Posts Tagged ‘George Gascon’

Crime Is Rising In America Because George Soros Wants It To Rise

Monday, December 6th, 2021

We’ve covered George Soros’ baleful effect on American law and order many times before, and will no doubt again. But the Daily Mail has published this handy piece about how Soros-backed DAs have led to spiraling crime rates in deep blue cities:

Billionaire Democrat donor George Soros has bankrolled District Attorneys in America’s most crime ravaged cities, where criminals are being allowed to walk out of jail on low cash bonds or aren’t even being charged.

Soros, the most prolific Democratic donor, is most known for giving to Presidents Clinton and Obama but he has also been pumping money into a far-left effort to overhaul the criminal justice system by giving millions to a network of woke prosecutors in Democratic races.

Among them is Kim Foxx, the State’s Attorney for Cook County, Chicago, where murder is at its highest in nearly 30 years.

In 2020, Soros donated $2 million to a PAC that backed Foxx in her re-election campaign. She won the race and has since offered deferred prosecutions and softball deals to criminals.

In 2021, there were more murders in Chicago than in any other year since 1994.

There have been more than 1,000 murders in Cook County, Foxx’s district, this year.

Soros bolstered her re-election campaign by donating to the Illinois Justice and Public Safety PAC.

Attorney Buta Biberaj is refusing to recuse herself from the case to remove School Board Chair Brenda Sheridan, despite what district parents say is an apparent conflict of interest.

Fight for Schools, the parent organization that filed to remove Sheridan, has now also filed a petition to remove Biberaj – who received a $861,039 contribution from the George Soros-funded Justice and Public Safety PAC during her 2019 election – from the case.

Ian Prior, executive director of the group, claimed Biberaj was ‘very involved in two of the very serious incidents’ that were catalysts for the push for Sheridan’s recall.

He said Loudoun County residents need to know the case will be handled fairly and that Biberaj’s involvement makes that nearly impossible.

‘It is necessary to have faith that the prosecutor in this removal proceeding has no actual or perceived conflicts, that she will go where the evidence takes her, and litigate this case with appropriate prosecutorial zeal,’ Prior told Fox News.

‘In this case, Commonwealth Attorney Biberaj was very involved in two of the very serious incidents that gave rise to the recall. There is simply no way that the people of Loudoun County can be confident in a fair process for the removal of Brenda Sheridan unless Ms. Biberaj either recuses herself, or is disqualified based on her conflicts of interest, and an independent prosecutor is appointed by the Court.’

The PAC spent over $500,000 on materials to damage one of her challengers. It’s a pattern that can be seen in other parts of the country.

He has also donated to PACs that support Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón, who is being widely condemned for not cracking down on shoplifters and violent criminals.

Soros has also donated to the campaign of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.

He donated $1.7 million to Krasner’s campaign, according to The New York Post.

Soros also donated to Super PACS that prop up Democratic prosecutors and politicians across Republican states.

Republican pundits say he has blood on his hands now for the deaths of innocent people like those killed at the Waukesha Christmas Parade by Darrell Brooks, a career criminal who had been bonded out of jail days earlier for other crimes.

In 2016, Soros pumped $3million into seven local district-attorney campaigns including races in Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas.

That includes Austin’s Jose Garza.

Larry Krasner, a 60-year-old longtime civil rights and defense attorney who sued the Philadelphia Police Department 75 times, won election in 2017 against a crowded field by billing himself as the outsider candidate capable of making radical change.

Krasner’s campaign benefitted from the largesse of controversial Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros, who poured an eye-popping $1,7million into the race to support the Democratic candidate’s criminal justice reform agenda.

Under Krasner, the future years of incarceration have been cut by half, and the length of parole in probation supervision have been slashed by nearly two-thirds compared to the previous DA.

Krasner, who previously defended Black Lives Matter and Occupy Philadelphia protesters as a lawyer, has clashed with the city’s top cops over his reluctance to prosecute non-violent gun and drug possession crimes, despite a surge in gun violence and rising homicide rates in the City of Brotherly Love.

As of November 21, 2021, there have been 491 homicide victims, a 14 per cent increase from last year’s number of 436, and 283 in 2019.

The Philadelphia Police Department and Krasner have been at loggerheads over a steep drop in convictions related to gun offenses.

This year, police in Philadelphia have made a record number of arrests for illegal gun possession, but the suspects’ chances of getting convicted have dropped from 63 per cent in 2017 down to 49 per cent in 2021, according to an analysis by the Philadelphia Inquirer published in March.

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw was previously quoted as saying that Philadelphia’s criminal justice system has become a ‘revolving door’ for repeat gun offenders since Krasner was sworn into office in January 2018.

Krasner has blamed the decrease on police submitting weaker evidence in cases, or on witnesses failing to show up in court to testify.

The progressive Democrat DA has contended that his main focus is on convicting people who use guns to kill or hurt others, not those who are caught being in possession of the weapons.

Krasner’s office has argued that there is little evidence that suspects accused of being in possession of guns are responsible for the uptick in gun violence.

Compared to the previous DA term, Krasner’s has imposed 24,000 fewer years of incarceration and 102,000 fewer years of supervised probation or parole since 2018.

We covered some of Krasner’s follies here.

Other Soros-backed DAs include:

  • Kim Ogg (Harris County)
  • Joe Gonzalez (Bexar County)
  • Chesa Boudin (San Francisco)
  • Kim Gardner (St. Louis County)
  • Mike Schmidt (Multnomah County (Portland))
  • Rachael Rollins (Suffolk County, MA)
  • There are probably several I’ve missed. (Feel free to add them in the comments below.)

    The question remains: How does Soros benefit from raising crime rates in Democratic Party-controlled cities? What is the endgame?

    I’ve seen various theories, but I want to throw it open to readers as well. Feel free to share your thoughts and theories in the comments below.

    The Return of Urban Blight

    Wednesday, July 21st, 2021

    If you didn’t grow up in the 1970s, you probably don’t remember what the first bout of urban blight in America’s largest cities looked like. High crime, endemic corruption, failing city services and decaying infrastructure were some of the hallmarks. Though cities like Detroit and Baltimore never recovered, others bounced back thanks to the Reagan economic boom, tough-on-crime mayors, and Broken Window policing.

    But thanks to the radical left, high taxes, lockdowns, antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots, George Soros-backed DAs, and the Homeless Industrial Complex, urban blight is back with a vengeance:

    Six Target stores in San Francisco are adjusting their times, opening hours later and closing hours earlier to try to curtail soaring theft.

    They join Walgreens, which has closed 17 stores over five years in direct response to criminal activity. Last month, a video went viral of a hooded and masked man riding his bike into a San Francisco branch of the chain, loading a trash bag with merchandise, and riding back out — past a powerless security guard and two others filming on their phones.

    Early Monday evening, at least nine men and women smashed cases and stripped shelves in San Francisco’s high-end Neiman Marcus store, fleeing with a fortune in designer handbags. The brazenness is out of control, is goaded on by the normalization of masks, and is directly enabled by district attorneys and other politicians.

    The Golden City is joined by nearby Sacramento and Los Angeles, where retail crime has spiked, but across the country as district attorneys from Massachusetts to Missouri to Texas have declared they won’t defend citizens from theft, the story has gone much the same.

    While it’s insane that crime is so severe and law enforcement so nonexistent in a prosperous city that businesses must close their doors early or shut them entirely, there’s more in store. Far more ominous than a sign of how bad things have gotten, darkened windows and shuttered doors reveal just how much worse things are going to get.

    Snip.

    More than 50 years later, over-credentialed activists and politicians once again say they know better, and tell us our neighborhoods will be more just and “equitable” if we don’t enforce laws. Now business owners are telling those politicians they’ll need to close their doors. Residents are left to feel the pain of both the crime and the closures. The boon of life and appreciation is suffocating.

    Crime begets crime begets crime, and changes to enforcement and prosecution policies are entirely to blame. In nearby Oakland, where murder is up 90 percent in the past year and car-jackings up 88 percent while the city council continues to cut police, city leaders dismiss the surge in crime as “a bump in the road,” but for the people who live there, strive to work there, and try to not be murdered there, it’s more than that…

    Rising crime is a direct threat to our towns, our neighborhoods, and our families. Already in great American cities, urban blight is setting in. We’ve down this path before for virtually the exact same bleeding-heart reasons, and we lived through the tremendous pain it brought. We cannot let it happen again — unless we do.

    Things are particularly bad in San Francisco, where George Soros-backed DA George Gascon Chesa Boudin refuses to prosecute shoplifters:

    New York City YouTuber Louis Rossmann takes a walk down 7th avenue from 27th Street to Canal to record all the empty storefronts

    Here’s another, longer walk, showing more of the same, that businesses aren’t returning to NYC, despite which rents remain insanely high. They also pass a guy shooting up.

    Not even Broadway is immune:

    (By the way, here’s a video from the same guy talking about how impossible it is to get an NYC licensing authority to renew a license he had already paid for a year before, which finally got their attention.)

    But it’s not just New York. Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, and any other Democrat-run city that’s allowed antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioting and graft to run rampant.

    Democrats were allowed to run America’s big cities for decades because machine politics mostly worked well enough most of the time to meet the needs of most citizens. There was enough graft, cronyism and featherbedding to keep close party coalition partners happy while still providing a minimum baseline of services. But Social Justice appears to be the straw that’s breaking the camel’s back. No longer content with traditional levels of welfare state clientism, Social Justice demands that all city funding must flow through its sticky fingers, especially police funding that previously keep big American cities mostly safe and livable.

    The security necessary to maintain life, liberty and property is the the most basic function of government. The Democratic Party’s need to replace police with social justice cadres is destroying the quality of life in big cities at the same time telework advances have made living in expensive cities unnecessary for vast swathes of American technology and service workers. With the antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots that destroyed businesses built up over entire lifetimes and you have a recipe for increasing numbers of middle class Americans to flee cities Democratic polices have made unlivable.

    To quote Ernest Hemingway:

    “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

    “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

    “What brought it on?”

    “Friends,” said Mike. “”I had a lot of friends.”

    For “friends” read “cronies” (or “looters” if you prefer). Previously Democratic politicians were mostly content to take their piece of the action to keep the graft coming. That’s the “gradually” part. Social Justice Democrats want the entire pie, and they want it now, all of it, even if it means destroying American cities to do it.

    They’re eagerly devouring America’s seed corn, hoping to bring down the entire system and replace it with their neo-Marxist rule.

    That’s the “suddenly” portion.

    The physical and human capital built up in American cities took innumerable lifetimes to build up, but Social Justice is destroying it all in the space of a few years.

    LinkSwarm for June 11, 2021

    Friday, June 11th, 2021

    Joe Manchin, controlling the border, and Soros-backed DA’s doing their best to bring back the high crime rates of the 1970s top this Friday’s LinkSwarm:

  • Seems like this should be a bigger story than it is: Mexico just had it’s midterm elections. But that’s not the big part: “97 politicians had been assassinated. Along with almost a thousand being attacked in some way, shape, or form. Just in this election cycle!”
  • West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin says that he will refuse to vote for the Democratic Voter Fraud Enablement Act of 2021. “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For The People Act.”
  • Indeed, Manchin just crushed two anti-democratic Democratic power grabs:

    Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) will oppose the Democratic Party’s legislation that would federalize elections, the For the People Act, citing the bill’s overtly partisan nature.

    Manchin declared his position in an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail. According to Manchin, “voting and election reform that is done in a partisan manner will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen.”

    “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act,” Manchin wrote.

    Manchin also laid to rest the possibility he would ever support ending the filibuster.

    “Furthermore, I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster,” he said. “For as long as I have the privilege of being your U.S. senator, I will fight to represent the people of West Virginia, to seek bipartisan compromise no matter how difficult and to develop the political bonds that end divisions and help unite the country we love.”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Manchin is thwarting The Will of The Party, so naturally Jemele Hill is calling him a racist.
    

  • Remember how Democrats were sure Hispanics would usher them into permanent majority status? Not in Texas:

    Republicans swept key races for mayor in Texas on Saturday, setting back Democratic hopes that the state’s urban areas will deliver statewide majorities for them in the future. Most shocking: In McAllen, Texas, a border city of 150,000 people of which 85 percent are Hispanic, Republicans elected their first mayor since 1997.

    Other cities with strong Hispanic populations also elected Republicans to replace retiring mayors. Fort Worth is the twelfth-largest city in the country and has more than 1 million people. Only a third of them are Anglo. But 37-year-old Republican Mattie Parker easily defeated Democrat Deborah Peoples, becoming the youngest mayor of a major Texas city.

    The race was ostensibly nonpartisan, but the divisions were clear.

    “We’ve never had a race that was this partisan,” Kenneth Barr, the former Democratic mayor of Fort Worth, told Politico. “This particular election has moved as far in the partisan direction as any we’ve ever had.”

    Voters also elected Republican Jim Ross as mayor of Arlington, a suburb of 400,000 people that borders Fort Worth and is only 39 percent Anglo. Ross, a former Arlington police officer, was endorsed by several police associations who liked his anti-crime platform. He defeated Michael Glaspie, a former city-council member who was endorsed by the Dallas Morning News and leading Democratic politicians.

    But it was the victory of Javier Villalobos in the overwhelmingly Democratic Rio Grande Valley bordering Mexico that shook political observers.

    Villalobos, a former chairman of the Hidalgo County Republican Party, defeated Democrat Veronica Vega Whitacre, a fellow McAllen city council member, to become mayor. He campaigned as a conservative and said he wanted to cut water and sewage fees. He called for compassion for undocumented migrants but said the safety of local citizens had to be the first concern. His supporters questioned Whitacre’s wooly-headed claim that if migrants were flowing the other way, toward Mexico, they would be treated with as much compassion by Mexican authorities.

    Whitacre’s loss was only the latest sign for Democrats that the Rio Grande Valley is slipping away from them. Biden won the region by 15 points last November, a far cry from Hillary Clinton’s 39-point margin in 2016. At the same time, Congressman Vicente Gonzalez won reelection by only 51 percent to 48 percent over Republican Monica De La Cruz-Hernandez in a district Democrats always carry.

    “Democrats have a big problem in Texas,” Rio Grande Valley congressman Filemon Vela told the Texas Tribune in January, shortly after he became vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “For the first time in generations, or maybe ever, we lost . . . South Texas counties with significant Hispanic populations,” he said. “And we are going to have to . . . wrap our arms around exactly why that happened. It may be a difficult issue to reconcile.”

    It’s not at all difficult to reconcile: The modern Democratic Party’s core policies of racist social justice, anti-police, soft-on-crime and pro-illegal alien are anathema to ordinary middle class Hispanic American citizens. Your ideas are unpopular and you’ll continue to lose as long as you let the radical social justice warriors set the agenda for the party.

  • Indeed, illegal border crossings hit 180,000 in May. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Governor Greg Abbott has announced plans to build the border wall in Texas the Biden Administration stopped work on.
  • Meanwhile, since being put in charge of the border crisis, Kamala Harris not only hasn’t visited the border, she laughs off questions about it. (Hat tip: Texas Public Policy Foundation.)
  • Speaking of illegal aliens, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision that those who entered the country illegally and were allowed to stay for humanitarian reasons are not allowed to apply for a green card. Also note the Justice Elana Kagan-penned decision makes no mention whatsoever of the “undocumented.” She refers to them, using the standard statutory language, as “aliens.”
  • “LA Sheriff Attributes Crime Surge To Soros-Backed DA Gascón, Supports Recall.”

    The city of Los Angeles saw a sharp 36 percent increase in homicides in 2020—but the L.A. County sheriff said this year is looking even more grim, and he’s blaming the widespread uptick in crime on District Attorney George Gascón.

    “In 2021, that 36 percent has now become 92 percent, which is a huge statistical jump,” Sheriff Alex Villanueva told The Epoch Times.

    “We’re seeing increases in all the categories – assault with a deadly weapon, arson, rape… these things are continuing upward unabated.”

    The widespread uptick in crime is the direct result of Gascón’s election as DA of L.A. County and his failure to prosecute offenses, according to Villanueva. Since Gascón took office, 2,690 cases—about 30 percent—“that normally would have gone through were rejected,” he said.

    While Gascón has defended his reform policies, criminals in prison are toasting the DA to celebrate their early release, according to officials—and the sheriff said the DA’s policies are making it more difficult for him to do his job.

    “You’re supposed to have a district attorney who represents the people … but [he’s] acting like a public defender,” Villanueva said.

    “There’s no one left representing the people. I need to work in partnership with the person who’s representing the people. I don’t have that right now.”

  • Speaking of Gascón: “Double murderer approved for parole at third hearing; prosecutors barred from attending under Gascón’s reform.” “Howard Elwin Jones has been imprisoned at San Quentin state prison since 1991 for the December 1988 shooting and killing of 18-year-old Chris Baker and another boy at a party in Rowland Heights.” It appears that there’s nothing Soros-backed DAs enjoy more than putting violent, dangerous felons back on the street.
  • Dozens of Baltimore businesses plan to go Galt:

    It comes as no surprise to readers that dozens of Baltimore City businesses, located in the Inner Harbor, in a stretch called “Fells Point,” are threatening the new city government, run by Mayor Brandon Scott, with not paying their taxes because they’re “fed up and frustrated” with the outburst of violence.

    In a letter titled “Letter to City Leaders From Fells Point Business Leaders,” addressed to Mayor Brandon Scott, Council President Nick Mosby, Councilman Zeke Cohen, Madam State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, and Commissioner Michael Harrison, the 37 restaurants and small businesses are threatening to stop paying city taxes and other fees until “basic and essential municipal services are restored.”

    What’s happening in Fells Point, known for its hipster pubs and taverns, as well as delicious seafood from the Chesapeake Bay, is experiencing an overflow of violent crime from other troubled areas.

    The letter comes after three men were shot in Fells Point over the weekend.

    “What is happening in our front yard — the chaos and lawlessness that escalated this weekend into another night of tragic, unspeakable gun violence — has been going on for far too long,” said the letter.

    The 37 businesses are planning to place their city taxes in an “escrow account” and released them until these demands are satisfied:

    • Pick up the trash
    • Enforce traffic and parking laws through tickets and towing
    • Stop illegal open-air alcohol and drug sales
    • Empower police to responsibly do their job

    The letter continued to say that minor crime that police “ignore” is what is contributing to more violent crime. So Marilyn Mosby’s halt on prosecuting petty crimes appears to be backfiring.

    You don’t say. Baltimore has had a problem with open-air drug markets for over three decades. And the last Republican mayor left office in 1967…

  • “DeSantis Signs Bills Combatting Chinese Communist Party’s Influence In US.””The first bill is intended to safeguard public institutions from ‘undue foreign influence,’ DeSantis said at a press conference, noting that the bill will prohibit ‘agreements between public entities and the Communist Party of China or Cuba or any of these malignant forces.’ The second bill criminalizes theft and trafficking trade secrets under Florida state law.” If Trump doesn’t run again in 2024, right now DeSantis would be the early favorite for the GOP nomination.
  • More words from the man in question:

  • Things that make you go “Hmmmm”: “Obama Administration Lifted Block on “Gain of Function Research” Just Eleven Days Before President Trump Took Office, January 9, 2017.”
  • Own any of the estimated 40 million guns in America with a pistol brace? Congratulations! The Biden Administration wants to make you a felon.

    “Today’s proposed rulemaking on pistol-braced firearms represents a gross abuse of executive authority,” said Aidan Johnston, Director of Federal Affairs for Gun Owners of America, in a statement.

    [Pistol brace inventor Alex] Bosco said the rule would outlaw the vast majority of braces on the market and read like it was “reverse-engineered to make braces illegal.” He called it “arbitrary and capricious.”

  • How’s that socialized medicine working out for you, UK? “Hospital waiting list tops 5m in England.”
  • Old and busted: Young families buying homes. The new hotness: Pension funds buying homes. “The consulting firm found Houston to be a favorite haunt of investors who have lately accounted for 24% of home purchases there.”
  • The Kung Flu lockdowns were a war on the working class:

  • Fake Florida coronavirus “whistleblower” Rebekah Jones suspended from Twitter.

  • Charles C. W. Cooke wonders what use Chris Cuomo is to CNN?

    Andrew Cuomo’s little brother is a continuous embarrassment to the cable-news network that employs him. So why does he still have a job?

    At this point in the proceedings, one is tempted to conclude that Chris Cuomo must have laced CNN’s corporate offices with dynamite and informed the powers that be that, if he goes, they go, too. What else could explain the network’s eternal tolerance for being embarrassed and degraded by the man? Here, at the tail end of his long experiment in deficiency, Cuomo resembles nothing more keenly than the inadequate tee-baller who gets to stay in past eight or nine strikes because his uncle coaches the team. His ratings are poor. His insights are vacuous. His conduct is a permanent source of ignominy. All the perfumes of Albany could not sweeten this little man. “What’s in a name?” inquired Shakespeare. Little did he know.

    It is unclear why Cuomo was selected by CNN to begin with. He’s a lawyer who knows nothing of the law; a journalist who knows nothing of journalism; an American who knows nothing of America. His temper is third-rate, his interests are bewilderingly narrow, he possesses no discernible sense of shame or self-knowledge, and the opinions he proffers are so ruthlessly subordinated to expedience that hypocrisy is his default mode. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s maxim that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” was meant as an extolment of the virtues of personal growth. Cuomo seems to have taken it literally.

    On no single topic has the man’s unique set of professional and personal shortcomings been more obvious than COVID-19. In April of last year, Cuomo’s attempt to fake a two-week quarantine was ruined by his failure to remember that, just a week earlier, he had admitted on the radio that he had left the house to visit a property he owns in East Hampton and gotten into an argument with a stranger. And yet, rather than demote him for telling such a galling and obvious lie, CNN encouraged him to inject his peculiar brand of mendacity into a series of interviews with his own brother. Thus it was that while Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York was making the single worst mistake of the entire coronavirus crisis — herding the elderly into nursing homes and then covering up the death toll — Television Host Chris Cuomo of New York was using America’s most famous cable-news channel to portray him as a national hero. What America needed last year was a dispassionate examination of Andrew Cuomo’s official messaging. What America got was a smirking nepotist brandishing a comedy-sized nasal swab and tweeting obsequious fluff about his sibling. New York, Chris Cuomo concluded, was “doing way better than what we see elsewhere & no way that happens without the Luv Guv dishing the real 24/7.” In exchange, the “Luv Guv” dealt Chris in on a series of private, government-funded COVID tests that were unavailable to everybody else.

    Watching Chris Cuomo work is a little like watching a man jump out of an airplane without a parachute and then become irrationally angry at those who tell him he’s going to die.

  • Speaking of CNN, they also brought back Jeffrey “lubin his” Toobin. Proving yet again that the the Democratic Media Complex will alwaqys refuse to apply its rules to their own.
  • Jon Del Arroz wins his lawsuit against Worldcon for calling him racist:

    The snowflakes at Worldcon are having a very bad weekend. On Friday, the San Francisco chapter of Worldcon settled a lawsuit and agreed to pay restitution and to issue a public apology for banning conservative author Jon Del Arroz from their convention in 2018 and for besmirching him as a “racist.” Del Arroz is the most dangerous Hispanic voice in science fiction because he refuses to back down in the face of political bullies. He has also written an amazing series, The Saga of the Nano Templar, that my teen daughter is reading for the second time—that’s how good it is—and I don’t have to worry about garbage culture or leftist politics sullying her mind. The Adventures of Baron Von Monacle, a steampunk series, is also highly entertaining. (Always support freedom-loving artists!)

    At the time of the banning, Del Arroz was under serious mob attack from social justice warriors trying to drive him out of the sci-fi community. SJWs even sent a spring-loaded exploding can of penis-shaped glitter to his home, which scared his wife and children. The ban came about when Del Arroz asked Worldcon for security measures because he feared for his safety due to the mob-like attacks on him and his family from industry insiders. Instead of helping him, Worldcon banned him and made public statements claiming the author was a “racist” and a “bully,” with no substantiated evidence to back those statements up. I’ve known Del Arroz personally for many years. He is a devout and kind man with a good sense of humor and a love of the art of the troll. He is not vicious, but provocative in a way that is necessary for freedom of speech to be preserved. He’s the one brave enough to exercise the First Amendment in ways that ensure we will keep it. We all need people like Del Arroz in the fight to preserve liberty.

    Now we only need about a hundred such lawsuits to force institutional science fiction to regain its sanity… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Not-so-much news: Gun control bill fails. News: In California.
  • For all the disappointments of the Texas 87th legislature’s regular session, a number of pro Second Amendment bills were passed.
  • Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman resigns, said to be interested in running for Attorney General against incumbent Ken Paxton and George P. Bush.

    This is probably the wrong Eva to use as clip art here.

  • French France’s Emmanuel Macron Urges G-7 To Sell Gold Reserves To Fund Bailout For Africa. I imagine that the other G-7 members responses to this proposal ranged from “Are you high?” to “Die in a fire.” (Plus an “Is Matlock on yet?” from Biden.)
  • Chinese Police Storm Rare Student Protest Inside Nanjing Normal University.”
  • “50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat.”
  • Demolition Ranch’s Matt Carriker has his truck broken into while he was in San Antonio. The Democratic Party’s soft-on-crime stances just keep reaping their rewards…
  • Speaking of Carriker, he just hit 10 million subscribers.
  • Three reporters at the New York Post are breaking the first rule of Fight Club. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • The world’s creepiest McDonalds is an abandoned barge.
  • Crazy criminals, UK edition:

  • Babylon Bee counts down genders:

  • How to Protect Your Shopping Trolley From Improvised Explosives.” However, I feel compelled to point out a technical error: The Trophy active protection system is not yet available on the British Challenger tank, making it deeply unlikely that the system would be made available for a Tesco shopping cart.
  • LinkSwarm for January 1, 2021

    Friday, January 1st, 2021

    Congratulations! If you’re reading this, 2020 didn’t manage to kill you! Happy New Year!

  • “Ukraine Press Conference Explicitly Ties Hunter & Joe Biden To Corruption“:

    A video from a press conference in Ukraine is going viral. It is the follow-up to a video press conference that Ukraine released over a year ago, in which Members of the Ukraine Parliament demanded that President Zelensky and President Trump investigate billions of dollars of corruption in Ukraine that is tied to the U.S. The newly released video is meant to provide documentary and eyewitness information about the corruption – and the Biden family figures prominently in the story.

    Snip.

    At one of the first press conferences about a year ago, we showed bank transactions for hundreds of thousands of dollars to the family of former US Vice President Joe Biden, namely to his son Robert Hunter Biden. The latter was a member of the board of directors of the infamous gas production company Burisma.

    Burisma belongs to the fugitive Yanukovych-era minister Mykola Zlochevsky.

    The inclusion of Biden in the Burisma leadership and payment for his services is nothing more than a political cover that protected Zlochevsky from the Ukrainian law, namely from the criminal code.

    Two foreign witnesses whose identities are protected – Witness 1 and Witness 2 – came forward to testify about the facts of the case. Konstantyn Kulyk, the Head of the Group of Prosecutors of the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, explained what the witnesses offered:

    One quote from a statement by a Witness:

    “All the described financial transactions were fictitious. And a lot of money was paid in Ukraine so that the state authorities turned a blind eye to it.”

    [snip]

    In the period from November 2014 to October 2015, the Witnesses noticed strange recurring payments that, at the direction of Oleh Nelin (Zlochevsky’s assistant in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine), were sent from the account of BURISMA HOLDINGS LTD, which was opened for the personal needs of Mykola Zlochevsky, in the Latvian PrivatBank AS to the account of the American company ROSEMONT SENECA BONAI LLC.

    The witnesses drew attention to these payments since about 20 times the same uneven amount was recurring – $83,333.33 as payment for consulting services.

    [snip]

    In the period from November 2014 to October 2015, the money stolen from Ukrainians, located on account of BURISMA HOLDINGS LTD with the Latvian PrivatBank AS, was transferred to the account of ROSEMONT SENECA BONAI LLC in the American bank MORGAN STANLEY in payments in total amounting to $3.4 million for consulting services.

    And this handy chart:

    The broad outlines of this have already been covered here, but the conference filled in some details.

  • Why the Hunter Biden scandal isn’t going away. “That is the problem with a bunker press strategy of denial and isolation. Like water, truth has a way of coming out.”
  • Five great Trump victories in 2020. Including Amy Coney Barrett and peace in the Middle East. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Want some brutal truth? Well, sorry, but that’s what’s on the menu:

    So I guess there’s going to be a rally in Washington DC on Wednesday, organized by https://stopthesteal.us/. There’s also going to be rallies (protests?) in many state capitols on Sunday as well.

    My question is, why? What, exactly, is the point of these demonstrations?

    If the purpose is to just gather like-minded people together for one last good time rock and roll bash before the awful, awful Harris-Biden administration sets in, OK, I can see that. Just don’t delude yourself into thinking that something is going to change because of these rallies. No Democratic lawmaker is going to say “hey, look at all of those pro-Trump protestors out there. We’d better not certify the swing-state electors because maybe they’re right about election fraud.”

    They’re not afraid of us.

    Because we hold our rallies, listen to the scheduled speakers, clap politely, and march around carrying our protest signs in an orderly fashion, and then go home – after first cleaning up after ourselves.

    At these rallies, we don’t wear masks to hide our identity, we don’t slug it out with the police, we don’t assault random passers-by and shout at diners through bullhorns at outdoor restaurants, we don’t vandalize and loot small businesses, we don’t break windows and we don’t cover the place with graffiti. And we don’t walk away from 100 tons of trash, which is the amount the city of Seattle had to clean up when they finally got around to busting up the CHAZ sh*thole last summer.

    So why would they listen to us?

    I am by no means advocating we start doing any of those things. This is an advantage the other other side has over us that we have to live with: politicians and judges are afraid of their protests, but not ours. Because if a judge rules against them, they’ll show up at his house late at night and threaten him. Nobody wants to have to face that. And I wonder why many of Trump’s election lawsuits got dismissed without so much as looking at the evidence. Is it because of the fear of the consequences if they found in his favor?

    My point is, none of these rallies, and I don’t care if they get a million people, two million to show up on Jan. 6th, is going to move the needle in the slightest.

  • Kurt Schlichter has predictions for 2021:

    5. Woke Won’t Work

    Slowly but surely, I think people are getting tired of Woke. None of us signed up to be ruled by a bunch of lachrymose sophomores who burst into tears because we insist they use the right toilet. Even liberals are getting sick of constantly having to navigate a minefield of microaggressions – it’s tiresome to always be worried that someone is going to freak out by your perfectly reasonable behavior. Look for a major star of some sort who is too big to cancel to simply refuse to play along anymore, and that may open the door to others. The SJW emperor truly has no clothes, and the second someone points and laughs at his/her/their shriveled junk, the entire country will join in the well-deserved mockery.

    4. The Murder Turtle Will Be Even More Of A Hero Than Dick “The Savior of Saigon” Blumenthal

    He’s frustrating, sure, but Cocaine Mitch is the most skillful knife fighter/Senate Majority Leader in American history, and whether or not we win in Georgia next week (I think we will, but not enough to put money on it – just don’t be an idiot and refuse to vote if you dwell in the Peach State), he will be our bulwark against the Democrat onslaught. And by “bulwark,” I refer to a strong, implacable defensive fortification, and not that lame blog written by sexually inadequate sissies that is hoping that the end result of 2020’s election is that they can once again round up suckers to pay good money to take their insipid Conservative Inc. cruises.

    However, I doubt his number 1 prediction, that Biden won’t be president by next New Year’s Eve. As bad as Biden’s cognitive decline might be, I have a hunch that both Jill Biden and the DNC cabal that managed to install him will turn the reigns over to Kamala Harris anytime soon.
    

  • “Floodgates Opening? Student sues over Critical Race Training at Nevada public charter school”:

    A Nevada mother has followed through on her threat to file a civil rights lawsuit against her son’s charter school for refusing to let him opt out of a mandatory class that promotes hostility toward whites as a race.

    Democracy Prep at the Agassi Campus forced William Clark “to make professions about his racial, sexual, gender and religious identities in verbal class exercises and in graded, written homework assignments,” creating a hostile environment, the biracial high school student and Gabrielle Clark allege in their federal lawsuit filed Tuesday.

    The senior’s statements were “subject to the scrutiny, interrogation and derogatory labeling of students, teachers and school administrators,” who are “still are coercing him to accept and affirm politicized and discriminatory principles and statements that he cannot in conscience affirm.”

    The suit also names Democracy Prep Public Schools, the New York-based charter network, and several officials in the local school and network as defendants.

  • The top seven myths of 2020. Including “Lockdowns work” and “The Presidential election was fair and clean.”
  • Chicago murders up 55% this year. And it’s not like Chicago was an oasis of peace before this year, either…
  • “Chicago Teachers Union Big Shot Says Unsafe To Teach Live…From Her Pool Side In Puerto Rico.”
  • The Great Exodus:

    One of the earliest signals that 2020 would be a year of mass homeschooling appeared in an April survey of parents conducted by EdChoice. It asked a variety of questions about how families were coping with school shutdowns and revealed that more than half of the respondents had a more favorable view of homeschooling as a result of the school closures. I remember thinking at the time that if families thought homeschooling was tolerable during the springtime tumult and isolation, then they would find it far more fulfilling under ordinary circumstances when they could actually gather with others, visit libraries and museums, attend classes and so on.

    In May, a RealClear Opinion Research survey confirmed that many parents were more satisfied with at-home learning than expected, with 40 percent saying they were more likely to choose homeschooling or virtual learning even after lockdowns ended. Around the same time, a USA Today/Ipsos poll found that 60 percent of parents surveyed said they would likely choose at-home learning in the fall rather than send their children to school even if the schools reopened for in-person learning.

    As summer began, parent actions reflected pollster predictions. Many parents began pulling their children out of school and registering them as independent homeschoolers. During the first week of July, so many parents in North Carolina submitted their online intent to homeschool forms that it crashed the state’s nonpublic education website. Homeschool applications were up 21 percent in Nebraska in July, and 75 percent in Vermont, while grassroots homeschooling networks and local Facebook homeschooling groups reported record increases in new members.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Los Angeles County prosecutors sue Gascon for not enforcing the law.” George Gascon is, of course, another George Soros backed prosecutor. We need similar lawsuits against all the other Soros prosecutors. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “California Doctor Fired After Writing Letter Criticizing Lockdown Orders.”
  • Louisiana Republican congressman elect Luke Letlow dies from a heart attack during a Wuhan coronavirus procedure. Dang, he was only 41…
  • Donald Trump Ends Obama’s 12-Year Run As Gallup’s ‘Most Admired Man.'”
  • Israel hits Gaza and Syria after Hamas rocket attack.
  • “Trump Administration Approves $290 Million Bomb Sale To Saudi Arabia.” That should about cover Cats and Dolittle
  • Just when you think 2021 couldn’t possibly be worse than 2020, scientists invent Ice 9.
  • Hungary: Christmas 1, Commies 0.
  • “Former public radio reporter charged with torching cop cars during BLM protests.” This is my shocked face. (Hat tip: Steven F. Hayward.)
  • Joe Rogan on Cabo Steve Adler:

  • Man charged with throwing large concrete blocks off Congress overpass above Ben White.
  • Who is the super genius at Walmart who decided it was a good idea to let their social media person snipe at a sitting U.S. senator and piss off half of America?
  • “But only Gatsby knew…”
  • “How author Farley Mowat smuggled a V2 rocket into Canada.”
  • A wine guy reviews Everclear.
  • Speaking of booze, a cool milestone (or why he won’t be having a nice Chianti):

  • Interesting map:

  • If you haven’t already done so, now would be a good time to uninstall Flash.
  • Heh:

  • Heh: Dog Division: