In his Joe Rogan interview, President Trump said that his biggest mistake from his first term came from appointing “disloyal” people to important positions based on advice from career Republican politicians. So naturally this time around he’s picking people based in large measure on personal loyalty to him. The result is a much better cabinet than his first, but not a perfect one. I’ll go through the top picks with quick reaction on each.
Secretary of State: Marco Rubio. Meh. Marco has always struck me as an intellectual lightweight. He will doubtless be a much better Secretary of State than Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first choice, as well as all Democratic secretaries of state back to at least Cyrus Vance (if not further), but in terms of actual ability I’m not sure he’s better than Trump’s second Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. I would prefer someone like Victor Davis Hanson. Or even (dare I say it?) Rick Perry. This also starts the run of “Sure is a lot of people from Florida on this list.”
Secretary of Defense: Pete Hegseth. “Before joining Fox in 2014, Hegseth served as an Army National Guard captain in Afghanistan and Iraq and earned the Bronze Star medal for his service in the latter.” I don’t watch Fox (or network or cable news in general), so I wasn’t previously aware of him, but he wants to completely purge wokeness and DEI, so I’m firmly on Team Hegseth now.
Attorney General: Florida congressman Matt Gaetz. Boy, this one really has the left freaking out. As well it should. While I’m confident Gaetz has the steel to launch investigations of the Russian collusion hoax, the Trump assassination attempts, the lawfare waged against him, censorship efforts, January 6, etc., I worry that he hasn’t run a state attorney generals office, and thus won’t know how best to bring “resistance” staffers to heel. I suspect a seasoned Republican state attorney general like Ken Paxton might have been a better choice, but Texas conservatives won’t complain about getting to keep Paxton in his current job.
Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security: South Dakota governor Kristi Noem. Meh. I liked Noem back when she kept her state open during the Flu Manchu panic, but then she went off tranny pandering by vetoing a bill banning men from women’s sports she had promised to sign. She later made amends, but the initial pander of caving to radical social justice pressure makes me worry that she doesn’t have the necessary gumption for such an important job.
Department Of Government Efficiency: Elon Musk And Vivek Ramaswamy. Putting aside why this isn’t simply the Office of Management and Budget (maybe to staff a new department from the ground up without “resisters”), this one Trump hit out of the park. Both Musk and Ramaswamy are going to bring outsider energy from two guys who simply don’t care what the MSM and the DC chattering classes have to say about them. Ramaswamy is the ideological firebrand that won’t be diverted from the task, and Musk is the radical innovator who’s not afraid to to make rapid, radical changes. Every Republican President since Reagan has said they’re for a balanced budget, yet somehow the goal has eluded every single one of them. Trump did not pursue a budget cutting agenda in his first term, but having been targeted by multiple tentacles of the deep state leviathan, I’m pretty sure he’ll come in with a newfound zeal for chopping the federal government down to size. And Musk has a talent for both management and radical disruption, which the federal government badly needs.
Director of National Intelligence: Tulsi Gabbard. I’m skeptical this one works out. Tulsi is clearly sharp, and after this election she clearly needs some role in the Trump 2: The Venging administration. And she drive feminists crazy simply by standing there and looking pretty. But directing the national intelligence apparatus, especially one that will be institutionally hostile to reform from the git go, will take a very special, and very tough, director to fill that role, and I’m not sure Gabbard has the intestinal fortitude for the sort of brutal inter-agency knife-fighting necessary to defeat the Deep State. Very few men do, and even fewer women, and having served in the military isn’t sufficient to assure that. For a woman to succeed in this role, she’s going to need to fall somewhere on the Margaret Thatcher to Nancy Pelosi Iron Lady to Stone Cold Bitch spectrum, and I’m skeptical Tulsi meets that threshold. Maybe I’m wrong and she’ll suprise us all.
Robert K. Kennedy, Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. No. Like Tulsi, you have to give him some role, and he probably has some good points to make about over-medication, junk food additives, and how the pharmaceutical industry has misled the public (especially over Flu Manchu vaccines and side effects) and commits regulatory capture of the people who should be overseeing it, but he has too many fringe, scientifically supported ideas, and he seems to support ObamaCare. There’s still a chance this selection works out, assuming the Assistant Director is someone who can keep Kennedy’s worst impulses in check, and having him as the designated bad cop may force the medial industry get its shit together (and give up its push to mutilate children for funny, profit and virtue signaling brownie points entirely). Then there’s this via Instapundit:
God forbid we let RFK Jr. be in charge of HHS, otherwise he might do something crazy like fund experimental gain-of-function research in Chinese laboratories and cause a global pandemic
But this could still blow up in Trump’s face. Rand Paul would have been a much better pick here, assuming he could be persuaded to leave the senate.
Border Czar: Former ICE director Tom Homan. Yeah, he’s got the starch.
Let a thousand ten million deportations bloom.
So I find it a pretty mixed bag.
Athena Thorne notes that all those selected were unfairly targeted by the very agencies they’re being tasked to oversee, and that probably does provide powerful motivation, as well as insight on the types of abuse that need to be rooted out. I’m just not sure that’s sufficient…
Kneon and Geeky Sparkles at Clownfish TV have a simple message for the MSM and Hollywood following Trump’s decisive win: It’s the wokeness, stupid.
K: “For those of you who are outside the country, Donald Trump won. Not only did he win, he won the popular vote as well. I mean, he just destroyed Harris completely by millions. It’s not even close.”
K: “It’s middle America choosing to push back against all the nonsense we’ve seen from the left the last several years.”
GS: “We’re watching it go down last night, watching MSNBC and CNN, and that they could not comprehend. Like they could seriously not fathom that they were wrong, and that people didn’t vote the way they thought because they are in their echo chambers.”
GS: “This is why the journalists and the media have been so cracking down and going against YouTubers or anything else, because people aren’t listening to them anymore.”
GS: “But they did it to themselves, they put themselves in their own echo chamber. They only hear what they want to hear instead of listening and questioning and trying to find the actual truth, they keep telling people they’re going to tell you what the truth is and you have to listen to it, and people are like ‘No we don’t.’ And that’s why they’re caught off guard, because if they had just listened they would know.”
K: “We were flipping between uh MSNBC last night and CNN and they were all just kind of like ‘Well, it surely must be the children who are wrong.'”
Made for illustrative purposes
GS: “Or uneducated. That was the other thing on MSNBC. I can’t tell you how many digs they made. CNN too. Both of them they were saying that if you voted for Trump, it’s the uneducated people that voted for Trump, and then later on they had to admit he had the more diverse voter base, including a lot of the black vote, and they couldn’t understand it.”
GS: “And they’re like going on about how uneducated people are, and then they just insulted all the people they claimed to be standing for. Women voted for Trump because they’re tired of being told you’re not a woman or whatever. People are sick of it.”
GS: “And I can tell you right now, right now, I have no doubt in my mind the reason that people went this way was because they are been pushed that way by the news, by the media, by social media, by Hollywood, by out-of-touch celebrities. By these immature people, screeching baby meltdowns that you see constantly.”
GS: “Not liking a cartoon show somehow makes you a bigot and you deserve to die.”
Kamala and the last four years have been so bad that even the Amish came out to vote for Trump.
GS: “People in general did this because they got tired of it. You pushed the Middle America that way. It’s your own fault.”
GS: “We’re going back to racism, we’re going back to putting people in category because they [the woke] are doing it. We got past it and they keep bringing it back. They keep digging.”
GS: “We were watching the shows, and then one lady, the one anchor on MSNBC was like ‘I think wokeism has a lot to do with it,’ and they looked at her like she just murdered their puppy.”
GS: “I’m sure lot of celebrities are going to be reacting to this, uh, badly. This is the official end of woke. This is it. This is over. America has spoken. They’re tired of it and they’re done with it. They’re done with it.”
GS: “It all ties into entertainment and, you know, pop culture, because I think ground zero for the stupidity is out of Hollywood and the media and things like that. And they have caused this, encouraged people to have echo chambers, and then they’re shocked when when not everybody thinks the way they think.”
GS: “We’re seeing video after video of meltdowns, mostly women, white women, usually having hissy fits over Trump signs and attacking people. There’s so many things that that caused it, but I do think that Hollywood did it to themselves.”
K: “They’re like ‘Well, maybe we’ve pushed people away from the Democratic party.’ I’m like: ‘You don’t fucking say so.'”
K: “RFK, they tanked him, they tanked Tulsi. They actually have candidates that could could reach across the aisle and pull people over, but you push them out.”
K: “Trump won the popular vote, too…so if you call every Trump supporter a Nazi, kiss your money goodbye.”
Bit on Chris Pratt calling for unity snipped.
GS: “Hollywood has had their asses kicked. They’re losing money. People are rejecting Disney. All their movies pretty much flopped. Last year people were rejecting their bullshit. Hollywood’s trying to course correct now. That should have been the first indication that maybe, just maybe, you lost the plot.”
GS: “A lot of people were Democrats are now Trump supporters and it’s your own fault, because you pushed them that way.”
K: “This feels more like this isn’t just Republicans vs. Democrats. To me this feels like this was Americans versus this Marxist, Communist bullshit that has infected this country, and we need to work together to to get America back on on track.”
K: “This feels like this is it. This is the end of woke.”
Israel hits Iran, everyone wants to delete illegal aliens, Kamala loses a one-person debate, WaPo refuses to pick Kamala over Hitler, the WNBA continues to bleed cash, and Tim Walz gets his ABBA on. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Reminder: Early voting in Texas is going on now and extends through November 1st, and Joe Rogan’s interview with Donald Trump is tonight.
A new Fox News poll shows that two-thirds of American voters favor deporting illegal aliens—a dramatic increase over the past decade.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has made mass deportation a major policy promise throughout his campaign, as the open border policies of the Biden-Harris administration have allowed millions of illegal aliens to enter the U.S.
The October 2024 poll of registered voters shows that support for deportation has increased dramatically since 2015. Among nonwhite voters, 57 percent now support mass deportations, while only 33 percent said they did in 2015.
Additionally, 91 percent of Republicans now say they support deportations—a 21-point increase since 2015. Rural voters’ support has risen by 20 points, urban voters by 19 points, and men’s support increased by 16.
Democrat support for deportations has increased to 42 percent from 34 percent in 2015.
Voters were also asked if they were in favor of allowing illegal aliens who have jobs to apply for legal status. While 68 percent said they were in favor in 2015, it dropped to 58 percent in favor this year.
Another Fox News poll shows that immigration is voters’ second top issue as they head into the November election. The economy is the number one issue for 40 percent of voters, while 17 percent said immigration and 15 percent said abortion.
is out of gas. The weather is choppy, the navigation system completely unreliable, and the best guess is that you’re still short of the runway. (Oh, and the captain had a stroke while in the cockpit a few hours ago, leaving only a flight attendant as the pilot. She refuses to read the instruction manual or listen to the passengers.) Yes, it’s easy enough to spin up lovingly bespoke metaphors for how the Harris campaign is handling the late stages of the 2024 race — a race they very much could still win, I must always emphasize — but I’ll conclude this one by saying that if last night’s Kamala Harris CNN town hall (with Anderson Cooper hosting in the Philadelphia suburbs) is any indication, the plane may already be disintegrating in midair, before it even hits the ground.
You may have noticed that I’ve had a decidedly muted reaction to Harris’s other recent “serious” media interviews, whether Bret Baier at Fox News or Bill Whitaker on 60 Minutes, in the sense that while Harris was predictably awful in both sit-downs (almost relentlessly so), she was boring and unrevelatory in her awfulness. In other words, we learned nothing new about the depths to which she is capable of sinking performatively that we didn’t already know. They were water-treading exercises for the most part.
Last night’s CNN town hall, on the other hand, was memorably bad. This is the moment her campaign dreaded, the moment when the fundamental emptiness and inadequacy of their candidate was revealed for all the world to see without helpful edits or someone to bail her out. There Harris stood exposed — with an unpersuaded audience and a moderator in Cooper who handled his task without showing any particular solicitude for her electoral fortunes — and she withered in the spotlight. (As Dylan might have said, “Even the vice president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.”) There are moments from this event — many moments, oh so terribly many of them — that will haunt Harris in retirement forever should she lose, the sorts of ghastly stammering failures destined to go into YouTube clip reels ten years later explaining “How We Got Here….”
As for myself, I found Harris’s answer to Anderson Cooper’s pointed question about the border fence to be perhaps the lowest moment of her entire public career to date, and I mean that in the specific sense that nobody who watches it — not even her fiercest partisans — will be able to come away from it with anything save a reflex-level revulsion.
I did not have Anderson Cooper cooking Kamala on my bingo card but here we are.
She’s exposed as a total hypocrite here. First the wall was racist, stupid and xenophobic but now that she needs votes she’s pandering. pic.twitter.com/ctk6nmQcvZ
“What was most remarkable about the disaster is how even CNN’s own analysts panned Harris’s performance as well, some with a palpable sense of disgust.”
Some excerpts of that:
NEW: CNN’s Scott Jennings says Kamala Harris is a “double-threat” because she can’t think on her feet and can’t answer the expected questions.
CNN has railed on Harris after her town hall event.
Next, after weeks of courting Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate, Harris rejected him for Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota – the state that gave us Gov. Jesse “the body” Ventura and Saturday Night Live’s Al Franken as a U.S. Senator.
Another misstep for Harris. While Shapiro isn’t Biden, he is well known in greater Philadelphia and seems comfortable campaigning in Scranton and towns like it across the state.
It still isn’t clear if Harris rejected Shapiro because he is Jewish and supports Israel’s right to defend itself or because he is a tireless campaigner, well-received on the stump, who might show her up. Did she reject Shapiro because picking him would offend “the Squad” in Congress and endanger the electoral votes of Michigan, home to a large Muslim population? Or did she spurn the Pennsylvania governor because she didn’t want her supporters murmuring: “We should’ve run him?
Harris compounded her mistake by picking Walz, who represents the Democratic Party’s modern left wing. Walz won’t help Harris win votes in Pennsylvania; in fact, he makes it harder. She picked someone who is un-relatable everywhere, from Philadelphia’s neighborhoods to small town and rural Pennsylvania. And, he’s just plain “weird.”
It gets worse. Her message, agenda, and policies are not resonating here.
She has tried to stress that the economy is actually good – “Bidenomics is working,” she maintained. They tried charts, graphs, and “experts.” No one in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods is buying it, especially blacks and Hispanics, who are being crushed by inflation and violent crime.
So Harris pivoted to a new message: she would “fix” the economy and “fight” inflation. Her now comically repeated line about being “raised in a middle-class family” draws blank stares, laughs, or anger, even among some in her usual base.
It’s even worse in rural Pennsylvania, where Walz and “second man” Doug Emhoff tried a “real men for Kamala tour,” complete with ads and Zoom calls about why men should support her.
Then they sent “Elmer Fudd” – aka Walz – out hunting. In newly purchased hunting clothes, using the wrong rifle (plus demonstrating that he didn’t know how to load it), Walz resembled something like King Charles attending the Indianapolis 500.
Harris was against fracking – that is, before she was for it, as she now claims to be. No one in rural Pennsylvania is buying it. Her “values haven’t changed,” as she herself says. Rural Pennsylvanians know that her preferred policy would hurt the economy of northern, central and western Pennsylvania, to say nothing of the national economy and national security.
Democrats want to win Pennsylvania, of course – but they have selected the wrong candidate, through the wrong method. Harris then dug the hole deeper by picking the wrong running mate. And to top it off, they’re running on a misguided, if not delusional, platform.
“Black, Latino, and Asian Trump supporters shout down white, liberal Harris supporters in Lancaster.”
The left-wing, liberal, and Democratic narrative about former President Donald Trump being a racist is falling apart.
For years, labeling Trump as a racist was an integral part of Democrats’ political strategy. It was never really true, mind you. It was just baseless hyperbolic hysteria that was at the foundation of the Democratic political propaganda machine. They have used it against every Republican presidential candidate for the last 40 years.
They used it to brainwash, scare, and manipulate racial minorities and white liberals in the previous two presidential elections, in which Trump was the GOP nominee. They wanted to create a narrative that the only people who supported Trump were a bunch of lowly, uneducated, racist white people. It worked in 2016, and it worked in 2020. It’s not working in 2024.
The sanctimony of white, liberal Democrats is predicated on their unhinged arrogance of moral superiority involving race. The white, liberal Democrats think racial minorities cannot succeed in the United States without white, liberal Democrats saving them. The white, liberal Democrats think they are more intelligent, enlightened, and compassionate than Republicans. So, imagine their surprise when, outside the venue that hosted a town hall for Trump in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, it was black, Latino, and Asian Trump supporters shouting down Vice President Kamala Harris’s white, liberal supporters.
I witnessed, firsthand, white, liberal Harris supporters screaming that Trump is a racist and then demeaning the many black, Latino, and Asian Trump supporters holding Trump signs and wearing MAGA hats and shirts. These smug, arrogant white people were trying to tell racial minorities what was best for them. It was a sight to behold, but not one that has not become commonplace in American society. It was a reflection of just how out of touch with reality white, liberal Harris voters are.
Dominicans for Trump sign holders outside Trump town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Christopher Tremoglie)
The crowd at the town hall was diverse, with a larger-than-expected minority presence, given the tall tales of Harris supporters’ fails regarding diversity and race among Trump supporters. It was immediately noticeable upon arriving at the town hall. Those in attendance were greeted by boisterous Asian Americans waving American flags in front of Trump posters, wearing red MAGA hats, and chanting the name “Trump!”
A few hundred feet away, a group of Dominican Trump voters were cheering for the former president and shouting down anyone who dared insult the GOP nominee. They stood outside the venue holding signs that read “Dominicans for Trump” and “Boricuas for Trump.”
A Harris supporter passed the group and chastised them, asking how they could be a minority and support a racist and a bigot. A person holding a “Boricuas for Trump” sign shouted back at them, asking the white Harris supporter who they thought they were telling a Dominican who to support. The Harris supporter kept walking. Other incidents played out similarly nearby.
Later, this group gathered at a main intersection near the Lancaster Convention Center and engaged in a shouting match with a group of Harris supporters, who had gathered to protest Trump. There did not appear to be any mention of race, just two groups shouting back and forth at each other. However, again, I noticed the Harris supporters were white, and the most vocal Trump supporters were black, Latino, and Asian.
Also: “Initial GOP Early Vote Turnout in Texas Substantially Higher Than 2020 Levels.”
But don’t get cocky! “Schumer-Backed Democratic PAC Makes $5 Million Texas Ad Buy Backing Allred….Schumer’s group, Senate Majority PAC (SMP) had mostly abstained from the Texas race, playing ball in other, seemingly more competitive races like in Ohio and Montana — much to Congressman Colin Allred’s (D-TX-32) chagrin. But clearly the calculus has changed for the group, which has now put substantial skin in the game in Texas.”
The Democratic Party’s election dirty tricks begin. “Montana Dem Operative Caught Tampering With Ballot Box…The operative, Laszlo Gendler, has been paid by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), according to OpenSecrets.org, as Montana Talks reported. The DSCC is attempting to help incumbent Democrat Senator Jon Tester against GOP senatorial candidate Tim Sheehy.”
A decade and a quarter of a billion dollars later, students and faculty are more frustrated than ever….
A decade ago, Michigan’s leaders set in motion an ambitious new D.E.I. plan, aiming “to enact far-reaching foundational change at every level, in every unit.” Striving to touch “every individual on campus,” as the school puts it, Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016, according to an internal presentation I obtained. A 2021 report from the conservative Heritage Foundation examining the growth of D.E.I. programs across higher education — the only such study that currently exists — found Michigan to have by far the largest D.E.I. bureaucracy of any large public university. Tens of thousands of undergraduates have completed bias training. Thousands of instructors have been trained in inclusive teaching.
Michigan inaugurated what it now calls D.E.I. 1.0, it intentionally placed itself in the vanguard of a revolution then reshaping American higher education. Around the country, college administrators were rapidly expanding D.E.I., convinced that such programs would help attract and retain a more diverse array of students and faculty.
Today that revolution is under withering attack. Energized by backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement and the right-wing campaign against “critical race theory” in public institutions, at least a dozen states have banned or limited D.E.I. programs at public universities. After the Oct. 7 attacks, as campuses across the country erupted with protests against Israel, critics accused D.E.I. programs of fostering antisemitism. In the fever of the 2024 campaign, Republican influencers and politicians have recast D.E.I. as an all-purpose boogeyman — the root cause of defective airplanes, the collapse of a Baltimore bridge and the near-assassination of Donald J. Trump.
But even some of Michigan’s peer institutions have soured on aspects of D.E.I. Last spring, both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences said they would no longer require job candidates to submit diversity; such “compelled statements,” M.I.T.’s president said, “impinge on freedom of expression.”
Michigan hasn’t joined the retreat. Instead, it has redoubled its efforts, testing the future of an embattled ideal. A year ago, the university inaugurated what it calls D.E.I. 2.0. At Michigan’s flagship Ann Arbor campus, the number of employees who work in D.E.I.-related offices or have “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion” in their job titles increased by 70 percent, reaching 241, according to figures compiled by Mark J. Perry, an emeritus professor of finance at the university’s Flint campus and a D.E.I. critic. (The school’s own figures, which count the D.E.I. work force differently, show less growth over time and a much smaller staff as of last year.) When school began in August, brightly colored flags around campus promoted the goals of D.E.I. 2.0.
According to a confidential report I obtained, a committee appointed by Michigan’s provost — and stocked with professors with D.E.I.-related appointments — urged the school this summer to continue using diversity statements in hiring and promotion, arguing that eliminating them “would be seen as a capitulation to the winds of political expediency.”
In many respects, Michigan’s entire D.E.I. initiative can be understood as a sustained act of defiance against such pressures. Nearly two decades ago, voters in Michigan banned racial preferences in university admissions and hiring. When the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action across the land last year — stripping selective colleges of their most powerful tool for building racially diverse classes — Michigan’s president, Santa J. Ono, went on PBS’s “NewsHour” to offer his university as the model for achieving diversity in a post-affirmative action world.
But over months of reporting this year, I found a different kind of backlash building, one that emanated not from Washington or right-wing think tanks but from inside the university’s own dorms and faculty lounges. On Michigan’s largely left-leaning campus, few of the people I met questioned the broad ideals of diversity or social justice. Yet the most common attitude I encountered about D.E.I. during my visits to Ann Arbor was a kind of wary disdain.
D.E.I. at Michigan is rooted in a struggle for racial integration that began more than a half-century ago, but many Black students today regard the school’s expansive program as a well-meaning failure. The university now has a greater proportion of Hispanic, Asian and first-generation students and a more racially diverse staff. But in a state where 14 percent of residents are Black, the school’s Black undergraduate enrollment has long hovered stubbornly at around 4 percent, before ticking up just past 5 percent this fall. (The figures are slightly higher if, as school officials strongly urged, you include students who identify as more than one race.) …
Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive: In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.
Social Justice is racist garbage that destroys everything it touches.
'We must not publish a study that says we're harming children because people who say we're harming children will use the study as evidence that we're harming children, which might make it difficult for us to continue harming children.' pic.twitter.com/hS4CcswkXg
Hezbollah launches a drone attack against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s house, though they cause no injuries. Honestly, this is a huge step up from their usual targeting of women and children, as a country’s political leaders are a legitimate war target.
“Half of Millennials and Gen Z homeowners are, quote, trapped in their starter homes, which are now losing tens of thousands in value thanks to the same Federal Reserve that put them in a housing hell to begin with.”
Ammo.com sent over a report on defensive gun use in the U.S. “Although many dispute the plausibility of more than one million DGUs yearly, it is entirely plausible. With millions of gun owners in the U.S. and millions of unreported crimes, more civilians likely stop threats than are harmed by them. Furthermore, states with permitless carry and stand-your-ground laws experience reduced violent crime rates. Therefore, armed civilians are, at least, not a danger to society.”
Another one. “North Texas Teacher Arrested for Sexual Relationship With Former Student. Carroll ISD middle school teacher Angela Barnes was charged with sexual assault of a child and improper relationship between an educator and student.”
Lin Chen pleaded guilty in federal court today to illegally exporting U.S. technology to a prohibited end user in China, in violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). The plea was accepted by the Hon. William Alsup, Senior U.S. District Judge.
In pleading guilty, Chen, 65, a citizen of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), admitted to acting on behalf of Jiangsu Hantang International Trade Group Corp., Ltd. (JHI), a company headquartered in Nanjing, PRC, to procure a wafer cutting machine on behalf of Chengdu GaStone Technology Co., Ltd. (GaStone), an entity located in Chengdu, PRC. Chen admitted to knowing that GaStone was designated on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Entity List on Aug. 1, 2014. Federal regulations restrict the export of certain items to companies, research institutions, and other entities identified on the Department of Commerce’s Entity List. Under applicable Department of Commerce regulations, wafer cutting machines, which are used to cut thin semiconductors used in electronics (also known as silicon wafers), require a license for export to end-users such as GaStone.
According to the plea agreement, by no later than Dec. 4, 2015, Chen knew that GaStone was prohibited from receiving restricted exports without a license, including a DTX-150 Scribe and Break Machine, a machine for processing silicon wafer microchips. On approximately Dec. 10, 2015, Chen worked with a co-defendant to arrange the sale of a DTX-150 to GaStone by shipping it to the PRC in the name of JHI without an export license from Commerce. Chen used JHI’s status as an intermediary to conceal GaStone as the true end-user of the technology.
That’s a slice-and-dice machine, not some cutting-edge process tech that’s embargoed to China. They might have been able to get that legally by just filling out the proper forms.
The last full-sized Kmart closes. I would say “Thanks, Joe Biden,” but this particular death, thanks to Walmart and Amazon, has been a long time coming.
“WNBA will lose $40 million this season. So naturally the players are thinking of opting out of their labor agreement to ask for more money… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Postcards From Barsoom has an extensive, reasonably compelling case that men gravitate toward jobs that allow them to compete with other men, mainly to impress women, and as become the majority in each of these fields, those particular arenas no longer convey status for achievement, because men do not win status by defeating women. Thus men who enter female-dominated fields for greater access to women are barking up the wrong tree, because even their co-workers will view them as low status. This theory has a certain amount of explanatory power, and posits that the feminization of academia begat social justice, not vice versa, but seems to me to be too totalizing an explanation for our current woes. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
More bad Biden Recession news, Kamala Harris wants a $5 trillion tax increase, a power-mad Brazilian judge wants to punish Elon Musk for refusing to censor his political enemies, more Texans sue the Biden Administration for failing to secure the border, Texas trims the voter roles, Harris County gets closer election supervision, two DEI-infected video games tank hard upon release, and the Navy runs put of pants.
After tumbling in April, and rebounding modestly in June, analysts expected a continued gain in pending home sales in July, but it wasn’t meant to be: moments ago the NAR reported that in July, Pending Home Sales tumbled 5.5% MoM, a huge miss to the 0.2% expected gain (and down from a 4.8% increase in June), and also slumped 4.6% YoY, a modest improvement from the 7.8% plunged in June but also missing expectations of a -2.0% drop.
That dragged the Pending home sales index to 70.2%, a fresh record low.
The Pending Home Sales Index is a leading indicator for the housing sector, based on pending sales of existing homes. A sale is listed as pending when the contract has been signed but the transaction has not closed, though the sale usually is finalized within one or two months of signing.
“A sales recovery did not occur in midsummer. The positive impact of job growth and higher inventory could not overcome affordability challenges and some degree of wait-and-see related to the upcoming U.S. presidential election,” NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in a statement.
Sales decreased in all four US regions, especially in the Midwest and South.
Vice President Kamala Harris wants to extract a $5 trillion tax increase from American households and businesses, her campaign confirmed on Monday.
The Harris campaign officially endorsed the laundry list of new and higher taxes included in the Biden-Harris administration’s fiscal year 2025 budget, a plan that would increase taxes by $5 trillion over ten years.
The burden of Harris’s tax increases will hit households in the form of diminished wage growth and higher costs of goods and services. These Harris tax increases will make the U.S. less competitive vs. our adversaries.
Harris also endorsed further increasing the size and power of the already-supersized IRS and erode taxpayer rights by watering down procedures designed to protect taxpayers from abusive and dishonest IRS agents (details below.)
Kamala Harris’s tax increases include:
Small business tax rate hike to 39.6%
Small business owners pay business taxes on their individual tax return. The Harris endorsed budget raises the top marginal income tax rate to 39.6% from the current 37%.
Corporate tax rate higher than the EU and communist China.
Kamala Harris wants to hike the current 21% federal corporate income tax rate to 28%, higher than communist China’s 25% and the EU average of 21%, her campaign said Monday.
The Kamala Harris federal 28% rate is higher than the Asia average corporate tax rate of 19.8%, the EU average of 21%, the world average of 23.5%, and the OECD average of 23.7%. (See the Tax Foundation’s comprehensive listing here.)
The Harris federal 28% rate is also higher than Canada (26.2%), the UK (25%) Sweden (20.6%), and even Russia (20%), Afghanistan (20%), and Iraq (15%).
After adding state corporate income taxes, the combined federal-state tax burden in most states will easily exceed 30% under the Harris plan.
The Harris rate hurts the USA vs. China with its 25% rate. And note: Industry sectors of strategic use to the Chinese government pay an even lower rate of 15%.
American workers will bear the brunt of Harris’s corporate tax increase.
The non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation affirmed in congressional testimony that corporate tax rate hikes hit “labor, laborers.” A study compiled by the Tax Foundation found that “labor bears between 50 percent and 100 percent of the burden of the corporate income tax, with 70 percent or higher the most likely outcome.”
Capital gains and dividends tax more than twice as high as communist China
Here is a direct quote from the Biden-Harris budget: “Together, the proposals would increase the top marginal rate on long-term capital gains and qualified dividends to 44.6 percent.“
Yes, you read that correctly: A Kamala Harris capital gains and dividends tax rate of 44.6%
China’s capital gains tax rate is 20%. Is it wise to have higher taxes than China?
Under the Harris plan, the combined federal-state capital gains tax exceeds 50% in many states. California will face a combined federal-state rate of 57.8%, New Jersey 55.3%, Oregon at 54.5%, Minnesota at 54.4%, and New York state at 53.4%.
Unconstitutional wealth tax on unrealized gains
The Harris-endorsed budget calls for an annual 25 percent minimum tax on the unrealized gains of individuals with income and assets exceeding $100 million. Once in place, it won’t be long before the threshold is lowered to hit more and more Americans.
Americans overwhelmingly oppose taxes on unrealized gains, by a factor of three to one, including 76% of independents. Americans know that a “gain” isn’t “real” until it is actually realized, in hand.
This Harris tax is similar to the wealth taxes pushed by radical progressives such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Capital gains taxes should only be paid when a gain is realized. Harris’s wealth tax would break with current tax policy and impose tax Americans based on the value of an asset on a particular arbitrary date.
This unprecedented tax would give even more power to the IRS, encourage taxpayers to move assets overseas, and will only expand to hit millions of Americans over time.
I don’t agree with every single item on this new RFK, Jr. hit job on Democrats, but it is pretty brutal, and the perfect thing to post to really annoy your facebook friends the next time they post an anti-Trump meme:
A federal judge has ruled that Elon Musk’s lawsuit against leftwing pressure group Media Matters can go forward.
X, formerly known as Twitter, filed the suit in November after Musk threatened to bring a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against the left-leaning nonprofit and “all those who colluded” for “completely misrepresenting” the real user experience on X.”
According to the lawsuit, Media Matters – founded by Democratic operative David Brock, who left the organization in 2022, used manipulative and deceptive tactics to convince advertisers like Apple, IBM and Disney that ‘hateful’ content was being displayed next to their brands – leading them to pause their X advertising campaigns.
X claims Media Matters fabricated the results. From the original complaint:
Media Matters has opted for new tactics in its campaign to drive advertisers from X. Media Matters has manipulated the algorithms governing the user experience on X to bypass safeguards and create images of X’s largest advertisers’ paid posts adjacent to racist, incendiary content, leaving the false impression that these pairings are anything but what they actually are: manufactured, inorganic, and extraordinarily rare.
Media Matters executed this plot in multiple steps, as X’s internal investigations have revealed.
First, Media Matters accessed accounts that had been active for at least 30 days, bypassing X’s ad filter for new users. Media Matters then exclusively followed a small subset of users consisting entirely of accounts in one of two categories: those known to produce extreme, fringe content, and accounts owned by X’s big-name advertisers. The end result was a feed precision-designed by Media Matters for a single purpose: to produce side-by-side ad/content placements that it could screenshot in an effort to alienate advertisers.
But this activity still was not enough to create the pairings of advertisements and content that Media Matters aimed to produce.
Media Matters therefore resorted to endlessly scrolling and refreshing its unrepresentative, hand-selected feed, generating between 13 and 15 times more advertisements per hour than viewed by the average X user repeating this inauthentic activity until it finally received pages containing the result it wanted: controversial content next to X’s largest advertisers’ paid posts.
Pretty much everyone saw this coming. “Elon’s SpaceX To Rescue Stranded Astronauts After NASA Dumps Boeing.”
Speaking of Elon Musk, a Brazilian Supreme Court Judge has declared that Twitter/X must censor the accounts of political enemies he specifies, and Musk, citing the Brazilian constitution, is having none of it.
On Thursday night, X’s Global Government Affairs account posted a dire warning over service availability in Brazil, after dictatorial Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes punished them for not complying “with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents,” according to the post.
More:
When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts. Our challenges against his manifestly illegal actions were either dismissed or ignored. Judge de Moraes’ colleagues on the Supreme Court are either unwilling or unable to stand up to him.
We are absolutely not insisting that other countries have the same free speech laws as the United States. The fundamental issue at stake here is that Judge de Moraes demands we break Brazil’s own laws. We simply won’t do that.
In the days to come, we will publish all of Judge de Moraes’ illegal demands and all related court filings in the interest of transparency.
Unlike other social media and technology platforms, we will not comply in secret with illegal orders.
To our users in Brazil and around the world, X remains committed to protecting your freedom of speech.
Meanwhile, Musk says that SpaceX is going to continue to provide Starlink in Brazil to schools and hospitals for free…
* * *
One day after Brazillian Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes threatened to suspend social media platform X unless Elon Musk appoints a new legal representative in 24 hours, the judge – dubbed “Brazil’s Darth Vader” by Musk – issued a subpoena against the company.
Today, he blocked the financial accounts of Musk-owned Starlink Holdings, due to the absence of an attorney.
Alexandre de Moraes might be the second-most powerful person in Brazil.
He does not quite have the reach of the president. But as a judge on the Supreme Court, until recently the president of the Electoral Court, and especially as head of two sprawling investigations against groups spreading disinformation, Moraes has wielded a rare combination of judicial powers. He has unilaterally handed out fines, ordered arrests, social media bans and other sanctions, and even acted as investigator and judge at once.
Moraes, 55, has used those powers prolifically, including against several members of the right-wing opposition to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government.
Brazilian conservatives have long contended he is abusing his power. But “Xandão” (“Big Alex”), as he is semi-jokingly called by supporters and detractors alike, earned the gratitude of many members of Brazil’s political establishment who believed his actions were fundamental to defending democracy during and after Jair Bolsonaro’s tumultuous 2018-22 presidency.
Now, that goodwill is being put to the test. As international voices add to a swelling domestic chorus, criticism of Moraes is starting to break through into the mainstream of Brazilian discourse.
The most public clash has been between Moraes and the South African billionaire Elon Musk, who has vigorously resisted the judge’s efforts to control speech on his X platform and other social media. Late Wednesday, Moraes used X itself to send Musk an ultimatum to appoint a new legal representative for his company in Brazil, and threatened a total ban of the platform in Latin America’s largest country unless he complied. Several Brazilian legal experts told Estado de S.Paulo newspaper that Moraes was overstepping his powers—that his use of social media to deliver the order was invalid, and that any suspension would be illegal.
Also recently, reporting by Fabio Serapião and Glenn Greenwald, the well-known American journalist who lives in Brazil, in Folha de S.Paulo newspaper indicated that Moraes and his lieutenants skirted official procedure in preparing sanctions for targets of his investigations.
These controversies have put renewed focus on several questions: Is Moraes censoring the opposition, or guarding Brazilian democracy? What should be the balance between allowing political speech on social media—and fighting back against disinformation and other threats? And finally: Has Moraes’ power outlived its usefulness, placing due process and the rule of law under threat in a different but also harmful way?
“It’s clear he’s pushing the limits,” said Conrado Hübner, a professor of constitutional law at the University of São Paulo and columnist at Folha. “There’s no precedent, nothing remotely similar to having a minister leading … investigations that almost become permanent institutions.”
“It’s been a year and a half since the 2022 election and the departure of a president who threatened institutions,” wrote the editorial board of Folha on August 26. “But for minister Alexandre de Moraes and his colleagues at the Supreme Court, it’s as if it was still that time—at least as a pretext for maintaining the anomalous concentration of power in this magistrate and his court.”
Snip.
Moraes banned the social media accounts of right-wing influencers Rodrigo Constantino and Paulo Figueiredo, for allegedly spreading Covid-19 misinformation and casting doubt on the Brazilian electoral system. He also banned the accounts of department store chain owner and right-wing influencer Luciano Hang, allegedly for agitating for a coup in a pro-Bolsonaro message group. Blogger Allan dos Santos, in self-imposed exile in Florida, had his passport revoked after calling for the dissolution of the STF, and being accused of involvement in an “organized crime network” that operates through monetized videos online. The U.S. refused an extradition request—reportedly because it determined Santos’s actions aren’t considered a crime in the U.S.
“It’s persecution, pure and simple,” Santos said.
The political temperature has moderated in Brazil over the past year, as a degree of institutional harmony has returned under Lula’s watch. But Moraes has remained on the offensive, threatening earlier this year to block Telegram, an encrypted messaging service, for refusing to comply with his orders. (Pavel Durov, the service’s founder, was arrested in France earlier this week for failing to prevent illegal activity on the platform.)
As part of the reporting on leaked documents from Moraes’ office in August, Greenwald wrote that former Bolsonaro advisor Filipe Martins had been detained under an order by Moraes for almost six months without charges, based on evidence that (Greenwald wrote) had been disproven. Less than a week later, Moraes ordered him released.
In reporting over the last several weeks, Greenwald and a co-author have used leaked messages to level accusations that Moraes directed his aides to compile reports on individuals, setting them up for social-media bans and other sanctions, and pass off the reports as having come from other legal organs or as anonymous complaints. The reports exacerbated concerns that Moraes was blurring the lines between legal roles—and so did his response, which was to order an inquiry into the source of the leaks.
Some of those actions sound familiar… (Hat tip: Glenn Greenwald.)
Hamas terrorist official Ghazi Hamad said during a recent interview that the terror group views its October 7 massacre as an enormous success because it damaged attempts to establish diplomatic ties between Israel and the Arab states.
Hamad, who previously said that the terror group aims to repeatedly carry out October 7-style attacks, said during an interview earlier this summer that was only translated this week that the terrorist attack — in which 1,200 were murdered, 5,300+ wounded, and hundreds more taken hostage — was “able to slap at the progress of the normalization of effort, and this is, of course, a very important political success.”
He said that the attack has also been successful in creating divisions among Israelis and uniting other Islamic terrorist organizations to attack Israel.
“US Strike Eliminates Senior Al-Qaeda-Linked Terrorist Leader In Syria. A U.S. military drone strike has killed a senior leader of Hurras al-Din, a group in Syria aligned with the al-Qaeda terrorist group, the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said in an Aug. 23 statement. The strike targeted Abu-‘Abd al-Rahman al-Makki, a prominent figure within the group’s Shura Council, responsible for overseeing terrorist activities from Syria, according to the statement.”
Are you an senior citizen living in Communist Cuba? Good luck surviving on $10 a month.
Cubans continue to flee a worsening economy in record numbers while the elderly have been left behind, fighting to survive on the communist regime’s $10 monthly pension and a critical lack of basic supplies.
Food, power, medical equipment, and pharmaceutical shortages have ignited persistent protests this year and driven Cuba’s ongoing exodus of working-age adults.
The result has been nothing short of devastating for the country’s retirees.
“It’s a nightmare in every direction. This is an SOS. Cuba is about to collapse in a fatal way,” said Ramon Saul Sanchez, a long-time anti-Cuban regime activist and president of the Democracy Movement in Miami.
“People can’t really imagine, especially from outside, making elderly people live in such inhumane conditions,” Sanchez told The Epoch Times.
“Because of the deterioration of the economy and the lack of interest of the Cuban regime, they aren’t helping those who need it,” he said. “Retirement pension maybe allows you to buy a dozen eggs a month. That’s it.”
Another lawsuit from Texas over the Biden Administration’s refusal to secure the border, but this one wasn’t from Ken Paxton. ” Border Counties, Residents Sue Biden Administration, Alleging Refusal to Enforce Immigration Laws.”
A grim scene of death, destruction, and crime is described among the harms suffered by two Texas border counties in a lawsuit against the Biden administration, alleging that the “willful and unconstitutional” refusal to enforce federal law has resulted in unprecedented harm inflicted upon the rural communities.
Kinney and Atascosa counties, Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe, and rancher Dr. Michael Vickers are the plaintiffs in the petition filed in the federal district court for the Southern District of Texas this past week naming President Joe Biden, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Majorkas, and other federal immigration officials as defendants.
The plaintiffs raised unique arguments not yet seen in other legal disputes over the border crisis, including that the Biden administration violated the U.S. Constitution’s Take Care Clause and a law requiring environmental impact studies.
The Take Care Clause in Article II, Section 3 states that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
“Immediately upon being sworn into office, the current Administration has pursued immigration policies that are not only at odds with Congress’s statutory scheme and directives but are objectively calculated to dismantle proven border security programs or craft novel administrative processing ‘pathways’ to permit inadmissible aliens to enter and remain inside the country,” the lawsuit alleges.
Among the examples contained in the complaint, the Biden administration is accused of abusing prosecutorial discretion to effectively rewrite immigration law, paroling more illegal aliens into the nation in the past year than lawful aliens.
The administration also adopted a policy allowing illegal aliens with criminal backgrounds to remain in the country, contrary to laws that require deportation.
“Collectively, Defendants’ actions signaled to potential border crossers—and to the human trafficking and drug cartels that coordinate illegal border crossing—that the Administration is unwilling to secure our border,” the lawsuit states, adding, “Defendants have completely abdicated their statutory responsibilities, allowed or encouraged the southern border to be overrun, and are violating their duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
The plaintiffs then described the harms they have suffered as a result of the alleged policies, with Vickers noting illegal aliens have caused $50,000 worth of damages on his ranch since 2021, not including trash the aliens have left behind that has harmed both livestock and the environment.
Vickers said he must also constantly remain armed, noting that with the increased illegal immigration, numerous gang members are also coming to his ranch, including MS-13, Tango Blast, the Pistoleros, and the Mexican Mafia.
Citing another shocking result of the policies, he said that since 2021 over 270 dead bodies have been found within 15 minutes of his home.
The counties also described the unprecedented burden the crisis places on local government.
The lawsuit explains that in 2020, before the Biden administration implemented its current border policies, Kinney County handled 134 criminal charges.
From there, it skyrocketed within a year to 2,708 criminal cases and continued to climb to 6,800 in 2022. Most recently, it faced 5,826 cases in 2023.
The crime has strained the rural communities’ limited financial resources.
The lawsuit asks the court to enjoin the Biden administration’s policies that run contrary to federal law, citing causes for relief under both an administrative rule-making statute and the Take Care Clause.
State Rep. Shawn Thierry (D-Houston) is switching parties to the GOP, she announced Friday at an event in Washington, D.C. held by Moms for Liberty.
“The Democratic Party has veered so far left, so deep into the progressive abyss, that it now champions policies I cannot, in good conscience, support — policies like promoting sex changes for vulnerable children and dismantling Title IX protections for women in sports. That’s why I am leaving the left and joining the party of family, faith, and freedom,” Thierry said in a release.
“I now stand with colleagues, friends, neighbors, women, and mothers in the Republican Party.”
Thierry lost her primary runoff to Lauren Simmons, and the legislature is out of session, so no change in the legislative status quo.
Current rate per megawatt hour: $36. What New York pays for wind power $155 per megawatt hour.
Here’s an interesting ruling: “US judge tosses machine gun possession case, calls ban unconstitutional.”
A federal judge has dismissed charges against a Kansas man for possessing a machine gun, saying prosecutors failed to establish that a federal ban on owning such weapons is constitutional.
The decision, by U.S. District Judge John Broomes in Wichita on Wednesday appeared to mark the first time a court has held that banning machine guns is unconstitutional after the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 issued a landmark ruling that expanded gun rights.
In that ruling, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Supreme Court established a new test for assessing firearms laws, saying restrictions must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
The Supreme Court clarified that standard in June as it upheld a ban on people subject to domestic violence restraining orders having guns, saying a modern firearms restriction needs only a “historical analogue,” not a “historical twin,” to be valid.
Broomes, an appointee of Republican then-President Donald Trump, said prosecutors in Tamori Morgan’s case failed to identify such a historical analogue to support charging him with violating the machine gun ban.
The Texas Secretary of State’s Office (SOS) will send multiple staff members to Harris County to inspect records and procedures and assist the elections division during the 2024 general election, citing multiple issues uncovered in a state audit of the county’s management of past elections.
According to a press release from Secretary of State Jane Nelson, the SOS “will assign state inspectors to Harris County to perform checks on election records, including tapes and chain-of-custody, and will observe the handling and counting of ballots and electronic media during the November 2024 election period.”
SOS will also send staff to assist the county for the duration of the election period, from early voting to Election Day and through tabulation.
The SOS announced the planned “enhanced presence” along with the final results of an audit of the 2022 elections, which included findings the county had not followed state law in maintaining voter registration rolls and in providing the required minimum amounts of ballot paper to all polling sites.
Ballot paper shortages halted voting at multiple locations on Election Day 2022.
According to state law, officials must provide each polling site with ballots equivalent to 125 percent of voter turnout in the last corresponding election. Under former Elections Administrator Clifford Tatum the county only provided 600 ballots to locations that had processed twice that many voters in 2018; a former county employee has been charged with six felonies in relation to the ballot paper allocation.
SOS Elections Division auditors also found that the county had not provided adequate training to election workers, which contributed to widespread equipment failures across multiple elections, and had failed to comply with state paperwork requirements.
During a Texas House Committee on Elections hearing on Monday, SOS Elections Director Christina Adkins briefed lawmakers on the results of the audit. She noted that after moving from a paperless system to paper ballots in May 2021, Harris County had not provided hands-on training for election judges and clerks.
As a result, Adkins said voting ceased for an hour or more at multiple polling locations during the November 2021 elections, with 17 sites not processing any voters until more than an hour after the scheduled opening due to equipment problems. Despite the issues, then-County Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria did not revise training procedures prior to the March 2022 primary election, which had similar problems.
Adkins also noted that Harris County failed to include 10,000 ballots in preliminary counts after the March 2022 primaries, a discrepancy that was identified by a reconciliation report required by election reform legislation enacted in 2021. The ballots were kept on a thumb drive, but Adkins noted that counties develop their own tracking procedures for the devices.
”I don’t recall that they had a lot of paperwork to show us on tracking that process,” said Adkins.
The county has also struggled to maintain voter registration rolls. Adkins told lawmakers that Harris is one of 33 counties that use a third-party vendor for management of voter rolls, leading to significant discrepancies between state and local databases.
The final audit noted that while the discrepancies “may seem minor in comparison to the total number of registered voters, the inconsistencies make it difficult to validate election data.”
In his stated effort to uphold election integrity in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott announced that more than one million people have been removed from the state’s voter rolls.
As part of the announcement, Abbott provided a chart that shows over 1.1 million voters in various categories are flagged as “removed,” including over 457,000 deceased individuals and over 463,000 voters on the “suspense list.”
Additionally, over 134,000 voters failed to respond to an address confirmation notice, while over 6,500 are noncitizens and over 6,000 have felony convictions.
Abbott highlighted Senate Bill (SB) 1, which was signed into law in 2021, that added provisions designed to prevent fraud by adding criminal statutes, prohibiting unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, and setting additional ground rules for early voting and voter registration.
“Election integrity is essential to our democracy,” said Abbott in his recent press release.
“I have signed the strongest election laws in the nation to protect the right to vote and to crack down on illegal voting. These reforms have led to the removal of over one million ineligible people from our voter rolls in the last three years, including noncitizens, deceased voters, and people who moved to another state.”
Abbott added that the Texas Secretary of State has “an ongoing legal requirement to review the voter rolls, remove ineligible voters, and refer any potential illegal voting to the Attorney General’s Office and local authorities for investigation and prosecution.”
“Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated.”
In addition to SB 1, Abbott has signed multiple other bills to crack down on illegal voting. This includes House Bill (HB) 1243, which increases the penalty for illegal voting to a second-degree felony; SB 1113, which empowers the Secretary of State to withhold funds from counties that fail to remove noncitizens from voter rolls; and HB 574, which criminalizes knowingly counting invalid votes.
Whereas O’Rourke spent much of his time on the road doing a glorified whistle-stop tour of the state, Allred’s camp has opted for carpet bombing the Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Beaumont, and Rio Grande Valley media markets with ads.
According to the Cruz campaign, the television spend breakdown so far is $5.9 million for Allred and $265,000 for Cruz; Allred’s campaign declined to confirm any numbers. National political ad-tracking firm AdImpact put the Cruz deficit among all entities and groups at a much larger figure: $21.7 million to $2.2 million.
I expect Cruz to win by more than he did in 2018, especially in a Presidential election year, but I’m sure Ted could use more money.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit held that a novel type of search warrant used to collect digital record data is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.
The case arose from the robbery of a postal service worker in Mississippi, where surveillance video showed one of the robbers checking his cell phone during his escape after taking a mailbag containing $60,706 at gunpoint from the postman.
After coming up short of other ways to identify the perpetrators, postal inspector agents obtained what are known as geofencing warrants, which ultimately led to Gilbert McThunel’s arrest and conviction for the crime.
Geofencing warrants, the court explained, are different from normal search warrants that are based on probable cause and allow the police to search a known specific person or thing. Instead, law enforcement uses geofencing warrants when the identity of the suspect isn’t known, such as in this instance.
The warrants work in reverse from traditional search warrants. Most commonly, as with this case, investigators ask Google to search a database containing data from every one of their users who has their location history enabled on their smartphones.
Approximately one-third of Google’s 592 million users have their location history feature turned on, which silently tracks the location of the device through cell signals, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth every two minutes, uploading that location data to a “Sensorvault.”
When Google receives a geofencing warrant, the company must search all records in the Sensorvault for location data that corresponds to the warrant — for all accounts that were within a certain geographic location at a certain time.
I’m conflicted on this. I can see situations where a geofence warrant may be justified for serious crimes, but they also offer a real possibility of government abuse (such as January 6th defendants).
California continues to California: “Dems Pass Bill to Give Illegal Immigrants $150,000 Home Loans — but the Program Is Broke.”
The latest business slammed by the Biden Recession: RVs. Also, holy crap, have RVs gotten ridiculously expensive. I guess they’re pricing them against owning a home these days…
Dwight alerted me to this story last week, and I told him “I’m waiting for the followup when the police capture the man and it turns out his name is Abbas Mohammed Jihad.” Well: “3 people were killed and 6 others injured at a diversity festival in Solingen, Germany, when a man with a knife went on a rampage…According to reports from the scene, and according to a German newspaper, witnesses heard the unidentified attacker shouting “Allahu Akbar” during what is being called a potential act of terrorism.” Sometimes it sucks to be so psychic…
Dispatches from Tim Walz’s Minnesota: CBS News was running a segment on car thefts and a car theft happened while they were filing.
She dug deeper into the nonprofit’s bank records and found much more that concerned her. Mansion rentals. Vet bills. Luxury clothes. Finally, a stay at a Cancun resort. Ms. Banks scrolled back through Facebook to the week that resort bill was paid. She saw her boss, [Raheem AI president] Brandon D. Anderson, posing in a pool.
The photo was tagged: “Cancun.”
Snip.
They investigated and questioned more than $250,000 in charges since 2021 alone, internal documents show.
Among them: Mr. Anderson — who was paid a salary of $160,000 — had spent $1,500 of the charity’s money at a chiropractor; $5,000 on veterinary care; and an astounding $46,000 on ride-share services like Uber and Lyft. Most confoundingly, the nonprofit had paid $80,000 for luxury vacation rentals, including a service that let members stay in luxury mansions around the world, according to the board’s accounting.
And since Raheem AI is an anti-police organization, no one wanted to go to the cops… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
A teacher in Round Rock Independent School District was arrested for sex crimes involving children.
Domingo Perez Jr., also known as Dominic, was a science teacher at Stony Point High School through the 2023-2024 school year.
Perez was arrested and booked into the Williamson County Jail on August 21.
He is facing charges of indecency with a child by sexual contact—a second-degree felony punishable by 2 to 20 years in prison—and possession of 50 or more images or videos of child pornography, a first-degree felony punishable by up to life in prison.
Yes, they are trying to Trans your kids:
These images were reportedly taken inside @MMSDschools in Wisconsin.
This school is trying to destroy "heteronormative thinking" and replace it with a "queer affirming network?"
Concord and Dustborn were two AAA gaming title that had three things in common: they both cost a lot of money, they both pushed social justice, and they both tanked hard on release. Unlike Black Myth Wukong, which social justice game journalist sites criticized relentlessly and which sold 10 million copies…
Critical Drinker calls The Crow reboot the worst film of the year. “A violent, grimy and bleak exercise in stupidity.”
Comedian Gary Gulman on how the states got their abbreviations. Conan O’Brien said this was one of the funniest bits ever on his show, and it’s pretty good.
Evidently MSNBC saw CNN being sued for being worthless partisan shills, and went “Hey, we can do that too!”
In this case, they deceptively edited a Joe Rogan segment critical of Kamala Harris that went on to praise Tulsi Gabbard to make it appear that Rogan was praising Harris.
Just watch the first three minutes of this:
It’s extremely blatant. (And they evidently took the video down.)
Tulsi Gabbard:
Not only does Joe Rogan deserve an apology, there’s actually something far bigger at stake here. This is yet another example of how MSNBC is working hand-in-glove with the Democrat elite and the Kamala Harris campaign uh to try to spread lies, simply things that are not true. What this means is MSNBC is a for-profit corporation, they are helping Kamala Harris’ election campaign, and what they are doing through their platform would qualify as an in-kind contribution to her campaign. It’s worth a lot of money. The fact that they are doing this should require the Federal Election Commission, that manages campaign spending and campaign finance, require them to report this as an in-kind campaign contribution, or to be punished for abusing their position in trying to use their platform, that has nothing to do with journalism it is purely a propaganda platform, and that they are using this in order to try to help Kamala Harris get elected.
The clip brings up that this is not the first time the MSM has lied about Rogan for propaganda purposes, bringing up the “horse dewormer” lie over taking Ivermectin to fight his bout of Flu Manchu. “I can afford people medicine, motherfucker.”
Given MSNBC’s blatantly false editing, Rogan is reportedlysuing MSNBC for $30 million. I say “reportedly” because stories about the lawsuit with that $30 million amount have popped up all over the Internet, but I have yet to find a primary source or real court documents stating that. Let it never be said that I have the callous disregard for truth shown by the likes of CNN and MSNBC.
Given how obviously blatant and deceptive the video editing was, you wonder why they even tried it in the first place. But given the outlandish, over-the-top lovefest the MSM has thrown to gaslight the American public into thinking that unpopular, perpetual mediocrity Harris is somehow smart, accomplished and popular despite all evidence to the contrary, I wonder if all MSNBC staffers are under specific orders to produce segments that make Harris look good by any means necessary.
I would say the MSM will do everything it can to drag Cackles McSidepiece across the finish line, even if it means destroying what’s left of their own credibility, but I don’t see any left to destroy…
Now that most prominent Democrats have dutifully lined up behind Kamala Harris as their 2024 presidential candidate, let’s have a roundup that confirms what regular blog readers already know: Kamala Harris is just the worst.
Short of Joe Biden staying in the race while exemplifying the energy and lucidity of an empty bag of Lay’s Sour Cream and Onion potato chips on the floor of a basement frat party, “passing the torch” to Kamala Harris is the best thing Republicans could have wished for — and simply “the next worst thing” for Democrats who, in their hail mary hour, reached into their quiver and pulled out the political equivalent of a Fran Drescher laugh track on repeat.
The entire party all of a sudden throwing their endorsement behind a woman who polled worse than a quart of cottage cheese that was left to sit in the sun for six months during the 2020 primary exemplifies the point I made a month or two ago when I argued that politicians have a talent for making the worst possible decisions.
Not only did Tulsi Gabbard publicly humiliate Kamala Harris on the debate stage during the 2020 primaries, but both polling and the results of Harris’ campaign forced us to one conclusion: most Americans find Harris detestable. And, in 2024, there doesn’t seem to be any indication that this attitude has changed.
I can’t describe the pleasure I get from watching the stupid decisions the Democratic party makes—namely, selecting Kamala Harris based on her gender and race to be Vice President of the f*cking United States —come back to bite them in the ass.
The fact is that if Harris was not vice president, she would never be next in line to be the Democratic nominee. She was picked to be vice president only because Joe Biden made his selection based on race and gender hustling, completely ignoring the fact that nobody seemed to like Harris and she doesn’t appear to have the brain torque necessary for the job.
By circumventing an actual legitimate selection process for Vice President, which should always boil down to a meritocracy as one of the most important positions in the world, Democrats planted a political seed in a pile of horse manure that has now blossomed into poisonous, cackling political fungus. And by moving Kamala Harris into position to be the next Presidential nominee, the party is officially taking the first bite of the fungi they began growing on the dung heap four years ago.
Beyond identity politics coming back to bite Democrats, the Harris pick makes no obvious sense because she is easily tethered and tied to the horrific last four years President Biden had in office. We are voting to “continue to be burdened by what was”, to use the parlance of Kamala’s time.
Under Kamala Harris, the Office of the Vice President has been called a “revolving door,” a “staff exodus” of key aides “heading for the exits.”
That’s not hyperbole from the national media. Our auditors at OpenTheBooks quantified an extraordinarily high 91.5-percent staff turnover rate. We used U.S. Senate disclosures to conduct our investigation and those databases can be downloaded below.
Elected in November 2020, Harris took the oath of office in January 2021. As of March 31, 2024, only four of the initial 47 staffers from the first year are still employed – consistently and without interruption – by the Vice President.
Furthermore, the turnover chaos isn’t getting better. In the trailing 12-month period, 24 staffers left — that’s almost half the employees.
The “top-to-bottom dysfunction” that The Atlantic referenced in October 2023 is shown in the reported payrolls that we captured.
“In her first year and a half as vice president, Harris saw the departure of her chief of staff, communications director, domestic-policy adviser, national security adviser, and other aides,” the magazine wrote.
If only that was all who left.
The semi-annual Report of the Secretary of the Senate, among other things, lists the names, titles and salaries of staff in the Office of the Vice President (OVP).
In the most recent publishing through March 31, only four staff from the original 47 listed in the 2021 report remained consistently employed and are among the office’s 50 current staff members.
The Kamala Harris Fabulous Four – here are the names, titles, employment date, and salaries of the four employees most loyal to Kamala Harris:
Yael S. Belkind has been assistant to the chief of staff since Jan. 20, 2021, earning $85,924;
Nasrina Bargzie was associate counsel since Feb. 10, 2021, now is deputy council, taking home $118,066.
Oludayo O. Faderin was associate director from July 2021, then became deputy director of west wing operations, making $85,924.
Olivia K. Hartman was hired in August 2021 as advance coordinator and became deputy director of scheduling, making $94,750.
Remember how everyone was saying that only Harris could use money raised for Biden? Trump’s lawyers say “Not so fast!”
Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers on Tuesday filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission arguing that Vice President Kamala Harris cannot legally gain control of nearly $100 million donated to President Joe Biden by changing the name of his campaign committee.
“This is little more than a thinly veiled $91.5 million excessive contribution from one presidential candidate to another, that is, from Joe Biden’s old campaign to Kamala Harris’s new campaign,” Trump general counsel David A. Warrington wrote in a complaint obtained by The Daily Wire. “Contributions by federal candidate committees to other federal candidates are limited to $2,000.”
“Kamala Harris is in the process of committing the largest campaign finance violation in American history and she is using the Commission’s own forms to do it,” the complaint alleges.
Candidates for office must create a campaign committee which includes their name, and file a statement of candidacy designating that committee as their fundraising vehicle. Harris did neither. Instead, on Sunday, the campaign treasurer “amended” Biden’s statement of candidacy to swap his name with Kamala’s, and pointed to Harris for President as her committee, using the same ID as the Biden for President committee. It also filed amended paperwork changing the name of that committee.
“There is no provision in federal campaign finance law for Kamala Harris to take over Joe Biden’s candidacy now by quite literally attempting to become him via an amendment… and making off with all of his cash,” Trump’s lawyers say. “Ms. Harris’ actions constitute a massive excessive contribution from Biden for President to Ms. Harris.”
With few exceptions, a campaign committee can only be linked to one candidate. Harris’s name has appeared on the Biden committee’s forms since 2020, but Trump’s lawyers argue that does not entitle her to the funds. Had Harris dropped off the ticket to challenge Biden for the presidential nomination, they note, she would not have been able to claim half of the campaign’s war chest.
“If the Commission were to deem Joe Biden to have ended his candidacy before transferring his campaign funds to Kamala Harris, then this only creates another violation. Federal candidates are prohibited from keeping contributions for elections in which they do not participate,” the complaint said.
Trump’s lawyers accuse Harris and committee treasurer Keana Spencer, who is in charge of submitting forms to the FEC, of committing “an attempted fraud on the Commission and should be referred to the Department of Justice for investigation and prosecution” as “a conspiracy to obstruct the lawful functions of the United States.”
You know who else doesn’t trust Kamala Harris? Democrats.
This is going to sound immodest,” Kamala Harris told an interviewer in the summer of 2019, “but I’m obviously a top-tier candidate.” That, she said, was why she drew so much fire from her fellow Democratic presidential candidates. But her face-saving appeal did not explain why she wilted in the face of those attacks, made a hash of her campaign, and ultimately dropped out of the race before a single primary vote was cast. Harris’s aborted presidential campaign clarified for Democrats what Republicans already knew — that the former California senator cannot live up to the standards her image-makers set for her. Contrary to the story Democrats are about to try to sell to the public, Harris’s party has never regained confidence in her abilities.
The trouble signs were apparent early in the vice president’s tenure. Just six months after she was sworn in, sources in Harris’s orbit began telling anyone willing to listen that her office was “not a healthy environment.” She was accused of refusing to read her briefing materials only to turn around and “berate employees” whom she accused of being responsible for her embarrassing unpreparedness. By the summer of 2022, 13 senior Harris staffers had left for greener pastures.
The chaos unfolding behind closed doors reinforced the impression she cultivated in public as a maladroit executive. The revolt of the staffers coincided with a one-on-one interview with NBC News reporter Lester Holt, in which Harris defended her failure to visit the rapidly deteriorating Southern border by laughing awkwardly while insisting she hadn’t “been to Europe” either. “I don’t understand the point you’re making,” Harris insisted. No one else appeared similarly perplexed.
As New York Times reporter Astead Herndon later detailed, Harris and her allies were so demoralized by the vice president’s faceplant that she withdrew from the public spotlight. “Over the following year, Harris traveled less often,” he reported, “and she mostly avoided further media interviews, preferring friendly settings like The View and a show on Comedy Central hosted by Charlamagne tha God.”
“Whatever happened to Kamala Harris?” Los Angeles Times columnist Mark Barabak asked in late 2021. Barabak attributed Harris’s disappearing act to the demands of the vice presidency and the Biden team’s allergy to the “merest hint of personal ambition” shown by the president’s subordinates. But as CNN reported at the time, Harris was being managed by the White House in ways her supporters bitterly resented.
“Many in the vice president’s circle fume[d]” over the degree to which Harris was “being sidelined,” the dispatch revealed. “The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she’s able to do politically.” Indeed, Harris was “perceived to be in such a weak position” that Democrats had begun to wonder aloud why the White House would allow the vice president to “become so hobbled in the public conscious” — the assumption being that this was done to Harris rather than something she did to herself.
After spending the first two years of the Biden administration waiting without reward for the competent campaigner Democrats had been promised to emerge, Harris’s allies began to show their impatience. The “painful reality” of Harris’s vice presidency, Times reporters wrote in early February 2023 after speaking to “dozens of Democrats,” was that “she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country.” These sentiments were not confined to Harris’s embittered rivals within her own party: “Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.”
Democratic leaders soon moved on Harris in a scaled-down version of the very putsch that finally rid them of Joe Biden. In January 2023, Senator Elizabeth Warren was asked if Biden should keep Harris on the ticket in 2024. “I really want to defer to what makes Biden comfortable on his team,” Warren replied. The remark was described as “pretty insulting” by Harris’s staff, and Warren made multiple efforts to apologize to the vice president for her flippancy. But if Warren’s remarks betrayed her doubts about Harris’s political acumen, those doubts weren’t hers alone.
In September of that year, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper pressed former House speaker Nancy Pelosi for her thoughts on Harris’s potential. “Is Vice President Kamala Harris the best running mate” for Biden, Cooper asked. “He thinks so,” Pelosi replied curtly. In turn, influential House Democrat Jamie Raskin was asked the same question, and he, too, attempted an evasive maneuver. “That’s President Biden’s choice,” Raskin finally said when pressured for a definitive answer. “Raskin, after receiving backlash, later went on a different network to clarify his support,” Herndon noted.
Today, for want of any realistic alternatives, Democrats are stuck with Harris at the top of the party’s ticket in November. But for all the party’s public displays of bravado, Democrats appear to understand that the vice president needs to operate in a rigidly structured environment . . . or else. “Harris has been cautious and reluctant to participate in events that weren’t tightly controlled,” Axios reported on Monday. For example, when Harris was invited to attend a 2022 dinner at the house owned by the former owner of the Atlantic, David Bradley, Harris was so beset with anxiety that “her staff held a mock dinner beforehand,” with her staffers “playing participants.” The preparation must have proven insufficient because, in the end, Harris declined to attend.
Say what you want about Trump, but he’s never been afraid to attend a dinner party.
As attorney general, it was her job to give propositions appearing on the ballot accurate titles and explanatory summaries. In order to fool the voters into passing Proposition 47 — decriminalizing crime — and Proposition 57 — allowing the release of thousands of violent criminals — Harris intentionally lied to the voters about what these laws would do.
Proposition 47 basically turned every crime into a “misdemeanor.” Grand theft, commercial burglary and possession of illegal narcotics — all misdemeanors.
Theft of anything worth less than $950 — even theft of a gun — became a misdemeanor, no more consequential than a waiter giving a straw to someone who didn’t ask for one. As Californians have since learned, that $950 cap does not include the tens of thousands of dollars required to repair smashed car windows, store fronts or display cases.
As a result, smash-and-grab robberies have become the new sport in the Golden State, leaving entire inner-city neighborhoods without a pharmacy. The police don’t even respond to thefts of less than $950. Retail stores have to keep their entire inventory under lock and key, including ordinary items, like shampoo and toothpaste — and those are the ones that aren’t closing permanently. San Francisco’s landmark Union Square shopping district is now plastered with “For Lease” and “Going Out of Business” signs. Roughly 50% of all videos on the internet are clips of California “teens” dashing out of upscale stores with armloads of stolen goods — Gucci, Prada, Burberry, Luis Vuitton.
Last year, Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco topped the list of the U.S. cities with the most retail theft, according to the National Retail Federation. A fourth California city, Sacramento, came in at No. 7. These days, when a customer tries to actually pay for something, the cashier calls the manager.
The shoplifting is so pervasive that, earlier this year, a Target shoplifter strolled out of the store right past Gov. Gavin Newsom. During a CNN report on the rash of thefts in San Francisco, three shoplifters hit the CVS as they were filming.
Also good for business: Tourists are warned not to rent cars, because they’ll only be broken into. Drug addicts clog the sidewalks, writhing in their own needles and fecal matter.
KAMALA HARRIS: "The United States shares a very important relationship, which is an alliance with the Republic of North Korea." pic.twitter.com/H2dI5UYOlo
Let’s also not forget that she’s a liar, even about trivial crap:
You know how Democrats crowed about that one poll that showed Harris was leading Trump? Yeah, they oversampled Democrats, just as you would expect. Always check the crosstabs…
“How do you perceive Vice President Harris compared to President Biden in terms of competency and experience?” Jordan asked.
One woman said she believes Harris is “worse” while another said, “She doesn’t even know what’s going on at the border. That’s what she was supposed to be doing.”
Jordan asked when the group believes the United States will have its first woman president.
“When there’s a competent one,” a different voter said.
Another voter said, “I don’t get a good feel for her” while a voter named Mary said, “I think she’s an idiot.”
Jordan asked Mary why she feels this way about Harris.
“Because she hasn’t done anything in the time that she’s had. We don’t know anything about her as far as her three years so far in the White House. She’s not real smart.”
I can’t find a full video of that, just this snippet:
Either MSNBC or YouTube (or probably both) sure doesn’t want you to find that interview…
Speculation as to Trump’s 2024 is in full swing, and Sean Trende has an entry in the genre that’s half obvious and half “What are you smoking?”
10. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
No way in hell. There’s a palpable lack of enthusiasm for Haley among the GOP base, and her primary backers are a tiny cadre of bitter NeverTrumpers. Trump will win South Carolina going away, and the only people likely to back Trump who wouldn’t otherwise would be those Haley campaign staffers hired on for the big show.
9. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Maybe. A safe choice and part of a play to bring middle and upper class white women back into the GOP fold. But not much wow factor, and Arkansas is another state Trump will win running away.
8. Sen. J.D. Vance, Ohio.
Vance won his senate race, but he didn’t knock it out of the park. Trump won Ohio in 2020 so there’s no reason to think he won’t win it this time around. Don’t see it.
2. Former Hawai’i Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.
A good bit more exciting than Haley, and maybe it would play well with young voters, but a pretty long shot. Would give Democrats a bit of the vapors, but Hawaii is too blue a state for this pick to make it competitive. Plus the last Veep nominee to be successfully elected from the House was John Nance Garner, and he was Speaker of the House (and a very powerful and effective one) and the runner-up to FDR in the 1932 Democratic race, not an obscure back-bencher from the other party with all of one losing Presidential run under her belt.
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott.
Right now, this would be my odds-on favorite for Trump to select, and is probably the pick that has Democrats most worried. The Democratic Party is already losing black voters to Trump, and another 10% loss thanks to a Scott pick might put Pennsylvania and Michigan beyond the margin of fraud.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
This would be a safe pick in the Pence mode, the base won’t object to him (the way they might over, say, Gabbard or Haley), but Texas is another state Trump wins going away.
4. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds.
If you’re going to pick a white, female governor, Reynolds is a better pick than Haley, Kay Ivey is too old for a ticket balance pick, and Noem has managed to take herself out of the picture (🐕 🔫), but Reynolds is squishy on a wide range of culture war issues, and isn’t even as well-liked as Sanders. And Iowa is another state Trump won handily.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum.
Beloved by election wonks but unknown nationally, and another state Trump will win handily. Don’t see it.
2. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
A credible pick who’s on the right side of the culture wars that would be popular with the base and put Virginia in play. But, by that standard, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears might be an even better pick, with additional appeal to blacks voters. She would be higher on my list than most of Trende’s picks.
1. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
The irrational enthusiasm for Rubio among certain segments of the punditry remind me of the similar irrational enthusiasm for Jeb!
This meme still cracks me up.
Rubio is an intellectual lightweight who did poorly in the 2016 Presidential race, would make the ticket constitutionally ineligible to receive Florida’s votes (something Trende unconvincingly tap dances around), and I see no signs that Rubio would draw Hispanics to the ticket in places like Nevada and Arizona, despite Trende’s assertions, which seem more like wishcasting than analysis.
Of Trende’s list, Scott, Youngkin, Sanders, and Abbott strike me as credible choices. I’d also add Earle-Sears, Alabama Senator Katie Britt (age/sex balancing the ticket), Rand Paul (libertarian/youth appeal), and former New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez (play for that state), all of which strike me as more likely picks than Rubio.
But Trump has a long history of doing the unexpected…
The media gets lots of stories wrong, but the Kyle Rittenhouse story (along with the Russiagate hoax, the “fine people” hoax, and the antifa/BLM “mostly peaceful riots” gaslight) is a story that the mainstream media got intentionally wrong to push a particular narrative. (If you haven’t read it already, this previously linked Bari Weiss piece on the trial is the go-to piece for covering media lies.) As the fallout from media lies continues,
Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all six charges today, already causing a great exploding of heads in the pundit-o-sphere. Unrest wouldn’t be surprising. How could it be otherwise? Colleagues in national media spent over a year telling the country the 18-year-old was not just guilty, but a moral monster whose acquittal would be an in-your-face affirmation of systemic white supremacy.
It used to bother me that journalists were portrayed in pop culture as sniveling, amoral weenies. Take William Atherton’s iconic portrayal in Die Hard of “Thornburg,” the TV-news creep who gasps, “Tell me you got that!” with orgasmic awe when an explosion rocks the Nakatomi building. I got that I’d seen that face on reporters.
But risking the life of hero John McClane’s wife Holly by putting her name on TV, and getting the info by threatening the family nanny Paulina with an immigration raid? We’re bad, I thought, but not that bad. I got that it was a movie, but my father was a local TV man, and that one stung a bit.
MSNBC Thursday pulled a Thornburg in real life. Police stopped a man named James Morrison who was apparently following a jury bus, and said he was acting at the direction of a New York-based MSNBC producer named Irene Byon. Even if all you’re after is a post-verdict interview, if a jury gets the slightest whiff that the press is searching out their names and addresses, that’s clear intimidation. People will worry about the safety of their spouses and children as they’re deliberating. Not that it matters to anyone but the defense, prosecution, judge, jury, and taxpayers, but you’re also putting the trial at risk. I’ve covered plenty of celebrity trials, from Michael Jackson to the Enron defendants, and know the identifying-jurors practice isn’t unheard of. However, in a powder-keg case like this, it’s bonkers to play it any way but straight.
We’ve seen Die Hard-level indifference to social consequence from the beginning of this case. The context of the Rittenhouse shootings involved a summer of protests that began after the police killing of George Floyd, and continued in Kenosha after the shooting of Jacob Blake. We saw demonstrations of all types last summer, ranging from solemn candlelight vigils and thousands of protesters laying peacefully on their backs across bridges, to the burning of storefronts and “hundreds” of car thieves stealing “nearly 80” cars from a dealership in San Leandro, California. When the population is on edge, and people are amped and ready to lash out, that puts an even greater onus on media figures to get things right.
In a tinderbox situation like this one, it was reckless beyond belief for analysts to tell audiences Rittenhouse was a murderer when many if not most of them had a good idea he would be acquitted. But that’s exactly what most outlets did.
This is separate and apart from the question of whether or not you like Kyle Rittenhouse, or agree with his politics, or if, as a parent, you would want your own teenager carrying an AR-15 into a chaotic protest zone. The huge media error here was of the “Walls are closing in” variety, except the context was far worse. The “Walls are closing in” stupidity raised vague expectations among #Resistance audiences that at some unfixed point in time, Donald Trump would be pushed from office by scandal. In this case, the same people who poured out onto the streets last summer were told over and over that Rittenhouse was guilty, setting the stage for shock and horror if and when the “wrong” verdict came back.
Media figures got every element of this story wrong. As documented by TK contributor Matt Orfalea, the Young Turks alone spat out all sorts of misconceptions with shocking inattention: that Rittenhouse was “shooting randomly at people” after falling down, that he’d fired first, that there was no evidence that anyone had raised a gun at him, among many, many other errors. Belatedly, the show conceded some of these problems…
Snip.
Joe Scarborough on MSNBC said Rittenhouse unloaded “about sixty rounds” into the crowd (it was eight), adding in another segment that he “drove across state lines and started shooting people up,” and in still another that he was “shooting wildly, running around acting like a rent a cop, trying to protect property in a town he doesn’t know.” (His father and other relatives live there). John Heilemann on the same channel said Rittenhouse was “arguably a domestic terrorist” who “crossed state lines to go and shoot people.” Bakari Sellers, CNN: “The only person who fired shots that night was Kyle Rittenhouse” (he didn’t fire first, and protesters actually fired more rounds).
In the early days after the shooting, there were widespread reports that Rittenhouse either was a “militia member” or “thought of himself as a militia member,” but these turned out to not be true (he was actually only a member of a Police Explorers program). A well-known politician, squad member Ayanna Pressley, whom I wouldn’t by any means characterize as stupid or generally careless, tweeted a slew of accusations paired with a challenge to media outlets to “fix your damn headlines”
This was followed by other politicians making similar comments. Congressman Ted Lieu in September of last year said Rittenhouse “drove across state lines and he murdered two protesters,” adding, “Americans of all colors and creeds are seeing that racism and white supremacy are problems we can’t ignore.” Stacy Abrams said Rittenhouse was “willing to drive across state lines in order to commit murder.” Of course, the crowning impropriety, already mentioned in this space, was then-candidate Joe Biden putting Rittenhouse in a campaign ad in which he talked about how Trump “refused to disavow white supremacists” in a debate…
Snip.
A scant few outlets bothered to do what The New Yorker did in July of this year, in examining each of these claims one by one. This involved simple things like citing the Anti-Defamation League report covering Rittenhouse:
Quote:
There is to date no evidence that Rittenhouse was involved with the Kenosha Guard or showed up as a result of their call to action. Nor is there evidence of ties to other extremist groups, either militia groups or white supremacist groups. Rittenhouse’s social media accounts provided no evidence of ties to extremism prior to the killings.
The New Yorker also took a sober look at the oft-howled objection that Rittenhouse “crossed state lines,” as if this were somehow an offense in itself (see the Matt Orfalea video above) and quickly determined that news outlets simply didn’t bother to ask a few basic questions about the case:
Quote:
Because he lived in Illinois, people assumed that he had travelled some distance, for nefarious purposes, and had “crossed state lines” with his rifle. (The Rittenhouse apartment was a mile south of the Wisconsin border, and Rittenhouse had been storing his gun in Kenosha, at the house of a friend’s stepfather.)
Because of all of these simple factual misconceptions that Rittenhouse was a militia member and a white supremacist who’d traveled a great distance to a town to which he had no connection, then fired first and indiscriminately analysts not only pre-judged Rittenhouse’s guilt, but offered advance explanations for any possible acquittal.
Since it was not possible that it was real self-defense, the trial could only be an affirmation of white supremacy’s hold on the judicial system. “I know what white people are willing to do to defend white supremacy,” is how Nation justice correspondent Elie Mystal put it, in a Democracy Now! appearance that casually explained some of Judge Schroeder’s decisions by saying things like, “That’s what racists do.” There’s simply no requirement anymore for substantiating words like “white supremacist” or “racist” in media. We were once terrified to use these words without a lot of backup, but now, we don’t distinguish between a person who attends Richard Spencer rallies and, say, a judge with a “God Bless The U.S.A.” ringtone, or a member of a Police Explorers program.
Pretty much any use of the phrase “white supremacy” in current political context indicates the one using it is pushing a radical left-wing social justice agenda.
Here’s a quick and dirty takedown of various Rittenhouse lies in meme form:
One campaign, titled “CHARGED WITH BANK ROBBERY DURING GEORGE FLOYD RIOT,” has raised $140 of a $40,000 goal for a couple arrested in May last year.
“My girlfriend was released with no paper, but unfortunately they kept me and charged me with bank larceny,” the description reads, adding that the charges have since changed to “attempted bank robbery.”
Another titled “Fundraiser for Tuscon Arrestees” is soliciting donations for 12 people who face felony riot charges. The campaign has so far raised nearly $7,200 of a $12,000 goal.
The “Tia Pugh Legal Defense Fund” is raising money for a 22-year-old Alabama woman arrested for criminal mischief and inciting a riot. The fund has just fallen about $50 short of a $3,000 goal.
Rittenhouse, however, was unable to collect donations from the website because the then-17-year-old shooter was charged with a violent crime.
The Norfolk Virginia Police Department fired Sgt. William K. Kelly III for donating anonymously $25 to Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense.
The department only found out because a hacker group released the information of the anonymous users.
A jury found Rittenhouse not guilty on all counts.
Kelly wants his job back.
A lot of the left-wing response to the Rittenhouse verdict is that “juries would never acquit black people who used deadly force in self-defense.” A tiny problem with this argument: It’s not true.
Jaleel Stallings was acquitted of multiple attempted murder charges related to him shooting at several St. Paul police officers last summer. He [reasonably] claimed self-defense and that he had no idea these guys were cops. https://t.co/8DPWDdRIut
Timothy Simpkins, an 18-year-old who shot three people with an illegally possessed gun at a Texas high school, is literally out on bond right now and claiming he shot in self-defense. Honestly, he has a viable claim wrt to the intended target. https://t.co/A591OzmE36
Tony Bristol, a nightclub security guard, was acquitted after claiming self-defense in the shooting deaths of two unarmed patrons. https://t.co/Zqd3Ek3F1A
One rare Democrat not joining the irrational “Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist murderer” mob: Tulsi Gabbard.
The jury got it right—finding Rittenhouse not guilty on all charges. The fact that charges were brought before any serious investigation is evidence that the government was motivated by politics, which itself should be considered criminal. pic.twitter.com/4pf8Ct3TkE
Democrats take a good, hard, sober look at their policies to determine why voters abandoned them in drove. Ha, just kidding! It’s all racism all the way down:
In response to Republican Glenn Youngkin’s win in yesterday’s Virginia gubernatorial race — as well as Republican wins all the way down the ballot — left-wing pundits and celebrities immediately began to assert that the Democratic losses were the result of voters’ white-supremacist sympathies.
Yeah, that’s the reason voters turned out in droves to elect a black Republican Lt. Governor: white supremacy.
Even Politico writers got in on the action, asserting in this morning’s newsletter that Youngkin’s strategy included “racial appeals to working-class white voters.” During elections results coverage last night, MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace asserted that “critical race theory, which isn’t real, turned the suburbs 15 points to the Trump-insurrection endorsed Republican.”
Also on MSNBC last night, host Joy Reid spent much of the evening insisting that the education issue, an enormous part of Youngkin’s successful appeal to Virginia parents, was a dog whistle for racism. Plenty of progressives, including Reid herself, began pushing this line well before Election Day.
And that worked out so well for them.
Already, progressives are pointing to exit polls showing an enormous swing to the GOP among white working-class women, who voted for Joe Biden last fall but supported Youngkin this time around — the nasty implication being that these women were motivated to vote by Republicans’ supposedly racist agenda. Totally ignored, or even outright dismissed, are the many nonwhite voters who backed the GOP.
McAuliffe himself obliquely indulged in this fantasy in his statement conceding the election.
On several counts, progressives have begun to coalesce around a narrative that doesn’t hang together — one that displays a shocking unwillingness to grapple with the problems facing their party. For one thing, it makes little sense to assert both that critical race theory doesn’t exist and that parents who oppose it are doing so because they don’t want their children to learn about race or slavery.
If progressives admit that CRT exists at all, they pretend that it’s merely an effort to teach school children about the complicated history of race in our country. In fact, a quick investigation reveals that the proposed curricula contain, in most cases, highly inaccurate history aimed at indoctrinating kids into racially divisive identity politics.
Parents have legitimate concerns about such curricula, including understandable resistance to misrepresenting history, stoking guilt and division among children, and perhaps even encouraging race-based bullying. Dismissing these parents as white supremacists for having these concerns is unlikely to succeed either in persuading them to think differently about the curriculum in question or to vote for Democrats the next time around.
Finally, the “white supremacist” theory for Democratic losses intentionally ignores that two of the top Republican candidates voted into office were Winsome Sears, a female Jamaican immigrant elected lieutenant governor, and Jason Miyares, a Cuban American who was elected attorney general. It’s hard to imagine why Virginians voting en masse for the GOP out of thinly veiled racial animus would throw in their lot with this ticket.
Logic has never been the Democratic Party’s strong suit.
While former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s loss to Republican challenger Glenn Youngkin was cemented very late on election night, in practice the day that he forfeited the gubernatorial race was September 28. That was when, during a debate with Youngkin, McAuliffe, a Democrat, made the statement that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
That was his response to questions about school curriculum and the fury that had taken hold at many local school board meetings, where irate parents assailed education leaders for allegedly supporting what has been termed “critical race theory” by right-wing activists who oppose it. CRT is a divisive concept, in part because progressives and conservative disagree sharply about what it even is. Many members of the liberal media don’t even believe it exists, and have accused the GOP of fabricating the issue. As Youngkin’s victory became apparent, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace lamented that critical race theory, “which isn’t even real,” had swung the suburbs 15 points in Republicans’ favor.
Well, they can’t really racialize it because a number of Black parents and immigrant parents have stood with their White brothers and sisters to reject critical race theory, which is very harmful to Black and minority children. It’s a violation of our civil rights laws. It’s un-American because it involves shaming and bullying children and it runs counter to our Constitution. And so, they can say what they want with their Marxist agenda and their false narratives but the American people spoke in my home state of Virginia and I could not be more proud of them.
McAuliffe’s loss is a victory for all Americans. Why? Because it was a resounding rejection of efforts to divide us by race, the stripping of parental rights, and arrogant, deaf leaders. This benefits us all.
Democratic political strategist James Carville blamed his party’s recent losses and weak performance in state elections on “stupid wokeness” on Wednesday.
“PBS NewsHour” host Judy Woodruff asked Carville what went wrong for the Democratic Party in the Virginia gubernatorial race in which Republican Glenn Youngkin beat former Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
“What went wrong is just stupid wokeness. Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Wash. I mean, this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools. I mean that — people see that,” Carville said.
“It’s just really — has a suppressive effect all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a ‘woke’ detox center or something,” he added. “They’re expressing a language that people just don’t use, and there’s backlash and a frustration at that.”
Will Democrats heed his warning and abandon their suicidal drive for social justice, forced transgenderism and critical race theory?
Other news I missed: The Alexandria Ocasio Cortez-backed socialist running as a Democrat for mayor of Buffalo lost, despite being the only candidate on the ballot.
The incumbent Democratic mayor of Buffalo, running as a write-in candidate, declared victory Tuesday night as he held a nearly 20-point lead over his Democratic Party opponent.
India Walton, a socialist backed by many high-profile progressives, refused to concede to Mayor Byron Brown in the highly publicized contest until her campaign sees “all the votes,” her spokesman Jesse Myerson told The Post via text.
Brown, 63, who lost to Walton in the June Democratic primary, claimed what would be a stunning victory in a speech to supporters from his campaign headquarters shortly after 11 p.m.
“Today’s election, it’s not just a referendum on the future of the city of Buffalo, it was a referendum on the future of our democracy,” Brown said.
Both Walton and Brown are black, so I’m sure the reason he won was racism…
Republicans won four contested City Council races in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island and had a shot at taking a fifth in a potential upset.
Republican Inna Vernikov thumped her Democratic opponent Steve Saperstein for an open seat in southern Brooklyn’s 48th Council District by nearly 30 points.
With 87 percent of the vote in, Vernikov, a 37-year-old lawyer and Ukraine native, garnered 10,768 votes, or 65 percent of the vote, to 5,870 votes, or 35 percent, for Saperstein.
She will succeed ex-Councilman Chaim Deutsch, who forfeited his seat earlier this year when he was convicted of tax fraud.
The district includes many Russian-speaking and Jewish immigrants in the communities of Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach, Sheepshead Bay and Homecrest.
Vernikov ran as an unabashed supporter of former President Donald Trump, and Donald Trump Jr. endorsed her in a robocall to voters. She also opposed coronavirus vaccine mandates.
“I’m very excited. This election victory shows that the people are fed up with the progressive policies that have destroyed our city and district,” Vernikov told The Post last night.
Snip.
Vickie Paladino led former Democratic Councilman Tony Avella with 99 percent of the votes in. Paladino had the support of 12,143 votes, or 50 percent, to 10,490, or 43 percent, for Avella. John-Alexander Sakelos, running on the Conservative and Save Our City lines, received 1,729 votes or 7 percent.
Snip.
In another shocker, Democratic Councilman Justin Brannan, who is running to become the next council speaker, is fighting for political survival.
With 95 percent of the vote in, Brannan was locked in a dead heat with Republican Brian Fox in the 43rd District that takes in communities including Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights.
Other Republicans holding onto GOP seats: David Carr (not the former Texans quarterback) and Joann Ariola, who beat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-backed Felica Singh.
Another shocking loss for the hard left in deep-blue Seattle: “Republican Ann Davison is leading police- and jail-abolitionist Nicole Thomas-Kennedy in the race for city attorney.” Also, in the Mayor’s race, “Bruce Harrell, a former City Council president who urged adding police, including unarmed officers, rather than cutting funding, held a commanding lead of nearly 30 percentage points over current Council President Lorena González as additional ballots were counted Wednesday.” To be fair, Davison is a pretty nominal Republican.
Though it looks like Murphy will hold on to the governor’s mansion in New Jersey, “Republican Edward Durr, Truck Driver Who Spent $153 on Campaign, Defeats New Jersey Senate President Stephen Sweeney.”
The second-largest school bond in the state faced a narrow defeat Tuesday night as Leander ISD voters rejected the $727.2 million proposition. The proposal would’ve financed the construction of new buildings, including five new schools, and the renovation of two existing schools to expand capacity.
The final margin was one percentage point, amounting to 215 votes difference in the school district with over 40,000 students. Leander ISD said the bond, along with two others on the ballot Tuesday, was necessary for the population growth the district expects to come.
Those other two finished with slim margins, as well. Proposition B, a $33 million bond to finance technology upgrades including laptops for students and faculty, passed by 805 votes, and Proposition C, a performing arts center upgrade, failed by 765 votes.
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Looks like I may have to start doing BidenWatch again, given all the stupid things the newly ensconced Biden Administration has been up to…
US government debt now stands at $20 trillion, or roughly 100% of GDP. This should be a concern, but Democratic economists are not worried. A much-discussed November 30 paper by former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and former Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Jason Furman suggests that Democratic thinking has veered into the paranormal, with an emphasis on levitation. Governments will be able to borrow and spend as much as they want for whatever purpose they want, the authors argue in so many words, and interest rates will remain low forever.
As Washington Post editorialist Charles Lane commented Dec. 7, “Far from burdening future generations, governments have a golden opportunity to fund long-standing needs by borrowing for investments in future prosperity—the list includes child care, early education, job training and clean water.”
The argument so easily refuted by casual reference to the facts that it takes a doctorate from Harvard (which both Summers and Furman hold) to suspend disbelief in the obvious. The authors aver:
We note that with massive increases in budget deficits and government debt, expansions in social insurance, and sharp reductions in capital tax rates, one would have expected to see increasing real rates if private sector behavior had remained constant. We suggest that changes in the supply of saving associated with lengthening life expectancy, rising uncertainty and increased inequality along with reductions in the demand for capital associated with demographic changes, demassification of the economy, and perhaps changes in corporate behavior have driven real interest rates down. This characterization is rather like Hamlet without the Ghost, for the ghost in the interest machine during the past decade has been the Federal Reserve Board’s multi-trillion-dollar purchases of Treasury and agency securities. Summers and Furman do not mention this in their 50-page excursus.
Today, President Biden doubled-down on critical race theory in the federal government.
In response, I am announcing a new coalition of legal foundations and private attorneys that will wage relentless legal warfare against race theory in America's institutions.
Thomas Zimmerman, who will serve as a Special Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel under Joe Biden, formerly served as a visiting scholar at what the FBI has called a “front group for Chinese intelligence collection and overseas spy recruitment,” The National Pulse can reveal.
While at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, Zimmerman also served as a fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, flagged by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for its close ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s top spy agency, the Ministry of State Security.
The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS), which the FBI views as a “front group for Chinese intelligence collection and overseas spy recruitment,” was involved in a 2019 criminal case involving a retired Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative selling classified U.S. defense documents to China.
The operative, Kevin Mallory, was contacted by a SASS official via LinkedIn to begin the relationship that culminated in a 20-year prison sentence for Mallory.
It must be understood that Critical Social Justice is an administrative and bureaucratic ideology by its very design. It was formulated by activist academics to train not just activists but, very specifically, either people who will go on to produce the culture industry (like in media and arts) or who will become administrative bureaucrats where they can produce a kind of unaccountable policy that we find in HR departments, where pushback is irrelevant unless it’s from the top down. These sorts of people dream of positions not specifically of power and influence, like the presidency, but of training and administrative roles where they will receive relatively little scrutiny or opposition while they engage in their favorite activity of all: telling other people what to do, not directly, but through a shield of very official and institutionally binding paper.
For any of his late and thin comments about the violence that has rocked our streets for the last half of this year, Biden has given us absolutely no indication that he’s going to resist any of this bureaucratic totalitarianism. In fact, he’s done the opposite, using the language of the ideology, like saying he has a “mandate” from the voters (in an election that hasn’t yet even been decided, two weeks later) to take on “systemic racism,” and tapping individuals like Mehrsa Baradaran (who believes in full reparations) for the Treasury Department and Margaret Salazar (whose focus is on “cultural responsiveness”) for Housing and Urban Development. These come among roughly 500 more appointments to his administrative bureaucracy—so far—who allegedly express a commitment to racial justice, in line with precisely the racial equity programs touted by Biden and Harris on their campaign and now transition websites. In few domains has it been signaled that this will be more powerfully considered than in public health and the Covid-19 response, which Biden has already indicated will lead to a permanent position: “At the end of this health crisis, it will transition to a permanent Infectious Disease Racial Disparities Task Force,” we’re told on the Covid-19 priorities page on Biden’s “Build Back Better” transition site.
This renders Biden and, perhaps, Harris largely irrelevant to the “Woke” impacts of their election. They are, if you’ll accept the metaphor, “not the room.” These administrators are the room. Biden (and Harris, maybe) can be as moderate as moderate gets, and if even a modest fraction of the administrators in key departments favor the Critical Social Justice style of policy, that’s most of what we’ll get. So far, we have reason to suspect that at least an eighth of Biden’s administrative apparatus will be in that vein, including in key and powerful sectors like public health—to say nothing of apparatuses like the FBI.
Tulsi Gabbard reveals why congress won’t attempt to reign in Big Tech:
"It goes to money… Google will have a big reception, members of Congress will go, and then they'll pick up their checks."@TulsiGabbard explains why Congress has failed to act on big tech censorship pic.twitter.com/i7TOJYQ7lv
He was made a martyr. Yes, die-hard anti-Trump Democrats always would hate him, and die-hard pro-Trump Republicans would love him no matter what. But the great American center, comprised of reasonable Democrats and Independents, flocked towards Trump during and after the prior impeachment. They saw he was being railroaded.
He now is being railroaded again. We still all are trees inside the forest, lacking the broader perspective that time will afford. Right now tensions are too high for people to step back a moment and to gauge objectively. But that is only today. The Democrats irresponsibly have just done something that perhaps is all but unprecedented in American history: they charged, tried, and convicted a person — the impeachment phase of the political drama — in less than a day. If impeachments are meant to be fit in during a coffee break, why did the last one drag on so long? Why did Clinton’s and Johnson’s? Last year’s annual Trump impeachment took weeks of testimony from witnesses all over the place. Remember their names — all your favorites — from last time? Kurt Volker. Marie Yovanovitch. Fiona Hill. George Kent. Gordon Sondland. Bill Taylor. Laura Cooper. Alex Vindman. His medals. Catherine Croft. It went on and on and on. If they had not shut it down for Christmas, Kato Kaelin would have been next.
But this time it was Darkness at Noon: instead of pretending honesty, Pelosi and her Democrats did the impeachment as Josef Stalin conducted his show trials in the Soviet Union: first declare the guilt, then type up some charges, and then vote to convict without so much as a meaningful hearing. She did not even bother with the souvenir pens — presumably just ink-refill cartridges this time.
“City councilman in Louisiana arrested for election fraud.” “Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin Thursday morning announced their offices have arrested an Amite City Councilman on eight counts of election fraud. Emanuel Zanders, III is accused of submitting voter registration applications that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent.” I know you’ll be shocked to learn he’s a Democrat.
As COVID-19 settled into its new home in NYC, my local coffee shop closed, my gym shuttered, I lost my job at SUNY, and everything I loved was temporarily put “on pause.” A term that nine months later now feels like a cruel joke. None of us knew what we were facing back in March, or how long it would last. The streets became quiet, the city became still. All the sounds, the familiar faces, the busy restaurants, the daily rituals, the very pace of our existence slowed to a full stop. The silence was deafening.
The homeless and mentally ill flourished in my Chelsea neighborhood overnight. Many residents fled our beloved city to safer suburbs and second homes. After a night in the West Village where I saw men looting cars, and a gunpoint robbery happen by the West 4th train station, I no longer felt comfortable here. I decided that I couldn’t abide the lawlessness and my first pandemic at the same time, so I spent the first wave of the pandemic upstate in a guest room at my family’s house, where at least I didn’t have to worry about the crime.
After spending three months in quarantine upstate, I decided it was time to start putting my NYC life back together. The idea of suffering through this time with my closest friends felt like a step in the right direction. Even if we didn’t have our bars and restaurants for an undetermined amount of time, at least we’d have each other.
I imagined my summer would be filled with long walks, bike rides on the West Side Highway, and small gatherings on rooftops. I imagined we’d get over COVID and that the energy of the city would come back slowly over the next six months. I was optimistic, loved my city and loved my life here with all my heart. I hopefully assumed most New Yorkers had the same feelings I did. And then the riots happened.
The dark tone of daily life here now seems permanent. For months after the riots, stores in my area were still being burglarized. The helicopters were so close they would shake my top-floor apartment all night. In peak summer there were always two or three homeless people on both sides of every street in my area. Every aspect of my life became about avoiding them and staying far enough away from anyone who might attack me. Someone broke into my building one night but fled when they accidentally set off the alarm on the roof. The whole summer felt like living in a war zone.
Dating used to be a pleasure for me, but during my summer in Chelsea there were so many stabbings and robberies within one block of my apartment, I no longer felt comfortable making plans that involved meeting anywhere. I’d walk to get coffee in the morning and get harassed and threatened by homeless people every day.
Six months after NYC’s first wave of riots, I was clearly wrong about my hopes of returning to the fast-paced yet wonderful life that I once loved.
The City of Houston wants to regulate your homes for looks. “Everything from what color you paint your home, to whether you put shutters on your windows, would be subject to government control.” Nuts to that.
In the end, it was not the British deep state, Darwinists, Jews, Freemasons or any of the sinister cabals that Adnan Oktar long railed against that defeated him. It was the Turkish judiciary.
On Monday, the notorious 64-year-old preacher, often referred to in salacious headlines as a “sex cult leader,” was sentenced to 1,075 years in jail for crimes including sexual assault, sexual abuse of minors, fraud, and attempted political and military espionage.
It marks the end of a long and bizarre career for the preacher, television host, author and filmmaker.
Beginning his career in the 80s as a firebrand orator, railing against Jews, Freemasons and Charles Darwin, he later became (in)famous for his shows on Turkish TV, in which he would discuss Islamic principles while scantily clad women with bleached blonde hair danced around him to popular music. These women Oktar referred to as his “kittens”.
Skipping over a lot, including the bit where he went from being a Holocaust denier to being a supporter of building the Third Temple in Jerusalem.
In July 2018, Oktar was arrested on a number of charges, including forming a criminal organisation, sexual abuse of children and sexual assault.
According to the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office, he was caught while attempting to run away from the arresting officers. As he was led away, he told journalists that the charges were a conspiracy by the British deep state.
“They are thinking of covering the whole region with Christianity. They targeted me because they saw me as the effective inhibitor of this game,” he would later say in court.
Though “the British deep state” has yet to officially comment on the case, many have questioned the timing of Oktar’s arrest, considering accusations against him dated back decades.
In 1999, Oktar and a number of associates were arrested and charged with using threats for personal benefit and creating an organisation with the intent to commit a crime. A Turkish prosecutor listed a number of companies tied to BAV, which was accused of using blackmail and sex traps to generate revenue. The legal process against Oktar and BAV lasted two years, during which the majority of the complainants retracted their claims.
In the case file during his most recent trial, prosecutors presented an array of photos depicting sexual acts involving members of the organisation purportedly taken secretly at Oktar-owned properties for the purpose of blackmail. It also revealed WhatsApp messages involving male and female members of the group, in which they were given instructions to get used to anal sex.
Yuksel told MEE that he was aware of a number of senior politicians who had been involved with (or had relatives involved with) Oktar and were compromised by their association with him. However, he declined to offer any names.
In October 2017, the University of Texas at Austin announced that it had signed a new memorandum of understanding with the China University of Petroleum, a school directly affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education.
According to a statement released at the time by the Texas Bureau of Economic Geology, the agreement would “encourage academic cooperation through research and study in furtherance of the advancement of learning.”
But in October 2020, the U.S. Department of Education released a report critical of such foreign entanglements, specifically deeming contracts with China University of Petroleum a security risk.
“Academic research regarding oil and gas extraction should not be considered separate from the Chinese government’s geopolitical ambitions,” the Education Department report reads, adding, “China’s largest oil companies are state owned and dominate China’s oil market, so this could cross paths with Chinese government endeavors.”
