during the first Trump presidency. The Chinese government aimed to identify anti-Trump reporters and pay them large sums of money to produce stories that cast Trump in a negative light.
The FBI obtained raw intelligence indicating that China’s activities included efforts to produce illegal ballots for Joe Biden. These were kept out of the presidential briefing. One analyst admitted to intentionally downplaying Chinese election activities. Another official stated she was running a shadow government to keep intelligence on China’s election interference away from the media and the White House. Numerous burn bags have been found.
Americans were lied to about the security of our election systems, including voting machines. They’re highly susceptible to attack. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and non-state actors have the ability to compromise our election infrastructure.
Michigan police raided a Democrat GOTV organization and were so concerned they contacted the FBI in Detroit. The documents state that canvassers signed voter registration forms in other people’s names, registered nonexistent individuals, and got paid based on the number of applications they produced. The FBI believed crimes were committed, but the Biden DOJ slow-walked and suppressed the case.
Today at 9:40 p.m. ET, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) completed its latest major wave of strikes against Iran.
U.S. forces, including fighter jets, aerial drones, and warships, launched precision munitions that hit dozens of Iranian military targets such as coastal surveillance and air defense sites, military logistics infrastructure, and maritime capabilities. This was the sixth consecutive night of U.S. strikes against Iran.
At the Commander in Chief’s direction, CENTCOM is further degrading Iranian military capabilities and holding Iran accountable for recent attacks on commercial shipping.
More than 50,000 U.S. service members are operating across the Middle East and remain vigilant, lethal, and ready.
“U.S. forces resumed the naval blockade against vessels transiting to and from Iranian ports and coastal areas today [July 14] at 4 p.m. ET,” the command posted to social media on Tuesday.
“There are currently more than 20 U.S. Navy warships and hundreds of military aircraft operating across the Middle East. American forces remain vigilant, lethal, and ready,” the statement continued.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has requested that senior officials from more than 60 countries convene in Washington next Thursday to discuss the alarming rise of transnational far-left terrorism, according to a Washington Post report.
Snip.
The initiative is intended to expand intelligence sharing, law-enforcement cooperation and potential terrorist designations targeting militant groups with alleged ties to Antifa.
Administration officials have discussed whether foreign-terrorism links could unlock broader investigative and surveillance powers against US-based far-left revolutionaries that are a part of subversion networks.
The problem is that countries have been addressing far-left revolutionaries as a domestic threat, but in fact it’s transnational.
State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said the upcoming event is in response to the rise of the radical left. He said far-left terrorism is “an old threat re-emerging with strong transnational links and new convergences.”
“Because this threat has not been adequately addressed in the past, each engagement, designation, or security assistance program creates a compounding effect supporting countermeasures at home and abroad,” Pigott said in a statement.
In November, the State Department designated four European far-left groups as foreign terrorist organizations and directed agencies to investigate networks accused of fomenting political violence. One of the militant groups in Germany is called Antifa Ost. Two more were in Greece and one in Italy.
During the Antifa roundtable at the White House last October, Seamus Bruner, Director of Research at the Government Accountability Institute, briefed the president and his cabinet on a complex network of dark-money NGOs and activist groups fueling unrest nationwide via the permanent protest-industrial complex.
“We have identified dozens of radical organizations, not just the decentralized Antifa organizations, but dozens of radical organizations that have received more than $100 million from the Riot Inc investors,” Bruner told Trump.
Jihadists attacks and plots in the United States are down by two-thirds since ISIS’s peak. The number of people killed by jihadist terrorism in Europe dropped by roughly 97 percent from the year 2015 to the year 2024. In other words, to a very great extent, our counterterrorism strategy has worked. The threat has not disappeared, of course. It will continue to exist, particularly so long as we tolerate immigration systems that imports these threats directly into our respective homelands. But this threat has been severely diminished. The world looks very different today because of it.
For far too long, however, our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot – a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left. Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy. It’s treated this way by many in the press, by many in academia and our universities, and by many of our legacy institutions. You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference. In spite of the clear and the undeniable reality, in spite of the objective numbers and statistics, in spite of the fact that in this room today there are representatives from across the political spectrum, we will hear this organized – that this kind of organized violence and terror will be dismissed. It will be dismissed as a partisan fiction.
A whole industry grew up in our countries around the study of extremism. We have think tanks and fellowships and journals and consultancies, with the unspoken understanding among them that the only kind of political violence that was a true threat to our system – I’m sorry – that only one kind of political violence was a true threat to the system. A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil. It is. But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary – well, that’s just merely a tragic excess of idealism. Perhaps its means were misplaced or overzealous, but its ends were virtuous and just. That’s the implication of how they treat it.
For years, this extraordinary ideological prejudice was embedded in the way we talked about political violence and extremism. It was repeated again and again, until it was accepted as the neutral and objective baseline, so entrenched – so entrenched in the mainstream conventional wisdom that it came to be regarded as an apolitical fact. It is the reason why, here in my country, so many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression so long as they served a left-wing cause.
It is why during those George Floyd – so-called George Floyd – riots in the summer of 2020, as criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through American great – America’s great cities and nearly brought the country to its knees, city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror. It is the reason for the now infamous image – and you all recall this – of a news anchor from a very prominent agency – a news anchor standing in a neighborhood consumed in flames; meanwhile the chyron on the bottom read that the protests were mostly peaceful. This was something worse than a double standard. Left-wing violence was not just excused; it was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself. That era has to end.
“Move over, Somali Learing Centers! Nick Shirley and Dr. Oz just visited Asian “adult daycares” and found a whole bunch of fraud.” “We uncovered over $190,000,000 in fraud as these fraudsters use the elderly and needy to commit fraud through adult and personal home care scams in NYC. Your tax dollars are paying for elderly Koreans and Chinese to play ping pong and do tai chi, while the fraudsters give $ kickbacks to those who enroll.”
“I Watched the DSA Go Crazy. The Democrats May Be Next. The anti-democratic far Left is using the same strategy that helped them capture the Democratic Socialists of America.”
How worried should Democrats be about the Democratic Socialists of America? In the wake of a series of DSA victories in New York City, Jonathan Chait raised the alarm in The Atlantic, writing that as the group has risen in power, it has also grown “more hostile to the [Democratic] party, more illiberal, and more dogmatic.” Long-time DSA members, including former staff member and thought leader David Duhalde and socialist magazine publisher Nathan J. Robinson, pushed back, dismissing Chait as someone who doesn’t know or understand the DSA.
Well, I know the DSA, and as someone who was a member and served in local leadership, I can say that Chait has it right: today’s DSA is not a harmless organization. It includes disciplined, radicalized networks that have methodically expanded their power over the last decade in pursuit of extremist goals.
As the Democratic Party grapples with the DSA’s growing influence and extremism, it would do well to recognize that the same dynamic underway now—first accommodation, then capture, then surrender to insurgent radicals—already played out on a smaller scale within the DSA itself. The only defense is to out-organize it.
For decades, the DSA was mostly composed of a cohort of aging Boomers left over from its founding in 1982. It prioritized open debate and political tolerance. Following in the tradition of founder Michael Harrington, members viewed the DSA not as a revolutionary vanguard but as a reformist bridge to mainstream labor-liberalism, and they prioritized parliamentary process and pluralism.
But in the mid-2010s, the character of the organization began to change. I was in Boston at the time and witnessed the last days of the “old” DSA. New, younger members began to enter the organization, while Senator Bernie Sanders and the socialist magazine Jacobin grew their followings.
As the DSA’s cultural power expanded and it began to amass electoral victories, more leftists of varying extremist commitments were drawn in. This was an explicit strategy called “the big tent,” advanced by the then-DSA Jacobin Left. In August 2025, DSA delegates voted to remove a constitutional provision barring Leninists from entry. The provision was already a dead letter.
The old DSA’s high-mindedness became its fatal weakness. Veteran members assumed the younger generation played by the same rules of persuasion, but the newcomers’ goal was not to win arguments—it was to transform the institution and its politics.
As the organization grew, it began to profess more extreme ideas—and demand that its members do the same. First there were the purity tests of Black Lives Matter and BDS, then apologia for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and support for Hamas and its atrocities.
The new DSA—with the help of hype-man Hasan Piker—advanced these agendas with what American labor leader Walter Reuther called “the Communists’ highly developed technique of name-calling and character assassination.” The Harringtonites fought back, but their efforts came far too late, and many prominent members of the older generation eventually left.
In a sense Jake Altman is wrong. The Democrat Party has largely already been captured by allied forces under the guise of “social justice” at the same time the commies were taking over the DSA, and were able to do it for much the same reasons: “no enemies on the left”, along with a heaping bowlful of white guilt.
A coalition of state financial officers said it uncovered roughly $225 million in alleged fraud across America’s schools over the past six years, identifying nearly 90 cases involving embezzlement, fake invoices, inflated enrollment, bid-rigging and kickbacks.
In a new report obtained exclusively by Fox News Digital, the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF) and Open the Books analyzed every Education Department Office of Inspector General (OIG) Semiannual Report to Congress issued between Oct. 1, 2019, and March 31, 2026, revealing alleged fraud across 24 states and Puerto Rico.
Some other examples snipped.
In Texas, former Houston Independent School District Chief Operating Officer Brian Busby and contractor Anthony Hutchison allegedly orchestrated a fraud scheme of more than $6 million, involving school construction and grounds maintenance contracts in exchange for cash bribes and hundreds of thousands of dollars in home renovations.
A federal jury found Busby and Hutchison guilty of conspiracy, bribery, filing false tax returns, and witness tampering, with Hutchison also convicted on seven wire fraud counts, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas.
“Bureaucratic bloat, insider dealing, and poor oversight prompted Governor Abbott and the Texas Education Agency to intervene in HISD and appoint new leadership,” HISD Superintendent Mike Miles told Fox News Digital. “School funding was being squandered, the quality of schools had deteriorated, and the majority of students’ education was being neglected. That is no longer the case. Since June 2023, we have made it a priority to eliminate waste and most importantly, now every decision we make is focused on closing student achievement gaps, preparing students for the future, and supporting teachers.”
More proof that Democrats in office are scumbags all the way down. “Swalwell pal Sen. Ruben Gallego had sexual relationships with two House staffers, sources reveal to The Post.”
Arizona Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, engaged in sexual relationships with at least two House staffers and his “very flirtatious” habits with others may come back to haunt him, The Post has learned.
The 46-year-old lawmaker admitted to the two relationships — both with aides to Texas Democrats — to one source while a second person said they had recently learned of the romantic entanglements.
A third source confirmed one of the dalliances, both of which are said to have been consensual and occurred during Gallego’s decade representing Phoenix in the House.
So he’s just an adulterer, not a rapist (as far as we know). Does this put him in the top half of senate Democrats for morality? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“Marine Drones Hit Two Russian Tankers: Magyar Hit 11 More Ships.” I’ve arranged these from most recent to least recent, which is all of five days ago.
“American Marine Drone Hits Iranian Submarine Repair Facility & Submarine at Bandar Abbas.” The drone used to attack the facility was the Corsair, manufactured by Austin company Saronic. Speaking of which:
“Sea Drone Company Saronic Announces $3.2 Billion Texas Shipyard. The company says the project is aimed at strengthening U.S. shipbuilding as autonomous vessels play an increasingly prominent role in modern warfare.”
Austin-based defense technology company Saronic, known for building autonomous watercraft, announced plans to invest more than $3.2 billion in a new shipyard at the Port of Brownsville that is expected to create 10,000 jobs.
Gov. Greg Abbott joined Saronic CEO Dino Mavrookas Thursday at the company’s Austin headquarters to announce the project, known as Port Alpha.
The shipyard’s initial phase will occupy more than 800 acres, with the potential to expand to more than 4,000 acres. Saronic plans to break ground this year and begin producing ships in 2028.
“The initial phase of Port Alpha will more than double America’s shipbuilding capacity today and will make it the largest shipyard in the country,” said Mavrookas.
Port Alpha will be designed for advanced manufacturing, software-based production, and autonomous vessels.
Mavrookas framed the project as a response to the decline of American shipbuilding and the increasing maritime capabilities of China.
“Today, China is now outbuilding the United States in shipbuilding capacity 230 to one,” he said.
“A nation that cannot build ships cannot project power, cannot protect its supply chains, and cannot defend its interests,” Mavrookas added. “We are at that moment right now. Port Alpha is our answer.”
Saronic designs and manufactures autonomous vessels for the U.S. military, including the Corsair, Mirage, and Marauder.
This is good news for American drone manufacturing (and shipbuilding). However, on a personal level, I note that Saronic has had the same technical writing position open for most of this year. Indeed, I’ve applied for it multiple times when listed, but gotten no contacts save form replies. Maybe with all their new activity they’ll finally be hiring…
Former Obama staffer accused of stealing from colleagues to fund drug habit.
Adam Fetcher, 42, was let go from his role as Chief Communications Officer for the City of Minneapolis last week amid a police probe, The Minnesota Star Tribune reported.
According to the outlet, Fetcher, who earned $186,495 a year in his role, is accused of stealing cash and credit cards from three of his colleagues and racking up fraudulent charges in smoke shops.
Fetcher’s drug of choice was Kratom, “a substance which is used to manage opioid withdrawal.”
U.S. Rep. Chip Roy wants the Trump administration to crack down on legal immigration after last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision thwarting a presidential executive order to address birthright citizenship.
In a letter to the Trump administration, Roy (R–Austin) said that while the administration works to secure the nation from illegal immigration, the current level of legal immigration should be reassessed to ensure that the “economic opportunities, cultural and social cohesion, or security” of American citizens is not negatively impacted.
Expressing concern about increasing pressure on housing, schools, and healthcare services, Roy wrote that the “American people deserve transparency so we can ensure our immigration system puts American workers, taxpayers, and communities first.”
According to the congressman, the U.S. takes in approximately one million legal immigrants each year because of the Immigration Act of 1990. This accounts for roughly 34 million immigrants over the last 35 years. He also explained that more than 10 million nonimmigrant visas are issued to visitors such as guest workers, foreign students, and tourists.
Roy went on to cite an analysis of last year’s Current Population Survey (CPS) by the Center for Immigration Studies, which highlighted legal and illegal immigrant totals of “53.3 million and 15.8 percent of the total U.S. population in January 2025.”
Ashrafuzzaman Khan, a former top official of the Islamic Circle of North America in Queens, New York, personally slaughtered seven university professors as the chief executioner of Jamaat-e-Islami’s Al Badr death squads during the 1971 Bangladesh massacre. Despite being convicted in absentia of war crimes, he helped build one of America’s largest Muslim organizations and continues to live freely in the United States.
Here’s a weird Texas crime story: “Lavaca County Justice of the Peace Commits Suicide Following Arrest for Compelling Prostitution, Sexual Assault. Travis Hill had been a fugitive since Monday, when he failed to appear for a pre-trial appointment.” Lavaca County is in south central Texas between Houston and Seguin on highway 90.
A Lavaca County justice of the peace who was arrested earlier this month on felony charges committed suicide on Thursday as law enforcement agents attempted to arrest him a second time.
Precinct 2 Justice of the Peace Travis Mitchell Hill was arrested July 11 on first- degree felony charges of compelling prostitution, second-degree sexual assault, and solicitation of prostitution, but reportedly had been released on bond.
Usually, compelling prostitution is upgraded to a first-degree felony when the victim is a minor.
The Lavaca County Sheriff’s Office was made aware of allegations against Hill six weeks ago, but since Hill was an elected official and a practicing criminal defense attorney, Lavaca County Attorney James Reeves recused himself and referred the case to the Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG). The Texas Rangers were leading the investigation.
Hill did not appear for a pre-trial appointment Monday, when he was supposed to receive an ankle monitor. The U.S. Marshal’s Office was assisting local law enforcement with locating him on Thursday.
According to a statement issued by Reeves, Hill was located Thursday evening “at a remote location in Gonzales County, Texas. During law enforcement’s encounter with Mr. Hill, he committed suicide.” No other details were provided.
“Hill was appointed as justice of the peace in 2011 by the Lavaca County Commissioners Court. He had reportedly previously run as a Democrat for Lavaca County district clerk in the March 2011 primary, but switched to the Republican Party sometime later.” There are no more details about the charges against him online that I can find.
Follow-up: Remember the killing of Tory-turned-reform MP Ann Widdecombe in last week’s LinkSwarm? Turns out the suspect arrested is probably a commie. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.
“Houston Man Killed by ICE, Hailed as Father Chasing ‘American Dream,’ Had Meth in His Car.” That would be illegal alien Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who tried to run over an ice agent in his truck.
Unexpected headlines: “A tech company is repurposing its sexbots into AI teachers’ aides and they’re already being used in at least one New York state school.”
As Flock cameras are installed across the nation, citizens are growing more concerned about the potential privacy violations posed by automatic license plate readers.
On Friday, U.S. Rep. Keith Self wrote on X that “[i]f transparency is now considered a threat, we’ve already drifted too far from the principles of a free Republic,” responding to an article about Flock’s CEO, who said that it is “terroristic” for the public to want to know where the company’s automatic license plate readers are being installed.
Flock cameras do not act like traditional license plate readers. Powered by AI, they capture details such as the make and model of a passing vehicle, as well as any unique or identifying features such as dents, scratches, stickers, and aftermarket parts.
The ALPRs also capture data on vehicles, regardless of whether they have been implicated in a crime. Police departments do not need a search warrant to access Flock data, heightening concerns about Fourth Amendment violations.
“TSMC posts record revenue in second quarter on AI demand.” “Revenue in the April-June period of this year came in at T$1.27 trillion ($39.62 billion), according to Reuters calculations, slightly above a T$1.264 trillion LSEG SmartEstimate drawn from 20 analysts.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
We’re living in an Age of AI. Why was there a “Jazz Age”? Why did jazz create an “Age”? Why was there this period between the Great War and the Great Depression, where a new form of music was very important, and people around the world cared about it?
You can theorize about jazz. You can say that there were social reasons: that jazz was fun and new and sexy, and women wanted to wear short skirts and dance the Charleston.
Or you could say that jazz was infrastructural — that music from the town of New Orleans could be recorded, and exported, and transmitted on the radio. There were new forms of mass media, so it was easier to spread a viral fad, around the world. So, that somehow explains jazz.
Or you could say that jazz was political — that there was an oppressed class of black people living under apartheid, and jazz musicians and composers were making their voices heard.
Or you could say that the Great War had just ended, and it was followed by a plague of flu that killed even more people than the worst war in history. You might say that jazz was a method for musicians to rescue mankind by changing the subject. Jazz was strange and extreme, because it was denying and avoiding the trauma of a lost generation. With more trauma — depression and war — well on the way.
It’s pretty clear to me that the generation of AI — and it’s been going on for ten years, it’s a generation — has a lot of that unspoken Jazz Age anguish. It’s a vivid displacement activity for a lost and troubled era.
I’m a novelist, so I notice the peculiar emotional expressions here. I notice things like AI burnout, AI psychosis, unhealthy relations with imaginary boyfriends and girlfriends, AI fakes, stock market bubbles, and the fear of missing out. That stark fear. So much fear. The fear of missing that golden chance. Also, the fear that AI is real this time, and is really happening. The apocalyptic terror that AI will lead to the destruction of the world.
This is not the cyberpunk dystopian dark side of AI. This is the propulsive force of AI. It’s the restless and itchy drive that forces you to leave your apartment and rush downtown to the jazz club.
Why do you go? The jazz club is not a place for the angels. You might drink bootleg liquor there and become an alcoholic. Or you might get in a fight, or catch a venereal disease. There’s cocaine and marijuana there. Someone might mug you and take your purse or wallet. But also, in New York, Duke Ellington is playing! In Paris, Django Reinhart is playing! It may be a wild scene, but you’re crazy not to go!
This is the high summer of AI. The scene is red hot. I’ve been aware of AI for my entire, extensive lifetime, and it’s never been this technically intense and this deeply felt. Rational people, with education and money and power and experience, are cracking up in public. They’re losing their heads over it. Billionaires, captains of industry, politicians, military, spies. Worldwide. Old and young, men and women.
It’s a craze.
I’m very interested in it. I follow its every little up and down. It is so far out and science fictional that it might have been built just to entertain elderly cyberpunk writers. I do not invest in it. I’m not selling any of it to you. I don’t use it much personally. It isn’t changing my life — not much as yet. I’m not afraid of it. I don’t even think it will last. It’s defining an era, an era which is ten years old and counting, but something else will show up. AI is not a fraud, or pretense, or a fake. It’s a real and powerful technology and we’re never going back to the way things were. I recognize all that, but also, I take consolation in continuity.
Happy Independence Day Eve! We plan to celebrate America’s 250th Birthday tomorrow in the time-honored tradition: Blowing things up.
More Democrat welfare state fraud, dispatches from the Democrat Civil War, another very bad week for Russian logistics (and aircraft, and any Russians trying to buy fuel), Eurocrats want lowly peons to die of heatstroke rather than use the air conditioning enjoyed by their betters…
…a followup to the weird Plano ISD booster club story, plus Mexican Batman. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Finally: “DOJ Grand Jury Probes Neville Roy Singham’s Marxist NGO Empire.”
Fox News’ Asra Nomani reports that on Monday, U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York, authorized by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, is examining whether Singham, NGOs he funded, or their leaders committed wire fraud, bank fraud, money laundering, or other financial crimes.
Prosecutors have issued subpoenas seeking bank records and other financial documents, according to Nomani’s sources.
Nomani’s team recently reported that Singham pumped $285 million through a Goldman Sachs donor-advised philanthropy fund and shell entities before it flowed into US nonprofits, while a broader review showed that $591 million flowed across five continents from 2017 through 2025.
More color from the report:
Of that money, Fox News Digital established a documented $278 million flowed directly from Singham into organizations that “sow discord” in the U.S., as House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith put it earlier this year at a hearing a dynamics called “foreign malign influence.”
Singham, who resides in China, has a long track record of assisting far-left entities, such as Code Pink and the Party for Socialism and other socialist NGOs, that oppose U.S. interests and support U.S. adversaries.
According to investigative reports (e.g., New York Times, 2023), Singham has worked closely with pro-CCP propaganda networks targeting the US.
Any Democrat or NGO staffers who knowingly accepted communist Chinese money need to go to prison.
“RFK Jr. Says 1 Million Obamacare Enrollees Lacked Social Security Numbers. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said 1 million people were enrolled in Obamacare health plans without Social Security numbers, as the Trump administration pledged to intensify efforts to combat fraud in federal health care programs.” Was ObamaCare designed from the ground up to provide taxpayer-funded medical care for illegal aliens, or did Democrats just see the opportunity along the way?
Finally Redux: “Supreme Court: States Can Ban Trans Athletes From Girls’ Sports.”
The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that states can block biological transgender males from competing in girls’ sports. In a 6-3 ruling, the court gave an iron-clad answer to the question.
Writing for the majority in West Virginia v. B.P.J. (consolidated with Little v. Hecox), Justice Brett Kavanaugh held that neither Title IX nor the Equal Protection Clause requires schools to carve out an exception for transgender athletes who’ve undergone hormone therapy or never experienced male puberty. States can draw the line at biological sex, full stop – no judge-administered athlete-by-athlete fairness hearings required. The ruling reverses both the Fourth Circuit (which sided with West Virginia’s B.P.J.) and the Ninth Circuit (which sided with Idaho’s Lindsay Hecox), and lands squarely in the wake of last year’s Skrmetti decision, extending its “this is a sex classification, not a transgender classification” framework from medical care straight into the locker room.
The transsexual madness gripping the left deserves its own chapter in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
“DOJ Sues States Over Alleged Failure To Turn Over Food Stamp Data. The Trump administration has sued four states, accusing them of withholding crucial data on food stamp applicants.” The only surprise is that California is not among them.
Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania refused to turn over information to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that would let federal officials identify fraud, Trump administration lawyers said in lawsuits filed on June 26 against the states.
Officials are asking judges to enter injunctions that would force state authorities to hand over the last five years of applications for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the food stamp program known as SNAP.
The USDA requested the SNAP data in 2025, citing an executive order from President Donald Trump that directed agencies to stop waste, fraud, and abuse, and many states complied with the request.
Data from those states showed that states had enrolled some 186,000 people in SNAP despite those people being deceased, among the discrepancies that added up to $3 billion in wasteful spending, the department said in a report.
We known Minnesota isn’t turning it over due to the massive fraud lining Democrat pockets, and the same is probably true in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Kentucky is pretty red, but Democrat Governor Andy Beshear must be doing his best to gear up the fraud there.
The Democratic Party has two main factions right now, which can conveniently be described as the Organized Crime Democrats, who view the government as primarily a vehicle to distribute resources and power to friends, allies, and clients who can be counted on to return their largesse with reliable votes, and the Bolsheviks, who want to do all those things as well, but whose overriding goal is the destruction of the United States and Western Civilization and replace it with Third World communism.
For decades, at least, the Organized Crime Democrats have dominated the party, but they have tolerated and even fostered the growth of the Bolsheviks with the mistaken belief that no group of clients can ever be more reliable than those who could not in a million years vote for the Republicans.
Snip.
The OCDs’ alliance with and fostering of the radical left has come back to bite them in the nether regions now. As their resources have become constrained, the Bolsheviks have become ever more powerful, and as is always the case, the revolutionaries despise their allies as much as their ideological opponents, and now feel ready to take them out.
And, so far, their putsch is working, and the OCDs are rightfully frightened.
I had previously reported on this civil war much earlier, but I used the terms “insane wing” and “corrupt wing.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Here’s a follow-up to yesterday’s post on Russian full shortages. “4km Line for Fuel in Russia’s Zabaykalsky Krai Region: 28 Hour Wait!” That’s all the way out east near Mongolia.
A JOINT PROJECT BY the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel and the investigative website The Insider has uncovered the existence and inner workings of a previously unknown Russian intelligence and cover action unit. The unit’s formal name is Military Unit 75127, but it is known within Russia’s intelligence establishment as Center 795. The Russian government reportedly created the unit in December 2022—less than a year following the Kremlin’s full military invasion of Ukraine.
Snip.
Notably, unlike other special activities units in Russia’s intelligence arsenal, Center 795 does not appear to reside within the GRU. Instead, it appears to operate independently of military intelligence oversight and to report directly to General Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the Russian Armed Forces’ General Staff of and First Deputy Minister of Defense, or to one of his subordinate deputy defense ministers.
According to the investigative reports, the existence of Center 795 was revealed when one of its officers, Denis Alimov, used Google to translate a message sent to him by a Serbian operative living in the United States. This allowed the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation to use a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) warrant and access the Google Translate transcripts. Alimov was eventually arrested in Bogotá, Colombia, on February 24, 2026, after arriving there on a Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul, Turkey. He is currently awaiting extradition to New York.
A Minnesota pardon board that includes Gov Tim Walz among its three members has issued a full pardon to a convicted Laotian child-molester, torpedoing Homeland Security’s effort to deport him. The 42-year-old convict, Tou Lue Vang, submitted a letter to the board saying he regretted what he did — and just like that, his criminal record is now clean as a whistle via unanimous decision.
“Governor Tim Walz’s decision to pardon an illegal alien convicted child rapist so he can remain in our country is disgusting,” said DHS spokeswoman Lauren Bis. “These are the criminal illegal aliens he and his Minnesota sanctuary politicians are protecting. Tou Lue Vang lost his legal status following his conviction for repeatedly sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl.”
Find someone who loves you as much as Democrats love illegal alien child molesters…
The European Commission’s headquarters was forced to shut down its air-conditioning system on Friday due to the heat wave.
Staff working at the Berlaymont building received a text at midday, reading: ‘BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day.’
The 13-story building is home to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, her 26 commissioners, and about 3,000 staff. Von der Leyen works on the 13th floor, and most of her commissioners’ offices are housed on floors eight or above.
Britons have been ordered to remove air conditioning from their homes – despite the country baking in up to 40C heat this week – under a fresh Net Zero crackdown.
Planning officials at councils have told residents to take down their cooling units over concerns about carbon dioxide emissions.
They say AC, despite the heat, should serve only as a ‘last resort’.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to disturb the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling upholding a sweeping Texas election security law banning paid vote harvesting.
Senate Bill 1, passed in 2021, aimed to extensively reform election security and eliminate paid vote harvesting with increased criminal penalties for offenses.
Vote harvesting is the practice of collecting and returning completed ballots, which can be used as a cover for voter fraud and voter coercion. Paid harvesters are often intent on delivering results for a specific candidate or measure.
A source told Axios the DOJ started the investigation after a “whistleblower complaint” in Southern California.
Gallego’s problems began after numerous women came forward accusing his bestie, former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), of sexual misconduct.
In April, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) claimed, “There is a woman that allegedly is coming forward with attorneys, wants to go on-record about an incident that occurred between the two of them at the same time, and the event was sexual in nature, allegedly.
Last week, I wrote about how Politico scrutinized Gallego’s financial records and discovered he used leadership PAC campaign cash to fund luxury outings with his family since he launched his Senate campaign in 2023.
The Senate Ethics Committee dismissed an inquiry into those allegations against Gallego on Monday.
Attorney General Ken Paxton is challenging California’s Plastics Act, arguing it imposes burdensome regulations on companies doing business with California and will increase the cost of everyday American products.
The lawsuit, which Paxton joined alongside the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors and 16 additional attorneys general, calls the California law a “blatant and unprecedented attempt to impose its own policy preferences on the entire nation” and argues that it infringes on the sovereignty of other states.
Implemented May 1, “the Plastics Act” places new requirements on goods containing plastic shipped into and out of California, affecting both producers and consumers nationwide.
The act forces companies that sell products in the state to reduce single‑use plastic packaging, make it recyclable or compostable, and help pay for recycling and cleanup. It does this through strict reduction and recycling targets by 2032 and an extended producer responsibility program that shifts costs from taxpayers to packaging producers.
Paxton’s office expressed alarm that the regulations and fees will drive up prices for everyday goods and discriminate against out-of-state businesses.
“I am challenging California’s Plastics Act to protect businesses from unnecessary regulations and Texans from higher costs on the products they use every day,” said Paxton. “Texas has always been a place where businesses can thrive, and I will ensure it remains that way. I will not allow California lawmakers to harm Texas businesses.”
The lawsuit further challenges California’s decision to place the private organization Circular Action Alliance in charge of implementing the law.
According to the complaint, the CAA would collect roughly $500 million annually from businesses while operating with little public oversight or transparency.
So a left-wing, radical environmental NGO gets to benefit directly by running left-wing, radical environmental program. What are the odds?
The Supreme Court of Texas (SCOTX) determined on Friday that a woman who regretted her gender modification surgery did not file her claims too late to take her providers to court, in a case centered on the state’s statute of limitations in medical malpractice cases.
Soren Aldaco of Tarrant County sued her healthcare providers and counselors for fraud and negligence over their roles in obtaining gender modification procedures for her, including a double mastectomy at age 19 — a procedure she later came to regret.
After the Second Court of Appeals in Fort Worth rejected Aldaco’s appeal in November 2024 on the basis that her medical claim had expired, affirming the Tarrant County district court’s prior summary judgement, SCOTX accepted her petition for review and scheduled the case for oral arguments on February 11, 2026.
A SCOTX opinion was then issued by Justice James P. Sullivan four months later on Friday morning, reversing the finding that her claims had expired on the basis that the clock began ticking once the injury occurred, not when her therapist recommended her for the procedure.
Aldaco’s therapist, Barbara Rose Wood of the Three Oaks Counseling Group, wrote her a letter of recommendation for a double mastectomy after the Crane Clinic advised her that she would need one in order to move forward with the procedure.
Those who inflicted radical surgery on teenagers in the name of social justice deserve to lose every dime they own.
In response to lawmakers’ request for a pause on extra-high-voltage transmission lines, transmission service providers admitted reliance on wind and solar power, along with government intervention, is driving Permian Basin energy issues. This aligns with a third-party report that the lines are primarily built to support wind and solar, while local reliable generation alternatives were never fully examined.
Providers argued that public utility commissioners do not have the power to grant lawmakers’ request to pause the project. The next day, state senators announced they would hold a hearing on the proposed lines in late July.
This centers on ERCOT’s 765-kilovolt Strategic Transmission Expansion Plan (STEP), a key part of the Permian Basin Reliability Plan (PBRP). STEP proposes three transmission lines spanning over 1,200 miles to move power from East Texas into the natural-gas-rich Permian Basin, with routes crossing North Texas, Central Texas, and South Texas.
The three lines are split into five interconnected segments for Phase 1. Phase 2 would build 765-kV lines from Northeast-East Texas southward through Central and South Texas. This eastern portion would tie into the lines leading into the Permian Basin.
On June 24, in a joint filing, Transmission Service Providers (TSPs) Oncor, Lower Colorado River Authority Transmission Service Corporation, AEP Texas, and City of San Antonio-owned CPS Energy admitted that the risk to sustained electrical supply in West Texas is “greatest during low-wind, no-solar conditions, when the Permian Basin relies heavily on imports” from the lower voltage 345-kV network.
The TSPs’ filing was in response to a June 15 brief by more than 40 state lawmakers asking PUCT to pause the project. They filed it in support of pro-landowner American Stewards of Liberty’s motion to defer deciding the need for the first four segments.
The lawmakers cited Dr. Brent Bennett, who wrote the May 2026 study by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF). Bennett warned that the “main effect of the 765-kV lines is to integrate more wind and solar into the ERCOT grid,” and that helping ERCOT “manage [such] a future system … to meet growing industrial demand” is the “primary rationale” for the lines.
This comes roughly five years after the 2021 winter blackouts. Two failures that energy specialist Jason Isaac said contributed to the problem are overreliance on “unreliable” wind and solar and market-distorting subsidies for wind and solar.
Bennett wrote that more transmission “does not ensure that enough new reliable generation will be built to meet demand and could even discourage such generation if the transmission provides wind and solar favorable market access.”
Bennett and ASL believe that building new dispatchable power generation, such as natural gas, in the Permian Basin was not fully examined as an alternative. The TSPs wrote they “do not dispute” that more such generation would benefit the Permian Basin.
When local taxpayers used cash, a tax office employee would put the cash in an envelope and record the payment as part of a “batch” of payments in the office’s tax collection software, Spindlemedia.
After reaching between $15,000 to $20,000, an employee would close that batch of payments in the software. At this point, Williams was responsible for depositing the cash from the envelopes into the district’s bank accounts.
Williams’ indictment alleges that she stole $996,174 in cash and disguised the theft by reversing payments recorded in certain batches, recorded those payments in new batches, and kept the new batches open for long periods in the Spindlemedia software.
Las Vegas cops busted a transgender gunman who allegedly planned a casino massacre using a huge cache of weapons.
Allison Howlett, 36, who was born a man but lives as a woman, was arrested Saturday on charges of making terroristic threats, assault with a deadly weapon, auto theft, gun theft and other offenses.
The wild story unfolded shortly after 9:30 a.m. Saturday when Howlett’s former spouse, who is female, called police to report Howlett had stolen her car and the vehicle held numerous firearms, Henderson Police Chief Reggie Rader said.
You know how the MSM always report “arsenals” that seem like fairly puny gun collections? That isn’t the case this time.
The officers were shocked to see that Howlett had been sitting on a handgun and had an MP5 submachine gun sitting on the back seat.
When cops searched Howlett’s car, they recovered 22 other guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
Cops who searched the suspect’s home in Henderson found 30 more firearms, including automatic rifles, plus ammo, grenade launcher attachments and silencers.
Officers said Howlett made several threats going back years, a including a 2024 call where Howlett threatened a mass shooting.
Here’s a weird follow-up to a weird story. “Plano ISD Sued Over Arrests of High School Booster Club Mothers.”
Mothers from a Jasper High School choir booster club filed a lawsuit claiming Plano Independent School District (ISD) participated in civil conspiracy and had them falsely arrested.
The lawsuit, which names Laura Cervantes and the Jasper High School Choir Booster Club as the plaintiffs, describes the series of events that led to the filing.
Cervantes was elected as president of the booster club in 2019, and in June 2022 the club was filed as an incorporated nonprofit organization. The club utilized a Prosperity Bank account, and three directors, Cervantes, Krisinda Lingenfelter, and Maria King, assumed oversight.
Cervantes’ lawsuit states, “Neither Plano ISD, nor any of its employees, were members, officers, or employees of the organization” at that time.
The directors reportedly sought funding from Plano ISD for repairs in the theater, but allege that the district then flipped the script, asking the booster club to instead fund improvements. When they responded that repairs were not in the description of the club’s functions, Plano ISD claimed that the booster club was no longer acting in compliance with district guidelines and staged a coup, according to Cervantes.
The district disavowed the club and elected new leadership, despite the club operating as a legally separate entity from the district. The lawsuit claims that during that time, “Defendants continued to divert the Booster Club’s mail, kept it, opened it, and used its contents (namely bank statements).”
The lawsuit also claims that the newly elected booster club directors, along with the school’s fine arts director, subsequently went to Prosperity Bank in order to replace the original club directors as authorized signers on the account.
The lawsuit states, “These Defendants’ conduct likely constituted the crime of forgery under [the Texas Penal Code], because they intentionally presented documents intended to defraud the bank and harm the Booster Club by taking over its funds.”
Eventually, the bank notified the three moms that it would be closing the account, and they proceeded to take the check and deposit that money into another bank account at Vantage Bank in the name of the booster club. The check bounced.
In August 2024, a Plano Police Department detective executed a probable cause affidavit — which Cervantes claims was “based entirely off the knowingly false statements of each Defendant” — and obtained warrants for the arrests of Cervantes, Lingenfelter, and King “for the felony offense of theft over $2,500 but less than $30,000.”
They were booked into the Collin County Jail with their bonds set at $25,000 each.
A Collin County grand jury declined to indict the women “for any crime for want of probable cause, and the prosecution was terminated in Cervantes’s favor.”
Plano ISD released a statement about the legal drama, arguing that school-affiliated organizations, including booster clubs, “must follow established guidelines for financial accountability, annual audits and open communication with district leaders.”
The statement did not address the termination of the prosecution, or the district-led formation of the new booster club, but maintained, “Plano ISD did not file any suit against the former booster club- these proceedings were strictly between the current booster organization and the previously disbanded group.”
The statement by Plano ISD also detailed that they gave the $4,437.39 recovered from the old booster club’s account to the new club.
On May 27, the federal lawsuit was filed with Cervantes at the helm. Allegations cover 11 items, from false arrest and unreasonable seizure of property to violations of the rights to free association, free speech, petition.
The lawsuit alleges, “Plano Independent School District and its employees conspir[ed] with private citizens to assume control over a private non-profit organization, take control of its property and monies, and eventually, have the directors of that organization falsely arrested and publicly humiliated – all because the officers of a high school choir booster club would not bend the knee to an out-of-control public school district.”
It seems inexplicable that Plano ISD threw three booster club members in jail in order to steal their $4,437.39…
Over the last few days, American news networks have failed to make any mention of a massive report about the rampancy of migrant rape gangs in the UK. Now, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer resigned under colossal political pressure surrounding the migrant crisis, Monday’s CNN News Central had only continued to avoid mention of the terrifying report and the other consequences of mass migration in the U.K.
During the morning’s CNN News Central, there was hourly coverage of Starmer’s resignation from the role of Prime Minister. Only once did they go into the reasons behind his resignation, with CNN correspondent Clare Sebastian saying this about the troubles facing the U.K.’s political leadership:
Why, you might ask, can the UK not hold on to prime ministers? Well, there’s a number of different reasons. But ten years ago this week, the UK voted to leave the European Union and the turmoil that has followed, the economic turmoil, the political turmoil, certainly has contributed to some of this. There’s other economic reasons as well. The big surge in inflation that we saw after the pandemic and the war in Ukraine has really hurt people here, and they are looking for radical change.
Sebastian was very vague about the conditions surrounding Starmer’s resignation, shifting the blame onto U.K.’s exit from the E.U., the Ukraine war, and COVID, things which occurred years ago. She avoided mention of the actual current disaster facing Starmer’s administration: the UK migration crisis.
For the past few years, concerns among the British public have risen regarding immigration, eventually reaching a breaking point after two massive scandals in the past two weeks.
Firstly, major riots in Belfast after a beheading attempt by a Sudanese migrant. Secondly, the release of a massive report uncovering huge child trafficking networks in the U.K., perpetrated primarily by Muslim immigrants and entirely ignored by the British government. Those who only listen to the media, however, have probably never heard about these crises.
According to Sebastian, Starmer simply just didn’t bring the radical leftist change he promised:
Now, Keir Starmer swept to power in a landslide nearly two years ago, promising that radical change. But most people here, well, certainly most people around the country that we’ve spoken to, and an increasing number of members of parliament in his party, feel that he hasn’t managed to deliver that.
This cover-up of immigration crises like these was part of a larger campaign by the media. They downplay the brutal effects mass immigration has on European societies. They demonize those who try to fight back against the flood of violent criminals into their societies.
And Starmer’s coverup of the Muslim rape gang scandal stretch back to long before he took up residence at Number 10 Downing Street, as the rape gang inquiry report makes clear. “While Sir Keir Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions, it has been reported that 13,000 suspected rape gang members and paedophiles were let off with warning letters.”
Ah yes, pedophiles. The other constituency that Starmer’s Labour Party seems riddled with. “Starmer’s Labour is now infested with sexual predators and child rapists. The communist types, the Jeremy Corbynites, you know, like, you know, they’re insane, but they’re not Blairites. And the Blairits seem to have a lot of nonces [i.e. pedophiles] in there.”
Jeremy Corbyn is an old-style communist whose policies would have been disasterous for the UK (and he played his own role in covering up the Muslim rape gangs), but somehow the elderly commie seems less personally odious and repulsive than Starmer. It’s not so much that Starmer is insincere as that he’s completely incapable of understanding what sincerity consists of. He’s a frightened little rabbit who fancies himself a lion, with none of the cunning or cuddleness of an actual rabbit.
And speaking of Corbyn, remember that Starmer’s “Labour Together” operation was a coordinated effort to censor those who dared to disagree with Keir Starmer, from Corbyn to Donald Trump to Elon Musk’s Twitter. Starmer had a significant role in helping spin up the global left-wing, social justice censorship machine to hide inconvenient facts that might negatively impact Starmer’s Labour Party. The fact that Starmer is the most unpopular PM in the history of polling tells you how well his censorship efforts worked out for him.
Certainly there have been worse Prime Ministers. The tenures of Neville Chamberlain and Lord North probably wrought more harm to the UK than Starmer’s short time at the top. But none seemed as personally repugnant as Starmer, and his slithering off stage is long overdue.
Conflicting economic signals, more Democrat fraud uncovered, more criminal illegal aliens deported, Ukraine sinks more Russian ships and ignites more Russian oil refineries, more Winning, more media companies still try to cling to woke (but Victoria’s Secret wises up), and videos that will break your brain. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Personally, it’s been an eventful week. I opened an IRA to move money into from a 401K so I can move some of it to my checking, but it always takes longer than they promise. And my dog managed to catch a skunk, who seemed to spray directly into his mouth from the way he was frothing. So I bought some carpet stuff to get the second-hand Eue de Skunk out of my carpets. (From the description of other people whose dogs have been skunked, I don’t think he got much of a dose except in his mouth and on his head, so I suspect I haven’t had it as bad as some people.)
The closely watched employment report from the Labor Department on Friday painted an upbeat picture of the jobs market. The economy added 93,000 more jobs in March and April than previously estimated and the unemployment rate held at 4.3% for a third consecutive month.
But: “Tech job cuts surge, hitting a nearly two-year high. Big Tech in May announced the most job cuts in almost two years — more than 38,000 in total, according to new data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The tech sector has announced 123,653 cuts in 2026, a 65% increase over the same period last year.” So the economy is doing great! Except for the part of it that could hire me…
Russ Vought at OMB has just overhauled $1 TRILLION in federal grants by adding: Strict E-Verify requirements, English-language rules, and political appointee oversight to ensure taxpayer dollars go to American citizens first.
Vought’s new proposal replaces automatic payouts with “pay for performance” standards. Grants can now be terminated for waste, fraud, underperformance, or pushing anti-American priorities like DEI, gender ideology, or Green New Scam programs.
No more blank checks and fraud complaints go STRAIGHT to inspectors general and U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro within 10 days.
Sounds like a great start, but the fact that the federal government is handing out $1 trillion in grants seems like a problem in and of itself…
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin says he has made several criminal referrals after uncovering a major political enrichment scandal that routed billions in Biden-era green energy grants to Democrat cronies. “It’s about self-dealing,” Zeldin tells Just the News.
Zeldin said he has canceled or stopped about $29 billion in EPA grants – including one for $2 billion to a nonprofit tied to longtime Georgia Democrat election activist and failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams – after unmasking a series of pass-through groups used to route taxpayer monies to the politically connected.
“As you look through all of these pass-through entities, you’re seeing so many connections to former Obama and Biden administration officials and Democratic donors, people who were former Cabinet members, other high-ranking administration officials,” he said during a wide-ranging interview Monday on the John Solomon Reports podcast.
Zeldin: “Blatant waste and abuse.”
Zeldin said he has referred several of the transactions to the EPA inspector general, the agency’s chief watchdog, and the Justice Department for possible prosecution or further investigation. “Those referrals have been made,” he said.
Zeldin said some of the allegations have their roots in legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act, when Congress and the White House were all in Democrat hands. “They included all of this funding in this so-called Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. And then they would work with these different agencies of the Biden administration to get it out to their unqualified friends. The whole thing just feels criminal,” he said. “[…] This is clearly something that falls into the category of blatant waste and abuse.”
Zeldin has repeatedly singled out the Biden administration’s $2 billion grant to Power Forward Communities, a nonprofit tied to the former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abrams. The funds were awarded in 2024 to finance “residential decarbonization,” which was an effort to replace gas furnaces and other appliances with electric ones.
Abrams reportedly “played a pivotal role” in establishing the group, according to Fox News.
The award came under scrutiny after it was revealed Power Forward Communities had reported only $100 the year before the award. The Trump administration’s EPA announced in February 2025 it was taking measures to get the money back as part of an overall effort to claw back funding rushed out the door in the final days of the Biden administration.
There doesn’t seem to be a single federal agency the Democrat Party didn’t treat as a giant bag of graft.
“SCOTUS Allows Alabama Congressional Map Likely to Net GOP House Seat. Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District, currently represented by Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures, is now widely viewed as a likely Republican pickup.”
The Supreme Court ruled 6–3 on Tuesday night that Alabama may use a congressional map drawn in 2023 for this year’s elections, reversing a lower federal court’s decision that the plan unlawfully diluted the voting power of black residents.
This ruling reduces the number of majority-black congressional districts in the state from two to one and is widely expected to give Republicans one additional House seat in the upcoming midterm elections.
“Superseding Indictment Alleges SPLC Funded ‘Ku Klux Klan garments’ and ‘Cross-Burning Events.’ Asserts wide-ranging wire and bank fraud ‘to disguise the true nature, source, ownership, and control of the fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid’ to extremist group members SPLC supposedly was fighting.”
From the Introduction to the Superseding Indictment:
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s (“SPLC”) stated mission included the dismantling of white supremacy and confronting hate across the country. However, unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the National Alliance. The SPLC’s paid informants (“field sources”) engaged in the active promotion of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website. The SPLC also had a field source who was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Virginia. That field source made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. In order to covertly pay its field sources, the SPLC opened bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities. The covert nature of the accounts allowed the SPLC to disguise the true nature, source, ownership, and control of the fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid the field sources. In order to keep the scheme going, the SPLC made a series of false statements related to the operation of the accounts.
The Superseding Indictment summarizes the structure of SPLC’s alleged fraudulent operation:
10. Starting in the 1980s, the SPLC began operating a covert network of individuals who were either associated with violent extremist organizations or who had infiltrated such organizations at the SPLC’s direction. These individuals were referred to by some high-level employees within the SPLC as the “field sources” or the “Fs.” Upon entering into an agreement with an F, the SPLC assigned each F a unique number. The SPLC assigned these numbers in chronological order. The SPLC then paid the Fs with donor money.
11. Between in or about 2010 through in or about 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled approximately $4.1 million dollars in tax-exempt donor funds to a series of fictitious accounts described hereinafter. The general purpose of these fictious accounts was to pay Fs who were either leading or affiliated with multiple violent extremist organizations. Fs used the money donors gave to the SPLC to, among other things:
a. Attend extremist group rallies across the country;
b. Host extremist group rallies throughout the country;
c. Grow existing chapters of extremist groups;
d. Create new chapters of extremist groups;
e. Recruit new individuals into extremist groups;
f. Make donations to extremist group leaders;
g. Purchase materials for cross burnings;
h. Purchase materials to make Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods;
1. Create racist paraphernalia that extremist groups sold at rallies;
J. Publish extremist literature used in the recruiting of more members; and
k. Pay everyday living expenses, which allowed the Fs to focus on their extremistgroups rather than seeking other employment.
12. Certain SPLC employees knew that Fs used donors’ money to actively recruit new members and grow their violent extremist organizations.
There allegedly were fictitious entities set up to conceal what SPLC was doing:
15. To secretly funnel donors’ money to the Fs, employees at the SPLC, including a person who would become the SPLC’s Chief Financial Officer (“Employee-I”) and the person who would become Director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project (“Employee-2”) among others, opened and/or modified a series of bank accounts at Bank-I and Bank-2 in the name of various fictitious entities, including the following:
a. Center Investigative Agency (“CIA”);
b. Fox Photography;
c. North West Technologies (“North West Tech”);
d. Tech Writers Group (“Tech Writers”);
e. Rare Books Warehouse (“Rare Books”);
f. Imagery Ink;
g. J&J Electronics;
h. Kelly ‘s Marine; and
1. Turner Personnel
16. These fictitious entities were never incorporated, had no bonafide employees, and conducted no legitimate business.
More at the link. But it certainly sounds like they were breaking a whole host of laws, including deceptive trade practices, and possibly tax fraud.
“Multiple Drone Strikes on ST-68 Radars, Pantsir SAM System and Big Logistics Hub.” There have been a lot of reports about how Ukrainian attacks are wrecking logistics well back of the front lines, and I should probably do a separate post on that when I have the time.
“Mala Tokmachka. Here, Ukrainians completely broke Russian forces who have now spent a historically long time trying to capture a tiny village.” “These repetitive assaults have been producing mounting casualties for more than four years now.” “The battle for the tiny Mala Tokmachka has turned into the longest battle in history, even exceeding the Siege of the major town of Leningrad in the Second World War, which lasted eight hundred and seventy-two days and was an important turning point and a win for the Soviets.”
“Latest ICE roundup nabs pedophiles, violent criminals. Under the Trump administration, DHS has sought to implement the president’s mass deportation agenda to remove as many as 22 million illegal aliens from the U.S.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday unveiled the latest alien criminals in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody, which included pedophiles and persons convicted of violent crimes.
Snip.
Topping the list was Carlos Sanchez-Benitez of El Salvador, who was convicted for second-degree vehicular manslaughter.
Lauro Javier Miron-Tapia of Mexico was convicted for lewd acts with a minor child under 14 years old.
Daniel Alexis Casasola-Rivera of Mexico was convicted for a lewd act with a child under 14 years old.
Nun Hawi Tuam of Myanmar was convicted for aggravated sexual battery.
Franklin William Orellana-Maya of Honduras was convicted for sexual assault.
Yermy Hernandez-Castro of Honduras was convicted for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
Geovanny Gonzalez-Gonzalez of Nicaragua was convicted for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, battery by strangulation.
Ivan Jayasi of Mexico was convicted for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon.
Mario Zendejas-Gomez of Mexico was convicted for fourth-degree assault, obstructing law enforcement, and no contact order violation.
Miguel Sosa of Cuba was convicted for cocaine trafficking.
Oriol Mora-Arroyo of Mexico was convicted for attempted trafficking of a schedule II-controlled substance and carrying a concealed gun.
Juan Flores-Archaga of Honduras was convicted for third-degree burglary: illegal entry with intent to commit a crime.
Jhonathan Perla-Bonilla of Honduras was convicted for strongarm robbery and burglary of occupied conveyance.
Alexei Marti-Martinez of Cuba was convicted for grand theft.
Pedro Wladimir Contreras-Perez of Ecuador was convicted for larceny and licensing violation.
All of the UK seems furious over the death of Henry Nowak from stab wounds in police custody after his attacker accused his victim of being racist. “Police handcuffed Nowak, who had been stabbed by Sikh immigrant Vickrum Digwa, believing the Sikh man’s claim that Nowak had made a racist remark. Nowak told police he had been stabbed and couldn’t breathe, but officers simply left him on the ground as he lost consciousness and died.” So just like George Floyd, except Nowak was a real victim rather than a career criminal high on fentanyl.
The House Judiciary Committee said that it has uncovered new funding links between the Biden administration and left-wing groups that oppose the Israeli government, as well as groups with ties to terrorist organizations
A May 29 committee memorandum, which JNS obtained exclusively and which was addressed to committee members from the Republican-led committee staff, addresses “new information about the Biden-Harris administration helping to fund protests against the Netanyahu government.”
It alleges that U.S.-based organizations, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Tides Network, “provided over $5 million to groups that funded radical anti-Israel protests in the U.S. and Israel, and supported multiple terrorist-linked NGOs.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the committee, told JNS that the funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the State Department and other federal agencies raised questions about the misuse of federal dollars.
“You’re taking taxpayer money, you’re supposed to be doing good work,” the congressman said. “Why in the heck is it going to groups that are pro-Hamas?”
“Our government is sending American tax dollars to NGOs that are undermining our ally—our best ally—the State of Israel,” he told JNS. “That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”
The memo provides new details, after the committee released the initial findings of its investigation in 2025.
It describes a web of financial connections, in which the Biden administration “provided grant funds to groups that contributed directly and indirectly to the judicial reform protests that sought to undermine the Israeli government.”
“Documents suggest that the Jewish Communal Fund, and its grantees, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and PEF Israel Endowment Funds, may have violated their tax-exempt status by funding groups engaged in radical anti-government campaigns in Israel,” the memo says.
“Another U.S. government grantee, Abraham Initiatives, similarly led anti-government protests in Israel and, according to a 2023 audit, the organization failed to comply with anti-terrorism procedures in a USAID-funded program,” per the memo.
Between 2016 and 2022, the Tides Network received $30 million from USAID, while Abraham Initiatives received about $2.05 million in government funds between 2018 and 2021.
Some of the money that the Biden administration provided to these groups was intended for projects unrelated to Israel.
In the case of Tides, the $30 million went to “a civil development program in regions of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific.”
The report argues that money intended for one project freed these organizations to fund activism in Israel to oppose the judicial reform efforts of the Netanyahu government.
“Money is fungible,” Jordan told JNS. “It’s tough to track exactly, but it looks like some of this money was also then being run through one or two NGOs, winding up on college campuses to promote all the crazy antisemitic, anti-Israel stuff on campuses.”
“Even worse yet, it looks like some of it maybe even funded organizations that had links to terrorism,” he said.
In one example, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA) “received millions of dollars in grants from the Biden-Harris Administration’s USAID, State Department and Department of Defense,” the committee memo says.
RPA then donated $557,000 to its “affiliate and partner,” the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), per the memo.
RBF, in turn, has “donated $190,000 to Defense for Children International Palestine, an Israel-designated terrorist organization with ties to the U.S.-designated terrorist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,” according to the memo.
RBF has also made donations to Jewish Voice for Peace, one of the main organizers of anti-Israel demonstrations in the United States, and to Alliance for Global Justice, a U.S.-based non-profit that the committee alleges has provided funding to the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network.
The Biden administration designated Samidoun as a front for the PFLP in 2024.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled his administration’s new housing initiative on Tuesday to considerable fanfare. The plan, titled “Block by Block,” aims to build 200,000 new affordable housing units and preserve or stabilize another 200,000 over the next decade.
The administration’s website describes “Block by Block” as “a sweeping blueprint to tackle New York City’s deepening housing crisis with the urgency and scale the moment demands. Spanning the full breadth of housing policy, from new construction to tenant protections to public housing, homeownership and worker protections, the plan lays out a comprehensive strategy to make New York City more affordable for working people.”
The reality is that this plan would significantly expand the power and protections afforded to renters, fulfilling a promise Mamdani made repeatedly on the campaign trail.
It would also impose steep penalties on landlords who allow their buildings to fall into disrepair and, in some cases, even transfer ownership of neglected properties.
The mayor smiled broadly as he announced his administration’s astounding plan to seize and redistribute properties owned by neglectful landlords — a proposal taken right out of the Marxist playbook.
“Through our new citywide campaign, Fix the City, we will focus on the worst landlords in New York City,” the mayor said, to much applause. “When necessary we will take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers.”
He continued, “And for buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we will work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards – stewards that include community land trusts, nonprofits or even the tenants themselves.”
If you’re wondering how low the administration might actually set the bar for “neglect,” and what new regulations and/or coercive tax measures it may impose on current property owners to achieve its goals, you’re not alone.
And how much of this “neglected” property belongs to his political enemies?
173 House Democrats vote against resolution honoring police amid rising attacks
House Democrats split over a resolution backing law enforcement as assaults on officers surged last year.
Just 29 House Democrats on Wednesday voted for a GOP-authored measure paying tribute to the “extraordinary sacrifice” law enforcement officers make and criticizing the defund the police movement for jeopardizing public safety.
Meanwhile, 173 Democrats voted with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., against the resolution, while every GOP lawmaker present supported it.
7News confirmed that a man accused of sexually assaulting a woman in the stairwell of an Arlington parking garage is in the country illegally.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis told 7News Reporter Nick Minock that Cristobal Liobardo Vasquez-Sanchez is from El Salvador and had prior charges for rape, sexual assault, property damage, drug possession, and larceny.
Sounds like a good candidate for deportation back to El Salvador’s notoriously fun gang prison.
Speaking of tattooed Democrat lunatics, “Dem congressional candidate charged with terrorist threats after pulling gun on government officials.” “Kirill Basin, 40, allegedly threatened two Maui County workers during the terrifying incident at around 9:30 a.m. on Friday before fleeing the building in Wailuku, Civil Beat reported. The longshot candidate for Hawaii’s 2nd Congressional District was arrested at his home around 12:30 p.m. on a terrorist threatening in the first degree charge.”
Talafreakco.exe: “I’ve never seen a politician memorize his lines like James Talarico and it’s creepy as heck.”
This guy thinks God is non-binary and loves abortion and transing the kids in the name of Jesus, but this right here is the creepy cherry on top of the leftwing cake:
There’s being a robot, and then there’s … this. Do you think Talarico plugs himself into his charging unit at night, or does someone do it for him?
And the cherry on top is you know that he’s absolutely lying about those random “I’m not a Democrat” voters coming up to him…
Disgraced Ex-California Dem Rep. Eric Swalwell is so sleazy that he’s even involved in secondhand sleaze: “Rep. Jimmy Gomez’s mystery makeout IDed as Eric Swalwell’s chief of staff.”
The mystery woman Rep. Jimmy Gomez admitted to making “mistakes” with is his best buddy Eric Swalwell’s former chief of staff, The Post can reveal.
The married California Democrat had an 11-month-old child at home when he was caught in a moment of passion with Swalwell’s minxy congressional aide Yardena Wolf three years ago.
Gomez, the founder of the Dads Caucus in Congress, confessed Tuesday in a statement that he cheated on his wife after The Post’s reporting on the encounter with Wolf, which kicked off a House Ethics Committee investigation, yielding fresh tips on his conduct.
Wolf, at the time 29, and Gomez, then 48, were spotted having an intimate moment against a car outside a party at Swalwell’s home north of the Capitol in the summer of 2023 — about two years into her tenure as Swalwell’s top staffer.
There’s also this: “[Wolf] co-founded an AI fundraising company with Swalwell in 2024.” That’s evidently Findraiser.AI. “Findraiser uses AI to search your donor database so you don’t have to.” Creating a tag for it now so I’ll have it ready when the inevitable scandal hits… (Hat tip: Dwight, in comments.)
A rebuke for the media types who accuse Republican voters of mindlessly doing Trump’s bidding: “Zach Lahn, who went viral for confronting Obama in 2009, beat Trump’s pick for Iowa governor.”
Lahn took down multiple established GOP politicians, including Randy Feenstra, who had the coveted Trump endorsement. Lahn had an endorsement from TPUSA and MAHA Action, but was not expected to win. He also won the coveted … Steak ‘n Shake endorsement?
Lahn strongly promoted the message of “Iowa First,” with a focus on agricultural pesticides, health, and Chinese influence. He also rejected outside funding (the internet is noting in particular that he rejected funding from AIPAC).
I wouldn’t necessarily count AIPAC backing as pro or con, save for the fact that they’ve backed some real squishy moderate Republicans lately (Dan Crenshaw and Tony Gonzales come to mind).
This is bad news: A confirmed case of New World Screwworm in south Texas.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins says a single confirmed case of New World screwworm is contained, as state and federal officials move quickly to quarantine the area.
During a Thursday press call, Rollins reported that the single screwworm case was confirmed in a three-week-old beef calf on Wednesday in La Pryor, south of Uvalde. The U.S. Department of Agriculture immediately created a unified incident command team with the Texas Animal Health Commission and deployed the USDA Animal and Plant Health and Inspection Service to the area.
A 20-kilometer control zone was established around the detection site, and an expedited, targeted release of 4 million sterile New World screwworm flies a week is planned for the immediate area.
Texas State Veterinarian Dr. Lewis Dinges told the press that his staff have reported that the infested calf is improving and they have not found any other infested animals on the premises. There has also been no recent movement of animals onto or off the premises.
Dinges encouraged Texans to monitor their animals as often as possible and keep a close eye on any open wounds.
A quarantine has been issued on all warm-blooded animals within the control zone.
“Animals will still be able to move,” said Dinges. “We just need to make sure that they are moving safely and not moving the screwworm with it.”
It’s a nasty, nasty critter, and extreme measures are justified in keeping it from spreading.
The departure triggered immediate criticism of New Jersey’s tax and regulatory environment. Michele Siekerka, president and CEO of the New Jersey Business and Industry Association, called the announcement “not surprising, but it is no less sad.” Siekerka pointed to New Jersey’s 11.5% corporate tax rate — the highest in the nation, confirmed by the Tax Foundation’s 2026 state comparison — and noted that the number of Fortune 500 companies headquartered in New Jersey has declined from 22 in 2018 to 15 in 2025.
“These are the results of decades of anti-business policies in the state,” Siekerka said. “These are not accidents, nor are they coincidences.”
Assemblyman John Azzariti, a Republican representing the 39th District, was more pointed: “Texas didn’t win Samsung by accident. They won because they have spent years creating an environment where businesses want to invest, grow and create jobs. Meanwhile, New Jersey continues to raise costs, add regulations and send the message that employers are little more than a revenue source for government.”
Azzariti cited a pattern: in addition to Samsung, Mercedes-Benz USA, Honeywell, Hertz, and Sealed Air have all departed the state.
Speaking of relocating to Texas: “ExxonMobil Receives Shareholder Approval for Texas Move . The approval comes after Attorney General Paxton filed a lawsuit against a shareholder advisory firm that attempted to discourage the move.”
“Murder charge dropped for Arkansas sheriff nominee who killed teen daughter’s rapist.” No jury in the world…well, at least outside California and London. “The case against Aaron Spencer was dismissed by a judge on Thursday afternoon after law enforcement lost a dash camera memory card that may have captured the fatal October 2024 shooting of 67-year-old Michael Fosler.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Two Republicans and two Democrats in the Senate and House of Representatives are co-sponsoring proposed legislation designed to protect the Fourth Amendment’s bar of warrantless government searches and seizures of private citizens’ email content.
“The Fourth Amendment is clear: the government must get a warrant before searching an individual’s private property, including written communications. As today’s world has grown increasingly digital, that principle should apply just as strongly to an email inbox as it does to a desk drawer or file cabinet,” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) said in a jointly issued June 2 statement.
“That’s exactly why I’m proud to cosponsor the Email Privacy Act — to ensure our freedoms carry into the digital world and that all communications are protected as the Founders intended. Congress must pass this commonsense legislation, so Americans’ rights are fully respected in the 21st century,” Davidson added.
Under current statutes, law enforcement authorities such as the Department of Justice (DOJ) are able to acquire email content that is at least 180 days old, thanks to the now-outdated storage capacity limits in force when Congress passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in 1986 and in subsequent amendments….
Joining the Ohio Republican in the House in co-sponsoring the Email Privacy Act are Rep. Suzan Delbene (D-Wash.), Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
Usually when the Evil Party and the Stupid Party get together to pass a bill, it’s both Evil and Stupid, but this sound like the rare case where they’re working on something that’s actually needed.
Heh:
🚨 LMAO!! President Trump just dropped this absolute GEM: He's filling the newly improved Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with leftist tears
“Things From Another World — the cult-favorite comic and collectibles chain owned by Dark Horse Comics — is shutting down all of its stores after 46 years in business.” Unmentioned in the article is that Dark Horse was bought by Swedish gaming company Embracer Group in 2022, and they’re busy Borging Dark Horse with a bunch of other media companies for an anticipated spinoff called “Fellowship Entertainment” with a bunch of Lord of the Rings licensed companies.
Should we seriously consider the possibility that Claude, or any large language model, might be conscious? And if it has feelings, is it capable of receiving moral instruction?
No. Absolutely not. Generative AI is harmful enough when we understand it as a conventional technology, but if we confuse fluency at generating text with consciousness or moral agency, we’re at risk of assigning responsibility to entirely the wrong parties whenever anyone uses a chatbot.
Ted (who is a very smart cookie) then goes into great detail why they’re not conscious.
Rick Beato on the Fender disaster. “If you were to go to any music store, Guitar Center, and pull a Fender Strat off the shelf and go play it at a gig, well, I wouldn’t recommend it, because the chances of it playing well are extremely low. That’s why there are so many other companies like Sire, PRS, Charvel, tons of companies that make Strat style guitars that are far better than normal Fenders that you buy at your local Guitar Center.”
More Blue State welfare fraud uncovered, some of which gets shipped overseas, more Russian oil refineries knocked out of action, a CIA operative with a fortune in gold, and trouble at a Texas dam. Plus: Puppies!
Food stamps and food pantries are intended to keep struggling Americans fed.
What we found is that, in some communities, that food never reaches an American table. Instead, it gets shipped overseas and sold for profit.
The scheme works like this. Residents in cities like Lawrence, Massachusetts collect food through two channels: purchasing it at local markets using EBT cards, and picking it up for free from food banks and churches. That food is then packed into large blue barrels, dropped off at shipping companies, and sent by container ship to the Dominican Republic. Once it arrives, it is sold for profit in local stores. The people doing this see nothing wrong with it. In many cases, they do it openly.
According to a local that assisted us with this story, this fraud has been happening for over a decade.
Over the course of several weeks, Muckraker Foundation traced the full pipeline from food pantry lines in Lawrence, Massachusetts, through shipping warehouses in New York, to store shelves in Santo Domingo. This is what we found.
Lawrence is a small city about 30 miles north of Boston. It has the highest concentration of Dominican immigrants of any city in Massachusetts, and the highest rate of SNAP enrollment in the state.
John has been delivering goods in Lawrence for over 11 years, six days a week, 35 stops a day. He knows the community intimately.
“I’ve been witnessing the Dominican residents going to food bank lines and collecting non-perishable goods,” he told us, “and then packing it in barrels and in boxes, and then they ship it back to the Dominican Republic.”
“California Assembly passes “Stop Nick Shirley Act” to prevent people from uncovering fraud.”
If the bill passes the state senate, “it would become criminal to film and reveal information on taxpayer-funded immigration services like healthcare, which would include daycare, and hospices; it also covers counseling services, translation services, and immigration legal services.”
How is this not prima facia evidence that collecting fraud and graft is the highest priority of the Democrat Party?
And speaking of Democrats protecting fraud: “Seattle socialist mayor will NOT investigate fraud at Somali-run daycare centers, calls it attack on immigrants.”
Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson said the city has no intention of investigating fraud claims in taxpayer-funded social programs, claiming the concerns are an effort to target immigrant communities rather than address legitimate financial irregularities.
In an interview with KOMO News, Wilson was asked if she had authorized the Seattle Police Department or the city’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs to investigate fraud charges involving daycare providers, particularly those in Somali and other immigrant communities. The mayor responded: “No.”
“This whole issue is not really about fraud,” said Wilson. “It’s about dividing and conquering.”
Translation: We can’t let people investigate fraud as long as Democrats are the ones raking off the graft. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
During a Wednesday cabinet meeting, Small Business Administration Chief Kelly Loeffler accused the Biden administration of concealing a staggering amount of fraud tied to the federal government’s pandemic-era Paycheck Protection Program. She claimed that rather than aggressively working to recover the funds, officials tried “to hide and forgive and sweep under the rug” roughly $200 billion in “fraudulent PPP loans.” The explosive allegation, if substantiated, would represent one of the largest fraud scandals in government history.
Loeffler told colleagues that small business owners are “hit particularly hard by fraud because they’re some of our biggest taxpayers in the country.” She continued:
Think about it. At the SBA, we found $200 billion in fraudulent PPP loans that the Biden administration tried to hide and forgive and sweep under the rug.
We’ve turned the first $22 billion of that over to Treasury for collection and to DOJ for prosecution. Our inspector general is already announcing that people are going to jail.
…
We’ve announced that 140,000 people have been barred from ever getting SBA loans again — defrauding the government of about $9 billion. So we are going to continue our work under the great leadership of Vice President Vance and appreciate the partnership because it’s really accelerated our ability to get the job done.
She later posted a video of her remarks on X along with the following statement: “During the Biden Admin, PPP and EIDL [the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan program] became some of THE MOST defrauded federal programs in U.S. history – robbing honest small business owners and taxpayers of vital pandemic relief, to the tune of $200 billion. … Under the leadership of @POTUS, the SBA is delivering long-awaited accountability for every criminal fraudster that the last Administration tried to forgive or sweep under the rug.”
If you subtracted fraud, madness and spite from social justice and the Democrat Party, you’d have almost nothing left.
Three oil tanks hit which were in between the units. Then hits on the connecting pipelines and the loading cranes as well surrounding the unit. Additionally, two additional oil tanks here were hit as well. So this was a pretty massive strike. As a result of this, it’s been estimated that between 90 to even 100% of the refinery’s processing capacity is out.
A war that looked like it was a grinding stalemate being fought to the last Russian or Ukrainian is looking increasingly like one that Ukraine is actually winning.
Ukraine’s tactical victories on the battlefield, as impressive as they are, won’t ensure victory. And as fascinating and gruesome as the videos of first-person drones on the battlefield are, those only explain why Ukraine is able to hold Russian advances back, and the modest gains on the battlefield Ukraine has made in retaking small bits of occupied territory.
Ukraine has mastered drone warfare on the battlefield, and even more importantly, has built an incredibly resilient and innovative system that adjusts hardware, software, and tactics at a blistering pace that Russia could not hope to achieve with its clunky and corrupt procurement and training systems. That explains Ukraine’s increasingly solid tactical position; unpredictably, Ukraine is now its own most important weapons supplier, and is now teaching the rest of the world how modern warfare is conducted on the ground.
But Russia can take a punch in the same way that Andre the Giant could. Ukraine needs strategic victories, and until, ironically, Trump weaned them off the teat of the West to the extent they were dependent completely on the West, all Ukraine could do was fight at the tactical level, guaranteeing a stalemate.
At the same time that Trump reduced American aid, he also allowed Ukraine to take the gloves off and to put Russian assets in Russia at risk, and the results are stunning. Not only have the tactical battle lines extended into Russia, making logistics infinitely harder, but Ukraine is now systematically dismantling key parts of Russia’s economic engine and weapons production facilities.
Virtually all major oil refineries in central Russia have been forced to halt or scale back fuel output following Ukrainian drone attacks in recent days, according to official data and sources.
The combined capacity of refineries that have fully or partially halted operations exceeds 83 million metric tons per year, or around 238,000 tons per day. That accounts for around one quarter of Russia’s total refining capacity, according to data and sources who spoke on condition of anonymity…
One of Russia’s largest refineries, Kirishi, with capacity of 20 million metric tons per year, has been fully shut since May 5, according to the sources.”
If you regularly read the LinkSwarm, most of this will be familiar to you. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Here’s a strange story with some disturbing implications: “FBI arrests former CIA official over $40 million worth of gold bars stashed at Virginia home.”
The FBI arrested a former CIA official last week after investigators discovered hundreds of gold bars hidden at his home in Virginia, according to court documents reported by NBC News on Wednesday.
The official, identified as David Rush, was charged with criminal theft of public money in a complaint filed last week in the Eastern District of Virginia. He has also been accused of lying to employers about his background for nearly two decades.
The CIA and FBI confirmed Rush’s arrest to the outlet in a joint statement and said CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred Rush for a criminal investigation.
“After a CIA internal investigation identified potential violations of the law, CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred the information to the FBI for a law enforcement investigation,” the statement said. “The FBI is working closely with our partners at the CIA and the Department of Justice as we continue to investigate this matter fully. We are committed to following the facts, ensuring accountability, and pursuing justice in accordance with the law.”
The arrest comes after the FBI raided Rush’s home in Virginia on May 18, where law enforcement officers found more than 300 gold bars, which are estimated to be worth more than $40 million combined, according to the New York Times.
The court papers do not indicate why Rush kept so much gold, but it comes after he requested and received “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses,” which the CIA was later unable to locate.
“Work-related expenses.” What sort of “work-related expenses” involve tens of millions of dollars in gold bars? Bribing officials? Buying cocaine?
Faster, please. “US Probe of Embattled UN Gaza Relief Agency Expands to 1,500 Staffers Suspected of Hamas Ties: UNRWA Could Soon Be Labeled a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.'” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Texas’ Supreme Court has ordered a Travis County judge to quit avoiding a critical question in the fight over Austin’s troubled rail construction plan, known as Project Connect.
In a May 22 ruling, the Court said trial courts can’t simply refuse to rule on jurisdictional challenges to avoid triggering appeals. Chief Justice James Blacklock didn’t mince words, writing that “nothing about this scenario is as it should be.”
The ruling clarifies that courts may not ignore jurisdictional challenges while proceeding to trial, something that will be relevant to a similar case in which the City of McKinney is suing its own citizens to expeditiously validate its airport expansion bonds.
In 2020, Austin voters approved Proposition A, which authorized a property tax increase to fund Project Connect. The original plan promised 20.2 miles of light rail, subway, rapid bus routes, and connections to the airport.
The City of Austin formed a corporation called Austin Transit Partnership (ATP) to implement the project and issue the bonds.
However, the project was significantly scaled back by 2022.
What remained was a 9.8-mile surface line with no subway and no airport link. Community members argued the new plan constituted a “bait and switch,” since voters never approved the scaled-down version.
This led a group of taxpayers to file a lawsuit in 2023 to stop ATP’s bond issuance.
In response, the City of Austin and ATP filed a lawsuit against its own citizens under the Texas Expedited Declaratory Judgement Act (EDJA), seeking to validate the bonds and throw out any legal challenges they may face—including the pending taxpayer lawsuit.
This little-known law allows bond issuers—including cities—to file an expedited declaratory bond-validation lawsuit against a very broad group of defendants, including all taxpayers, property owners, or residents whose rights might be affected by the bonds.
The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) is automatically served in EDJA cases and is tasked with informing the court whether the bonds comply with Texas law.
“Issuing authority” details snipped.
Last week, Texas’ Supreme Court ruled in the OAG’s favor, finding that a jurisdictional challenge must always be addressed before proceeding to the merits.
“Proceeding to trial without first resolving the State’s challenge to the court’s authority to do so was an abuse of the district court’s otherwise broad discretion to manage the progress of the case,” reads the opinion.
Chief Justice James Blacklock did not hold back in writing the opinion of the Court.
“Nothing about this scenario is as it should be,” wrote Blacklock. “A court may not withhold a ruling on the government’s properly presented plea to the jurisdiction in order to prevent the government from appealing. And the government may not appeal from an interlocutory order that does not exist.”
The Court therefore construed the OAG’s petition for review as a petition for writ of mandamus that would order the lower court to issue a ruling on the jurisdictional challenge.
“The writ will issue only if the court does not do so. The judgment of the court of appeals is undisturbed,” wrote Blacklock.
Now, the trial court must rule on the OAG’s jurisdictional challenge. If the court denies the plea, the OAG gets an automatic appeal that pauses everything. If the court grants it, ATP’s bond validation suit gets tossed.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a resolution outlining the locations of drop boxes for the upcoming early-voting period without consulting Recorder Justin Heap.
The board approved the resolution while it continues to deal with an ongoing lawsuit with Heap about who runs specific election functions.
In April, a judge ruled in favor of Heap, saying the board members need to hand over control of specific election functions to his office.
The board sought a stay of the motion, but the Arizona Superior Court denied it. The board then announced it was appealing the lower court’s decision.
Snip.
Heap said he was not consulted before the board approved the resolution Wednesday on drop-box locations.
“The law is not optional,” he said. “The court has already ruled that the Board does not possess unlimited authority over election administration, yet the Board continues attempting to exercise powers Arizona law assigns to the recorder.”
He also said: “Voters deserve lawful, professional election administration, not political gamesmanship and last-minute public ambushes.”
How are they supposed to manufacture votes for Democrats at the last minute without controlling the boxes?
“MSNOW Senior Washington Correspondent [Eugene Daniels] Thinks Abortion and Trans Kids Are ‘Kitchen Table Issues.’ ‘When you talk about whether or not people can have access to healthy abortions—safe abortions, that is a kitchen table issue, right?'”
Shelby Campbell…is a candidate in Michigan’s Democratic primary for the 13th Congressional District, which includes portions of Detroit and some of its suburbs.
She has built her campaign around provocation — relying on edgy rhetoric, inflammatory stunts, and degrading online content to attract attention. Just in time for Memorial Day weekend, she released a new video urging voters to “quit thanking the troops for sacrificing their lives” for their country.
Snip.
I don’t want to thank these men and women who join the military because they had no other option. Like, they didn’t want to go to school. They didn’t have the resources. They don’t have the knowledge. They don’t have people to like, love them. And, [yawning] they go into the military. Military preys on more rural populations.
She evidently learned nothing from John Kerry’s presidential campaign…
Did Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey honor America’s fallen warriors on Memorial Day? No. He honored George Floyd.
“Come meet the all Native American ICE troop ‘The Shadow Wolves.'” “ICE apparently has an all American Indian squadron who patrol the Mexican border in the Sonoran Desert. Their job is primarily to use native tactics to track down and stop narcos and human traffickers on the southern border.”
“Texas woman says she was arrested for making Facebook posts about town’s water quality.” “Jennifer Combs says she would complain on Facebook about the brown water coming out of her faucet in Trinidad, Texas, and then every time the police would show up afterwards. Eventually, she says, she was arrested.” Sounds like a clear First Amendment violation.
Chicago: “39 people shot, 5 cops seriously injured at black teen ‘takeovers’ during Memorial Day weekend.”
“26-year-old man arrested over bomb and death threats targeting Erika Kirk.” “Jacob Wenske, 26, was arrested Wednesday night in San Antonio…Wenske was charged with two third-degree felony counts of making a terroristic threat with the intent to impair public service, create public fear of serious bodily injury and influence government conduct, legal filings revealed.”
Livingston Dam in Texas, where Houston gets most of its drinking water, is deteriorating.
A food emergency: “Some of Texas’s oldest barbecue joints close as meat prices skyrocket Even the state’s most celebrated restaurants are struggling to remain open as costs climb, with no relief in sight.”
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.”
