Greetings, and welcome to a rare Saturday LinkSwarm! This week: The Supreme Court stays the injunction against the Texas redistricting map, a bunch of Twitter fakes exposed, Trump drops the boom on Somali illegal alien scumbags,
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued an administrative stay of Tuesday’s ruling by an El Paso panel of federal judges that rendered the new congressional map passed by Texas Republicans this summer unusable for the 2026 midterm election.
The order restored the new map, pending consideration of the appeal by the State of Texas, and directed the Democratic-aligned parties to submit their response by Monday.
Snip.
The ruling drew a particularly pointed dissent from Judge Jerry Smith, the lone dissenter on the panel, who asserted that the motivation behind the redraw was clearly partisan gain — a position that sits outside the jurisdiction of the court.
Following that ruling, Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, asking for an administrative stay — which Alito granted.
“Compounding the harm, the district court entered its sweeping injunction far too late in the day — ten days after Texas’s candidate filing period had already opened. The injunction changes the boundaries of all but one of the State’s 38 congressional districts, enjoining Texas from using its duly enacted 2025 map and resurrecting the repealed 2021 map,” Texas wrote in its appeal.
“The chaos caused by such an injunction is obvious: campaigning had already begun, candidates had already gathered signatures and filed applications to appear on the ballot under the 2025 map, and early voting for the March 3, 2026, primary was only 91 days away. The lateness of the district court’s injunction (issued 38 days after the hearing) alone warrants a stay.”
As things stand, Texas Republicans’ map is back in effect while the U.S. Supreme Court considers the case in expedited fashion.
Texas’ candidate filing deadline is December 8, 2025.
There are thousands of accounts like this. Many of them explicitly claim to be American or Western, but are run by random people in Asia and Africa to sow chaos and get clicks.
BREAKING – Waves of Democrat influencers are being exposed as foreigners under X’s new location update, including leftist X agitator Alex Cole, who claimed he voted for Kamala but has now been revealed to be Canadian. pic.twitter.com/3LrAsYCiMw
— Right Angle News Network (@Rightanglenews) November 22, 2025
And a whole lot of “besieged Gazans” turn out to be posting from Europe…
Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is supposed to be used in extreme cases of humanitarian need for short terms (usually for 6, 12, or 18 months), allowing foreign refugees a safe haven in America.
As deportation efforts have ramped up, however, the American public has learned that some foreigners have remained in the country on TPS for decades. Some politicians and businesses have purposely imported large numbers of foreigners into small American towns, such as Haitians in Ohio and Pennsylvania, as cheap labor to replace Americans.
Faster, please.
President Donald Trump’s initiative to eliminate government waste and fraud through a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has quietly disbanded with a full 8 months still left on its charter.
Earlier this month when Reuters asked Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor about the status of DOGE, Kupor replied, “That doesn’t exist.”
Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) said that Elon Musk, who headed up the DOGE effort, was pushed out Washington D.C. because he was getting too close to exposing corrupt officials who are enriching themselves through dark money non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
Burchett told Benny Johnson, “NGO money pours into Washington and ends up in politicians’ pockets as dark money.”
DOGE had made dramatic impact on the federal government during the early months of Trump’s second term, shrinking the size of federal agencies and cutting their budgets or revealing astonishing amounts of questionable money flowing through NGO coffers.
Sound like a good reason to continue the work, not abandon it…
The Philippine Navy recently caught Chinese Fishing Militia putting Cyanide in the water near the BRP Sierra Madre at the Second Thomas Shoal.
The incident that was recorded on camera demonstrates the brutality & destruction meted out by the Chinese Fishing Militia inside… pic.twitter.com/L7NCI0UIik
— Isabella Anderson (@IsabellaAn67) November 27, 2025
The apparent reason Armata failed is this: sanctions.
But there’s more to the story, too. In fact, several interlocking factors account for the T-14’s failure to materialize as intended.
Let’s first look at costs and priorities: the unit cost of the T-14 was estimated at several million dollars – far higher than Russia had budgeted for.
The increase in cost meant that it couldn’t actually be sustained at scale. And, faced with heavy losses in Ukraine and urgent demands to ramp up numbers, Moscow opted to modernize its legacy platforms, such as the T-90, rather than invest in an expensive and unproven system. A tough choice, but a logical one.
The domestic production line for the T-14 never actually achieved accurate serial output, in large part thanks to sanctions and industrial bottlenecks.
There was no assembly line. Yes, really: every vehicle was hand-built like a luxury car. Sanctions and supply-chain constraints further hindered the manufacture of key components and high-end electronics required for the platform.
But even if Russia had been able to assemble more of the tanks before the sanctions really kicked in, it might not have changed the reality on the battlefield. Even when the war in Ukraine created a burning need for armored vehicles, Russia hesitated to commit T-14 units to the frontline for one worrying reason: they were vulnerable.
With the rise of automated systems, drone warfare, and long-range combat, those tanks may have proven as vulnerable as older units – and losing tanks built pre-sanctions would mean replacing them with older tanks.
That wouldn’t have made sense.
For more than a decade, the T-14 Armata has embodied Russia’s ambition to leap ahead of the West in tank design and warfare.
But it failed.
Brown County Judge Shane Britton was suspended from office without pay on Tuesday, one day after he was arrested on multiple charges that included allegations he assaulted a female prosecutor and interfered with the prosecution of a family violence case.
According to indictments handed down by a grand jury last week, Britton has been charged with three felonies: tampering with a witness in a family violence case, assault of a public servant, and tampering with a government document.
Britton is a Republican.
To understand the difference, it helps to look at what each chip was originally built to do. A GPU is a “general-purpose” parallel processor, while a TPU is a “domain-specific” architecture.
The GPUs were designed for graphics. They excel at parallel processing (doing many things at once), which is great for AI. However, because they are designed to handle everything from video game textures to scientific simulations, they carry “architectural baggage.” They spend significant energy and chip area on complex tasks like caching, branch prediction, and managing independent threads.
A TPU, on the other hand, strips away all that baggage. It has no hardware for rasterization or texture mapping. Instead, it uses a unique architecture called a Systolic Array.
The “Systolic Array” is the key differentiator. In a standard CPU or GPU, the chip moves data back and forth between the memory and the computing units for every calculation. This constant shuffling creates a bottleneck (the Von Neumann bottleneck).
In a TPU’s systolic array, data flows through the chip like blood through a heart (hence “systolic”).
- It loads data (weights) once.
- It passes inputs through a massive grid of multipliers.
- The data is passed directly to the next unit in the array without writing back to memory.
What this means, in essence, is that a TPU, because of its systolic array, drastically reduces the number of memory reads and writes required from HBM. As a result, the TPU can spend its cycles computing rather than waiting for data.
Google’s new TPU design, also called Ironwood also addressed some of the key areas where a TPU was lacking:
- They enhanced the SparseCore for efficiently handling large embeddings (good for recommendation systems and LLMs)
- It increased HBM capacity and bandwidth (up to 192 GB per chip). For a better understanding, Nvidia’s Blackwell B200 has 192GB per chip, while Blackwell Ultra, also known as the B300, has 288 GB per chip.
- Improved the Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI) for linking thousands of chips into massive clusters, also called TPU Pods (needed for AI training as well as some time test compute inference workloads). When it comes to ICI, it is important to note that it is very performant with a Peak Bandwidth of 1.2 TB/s vs Blackwell NVLink 5 at 1.8 TB/s. But Google’s ICI, together with its specialized compiler and software stack, still delivers superior performance on some specific AI tasks.
The key thing to understand is that because the TPU doesn’t need to decode complex instructions or constantly access memory, it can deliver significantly higher Operations Per Joule.
“TPU v6 is 60-65% more efficient than GPUs.”
Happy Thanksgiving 🫡 🦅 pic.twitter.com/yhJYbrCQZx
— Kristi Yamaguccimane (@TheWapplehouse) November 27, 2025
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.
In our previous examination of Sig Sauer’s P320 uncommanded discharges issue, a whole lot of commenters seem to get hung up on the screw, ignoring the methodology that Wyoming Gun Project laid out in his video. Well, it is a 40 minute video, and maybe he didn’t explain the preconditions for the failure mode he was trying to demonstrate well enough.
Well, here’s a 20 minute video by Shadetree Armorer that explains, in much clearer detail, the part failures the screw simulates before the loose slide come into play.
Because of the inherent movement between the slide and frame, a third test of the striker safety lock was conducted. Approximately 50 attempts were made to determine if the striker would impact the prime case after manipulating the weapon while holstered. The weapon was pressed together and pulled apart at the slide and frame. Thereafter, pressure was applied to the frame and the sear manually released from the primary notch. The intent of the manipulation and pressure was to mimic what might occur to a holstered weapon during an officer’s duties, such as running, jumping, climbing, fighting, pressing a weapon against a wall or vehicle, or obtaining a master grip on the pistol prior to drawing, etc.
BRF staff observed the prime case fired on nine attempts, with the primer indent measuring between 019 and 0026 of an inch with, an average of 023. While staging one attempt to allow another BRF staff member to observe the striker safety lock function as designed, the weapon was prepared and placed in the holster with no manipulation. A second staff member released the primary sear notch from the striker and the prime case fired, indicating failure of the striker safety lock.
Shadetree Armorer also points to YouTuber Dick Fairburn’s SIG P320 An unfolding Disaster, which I haven’t had a chance to watch yet (it’s another 40 minute video, and seems heavy on talk and light on illustrations).
I had no intention of doing another Sig P320 post so soon after the last one, but the video was so informative on the (alleged) flaws, and so clear on things people seem to be getting hung up on, that I thought it was worth posting.
In Friday’s LinkSwarm, we covered how Sig Sauer’s problem with uncommanded discharges from the P320 got still more serious with the death of an Air Force airman. This has been a low-level, intermittent story that’s been bubbling on for many years now, with no root cause anyone could find for the problem.
Well, we may finally have the root cause.
But first the caveat: I am not a gunsmith, and I have no way to determine how plausible the explanation is, if the methodology is sound, or if the applies to a significant number of P320s rather than the one the YouTuber is testing.
Executive Summary: YouTuber Wyoming Gun Project was able to get repeated P320 discharges by putting one millimeter of pressure (not a full pull) on the trigger and manipulating the overly loose slide.
That should not happen.
If you just want to skip to the money shot, skip to the beginning of the second video. But first up, I have Forgotten Weapons’ Ian McCollum describing the issue in detail with his usual clarity. (I don’t think he had seen Wyoming Gun Project’s video before recording this.)
Now the Wyoming Gun Project video:
It’s a 40 minute video, because he goes into significant detail on his methodology. So you get lots of caliper measurement, among other things.
That’s bad.
While this is not quite “vice-gripped to a test mount on a granite slab table in an FBI safety lab” level quality control, it does indeed seem pretty repeatable. It’s a cascading failure where two separate things have to go wrong. But neither of those two separate things is some inconceivable, unlikely scenario.
Bonus video: Penguinz0 commenting on the situation, which is where I first heard about the Wyoming Gun Project video, and includes a lot of footage from that video, if you just want the Cliff Notes version.
All of this renewed interest in P320 discharges probably wouldn’t happen if Sig hadn’t gone out of their way to declare that there was no way P320s could discharge on their own. That probably goes down with the Twitter employee who banned the Babylon Bee as one of the greatest social media backfires of all time.
For a looking at a completely different series of cascading failures, see my analysis of the Pipe Alpha disaster.
It’s been an expensive month. I had to get a new dishwasher, quarterly home and car insurance payments were due, and my dog Avery has enlarged lymph nodes that my vet and I are hoping is just due to her current bad bout of allergies (hence buying a lot of medicine) and not cancer. I’ll find out in a couple of weeks. Fingers crossed.
The Russiagate Hoax gets investigated, more WINNING, Iran’s nuke program confirmed to be toast, Colbert vs. Math, Gen Z workers get roasted, and The Case of Too Much Moose Meat.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The Department of Justice announced on Wednesday the creation of a so-called strike force to investigate allegations advanced by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that former President Barack Obama and members of his administration led a “treasonous” conspiracy to promote the false claim that Trump colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election.
The task force announcement came hours after Gabbard released a previously classified House Intelligence Committee report that said the conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s was interested in aiding Trump was based on “one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports.”
The DOJ strike force will assess the legal options it can take in response to the “alleged weaponization of the intelligence community.”
“Our facilities have been damaged, seriously damaged, the extent of which is now under evaluation,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed in a Fox News “Special Report” interview on July 21.
Later in the interview, Araghchi conceded that “the facilities have been destroyed,” referring to nuclear enrichment sites that were targeted by the U.S. military on June 22. President Donald Trump authorized the strikes amid a nearly two-week aerial war between Iran and Israel.
I’m sure this will completely end any discussion of the effectiveness of the strike in the comments…
The Iranian nuclear sites were bombed 24 days ago. Despite high-profile figures making predictions of near-apocalyptic consequences of that action, the Iranian retaliation, so far, consisted of a missile strike on a geodesic dome used for communications at the Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar. Parnell said the Iranian response “did minimal damage to equipment and structures on the base.”
(If you think you’re having a tough day, imagine being a salesman for the air-defense systems purchased by the Iranian regime. Israel dismantled Iran’s air defenses within 48 hours. Zohar Palti, former head of intelligence for the Mossad, told Sky News, “This is shocking in a way. This is amazing. We thought that it would be much harder. It was much more fast than we anticipated.” Despite claims from the Iranian government, there are no confirmed shootdowns of Israeli or U.S. planes.)
This morning, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany agreed to restore tough U.N. sanctions on Iran by the end of August if there has been no concrete progress toward a new nuclear deal.
Today, Benjamin Baird, the director of MEF Action at the Middle East Forum, writes at NR, “Congress has already introduced much of the legislation needed to bring the ayatollah to his knees, and committee chairmen need only hold markup hearings to advance these bills and send them to the House and Senate floors.” This legislation would enact crushing sanctions on key parts of the Iranian economy, place an economic stranglehold on Iran’s remaining proxies, rescind Biden-era loopholes, and undermine the Iranian regime’s ability to censor information.
The year 2025 has been a terrible one for the Iranian mullahs, and we’re not even in August yet.
Snip.
“Across every branch of the U.S. armed forces, military recruitment has significantly increased since President Trump took office . . . the Army hitting its goal four months early and the Navy doing so three months early. The Air Force and Space Force have both achieved their recruiting goals three months ahead of schedule.”
Speaking of foreign economies, the official numbers from the Chinese government tell us they’re easily withstanding the trade war and tariffs. But Reuters reports that once you look closer, the Chinese economy is showing signs of strain:
Contract and bill payment delays are rising, including among export champions like the autos and electronics industries and at utilities, whose owners, indebted local governments, have to run a tight shop while shoring up tariff-hit factories.
Ferocious competition for a slice of external demand, hit by global trade tensions, is crimping industrial profits, fueling factory-gate deflation even as export volumes climb. Workers bear the brunt of companies cutting costs.
Falling profits and wages shrank tax revenues, pressuring state employers like Zhang’s to cut costs as well. In pockets of the financial system, non-performing loans are surging as authorities push banks to lend more.
The New York Times warns that China’s “local governments are swimming in debt after decades of building airports, train stations and bridges.” (And if you’ve been reading our Thérèse Shaheen, you know that modern China is beset by four walls closing in on them — environmental degradation, runaway debt, the inherent flaws of a centrally planned economy, and demographics of an aging and declining population.)
Closer to home, the U.S. unemployment rate is 4.1 percent, low by historical standards. The U.S. has 7.8 million job openings. Inflation ticked up a bit last month, to 2.7 percent, which is not great (and a likely consequence of the tariffs), but it’s still down from the 3 percent number in January. The stock market has won back all of its big losses from the spring, and the NASDAQ closed at another all-time high yesterday.
Plenty more winning at the link.
A federal judge in Florida on Wednesday denied a request from the Trump administration to unseal grand jury transcripts from an investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Separately, the House Oversight Committee has issued a subpoena for Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s long-time associate, in an attempt to obtain further details about his high-profile clients.
Chairman James Comer of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform issued the subpoena Wednesday to Maxwell for a deposition at a federal correctional institution in Tallahassee, Florida, on August 11. Representative Tim Burchett made the motion for Comer to subpoena Maxwell, who was convicted for her role helping Epstein solicit minors for prostitution, in a Tuesday House subcommittee hearing. The motion was adopted by voice vote.
Snip.
United States District Judge Robin Rosenberg denied the request in a 12-page opinion Wednesday, saying she could not legally release the transcripts under the guidelines that govern grand jury secrecy set by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit because the government had not requested the grand jury’s findings for use in a judicial proceeding. She further stated that the legal standard for transfer of the petition to another district was not met in this case.
Reeling from their 2024 election loss, Democrats are scrambling to reconnect with the working class—yet their brilliant strategy of embracing socialist and communist candidates, doubling down on un-American woke ideology, shielding criminal illegal aliens, and supporting dark-money NGOs that fuel insurrectionist behavior like the Los Angeles riots—isn’t a comeback plan but just political suicide.
The party of leftist social justice warriors is cracking under the weight of its own failures. Woke culture is imploding, “green” fantasies are backfiring, and nowhere is this more evident than in the Democrat stronghold states of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, where the retirement of stable, affordable fossil fuel power in favor of unreliable solar and wind is driving up energy costs to the highest in the nation this summer and breaking the pocketbooks of working-class families they claim to champion.
Energy policies should balance three key objectives: affordability, reliability, and environmental sustainability — often referred to as the “energy trilemma.” Yet Democrats rammed through climate policies that torched two objectives, affordability and reliability for the environment.
According to the latest EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook for July, the average summer wholesale power prices across the PJM, NYISO, and ISO-NE grids are the highest in the nation. These prices now far exceed those in Texas’ ERCOT, the U.S. average, and even the traditionally high-cost West Coast markets. The blame is squarely focused on the Democrats’ initiative to decarbonize power grids.
Here we go again. Politico declares that Democratic Texas State Representative James Talarico “might turn Texas blue,” in large part because he recently was a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Talarico is thinking of running for Texas’s U.S. Senate seat in 2026.
This is a couple months after Politico wrote about the “eye-catching showing of support” Democrats had for Senate candidate Colin Allred, who lost to Ted Cruz by about 960,000 votes in the 2024 Senate race. And about seven years after Politico wrote “Beto-Mania Sweeps Texas.” And the August 2013 “Game On” cover of Texas Monthly. And . . . well, you get the idea.
You know what a Texas Democrat must do to get members of the national mainstream media to write that they have a chance to win that deep red state? Just show up, apparently.
Of course Talarico is making all the usual moderate noises Texas Democrats make when they’re trying to run statewide, and which he would almost certainl;y abandon if elected, like all Democrats seem to. He has a lifetime Freedom Index score of 4%.
In the last midterm, 8 million Texans voted; in the last presidential election, 11 million Texans voted. If turnout is 8 million, and a Democrat is behind by “just” five percentage points, he’s trailing by “just” 400,000 votes.
And yet cycle after cycle, we get not only credulous coverage saying a Democrat could win Texas — sotto voce conceding it is unlikely — last year you could easily find left-of-center columnists who were willing to go on the record predicting Allred would beat Cruz. Again, Cruz won by 959,492 votes or about 8.5 percentage points. It wasn’t close, and it was never close. Every cycle, the “Democrats could win Texas this year” coverage turns out to be pure wishcasting, as farfetched and unlikely as Trump’s quadrennial prediction that he will win his home state of New York.
According to a DHS report, those arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement include individuals guilty of murder, rape, and pedophilia.
“Over the weekend, our brave ICE agents arrested more depraved criminal illegal aliens, including murderers, rapists, and three child pedophiles. These are the types of barbaric criminals our ICE law enforcement is arresting and removing from American communities every day,” said DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
McLaughlin said that despite the rise in assaults against ICE officers, they continue to put their lives on the line to make American communities safe.
DHS highlighted the arrests of nearly a dozen individuals. Among those apprehended is 58-year-old Jose Arinaga-Ramirez, who is in the U.S. unlawfully from Mexico and was arrested in San Antonio by ICE Dallas. He has been convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child.
ICE Dallas also reports that Ramirez has a criminal history of resisting arrest, driving while intoxicated, and has two convictions for illegal re-entry.
Gilmer Vertiz-Bustemante, 37, another illegal alien from Mexico, was arrested by ICE Houston and has a murder conviction in Tarrant County.
Several other ICE field offices across the nation also reported the arrests of illegal aliens guilty of similar crimes, including ICE Los Angeles, ICE Philadelphia, and ICE Boston.
You can be like Chris Hayes, Brian Stelter, Vox, The New Republic, Adam Schiff, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other progressives, and choose to believe you live in a world where the ending of The Late Show is a sinister plot by spineless, cowardly corporate executives who are terrified of irking President Trump and who desperately want the Federal Communications Commission to approve the merger of CBS’ parent company, Paramount Global, with Skydance Media. (And, it should be noted, Colbert’s choice to turn the show into a four-nights-a-week version of the speaker list at the quadrennial Democratic National Convention.) That is a dramatic world, with noble heroes and dastardly villains, plotting against the interests of the public, punishing a brave comedian, smashing dissent, and bending the knee in obedience to a ruthless, vindictive, power-mad president.
Or you choose to believe you live in a world where the ending of the show is a reflection of the fact that CBS was losing $40 million each year on the show, as the Wall Street Journal reports today. And as much fun as it would be to blame Colbert for being greedy and making the show unprofitable with his $20 million per year salary, with numbers like that, the show would still be unprofitable even if he worked for free.
Reuters adds, “the show’s ad revenue plummeted to $70.2 million last year from $121.1 million in 2018, according to ad tracking firm Guideline.” If a show’s ad revenue gets nearly cut in half over a six-year period, that is a serious and worsening problem, and an indication that it isn’t a reflection of a one-year blip or temporary economic pressures.
The real problem with CBS’s Late Show isn’t that it needed Letterman to survive, or even that CBS’s recent lawsuit payout to Donald Trump left Paramount/CBS looking to quickly cut a cool $16 million from their operating budget. The Late Show deserved to die simply because it got swallowed by the media trends surrounding it: Colbert used his star power to turn it into a watered-down variant on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. (Or, more often, and infinitely more damningly, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.) He became irrelevant.
Lately, he just doesn’t seem to be bothering at all. NR contributor Becket Adams hilariously noted how many of Stephen Colbert’s guests since taking the helm — on CBS, on a marquee-brand late-night talk show meant primarily to highlight Hollywood’s latest effluvia — have been better suited for The Maddow Report than late-night broadcast entertainment. “Where will I go now for lighthearted, fun celebrity interviews of, uh, CNN staffers, obscure federal administrators, and failed gubernatorial candidates?” Becket asks.
Stacey Abrams helpfully chimed in to salute Colbert on his way out the door, noting that she had appeared four times on the show — which, as Dominic Pino assesses, is a remarkable “2-to-1 exchange rate between Late Show appearances and number of elections lost to Brian Kemp.” And the just-so story to cap it all off: Who was the young Hollywood celebrity joining Stephen Colbert on the day he announced his cancellation? None other than that buxom starlet Adam Schiff, Democratic senator from California — for the full hour.
What is there to say? This was supposed to be a goofy, winkingly subversive late-night comedy show. With Colbert at the helm it has turned into Theme Time Therapy Hour for aging liberals who just want to watch a little TV in bed before turning out the light. “Political comedy” talk shows have infamously been the death of late-night comedy, the substitution of “clapter” in place of “laughter,” which is much harder to earn in any media era, and particularly one dominated by censorious progressive sensibilities. Their ratings trajectories have long since been clear. Why didn’t Colbert ever just try to be funny instead?
Because he’d rather garner the seal-clapping seal of approval for #CorrectThought.
Legislation separating biological males from women’s private spaces and vice versa is set to take the stage once again in the Texas Capitol as one of Gov. Greg Abbott’s items for this year’s first special session after a similar bill died in committee during the regular session.
The “Texas Women’s Privacy Act,” or House Bill (HB) 239, was filed during the 89th regular session by state Rep. Valoree Swanson (R-Spring) — resembling a nearly identical piece of legislation filed in 2017 that was also brought up during a special session, although it ultimately failed to pass.
Swanson filed HB 32, the special session version of the “bathroom bill,” on July 14. Identical to the legislation filed during the regular session, it seeks to establish a “statewide standard” for “private spaces” such as locker rooms or bathrooms in publicly-funded facilities such as prisons or domestic violence shelters. It stated that they “must be designated based on biological sex as stated on a person’s original birth certificate.”
While the Democratic Party increasingly embraces socialist and Marxist-leaning policies, such as the seizure of private property, this idea of government-funded grocery stores appears disconnected from both fundamental economic realities and historical precedent.
Nowhere is this more evident than in East Kansas City, where a nonprofit operates a grocery store on government land that has become a symbol of failure, plagued by the smell of rot and empty shelves.
Local media outlet KSHB 41 Kansas City toured Sun Fresh Market at 3110 Wabash Ave (31st & Prospect) on the city’s Eastside. The store opened in 2018 as part of a multi-million dollar public-private revitalization of the Linwood Shopping Center. Operated by Community Builders of Kansas City, a nonprofit focused on urban development, the store has since become a massive reminder that while socialism may sound great on paper, in practice, it can be an absolute disaster.
KSHB 41’s Alyssa Jackson reported that her news team received a tip from a viewer about empty shelves throughout the dairy section, meat department, bakery aisle, and deli counter.
In capitalist countries, food waits for people. In socialist countries, people wait for food.
The U.S. Agency for Global Media sponsored hundreds of visas over a number of years for foreign journalists to come work for its subsidiary Voice of America, some of which were awarded to employees tied to Chinese state media, according to records reviewed by Just the News.
The agency’s hiring of more than 400 foreign journalists, from about 2009 to the end of the Biden administration, raises questions because of the liberal use of J1 cultural exchange visas, which are not designed for use as a general work authorization.
So Obama started importing communist Chinese and Biden continued it.
Edwin J. Feulner, founder and longest-serving president of the Heritage Foundation, died yesterday at 83. He is survived by his wife, Linda, and their two children.
Feulner founded Heritage in 1973 alongside Paul Weyrich and Joseph Coors. Since his passing, Republican politicians and conservative institutions have remembered him as a courageous and wise defender of truth.
Snip.
Feulner served for 37 years as Heritage’s president before he moved into an advisory role.
“His unwavering love of country and his determination to safeguard the principles that made America the freest, most prosperous nation in human history shaped every fiber of the conservative movement—and still do,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts said. “Whether he was bringing together the various corners of the conservative movement at meetings of the Philadelphia Society, or launching what is now the Heritage Strategy Forum, Ed championed a bold, ‘big-tent conservatism.’”
Though it’s become yet another ossified inside-the-beltway institution, in its heyday under Fuelner, Heritage was a force to be reckoned with The Reagan Revolution probably isn’t half as effective without the studies and policy guides Heritage produced, including the various Mandate for Leaderships.
They FaceTime at their desks, show up in sweats or other inappropriate office attire, and expect a promotion by lunchtime. Some of them even bring their parents to job interviews.
To put it mildly, their older coworkers aren’t impressed. The latest crop of Gen Z workers is attempting to redefine workplace norms, and they’re running into some resistance along the way.
There are several possible explanations for why Gen Zers are struggling to adapt to the corporate workplace. Perhaps it’s because they’re the first generation to grow up entirely online. Or maybe it stems from a lifetime of being coddled—made to feel exceptional by parents, teachers, and other adults. The disruption of remote learning during the pandemic certainly didn’t help. Whatever the cause, many Gen Zers are entering the workforce with little understanding of how to behave in a professional environment.
And yet companies don’t want to hire older workers, either. Make up your mind!
The 4th dog is not running.. 🤯 pic.twitter.com/nmD0tQcGcu
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) July 7, 2025
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.
More Biden jobs number fakery, more green graft exposed, everyone knew about Slow Joe, the DNC butchers David Hogg, Gun Jesus weighs in on Sig Saur, and Shoeless Joe gets a shot at redemption.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The Biden administration’s phony jobs boom just went up in smoke. For months, it paraded numbers around like everything was fine, telling Americans the economy was roaring back, that job creation was on fire, and that “Bidenomics” was working. But the truth, long suspected by anyone trying to pay the bills, is now confirmed by the government’s own data: those jobs never existed.
According to new figures released this week, the 399,000 jobs the Biden team claimed were created between July and September of last year have completely vanished. Not only did the economy not add those jobs, but it also lost 1,000 private-sector jobs during that period.
“This more accurate dataset was just released by the BLS for the third quarter of last year,” EJ Antoni, a research fellow and the Richard Aster Fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, explains over at Townhall. “In stark contrast to the monthly job reports showing an increase of 399,000 jobs during the third quarter, these new numbers show a decline of 1,000 private-sector jobs.”
Nearly 400,000 phantom jobs were quietly wiped off the books. And this isn’t just a one-time discrepancy. Month after month during Joe Biden’s term, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) published inflated job estimates, only to revise them downward later, long after the headlines had already done their PR damage for the White House.
Antoni breaks it down further: “Under Biden, these revisions were abnormal in magnitude and direction, being revised down with unusual frequency.” No kidding. In fact, the BLS’s more comprehensive annual benchmark, released earlier this year, revised down Biden’s job numbers from March 2023 to March 2024 by a jaw-dropping 598,000 jobs.
That’s not just bad math; that’s deception on a national scale.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GRF), passed as part of the “Inflation Reduction Act” in 2022, has proved to be a cornucopia of graft for Biden’s Democratic Party favorites and green non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
The GRF rushed $20 billion in grants out the door in the waning days of the Biden administration to just six organizations. As The Free Press reports, the EPA employees charged with vetting the NGOs who were to receive that $20 billion raised numerous objections to the grants. Despite their concerns, the money was doled out.
We’re just now finding out how corrupt the process of throwing $20 billion to the Democratic Party’s friends actually was.
I’ve written extensively about former Georgia candidate for governor Stacey Abrams’ ties to one NGO that received $2 billion from the GRF despite having only $100 in the bank when they applied for the grant. The $20 billion fund became a one-stop shop for climate graft as hundreds of smaller non-profits joined coalitions of grifters to get millions of dollars despite many having no experience handling that kind of money.
The Free Press obtained documents that include the reviews of the applications for grants from the organizations requesting money from the GRF. Some of them are eye-openers.
One of the reasons for the grant review is for the grantee to justify expenses, including the salaries of top executives. The federal employee who reviewed the application for Power Forward Communities, the Stacey Abrams-linked NGO that was selected to receive $2 billion, questioned the salaries and estimated expenses in the grant application.
“For such an important section, it was pithy, though not always in a good way. Many of the costs were just presented, but little or no explanation as to why they are reasonable. I would have preferred they omitted the travel discussion and explained why they need to pay the CEO $800,000, growing to $948,000 in year 7. And chief operation officer $455,000 per year.”
Anyone who has ever completed an application for a government grant knows that this is a slipshod job that wouldn’t pass muster with any number of federal agencies. But Biden’s EPA just handed $2 billion taxpayer dollars to these incompetent bozos.
Another nonprofit, Appalachian Community Capital, applied for $1 billion from the fund, even though it had never managed anywhere near that much money. In 2023, the latest year for which it has filed tax forms, it spent less than $4.5 million. Two reviewers noted this lack of experience in their comments, saying “The amount of money managed under previous agreements was much less than what is being proposed under this grant opportunity.”
A reviewer also noted that Appalachian Community Capital planned to use $215 million to finance 600 zero-emission vehicles and $105 million to finance 700 charging stations. “This is $358,333 per EV vehicle,” the reviewer wrote, adding that $150,000 per charging station “seems too high.”
Appalachian Community Capital was ultimately granted $500 million from the EPA.
The reviewers were from several different agencies, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of the Treasury, and the EPA. A panel of judges based their recommendations for grant approval on the written application and a 40-minute interview.
Not surprisingly, the criteria for receiving the funds included “equity and environmental justice” and “labor and equitable workforce.” They could have been groups of serial killers and still gotten a grant if they were woke enough.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has vowed to recover the $20 billion after a secretly recorded video made by Project Veritas showed a former EPA employee likening the deployment of the funds to “throwing gold bars” off the Titanic. He added that the goal was to “get the money out as fast as possible” before the Trump administration took over.
Meanwhile, the litigation over the $20 billion continues. Late last month, Politico obtained government emails in which an EPA lawyer noted the Trump administration could be on the hook for billions of dollars in damages if the court finds that the EPA has no legal grounds to recoup the grant money or block it from being disbursed to the nonprofits.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“We gave them everything they needed to provide for their independence,” Biden said of Ukraine, “and we were prepared to respond more aggressively if Putin moved again.”
Hogwash.
It was only in late February of last year — just about two years to the day from the outset of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine — that the Biden administration reluctantly dropped its objection to providing Kyiv with long-range ordnance for use in Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS). Biden wouldn’t authorize the use of that ordnance against Russian targets outside the Ukrainian theater for another nine months. Indeed, the former president didn’t consent to providing Ukraine with ATACMS at all until September 2023, even though Ukraine had requested access to those platforms from the start of Russia’s campaign of conquest.
That story — one defined by the Biden administration’s persistent self-doubt and halting, qualified, often insufficient support for Ukraine’s cause, only to be abruptly reversed after the damage had already been done — repeated throughout the war. The same sequence of events describes the administration’s withholding and eventual reluctant provision of High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), heavy artillery, tanks, fixed-wing aircraft, cluster munitions, antipersonnel mines, and so on.
The administration’s first thought was always about how the Russians would respond to America’s furnishment of weapons platforms and ordnance that Moscow was already using on Ukraine’s battlefields. The Biden administration’s concern wasn’t irrational, but the president and his subordinates refused to revisit their assumptions. Moscow would draw a red line, Washington would observe that red line, and when that red line was crossed without broader incident, the White House would move on to obsess over the next illusory red line. Biden declined to revise this doctrine even when it became obvious that Russia’s table-pounding objections to America’s support for Ukraine would amount to just that.
Biden failed to deter Russia’s war. Indeed, it responded to months of provocative indications that Putin was ready to attack by rewarding the Russian despot with bilateral summitry. And when Putin’s forces poured over the Ukrainian border anyway, the former president didn’t just fail to hand over “everything they needed to provide for their independence.” Rather, the administration provided Ukraine with just enough to prevent it from being wholly subsumed into the Russian Federation — and that only after losing an unnecessarily public argument with itself.
In fact, we can safely conclude that the Biden administration never trusted the Ukrainians to provide for their own defense. Instead, the president signaled to the Kremlin that the U.S. would not respond to a “minor incursion” into Ukrainian territory, and his instinct in response to Moscow’s full-scale invasion was to establish a Ukrainian government in exile. “The fight is here,” Volodymyr Zelensky said in his famous rejection of Biden’s pusillanimity. “I need ammunition, not a ride.”
Mass delusion gripped the entire Democratic Party, and they talked themselves into believing they could carry a senile president over the reelection finish line, Weekend at Bernie’s–style, if everyone just tried hard enough to gaslight the public. And as far as we can tell, at no point did any of them pause to contemplate the potential consequences for the country.
There’s something grimly satisfying about the bitter recriminations laid out in the concluding pages of Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s new book Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, as the Democrats grapple with the fact that their own leaders misled them about the reality of the 2024 presidential race every step of the way.
Three weeks after Election Day, top Kamala Harris campaign staffers appeared on Pod Save America and contended their internal polling always showed the vice president trailing. “It was hard for Democratic voters to tell what was real,” Allen and Parnes write. “They had been led to believe that Joe Biden was in fighting shape. But he wasn’t. They had been led to believe he was locked in a dead-heat race with Trump. But he wasn’t. They had been led to believe that [Kamala] Harris was in a position to win. But she wasn’t. And now they were being led to believe she never had a chance. That wasn’t really true, either.”
And in the preceding 287 pages, we keep getting anecdotes indicating things had gone terribly, glaringly, obviously wrong in the Democrats’ world, but no one wanted to admit it and confront the problems.
After his disastrous debate performance, President Biden attempted to reassure a group of unnerved Democratic governors by telling them he would no longer plan to appear at events past 8 in the evening. Allen and Parnes say one governor later quipped, “Somebody better tell the Chinese when they can attack us, because I don’t want them to wake him up.”
If the president can’t physically or mentally function well in the evening hours, why is he still president? How would he handle a sustained emergency like the Cuban Missile Crisis, where he’d need to make tough decisions after long days?
Allen and Parnes describe Biden aides calling up doubtful Democratic donors before his withdrawal and threatening them, “You want her? Look at her polling. No one wants her. Forget it.” One donor tells the authors, “They were aggressively saying that we would wind up with the vice president and that would be a mistake.” The argument that Harris is a self-evident disaster was characterized by Biden staffers as their “ace in the hole.”
If nominating Harris was such an obvious catastrophe . . . why was she vice president? At any moment, the 82-year-old Biden could keel over or have an aneurysm, and she would be the nominee anyway. For that matter, didn’t anybody on the president’s staff foresee any potential downside to trashing the veep?
If, as Allen and Parnes report, in the weeks leading up to the debate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was so nervous that he couldn’t sleep at night and his aides had to remind him to eat, wasn’t that a glaring sign that this guy wasn’t ready to be a heartbeat away from the presidency? The duties of the vice-presidency include tasks even more intimidating than debating JD Vance.
No one in any position of leadership in the Democratic Party in 2024 should have been there. None of them were up to the task before them.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday aimed at lowering prescription drug prices, instituting a “most favored nation’s policy” that would push drug companies to charge Americans the same price other nations pay.
Trump signed a similar measure during his first term to institute price controls for fifty drugs paid for with Medicare Part B, but a court blocked its implementation, ruling that the administration had skipped key administrative steps in trying to institute the proposal.
Monday’s executive order is broader in scope, focusing on all prescriptions drugs where the price disparities between the U.S. and foreign nations are the widest. But according to the White House, this executive order is not focused on a particular class of pharmaceutical drugs.
The order — which is likely to run into legal challenges as well — is in keeping with the administration’s broader trade war strategy, which relies on a suite of policy tools to address what officials say is an uneven global economic playing field.
“What’s been happening is we’ve been subsidizing other countries throughout the world,” Trump said on Monday morning before signing the executive action. “Our country is the highest drug prices anywhere in the world, by sometimes a factor of five, six, seven, eight times.”
I have no idea what the ramifications of this may be, but it will be fun to watch Democrats try to explain why driving down Big Pharma prices is bad…
The order by U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich came amid a lawsuit by Centro de Trabajadores Unidos, an immigrant-rights aid group, against Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
“At its core, this case presents a narrow legal issue: Does the Memorandum of Understanding between the IRS and DHS violate the Internal Revenue Code? It does not,” Friedrich wrote in his order.
“(Note: Friedrich, a Trump appointee, is a woman, so that would be her order.)” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
The Parkland shooting survivor bootstrapped his way from anti-gun youth activist to recent election as one of the vice-chairs of the Democratic National Committee — and all this despite having forearms that look like they were carved out of balsa wood. But instead of being the easily controlled patsy the DNC’s grandees and voters expected, Hogg promptly began using the DNC’s fundraising lists and prestige to raise money for his own outside super PAC — one designed to take down “asleep-at-the-wheel” Democratic incumbents. Keep in mind that most Democratic incumbents sleep (and sometimes at the wheel) in a perpetual cold sweat about being primaried by the next wave of “Squad”-like radical lefties; now their own vice-chairman is promising to help unseat them. (The calls to get them out of the House are coming from inside the house.)
Snip.
The DNC has instead approved a resolution challenging the validity of Hogg’s election on pretextual grounds and is set to nullify the race later this month and bounce the little chiseler out of office altogether. He got too greedy with his power too fast. As both farmers and politicos will tell you: Pigs get fed, but hogs and Hoggs alike get slaughtered.
As much as I enjoy making jokes about the Democratic Party nullifying its own democratic internal processes because democracy elected the wrong person, I speak as an adult when I say Hogg had it coming, and then some. His pitch to “firewall” himself away from races where he is fundraising for enemy insurgents was the sort of farcical fantasy-world pitch that could only come from a spectacularly self-centered youth, one who believes his personal project is more important than the corporate enterprise he has joined. As another current vice-chair says in the piece, “it is not the DNC’s job to create a firewall for one officer — it is the officer’s responsibility to create a firewall.”
And the way the Democratic National Committee is doing it is so splendidly pathetic that I can barely believe my good fortune. Remember: The DNC voted for Hogg as vice-chair a mere three months ago. Upon what grounds do they propose to undo that vote? (“Behaving like a traitorous weasel” was apparently insufficient under current DNC bylaws.) Upon grounds of wokeness, as it turns out.
It’s always nice to have a splendid reminder of the sort of work the NRO crew used to be able to do before their terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome made so much of it unreadable.
House Republicans took major step on Wednesday afternoon towards codifying President Donald Trump’s efforts to protect children from transgender procedures during a marathon markup session for the “one, big, beautiful bill” working its way through Congress.
After a 26-hour budget hearing, the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed a provision from Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) that would block federal dollars funding transgender procedures. This means that Medicaid, Affordable Care Act, and Children’s Health Insurance Program money will no longer be allowed to fund procedures like removing the breasts of girls who identify as boys or putting children on cross-sex hormones, if the provision makes it through the rest of the reconciliation process.
Crenshaw receives a lot of criticism from conservatives, some of it justified, but he’s done well here.
The Texas Compassionate Use Act, enacted in 2015, allows physicians to prescribe low-dose THC for patients with specific medical conditions such as incurable neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
With HB 46, TCUP will be expanded to new qualifying medical conditions, including glaucoma, traumatic brain injuries, Crohn’s disease, or any terminal illness or condition where a patient is receiving hospice or palliative care. The bill will also allow for “medication” that is “aerosolized” or “vaporized,” and the TCUP program will be expanded to include veterans “who would benefit from medical use to address a medical condition.”
The legislation also expands access by increasing the number of dispensing licenses, authorizing satellite locations across all public health regions.
[Rep. Ken] King adopted a perfecting amendment that would “grandfather” in existing satellite TCUP locations, revise the THC content limits to exceed the “one percent by weight” provision, and establish timelines for approving medical inhalation devices.
Rep. Tom Oliverson (R-Cypress) also had his amendment adopted, which will require physicians prescribing low-THC cannabis to report prescription data to the Texas State Board of Pharmacy.
The states that have experimented with uncontrolled complete legalization of marijuana seemed to have suffered a lot of harmful effects, from sketchy potheads in broken RVs trashing formerly respectable neighborhoods to state and national forests trashed by illegal grow operations, maybe because a lot are also one-party Democratic soft-on-crime blue states and deep blue cities. Oklahoma, which isn’t, has suffered from Chinese mob control of the marijuana trade. Whatever it’s flaws, Texas extremely slow medical marijuana legalization program seems to have at least avoided those problems.
I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.
More DOGE revelations, more leftwing violence, more pervert school teachers arrested, Baltimore builds a ghost city, astronauts get rescued, DVDs rot, and a bunch of fierce togers with a gentle mom.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Muslim charity with links to Hamas was awarded more than $7.2 million in taxpayer cash, which has now disappeared, according to a watchdog group.
An “immediate investigation” needs to be launched into The Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) California chapter’s use of funds, according to the watchdog, who sent a complaint to the Department of Justice Thursday.
According to the Intelligent Advocacy Network (IAN), a California-based, non-partisan advocacy group, the money was given to the chapter to help re-settle impoverished immigrants in California between 2022 and 2024.
In what appears to be a sleight of hand, the money – $7,217,968.44 — was sent to CAIR-Greater Los Angeles and not to CAIR-CA, which was the only group eligible to receive it, according to the complaint.
The Greater Los Angeles chapter of the Muslim organization, which is not a registered non-profit and not eligible to handle charitable donations, received the entire pot of money according to the complaint, viewed by The Post.
I think we all know where that money went: Leftwing pockets and murdering Jews.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday shuttering the Department of Education, fulfilling a long-standing conservative wish to do away with the agency.
Trump’s order directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take the “necessary steps” to close the $268 billion agency and transfer its authority back to the states. The order does not immediately shutter the agency, and it will require programs and services to continue uninterrupted.
“Everybody knows it’s right,” Trump said moments before signing the order, which he said was 45 years in the making. “We have to get our children educated.”
The long-expected executive order will likely face significant legal challenges over whether Trump has the authority to dismantle the agency. Fully closing down the Department of Education will require congressional approval.
Since the days of President Ronald Reagan, Republicans have sought to eliminate the Department of Education, created in 1979 under former President Jimmy Carter, for its role in promoting left-wing ideology and encroaching on state authority. The Education Department’s responsibilities primarily consist of allocating grant money, administering student loans, and enforcing federal civil rights laws
Trump has long promised to terminate the agency and empower states to run their own education systems without federal interference. Shuttering the Education Department was a bullet point on the 2024 GOP platform.
National Review seems to think Trump’s plan is more flawed than the previous Republican Presidential attempts to shutter the Department of Education by not doing a goddamn thing…
The Department of Education has a budget of about $280 billion dollars per year. Less than 25% goes to educating our students.
It goes to a bureaucracy. It goes to a consultant. And that consultant then donates money back to the Democrats. And then it goes to a different consultant. And then it goes to an NGO. It is money laundering and money churning at its absolute best.
It appears that the entire point of both the Biden and Obama Administrations was to turn the entirety of the federal government into a giant graft machine for the radical left.
For years, the left has advanced utter untruths for cheap partisan purposes that it knew at the time were all false. And now when caught, they just shrug and say they were lying all along.
Once it was known that the first COVID-19 case originated in or near a Chinese communist virology lab engineering gain-in-function deadly viruses—with help from Western agencies—the left went into full persecution mode.
They damned as incompetent, racist, and conspiratorial any who dared follow logic and evidence to point out that the Chinese government and its military were both culpable for the virus and lying.
A million Americans died of COVID. Millions more suffered long-term injuries. Still, the left-wing media and Biden administration demonized any who dared speak the truth about a lab origin of the deadly virus.
The lies were designed to protect the guilty who had helped fund the virus’s origins, such as Doctors Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins.
The Biden government also tried to use the lab theory to ridicule a supposedly pro-Trump “conspiracy.”
Western corporate interests deeply invested in China did not want their partner held responsible for veritably killing and maiming hundreds of millions worldwide.
Almost as soon as Joe Biden was inaugurated, the left knew that he was physically and mentally unable to serve as president.
Indeed, that was the point.
Biden’s role was designed as a waxen figurine for hard-left agendas that, without the “old Joe Biden from Scranton” pseudo-moderate veneer, could never have been advanced.
His handlers operated a nightmare administration: the destruction of deterrence abroad, two theater wars, 12 million illegal aliens, a weaponized justice system, hyperinflation, and $7 trillion more in debt.
By 2017, the public knew three truths about the so-called Christopher Steele dossier.
One, it was completely fallacious—fabricated by a has-been, ex-British spy Christopher Steele. He childishly had cobbled together lurid sex stories, James Bond spy fictions, and Russian-fed disinformation to destroy the Trump candidacy and later presidency.
Two, it was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. She hid her checks behind the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GSP paywalls.
Three, the FBI under James Comey hired Steele as an informant. It helped disseminate his concocted files and was also instrumental in trying to subvert the Trump campaign and later administration.
No sane person ever believed that Hunter Biden’s laptop was the work of “Russian disinformation.” Its contents a year before the 2020 election were verified by the FBI, but it kept mum about its confirmation.
The pornographic pictures, the evidence of prostitution and drug use, the electronic communications implicating Joe Biden in his family’s illicit shake-down operation of foreign governments—all were never challenged by anyone who was associated with the laptop’s contents.
Yet future Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, along with former interim CIA Director Mike Morrell, sought to fabricate a colossal lie to arm their candidate, Joe Biden, with plausible denial in the last presidential debate before the 2020 election.
They rounded up a rogue’s gallery of 51 now utterly discredited former intelligence authorities to lie to the nation that the laptop was likely fake.
All knew the FBI had verified the laptop. But they also knew that their titles would empower their lies that the Russians likely invented the laptop to aid the sinister Trump.
Ekrem Imamoglu, Istanbul’s mayor and a high-profile member of the opposition to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was arrested along with dozens of others Wednesday, state-run media reported, in what critics said was a significant escalation of the government’s crackdown on dissent.
Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.The chief public prosecutor’s office ordered the arrest of about 100 people Wednesday, saying Imamoglu and others faced allegations including membership in criminal organization, bribery, aggravated fraud and unlawful acquisition of personal data. More than 80 people had been detained so far, according to local media reports.
Imamoglu, a popular politician and member of the opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, became mayor of Turkey’s largest city in 2019 and won reelection last year in high-profile races where he defeated candidates from Erdogan’s ruling party. He was expected to be selected as the CHP’s candidate for president in the party’s primary elections scheduled for this weekend. The mayorship of Istanbul is seen as a political stepping stone: Erdogan once held the role.
Over two decades in power, Erdogan has tightened his control over state institutions and deepened restrictions on speech and expression, including within the judiciary, bringing charges against and imprisoning opponents. He has also exerted widespread control over the media, universities and other institutions.
US Attorney General Pam Bondi released a statement overnight, calling the “violent attacks” on Tesla showrooms, service centers, Supercharger networks, and vehicles “nothing short of domestic terrorism.”
“The swarm of violent attacks on Tesla property is nothing short of domestic terrorism. The Department of Justice has already charged several perpetrators with that in mind, including in cases that involve charges with five-year mandatory minimum sentences,” Bondi stated in a press release.
She continued: “We will continue investigations that impose severe consequences on those involved in these attacks, including those operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes.”
The latest domestic terrorism attack on Tesla occurred at a service center in Las Vegas early Tuesday morning.
ver the next few days you’re going to see an organized progressional protest effort at Tesla stores put together by a group called Indivisible.
George Soros foundation has given Indivisible nearly $8 million dollars for their “activism”.
They’re calling these “Tesla takedown” events and they’re doing it in the midst of a domestic terror spree targeting Tesla and Tesla owners. They have these planned across the entire country. These images are just six examples.
How can this not be seen as encouraging more violence and terrorism? I personally think that any violence occurring near locations they’ve chosen should result in Soros, his foundation, Indivisible and their founders being held criminally accountable as co-conspirators.
The indivisible founders are Ezra Levin and his wife Leah Greenberg. They became “resistance” figures during Trump’s first term and their work is celebrated by elected Democrats. So yeah, it’s clear to me that the Democrats and their typical thugs are organizing this insanity.
There’s reportedly even a form protest leaders can fill out to receive “reimbursement” payments for their protests.
🚨 BREAKING: Trump says he will pay the astronauts who were stranded in outer space overtime out of his own pocket.
DOOCY: They didn't get any over time. $5 per day per diem, that's $1,430 in extra pay. Can the administration fix this?
TRUMP: No one mentioned this. If I have… pic.twitter.com/5WNbdzYYZa
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) March 21, 2025
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Federal prosecutors announced the convictions of two of the human smugglers responsible for the horrific 2022 mass casualty event wherein 53 people were killed and 11 injured after being locked into a tractor-trailer and left in the Texas heat.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) described the tragedy as the single deadliest human smuggling case in U.S. history at the time. Four men, all Mexican nationals, were charged in connection with the crime: 30-year-old Riley Covarrubias-Ponce, 28-year-old Felipe Orduna-Torres, 37-year-old Luis Rivera-Leal, and 53-year-old Armando Gonzales-Ortega.
Fast forward, and the DOJ confirmed in a press statement that Orduna-Torres and Gonzalez-Ortega were convicted for their roles in the alien smuggling conspiracy that led to the deaths.
A music bigwig who helped launch Nipsey Hussle’s career and was lauded as rap’s “godfather” has been accused of running a “Mafia-like” criminal enterprise involving murder, human trafficking, robbery and extortion on the streets of Los Angeles.
Eugene Henley Jr. — known as “Big U” in the entertainment world — was one of 18 members of the Rollin’ 60s Neighborhood Crips street gang charged in a sprawling federal racketeering complaint, the US Attorney’s Office said Wednesday.
Henley has “maintained the image of an entertainment industry entrepreneur running a music label and of somebody who gives back to the community here in Los Angeles,” US Attorney Joseph T. McNally said while announcing the indictment.
(Hat tip: Dwight.)
This is the best thing you'll see all day.. pic.twitter.com/5paEU34GqC
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) September 29, 2024
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
I’m between jobs again. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.
Happy New Year! The Biden Administration is made of lies (which you already knew), a few links about guns, mysterious deaths in Tarrant County jails, Russian finds new, embarrassing ways to lose equipment, Hasbro destroys D&D’s legacy, and a look at biblical werewolves. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Another 653,000 fake jobs revised away by govt statisticians. They were faking the data during 2023 and 2024 to try to boost Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
In the revisions, they have also admitted to 818,000 fake jobs being removed from the 2023 data.
Now the truth is coming… https://t.co/ugFjndy7vZ
— Wall Street Mav (@WallStreetMav) December 30, 2024
A brand new investigation from the Wall Street Journal has revealed that scientists knew early on that the COVID-19 virus was an engineered virus that escaped a lab, but the information was suppressed by intelligence agencies and removed from all presidential briefings on the matter.
Three scientists from the National Center for Medical Intelligence, John Hardham, Robert Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien, had reported their findings that the virus was manipulated in a lab. They shared their findings with the FBI, but were soon told to stop.
In August of 2021, Biden was briefed on the origins of COVID-19 after a 90-day investigation from intelligence agencies. National Intelligence Director Avril Haines briefed the President and left out all research pointing to a lab leak from her briefing.
It’s going to take a long time for us to stop flinching and deciding we’re going to be betrayed. 2020 left scars in the collective psyche, and scars take a long time to fade if they ever do.
The last four years we were hunching our shoulders and just enduring the blows, and that will take a long long time to fade.
And sure, there are things that won’t go our way. But you shouldn’t worry too much about that.
Look, the edifice that supports the boot on our necks is not only rickety. It always was rickety.
Keeping the big lie of the all powerful centralized government in place was a full scale production, and it required a fully coordinated media, fully coordinated panels of “experts”, and a trusting public that believed all of it. Or at least a majority of the public that believed all of it.
It has been eroding for a while, since social media and blogs got really big in the wake of 9/11. Despite their best efforts at censorship, a massed multitude of — what did they call us? — hobbits is harder to control than a few journalists who want to be invited to the right parties.
Trump’s election in 2016 was the first time the media lost to the hobbits. Really lost, publicly. They didn’t like it. The hell the establishment has put us through since is their payback.
It came with unexpected consequences though. The main ones being: their masks were yanked off; and we don’t believe them anymore.
This is the sort of thing that not all the king’s horses and not all the king’s men can put together ever again.
Sure, we’ll “lose” some. Sure, they’re making cunning plans to thwart the will of the people.
But be not afraid. If we win even a few places, it’s enough for the whole edifice of oppression and lies to come tumbling down.
It has been tumbling down, already, even while they were nominally in power, which is why we won 2024.
Be not afraid. This is very important. The rest will fall into place, provided you keep your heads and remember you’re Americans.
Until a few years ago I was working as a mid-career research scientist, no I won’t tell you what field. Within my collaboration I was known for being extremely productive. I’ve seen jaws drop when I show colleagues my publication list.
Then it came time to start applying for junior professor positions.
Got a few interviews, but doors kept getting slammed in my face. It’s a very opaque process ofc, they never tell you why. In one case however I had the dean – a portly Hispanic woman – tell me two minutes into the interview that “women in STEM are very important to me”, and ultimately heard informally from one of the profs at that dept that I hadn’t been hired because of interference from the dean, despite all of the profs on the committee wanting me, and that instead they’d hired … no one.
(Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
One of the many controversial chunks of the short-term spending bill that sparked debate recently included funding for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center.
But what’s the problem? After all, who doesn’t like “Global Engagement”?!
Well, this agency — formed by Barack Obama — has been moonlighting as a censorship czar, handing out taxpayer dollars like candy to groups that spend their time suppressing conservative voices online.
(In other words, your average Obama administration government office.)
But after widespread backlash, the new version has no room for the Global Engagement Center.
Snip.
Reports from the Washington Examiner indicated that the GEC bankrolled groups like the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard, organizations that basically police speech with the finesse of a drunk mall cop. The Federalist and the Daily Wire even sued the GEC over its role in suppressing right-leaning voices.
Thanks to the new continuing resolution, the GEC finally met its own doom, with yet another scrap of Barack Obama’s legacy shuffling off into the sunset like Joe Biden’s last remaining marble.
Just got a dm from someone who works in recruiting at one of big tech companies. He said it's internal policy within the team he works for to reserve roles for what they call “outside talent”.
They are not allowed to recruit Americans for these roles but must go through the…
— Aesthetica (@Anc_Aesthetics) December 29, 2024
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
— Doglover (@puppiesDoglover) January 2, 2025
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
For several weeks, I’ve been running out of time to post every link I’ve gathered, so I’ve been bumping some links (generally ones that seemed less time-sensitive or required more commentary than others) to the next week’s LinkSwarm, whereupon I may use one or two, but otherwise the process repeats.
Well, I’m just going to post all those today to clear the decks.
In the summer of 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom convinced the state legislature to provide $4.7 billion for K-12 mental health services, which, among other things, funded 10,000 new school counselors.
Gavin Newsom convinced the legislature because Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of the governor, convinced him. The biggest advocate for mental health funding within the K-12 California public schools in the Newsom administration was Mrs. Newsom, according to published accounts.
In fact, Gavin Newsom created The Office of First Partner so his wife could promote her policy agenda using taxpayer money. Since 2019, Siebel Newsom’s been armed with nearly $5 million and nine staffers within her subdivision of the governor’s office.
Snip.
Siebel Newsom spent years laying the ideological groundwork and political infrastructure to support her policy ambitions.
In 2012, Siebel Newsom founded a nonprofit, The Representation Project, that licenses “gender justice” films and curricula to 5,000 schools in all 50 states. The year Gavin Newsom became governor, the California Board of Education adopted guidance that recommended her films and curriculum be licensed and used in classrooms.
Policy making in California isn’t magic. Turns out, it’s a carefully thought through process to maximize political power and personal return from public investments.
Last week, we investigated the sophisticated scheme through which Siebel Newsom’s film and curricula “gender justice” nonprofit, The Representation Project, leverages taxpayer dollars to promote radical ideologies, personally profit, and push the political ambitions of her husband. She brags that 2.6 million students have seen the films nationwide.
The Representation Project contracts with her for-profit film-production company, Girls Club Entertainment. Since 2012, Siebel Newsom received $1.5 million in salary from the nonprofit. Furthermore, since 2012, the Siebel’s nonprofit paid her for-profit Girls Club $1.6 million to produce films.
Last month, our investigation broke the story that The Representation Project was not in compliance with the California Charitable Solicitation Act. The organization was not permitted to operate or solicit donations in California most of 2022 – yet spent all last year in operation and fundraising.
Now, we dig deeper, investigating the $4.8 million “Office of the First Partner” Gavin Newsom established for his wife’s policy work, and how Jennifer Siebel Newsom used her position to impact social and political processes, cashing checks along the way.
n 2019, Gov. Newsom created an office for his wife as a division within the governor’s executive team. According to a press release “the First Partner and her team will focus on lifting up women and their families, breaking down barriers for our youth, and furthering the cause of gender equity in California.”
Since inception, Siebel Newsom’s office has received nearly $4.8 million in directed taxpayer funding. The Office of First Partner has grown from seven employees with a budget of $791,000, to nine employees with a budget of $1,166,000 proposed for 2023-2024.
Snip.
Parents have complained about the pornographic content in Newsom’s films shown to 11-year-olds (such as an animated, upside-down stripper with tape over breasts) and 15-year-olds (nearly naked women being slapped, handcuffed, and brutalized in images taken from porn sites) — to view images, viewer discretion is advised.
Editorials have criticized the activities in Newsom’s film The Great American Lie as “emotionally abusive.” The activities ask students to publicly reveal personal information and force commentary on their relative “privilege” and “oppression.”
So Jennifer Siebel Newsom is using California taxpayer money to propagandize children for radical social justice and transexism.
Jordan Shanks is an Australian comedian, also know as freindlyjordies, who fell in to doing YouTube videos about Australian politicians and powerful companies over the past few years. Along the way he became a journalist, the only journalist covering some of the things being done by the government and the corporations. Then in November of 2022 his house was firebombed. It was only by chance that he wasn’t in the house at the time.
And hey, if that sounds too dry, well you kids like Knives Out or whatever. Stick around. It’s a pretty interesting whodunit.
Most of the Australian press is even more in the bag for the powers-that-be than the US national media is for the Democrats. There were numerous stories, all but ignored by the mainstream. One example, the Premiere of New South Wales was under investigation. That was all but ignored by the press until she resigned. Then there were the antics of her Deputy Premiere, John Barilaro.
That is the most entertaining — or damaging to powers that be — story friendlyjordies covered.
As a result of that coverage, the Australian anti-terrorism machinery was directed at Shanks and his employees. Of course that turned out to be a group of Keystone cops, which got their own exposure on freindlyjordies. Along the way he exposed the abuse of the anti-terrorism squad, the relationship between some of the politicians and large corporations and perhaps organized crime. Then in November of the last year, after the lawsuits failed, the anti-terrorism actions failed, and the intimidation failed, someone moved to direct action, and tried to kill him.
On all key technical measures, the Next Generation Squad Weapons program is imploding before Army’s very eyes. The program is on mechanical life support, with its progenitors at the Joint Chiefs obstinately now ramming the program through despite spectacularly failing multiple civilian-sector peer reviews almost immediately upon commercial release.
Indeed the rifle seems cursed from birth. Even the naming has failed. Army recently allowed a third-party company to scare it off the military designation M5. The re-naming will certainly also help scupper bad public relations growing around ‘XM-5′ search results.
Civilian testing problems have, or should have, sunk the program already. The XM-5/7 as it turns out fails a single round into a mud test. Given the platform is a piston-driven rifle it now lacks gas, as the M-16 was originally designed, to blow away debris from the eject port. Possibly aiming to avoid long-term health and safety issues associated with rifle gas, Army has selected an operating system less hardy in battlefield environments. A choice understandable in certain respects, however, in the larger scheme the decision presents potentially war-losing cost/benefit analysis.
Civilian testing, testing Army either never did or is hiding, also only recently demonstrated that the rifle seemingly fails, at point-blank ranges, to meet its base criteria of penetrating Level 4 body armor (unassisted). True, the Army never explicitly set this goal, but it has nonetheless insinuated at every level, from media to Congress, that the rifle will penetrate said armor unassisted. Indeed, that was the entire point of the program. Of course, the rounds can penetrate body armor with Armor Piercing rounds, but so can 7.62x51mm NATO, even 5.56x45mm NATO.
The fundamental problem with the program is there remains not enough tungsten available from China, as Army knows, to make the goal of making every round armor piercing even remotely feasible. The plan also assumes that the world’s by far largest supplier will have zero problems selling tungsten to America only for it to be shot back at its troops during World War III. Even making steel core penetrators would be exceedingly difficult when the time came, adding layers of complexity and time to the most time-contingent of human endeavors. In any case, most large bullet manufacturers and even Army pre-program have moved to tungsten penetrators for a reason, despite the fact it increases the cost by an order of magnitude and supply seems troubled. Perhaps Army has a solution, perhaps.
The slight increase in ballistic coefficiency between the 6.8x51mm and 7.62x51mm cartridges neither justified the money pumped into the program nor does the slight increase in kinetic energy dumped on target. Itself a simple function of case pressurization within the bastardized 7.62mm case. Thus the net mechanical results of the program design-wise is a rifle still chambered in a 7.62×51 mm NATO base case (as the M-14), enjoying now two ways to charge the weapon and a folding stock. This is the limit of the touted generational design ‘leap’ under the program. And while the increased case pressure technology is very welcome the problem is, in terms of ballistics, the round is in no way a leap ahead compared to existing off-the-shelf options as those Army nearly went with under the now disavowed Interim Combat Service Rifle program, or it in fact did purchase schizophrenically just before the NGSW program began with the HK M110A1.
The Army is evidently still moving ahead with the program.
I can’t tell you whether the criticisms are true or not unless Sig Saur sends me a example to shoot. While that would be cool, I suspect it’s pretty unlikely, and I fear many test ranges have picayune policies against using military grade automatic weapons…
For questioning Covid restrictions, Georgetown Law suspended me from campus, forced me to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, required me to waive my right to medical confidentiality, and threatened to report me to state bar associations.
The Dean of Students claimed that I posed a “risk to the public health” of the University, but I quickly learned that my crime had been heretical, not medical.
Just before I entered Georgetown Law in August 2019, I watched The Paper Chase, a 1973 film about a first-year Harvard Law student and his experiences with a demanding professor, Charles Kingsfield.
The movie has the standard themes of law school: teaching students how to think, challenging the premises of an argument, differentiating fact patterns to support precedent. Kingsfield’s demands represent the difficulty of law school, and the most important skill is articulate, logic-based communication. “Nobody inhibits you from expressing yourself,” he scolds one student.
“Nobody inhibits you from expressing yourself.”
Two years later, I realized that Georgetown Law had inverted that script. The school fired a professor for commenting on differences in achievement between racial groups, slandered faculty members for deviating from university group-think, and threatened to destroy dissidents. Students banished cabinet officials from campus and demanded censorship of a tenured professor for her work defending women’s rights in Muslim-majority countries.
Unaware of the paradigm shift, I thought it was proper to ask questions about Georgetown’s Covid policies.
In August 2021, Georgetown Law returned to in-person learning after 17 months of virtual learning. The school announced a series of new policies for the school year: there was a vaccine requirement (later to be supplemented with booster mandates), students were required to wear masks on campus, and drinking water was banned in the classroom.
Dean Bill Treanor announced a new anonymous hotline called “Law Compliance” for community members to report dissidents who dared to quench their thirst or free their vaccinated nostrils.
Meanwhile, faculty members were exempt from the requirement, though the school never explained what factors caused their heightened powers of immunity.
Shortly thereafter, I received a notification from “Law Compliance” that I had been “identified as non-compliant” for “letting the mask fall beneath [my] nose.” I had a meeting with Dean of Students Mitch Bailin to discuss my insubordination, and I tried to voice my concerns about the irrationality of the school’s policies.
He had no answers to my simple questions but assured me that he “understood my frustration.” Then, he encouraged me to “get involved in the conversation,” telling me there was a Student Bar Association meeting set to take place the following Wednesday.
I arrived at the meeting with curiosity. I had no interest in banging my fists and causing a commotion; I just wanted to know the reasoning – the “rational basis” that law schools so often discuss – behind our school’s policies. There were four simple questions:
What was the goal of the school’s Covid policy? (Zero Covid? Flatten the curve?) What was the limiting principle to that goal? (What were the tradeoffs?) What metrics would the community need to reach for the school to remove its mask mandate? How can you explain the contradictions in your policies? For example, how could the virus be so dangerous that we could not take a sip of water but safe enough that we were required to be present? Why are faculty exempt from masking requirements? I feared there were simple answers to my questions that I had overlooked: these administrators made hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, surely they must have had some reasoning behind their draconian measures. Right? The contradictions appeared obvious to me. The data seemed to be clear, but maybe there was an explanation.
I delivered the brief speech without a mask, standing fifteen feet away from the nearest person. I awaited a response to my questions, but I realized this wasn’t about facts or data, premises or conclusions. This was about power and image.
Arbitrary. Irrational. Capricious. Students learn in their first days of their legal education to invoke these words to challenge unfavored laws and policies. I figured that I was doing the same, and I thought the school would welcome a calm, albeit defiant, student asking the questions rather than loud and angry crowds.
But this assumption turned out to be an incorrect premise. Nobody cared about my points regarding rationality – they cared that I had been reading from the wrong script. Even worse, not wearing a mask had been a more objectionable wardrobe malfunction than Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl performance.
(Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
Moscow’s ability to develop its own resource-based economy, expand the Northern Sea Route, cement ties with China and support Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to project power into the Arctic depends on the development of land-based infrastructure in the northern regions of the Russian Federation…
Yet, that ability has now been called into question, as the Russian government has canceled, despite Putin’s repeated orders to the contrary, a program to complete the broad-gauge Northern Broad-Gauge Railway. The route was intended to link settlements that support the Northern Sea Route, military bases and the locations of key sources of raw materials across the Russian North with the rest of the country…
Snip.
What appears to be this project’s death knell, at least for the time being, is instructive in its own right. It occurred not with some dramatic single action by the Kremlin but in a rolling fashion as has often been the case with the backtracking of decisions under Putin. In April 2021, to much acclaim, the Russian president called for construction of the Northern Broad-Gauge Railway to begin, with the goal of completing the project in the next few years. Yet, despite Putin’s words, nothing happened, at least in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic, increased spending for his war against Ukraine and the impact of Western sanctions. Then, in 2022, Putin issued a new order for the project to go ahead. Again, nothing happened. Instead, less than a month later, Marat Khusnullin, a Russian deputy prime minister, quietly stopped all work on the project without giving anyone reason to think it would be resumed. Indeed, many Russian experts and commentators concerned with infrastructure issues believe that this railway plan has come to the end of its line, and one has even suggested that the cancellation of this project puts “a cross on the future of Russia.
Russia was broke before it launched its illegal war of territorial aggression against the Ukraine. Now it’s even more broke.
Turns out I got through all but one…