Eric Weinstein sat down with the Triggernometry guys (Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster) to talk about the 2024 election and the Democrat Party’s radical diversion from “Democracy.”
Straus/Bonnen/Phelan Cabal Screws Republican Voters Yet Again
January 14th, 2025It happened again.
If madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, Republicans are certifiable.
Republicans expected Republican state reps to vote like Republicans, despite two decades of evidence to the contrary, and once again, Republican voters were disappointed.
State Rep. Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock) won the Texas House speakership after two rounds of voting on Tuesday, the first day of the 89th Legislative Session.
Burrows, of course, is the latest catspaw of the Democrat-backed Straus/Bonnen/Phelan cabal.
“I want to be very direct on one overriding concept: this is the people’s House,” Burrows said in an acceptance speech. “This is greater than any one person, and any one faction. This is a sacrifice, and I accept that sacrifice readily. If you voted against me, my door will be open for you.”
The final vote broke down with 85 in favor of Burrows, 55 in favor of state Rep. David Cook (R-Mansfield), and nine registering as present-not-voting. Burrows was then sworn into office by Secretary of State Jane Nelson.
Burrows’ effective governing coalition is 36 Republicans and 49 Democrats — and is the first time a speaker was elected in the official vote with a minority of his own party behind him in recent memory.
In the first round of voting, Burrows was five votes shy of the 76 needed to win with Cook pulling in 56 votes and state Rep. Ana-Maria Ramos (D-Dallas) receiving 23.
Ramos was then eliminated and the top two moved onto a runoff.
The three candidates were nominated by their colleagues:
Burrows – State Reps. Charlie Geren (R-Fort Worth), Mihalea Plesa (D-Dallas), Toni Rose (D-Dallas), and Lacey Hull (R-Houston) Cook – State Reps. Trent Ashby (R-Lufkin), Ellen Troxclair (R-Lakeway), James Frank (R-Wichita Falls), and Richard Raymond (D-Laredo) Ramos – State Reps. Christina Morales (D-Houston), John Bryant (D-Dallas), and Jolanda Jones (D-Houston) The slate of speeches had distinct themes. Ramos’ supporters showed displeasure with the GOP-controlled state, calling for a change in leadership. Cook’s were much more positively-imbued, calling for reforms to the process that put members in the driver’s seat and reduce the power of the speaker — save for Raymond’s, which blasted Burrows and former Speaker Dennis Bonnen (R-Angleton) over their past scandal that ended Bonnen’s speakership after one term as well as his current involvement behind the scenes of the legislature.
For over two decades, Republicans have fought hard against the cabal. More recently, Attorney General Ken Paxton, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, Governor Greg Abbott, and once and future President of The United States of America Donald Trump have come out strong against the cabal. And while last year saw many of Phelan’s closest confederates knocked off, once again the cabal has thwarted the will of Texas Republican voters.
When it comes to speaker races, the cabal remains undefeated.
Update: People have asked for a roll call of votes, so here it is.
Russian Mercenary Captured At Border
January 13th, 2025The problem with open borders is that they’re open borders, and you have no way to vet who is coming across. We already covered the strangely high number of Chinese nationals crossing the border, and now a Russian mercenary has been captured there…with a drone.
A former Russian mercenary was captured by U.S. Border Patrol agents near the city of Roma after he waded across the Rio Grande.
According to KVEO, Timur Praliev was reportedly carrying two passports—one from Russia and one from Kazakhstan—as well as $4,000 in U.S. cash and 60,000 Mexican pesos. Following a search of his backpack, Border Patrol agents discovered that he was also transporting a drone.
Nothing suspicious about that at all…
Praliev claimed to have previously worked for the Wagner Group, which is a Russian-backed paramilitary organization.
According to the criminal complaint against him, Praliev is a Kazakhstani national who was encountered by Border Patrol on January 4. He appeared in a McAllen courthouse on January 7.
Praliev pleaded guilty to the crime of illegally entering the country. U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Scott Hacker sentenced him to time served and imposed a fine.
Supposedly he’s still being held by the feds, but there’s nothing in the judge’s original order calling for his deportation.
More: Just last month this same mercenary was evidently honored by Russia.
A self-confessed veteran of Russia’s Wagner paramilitary group arrested for crossing into the United States from Mexico was honored as a combat veteran weeks earlier by an organization established by Russian President Valdimir Putin, RFE/RL has found.
Timur Praliev, 31, was detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents on January 4 near the border town of Roma, Texas, after crossing the Rio Grande River into the United States and told the agents he was a citizen of Kazakhstan, U.S. federal court records show.
Snip.
Online records reviewed by RFE/RL show that less than a month before his detention, a man of the same name had been honored at an event held by an official government veterans’ organization in Russia’s Bashkortostan region.
An account of the December 12, 2024, event was published on Russian social media by the Bashkortostan branch of Defenders Of The Fatherland Foundation. The group was established by Putin in April 2023 to support combat veterans of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
You would think that Russian mercenaries coming across America’s southern border with military surveillance equipment would be of greater concern to the federal government, but here in the waning days of the Biden Administration, that would not appear to be the case.
I’d really like to know what sort of drone this theoretically Ex-Wagner mercenary was carrying…
Lefties Mourn End To Facebook Censorship
January 12th, 2025As when Elon Musk dismantled the censorship apparatus at Twitter, leftists are bemoaning Meta/Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg ending “fact checking” at Facebook as though it was the end of some sort of golden age. What they are actually bemoaning is that they will no longer be able to suppress political opinions they disagree with.
Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan to spell out just how the Biden Administration’s censorship regime worked.
I don’t necessarily trust Zuckerberg’s assertions that Facebook’s original intentions were pure as the driven snow when he started putting fact checkers in place (and that’s one reason I’m not editing out things like “um,” “like,” and “you knows,” as these may be verbal tells when he’s glossing over or eliding information rather than just verbal throat clearing), but I think his depiction of how government pressure for censorship came down is probably accurate.
there.”
action lawsuit type meme. And they’re like ‘No you have to take that down.’ We just said no, we’re not we’re not going to take down humor and satire. We’re not going to take down things that are that are true.”
Should we trust Zuckerberg? To quote Omar Little from The Wire, “I trust his fear.” As I noted in Friday’s LinkSwarm, the MAGA winds must be blowing very strong indeed for Zuckerberg to flip so quickly and completely. Zuckerberg probably had misgivings while these things were going on, but unlike Musk, would never have voiced them so openly had Trump not won.
Also, as Tim Pool noted, “Facebook built a portal for Feds to log into their system to flag ‘misinformation.’ For more than a decade, the federal government, the FBI, the CIA, I think the NSA, had backdoor access to Facebook as well as other companies.”
Time for an update to this old classic
The Jim Jordan report Zuckerberg references is the final committee report on the weaponization of the American government to censor opposing political viewpoints. The report is not only hard to find online (it’s not in the first page of Google results), it is so large (17,014 pages) that it seems to be literally unreadabe in Firefox, as whatever Acrobat window thing they have wants to jump back when you scroll to the second page. As a partial remedy, I have (with a bit of difficulty) captured the introduction and posted it here, though the paragraph breaks may not be exact.
The founding documents of the United States articulate the ideals of the American republic and guarantee to all American citizens fundamental rights and liberties. For too long, however, the American people have faced a two-tiered system of government—one of favorable treatment for the politically-favored class, and one of intimidation and unfairness for the rest of American citizens. Under the Biden-Harris Administration, the contrast between these two tiers has become even more stark.
To stand up for the American people, the House of Representatives authorized the creation of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government within the Committee on the Judiciary. During the 118th Congress, the Select Subcommittee worked to “bring abuses by the Federal Government into the light for the American people and ensure that Congress, as their elected representatives, can take appropriate action to remedy them.”2 The mission of the Select Subcommittee has been to protect and strengthen the fundamental rights of the American people.
By investigating, uncovering, and documenting executive branch misconduct, the Select Subcommittee has taken important steps to ensure that the federal government no longer works against the American people. This work is not complete, but it is a necessary first step to stop the weaponization of the federal government. From its inception, the Select Subcommittee sought to protect free speech and expand upon the constitutional protections of the First Amendment. Throughout the Biden-Harris Administration, multiple federal agencies, including the White House, have engaged in a vast censorship campaign against so-called mis-, dis-, or malinformation.
The Select Subcommittee revealed the extent of the “censorship-industrial complex,” detailing how the federal government and law enforcement coordinated with academics, nonprofits, and other private entities to censor speech online. The Select Subcommittee also revealed how the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Election Integrity Partnership—created “at the request of” the Department of Homeland Security3—urged Big Tech to censor Americans online.
The Select Subcommittee’s oversight has had a real effect in expanding the First Amendment. In a Supreme Court dissent, three justices noted how the Select Subcommittee’s investigation revealed “that valuable speech was . . . suppressed.”4 In a letter to the Committee and Select Subcommittee, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the Biden-Harris Administration “pressured” Facebook to censor Americans.5 Facebook gave in to this pressure, demoting posts and content that was highly relevant to political discourse in the United States. In response to the Select Subcommittee’s oversight, universities and other groups shut down their “disinformation” research and federal agencies slowed their communications with Big Tech.
Pursuant to its mission, the Select Subcommittee also examined the weaponization of federal law-enforcement resources. Many FBI whistleblowers have disclosed to the Select Subcommittee examples of waste, fraud, and abuse at the FBI. When these whistleblowers came forward, the Bureau brutally retaliated against many of them for breaking ranks—suspending them without pay, preventing them for seeking outside employment, and even purging suspected disloyal employees. Through its oversight, the Select Subcommittee revealed how the FBI abused its security clearance adjudication process to target whistleblowers, with the FBI even admitting its error and reinstating the security clearance of one decorated FBI employee.
The Select Subcommittee also investigated the executive branch’s actions in intruding on and interfering with Americans’ constitutionally protected activity. The Select Subcommittee revealed and stopped the FBI’s effort to target Catholic Americans because of their religious views, detailed the Justice Department’s directives to target parents at school board meetings, stopped the Internal Revenue Service from making unannounced visits to American taxpayers’ homes, caused the Justice Department to change its internal policies to respect the separation of powers and limit subpoenas for Legislative Branch employees, and highlighted the vast warrantless financial surveillance of Americans by federal law enforcement.
The Select Subcommittee has examined the federal government’s efforts to interfere in our elections, highlighting the FBI’s fervent efforts to “prebunk” a story about the Biden family’s influence peddling scheme in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. The Select Subcommittee’s work also demonstrated how the Biden campaign colluded with the intelligence community to falsely discredit this story as “Russian disinformation.”
This report accumulates and presents the findings of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government during the 118th Congress. The federal government must work for all Americans, not just the favored few. As the country moves forward from the disastrous policies of the Biden-Harris Administration, it is important that policymakers ensure that the federal government can no longer be weaponized against American citizens. “Freedom is fragile thing,” Ronald Reagan warned in 1967, “it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.”6 The Select Subcommittee’s work in the 118th Congress has been a start to a long and difficult process to better protect Americans’ fundamental freedoms. But our work is not the end. More must be done to ensure that our fundamental liberties and cherished rights continue for Americans to come.
1 THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE para.
2 (U.S. 1776). 2169 CONG. REC. H130 (daily ed. Jan. 10, 2023) (statement of Rep. Tom Cole).
3 STAFF OF SELECT SUBCOMM. ON THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE FED. GOV’T OF THE H. COMM. ON THE JUDICIARY, 118TH CONG., THE WEAPONIZATION OF ‘DISINFORMATION’ PSEUDO-EXPERTS AND BUREAUCRATS: HOW THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PARTNERED WITH UNIVERSITIES TO CENSOR AMERICANS’ POLITICAL SPEECH (Comm. Print Nov. 6, 2023) [hereinafter “NOV. 6 REPORT”].
4 Murthy v. Missouri, 603 U.S. 43, 78 (2024) (Alito, J., dissenting).
5 Letter from Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Exec. Officer, Meta, to Rep. Jim Jordan, Chairman, H. Comm. on the Judiciary (Aug. 26, 2024).
6 Governor Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address (Jan. 5, 1967).
And remember this was all part of a coordinated international censorship regime. The recently shut down Center for Global Engagement, started under Obama, was a a key proponent of this censorship regime.
When lefties bemoan the change in Facebook, this is what they’re lamenting: The ability to censor the free speech of fellow Americans under the direct mandate of federal government agencies working on behalf of the Democrat Party to suppress the speech of their ideological opponents.
Why Is Diet Root Beer Up 131% Even Though Aluminum Is Down?
January 8th, 2025This may count as an “old man yells at cloud” moment, but before the Flu Manchu lockdowns and the resultant supply chain breakage, HEB’s house brand of Diet Root Beer went for $2.25 a 12-pack. Now, here in early 2025, it’s going for $5.20. I calculate that as a 131% inflation rate over five years, considerably above the official 21.9% phony baloney “let’s lie for Biden” rate. So what gives?
My first thought was “Well, aluminum prices must have gone through the roof again.” Nope.
Aluminum shot way up in 2022, and then came right back down, and has been essentially flat for two years.
As one of the biggest costs in soft drinks 12-packs, you’d think prices might be stable for that, but no. The prices for name brand soft drinks have gone up as well.
Even if we can all agree that the real inflation rate is much higher than admitted, why are soft drinks up so much more than even the unofficial rate?
If you have any idea, please feel free to share in the comments below.
Tom Homan: We’re Deporting Venezuelan Illegal Aliens. Venezuela: We Don’t Want Them Back. Homan: Tough.
January 7th, 2025The incoming Trump Administration is serious about deporting illegal aliens, and isn’t about to let any failed socialist dictatorships stop them.
President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming border czar, Tom Homan, said during an interview over the weekend that the administration will be deporting illegal aliens from Venezuela regardless of whether or not Venezuela takes them back.
Homan made the remarks during a Sunday interview on CBS News’ “Face The Nation” with Margaret Brennan, when asked about countries like Venezuela that are not accepting deportations back from the U.S.
“Well, first of all, we got President Trump coming to the Oval Office, and he’s proven during his first administration, his leadership on illegal immigration was a game changer, because, for instance, El Salvador wouldn’t take back MS-13 members when I was the ICE Director,” he said. “It took President Trump 48 hours to get El Salvador to take back their criminal aliens into their prisons.”
“And Mexico didn’t want to do the Remain in Mexico program,” he continued. “But President Trump was able to get Remain in Mexico established in Mexico. He was able to get Mexico put military on the southern and northern border.”
Homan noted that President Joe Biden was so weak that countries simply refused to take their criminal illegal aliens back and the administration never “forced these countries to take them back.”
“If for instance, Venezuela don’t take their people back, there’s other ways we can do it,” he said. “There’s other countries be willing to accept them. We’re hoping that President Trump will work with Venezuela and like he did with Mexico and El Salvador, and get these countries take them back. If they don’t, they’re still gonna be deported. They’re just gonna be deported to a different country.”
“We’re not gonna be held up on removing public safety trust in this country,” he continued. “We gotta put the safety of the American people first. We’ve had too many young women murdered and raped and burned alive by members of Venezuelan gangs. They need to be a priority under this administration. They’re gonna be a priority starting day one, and they will be deported.”
One of those Venezuelan gangs is Tren de Aragua, which we’ve talked about here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Just a week ago, four Tren de Aragua members were caught trying to sneak into Texas.
Homan says he’s going to send them all back, no matter what the Caracas commies say.
It’s funny what you can accomplish when your biggest concern is protecting the American people rather than currying favor with transnational political elites, or trying to advance the electoral chances of the Democratic Party…