I’ve long been amazed at the hyperparasitism of the hacker exploit ecosystem, where hackers penetrate systems not to steal credit card numbers, but just to steal the resources to run bot farms. And now hackers are stealing cloud resources to run AI sexbots.
Organizations that get relieved of credentials to their cloud environments can quickly find themselves part of a disturbing new trend: Cybercriminals using stolen cloud credentials to operate and resell sexualized AI-powered chat services. Researchers say these illicit chat bots, which use custom jailbreaks to bypass content filtering, often veer into darker role-playing scenarios, including child sexual exploitation and rape.
Researchers at security firm Permiso Security say attacks against generative artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure like Bedrock from Amazon Web Services (AWS) have increased markedly over the last six months, particularly when someone in the organization accidentally exposes their cloud credentials or key online, such as in a code repository like GitHub.
You might wonder how a company could be so stupid as to include their cloud access credentials in their GitHub repository. Having worked for a long time in the cloud/SaaS space, I can tell you: It’s easier than you think. Developers probably included it so they could do rapid testing during the development cycle (and nobody wants to go through the pain of setting up another cryptokey through two-factor authentication every damn time they want to run a test), then overlooked changing it when they rolled to production. It’s the sort of thing dev should be looking for, but there are a lot of ways (personnel change, version rollback, etc.) something like that can slip through.
Investigating the abuse of AWS accounts for several organizations, Permiso found attackers had seized on stolen AWS credentials to interact with the large language models (LLMs) available on Bedrock. But they also soon discovered none of these AWS users had enabled full logging of LLM activity (by default, logs don’t include model prompts and outputs), and thus they lacked any visibility into what attackers were doing with that access.
So Permiso researchers decided to leak their own test AWS key on GitHub, while turning on logging so that they could see exactly what an attacker might ask for, and what the responses might be.
Within minutes, their bait key was scooped up and used in a service that offers AI-powered sex chats online.
Long gone are the days when boys were initiated into onanistic pursuits by the time-honored method of finding an old issue of Penthouse under a tree in the woods, but having to use AI chatbots when there’s a veritable ocean of pornography rolling around the Internet bespeaks of a lack of imagination in today’s large cohorts of lonely men.
“After reviewing the prompts and responses it became clear that the attacker was hosting an AI roleplaying service that leverages common jailbreak techniques to get the models to accept and respond with content that would normally be blocked,” Permiso researchers wrote in a report released today.
“Almost all of the roleplaying was of a sexual nature, with some of the content straying into darker topics such as child sexual abuse,” they continued. “Over the course of two days we saw over 75,000 successful model invocations, almost all of a sexual nature.”
Ian Ahl, senior vice president of threat research at Permiso, said attackers in possession of a working cloud account traditionally have used that access for run-of-the-mill financial cybercrime, such as cryptocurrency mining or spam. But over the past six months, Ahl said, Bedrock has emerged as one of the top targeted cloud services.
Stealing computer resources to run bots for cryptocurrency mining or spam is now evidentially one of those traditional criminal enterprises like running a numbers racket or selling swampland in Florida. Perhaps this strikes you with the same “get off my lawn” unease that I felt upon first reading the phrase “90s Music Nostalgia Tour.”
“Bad guy hosts a chat service, and subscribers pay them money,” Ahl said of the business model for commandeering Bedrock access to power sex chat bots. “They don’t want to pay for all the prompting that their subscribers are doing, so instead they hijack someone else’s infrastructure.”
Ahl said much of the AI-powered chat conversations initiated by the users of their honeypot AWS key were harmless roleplaying of sexual behavior.
“But a percentage of it is also geared toward very illegal stuff, like child sexual assault fantasies and rapes being played out,” Ahl said. “And these are typically things the large language models won’t be able to talk about.”
AWS’s Bedrock uses large language models from Anthropic, which incorporates a number of technical restrictions aimed at placing certain ethical guardrails on the use of their LLMs. But attackers can evade or “jailbreak” their way out of these restricted settings, usually by asking the AI to imagine itself in an elaborate hypothetical situation under which its normal restrictions might be relaxed or discarded altogether.
“A typical jailbreak will pose a very specific scenario, like you’re a writer who’s doing research for a book, and everyone involved is a consenting adult, even though they often end up chatting about nonconsensual things,” Ahl said.
In June 2024, security experts at Sysdig documented a new attack that leveraged stolen cloud credentials to target ten cloud-hosted LLMs. The attackers Sysdig wrote about gathered cloud credentials through a known security vulnerability, but the researchers also found the attackers sold LLM access to other cybercriminals while sticking the cloud account owner with an astronomical bill.
“Once initial access was obtained, they exfiltrated cloud credentials and gained access to the cloud environment, where they attempted to access local LLM models hosted by cloud providers: in this instance, a local Claude (v2/v3) LLM model from Anthropic was targeted,” Sysdig researchers wrote. “If undiscovered, this type of attack could result in over $46,000 of LLM consumption costs per day for the victim.”
Stolen credentials paid for with stolen credit cards running stolen AI access on stolen cloud platforms to run illegal sex chatbots. It’s a veritable ecology of cybercriminality…
Even a flatworm can turn away from pain, and Asmongold (AKA ZackRawrr) offers a video in which studio executives reveal that ordinary American moviegoers have at long last inflicted enough pain on Hollywood studios over their attempting to shove wokeness down our throats that they’ve finally, finally gotten the message.
“Studios are assembling super fan focus groups to assess various materials for franchise projects to avoid social media backlash.” Well, at least they realize they have a problem. The problem is wokeness. If you work in Hollywood and think to yourself “Hey, can we put this ‘message’ for ‘modern audiences’ in a movie that’s in a beloved franchise,” the answer should always be “No, don’t do that.” Maybe Hollywood could hire me to be a focus group of one. Pay me an executive producer salary and run ideas by me, and I can tell you how not to ruin your bottom line doing stupid things. “No, Galadriel shouldn’t be a girlboss.” “No, you shouldn’t replace Indiana Jones with a young woman who does everything better than him.” “No, you shouldn’t make Superman gay.” It’s not rocket science. Drop me a line and I’ll help save you from your woke staffers (and yourself).
“Toxic fandoms have grown so powerful that talent executives and publicists privately bemoan the issue fear of triggering another backlash.” For “toxic fandoms,” read “ordinary fans tired of your woke bullshit.”
“‘They think the purity of the first version will never be replaced, or you’ve done something to upset the canon of a beloved franchise, and they’re going to take you down for doing so.’ That’s exactly right. I’m glad they understand.” We don’t watch something based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien to take in the vapid natterings of a pink-haired, 20-something gender studies major who thinks she can do a better job than the greatest fantasy writer of the 20th century. Go write your own books, you shallow snowflake loser. Leave ours alone. If you don’t love and respect Tolkien, don’t adapt Tolkien. If you don’t love and respect Star Wars, don’t write Star Wars. If you don’t like and respect existing D.C. and Marvel superheroes, don’t write them. See how this works? If you don’t respect the source material, we don’t care about your “spin.” Bugger off.
“The problem is that the fan base wants you to maintain what the original story was and not change the story.” That’s because we liked the original store and hate the woke garbage you’ve replaced it with.
“‘Fear of inadvertently triggering another backlash kept several studios from speaking for this story, even in the background.’ I think this is a good thing.” Damn straight. Screw up beloved franchises and fans will stay away in droves, and tell all their friends to stay away in droves. And not only will we stay away, we’ll actively hope that every social justice warrior working so hard to ruin the source material loses their jobs.
“We’re trying to put this agenda that we want to have in, like, this show. The fans don’t like it. Now the fans are the problem? No, you’re the problem for trying to force it into the show. You either meet the audience expectations, or you die.” Damn straight. The people that told you to should replace Jedi with lesbian space witches are the problem. They’re the ones that should be fired and never allowed to destroy your shareholder value ever again. The fans were the ones telling you not to set that giant pile of money on fire, and everyone in Kathleen Kennedy’s chain of command was going “Nah, it’ll be fine!”
“‘They’ll just tell us if you do that, the fans are going to retaliate.’ This is a good decision. You know what this shows? It shows that we’re winning. You don’t get to morally obligate an audience to buy your product. That’s not how the world works. Nobody has to do that.”
He points out early Sonic the Hedgehog footage feedback as an example of a non-political example of fans telling a studio they’re screwing up, and the studio listening. “They fixed it and they made it the way that people wanted, and now they’re making Sonic 3 with Keanu Reeves as Shadow.”
“If the companies are making products and people don’t like them, then they’re not going to sell. And that’s it. That’s the bottom line. Literally nothing else matters.”
Social Justice destroys everything it touches. Disney spent billions acquiring valuable cash cow franchises and then woke employees turned them into money losing failures. The woke insisting that Lightyear needed more gay lost Disney tons of money and goodwill. The staffers who kept wokeness out of Inside Out 2 made Disney a billion dollars. That and Deadpool and Wolverine proved that fans will still flock to theaters if you just stop trying to shove “The Message” down their throats and simply give them what they want.
Or you can keep trying wokeness and continue to enjoy the massive layoffs happening all across Hollywood.
Your choice.
It’s the woke that are toxic. It’s the fans that are trying to keep them from setting billions of dollars in shareholder value on fire.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton doesn’t just sue the Biden Administration, he sues anyone breaking Texas law. and this time he’s suing Chinese-owned Tik-Tok.
Big tech companies, and TikTok especially, have continued to draw the attention of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has now sued the social media giant alleging it violated aspects of a newly enacted Texas online safety law.
“Big Tech companies are on notice that I will hold them accountable for exploiting Texas children and failing to prioritize minors’ online safety and privacy,” Paxton wrote on social media.
The Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act is at the center of Paxton’s allegations. “In contravention of the SCOPE Act, Defendants have failed, and continue to fail, to create and provide parents and guardians with the tools legally required to protect minors’ privacy and safety,” the lawsuit states.
An overview of the SCOPE Act can be found here, and the full text of the act can be found here.
The SCOPE Act, also known as House Bill 18, was passed during the 88th Legislative Session. The law aims to prevent digital service providers (DSPs) from entering into agreements with minors without parental or guardian consent. It also mandates that DSPs include options in these agreements for parents or guardians to permanently enable specific settings.
It goes on to allege that TikTok has “failed to develop a commercially reasonable method for a known minor’s parent or guardian to verify their identity and relationship to a known minor.”
Last month, the SCOPE Act went into effect, but only partially.
Judge Robert Pitman for the Western District Court of Texas in Austin determined that the “monitoring-and-filter requirements” of the SCOPE Act, which would require DSPs to monitor certain categories of content and filter them from being on display for known minors,” posed a threat to “content based” online speech.
In his opinion, Pittman questioned the “overbroad terminology” employed by the SCOPE Act.
“For example, what does it mean for content to ‘promote’ ‘grooming?’ The law is not clear.”
“Grooming” is listed alongside other explicit topics like suicide and substance abuse that the SCOPE Act would have required DSPs to monitor and filter out for minors.
Tech industry groups NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association filed the lawsuit to block the law, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) sued Paxton in an effort to prevent the SCOPE Act from going into effect.
“Texas law requires social media companies to take steps to protect kids online and requires them to provide parents with tools to do the same,” wrote Paxton about his most recent lawsuit. “TikTok and other social media companies cannot ignore their duties under Texas law.”
The lawsuit, filed in a Galveston County District Court, is seeking civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation and injunctive relief to prevent future violations of the SCOPE Act by TikTok.
TikTok has come under increased scrutiny in recent months.
President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that included a requirement for the Chinese corporation ByteDance to divest from the social media platform.
Last year, back when I wad employed, I had a cleaning lady come in to do my house before a small 4th of July gathering. She brought her daughter, who watched Tik-Tok videos while her mother cleaned. And by “watched,” I mean she would look at the first second or two of a video and then instantly scroll on to the next. I fear we’re raising generations with the attention span of a gnat.
We’ve previously covered that Tik-Tok is nasty Chinese spyware, but the issue of parental controls is not one easily solved, nor is the issue of balancing constitutional rights with the traditional doctrine of in loco parentis any less difficult. Indeed, there are multiple constitutional issues involved:
Just what “constitutional rights” does a corporation owned in part by the Chinese Communist Party enjoy? Corporate personhood is a legal fiction designed to allow corporate entities to enter into legal contracts an obtain standing as separate entities in the judicial system. The rights of foreign corporations to access American markets is usually defined by bilateral or multilateral treaties, yet we know Communist China ignores such treaties at will when it suits them. Why should Tik-Tok enjoy First Amendment protections when American corporations enjoy no such rights in China?
Can a state have the standing to regulate a company that doesn’t have any physical presence in that state? Can California sue Gunbroker for not banning AR pattern rifles entirely?
There seems to be a legal assumption that states have some standing in these matters, as Pornhub IP range-blocked Texas rather than test the constitutionality of parental control requirements in court.
It would be better if parents instituted their own controls and/or refrained from handing their spawn smartphones with mind-destroying Chinese spyware installed, but that doesn’t seem to be the world we live in.
Needless to say, if you have Tik-Tok on your phone, you should delete that right now…
A crippling dock strike gets the can kicked past election day, Hurricane Helene wrecks havoc on the highlands, illegal alien crime flourishes, two bombing plots aimed at “diversity” are thwarted, Texas A&M ditches woke classes, more Diddy dirt, and Japanese gamers aren’t onboard with Ubisoft’s “black samurai.”
The Biden-Harris administration’s ‘America Last’ policies have left the country vulnerable. Between draining the strategic petroleum reserve, sending hundreds of billions in cash and equipment to Ukraine (such as electrical transformers that are now needed for Hurricane Helene), and FEMA spending $640 million to help migrants, the agency tasked with emergency preparedness is now ‘broke,’ and doesn’t have enough money to get through hurricane season which typically lasts through November.
The agency is being stretched as it works with states to assess damage from Hurricane Helene and delivers meals, water, generators and other critical supplies. The storm struck Florida last week, then plowed through several states in the Southeast, flooding towns and killing more than 160 people.
Mayorkas was not specific about how much additional money the agency may need, but his remarks on Air Force One underscored concerns voiced by President Joe Biden and some lawmakers earlier this week that Congress may need to pass a supplemental spending bill this fall to help states with recovery efforts.
“This woman blasted Joe Biden live on NBC – she has family that has been trapped in NC for days and says FEMA is nowhere in sight. Why haven’t President Biden or Vice President Harris called a major press conference and/or landed on the ground in towns that were wiped off the map by last week’s flooding?”
Indeed, there are a lot of reports that some government agencies are actively hindering private rescue and relief efforts in North Carolina. “Let’s begin with this terrible report of a man who used his own helicopter to rescue stranded people above Asheville, N.C., and who was told if he continued, he would be placed under arrest.”
Also: “We have medical teams trying to access Burnsville (elevation 2,700ft) and Black Mountain. Authorities are threatening arrest. I’m gonna keep this short & simple; something is very wrong here.”
Also: “NEW – Federal Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has shut down aid flights into Western North Carolina. A NOTAM has been issued by the FAA that won’t allow anyone not approved by the state to fly aid missions.”
Plus a slate of 18-wheeler tire slashings in multiple locations that’s hopefully not government sanctioned. Hopefully…
The Trafalgar Group released a poll on Wednesday showing Trump has increased his lead in the vital swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin.
The recent poll shows Trump beating Harris by 2.2 points in Michigan, with Trump scoring 47.5% of the votes to Harris’s 45.3%.
On August 31, the Trafalgar Group had Trump beating Harris 47% to 46.6%, a lead of only 0.4%.
Trump is winning in Wisconsin as well, topping the Kackler by 47.1% to 46%. The poll had Trump at 47.3% to Harris’s 46.2%.
“These numbers are the best we’ve seen for Trump in this election cycle. If this momentum holds, he could easily win by a significant margin,” a polling source stated.
In Pennsylvania, which many pundits believe Harris needs to win, Trump is up, with 47.5% of the vote, compared to Harris’s 45.3%.
The Biden-Harris administration has allowed well over half a million illegal aliens with criminal histories to enter the United States.
U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-23) published the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data on social media platform X.
According to the newly released information, 662,566 noncitizens on ICE’s national docket have criminal histories. These numbers include 13,099 murder convicts, 15,811 sexual assault convicts, and 13,423 weapon offense convicts.
“We’ve known for far too long that the Biden-Harris border crisis poses a direct threat to Americans,” Gonzales said in a press release. “The truth is clear—illegal immigrants with a criminal record are coming into our country.”
The Texas congressman asserted that beyond the disturbing new data, it should also serve as a “wake-up call” for the federal government and cities across the United States that keep sanctuary policies in place.
Gonzales first requested the data on March 13 when he penned a letter requesting answers to several illegal immigration questions to President Joe Biden and U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Of the seven million reported cases on ICE’s docket, the letter requested information on how many noncitizens were charged with a crime by a municipality. Additionally, the letter asked how many were noncitizens convicted of a crime and released into U.S. communities.
Over six months later, Gonzales has finally received a response.
Sure seems like Gonzales has been a lot more active on this issue since Brandon Herrera primaried him…
As ‘Border Czar’ Kamala Harris visited the southern border for a photo-op on Friday, alarming new revelations also emerged showing that far-left Democrats in the White House rolled out the red carpet to 650,000 migrants with criminal records. This has already fueled chaos nationwide, including a new report of an “explosion in migrant prostitution” networks across America.
A newly leaked law enforcement document obtained by New York Post journalists shows that the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua has exploited desperate migrant women into sex trafficking networks across eight states.
At least eight states have seen an explosion in migrant prostitution since the gang laid down roots in the US, with authorities in Texas, Nevada, Illinois, California, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey and New York now fighting to curtail the sex trade, the memo shows. -NYPost
The Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua has been linked to sex trafficking in eight states including New York.
In New York City, police sources told the NYPost that Tren de Aragua gangsters are recruiting their members and victims straight out of city-run migrant shelters.
In the Big Apple, Tren de Aragua is trying to recruit foot soldiers to force women into sex trafficking — in the hopes that it will become a main source of income for the gang, according to the leaked memo.
Funny how we didn’t see or hear a single story about Tren de Aragua prior to the Biden Administration, and now they seem to be everywhere.
Speaking of sexual slavery, a Yazidi woman captured by the Islamic State was just rescued…in Gaza. From the river to the sea/No sex slave shall be free…
“Philadelphia: Muslim teen hoped to make bombs for terror group, planned LGBTQ parade jihad massacre….Muhyyee-ud-din Abdul-Rahman, 18, of West Philadelphia, not only had bomb-making materials, that were found in the trash at his home, he had tested bombs in the woods behind his home and had likely considered an attack on Philly’s LGBTQ community.” Funny how some of the Democratic Party’s vibrant diversity wants to blow up other parts of the Democratic Party’s vibrant diversity…
John Kerry admits that the First Amendment is a huge barrier to forcing leftist views down people’s throats. “Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence. What we need is to win…the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.” If anyone you know is committing #Wrongthink, be sure to report them to the Ministry of Love…
Israel hits a Russian airbase in Syria. One wonders what Russian’s adventures in Syria have gotten them other than some dead mercenaries and weapons sales.
Virginia high school teacher fired for refusing to use tranny pronouns awarded $575,000. Make them pay.
Albania wants to createa microstate in their own capital for “Sovereign State of the Bektashi Order” for the moderate Sufi Muslim sect. “His hoped-for Muslim state in Tirana, the capital of Albania, will be a Vatican-style sovereign enclave that will control territory the size of five New York City blocks and will allow alcohol, allow women to wear what they want and not impose lifestyle rules.” Not the worst idea I’ve heard this year. At least they could sell postage stamps…
A Texas A&M spokesperson has confirmed that the university will deactivate 38 certificates and 14 minors, including the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies minor.
The A&M spokesperson told The Battalion that the official list of deactivated programs will not be public until it appears before the Faculty Senate on October 14. A university statement cited low enrollment as the reason for deactivating the programs.
However, Theresa Morris, the director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, said that the LGBTQ Studies minor was among those ending.
An official in the Department of Communication & Journalism also confirmed that certificates for both Communication, Diversity and Social Justice and Communication & Global Media are being deactivated.
Additionally, the director of Marketing and Communications in the College of Performance confirmed that the certificates for popular culture and performing social activism were also in the deactivation process.
This comes after State Rep. Brian Harrison (R-Midlothian) repeatedly called DEI courses and the LGBTQ studies minor an “outrageous abuse of tax money” and examples of “taxpayer-funded indoctrination.”
Good. Maybe students will be forced to choose a major that adds to the world rather than tearing it down with social justice.
“Lawsuit Accuses Democrat State House Candidate of Not Paying Vendors. House District 80 Democrat candidate Cecilia Castellano is already under investigation by Attorney General Ken Paxton in a separate voter fraud case.”
A lawsuit filed in Tarrant County is accusing a Democrat running for the Texas House of Representatives of failing to pay her vendors and subcontractors in the business she operates.
House District 80 candidate Cecilia Castellano, who operates Azteca Designs and Construction, allegedly failed to provide proper compensation for work done by one of Azteca’s subcontractors, the Glass Doctor of North Texas, according to the suit.
Glass Doctor had entered an agreement to work on a project with Azteca in November 2023, where the subcontractor was slated to earn $49,643.36, according to the filing. Later, Glass Doctor was tasked with replacing damaged glass installed by another subcontractor for an additional $18,487.77.
However, Glass Doctor says the payments never arrived.
Plaintiffs instead painted a picture of Azteca going out of their way to avoid providing the payments, claiming the project was “not built pursuant to written plans” and back-charging Glass Doctor to fix work done by a third party.
Fort Bend County Judge KP George has been indicted on misdemeanor charges related to faked racist messages on social media but could face felony charges over an alleged attempt to hide evidence.
A grand jury indicted George last Thursday in relation to a scheme in collaboration with Taral Patel, his former chief of staff and now Democratic candidate for county commissioner. Patel was indicted on four felony and four misdemeanor charges after investigators tied him to fake social media and email accounts used to make offensive posts and circulate falsified polls.
“Netflix Cancellations Skyrocketed After Founder Donated, Endorsed Harris. Netflix cancellations went through the roof after co-founder and chairman Reed Hastings endorsed and donated to VP Kamala Harris.”
“[German] Green Party co-chairs Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour are stepping down. The move could make things even harder for Germany’s fractious coalition government. Germany’s Green Party is going from crisis to crisis. Three days after regional elections in the eastern state of Brandenburg delivered a stinging defeat to the party, its entire leadership has resigned. Now, the party will have to choose a replacement at its party conference in November.”
My my, hey hey/Disney cancels the movie about Rei.
Who could possibly be pissed off about a historical game starring a black samurai? Well, for starters, Japanese gamers.
The Democratic Party has long benefited from its reputation as “the party of the working man” long after that description ceased to be true. But the New Left have all but completed their long march through the party’s institutions, and now they’re run by college-educated social justice Marxists who don’t even bother to conceal their contempt for people who make their living working with their hands.
Has anyone noticed that CNN stands nearly alone in the mainstream media as resistant to the Kamala Harris Joy™ Revival? Perhaps they perhaps get a dose of reality from the presidential debate they moderated in June. Or maybe their Close Encounter of the Harris-Walz Kind in late August showed CNN that Gertrude Stein’s observation about Oakland — there’s no there there — applies even more to Harris.
Or maybe they just pay attention to their own data. Yesterday, Harry Enten dumped all sorts of cold water on Democrat prospects this November with Harris at the top of the ticket. Or perhaps in this context, the problem comes from the man who no longer gets listed on it. Joe Biden’s ignominious booting from a nomination union workers supported has created a potentially large shift in the electorate, one that could doom Democrats in the states they need most:
HARRY ENTEN, CNN SENIOR DATA REPORTER: One of many elements that we’ll be looking at this morning. You know, sometimes there are data points that just jump off the screen, should set off sirens. All right, this is union households. This is democratic margin and presidential election. It ain’t what it used to be. You know, you go back to 1992. Bill Clinton won that union vote by 30 points. Hillary Clinton only won it by 12 points back in 2016. That was the lowest mark for a Democrat since 1984, Mondale versus Reagan. But look at where Kamala Harris is today. She is only leading by nine points. That would be the worst Democratic performance in a generation. Ten points off the mark of Joe Biden, who, of course, won four years ago. He was sort of that union guy, union Joe, right? Won it up by 19 point. She’s ten points off his mark. And the worst in a generation if this, in fact, holds, Sara.
SIDNER: It is interesting to note that the difference between this and this – and Biden still won.
ENTEN: Still won.
SIDNER: But those numbers are significantly down. All right, talk to me about manual labor. Those folks who went to trade schools.
ENTEN: Yes, those folks who use their hands. I think a lot of people oftentimes conflate the union vote with those who use their hands. Mike Rowe, of course, has been arguing more people should go to trade schools, more people should get a vocational degree. Look at this margin.
Dirty Jobs’ didn’t resonate because the host was incredibly charming. It wasn’t a hit because it was gross, or irreverent, or funny, or silly, or smart, or terribly clever. ‘Dirty Jobs’ succeeded because it was authentic,” Rowe wrote. “It spoke directly and candidly to a big chunk of the country that non-fiction networks had been completely ignoring. In a very simple way, ‘Dirty Jobs’ said ‘Hey — we can see you,’ to millions of regular people who had started to feel invisible. Ultimately, that’s why ‘Dirty Jobs’ ran for eight seasons. And today, that’s also why Donald Trump is the President of the United States.”
Back to CNN:
SIDNER: Wow.
ENTEN: This, to me, oh boy does this tell you about the state of our politics now versus back in the early 1990s. Margin among vocational and trade school grads in pre-election polling. Bill Clinton was leading that vote over George H.W. Bush by seven points. Look at where Donald Trump is today over Kamala Harris, a 31-point advantage. When I think people think of the working class, they think of people who use their hands. And we know that Donald Trump has been going after that vote, and he is in a very, very strong position, more so perhaps than any other bloc. The folks who go to trade school, vocational school, that has moved from being a core Democratic group to now being a core group of Donald Trump’s massive amount of support among the working class.
And it’s not just the white working class, no matter how much the Protection Racket Media tries to spin this as some sort of white-supremacy impulse. Enten shows that Trump has made real inroads among non-white voters, especially among those in the working and middle classes:
ENTEN: Yes, you know, we have been noting on this program, right, that Donald Trump seems to have been having some real impact among voters of color, getting into that traditional democratic support. And I was very interested to see this, because we’re talking about the working class, right? So, this is the margin among non-college graduates, all right, the voters of color. You go back four years ago. Look at that, Joe Biden won that group by 45 points. Look at where Kamala Harris’ support is today. She’s still leading amongst that group, but that lead is down 17 points to just 28 points.
And I will note that the margin among voters of color who actually graduate college has only been changed by five points. Five points compared to four years ago. The reason Donald Trump is doing so well amongst voters of color is because he has really gone in and grabbed a lot of voters that he didn’t previously have among those who didn’t graduate college. And this is part of a larger trend that we’re seeing throughout our politics, Sara, in which Republicans, specifically Donald Trump, is doing very, very well among working class voters whether they were in unions, whether they went to trade school, or whether they’re voters of color. The fact is, Donald Trump seems to have gone into a hotbed of traditional Democratic support and made a lot of movement in ways I don’t think a lot of people would have thought when he went down that escalator just back in 2015.
If those numbers hold up in this election cycle, the results would be catastrophic for Democrats all the way down the ticket. They barely won in 2020 and barely lost in 2016 while remaining strong in these demos in both cycles. If those demos are shifting significantly to the GOP, it spells doom in what had been an evenly split electorate otherwise.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that many working-class voters in deep-blue Philadelphia continue to support Republicans over Democrats.
This could cause significant problems for VP Kamala Harris:
Gabriel Lopez grew up in a family of Democrats in the Kensington neighborhood of deep-blue Philadelphia. So in 2016, the first presidential election he was old enough to vote in, he picked Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.
But Lopez, now 27, says his views have changed. He switched his registration to Republican this year, and he plans to vote for Trump, who’s running for president a third time.
“Democrats keep saying [Trump] is going to bring down the economy, but he was already president for four years, and taxes were lower,” Lopez said. “We’re tired of the same politics. We got a different type of guy, and the people actually love him.”
A home health aide and rideshare driver, Lopez said Democrats haven’t kept their promises to bring down prices or improve life in his community. Trump, he said, is “at least straightforward.”
The thing is, the left and media cannot blame racism or sexism because the shift began years ago.
Philly houses 20% of the state’s Democrats.
The county lost more Democrat votes in 2020 than any other county.
In 2020, President Joe Biden “performed worse than [Hillary] Clinton in 41 of the city’s 66 political wards.”
The most significant shift occurred in working-class communities, especially those “where education levels were lowest and poverty rates were highest.”
Yikes:
The trend was consistent across racial groups, though it was most pronounced in majority-Latino neighborhoods. In two North Philadelphia political wards — including the one where Lopez lives — Biden in 2020 performed worse in nearly every voting division than Clinton did in 2016.
In some areas, voters increasingly cast ballots for Trump. In others, Democratic vote totals declined because turnout did — fewer people showing up in blue strongholds is effectively a gain for Republicans.
The Pennsylvania Democrat Party has brushed aside concerns, which I expected to hear. The party claimed Harris has “a robust get-out-the-vote program” and bragged about supposed high enthusiasm for Harris, “especially among younger voters and voters of color who were skeptical of Biden before he dropped out of the race in July.”
One recent poll showed Harris performing better than Biden did in 2020.
However, “enthusiasm to vote was lowest in the city’s working-class neighborhoods.”
Retired trucker Jim Kohn voted Democrat all his life until 2016, when he chose Trump over Hillary:
Kohn, a retired truck driver who lives in South Philly and for years voted along with the Teamsters union, is still a registered Democrat. But he’s planning to vote for Trump for the third time, and he believes more of his neighbors frustrated with inflation and the high cost of goods will, too.
“When Trump was president, everything was cheaper,” he said. “Now, everything is so sky high.”
Trump’s presidency was capped by the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a historically sharp economic downturn that economists say shifted prices upward for years to come.
Hillary won Kohn’s “largely white, working-class neighborhood” in 2016.
Trump won in 2020. The votes for Trump went up by 52%.
The piece goes on to note that Republican voter drives in Philadelphia and across the state are signing up new Republicans faster than Democrats.
It’s not just the U.S. All over the world, left-wing parties have gone from those with a substantial membership that came up through union ranks to parties dominated by upper-middle class college-educated Marxists pushing social justice. It happened in the UK, with “the transformation of Labour from a party of working people into a metropolitan machine more concerned with gender-neutral toilets and taking the knee than with what working-class people want and need.”
In the U.S. as abroad, the most salient characteristic of parties supposedly of “the working man” is their naked contempt for anyone who actually uses their hands to work for a living.
The election season is upon us, which means it’s time for Democrats to try to win the only way they know how: Cheating. So here’s a roundup of links on some (but far from all) the ways Democrats will attempt to cheat in November.
A network of left-wing organizations backed by billionaire George Soros is working to naturalize and mobilize immigrants and refugees in order to activate them as voting blocs in swing states, boasting that they could “sway the outcome of national, state, and local elections.”
Chief among these groups is the National Partnership for New Americans, which describes itself as “a national multiethnic, multiracial partnership network of 60 of the country’s leading immigrant and refugee rights organizations.” The group received $560,000 from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations from 2016 to 2021. The group had a total revenue of $4.11 million in 2023.
“Our network has supported the naturalization of over 250,000 U.S. Citizens and has been a key driver of advocacy to make naturalization more affordable and accessible,” the National Partnership for New Americans states. Its website features an image of a t-shirt that reads “Naturalize 2 Million by 2022,” along with the phrase “New American Voters.”
Democrats often rebut the Republican argument on illegal immigration — that the left encourages it to forge a path to permanent Democrat political power — by saying that illegal immigrants don’t have the right to vote. But the effort by the Soros-funded group to get as many immigrants as possible on the voter rolls as a way to “sway” elections indicates that the left does view immigration as a political tool.
Figures suggest that mass immigration could be a boon for Democrats’ electoral chances. One analysis found that congressional districts with a higher-than-average foreign born population voted for Democrats in 90 percent of cases during the 2018 midterm election. The foreign-born population residing in the United States surged to 51.6 million — the highest level ever — under the Biden-Harris administration. An estimate from the Center for Immigration Studies found that illegal immigration accounted for approximately 58 percent of that spike.
President Joe Biden beat former President Donald Trump by only 11,000 votes in Arizona in 2020, a fact that underscores the impact mass immigration could have on American elections. Biden beat Trump by just 12,000 votes in Georgia, another crucial swing state, in 2020. The New American Voters campaign notes that there are more than 86,000 individuals who have been naturalized in Georgia since the election.
The New American Voters campaign, a project of the National Partnership for New Americans, maintains demographic reports on critical swing states and the country as a whole.
“Since the last presidential election in November 2020, an estimated 62,179 voting age adults have become newly naturalized citizens in Arizona,” reads one such report, which also track the top ten countries of origin for new citizens in each state.
National Partnership for New Americans Executive Director Nicole Melaku used the release of its demographic data as an opportunity to push Biden to swing further to the left on immigration, pressuring him to support “pathways to citizenship.”
One 2020 report from the National Partnership for New Americans explains that “new American voters form critical voting blocks that can have the power to sway national electoral outcomes,” highlighting their growing share of the population in key swing states and calling them “a sleeping political giant.”
A 2022 report from the group celebrated newly-naturalized voters as part of the “new American majority,” a term used to describe “all people of color, unmarried women, and young voting eligible Americans.” The National Partnership for New Americans directly compared the margin of victory in the 2020 presidential election to the number of newly-naturalized voters who had since gained citizenship within each state.
The National Partnership for New Americans isn’t the only leftist organization working to leverage mass immigration to impact American elections, however. There’s also the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, an organization that’s received nearly $7 million from Soros between 2016 to 2022, and had $25 million in total revenue in 2022.
Two of the most recent listed grants from the Open Society Foundations, which total nearly $4.3 million, are intended “to encourage naturalization among eligible immigrants, assist them with the process, and mobilize their civic participation.” The center is one of the organizations behind Citizenshipworks, an effort also funded by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative to help non-citizens residing in the United States become citizens.
The Immigrant Legal Resource Center isn’t exclusively concerned with naturalizing and mobilizing non-citizens. The organization also works to prevent the deportation of illegal aliens. It received $500,000 in 2021 from the Open Society Foundations to fund its efforts to “dismantle the infrastructure of criminalization, detention, and deportation of immigrants.”
A coalition of 19 Republican attorneys general have launched a criminal investigation into the Democrat fundraising platform ActBlue over allegations of money laundering.
As American Greatness reported in April, multiple independent investigative journalists, including O’Keefe Media Group (OMG) and Election Watch have uncovered what appears to be illegal activity involving millions of dollars in campaign donations to Act Blue that have been laundered through unwitting small donors.
The process of breaking up large donations and submitting them under the names of small donors to cover up illegal contributions has been dubbed “smurfing.” Suspicions that ActBlue routinely engages in this type of illicit fundraising have dogged the outfit since at least Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020.
The Committee on House Administration, chaired by Congressman Bryan Steil (R-Wisc.), launched an investigation into Act Blue in November of 2023 to look into reports that the fundraising giant was skirting campaign donation laws and allowing rampant fraud on the site. The committee widened its probe in August 2024.
In a letter sent to top officials on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on August 5, Steil urged them to “immediately initiate an emergency rulemaking to require political campaigns to verify the card verification value (‘CVV’) of donors who contribute online using a credit or debit card, and to prohibit political campaigns from accepting online contributions from a gift card or other prepaid credit cards.”
In September, Steil sent letters to five states, urging them to launch criminal investigations into ActBlue’s alleged illicit activities, citing three specific areas of concern:
– Donations significantly disproportionate to an individual’s net worth or previous giving history.
– Uncharacteristic donations from party-affiliated registered voters suddenly contributing to candidates of the opposing party.
– Unusually frequent donations from elderly individuals or first-time donors.
The number of GOP AGs involved in the effort has since swelled to 19.
On Tuesday, the 19 Republican Attorney’s General sent a letter to ActBlue CEO and President Regina Wallace-Jones demanding information and explanations regarding the suspicious donations.
Recent reporting suggests that that there may be donors across the country who are identified in filings with the Federal Election Commission as having donated to candidates through ActBlue (and other affiliated entities), but who did not actually make those donations. That raises a host of concerns about whether ActBlue’s platform is being used to facilitate “smurfing”––a type of money laundering in which donors break up large donations and submit them under different names to disguise who the money comes from and thereby skirt contribution limits in violation of state and federal law.
As one former FEC commissioner recently explained, wealthy donors—some of whom are foreign nationals and therefore barred from donating to federal candidates at all—can employ complicated schemes like this to make donations in others’ names. This concern is not hypothetical. Indeed, in an indictment filed last week in federal court, the U.S. Department of Justice alleged that a major U.S. political figure knowingly participated in such a scheme in a recent election cycle to receive contributions from a foreign national through straw donors. Further, the apparent irregularities in FEC filings also raise concerns about whether ActBlue’s fundraising methods are deceptive and properly safeguard donor’s data privacy.
Some of us and our colleagues have raised these concerns with you directly, and at least one senator has raised these concerns with the FEC. Independent investigations have shown that there are donors across the country who show up on FEC filings as having donated to candidates through ActBlue (and other affiliated entities) but deny having made those donations. Given the prominent role it plays in our elections, it is incumbent on ActBlue to address the serious questions created by apparent irregularities in ActBlue’s FEC filings.
ActBlue is one of the largest fundraising platforms for election-related donations. Already during the 2024 election cycle ActBlue has raised billions of dollars. But there are concerns about where those dollars came from. It is essential that we know whether political donations—particularly in such large volumes—are being solicited, made, and processed consistent with campaign finance, consumer protection, and other state and federal laws. We, the chief legal officers of Iowa, Indiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming ask that you explain what measures you have in place to ensure that donations made through your platform follow State and federal law.
Just as important, we ask for clarification as to what measures you take to make sure that the donors identified as donating via the ActBlue platform are who they claim. If individuals are inadvertently donating to political campaigns, are misled into making repeat donations, or are having donations made in their name that they do not wish to make, that could violate election-related disclosures or state consumer fraud statutes. Our States’ citizens deserve to know that those facilitating election-related financing are following State and federal laws. Thus we appreciate the assurances that you will provide in answering our questions promptly before the upcoming elections in November.
To prevent voter fraud, many states require voter ID. But in California, Democrats enacted laws to outlaw it.
On Monday, California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill preventing local governments from requiring voters to present identification at the polls.
Monday evening, X CEO Elon Musk posted in response to the legislation, “Wow, it is now illegal to require voter ID in California! They just made PREVENTING voter fraud against the law.”
Snip.
The new legislation is in a response to Huntington Beach residents passing a voter ID requirement in March. In April, California’s Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta and Democratic Secretary of State Shirley Weber sued the city to invalidate the law, claiming the legislation violated state voting protections.
The bill was passed by the Democratic-controlled California Assembly and Senate earlier this year after members claimed voter ID laws disproportionately affect low-income, elderly and minority voters. The new bill goes into effect on January 1, 2025 when California will become one of 14 states that do not require voter ID for elections.
Despite the bill being signed into law, Huntington Beach has yet to respond to the lawsuit. According to Newsweek, California’s Democratic lawmakers have introduced multiple bills to prevent conservative-leaning locations in the state such as Shasta County from adopting voter ID laws.
Here in Texas, a federal judge wants Democrats to be able to “harvest” ballots.
Six progressive organizations were victorious in their lawsuit challenging a state law that prohibits paid ballot harvesting, with San Antonio-based federal Judge Xavier Rodriguez issuing a ruling on Saturday that declared the law unconstitutional and enjoined state officials from enforcing it.
La Union Del Pueblo Entero (LUPE) was the lead plaintiff, along with the League of Women Voters of Texas, Texas American Federation of Teachers, the Texas Alliance for Retired Americans, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and OCA-Greater Houston.
The law in question, which was passed within Senate Bill (SB) 1 during the Texas Legislature’s first special session in 2021, creates an offense for “vote harvesting services.”
Specifically, the law bans “in-person interaction with one or more voters, in the physical presence of an official ballot or a ballot voted by mail, intended to deliver votes for a specific candidate or measure” and only if it’s done for compensation or benefit.
Volunteers are not prohibited.
According to the plaintiffs that include LUPE, their paid canvassers are often invited into voters’ homes and asked for assistance with their mail-in ballots.
LUPE staff members and volunteers have been asked for assistance with voting by mail and in-person at the polls by elderly and disabled voters, and have provided such assistance, the lawsuit says, adding, “LUPE often provides its volunteers with t-shirts or gas cards, particularly because there is little public transportation in the Rio Grande Valley.”
According to the judge, confusion about the law’s applicability was not addressed by state officials in charge of enforcing it, such as whether the gas card or other items may qualify as compensation that makes ballot harvesting a crime, and he agreed with their position that the law chilled their First Amendment rights.
In his holding, Rodriguez declared the canvassing restrictions in Texas Election Code Sec. 276.015 unconstitutional under the First and 14th Amendments, and ordered the state’s Office of the Attorney General and the Secretary of State not to investigate violations of the law and local prosecutors not to enforce it.
State Sen. Bryan Hughes (R-Mineola), who authored the legislation, reacted to the news on social media, arguing why the law is needed and adding that Rodriguez’s decision will be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.
“I’m glad the Fifth Circuit will be reviewing,” Hughes wrote.
“I included this in SB1 to protect vulnerable voters — the elderly, first-time voters, voters with limited English proficiency. These are the voters most often preyed upon by vote harvesters and paid political operatives,” he explained.
The Heritage Foundation has a voting fraud tracker. The page for Pennsylvania shows nine voting fraud incidents since 2020, two of which were for “Altering The Vote Count.”
This is just a sampler of how Democrats intend to commit voting fraud between now and election day. If you know of any others, feel free to share them in the comments.
I’m sure they next month will provide many more examples…
The IDF has initiated a “limited” incursion into southern Lebanon targeting Hezbollah assets, according to the Israeli military.
“The IDF began limited, localized, and targeted ground raids based on precise intelligence against Hezbollah terrorist targets and infrastructure in southern Lebanon,” the IDF said in a statement.
“These targets are located in villages close to the border and pose an immediate threat to Israeli communities in northern Israel.”
According to the statement, this latest action is part of the northern offensive codenamed Operation Northern Arrows. Israel hopes to secure the return of approximately 60,000 internally displaced citizens forced to flee their homes in the north because of artillery exchanges over the past year.
The IDF claims to be carrying out “a methodical plan set out by the General Staff and the Northern Command, which soldiers have trained and prepared for in recent months.”
The Lebanese Army — separate from Hezbollah — pulled back from certain checkpoints near the border amid intense shelling, seemingly clearing a path for Israeli ground forces to enter.
Israel has spent the past week degrading Hezbollah’s capabilities and inflicting heavy damage on the terror group’s infrastructure, leadership, and communications network. This culminated in the assassination on Friday of Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, who commanded Iran’s fiercest regional proxy force.
I speculated that the rest of Lebanon may finally be tired of Hezbollah’s shit, and the Lebanese army pulling back to let Israel roll over whatever Hezbollah units are left is a pretty big sign that they are.
Video from the ground offensive seems limited, probably because IDF has much better InfoSec discipline than Hezbollah. But here’s a video of some action, with an IDF spokesman calling the ground campaign (again) “limited, targeted raids.” Also said that Hezbollah was preparing an “October 7 style” attack on Israel.
Fire could be seen over the night skies of Israel as missiles exploded overhead. The Israel Defense Forces said the explosions were either successful interceptions or missiles that evaded Israel’s air-defense system and hit open land. Israel, Iraq, and Jordan shut down their respective airspaces as a result; Israel’s airspace reopened a short while later.
Two U.S. Navy destroyers fired about a dozen interceptor missiles to help defend Israel, Pentagon press secretary Patrick Ryder told reporters. He noted those details may change as the situation develops.
Israel vowed to respond to the attack, which came less than 24 hours after the IDF initiated a limited incursion into southern Lebanon to target Iranian-backed Hezbollah assets.
“We are on heightened alert on defense and offensive, we will protect the citizens of Israel. This [missile] fire will have consequences,” IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said after the initial wave of ballistic missiles. “We have plans, and we will act in the time and place that we choose.”
On top of all this, word has leaked out that the head of the Iranian unit charged with countering Mossad was actually an Israeli agent.
The head of an Iranian secret service unit set up to target Mossad agents working in the Islamic Republic turned out to be an Israeli agent himself, according to former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Speaking to CNN Turk, Ahmadinejad claimed Monday that a further 20 agents in the Iranian intelligence team tasked with monitoring Israeli spying activities also turned against Tehran.
The alleged double agents provided Israel with sensitive information on the Iranian nuclear program, according to his comments in the interview, which were widely picked up by international media.
Ahmadinejad said the agents were behind some key Mossad successes in Iran, including the 2018 theft of nuclear program documents that were taken from Tehran to Israel and revealed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The trove is thought to have been a factor in convincing then-US president Donald Trump to pull out of the nuclear agreement between world powers and Iran.
I doubt that. Just about everyone outside of Obama foreign policy wonks and social justice warriors though the Iran deal was idiocy.
The head of the counterintelligence unit was revealed as a double agent in 2021 but he and all of the other alleged Mossad moles were able to flee the country and are now living in Israel, claimed Ahmadinejad, a firebrand populist known for his hardline anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric and for the violent crackdown that followed his disputed 2009 reelection. He was prevented from running again for president earlier this year.
There’s a recurring pattern where conservatives point out the obvious negative effects of leftwing policies, Democrats ignore them, and then are stunned by the obvious, foreseeable consequences of their actions. Be it the inflation from deficit spending and flu manchu shutdowns to Austin’s decision to let drug addict transients camp in the streets increasing the number of drug addicted transients camping in the streets, leftists are constantly making things worse and then throwing up their hands and proclaiming “How could I have possibly known?”
Which brings us to Fort Worth ISD. In 2022, over protesting parents, they hired a social justice superintendent eager to impose DEI on the district.
As parents fight back against racist ideologies in their children’s schools, Fort Worth ISD’s newly minted superintendent, Dr. Angélica Ramsey, announced at a breakfast meeting that the system needs to be “reinvented” because “the truth is that black, brown, and poor kids in this country do not get the education they deserve because we’re in a system that wasn’t built for us.”
According to Ramsey, who has a history of supporting the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” agenda, “we integrated into their system, not the other way around.”
Ramsey’s 2013 doctoral dissertation on “the experiences of Latina principals in both established and burgeoning Latina/o communities in raising Latina/o achievement” promotes her research as “championing the causes of equity and student success for all with a social justice agenda.”
Meanwhile, Fort Worth ISD’s student test scores are declining, yet Ramsey called parents and citizens concerned with her overarching agenda “haters,” promising to “keep pushing forward” with her radical policies.
“Superintendent Ramsey has shown her true ideological colors,” said local Fort Worth activist Carlos Turcios. “It’s strange how she has said she would listen to every parent, yet she attacks conservatives for being haters and being afraid.”
Naturally, she also wanted to impose transsexual gender fluidity ideology on the district.
Fort Worth Independent School District Superintendent Angélica Ramsey has resigned following parental and teacher outrage at her leadership over the past two years.
In an 8-1 vote Tuesday night, the Fort Worth ISD Board of Trustees agreed to accept Ramsey’s resignation. Trustee Camille Rodriguez was the lone dissenting voice.
Trustees hired Ramsey to lead Fort Worth ISD in 2022 and set her salary at $335,000. Her contract was scheduled to expire in July 2026.
The decision to accept Ramsey’s resignation came after a four-hour closed executive session with Fort Worth ISD attorneys.
During the meeting, Board President Roxanne Martinez said she supported Ramsey’s resignation following public comments by concerned residents and teachers.
“The board will, of course, be moving forward with our commitment and focus on student outcomes and improving student achievement,” said Martinez.
Questions arose about Ramsey’s performance after Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker sent a letter and spoke to the board last month to discuss the district’s failings.
According to Parker, standardized test data from spring 2024 showed that Fort Worth ISD trailed 11 percentage points behind Dallas ISD, 14 points behind Houston ISD, and 18 behind Brownsville ISD.
I would say that Forth Worth ISD trailing Houston ISD is especially shocking, but to my surprise Fort Worth ISD and Houston ISD now have broadly similar demographics, each with over 60% Hispanic students. Hispanics have increased from just under 20% to 35% of Fort Worth’s population since 1990.
During last week’s board meeting, residents and teachers spoke to the board, expressing their outrage with Ramsey’s leadership, accusing her of creating a toxic environment and failing Fort Worth students.
One mother said she had warned the board about Ramsey’s prior performance at Midland ISD before her hiring. Ramsey led Midland ISD for only a year before breaking her contract and moving to Fort Worth.
“What would have happened if the things that I told you, you would’ve listened, what would happen to our students?” asked mom Hollie Plemons. “I gave all of you the data on Midland before she came here, before you gave her a contract, before the 21 days was up, before it had even started. They were an F-rated school. Their school had worse scores than we did. You hired her [Ramsey] based on equity, not merits, and look where it’s gotten us.”
Fort Worth had the opportunity to focus on academic excellence, or focus on social justice, and they chose social justice, and reaped the inevitable falling test scores that decision entailed. What did they think was going to happen?
Social justice is a racist, sexist, anti-American, anti-Enlightenment, anti-reality ideology designed to weaponize white guilt, empower the far left and destroy everything it touches. Advocating for it should be immediately disqualifying for any management or supervisory position.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah group confirmed on Saturday that its leader and one of its founding members, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in a southern suburb of Beirut.
The killing of the powerful militant group’s longtime leader sent shockwaves throughout Lebanon and the Middle East, where he has been a dominant political and military figure for more than three decades.
Nasrallah, linked by Israel to numerous deadly attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets, has been on Israel’s kill list for decades. His assassination is by far the biggest and most consequential of Israel’s targeted killings in years, and significantly escalates the war in the Middle East. The Israeli military said it carried out a precise airstrike on Friday while Hezbollah leaders were meeting at their headquarters in Dahiyeh, south of Beirut.
Quick reaction:
Good.
Fuck that guy.
Hezbollah is a terrorist organization that has a long history not only of killing Israeli women and children, but also killing Americans, stretching back into the 1980s, and we should celebrate every time a member is killed. Indeed, a whole bunch people who oppose jihad reportedly celebrated Nasrallah’s death in Syria and Iran. Muhannad Alazzeh, former member of the Jordanian Senate, explains:
Hezbollah is an ideological party based on the principle of Wilayat al-Faqih or Guardianship of the Jurist, which is the cornerstone of the Shiite doctrine. It demands the loyalty of its followers to the guardian jurist, who acts on behalf of heaven’s command. That person is Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and Hezbollah’s fealty to Khomeini is what pushed the party without hesitation to engage in civil wars in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and to intervene in the protests in Bahrain years ago. These interventions by Hezbollah were not against Israel but against the Muslim citizens in those countries, most of whom were engaged in revolts against tyrannical dictatorial regimes, who built their power off the bodies of their opponents.
Hezbollah’s support for criminal and corrupt regimes in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Iran has had a much stronger impact on the Arab and Islamic masses than Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel, which is why the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah is not an event worth shedding tears for most of these masses.
Hezbollah’s involvement in repressive actions in neighboring countries elevated strongman leaders who oppressed their fellow Muslims, which angered enough people that Israel was able to recruit a large base for espionage missions, one which undoubtedly helped in carrying out successive assassinations of Hezbollah leaders, the last but not least of which was the assassination of Nasrallah.
Even at home in Lebanon, Hezbollah is accused by Lebanese citizens (with the exception of the Shiite community) of being an armed militia that undermines and weakens the Lebanese state. This accusation has turned out to be true over the past years; Hezbollah took up arms against Saad Hariri’s Future Movement in 2008 and occupied buildings and facilities in Beirut in a blatant show of force. The group was also accused of being involved in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
From the perspective of the overwhelming majority of Arab and Muslim peoples, Hezbollah is a destructive element that fuels sectarian conflicts and supports authoritarian regimes so long as these regimes share a common sectarian affiliation with Hezbollah and the Supreme Leader of Iran wishes to support them.
Now Israel must deal with Nasrallah’s successor, Hassan Khalil Yassin, who—
Oh wait. They just did. “The IDF eliminated senior Hezbollah intelligence array terrorist Hassan Khalil Yassin in an additional precision strike in the Dahieh district in Beirut on Saturday, the military reported.”
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He left out “opportunities for rapid advancement.”
One of the primary goals of warfare is to take out an enemy’s C3: command, control and communications. Operation Grim Beeper took out their communications, and the bombing campaign has taken out their command and control. It’s as close to an absolute decapitation strike as I’ve seen in warfare. They’ve taken out all of Hezbollah’s leadership, along with several of their Iranian handlers. Hezbollah’s network is gone, and it will take years to reconstitute those hierarchies of competence, if ever. Does Hezbollah have a written succession chart for this situation? Does the Assistant Undersecretary for Raping Jewish Women move all the way up to the top spot? Expect a lot of power-jockeying and internecine warfare among surviving lower-level terrorists, all of whom, in classic Arab fashion, see no reason why they shouldn’t be the ones running things
The MSM is doing their usual hand-wringing over “escalation” and “a wider war.” With whom? Israel has effectively destroyed Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Syria is still mired in its own unending civil war. Israel aircraft are now pounding the snot out of the Houthis in Yemen. And via Instapundit:
There are unconfirmed reports in Iranian media of a helicopter crash in southwestern Iran.
It is reported that Mohammad Abdul Salam, the head of Houthi coordination in Iran, and several others have been killed.
Is Iran going to send Republican Revolutionary Guard units through Syria to attack the Golan Heights? Are they finally going to pack their much-rumored nuke on one of their missiles and pray really hard it gets past Arrow-2 and -3, David’s Sling and Iron Dome? I’m not even sure the Mahdi personally assuring the mullahs he would unoccult himself would convince them to go toe-to-toe with Israel in a game of nuclear war.
Israel has effectively destroyed its nearest foes and delivered blows to Iran’s prestige it will take the mullahs years, if not decades, to recover from. As I said back in July, Israel is settling all family business.
There’s obviously going to be a lot of fallout:
What happens to Lebanon’s ruling March 8 coalition, of which Hezbollah is a member? How many Hezbollah members are even still alive? Who do they even take orders from if the entire “military wing” leadership is dead? It’s also no secret that a lot of Hezbollah’s coalition “partners” (especially Christians and Druze) hate their guts, and might take the opportunity for a quick political divorce.
One reason Bashar Assad has been able to maintain his tenuous grip on power in Syria is the active support of Hezbollah. With Hezbollah gone, Assad’s position becomes more precarious still, especially with overextended allies Iran and Russia reeling from their own difficulties.
Whoever is running the Obama-Biden-Harris foreign policy axis just had their Netanyahu loathing and “Now Israel, you play nice!” dictates blow up in their face. (Exactly a year ago, Biden Administration National Security Advisor Jack Sullivan declared that “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” How’d that tempting fate think work out for you, Jake?) Their insistence on playing footsie with Iran (because…why? Just because they hate America? Or did some of those billions they handed over to the Mullahs somehow get kicked back into Democratic Party pockets?) and propping up the Palestinians got them October 7, and October 7 finally got Israel to finish off Hamas and Hezbollah in the same war. And Israel wiping the map with Hezbollah and Hamas may end up pushing those “Muslim Michigan voters” we keep hearing about (the ones Democrats spent so much time and effort importing) to vote against Harris in November.
Benjamin Netanyahu ignored Biden Administration blithering to finish off Israel’s terrorist enemies, much to the consternation of global anti-Israeli political elites. Netanyahu will probably emerge from the Israeli-Hamas not only stronger than ever, but possibly the most significant Israeli leader since David Ben-Gurion.
If you’ve been reading this blog any length of time, you know that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has been suing the Biden Administration for both dereliction of federal duties and regulatory overreach. The latter has included several lawsuits against the Biden Administration over their attempts to impose a radical transexual agenda via judicial fiat, and on this front Paxton has just filed another one, this time over the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Texas and 16 other states sued the Biden administration, accusing it of attempting to unlawfully rewrite a federal disability law to include “gender dysphoria” in a newly approved rule.
The lawsuit was filed on September 26 against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the charge that its rule “upends decades of established federal disability law” by redefining “gender dysphoria” as a disability under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the ADA were signed into law in 1977. Section 504 states, “No otherwise qualified individual with a disability in the United States … shall, solely by reason of his or her disability, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under … any program or activity conducted by any Executive agency…”
According to the lawsuit, Section 504 “prohibits ‘any program or activity’ that receives federal financial assistance from discriminating against a qualified individual with a disability.”
The ADA defines a disability as “a physical or mental impairment that constitutes or results in a substantial impediment to employment.”
The HHS issued a rule in May titled “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” which included a change to Section 504 that states gender dysphoria “may be a disability.”
It determined that any “restrictions that prevent, limit, or interfere with otherwise qualified individuals’ access to care due to their gender dysphoria, gender dysphoria diagnosis, or perception of gender dysphoria, may violate section 504.”
However, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit asserts that when Congress enacted Section 504 and the ADA in the 70s, “it established as a matter of law that ‘transvestism, transsexualism . . . [and] gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments, or other sexual behavior disorders,’ are not protected disabilities.”
The lawsuit additionally seeks to have a 2002 amendment to Section 504, “Nondiscrimination Under Federal Grants and Programs,” declared unconstitutional, claiming it “applies with extreme breadth” to any “program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance,” meaning all recipients of Federal funds are subject to compliance to the Rehabilitation Act.
The court documents allege that the HHS rule “exposes” the 17 states and their agencies to “loss of federal funding.”
“The Biden Administration is once again abusing executive action to sidestep federal law and force unscientific, unfounded gender ideology onto the public,” Paxton said in a press release.
Funny how a man pretending to be a woman is simultaneously both a powerful personal statement of individuality that requires large companies to demand people use officially sanctioned pronouns and a mental illness that requires the federal government to invoke the ADA to remove federal funds unless targeted political enemies bow down to radical transsexual social justice. The answer appears to change depending on whichever is most useful for radical leftwing Democrats to force ordinary Americans to bend to their will.
Paxton has won several previous lawsuits on the issue, and I expect him to win this one as well.
