Posts Tagged ‘SAVE Act’

Cornyn’s Slaughter: A Postmortem

Thursday, May 28th, 2026

It’s pretty rare that a four term incumbent senator gets primaried out of office. Indeed, I think you’d have to go back to Alfonse D’Amato defeating Jacob Javits in 1980 for the last time it happened, back when New York was still capable of electing Republicans statewide. So it’s worth taking a deeper look at why John Cornyn got slaughtered by Ken Paxton in Tuesday’s runoff.

And a slaughter it was. Cornyn lost by 384,000 votes, or 27% of people voting. Nor was it a geographical narrow victory for Paxton. Cornyn lost everywhere:

Cornyn won two counties: Liberal, politics-obsessed Travis County, where Cornyn won by just over 2,000 votes, and (as commenter FM noted) rural coastal Kenedy County, the third least populous county in the state with 350 people, where Cornyn won by all of 6 votes to 2. If there’s ever been such a geographically dominant statewide victory in a runoff, I can’t remember it. (Dan Patrick walloped David Dewhurst by a slightly larger margin in the 2014 Lt. Governor runoff, but Dewhurst still won more counties than Cornyn did.)

Some national media has gotten a key fact about the race wrong. No, it was not a dead heat until President Trump endorsed Paxton; polls throughout the runoff constantly showed Paxton ahead by substantial margins. Indeed, between Paxton, Wesley Hunt, and longshot Sara Canady, fully 58% of Republican primary voters cast their ballots against longtime incumbent Cornyn, which should have been a big warning sign.

And if money was truly the only thing that mattered in politics, Cronyn should have mopped the floor with Paxton. Cornyn’s own campaign and allied Super PACs poured more than $100 million into Cornyn’s campaign to no visible effect.

No, the reason that Cornyn lost was because Texas Republicans were finally well and truly tired of him. Cornyn’s playing footsie with illegal alien amnesty while claiming he was against amnesty was one of the biggest reasons voters rejected him.

There’s being rejected by voters, then there’s being absolutely embarrassed.

That’s what we saw in Texas last night. John Cornyn, who outspent his opponent Texas AG Ken Paxton 10-1, was absolutely wrecked at the polls.

No incumbent senator has done worse than Cornyn in half a century, and no other election in U.S. history has seen two incumbent senators voted out in the same election.

Cornyn’s holdout on the SAVE Act, his pro-amnesty leanings, and his refusal to push Trump’s agenda, along with Ken Paxton’s statewide popularity and effectiveness totally sealed the deal.

Funny, Cornyn is a co-sponsor of the SAVE Act, but didn’t make himself conspicuous by trying to get the senate to actually pass it.

The GOP is WILDLY out of step with its voters, who keep trying to send the establishment a message.

Moreover, Paxton did better among Hispanic than white voters.

The population of Hidalgo County, Texas, is almost 100% Hispanic. Like many other similar counties, it had heavy support for Paxton.

While the number of Hispanics who voted in this primary was only in the tens of thousands, the fact that they supported the pro-deportation candidate even more than white voters is an important data point.

If you spend any time with Hispanic Americans, you will know that they hate people who cheat the system with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns. I am told this makes them racist.

John Cornyn has become the poster boy for someone who votes right the overwhelming majority of the time, but still manages to be out of touch with the base on their biggest priorities.

In a not-so different time and age, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) would still be considered one of the good guys: As a pro-life conservative who voted with President Donald Trump 99.2% of the time, just a generation earlier, he would’ve been lauded as one of our most staunchly conservative, reliably Republican senators.

And not just reliably Republican: He’s reliably a winner, too. Sen. Cornyn hadn’t lost an election in 42 years.

Yet last night, this four-term senator with a 42-year winning streak was smooshed like a bug, winning just 36% of the vote in his Republican primary runoff. Nearly two-thirds of his constituents rejected him!

Just like that, his political career is over. No second acts, no chance for redemption.

GOP politicians beware: The rules for Republican Party membership ain’t what they once were. Violate the new rules at your own peril.

But don’t look to the mainstream media to explain the new rules. Reductive, knee-jerk journalists can’t see beyond the Great Orange Monster, interpreting Cornyn’s fate — as well as Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), and a slew of Indiana state senators — as the umpteenth sign that Trump is a dictator/fascist/authoritarian.

Examples snipped.

The mainstream media defines “bipartisanship” as Republicans crossing the aisle to help Democrats. But when Democrats cross the aisle to help Republicans, they’re sellouts and traitors.

Case in point: Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.). Because he’ll occasionally side with Republicans, he’s a Judas to the Donkeys.

Snip.

Today, we expect a Republican district will send a loyal, dependable Republican representative to Washington. Helping our GOP “team” is considered part of the job. And given how narrow the margins are, we’re unwilling to sacrifice a roster spot for someone who refuses to play ball.

It’s a luxury we can no longer afford.

Congressmen and senators aren’t simply judged by how much pork they can peddle. Not anymore — that’s as out-of-fashion as parachute pants, Wham! records, and the mullet. Instead, they’re judged by how effectively they help their “team” advance the national football.

That’s because the Democratic Party has changed. Until the Obama years, it was a coalition party: liberals, unions, Catholics, environmentalists, blue-collar workers, minorities, and women. Post-Obama, it became a vehicle for left-wing radicalism — and this alone became its North Star.

Not compromise. Not meeting in the middle. Its stated goal was “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Which made conservative compromise an impossibility.

The Republican Party and the Democratic Party have evolved to address each other’s deficiencies. It was probably inevitable: The political marketplace demanded it, because they’re competing products.

So, when one party changes, so must the other:

As the Democrats have embraced socialism, Wokeism, and trans/LGBTQ policies, Republican voters have recoiled in horror. We want our party to protect us from their madness.

And that’s an all-hands-on-deck challenge.

The Democratic Party nationalized state elections in 2008 with Barack Obama. It ceased to consist of free-wheeling, locally attuned legislators who represented different segments of the Democratic coalition and became a unified, unapologetic, left-wing movement that placed ideology first.

The Democrats’ goal wasn’t compromise. It was victory.

And during the Obama years, the Democrats won a lot.

The MAGA movement responded by nationalizing elections on the Republican side, too. It’s one of Donald Trump’s most significant legacies, because pre-Trump, we were a party of John Fettermans — always ready to swing a deal and compromise — and the best we could hope for was electing the occasional John Cornyn, who’d sway his GOP colleagues a little to the right.

It was an age when the Republican Party AND the Democratic Party were moving to the left. The only difference was, the Republicans moved slightly slower than the Democrats.

The Trump revolution wasn’t just a response to Democratic Party excesses. It was also a stinging rebuke to the GOP establishment — and to Republican politicians who’d cosplay as senior statesmen, earning mainstream media “kudos” for (repeatedly) bending their knee before their Democratic masters.

Snip.

Under the old rules, “conservative” senators like John Cornyn were incentivized to move to the middle, because their Republican seats were safe. Nobody dared primary a sitting GOP senator; therefore, his only real threat was being too “extreme” and angering the left.

As such, many conservative states and conservative districts had wishy-washy RINOs representing them in Congress. (Many were there for decades at a time.)

It was inefficient. We were squandering precious resources.

Not anymore. Now, on a national level, we expect more from conservative states and conservative districts — not less — and we’ll vote you out of office if you don’t deliver.

Like it or not, there are no local federal elections anymore. Everything is national. For better or worse, politics has become the ultimate team sport.

And the team that maximizes its resources is the one that will win.

If you want a bright future in today’s Republican Party, the path is clear: Be an asset to your team. Become indispensable. Listen to your coach, know your role, and do it well.

And let’s score some frickin’ points!

(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

Finally, it wasn’t all about Cornyn’s manifest deficiencies. Ken Paxton, despite being grossly outspent, was simply the more conservative candidate. Hell, Paxton even tried to unseat Joe Straus for speaker back when he was in the Texas House. He was the most conservative candidate when he first ran for Attorney General. He started fighting the radical dictates of the Obama administration and social justice initiatives here in the state in his first term. As I’ve said many a time before, I say about Paxton what Abraham Lincoln said about Ulysses S. Grant: “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”

For all the money backing him, Cornyn was a weak candidate who’d grown out of touch with the base and state he represented. But Ken Paxton got the nod to be the Republican candidate for U.S. Senator from Texas the old fashioned way: He earned it.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Elections, Republicans, Texas | 21 Comments »

The Democrat Party’s Existential Crises

Sunday, May 10th, 2026

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.

(Hat tip: Director Blue.)

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Border Control, Communism, Democrats, Elections, Global Warming, Media Watch, Obama Scandals, Social Justice Warriors, Waste and Fraud | 10 Comments »

LinkSwarm For March 27, 2026

Friday, March 27th, 2026

More proof of widespread Biden Administration abuse and fraud uncovered, more news from the Iran war, the Trump Administration fights welfare fraud, LA displays both welfare and voting fraud, more lefty sorts stealing funds to feather their own nests, Muslim EPIC City development runs into more roadblocks, and some weird video game news.

It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

Thanks for everyone who contributed to the Pay For Buddy’s Vet Bill Fund. He’s already doing so much better that you can’t tell he was hurt, though some of that is probably the pain pills.

  • The Arctic Frost/FISA abuse was even greater than we thought.

    Newly released records in the Senate investigation into the weaponization of government raise questions about whether the FBI went on a fishing expedition targeting Trump advisors who were never charged with crimes and whether Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prior testimony to Congress was truthful.

    The documents were made public by Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, before a Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee hearing into alleged abuses by the Biden-era FBI and Justice Department in their investigations into then ex-president Donald Trump before and during the 2024 presidential election during its probe code-named “Arctic Frost.” Just the News previously reported that Biden’s FBI paid anti-Trump ‘Sedition Hunters’ as informants in the Arctic Frost probes.

    “If Watergate taught us anything, it is that even a single abuse of power carried out by a handful of individuals can shake the foundations of our Republic,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., Chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights.

    “What we confront today, the Biden administration’s Arctic Frost scheme, is not a single act,” he continued in his opening remarks. “​​It is a modern Watergate trading a break-in at one office for a digital sweep into approximately 100,000 private communications, more than a dozen senators and 1000s of individuals lives.”

    Cruz said that ultimately, “just like Watergate,” the judges, FBI and Justice Department officials involved should be “investigated, tried, impeached, and brought to justice.”

    The scope of Smith’s probe, which centered on Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election results and the events of January 6, 2021, was truly expansive. Grassley previously released records showing that Smith’s office issued nearly 200 subpoenas in his sweeping Arctic Frost-linked case, secretly seeking records on more than 400 Republican personalities and groups. This included more than 160 Republicans–many closely connected to Trump.

    The Arctic Frost was one of four separate probes that targeted Trump and his allies stretching from summer 2016 to January 2025. The other probes were code-named Crossfire Hurricane, Round River, and Plasmic Echo, Just the News reported earlier this month.

    As FBI Director, Patel has personally led the effort to review those probes, uncovering evidence of a far-reaching dragnet that in some cases may have been predicated on false, misleading or uncorroborated justifications, officials previously told Just the News.

    The newly-disclosed records show that the FBI ordered two sweeping subpoenas of FBI Director Kash Patel’s phone records, while he was a private citizen in Trump’s orbit. Each subpoena covered an approximately two-year time frame.

    The FBI’s requests for information included demands for highly personal data of Patel’s, including Patel’s addresses (“mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, and e-mail addresses”), a “call detail record” which lists inbound and outbound calls, text messages and voicemail messages, as well as sources of payment for the phone service, including credit card and bank account numbers. The FBI also demanded expansive internet session data including exact IP addresses, the document shows.

    The FBI also sought–and was granted–non-disclosure orders (NDOs) from federal judges, shielding the existence of the subpoenas from Patel and his lawyers on the grounds that revealing them could result in his “flight from prosecution, destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses and serious jeopardy to the investigation.”

    Susie Wiles, Donald Trump’s then campaign manager and future chief of staff, was also targeted in the probe. The Biden-era FBI reportedly even went so far as to record a private phone call between Wiles and her lawyer in 2023 while she was actively managing the campaign of President Joe Biden’s chief political rival, according to Reuters.

  • The Biden corruption was just as bad as we thought it was. “Tulsi shares declassified docs suggesting Ukraine planned to spend hundreds of millions in USAID money to fund Biden’s campaign.”

    U.S. intelligence intercepted Ukrainian government communications discussing a plot to route hundreds of millions of American tax dollars earmarked for clean energy in the war-torn country and move them to the United States to enrich then-President Joe Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee, according to a declassified intelligence report summarizing the intercepts that was obtained by Just the News….

    ‘The Ukrainian Government and unspecified U.S. Government personnel, through USAID in Kyiv, reportedly developed a plan that would provide hundreds of millions of US taxpayer dollars to fund an infrastructure project for Ukraine that would be used as a cover to send approximately 90% of funds allocated to the DNC to fund Joe Biden’s reelection campaign,’ the declassified summary of the intercepts stated.

    Every American involved in the scheme should be prosecuted. Still doesn’t justify taking Russia’s side in their illegal war of territorial aggression.

  • Long overdue: “Trump Administration Launches Whole-of-Government Effort to Fight Welfare Fraud.”

    Vice President JD Vance and Federal Trade Chairman Andrew Ferguson convened members of the administration’s newly created anti-fraud task force on Friday to lay out the administration’s hopes for rooting out fraud in public programs across the country.

    Established by President Trump via executive order earlier this month, the task force includes newly confirmed fraud-focused Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald and spans multiple government agencies tasked with implementing new fraud detection and reporting protocols, investigating Biden-era policies regarding fraud prevention, proposing new legislative and regulatory tools to combat fraud, and prosecuting illegal behavior when necessary to recover as much in improperly obtained funds as possible.

    According to a task force memo authored by Vance and Ferguson and shared with National Review, the White House will focus primarily on high-spend, low-verification programs that “pay out large sums of money with low confidence or limited information about the ultimate recipients and uses of those funds.” Key programs that fall into this category include benefits administered through Medicare, Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Small Business Administration loans.

    The task force divides fraud into four main categories, according to the memo. The first category is so-called “ghost” billing where there is no real beneficiary and no real service provided, a prime example being a fake business that applied for Paycheck Protection Program relief during the Covid-19 pandemic. The second category are low-quality services provided to real beneficiaries, such as substandard medical care provided to elderly patients at nursing homes or memory-care facilities.

    The third category is “upcoding” or “overbilling,” where fraudsters hand patients manipulated bills. “When hospitals commit fraud, for example, there are often real patients receiving necessary hospitalizations but with exaggerated diagnoses purporting to justify more expensive services than the patient actually needed or received,” the memo reads.

    And the final category outlined by the task force is “necessity” fraud, where a real service is provided to an unqualified beneficiary. “Medicare fraud, for example, often involves real doctors giving real people treatments they don’t need, such as a person who can walk getting a wheelchair or a patient getting a lab test they don’t need,” the memo adds.

    During a brief news conference on Friday, the vice president spotlighted egregious practices by autism daycare programs in Minnesota, where earlier this month one defendant, a Somali man named Abdinajib Yussuf, pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in a $6 million Medicaid reimbursement scheme.

    “The first tragedy is that you have people who pay into the federal government, who pay into the IRS, who pay their taxes, expecting that those taxes will go to help their fellow citizens, and it’s not going to. It’s going to help fraudsters,” Vance said in remarks to the press before leading a closed-door strategy meeting with cabinet members and other senior administration officials working on the effort.

    And the more important tragedy is that you have families who need these services who are unable to get them because people are getting rich off of fraud schemes, instead of making sure that autistic children and their families get access to these resources,” he added.

    The task force has already cracked down on blue states and cities like Los Angeles, where the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid recently suspended 70 home-health providers and hospice centers identified as high-risk fraudulent medical programs.

    Another target is also Minnesota, where federally funded nutrition-assistance fraud and state-agency-related mismanagement ran rampant during Democratic Governor Tim Walz’s tenure while somehow failing to disqualify him from Vice President Kamala Harris’s running-mate shortlist. The White House paused $259 million in federal Medicaid payments to Minnesota earlier this month as part of the administration’s response to the state’s baffling degree of fraud.

    Over the coming months, task force members are also looking to highlight lax verification protocols at the state level that amplify this problem, particularly in states run by Democrats.

    “I think that most citizens probably assume that there’s some verification process that takes place for the receipt of most federal benefits,” said White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller. “The reality is that there is not. This is particularly true in blue states — willfully true in blue states in which all of these programs are operating entirely on the honor system, no verification takes place before individuals are enrolled in or receive these benefits.”

  • “Vance’s Anti-Fraud Task Force Suspends 70 Hospices in Los Angeles. The Senate also confirmed federal prosecutor Colin McDonald to lead the DOJ’s anti-fraud division.”
  • Yesterday the Telegraph told us about a “sinister new power” pulling the strings in Iran: “Ahmad Vahidi is the key cog in the regime’s chain of command.”

    Unlike [Mohammad Bagher] Ghalibaf, Vahidi has remained in the shadows since the war. This is not without reason: our analysis suggests he is likely to be operating as the key cog in the regime’s chain of command and his survival is essential to its continuity. Long before the war, Ali Khamenei had entrusted Vahidi to draw up plans to further militarise the regime. If he outlasts this conflict and the regime survives, he will finally be able to implement this vision – a design that will produce a far more radical and extremist Islamic Republic.

    Vahidi has unmatched experience and influence across the regime’s military, intelligence, and bureaucracy. His career began in the 1980s in the IRGC’s Intelligence Bureau, made up of the regime’s most ideologically loyal operatives. As the IRGC’s deputy for intelligence, he was hand-picked to join a secretive cohort to accompany Khamenei to visit North Korea – a trip designed to acquire missile and nuclear technology.

    During the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), Vahidi was also one of the original members of the Ramadan Headquarters, a unit within the IRGC created to form Islamist terrorist groups globally and overseen by Khamenei.

    Upon assuming the supreme leadership in 1989, Khamenei created the notorious Quds Force – the IRGC’s extraterritorial terror branch – and appointed Vahidi as its first commander. It was a testament to his loyalty. Vahidi demonstrated in that role that his vision to export terrorism was far more global than his notorious successor Qasem Soleimani.

    Under Vahidi’s command, the IRGC orchestrated the bombing of a Jewish cultural centre in Argentina in 1994, the 1996 Khobar Towers attack in Saudi Arabia, and secretly dispatched operatives to Europe to train Islamist Mujahideen – including members of al-Qaeda – during the Bosnian war. This résumé would earn him a spot on Interpol’s wanted list in 2007.

    Today:

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Another ZeroHedge roundup.
    • US signals to allies no ground invasion coming, with thousands of troops still en route: Iran denies requesting Donald Trump’s 10-day halt; Israel attacks steel & industrial sites. Also, Khondab Heavy Water Research Reactor, part of the Arak Nuclear Complex, targeted. Yellow Cake factory in Yazd province hit.
    • Escalation on all fronts: IRGC HQ targeted by US-Israsel; Iran signals expansion by naming UAE targets, hitting Kuwait ports and sending drones on Riyadh. Iran newly warning it will hit Gulf industry.
    • Rubio tells G7 foreign ministers war will continue for another 2-4 weeks.
    • Israel doubles down amid reports of manpower strain: IDF chief warns of manpower pressure even as Defense Minister Katz vows to “intensify and expand” strikes.
    • Risk rises that Iran is holding back more advanced missiles for a prolonged war: WSJ writes “The US and Israel are pounding Iran’s missile-launching sites… But Tehran’s missiles keep flying.”

    The last seems tinged with ZeroHedge’s usual Iran war pessimism. Ever fewer missiles have been flying as time goes on, and the places they’re manufactured have been hammered.

  • “Iranian Atomic Energy Organization: US and Israeli airstrikes target uranium processing plant.” Good. Bomb every nuclear-related facility twice-over, then make the rubble bounce.
  • “General Behnam Rezaei, IRGC Navy Deputy Intelligence Chief, was killed alongside Alireza Tangsiri.”
  • “House Ethics Committee Finds Florida Democrat Used FEMA Funds to Back Her Own Campaign.”

    A special House Ethics Committee found Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick guilty of 25 total ethics violations, after a three-year investigation into allegations that the Florida Democrat stole millions in federal relief funds.

    Following a seven-hour televised trial, members deliberated through the night before voting, finding Cherfilus-McCormick guilty of almost all the charges against her — 25 of the 27.

    “I’m as pure as the driven snow!” denials snipped.

    In November, a federal grand jury indicted Cherfilus-McCormick, alleging she stole $5 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Cherfilus-McCormick’s family operates a health care company, Trinity Healthcare Services, and received FEMA funds for a Covid vaccination contract.

    According to the DOJ, the $5 million payment was an overpayment, and the congresswoman and her brother never paid back the funds to the government. Rather, the pair funneled the funds through various accounts and used the money to back Cherfilus-McCormick’s 2022 special election campaign, which she ultimately won.

    Snip.

    Cherfilus-McCormick and her siblings “funneled more than $500,000 originating from Trinity into various outside organizations that made expenditures on behalf of the campaign,” Sydney Bellwoar, the committee’s lawyer, said.

    Further, Bellwoar said “the most egregious example” was when Cherfilus-McCormick received $2 million directly from Trinity Health into her campaign in July 2021, to forge the appearance of a robust campaign infrastructure.

    Seize everything she owns to pay back and sentence her to extended prison time.

  • Sen Rand Paul offers up a simple, elegant solution that Democrats will fight tooth and claw against:

  • DataRepublican says that John Thune is trying to pull a sneaky maneuver to kill the SAVE Act.

    Hello Senator Thune,

    Let’s expose what you’re really doing with “reconciliation.”

    You announced it yesterday, eleven months after the House passed the SAVE America Act. You’re not trying to pass this bill. You’re trying to kill it in a way you can blame on process.

    Here’s how we know:

    Reconciliation requires the Senate parliamentarian to rule that provisions are “budgetary.” Citizenship verification is not budgetary. Photo ID mandates are not budgetary. The parliamentarian will gut the bill. Then you’ll shrug and say “we tried.” We see through you.

    Meanwhile, you WON’T use the tools that actually work:

    Rule XIX limits each senator to two speeches per legislative day. Keep the Senate in continuous session, file cloture daily, and the filibuster exhausts in ~12-20 days. You dismissed it as “complicated.” Because if you tried and succeeded, you’d have to actually pass the bill.

    Harry Reid nuked the filibuster in 2013 when he wanted results.

    Mitch McConnell changed Senate rules THREE times and canceled the August recess.

    Chuck Schumer used reconciliation within months on a 50-50 Senate.

    You have 53 seats. You’ve changed nothing, canceled nothing, and waited eleven months.

    Now let’s talk donors:

    • Goldman Sachs: $150K to you – top H-1B user
    • Google: $75K – lobbies against E-Verify
    • Meta: $72.5K – Zuckerberg’s FWD[.]us pushes mass immigration
    • Wells Fargo: $90K – banks undocumented immigrants

    Same corporations sponsor Punchbowl News, where you sit for “Fly Out Days” which nobody watches except Congress staffers and K Street lobbyists who pays premium bucks for legislative intelligence. Their reporter then telegraphs to the audience the SAVE Act “will ultimately fail.”

    Corporate money flows to you AND to the outlet that frames your inaction as inevitable.

    We see the loop.

    You called grassroots anger a “paid influencer ecosystem.” YOU are the paid influencer. You take the wrong side of a 80% issue because you are indistinguishable from a K Street mouthpiece, and an ineffective one to boot who won’t bend the rules to get anything passed.

    What we want:

    1. Force a real talking filibuster.
    2. Stop hiding behind process.
    3. Pass the SAVE America Act.

    YOU will become the reason that we will have our butts kicked in midterms. Not Candace Owens, not Nick Fuentes, not anyone else. You and you alone, and all because you want to make the 200 or so viewers of Punchbowl Fly Out Days happy. You’re living in a K Street information bubble, addicted to the comforts and praises of lobbyists masquerading as journalists. You mistake the steak and martini dinners you get invited to as your own constituents.

    You are not “moderate.” The SAVE America Act has 98% support among Republicans. Name one other thing that has 98% support. You are an extreme minority who prides himself on being a calm leader, when in reality you are well in the running for the most ineffective Majority leader of all time.

    Prove me wrong. Do the bare modicum of effort. Not symbolic. Actual effort. Cancel the recess. Get SAVE America Act passed.

  • More proof of that voter registration fraud Democrats swear up and down don’t exist.

    Paid activists in Los Angeles, California, have been caught on hidden camera paying homeless people on skid row to forge signatures of registered voters on ballot initiatives.

    O’Keefe Media Group (OMG) released part Two of its undercover investigation into the Democrats’ blatant election fraud operation in L.A. on Tuesday.

    California’s Republican gubernatorial frontrunner Steve Hilton commented on X: “They paid homeless people cash and drugs on Skid Row to forge your signature. Your name. Your vote. Stolen by a crackhead with a clipboard — while Gavin Newsom looked the other way.”

    Hilton added: “This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s on tape. And not one Democrat is outraged. That’s because THEY DID IT ON PURPOSE.”

    Part One showed petitioners offering cash to homeless people and drug addicts for their signatures. The shocking new video shows the activists, armed with printed lists of voter names and addresses, taking the scheme to another level.

    “Fraudulent petitioners on Skid Row are now paying the homeless people to forge names, forge addresses and forge signatures of registered voters,” O’Keefe says at the beginning of Part Two.

    Rather than registering the Skid Row denizens to vote, activists gave them $2–$3 in cash to commit forgery and election fraud in what OMG called “a coordinated system.”

    O’Keefe stated that the operation was observed on nearly every street corner in downtown Los Angeles.

    “The scheme appeared to be present in whatever direction we walked,” he noted.

    The goal of the operation, according to OMG, is to “ensure the information matches official records so he signature passes verification.”

    The workers handed out post-it notes with the names of a single voter written on them to each of the homeless dupes.

    Lots of “activists” need to go to prison.

  • “‘Not a done deal‘: Democrats start to sweat over Virginia’s redistricting referendum. The unique nature of the April special election and the state’s recent redistricting history have presented challenges for Democrats, even as they hold a financial edge in the race.” “Some supporters of the Virginia referendum acknowledge the challenge of convincing voters to back a gerrymandered map when Democrats, who several years ago backed the formation of the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission, have criticized Republicans for similar moves.” Ya think? (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • It turns out that far-left, pro-Jihad policies aren’t even popular in illinois Democrat primaries. “6 Squad Members, Including 2 Muslims, Lose in Illinois Dem Primaries.”

    Democrats have been hyping their wins in very specialized races. And the Left has been declaring that it’s going to finish devouring and digesting the Democrats.

    On paper, it should be looking good. The public is dissatisfied. The Left’s program of socialism disguised as economic populism and antisemitism disguised as anti-Zionism should be selling. Except the Illinois wipeout suggests it’s not.

    Again, on paper Obamaville, where the dead vote and the unions run everything, should have been a good choice. Plenty of leftists have been elected here. And the Democrat primaries in many urban areas are virtually owned by the Left.

    But 6 potential Squaddies, including two Muslim candidates, lost Democrat congressional primary races.

    The media and the Left (but I repeat myself) are blaming AIPAC and the newly combative pro-Israel lobby, which sees itself being NRA’d out of the Democrats, is happy to take credit, but its results were mostly mixed.

    So what does explain the Left taking a beating in primaries it should have been able to dominate?

    Despite all the anti-ICE hysteria, radicalism fatigue may be setting in. Enough Democrat primary voters showed no interest in voting for the ‘podcast class’, the Bernie Brats, Hamas fan girls and the rest of the radicals.

    The Left was hoping that Mamdani’s victory was a bellwether, but just like Obama’s win what it really showed was that a smooth radical isn’t supposed to sound like one. Democrats didn’t want. The Bernie people, the Justice Dems and that ilk lost badly in Illinois because maybe radicalism isn’t what the Democrat voter wants right now.

  • “Justice Dept Settles Lt. Gen Michael Flynn Lawsuit for $1.2 Million.”
  • Ukraine war: “Huge Drone Strike on Primorsk Oil Terminal Near St. Petersburg”
  • They also hit the Ust-Luga oil terminal in the same general area, and it was still burning 24 hours later. They also hit two oil tankers in the same strike.
  • But that’s not all! They hit the same Ust-Luga oil terminal again less than a day later. “Russia has lost 40% of its oil export capacity.”
  • One of Russia’s newest warships, a Project 23550 icebreaker, is now damaged and listing heavily after drone strike.
  • Ukraine counterattack retakes 450 square kilometers in Dnipropetrovsk region
  • Ukraine has also cleared the last Russian troops from the city of Kupiansk.
  • But Russia started their own Spring offensive…it didn’t go well. “HUGE Losses for Russia Near Lyman.”
  • “U. North Texas Cutting up to 70 Programs in Effort to Trim Deficit” including “women’s and gender studies, LGBTQ studies, Mexican American studies, Africana studies, Asian studies as well as dance, geology and special education.” Most of those sound like they should be killed, and the rest are unnecessary luxuries if no one is taking them.

    Image vaguely related

  • “Judge Freezes Utility District Tied to Islamic EPIC City Development.”

    Attorney General Ken Paxton has obtained a court order halting actions by an EPIC City-linked municipal utility district.

    The case centers on allegations that the Double R Municipal Utility District No. 2A has been used to advance a controversial development project organized by the East Plano Islamic Center by skirting state oversight and standard MUD-creation procedures. The project, originally known as EPIC City, has been rebranded as the Meadow.

    Judge Christine Nowak’s order blocks the district and its board from taking further steps to support the development while the litigation continues.

    The state’s lawsuit focuses on a 2025 special meeting where the Double R MUD board allegedly resigned en masse, installed new directors at a remote roadside location identified only by GPS coordinates, and then quickly voted to annex more than 400 acres tied to the EPIC project.

    State lawyers say that maneuver effectively transformed the MUD into a vehicle for EPIC City’s backers, allowing them to expand taxing authority and infrastructure support without going through the process of forming a new district.

    After the annexation, regulators requested documents to confirm that the new board members met legal requirements to hold public office and levy taxes on residents inside the district.

    According to the suit, records submitted by Double R MUD showed the individuals did not meet statutory qualifications—a finding the attorney general’s office said casts doubt on every action the board took, including the EPIC City annexation.

    The state is asking the court to remove the disputed board members, unwind the 402.5-acre annexation tied to EPIC City, and restore what Paxton describes as lawful governance of the utility district.

  • More: “Hunt County Rejects Plans for Controversial EPIC City. Commissioners disapproved the Islamic development based on deficiencies in the plat application.”
  • “Texas Moves To Block Professional & Commercial Licenses for Illegal Aliens. The rule comes after a recent opinion by Attorney General Ken Paxton requiring licensing authorities to obtain social security numbers from applicants.”
  • “Monica Cannon-Grant, a Black Lives Matter activist who was named ‘Bostonian of the Year’ by the Boston Globe, was ordered to pay back every dime she stole from her nonprofit, unemployment benefits, and other fraudulent practices, amounting to almost $225,000. U.S. District Court Judge Angel Kelley sentenced Cannon-Grant to four years’ probation, six months of home detention, and 100 hours of community service. Federal prosecutors, however, recommended 18 months in prison. Although Cannon-Grant dodged time behind bars, she must return all of the money she managed to bilk from her nonprofit.” Kelley was appointed by Biden, and I bet if Cannon-Grant hadn’t been a leftwing political activist, she would have received prison time.
  • Important tip: “Ultra-pure copper” bought from China shouldn’t stick to a magnet. Plus, make sure the Chinese companies you’re buying materials from actually exists…
  • “Champagne socialists in designer clothes visit Cuba to host concert, paint mural, stay in fancy hotel during rolling blackouts.” Including Hasan Piker and Code Pink.

    Just hours after Irish rappers Kneecap blasted the amps and turned a Havana concert into a rave for Code Pink activists chanting anti-blockade slogans, reports claim local hospital went dark and ventilator patients died.

    Meanwhile, members of the communist flotilla stayed in 5-star hotels with the lights blazing and AC running.

    No one cashes in on capitalism faster than the clowns preaching communism.

  • Super Micro employees charged with smuggling Nvidia chips to China.

    The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has charged associates of an unidentified U.S. server maker with illegally diverting billions of dollars in Nvidia-powered servers to China.

    The U.S. government has been trying to figure out how high-powered chips have reached China without authorization, as American artificial intelligence companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI face challenges from DeepSeek and other Chinese rivals.

    In an indictment unsealed Thursday, the U.S. government alleged that Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, Ruei-Tsan “Steven” Chang and Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun worked together to violate the Export Control Reform Act.

    The server company’s products containing Nvidia chips “are subject to strict U.S. export controls barring their sale to China without a license,” the plaintiff said in the indictment. “Those controls are in place to protect U.S. national security and foreign policy interests, among other things.”

  • The cost of the AI bubble.

    Artificial intelligence may well be the most important technological development of the coming decade-and that is exactly why the current capital surge around it warrants skepticism. History is littered with transformative innovations that were nonetheless disastrously overbuilt and mispriced in their early phases. Austrian Business Cycle Theory was never a children’s story in which every boom ends with clowns, ashes, and worthless machinery; its real claim is subtler and nastier. When the price of time is falsified-when interest rates are pushed below their natural rate-often proxied, however imperfectly, by modern estimates of the neutral rate-entrepreneurs are encouraged to undertake projects that are more roundabout, more capital-intensive, and more time-sensitive than underlying saving and final demand can actually support. The neutral rate is a policy construct; the natural rate is an economic reality. Some of those projects may still embody genuine innovation.

    The problem is not that AI must be fake; it is that a very real technological advance can be financed, priced, and physically built in ways that are wildly uneconomic.

    That distinction matters because AI is about as roundabout as modern capitalism gets. This is not a boom in apps and slogans alone; it is a boom in data centers, power, cooling, transformers, specialized semiconductors, fiber, land, and the commodities and construction needed to house and feed all of it. Reuters reports that Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are expected to spend more than $630 billion combined on AI-related infrastructure in 2026, up sharply from 2025, while separate Reuters reporting says Amazon alone projects roughly $200 billion of 2026 capex. Analysts also expect the hyperscalers’ debt issuance to keep climbing, with BofA lifting its 2026 forecast to $175 billion after Amazon’s jumbo deal and Reuters noting that these firms issued $121 billion in bonds in 2025 versus a 2020–2024 annual average of just $28 billion. In Austrian terms, this is not consumption drunkenness; it is higher-order production marching deep into the structure of capital with a flamethrower and an Excel model.

    Snip.

    The most charitable case is that AI is a genuine general-purpose technology whose economics are merely messy in the early innings. OpenAI says ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly users as of late February, and Bloomberg reports OpenAI’s annualized revenue topped $20 billion in 2025 while Anthropic is tracking near that level as well. There are also signs of real productivity gains in narrow use cases, especially coding and selected support tasks. But the bill is arriving much faster than the profits: Bain estimated the industry would need roughly $2 trillion in annual revenue by 2030 to support projected compute demand, yet expected a gap of about $800 billion. That is not a business model; that is a promissory note written in GPU ink.

    The more worrying Austrian angle is not simply overvaluation in public equities, but miscoordination in the capital structure. If chips depreciate economically faster than accountants admit, if grid interconnections lag by years, if open models compress pricing power, and if customers love AI demos more than they love paying enterprise invoices, then the industry has a classic ABCT problem: complementary capital arrives in the wrong proportions and at the wrong times. And though not easily captured in formal models, technological history is clear: infrastructure-heavy systems rarely stay that way for long, and early capital often pays the price. The New York Fed warns that r-star is an estimate, not an oracle, but the larger point survives that caveat: if market rates were held too low relative to the economy’s true intertemporal balance, then the resulting investment pattern will look profitable only until bottlenecks, replacement cycles, and cost of capital reassert themselves. Bloomberg reports OpenAI has discussed infrastructure commitments above $1.4 trillion, while Anthropic has announced a $50 billion U.S. data-center push; meanwhile, the IEA has warned of grid-connection queues, transformer shortages, and permitting delays for the power build-out data centers require. A boom can survive many indignities, but not all of them at once.

    So: does AI constitute malinvestment? The best answer is that AI almost certainly contains both real innovation and a large malinvestment component.

  • A small droneswarm buzzed an American nuclear bomber base.

    Barksdale Air Force Base (BAFB), a major U.S. strategic bomber installation in northwest Louisiana, has just experienced an unusually serious series of unauthorized drone incursions over its most sensitive areas.

    More than a dozen unsanctioned drones repeatedly swarmed a US Air Force base that is home to a nuclear bomber fleet — and were able to resist efforts to bring them down via jamming technology, according to military officials.

    The restricted airspace of Barksdale Air Force Base in Bossier City, Louisiana, was infiltrated by “multiple unauthorized drones” between March 9 and March 15, a base spokesperson told The Post.

    The 22-acre installation located east of Shreveport, hosts a fleet of B-52 bombers which can carry out nuclear strikes with “worldwide precision,” according to the Air Force.

    As an Air Force Global Strike Command base, Barksdale also plays a crucial role in the Air Force’s nuclear defense capabilities…

    Military officials report that more than 12 to 15 unauthorized drones swarmed the base, which hosts the U.S. nuclear B-52 bomber fleet.

    The drones resisted jamming efforts, with multiple waves detected.

    Snip.

    The briefing includes a determination that the drones were different than what the typical consumer could purchase off the shelf. They appeared to be custom built and required “advanced knowledge” of signal operations.

    The analysts said “with high confidence” they expected unauthorized drones to continue to operate in and around Barksdale Air Force Base in the immediate future.

    “The drone incursions at BAFB pose a significant threat to public safety and national security since they require the flight line to be shut down while also putting manned aircrafts already inflight in the area at risk,” the document said.

  • Maybe his hatred for the police will finally be his undoing. “Resignation Demands Mount for Travis County DA Garza over Prosecutorial Misconduct Allegations.”

    Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza is facing calls for his resignation over accusations that he withheld evidence in prosecuting a police officer for actions taken during a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Austin.

    “Jose Garza’s habitual misconduct and his lack of prosecutorial experience puts our entire community at risk,” said Austin Police Retired Officers Association (APROA) President Dennis Farris in a statement.

    “Felony cases, when properly handled, present opportunities for the innocent to be absolved of serious allegations, for the guilty to be held accountable and for the residents of Travis County to have confidence in the judicial system. In order for these principles to be upheld, Travis County needs a new district attorney.”

    Farris was responding to recent revelations about Garza’s prosecution of Austin police officer Chance Bretches.

    In 2022, Garza charged Bretches with Aggravated Assault, two years after an anti-police demonstration spurred by the death of George Floyd. During the protest, Bretches fired a “less lethal” bean bag round, resulting in severe injury to a woman who said she was a volunteer providing medical assistance to protestors.

    In 2024, Garza brought additional charges against Bretches for Aggravated Assault by a Public Servant, Deadly Conduct, and Assault.

    Although prosecutors are required to provide the defense with exculpatory evidence in accordance with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland and Texas’ Michael Morton Act, Garza did not disclose alleged “secret” meetings in 2023 with city officials to discuss the possibility of charging the City of Austin.

    Last week, attorney Doug O’Connell asked Travis County District Court Judge Karen Sage to dismiss the case on the grounds that Garza violated Bretches’ constitutional due process rights and violated the law by not disclosing the meetings or related communications. O’Connell also argued that Garza’s actions are part of a pattern of misconduct.

    “This goes to the issue of why dismissing the case is the only solution, because how will the judge ever know whether they turned over all the evidence,” O’Connell told The Texan.

    Courts previously sanctioned Garza for withholding evidence in the manslaughter prosecution of two Williamson County Sheriff’s deputies, and an investigator also accused the DA of hiding evidence in the trial of Daniel Perry.

    Perry was convicted in 2023 of murdering Air Force veteran and Black Lives Matter protester Garrett Foster. Gov. Greg Abbott pardoned Perry in 2024.

    In addition to APROA, the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas (CLEAT) has also called for Garza’s resignation, and the incoming president of the nonprofit Central Texas Public Safety Commission, Jennifer Stevens, told CBS Austin that Garza’s prosecution of police officers instead of criminal defendants is contributing to division between the Travis County District Attorney’s Office (TCDAO) and law enforcement.

    “There can be no worse violation of the oath taken by a district attorney than to intentionally deny a defendant a fair trial. It is a direct violation of their constitutional rights,” said CLEAT Executive Director Robert Leonard in a statement.

    In December, a Texas appeals court overturned the conviction of Austin police officer Christopher Taylor, who had been prosecuted by Garza over the 2019 shooting death of Mauris DeSilva.

    Abbott responded to the new allegations against Garza in a social media post.

    “All of this will be taken into consideration when I have the final say on the fate of the police officer. This DA’s failure to prosecute murderers & repeatedly letting dangerous criminals go free, while prioritizing prosecuting police, will have consequences,” wrote Abbott.

    The sooner Garza is gone, the sooner citizens can stop dying because he let criminal scumbags back on the street.

  • “Dallas and Williamson County GOPs to Return to Countywide Voting After Primary Election Day Confusion. At least 13,000 Dallas residents reportedly showed up to the wrong polling place on March 3.”
  • “Aaron Reitz Endorses Former Rival Mayes Middleton in Attorney General Runoff.”
  • America’s most prolific serial killers now burns in hell. Kermit Gosnell dies in prison at 85.

    A Philadelphia grand jury, in its investigation of Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society abortion center, labeled it a ‘house of horrors’ and initially sought charges for hundreds of murders of babies born alive and then killed.

    Charges were ultimately limited to seven murder counts ‘after pressure from senior political and law enforcement officials,’ according to accounts from those covering the case.

    The facility functioned as a ‘pill mill by day and an ‘abortion mill’ by night,’ federal authorities noted….

    Witnesses described shocking details: Baby A was large enough that employees took photos after the killing, with Gosnell joking the baby was ‘big enough to walk around with me or walk me to the bus stop.’

    Other infants showed signs of life, including breathing and movement, before being killed.

    Gosnell was also convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the 2009 death of 41-year-old patient Karnamaya Mongar, a Bhutanese refugee who died from an overdose of anesthesia during a botched abortion.

    He faced more than 200 additional counts and was found guilty on most, including 21 felony counts of performing illegal abortions beyond Pennsylvania’s 24-week limit and violations of the state’s 24-hour informed-consent law.

  • Finally. “International Olympic Committee Bans Male Athletes from Women’s Sports.” Pretty soon the only place radical transsexism will still hold sway is among 2028 Democratic Presidential candidates…
  • “Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock) released his interim committee charges on Thursday,” and he’s still appointing Democrats.

    The House Select Committee on Governmental Oversight will have over a dozen members, with state Rep. Cody Vasut (R-Angleton) serving as the chair and state Rep. Armando Walle (D-Houston) as co-chair.

    The other representatives on it will be state Reps. Richard Hayes (R-Denton), Brooks Landgraf (R-Odessa), Mitch Little (R-Lewisville), AJ Louderback (R-Victoria), Christian Manuel (D-Beaumont), Eddie Morales (D-Eagle Pass), Richard Raymond (D-Laredo), Shelby Slawson (R-Stephenville), Carl Tepper (R-Lubbock), Ellen Troxclair (R-Lakeway, and Erin Zwiener (D-Driftwood).

  • “Meta to Pay $375 Million Penalty After Jury Finds Company Endangered Children in Landmark Case.”

    A jury in New Mexico determined on Tuesday that Meta misled consumers about the safety of its platforms and put children in harm’s way by failing to protect them from sexual predators.

    The jury ordered meta to pay a $375 million penalty, significantly lower than the $2.2 billion that New Mexico sought, based on the total number of violations and a $5,000 fine per violation. Meta was found to have violated New Mexico’s unfair-practices act

  • “OpenAI pulls the plug on its Sora AI video app.” Presumably it wasn’t popular enough, or was too resource intense, to make money.
  • Unexpected headlines: “Federal Appeals Court Reinstates Dismissed Indictment for Roblox Islamic Terror Threat.”
  • Speaking of weird video game threats: “Five Nights at Epstein’s Island.”
  • Adam Savage reorganizes his storage drawers. I’m not saying everyone should watch all 40 minutes of this, but if you have a workshop full of tiny components you have trouble organizing, you might find his method useful.
  • Tom Scott returns to YouTube after a two year absence. I’m not necessarily super excited for the particular shows he’s returning with (a tour through all of England’s counties, with something interesting in each), but I’ll probably dip into it because I liked his previous work, where he traveled around the world and explained interesting things.
  • Mr. T meets a Make-A-Wish cancer survivor he first met back in 1986.
  • Last week: Marlene Dietrich’s guns. This week: Chuck Norris’ guns. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “TSA Reduces Delays By Eliminating Colonoscopy Portion Of Search.”
  • “Local Couple Enjoys Romantic Two-Week Honeymoon In TSA Line.”
  • “Guy Who Pushed Over Reacher’s Motorcycle Announces Plan To Shoot John Wick’s Dog.”
  • Those are some happy puppies.

    (Hat tip Ace of Spades HQ.)

    • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Budget, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Military, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Technology, Texas, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 12 Comments »

    LinkSwarm For February 20, 2026

    Friday, February 20th, 2026

    Everyone favors Voter ID except Democrats trying to cling to power, America’s big stick gets bigger, Trump’s tariffs hit a setback at the Supreme Court, another insane tranny shooter, Ukraine recaptures more land from Russia, another Pulitzer Prize winning leftist pedo, more Paxton lawsuits, and a new party rises on the right in the UK.

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

    On the personal front, I may need to buy a new dryer. We’ll see what the repairman says Monday…

  • “Vast Majority Of Americans Want Voter ID And Democrats Don’t Care.”

    Are voter ID requirements considered a controversial idea in the eyes of US citizens? If you watch the establishment media or follow leaders in the Democratic Party then you might think bills like the SAVE Act are the end of freedom as we know it. However, outside the echo chambers of DNC propaganda, the vast majority of Americans have no problem whatsoever with people proving their US citizenship before they vote in local and federal elections.

    The widespread support for voter ID is undeniable. Surveys from the past year including those from Pew and Gallup show that, regardless of party or ethnicity, Americans citizens want elections to be protected from manipulation through mass illegal immigration.

    A Pew Research Center survey from August 2025 found that 83% of Americans favor requiring all voters to show government-issued photo ID to vote. This includes:

    95% of Republicans

    71% of Democrats

    Only 16% of people oppose it.

    A Gallup poll from 2024 shows 84% support for requiring photo ID to vote, with 98% of Republicans, 84% of independents and 67% of Democrats in approval.

    A recent CNN segment featuring number cruncher Harry Enten confirms that the backing for the SAVE Act is also dominant regardless of ethnicity: 85% of white voter, 82% of Latino voters and 76% of black voters all want voter ID. It’s difficult to find many issues which the American public universally supports at this level.

    Democrat leaders, however, don’t care that the majority of their own base wants voter ID laws. Party officials and the left-wing media have engaged in a shameless propaganda campaign designed to frighten the public into opposing the SAVE Act, despite their previous platforms defending majority rule.

    That’s because they view voter integrity laws as an existential threat to their power. If they can’t cheat, they can’t win…

  • The big stick gets bigger. “Ford Carrier Group Enters Mediterranean To Join Biggest US Build-Up Since 2003 Iraq War.”

    Open source monitors as well as US and Middle East media have confirmed that the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, has entered the Mediterranean Sea, having sailed passed the Strait of Gibraltar on Friday.

    This is the second carrier strike group expected to soon operate directly in the CENTCOM area of responsibility, amid the massive military build-up and pressure campaign against Iran. It was sent from the Caribbean earlier this month, extending its planned deployment.

    The USS Mahan Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, which is accompanying the USS Gerald R. Ford, is also now crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, maritime tracking analysis shows.

    The aircraft carrier will likely take several more days to reach the Middle East and be poised to operate against Iran – so it looks to be in place by start of next week.

    According to Bloomberg and other outlets, the US has now amassed the biggest force in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. There is administration talk of “limited strikes” – but clearly Washington is getting ready for all escalation scenarios.

  • The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs.

    The Supreme Court (6-3 in a majority opinion written by CJ Roberts) has ruled that Trump’s tariffs exceeded his authority.

    We decide whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) authorizes the President to impose tariffs.

    ***

    The President asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope. In light of the breadth, history, and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorization to exercise it. IEEPA’s grant of authority to “regulate . . . importation” falls short. IEEPA contains no reference to tariffs or duties. The Government points to no statute in which Congress used the word “regulate” to authorize taxation. And until now no President has read IEEPA to confer such power. We claim no special competence in matters of economics or foreign affairs. We claim only, as we must, the limited role assigned to us by Article III of the Constitution. Fulfilling that role, we hold that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.

  • Trump says he has alternative means to impose tariffs. “Effective immediately, all national security tariffs under Section 232 and existing Section 301 tariffs remain in place… Today, I will sign an order to impose a 10% global tariff under Section 122 over and above our normal tariffs already being charged.”
  • A sign that Trump’s border control policies are having an effect: the percentage of foreign born workers in the American economy is dropping.

    In the past 12 months (January 2025 to January 2026) there are fewer foreign-born workers employed and more native-born workers in jobs. The time period roughly corresponds to the first year of Pres. Trump’s second term.

    The tale of the tape:

    • Foreign-born population (age 16+) -707,000
    • Foreign-born in jobs: -97,000
    • American-born population (age 16+) +3,004,000
    • American-born in jobs: +840,000

    That’s the first drop in half a century.

  • Another week, another insane tranny shooter.

    The murder-suicide at a Rhode Island hockey rink on Monday is just the latest in a recent string of murders allegedly carried out by self-identifying transgender perpetrators or by those seemingly inspired by transgender ideology.

    Robert Dorgan — who police say shot and killed his ex-wife and one of their sons during a high school hockey game this week — had previously insisted he believed he was actually a transgender woman despite being a man. A local TV station said that “An unnamed woman, who identified herself as Dorgan’s daughter, has since come forward, telling WCVB that her father ‘has mental health issues.'”

    “He shot my family and he’s dead now,” she reportedly said. Dorgan, who killed himself after the murders on Monday, had also expressed pro-Nazi sentiments, and according to The New York Post, was adorned with “vile neo-Nazi tattoos.”

    He is only the most recent example of high-profile attacks linked to transgender perpetrators or transgender ideology, including mass shootings at Christian schools, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the attempted assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

  • Progress: “Major Manhattan Hospital, Massachusetts Health Care System End ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Minors.”
  • Setback: “Judge Orders California Hospital to Resume Gender Transition Procedures for Minors.” Democrats seem to love mutilating children too much to give it up.
  • “Kansas’ governor vetoed a bill that banned men from the women’s room. The legislature overrode her.” “Even in an uber-red state, Democrat governors are still going to toe the party line.”
  • Ukraine carried out a big drone strike on the Velikiye Luki military oil depot, nearly 500 miles from the border.
  • Ukraine captured islands in the Dnipro river near Kherson City.
  • They also destroyed a BK-16 fast patrol boat with a drone, Russia’s first naval loss of 2026.
  • Scott Pinkser thinks Trump’s deal with India spells doom for the Russian economy, because they won’t allow those shadow fleet tankers to continue on to China. Quoting Peter Zeihan:

    If the Russians have lost their single largest source of income, that will manifest on the battlefield. The Chinese may be supplying the Russians with all the gear that they can pay for, but the key thing there is: pay for.

    And if the Russians can’t [pay], then a drone war where the Russians can’t get enough drones is one where the Russians start losing territory.

    Just like they’ve lost territory the last two weeks. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • Satellite photos show an additional 24 Russian fighter jets decommissioned since 2023 due to lack of spares.
  • Russian tanker crashes into loading crane at Ust-Luga. Comrade Vodakovitch takes the wheel again…
  • Price of cucumbers double in Russia. I’m mildly fascinated by those per-country yearly cucumber consumption numbers. 12 kilograms about 26 pounds a year, which doesn’t seem high if you’re including pickles, as that’s only one small jar of pickles every other week. But China’s 55 kilograms a year works out to two pounds a year per person. That’s a lot of damn cucumbers…
  • Democracy dies in protecting sex offenders that check the right boxes:

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Paxton Sues Dallas Officials for Defying Voters’ Police Funding Mandate.”

    Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing Dallas officials, accusing them of defying a voter‑approved mandate to boost police funding under Proposition U.

    Proposition U, approved by Dallas voters in November 2024, amended the city charter to require at least 50 percent of “excess” annual revenue be directed to public safety. The charter language earmarks those dollars first for the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System, then for increasing officer pay and growing the force to at least 4,000 sworn officers.

    Paxton’s lawsuit, filed in a Dallas County district court, targets the City of Dallas, City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert, and Chief Financial Officer Jack Ireland Jr. for allegedly underfunding public safety in violation of the charter.

    The attorney general argues that city officials “acted beyond their legal authority” by using an improper calculation of excess revenue that drastically reduced the amount legally owed to police priorities.

    For the 2025–26 fiscal year, the city’s own projections reportedly show about $220 million in excess revenue above the prior year. But Ireland told the Dallas City Council that excess revenue totaled only $61 million—roughly a quarter of that amount—after excluding large categories of city income from the calculation.

    Paxton’s filing notes that the city did not cite any state or federal law restricting the use of the excluded revenue, which would be required to legally omit those funds from the Proposition U formula.

    Because of this narrower calculation, the proposed city budget allocates far less money to police pensions, officer pay, and hiring than voters required, Paxton says. The lawsuit contends that Dallas’ current hiring plan leaves the department hundreds of officers short of the 4,000‑officer minimum mandated in the charter amendment.

    Paxton’s lawsuit also points to another provision of Proposition U that city officials allegedly ignored altogether. The charter requires Dallas to hire an independent third‑party firm each year to conduct a police compensation survey comparing Dallas officer pay and benefits to those of other major North Texas departments.

    According to information obtained by the state, no such survey was conducted, despite the charter’s mandatory language. That failure, Paxton argues, makes it impossible for city leadership to honestly claim they are meeting the voter‑approved requirement to make Dallas police pay competitive in the region.

    Blue city functionaries hate funding the police because the hard left can’t get any of their sticky fingers into that pile of money…

  • “Authorities Allege Nearly 200 Fraudulent Transactions at Harris County Tax Office.

    Two former Harris County Tax Office employees and two local business owners are facing first-degree felony charges in connection with what authorities say was a coordinated vehicle registration fraud operation.

    Court filings allege the group worked together to process registrations and title transfers that bypassed required state safeguards, collecting bribes in exchange for pushing transactions through the system.

    Adriana De La Rosa, 43, owner of Bella’s Multiservices in South Houston, has been arrested. Oswaldo “Oz” Perez, 51, who is affiliated with the same business, remains wanted.

    Former tax office employees Sarah Ambria Anderson, 31, and Renisha Touche Wilkins, 35, were also charged. Both were dismissed from their positions in April 2024.

    Investigators allege the activity centered on the Scarsdale branch of the Harris County Tax Office, where nearly 200 questionable transactions were processed. According to reporting from KPRC 2, the employees allegedly accepted cash and gifts in exchange for overriding verification requirements tied to insurance coverage, emissions inspections, and residency. Some vehicles were allegedly coded as tax-exempt, allowing customers to avoid paying required fees.

    Authorities further allege that Anderson charged approximately $300 per transaction and transported paperwork in a personal binder to avoid detection.

    The case reportedly began after employees in another Texas county noticed Bella’s Multiservices promoting vehicle registration stickers on TikTok and Facebook. Social media posts advertised expedited service and claimed inspections were not necessary. That tip prompted an internal review, which eventually led to a criminal investigation.

    This is not known as “keeping a low profile.” One wonders if they might also be charged as accessories for Grand Theft Auto.

  • Rupert Lowe has created a new political party, Restore Britain, that looks to outflank Reform on the right.

    The first priority is to control who comes to our country, and more importantly, who stays in our country. Restore Britain will not just stop mass immigration; we will reverse it.

    Every single illegal migrant will be securely detained, and then deported. The message will be unrelenting: If you are in this country without permission, you will be removed. For the foreseeable future, far more people must leave Britain than arrive.

    If a foreign national is unable to speak English, lives in social housing, claims benefits, refuses to work, fails to integrate, commits crime, or even actively hates our way of life and wishes to do us harm, then they must leave, or be made to leave…

    Restore Britain will make our communities safe again for women and children. That I promise you. If that means millions go, then millions go.

    We’re constantly told that the economy needs vast swaths of low-skilled migrants. We know that’s simply not true. What we need is to get millions of healthy Brits back into work – a radical overhaul of how welfare is delivered. Protecting those in genuine need, but not funding healthy shirkers to live off the back of hard working men and women. If you can work, you must work. It really is that simple.

    There seems to be a lot of enthusiasm for Restore Britain, given their willingness to tackle the illegal alien invasion head on. The irony is the reform leader Nigel Farage looks poised to go from a fringe figure on the right to being ,i>outflanked on the right without ever being elected Prime Minister…

  • The face of evil: “This Karen called CPS on students’ parents because they chartered a TPUSA chapter at school…A liberal woman in Maryland, Nancy Krause, is facing mass calls to be charged after she weaponized CPS against Calvert County high school students for starting a TPUSA chapter at their school.”

    I hope they sure her for every penny she has, and then some.

  • Stephen Colbert and James Talarico are lying about Trump blocking an interview. CBS merely told Colbert there were equal time considerations for such an interview, and that he might have to interview other Texasw Democratic senate candidates like Jasmine Crockett.
  • “Congressman Tony Gonzales Denies Staffer Affair Amid Husband’s Allegations, Released Text Messages.”

    After text messages obtained by news media appeared to corroborate prior reports alleging that U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX-23) engaged in a relationship with his now-deceased regional director, Regina Ann Santos-Aviles — which would violate U.S. House rules — her husband has now come forward in a tell-all interview affirming the claims.

    Gonzales, however, continues to deny the allegations and now says he is being “blackmailed” following a settlement request from the husband’s attorney.

    Santos-Aviles died months after her husband discovered the affair and confronted Gonzales in what authorities ruled a suicide by self-immolation.

    The story has set off a bombshell of controversy, with the most recent evidence being released at the beginning of early voting for the March primary election, where Gonzales faces three challengers in the GOP primary.

    Santos-Aviles served as Gonzales’ regional director based in Uvalde, overseeing constituent affairs across 11 of the congressional district’s 23 counties near Texas’ southern border.

    Emergency responders found her in the backyard of her home on the night of September 13. A gasoline can was nearby where she laid severely burned. She was taken to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead the next day.

    News of the affair was first reported by Current Revolt, which was met with silence by Gonzales until an interview with the Texas Tribune wherein he claimed the reports were not true.

    Fast forward, and the San Antonio Express News obtained text messages between Santos-Aviles and another former staffer that purportedly show her writing,“I had an affair with our boss.”

    This prompted Gonzales’ main opponent in the GOP primary, Brandon Herrera, to call for his resignation, saying an affair would have violated House rules.

    “Tony Gonzales must resign. He not only broke House ethics rules by having an adulterous affair with a member of his congressional staff and by using taxpayer money to fund the affair, but he also broke trust with the public by insisting that the initial reporting of the affair was false,” Herrera wrote in a press statement.

  • Speaking of Texas politicians behaving badly, here’s a story that doesn’t cover anyone in glory.

    After personal details about U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt were posted online by a senior John Cornyn advisor, the Houston Republican has filed a police report documenting what some are describing as a possible crime under federal or state law.

    Cornyn advisor Matt Mackowiak posted images of documents late last week that purportedly listed Hunt’s address, Texas driver’s license number, and the last four digits of his Social Security number. What Mackowiak seems to have designed as a last-minute attack on Hunt has turned a spotlight on Cornyn’s struggle to remain relevant with Texas voters ahead of the March 3 Primary Election.

    Mackowiak, who runs Save Austin Now and was head of the Travis County GOP, is someone I know casually. We followed each other on Twitter before my suspension there, and we’ve bumped into each other at various events. As a political consultant/head of Potomac Strategies Group, Mackowiak has worked for some pretty squishy, swampy Republicans.

    Cornyn is being challenged by Attorney General Ken Paxton and Hunt for the GOP nomination. Most public polling has consistently shown Paxton leading the field, followed by Cornyn and Hunt. Recent polls have shown Hunt closing that gap. The “doxxing” of Hunt by a senior Cornyn advisor has led some to suggest that perhaps the incumbent’s polling is even worse.

    “The only reason you direct fire at someone behind you in the polls is you thinking their momentum will overtake you,” explained a political consultant not working the race. “Whether Cornyn is worried or not, Mackowiak’s actions make their campaign look desperate.”

    Yeah, that was pretty stupid of Mackowiak. His post was evidently designed to ding Hunt over some provisional ballot he wasn’t entitled to file in 2016, and frankly my care meter isn’t even twitching. A three-term incumbent attacking a third place candidate does indeed reek of desperation. That said, in my (admittedly limited) understanding of federal laws on personally identifiable information is that none of that stuff quite qualifies as actual PID, so the Hunt campaign is probably going to see that criminal complaint dismissed.

  • Speaking of Texas politicians, President Trump issued a lot of Texas U.S. congressional race endorsements.

    In one of his more unanticipated endorsements, Trump threw his support behind Republican candidate Alex Mealer in her bid for Congressional District (CD) 9, against state Rep. Briscoe Cain (R-Deer Park) and seven other GOP primary candidates.

    The district, currently held by U.S. Rep. Al Green (D-TX-9), was heavily impacted by the GOP-favored redistricting map that passed the Texas Legislature during the summer of 2025 — legislation initiated at the White House’s request and voted for by Cain in the Texas House. CD 9 is one of the five congressional districts expected to flip from blue to red in 2026, with a majority of the current CD 9 folded into the new boundaries of the Democratic stronghold of CD 18, where Green is now running instead.

    Trump stated in his endorsement of Mealer, “A West Point Graduate, and Combat Decorated Army Bomb Squad Officer, Alex knows the Wisdom and Courage required to Defend our Country, Support our Military/Veterans, and Ensure PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH.”

    Cain was supported by Trump for re-election to the Texas House in a mass endorsement issued by the president for House Republicans who voted to pass education savings accounts legislation. The endorsement did not include any members’ pursuit of an alternative office.

    According to a recent survey, Mealer leads the Republican primary for CD 9 with 34 percent of the vote, followed by Cain at 26 percent. When the poll was taken there were 10 candidates in the race, but one, Dwayne Stovall, ended his campaign on Tuesday and endorsed Dan Mims.

    Among the other endorsements announced by Trump via Truth Social posts on Monday night was for Jon Bonck in his bid for CD 38, left open by U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt’s (R-TX-38) run for U.S. Senate against incumbent U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Republican primary.

    Bonck is up against nine other Republican candidates, including businesswoman Shelly deZevallos, businessman Larry Rubin, and Tomball Independent School District President Michael Pratt. The district’s partisan makeup did not alter after redistricting, remaining at R-65%, per The Texan’s Texas Partisan Index (TPI).

    “Jon Bonck is an incredible Candidate,” Trump said in his endorsement.

    “He is supported by many MAGA Patriots, including Senator Ted Cruz [(R-TX)], Congressmen ‘Doc’ Ronny Jackson [(R-TX-13)], Brandon Gill [(R-TX-26)], Jim Jordan [(R-OH-4)], and Tim Burchett [(R-TN-2)], among others.”

    “A successful Business Executive, Jon knows the America First Policies required to Create GREAT Jobs, Cut Taxes and Regulations, Promote MADE IN THE U.S.A., Unleash American Energy DOMINANCE, and Champion our Nation’s Golden Age,” Trump added.

    Trump also endorsed Carlos De La Cruz, brother of Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz (R-TX-15), in his bid for CD 35. The district is currently represented by U.S. Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX-35), but went from a TPI rating of D-70% to R-55% due to redistricting — drawing in a number of Republican candidates eyeing the new GOP-favored seat.

    “A Brave, 20 Year Air Force Veteran, and now, as a successful Businessman, Carlos has a Proven Record of Success — He is a WINNER!” Trump posted.

    “In Congress, Carlos will work tirelessly to Grow the Economy, Promote our Amazing Farmers and Ranchers, Cut Taxes and Regulations,” he continued, with similar language used in his several other endorsements that night.

    He also endorsed in the race to replace retiring U.S. Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-TX-8), throwing his support behind attorney Jessica Hart Steinmann, who served as the director for the Office of Victims of Crime in the U.S. Department of Justice during Trump’s first presidential term.

    Steinmann, now with an edge up, is running in a field with five other Republican candidates, including U.S. Army veteran Nick Tran, Deddrick Wilmer, Jay Fondren, and Stephen Long. Businessman Brett Jensen suspended his campaign following Trump’s endorsement.

    Trump said of Steinmann, “As a former appointee in my First Term, and now, as a Highly Respected Attorney, Jessica continues to prove that she has the Wisdom and Courage necessary to uphold our Constitution, and ensure LAW AND ORDER.”

  • Good news: “The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced that the VA will no longer report veterans to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) solely because they have been assigned a fiduciary to assist them with their finances. Further, the VA is working with the FBI to remove all the names of veterans who have been unjustly reported to NICS under this guise.
  • Former Democratic Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson died. Oddly enough, President Trump had good things to say about him.

    Well, I didn’t know Jackson, so I’ll always consider him a race-hustling poverty pimp who ran a shakedown operation. He’s probably among the five people most responsible for strained race relations in modern America, behind Obama, George Soros, Al Sharpton and Ibram X. Kendi.

  • In like of Jackson’s death, Tablet magazine revisits Hymietown.

    Less frequently recalled is the distress Jackson’s rise caused within the American Jewish community during the 1980s. For many identifiable Jews, and especially for Orthodox Jews, his candidacy was not merely another political development but a moment of rupture. His reference to Jews as “Hymie” and to New York City as “Hymietown” was not dismissed as a careless aside. It was recognized as an anti-Jewish slur, and it left a lasting mark, even becoming the subject of an Eddie Murphy Saturday Night Live skit that captured the moment with uncomfortable precision, as comedy often can.

    The episode revealed how quickly old language could reemerge, even from figures celebrated as moral leaders within liberal politics. Jackson’s campaigns compelled Jewish institutions to confront questions about alliance, dignity, and communal security that they had long preferred to manage discreetly. They did more than provoke private discomfort; they produced public argument. On the pages of Jewish newspapers, the debate unfolded in real time, week by week, as each issue went to print, and it was not confined to the usual institutional voices. Orthodox writers, in particular, entered the conversation with a directness that many establishment Jewish leaders found unwelcome but that the moment required.

    Three figures responded with unusual clarity. Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, writing in The Jewish Week; Dr. Marvin Schick, writing in The Jewish World; and Rabbi Meir Kahane, writing both in The Jewish Press and in the periodical Kahane: The Magazine of the Authentic Jewish Idea all confronted the Jackson candidacy directly. Each treated Jackson’s candidacy not as an isolated controversy but as a diagnostic moment, asking what it revealed about Black-Jewish relations, the credibility of coalition politics, and the judgment of Jewish leadership itself. They disagreed about almost everything, but they shared one conclusion: The assumptions that had governed Jewish political alliance since the 1960s were beginning to fray.

    The desire of western liberal elites to import unassimilated Muslims into the country would pretty much break those assumptions apart.

  • Dallas officials aren’t the only ones Paxton sued this week: “Texas Sues Temu for Deceptive Marketing and CCP‑Linked Data Harvesting.”

    Attorney General Ken Paxton is escalating his campaign against China‑linked tech companies, filing a new lawsuit targeting one of the most downloaded shopping apps in the United States, Temu.

    Paxton’s suit names PDD Holdings, Inc. and WhaleCo Inc., the companies behind Temu, alleging they deceptively market the platform as a simple discount marketplace while secretly using it as a vehicle for aggressive data harvesting.

    Though PDD moved its principal executive offices from Shanghai to Dublin, Ireland, it still maintains significant operations in China, and Temu has rapidly grown to more than 80 million active users in the United States as of late 2023.

    According to the lawsuit, the Temu app is not just a shopping tool—it runs “dangerous software functions” that are “completely inappropriate” for a normal e‑commerce platform.

    Paxton characterizes Temu as a digital “trojan horse” capable of bypassing security protocols and creating backdoor access into a user’s private data, all while presenting itself as a harmless way to buy “affordable great products.”

    The attorney general alleges that when Texans use Temu, they are unknowingly exposing themselves to a serious digital security threat.

    The Temu security threat has been known for a while. Security-aware shoppers will have to forgo such great products as this:

  • Kurt Schlichter has a word of warning to dog-hating Muslims thinking of moving to the west:

    “This is not open to debate. We’re going to keep our dogs as we always have. If you come to our civilization, you’re going to respect our pets, or there’s going to be trouble. John Wick is the moderate position on this issue.”

    Damn straight. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Not even Da Bears want to stay in the blue hellhole that is Chicago, having started taking steps to move to a site in Indiana.
  • A fungus among us: “Dangerous superbug spreads in US hospitals…Candida auris infections reported in more than half of US states as healthcare facilities struggle with containment.”
  • “Western Digital is completely sold out of hard drive production capacity through 2026 due to massive demand from—” (You know exactly what’s coming next, don’t you?) “—AI data centers.”
  • Facebook makes Dead Internet Theory real by filing a patent to make dead users into AI chatbots.
  • Forgotten Weapons tests AI thumbnail. Result? More people clicked on it…but everybody hated it.
  • Grandpa Rick is really tired of these motherfucking AIs in his motherfucking streaming services.
  • Lock-picking lawyer + turner tool + new tool and raking technique = just about every padlock open in 5 seconds or less.
  • The Dallas lawyer with a 39,000 book library. Bryan A. Garner sounds like a man after my own heart.
  • Cisco is trying to weasel out of right-to-repair laws in Colorado by claiming all their products are “critical infrastructure” that can’t be repaired.
  • “New Yorkers Report Warmth Of Collectivism Feels Strangely Like Crushing Tax Hike.”
  • “Prince Andrew Joins UK Muslim Rape Gang So He Can Keep Abusing Young Girls.”
  • Humanity’s worse inventions, including QR code menus, Zoom meetings, and Ohio.
  • News you can use: “Amazing New Study Suggests You Can Just Think Thoughts Without Posting Them Online.”
  • Dogs that never heard “Bros Before Hos”:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Technology, Texas, video, Waste and Fraud | 10 Comments »

    LinkSwarm For April 11, 2025

    Friday, April 11th, 2025

    I hope your taxes are finished, or at least in the home stretch. Mine are done but not mailed out yet. I made so little last year that I’m getting every cent I sent in back, pitiful though it is.

    This week: The Supreme Court hands Trump two victories, more progress in the war against illegal aliens, a trade war reprieve for everyone but China, Jasmine Crockett seems to think illegal aliens pick cotton, Tim Walz proves he’s still a putz, and after 72 years, police finally arrest an infamous Mexican bandit!

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • “Supreme Court Allows Trump Administration to Fire Thousands of Federal Workers.”

    The Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to move forward with its plans to fire thousands of probationary federal employees, overturning a lower court order preventing the terminations.

    The Supreme Court lifted an injunction Tuesday from a California federal court barring the Trump administration from firing employees across six federal agencies. The lower court order came last month following a lawsuit from the American Federation of Government Employees, a powerful public sector union.

    “The District Court’s injunction was based solely on the allegations of the nine non-profit-organization plaintiffs in this case. But under established law, those allegations are presently insufficient to support the organizations’ standing,” the justices said in an unsigned ruling.

    Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the court’s order. Sotomayor did not explain her reasoning, while Jackson said the Trump administration failed to demonstrate the urgency of the issue.

    Pink slip by pink slip, progress is made…

  • A quarter of IRS employees are about to get the axe.

    Nearly two months after a top Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) official and support team arrived at IRS headquarters to investigate waste and fraud—aiming to streamline a bloated and corrupt federal bureaucracy—the Trump administration has begun a sizeable workforce reduction across the federal agency.

    Fox News reported late Friday evening that the IRS will begin laying off about 20,000 staffers — up to 25% of the workforce — on Friday and through next week.

    Most job cuts will center around the IRS Office of Civil Rights and Compliance, which protects taxpayers from discrimination, audits, and investigations.

    White House spokesperson Liz Huston told Fox News, “In a stark contrast to the previous administration’s wildly unpopular plan to hire thousands of additional IRS agents, President Trump is focused on saving tax dollars, eliminating bloat, axing useless DEI offices, and increasing the agency’s efficiency.”

    Here’s more from Fox:

    In addition to the layoffs, the agency said in a letter to employees that it is eliminating its Office of Civil Rights and Compliance, which is responsible for protecting taxpayers from discrimination, audits and investigations.

    . . .

    “This action is being taken to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the IRS in accordance with agency priorities and the Workforce Optimization Initiative outlined in a recent Executive Order,” the letter states, referring to President Donald Trump’s executive order directing the Department of Government Efficiency to get rid of wasteful spending.

    The agency said it was approved to offer Voluntary Early Retirement Authority (VERA) and Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment (VSIP). Information about those programs will be shared with employees at a later date, the message said.

    “This calendar year to date, approximately 5% of this office left through the Deferred Resignation Program and attrition,” the message said. “An additional 75% of the office will be reduced through a RIF (Reduction in Force).”

    A Treasury Department spokesperson told Fox News, “The rollback of wasteful Biden-era hiring surges and consolidation of critical support functions are vital to improving both efficiency and quality of service. ” The spokesperson added, “The Secretary is committed to ensuring that efficiency is realized while providing the collections, privacy, and customer service the American people deserve.”

  • “DOGE Official: More Than One Million Migrants On Medicaid, Thousands On Voter Rolls.”

    An official with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) said that millions of migrants are currently receiving taxpayer-funded Medicaid benefits while thousands are on voter rolls across the country and are illegally voting in American elections.

    DOGE official and equity firm CEO Antonio Gracias said that migrants have obtained Social Security cards after being released into the interior of the country with a notice to appear in immigration court, with court dates scheduled an average of six years after their release.

    “So now you’re in the country with some quasi-legal status, you’re waiting for your court date … you can fill out an asylum application,” Gracias explained during a recent appearance on the “All In” podcast, which featured Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro. “Once that application is in, you can file another form, a 765 to get work authorization, once you get that, you get a 766, which is the authorization and we automatically send you a Social Security card in the mail.”

    With access to Social Security cards, Gracias says, over a million migrants have been able to receive Medicaid benefits. “We mapped this through the benefit programs, we found every benefits program that is being accessed by these people, 1.3 million are on Medicaid right now, today,” Gracias said.

    He went on to explain that thousands of migrants have been found on voter rolls as well, also asserting that the Democratic Party opened the border in order to import new voters.

    “We looked at voter rolls and we found that thousands are registered to vote in friendly states. And we looked even further in those friendly states and found that many of those people had actually voted. It was shocking to us,” Gracias explained. “I think this was a move to import voters.”

    “This doesn’t include the 7.8 million that ICE has that have come in illegally that we know are here and all the people who are here illegally who we don’t know are here,” he explained.

    DOGE is uncovering illegal aliens and massive fraud. It’s easy to see why Democrats are upset…

  • The Supreme Court also gave Trump the greenlight to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport illegal aliens.

    The Supreme Court on Monday lifted a federal judge’s order that once blocked the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport suspected members of a Venezuelan gang to El Salvador.

    In a 5–4 majority opinion, the Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a major victory against legal challenges regarding his mass deportation agenda. The decision allows Trump to continue invoking the Alien Enemies Act to accelerate the removal of illegal immigrants believed to be in Tren de Aragua.

    The nation’s highest court, however, noted that the administration should give immigrants it seeks to deport “reasonable time” to challenge their removal from the U.S. in court. Those legal challenges must take place in Texas, where the detainees are held, and not Washington, D.C., the conservative majority ruled.

    “The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs,” the ruling states. “The detainees subject to removal orders under the [Alien Enemies Act] are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal.”

  • “Trump Plans to Withhold All Federal Funding From Sanctuary City ‘Death Trap.'”

    President Donald Trump announced Thursday that his administration is finalizing plans to withhold all federal funding for sanctuary cities and states that provide safe harbor to illegal aliens.

    “No more Sanctuary Cities! They protect the Criminals, not the Victims,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “They are disgracing our Country, and are being mocked all over the World.”

    On his first day in office, Trump signed the “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” executive order laying out a framework to strictly enforce the nation’s immigration laws and “prioritize the safety, security, and financial and economic well-being of Americans.”

    In the E/O, Trump authorized the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security to “evaluate and undertake any lawful actions” needed to ensure sanctuary jurisdictions across the U.S. are not receiving federal funds.

    Now, it appears Trump is ready to drop the hammer on these Democrat strongholds.

    “Working on papers to withhold all Federal Funding for any City or State that allows these Death Traps to exist,” the president said in his post.

    Sanctuary jurisdictions are states, counties, or cities that refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement agencies seeking to deport criminal illegal aliens.

    There are about a dozen states and hundreds of cities across the US that consider themselves “sanctuaries” for illegals.

    The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security and Enforcement held a hearing Wednesday to address the issue, titled “Sanctuary Jurisdictions: Magnet for Migrants, Cover for Criminals.”

    Republicans contended that sanctuary cities have been an impediment to the mass deportations the Trump administration has prioritized in its first 100 days of office.

    But Democrats defended Sanctuary Cities, arguing that trust between local law enforcement and the community erodes when the police comply with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

    In his opening statement, Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) argued that the strong measures were necessary after Democrats deliberately trafficked over eight million unvetted illegal aliens into the country, “including some of the most dangerous, vicious criminals and cartel members in the world.”

    “Congress must enact stronger laws that will prevent a future Joe Biden from ever again placing our families at risk, and that will stop today’s Democratic politicians from impeding the enforcement of our immigration and public safety laws,” said McClintock stated.

  • The usual talking heads said that Trump was going to trigger higher inflation (higher, that is, than the Biden inflation they’d been taking such pains to hide). Reality: Not so much. “CPI Shows 12 Month Inflation Rate at 2.4%; Lowest Core in 4 Years.”
  • ICE deport criminal illegal alien for the 40th time. “Julian Estrada-Garcia, 36, has four convictions for illegal entry and convictions for driving while intoxicated, possession of illicit narcotics, and fraud.” Just the sort of people Democrats are working so hard to keep us from deporting…
  • SAVE voter integrity act passes the House.

    The U.S. House of Representatives has passed Rep. Chip Roy’s (R-TX-21) Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would require proof of American citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.

    The SAVE Act would require states to verify U.S. citizenship and identity through documentary proof in-person when an individual registers to vote in federal elections, regardless of the registration method. Additionally, it requires states to remove “non-citizens” from voter rolls.

    “The American people have spoken very clearly that they believe only American citizens should vote in American elections. There’s nothing controversial about that,” Roy said on the floor before the vote.

    “This legislation is designed to restore that faith, to save our elections, to save election integrity,” he added.

    The U.S. House passed the SAVE Act 220 to 208, with four Democratic members voting in favor of the legislation — one of them being Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX-28). No Republicans voted against the bill.

    A Gallup poll from October 2024 found that 84 percent of respondents are in favor of requiring voters to provide photo identification at voting locations, and 83 percent favor requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote.

    What do you know, another 80/20 issue Democrats are on the wrong side of. Of course, they’re lying about the SAVE Act, so if you see misinformation about it on facebook, ask them where in the ext of the bill itself do they see the nonsense they’re peddling.

  • “Trump Announces 90-Day Pause on Reciprocal Tariffs for Negotiating Countries, Hits China with 125 Percent Rate.”

    President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he is implementing a 90-day pause on retaliatory tariffs for countries that have come to the negotiating table, while raising tariffs on China to 125 percent following Beijing’s latest retaliatory levies.

    Trump stated on Truth Social that he is lowering the retaliatory tariffs he unveiled earlier this week for the “worst offenders” to the baseline rate of 10 percent after more than 75 nations expressed a willingness to negotiate new trade deals with the U.S. He vowed not to raise rates on those countries for 90 days while negotiations proceed.

    “Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately,” Trump posted.

    “Conversely, and based on the fact that more than 75 Countries have called Representatives of the United States, including the Departments of Commerce, Treasury, and the USTR, to negotiate a solution to the subjects being discussed relative to Trade, Trade Barriers, Tariffs, Currency Manipulation, and Non Monetary Tariffs, and that these Countries have not, at my strong suggestion, retaliated in any way, shape, or form against the United States, I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately,” Trump added.

    Stocks immediately surged upon Trump’s announcement with each of the three major indexes jumping by over 7 percent. The Dow Jones and S&P 500 saw their biggest gains in five years, and the tech-oriented Nasdaq jumped over 10 percent. Wall Street had been reeling since last week when Trump announced a dramatic global tariff package consisting of a 10 percent minimum tariff and much higher tariff rates for many countries worldwide.

    Golly, It’s almost like Trump knew what he was doing and planned something like this all along, integrating both carrot and stick in his negotiating strategy. And it’s almost like China is on the outside looking in as Trump wins lower rates for American goods, accomplishing the decoupling of America from China and more firmly cementing other nations in America’s sphere of influence rather than China’s.

    A whole lot of promising return for one week of work…

  • Along those lines, the White House says more than 15 countries have made trade deal offers.
  • “Trump Has Xi and China Over a Tariff Cliff—Right Where He Wants Them.”

    This week, President Trump instituted a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs for the nations that are clearly interested in coming to the negotiating table to make deals more fair to the United States. The reality is brutally simple: America holds all the cards.

    “What’s the largest consumer market on Earth? The United States,” Kevin O’Leary noted this week. “Almost 40% of all goods consumed worldwide. What’s the largest GDP? 25 or 26% of the world? The United States of America. China needs the United States.”

    Even our top competitor in the global market, China, needs us more than we need them.

    During a recent appearance on “The Ingraham Angle,” investor Chamath Palihapitiya laid out a stark picture of China’s economic fragility, arguing that the ongoing tariff standoff gives the United States far more leverage than Beijing wants to admit.

    “Even the Chinese economists are admitting that the tariffs are gonna hurt China a lot more than the United States,” Ingraham said, pointing to growing concern within China itself. She quoted one Chinese economist who conceded, “The impact on China is mainly that Chinese products have nowhere to go. These companies will be hit very hard.”

    Palihapitiya agreed, saying Americans routinely underestimate just how dire China’s economic outlook has become. “Together, America and China represent almost half of world GDP,” he explained, “but underneath the covers, what we keep forgetting time and again is America is the market that matters.”

    He pointed to a series of structural problems dragging China down, including its rapidly aging population, tightening restrictions on foreign investment, and unreliable intellectual property protections. “Foreign investment in China has fallen off of a cliff,” Palihapitiya noted, painting a picture of a nation increasingly isolated and economically vulnerable.

    This tariff cliff is precisely what America needs to force real change.

    China’s economic trajectory, he warned, is far from sustainable. “They have a very difficult economic forecast if they shrink,” he said. “When you look at the China case, they’re in a worse position than we are, which is why they have to sort of come to the negotiating table now and figure out some reasonable thing.”

    Palihapitiya added that President Trump understands this imbalance well. “I think this is what President Trump was alluding to when he said, ‘They want to come to the table, and they don’t quite know how.’”

    With China’s economy teetering on the brink, the United States is in a far stronger position than most so-called experts ever imagined—and President Trump is wasting no time seizing the advantage.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “The Middle Eastern Children’s Alliance (MECA), a California nonprofit that designs K–12 curriculum material, has fiscal and personnel ties to U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations, according to a new report by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI).

    “Our investigation of MECA has yielded evidence suggesting it holds fiscal and personnel ties to US designated foreign terrorist organizations, chiefly the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), alongside a host of extremist anti-government actors based in the United States,” reads the report by the NCRI, released on Monday.

    MECA states on its website that it has sent more than $31 million in aid to children in “Palestine,” Iraq, and Lebanon since 1988. The nonprofit further purports to provide financial and professional assistance to community organizations in the West Bank and Gaza, fund university scholarships for Palestinians, and develop educational programs about the Middle East. MECA states that its “founding advisors” include Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Edward Said, and Maxine Waters.

    The supposedly humanitarian organization has expressed its support for violence against Israel. The day after October 7, MECA declared its support on social media for the attack: “We are witnessing the people of Gaza rising up to respond to decades of Israeli settler colonial violence. The US [government] bears responsibility for its political, economic & military support of this brutal apartheid regime. Join us to stand in solidarity with Palestine.”

    The NCRI report identifies deeper relationships between MECA and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which has been a designated foreign terrorist organization since 1997 and participated in the October 7 attack on Israel.

    MECA’s current director of Gaza projects, Dr. Mona El-Farra, previously served as the deputy director of the Union of Health Work Committees, which was recognized as the “health organization” of the PFLP in a 1993 USAID report. In 2014, El-Farra was reportedly denied an exit visa by Israel for “security reasons.” El-Farra and Barbara Lubin, MECA’s founder and current executive director, have both met with Leila Khaled, who joined the PFLP when it was founded in 1967 and became the first woman to hijack a plane.

    A media advisory released by MECA in 2011 listed Leena Al-Arian as its communications coordinator. Al-Arian is the daughter of Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist who was sentenced to 57 months in prison for “conspiring to violate a federal law that prohibits making or receiving contributions of funds, goods or services to, or for the benefit of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).”

    I think it’s far safer to assume that every middle eastern or Islamic charity raising money for “the children” is actually buying weapons for terrorists or lining the pockets of jihadis. But I’m cynical that way…

  • “Journalist Matt Taibbi is suing Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove for libel, after the California Democrat claimed during her opening remarks in a House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee hearing on Tuesday that he’s a ‘serial sexual harasser.'” Juding from that picture, I can only assume that Kamlager-Dove has never been on the receiving end of sexual harassment…
  • Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-ranged) evidently thinks that illegal aliens pick cotton. Eli Whitney died in vain. (Though it wasn’t until John Rust invented an improved picker that manual cotton picking finally died out after World War II.)
  • “Judge Rejects California’s Attempt To Block City’s Voter ID Law.” Score one for Huntington beach.
  • “Fairfax County School Board Member Embezzled Corporate Funds For Strip Clubs And Campaign, Lawsuit Says. Democrat Kyle McDaniel is the budget chair for the $4 billion Virginia school district.” You may remember Fairfax from such hits as “Fairfax, Virginia Schools May Expel Elementary Students For ‘Misgendering’ People” and “Let’s sue parents for publishing our misdeeds.”
  • Follow-up: “Collin County Residents Reject Planned Islamic ‘City‘. County Judge Chris Hill said he ‘cannot support’ the proposed EPIC City project.” (Previously.)
  • “THIRD Huntsville ISD Teacher Arrested for Sex Crime in Three Weeks. Lauren Rudolph was a dyslexia teacher and cheer coach at Huntsville High School.” Looks like whoever has been vetting teachers there has a lot of ‘splaining to do…
  • Live in Chicago? Enjoy having police do nothing about gangs of thieves who target drivers with aggressive parking scams.
  • Remember those pro-Hamas UT students arrested a while back? Well, a number of foreign students at Texas and Texas A&M their student visas revoked.
  • Tim Walz gets a savage heckling from veterans at the Minnesota state capital. Say what you want about Hillary’s losing Veep pick Tim Kaine, but he wasn’t a weirdo who didn’t know when to get off the stage and slink back into relative obscurity.
  • The Nanny State’s war on children continues apace. “California bill could ban children as old as 16 from sitting in the front seat.”
  • “Texas Supreme Court Justice Jeff Boyd Won’t Seek Third Term.”
  • Evidently made jealous by Amazon ruining J.R.R. Tolkien, Netflix decided to ruin C. S. Lewis. “Netflix offered Meryl Streep the role of Aslan in new ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ movie.”
  • “A dozen Texas Dairy Queen locations have closed in the last week.” Including one in Pflugerville. Seems to be a dispute between corporate and the particular franchisee.
  • “Gina Carano Wins Big Against Disney in Lawsuit Discovery Battle—Judge Orders Disney to Hand Over Actor Pay Records Within 20 Days.”
  • Good news, everyone! They finally arrested Speedy Gonzalez!
  • Hoovie makes a six figure error calculating the capital gains costs of trading in a Lamborghini Countach for a lease-to-buy Bugatti Veyron. Offered here as a public service for all my viewers leasing a Bugatti Veyron…
  • The MST3K cast reflects on the infamous Manos: The Hands of Fate.
  • “Protesters Demand Government Waste.”
  • “Democrats Worried Trump May Not Have China’s Best Interests At Heart.”
  • “Financial Advisor Announces It’s Time To Panic, Urges Clients To Make Hasty, Emotional Decisions.”
  • “Dire Wolves Extinct Again After New Dr. Fauci Experiments.”
  • Teambuilding!

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Budget, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Regulation, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 9 Comments »

    Democrats: Farming Illegal Aliens For Votes And Profit

    Monday, September 23rd, 2024

    The storyline that’s come out of the Democratic Party’s decision to flood Springfield, Ohio with illegal aliens from Haiti is them eating people’s pets, but the real storyline should be how Democrats destroy neighborhoods and displace locals for financial and political gain all over the country.

    Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani has published a shocking report that could soon change the national discussion from Haitians and other migrants eating cats or dogs in Springfield, Ohio, to one that is more sinister: The hub of a complex “hidden human trafficking network” in the tiny rust belt town.

    “The story in this town is not about cats or dogs. It’s about mules. It’s a twin tragedy of migrant workers from Haiti exploited and locals from Springfield marginalized,” Nomani wrote in the Jewish Journal.

    She said, “Just about every week since 2019, First Diversity Staffing Group Inc. has shuttled vulnerable Haitian migrants in unmarked white Ford and Chevy vans from Florida to Ohio, where they are allegedly exploited for cheap labor by companies like Dole Food Company Inc.,” adding, “It is a secretive and sinister operation that has gone unchecked for more than five years.”

    Nomani provided an image of one of those vans owned by staffing companies that shuttles the migrants to factories.

    The ex-WSJ journo said ‘George Ten’, the alleged mastermind behind this scheme, lives in a mansion in rural Ohio. She continued, “His nickname is “King George” because of his opulent lifestyle of luxury cars, cash handouts, and fast talk. For years, he has operated his reign of alleged exploitation.”

    This is stunning, as Nomani noted:

    One Haitian man I interviewed asked to be anonymous for fear of retaliation and recalled how he was picked up by a driver for one of Ten’s vans on a street corner near a Winn-Dixie grocery store in Immokalee, Florida. After the long journey to Springfield, he was dropped off at a rundown home on Rice Street, infested with cockroaches. He soon found work through First Diversity at Jefferson Industries Corporation, earning $12.50 an hour; he didn’t know how much George skimmed off his wages. The home he lived in had no working heat, and he bought an electric heater to survive the cold Ohio winter, the heater barely heating his room.

    What essentially began as an unverified claim by Trump about migrants eating pets has led to the disturbing truth of alleged labor trafficking and modern-day slavery in Springfield. The Haitians, here legally, are being exploited by mega corporations…

    And it’s not just Ohio.

    What will also blow your mind is that this alleged labor trafficking network has possibly also surfaced in Charleroi, Pennsylvania.

    We cited a resident of the town, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. In a video, the resident revealed the complex network of staffing vans in a town that is 50% Haitian. The vans shuttle migrants back and forth to several food packaging plants.

    Funny how the Democratic Party, the supposed “friend of the working man” seems so intent on helping replace working Americans with illegal aliens.

    It’s not just Pennsylvania or Ohio, it’s all over the country.

    Bloomberg has unveiled one of the most detailed maps yet, showing where the 2023 migrant invasion has spread across the US, broken down on a county-by-county basis. The map, built on immigration court case data, highlights clusters of new migrant populations that primarily emerged across the eastern half of the nation. The question becomes if the federal government and a shadowy network of non-governmental organizations worked in unison to precision dump migrants in small towns and cities to replace native blue-collar workers.

    The data plotted on the map includes immigration court data showing where the 1.8 million migrants landed in the US and have since taken up residence. Notice massive clusters of new migrants across the Mid-Alantic and Northeast metro areas, as well as the Midwest and Rust Belt regions.

    “In the battleground states that will decide this November’s election, about 72% of migrants in 2023 went to Biden counties while less than a third went to Trump counties, the Bloomberg analysis found. Counties that voted for Biden four years ago are home to roughly 60% of the overall US population,” Bloomberg said. ‘

    More on how illegal aliens were used in Charleroi, PA.

    The story in Springfield, Ohio, and Charleroi, Pennsylvania, should not be about goat sacrifices and migrants eating cats and dogs. It’s more sinister than that. It’s about a much darker reality of an alleged large-scale human trafficking and labor exploitation network operated by mysterious staffing companies with dozens and dozens of passenger vans in what some have called “modern-day slavery.” These migrants are shuttled around to factories, displacing native-born workers.

    More:

    It seems like the Biden Administration and their shadowy network of NGO’s imported some 10 million illegal aliens into the country to provide cheap labor for big business.

    corporate interests have become deeply interconnected with immigration through a non-governmental organization called Tent Partnership for Refugees. This NGO comprises more than 400 major multinational companies committed to hiring “refugees.”

    Several NGO partnerships with mega corporations include RedRoof Inn, Royal Farms, Shopify, CSX, Delta Airlines, DoorDash, Etsy, and even Bloomberg.

    The NGO’s relationships run deeper than mega-corporations, in fact, all the way up to the Biden administration.

    In December of 2022, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed a memorandum of understanding with Tent Partnership to “expand economic opportunity for refugees” in the private sector.

    And what do Democrats get for letting all these illegal aliens in? Well, obviously they get to punish lots of blue collar workers for their “whiteness” and “clinging to their guns and religion.” And they get to rake off lots of NGO graft. And, of course, they expect illegal aliens to vote for Democrats, either illegally through voting fraud or legally via a mass amnesty.

    Forestalling illegal alien voting was part of rational behind the SAVE Act.

    The electorate is narrowly divided, and November’s presidential contest is likely to come down to the wire once again. Those in power are naturally tempted to secure an advantage — by any means necessary.

    That became clear Monday when the White House threatened to veto legislation intended to close a loophole allowing illegal aliens to register to vote. The loophole was created by what is known as the motor voter law, which forced states to allow mail-in voter registration in 1993.

    All one has to do is check a box that says “Are you a citizen of the United States of America?” on a federal form to be signed up. Though the form asks for more information, it’s optional.

    “If you do not have a driver’s license or a state-issued identification or a Social Security number, please write ‘NONE’ on the form,” Colorado’s official instructions state. At the polling place, a utility bill or welfare check counts as acceptable identification.

    House Republicans set up a vote Wednesday to close this loophole through the SAVE Act. Introduced by Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, the proposal forces states to verify citizenship before adding someone to the voter rolls. It also enhances penalties against anyone intentionally registering noncitizens.

    The White House blasted the effort. “It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in Federal elections — it is a Federal crime punishable by prison and fines. … States already have effective safeguards in place to verify voters’ eligibility and maintain the accuracy of voter rolls,” the formal statement of administration policy explained.

    While noncitizen voting is illegal, there’s no way to know when it happens. The Supreme Court blocked states from enforcing their own registration verification process in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona. Writing for the majority in 2013, Justice Antonin Scalia said requiring proof of citizenship prior to registration clashed with federal law.

    And that’s why Congress must exercise its authority to fix that broken law and restore trust in the system. Liberals will cry foul, but they’re not sincere. They have no problem forcing everyone to flash IDs and passports to handsy Transportation Security Administration agents before boarding an airplane.

    “Many of the Democrats want all of these illegals to participate in our federal elections,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, said at a news conference Tuesday. “They want them to vote. There’s no other conclusion you can draw.”

    Mr. Johnson estimates the administration has allowed as many as 16 million illegal immigrants to enter the country, which is more than enough to swing a tight election.

    Noncitizens aren’t supposed to participate in elections, but it’s also illegal for them to enter the country uninvited. Unlawful immigrants don’t even need to cast votes themselves. The loophole adds names and addresses to the system that ballot harvesters can then use with mail-in voting schemes.

    Unverified checkboxes go hand in hand with unverified ballot drop boxes.

    Sounds like the SAVE Act is important for election integrity. So why did the same Republican Speaker just give up on fighting for it?

    House Republicans are moving forward with plans to vote on a clean stopgap spending bill that will extend government funding until mid-December, dropping a proof-of-citizenship voting measure backed by former President Donald Trump from their latest proposal.

    The continuing resolution, released on Sunday, would continue current spending levels until Dec. 20, buying lawmakers time to continue negotiations for the federal budget for the 2025 fiscal year. The proposal comes after the House failed to pass its initial government funding proposal last week that would have extended current spending levels until the end of March 2025 and included a voting integrity measure known as the SAVE Act that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sought to attach as a policy win for Republicans.

    That spending package was shot down after it failed to garner enough support from GOP lawmakers who vowed never to support a temporary government funding bill.

    “Since we fell a bit short of the goal line, an alternative plan is now required,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) wrote in a Dear Colleague letter to lawmakers on Sunday. “The feedback and ideas from everyone have been very helpful, and next week the House will take the initiative and pass a clean, three-month CR to prevent the Senate from jamming us with a bill loaded with billions in new spending and unrelated provisions. Our legislation will be a very narrow, bare-bones CR including only the extensions that are absolutely necessary.”

    But the absence of the SAVE Act could prompt several Republicans in both the House and Senate to reject the stopgap measure. Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly called on Republicans to oppose any funding bill that does not include language of the SAVE Act, even at the risk of a shutdown.

    Democrats are importing millions of illegal aliens to replace Americans and congressional Republicans are evidently too scared of losing a press cycle to try and stop it.

    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors, Welfare State | 10 Comments »