Too damn much news out this week. Biden’s “boom” is busted, Charlie Kirk’s assassin is caught, Israel dirtnaps top Hamas kingpins in Qatar, the curse of BlueSkyism, more illegal alien perverts sexually abusing children, more of the evil George Soros funds, and California’s “Jay Leno Bill” dies in committee. Plus some Prog Rock.
The U.S. economy probably added close to a million fewer jobs in 2024 and early 2025 than previously reported, the latest sign that the labor market, until recently a bright spot in the economy, may be weaker than it initially appeared.
The revised data was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as part of a longstanding annual process known as benchmarking. But the big downward adjustment comes at an awkward moment for the agency, just weeks after President Trump fired its top official following a separate set of negative revisions last month.
The data released on Tuesday showed that employers added 911,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months through March than had been indicated in the monthly payroll figures. That implies the economy added only about 850,000 jobs during that time — half as many as previously reported.
Police have identified the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s assassination as Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah man who authorities say became more political ahead of the shooting and recently expressed animosity toward Kirk.
Robinson, who is believed to have acted alone, came to the attention of the authorities after he contacted a family friend following the assassination, Utah Governor Spencer Cox revealed during a Friday morning press conference. That friend reported Robinson to the local sheriff’s office and Robinson’s father, a veteran police officer, then orchestrated his surrender to authorities at his home in Washington County, Utah.
The alleged gunman is expected to face at least three felony charges, including aggravated murder, obstruction of justice, and felony discharge of a firearm causing serious bodily injury, according to a probable cause affidavit obtained by NBC News. Cox said state law requires authorities to file the charging documents within three days.
Robinson appears to have become more political ahead of the shooting and criticized Kirk by name at a recent dinner, a family member of Robinson’s told authorities. Robinson said Kirk was “full of hate” and accused him of “promoting hate,” Cox said, though the affidavit, released later, indicates another family member may have made those remarks.
Robinson’s arrest comes after authorities had recovered a high-powered bolt action rifle they believe was used in the assassination, along with unspent rounds that were engraved with antifascist writing.
“Hey fascist, catch,” read the engraving on one round. Another round was engraved with the message “Bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao,” a reference to a song favored by resistance movements and revolutionary anti-capitalist partisans.
This is who they chose to kill: the affable man whose main act was having good-faith political debates with college students. The man who, since fatherhood, was turning more toward Christianity as both a purpose and a theme. He was a partisan to be sure, but he was nowhere near the outer limits of the American tradition, especially given his relentless fixation on Lincolnian persuasion as a stabilizing force in a slowly disintegrating polity. The ones who kept losing debates with him didn’t feel that way, of course, but they were only the instrument, not the object, of his work. The object was the millions of Americans who watched, learned, and saw who won again and again—and decided that they wished to side with the winner.
In this way, Charlie Kirk was perhaps the closest thing to Socrates in the American public square. The leftist intellectuals who sneered at him—the rube peddling his simple lines, his crass sophistry, his heartland aw-shucks certainties—would guffaw at the parallel, but it is no less true. He argued—amiably, fairly, relentlessly—until they couldn’t stand it any longer. And like Socrates, they had him killed.
Also like Socrates, his students will now do more for his cause after his martyrdom than they ever did during his life. The Socratic vindication was in his deification through literature at the pens of Plato and Xenophon. Millennia later, everyone remembers the philosopher, but vanishingly few know who ended his life.
The armies of Charlie Kirk, martyr, will be much more vast: not a handful of Athenians but millions of Americans. Their work will not be in philosophical literature but in the politics of the years to come. Whatever benefit accrues to the Republican Party is merely incidental. We are now in the realm of fundamental politics, which is concerned with the nature of the nation and the wielding of power for the common good. The generation of Americans that Charlie Kirk molded will be drawing conclusions about both from his life and his death alike.
After President Trump told Fox & Friends hosts that Charlie Kirk’s assassin is “in custody,” he went on to comment about radical leftist organizations, stating, “We are going to look into Soros. It looks like a RICO case.”
Recall that on Wednesday night, just hours after Kirk’s assassination, President Trump addressed the nation from the Oval Office, calling it a “dark moment for America.” He vowed to crack down on radical left movements across the country that have fueled chaos and even death this year.
Then on Thursday night, Texan News reporter Cameron Abrams wrote on X that Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and two dozen others in Congress called for a select committee on “the money, influence, and power behind the radical left’s assault on America and the rule of law.”
Just weeks ago, Trump stated on Truth Social that George Soros and his radical leftist son, Alex Soros, “should be charged with RICO because of their support of violent protests.”
Around that time, the “dark money” leftist NGO network operated by Arabella Advisors reportedly lost one of its top funding sources: Bill Gates.
Civil terrorism expert Jason Curtis Anderson of One City Rising states:
After the political assassination of Charlie Kirk, President Trump is interested in pursuing a RICO case against George Soros, America’s primary financier of far-left NGOs. What will likely be revealed is a complex web of dark money that observers have warned about for 20 years but never acted on.
At the center of this web are the various George Soros Open Society Foundation legal entities—four separate tax-exempt charities and one 501(c)(4) dark-money channel. Next are the Tides Foundation organizations, funded primarily by the Pritzker family, which include three separate tax-exempt charities and one 501(c)(4) dark-money channel. Following them are the Rockefeller Foundation nexus, NEO Philanthropy, the Ford Foundation, and a host of similar operations, including the Singham network. Collectively, these entities form America’s dark-money ecosystem. They fund permanent protests, bail demonstrators out of jail, finance legal efforts to sue local governments and police departments, influence immigration policy, promote drug decriminalization and criminal-justice reforms, and help elect district attorneys who decline to prosecute crime. On top of all of this, they also have entities like the Working Families Party that elect local politicians.
The money flows from donations to tax-exempt charities into non-tax-exempt 501(c)(4)s, and then trickles down to local groups. From there, funds reach the most radical organizations, which can’t even qualify for 501(c)(3) status and are instead “fiscally sponsored” by parent organizations. Because of this fiscal-sponsorship loophole, the books of these groups remain opaque. Everything from terror financing to protests-turned-riots connects in some way to these foundations.
The revolution against the West is, in effect, a network of tax-exempt charities operating as a powerful parallel government that no one ever voted for. It must be stopped before it’s too late.
A look into Soros-funded terrorist networks is long overdue. Here’s hoping a lot of indictments, bank account freezes and billions in civil forfeiture claims are forthcoming.
Your reminder that the social justice left are horrible people:
Right on cue deranged leftists are celebrating Charlie Kirk being shot
Bluesky, the Twitter spinoff that was once billed as a kinder, gentler alternative to what is now known as X, probably isn’t on death’s door. But after a burst of growth around the election, it’s shrinking and steadily declining in influence, even as other corners of the left thrive during Trump’s second term.
Snip.
Even on a logarithmic scale — on a linear scale, the graph is boring, because everything but Twitter would pretty much just be a flat line — the gulf between X and the other platforms is clear. And since the election, Bluesky has lost ground. More precise data based on the number of unique “likers”, “posters” and “followers” at Bluesky tracks a similar curve, with an initial peak around the election and a secondary peak after Trump’s inauguration but persistent erosion since then. The number of unique posters at Bluesky peaked at just under 1.5 million on Nov. 18, 2024 but has since fallen to an average of about 660,000 on weekdays and 600,000 on weekends: in other words, a drop of more than half.
The decline in Bluesky’s number of unique daily followers is even more substantial. They topped out at 3.1 million on Nov. 18 last year, but are now just under 400,000 per day: almost a tenfold decline. So while a dedicated troupe of Bluesky regulars are still skeeting up a storm, they’re gaining less and less traction, preaching only to the converted.
Snip.
Bluesky was initially popular with Twitter refugees who disliked Musk’s takeover of the platform, some of whom proclaimed that Elon had unleashed the “gates of hell” by restoring banned accounts or predicted that the platform would implode due to a shortage of engineering talent. I suppose I have no problem with this; ironically, the first post in Silver Bulletin history is entitled “In case Twitter goes to zero”. (I wanted a hedge in case it did, although if we’re being honest, I also had one eye out the door as ABC News was beginning to dismantle FiveThirtyEight.) However, this also self-selected for a certain type of user, adherents of an attitude that I call “Blueskyism”.
Blueskyism should not be mistaken for general left-of-center political views. Google search traffic for Bluesky over the past year is highly correlated with Kamala Harris’s vote share, but has some other skews: controlling for the Harris vote, it’s (statistically) significantly higher in states with a large white population and where the percentage of people with advanced degrees is higher. Bluesky is disproportionately popular in D.C., but also in crunchy white states like Vermont and Oregon. Search traffic for Twitter/X over the same period shows the same bias toward highly educated states, but less toward Harris voters4 and actually an inverse correlation with the white population share. (X gets more search traffic in more diverse states.)
Demographics alone only go so far in explaining Blueskyism, however. It’s not a political movement so much as a tribal affiliation, a niche set of attitudes and style of discursive norms that almost seem designed in a lab to be as unappealing as possible to anyone outside the clique.
Emphasis added. Snip.
Some of the most annoying people on the platform have exited for Bluesky.
As compared to other people with a similar level of public prominence — so not heads-of-state or celebrities or NFL quarterbacks — I was a “trending topic” on Twitter as often as just about anyone for a period from roughly 2018-2021. Matt Yglesias and Maggie Haberman also come to mind as other people who share this particular “honor”, which is not a welcome one: it means you’re the main character of the day, the person that other people have decided to dogpile upon.
There’s still some of this. If you tweet about election-related stuff, there is a pervasive tendency to “shoot the messenger” from partisans when the polls aren’t going their way. But much less than there once was: no more of the dogpiles for exceptionally strange reasons that I couldn’t even explain to my IRL friends.
And that’s because this behavior — I guess you could call it harassment but I’m a big boy and I can take it — consistently came from a relatively narrow group of power users, birds of a feather who flocked together, people who could demonstrate their fidelity to the group by picking on the main character. On Bluesky, exactly the same people — and I do mean exactly — attack exactly the same perpetual enemies, but to roughly 1/60th the size of the audience.
So I feel freer using Twitter these days for jokes, memes, and tongue-in-cheek ideas that aren’t meant to be taken entirely seriously, intended to be read as though they’re written in comic sans.
Snip.
What really matters in elections is simply being popular and winning over new converts. Blueskyism, with its intolerance for dissent, is the opposite of that.
Because, yes, while this is personal for me, annoyingness matters in politics.
Snip.
The three essential characteristics of Blueskyism.
The first essential characteristic: Smalltentism
Aggressive policing of dissent, particularly of people “just outside the circle” who might have broader credibility on the center-left. Censoriousness, often taking the form of moral micropanics that designate a rotating cast of opponents as the main characters of the day. Self-reinforcing belief in the righteousness of the clique, and conflation of its values with broader public sentiment among “the base”.
A healthy political movement, you’d think, would welcome people who agree with them on 70 percent of issues, particularly if it sees Trump as an existential threat to democracy and wants a broad coalition against him. Blueskyists do literally almost the exact opposite: their biggest enemies are people on the center-left like me and Yglesias and Ezra Klein. Or center-left media institutions like the New York Times, which are often viewed as more problematic than Fox News.
This aggressive policing of boundaries might at least have been tactically smart during the miraculous Blue Period when Twitter was afflicted with Blueskyism. Yglesias, say, is followed by a lot more Democratic staffers than Ben Shapiro or some actual conservative is.
But now that Blueskyism is losing the battle of ideas, it just draws the tent narrower and ensures that it will remain obscure. There’s nothing more Blueskyist than this, literally creating a “list of shame” of Bluesky posters who remain active on Twitter.
And sometimes, Blueskyists even make violent threats toward people who disagree with them. For instance, the journalist Billy Binion says he recently “logged onto Bluesky to find thousands of people screaming at me, many of whom were telling me to kill myself” after having posted that “billionaires should exist”. There’s some of that on every social media platform, unfortunately, and I’m not going to make assertions about the relative frequency on Bluesky without taking some more comprehensive approach to the question. It certainly shouldn’t have a reputation for civil discourse, however, and this may help to explain the high rate of exits from the platform.
The second essential characteristic: Credentialism
Appeals to authority, particularly academic authority. Centering of the suitability of the speaker based on his or her credentials and/or identity characteristics (standpoint epistemology) as opposed to the strength of his or her arguments, accompanied by the implicit presumption to claim to be speaking on behalf of the entire identity group.
Although Blueskyism is small, its practitioners mostly consist of people within the professional-managerial class: (over)educated blue-state liberals, perhaps people who have drawn the short straw of elite overproduction. You can see that in the demographic data, or in the attitude site management takes: the platform literally just banned people from Mississippi because of a dispute over age verification.
And Bluesky has become relatively popular among academics, which I regard as a problem on various levels. The Democratic Party has already forgotten how to talk to large groups of voters like young men, who have become considerably less likely to complete college than young women. Meanwhile, the experts have made a lot of mistakes, and sometimes the reason is because they’ve become self-serving in pursuit of social media validation or blinded by political partisanship. Increasingly often, I’ll see academics engage in incredibly sloppy argumentation and this seems to be correlated with recent exposure to Bluesky. Because Bluesky is so small, it has a highly specific signature. It’s like if you have some toxic persona on the periphery of your friend group; someone starts speaking in a particular way that you just know they recently hung out with George or Gina.
While academic credentials are one way to gain credibility under Blueskyism, they aren’t the only one. Even though the Google search data suggests that the platform is disproportionately white, an alternative is to claim to speak on behalf of a disadvantaged group. I swear to God, I’m not trying to make this about “wokeness” but there is overlap there.
Perhaps the most prominent example of Blueskyism creeping into real life is when a group of left-leaning public health professionals, who often took a bullying approach during Twitter’s Blue Period, went out of their way to rationalize mass protests after George Floyd was murdered in 2020. Personally, I think it was perfectly fine to join in on these protests; political expression is important (and these protests were usually outdoors and masked). But I also think a lot of other things, like sending your children to school or visiting your dying relatives in the hospital, would have risen to this threshold also, and this group specifically used their credentials to endorse the Floyd protests after having campaigned for those other activities to be prohibited.
Indeed, this controversy recently resurfaced on Bluesky. After Brian Schatz, the Democratic senator from Hawaii, wrote sympathetically in response to a Sean Trende tweet that recalled the hypocrisy of endorsing the protests, he and other “Dem elected/staff/consultants” were blamed on the platform for being “awash in right-wing brainrot.”
The third essential characteristic: Catastrophism
Humorless, scoldy neuroticism, often rationalized by the view that one must be on “war footing” because the world is self-evidently in crisis. Sublimation of personal anxiety as a substitute for political activism or material solutions to the crisis, with expressions of weariness and pessimism signaling virtue and/or savviness.
Although the first two characteristics already limit the appeal of Blueskyism, this makes it worse. Even people who might otherwise be sympathetic to Bluesky have noticed how impossible it is to get away with a joke on the platform, one of the things that X sometimes13 still has going for it. The Bernie-era, Chapo Trap House strain of left-wing discourse also at least had a caustic if sometimes juvenile humor streak. Blueskyism does not.
Instead, the prevailing Blueskyist attitude is often something like this — that we’re in the midst of a “late stage capitalist hellscape” and that you have to be “delusional” to have any amount of hope or optimism”.
Most people outside of Bluesky don’t think like this. Although literally almost zero Democrats are happy with the state of the country, overwhelming majorities of Americans are happy with how their personal lives are going and are able to compartmentalize politics away or recognize that other things matter in life, too.
Conclusion: “A subculture like Blueskyism that sees depression as a rational and even virtuous response is going to select for a lot of miserable people. And misery likes company. So the Blueskyists gather in a corner, exchanging tales of woe, while the rest of us slink away.”
Though there is the usual Silver hemming, hawing and sifting things into ever-finer categories (not to mention his willful denial that “wokeness” is an actual thing, despite so carefully delineating some of its most central characteristics, and his dismissal of the Twitter Files), it’s still worth reading the whole thing. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Rich Hamas honchos throught they could hang out safe in Qatar while their footsoldiers died in Gaza. Wrong.
Israel carried out a strike on senior Hamas leaders in Qatar’s capital, Doha, on Tuesday afternoon.
Qatar quickly accused Israel of “reckless” behaviour and breaking international law after the attack on a residential premises in the city.
The Israel Defense Forces claimed to have targeted those “directly responsible for the brutal October 7 massacre”.
Snip.
According to the Israeli military, it conducted a “precise strike” targeted at Hamas senior leaders in Qatar using “precise munitions”.
Israeli media says the operation involved 15 Israeli fighter jets, firing 10 munitions against a single target.
Qatar has hosted Hamas’s political bureau since 2012 and has played a key role in facilitating indirect negotiations between the group and Israel since the 7 October attacks.
Hamas said members of the group’s negotiating delegation in Doha were targeted but survived the strike. However Hamas said six others, including a Qatari security official, were killed.
According to Hamas, those killed were:
Humam Al-Hayya (Abu Yahya) – son of chief negotiator al-Hayya
Jihad Labad (Abu Bilal) – director of al-Hayya’s office
Abdullah Abdul Wahid (Abu Khalil)
Moamen Hassouna (Abu Omar)
Ahmed Al-Mamluk (Abu Malik)
Corporal Badr Saad Mohammed Al-Humaidi – Qatari internal security forces
“Trump is enjoying his highest approval rating of either term right now according to a DailyMail/J.L. Partners poll. He’s sitting at a solid 55% approval rating.”
Once again, the Supreme Court has stepped in to prevent a rogue district judge from hamstringing the executive branch in performing core executive functions under Donald Trump. And once again, the Court’s conservative majority has dispatched this order without explanation, over an angry and overwrought dissent from the Court’s liberals. This time, however, Justice Brett Kavanaugh stepped up to explain what was going on.
The Court’s order this morning in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo stayed an August 1 order by district judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong-
That name sounds like it came out of a Monty Python skit.
-of the Central District of California, a Biden appointee and former Obama Justice Department official. The order will thus have no effect unless and until the Ninth Circuit rules in the case — perhaps only a brief reprieve, given that the Ninth Circuit previously declined to stay Judge Frimpong’s initial temporary restraining order in the case.
The crux of the case is whether the government may stop individuals in Los Angeles on suspicion of being illegal immigrants on the basis of four factors: “(i) presence at particular locations such as bus stops, car washes, day laborer pickup sites, agricultural sites, and the like; (ii) the type of work one does; (iii) speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent; and (iv) apparent race or ethnicity.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent noted that the order attempted to enjoin Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) only from stops based solely on those four criteria, but as Kavanaugh noted, there are inherent problems in the judiciary trying to prospectively micromanage law enforcement in such fashion: “Even if the Government had a policy of making stops based on the factors prohibited by the District Court, immigration officers might not rely only on those factors if and when they stop [the lawsuit’s named] plaintiffs in the future,” and “the District Court’s injunction threatens contempt sanctions against immigration officers who make brief investigative stops later found by the court to violate the injunction. The prospect of such after-the-fact judicial second-guessing and contempt proceedings will inevitably chill lawful immigration enforcement efforts. . . . Judges are not appointed to make those policy calls.” As Kavanaugh added, particular plaintiffs do not have standing to enjoin the government in advance from stops that may or may not involve them and may or may not, depending on the circumstances, violate the Fourth Amendment.
The Department of Homeland Security launched Operation Midway Blitz on Monday to combat the influx of illegal immigration Chicago has seen under Democratic Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.
DHS said that the program was created in honor of Katie Abraham, a college student who was struck and killed by a Guatemalan national in a drunk driving hit-and-run accident in Illinois.
“DHS is launching Operation Midway Blitz in honor of Katie Abraham who was killed in Illinois by a criminal illegal alien who should have never been in our country. This operation will target the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens in Chicago,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “For years, Governor Pritzker and his fellow sanctuary politicians released Tren de Aragua gang members, rapists, kidnappers, and drug traffickers on Chicago’s streets — putting American lives at risk and making Chicago a magnet for criminals.”
During Joe Biden’s term, an estimated 233,000 unaccompanied children crossed the border and were completely lost.
The Trump admin has now found 22,638 of these children.
But many of them have suffered unbelievable horrors:
John Fabbricatore, HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement senior advisor, said to Fox News:
We found children who have been raped. We’re talking about debt bondage, where children are being made to work off debt, trafficking debt. We’re talking about children that were brought into situations and then treated like sexual slaves.
So far, 27 of the children Biden lost have been found dead, often from murder or drug overdose.
Children are in horrific environments, just environments that they should not be in, where the sponsor is a heroin dealer and that child winds up dying of a heroin overdose.
Iryna Zarutska was a 23-year-old Ukrainian who fled the war in her country for Charlotte, North Carolina.
Over the weekend, police released video of her being stabbed in the neck by a violent career criminal.
Iryna got on the train, sat down, and immediately went “condition white” (looking at her phone without paying attention to her surroundings).
Let this be a reminder that, if you’re in public, you need situational awareness at all times.
In the blink of an eye, her throat was slashed and she was bleeding out over the floor of the train.
Despite the horror of the crime, the media has remained ostensibly quiet.
The lack of any mention whatsoever of Iryna Zarutska’s murder despite her being a Ukrainian refugee reminds me of USAID’s call for media organizations to “collaborate” and “agree policies on strategic silence.” https://t.co/AkH4dxxrjtpic.twitter.com/nK6NbqvV4j
The optics are incredibly awful for the entire Democratic Party machine.
The brutal killing of Iryna Zarutska (Ukrainian refugee) on a commuter train in North Carolina highlights not only the willingness of leftist corporate media to cover up news stories that jeopardize their woke narratives but also the broader failure of so-called criminal justice reform, which appears to have shockingly backfired and become a major public safety threat. Adding to the mounting outrage, a leftist magistrate judge released the schizophrenic monster on cashless bail (before he killed Zarutska) – another failure point. And then there’s this: far-left nonprofits accelerated the push for disastrous criminal justice reforms.
It’s now widely known that Decarlos Brown Jr., 34, Zarutska’s killer, had been previously arrested 14 times in North Carolina for crimes ranging from assault to firearms possession, and whose own mother admitted he was schizophrenic and should never have been allowed back on the streets, was recently released on cashless bail (before he killed Zarutska) by a progressive magistrate judge despite a two-decade violent crime spree.
But the failures don’t stop with local leftist politicians and rogue progressive judges (or magistrate judges) who embrace woke and enabled criminal justice reform from hell. They extend much deeper – into the shadowy world of the dark-money-funded nonprofit industrial complex, which poured millions of dollars into Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, to push for “reducing the jail population.”
“Another factor in the death of Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte’s light rail–the left-wing MacArthur Foundation giving Mecklenburg county a $3.3 million grant to reduce the jail population. Specifically as part of racial equity aims,” Daily Wire’s Megan Basham wrote on X.
Basham noted, “Like Soros’ Open Society, the MacArthur Foundation incentivizes local municipalities to make residents less safe by leaving threats like Decarlos Brown on the streets.”
[Yordanis] Cobos-Martinez has a prior criminal history of:
False imprisonment in CA (unknown disposition)
Indecency with a child in Texas (dismissed)
Grand theft of vehicle in Florida (dismissed)
Carjacking & false imprisonment in CA (acquitted on carjacking, convicted of false imprisonment).
Disturbing surveillance video shows Cobos-Martinez allegedly kicking and picking up the victim’s severed head in the motel parking lot as it drips blood…
“Russian Oil Tanker in Primorsk Set on Fire by Drones & Smolensk Oil Depot Hit.” Primorsk is a good 1,000km from the Ukrainian border, up near Finland.
The Trump administration announced Wednesday that an unprecedented law enforcement operation has busted a Chinese-based fentanyl drug and money laundering conspiracy, resulting in charges against 22 Chinese nationals, four Chinese pharmaceutical companies and three U.S. citizens.
FBI Director Kash Patel described Operation Box Cutter as a “first-of-its-kind” law enforcement action targeting the threat posed to the American public by China-manufactured precursor chemicals used in the production of fentanyl.
“We’re done playing whack-a-mole,” he said during a press conference in Cincinnati, Ohio.
“We didn’t arrest a couple of people. We charged an enterprise-wide system in mainland China to include dozens of individuals and banks and companies that are responsible for making these lethal precursors and shipping them here.”
The Dayton, Ohio, grand jury five-count indictment unsealed Wednesday focuses on a Tipp City, Ohio, resident, 39-year-old Eric Michael Payne.
At this rate, with President Donald Trump being one of the most decisive presidents in history, statistics show that his endorsement could undoubtedly lead a candidate to victory.
As Ian Vallencillo, commissioner of Sweetwater, Florida, told the Washington Examiner, Trump is one of “the most popular political figures,” stating that voters “overwhelmingly support Trump’s picks.”
At this rate, with President Donald Trump being one of the most decisive presidents in history, statistics show that his endorsement could undoubtedly lead a candidate to victory.
As Ian Vallencillo, commissioner of Sweetwater, Florida, told the Washington Examiner, Trump is one of “the most popular political figures,” stating that voters “overwhelmingly support Trump’s picks.”
The commissioner is right.
Candidates endorsed by Trump have lost, but very rarely. Former Republican North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson conceded his gubernatorial election against an incumbent after receiving Trump’s approval, partly over a scandal that engulfed the news cycle days before the election.
Similarly, former presidential candidate and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) lost his reelection bid, over years of controversy, anti-Trump skepticism, and a failure to get the Republican Party in the White House in 2012.
During the 2024 federal and gubernatorial election cycles, Trump endorsed 306 candidates. Eighty-nine percent of those candidates now occupy the office they ran for. In the 2022 election cycle, Trump endorsed 195 candidates, 83% of whom were sworn in to office a few months later.
One of those key endorsements includes the key race of Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA), who unseated a longtime incumbent, former Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, by a 0.5% margin.
Similarly, in the same election cycle, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) won his Senate race against former Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, who had been in office since 2007.
The year before that, after former California GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy resigned from Congress in 2023 following a motion for him to step down as speaker of the House from a Trump-endorsed representative, California Assemblyman Vince Fong was elected soon after receiving the nod from the president.
Similarly, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), who was challenged by a local Democratic advocate, won his third term soon after Trump endorsed him.
The latest scandal involves a web of shell companies, family members on mysterious payrolls, and taxpayer money that somehow found its way into campaign coffers. Multiple federal agencies are now investigating what appears to be a deliberate scheme to circumvent campaign finance laws through a maze of LLCs and nonprofits. The numbers are staggering: millions in taxpayer funds allegedly embezzled, hundreds of thousands in unreported campaign contributions, and a trail of financial breadcrumbs leading through family businesses.
The politician at the center of this storm? Democratic Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida.
Cherfilus-McCormick had won her seat after campaigning against the corruption of her predecessor, Alcee Hastings.
Today, Cherfilus-McCormick finds herself drowning in exactly the kind of investigations she once condemned. The Federal Election Commission has launched a formal probe into her campaign’s alleged violations, while the Office of Congressional Ethics has found “probable cause” that she accepted illegal campaign contributions. The schemes are breathtaking in their audacity: her husband and sister-in-law running an LLC that funneled $725,000 through a nonprofit that then paid her campaign vendors. A political consultant with direct access to these funds, making payments on her behalf while she pretended not to know.
But here’s where my blood really starts to boil. Before entering Congress, Cherfilus-McCormick was CEO of Trinity Health Care Services, a family company that received a $5 million “overpayment” from Florida’s emergency services department – supposedly due to a misplaced decimal point. Instead of immediately returning the taxpayer money, investigators allege she began moving it between family businesses, including companies where she held major stakes. The state had to sue to get its money back.
As expected. “James Talarico Launches Democrat Bid for U.S. Senate. Talarico has positioned himself as one of the more left-wing voices in the Texas Legislature.”
Remember how Adam Carolla said the Palisades fire would used as an excuse for a land grab by the Democrats running Los Angeles and California? Guess what? “Iconic Malibu restaurant is told it can’t rebuild after Palisades Fire.”
An Alpha News reporter participated in a ride-along with ICE agents during the arrest. Wilson Tindi, a Kenya native, pled guilty to sexually assaulting a sleeping woman in Minneapolis in 2014 after breaking into her home. A judge ordered Tindi to be deported, but a federal judge later overturned this ruling. ICE released him after 18 months.
After his release, Tindi became a chief audit officer at Minnesota’s education department. He was later fired after his past became known, raising questions about how he was ever hired in the first place.
Among the most high-profile and controversial legislation passed was a handful of social issue bills — in particular, one establishing civil cause of action against chemical abortion pill providers, and another separating publicly-funded private spaces by biological sex. The former came with its fair share of backdoor negotiations and amendments before it was successfully carried through both chambers, as was the case for multiple priorities of Abbott’s.
One issue which faced an untimely end in the Legislature was the attempted regulation of hemp-derived THC products. Ultimately, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, House Speaker Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock), and Abbott were unable to reach an agreement on Wednesday.
Collateral damage from the death of print magazines. “Publishers Clearing House Winners Say They Are No Longer Receiving Their Lifetime Payments.”
It seems that some leftwing Texas school nurses are practicing malicious compliance.
Texas Education Agency Updates First Aid Guidelines After Controversy Over Withheld Medical Care
The TEA updated their guidance to allow schools to provide “first aid” without parental consent.
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has released updated guidelines for how Texas public schools should approach the implementation of Senate Bill (SB) 12, known as the “Parent Bill of Rights,” after recent reports of school nurses not providing first aid to students.
One aspect of SB 12 that caused distress and confusion among lawmakers, parents, and schools alike is the requirement for school districts to receive documentation of notice and consent from parents for their child to receive “medical, psychiatric, and psychological treatment.”
State Rep. Jeff Leach (R-Allen) posted a letter on social media he had sent to TEA Commissioner Mike Morath last week regarding “concerns with the implementation” of SB 12 after reports of how “some school districts are taking an ‘all or nothing’ approach” to the new policy requirements, which has resulted in “band-aids” and “ice packs” being withheld from children.
Following the publication of the letter, which was also signed by the bill author state Sen. Brandon Creighton (R-Conroe), reports of children not being treated for certain “general care” services began being made public.
“After a thorough review was conducted of the video recordings of the statements, it became clear to me that their actions amounted to serious professional and personal misconduct,” Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse stated late Wednesday. “Conduct that advocates for inciting violence is directly contrary to the values of Texas State University. I cannot and will not tolerate such behavior.”
“As a result, I have determined that their actions are incompatible with their responsibilities as a faculty member at Texas State University,” Damphousse continued. “Effective immediately, their employment with Texas State University has been terminated.”
Damphousse was referring to Tom Alter, who was previously an associate professor of history at Texas State.
Alter had been exposed making comments calling for the overthrow of the U.S. government.
The European Commission has suffered a major defeat in court over its plans to make large tech platforms pay it to enforce the Digital Services Act.
Meta and ByteDance’s TikTok took the European Commission to court after it presented them with a “supervisory fee” equal to 0.05 per cent of their yearly global net income. The bill was to cover the EU executive’s expenses in monitoring their compliance with the Digital Services Act.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) gives the European Commission oversight of very large online platforms and search engines—ones with more than 45 million EU users a year. To fund this oversight, the Commission has said it will charge these providers an annual fee, based on their average monthly users.
The Commission adopted rules saying how it would set these fees on 2 March 2023. The next month, on 25 April, it classified Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok as very large platforms. That November, it finalised the 2023 fees for each.
In two decisions 10 September, the Court of Justice of the EU determined the Commission’s supervisory fees on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok were void for procedural grounds.
To set the 2023 fees, the Commission decided to calculate each platform’s average monthly users using a methodology based on third-party data it attached to each decision.
However, the Court ruled that this methodology for calculating fees should have been established through a delegated act–a process which involves the European Parliament and Council.
The judges said it was incorrect for the European Commission to determine the fees using implementing decisions it devised on its own authority alone.
Jay Leno’s star power wasn’t enough to persuade a California legislative committee to pass a measure to allow owners of classic cars like him to be exempted from the state’s rigorous smog-check requirements.
The Assembly Appropriations Committee on Friday blocked Bakersfield Republican Sen. Shannon Grove’s Senate Bill 712 from advancing for a full vote. Leno had testified in support of the measure in Sacramento earlier this year.
The committee’s members and its powerful Democratic chairperson, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks of Oakland, did not provide a reason for killing the bill during Friday’s hearing, which quickly and with little fanfare announced the fate of 260 other bills that had been placed on the committee’s so-called “suspense file.” Seventy other bills also were killed without explanation.
The Senate and Assembly’s appropriations committees, which both met Friday and rejected hundreds of bills, are supposed to be the gatekeepers for bills proposing to spend taxpayer money. But the committees’ suspense files are where hundreds of politically touchy bills die quietly each year with only a few insiders knowing the real reasons.
Random meme stolen from Facebook:
So I don’t think I’ll be watching all of the Joe Rogan podcasts with Carrot Top or Charlie Sheen, but I suspect I’ll be watching snippets from them, and felt I should make you aware of their existence…
For some reason, all three Top Gear/Grand Tour presents have decided they need to come out with their own gin.
Ten musical pieces you know, but not the names of. I already knew a good number, but a few were new, and a couple of others I didn’t know under their original language name.
I’m sure that every single person reading this blog is aware that Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated yesterday while speaking at a campus event at Utah Valley University. Since every single conservative blogger is going to be writing about this, I was looking to write about something else today, but sometimes you have to bow to the inevitable.
National Review just published an article stating “Unspent rounds found inside the rifle that authorities believe was used in the Charlie Kirk assassination were engraved with transgender and antifascist writing, according to an internal law enforcement memo obtained by the Wall Street Journal.” So another crazy Transtifa shooter, just like the Minneapolis Catholic School shooter and the Nashville Christian school shooter. (See also: “You Can’t Tell The Satanic Leftwing Tranny Deathcults Without A Program.”)
The radical left has always been violent, so why are we seeing such an upsurge in violence now? It may be that social justice is just the latest leftwing God that failed.
I’m reminded of Hunter S. Thompson’s famous quote about how San Francisco’s hippies were absolutely sure their movement would triumph:
There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Chris Bray sees a parallel between that failure and the one the left is now experiencing.
First, the murder of Charlie Kirk is just the next level up the behavioral chain from the way Robert F. Kennedy was just treated in front of a Senate committee. He wasn’t mistaken, or wrong: He was an unforgivable monster, wholly illegitimate in every imaginable sense, who had no views or arguments that were worth considering in any way, and the only possible response to him is personal destruction. Our institutional left is a rage mob with formal titles. We’re not having a debate.
Second, the transition to radical violence is a reflection of the events that followed the death of the radical dream of the 1960s New Left. After the hippies, the Weatherman and the Symbionese Liberation Army. The turn to radical violence is the turn that follows obvious failure. It’s an acknowledgement of political impotence, and a last-ditch emergency reflex: If they won’t submit to our political vision, we’ll coerce them into submission. It’s the death rattle. It means the arguing and convincing has failed, and they see the failure.
Third, Camille Paglia persistently describes late-cultural-stage sexual disorder, especially widespread transgenderism, as a turn to sadomasochism, and I didn’t get that description for a long time. I’m seeing it now. It comes from an impotent rage over the limits of personal will, a Veruca Salt disgust that the world doesn’t do what I want, and a desire to hurt the body that’s trapped by a nature that won’t yield to ideology. I’m going to dive back into Sexual Personae today. Notice how much left-oriented political identities are currently invested in causing literal, physical injury, and in celebrating moments in which political opponents suffer actual pain. Go look for leftists celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death on social media, if you want to wade into that sewer. “Progressive” politics is becoming a torture fetish.
Some have observed that the wave of Islamic terrorism (yes, I know today in the anniversary of 9/11) is a result not of unshakable faith, but of deep doubt; last, desperate gestures by those losing their faith against the onslaught of the modern world looking commit dramatic acts to prove they still believe.
There was a time, not so long ago, when woke social justice appeared to be on the ascent everywhere. Institution after institution was infected with its peculiar madness, and cancel culture bloomed, attacking anyone who dared to express #WrongThink over its sacred tenets. The radical left seemed to believe their victory was inevitable.
And then a funny thing happened on the road to Woketopia: America fought back, and Trump was elected president in 2016. (Charlie Kirk played an important role in America fighting back, along with thousands of others.) The little platoons of American society decisively rejected social justice, and its inevitability proved to be an artifact of systemic preference falsification by a thin veneer of echo chamber urban elites who thought they could bully their way to culture war victory by censoring all opposition. Hence the irrational rage of Trump Derangement Syndrome when the Bad Orange Man rose up to inexplicably thwart their plans. Hence all the desperate fraud to drag Slow Joe over the finish line to keep the leftwing graft firehose running.
Though illusory, the woke left thought they had achieved an unshakable stranglehold over American, but now all they taste is ashes. With Trump47 retaking American institution after institution in the name of basic sanity, the only important organization the woke left seems to retain control of is…the Democratic Party.
They’re not the vanguard of the revolution they thought they were, they’re just pathetic asshole losers that normal people hate. And none are more pathetic than transexuals who were convinced to mutilate their bodies on a lie only to find that it did nothing to reduce their insane self-loathing. Instead of acceptance, they’ve only found that normal society has rejected them even harder. No wonder they’ve turned violent.
A deluded woke leftist assassinated Charlie Kirk in rage at their own pathetic failure, and all the senseless murder will accomplish is cause ordinary, sane Americans to reject the poison of wokeness all the more decisively.
Just about every country of any size is worried about the possibility of drone attacks against their infrastructure. Saudi Arabia is no different. Seeking to protect their oil production facilities, they contracted to buy several anti-drone systems.
Saudi Arabia has become one of the first countries in the world to acquire Chinese laser-based air defense systems and anti-air missiles, purchasing China’s SkyShield integrated counter-drone system and HQ-17E to protect key sites and expensive air defense assets from drone attacks.
But operational experience in the kingdom’s harsh environment has revealed severe limitations of the Chinese HQ-17E and Laser Weapon.
The SkyShield system uses a layered approach that combines counter-drone radars with both “hard kill” and “soft kill” options. Each battery consists of four vehicles: a 3D TWA Radar, an AESA (Active Electronically Scanned Array) counter-drone radar with three side-facing panels providing 360-degree coverage without rotation; two JN1101 counter-drone jamming vehicles, which feature both interception and electronic jamming capabilities; and the Silent Hunter Laser Directed-Energy Weapon, intended for direct destruction of drones.
However, the radar failed to provide targeting data to both the jamming and laser elements, integrating the system into a single defensive package. The HQ-17E and Laser weapon’s integrated radar fails to detect targets and does not launch interceptors on time.
The HQ-17AE is a short-range surface-to-air weapon system advertised to operate in all weather conditions and capable of intercepting targets flying at low and medium altitude. Developed by the Second Academy of the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC), it is an export version of the HQ-17A, itself derived from the Russian Tor system. The HQ-17E failed to operate in Saudi Arabia because the radar could not discriminate targets when used in clutter.
Saudi Arabia procured the SkyShield as part of its broader effort to counter the rising threat of unmanned aerial attacks on critical infrastructure. The system was fielded with assistance from Chinese specialists, and its initial demonstrations showed strong results.
However, a former Saudi military officer who coordinated the project said performance has not met expectations under operational conditions.
“Despite the strong performance demonstrated during trials, in real conditions the SkyShield components have lower effectiveness than promised,” he said.
The Silent Hunter laser, developed by China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), in particular was limited by environmental factors.
“In some cases, it took between 15 and 30 minutes of continuous targeting and laser illumination to guarantee a drone kill,” the officer explained. Dust and sand disrupted optical tracking and weakened the laser beam. Continuous exposure also caused abrasion to the optical systems, while the high desert heat forced much of the system’s power into cooling rather than firing.
15-30 minutes? You’d get better results from David’s sling. And I don’t mean the Israel air defense system, I mean a guy with an actual sling, chucking rocks.
Or a Boy Scout with a BB gun. (Or whatever has replaced the Boy Scouts these days.)
The chances of a drone standing still for 30 minutes while you laser it are about as good as a 7-Eleven hot dog roller garnering three stars from Michelin.
Back in the heyday of Cyberpunk and the beginning of the Internet Revolution, there was a saying bandied about by Bruce Sterling and others: information wants to be free. That tendency for information to escape the bounds placed by repressive governments helped pull down the Berlin Wall and end the Soviet Union.
Despite that, governments around the world still continue to impose censorship on information they deem to hurt their own preferred narratives, despite the colossal failure of all but complete totalitarian regimes like North Korea to prevent such information from spreading. Just look at how all the truths the Democrat media complex and European elites wanted to hide in 2020 eventually came out, and the effort to censor them in the name of “fighting misinformation” ended up backfiring.
The latest example of a regime attempting to hide information they don’t like comes from Nepal, where two days ago the commie government tried to ban social media platforms.
Nepal’s government has banned dozens of social media platforms after they failed to comply with new registration requirements, disrupting essential communication and raising concerns over free speech.
The 26 blocked platforms include messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and WeChat, as well as websites like YouTube and LinkedIn.
The ban, which went into effect on Thursday after a one-week ultimatum to the social media companies expired, has caused confusion across the country. It has ignited fears about how it could affect press freedom and the tourism industry, and particularly about how families can continue to communicate with relatives working abroad as migrant laborers. About 7.5 percent of Nepal’s 29 million population was living abroad in 2021, according to census figures cited by the Nepal Economic Forum, a research institute.
Officials at Nepal’s ministry of communication and information technology said the ban was enforced after the platforms refused to comply with a new law regulating social media, despite several formal requests.
Sounds an awful lot like what the EU is trying to do, doesn’t it?
The proper response to all such government demands is “Get bent!”
Gen Z protesters have set fire to Nepal’s parliament and the prime minister’s house, forcing his resignation, amid a deadly crackdown on dissent sparked by a social media ban.
There’s video:
KP Sharma Oli, the four-time prime minister and leader of the Communist Party, stood down on Tuesday after violent youth demonstrations in Kathmandu left at least 19 people dead and more than 500 injured on Monday.
So a commie wanted to censor his own people. What are the odds?
The unprecedented violence left the capital shrouded in smoke and forced security forces to retreat, with ministers reportedly plucked to safety by military helicopters after some were chased down the street and assaulted.
Corrupt commies deserve to end up like Nicolae Ceausescu.
Oh yeah, corruption. People exposing that was a big reason why the government wanted to impose censorship.
What are the protesters’ demands?
Their two main demands have been clear: the government lifting the ban on social media, which has now happened, and officials putting an end to what they call “corrupt practices”.
Protesters, many of them college students, have linked the social media blockade with curtailing freedom of speech, and widespread allegations of corruption among politicians.
“We want to see an end to corruption in Nepal,” Binu KC, a 19-year-old college student, told BBC Nepali. “Leaders promise one thing during elections but never deliver. They are the cause of so many problems.” She added the social media ban had disrupted her education, limiting access to online classes and study resources.
Subhana Budhathoki, a content creator, echoed the frustration: “Gen Z will not stop now. This protest is about more than just social media – it’s about silencing our voices, and we won’t let that happen.”
What is the ‘NepoKids’ trend and how is it related to these protests?
A defining feature of the protest has been the widespread use of two slogans -#Nepo Baby and #Nepo Kids.
These two terms have gained popularity on social media in the past few weeks after a number of videos showing the lavish lifestyles of politicians and their families went viral in Nepal.
Protesters argue these individuals enjoy success and luxury without merit, living off public money while ordinary Nepalis struggle.
Viral videos on TikTok and Instagram have contrasted the lavish lifestyles of political families — involving designer clothes, foreign travel and luxury cars — with the harsh realities faced by young people, including unemployment and forced migration.
The slogans have become symbolic of a deeper frustration with inequality, as protesters compare the lives of the elite with those of everyday citizens.
William Gibson once said that the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. A cyberpunk revolution against an oppressive communist regime sounds like it should have happened in the 1990s, but Nepal is finally getting theirs in 2025.
Let’s hope they drive the commie scumbags out of power entirely.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve never been impressed with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I first became aware of him due to his ludicrous overstatements about global warming and falsely claiming that George W. Bush didn’t win the 2004 presidential election. Indeed, he was previously lefty scumbag on many (perhaps most) issues, had more than a whiff of fringe lunacy about him, and (through no fault of his own) I find him hard to listen to, due to his spasmodic dysphonia. And I still think he’s more wrong than right on the vaccine-autism link.
But the Democrat Media Complex seems to have conspicuously hated RFK, Jr. since he suggested that link back in 2005. That hatred only kicked into higher gear when Kennedy had the unmitigated gall that his ancestral party might be willing to live up to its name and let him primary Slow Joe Biden. No such luck. The DNC opened their vast bag of dirty tricks to keep Kennedy from even competing in the 2024 Democratic Presidential primary, and thus making sure nothing would expose Slow Joe’s cognitive decline until it was too late for a real primary. Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump was a key factor in winning over a certain type of old school liberal who felt alienated from the modern Democratic Party’s increasing authoritarian, social justice-infected nature, but was still wary of Trump.
All that doesn’t necessarily make him a good Director of the Department of Health and Human Services. But damn, given how viciously Democrats have been attacking Kennedy on everything from CDC firings to vaccine policy makes me think that Kennedy may be over the target. It’s fascinating to see Democrats attack someone who literally grew up in the Democrat Party harder than they’ve attacked anyone else in Trump47’s cabinet.
The reasons for this are probably varied. One is the absolute refusal of the social justice left to admit that their full-bore 2020 Flu Manchu freakout, with its lockdowns, vaccine mandates (especially for children) and thunderous invocation of that most holy of deities, THE SCIENCE, were in any way mistakes or overreactions. The Democrat Party has come to represent the entirety of the ruling class, and Kennedy’s exposure of the lies and data manipulation carried out in the name of fighting Covid raises the specter of people actually being held to account for their self-dealing lies, and that Simply Will Not Do.
The second reason Democrats absolutely hate Kennedy is his documentation of how Big Pharma has bought control of the Democrats. Here’s a Rumble interview Jordan Peterson did with Kennedy on a variety of topics, including how Big Pharma (specifically Merck, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKlein, and either Novartis or Novo Nordisk) were committing crimes, capturing regulatory agencies and how ObamaCare got the Democrats in bed with them.
(I had previously embedded that video (or an excerpt from it) here, but, what do you know, YouTube deleted that video.)
Kennedy may still be wrong about a great many things, but the more viciously he’s attacked, the more convinced I am that Big Pharma has fatally compromised both medical science and our unworthy political elites.
When you’re receiving this much flak, I have to assume that you’re over the target…
Back in the dim mists of time, under one of the Bush Administrations, I remember reading a National Review or Weekly Standard piece on immigration enforcement that threw in the line “Obviously we’re not going to be raiding job sites anymore,” and I remember doing a double-take. “Why not? They’re illegal aliens. Deport them and fine the company illegally hiring them, and then start arresting them if they do it again.” This was my first inkling that there were Republicans who though that illegal aliens entering the country was no big deal as long as they could get consumer goods a few cents cheaper.
The Hyundai Motor Group facility in Ellabell, Georgia, stretches across 3,000 acres of what was once sleepy farmland twenty miles outside Savannah. This $4.3 to $7.6 billion joint venture with South Korea’s LG Energy Solutions represents the largest single industrial investment in Georgia’s history, designed to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles and employ over 1,200 Americans. Republican Governor Brian Kemp had hailed it as a crown jewel of economic development, a testament to America’s ability to attract world-class manufacturing back to our shores. I’ll admit, on paper it looked like everything we’ve been asking for.
The sprawling construction site buzzed with activity until Thursday morning, when federal agents arrived with search warrants and a clear message about the difference between legal investment and illegal employment practices. Suddenly, all those rosy economic development photos didn’t tell the whole story.
In the largest single-site operation in Homeland Security Investigations history, federal agents arrested 475 illegal migrants working at the facility. Think about that number for a moment—475 people working illegally at a single site. The raid involved multiple agencies—HSI, ICE, FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS, and Georgia State Patrol—executing what officials described as the culmination of a months-long criminal investigation into unlawful employment practices.
That’s a regular alphabet soup of government agencies. Were the illegal aliens dealing drugs and guns? If not, I fear some lower level federal judge is going to order some illegal aliens freed because they were arrested by the ATF and not ICE. But it does show Trump47 isn’t afraid to use the manpower at his disposal to enforce federal law.
South Korean officials don’t seem to express any embarrassment over a Korean company hiring illegal aliens.
The South Korean foreign ministry expressed ‘concern and regret’ over the raid and sent a counselor and embassy officials to the location.
‘Our companies’ economic activities and our people’s rights should not be infringed unfairly in the US legal enforcement process,’ Lee Jae-woong, a spokesperson for South Korea’s foreign ministry, said on Friday, according to the Financial Times.
Or, hear me out, maybe Hyundai could obey the laws of the country they’re building their factory in.
When it comes to immigration enforcement,the Trump Administration isn’t just talking the talk, it’s walking the walk.
Every year the timeless adage to “Never bring a knife to a gun fight” gets bandied about, and every year at least one dumbass does just that.
Today’s dumbass is Tikila Walker, AKA Florida Woman.
The incident happened on August 15 in Gulf County, Florida. Police in Port St. Joe responded to a call from a repo driver at 3:42 p.m. who said 41-year-old Tikila Walker had fled while he was trying to repossess her white Ford Fusion for failure to make payments.
Police located Walker, but she fled, getting involved in a hit-and-run at 4:19 p.m. The other driver didn’t press charges against Walker, but the repo driver caught up and police had to deescalate an argument between the two while Walker remained in her car.
Walker drove away to escape the repo man, but at 5:52 p.m., she was involved in another hit-and-run at a convenience store after the repo man had tried to box her in.
At 6:01 p.m., police located her again. She refused to get out of the vehicle after police tried once again to deescalate the situation. She then charged at them with a knife.
And yes, there’s video.
The money shot comes precisely 3 minutes in.
Keep in mind, this is after one of them has already tased her seven times.
She survived and was arrested after treatment at the hospital.
This is such a textbook justified shooting they’ll probably teach it in law courses next year.
If you are surrounded by three cops, one of whom has already tased you, and you find yourself thinking “I should grab this knife and charge one them,” this is the precise moment when you should stop, reflect on the possibility that you’re making a really bad decision, and reconsider your life choices.
The left doubles down on crazy, Trump gets creative in cutting more foreign aid, we start kicking illegal aliens out of public housing, Google skates on monopoly remedies, more Russian refineries go boom, Ryan George examines ghost jobs, and the crazy story behind a classic American film.
From the indigenous LGBT woman’s land acknowledgement that opened the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting in Minneapolis to reaffirming the party’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, Democrats sent a clear signal to Americans: Despite last year’s electoral drubbing and the dismal polling that has followed, they have no intention of recalibrating.
One speaker told attendees that migrant crime and carjackings “don’t matter to that many Americans.” She sees President Donald Trump’s crackdown on crime as a “power grab” and a “political liability.”
Remarks from DNC Chairman Ken Martin showed they’ve learned nothing from their defeat or their time in the wilderness. “I’m sick and tired of this Democratic Party bringing a pencil to a knife fight,” he said. “We cannot be the only party that plays by the rules anymore. We’ve got to stand up and fight. We’re not going to have a hand tied behind our back anymore.”
Does Martin even hear himself?
After an alleged transgender person opened fire during a worship service at a Minneapolis Catholic School on the third day of the meeting, killing at least two children and wounding 17 other people, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey made a remarkable statement to reporters: “I have heard about a whole lot of hate that’s being directed at our trans community. Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community, or any other community out there, has lost their sense of common humanity.”
The reality is that Democrats have been ignoring the rules since Trump declared his candidacy in 2015. After failing to prevent his victory, they sought to undermine his presidency. They used lawfare to try to jail and bankrupt him, and even tried to remove his name from the ballot in several states. It turned out the public noticed, and a majority of voters rejected those tactics at the ballot box.
Dan Turrentine, cohost of the 2WAY Network podcast The Morning Meeting, once worked for the DNC. He attended the first day of the summer meeting and later told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham that his party “keep[s] doing the same thing over and over again,” which he notes is “the definition of insanity. And as a Democrat, it’s maddening that we’re still not serious.”
“We haven’t lost 4.5 million voters, nor is our brand at a historic low, because we don’t fight hard enough,” he told Ingraham. “It’s because we remain completely culturally disconnected and we have absolutely no agenda.”
He concluded, “We are not in good shape.”
Turrentine was citing a recent analysis from the New York Times showing that, over a four-year span, Democrats lost 2.1 million registered voters while Republicans gained 2.4 million. Multiple polls now suggest the party’s approval rating is in free fall, and its policies are increasingly out of step with everyday Americans.
But rather than course-correct, Democrats appear to be doubling down, clinging to a sense of moral virtue while defending principles most Americans reject. The result is a party that no longer even pretends to represent the working-class voters it once championed. Instead, it now serves a narrow circle of progressive elites concentrated in coastal cities and urban enclaves.
Without the sword of Damocles hanging over Trump’s head in the form of a weaponized Department of Justice, an aggressive FBI, and the ever-leaking Mueller team, as was the case during his first term, Democrats now find themselves operating from a position of weakness. Unable to rein him in, aside from occasional blows delivered by district court judges, Trump now sits firmly in the catbird seat.
President Donald Trump on Aug. 28 proposed the cancellation of $4.9 billion in appropriated funds for foreign aid spending, using a maneuver that could effectively bypass the congressional approval process normally required to rescind the funds.
The funds were allocated to the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development—which is in the process of being closed by the Trump administration—during the Fiscal Year 2025 appropriations process.
Under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, the government must make a rescission request to Congress, which then has 45 days to approve the cancellation of appropriated funds. A “pocket rescission,” however, refers to such requests made within 45 days of the end of the fiscal year, which is Sept. 30. In these cases, the funds are withheld during the 45-day congressional review period, and if Congress doesn’t act before the fiscal year ends, the funds expire.
“Last night, President Trump cancelled $4.9 billion in America Last foreign aid using a pocket rescission,” the Office of Management and Budget, a cabinet-level agency in the Executive Office of the President, wrote on X on Aug. 29.
Pocket rescissions are uncommon, and the last one attempted was in 1983, when President Ronald Reagan sought to cut $2 million appropriated to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Trump, during his second term, has successfully requested some rescissions from Congress. A rescissions bill canceling $9.4 billion in funding for foreign aid and public broadcasters was approved by Congress in July.
Rescission requests, when presented to Congress, may be enacted through legislation with simple majorities voting in favor in both houses, meaning that the minority has no leverage to stop or alter the process. Democrats in Congress, who are the minority in both houses, have thus protested against Trump’s rescissions, but often to no avail.
For all that stocks are soaring, we’re still feeling the effects of the Biden Recession. “Putrid Payrolls: Job Growth Collapses To Just 22K, Unemp Rate Rises To 4.3% Putting 50bps Rate Cut In Play.”
Ahead of today’s jobs report, consensus was that a print between 40K and 100K is largely priced in and greenlighting a 25bps rate cut by the Fed in two weeks, and that we would need a real outlier number for the Fed to either cut 50bps… or not hike. Well, we got a real outlier when moments ago the BLS reported that in August the US added only 22K jobs, a big drop from the upward revised 79K (from 73K previously) but more importantly June was revised from 27K to -13K, ushering in the first negative jobs print since 2020.
The systemic falsification of economic data to boost Biden has left the economy in a much bigger hole than most people realize.
No longer will illegal aliens be able to leave citizenship boxes blank or take advantage of HUD-funded housing, riding the coattails of hardworking American citizens,” [Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott] Turner wrote.
The secretary stressed that weak enforcement under previous administrations left thousands of American families on waiting lists.
“Currently, HUD only serves one out of four eligible families due, in part, to the lack of enforcement of prohibition against federally funded assistance to illegal aliens,” Turner continued.
HUD warned that noncompliance could lead to an “examination” of federal funding. Turner told Fox News’ Charles Hurt on Jesse Watters Primetime that Washington, D.C., has already been placed on notice and that more than 3,000 other public housing authorities will face the same requirements.
“American citizens will be prioritized,” Turner said.
No one should come to America to go on welfare, period. So this is a good start, but not as good as completely eliminating subsidized housing entirely.
Anger is boiling over in the UK pressure cooker, and it is hard to see anybody in power finding the courage to use the steam release valve before it explodes. On the issue of immigration, it now boils down to the state vs its citizens.
What began as a flag protest–English people putting up the St George’s flag as an act of defiance against government indifference to their anger–has spread to Wales and Scotland. Larger and larger crowds are gathering, and confrontations with police are becoming common.
It seems that Keir Starmer’s Labour government would rather risk actual outright revolt that deport unassimiliated Muslim rapists. The real question is why. (Hat tip: Irons in the Fire.)
“Trump Administration Warns 40 States To Remove ‘Gender Ideology’ From Sex Education Or Lose $81 Million.” If the purpose of sex education is to prevent out-of-wedlock births, it doesn’t seem to have been a rousing success. Maybe schools should eliminate it altogether.
Today, the decade-long campaign to stop big tech from dominating our society took a significant step backwards, as the judge hearing the search case against Google, Amit Mehta, chose not to meaningfully constrain the firm’s illegal behavior. And to engage in such deferential behavior, he openly ignored Supreme Court precedent.
You don’t have to take it from me. It’s Mehta who last year found Google to have violated the law. “Google is a monopolist,” he wrote, “and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.” It’s also Mehta who found the Supreme Court mandated what he called the “remedial objective” in monopolization cases, to “terminate the illegal monopoly.” But, Mehta wrote, “remedies designed to eliminate the defendant’s monopoly—i.e., structural remedies—are inappropriate in this case.”
So there we go. Mehta understood the law mandates he terminate Google’s monopoly, but he just decided against doing so.
Snip.
So what’s Mehta’s actual remedy? To understand that, we have look at the root of Google’s monopoly, as Mehta saw it. I characterized the case as follows, that the search giant had “bought up all the shelf space for search engines, aka paid Apple and browsers like Mozilla to be the default search provider instead of any of its rivals. It created Chrome so it could control that channel of distribution, and it bought Android for the same reason.” The goal of the remedy that the Antitrust Division sought was to terminate that monopoly, confiscate the fruits of its illegal behavior, and make sure monopolization would not recur. Here’s what I noted the DOJ sought:
The DOJ asked to remove the defaults that automatically place Google as the search choice for most browsers, an end to search-related payments, a spinoff of the Chrome browser which was itself a big search access point, as well as regulation of the mobile operating system Android. It also asked for syndication of Google’s search results and data to approved rivals, which is a way of forcing Google to not enjoy the illegal “fruits” of its monopoly by offering rivals some access to the secret sauce.
There were other requests, but those were the big ones. So what did the judge do? Mehta rejected both a Chrome spinoff and regulation of Android, since that’s a structural separation and he got nervous about that. But more insanely, he didn’t even say that Google had to stop paying Apple $20B+ a year to be the default search engine, it just had to limit such default payment agreements to one year terms. Mehta found that Google was doing illegal things to maintain its monopoly, but he didn’t force the company to stop doing those illegal things.
Why not? Well, he said that new companies like OpenAI had emerged to potentially challenge Google, and he didn’t want to, and I’m not kidding, hinder Google’s ability to compete with them. (“It also weighs in favor of “caution” before disadvantaging Google in this highly competitive space.”).
Beyond that, Mehta wrote that “cutting off payments from Google almost certainly will impose substantial—in some cases, crippling— downstream harms to distribution partners, related markets, and consumers, which counsels against a broad payment ban.” Here he’s talking about… Apple. Yes there are others, but Mehta could have blocked the contract with Apple, and let the other payments continue. But he didn’t. Mehta even wrote that if he restores competition in search, it could hurt Apple’s ability to invest in making phones better. It is quite problematic for a judge to refuse to break an illegal monopoly on the premise that an adjacent non-relevant market might be harmed. I can’t emphasize how crazy that is, it’s like, as my colleague Nidhi Hegde stated, finding someone guilty for bank robbery and then sentencing him to write a thank you note.
Google has been abusing it’s monopoly position for a long time now, and deserves much harsher than a slap on the wrist. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Chalk up a win for the First Amendment. “California’s ‘Deepfake’ Election Ad Ban Is Unconstitutional, Federal Court Rules. ‘Just as the government may not dictate the canon of comedy, California cannot pre-emptively sterilize political content.'”
“St. Louis cop-killer released on bond after paying only $5,000…Accused of shooting and killing an off-duty campus police officer in 2008, Brandon Levy was inexplicably allowed to walk after being required to pay only 10% of a $50,000 bond set by the court.” Thanks a lot, Associate Circuit Judge Michael Colona. I know you’ll be shocked to learn he’s a Democrat.
On that same theme: “Following reports that Texas was not complying with a presidential executive order requiring English proficiency for commercial truck drivers, Gov. Greg Abbott has directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to enforce the requirement for the safety of all drivers.”
Florida just ended all vaccine mandates. Mixed feelings. There is zero reason for children to be forced to take vaccines for Flu Manchu, but skipping polio vaccines is probably a mistake. Still, Florida is a laboratory for democracy. Nobody is forced to skip vaccines, now they merely have a choice. Let’s see if autism experiences a drop in Florida a decade hence…
They also hit the Ryazan oil refinery, again. “Ukraine has so far reduced about 20% of Russia’s refining capacity in the past month or so. This won’t add to that because this refinery was already offline. This is Ukraine doing its new tactic of just constantly hitting the refineries as often as possible to ensure that they remain offline.”
“Electromagnetic Weapon Destroys Drone Swarm In Seconds.” “Defense contractor Epirus quietly tested its latest electromagnetic weapon, Leonidas, against a swarm of 49 quadcopters, neutralizing them in seconds at Camp Atterbury, Indiana.” We previously talked about that system here.
“Pennsylvania Democrat County Commissioner Arrested In Massive Multi-State Drug Bust.” “Lehigh County Commissioner Zachary Cole-Borghi, a Democrat, was arrested at Bethlehem City Hall where he worked as an open records officer. The charges: possession of marijuana and possession with intent to deliver a pound of marijuana.” While you should definately move to a state where the devil’s cabbage is legal to do that sort of thing, the email teaser for this story (“Top Democrat Arrested in Massive Drug Bust”) did rather over-promise and under-deliver…
Ryan George tackles ghost jobs. Since I’m looking for a job (still), I can tell you that there are a lot of them out here…
Universal Music Group continues to attack Rick Beato…even to the point that they’re violating YouTube’s terms of service.
Looks like a clip job. “Kawhi Leonard reportedly paid $28 million for ‘no-show job’ with Clippers as way to get around salary cap, NBA investigating.”
It seems like every year there are news stories about “the biggest meth bust ever in [location x].” But this one is going to be pretty hard to beat.
The “largest” seizure of precursor chemicals used to produce methamphetamine “in U.S. history” happened in Houston this week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Wednesday.
Over 300,000 kilograms worth of chemicals “used to produce methamphetamine and intended for clandistine labs” were seized at the Port of Houston, allegedly being shipped from China to the Mexican Sinaloa Drug Cartel.
The seized chemicals are estimated to be capable of producing nearly 190,000 kilograms of methamphetamine, with a dollar value of around $569 million.
“This is the largest seizure of precursor chemicals used to manufacture methamphetamine in U.S. history,” U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said in a U.S. Department of Justice press release.
“China was sending over 700,000 lbs on the high seas to the Sinaloa Cartel before my office seized them. Because of President Trump and Secretary Rubio declared the Sinaloa Cartel a Foreign Terrorist Organization, we can now strike faster and hit harder,” Pirro concluded.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued an executive order on February 20 designating the Sinaloa Cartel and several other cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO). He described it as “one of the world’s most powerful drug cartels and is one of the largest producers and traffickers of fentanyl and other illicit drugs to the United States,” adding that it has “used violence to murder, kidnap, and intimidate civilians, government officials, and journalists.”
In a video posted by Pirro on X, hundreds of blue barrels in plastic wrap could be seen lined up in a Port of Houston warehouse.
“Agents seized six shipping containers of benzyl alcohol, a solvent used in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, weighing 164,880 kilos and six shipping containers of N-methyl formamide, another liquid organic solvent, weighing 151,560 kilos,” the press release recounted. It contrasted this with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) seizure of 78,925 total kilos of methamphetamine in one year.
I hope the DEA’s data linking these to meth manufacture and Sinaloa is airtight, because there are a lot of legitimate, non-drug uses for those chemicals.
“In order to transport the chemicals from port to a secure [Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)] storage facility, it took twenty-four, 18-wheeler trucks to transport the sheer volume of precursor chemicals.”
Due to the Sinaloa Cartel’s designation as a FTO by Rubio, Pirro and her office had the authority to execute a search warrant under the “terrosim forfeiture provision” of the declaration.
The Houston operation was a collaboration between the HSI, Pirro, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Todd Lyons.
Not much attention and effort has been spent on The War on Drugs recently, mainly because it looks like Drugs had already decisively won the war. The law of supply and demand is powerful enough to easily jump hurdles like “the rule of law.” To be fair, the ruling elite who lost that war seem increasingly feckless and incompetent in hindsight, and one suspects that a significant percentage of previous regimes never seriously tried to win the War on Drugs. It’s obvious that Trump is able to accomplish many goals they couldn’t. Plus the ongoing slow-motion legalization of marijuana will presumably let the feds concentrate on the hard stuff.
Trump47’s approach, emphasizing the tools of anti-terrorism over mere law enforcement, promises to take the fight nation-state and non-nation-state actors rather than relying on street level busts. But previous administrations have used supply interdiction strategies, to little effect. And it’s not like international drug cartels can’t avoid this problem in the future. If there’s a risk that docking in Houston, New Orleans or Long Beach might get their chemicals captured, they’ll just ship directly to Lazaro Cardenas or Veracruz instead.
And meth is particularly tricky to stop, since there are multiple chemical pathways to producing it. Though this particular bust is huge, it will likely only temporarily raise the price of the end-product and allow other cartels and small-time American sleazeballs to pick up the slack.
There’s talk that blowing up that drug boat will make international drug traffickers “think twice” before smuggling into the U.S. With all due respect: No it won’t. It may temporarily put a crimp in Venezuelan gangs, because they’re relatively low on the pecking order, but for the bigger cartels, a couple of goons and a speedboat isn’t even a rounding error. There are always more boats, and more goons, because the trade is lucrative enough to ensure there will always be more. Cartel gunmen get waxed all the time, and there are always more to take their place, because a high-paying job that lets you have flashy cars and flashy women beats hard-scrabble farming or working in a maliquadora for the vast majority of Mexican street toughs. And the Venezuela per capita GDP is, what, $15 a day? I’m pretty sure $2,000 a speedboat run to the U.S. would be more than sufficient for additional goons to keep lining up for the job indefinitely.
There’s a passage in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men where a sheriff talks about staking out an empty drug plane to arrest the gang members when they come back, and another cop notes they’re never coming back. An entire plane is just a line-item write-off for international drug cartels.
I have no objection to dirt-napping narcoterrorists on the high seas, and there’s no foe on earth the U.S. military can’t defeat in a real shooting war, but M1A3 tanks and F-35s are of rather limited use against criminal cartels. It’s easy to imagine DoD throwing billions worth of effort into the fight, killing multitudes of cartel gunmen, and still not making any dent in the drug trade.
I can imagine a War on Drugs that the United States government could actually win, but it would involve simultaneous attacks on all the cartels at the same time, temporary martial law and suspension of habeas corpus where all known drug dealers and gang members where arrested and held for a time while also rounding up and forcing all known addicts into rehab. Oh, you’d probably need to take the top level Mexican politicians, judges and quite a few generals into “protective custody” for a while, take an AI troll through every bank record in Mexico and the U.S. for cartel payoffs, then arrest anyone (in Mexico or the U.S) who were dirty and put them on trial, plus occupy significant portions of Columbia to seize the entirety of the coca crop, do the same to the poppy fields of the golden triangle, and probably bomb a who bunch of fentanyl factories in foreign countries, including China.
Do all that, and you might put a serious dent into the illegal narcotics trade that might last for, oh, maybe five years before the networks regrow. And I think a few people might just have some wee tiny constitutional quibbles with the approach.
It would be every bit as enjoyable as America’s military missions to Afghanistan and Iraq, but without all the rollicking, laughter-filled fun and good times.
And speaking of Afghanistan, drug warriors tried to wipe out the opium trade there during the two decade occupation. How did that work out?
President Trump’s numerous unorthodox approaches to previously intractable problems have already achieved things that many thought were impossible, but I suspect the War on Drugs is one even he can’t win.
As greed, bias and AI enshittification continues to degrade Google’s once-vaunted search dominance into barely usable garbage, similar problems are degrading the usefulness of video searches on YouTube.
For once it’s not the ad block wars, as the ad-blockers (and ad-block blocker blockers) seemed to have handily gained the upper hand for the last several weeks. What’s ruining YouTube right now are shorts and AI slop.
For some reason, the powers that be at Google/YouTube have decided that just being the most dominate video platform in the world isn’t enough, and what they really want to do is mimic the braindead hellscape that is TikTok. Hence the bite-sized morsels of annoyance that are Shorts. A good bit of the time, when I’m on YouTube, I’m looking for content to post here. (Or at least that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.) Shorts, being non-embedable, are useless to me. Plus I have no desire to be shunted into your scrolling TikTok clone.
The first tool needed to reverse the enshittification of YouTube is a way to exclude Shorts from search results.
The second thing enshittifying YouTube is the AI Slop infecting the platform these days. Now, I don’t object to the mere existence of AI generated videos there, as some are pretty interesting and/or amusing, like those “Super Panavision” Star Wars re-imaginings, or the imaginary Wes Anderson remakes.
What I object to is those being plopped down in my video feed and search results without any disclaimer that they’re AI. Worse still, AI videos are not only being created and uploaded more than ever, they’re actually being created exponentially and algorithmically, as shown in this Speeed video from five months ago (which I think I’ve linked to before).
It’s one thing when a human tells an AI to create a video, but quite another when AIs are automatically spamming videos to YouTube without human intervention, a mindless army of sorcerer’s apprentices creating more sorcerer’s apprentices, just on the off-chance they’ll suck in enough eyeballs to monetize their ever-rising tide of slop.
Worse, these two flaws combine when setting the previously quite useful “Upload date” filter for video searches. For a lot of things, almost the entire feed is now AI slop shorts that combine the worst of both worlds. For a non-political example, a search for “dog rescue” videos quickly turns up obvious AI slop like this, or this, or this.
They second tool needed to fight the enshittification of YouTube is a new category for the “Report” button where you can label something “AI Slop,” and then have a search option to exclude things tagged AI slop from your search results.
These are two obvious moves to improve the quality of the user experience. So naturally, I don’t expect the powers-that-be at YouTube/Google to implement them…
