If you live in the City of Austin, today the City Council will be hearing testimony on a sneaky proposal to buy AI-enabled surveillance cameras that they scheduled without giving mere citizens a chance to comment. Louis Rossmann has the details:
“Today, I’m going be making the case for every single one of you who lives in the city of Austin to show up to City Hall September 25th, 10:00AM.”
“In a few videos I’ve done recently, I talked about these AI powered surveillance cameras that are everywhere and why I don’t like them.”
“These AI powered surveillance cameras [have] been going up all over the country. They’ve been used for everything from police officers spying on their exes to people getting pulled over on the side of the highway because the AI powered camera got a seven or a three or seven and a B wrong, and just nonsense like this.”
“And a lot of people signed up for a hearing that was 10:00AM on a Thursday morning.”
“10:00AM on a Thursday morning on a Thursday morning is a really bad time to have a hearing because most people are going to be at work. And many of you were saying, ‘I don’t think they’re going to listen to me anyway.'”
“I did a video, came out and they said, ‘There’s no way in hell these people are actually going to cancel after getting you to take off work at 10:00AM on a Thursday with no notice.’ Unfortunately, that’s what they did. Over 10 years in in lobbying, never seen some shit like this.”
So they bring the item back for September 25th, but do it in a really sneaky way. “I go to check the agenda. I search for LiveView. I notice it’s not in the agenda. However, even though it’s not on the agenda, it shows up in Public Communication General. The only two people that are scheduled to speak are Kevin Rabininoitz and Kohar Ramini…Investment into LiveView Technologies for cameras at Austin Parks. LiveView Technologies Parks and Rec contract for mobile security units. There’s no agenda item.”
“So, I’m not able to sign up to speak, but they are.”
Turns out you have to sign up to speak 21 days before the meeting. The meeting they didn’t announce in advance for the item that’s not listed. “A person who intends to speak during general public communication must register between 9:00AM on the 21st day before the council meeting at which the person intends to speak, and 4:30PM on the 14th day before the council meeting at which the person intends to speak via the online form of the city’s website, by telephone, or in person. And this is a separate form than the form that you use to speak on regular issues.”
“Here’s what’s going to happen on Thursday morning. People who work as the lead salespeople at this company are going to show up and they’re going to speak to the City Council and they’re going to speak to you and they’re going to tell you why it is you’re going to sign a contract for $400,000 to $2 million of AI powered surveillance all over your city and you’re not allowed to say anything back.”
The marketing representative for the company said that they’re not going to use the cameras for facial recognition, but guess what? Their website says “Video analytics is a technology that utilizes artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms to automatically analyze video content from surveillance cameras, enables functionality such as facial recognition.”
Supposedly the cameras are for crime prevention. Fine. But that makes me wonder why they want to put them in parks rather than, say, crime hot spots like Sixth Street? Because they’re too bulky to locate there?
Though they say customers own all the data, it’s all be fed to LiveView’s own backend servers.
Rossmann is hoping that lots of people show up to express their opposition to the surveillance cameras, and has a page up on when and where to show up today to make your voice heard. (Given that I live outside the boundaries of Austin, I will not be going, though I’d still like to interview Rossmann on a variety of topics one day.)
There’s a case to be made for surveillance cameras in public places in crime hot spots, but not ones using unproven AI technology. And these bulky, solar-powered things aren’t going in crime hot spots, they’re going in public parks. True, there was been a plague of drug-addicted transients living in parks since former mayor Steve Adler invited them into the city, but these expensive, stationary things seem particularly unsuited to combing the parks for illegal campers; you’d be better off hiring more park employees to do that for the same money. Or, better yet, hiring more APD officers, as the city still hasn’t fully recovered from the damage done by the “defund the police” madness.
So there’s a case, but not for these bulky things, at this extravagant price, and not in city parks most days of the year. (I can see a partial exception for things like the gates of big outdoor public concerts, like ACL, or for the entrance to the Zilker trail of lights. Even then, there are better, cheaper alternatives available.) I also see a parallel with gunshot acoustic tracking systems, which were similarly hyped, similarly expensive, and seemed to yield practically no real-world benefits.
Rossmann is right: This thing stinks to high heaven, and it certainly smells like various palms have been greased to get this thing to slide through on the sly. Hopefully there’s enough outcry to put the kibosh on this bad, expensive idea.
This seems like a story that should have gotten a lot more attention than it has. “Secret Service Dismantles Weaponized SIM Farms Designed To ‘Shut Down’ NYC Cell Networks.”
Hours before President Donald Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly, the U.S. Secret Service announced that it had dismantled a massive, decentralized SIM farm network, just 35 miles from New York City, hidden inside five abandoned apartment buildings. The telecommunications stealth weapon was capable of paralyzing regional cell networks through denial-of-service attacks.
Key Details from the Secret Service Report:
Investigators seized 300 SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards across multiple sites.
The devices enabled anonymous threats, encrypted communications, and could launch telecom attacks such as:
Disabling cell towers
Denial-of-service attacks
Secure communication for criminal enterprises
If you want secure communications networks, there are lots of cheaper ways to do it that don’t involve rooms of rackmountable servers full of SIM cards. This setup suggests a big planned infrastructure hit.
Early analysis shows links between nation-state actors and known criminals.
CBS News described the seizure as the largest of its kind, noting the network was scattered across abandoned apartment buildings at more than five sites, roughly 35 miles from New York City.
Pretty ballsy to just pick abandoned apartment buildings and go “Hey, let’s just move lots of really expensive equipment in here for a future attack. I’m sure no one will notice.”
“This network had the potential to disable cell phone towers and essentially shut down the cellular network in New York City,” Secret Service Special Agent in Charge Matt McCool stated in a video released in the report by the agency.
Beyond DDoS attacks, the SIM farms could also support psychological warfare operations such as:
CBS, citing multiple officials briefed on the probe, reported that early findings suggest the network was used for communications between foreign governments and individuals already known to U.S. law enforcement.
In our view, the likelihood of this being part of a larger threat vector for potential physical terrorism appears elevated. Consider this: disrupting communications in tandem with a physical attack would be the playbook for foreign adversaries…
The Secret Service tweet shows an awful lot of specialized hardware:
The Secret Service dismantled a network of more than 300 SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards in the New York-area that were capable of crippling telecom systems and carrying out anonymous telephonic attacks, disrupting the threat before world leaders arrived for the UN General… pic.twitter.com/sZKUeGqvGY
The scale of the thing suggests a state actor behind the plot, most likely China or Russia.
A bigger concern is that such a telecom infrastructure attack probably wouldn’t be the main attack, but likely a secondary attack to slow response to or amplify the chaos of the primary attack. You don’t spend this much time and effort to annoy New Yorkers for a day or two before countermeasures can be deployed.
No, this was a supporting element for something much bigger.
Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.
As a reminder, Jimmy Kimmel’s ratings trail behind Stephen Colbert, and Stephen Colbert’s show will be wrapping up soon because it is losing CBS a whopping 50 million a year.
In fact, Kimmel’s audience was down 43% from earlier in 2025, averaging only 1.1 million viewers in August 2025.
Is ABC really going to bring back a huge financial liability because Barack Obama and a bunch of liberal elites got mad? Did advertisers think a week-long suspension was enough? Did the woke executives at Disney not actually find Kimmel’s lies about Charlie Kirk’s assassination offensive?
Will Kimmel even be required to apologize?
So liberals were finally able to prevent consequences for one liberal for their horrible lies over Charlie Kirk, and the hill they chose to die on was…Jimmy Kimmel.
The question is: Why? Obviously, the answer is that the left thinks none of their ranks should ever be allowed to be cancelled for anything nasty they’ve ever said about anyone on the right, no matter how dishonest and slimy, ever. But the deeper question is: Why Jimmey Kimmel? Why was this failing talk show, the one that ratings show the vast majority of them don’t even watch, the Khazad-dûm upon which the hate-filled orcs of the left brandished their pre-printed talking points and screamed “You shall not pass!”?
Nexstar and Sinclair have confirmed that Jimmy Kimmel Live will not be returning to the air on their affiliates after Kimmel’s lies about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, so all Disney/ABC will do by bringing it back is to temporarily mollify outraged leftists while losing even more money.
It’s rather like French general Henri Eugene Navarre fixing his hopes of defeating the Viet Minh on establishing an isolated fortress at Dien Bien Phu, some 120 miles from the nearest French base and resupplied solely by air, to interdict supply lines running into Laos. It was a tremendously bad idea, as Dien Bien Phu had no strategic value on its own, French forces did not control the highlands, and Viet Minh commander Vo Nguyen Giap declined to engage in the all-out climatic battle by which Navarre sought to shatter Viet Minh forces. Instead, Giap conducted a methodical siege, hauled in artillery to pound French positions, and used sappers to undermine the French perimeter. This strategy gradually contracted the French perimeter until air resupply became impossible, and French forces surrendered after just under two months of siege on May 7, 1954, a decisive defeat that resulted in them abandoning Vietnam entirely, resulting in the partitioning of French Indochina and setting the stage for American involvement in the Vietnam War.
Like Dien Bien Phu, Jimmy Kimmel Live is of no particular strategic importance of its own. It’s a money-losing show that’s lost 72% of its audience over the last decade, an increasingly irrelevant legacy media leftover on a network whose ratings fall behind not only Fox, but Fox News and ESPN, and part of a media conglomerate that’s already acquiesced to conservative demands to end its DEI programs.
It’s likely all the leftwing shouting and foot-stomping will accomplish is to delay the unemployment of Kimmel and his murder horny crew to a few months down the road. My guess is that they will quietly cancel the show over the Christmas holidays and have a less controversial replacement ready to go in January.
For a long time, far left domestic terror group Antifa seemed to operate with impunity. Teaming up with #BlackLivesMatter at an operational level temporarily gave them a fake halo of social approval. Soros-backed DAs in the deep blue locales that make up their homebases constantly let them bail out and walk without felony charges, preferring to prosecute law-abiding citizens exercising their right of self-defense like Kyle Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny or Daniel Perry instead.
But in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, that unearned immunity finally seems to be coming to an end. Not only has President Trump designated Antifa a terrorist organization, but according to Andy Ngo, the scumbags making up Antifa now realize they screwed up.
On Sept. 17, I joined Newsmax to discuss how Antifa are stunned by the unity of outrage on the right after the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week. A Corvallis, Ore. Antifa cell — based in the same city as Oregon State University — has now published an after-action report detailing their concerns about the fallout after the murder.
In their own words, they admit fearing the loss of their long-standing ability to mark conservatives for death without much resistance. They point out that for the first time, even apolitical groups, institutions, and businesses feel safe expressing sympathy to Kirk’s family and supporters. Compounding their panic, numerous people have already been fired after celebrating the assassination online. Meanwhile, Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show has been pulled off the air by Nexstar after he attempted to mislead the public by falsely suggesting the assassin was “MAGA.”
The report also acknowledges that Antifa’s recent attacks on Sean Feucht’s Christian worship events have backfired badly. Cameras captured masked militants assaulting families and children — images that damaged Antifa’s carefully crafted narrative. The group admits these events, combined with the Kirk assassination, risk “galvanizing otherwise politically inactive conservatives.” They are desperate to prevent that.
Waking the normies from their slumbers is the last thing the left wanted to do, but now Kirk’s assassination, and more crucially, the horrifying open celebration of it on the left, has done precisely that.
The backlash against the sick, ugly-souled left only continues to build. And the real-time disintegration of the money-losing legacy media outlets that use to cover for them has fatally undermined the systemic preference falsification by which they used to maintain the facade of historical inevitability. All the old tricks are losing their power, and the ugliness of Antifa and their numerous enablers and apologists stands revealed for all to see.
he U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into whether the City of Austin is violating federal law by engaging in discriminatory employment practices tied to its diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda.
In a notice sent Thursday to Mayor Kirk Watson, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division said it is examining whether Austin is involved in a “pattern or practice of discrimination” based on race, color, sex, or national origin in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Title VII is the section that prohibits discrimination based on an “individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
“The Department of Justice will not tolerate discriminatory race-based employment practices and DEI policies, in Austin or other cities,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon. “Such practices are illegal and un-American, and we will vigorously protect equal opportunity and hold accountable those who seek to perpetuate vestiges of outlawed discrimination.”
At the center of the probe is the City of Austin’s Office of Equity and Inclusion. On its website, the office describes its mission as working “across all City departments … to build capacity and leadership in working from a racial equity lens.”
The office promotes citywide guidance that instructs managers to set racial equity expectations in hiring, urges stronger racial equity criteria in executive-level searches, and directs departments to collect demographic data on employees in order to identify gaps and set targets for eliminating them.
The office also encourages the use of “racial equity tools” designed to inject race into city decision-making on policies, programs, and budgets.
According to the DOJ, these directives raise legal concerns that Austin is discriminating against job applicants, employees, and even participants in training programs. Officials stressed that no conclusions have yet been reached but confirmed that a full investigation has been authorized.
Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Eric Sell has been assigned to lead the probe.
This is likely to put Austin Mayor Kirk Watson in a bind. Watson is a Democrat, but he campaigned on being a moderate Democrat, someone who was going to reverse the far-left excesses of the Steve Alder era. While Watson did tack closer to the center on a few key issues (like reinstating the homeless “camping” ban), he has done very little to dismantle various other hard left policies enacted by the Austin City Council and the city bureaucracy.
Numerous federal laws ban discrimination based on race, but the whole point of “equity” is that it allows social justice democrats to discriminate based on race to hand out jobs and goodies to favored groups (blacks, Hispanics, gays, transsexuals, Muslims, women) while denying the same to disfavored groups (whites, Asians, Jews, straights, Christians, men). Favoring group rights over individual merit is one of the “features” of social justice, and is the theoretical glue that binds together the Democratic Party’s increasing fractious coalition. A DOJ investigation has the potential to uncover all sorts of illegal discriminatory policies, including graft grants to favored victim group NGOs.
It could discover a whole lot of things the Watson Administration and Austin leftists don’t want dragged out into the sunlight.
Another ostensibly liberal YouTuber comes to the conclusion that lefties celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk are actively evil “atomized bug people” that can’t be reasoned with.
“Charlie Kirk had many bad takes over the years. Like for example, the two most popular quotes I see people posting are the one where he advocated for stoning gays and black women are too stupid to be pilots. But guess what? Both those things, the two most popular quotes people are posting to justify this guy being murdered, are out of context. But idiots like Stephen King ran with it, then later had to apologize for spreading misinformation about a dead man.”
“These people will build a straw man of you in their minds. They get so fucking mad about it that they celebrate the real you dying. Horrifying.”
“But more importantly, even if everything was in context, who cares? Oh, he said this. Oh, he said this. I don’t care. There are many things he said that I disagree with. There are many things he said that I think are bad. Who cares? It is just a fact that nothing he said warranted his life being taken away. This is America. We have freedom of speech here.”
“One person may have pulled the trigger, but then we saw the reaction of many.” She then plays a sampler of clips of lefties ecstatically celebrating Kirk’s murder, including one who argued that his wife and children should also be murdered.
“There were thousands of videos like that. Some of these people posting with their full names and faces with hundreds and thousands of likes, thousands of tweets celebrating it with half a million likes. And it’s important to remember that all of those likes are a real person. Millions of people in this country apparently believe the acceptable response to speech they don’t like is murder.”
“They were teachers, professors, doctors, HR workers, healthcare workers, nurses, pediatricians, people who work with kids, people’s classmates, roommates. They are teachers showing our children the gory, horrifying video of Charlie’s murder on repeat. The hippie-dippy in this house we believe shitlib mask was ripped off and underneath was nothing but psychopathic bloodlust.”
She says the only time she ever saw anyone on “the right” celebrate a death was a dozen Stormfront losers, who were immediately condemned by the entirety of the Internet.
“This is different. It’s never been like this before. It’s never been this much. It’s never been this brazen. Normal people have to log into like an alternate Twitter account where they can post their more ‘unorthodox’ opinions. And these people are out here full face, full name, like ‘Hell yeah! Murder!”
“The smug, unearned confidence these people have to be openly sociopathic with their full name and face because they live under the pathetic delusion of being on the right side of history needs to end.”
“They will blame you for your death because words are violence.”
“So them killing you is just self-defense. That’s why they are using Kyle Rittenhouse as some kind of gotcha. ‘Oh, if you don’t condone political violence, why do you support Kyle Rittenhouse?’ They fundamentally don’t see the difference between killing someone over speech and killing someone over self-defense because these are the same things to them.”
“Why are most of them women? Most of the people celebrating are women. Like, it’s a good like 80/20 ratio all over the internet. What is going on, ladies?”
“Basically, the whole country is shook because last year they realized how many people would celebrate the murder of a president, and this year they realized how many people would celebrate the murder of them.”
“This is all the inevitable conclusion of the punch a Nazi thing from like 2017. Do you guys remember that? We always knew it was a slippery slope. That’s why we were against it. And they always say this dumb shit. Like, if you don’t want to be called a Nazi, stop being a Nazi. Even a congressman from my state, New York, was like, ‘Oh, if you want to stop being called a fascist, you should stop being a fascist.’ Yeah, that’s great. Except you’ve called everyone and their mother a fascist and a Nazi for the past like 15 years.”
She then reads a long, long list of all the things she’s personally being a called a Nazi or fascist over, including “making fun of Joe Biden eating ice cream.”
Quoting Blair White: “They don’t kill you because you’re a Nazi. They call you a Nazi so they can kill you.”
“I’ve been to the TPUSA AmericaFest in 2021. I actually went there planning to make a video making fun of it, but I had so much fun and met so many friends that I’m still friends with to this day.”
After Kirk was killed “I kept going to every single like lefty, liberal, left-wing person I know and like checking out what they have been saying about this. And besides maybe like four or five, every single one was being an unhinged psychopath about this, or saying some backhanded shit like ‘This is why we need gun control,’ which, first of all, we were just watching a whole bunch of people celebrate killing someone over political differences. You are never taking our guns now. That that is not happening.”
“I felt like I was in the middle of the ocean. I was trying to, like, grasp onto a flotation device, checking all of these accounts for their take. Like ‘Be normal, be normal.’ Nothing. Nobody. I’m just drowning in a sea of evil, apparently. Maybe I was just blind up until now.” So basically it’s as bad as conservatives have been saying for the last decade.
“This is how they would react to me, my family, my friends, you, your family, your friends that have ever stepped out of line from the nebulous, ever-changing definition of progressive.”
“These are people I thought were levelheaded. They were left-wing, but you know, like they were one of the good ones. Like you can joke with them. You know, they weren’t those like woke SJWs. Like they were cool. We can disagree and still be friends.”
“You know, your friend wouldn’t celebrate you being murdered, of course. But if they would celebrate an exact clone of you that wasn’t you, that had all the same opinions, or some of the opinions that you have, if they would celebrate that clone being murdered, they’re not your friend.”
“It’s just sick.”
“I would rather live in a world full of Charlie Kirks who would sit down and debate than a world full of people who agree with me, but would murder people who don’t.”
“You can’t say, ‘What if that was your dad or your brother getting killed for their opinions?’ Because they’ve already cut those people off. They’ve already cut those people off out of their lives. And posting videos and pictures of Charlie’s wife and young kids will not move these people at all because they hate their lives. They hate their families. They are atomized bug people.”
“From a political standpoint, not even a personal human standpoint, why are you celebrating the most popular college Gen Z political pundit dying? Like, why are you celebrating him becoming a martyr? Say goodbye to that young male vote. All the liberal Joe Rogans in the world are not fixing this.”
She ends with a Trumpism: “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
I had to disable the ancient Word Press Stats package that stopped working and was screwing up my dashboard. So I lost all my blog hit history, which is irksome, as I received more than five million hits. On the plus side, it seems to save drafts much more quickly, and it also seems to be recording more views than the old stats did. I also wonder if the old stat package was responsible for some of the slow load times people occasionally experienced.
This week: More Charlie Kirk assassination fallout, more Ukrainian oil infrastructure strikes, Fani Willis gets permabanned, Planned Parenthood want to trans your children, the Democrat party’s racism problem, Lina Hidalgo calls it quits, more of that voting fraud that doesn’t exist, and YouTube screws up, then refuses to admit it
Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk, was living with his transgender romantic partner in the leadup to the assassination, Utah Governor Spencer Cox confirmed to CNN.
The roommate was “a male transitioning to female,” Cox said, noting that “this partner has been incredibly cooperative, had no idea this was happening, and is working with investigators right now.”
Snip.
While officials have not yet released the name of the roommate, public records show that Lance Twiggs, a 22-year-old, reportedly in the process of transitioning from male to female, lives at the same address as Robinson. The Post reported that a family member of Twiggs confirmed they were living together.
Cox told the Wall Street Journal that the suspect was “deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology.”
Robinson was also evidently a furry. So a gay tranny-loving furry killed Charlie Kirk. Some things are beyond parody…
“Anyone Who Blames ‘Both Sides’ After Charlie Kirk’s Murder Is A Liar And Coward.”
the Official Party of Wanton Assassination is busy making the case that there is extreme political violence “on both sides.” Immediately after the shooting, buffoonish Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, and Elizabeth Warren marched out to the microphones with convoluted messages about coming together and stopping violence on both sides.
By now, the drumbeat of bothsidesism in the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination has become a cacophony. “Bothsidesism” is what I am calling the irresistible urge for morally corrupt politicians (on both sides!) and journalists to lay half the blame for Kirk’s brutal murder at the feet of the right.
In fact, the worst Bothsiders — even worse than the sneering Democrats who can barely contain their glee that Kirk is dead, even as they scold us for not being interested in “unity” — are sniveling Republicans and so-called conservatives.
“There are monsters in your midst too,” intoned The New York Times’ David French, who persists in claiming to be conservative.
As proof, they will present their list of “right-wing violent attacks.” To give this barebones list more heft, they will go as far back as the Oklahoma City bombing, as that cretinous GOP Sen. James Lankford did on CNN. Lankford even had the gall to open his interview with Dana Bash by bringing up “white supremacy.” On Fox and Friends, Ainsley Earhardt tried to bait Trump into conceding that there are extremists on the right, too. Thank God he refused to take it.
This outrageous formulation must be crushed into dust, immediately. There is no moral equivalency. The Bothsiders are on the wrong side.
Why are Bothsiders wasting time blaming the right after a vicious murder committed by a leftist? Shouldn’t they be vociferously defending the innocent? The answer is that they’re cowards. They are too scared to call out Democrats for creating, supporting, and ignoring the evil that has taken root in their party.
Instead of courageously calling out their friends, colleagues, coworkers, and media allies, these pathetic Republican Bothsiders will spout long lists of examples of “right-wing political violence.” This allows them to avoid doing what has to be done: laying bare the left’s deep hatred of conservatives that has been allowed to fester for decade after decade.
By insisting that “both sides” are guilty of violence, they are giving the vicious left a way out. It’s a lifeline — a magical force field that immediately exonerates them. Democrats can then neatly avoid having to address the malevolent violence and hatred in so many of their voters. When it’s “both sides,” you get to escape accountability. When it’s “both sides,” the guilty get to escape a hard look in the mirror.
And just to belabor the point, here is why nearly everyone on the right is so united about political violence as a left-wing problem. First, Matt Walsh posted a short list of all the left-wing violence the right has had to endure in just the past few years:
BLM riots
Antifa
Church shootings
Trump assassination attempt [two of these!]
Pro life pregnancy center fires
Tesla vandalism
Attacks against ICE agents
Attacks against police
Attacks against federal courthouses
Allow me to add to this: multiple transgender shootings and threats by transgender activists. Plus, don’t any of these Bothsiders remember that our cities turned into a nightly warzone of fires, shootings, and Molotov cocktails from 2020-2021? It got so bad outside the White House that the president had to be moved to a secure location.
Don’t forget “Punch a Nazi” and “Punch a TERF” rhetoric either. Yes, men who identify as transgender, some of the most violent of the various Democrat shock troops, have attacked women as TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, for years.
And we endure plenty of ancillary political violence. It was left-wing violence that forced Kyle Rittenhouse into a trial for self-defense. It was left-wing violence that forced Daniel Penny into a trial for being a hero. It was left-wing violence that wrecked countless statues, monuments, and businesses.
Just days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the left is working overtime to hide the truth and create fantasies about his death.
Specifically, leftists alleged that conservatives were going to “pounce” on the death to wage protests and boost radical agendas in the manner of what followed George Floyd’s death.
Here are some of the lies that such a ridiculous narrative entails.
One, Charlie Kirk is not conservatives’ George Floyd. There were no mass riots after his death of the sort that followed Floyd’s demise.
Floyd’s death was used by the left to justify five months of rioting, arson, murder, looting, and attacking police officers.
The postmortem respect for Kirk’s singular life was not characterized by $2 billion in property damage, the torching of a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic church, 35 deaths, and 1,500 injured law-enforcement officers.
Instead, thousands of people peacefully joined his Turning Point USA organization and promised to redirect their lives toward peaceful political engagement.
Two, after Kirk’s death, no prominent Republican or conservative is encouraging ongoing mass (and often violent) protests in the manner of high-profile leftists like Kamala Harris.
Snip.
Three, Charles Kirk was not George Floyd. He was a law-abiding, religiously devout, political organizer, happily married with two children. Kirk was a media figure and head of a huge 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose brand was calmly debating students who disagreed with him.
Floyd should not have died while in police custody. But Floyd’s comorbidities were many. When arrested, he was under the influence of fentanyl and methamphetamine, with a heart condition and recent Covid infection.
He was a career felon, with eight previous criminal convictions, who had in the past staged a violent home-invasion robbery and pointed a knife at the abdomen of one of the female occupants.
In contrast, when Kirk was killed, he was not on drugs. He was not resisting police officers. And he was not trying to pass counterfeit currency. Instead, he eschewed violence and tried to engage in polite dialogue with students of different views.
Four, Kirk was not, as alleged by the left, murdered by a right-wing shooter. His death was not an example of right-on-right violence. Just the opposite was true. The shooter, Tyler Robinson, was on record with his family expressing hatred for the conservative Kirk.
Robinson engraved his bullets with both Antifa-like “anti-fascist” messaging and transgender references. He lived with his transgender partner, who was a leftist. Robinson’s aim was to end Kirk’s peaceful conservative career because he hated his politics and popularity and feared his influence.
Five, the left used the death of Floyd to promote its hard-left and otherwise unpopular agenda—defunding the police, cashless bail, decriminalization of theft, and DEI mandates. It manipulated outrage, chaos, and months-long violence to ram through radical cultural and top-down legal changes that otherwise had little popular support.
“The Fake News Media, Democrats and Radical Left are Lying about Charlie Kirk. They use their lies to justify and excuse Charlie Kirk’s brutal murder and their culpability for it for winding up the radical leftist fringe with their violent rhetoric.”
Leftist political violence is on the rise with Fake News Media, Democrat politicians, activists and the far left using more and more radical, violent rhetoric. I wrote about the violent rhetoric (and leftist political violence) on this substack, several times (see also here and here). I also observed previously that the far left consider political violence a tool and that the violent rhetoric serves to “trigger” the radical leftist fringe into acting out violence. The visceral response Americans had to the brutal assassination of Charlie Kirk only days ago made the media, Democrats and their enablers “circle the wagons” and start fabricating lies and misinformation about Charlie Kirk. I debunk a couple of the nastier lies in this article.
Snip.
AT NO TIME did he say “black women” lack brain processing power. He said several prominent liberal women who admitted they were assisted by affirmative action were admitting they lacked the “brain processing power to be taken really seriously.”
The comments at issue were made on the July 13, 2023 episode of Charlie Kirk’s podcast. During the show, Charlie discusses affirmative action. Affirmative action was a particularly hotly debated topic at the time due to the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard wherein SCOTUS found the use of race-based affirmative action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
After the Supreme Court’s opinion in Harvard a number of prominent black Democrats publicly supported affirmative action and stated they were personally assisted in their careers by affirmative action. Among these were the late Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat Congresswoman from Texas, former First Lady Michelle Obama and former MSNBC correspondent Joy Reid.
Snip.
The Charlie Kirk Called for Stoning Gay People LIE
Literally hours after his murder, prominent leftists started circulating false claims that Charlie Kirk advocated for or supported stoning gay people to death. Chief among the purveyors of this misinformation was famous author (and radical leftist) Stephen King.
Snip.
Did Charlie Kirk “Advocate” for Stoning Gays?
No, of course not. In fact, Charlie Kirk advocated repeatedly for caring for gay people and encouraged and supported gay conservatives. (This link is to a gay conservative Charlie supported. His video is worth watching and includes video of Charlie Kirk answering questions from gay people.)
Charlie Kirk was a Christian and believed in the Bible. Based on Scripture, Charlie knew homosexuality was a sin. Naturally, this enraged the far left. To justify or excuse Charlie’s murder the far left FABRICATED the claim that Charlie Kirk “advocated” for “stoning gays.” All Charlie Kirk did was reference Scripture. Here is what happened.
Charlie Kirk and Jack Posobiec hosted a podcast called Thoughtcrime. During a Thoughtcrime episode on June 8, 2024, Jack and Charlie (along with a couple of other frequent conservative contributors to the show) discussed a social media personality named Miss Rachel and her endorsement of Pride month (gay pride). Miss Rachel’s social media and blogging content focuses largely on kids and parenting. Miss Rachel made a post about suppoting Pride month and invoked the Bible in the process, citing the admonitions on the Book of Matthew to “love your neighbor.” Miss Rachel implied, but did not expressly say, anyone who is against Pride Month, is not being a good Christian.
In response, Charlie Kirk pointed out you love someone by “. . . by telling them the truth and not by confirming or affirming their sin.” He then suggested Miss Rachel read the rest of the Scriptures and pointed out the Book of Leviticus calls for a man who lays with another man to be stoned, making the point Miss Rachel was cherry-picking Bible verses. He also pointed out the Bible says to love God, one must love his law and that the Book of Leviticus lays down God’s law about sex.
“Stephen King himself agreed his own post was untrue and apologized for the post.”
The Fake News Media, the Democrats and the left generally are in panic mode working to spread lies about Charlie Kirk in an effort to blunt public opinion against their radical, violent rhetoric and leftist violence. These two lies are the worst in my view. There are many more other lies being spread about Charlie Kirk by the left. Keep that in mind as you read any media reports.
Florida’s Commissioner of Education Anastasios Kamoutsas reminded teachers and administrators that they can be fired for violating the state’s code of ethics. “An educator who is designated with ensuring the health, safety and welfare of students in schools making comments celebrating violence at a school is very concerning.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
More transtifa news: “The man who pleaded guilty to attempting to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh identifies as a transgender woman, according to newly revealed court documents. In a recent court filing, Nicholas Roske’s defense attorneys call their client “Sophie” and explain in a footnote that they will use female pronouns to refer to him ‘out of respect.'”
A few years back we got really serious about studying cash transfers, and rigorous research began in cities all across America. Some programs targeted the homeless, some new mothers and some families living beneath the poverty line. The goal was to figure out whether sizable monthly payments help people lead better lives, get better educations and jobs, care more for their children and achieve better health outcomes.
Many of the studies are still ongoing, but, at this point, the results aren’t “uncertain.” They’re pretty consistent and very weird. Multiple large, high-quality randomized studies are finding that guaranteed income transfers do not appear to produce sustained improvements in mental health, stress levels, physical health, child development outcomes or employment. Treated participants do work a little less, but shockingly, this doesn’t correspond with either lower stress levels or higher overall reported life satisfaction.
Homeless people, new mothers and low-income Americans all over the country received thousands of dollars. And it’s practically invisible in the data. On so many important metrics, these people are statistically indistinguishable from those who did not receive this aid.
Read on for more detailed methodologies, but the results (or lack thereof) are consistent with all other experiments of this type, all the way back to the SIME/DIME experiments of the late 1960s. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
The State Department announced Wednesday its decision to close the remnants of the Global Engagement Center, an office the Biden administration rebranded last year after it came under scrutiny for contributing to the censorship of conservatives online.
“The United States has ceased all Frameworks to Counter Foreign State Information Manipulation and any associated instruments implemented by the former administration,” principal deputy spokesperson Tommy Pigott said in a statement, referring to the Global Engagement Center’s new title.
“The Framework, initially launched by the GEC to counter so-called disinformation, devolved into tools for political censorship instead of protecting Americans from foreign adversarial propaganda,” he added.
“Through free speech, the United States will counter genuine malign propaganda from adversaries that threaten our national security, while protecting Americans’ right to exchange ideas.”
The Biden administration reshuffled the GEC into the Frameworks to Counter Foreign State Information Manipulation after congressional Republicans defunded the GEC in 2024. Republican lawmakers shut down the GEC after widespread backlash among conservatives against the agency over the pressure it put on social media companies to censor disfavored points of view.
The State Department’s move followed through on Secretary Marco Rubio’s directive earlier this year to close the unit and end the practice of government-sponsored censorship.
Disgraced Georgia DA Fani Willis permabanned from prosecuting Trump. “The denial of certiorari to Ms. Willis’s appeal of her suspension from the election interference case she brought against Mr. Trump and 18 others is a decisive victory for the 47th president. The high court’s four-to-three decision ends Ms. Willis’s time atop the case, which was terminated because of her secret romance with her special prosecutor, Nathan Wade.”
More food inflation? Except for beef, I’m not seeing price spikes the way I saw 2020-2022.
There’s a rare public spat going on between Governor Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick over THC regulation.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has responded to Gov. Greg Abbott’s hemp-derived THC executive order (EO), saying that “on this issue, we disagree.”
A staunch supporter of an outright ban on THC in Texas, Patrick said in his Friday press release that via the EO, Abbott “intentionally or not, has sent a signal to the THC industry that they have a state seal of approval on the current THC market.”
Abbott’s EO, which comes after his veto of the THC ban in Senate Bill 3 at the end of the regular session and then two special sessions where the Legislature was unable to come to an agreement on regulation, directs the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC) and Department of State Health Services (DSHS) with prohibiting the sale of hemp-derived THC products to “minors” — but does not explicitly state a specific age.
The EO also directs DSHS to conduct a review of existing agency rules that deal with total THC content in products, labeling requirements, and record-keeping.
Abbott told The Texan in July that he wants to see a 21-year age limit on the sale of hemp-derived THC products, an age he had mentioned in his veto proclamation.
Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller joined Vice President JD Vance, who hosted The Charlie Kirk Show earlier, following Kirk’s assassination last Wednesday by what has been described as a “radical left, ANTIFA-adjacent creep” with a radicalized transgender partner.
Miller told Vance, “Which is that we need to have an organized strategy to go after the left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country.”
It appears that Miller has correctly identified the dark-money-funded NGO world as fueling this madness, and that an urgent all-of-government approach is necessary.
More on the subject from Jason Curtis Anderson of One City Rising:
It’s encouraging to see the White House focus on the violent, revolutionary arm of the radical left, but targeting small organizations alone won’t solve the problem.
We need a multi-agency coordinated effort, and it must confront the dark-money network of foundations that prop them up.
We also must begin ruthlessly regulating and enforcing the tax-exempt 501(c)(3) system, where the revolution against the West operates. To qualify for tax-exempt status, a group is supposed to serve the public good.
Yet many qualify on flimsy claims of promoting social, racial, or climate justice and then devote themselves to protests and flag-burning.
They are a cancer on society, and the longer we wait, the more it will metastasize.
It’s also alarming how closely far-left radicalization mirrors Islamist radicalization. The stages are strikingly similar: Introduction to ideology, Obsession with ideology, Belief that violence is justified, Acts of violence on behalf of the ideology.
Planned Parenthood’s online “gender affirming care” lesson for students as young as middle-schoolers suggests using “liquid filled condoms” to mimic a penis and provides instructions on how to circumvent safeguards if “you’re looking for hormones without extra gatekeeping.”
Sex Ed To-Go is an online program with free sex-education lessons in Spanish and English developed by Planned Parenthood for teachers and students, ranging from topics like sexually transmitted diseases to “handling break-ups.” The new module titled “Gender Affirming Care,” created by Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest, is designed for students in eighth grade and above. The lesson plan explains gender-related terminology, explores “types of things people can do to help their body and appearance match their gender identity,” directs students on finding “resources,” and details “how to support someone who is transgender, non-binary, or transitioning.”
Conversely, University President Mark Welsh is out at Texas A&M.
Mark Welsh, president of Texas A&M University, is stepping down effective September 19. Announced by Chancellor Glenn Hegar and the Board of Regents, the news follows weeks of mounting controversy over Welsh’s leadership.
Welsh’s resignation caps a period of public uproar sparked by his handling of a children’s literature course that included instruction on introducing LGBT and gender identity material to children as young as three.
The situation came under public scrutiny after State Rep. Brian Harrison (R–Midlothian) released audio of a student objecting to the curriculum and subsequent allegations that the student was kicked out of class for expressing concerns about transgender indoctrination. Initially, Welsh defended the professor involved but later reversed himself—firing the instructor and removing the department head and dean from their posts.
Despite these actions, criticism intensified from lawmakers and activists, who accused Welsh of ambivalence and being slow to address the controversy.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick publicly called for further accountability, stating Welsh “did not handle the recent situation … as he should have,” while Harrison said Welsh “must be fired for forcing radical trans indoctrination on students.”
Sadly, trans indoctrination in education is something squishy Republicans dragged their heels on fighting in the past. That’s no longer the case, and I suspect that anyone in Texas who thinks its a good idea to use trans indoctrination on kids is soon going to find themseleves on the receiving end of a pink slip.
“We got too progressive, I believe,” said JoJo Burgess, the black Democratic mayor of Washington, Pennsylvania, a small city in steel country. He’s also a steelworker trying to claw back some of the steel country for Democrats.
Burgess argued that the Democrats’ problems are Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and identity politics, including gender ideology. Clairton Mayor Rich Lattanzi, also a Democrat and a former steelworker, basically agreed.
“It’s almost like the Democrats forgot the people they are representing,” Lattanzi told the Washington Examiner.
In 2000, Al Gore won Fayette, Washington, and Greene counties, all steel and coal country south of Pittsburgh, by 10 points, which was the norm. More recently, President Donald Trump carried all three counties by 30 points.
Burgess told the Washington Examiner he believes steel country Democrats were done in by a one-two punch. First, former President Barack Obama won the presidency, and Burgess said he believes white rural Democrats didn’t want to be in a party headed by a black man. He said the second blow was self-inflicted in 2016, adding “one of the biggest problems that we had with the Democratic Party — that’s Bernie Sanders.”
Burgess said he believes Sanders got so much attention that party leadership felt they had to tack left to embrace it.
“We got too progressive, I believe. And you got the progressives that picked up on that, like the AOCs [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and people like that,” Burgess said. “Listen, I’m not gonna say that they’re bad, but sometimes some of the shit that some of these guys say: it’s just it’s too extreme and it don’t make sense.”
He added that one example is “gender stuff.”
“Whenever the LGBQTIA community comes out and says, ‘We’re getting treated just like black people,’ no, you’re not,” Burgess said. “As black people, we have no choice. In that community, you do have a choice, and you do know what you sign up for when you take on that role. Do I believe that you’re discriminated against? Yes. Do I believe you should be protected against it? Absolutely.”
However, Burgess totally rejected the idea that boys who identify as girls should be able to compete as girls, and he said he believes Democrats harm themselves by taking the other side.
Lattanzi said when the Democratic establishment hosts an event in steel country, it plays its identity-politics games and tries to stay away from the working-class white guy who stereotypically embodies this region.
“They’re out there looking for minorities, gays, and lesbians,” Lattanzi said.
Lots of interesting takeaways there, but this was a big one: “white rural Democrats didn’t want to be in a party headed by a black man.” Emphasis added. And that’s in 2008, which suggests racism lingered on in the rural Democratic Party much longer than in the Republican Party or America as a whole. See also: The Myth of the Southern Strategy.
Things that make you go “Hmmmm: “The EU Paid-Off €600,000 To Friendly Media Outlets Right After European Elections.”
One European politician, MEP Petr Bystron, has revealed that the EU commission has provided Financial support to the American investigative network Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) right after the 2024 EU elections. Major German news outlets like Spiegel, Zeit, and Süddeutsche Zeitung belong to the group, which is the world’s largest network of investigative media.
These outlets are known for their hit pieces on conservative and right-wing parties, often at opportune times. Notably, Spiegel and Süddeutsche Zeitung’s reporting in 2019 on the Ibiza Affair scandal — which involved an undercover video of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) party’s leader — led to the toppling of the Austrian government at the time, which included the FPÖ. Many critics believed that due to the sophistication of the operation, which included an undercover actress, intelligence services may have played a role.
The OCCRP group was founded in 2006 and is most well known for publishing the “Panama Papers” and the “Azerbaijan Laundromat” evasion scandals.
After a massive flow of U.S. money was cut off to key European establishment outlets and NGOs, Brussels is stepping in to fill the gap. Namely, the Trump administration ended the massive levels of funding headed towards foreign organizations, particularly from USAID, which allowed them to pump out pro-EU and left-wing content to wide swathes of the population across Europe.
The OCCRP group has received an extraordinary amount of money from U.S. taxpayers and other U.S. sources. According to French outlet Mediapart, the group received nearly $50 million from U.S. sources, but these funders were not just generous donors. They also could dictate editorial agendas and veto staff appointments.
Two journalists from NDR, a German state media network, questioned just how independent the OCCRP is in a 2024 report.
The two determined that a significant portion of the money was coming from American funds, particularly from USAID. OCCRP was funneling content and material to German media outlets like Spiegel, Zeit, and Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Since the revelations, Alternative for Germany (AfD) MEP Petr Bystron has officially requested the EU Commission to provide information about whether it also provides financial support to OCCRP. The response revealed that the organization has received €600,000 since November 2024 as part of an EU project to “strengthen” journalism.
Known as the NEXT-U project, it aims to support European journalists and media organizations with training and tools for investigative journalism. The commission defends the grants, stating that the taxpayer money is transparently distributed and adheres to journalistic standards.
Bystron argues that the ample amount of money amounts to an influence operation.
“OCCRP media outlets like Der Spiegel received over 600,000 euros from the EU directly after the EU elections. These very media outlets manipulated the last EU elections through massive campaigns,” he said in an interview with Berliner Zeitung, which published the exclusive story first.
The AfD MEP stated that the aim was to discredit conservative, right-wing politicians who are critical of the EU.
I first met Charlie Kirk when he was just 18 years old, in my friend’s living room. Fresh out of high school, even then, he had a vision for Turning Point USA—a dream to energize young people, inspire them, and get them involved. He started in his parents’ garage, and that vision grew into something extraordinary.
From the beginning, Charlie stood out. He was brilliant, bold, courageous, and joyful. He was a happy warrior.
Like so many across the country, I struggled to comprehend the news of his death.
He was assassinated for speaking the truth, for sharing his heartfelt beliefs, for daring to open conversations across the political spectrum. And his absence leaves a gaping hole in our nation’s soul.
Snip.
When I think back on Charlie’s life and all that he accomplished by the age of 31, I’m struck by how profoundly he influenced our nation. He had a gift, and few have done more for America’s youth.
Yes, he encouraged young Americans to go to the polls. He engaged in open discussion. He wanted to know young people’s hearts.
But most importantly, he was good for our country because he wanted to revive the souls of Americans.
Charlie wanted people to know the Lord, and he wanted to be remembered most for his courage in faith. He was one of the most important Christian evangelists and apologists of modern times.
Charlie sought out those who disagreed with him, and he was happy to listen to their arguments—respectfully and civilly—and to engage them on substance.
And he made an unbelievable difference in the lives of young people, inspiring millions across America and across the world.
The Indiana Supreme Court on Thursday permanently banned Judge Matthew J. Elkin of Howard County from judicial service following findings of judicial misconduct.
Chief Justice Loretta Rush wrote the rare decision to oust a county judge, and the other four justices on the Indiana Supreme Court agreed.
Elkin, a Republican who served in Howard Superior Court in Kokomo, was found to have engaged in misconduct by failing to disqualify himself from cases involving former clients, making inappropriate comments to court participants, and favoring certain litigants over others.
Yeah, the failure to disqualify is a huge no-no. Never let it be said that I don’t report actual Republican corruption when it happens.
Aw, how does it feel? “Rolling Stone Hit With Layoffs Amid Ongoing Staff Reductions at Penske.”
According to [Oliver] Darcy, among the affected Rolling Stone staffers are executive digital director Lisa Tozzi, chief television critic Alan Sepinwall and copy chief Steven Pearl. As of this writing, none of them have commented publicly.
Following months of speculation about her future plans, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo announced this week she will not seek a third term as chief executive of Texas’ largest county.
“I am still in office until December 2026, and I’ve got the work cut out for me and that’s not even, knock on wood, counting any emergencies that might arise,” Hidalgo said during an interview with ABC 13 in Houston. “After that, I don’t know. I don’t know what I will do. I know that I’m not running for office this cycle. I can say that with confidence, and I know that I will stay in public service.”
First elected in 2018 in the down-ballot “Beto wave” of victories for Democrats, Hidalgo won with less than 50 percent of the vote against incumbent Republican Judge Ed Emmett. Prior to taking the reins as chief executive of Harris County, the 27-year-old had worked as a medical interpreter at the Texas Medical Center in Houston and volunteered for the Texas Civil Rights Project. A graduate of Stanford University, Hidalgo previously worked for international media group Internews in Indonesia.
Hidalgo’s surprise victory handed Democrats control of the commissioners court, with whom she initially worked well to usher in a slew of reforms to the county’s management of flood mitigation, infrastructure, and criminal justice systems; an administrative restructuring of county government; and the launch of new social programs. Lauded as a rising political star, the young judge drew the attention of national media for her promotion of progressive policies in a reliably Republican state.
Despite multiple controversies during her first term — including her efforts to release violent criminal suspects from the county’s jail during the COVID-19 pandemic and indictment of several staffers over an alleged vaccine outreach bid-rigging scheme — Hidalgo narrowly won a second term in 2022, but has since increasingly clashed with fellow Democratic commissioners and often exhibited erratic behavior.
During a swearing-in ceremony after the 2022 election, Hidalgo accused fellow Democratic commissioners of trying to cut her out of the program. Later that year she alleged that she had been “groped” in the commissioners court meeting room. Months later, Hidalgo took a lengthy leave of absence while she sought in-patient treatment for depression.
Since returning to her office Hidalgo has increasingly clashed publicly with Commissioners Adrian Garcia (D-Pct. 2) and Lesley Briones (D-Pct. 4), while largely maintaining her alliance with Commissioner Rodney Ellis (D-Pct. 1).
The fractures on the commissioners’ court erupted earlier this year when Garcia and Briones joined the lone Republican Commissioner Tom Ramsey (R-Pct. 3) in support of raises for law enforcement but refused to support Hidalgo’s proposal for a tax increase to continue a pilot daycare program launched with federal COVID-19 relief funds in 2022.
Good news for the exit of an unqualified leftist who did much harm while she was there.
Jimmy Kimmel yanked off the air indefinitely for Charlie Kirk comments, mainly implying the shooter was MAGA rather than a lefty and for using Kirk’s death as an excuse to segway into still more Trump bashing. Evidently affiliate stations and advertisers stated they would no longer air or advertise on the show after that. I think media companies are finally figuring out just how tired ordinary Americans are of the far left, social justice hatefest on late night TV.
Analysis: True. “The Left is angrier about Kimmel getting fired for lying about an assassination than the assassination itself.”
A woman accused of running an illegal ballot harvesting scheme during the 2022 General Election was arrested in Starr County, Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Wednesday.
A grand jury indicted Modesta Vela of Roma after a yearlong investigation into ballot harvesting operations targeting numerous senior citizens in South Texas. She was arrested on September 4, marking her fourth arrest since 2010.
“Due to the findings of this investigation, a grand jury issued a true bill indictment against Vela for intentionally and knowingly influencing a Texan’s vote in the presence of the ballot during the voting process, which is an offense punishable as a state jail felony,” according to Paxton’s office.
Ballot harvesting—sometimes referred to as “ballot trafficking”—typically involves a third party illegally collecting and handling voters’ ballots in order to influence elections.
In South Texas, these third-party ballot harvesters are known as politiqueras.
Investigators with the Office of the Attorney General said Vela’s activities focused on Texans over the age of 65, a group often targeted in such cases due to their automatic eligibility for mail-in voting.
Paxton reiterated his longstanding position that election fraud is an ongoing threat in Texas.
“Though liberals and the left-wing media like to pretend otherwise, we know that election fraud is real and a serious threat,” said Paxton. “Criminals trying to steal our elections and rig the democratic process will be found, arrested, and prosecuted. Modesta Vela was trying to take advantage of voters and broke the law by illegally ballot harvesting and targeting a Texan seeking to engage in our elections. Now, it’s time for Vela to answer for her actions in court.”
The investigation followed a complaint filed in late 2022 by Project Red Texas, alleging Vela was involved in ballot harvesting operations in Starr County.
A popular Ohio barbecue restaurant is facing major backlash after one of its co-owners called conservative activist Charlie Kirk a “piece of s—” in a social media post after his assassination.
Shortly after Kirk, 31, was shot Wednesday while speaking at a campus event in Utah, Aaron Sharpe, co-owner of Lucius Q in Cincinnati, commented on a Facebook post from someone offering prayers for the husband and father of two.
“Good riddance,” Sharpe wrote in a post that is no longer publicly visible but has been circulated widely online in screenshots. “What a piece of s—,” he added.
On Wednesday evening, Sharpe doubled down on Facebook, posting, “Don’t you dare come at me with your hypocrisy. … If you think that threats of social media attacks on me or my business will in any way keep me silent about what I believe, you are sorely mistaken….”
On Thursday, several of Lucius Q’s business partners announced they had cut ties with the restaurant. Lucius Q later announced it had parted ways with Sharpe.
Remember how everyone swore that the idea Democrats were going to use the Pacific Palisades fire as an excuse to build public housing was just a conspiracy theory? Guess what?
🚨 "I am pleased to inform our many U.S.A. Patriots that I am designating ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION…" – President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/irLHCkrX1n
The man arrested for Charlie Kirk’s murder thought he was stopping hate. In actuality, he united the country against his own leftwing hate … and gave the president the standing to arrest all his associates as terrorists.
I’m hope this will give the Trump Administration the tools to subpoena, back-trace and freeze terrorist funding coming from various NGOs, including a wide variety of Soros, Singham, MacArthur and Rockefeller hydra heads.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane to cover the myriad violent felonies the commie losers of Antifa have committed over the years:
They attacked journalist Andy Ngo in Berkeley and Portland.
This is just a Greatest Hits package of Antifa scumbaggery. This post could easily be ten times as long…
(Note: While doing this roundup, I noticed that a lot of the sources I linked to prior to 2020 are no longer good. With linkrot, the stability of online digital data seems several orders of magnitude less permanent than ink printed on paper…)
There’s been a shakeup in the Austin Homeless Industrial Complex hierarchy.
The City of Austin’s Homeless Strategy Office (HSO) will end its contract with homelessness resources nonprofit Urban Alchemy at the end of September. According to a city memo, some Urban Alchemy staff “misrepresented Homeless Management Information System exit dates and records.”
Urban Alchemy operated the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless (ARCH) and the Eighth Street Women’s Shelter in downtown Austin.
For those unfamiliar with Austin geography, ARCH is the city’s big downtown homeless shelter on Eighth Street, just two blocks north of the booze and nightclub district on Sixth Street, and two blocks east of the APD headquarters; sort of one-stop shopping. Before the Austin City Council decided to invite every drug-addicted transient in Texas to move to the city in 2019, ARCH constantly showed up as the epicenter of crime. Since that calamity, and the lunacy of police defunding, crime seems to have spread to the rest of downtown as well.
Urban Alchemy is a West Coast Homeless Industrial Complex outfit that runs shelters in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, etc.
A spokesperson for the nonprofit said that staff had “misreported” those exit dates and records. Homeless Strategy Director, David Gray said there was no financial impact and that the records have been fixed.
“We notified the City after our internal controls discovered the issue and terminated the employees that we identified as responsible,” the spokesperson said. “We hold our entire team to the highest possible standards, and will never hesitate to take appropriate action when we fall short of those standards.”
KXAN was told five Urban Alchemy employees were fired.
Gray sent the memo to Austin City Council on Tuesday, notifying members that the contract with Urban Alchemy will end Sept. 30. According to Gray, the records that were changed, make it harder to know how shelters are actually operating.
“When a record is incorrect or it’s incorrectly altered, it makes it more challenging for us to know whether or not a client truly is successfully housed or not, and where they’re at in their journey,” Gray said. “It could make outcomes look better than what they are, or make a shelter look more efficient than what it actually is.”
Though the records have been corrected, Gray told council members, ending the contract with Urban Alchemy is about accountability.
“Ending this contract reflects HSO’s commitment to upholding the integrity of its operations,” Gray said in the memo.
Gray told members that in order to keep downtown homeless shelters in operation, HSO will enter into an emergency contract with Endeavors. Endeavors is currently responsible for operating HSO’s Marshalling Yard Temporary Emergency Shelter and Northbridge Shelter.
The Marshalling Yard Homeless Shelter (yes, the city spells it with two Ls) is basically a big metal warehouse at the edge of Montopolis, near the 183/71 interchange, they just plopped some beds down into. Montopolis is one of the last remnants of Austin’s traditionally poor, traditional black neighborhoods (lots of little houses) that’s being transformed by both an increasing Hispanic population and the terrible slow sword of gentrification. Either way, the land is too close to downtown to keep letting poor black people live there, so apartment complexes and $500,000 home subdivisions are popping up like mushrooms.
The Northbridge site is a former hotel near the I-35/183 interchange that the City of Austin bought in 2020 and it’s now reportedly strewn with drugs and trash.
Endeavors is a San Antonio-based Homeless Industrial Complex outfit.
HSO plans to place an emergency contract on city council’s Oct. 9 agenda, according to Gray. That emergency contract would authorize an agreement with Endeavors until Sept. 30, 2026.
Gray told KXAN, Endeavors will need to hire roughly 150 employees within the next three weeks, in order to take over for Urban Alchemy.
“HSO selected Endeavors for this emergency contract based on the organization’s demonstrated ability to rapidly hire and train staff for large-scale operations, its familiarity with HSO’s contracting requirements, and its strong track record in delivering quality services,” Gray said in the memo.
Urban Alchemy will continue its operations until the emergency contract is approved. The nonprofit also said it was “grateful for [its] years of partnership” with the city.
Maybe it is as simple as Urban Alchemy lying about results and getting replaced. Or maybe they simply didn’t do a good enough job of getting the graft wheels greased, and Endeavors will keep better keep the kickbacks and graft flowing to the right people…
I started this post to roundup reactions to the Charlie Kirk assassination, and it’s grown to enormous size due to the large number of ugly-souled leftists celebrating his murder. So let’s wade into the filth, and the reactions (and consequences) therefore.
When there’s a killing the left always tries to assign the killer to the right. We’re used to it. And the vast majority of the right always overwhelmingly condemns the killer.
Only this time all the moderate normie republicans out there saw MILLIONS of liberals celebrate and justify the brutal murder of a man… all because that man held beliefs similar to theirs. Beliefs that regular Americans consider completely normal and common sense.
These normal folks were going about their day, then they saw some shocking brutality, and before they could even process it all their liberal friends were dancing in the blood and gleefully justifying it. “He deserved it for believing X and Y.” And that normal person realized that they also believe X and Y, so them getting murdered would be just as celebrated too. At best they saw a “Murder is bad, BUT… he deserved it for believing X and Y.”
And the lights go on.
It doesn’t matter how hard the left scrambles to put the shooter in some particular ideological bucket to cover their asses and take no blame (as usual), because regular America saw how fucking gleeful libs were when somebody just like them dies horribly, and they realized that the left wants them dead. Not metaphorically. They want you to die. Some of us have known this for a long time because we pissed off the left somehow previously, but for the regular folks coming to that understanding is a life changing moment.
Democratic representative and “Squad” member Ilhan Omar reminds, yet again, that she’s simply a horrible person. “Kirk was a reprehensible human being.”
The TEA will be referring all posts that contain the “vile content” to its Educator Investigations Division, as the posts could be in violation of the Educators’ Code of Ethics and potentially result in a reprimand, suspension, or permanent dismissal.
One standard in the code of ethics includes that the educator “shall be of good moral character and be worthy to instruct or supervise the youth of this state.”
“While the exercise of free speech is a fundamental right we are all blessed to share,” the letter states, “it does not give carte blanche authority to celebrate or sow violence against those that share differing beliefs and perspectives.”
The letter directs Texas school superintendents to share potential violations and “inappropriate content” with the TEA’s Misconduct Reporting Portal.
A number of recorded such incidents involving Texas educators have circulated online, showing disparaging comments about Kirk’s assassination.
“A Middle Tennessee State University employee has been fired after commenting about conservative speaker and influencer Charlie Kirk’s death on social media, the university confirmed….University spokesman Jimmy Hart said Sept. 11 that the fired employee is Assistant Dean of Students Laura Sosh-Lightsy.”
Asmongold gathers several examples of brain-dead leftists celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder, including employees of Blizzard, Bungie, Sucker Punch Productions and Wizards of the Coast, some of whom have already been fired:
FA: Texas Tech student Camryn Giselle Booker celebrated Kirk’s death, interrupted a vigil, and actually assaulted other students. FO: “Texas Tech confirmed to Texas Scorecard that Booker is no longer enrolled.”
There was a video of a nose-ringed girl who literally mimed to the “He had it coming” part of “Cell Block Tango” from the musical Chicago, and then starting bawling out because every one of her close friends said she was a shitty, horrible person for doing so. Did this make her stop in a moment of self-reflection to consider that she was, in fact, a shitty person? No. She was bawling because she now had to cut ties with all her friends. She seems incapable of self-reflection.
The hate orgy on BlueSky was so bad that the management of that infamous hive of scum and villainy had to step in and tell them to cut that shit out, that it violated their terms of service.
Plus Tranny developer/comic creator Gretchen Felker Martin (that’s the ugly in the thumbnail) got canned over celebrating the murder.
Despite that, some lunatics on BlueSky are now calling for J. K. Rowling to be murdered as well.
Others on the list include “podcaster Joe Rogan, Harry Potter author JK Rowling, conservative political commentators Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh, among others.”
Ugly-souled rappers Bob Vylan celebrate the murder:
This clip of Bob Vylan mocking Charlie Kirk on stage makes my blood boil
