Your tax dollars help fund Hamas (and Brazil’s leftist censorship regime), Kathy Hochul and Gavin Newsom will do anything to keep Trump from deporting illegal aliens, Ukraine hits more natural gas facilities and data centers, and actually knocks some Russian trolls offline, a reckoning is finally coming for Ilhan Omar’s misdeeds, Musk unveils a flying car, and Hasan Piker endorses lynching black people. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Your tax dollars at work: “Louisiana Muslims Were on Medicaid While Sending Money to Terrorists.”
Between late 2023 and early this year, Abdel Adhami allegedly transferred more than $83,000, mostly through PayPal to financial associates of a Gaza-based contact who converted the funds into Tether cryptocurrency. Court records say about $2,000 was sent directly to Gaza through Western Union to a recipient who picked up the cash in October 2023.
His brother, Omar, is accused of sending about $6,000 through similar channels. Authorities say the money was ultimately routed to people associated with Saleem Alzaq, whom investigators describe as the brothers’ alleged handler in Gaza.
For example, on or about October 18, 2023, Adhami, via Snapchat account aadhami56, sent a voice message to Snapchat account “saleem_alzaq” stating the following: “I wish we could come, I wish we could help you, I wish we could do Jihad with you, you are the people of Jihad, you are the people of perseverance, you are who the Prophet, peace and prayer be upon him, has mentioned. Congratulations, congratulations, you are the free ones, not us eh . . . and let me know when you receive the wire transfer. If there is anything we can do, our lives and money and everything are at your service.”
While all this was going on, the Adhamis were on Medicaid despite having their own stores and plenty of money to send to terrorists.
A Slidell man who declined to be identified said he remembers the day federal agents raided their Slidell beauty store last month. The brothers also own a beauty store in Hammond.
Two stores. Terror cash. And hundreds of thousands in Medicaid benefits.
The wives of two Northshore brothers accused of helping funnel money to Hamas have been arrested along with another family member in a separate Medicaid fraud investigation.
The Louisiana Attorney General’s Office accuse the five of defrauding the Louisiana Medicaid program of more than $224,000 in benefits between 2021 and 2025.
Abdel Adhami, 35, and his wife, H.D. Srour, 29, received $113,344 in Medicaid benefits, according to the AG’s Office. They each face five counts of government benefits fraud and one count of theft of more than $25,000.
Omar Adhami, 33, and his wife, Abu Zenah, 28, received $81,099 in Medicaid benefits. They each face three counts of government benefits fraud and one count of theft of more than $25,000.
Their brother, Mohammad I. Adhami, 32, received $30,197 in Medicaid benefits. He faces three counts of government benefits fraud and one count of theft of more than $25,000.
New York has declined 16,070 ICE detainers for illegal aliens accused or convicted of over 50,000 serious crimes since President Donald Trump took office.
“While sanctuary politicians continue to release dangerous criminals onto their streets, our brave law enforcement officers will continue to risk their lives to arrest these heinous criminals and make America safe again. Illegal aliens have no sanctuary in America,” said DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. “We enforce these laws with no help from Mayor Mamdani and Governor Hochul. The Trump Administration is committed to protecting the American people in every city and every state, and we won’t let sanctuary politicians stand in our way. If you’re a state or local politician, your best bet is to cooperate with us so we can all make America safe again.”
Those crimes include murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault:
Homicides: 131
Kidnappings: 132
Sexual offenses: 1,017
DUIs: 1,561
Burglaries: 1,631
Robberies: 1,776
Weapons offenses: 2,198
Dangerous drugs: 4,324
Assaults: 9,502
The ICE detainers ask local and state law enforcement to hold illegal aliens for 48 hours so agents can take custody of them.
But sanctuary states like New York and sanctuary cities like New York City brush off any cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
Two illegal aliens, Dangelo Rafael Jean Caraballo and Sneider Mejia Bautista, allegedly stabbed an NYPD detective on October 2.
Both men have a lengthy rap sheet.
Local law enforcement released Caraballo after his December 2024 arrest for possession of burglar’s tools before ICE could lodge a detainer.
ICE lodged a detainer for Bautista after his October 2025 arrest for criminal possession of a weapon. The NYPD declined the detainer and released him.
Caraballo and Bautista ran to Massachusetts, another sanctuary state, for cover. Both were caught and arrested, but it’s unclear whether New York will hand them over to ICE.
Hochul signed her sanctuary state bill in May 2026. The law bars ICE agents from public places, and local law enforcement cannot cooperate with ICE.
Most public employees also cannot interact with federal immigration authorities unless they present a judicial warrant.
Hochul expanded her anti-ICE agenda in August with the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act, which bans local law enforcement from entering or maintaining any agreements with ICE.
In February, Mamdani signed an executive order to strengthen sanctuary laws in New York City.
Trump should flood New York with ICE agents and dare Hochul to arrest them.
Finally: “Feds Raid Ilhan Omar’s DC Home As Immigration Fraud Investigation Heats Up.”
Federal agents raided the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) early Monday morning as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the Somali-born congresswoman’s immigration paperwork, according to Fox News.
The pre-dawn operation began around 6 a.m., with multiple agents wearing Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) jackets observed outside the residence. Two sources close to the investigation told Fox News that authorities are examining immigration documents completed by Omar’s late father when she was a child.
Snip.
As Jonathan Turley previously noted, Homan confirmed that federal authorities were examining allegations involving the Minnesota Democrat.
The controversy centers in part on longstanding claims that Omar married her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, to facilitate an immigration benefit – allegations Omar has repeatedly denied and which have not been established as fact.
Turley examined whether the allegations could support a fraud case or instead amounted to potentially defamatory accusations, and noted that the statute of limitations could complicate any prosecution involving events dating back many years.
A new federal report finds “irrefutable evidence that the nation’s largest banks have denied, debanked and discriminated against” conservatives, religious organizations and lawful businesses because of their political beliefs or activities.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released the results of its investigation into the nine largest banks it supervises in a 47-page report on Wednesday. Those banks include JPMorgan Chase Bank, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo Bank, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC Bank, TD Bank and BMO Bank.
The revelations in the report include allegations that JPMorgan Chase’s former payment processor WePay closed accounts belonging to merchants selling Trump and Make America Great Again merchandise after the bank’s screening system apparently flagged phrases including “MAGA,” “Make America Great,” and “America First.”
The report also accuses WePay of closing accounts associated with conservative religious organizations, including one that was labeled an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
PNC, meanwhile, allegedly denied a line of credit to a media company after employees argued the company’s conservative owners had expressed opinions “very contrary to PNC’s beliefs/values.”
Wells Fargo pushed a payment processor to debank a religious nonprofit over its opposition to same-sex marriage, and also declined loans to firearms businesses amid concerns about potential Biden administration pressure, the report found.
The Trump administration has filed a lawsuit against California and two election officials, seeking to prevent approximately 20,000 potentially ineligible voters from having their ballots counted in November’s midterm elections until their citizenship status can be verified.
The Justice Department alleges that California is knowingly allowing noncitizens to participate in federal elections, raising concerns about election integrity just weeks before voters head to the polls.
“State-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable in the United States of America,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement.
“If found responsible in a court of law, the State of California will have seriously undermined confidence in our electoral system and violated laws that protect our nation’s representative system of government,” Blanche added.
According to the lawsuit, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators identified potentially ineligible voters using federal immigration records and information from the Social Security Administration and State Department.
The Justice Department previously sent Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan a password-protected drive containing more than 20,000 voter records, demanding citizenship verification within 48 hours.
Logan responded that his office would follow applicable federal and state election laws while maintaining accurate voter registration records.
The administration is now asking a federal court to prevent ballots associated with those voters from being counted until their eligibility is established.
Democrats will use every opportunity to get illegal alien votes into the ballot box.
Result? “Russian bot traffic decimated overnight after Ukraine drone strikes knock multiple Yandex data centers offline.” You know, Comrade Cartridge has been pretty quiet since August…
Abdul El-Seyed’s surrogate Hasan Piker: “I don’t give a fuck what Black people care about. Let’s go back to a better time, when lynchings were happening.”
1.4 million black people live in Michigan. https://t.co/EiEsKuuyrd
Does anyone doubt that if a white conservative “joked” about lynching black people the media would turn it into a full-in, front page onslaught to cancel him?
Former State Department official Mike Benz laid out USAID’s sweeping involvement in Brazil’s political and institutional landscape, detailing a network of American funding that reached media organizations, universities, activist groups and organizations involved with the country’s election system.
Benz, who serves as executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, broke down the extent of USAID’s footprint during an appearance on “The Benny Show” with host Benny Johnson.
“What’s happening in Brazil was a full-on Truman show. You had the media funded by USAID. You had the universities funded by USAID. You had the staffers of the Supreme Court and the TSE (Superior Electoral Court), the election court, USAID. You had all the constitutional law advocates funded by USAID. You had the LGBT activists funded by USAID,” Benz explained.
“It’s full spectrum. If you were to walk down a city block in Sao Paulo or, I don’t know, Brasilia, you would have a 360 vision of institutions funded and puppeteered by USAID without ever knowing it,” the former State Department official added. “In fact, USAID, knowing what they were doing, and I need to be careful about what I can and can’t say here, let’s just say, would anyone be surprised, for example, if USAID was going around and telling its grantees in Brazil to remove the USAID logo so that it doesn’t get out that grantee’s connection to USAID?”
Benz said USAID’s influence could continue even after its funding disappeared because institutional and legal changes remained in place.
“They knew what they were doing. They knew how sensitive it was. Would you be surprised, for example, if USAID, which basically set up the censorship state in Brazil, and this is actually something, let me quickly pivot to say, it is true that this is the first Brazilian election since the 2020 municipal elections in Brazil that does not have USAID money slushing around Lula and his allies, but is still an election that is in many ways under the thumb of the ghost of USAID,” he said. “There is something I call kind of the clockmaker’s dilemma, which is USAID, even when you remove it, the institutional and legal changes that a country goes through can live on even if you cut USAID funding down to zero.”
Benz then zeroed in on two of Brazil’s most powerful institutions, the Supreme Federal Court (STF) and Superior Electoral Court (TSE): “For example, in Brazil, you have this apparatus through the STF and TSE, the Supreme Court and the basically election court that determines all things around elections, and basically after Bolsonaro won in 2018, the TSE court with Alexandre de Moraes, the famous Voldemort judge, they declared disinformation a threat to free and fair elections, not just disinformation during an election season, but disinformation any time, misinformation, disinformation any time about anything because it could pollute people’s, I don’t know, sense of what’s true or false in the information ecosystem, and so it could have an impact on an election three years away if this false information is allowed to circulate online.”
Benz also went into detail about USAID’s connections to Brazil’s election and judicial establishment.
“That was set up by USAID, USAID flooded the zone, USAID had contact at every level with the TSE court, with the Alexandre de Moraes court,” he said. “I testified to the Brazilian Senate Relations Committee and put pictures from USAID’s website of Alexandre de Moraes being trained by CEPS (Competitive Economy Program), the USAID grantee, by NED (National Endowment for Democracy), the USAID grantee has gotten $3 billion from USAID and was created by the Central Intelligence Agency.”
So American taxpayers were footing the bill for the suborning of democracy in favor of leftwing control and censorship.
“Days after federal agents stopped an 18-year-old of Somali descent from buying an AK-47 to kill dozens at the Mall of America in an ISIS-inspired plot, another 18-year-old Somali is free after police say he opened fire outside a high school homecoming game.”
Investigators linked the Eden Prairie shooting to rival Somali gangs. The accused spent just two nights in jail before posting a $100,000 bond with $10,000 cash down. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty had said he would be held accountable.
On October 2, during Eden Prairie High School’s homecoming football game against Minnetonka, a fight involving about 10 people broke out in a parking lot after two vehicles arrived. Surveillance video showed a Hyundai Sonata, registered to the brother of Adam Abdihakeem Adam, 18, of St. Louis Park, enter the area.
harging documents state Adam was the only occupant. He got out, fired a single shot, struck two teenagers, and fled. The victims were an 18-year-old and a 17-year-old, both Somali males from St. Paul known to law enforcement and not students at either school. One was shot through the leg; the other in the foot. Both injuries were non-life-threatening. The stadium was evacuated and the game postponed.
Investigators used phone location data that tracked Adam and the vehicle before, during, and after the shooting. He abandoned the phone and changed its number. A search of his home recovered clothing consistent with what the shooter wore on video.
Eden Prairie police arrested him without incident on October 8 in Minneapolis with help from partner agencies. Police Chief Matt Sackett said, “The arrest today is an important step in this investigation. I’m incredibly proud of our officers and investigators who have worked nonstop alongside our law enforcement partners to identify those responsible and hold them accountable.”
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty charged Adam with two counts of second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon and one count of second-degree riot while armed with a dangerous weapon. She stated: “This was an alarming and dangerous act that injured two people and frightened many more. Mr. Adam will be held accountable.” She added, “Violence in our communities is completely unacceptable and it requires a professional, coordinated response, which happened here.”
Bail was set at $100,000 and Adam posted bond and was released on October 10.
For years, Welcoming America has been building a campaign to sell rural communities on immigration—training local leaders, supporting public events and teaching advocates how to change their neighbors’ minds.
Its own rural refugee toolkit describes the role of local media plainly:
“a positive force for changing public opinion”
The same guide praises storytelling used to:
“celebrate the demographic change of the community.”
“reshape the narrative about immigrants in new destination states”
“Trump Admin has Arrested 1,296 Tren de Aragua Gang Members. The admin has charged almost 350 members and associates with federal crimes.”
“President Trump created the Homeland Security Task Force to eradicate gangs, cartels, and transnational criminal organizations who entered the United States, and operated with impunity, as a result of the Biden administration’s disastrous open border policies,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told The Washington Examiner. “Our message to Tren de Aragua and all the transnational criminal organizations is simple: we will dismantle your networks, seize your profits, and put the safety of the American people first. The days of vicious gangs, like TdA, profiting off of the death of American citizens is over.”
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order forming the Homeland Security Task Forces with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ).
“The objective of each HSTF is to end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs, and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States, dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking networks, end the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking, with a particular focus on such offenses involving children, and ensure the use of all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States,” according to the executive order.
The data runs from January 20, 2025, to October 8, 2026. The task force has nabbed 1,296 Trn de Aragua members and charged almost 350 members and associates with federal crimes.
“President Trump’s Homeland Security Task Forces have encountered TdA gang members [in] almost every state,” an ICE spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Washington Examiner. “This is one of the most vicious gangs on planet earth. They rape, maim, and murder for sport.”
“Months after opening, workers at Obama’s presidential center are unionizing due to horrid job conditions.”
Nearly four months after the Obama Presidential Center opened, workers are organizing a union, citing “increasing workloads” and benefit rollbacks that have stirred concerns about their future with the organization.
Fifteen weeks working for Barack H. Obama and these folks have gone full Newsies. 😂
If the Barack Obama library is an unpleasant place to work, you won’t find me surprised. In any event, here’s what the library’s workers have alleged:
They are facing “increasing workloads.” That’s, um, sort of to be expected in the weeks after a major new facility opens and everyone’s still figuring out what work needs to be done. But okay.
They have “seen our benefits rolled back.” After just four months? That was quick! But I guess even the Obamacare Machine realized that offering full insurance to part-time administrative workers wasn’t financially feasible.
“Support from leadership,” meanwhile, has been “minimal.” Concerns about working conditions have been met with “vague responses.”
This unbearable, horrific working environment has contributed to a high turnover rate.
The workers have announced that they are forming a labor coalition, Obama Workers United, with AFSCME Council 31.
San Francisco’s Democratic mayor, Daniel Lurie, says he’s a proud progressive, but in a recent interview, Lurie acknowledged to CNN’s Dana Bash that on issues like crime, homelessness, drug use, housing, and affordability, the city getting “so entrapped in our progressive values” caused it to lose its way and go down the wrong path.
Lurie, a Levi Strauss heir with no political experience, was elected in November 2024, defeating the much better-known incumbent Democratic mayor, London Breed, in part because he promised to clean up the drug-infested streets and be tougher on crime.
In one situation from October 2025 that got a lot of national attention, Lurie was able to convince President Trump to back off sending a “surge” of National Guard troops into the city to help combat crime, successfully arguing to allow local law enforcement to work to turn things around in “continued partnerships” with the FBI, ATF, etc.:
“We have work to do, and we would welcome continued partnerships with the FBI, DEA, ATF, and U.S. Attorney to get drugs and drug dealers off our streets, but having the military and militarized immigration enforcement in our city will hinder our recovery,” he added. “We appreciate that the president understands that we are the global hub for technology, and when San Francisco is strong, our country is strong.”
In the CNN interview, Lurie noted that there was nothing progressive about overdose deaths, car break-ins, women feeling unsafe walking to their cars, and local businesses having to close because of repeat offenders.
Lurie’s social justice comrades have decided those are precisely the outcomes they desire…
Brandon Herrera’s 23rd Congressional District Democrat opponent Katy Stout isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. “Texas Democrat accidentally blasts opponent for ‘making fun of Nazis’ during live debate.” And if there’s ever been an apt last name…
Lennar and Millrose have a human centipede home selling ecosystem. Lennar makes the homes and owns Millrose, who buys the homes to rent out. And mysteriously helped Lennar hit their quarterly home-sale numbers.
At least he was ambitious. “ICE to deport illegal alien who pretended to be part of DHS and sold deportation “immunity” cards to other illegal aliens.”
[Mario Cesar Dos Santos Jr.] Brazilian illegal immigrant who admitted to creating a fake branch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and selling counterfeit DHS and FBI identification cards — which he claimed would provide immunity from federal immigration officers — has been ordered deported …
As part of the scheme, Dos Santos claimed to be the president of the ‘Chaplain Emergency Management Agency’ (CEMA), a fictitious federal agency he created to trick attendees at training seminars into paying for immunity from immigration enforcement.
While the training courses were offered for free, participants were charged $400 to $450 for bogus certificates they believed would protect them from deportation, authorities said. Each seminar drew approximately 30 to 45 participants.
In the UK, of course. “Fifteen-Year-Old Boy Is Arrested After Joking About How A Politician Dresses.”
The leader of the Conservative Party on the Wolverhampton City Council, Simon Bennett, apparently can take anything but fashion criticism. The politician reportedly called the police on a 15-year-old boy for mocking his clothing style at meetings. It is the latest example of the collapse of free speech in the United Kingdom.
A boy only identified as “Fraser” is a 15-year-old supporter of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party. He found himself searched and arrested by four officers from the West Midlands Police at his home, locked in a cell, fingerprinted, subjected to a DNA search, and taken for a mugshot. The police then searched his bedroom and telephone.
All of this was over his joking about how Bennett dressed in public.
“Georgia Bought a $954,578 Chevy, but Officials Won’t Say What’s Inside.” “Records obtained through Georgia’s open-records law show that Georgia purchased a 2026 Traverse in April from Hardy Chevrolet GMC. Its listed “TSE cellular communications package” cost $890,478.80, with another $25,394 for installation. The rest went to equipment officials won’t identify publicly, even as state lawmakers question whether a child-welfare agency should have technology normally associated with criminal investigations.”
The Center Square reported last month how the department spent $639,000 on four other police-grade technologies that surveil web activity, extract the contents of cell phones and track cell phone locations. The prospect of the department spending nearly $1 million more on yet another surveillance tool—one that’s mobile and far more invasive—has lawmakers raising Fourth Amendment concerns, the constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
“They are not a law enforcement agency, and my understanding is that that type of equipment is only supposed to go to law enforcement agencies,” state Rep. Beth Camp, R-Concord, told The Center Square after the news wire informed her of the spending. “That is surveillance. That is spy surveillance.”
In the year 1000 A.D. an unbiased world observer would never have picked Europe as the region that would dominate the globe. Probably they would pick China with its massive population or fabulously wealthy India. The Islamic Caliphate would have looked past its sell-by date but would have beaten Europe by a mile.
Snip.
In this day and age – and particularly on Columbus Day – it is frowned upon to ask these questions. The Powers That Be tell us that Europe got rich by stealing indigenous people’s wealth, conveniently ignoring the many other non-European powers that were much more brutal at doing that than the Europeans were. The Mongol Empire in 1300 would have had poll position for World Domination, as would the earlier Abbasid caliphate. If all it takes for World Domination is to steal other people’s stuff, what was it about Europe that was different?
After all, China invented gunpowder. Why did Europe perfect it? Why did little England perfect the sailing Ship-of-the-Line? Why did the Divergence start and why there?
Today I offer two books for interested readers that explain this. One of these could never be published today, and the author would never get tenure today. Fortunately (if that’s the right word) David Landes is safely dead and doesn’t have to worry about The Usual Suspects getting him denied tenure.
Landes was a big deal in Economic History, authoring the section on the Industrial Revolution in the Cambridge Economic History. Late in his career, perhaps 30 years ago, he wrote The Wealth And Poverty of Nations, an economic history whose title was unashamedly stolen from Adam Smith. Landes insisted that social systems were key, and that some societies allowed progress towards a Great Divergence while other societies stifled attempts towards that progress.
In other words, if your society doesn’t support the right efforts it doesn’t matter how much of other people’s wealth you steal; you’re going nowhere. We see this in the history of Spain which became fabulously wealthy by stealing New World wealth but squandered it, ending up at the bottom of European power rankings. You could say exactly the same thing about the Mongol empire, or the Caliphate.
Landes’ arguments in the book are considered double-plus ungood by the woke crowd, so you might want to pick up a used copy from Amazon. The chapter on Argentina is particularly interesting in this age of President Milei. Interestingly, Milei was an Economist, and may have read Landes’ book.
A second recommendation is less controversal with the woke crowd but is joined at the hip with the Great Divergence. The political cycle world wide has been the emergence of an empire, the collapse of the empire, and the rise of a successor empire. We see this in China, in India, in Mesoamerica.
But not in Europe. Europe only had one great empire, Rome. When it fell, it was not replaced. Walter Scheidel wrote a book exploring why this unusual circumstance happened, Escape From Rome. Using Landes’ analytical framework, the Roman Empire did not encourage the types of behaviors that could have led to an Industrial Revolution, because those behaviors were seen by the Authorities as subversive to the state. But when Rome fell, there were unusual circumstances in Europe that prevented a new empire from rising in its place. Then competition between the poor emerging states set Europe on a very different path from the rest of the world. Basically, Europe escaped from Empire while the rest of the world didn’t.
Read the whole thing.
If you want to list American cities least likely to flood, Las Vegas would seem a good bet (heh), but evidently an inch of rain is enough to turn it into Venice.
“Hitler Mussolini wins Peruvian election.” “Hitler Mussolini Simeon Flores has secured a narrow victory in Peru’s local elections, exit polls show. The candidate for the centre-left Ahora Nación party was elected mayor of Queropalca, a remote district in the Peruvian Andes.”
Washington State FAed, and now they’re finding out. “Columbia Bank moving top executives to Arizona, citing Washington taxes.”
A major Pacific Northwest bank is shifting some of its top leadership to Arizona.
First reported by The Puget Sound Business Journal, the Columbia Banking System is opening an executive office in the Scottsdale area.
The office will open later this month.
The exodus of Columbia Bank executives began with CEO Clint Stein, who sold his Auburn home (for $2.45 million in September) to relocate to Arizona permanently. According to The Puget Sound Business Journal, the company said new Washington taxes are costing it approximately $8 million a year, prompting the decision to move most executive roles to Arizona.
Democrats love raising taxes more than life itself.
Labour’s Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has just set the stage for yet another betrayal of the British people. That’s the only conclusion one can draw after listening to Shabana Mahmood’s speech at the Labour Party conference.
Because what Labour has put into motion is an entirely new wave of immigration that will further undermine our already weak economy, erode trust in our democracy, put British people at risk, and utterly transform what’s left of an already broken nation.
Before getting into the detail of Labour’s disastrous policy, a reminder.
The Labour Party has still not fixed Britain’s broken borders. It has not stopped the boats. It has not removed an estimated 1.5 million illegal migrants in Britain. It has not returned levels of legal immigration back to the sensible levels that were seen before Tony Blair and Labour fired the starting gun on mass immigration, in 1997.
And because of all this Labour has still not restored public trust and confidence in a system that is now so broken it is pushing rising numbers of British people into leaving the ballot box to join protests, demonstrations, and civil disobedience.
Yet despite failing to do all this, astonishingly, this week Andy Burnham’s Labour Party and Shabana Mahmood decided to put the narrow interests of their fanatical left-wing activists and Labour’s Muslim voters ahead of the interests of the country by announcing an entirely new wave of refugee migration from the Third World and a dramatic softening of current immigration policy.
Contrary to what every single opinion poll in Britain now shows, that a large majority of British people want immigration reduced, Shabana Mahmood’s extreme policy will now re-open and turbo-charge the UK Resettlement Scheme, importing as yet unknown numbers of refugees into Britain from Afghanistan, Gaza, and many other Third World nations. It will open immediately, with one-quarter of the first arrivals coming from Afghanistan and Palestine.
Britain, remember, has already taken in nearly 400,000 refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong. Some 50,000 Afghans and refugees through resettlement programmes. Another 210,000 illegal migrants on the small boats. And, thanks to the Boriswave, has already added nearly 3 million mainly low-wage, low-skill migrants from outside Europe to its population – net – through legal schemes since 2021 alone.
But if the Boriswave has become known for imposing a policy of mass migration from outside Europe that nobody voted for, then Shabana Mahmood’s new policy — what we might call the Shabbywave — is about to put all this on steroids.
It will be characterised by a fresh wave of mainly low-skill, low-wage, poorly-educated and Islamic migrants and refugees from radically different cultures who will not only be allowed into Britain but put on a path towards permanent settlement.
That’s right. Despite Britain already giving permanent settlement to roughly 700,000 people since 2021 alone, and about to give it to millions more Boriswave migrants who arrived between 2021 and 2024, Labour will fast-track another wave of migrants from the Third World into receiving Indefinite Leave to Remain.
They will be allowed to stay in Britain permanently and have unfettered access to welfare benefits, housing, education, and more, all of which will be subsidised and paid for by … the British people.
Despite already having to pay roughly £600 billion to cover the costs of the Boriswave, with most of those arrivals being a net fiscal cost to the British state, the hardworking and long-suffering British people will now have to pay who knows how much for yet another wave of migration they never asked for.
My critics will say “the people who come will work, they will contribute”. Well, look at the evidence. When Denmark imported hundreds of Palestinians during the 1990s, the majority soon had at least one criminal conviction and most lived on welfare.
When Denmark then tracked what happened to their children, more than one-third also had at least one criminal conviction, with many more relying on welfare. And, meanwhile, what evidence we have suggests people from Afghanistan are far more likely than everybody else to commit sexual violence against British women.
Snip.
All we do know is that Labour openly state the scheme will operate at “much higher capacity” than anything the British state currently has in place. And while Shabana Mahmood is doing all this, she also clearly signalled this week that she will water down other immigration restrictions.
Foreign workers will now find it easier, not harder, to claim permanent residence in Britain. The Boriswave will be made permanent and all those millions of people who were brought into the country with no democratic mandate, and who are taking more out of the economy than they are putting in, will now remain here forever.
Proposed reforms to the disastrous Boriswave are clearly about to be scrapped by a Labour Party that has abandoned any pretence to represent the British people and has moved sharply to the radical left to appease its own base.
We are now living under a Labour government that is more interested in winning over Mad Zack Polanski’s Green party voters than representing the wider country. We are living under a Labour government that is focused on consolidating increasingly radical left-wing voters ahead of an early general election than consolidating support around some kind of national majority that reflects the mood of the British people.
Make no mistake: this student union politics could easily push our country, already a tinderbox, completely over the edge.
A governing Labour Party that has no interest at all in appealing beyond its narrow coalition of radical left-wing progressives and voters from minority backgrounds.
Entirely new migration routes into Britain. A new wave of migration nobody asked for. A sponsorship scheme that has disaster written all over it.
The United Nations inserting itself into our national democracy. Permanent settlement and British citizenship being handed out like confetti, along with the ridiculous claim that people from Afghanistan and Gaza will be just as ‘British’ or ‘English’ as the rest of us.
Endless, never-ending chain migration into Britain turning the initial numbers into enormous ones. The removal of what little restrictions to immigration were at least being discussed. And underneath it all, the British people being smashed all over again with more costs, more pressures, more misery, more turbulence.
This is the Shabbywave. A new policy that nobody in this country voted for or asked for but will further undermine, destabilise, and transform the country from within.
So the solution to the radical unpopularity among actual voters of Labour’s policies to import unassimilated Muslim illegal aliens is to…import more unassimilated Muslim until the desired transformation of the electorate to one more favorable to Labour is complete.
Bonus: Here’s a video that just dropped with hotel owner John Mappin talking about how shadowy Labour government functionaries threatened to use his luxury hotel to house illegal aliens.
Some of the most interesting take-aways: They would have security for the hotel, but not to keep the illegal aliens from leaving or committing crimes, but to keep ordinary citizens out, and how property values crash when illegal aliens take up residence in local hotels.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? You can’t make your particular religion the official legal religion of the land anywhere in the United States, and you can’t keep people from exercising their own religion. Somehow, those Muslims that Democrats have imported into the United States don’t seem to have gotten the message.
A flock of chickens have come home to roost for Dearborn, Michigan, and its mayor, Abdullah Hammoud. He and his administration are being sued for violating the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, and the evidence supporting the claim is overwhelming. More on this lawsuit can be found here: “Journalist Sues Dearborn and Its Mayor for Anti-Christian, Anti-Jewish Discrimination,” by Dexter Van Zile, Middle East Forum, September 18, 2026:
…A year and a few days after Hammoud berated a local pastor who complained about the mayor’s praise for a Hezbollah supporter, Margot Cleveland, a journalist and legal commentator who writes for The Federalist, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against Hammoud and the city he governs. The suit, filed by the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC) on September 17, 2026, accuses the city and its leaders of violating the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits government institutions from showing preference for one religion over another.
“For too long, the City of Dearborn has been a hostile place for Christians and Jews. Defendant Hammoud has taken this hostility to the next level, openly conveying the message that Christians and Jews are not welcome in the city and are, indeed, second-class citizens,” the complaint declares, echoing arguments previously made in the pages of Focus on Western Islamism.
The complaint details a pattern of alleged religious favoritism dating back to April 2025, when Cleveland discovered the city had spent public funds—roughly $1,500 on “Ramadan Kareem” banners and $5,000 on a lit crescent-moon display in a municipal park—while providing no equivalent recognition for Lent or the approaching Passover holiday. According to the suit, Cleveland’s subsequent request that the city treat Christian and Jewish holidays with the same public recognition went unanswered, even as the city’s police department sold Ramadan-themed shirts bearing its official emblem and Hammoud used his government email to promote an Iftar event. The lawsuit alleges the disparity only widened in 2026, when the city installed additional lighted Ramadan displays that Hammoud himself described as reflecting “who we are as a city,” while the City Council’s budget that same year again included no funding for comparable Christian or Jewish observances despite a budget surplus and Cleveland’s repeated public appeals.
“Neither [city attorney] Mr. Romer nor anyone else from the City responded to Plaintiff’s email,” the complaint reports.
The suit brings three claims: a First Amendment retaliation claim alleging that the city and Hammoud punished Cleveland for her journalism and advocacy by freezing her out of communications and public meetings; a Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection claim alleging she was treated worse than similarly situated residents because of her religious and political viewpoints; and an Establishment Clause claim alleging the city unconstitutionally preferred Islam over Christianity and Judaism through its sponsorship of religious displays and events. The complaint points to Hammoud’s own public statement that the Ramadan program reflects “who we are as a city” as evidence of an official government endorsement of one faith over others, and asks the court for a declaratory judgment, an injunction against the city’s allegedly discriminatory practices, nominal damages, and attorneys’ fees…
Naturalized citizens swear an oath to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” If naturalized Muslims openly support suborning the Constitution to Sharia law, they are in violation of their oath and should be de-naturalized.
A lawsuit against Hammoud and his Sharia-loving cronies is a good start, but the Department of Justice should also come down on him like a ton of bricks for deprivation of rights under color of law.
Don’t look now, but Germany’s “ruling” Christian Democratic Union party has not only lost another state election, but lost it so badly they didn’t even win a single seat.
Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party has suffered the worst defeat in its history, failing to win a single seat in a crucial German state election.
The chancellor’s centre-Right party won 4.9 per cent of the vote in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, final results confirmed on Monday.
The state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is north of Berlin on the Baltic Sea, stretching between the German state of Schleswig-Holstein and Poland.
The hard-Right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) took 38.2 per cent of the vote, while the hard-Left Die Linke beat the CDU in mayoral elections in Berlin. Mr Merz is scheduled to address the public on Monday afternoon.
The astonishingly poor result meant that, for the first time, the CDU failed to win enough votes to enter a state parliament in Germany.
Under the country’s voting system, parties that fall below the 5 per cent threshold are not assigned any seats in the next parliament.
Such a scenario was virtually unthinkable for the CDU – the German version of the Conservatives and a mainstay of coalition governments for decades – until Sunday night.
Actually, CDU’s pro-illegal immigration policies, and the resultant rise of the AfD, have made it pretty thinkable for a while now.
Mr Merz was already facing calls to resign over his party’s poor performance in a previous election in Saxony-Anhalt this month, where the CDU lost swathes of support to the AfD.
According to DPA, a German news agency, the CDU held a crisis meeting about the results on Sunday evening, with the talks descending into “verbal clashes”.
Another crisis meeting later that night was attended by seven CDU state leaders, some of the most senior figures in the party, and was said to have lasted for nearly two hours.
Christian Gräff, a former CDU state MP and the chairman of the Berlin Mittelstand Union, called for Mr Merz’s resignation over the election results.
“Merz has got to go. He can’t do executive work and he can’t do communication,” he posted on X.
He later told the DPA news agency: “I believe that the people in Germany want reforms. Merz lacks the skills and communication abilities to implement them.”
Merz indeed seems unequal to the moment, but he’s not the one who has consigned his own party to the dust-bin of history. That dubious honor belongs to former Chancellor and CDU leader Angela Merkel.
An East German-born politician who came to lead Germany’s staunchly anti-communist, “mainstream” right party, Merkel, a protege of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, had a reputation as a colorless functionary, but in one of her first prominent roles, as Minister for the Environment and Nuclear Safety, she pushed for climate change legislation to limit greenhouse gases.
But her biggest mistake was throwing open German borders to accept huge numbers of unassimilated Muslim illegal aliens into the country. Though various leftist European political parties favored such policies in the cynical expectation of engineering an electorate more favorable to themselves, Merkel doing the same as both head of the EU’s most important country and as head of a “conservative” party was unprecedented. That wasn’t the only leftist policy she implemented, but it was certainly the one that’s had the biggest role in destroying the CDU and engineering the rise of the AfD.
All across Europe, native born citizens are revolting at the importation of unassimilated Muslim illegal aliens that European elites have imposed on them. But the collapse of support for the CDU is particularly notable, because it was previously the dominant party, and a party of the right until Frau Merkel began her demolition job.
To be sure, the immigration crisis isn’t the only trouble besetting the CDU: The high cost of energy in the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian War, Germany’s unwise decision to base it’s industrial policy on cheap Russian natural gas at the same time it was shutting down nuclear and coal plants, etc. all contributed to its decline. But almost every one of those foolish decisions can be traced back to Frau Merkel’s decisions to pull CDU policy to the left.
Why, a more conspiratorial man than myself, might view Merkel as a sleeper agent planted by the East German Stasi to destroy a newly united Germany from within. But then who can we blame for most of the rest of Europe’s insistence on importing unassimilated Muslims?
To bring things around full circle, I merely note that back in 1993, Merkel was elected leader of the CDU in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern…
The 25th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, GOP midterm convention, Iran and Yemen both get spicy again, AfD shocks Germany, Ukraine’s longest drone strike yet, more welfare state fraud, more money for Paxton,
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
More information about the murder of my friend Andrew Wimsatt has come out, and some of my original post needs to be corrected. I’m going to put that in a Saturday post, and there will be another for remembering Andrew on Sunday.
On a perfectly clear morning 25 years ago, America changed forever.
At 8:46 a.m. on that day, a team of Islamic terrorists crashed American Airlines Flight 11, carrying 76 passengers and eleven crew members, into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. It was followed 17 minutes later by United Airlines Flight 175, carrying 51 passengers and nine crew members, which terrorists steered into the South Tower. Less than 90 minutes later, both of those towers had collapsed into a massive pile of rubble.
Meanwhile, as Americans’ televisions were tuned to live footage of the burning buildings, American Airlines Flight 77, carrying 53 passengers and six crew members, was slammed into the Pentagon. And shortly after, United Airlines Flight 93, with 33 passengers and seven crew members, crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pa.
Today, we remember the 2,977 innocent victims who were the first casualties in what would become known as the War on Terror. We also remember the extraordinary heroism displayed that day, without which the horrific losses would have been far worse.
One of the most miraculous facts about that day was that at the World Trade Center, which may have had an occupancy of 19,000 people between the two buildings at the time, 99 percent of those who were below the point of impact of the planes survived. This achievement is owed to the extraordinary evacuation efforts of first responders, who ran into burning buildings, no doubt knowing that there was a good chance they wouldn’t make it out. In the end, 441 firefighters, police officers, and paramedics did not.
Then there was the civilian heroism displayed by the passengers on Flight 93, who had heard about what happened at the World Trade Center, overtook the plane, and ensured that it crashed in an empty field rather than into the U.S. Capitol or White House, one of which was believed to be the potential target. Passenger Todd Beamer’s remark to his fellow passengers, “Let’s roll,” overheard from a phone call, became a rallying cry as the nation fought back.
I have no dramatic, notable 9/11 stories to tell. I was driving to my job at Applied Materials when NPR (yes, I sometimes listened to them in the morning, back in the day) broke into regular coverage to report the first tower impact. I heard a rumor that the layoff that came next week (as the depths of the Dotcom Bust were just being felt) was actually scheduled for that day, but they decided to hold off due to the attacks. Ironically, one of the people in one of the planes was an Israeli Applied employee, who survived a country beset by terrorism only to be killed on an American flight.
President Donald Trump delivered the convention’s closing remarks following a keynote address from Vice President J.D. Vance.Before they took the stage, though, Texas Republicans used their appearances to focus on the November elections, public safety, immigration, and the direction of the Democrat Party.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick invoked Texas history and the Alamo before turning to the November election, portraying the contest as a broader fight over the country’s values.
“This election coming up is not about politics,” said Patrick. “It’s about darkness, and it’s about light.”
He accused Democrats of embracing socialism and communism and argued that Texas’ economic growth has been driven by conservative policies including low taxes and no state income tax.
He also singled out Democrat Senate nominee James Talarico, saying Republicans would put “the Democratic Party and James Talarico and his ilk on the dust heap of history.”
Patrick closed his remarks by urging Republicans to view the election as a fight for their families and the country. “You started a fight, and the Republicans are going to finish it in November.”
Eric Flores and Tano Tijerina, two Republican candidates challenging Democrats in South Texas, also addressed the convention. Their appearances highlighted Republicans’ continued focus on South Texas, where the president made significant gains in 2024.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz used his speech to warn about what he described as an emerging red-green alliance between communists and Islamists. He received one of the strongest reactions from the crowd when he declared that Sharia law is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution.
“Sharia law has no place in America,” said Cruz. “Sharia law is fundamentally inconsistent with the Constitution, and we need to stand together and stop it now.”
Gov. Greg Abbott focused much of his speech on Texas Democrats running statewide in November, contrasting their legislative records with policies he has signed into law.
Abbott pointed to the GOP’s success on a variety of issues including border security, policing, property taxes, oil and gas, election laws, parental rights, and school choice.
“All the Democrats running statewide in the state of Texas, they had a chance to vote on those policies, and they voted against those policies,” said Abbott. “They voted against common sense.”
Abbott highlighted legislation he signed prohibiting cities that reduce police funding from receiving certain state tax revenue, restricting some purchases of Texas property by citizens and entities tied to China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and prohibiting gender mutilation procedures for minors.
Snip.
Vice President J.D. Vance delivered the night’s keynote address, reflecting on the administration’s first 19 months back in office and making the case for Republicans in November.
Vance also paid tribute to Charlie Kirk on the anniversary of his assassination, recalling that Kirk had been in the front row when Vance addressed the Republican National Convention as the party’s vice presidential nominee in 2024.
Turning to Texas politics, Vance took aim at Democrat U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico over his previous comments on gender and Christianity.
“This Talarico guy—he will not shut up about how there are six genders. He will not shut up about how, ‘God is non-binary,’” said Vance.
“I gotta say, a guy that age who is so obsessed and focused on transgender children-I don’t know about you, but I never want to see that guy’s web browser.”
Last night Germany’s much-maligned AfD party won a crushing and historic victory. The victory is already being downplayed by many, owing to the fact that Saxony-Anhalt is technically one of Germany’s smallest and least consequential states. But there is far more to it than sheer numbers, as the win defines a turning point not only in German but European politics, and cements the gradual downfall of the globalist ruling class that has tried desperately for decades to keep populist movements from gaining power, in particular utilizing the “Brandmauer” or “firewall” to suppress the so-called far-right.
The destruction of this firewall is an historic occasion, even if it should come by way of such a seemingly inconsequential state.
Of course, there are other criticisms as well. AfD is seen by many as a kind of Trojan horse, a German “MAGA” party led by a lesbian woman in Alice Weidel. Even so, it represents a striking loss of power for the elites and a turning point which breaks a kind of psychological barrier that will only energize other anti-establishment, “far-right”, or populist parties throughout Europe.
Another secondary effect of the victory is that it has caused the ruling German establishment to go back to the drawing board and review its most unpopular policies, like on immigration, in order to bend with the clearly changing winds.
Merz expressed his “deep shock” at the election result, foreseeing it having major repercussions on Germany as a whole:
The AfD, however, fell just three seats short of an ‘absolute majority’ which would have allowed it to govern the state alone. Some commentators have pointed out some major ‘anomalies’ in regard to mail-in versus in-person votes. Just like in the highly irregular American 2020 election, every party but AfD was allegedly boosted by disproportionate numbers of mail-in votes:
More analysis at the link. Just think if Germany’s elites hadn’t decided to import millions of unassimilated Muslims into their country, they wouldn’t have empowered the AfD. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Yemen has also been getting spicy, with the Iranian-backed Houthis driving for the coast, successfully attacking a Saudi pipeline, and the official anti-Houthi government of Yemen making gains in the interior. More from Preston Stewart. If this week hadn’t been so insane, I might have done a separate post on this…
Maybe this is why I’m still unemployed. “Women Filled 98 Percent of Jobs Created in August.”
Women accounted for 158,000, or 98 percent, of the 162,000 nonfarm payroll jobs created in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ establishment data. Compared to this time last year, there are 870,000 more women employed in the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and 1.5 million fewer employed men.
So there were only 4,000 men hired in August.
Accounting for the new data, the gap between male and female employment reached its highest level since 1990, when men were overrepresented in the workforce.
Dramatic month-to-month swings in employment gains between the sexes are relatively common, and labor economists warn that sharp shifts don’t necessarily indicate lasting changes in the market. However, the August jobs report is in keeping with existing trends that have obtained for decades, namely a substantial increase in employment among women and a linear decline in employment among men.
There has been a “multi-decade decline in male labor force participation” and a “multi-decade increase in female labor force participation,” Kirk Doran, a professor specializing in labor economics at Notre Dame University, told National Review.
Part of this shift can be explained by the evolution of American industries. The sectors that grew at the highest rate in August — health care and public education — are female-dominated. Meanwhile, the industries that shrank — computing, data processing, and finance — are male-heavy.
We have every reason to be excited to go to the polls to ensure an ongoing Congressional Republican majority, and to keep the DSA-influenced Democrats away from any levers of power.
The 20 months since President Trump’s inauguration in early 2025 have had the most significant conservative victories of my lifetime, far exceeding President Reagan’s accomplishments. Here are just a few of the things President Trump and his team have done:
Closed the border to illegal invaders.
Deported hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens, and caused millions more to self-deport.
Slashed the federal workforce.
Eliminated DEI and wokeness from the military and federal agencies.
Eliminated EV mandates and green energy subsidies.
Effectively terminated corporate average fuel economy requirements for auto manufacturers.
Engaged the military to eliminate narco-terrorists.
Engaged the DOJ to target corporations engaged in illegal racial discrimination in hiring.
There are so many more milestone accomplishments beyond those.
For decades the conservative base has clamored for the above victories. President Trump finally delivered. Amidst all this, there are many “conservative” influencers who are promoting doom. For many of them, that is their job – being paid to blackpill conservative voters to stay home, so as to elect a Democrat Congress. The resumption of Democrat lawfare against the Trump administration is their goal.
Despite razor-thin congressional majorities, Trump47 has delivered numerous policy wins, and conservatives (and anyone else who wants to stop the insane, jihad-friendly, socialism- and social justice-infected Democrats from reclaiming power) should head to the polls in November to ensure Republican control through 2028.
“Ukraine’s Longest Range Drone Strike Yet! Nearly 3,000km! Plus Strikes on Sochi and Dagestan.” “Ukrainian drones carried out their longest range drone strike to date, hitting Russia’s Novy Urengoy and Purovsky gas processing plants in Yamalo-Nenets.” Yamalo-Nenets is an “autonomous okrug” on the Arctic Circle just east of the Urals.
Quality Care Access, LLC was chartered in July 2020 by Jovin Bayingana, and the Portland-based company rapidly became one of the most lucrative new MaineCare businesses in New England.
According to Medicaid payment records obtained via a Freedom of Access Act request, the company billed the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) for $1.2 million in 2021, $5.3 million in 2022, $7.4 million in 2023, $6.7 million in 2024, and $7.2 million in 2025 — for a lifetime cost of $27.8 million.
The more detailed federal Medicaid dataset shows that throughout this time frame QCA had fewer than 16 patients in most years.
Finally: “Republican Reinforcements Arrive for Paxton in Senate Race. The Senate Leadership Fund is pouring millions into Texas after questions over whether the Cornyn-aligned group would back Paxton.”
Republican reinforcements are finally arriving for Attorney General Ken Paxton in his U.S. Senate race, months after the party’s biggest Senate-focused outside group backed his primary opponent.
The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, has purchased $32 million in television advertisements across Texas and is reportedly preparing to spend more than $50 million to support Paxton against Democrat James Talarico.
The group announced Friday it created a new Texas PAC dedicated to the race, with ads promoting Paxton and contrasting his record with Talarico expected to run continuously through Election Day.
The investment ends months of uncertainty over whether the Senate Leadership Fund would support Paxton after backing Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary.
It also comes as other major Republican groups have already begun pouring money into the race.
MAGA Inc., the super PAC aligned with President Donald Trump, recently announced $10 million in advertising supporting Paxton. America PAC, the political group backed by Elon Musk, is also supporting Paxton and has begun door-knocking operations to register and get out the vote.
This is good, if overdue news, but media ad spends are the fools gold of politics. The same group spending zillions for Cornyn didn’t move the needle, so the efficacy of their political efforts seems debatable. But maybe they’re better at convincing squishy moderates than Republican primary voters…
Democrat Texas House candidate Oziel Ochoa’s campaign sponsored a May Day event co-hosted by the Rio Grande Valley chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Ochoa is challenging Republican State Rep. Janie Lopez for House District 37, a South Texas district covering Willacy County and portions of Cameron County.
Campaign finance records show Ochoa’s campaign made three $259 payments to La Union del Pueblo Entero, or LUPE, on May 4. The expenditures, totaling $777, were listed as advertising expenses for the first annual May Day Marcha del Pueblo (March of the People).
May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day, is an annual labor observance that has long been embraced by socialist and communist movements around the world.
The event took place two days earlier, on May 2, in Edinburg.
Organizers included LUPE, Texas Rising, the Rio Grande Valley American Federation of Teachers, the Rio Grande Valley Central Labor Council, South Texans for Reproductive Justice, Poder Latinx, and the Rio Grande Valley Democratic Socialists of America.
Ochoa was publicly recognized for his financial support, while RGV DSA was listed among the event’s organizers.
The former police chief of Hamtramck, Michigan, is in hot water after investigators have dug into allegations against the Muslim chief for how he ran his department.
Court records show that Hamtramck Police Chief Jamiel Altaheri personally engaged in a “pattern” of domestic violence in his own household, and told officers that wife-beating isn’t a “formal” crime.
The primary effects of Democrats importing unassimilated Muslims for political advantage seems to be more wife-beating and more rape.
“Criminal Illegal Alien Arrested in Texas, Ordered Deported 26 Years Ago. A Cuban national who evaded deportation for 26 years is now behind bars.” “According to ICE, Cuban national Emiliano Martinez Perez entered the United States around 1998 and was convicted of cocaine possession shortly afterward. He was ordered to leave the U.S. in early 2000, but remained in the country and was later convicted of drug trafficking in 2007.”
Speaking of immigration fraud: “Houston Immigration Attorney Arrested for Fraud. Nowowiejski allegedly committed mail fraud and made false statements related to immigration cases.”
A Houston immigration attorney was arrested Wednesday after a federal grand jury indicted her on charges of mail fraud and making false statements related to her work on behalf of immigrants seeking work-related legal status in the United States.
Alla Nowowiejski is a naturalized citizen from Russia and has practiced law in Texas since 2009 and specialized in business immigration assistance, but she allegedly never submitted, or only partially submitted, paperwork for clients seeking to obtain work status or work visas.
The indictment also alleges that Nowowiejski provided clients with false documents or reference numbers tied to active immigration cases unrelated to her own clients to make them believe their applications were being processed.
In 2023, Audubon Engineering Operations sued Nowowiejski for gross negligence and legal malpractice in Harris County. The company alleged that although she had charged them more than $109,000 for immigration work on behalf of five employees, she never filed paperwork with federal immigration agencies.
“Chaos ensues in Democratic Party after Arab reporter calls black congressman ‘AIPAC monkey.'” Arab reporter is Rula Jebreal (who, I guess, is most famous for dating Roger Waters) and the black congressman is Hakeem Jeffries. Hakeem Jeffries should never be called a monkey, only “TEMU Obama.”
The deal would mark the first chunk of change the nation will provide to the U.S. under South Korea’s new $350 billion commitment.
Last year, tariff talks between the U.S. and South Korea led to a 10 percent decrease in tariffs imposed on South Korea — a drop from 25 to 15 percent — provided the country invests $350 billion in the U.S. in exchange.
The power project would be set in Encinal, Texas, a small city in La Salle County.
According to The Korea Herald, talks initially began with South Korea proposing $19.8 billion for the project, and the U.S. countering with $25 billion. Negotiations will now proceed in the $22.6 billion range, although the exact amount will not be determined until the project is finalized.
The proposed gas combined-cycle project plant would total 6.3 gigawatts (GW) of power, built in stages. The first stage will consist of a 1.4-GW gas turbine power facility. Once the first stage passes inspection, the second stage, a 4.9-GW combined-cycle facility, will be built.
Though unconfirmed, the plant is expected to help meet the state’s booming demands for artificial intelligence (AI) computing capacity, data center development, and semiconductor development.
Microsoft Corp. today issued updates to plug at least 974 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, by far its biggest single patch batch ever. Microsoft says artificial intelligence is helping to speed the discovery of vulnerabilities, but security experts warn that many organizations already are struggling to prioritize the more human-intensive endeavor of testing and deploying so many fixes each month.
This month’s patch bundle obliterates the software giant’s previous record set in July, when it released updates for at least 570 security vulnerabilities. September’s Patch Tuesday brings this year’s total to more than 2,600, more than twice Microsoft’s previous record-setting patch year in 2020 (1,245) and with three more months to go.
There are two “zero-day” flaws fixed this month that are being actively exploited: both CVE-2026-81963 and CVE-2026-85880 allow an attacker to elevate their privileges on Windows system.
Fully 113 of the bugs addressed today earned Microsoft’s “critical” rating, meaning they could be abused by malware or miscreants to seize control over a vulnerable Windows machine with little or no help from the user.
Among the more serious critical flaws this month is CVE-2026-69730, a DNS weakness present in Windows Server 2012 onward and on Windows 10. Microsoft warns that an unauthenticated attacker could leverage this weakness simply by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected system, and that it is likely to be exploited.
Also scary is CVE-2026-69829, a critical, remote code execution flaw in the Windows Shell. This vulnerability has a CVSS base score of 9.8 (10 is the most severe), and can be exploited with low attack complexity, no privileges, and no user interaction.
Whatever else AI is or isn’t good at, it seems to be great at finding security flaws in Microsoft products…
It’s incredibly important to own physical media, because you do not know what people are going to do that work for these massive tech companies. Once they get a hold of the data and they put it into those AI [slop] machines, because that’s what they are, they can change anything. Half the stuff that people, when they Google things or whatever, that just comes out with some AI thing that’s based on something that somebody wrote on Reddit six years ago that’s probably not even true. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Who actually knows whether it’s true? It’s kind of like if you listen to a record on Spotify that says remastered in 2018, remastered in 2022, remastered in 2012, that’s not the original version. What they’ve done is they’ve either taken the original version, the mastered version, and just remastered it and made it sound worse, or you don’t know what they’ve actually done to it.
Another weird blog tidbit that may only be of interest to myself: Starting October 6, 2025 and running through February 9th, 2026, the Internet Archive took multiple daily snapshots of my blog after a long period of snapshotting it on a somewhat random basis, sometimes several time a week, and sometimes only a few times a month. I would say the optimal periodicity would be once a day, but I have no idea how the process works.
This is Charlotte. While everyone’s losing their minds over delayed flights and tiny seats, this Jack Russell snagged a blue balloon at the airport and turned the terminal into her own racetrack. Pure zoomie chaos in the best way on Red Bull levels. https://t.co/v8WbxBxT33
— Puppies & Positivity (@Puppieslover) March 4, 2026
Here’s an article I found quite surprising: “U.S. Muslim Brotherhood authorizes $140M annually to help Muslims take control of American government.”
Welp, the Muslim Brotherhood is alive and well, and its U.S. branch is putting its money where its mouth is.
BREAKING: The Shariah-ruling arm of the US Muslim Brotherhood has issued a fatwah unlocking an estimated $140 million a year in tithing (zakat) from American Muslims to finance the campaigns of Muslim leaders for public office including the House & Senatehttps://t.co/wqnPCYRiCQ
Abdul El-Sayed racked up at least $315,000 from Muslim Brotherhood-tied sources. Coincidentally, he also says Israel is “evil…”
Islamic organizers are advancing a nationwide plan to back Muslim and other Islamic-friendly candidates with financing from a potential political war chest of more than $140 million a year in mosque and other donations from the swelling Muslim-American community.
Earlier this year, the Qadhi-led Fiqh Council of North America issued a legal ruling (fatwa) in coordination with the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America that for the first time unlocks Muslim-American tithing and charitable giving, known as ‘zakat,’ for political use: ‘[G]iving one’s zakat for influencing political causes is warranted.’ The stated goal is to, broadly, ’empower’ Muslim communities in America, but more specifically, to fund the campaigns of politicians who oppose Israel and support policies such as criminalizing criticism of the Prophet Muhammad and Islam in general.
Qadhi is sympathetic to such censorship: ‘For us Muslims, an infinitely more amount of respect should be shown to our religious symbols and especially to our prophet.’
The reason all this strikes me as odd is because I was under the impression that the Muslim Brotherhood (AKA the Ikhwan) was a designated terrorist organization, and it is, but not in the U.S.
Today, as a first step in support of President Trump’s commitment to eliminate the capabilities and operations of Muslim Brotherhood chapters that pose a threat to the United States as described in Executive Order 14362, the United States is imposing terrorist designations against the Lebanese, Jordanian, and Egyptian chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Department of State is designating the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT), and the group’s leader Muhammad Fawzi Taqqosh as an SDGT. Concurrently, the Department of the Treasury is designating the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood as SDGTs for providing material support to Hamas.
Texas has declared the Muslim Brotherhood (and CAIR) as terrorist organizations as well, as did Florida. And numerous nations (Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, Kenya, and even Russia) have declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.
Yet, somehow, the United States government under Donald Trump has not done so. Given the disasterous reign of Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi in Egypt, where he tried to turn the nation into a one-party Islamic dictatorship, you would think America’s government would want to avoid the same mistake over here.
The First Amendment prevents government from barring people for running for office based on their religion or beliefs, no matter how criminally stupid. But nothing requires us to let a terrorist organization raise money to overthrow the Constitution and replace it with an Islamic dictatorship.
The Trump 47 administration should correct this oversight.
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.
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.”
Jeff Childers has an interesting piece on the Democrat Party’s self-inflicted “polycrisis,” when all the Party’s myriad bad decisions and extremist positions all come home to roost at the same time.
If you listen closely to the wind blowing through Washington, D.C., you might hear a faint, high-pitched whining sound. That is not the sound of cicadas fluttering through the cherry blossoms. That is the sound of the Democrat Party realizing that the check has finally arrived, and their credit card was declined. Last month, the Washington Post broke a story that perfectly captures the Democrat Party’s woebegone state:
The DNC expected big money after big Democratic wins. It never came.
The Democratic National Committee has scaled back some of its plans as donors remain reluctant to give, despite candidates’ recent victories.
Ruh-roh.
For the last few years, despite occasional bouts of truth bursting through the costume’s seams, corporate media has generally assured everyone that the Democratic Party is in fine fettle. Sharp as a tack. It is, they say, like a double-decker bus packed with a coalition of highly educated coastal elites, powerful unions, a motivated gang of highly diverse grievance groups, plus legions of narcissistic white boomers who somehow still believe that NPR is the best way to learn what’s going on in the world.
But underneath the hood, the engine was smoking, the transmission was held together by duct tape, and the bus driver was staring blankly at the dashboard trying to remember what to do when it makes that weird noise. The passengers argued about whether the bus should be renamed to something more trans-inclusive, whether to start with a land acknowledgment, and whether that weird noise was actually a microaggression.
Now, the bus has completely stalled out, parked on the side of the highway, and the passengers are sitting inside waiting for someone else to come fix it.
Corporate media is desperately trying to conceal what historians and political scientists call a “polycrisis.” As defined by historian Adam Tooze (and the World Economic Forum, which considered it an opportunity instead of a problem), a polycrisis happens “where disparate crises interact such that the overall impact far exceeds the sum of each part.” It describes where the political ground is destabilized from so many different directions at once that policymakers ultimately become paralyzed, usually while forming another gold-star committee to consider funding a new study on the destabilization.
Tooze explained, “In the polycrisis, the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”
Snip.
But amid all those examples, the modern Democratic polycrisis stands out as uniquely spectacular. It’s experiencing the political equivalent of getting audited by the IRS on the same day your Pekinese chews through your internet cable and then your roof caves in right after you opened the insurance cancellation notice.
All the insiders know it. Trad-media is doing its level best to distract and obfuscate, but some recent headlines are flashing red: On April 9th, Bloomberg warned that “Michigan Shows Democrats’ Identity Crisis Up Close.” On March 15th, Axios reported that “Democrats face a post-Trump identity crisis for 2028.” On March 30th, the NDSMC Observer simply called it “The Democratic party’s identity crisis.”
“The Democratic Party has an aura of ineffectiveness,” NDSMC wrote. “This is an existential threat.” The main problem, according to the author, is that the party is now only about opposing Trump— which manifestly is not working. So, the author argued, “with that opposition, there needs to be an alternative message. Something that voters can get behind. An idea. A value. Not the lack of values. Not just anti-MAGA.”
Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, agreed. “You can’t win a presidential election on opposition alone,” he told Axios. Democrats (not MAGA) are fractured. “Democrats are deeply divided over what they’d do if they returned to power,” Axios said. They intend to run against Trump in the 2026 midterms, but realize that won’t work in 2028, when Trump is terming out.
Democrats must “build a message predicated on values rather than reactions,” the NDSMC author fretted, “lest they doom themselves to a future of perpetual minority status, forever living in the shadow of the MAGA right.” But what screamed from the pages was that the author had no suggestions for a message. Not one.
The reason he didn’t is the same reason the Democrats cannot fix this problem. It’s a structural problem broken beyond repair.
Identity crises are the worst. A person or group questioning their very identity is a sinkhole of potential disaster. It’s like the Democrat Party is bored with being a stay-at-home dad named Benjamin, and yearns to move to Las Vegas, change its name to Mercedes, get that special surgery, and become a stripper.
It would be bad enough if identity were the only crisis Democrats were facing. Let’s dissect the anatomy of this rapidly approaching fast-motion disaster.
A polycrisis isn’t just a regular old run of bad luck. It is a structural failure. In any normal political cycle, a party could lose an election, suffer a fundraising dip, or deal with pushback against an unpopular leader. Or even all three. Those problems are manageable. You just replace the leader, change the messaging, and pretend you never actually supported the things you supported yesterday.
But in a polycrisis, the mechanisms for fixing the problems also break. The disease and the cure become indistinguishable. That’s what Democrats face. They are currently trapped in a perfect storm of intersecting, overlapping, cannibalistic calamities, each feeding and feeding off the others.
Democrats core problem is that their party has become an “odd coalition” of wildly divergent interest groups united by only one thing: opposition to Donald Trump. The so-called “No Kings” movement is the problem’s purest expression. No Kings is a hot mess of a tire fire, a janky collection of unrelated grievance groups, united only by deliberately vague policy positions— because articulating any specific proposal would immediately expose that half the coalition actively despises the other half.
When a political party has no articulable platform besides “we are not the other guy,” a polycrisis is not just possible. It becomes mandatory.
Snip.
The 2024 election exposed the fracture for all to see. Kamala Harris won 80% of the Black vote— solid, but a massive 10-point drop from Joe Biden’s 90% in 2020. President Trump secured 20% of the Black vote, the highest level of support from that demographic since George W. Bush in 2000. The shift was even more extreme among Hispanic voters, where Trump narrowed the gap to a mere 3 points, as compared to Biden’s 25-point margin four years earlier.
The shift among young men is particularly stark. Men under 50 split evenly (49% to 48%) between Trump and Harris, erasing a 10-point Democrat advantage from 2020.
Instead of addressing these defecting voters’ concerns, factions within the Democrat party are doubling down on purity tests, which I’ve previously labeled as the “purity spiral.” In Michigan, for instance, progressive Democrats punished the Harris campaign over the administration’s handling of Gaza, proving that for some factions, “wallowing in the illusion of purity” was more important than building a winning coalition. (That’s from last month’s Detroit News.)
The Detroit News wrung its bony hands over the fruits of the state’s recent Democrat primary nomination results, which produced far-left candidates whose views “raise serious questions about their electability.”
Recent polling by the Manhattan Institute confirmed the disconnect. The Democrat party is essentially three blocs: Moderates (47%), Progressive Liberals (37%), and a “Woke Fringe” (11%). The median Democrat actually wants border security and safe streets, but the party is held hostage by the 11% who think math is racist, there’s an infinite number of genders, and Karl Marx was on the right track but just didn’t try hard enough.
The problem is even worse than Childers makes it out to be. Where are the “Progressive Liberals” willing to call out the radical woke left on their insane agenda? Nowhere, that’s where. They’re scared to death of being called racist and dragged on Twitter. To deviate even slightly on, say, transing children or letting ICE deport illegal alien rapists, is to invite brutal reprisals ranging from ostracism to termination of employment.
Or being shot by a woke lunatic because you’re a “fascist.”
Moreover, after their long march through the institutions of the left, the levers of power for the Democrat Party apparatus and their Academic/Media Complex/NGO fellow travelers are all in the hands of social justice warriors. Any “Progressive Liberals” with any sort of power are in their 70s or older, and how many of those supposed “47% Moderates” are actually speaking up against the radical agenda? John Fetterman? Bill Maher? Stephen A. Smith? They’re so few and so far outside what today’s Democrat Party considers “acceptable discourse” that we can name them individually. Indeed, the online woke left is already calling all three “fascists.”
Snipping over Childers’ talk of the Democrat “gerontocracy,” since so many are part of those “moderates” losing their grip on power within the Party.
Perhaps the most under-appreciated aspect of the polycrisis is the perplexing psychological condition of the Democrat base. Studies consistently show that liberals report significantly lower levels of happiness and psychological well-being compared to conservatives. Maybe building an identity out of imminent global climate destruction and looming, ever-present fascism was a bad idea.
Progressivism is literally driving them insane.
According to the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, conservatives outnumber liberals 51% to 20% among those reporting “excellent” mental health, while liberals outnumber conservatives 45% to 19% among those reporting “poor” mental health. Read that again— nearly half of liberals self-report having poor mental health. Shocker.
On a 100-point happiness scale, even childless conservatives scored a 63; while childless liberals scored a dismaying 48. So weird.
Perhaps the most under-appreciated aspect of the polycrisis is the perplexing psychological condition of the Democrat base. Studies consistently show that liberals report significantly lower levels of happiness and psychological well-being compared to conservatives. Maybe building an identity out of imminent global climate destruction and looming, ever-present fascism was a bad idea.
Progressivism is literally driving them insane.
According to the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, conservatives outnumber liberals 51% to 20% among those reporting “excellent” mental health, while liberals outnumber conservatives 45% to 19% among those reporting “poor” mental health. Read that again— nearly half of liberals self-report having poor mental health. Shocker.
On a 100-point happiness scale, even childless conservatives scored a 63; while childless liberals scored a dismaying 48. So weird.
Childers is right on the insanity but outdated on some of the components. We’re already seeing an abandonment of global warming talking points among the woke. Trump is their apocalypse. There are too many intersectionality shibboleths to keep straight for woke brains to keep green catechisms in mind. Another possibility is that blacks, Hispanics, and all those Muslim illegal aliens they’ve imported obviously don’t give a rat’s ass about any of it.
Running a modern political campaign requires astronomical amounts of money. For years, Democrats relied on two massive funding streams: small-dollar digital donations via ActBlue, and a sprawling network of government-funded NGOs. Both are now collapsing.
I wonder how much of ActBlue was ever real and not simply foreign and NGO money laundering.
Last month, the Washington Post reported that the Democratic National Committee is facing a massive cash crunch as “top donors have been slow to open their wallets.” The DNC had assured party officials that their resounding 15-point victory in the Virginia governor’s race would open the floodgates. “But big checks did not flood back,” leaving DNC Chairman Ken Martin presiding over a financial and leadership crisis.
Left unsaid: Wealthy Jews in New York used to make up a significant fraction of the Democrats’ fundraising network, but they’ve all been tossed overboard in the name of demonizing “the 1%” and pandering to all the Muslims Democrats (not to mention political parties in Europe) have insisted on importing.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has taken a sledgehammer to the NGO complex. DOGE first targeted USAID, leading to the elimination of over 5,000 programs. These programs were rife with fraud and political grift, with taxpayer money flowing through dizzying arrays of cut-out corporations to Democrat coffers. Musk bluntly explained, “This is one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world— government-funded NGOs.”
The broader recent crackdowns on Medicare fraud, autism services, and daycare funding are systematically cutting off the federal spigot that has long nourished progressive advocacy groups and political operatives. The “blue laundromat” is being condemned, and the DNC is suddenly discovering that running a political party requires actual money and real fundraising, which tends to be harder than making backroom deals with Somalian cartels.
Section on lawfare blowback and indicting Dem corruption skipped, since there seem to be plenty of examples in every LinkSwarm.
An entirely separate problem for Democrats is the collapse of the legacy media infrastructure that has for decades carried water for the progressive platform. Trust in mass media has hit a record low of 28 percent. Viewers are migrating to alternative media, mostly conservative or conservative-adjacent podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience.
Corporate media is shifting rightwards. Within the last six months or so, conservative billionaires Larry and David Ellison acquired Warner Brothers (which owns CNN), independent commentator Bari Weiss was installed as editor-in-chief at CBS News, Jeff Bezos’ new head of the Washington Post fired 13 “climate reporters,” and the list goes on. Furthermore, as you well know, X (formerly Twitter) under Musk’s ownership allows uncensored conservative content…
The Democratic Party’s traditional megaphone is on the fritz. The batteries are running out. Which means they can no longer just scream “racist!” at their political problems and expect them to go away. They can no longer rely on corporate media to promote their narratives and psyops.
They are going to have to work harder to earn audience attention— but their problems are multiplied since they can’t enunciate clear policy positions anyway. They must feel like an aggressive drunk who dominated the barroom conversation through brute force until new management made him take it outside. Now nobody listens, and everybody feels better. And it’s much quieter inside.
Most of the argument on how the contradictions of slavery destroyed the Whig Party snipped.
Like the Whigs, today’s Democrat Party faces a similar irreconcilable fracture line. Not just one. Several of them. Immigration, police funding, and trans “rights” are all solid examples. All of them are potentially slavery questions for the loose Democrat coalition. If the DNC takes a strong position on any of those issues, it will forever fracture the coalition. That’s why they can’t commit.
Take immigration, for example. The progressive wing views open borders and amnesty as a moral imperative rooted in anti-racism. But Democrats’ working-class wing —especially unions, black, and hispanic voters, who are currently all defecting to the GOP— views unrestricted immigration as direct economic competition that drives down wages and overwhelms local resources.
The immigration question cleaves the coalition along lines that cannot be papered over with vague language about “comprehensive reform.” Every time the party tries to stake out a middle position, it simultaneously enrages multiple factions.
Progressives accuse leadership of fascism; the working class accuses leadership of abandonment.
The Whigs were destroyed not by a single catastrophic defeat, but by a slow accumulation of contradictions that ultimately made the coalition mathematically impossible to maintain. Then, snap. That is precisely the dynamic of a polycrisis, and it is precisely what the Democrats are facing now.
In complex systems theory, a polycrisis does not resolve itself gradually. It builds pressure until it reaches a tipping point— a threshold where a final small change —the proverbial camel’s straw— triggers an abrupt, potentially irreversible transformation or collapse.
For the Democratic Party, the 2026 midterms represent that tipping point. They face a brutal structural map, needing four seats to retake the Senate. Midcycle redistricting, wildly exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais decision striking down minority-majority districts, has scrambled the House battlefield more thoroughly than eggs on a Waffle House grill.
But the most profound implication of where the polycrisis is going, and what it will make politically possible, can best be understood through the Hegelian dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
The thesis is the current, chaotic, decentralized election system with late counting, mail-in ballots, harvesting, permissive voter rolls, and weak ID requirements. Democrats’ viability depends on that system, and they will fight to the political death to preserve it.
The Hegelian antithesis is the current crisis— the ongoing federal investigations in Georgia, Arizona, and elsewhere, combined with aggressive crackdowns on non-citizen voting and the stalled SAVE America Act, which would mandate ID, citizenship, and strict voter purges.
If the DOJ’s investigations produce credible convictions of election workers or political figures, it will shatter whatever remaining trust exists in the system. The synthesis is the solution that comes next, having been made politically possible by the thesis/antithesis dynamic. In this case, it will probably take the shape of a comprehensive federal elections bill. Maybe the SAVE Act. Maybe something bigger.
Here I think Childers is probably wrong. I think most Democrats have internalized the understanding that their Party is cheating nine ways to Sunday (even if they’d never admit it), and they simply don’t care. Trump is The Devil, and The Devil must be fought by any means necessary. Never mind that the idea that Trump (and by extension all Republicans) is some sort of racist monster is a laughable delusion engendered by the Southern Poverty Law Center literally subsidizing Nazis and the KKK. The idea that Republicans are Evil Racists and that Democrats are The Good People forms a bedrock in their political identities, and they’ll cling to it with religious fervor. Reason had nothing to do with them adopting the social justice worldview and reason cannot talk them out of it.
Thus Democrats will never support the SAVE Act or anything like it as long as the woke mind virus runs the Party. (A much bigger and thornier question is why old-line congressional Republicans refuse to support any strategy that threatens to implement it.)
No, the only path for Democrats out of the social justice wilderness is for their own Trump-like figure to come from outside the Party to cleanse the Augean stables of Obamaism entirely. Right now, Democrats don’t have such a Trump, and their entire SJW-ruled party apparatus stands ready to ensure their hands are never removed from the Party levers of power they’ve dedicated their entire adult life to controlling. The hard left is willing to lose an infinite number of elections rather than relinquish control. Just look to the lengths they took to keep Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. entirely off the 2024 Presidential ballot, and for a Democrat Trump to appear, he would need to be at least a hundred times better known than RFK Jr.
So I think Childers’ idea of how Democrats might solve the polycrisis is misguided, but his description of that crisis has admirable breadth.
Trump’s Iran blockade twists Iran’s arm into opening the Strait of Hormuz, Ukraine blows up a bunch more Russian oil and gas infrastructure, leftists try to remove more rights from their political opponents, and this weekend in Austin you can get a dog for $5!
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
I got my taxes done and mailed off. (I owed nothing because I made so little money last year.)
Trump wins again. “Iran, U.S. Announce Strait of Hormuz ‘Completely Open’ for Commercial Ships.”
The Strait of Hormuz is “completely open” for all commercial ships, the U.S. and Iran said Friday, after the agreement of a cease-fire in Lebanon.
“IRAN HAS JUST ANNOUNCED THAT THE STRAIT OF IRAN IS FULLY OPEN AND READY FOR FULL PASSAGE. THANK YOU!” President Trump said in a post on Truth Social, appearing to refer to the Strait of Hormuz.
The president also said that Iran would begin working to remove all of the sea mines from the strait, with the help of the U.S.
He said in a second post that the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports “WILL REMAIN IN FULL FORCE AND EFFECT” until peace negotiations with Iranian leaders are “100% COMPLETE.”
The blockade was first put into effect on Monday, with U.S. forces looking to stop Iranian and Iran-linked ships. The blockade came after negotiations in Pakistan to end the Iran war collapsed.
The president said at the time that the blockade would be enforced in an effort to stop Iran from policing the strait to its economic benefit while other countries suffer.
Iran had imposed a toll on vessels passing through the strait and has limited oil exports. It had allowed only a handful of countries, including China and India, to pass through the strait.
“Iran promised to open the Strait of Hormuz, and they knowingly failed to do so…as they promised, they better begin the process of getting this INTERNATIONAL WATERWAY OPEN AND FAST!” Trump said earlier this week.
Days before Saturday’s failed negotiations in Pakistan, Trump announced a two-week cease-fire, contingent upon Iran agreeing to the “complete, immediate, and safe opening” of the Strait of Hormuz.
Meanwhile, Trump on Thursday announced that Israel has agreed to a ten-day cease-fire in Lebanon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel had an “opportunity to forge a historic peace agreement with Lebanon” but said Israeli forces would remain inside Lebanese territory in a “reinforced security buffer zone.”
How is an open Strait but the U.S. keeps the blockade anything but a complete win for Trump?
All ships can sail through the Strait of Hormuz but this needs to be coordinated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a senior Iranian official told Reuters, adding that unfreezing Iranian funds was part of the deal.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi wrote on X that the strait was open after a ceasefire accord was agreed in Lebanon, while U.S. President Donald Trump said he believed a deal to end the Iran war would come “soon”, although the timing remains unclear.
Hundreds of ships and 20,000 seafarers have remained stranded inside the Gulf waiting to pass through the key waterway, which handles about 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas flows.
It’s still unclear who is actually calling the shots in Tehran these days.
It looks like Iran’s rulers have finally blinked — but that doesn’t mean they won’t try to weasel out of every promise they’re now making.
Tehran announced Friday that it’s opening the Strait of Hormuz, and supposedly even cooperating with US forces to sweep out all mines.
President Donald Trump says the regime has even agreed to end its quest for nuclear weapons and hand over its “nuclear dust” — nearly 1,000 pounds of highly-refined uranium now buried below various bunkers destroyed by American bombing last year.
But Trump knows Tehran has a long history of breaking its word — and it’s not even certain that the figures we’re negotiating with are the ultimate decision-makers.
Nor if Iran’s current leaders will be in charge next month: Regime factions will be a while realigning after US and Israel attacks slaughtered most of the top ranks — no one there or here knows how it’ll play out.
Snip.
Remember: Even the Islamic Republic’s so-called moderates are still Islamic fundamentalists who despise America and the West and believe that lying to non-Muslim leaders is entirely moral.
Meanwhile, a lasting peace deal that ensures Iran can’t go nuclear requires a reliable process for monitoring compliance, including “inspect anywhere, anytime” rules.
Also a must-monitor: Bans on acquisition of new missiles and missile tech, lest Tehran again threaten the entire region.
Plus financial controls to prevent the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force from again fostering and commanding terrorists far outside Iran.
If the regime doesn’t agree to these terms, and institutionalize enforcement, its oil exports must remain blocked as the bombing resumes.
For the past five weeks, opponents of the Trump administration have repeatedly called this “a war of choice,” a conflict the president launched without cause or coherent purpose. “[W]hen we ask, What is the administration doing? they can’t answer that question because they don’t know why they’re there in the first place,” Jake Sullivan told progressive talk-show host Jon Stewart. “They haven’t been able to give us an answer as to what this is all about.”
The administration has, in fact, made a clear and compelling case. It reduces to two interlocking imperatives. The first is Trump’s long-standing red line. As the president has stated repeatedly for years, “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. It’s very simple.” The second is the enabling condition that made this red line urgent: overmatch. Iran’s drones and ballistic missiles can overwhelm the air and missile defenses of Israel, the United States, and their Gulf allies.
In the June 2025 “12-Day War,” Iran absorbed heavy losses to its ballistic arsenal, which fell to roughly 1,500 missiles, and to key production sites. President Trump hoped that those losses would moderate Iranian behavior and bring Tehran to the negotiating table. That hope proved unfounded.
The IRGC moved immediately to rebuild. Work resumed at production plants, and stockpiles in hardened underground missile cities grew. IRGC Aerospace Force Commander Majid Mousavi stated in January 2026 that the arsenal had grown since the June war and that output across multiple sectors had already exceeded prewar levels. Israeli intelligence assessed that Iran was on track for a stockpile of roughly 8,000 ballistic missiles by 2027.
At the outset of the war, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described overmatch as the factor that drove America to act. “The United States is conducting an operation to eliminate the threat of Iran’s short-range ballistic missiles and the threat posed by their navy, particularly to naval assets,” he said at a March 2 press conference. He then quantified the threat. “They are producing, by some estimates, over 100 of these missiles a month. Compare that to the six or seven interceptors that can be built a month.”
The arithmetic spoke for itself and posed two interlocking threats. The first was conventional. Iran would soon have enough missiles and drones to overwhelm the defenses of Israel and every American base in the region. The second was nuclear. The huge conventional arsenal would serve as a shield behind which Iran could pursue a nuclear weapon without fear of retaliation—directly violating the president’s red line. If Iran were left unchecked, Rubio explained, it would soon “have so many conventional missiles, so many drones, and can inflict so much damage, that no one can do anything about their nuclear program.” Once Iran crossed that threshold, which Rubio called the “point of immunity,” the window for action would close permanently.
America therefore had three choices: to do nothing, in which case Iran would soon enter a zone of immunity guaranteed by overmatch; to let Israel attack alone, in which case Iran would attack American forces and cause significant casualties; or to work together with Israel to eliminate an intolerable threat to both countries.
Myth 2: The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action had moderated Iran and stabilized the Middle East before Trump broke it.
While arguing about the war, former Obama and Biden staffers are attempting to justify Obama’s nuclear deal and the strategy that produced it. The JCPOA, Sullivan tells Stewart, worked. Iran was “complying with the deal. Even the Israeli intelligence were saying they were complying with the agreement.” Trump’s 2018 unilateral withdrawal, Sullivan suggests, discarded this successful state of affairs.
This story fails to comport with reality in three crucial ways. First, the timeline doesn’t work. Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in May 2018. Tehran did not begin enriching its uranium to 60%, a major threshold that dramatically shortens the path to a nuclear weapon, until April 2021. In other words, Tehran made this crucial leap toward weaponization on Biden’s watch, not Trump’s.
And how did Biden respond? With conciliation. The administration stopped enforcing sanctions, especially against Chinese buyers. Iranian oil exports surged, and with them regime revenues. As Iran’s breakout time shrank to a matter of weeks, Biden and his team painted the increasing threat it had created as Trump’s fault. Every Iranian nuclear advance became, in their telling, not only a consequence of the 2018 withdrawal but also a justification for further conciliation. Then National Security Adviser Sullivan said so explicitly in April 2022, when Iran was racing forward under Biden’s presidency, that its progress “is a direct impact of [Trump’s] pulling out of the nuclear deal, making us less safe, giving us less visibility. And it’s one of the reasons we pursued a diplomatic path, again, when the president took office.”
Biden restored the core logic of the JCPOA unilaterally. Sanctions relief flowed while nuclear constraints collapsed. Tehran blew past the restrictions on the size of its uranium stockpiles and levels of enrichment while Washington relaxed pressure and pursued diplomacy on Iran’s terms. What Sullivan presents as the collapse of the deal was its continuation on asymmetric terms, slavish compliance in Washington without reciprocity in Tehran.
As sanctions enforcement weakened and oil revenue from China flowed, the regime did not moderate. Iran accelerated its missile and drone programs, deepened its support for proxies, and hardened the capabilities that now define the battlefield. Sanctions relief generated revenue. Revenue funded missiles, drones, and proxies. Those capabilities produced the overmatch that eroded deterrence.
The JCPOA and Biden’s de facto implementation of it financed and enabled the capabilities that drove the region toward large-scale conflict. Under Biden, Iran reached 60% enrichment and expanded its missile and drone programs. The Oct. 7 massacre in Israel was a direct result of Iran’s increasingly advantageous strategic posture.
The United States faced the same strategic choice at the end of the JCPOA process as it did at the beginning, but under worse conditions and against a stronger adversary. The policy, that is to say, ensured that the confrontation would come after Iran had advanced closer to immunity.
If ever we had a president who believes that “bigger is better,” it’s Donald Trump, and his administration just embiggened the blockade against Iran to include sanctioned ships from anywhere.
“In addition to enforcing the blockade, all Iranian vessels, vessels with active OFAC sanctions, and vessels suspected of carrying contraband, are subject to belligerent right to visit and search,” U.S. Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT) announced on Thursday. But here’s where it gets really interesting: “These vessels, regardless of location, are subject to visit, board, search, and seizure.”
Emphasis added because that’s serious.
Regardless of location? If I’m reading that right, the “Persian Gulf blockade” just went global.
Joint Chiefs chair Gen. Dan Caine confirmed the expanded scope this morning during a presser with War Secretary Pete Hegseth. “Under the command of Adm. Paparo, we’ll actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran,” Caine said. “This includes dark fleet vessels carrying Iranian oil. As most of you know, dark fleet vessels are those illicit or illegal ships evading international regulations, sanctions, or insurance requirements.”
Baltimore can’t decide who gets to ladle out the fraud. “Baltimore Reparations Fund Plagued by Infighting and Struggles for Control. ‘The City Hall says the mayor has final say, while commissioners maintain the body was created to independently manage the funds.'”
When the state of Maryland legalized marijuana for personal use a few years ago, it designated a percentage of sales to be put in a special fund, which would be used in part to pay reparations for slavery and to fund various social programs.
The fund now contains upwards of $35 million, but almost none of the money has been paid out because of an ongoing power struggle to control it between pretty much everyone involved in the program. Who could have predicted such a thing?
FOX News reports:
$35 million in reparations money remains unused as Baltimore officials battle over who gets control: report
Millions in reparations money remain unused as Baltimore officials battle over who gets control, according to a local report.
The Baltimore Beat reported that the $35 million in revenue from the recreational cannabis tax has not reached residents yet due to infighting between City Hall and the Community Reinvestment and Reparations Commission, a 17-member body established in November 2024 to oversee how the funds are distributed.
Since Maryland legalized recreational cannabis three years ago, “not a single dollar has reached the people it was meant to help, and the first round of funding may still be a year away,” the report said.
Why, it’s almost like that was the design…
“Huge Drone Strike on Tuapse Port! Oil Storage Hit,” an oil export terminal on the Black Sea Ukraine has hit before.
“German bill would ban home purchases for people with the wrong political views.” Germans banning rights for being an enemy of the ruling party? I think I’ve seen this movie before…
A Carrollton candidate who confessed to committing voter fraud in a past election is back on the mayoral ballot this May. While the situation is unusual, it’s not unlawful.
In 2024, Zul Mohamed pleaded guilty to more than 100 felony counts of voter fraud in his failed 2020 campaign for Carrollton mayor. A jury sentenced him to four years in state prison while agreeing with his attorney that Mohamed is mentally ill.
But Mohamed is appealing parts of his conviction and sentencing, arguing that the sting operation used to trace a mail-ballot fraud scheme back to him was constitutionally suspect, as is the court’s condition of probation that bars Mohamed from engaging in election-related activities.
Under Texas election law, a person is ineligible to be a candidate if they have been “finally convicted of a felony” or determined by a court to be “mentally incapacitated.”
(Previously.) Seems like the average 7-11 has more stringent vetting than Carrollton…
Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced an investigation into Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies at the University of North Texas.
“The DEI ideology has been a calamitous way that radical leftists have pushed a woke agenda in our educational institutions,” Paxton stated.
As part of the investigation, Paxton sent a letter to Nicole Dash, Dean of the College of Public Affairs and Human Sciences, asking UNT to detail their compliance with state law. While Dash’s academic writing primarily focuses on disaster recovery, she has also written about racial issues.
Paxton is also seeking information about “DEI policies and guidance from the University, details regarding DEI in accreditation standards, and all correspondence between UNT leadership and staff regarding DEI.”
Paxton’s investigation stems from an undercover video that was released earlier this week by Accuracy in Media.
In the video, Paige Falco, a field education coordinator in social work at UNT’s College of Public Affairs and Health Sciences, told an investigator with a hidden camera that DEI is “definitely still a focus” at the institution.
Falco told the investigator that she removed DEI keyphrases from course titles and descriptions, while continuing to teach the concepts.
Later in the video, Falco discussed how “antiracism, diversity, equity, and inclusion” is a competency for the Council on Social Work Education, which accredits the school. The Steve Hicks School of Social Work at UT-Austin also requires so-called “antiracism” training as part of its accreditation with this organization.
Senate Bill 17, a law state lawmakers passed in 2023, prohibits DEI in university human resource policies. SB 17 contains explicit exemptions for accreditation and course content.
The Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG), alongside the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), announced a settlement with three prominent advertising companies over alleged violations of antitrust laws.
The settlement comes after a multi-state complaint was filed to “combat unlawful media censorship.” The three companies involved are Dentsu US, Inc.; GroupM Worldwide LLC, now known as WPP Media; and Publicis, Inc.
The multi-state complaint also saw participation from Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, Utah, and West Virginia. The complaint alleges the companies violated the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, and calls the companies’ conduct “anticompetitive.”
The complaint alleges that the ad agencies, working through the World Federation of Advertisers’ Global Alliance for Responsible Media and the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ Advertiser Protection Bureau, blocked certain websites from being eligible for advertising revenue because they were labeled “misinformation.” The companies allegedly created “brand-safety” rules that made these “misinformation” websites ineligible for business.
The OAG’s announcement stated that the increase in online media coverage has led to large corporations “conspiring ways to suppress certain viewpoints,” favoring particular perspectives and “suppressing disfavored opinions as ‘misinformation.’”
The FTC stated that the defendants’ unlawful collusion “to impose common ‘brand safety’” standards across the industry weakened competitive behavior.
According to the FTC, upon approval by a federal judge, the order will prevent “the biggest U.S. advertising agencies” from restricting advertising based on ideological or political differences.
Although the settlement is subject to court approval, the advertising companies have agreed to several arrangements. The companies reportedly agreed to not enforce limitations on advertising spending based on ideological positions or diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments. They also agreed to not restrict business with any company based on “its news and political or social commentary content.”
Reading between the lines, this was part of the Democrat Media Complex’s attempt to keep anyone from advertising with any conservative media.
Ma Xingrui, a former high-flying technocrat and Xinjiang party secretary, is officially under investigation for corruption charges. That makes him the third member of the current Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo to fall amid President Xi Jinping’s latest purge, as well as the first civilian member.
There are two likely reasons for Ma’s targeting. The first is that Ma was exceptionally capable. He handled politically sensitive assignments in Xinjiang and earlier in Guangdong and the city of Shenzhen with skill and ruthlessness. As I noted in last week’s China Brief, Xi tends to find that kind of talent and ambition threatening.
Second, it’s possible that Ma’s background leading China’s space agencies connected him to the corruption being probed within the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force. However, Ma left the aerospace sector in 2013, before the Second Artillery Corps was reorganized into the Rocket Force and received the surge of funding and authority that enabled such corruption.
Ma’s time in Xinjiang certainly offered opportunities for large-scale graft, from the expropriation of Uyghur property and businesses to the notoriously corrupt paramilitary organization that runs much of the region’s industry, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps.
This purges are sort of an under-reported story, and Xi has purged at least two other Politburo members in the last year.
“Wisconsin sheriff sues Pakistani-American woman who said ICE detained her for two days when she was actually at hotel spa.”
US citizen Sundas ‘Sunny’ Naqvi, 28, gained national attention last month when she and a band of supporters – including Cook County, Ill., Commissioner Kevin Morrison — publicly insisted she was unlawfully detained by ICE officers for roughly 43 hours.
Keep Morrison in mind, because we’re going to get back to him in a sec.
Naqvi claimed that after landing back in the US from a work trip to Turkey on the morning of March 5, she was detained for nearly 30 hours at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, then transferred to another ICE facility in Broadview, Ill., before winding up at Dodge County Jail in Wisconsin.
Snip.
Now Naqvi and Morrison are the subjects of a federal defamation lawsuit filed by Dodge County Sheriff Dale Schmidt on Friday — as his office released new details of Naqvi’s actual actions during the alleged hoax period.
‘She checked into the Hampton Inn and Suites in Rosemont, Ill., for the entire duration of this alleged event,’ Schmidt said during a press conference, where he presented a hotel bill and text receipts to illustrate Naqvi’s time there.
The folio shows Naqvi checked in at the Hampton Inn — just a 10-minute drive from the airport — at 1:17 p.m. March 5, while text messages with an unidentified witness over the following days show she enjoyed free food, spa services, and trips to the gym.
Bonus: “Naqvi was previously convicted of making a false report in Cook County, Illinois, and was sentenced to probation.” Also, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to know that Kevin Morrison is a Democrat…
Former Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax shot and killed his wife before turning the gun on himself early Thursday in what the Fairfax County Police Department is calling a murder-suicide.
Police believe Fairfax shot his wife in the basement of their Annandale home, ran upstairs, and shot himself. The couple’s children were in the home at the time of the murders and called 911, according to Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis.
“This has been an ongoing domestic dispute surrounding what seems to be a complicated or messy divorce,” Davis said. “I don’t think it’s a secret that there’s been a divorce proceedings that have been ongoing. From what I understand in this early stage, former Lieutenant Governor Fairfax was recently served some paperwork associated with an upcoming court proceeding that apparently led to this incident last night.”
The couple had been married 20 years, but was currently separated and still living together, according to authorities.
“Separated and still living together” seems like an oxymoron.
Cerina Fairfax filed for divorce in July, according to court records.
Fairfax served as the lieutenant governor under former Democratic Governor Ralph Northam from 2018 to 2022. While in office, the lieutenant governor was accused of sexually assaulting two women years earlier. He maintained the sexual encounters, one of which took place in 2000 and another in 2004, were consensual. He then launched an unsuccessful bid for Virginia governor in 2021, coming in fourth in the Democratic primary. Prior to his tenure as lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax served as a federal prosecutor.
Funny how many Democrats hyped as “the next big thing” (Stacey Abrams, Andrew Gillum) turned out to have dark secrets, though none quite as dark as a murder-suicide.
Phil Collins has been elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, along with Oasis, Billy Idol, Wu-Tang Clan, Luther Vandross, Sade, Joy Division/New Order and Iron Maiden. You can argue that Collins is more pop than rock in his solo career, but he’s certainly more rock than Vandross, Sade, and a lot of already-inducted artists.
