More DOGE uncovered fraud, Trump yanks security clearances for a lot of swamp creatures, the Democratic Party goes all in on antisemitism, good luck getting an MRI in Canada, Warner Bros Discovery is considering a sale that’s absolutely loony, and a member of the Very, Very, Very Heavy Brigade takes on a Tesla.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
For all the talk of trump not allowing a peaceful transfer of power, it’s lefty Biden appointees who are thwarting democracy.
On Friday, the Board of Directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace informed the group’s president, George Moose, that he was relieved of his duties. The same day, Moose’s replacement, Kenneth Jackson, arrived at the office for the congressionally funded nonprofit to assume his new role.
There was one problem: Moose refused to go.
A source intimately involved in the situation told The Daily Wire that Moose put the building on lockdown when Jackson and his team were en route. When they arrived, they were astonished to find that the doors were locked and they were unable to gain entry.
“They treated us, quite frankly, like criminals,” a person who was with the group shared with The Daily Wire.
Jackson encountered similar behavior on Monday. He was ultimately able to enter USIP with the help of the Metropolitan Police Department, and ordered all unauthorized personnel to leave — including Moose, who confirmed to The Daily Wire that he was escorted out by police.
When Jackson and the rest of his group were finally able to get into the building, they found things in turmoil. The shades were drawn, with white noise playing when they arrived. USIP employees were using walkie talkies to communicate within the building, according to the person who was with Jackson. As of Tuesday, none of the phone systems in the building were working, nor were the elevators, and the internet was down, The Daily Wire has learned.
“I’ve never seen something so broken,” the source familiar with the situation told The Daily Wire. Moose did not respond to inquiries into whether he and his colleagues tampered with these systems.
Colin O’Brien, the chief security officer at USIP under Moose, told The Daily Wire on Tuesday evening that the systems likely were not working because the building had been placed on lockdown at Moose’s orders, meaning that all the systems would shut down. O’Brien and other employees were told to exit the building, and he said he hadn’t been in contact with anyone on Tuesday, though he believes he is still employed by USIP.
O’Brien said that Moose ordered that members of DOGE were not to be admitted into the building, and that members of USIP were under the impression that there was an ongoing dispute with DOGE about who the leadership of the USIP was — “something that, in my understanding, was going to be litigated,” he said. He disputed the notion that DOGE had the authority to enter the building.
This story, based on accounts from individuals who were on the scene as Jackson attempted to gain access to the organization he’d been put in charge of, shows how federally-funded bureaucrats worked to sabotage operations to stop the Trump administration from taking control.
Moose, who allegedly “barricaded” himself in his office until police arrived, has told the media that members of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) broke into the office without warning. But a review of events and internal emails show not only that USIP leadership blocked Moose’s replacement from entering the building, but that it was preparing to resist changes for weeks ahead of their arrival.
Elon Musk, the world’s most successful businessman and President Donald Trump’s top White House adviser, said this week that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has uncovered shocking cases of fraud within the federal government.
Musk made the remarks during a Monday meeting with the president and his cabinet secretaries.
“One case of fraud was with the Small Business Administration, where they were handing out loans—$330 million worth of loans—to people under the age of 11,” Musk said. “I think the youngest, Kelly, was a 9-month-old who got a $100,000 loan.”
“That’s a very precocious baby we’re talking about here,” Musk quipped.
SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler followed up Musk’s remarks by saying, “We’re tackling the fraud, waste, and abuse at the agency.”
“We’ve seen, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud go unprosecuted, so we’re taking that on,” she said. “We have a zero-tolerance policy for fraud, and we continue to crack down on it and make sure people are held accountable.”
Trump said that they have found “far too much” fraud, waste, and abuse in the government over the last couple of months.
“It’s pure fraud,” he said. “We like to use the words ‘waste’ and ‘abuse’ because they sort of sound good, but many of these things are pure fraud.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) said this week that the state was returning nearly $900 million to the federal government, something it tried to do repeatedly during the Biden administration.
“For years, Florida has been trying to return federal funds to the federal government due to the ideological strings attached by the Biden Administration—but they couldn’t even figure out how to accept it,” DeSantis said in a post on X.
The governor said that he met with Elon Musk on Friday and the rest of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team and was able to return the money.
“We got this done in the same day,” DeSantis said. “Other states should follow Florida in supporting DOGE’s efforts!”
The governor posted the letter that he sent to the U.S. Treasury Department alerting them that the state was formally returning $878,112,000.00 in taxpayer dollars to the federal government “as part of DOGE’s efforts.”
The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced on Wednesday that non-permanent residents will no longer be eligible for Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgages, National Review has learned, part of a broader effort by the administration to ensure that American citizens are prioritized under taxpayer-funded housing programs following massive flow of illegal immigration under former President Joe Biden.
FHA loans offer government-insured mortgages to ensure that lower-income individuals have access to home ownership. While illegal immigrants are technically ineligible to obtain FHA-backed home loans under U.S. law, HUD’s announcement will strengthen enforcement mechanisms to ensure that illegal immigrants are not abusing the program in the future. It is unclear how many illegal immigrants have obtained FHA-backed loans.
“FHA does not retain citizenship or residency data from the loan application and therefore does not maintain information on the number of non-permanent residents who have received FHA-insured loans under past policies,” General Deputy Assistant Secretary for Housing Jeffrey D. Little wrote in a March 26 mortgagee letter shared exclusively with National Review. “This update ensures that FHA’s mortgage insurance programs are administered in accordance with Administration priorities while fulfilling its mission of providing access to homeownership.”
The new policy will also prohibit government-backed mortgages for non-permanent residents moving forward. “Currently, non-permanent residents are subject to immigration laws that can affect their ability to remain legally in the country,” Little wrote in the March 26 memo. “This uncertainty poses a challenge for FHA as the ability to fulfill long-term financial obligations depends on stable residency and employment.”
HUD’s revised residency requirements for FHA-backed loans, which take effect on May 25, will apply to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients as well as individuals who are pending asylum or pending refugee status, according to HUD, since there is no guarantee that their residency status will be renewed under the current administration.
The new policy eliminates the “non-permanent resident” category entirely from the FHA’s Single Family Title I and Title II programs, and reverses a Biden-era policy which allows FHA loans for DACA recipients who provide a valid Social Security Number and work eligibility status.
I wonder if these programs were abused for helping illegal aliens buy homes in Colony Ridge.
Others named in the list are retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, former White House Russia expert Fiona Hill, former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic Norman Eisen, former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, and lawyer Mark Zaid.”
Can anyone really say America is less safe because the people on that list no longer have access to classified information?
What the support for Mahmoud Khalil, Hasan Piker and Rasha Alawieh really shows.
A few days after the anniversary of Oct 7, the New York Times reported that Columbia University Apartheid Divest officially endorsed terrorism against Jews and withdrew an apology by one of its members for threatening to kill Jews.
Over the past weeks, the paper and the entire Democratic Party, including 103 members of Congress, the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the Jewish Democratic Council of America led by Kamala’s former foreign policy advisor, went all in on fighting for Mahmoud Khalil, a leader in CUAD who had defended terrorism, from being deported.
The signatories to a letter standing up for a Syrian national who had taken part in a pro-terrorist group’s harassment of Jewish students and faculty included half of House Democrats, not only extremists like AOC and Rep. Ilhan Omar, but Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking House Judiciary Democrat, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with multiple House Democrats of Jewish ancestry and those who represent large Jewish districts including Rep. Jerrold Nadler in New York, as well as Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove and Rep. Laura Friedman who holds down Sen. Adam Schiff’s old seat, in the LA area. The same Democrat politicians who had remained silent when Jewish students and faculty were being terrorized on campuses in their areas now rushed to the barricades for a member of a group that had openly celebrated the murder of Jews.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest is a front group for the college’s suspended Students for Justice in Palestine chapter which reacted to the first anniversary of Oct 7 by promoting a statement from a Maoist publication, “October 7th was Not ‘Barbaric’ or ‘Unfortunate’—It was Strategic and Anti-imperialist” and hailed the “moral, military, and political victory of the Operation”. This is what the Democrats who condemn Trump’s proposed deportation of a CUAD leader as “authoritarian” now support. Not just terrorism: but the mass murder of Jews.
Now, Democrats rallied once more in support of Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese Hezbollah supporter, traveling to America on a visa who was refused entry into the United States.
According to Customs and Border Protection, Alawieh (pictured above) had deleted Hezbollah materials on her phone, attended the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and claimed that she followed Nasrallah’s teachings “from a religious perspective.”
Hezbollah is not only responsible for the murder of Jews, but the barracks bombing in Beirut which killed 220 Marines, the kidnapping and brutal torture of Colonel William R. Higgins, who was castrated and skinned before his body was dumped near a mosque, and the vicious killing of Robert Stethem, a Navy diver, during an airline hijacking when, as a stewardess described, “They were jumping in the air and landing full force on his body. He must have had all his ribs broken… they put the mike up to his face so his screams could be heard by the outside world.”
“A visa is a privilege not a right—glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied. This is commonsense security,” the Department of Homeland Security warned. Democrats fundamentally disagree with that position.
Judge Leo Sorokin, a Clinton appointee, barred the Hezbollah supporter from being deported, and then demanded to know why she had not been allowed into the country. Instead of reporting that Rasha Alawieh had visited a terrorist group’s event responsible for the murder of hundreds of Americans, the media claimed she had been visiting her family in her country.
Rep. Gabe Amo, along with other Dems, have stated that they intend to continue fighting for her
Brown University, which employed Alawieh and is under investigation for antisemitism, responded by urging foreign employees like her not to travel abroad because of “travel bans, visa procedures and processing, re-entry requirements” they might conceivably run afoul of if they support terrorists and the mass murder of Americans and Jews.
In the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz hyped Hasan Piker, a Muslim influencer on the video game streaming platform Twitch, as the best hope for the Democrats winning over “bros” and “young men” .Somewhere in the middle of the article, after mentioning his dog’s name and his support for ‘non-binary’ people, gets around to briefly mentioning his “soft-pedalling the brutality of Hamas, or the Houthis, or the Chinese Communist Party” and being named “Antisemite of the Year” as a minor detail before pivoting to a discussion about a possible Hasan reality show.
And to Democrats today, such things are minor details, less important than anything else.
Piker, has said, “it doesn’t matter if rapes f***ing happened on Oct. 7, like that doesn’t change the dynamic for me even this much” while holding up his fingers slightly apart. “The Palestinian resistance is not perfect.” And he’s been featured on CNN, invited to the DNC, and Democrats, from Rep. Ro Khanna to AOC to Sen. Ed Markey appeared on his podcast. Buttigieg has been trying to get on. Expect most other Democrats aspiring to run in 2028 to do likewise.
This week, the Texas Legislature took steps to strip power from the Texas Lottery Commission, possibly setting the agency up for abolition, and Las Vegas Sands’ casino plans suffered a setback in Irving at the hands of outraged citizens.
On Monday, State Sen. Mayes Middleton (R-Galveston) laid out Senate Bill 1721 in the State Affairs Committee. It would transfer the administration of bingo games in Texas from the Lottery Commission to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation.
Snip.
When introducing his measure to ban lottery couriers operating in Texas, State Sen. Bob Hall (R-Edgewood) noted that on a hierarchy of administration complexity, bingo and lottery are at the bottom of the totem pole.
During a September 2024 Sunset Commission hearing, State Sen. Judith Zaffirini (D-Laredo) noted that revenues to the state before and after the lottery was created remained flat. The state is not likely to lose money if the lottery goes away.
At two separate hearings this week in Irving, citizens showed up in force to oppose a planning variance to build a casino. Ultimately, Sands asked the city council to pull the language allowing the construction of a casino from the development request.
Sands currently operates no casinos in America and derives most of its revenue from China.
The mess at the Lottery Commission probably deserves a separate post…
In his lengthy announcement post on social media, McGregor voiced his opposition to the European Union (EU) Migration Pact, which the bloc has mandated that Ireland must ratify by June 12th, 2026. The pact would relax Ireland’s border security and make it easier for illegal aliens to claim asylum.
“Between now and 12 June 2026, several pieces of legislation have to be passed by both Houses of the Oireachtas and then signed by the President,” McGregor explained. “The next presidential election must take place by 11 [November] 2025.”
“Who else will stand up to Government and oppose this bill? Any other Presidential candidate they attempt to put forward will be of no resistance to them. I will!” McGregor declared.
He also said that, as president, he would pursue a nationwide referendum on the Migration Pact, allowing the people of Ireland to decide for themselves whether or not the country should be forced to abide by the deal.
In celebrating the life of Tony Dolan, President Reagan’s chief speechwriter, the most remarkable fact is that he was executing a strategy he conceived to defeat the Soviet Union.
In numerous conversations in the speechwriting office—long before any foreign policy experts dared to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet Union itself, Tony said that he knew how to defeat the Soviets.
As a young journalist in his hometown of Stamford, Connecticut, he had exposed organized crime that, he said, had entirely corrupted the city. Tony was relentless, ultimately breaking the mob’s power and becoming one of the youngest journalists to win the Pulitzer Prize. He said that the same method would bring down the Soviets, an entirely corrupt system, another form of organized crime. Tell the truth about them; expose them as evil; let everyone—especially those in power—hear them described as what they are. It was his conviction that President Reagan, by speaking with moral clarity about the Soviets, could hasten their collapse.
In his essay How the United States Won the Cold War, Warren Norquist identifies the rhetorical moral battle, “demoralizing the Soviets and generating pressure for change,” as one of seven crucial components in the US victory over the USSR.
Tony later wrote in the Wall Street Journal that for criminal regimes, there is “one weapon they fear more than military or economic sanction: the publicly-spoken truth about their moral absurdity, their ontological weakness.”
Snip.
The Reagan administration, internally, was a battlefield of competing visions that came to a head over presidential speeches. Once the president said something, it became the official policy—which made speechwriting a critical front in these internal struggles. The battle cry of conservatives in the administration was, “Let Reagan be Reagan.” In that struggle, Tony was unwavering. He would not wobble when West Wing power players tried to intimidate him. He was himself an exceptionally skilled political infighter—usually scheming, always charming, and with a spine of coiled steel.
From the outset of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Tony helped to chisel out the rhetorical space in which the speechwriters could give voice to President Reagan’s resolve that the outcome of the Cold War would be, “We win, they lose.”
And it was not only combative phrases. At times it was subversive speech, as in Reagan’s 1981 Univ. of Notre Dame speech drafted by Tony: “The West won’t contain communism; it will transcend communism. … it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”
Or his 1982 speech in London, the Westminster address, “… one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: of all the millions of refugees we’ve seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward, the Communist world. Today, on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east—to prevent their people from leaving. … What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy, which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”
California announces it will need another seven billion dollars in taxpayer money not to build a high speed rail. But I’m sure all the consultant graft will be channeled into the proper left-wing pockets… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Canadian woman gets a referral from her doctor to get an MRI to see if she has a brain tumor. So now she has an appointment for one. In 2026.
Carole Stewart Keeton McClellan Rylander Strayhorn (to use all the names she was known under), former Democratic mayor of Austin, Republican Railroad Commissioner and Comptroller of Texas, has died. In a way her career was emblematic of a certain kind of moderate politician in Texas at the time, with a huge realignment from the Democratic to the Republican Party, a change that started with John Connally, picked up speed with Phil Gramm and Rick Perry, and continues into this day with Hispanic office holders still switching over. Speaking of Perry, she was one of two prominent female Republican moderate officeholders (Kay Baily Hutchinson being the other) who destroyed their careers trying to unseat Perry from the Governor’s Mansion.
Is Warner BrothersTime WarnerAOL-Time WarnerWarnerMedia Warner Bros. Discovery putting Loony Tunes for sale? What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
Guy who did the Vegas Tesla bomby/turns out to be a dirty Commie.
Annals of criminal genius: 5-foot-2, 449-pound drives his 4-wheeler into an Tesla. “Demarqeyun Marquize Cox was arrested after one of his alleged attacks was recorded by the Tesla he purposely ran into, police in Texarkana, Texas announced.” And yes, there’s video:
Pinkslipapalooza in BureaucratLand, more DOGE savings, the deportation machine gets cranked up, Apple invests in America. Plus some depths of human depravity.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
“Federal Judge Rules In Favor Of Trump Government Layoffs.” “U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, who was appointed by Barack Obama, ruled that the labor unions which filed the lawsuit against the government layoffs had to take their case before the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) rather than a federal court.”
The now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development has funneled at least $122 million in approved grants to terror-tied aid charities, including an evangelical Christian group that in 2014 facilitated a $125,000 sub-grant to a Sudanese terrorist organization linked to al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden.
USAID has long been complicit in funding humanitarian aid groups associated with designated terrorists, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. This is just one egregious example of the waste, fraud, and abuse within USAID that the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency are working to uncover.
“There’s a fox loose in the henhouse of our foreign aid system—a system intended to uplift lives abroad that instead has funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to radical and terrorist-linked organizations,” Gregg Roman, executive director of the Middle East Forum, said in his testimony before House Oversight’s DOGE Subcommittee on Wednesday.
The Middle East Forum published these findings in a years-long study earlier this month, as DOGE head Elon Musk started targeting USAID and its wasteful, often ideologically-driven spending.
One organization, World Vision, was given $200,000 in taxpayer funding to direct toward the Islamic Relief Agency a decade ago. Of those funds, a $125,000 sub-grant was approved by the Obama administration. A whistleblower came forward to reveal the improper relationship between the two groups.
The evangelical non-governmental organization claimed in 2018 it had no knowledge of the al-Qaeda affiliate’s terrorism ties. In 2010, two members of Islamic Relief’s U.S. branch pleaded guilty to money-laundering, theft of public funds, conspiracy, and other charges. Six years earlier, the Treasury Department designated Islamic Relief as a terror-financing organization.
Despite the scandal, World Vision obtained $200 million in approved grants from USAID last year. It has received an estimated $2 billion since 2008.
Additionally, Helping Hand for Relief and Development received a $78,000 USAID grant in 2023 even after USAID’s inspector general launched an investigation into a prior grant. The group held ties to Pakistan’s Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation, a designated terrorist organization that played a role in the 2008 Mumbai massacre.
Helping Hand is partnered with the Unlimited Friends Association, a charity affiliated with Hamas and known for promoting violent antisemitism.
Another Hamas-tied group, Bayader Association for Environment and Development, received its last USAID grant on October 1, 2023, just before the October 7 terror attack on Israel. Bayader previously featured senior Hamas officials, including the son of the late Ismail Haniyeh, who orchestrated the October 7 massacre.
Other examples of aid groups involved in funding terrorists, sometimes knowingly, include the American Near East Refugee Agency, Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, and Tides Foundation.
Is there no evil in the world George Soros doesn’t have his fingerprints on?
Surprise! Trump’s policies are hugely popular…even among Democrats.
81% of Americans, including 70% of Democrats and 80% of Independents, support deporting illegal aliens who have committed crimes.
76% of Americans support a “full-scale effort” to eliminate government fraud and waste.
76% of Americans want to close the border and add extra security.
69% of Americans, including half of all Democrats, want to ban men from women’s sports – and a similar number want the government to declare that there are only two sexes.
And yet the Left has spent the last month railing against ICE arrests and DOGE audits while stumping for the right to castrate kids and let boys in girls’ restrooms.
Some more key findings:
70% of Americans said government should hire people “strictly on the basis of merit and objective evaluations.”
79% of Americans said the government should make sure that categories “like race, gender, and religion” are not used to discriminate against applicants.
66% of Americans, including more than a third of Democrats, think Democrats shouldn’t oppose everything Trump is doing out of the gate and help Trump eliminate government waste.
58% of Americans say Trump is doing a better job than Biden.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) told Morning Wire that the Senate GOP “has not let up the pressure at all” on Democrats as Republicans ram President Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments through their confirmations.
Senate Republicans, with their 53-47 majority, have cleared nearly all of the president’s most controversial picks after Kash Patel was confirmed to be the next FBI director in a 51-49 vote on Thursday. Mullin, who has gone to bat for each of Trump’s cabinet picks, told Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley that the confirmation process had gone smoothly thanks to Republican leadership that is laser-focused on supporting Trump’s agenda.
“What you’ve seen is a new leader in the Senate with Leader [John] Thune. He is just 100 percent grinding the Democrats down from the get-go,” Mullin told Morning Wire.
“And so once the president got confirmed and sworn into office on the 20th, what we did is we immediately started the clock on these nominees, and [we] haven’t stopped,” he added.
The Republican senator from Oklahoma explained that the party didn’t wait for Trump to be sworn in on January 20 to push his nominees through the confirmation process. Since the new Republican-controlled Senate began on January 3, the GOP immediately went to work putting pressure on Democrats to speed up confirmations.
Mullin said that Thune “has literally kept that clock running 24/7, seven days a week” on cabinet confirmations.
After a cabinet nominee gets reported out of committee, “there’s a 24-hour soak,” followed by a 30-hour debate, he explained, adding, “On directors, like Kash Patel, when you invoke cloture on them, you have a two-hour debate. So while you still have a 24-hour soak, you only have two hours of debate on that person. So you can move those faster.”
“Even when we’re not here, the Democrats will negotiate and say, ‘If you don’t make us stay over on the weekend, we’ll allow the clocks to run consecutively, even though we’re not here.’ So we’ll go ahead and invoke cloture on the next person,” Mullin told Morning Wire. “So when we get back here on Monday, we can confirm two people at once. That’s why we’re so far ahead — because Leader Thune has not let up the pressure at all, not one bit on the Democrats.”
Sounds like Thune is a vast improvement over Cocaine Mitch…
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working with the newly-established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cancel over $67 million in grants that had been issued by the Biden Administration.
According to Fox News, the EPA is focusing on $77.1 million in spending that was earmarked by the Biden-era EPA for “environmental justice” grants, distributed to 20 different recipients. Although approximately $10 million has already been spent and is irretrievable, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the agency was able to successfully cancel $67.4 million in planned funding.
“We will make sure every penny spent by EPA goes towards protecting human health and the environment, and Powering the Great American Comeback,” said Zeldin. “I am proud to partner with DOGE to restore fiscal responsibility and accountability in our government.”
In response, the official X account for DOGE lauded the EPA cuts as “good work.”
Among the canceled grants was a $4.2 million grant to San Diego State University Foundation, which planned to use the money to bring “environmental justice” to “tribal, indigenous, and Pacific Island communities.”
Under Zeldin, the EPA has revealed that the previous administration’s EPA was freely giving at least $20 billion in taxpayer dollars, with the spending being determined solely by eight agency entities “at their discretion.” Among this spending was a $2 billion grant sent to Power Forward Communities, a far-left non-profit with ties to failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
We’re very fortunate that those on the left were too greedy and incompetent to keep rigging elections…
Tiffany Henyard, the crooked, free-spending mayor of Dolton, Illinois, got slaughtered in a Democratic primary this week. “[Jason] House won the primary with 3,896 votes (87.91%), compared to Henyard’s 536 votes (12.09%).”
Christopher Rufo: Tell me about this culture and how it’s been spreading through the NSA. And talk to me about what it was like, even a year ago or a few months ago, before Trump reentered the White House.
NSA Whistleblower: About ten years ago, they started doing the “employee resource groups”: African-American, veterans, Pride. It was just a meeting here and there, almost like a potluck—culture, food, a speech. Then it started to get more and more. Instead of just one day a month, it was one week a month, or the whole month. You could be hired as a mathematician, a staff officer, or system engineer, but you would spend your time going to these events and having meetings all day about it. They got themselves into position to help craft policy and started pushing the idea that if you want to get promoted, you have to participate in these events.
And then everything became Pride. You would go to a training, and it would be about “privilege” and “how to be a better ally.” A lady would give classes on how to talk “gender-neutral” to people. You had analysts that didn’t want to do the reporting they were supposed to be doing because they were going to have to report on somebody’s “dead name.” They were having this crisis of conscience about reporting the adversary’s actual name because they thought it was their “dead name,” and they didn’t want to disrespect the person. It was like a cult that was hellbent on pushing gender ideology.
Rufo: It seems like this is a clique of very activist male-to-female transgender agents. Tell me about this community.
Whistleblower: There is a very small number of them, but they wield an enormous amount of power. And outside of the sick stuff, you also see a prevalent Marxist philosophy going on with these people in their chat rooms. They hate capitalism. They hate Christians. They’re always espousing socialist and Marxist beliefs.
I know several people at the agency brought that up, like, “Hey, we’re here to fight for the U.S.A. and go after the adversaries.” And they just got hammered. They would just start coming out with “transphobe” and “homophobe” right away or calling you a “racist.” And that’s why a lot of folks are still hesitant to say anything, because you still have people at these agencies in those key spots. It infected everything.
If this is true, intelligence head Tulsi Gabbard needs to purge the Puzzle Palace of all transculters and commies with a pink slip machine gun. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ. )
Bill Clinton advisors saying Democrats are screwed is nothing new, but this time it’s not James Carville.
“It’s very hard to be optimistic about the Democrats,” the advisor to President Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign, Douglas Schoen, tells The New York Sun. The party is “totally off base.” Lacking a message, strategy, or leader, the pollster says President Trump may defy expectations in next year’s midterms.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Schoen likened Mr. Trump to the boxing legend, Mohammed Ali, at his peak. He’s “moving so quickly, he has the Democrats totally unnerved,” he said. “They can’t hit him. They can’t find him. He’s way ahead of them.”
Mr. Schoen, “exaggerating” for illustration, said the Ukraine War “could be settled and resolved before the Democrats develop a coherent position.” They’re “MIA,” with “no interesting voice.” He suggests governors take the lead, rather than Senator Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
“There is nobody making policy,” Mr. Schoen said. “There is nobody with an overarching strategy.” That weakness is reflected in his Schoen Cooperman Research surveys. It “sort of tells you how off base the Democrats are” that their favorability is 31 percent versus Mr. Trump’s 53 percent.
“The Democrats spent $2 billion on Kamala Harris,” Mr. Schoen said, “and her percentage was lower than where she started. It’s an inescapable conclusion that $2 billion bought Democrats nothing at all.” Mr. Trump dodged every uppercut, jab, and haymaker.
Mr. Schoen said that Mr. Trump “gets the public mood” that “people are frustrated with government and angry about immigration.” The president also gets that Americans “want plain speaking and somebody outside the system.”
Democrats, in Mr. Schoen’s view, aren’t counterpunching against these strengths. He sees them as “off-putting and scolding,” whereas on the other side, “people love” Mr. Trump. “His rallies and his approach were entertaining — and, in their own way, positive.”
Mr. Schoen cites as another misfire the way Democrats went after Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees on “personal stuff rather than policy.” He adds: “It wasn’t, ‘We disagree with you on this,’ etc. It was all, ‘You had an affair, you were drunk, etc.’”
In a flip from Mr. Schoen’s time in the Clinton White House, voters now judge Democrats, not Republicans, as focusing too much on “social issues” and personal lives. “Abortion,” Mr. Schoen said, “may be good in a midterm. It’s not going to win a presidential election.”
Even modest gains next year could give Democrats control of one or both chambers of Congress, but Mr. Schoen has doubts. “I worry about 2026,” he said, “because I don’t see a message, a strategy at all — and the Republicans have a message and a strategy.”
“Apocalyptic environmentalism by Maryland’s far-left Democratic leadership in Annapolis has plunged the state into a severe energy crisis, with power bills doubling in some cases and 20% of households in Central Maryland now behind on payments.”
Soros DAs seem to love illegal alien criminals a whole lot more than they hate “gun violence.” “Two men arrested in a Feb. 5 gun and drug raid at a New York City auto repair shop were later released on reduced charges that may not lead to prosecution, according to police and court records – despite being suspected members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, which has been spreading violence across the country. Jose Tamaronis-Caldera, 27, and Richard Garcia, 33, were taken into custody after authorities seized a Glock handgun, two imitation pistols, and a significant amount of drugs.”
A new disclosure by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to the House Judiciary Committee reveals that, under the Biden administration, the IRS leaked the taxpayer information of more than 405,000 Americans–including President Trump.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, began an inquiry into the leaks last year and with this latest disclosure has found that the scope of the leak was much larger than the Biden administration initially led the public to believe.
The scandal began in late 2019 when an IRS contract worker named Charles (Chaz) Littlejohn, illegally accessed and stole tax returns and return information for President Trump and other wealthy Americans and then leaked that information to news outlets.
Littlejohn pled guilty to the unauthorized disclosure in Oct 2023 and was sentenced to 5 years in prison.
In April 2024, the IRS issued letters of notification to victims whose data had been leaked but the notifications prompted deeper questions into how many people’s data may have actually been disclosed.
One month later, an IRS spokesman stated that “more than 70,000” taxpayers had been affected by the leak.
Turns out that when you put warfighters in charge of the Pentagon rather than social justice weasels, recruiting problems disappear.
After years of struggling recruitment numbers — in 2022, the Army faced a shortfall of 15,000 recruits — the service celebrated record-breaking enlistment in December 2024 with nearly 5,877 recruits joining up.
“@USArmy: @USAREC had their most productive December in 15 years by enlisting 346 Soldiers daily into the World’s greatest #USArmy!” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote in a post on X.
A Navy spokesperson tells National Review the service has contracted 4,000 more sailors and shipped 5,000 more sailors to boot camp at this point in the fiscal year, which began in October, than the year prior. (Navy officials said last month it will take three years of meeting recruiting goals to recover from the Navy’s current 20,000 operational gaps at sea.)
Hegseth and Senator Tom Cotton praised the “Trump effect” for the rise in recruiting numbers, though the trend does pre-date Trump’s election.
“Army’s recruiting started getting better much earlier. We really started seeing the numbers, the monthly numbers, go up in February of 2024,” former Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told Fox News. “We were seeing sort of in the high 5000 contracts per month, and that accelerated, you know, into the spring all the way into August, when the Army really hit a peak.”
Still, the record-setting December is nothing to sneeze at, and regardless of who would go on to win the 2024 election, the boost began as Biden prepared to exit the White House.
Veterans tell National Review they feel confident the recruitment wave is here to stay, with prospective service members feeling more confident in our current commander in chief.
The Department of Defense is giving the military branches 30 days to identify service members who identify as transgender in order to remove them from the armed forces.
Pentagon senior leadership were notified in a Wednesday memo that they must begin setting up mechanisms for finding troops with gender dysphoria by March 26th to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order barring transgender-identifying people from the military.
“The medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals who have a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria are incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service,” defense undersecretary for personnel Darin Selnick said in the memo…
The Department of Defense recognizes the two sexes, male and female, and will only allow service members to be subject to standards based on their biological sex. Pronoun usage and access to facilities will be determined by biological sex, ensuring that males will not be allowed into female spaces for sleeping, changing, or bathing, the memo clarifies.
Were it not for social justice madness, these essential truths wouldn’t even need to be explicated…
When immigration agents were first ordered to deport Ivan Oramas and Santos Maradiaga-Villalta, President George W. Bush was in the White House and the iPhone was a distant dream.
That was over two decades ago—yet both men were arrested this week, according to federal data reviewed by DailyMail.com.
They were among over 50,000 illegal immigrants removed so far, a Department of Homeland Security official revealed to DailyMail.com.
News of their arrest was circulated Thursday in an internal immigration memo noting recent enforcement actions made by President Donald Trump’s administration.
Oramas, 61, is a citizen of Cuba with a rap sheet including convictions for sexual battery and aggravated assault.
His sexual battery case caused serious injury, according to his charges in the file.
ICE Houston nabbed Oramas this week, enforcing a deportation order first handed down in October 2003—21 years overdue.
Maradiaga-Villalta, a 40-year-old alien from Honduras, has convictions for smuggling aliens into the U.S. He was arrested recently by ICE in Phoenix. His first deportation order dates back to January 2006, a 19-year lapse in action.
A new study from the Discovery Institute’s Fix Homelessness reveals the devastating consequences of Seattle’s failed policies, which have not only failed to address homelessness but have actively worsened the crisis, according to 770 KTTH.
Driven by progressive ideology rather than practical solutions, city leaders have fostered a system that attracts homeless individuals from outside the region while keeping them trapped in cycles of addiction, crime, and dependency.
Rather than tackling the root causes, these policies have invited more homelessness, turning the issue into a manufactured disaster rather than a problem to be solved.
The study reveals that nearly half of the city’s homeless population became homeless outside of Seattle or King County, drawn in by the city’s permissive policies—free tents, open-air drug use, and a refusal to enforce encampment laws. An overwhelming 86.6% were born elsewhere, and 80.2% didn’t even attend high school in the area.
As in Austin, homeless programs in Seattle are not designed to solve the homeless problem, they’re designed to provide conduits of graft to the far left.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, along with a coalition of 22 states and several industry groups, has initiated legal action against New York over its Climate Change Superfund Act.
“New York’s law is nothing more than an unconstitutional shakedown of vital American energy industries that form the bedrock of our national economic independence,” said Paxton.
The lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of the act, which seeks to impose significant financial burdens on energy producers for past greenhouse gas emissions.
New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act, signed into law in December 2024, aims to collect approximately $75 billion over the next 25 years from oil and gas companies to fund “climate change adaptation” and infrastructure projects within the state. It retroactively holds energy producers accountable for emissions dating back to 2000, regardless of whether the companies operate within New York.
New York is quite ambitiously stupid to cram two different unconstitutional provisions into a single law, adding a lack of jurisdiction cherry on top of an ex post facto sundae…
Transsexual madness is alive and well in the Democratic Party. “Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers introduces budget recommendation that replaces ‘mother’ with ‘inseminated person.'”
Jeff Bezos made liberal heads explode with an editorial shift at the Waswhington Post.
Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is overhauling the paper’s opinion section and shifting its editorial stance towards defending personal freedom and free markets.
Bezos emailed Washington Post employees Wednesday morning to inform them of the dramatic change and told them contrary opinions could be found elsewhere.
“I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages,” Bezos wrote. “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars can be left to be published by others,” Bezos added.
“There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.”
Bezos’s announcement, which he posted on X after emailing it to Post staffers, also revealed that opinion editor David Shipley opted against staying on in the role given the section’s new direction.
I think Bezos has figured out that WaPo has a bad infestation of social justice, and the cheapest way to get rid of it is to publically announce policy changes that encourage the SJW termite to quit…
The latest onshoring trend, spurred by President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports, has led to a major announcement from Apple. The company has embraced “Make America Great Again” with plans to hire 20,000 US workers to manufacture high-tech AI servers in the Heartland and invest hundreds of billions of dollars in new factories.
Bloomberg reports Apple plans to unleash a tsunami of investments in the US, upwards of $500 billion over the next four years, including a new AI server manufacturing plant in Houston, Texas, and a supplier academy in Michigan.
This disclosure comes just days after President Trump announced that Apple CEO Tim Cook plans to relocate manufacturing operations from Mexico to the US.
He’s investing hundreds of billions of dollars,” Trump said after his meeting with Cook at the end of last week, adding that the executive is ramping up US investments because he wants to avoid tariffs.
Earlier this month, Trump imposed a 10% US levy on Chinese imports, where Apple manufactures most of its iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other products. In a tit-for-tat effort, Beijing announced retaliatory tariffs on US goods shortly after.
Apple’s $500 billion investment and promise to add 20,000 new US jobs over Trump’s second term is more evidence that corporate America is more willing to participate in onshoring efforts this time.
I live less than a mile away from Apple’s Austin campus, so it would be nice if they could open some technical writer recs there…
A man accused of cannibalism and murder has been granted conditional release, according to the Connecticut Psychiatric Security Review Board (PSRB).
The board granted Tyree Smith’s release after a careful review of his clinical progress, officials said.
He’s currently at Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown. Smith is accused of hacking a man to death with an axe in Bridgeport and eating part of the victim’s brain and an eyeball….Smith stood trial for the murder of Angel Gonzalez with an axe and consumed parts of the victim’s brain and eyeball in 2011. He was found not guilty because of insanity in 2013 and ordered confined to Whiting Forensic Hospital for 60 years.
An East Texas teacher and her boyfriend have been arrested on child pornography charges.
Authorities allege the couple had child sexual abuse images and video of her performing a sexual act on a male dog on their phones.
Hillary Danielle Williams, 33, was arrested Saturday in Lufkin and charged with bestiality and possession with intent to promote child pornography.
Her partner, 37-year-old Michael Scott McCary, was charged with possession of child pornography.
Texas public schools seem to have let some real filthy degenerates teach kids…
“New Caney ISD Teacher, Coach Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison for Sex With Student. Samantha Cummings had sex with a 17-year-old female student at New Caney High School.”
Liberals are staging a boycott today in a vain attempt to prove they matter, so now would be a good day to buy something from Amazon or Walmart. In fact, today I went to Walmart for the first time in, I don’t know, probably over a year…
What happens when a Detroit water main breaks during a deep freeze? This.
I’m pretty much over my cold, except the occasional cough and continued draining of the Strategic Mucus Reserve.
The USAID revelation continues, with every left-wing, anti-American cause getting their snout into the trough of taxpayer money. Plus blows against the illegal alien and tranny pander brigades. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Second Amendment advocates have long know that “Everytown for Gun Safety” was, like all the other branches of the Brady Bunch hydra, pure Astrotruf, but thanks to database revelations, we now know that taxpayers were footing the bill.
Have you ever heard of NEO Philanthropy? They’re a left-wing group that has been around for more than 40 years. NEO wants folks to believe it is a partnership between “changemakers and funders.” They claim to provide “resources to groups accelerating change.” Race, gender and DEI are huge for them, but guns are a problem.
An incredible website database has outed NEO Philanthropy’s actual duties, and those of thousands of other similar groups. NEO, it turns out, is nothing more than a middleman. It receives money and funnels some of it to Everytown for Gun Safety as well as other leftwing, anti-gun groups.
The website database is called DataRepublican.com, and it will forever change the way nonprofits handle their funding, especially those on the left.
Snip.
On Wednesday, pro-gun official Hannah Hill “exposed taxpayer money flowing to Bloomberg gun control orgs.”
The next day, she used the website to link USAID funds that went to Everytown, Giffords and more gun-control organizations.
Yesterday, @hannahhill_sc exposed taxpayer money flowing to Bloomberg gun control orgs.
Today, @DataRepublican's tool helped 2A advocates link USAID funds to Everytown, Giffords & more.
George Soros got his nose in the trough as well. Who was bankrolling the campaign to appoint pro-crime Soros DAs? You were.
Beginning about a decade ago, George Soros began funding campaigns for people who became known as the “Soros prosecutors.” Local prosecutorial races, which once had a few thousand spent on them, suddenly started seeing hundreds of thousands, and even millions of dollars pouring in, totaling about $50 million to elect 75 prosecutors nationwide.
Every one of those prosecutors is a radical leftist who immediately set about remaking the local justice system in accordance with leftist values: Criminals are victims of the system and should not be prosecuted; Republicans are enemies of the people and should be prosecuted. Some of these prosecutors are wreaking havoc on a scale that doesn’t make the news; others have done such horrible things that their names hit the headlines:
Kim Gardner, the woman who used false charges to destroy Eric Greitens, Missouri’s Republican governor, and whose tenure was distinguished by slandering the police, violating open records laws, persecuting the McCloskeys for defending their property against BLM rioters, discriminating against employees on racial grounds, and letting the most egregious criminals walk free.
Lawrence Krasner, the Philadelphia DA who just promised to prosecute the pardoned January 6ers. He couldn’t name a crime, though. He seemed to be operating on the Lavrentiy Beria principle of “show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”
Andrew Warren, the Florida prosecutor who announced that he would no longer prosecute entire categories of criminal activities because he didn’t like the Florida laws. Governor Ron DeSantis fired him.
George Gascón, a District Attorney who managed to break both the San Francisco and Los Angeles criminal justice systems. He was finally voted out of office in L.A. this past November.
Kimberly Foxx, the Cook County Chicago prosecutor who turned the criminal justice system into a revolving door, creating a staggering wave of violence in already beleaguered Chicago.
And then there’s Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg, who brought an utterly spurious and quite obviously political case against Donald Trump for allegedly criminal hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.
Without exception, the Soros prosecutors, most of whom received money from the Tides organizations, have been disastrous for their communities and, in Bragg’s case, for America as a whole. (Although one could argue that Bragg’s manifest political persecution of Donald Trump helped return Trump to the White House, which, to date, has been an incredibly good thing.)
Thus, there’s a straight line from Soros to Tides to corrupt prosecutors.
But what does this have to do with USAID? Well, back in October 2020, when no one was paying too much attention (COVID, BLM, the election), and USAID-funded mainstream media outlets were busy quashing stories that harmed Democrat interests, USAID was Funding the Tides Center:
Nearly $170 million in government grants has passed through a liberal dark money behemoth that houses numerous left-wing groups, including the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, tax forms show.
The taxpayer-funded grants were disbursed to groups through the Tides Center, a San Francisco-based nonprofit incubator that wealthy liberal donors use to bankroll progressive causes. A number of radical left-wing groups have fallen under the auspices of the Tides Center, which acts as a “fiscal sponsor” to nonprofits by providing its 501(c)(3) tax and legal status. This arrangement lets the groups under its umbrella avoid registering with the IRS.
[snip]
[Scott] Walter [president of the Capitol Research Center] noted that the Tides Center’s recipient profile on USASpending.gov, which posts government grants, shows $34 million in federal funding since 2008. The grants were primarily from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Health and Human Services.
And Stephen Green discovered that USAID was also funding #BlackLivesMatter so they could help burn down your city.
More than $1.3 billion in taxpayer funds from the Biden administration ended up helping groups that sponsored or committed terrorism.
Federal watchdog reports and other documents show former President Joe Biden’s aid programs funneled the money toward a network of terrorism in the Muslim world — largely by reversing Trump-era policies.
Snip.
The Biden administration gave $1,053,400,000 in taxpayer money to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which claims to help war-afflicted Palestinian civilians but is tied to terrorists fighting Israel, according to U.S. and Israeli intelligence. Biden reversed a Trump-era ban on UNRWA funding in 2021 but brought back the ban last year after Israel accused UNWRA workers of participating in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
Intelligence officials later revealed that more than 1,000 UNRWA employees, or around 10%, were linked to the groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, according to documents found on the bodies of dead terrorists and other evidence. A dozen took part in the Oct. 7 massacre, including a Hamas commander who was teaching in elementary school for UNRWA and led a siege against an Israeli kibbutz that killed almost 100 people.
UNWRA’s schools have long used curriculum for Palestinian children that glorifies terrorists and martyrdom, a March 2023 report from UN Watch found.
The curriculum comes from the Palestinian Authority (PA), a governing body in the West Bank that the Biden administration considered more friendly to American interests than Hamas. The PA also made a profit from Biden’s presidency despite its program that pays Palestinians and their families as a reward for acts of terror against Jews.
Trump and Congress passed a law in 2018 blocking economic support funds for the PA due to its program. Trump later paused all remaining funding for the PA before Biden took office and resumed it.
The Biden administration in part revived the economic support fund that Trump’s law restricts. The State Department claimed in documents from 2021 that “most” of the money did not “directly benefit the PA” in violation of the law. However, officials sent $265 million straight to the PA for its “security forces and justice sector institutions” throughout Biden’s presidency, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Under Biden, the PA agreed to pay more than $97 million to reward the perpetrators of the Oct. 7 attacks, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups.
They literally never denied a payment in their entire career.
So Treasury official David A. Lebryk resigned rather than testifying. Sounds like he should be subpoenaed and/or indicted…
Another media beneficiary of USAID taxpayer subsidies: Christianity Today. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and also render unto Caesar what is God’s…as long as Caesar is paying you enough.
You’ve never heard of the “Zizians,” and neither had I until this afternoon, but you’re probably going to be hearing a lot more about them now that this weirdo California cult has been connected to the shootout in Vermont last week that left a Border Patrol agent dead. Credit to Andy Ngo for putting together the pieces of this bizarre puzzle. When the shootout went down in Vermont on January 20, the initial reports were very thin, but piece by piece, we’ve learned more about the two suspects, Teresa Youngblut, a 21-year-old from Seattle, and Felix Bauckholt, a math genius from Germany who had worked in the financial industry on an H1B visa. About seven months ago, Youngblut’s parents had reported her missing, saying she had cut off contact with them and they were concerned she might be in a coercive relationship. The police didn’t do anything, saying that as an adult, she couldn’t be considered a runaway.
Youngblut and Bauckholt showed up in Vermont a couple of weeks ago and attracted suspicion because they were wearing black “tactical” gear and Youngblut had a pistol in a visible holster. Eventually, this led to an attempted traffic stop on I-91 in which both Youngblut and Bauckholt pulled pistols. Bauckholt was killed in the resulting shootout, but Younglut survived and will face charges.
The Department of Justice will ensure that, consistent with law, ‘sanctuary jurisdictions’ do not receive access to Federal funds from the Department,’ Bondi’s first-day memo says.
‘Consistent with applicable statutes, regulations, court orders, and terms, the Department of Justice shall pause the distribution of all funds until a review has been completed, terminate any agreements that are in violation of law or are the source of waste, fraud, or abuse, and initiate clawback or recoupment procedures, where appropriate.’
It’s no secret that Chicago has forsaken its own low-income residents to virtue signal as a so-called ‘sanctuary city’ for illegal immigrants – to the point where local residents have been excoriating city officials during official meetings, and major businesses such as Ken Griffin’s Citadel moved to Miami due to the city devolving into “Afghanistan.”
Now, the Trump DOJ is suing Chicago, the state of Illinois, local officials over laws creating said ‘sanctuary,’ and have accused the defendants of impeding federal immigration enforcement efforts. In their complaint, the DOJ has asked a judge to declare the state and local measures unconstitutional due to the federal government’s supremacy.
One of the laws challenged by the Wednesday lawsuit prohibits officials from complying with federal immigration detainers and providing certain information about noncitizens.
“The challenged provisions of Illinois, Chicago, and Cook County law reflect their intentional effort to obstruct the Federal Government’s enforcement of federal immigration law and to impede consultation and communication between federal, state, and local law enforcement officials that is necessary for federal officials to carry out federal immigration law and keep Americans safe,” reads the lawsuit.
Named in the case are Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D), Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D), as well as the city’s police superintendent and other city officials.
The case, filed in federal court in Chicago, marks one of the first major cases brought by the Trump administration in such a case, and comes after the Wednesday confirmation of Attorney General Pam Bondi, who issued a same-day memo restricting sanctuary cities from accessing DOJ funds.
The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it, and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangers, unexploded bombs, and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.
Trump’s affinity for beachfront property aside, I don’t see how rebuilding Gaza is a proper use of American tax dollars.
Sudden Putin Death Syndrome strike again. “Russian singer who donated to Ukraine and called Putin an ‘idiot’ mysteriously falls to his death from a window.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Kamala Harris team lied about Joe Rogan’s attempt to get her on his show. Of course they did. The whole campaign was built on lies and an attempt to install Harris in the White House without enduring any scrutiny from voters.
Speaking of which, remember when CBS swore up and down they didn’t deceptively edit the Kamala Harris video They lied.
Winning. “President Trump Signs Executive Order Barring Men from Women’s Sports.”
On Wednesday, National Girls and Women in Sports Day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order barring men from women’s sports through Title IX, withholding funding from universities that insist on allowing male athletes to encroach on women’s competition.
The order will also empower women who are forced to compete against men to sue their schools and directs the Department of Homeland Security to deny visa applications from foreign athletes who identify themselves as the opposite sex in order to compete in the U.S.
At the signing ceremony, Trump specifically cited the importance of protecting female athletes at the upcoming 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles and the World Cup.
“My administration will not stand by and watch men beat and batter female athletes. We’re just not going to let it happen,” Trump said.
J.K. Rowling had something to say about it as well:
Congratulations to every single person on the left who’s been campaigning to destroy women’s and girls’ rights. Without you, there’d be no images like this. pic.twitter.com/mzR7l5k1OW
Our vile media: “Newsweek runs puff piece on gender transition of man who held family hostage, raped them, and killed their kids.
More dictates from the Texas House Cabal: “Speaker Burrows Confirms House Rules Were Written by Democrat Lawyer. The new rules mandate that all House committee vice-chairs be Democrats and expand their authority.”
Follow-up: Charges against Aaron Dunn and Wallis Nader, two of the Lina Hidalgo’s aides indicted for vote rigging, have been been dismissed by the Texas Office of the Attorney General, and a third against Alex Triantaphyllis is expected to be dismissed as well, though it’s unclear why.
Democrats used election fraud and lawfare to strike down a glad-handing, dealmaking Trump the Grey who was treated with deep suspicion by the Republican establishment, and now he’s returned, more powerful than ever, as Trump the White with a unified GOP behind him, someone who has already unleashed a executive order blitzkrieg the likes of which the nation has never seen before. Trump now threatens the Democrats’ one-ring control of the federal bureaucracy, not to mention black and Hispanic voters, in a way previous Republican presidents never did. And Democrats have only themselves to blame for it, not only for their radical, shrieking TDS obstruction in his first term and their radical embrace of a deeply unpopular social justice agenda, but also their use of overreach in using so many executive orders to achieve their agenda. Now Trump has the blueprint and precedent to go after all their power centers. The scope and ferocity of Trump’s assault on a permanent leftwing deep state makes it seem less like The War of the Ring than The War of Wrath, in which the Valar returned to Middle Earth to finally settle Morgoth’s hash once and for all.
OK, I’ll stop making Tolkien analogies now.
Let’s just say that Trump’s first week back in the White House has unleashed a blizzard of winning, and I haven’t even remotely corralled all of it here.
In his final minutes as president, Joe Biden issued preemptive pardons to his two brothers, James and Francis, and his sister, Valerie, to protect them from what he predicts will be politically motivated attacks led by President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans.
“My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me—the worst kind of partisan politics,” Biden said in a statement. “Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end.”
Biden used his presidential power to pardon five members of his immediate family: James, his wife Sara, Valerie, her husband John Owens, and Francis. The outgoing president said the pardons “should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that they engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.”
James and Sara, in particular, were pardoned, presumably because James wrote Joe a $200,000 check on March 1, 2018 — the same day he received the funds from distressed rural hospital provider Americore.
In September 2017, James and his wife also sent his older brother a $40,000 check that used funds originating from a Chinese energy firm CEFC in addition to other transactions involving Joe that caught the attention of the Republican-led House Oversight and Judiciary Committees. Both checks were classified as loan repayments.
The other family members were pardoned to ensure they aren’t targeted by the incoming administration. The clemency act covers any nonviolent offenses they may have committed since January 1, 2014.
Like running an illegal pay-for-play graft mill for foreign governments. Which is what the Biden Crime Family did.
The federal government’s method of searching through information incidentally collected on U.S.-based individuals violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, a federal judge has ruled.
“To countenance this practice would convert Section 702 into precisely what Defendant has labeled it – a tool for law enforcement to run ‘backdoor searches’ that circumvent the Fourth Amendment,” U.S. District Judge LaShann Dearcy Hall said in the ruling, which was released on Jan. 21.
Government officials acquired information on the defendant, Agron Hasbajrami, a legal permanent resident who they arrested in 2011 and charged with providing material support to a terrorist organization. The information was gathered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which lets authorities spy on people.
After Hasbajrami pleaded guilty, authorities disclosed that some of the evidence they used in the case was the fruit of information they obtained without a warrant under a FISA supplement called Section 207, which enables authorities to conduct surveillance on non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States.
Donald Trump won the 2024 election in part because the Left’s hysterical style of attacking Trump no longer worked.
After a decade of this unhinged furor, it proved worthless in winning public support — and for two simple reasons.
One, after years of Russian collusion hoaxes, the laptop disinformation farce, and the warped lies about the “suckers” and “fine people on both sides” — the shrill Left became predictable.
So, the bored public began tuning them out, switching channels, hitting the mute button, and pulling the plug.
Like the deleterious effects of inflation that eventually render a currency worthless, nonstop hectoring, hysterics, pontification, and distortion finally made all such criticisms of Trump mostly as valueless as 1930s German marks.
Second, the wearied public never heard reasoned counterarguments from the likes of a Rachel Maddow. Instead, on spec, she kept mouthing, “The walls are closing in” on Trump.
Former President Joe Biden did not explain why his open border was a better idea than Trump’s closed one. He preferred mumbling about “semi-fascists!” and the “ultra-MAGA!”
The Never Trumpers did not critique the Trump deficits. Instead, they hammered away that Trump was Hitler, or Mussolini, or Putin — or just a dangerous dictator or autocrat.
Angry retired generals never demonstrated why Trump was, in their view, an existential threat to democracy. Instead, they shouted nonstop in op-eds and interviews that he was a fascist, Nazi-like, no different from the guards at Auschwitz, a pathological liar, and should be summarily removed.
Worn-out voters began to understand that these psychodramas were substitutes for substantive criticism or occasions for legitimate debate.
Indeed, the exhausted public finally concluded that the hysterics increased in direct proportion to the poverty of the charges.
So, what did 10 years of such derangement achieve for the Left?
Trump now has control of the White House and both houses of Congress operate under Republican majorities.
The Supreme Court is mostly conservative. Almost all of Trump’s issues — the border, immigration, the economy, foreign policy, and crime — poll well over 50 percent.
No matter, the Left is still hammering away at the trivial and irrelevant — and remains paralyzed in furor and hysterics.
Former Okaland mayor Sheng Thao was “indicted [last] Friday. Also indicted: Andre Jones, who the NYT describes as her ‘boyfriend,’ David Trung Duong, and Andy Hung Duong. David Duong is the head of a local waste management company, and Andy is his son.”
“Starbucks Lost $25 Million Lawsuit Because They Fired An Employee For Being White.” Good. Don’t be racist and don’t violate anti-discrimination laws. It’s not rocket science.
Left UK Guardian newspaper staffers: We’re striking for better wages! Guardian management: Enjoy being replaced by AI.
And another huge Russian oil facility goes up in a giant fireball, this one in Ryazan, some 476 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.
Biden: Stop attacking American ships. Houthis: LOL. Trump: Stop attacking American ships…or else. Houthis: “Yes, Mr. President. Please don’t kill us.”
“West Texas Teacher, Coach Charged With Continuous Sexual Assault of a Child. Justin Esquell is accused of sexually abusing a victim for four years, starting when the child was under the age of 14.”
This could be a very big story. “Trump Announces Tech Companies Will Invest $500 Billion in AI Infrastructure.”
President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a joint venture between three large tech companies to invest as much as $500 billion into building out U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The joint venture, known as Stargate, involves Oracle, Open AI, and Softbank and will see the companies join together to build out American data centers to power artificial intelligence systems, including ChatGPT. Stargate, which could cost up to $500 billion over a four-year period, will begin with a data center in Texas, a state friendly to crypto and other parts of the tech industry.
The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners. The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements.
That’s a lot of heavy hitters, but some of them (I’m looking at you Microsoft) have embraced wokeness. Hopefully their AI project won’t be infected with it.
If they need a technical writer, I know one who’s going to be available soon… (Update: I’m hearing it will be built out in Abilene.)
An end to flag madness. “State Department implements “one flag policy,” meaning no more Pride or BLM flags flown at U.S. facilities.”
CNN laid off 210 people or about 6% of it’s staff of 3,500. That still seems an unsustainably high staff for a network that averages less than a million viewers. Indeed, it’s something like 286 viewers per staffer. What advertisers are willing to pay money to reach so few people?
The Biden economy is still sucking, the arsonist who helped set LA ablaze was (of course!) an illegal alien, a Tik-Tok triptych, Dan Patrick announces a staggering warchest, WaPo walloped, Stacey Abrams is busted, and Americans are told “no thanks” by Chinese RedNote users.
The bad news for American workers doesn’t end there. “1 in 5 postings on Greenhouse are ‘ghost jobs.'”
There were many reasons why they did it. Some did it for the same reason Biden’s administration did: To make their company look like it was doing better than it was. Some post them just in case there is a unicorn out there with magical qualifications.
But the most frustrating reason was the final one:
Some hiring managers even admitted they post fake jobs to keep their own employees on their toes, saying they want workers to feel ‘replaceable’ so they will work harder.
“LA County Arson Suspect is Illegal Immigrant Repeat Offender Protected By California’s Sanctuary State Policies.” Because of course he is. “The suspect, Juan Manuel Sierra-Leyva, is a Mexican national who has already been convicted of multiple crimes, but because California is a sanctuary state, he is unlikely to be deported, the New York Post reported.”
Just days after reports that she’d planned to can her fire chief, Kristin Crowley, after she publicly criticized the level of funding she’d received from the city, Bass is facing intense criticism yet again from a memo up on a city website, which shows that just months ago, the chief practically begged city hall to stop its budget-cutting spree on fire response.
The memo, which was dated Nov. 18, was written to the fire commissioners, according to the Washington Free Beacon. That’s a five-person board appointed by Bass.
In Crowley’s memo, she urged the commissioners to let Bass and the city council know how dire the situation was.
“In many ways, the current staffing, deployment model, and size of the LAFD have not changed since the 1960s,” Crowley wrote.
A federal judge in Texas has found that American Airlines violated both federal law and their fiduciary duty to their employees by using the company’s 401(k) plan to push ESG. Let a thousand lawsuits bloom.
Texas Republican Lt. Governor Dan Patrick is loaded for bear. “Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick posted ‘over $33.5 million’ cash-on-hand for his re-election campaign in 2026.”
Ron DeSantis continues to drive the enemy before him and hear the lamentations of their women. “United Teachers of Dade, Florida’s largest teachers union, failed to meet the requirements of a new state law that requires at least 60% of union members pay dues.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Keir Starmer’s Labour government has been trying to give away the Chagos Islands, despite them being the home to vital U.S. military base Diego Garcia. Fortunately, someone has slammed the breaks on the deal until Trump is in office.
Big drone attack from Ukraine against Russia, with reportedly over 200 drones used.
“WaPo’s Pulitzer-winning cartoonist, who portrays Republicans as groomers and predators, arrested for possession of child porn. Washington Post cartoonist Darrin Bell arrested for possession of child pornography.”
But it’s not all bad news for Bezos! TDS sufferer Jennifer Rubin quit.
Remember Stacey Abrams, the black female Georgian Beto? The mediocrity whose fawning media profiles never turned into actual election victories? Well, “Stacey Abrams Group Hit with Largest Fine in Georgia History for Violating Campaign Finance Law.”
A Democratic advocacy group founded by former Representative Stacey Abrams and once led by Senator Raphael Warnock were fined $300,000 on Wednesday for breaking Georgia’s campaign finance law.
Georgia’s ethics commission found that the New Georgia Project and its affiliated action fund raised $4.2 million and spent $3.2 million to support Abrams during the 2018 election cycle when she ran for governor. The groups failed to disclose those partisan contributions in violation of state campaign finance law. Abrams ultimately lost to Republican Brian Kemp, who defeated her again in 2022.
The two entities agreed to pay a $300,000 penalty, the largest fine in the commission’s 38-year history, in two $150,000 installments for 16 instances of illegal activity. The punishment is aimed at the groups, not Abrams and Warnock directly.
The New Georgia Project failed to register as an independent campaign committee and failed to file campaign finance reports of contributions and spending in 2018, showing their support for Abrams and other Democratic candidates.
In 2019, the groups committed the same offense without disclosing $646,000 in contributions and $174,000 in spending to support a voter referendum for Gwinnett County’s citizens to join the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority system. Despite the nonprofit’s efforts, voters rejected the referendum.
Just like Beto…
You didn’t expect Ken Paxton to let Biden leave office without one last lawsuit. “Texas Sues Biden Administration Over ‘Unlawful’ Methane Tax. Along with 22 other states, Texas is seeking to bar the final rule from taking effect on January 17.”
Turns out Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin didn’t bother to tell the chain of command that he was having major surgery. Or that he was hopped up on goofballs afterwards…
Not the Bee: “Asked what he’ll talk about at Mar-a-Lago, John Fetterman says, “I demand that I need to be made Pope of Greenland.” Fetterman seems to be the rare Democrat with a sense of humor…
In December 2023, Levan Azrumelashvili bought a Cadillac EV Lyriq, an all-electric vehicle that cost nearly $86,000. It would be the heart of his brand-new limousine business.
He invested in livery plates and limousine insurance, which is more costly than insurance for a personal car.
The Fair Lawn man’s new venture was off to a solid start. But in April, he had what appeared to be a relatively minor accident — Azrumelashvili said his insurance company agreed it was not his fault — but the damage was more than cosmetic.
The car couldn’t be driven.
And now, nine months later — that’s 279 days as of Sunday since the accident — the vehicle remains at the body shop. Cadillac and its parent company General Motors (GM) haven’t been able to get one of the parts needed for the repairs — a bumper — despite multiple promises.
“At this point, my business is destroyed, I have not been able to drive my limousine for nine months, and I am told by GM that they can’t get my parts, yet they continue to build the cars, which obviously contain the parts my car needs,” Azrumelashvili said, noting that he’s still paying $1,100 a month for insurance and $1,437 a month on the vehicle loan.
“It seems unconscionable that a company would sell cars for which they cannot get parts within the first year,” he said.
His $86K car was his lifeblood. He’s been waiting to get a part for 275 days. Why?
After the accident, Azrumelashvili took the car to a Cadillac dealer, which sent it to a body shop, where it’s been sitting all this time.
At first, he said, he was patient.
“For the first five months, I received phone calls from the dealer just about weekly, saying that the needed part would arrive in about a month,” Azrumelashvili said.
Then he received an email on Aug. 19 that said the part would arrive in October.
Frustrated, his wife posted what was happening on social media, and it got the attention of a representative from GM’s “Executive Resolution Department.”
Azrumelashvili said the representative recommended he go to the dealer to discuss getting a replacement vehicle.
“The dealer said that in order to get a replacement car, I would have to give them a new, additional down payment,” Azrumelashvili said he was told at the September visit. “They did not offer me any compensation for the car they could not fix and were holding.”
Unsatisfied, he wrote his first of two letters to Mary Barra, GM’s chief executive, and several other higher-ups at the company. He asked for some kind of resolution.
Because that’s just the kind of hairball I am, I plugged Mary Barra’s name into Open Secrets, expecting that (like most CEOs) she would have donated to both Democrats and Republicans. And she has. But one of the first names to pop-up was Joe Straus (or the cabal), who she gave $1,000 to in 2016. Funny that, a Michigan CEO giving a grand to a Texas state rep (and, not coincidentally, then Speaker of the Texas House).
“Given all of this, your company is costing me well over $10,000 a month, and that is a low estimation, given the money I usually make, not even mentioning the depreciation of the car or the loss of time,” the letter said. “My limousine certification needs to be renewed every year, and I cannot provide `Black Car’ services with a vehicle older than five years. I have already lost half a year.”
In early October, the promised part didn’t arrive, but he received a check from GM for $3,593.47. The unsigned letter said it was a “good will adjustment.”
“I did not cash it, as it was a ridiculous offer after six months of losses, with no end in sight,” he said, and he called his contact at GM.
The representative explained the check represented half of his monthly car payment, and Azrumelashvili could choose between continuing to get monthly payments or asking GM’s “repurchase department” to buy back the vehicle.
“But he had no information about how I could reach such a person or department — except to contact the dealer,” he said.
That wouldn’t help, Azrumelashvili said he explained, because the dealer already said it wanted a new down payment.
Come December, instead of the part, Azrumelashvili received a baffling message. He had apparently been approved by GM for a buyback back on Sept. 3 — though he was never before told he was approved or given details or a contact person — but the offer was inexplicably rescinded on Nov. 14.
“It is my hope that GM will take back this car and reimburse me for my total losses, including all car payments, livery insurance payments and lost income,” he said.
Snip.
We reviewed Azrumelashvili’s paperwork and asked General Motors to review the case. A spokeswoman said GM was “aware of the situation and will continue to work with the customer directly.”
Then Azrumelashvili received an ironic email from Cadillac.
It congratulated him on a year of ownership for the Lyriq.
That was followed by a call from GM. A representative said they had the part.
“I told her right away that I obviously don’t believe this or can’t even tell if they’re being authentic or not after all I’ve faced,” he said. “I told her I wanted them to offer a buyback service and she told me she had to check something.”
A few days later, Azrumelashvili received an email from GM saying there were no new updates about the repair, but it would stay in touch with the dealer.
A few days after that, he called the dealer.
“I got information that GM is pushing that they can fix the car as soon as possible, but I was told the part was recalled,” he said.
We asked GM about it on Dec. 20. A spokeswoman said she couldn’t “speak to the recall” but she got confirmation that the part arrived.
A few days after that, Azrumelashvili received yet another message from GM. Once again, it said there were no new updates and the body shop told him it was waiting for parts.
After the holidays, we asked GM if it would reconsider the buyback, or something to make it right for this customer if the part was not available.
The company did not respond.
“I’m at a sheer loss situation and my car has lost a year of its value. I was unable to work and provide for my family this year and we faced many hardships,” Azrumelashvili said. “Ultimately, I’m very disappointed I chose Cadillac to only face what I did. I feel as if I was taken advantage of and thrown to the curb.”
Now, it’s tempting to think this is yet another result of the Flu Manchu supply chain disruption. And it might be. But something else is at play here: The drive to make new cars “smarter” (and thus more expensive). The Lyriq uses “multiple ultrasonic sensors located on your front and rear bumpers.” The more smart components the car has, the more fragile the supply chain and the easier to break.
But even beyond that, the shifting kaleidoscope of excuses indicates a company that’s either badly dropped the ball on customer service, or is simply lying its ass off for reasons not readily apparent.
And really, it’s yet another reason why you should be extra cautious when buying an electric car…
Trump is sentenced to nothing, Los Angeles burns, the Rotherham scandal boils, Biden flips off the nation (twice) before leaving office, Trudeau to go, and Germany starts disarming people who disagree with the government. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
President Joe Biden will ban new offshore oil and gas drilling in more than 625 million acres of federal waters, the White House announced Monday, striking a final blow against domestic energy production just two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
The outgoing president is set to use his authority under the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect offshore areas along the East Coast, West Coast, eastern Gulf of Mexico, and additional portions of the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska from future oil and gas leasing.
Snip.
The move comes on the same day that Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris is set to be certified by Congress. Trump has vowed to increase oil and gas production on a simple three-word energy policy: “Drill, baby, drill.” Biden’s latest action, however, poses an obstacle to the incoming president’s energy plans.
Asked about the ban during a Monday radio interview, Trump told host Hugh Hewitt he would “unban it immediately.”
Established 72 years ago, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act governs energy leasing activities in submerged lands under U.S. jurisdiction that extend three miles beyond the shoreline. An open-ended provision in federal law gives a president the authority to permanently withdraw portions of the Outer Continental Shelf without providing a way for a succeeding president to reverse course.
Therefore, the solution may not be as simple as Trump signing an executive order on his first day in office to undo the action. Congress would need to take legislative action. Or if Trump decides to revoke Biden’s withdrawal, that action may prompt legal challenges.
Democrats seem bound and determined to keep Americas broke for the sake of their environmental virtue signaling.
Those 34 hush money “felonies” were so serious that President Trump was sentenced to serve no jail time.
LA wildfire toll: “10 Dead, 10,000 Structures Burned In Los Angeles Area Inferno As Fire Damage Could Exceed $150 Billion.”
During the fire, hydrants ran out of water because nobody in the Democrat-dominated state could be bothered to fill the reservoir.
How badly does Los Angeles Democratic mayor Karen Bass suck? Just look at this timeline. She thought it was more important to jet off the Ghana than stay around when LA was faced with wildfire weather.
It gets better: A man apprehended setting fires with a blowtorch around LAwon’t be charged with arson. Because I guess burning people’s homes is social justice or something.
Canadian Prime Minister and all-around tool Justin Trudeau is resigning, though not until his successor is chosen in general elections. Canadian citizens enjoyed rough per-capita GDP economic parity with U.S. citizens when he took office. Now? “The gap between the Canadian and American economies has now reached its widest point in nearly a century.” And workers in Canada earn less than workers in even the poorest U.S. states. Heck of a job, Justin!
After an Elon Musk tweet brought up the Rotherham child gang rape scandal again, Keir Starmer’s Labour government went into full denial mode.
Gangs of predominantly Pakistani men have been raping and torturing vulnerable underage girls over the past three decades, with several independent inquiries having indicated systemic failures to investigate the crimes (because it would be ‘racist’). Three separate reports, published in 2013, 2014 and 2015 revealed that local politicians and police covered up the rapes.
Of note, foreigners are three times as likely to be arrested for sex offenses vs. British citizens.
In response Elon Musk launched an attack on Starmer, accusing him of failing to properly investigate and prosecute the gangs, which he called a “state-sponsored evil,” and alleging that Starmer was “complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN.”
And as The Telegraph notes, the state “had to bury the story.”
Denial about the extent of the problem is rooted deep in Britain’s political system. At times, it appears that the government’s approach to multiculturalism is not to uphold the law, but instead to minimise the risk of unrest between communities. Confronted with gangs of predominantly Pakistani men targeting predominantly white children, the state knew exactly what to do. For the good of community relations, it had to bury the story.
In Rotherham, a senior police officer told a distressed father that the town “would erupt” if the routine abuse of white children by Pakistani heritage men became public knowledge. One parent concerned about a missing daughter was told by the police that an “older Asian boyfriend” was a “fashion accessory” for girls in the town. The father of a 15-year-old rape victim was told the assault might mean she would “learn her lesson”.
Islamist MP Naz Shah just stated outright that raped girls should “shut their mouths for the good of diversity.” Just as with Democrats and illegal aliens, a little child rape is considered a small price to pay for all that glorious multiculturalism…
So, British MPs have voted against making a national inquiry into grooming gangs, in a 364-111 vote.
Man, when the “ruling class” of public servants don’t want something discussed, they really let us know about it. Big shots in England, who have no problem discussing American issues of governance, and even were fine with some of their citizens coming over the pond to campaign during our last election, are really, really annoyed that Americans are beginning to talk about the “grooming gangs” (read rapist gangs) who have operated in Rotherham and elsewhere who have been doing their thing for years, and with seeming impunity.
They’re really very annoyed about the American intrusion, you know. So much so, some are saying if the Americans don’t shut up about it, England should come cold all over its relationship with the USA.
Well, that’s gobsmacking, isn’t? It’s basically saying, “Shut up, stop talking about all the raping we did nothing to address or nip in the bud, or we won’t be your friends, anymore. We’ll take our soccer ball and go home, we will!”
I shouldn’t be so surprised. I’ve seen, and noted, in the past that for some there are two classes of sexual abuse/rape victims. The justly and properly acknowledged victims of priests, ministers, rabbi’s and religious — anything that involves church-centered abuse) and then the abused and raped people whose victimhood appears to be a lesser ken: Non-minor vulnerable adults; victims of public school teachers and staff; victims in state-run facilities. And now, apparently, English girls.
Fortunately, here in the U.S., the rule of law still actually means something. “Federal Judge Blocks Biden Administration’s Title IX Rewrite Protecting ‘Gender Identity.’”
Meta is immediately ending its DEI programs days after enacting sweeping changes to promote free speech on its platforms ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Meta vice president of human resources Janelle Gale sent an internal memo Friday announcing the company’s decision to terminate its DEI programs, Axios first reported, making it the latest large corporation to put an end to progressive workplace initiatives.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed Axios’s reporting when NR asked for comment. NR has reached out for additional comment.
“The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing,” Gale said in the memo, echoing the justifications given by other companies in walking back DEI.
“The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI,” the memo adds.
“The term ‘DEI’ has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.”
Meta is getting rid of its DEI team and changing the role of chief diversity officer Maxine Williams. Additionally, Meta is ending its equity and inclusion programs, and its supplier diversity goals.
“We believe there are other ways to build an industry-leading workforce and leverage teams made up of world-class people from all types of backgrounds,” Gale said.
Likewise, Meta is abandoning its diversity hiring approach and its corporate representation goals to prevent the impression that the company is hiring solely based on demographic characteristics.
“It’s important to us that our products are accessible to all, and are useful in promoting economic growth and opportunity around the world. We continue to be focused on serving everyone, and building a multi-talented, industry-leading workforce from all walks of life,” the memo concludes.
Earlier this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company will be replacing its fact-checking program with a “community notes” style approach mimicking Elon Musk’s X. The “community notes” feature on X allows for crowdsourced fact checking and demonetizes posts that get slapped with a note for misleading information.
Zuckerberg conceded that the fact-checkers Meta partnered with following the 2016 election were too politically biased, a nod to a longstanding complaint among conservatives. Meta is also reducing its “content moderation” policies to allow for greater freedom of speech on Facebook and Threads on controversial topics such as immigration and gender ideology. On that note, Meta is bringing back its promotion of political posts and moving its content moderation teams to Texas to prevent political insulation.
Well, Austin, anyway…
In August, Zuckerberg admitted that Meta was wrong to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story and criticized the Biden administration for pressuring Facebook into suppressing certain content related to the Covid-19 pandemic. Online censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and skeptics of stringent Covid-19 policies was a priority for congressional Republicans in their investigations over the past two years.
He also went on Joe Rogan and added UFC head Dana White to Meta’s board. If Zuckerberg is a weather-vane, the MAGA winds must be very strong indeed…
Biden’s letting 11 terrorists out to fly to Oman because of course he is. All 11 are Yemanis. At least he’s not letting Khalid Sheikh Mohammad go. Yet…
Remember how in The Prisoner, one security device was a giant rolling ball? China evidently took inspiration from that, but there version is made out of metal.
Meanwhile, in Germany: “Saxony-Anhalt begins disarming AfD members. AfD members in many German states are stripped of many of their rights, including the right to privacy and lawful gun ownership.” You know, I get the feeling I’ve seen this movie before… (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
How car theft rings are stealing exotic cars by posing as legitimate car transport companies.
I don’t often cover New York sports teams or link to ESPN, but this story about how the “New York Football Giants” (to use Dwight’s preferred nomenclature) went 3-14 puts the fun in dysfunctional, including asking their starting cornerback to take a pay cut…right before a game.
Happy New Year! The Biden Administration is made of lies (which you already knew), a few links about guns, mysterious deaths in Tarrant County jails, Russian finds new, embarrassing ways to lose equipment, Hasbro destroys D&D’s legacy, and a look at biblical werewolves. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
One of Biden’s main legacies: Corrupting official government economic statistics:
Another 653,000 fake jobs revised away by govt statisticians. They were faking the data during 2023 and 2024 to try to boost Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
In the revisions, they have also admitted to 818,000 fake jobs being removed from the 2023 data.
A brand new investigation from the Wall Street Journal has revealed that scientists knew early on that the COVID-19 virus was an engineered virus that escaped a lab, but the information was suppressed by intelligence agencies and removed from all presidential briefings on the matter.
Three scientists from the National Center for Medical Intelligence, John Hardham, Robert Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien, had reported their findings that the virus was manipulated in a lab. They shared their findings with the FBI, but were soon told to stop.
In August of 2021, Biden was briefed on the origins of COVID-19 after a 90-day investigation from intelligence agencies. National Intelligence Director Avril Haines briefed the President and left out all research pointing to a lab leak from her briefing.
Sarah Hoyt has a pretty good plan moving forward: We win, they lose.
It’s going to take a long time for us to stop flinching and deciding we’re going to be betrayed. 2020 left scars in the collective psyche, and scars take a long time to fade if they ever do.
The last four years we were hunching our shoulders and just enduring the blows, and that will take a long long time to fade.
And sure, there are things that won’t go our way. But you shouldn’t worry too much about that.
Look, the edifice that supports the boot on our necks is not only rickety. It always was rickety.
Keeping the big lie of the all powerful centralized government in place was a full scale production, and it required a fully coordinated media, fully coordinated panels of “experts”, and a trusting public that believed all of it. Or at least a majority of the public that believed all of it.
It has been eroding for a while, since social media and blogs got really big in the wake of 9/11. Despite their best efforts at censorship, a massed multitude of — what did they call us? — hobbits is harder to control than a few journalists who want to be invited to the right parties.
Trump’s election in 2016 was the first time the media lost to the hobbits. Really lost, publicly. They didn’t like it. The hell the establishment has put us through since is their payback.
It came with unexpected consequences though. The main ones being: their masks were yanked off; and we don’t believe them anymore.
This is the sort of thing that not all the king’s horses and not all the king’s men can put together ever again.
Sure, we’ll “lose” some. Sure, they’re making cunning plans to thwart the will of the people.
But be not afraid. If we win even a few places, it’s enough for the whole edifice of oppression and lies to come tumbling down.
It has been tumbling down, already, even while they were nominally in power, which is why we won 2024.
Be not afraid. This is very important. The rest will fall into place, provided you keep your heads and remember you’re Americans.
Until a few years ago I was working as a mid-career research scientist, no I won’t tell you what field. Within my collaboration I was known for being extremely productive. I’ve seen jaws drop when I show colleagues my publication list.
Then it came time to start applying for junior professor positions.
Got a few interviews, but doors kept getting slammed in my face. It’s a very opaque process ofc, they never tell you why. In one case however I had the dean – a portly Hispanic woman – tell me two minutes into the interview that “women in STEM are very important to me”, and ultimately heard informally from one of the profs at that dept that I hadn’t been hired because of interference from the dean, despite all of the profs on the committee wanting me, and that instead they’d hired … no one.
One of the many controversial chunks of the short-term spending bill that sparked debate recently included funding for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center.
But what’s the problem? After all, who doesn’t like “Global Engagement”?!
Well, this agency — formed by Barack Obama — has been moonlighting as a censorship czar, handing out taxpayer dollars like candy to groups that spend their time suppressing conservative voices online.
(In other words, your average Obama administration government office.)
But after widespread backlash, the new version has no room for the Global Engagement Center.
Snip.
Reports from the Washington Examiner indicated that the GEC bankrolled groups like the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard, organizations that basically police speech with the finesse of a drunk mall cop. The Federalist and the Daily Wire even sued the GEC over its role in suppressing right-leaning voices.
Thanks to the new continuing resolution, the GEC finally met its own doom, with yet another scrap of Barack Obama’s legacy shuffling off into the sunset like Joe Biden’s last remaining marble.
Sounds like some companies are asking for a lawsuit:
Just got a dm from someone who works in recruiting at one of big tech companies. He said it's internal policy within the team he works for to reserve roles for what they call “outside talent”.
They are not allowed to recruit Americans for these roles but must go through the…
Suspicious. “North Texas Activist Is Latest to Die in Tarrant County Jail. Mason Yancy was the ninth person to die in Tarrant County Jail custody this year….Yancy was well known to grassroots activists in North Texas and across the state as an advocate for limited government and First and Second Amendment rights. He co-founded Open Carry Texas with activist-turned-attorney CJ Grisham.”
Anti-Chinese riots in Africa, following a disputed election in which Daniel Chapo of the ruling FRELIMO (socialist, formerly communist) party was declared the winner. Seems like the citizens of Mozambique aren’t big fans of Belt and Road…
Waterloo records in Austin is relocating under new ownership. “Caren Kelleher, founder and president of Gold Rush Vinyl, confirmed Thursday she and business partner Trey Watson (CEO of Armadillo Records) will be taking over Waterloo Records. The vinyl shop has operated in Austin for more than 40 years, including 35 years at its current location along West Sixth Street and North Lamar Boulevard.” I used to spend a fair amount of time searching their used CD bins, but I all but stopped going downtown during the “homeless camping” fiasco. (Hat tip: .)
Greetings, and welcome to the Friday LinkSwarm! This one will be huge, since I didn’t do one last week. Biden pardons his crackhead/bagman son, Holman is serious about deporting illegal aliens, Trump taps some Texans,
Did you hear that, after swearing up and down that he would never pardon his son Hunter Biden, Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter Biden? “Joe Biden’s pardon covers the time period from January 1, 2014 to December 1, 2024, relieving his son of any crimes he “may have committed or taken part in” over an 11 year period.” Wow, it’s almost like Joe was running a pay-for-play foreign influence peddling operation and Hunter was his bagman…
Not only is Donald Trump returning to the White House, not only do Republicans have 53 Senate seats and about 220 seats to control the House of Representatives, but Republicans now control almost 55 percent of state legislative seats nationwide. Republicans won control of the Michigan state house of representatives, and the Minnesota state house of representatives shifted from a 70–64 Democratic advantage to a 67–67 tie. (Rough year for Tim Walz all around.) Twenty-three states have Republican governors and GOP-controlled state legislatures, just 15 states have the Democratic equivalent, and twelve states have divided governments.
If the election of Trump came as a shock to Democrats, it is perhaps even more shocking that, at least for now, a solid majority of Americans are giving the incoming president the benefit of the doubt. The latest Economist/YouGov poll found 51 percent of Americans have a very or somewhat favorable opinion of Trump, the highest level going back at least as far as the start of his first term as president. For a long, long stretch, that number was around 40 percent.
This weekend a CBS News poll found that 59 percent of Americans approve of how Trump is handling the transition. Perhaps this figure reflects that Trump’s announced cabinet picks have something for everyone. For hawks, there’s Marco Rubio. For doves and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, there’s Tulsi Gabbard. For those who see the Covid vaccines as “a gift from God,” there’s the surgeon general nominee, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat. For those who hate vaccines and erroneously believe they cause autism, there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. For those who love dogs, there’s attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, who adopted a dog abandoned during Hurricane Katrina. For those who hate dogs, there’s Kristi Noem.
That CBS poll also found that “there seems to be a sense of exhaustion, as fewer than half of Democrats feel motivated to oppose Trump right now.” And who can begrudge Democrats exhaustion after an election cycle that arguably started a week after the midterm elections? Saul Alinsky warned in Rules for Radicals, “A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.”
Evidently nine years of Trump Derangement Syndrome can be exhausting…
You’re in the country illegally, you’re not off the table. I mean we’ve been looking for fugitives. There’s over a million illegal aliens in this country who got due process at great taxpayer expense, were ordered removed by a judge, and failed to leave.
We’ll be moving on to those who may not be a criminal, may not be a fugitive, but they entered this country illegally, which is a crime. And they’re here illegally and they’re not off the table.
Denver mayor Mayor Mike Johnston says he’s going to resist the enforcement of immigration law in his city. Homan: Get ready to go to jail.
Speaking of people who should be going to jail for blocking immigration enforcement: “California Allegedly Threatens Police Officers Over Deportation Compliance. CA mayor: The State of California “is threatening to take pensions and charge police officers with felonies if they comply with federal deportation laws.”
Bill Wells, the mayor of El Cajon, California, claimed in a Monday post on X that the State of California “is threatening to take pensions and charge police officers with felonies if they comply with federal deportation laws. While the Trump administration is working to enforce immigration laws, California seems intent on blocking these efforts.”
Wells makes it clear that El Cajon, a city of approximately 100,000 people located 17 miles east of San Diego, is not a sanctuary city and that his police officers “are being put in an impossible position.”
Maybe Homan can start preparing an indictment against Gavin Newsom.
It’s insulting when members of the working class, which the Democratic Party has lost entirely in our lifetimes, to insist the economy is doing great. A 12-pack of Bounty is $40. Rich folks don’t feel that…
I think telling them that the Nasdaq is gangbusters is further insulting. It’s insulting, the biggest unforced error of the Biden administration, by far, was the border. To tell people that it’s not a problem is insulting. For the working class to see incoming migrants getting welcome bags, debit cards, and motel rooms is probably insulting as well …
They handed out camo hats that said ‘Harris-Walz’ the Democrats were kind of charmed by that. Their party has gone quinoa and the rest of America is eating at Cracker Barrel … it was an ironic use of something that millions of Americans put on their heads to start their day every day.
Harvard University’s celebrated pollster John Della Volpe has a message for the new leader of the Democratic Party: Move fast with proven solutions for voters who are hurting, or the party is doomed.
“Millions of Americans aren’t shifting right — they’re walking away. They’re abandoning a Democratic Party and democratic system they believe abandoned them first. This isn’t realignment — it’s abandonment,” the pollster known for his surveys of the youth vote said.
In a memo to the incoming leader of the Democratic National Committee posted on his Substack, “JDV on Gen Z,” Della Volpe was blunt in his assessment of the nation and the 2024 election. The bottom line for the Democrats, he said, is that it needs a massive reinvention and focus on kitchen-table issues and less on wokeness.
“This post-election analysis should not start with the question about moving left or right. It must begin by filling the vacuum of unaddressed daily struggles before it gets filled with something else. The typical response will be to fill that vacuum with new policies, messages, or words. But that’s precisely backward. Before we can talk about solutions, we need to rebuild trust. Before we can restore trust, we need to listen. Really listen,” he wrote.
Corporate media outlets have buried, downplayed, or otherwise shelved a new study which reveals that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) policies cause people to become ‘hostile’ – essentially seeing racism where none exists.
The new study from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and Rutgers University found that people exposed to DEI talking points about race, religion and gender form integroup hostility and authoritarian attitudes towards others.
“What we did was we took a lot of these ideas that were found to still be very prominent in a lot of these DEI lectures and interventions and training,” said NCRI Chief Science Officer Joel Finkelstein, a co-author of the study. “And we said, ‘Well, how is this going to affect people?’ What we found is that when people are exposed to this ideology, what happens is they become hostile without any indication that anything racist has happened.”
Researchers exposed 324 participants to two sets of reading material; a racially-neutral text about corn, or the writings of race-baiters Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DiAngelo. The participants were then exposed to a racially neutral scenario in which a student was rejected from college.
President Donald Trump’s return to power earlier this month was remarkable—among other reasons—for the breadth of the coalition that powered it. As Armin Rosen has documented for Tablet, by many measures Jews swung toward Trump, particularly in pivotal precincts. But they were just part of a minority-group wave: Exit polling and precinct analysis suggest large increases in the Black, Hispanic, and Asian vote for Trump.
Although Trump did not win outright majorities of any of these groups, Harris’ underperformance still marks a remarkable shift. The president slandered as a racist and antisemite outperformed prior Republicans among minorities of all types: Why?
One easy answer, of course, is the uniform rightward swing of the electorate, fueled by anger over inflation, an uncontrolled border, and Harris’ barely hidden far-left views. And future elections will probably see some bounce back.
But this argument misses the longer trend: Minority voters, once Democratic stalwarts, have been inching toward the GOP for decades. As the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch has showed, the GOP share of the nonwhite vote has been rising on and off since the 2000s. That mirrors trends among Jews: Over the past several elections, the Democratic share of the Jewish vote has shrunk, from around 80% in the 1990s and 2000s to around 70% in the 2010s and 2020s.
As the Jewish demographer Milton Himmelfarb famously wrote, Jews earn like Episcopalians, but vote like Puerto Ricans. If Puerto Ricans and Jews are both moving right, though, then maybe they’re moving right for similar reasons. Explanations that rely on Democratic antisemitism or affection for socialism are special pleading. The neater explanation is that the same social forces are pushing Black, Hispanic, Jewish, and other minority voters toward the Republicans.
Why are minority groups moving right? As a body of political science argues, the answer is the breakdown of the social institutions that kept them voting for group over ideology. Among Jews, a similar, albeit reversed, phenomenon might be happening: The collapse of Jewish communal life might be giving Jews permission to break from the old ideological consensus.
If that’s true, though, it has profound implications for the political future—of the Jews and everyone else.
In a sense, the question is not why minority voters are moving right, but why they have stayed left for so long. After all, Black and Hispanic Democrats are more moderate ideologically than their white Democrat peers. And the ideological gap between white and nonwhite Democrats has only grown in recent years—implying Black and Hispanic voters should be more willing to swing between parties. Yet in 2020, for example, 60% of Black voters who identified as conservative voted for Joe Biden, compared to 9% of white conservatives. Why?
The conventional explanation for this phenomenon is what political scientists call “linked fate,” the tendency of group members to see their individual well-being as linked to the overall well-being of the group, and so to consider group interest in making electoral decisions. Even if a Hispanic voter would prefer conservative policies, for example, she may still vote for the Democrats under the theory that Hispanic group interest is served by doing so. Such thinking is most common among Black Americans, but has been shown to explain Latino voting behavior as well.
The sense of linked fate, though, is in part socially constructed. Minority voters don’t consider their fates to be linked in a vacuum—they reach that conclusion thanks, in part, to the work of social institutions. In their recent book Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior, political scientists Ismail White and Chryl Laird look specifically at Black political identification, including with the Democratic Party. They argue that Blacks’ lopsided support for Democrats is driven by social pressure from the broader Black community.
“The steady reality that Black Americans’ kinship and social networks tend to be populated by other Blacks,” White and Laird write, “means they persistently anticipate social costs for failing to choose Democratic politics and social benefits for compliance with these group expectations.” They show in survey evidence and experiments that Black voters change their behavior when around other Black people—a proxy for the effect of social pressure in general. This “social constraint” strategy helps ensure that Black voters vote their racial identity, even when doing so is apparently at odds with their ideology.
Though it may sound unusual, this is a perfectly rational political strategy for minority groups in a large, pluralistic democracy. Being able to deliver lopsided group margins is one way a minority group’s leaders can curry favor with a party. Indeed, White and Laird identify tendencies toward social constraint among “Southern whites, white evangelical Christians, trade union members, and certain localized racial and ethnic groups.” Social constraint is not necessarily an exception—to the extent that any group has its own political interests, it has a reason to suppress dissent in the ranks.
Can the “social constraint” model explain Jewish voting patterns? As I’ve argued previously, one way to understand Jews’ strong support of Democrats is our unusually strong ideological commitments. Since at least the 19th century, Jews in America have been more left wing than the general public. And they associate those values with their identity. When asked by Pew what things were most essential to being Jewish, a majority of respondents listed “working for justice/equality” as a key component of their identity, with an even larger majority among the non-Orthodox.
But ideology, like partisanship, can be socially constructed. Jews have a strong sense of in-group identity, with 85% saying they have “a great deal” or “some” sense of belonging to the Jewish people. Most Jews have at least some close friends who are Jewish; 29% say all or most of their close friends are Jewish. And Jews are highly concentrated geographically, with roughly half of American Jews living in the New York, Los Angeles, Miami, or Philadelphia metropolitan areas alone.
Collectively, those facts suggest that—like Blacks, and other ethnic minorities—Jews’ “kinship and social networks tend be populated by” other Jews. Even in the non-Orthodox world, a Jewish person’s interactions with both fellow Jews and Jewish institutions may serve to reinforce his ideological commitments. After all, what right-leaning Jew has not been once or twice told his views are a shanda?
If social pressures produce in-group conformity among minority voters, then it stands to reason that they produce ideological conformity among Jews, too. But what happens to that conformity when the social pressures start to break down?
If you wanted to pack the history of the 21st century thus far into a single sentence, you could do worse than “20th-century social institutions collapsed.” As political scientist Robert Putnam has repeatedly argued, Americans have seen a steady decline in “social capital,” the network of interpersonal relationships that provide them informal means of individual security and advancement. The families, churches, and community groups which sustained that capital are in more or less continuous decline. That decline, though, has meant not just a reduction in the available stock of social capital, but also in those institutions’ ability to shape behavior—in their ability to impose social constraint.
Decades of unwillingness to enforce immigration laws were driven by the desire of some for cheap, controllable labor, and of others for a new client class that would shift political power to the Democratic Party. The culmination of that process under Biden became entwined with the identity of the party and its ideological activists who sincerely believe that national borders are an expression of racism and that turning away foreigners who want to move here illegally is immoral. The belief in unlimited, lawless immigration has become a litmus-test issue for the activist left, like hostility to the existence of law enforcement itself.
And because most voters naturally consider that insane, we now see broad public support, including among first-generation migrants, for “mass deportation” and an electoral mandate for what the president-elect has promised will be the “largest deportation effort in American history.”
Restoring credibility after decades of deceit will take time, cost money, get tied up in courts, and inevitably involve an unfortunate measure of human suffering, the images of which will be ruthlessly exploited for political purposes by the media and the interests they serve. But it’s neither the Manhattan Project nor the D-Day landings—it’s simply a matter of enforcing existing law consistently and without apology, which is the legal and popular mandate the American people have given the incoming administration.
Herewith a look at what’s likely to be involved.
When your tub is overflowing, you first turn off the tap. Mass impunity at the border will be the first thing to stop, because there’s no point to deporting people if it’s easy for them to return.
What drove the crisis under Biden was a policy of catch-and-release—millions of border-jumpers were simply waved into the country by a Border Patrol that the current administration turned into the equivalent of Walmart greeters. The illegal migrants told their friends back home, and more came. Human-trafficking cartels turned it into a massive business.
There are two ways to end catch-and-release: 1) detain illegal border-crossers until they can be repatriated, or 2) if they make an asylum claim, ensure that they wait across the border in Mexico for their court dates.
Option 1 will require a significant increase in spending and logistical assistance from the U.S. military. The Biden administration has consistently reduced DHS’s detention capacity, closing government-owned facilities and canceling contracts with private firms and county jails. That pattern will have to be reversed.
Option 2 is cheaper and easier, but requires Mexico’s consent, because the country has no obligation to take back non-Mexican migrants, which account for the majority of attempted crossings. In late 2018, this option was instituted as the “Migrant Protection Protocols” (commonly known as “Remain in Mexico”); Mexico went along with it after President Trump threatened punishing tariffs on its exports to the U.S.
It was successful almost overnight. In January 2021, Biden canceled the program.
Despite the fact that Mexico’s new president is more of a conventional leftist than her predecessor, she is likely to be cooperative with the new Trump administration’s demands to restore Remain in Mexico, given that the U.S.-Mexico trade agreement is up for review in 2026. Access to the U.S. market is far more important to Mexico than any rhetorical solidarity with foreigners using its territory as a means of entering the U.S.
These and other measures (such as “safe third country” agreements requiring migrants to have applied for asylum in one of the countries they passed through before reaching the U.S. border) will succeed in stabilizing the border. But what about those already here? Sending back people who’ve just recently snuck across the border is one thing, but finding and removing those already in the interior is something else altogether.
The Biden administration has released into the country close to 6 million foreigners with no legal right to enter, and another 2 million are believed to have eluded the overwhelmed Border Patrol, the so-called gotaways.
They join a large illegal population already here, though because of constant churn in the illegal population (people returning home, dying, or obtaining a green card), these numbers can’t simply be added to prior estimates. Census Bureau data suggests there are now at least 14 million total illegal aliens—given the imprecision of such estimates, the real number could easily be 15 or 16 million, though higher numbers bandied about by some Republican politicians of 30 or 40 million are implausible.
The opponents of immigration enforcement want to make this seem like an insuperable problem. The American Immigration Council, the think tank of the immigration lawyers’ lobby, has estimated it would cost close to a trillion dollars over a decade to return the illegal population to their home countries.
Vice President-elect Vance addressed this counsel of resignation and surrender by likening the problem to “a really big sandwich. It’s 10 times the size of your mouth. How are you possibly going to eat the whole thing?”
His answer:
you take the first bite and then you take the second bite, and then you take the third bite. Let’s start with the first million who are the most violent criminals, who are the most aggressive. Get them out of here. First prioritize them, and then you see where you are, and you keep on taking bites of the problem, until you get illegal immigration to a serviceable point.
Starting the deportation effort by focusing on criminals is both politically astute and simplest to manage. The Biden administration has reduced deportations of criminals by 67% compared to Trump I, so there’s nowhere to go but up. Criminal aliens are picked up every day by police in the normal course of their duties for all manner of nonimmigration crimes. Taking them off the hands of local law enforcement—either as an alternative to prosecution or after they’ve completed their sentences—is a no-brainer.
Read the whole thing. The people who say it’s impossible are simply lying because they don’t want it done.
“California’s fast food industry shed more than 6,000 jobs after Democratic lawmakers passed a bill mandating a $20 minimum wage for most fast food and counter service restaurants in the state.”
President-elect Donald Trump has begun to fill out his cabinet with new names coming each week, and two recent nominations have strong ties to Texas.
Nominated to be Secretary of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Trump has tapped former member of the Texas Legislature, Scott Turner.
Turner served as a member of the Texas House from 2013 to 2017 — he challenged then-House Speaker Joe Straus, but ultimately lost his run for the gavel.
Trump in his first administration appointed Turner to head the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council.
The 2025 President’s Budget has requested $72.6 billion for HUD and $185 billion over 10 years for “affordable housing investments.”
Another recent Texan to be nominated for the upcoming Trump cabinet is President and CEO of America First Policy Institute Brooke Rollins.
A native of Glen Rose, Rollins has been chosen as the nominee to become the next Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
“Brooke’s commitment to support the American Farmer, defense of American Food Self-Sufficiency, and the restoration of Agriculture-dependent American Small Towns is second to none,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial.
Rollins held previous positions in the first Trump administration, as well as being president of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
I like Turner’s starch in running against Straus, and Rollins helped turn TPPF into a think tank power house, so both seem like good picks for Trump. And you’ve got to balance out all the Floridians somehow…
Democrat megadonor John Morgan says Kamala was clueless and thought she was Obama. Plus: Barron Trump is smarter than Kamala’s entire team, because he urged his father to go on Joe Rogan.
Meanwhile, Russia abandoned its Tartus Naval base and its Khmeimim airbase in Syria.
And now Syrian rebels are on the outskirts of Homs, the last big city before Damascus itself. If they take it, it will essentially split Assad-controlled Syria into two parts.
Imagine there’s a link here to the Biden Administration strong-arming Israel into a ceasefire with Hezbollah, only for Hezbollah to start breaking the treaty in, what, an hour?
Russia’s been reduced to using Ladas to attack Ukrainian positions. For those unfamiliar with the name, that’s a brand of Soviet/Russian automobiles. So no armor and precious little reliability…
Dade Phelan bows out of the Texas House Speaker’s race. This was after he lost another House ally ahead of Saturday’s GOP caucus speaker vote. State Rep. Trent Ashby announced he was supporting State Rep. David Cook’s bid. “These endorsements bring Cook’s total public commitments to 48, giving him a majority within the 88-member Republican caucus.”
Sex trafficking busts in Montgomery county (immediately north of Harris County).
Montgomery County Constable Ryan Gable announced that a three-day operation this month resulted in numerous arrests associated with prostitution, child trafficking, and drug offenses.
The constable’s office collaborated with the Houston Police Department and received support from the Human Trafficking Rescue Alliance (HTRA) and the Houston Metro Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force to successfully carry out this operation.
During a Friday morning press conference, Gable explained working with ICAC was essential, as the internet has become a major platform for those who exploit children and traffic victims for sexual purposes. The partnership between HTRA and ICAC investigations enabled the use of digital forensics and online tracking to uncover trafficking networks. The three-day investigation, dubbed Operation Safe Haven, resulted in numerous arrests and the recovery of one victim.
The operation’s results include:
Seven arrests for prostitution.
Three arrests for promotion of prostitution.
Four arrests for online solicitation of a minor (including the capture of a registered sex offender).
One arrest for child trafficking.
One arrest for unlawful possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
One arrest for evading law enforcement.
One arrest for possession of a prohibited weapon.
Two arrests related to drug offenses.
One juvenile recovered.
“An illegal alien from Guatemala has been arrested in Massachusetts and charged with raping a child. Mynor Stiven De Paz-Munoz, 21, entered the country illegally in the Eagle Pass area in September 2020. He was arrested in Boston by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this month.”
“California assistant principal charged with molesting 8 elementary school children….David Lane Braff Jr., 42, was charged Friday with 17 counts of “lewd acts” on children under the age of 14. The alleged abuse occurred between 2015 and 2019 while Braff was employed as a counselor at McKevett Elementary School in Santa Paula. At the time of his arrest, Braff was serving as an assistant principal at Ingenium Charter Middle School in Los Angeles.”
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. “‘Defund The Police’ Activist Charged With Misusing Over $75,000 Donations On Vacations & Shopping Sprees…”Brandon Anderson misused charitable donations to fund lavish vacations and shopping sprees, and the Raheem AI board of directors let him get away with it.”
Progress: “Southwest Airlines Agrees To End DEI Employment Practices In Response To Lawsuit.”
Nothing of value was lost obit: Liberian rebel Prince Johnson, who (among other atrocities) cut off Samuel Doe’s ears, cooked them, and then served them to Doe. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
While other companies are running away from wokeness, Geico (which used to be a refuge from Progressive’s leftism) is forcing it down employees throats.
SCOOP: Employees at @Geico are being forced to complete mandatory training courses instructing them to provide their pronouns when engaging with customers and how to deal with being misgendered.
Yet another company pushing gender ideology nonsense. We the people want this… pic.twitter.com/rkBj7lJc63
It seems that trying to Bud Light their brand was just the beginning of Jaguar’s brand suicide. For a couple of weeks, images have been floating around online showing some hideous pink monstrosity that was dismissed as merely concept art. Alas, it seems to be all too real.
It like a giant pink dildo had sex with the Batmobile from Batman: The Animated Series. It’s so gay that Elton John would tell them to tone it down. There’s no rear window or side mirrors (which will likely make the car illegal in most states).
This vehicular Pink Panther is falling flat on its face.
Jaguar’s alleged attempts to woo Generation Z with a Barbie-pink electric vehicle backfired spectacularly after Zoomers dubbed the luxury UK automaker’s creation “cheap” and compared it to a “pink Batmobile.”
Pictures of new Jaguar Type 00 concept, dubbed the Design Vision Concept, had leaked online ahead of its official release at Miami Art Week this week, the Telegraph reported.
Per the photos, the $126,519.50 vehicle featured a giant bonnet, slatted rectangular grills and no rear window while the leaping Jaguar logo has vanished from both ends, taking a back seat to a divisive, new round logo, the Daily Mail reported.
Jaguar had a great logo, and now they’re throwing it away in this idiotic woke rebrand.
However, the hot-omobile’s most noticeable feature was its “Miami pink” exterior, which evoked a boxier version of the Corvette from the “Barbie” movie. It also comes in metallic blue.
Gerry McGovern, the chief creative officer of Jaguar Land Rover, deemed the flamboyant concept car a “taste of things to come” at the Miami convention.
And that taste seems to be “coal covered in pink aluminum foil.”
Jaguar Managing Director Rawdon Glover notably dubbed the company’s new direction a “complete reset” meant to “inspire a new generation.”
Ironically, many of their so-called intended younger customers were quick to put the Type 00 model in the rhetorical car compactor.
“If you thought the Jaguar rebrand was peak cringe, you gotta look at their new car,” scoffed one detractor on X.
Snip.
“What on Earth is Jaguar thinking?” exclaimed gearhead Luke Malpas in one TikTok clip. “They’ve gone from being a staple of British engineering, creating some of the best cars we’ve seen on the road, to this”
“Go woke, you know the rest,” wrote podcaster Jay Anderson on X, while journalist Jordan Schachtel wrote, “Go DEI go absolutely broke. This is a mockery of the Jaguar brand.”
Some critics found the “Copy Nothing” slogan ironic, given that the new EV vehicle seemed to rip off many storied vehicle brands.
“Copy nothing except Rolls Royce, Bentley, and then put a Studabaker radiator on the back of the car,” snarked Canopy Capital Group CEO Eric Golden on X.
“Copy nothing? It’s a pink Batmobile,” scoffed another naysayer while decrying the vehicle’s departure from the brand’s iconic macho mobiles of old.
Some accused Jaguar of risking alienating their consumer base by attempting to appeal to people who will never buy their product.
“Someone on the Jaguar marketing team has greatly overestimated the size of the ‘vegan barista who wants to roll up to the drum circle in a luxury sports car’ market, I fear,” mused Lulu Cheng Meservey, a board member at tech company Shopify, on X.
“I have a feeling @Jaguar may be about to find out that there are fewer well-off, non-binary, woke lesbians of color than their echo chamber assured them there were,” sniped right-wing British Reclaim Party founder and “political correctness” foe Laurence Fox.
This is simply the latest evidence that Jaguar is doubling down on wokeness. “Santino Pietrosanti, UK Brand Director at Jaguar Land Rover, teased the upcoming rebrand for the company as part of its own ‘transformative journey.’ ‘We’re on a transformative journey of our own. Driven by a belief in diversity, inclusion, creativity, policy and, most importantly, action. We’ve established over 15 DEI groups such as Pride, which are here tonight, and Women in Engineering and Neurodiversity Matters,’ Pietrosanti said.” Absent from that rebrand checklist is respect for its existing (overwhelmingly male) customer base, who I seriously doubt are inclined to plop down six figure sums for ugly pink electric cars. And there aren’t enough wealthy Mary Kay saleswomen in the world to make up that deficit.
I’d previously said that Rawdon Glover needs to be fired to save the brand, but that clearly isn’t sufficient. Not only does Pietrosanti need to go, but everyone in the executive suite, everyone in branding and everyone in marketing who refused to push back against this insane, brand-destroying path.
And, of course, the entire DEI department. But that goes without saying for every company…
(@PuppiesIover) 
Yesterday, 
