Read it.

A council in the county of Essex, close to London, has been ridiculed for offering emotional support to employees they claim are feeling unsettled by seeing so many people raising the national flag in the streets of towns and cities across the country.

As we have highlighted, the action is being taken by everyday people in Britain who are sick to the back teeth of mass illegal immigration and the fallout it’s having on their communities.

Read it.

The Wokerati don’t like it when the laws that they twisted to hammer normal people are being turned against them. ODF.

Read it.

Lackluster student performance has plagued the Schenectady, N.Y., city school district for years.

That’s because the teachers are crap. They won’t admit that, of course.

The school district, like many others, implemented a “grading for equity” policy in response to dismal test scores.

All of which is designed so that Fashionable Minorities can get better grades than they actually deserve, which incidentally hiding the fact that their teachers are crap.

However, as Aaron Gifford reports below for The Epoch Times, a recent national survey indicates that most teachers feel grade equity actually hurts students long term, although more than half of the schools and districts across the nation engage in the practice.

Schenectady’s 2022-2023 academic report said 95 percent of its high school freshmen were behind in math by three or more grade levels.

A year later, the district reported that in the first quarter of the 2022-2023 school year, more than half of its middle school students (grades 6-8) were three or more grade levels behind in both reading and math, while the daily attendance rate for high schoolers had dipped below 79 percent.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Florida investigators say some migrants have been using hidden cameras and earpieces to cheat on commercial driver’s license (CDL) exams, allowing them to operate 18-wheelers despite not knowing English, according to WTLV-TV and Breitbart.

According to WTLV-TV, applicants used tiny cameras to transmit test questions outside DMV facilities, where an accomplice provided answers through an earpiece. Police in Jacksonville recently arrested several migrants in the scheme. One man was sentenced to eight months in prison, another was turned over to ICE, and others had cases dismissed after court-ordered conditions.

Officials describe the cheating operation as “highly organized” and likely active nationwide. It comes amid a rise in fatal crashes involving non-English-speaking truckers.

Read it.

Why do celebrities turn awards show speeches into political rants?

Because they can, for starters.

They also know there’s no journalist within shouting distance to fact-check their claims. Nor will reporters press them on their lecture’s details.

A similar protection comes via celebrity relief efforts. Stars share their talent and time for various causes, typically with the best of intentions. What if those intentions aren’t enough?

Enter FireAid.

I predict that none of the $100 million will go to the people whose property in rich-people enclaves like Pacific Palisades the City of Los Angeles wants to expropriate and turn into ‘affordable housing’.

Read it.

Canada is often portrayed as a land of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity. Reality, however, tells a different story.

Statist policies, crushing taxes, bloated bureaucracy, and a society overtaken by woke ideology have shattered Canada. This is a cautionary tale for those looking at Canada as an ideal living space. If you are asking yourself what living in Canada is like, let me explain: Canada is not a land of fulfilled dreams but of enduring harsh conditions and barely getting by.

As if economic hardships aren’t enough, Canadians are also oppressed by the Orwellian newspeak that woke culture is creating. If you speak your mind, you’re labeled a fascist. If you question social policies, you’re accused of microaggressions.

There are no best places to live in Canada anymore. As a Canadian, I see little chance of Canada becoming livable again. Since I founded Expat Money in 2017, I have been helping expats build their Plan-Bs to protect their wealth and freedom and leave countries like this one.

Let’s look at the unfortunate condition that Canada has fallen into.

Read it.

Phillips 66 will begin shutting down its 139,000 bpd Los Angeles-area refinery as soon as next week, sources told Reuters, moving forward on a closure plan announced last year. Units at the plant will idle in phases through Q4 2025, with the facility permanently offline by year-end.

The decision isn’t a surprise—Phillips 66 said in October it would exit the site, citing “market dynamics.” But it comes with fallout: about 600 employees and 300 contractors will lose their jobs by December, with only a handful reassigned to the company’s marine terminal. The company insists it will support workers through the transition, though local officials remain worried about the economic hit.

California, meanwhile, is staring at a bigger problem. Between Phillips 66’s LA facility and Valero’s Benicia refinery, scheduled to close in 2026, the state is set to lose roughly 17% of its refining capacity. That’s a dangerous haircut in a state already paying the nation’s highest pump prices. Analysts warn that by late 2026, California gasoline could top $8 a gallon if supply disruptions collide with fewer in-state refineries.

Read it.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates, race-based hiring, and safe spaces are just a few of the noxious turns that have become the standard in American colleges and universities in recent times.

Examples of universities practicing preferential treatment are countless. John Sailer, director of higher education policy at the Manhattan Institute, reports on a faculty job rubric he obtained from the University of Texas at San Antonio, which listed “female/URM” (underrepresented minority) as a scoring category.

Similarly, in an email he received from Northern Illinois University, a computer science professor shared the department’s search committee evaluation rubric, which scored applicants on their “diversity” and awarded points for those who were “non-male or non-Caucasian.”

Newsbusters.

Yet another transgender extremist (biologically male) targeted a religious school and killed two children in a Catholic church during mass, on Wednesday. Despite the monstrous actions and the anti-Catholic messages written on the shooter’s equipment (like “Where is your God now?”), CNN’s Jake Tapper took to his show, The Lead, and wanted to make sure people were using the school shooter’s preferred pronouns and to make sure he wasn’t ‘dead named.

As with all proglodytes, the Agenda comes first.

Read it.

Time to leave.

Read it.

The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) over the department’s focus on racial equity when hiring, promoting and retaining employees.

The government on Wednesday sent a letter to the agency claiming that CalEPA “may be engaged in employment practices that discriminate … based on race, color, sex, and national origin” due to a document titled “Practices to Advance Racial Equity in Workforce Planning,” which advocates for diverse interview panels and for “applying a racial equity lens to every phase of workforce development.”

“In publicly available guidance documents, CAL EPA highlights ‘hiring, promotion and retention practices and policies’ that indicate it may be using protected characteristics to ‘advance racial equity,'” the letter stated. “Further, [the California Air Resources Board] CARB, a division of CAL EPA, appears to use these policies to engage in discriminatory employment practices in its ‘Racial Equity Framework,’ which aims to advance race-based decision-making within the agency.”

Trump is obviously going to keep the pressure on Blue States to eradicate as much DEI nonsense has he can. Once he breaks the seeming right-side-of-history inevitability of Wokeness, we might be able to keep things on a more even keel … but it will take work and constant vigilance.

Remember, Trump hasn’t even finished his first year of this term. I suspect that Democrats are going to become very tired of losing before he passes the torch in 2028.

Read it.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is no longer defending a Biden administration program that gave preferential treatment to farmers based on race and gender for loans, commodities, and conservation assistance, the Washington Examiner reported.

The USDA submitted a motion in a legal case declining to stand behind the initiative, according to a court filing obtained by the Examiner.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty had sued the USDA on behalf of a Wisconsin dairy farmer who said he was being discriminated against because he was white, the Examiner said.

Have you ever seen a ‘black farmer’? Ever heard tell of one? I was born and raised in Indiana farm country, and I never have. I suspect that this program was another race-based grift: Hey, black people! Pretend to be a farmer so we can give you money we don’t have to give to white people!

Read it.

The Department of Education has put the Burlington, Massachusetts, public school district on notice that it is reviewing the district’s actions of forcing students to take a sex and risk behavior study despite parental decisions to opt their kids out of participation.

The DOE posted that some parents denied the district permission to include their children in the survey, which included the sensitive topics of sexual behavior and gender. But those parental wishes were ignored by the district, and their children were still forced to complete the survey.

The survey was shared by the DOE. It involved extremely personal questions about sexual activities with graphic descriptions, including forced sexual activities. A question regarding gender included the statement: “Your sexual orientation is not the same as your gender identity.”

Huffington Post, a Voice of the Wokerati.

Mayor Muriel Bowser on Wednesday praised President Donald Trump’s surge of federal police into the city, saying it had significantly reduced carjackings.

Officers from various federal law enforcement agencies have backed up the city’s Metropolitan Police Department on patrol in the city for the past two-and-a-half weeks, with the White House taking credit for more than 1,000 arrests assisted by federal officers.

“We greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what MPD has been able to do in this city,” Bowser said at a press conference. “The difference between this 20-day period of this federal surge and last year represents an 87% reduction in carjackings.”

You can almost see the raised eyebrows….

The Existential Republic, a Voice of the Crust.

Behind closed doors, blue state leaders are planning. They’re war-gaming scenarios where federal agents show up and continue to transgress further and further past what is “legal.” Daily the courts are showing that that something is legal when Trump wants it to happen, and illegal when he doesn’t. How does a government function under these circumstance?

For many state Attorney Generals and Governors, the legal briefs are already drafted. The strategy sessions have been running since December. “We saw this coming, even though we hoped it wouldn’t,” former Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum told The 19th days after Trump’s inauguration.

This is what American federalism looks like in 2025: Democratic governors holding emergency sessions on encrypted apps, attorneys general filing lawsuits within hours of executive orders, and state legislatures quietly passing laws that amount to nullification of federal mandates. Oregon is stockpiling abortion medication in secret warehouses. Illinois is exploring digital sovereignty. California has $76 billion in reserves and is deciding how to deploy it. Three sources on those daily Zoom calls between Democratic AGs say the same phrase keeps coming up, though nobody wants to say it publicly: soft secession.

Not the violent rupture of 1861, but something else entirely. Blue states building parallel systems, withholding cooperation, and creating facts on the ground that render federal authority meaningless within their borders.

Gee, right-wingers used to talk about such a system and the Wokerati (a) trash-talked it as being unAmerican and (b) made sure to come down like a ton of bricks (using their control of the levers of power) on anybody who tried it.

Sauce for the goose….

The American Mind.

Conservatives often imagine that winning statewide elections means gaining control over the machinery of government. But this is wrong—and dangerously so. For far too long, red states have confused the two. The assumption that political victory automatically confers political authority is one of the chief falsehoods circulating on the Right. It is the reason Republican states often look like Democratic ones, only with different bumper stickers.

This is an uncomfortable but necessary message for conservatives to hear: red states are facing a major crisis of governance.

The State Leadership Initiative’s new Index Report lays out the evidence in extensive detail. By the most basic measures of lean, accountable, and ideologically grounded government, red states are failing. Many of the policies their representatives are voting for and their governors are signing into law are profoundly out of step with the wishes of voters. Bureaucracies are bloated, universities multiply administrators faster than scholars, there are fewer teachers than administrators in schools, New York-style regulations pile up in red states like Texas, and seven of the ten most federally dependent states wear the Republican label.

Read it.

The “dark money” network operated by Arabella Advisors has reportedly lost one of its top funding sources: a leftist billionaire’s foundation.

Equally significant in the news cycle this morning, President Trump stated on Truth Social that George Soros and his radical leftist son, Alex Soros, “should be charged with RICO because of their support of violent protests.”

UPDATE: Trump: Hit Soros With RICO Charges for ‘Support’ of Protests

UPDATE: GAME ON: Trump Calls for RICO Charges to Be Filed Against George Soros

UPDATE: Trump threatens to prosecute George Soros for backing protests (Josephine Walker/Axios)

Read it.

Twenty-three Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, demanding the EPA investigate funding for the Environmental Law Institute, which the AGs said attempts to “rig the courts” against American energy.

The EPA confirmed receipt and reiterated Zeldin’s dedication to cutting down on wasteful spending from the previous administration. The EPA canceled two grants to the Environmental Law Institute in May.

“It’s outrageous that the Biden EPA has funneled over a million taxpayer dollars to an organization actively working to sway the judiciary in favor of climate nuisance lawsuits,” Jason Isaac, founder and CEO of the American Energy Institute, told The Daily Signal in a statement Tuesday.

“The Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project isn’t education; it’s a backdoor lobbying effort targeting judges with materials crafted by climate activists and litigation insiders,” Isaac added. “Taxpayer dollars should never bankroll a scheme to rig the courts against American energy. This is the kind of corruption President [Donald] Trump was elected to root out, and it’s time for the EPA to stop the grants.”

American Greatness.

A California school district has enacted a new rule for young girls who are uncomfortable sharing a bathroom with biological males pretending to be girls, requiring the girls to file a mental health accommodation request.

The Temecula Valley Unified School District TVUSD has reportedly enacted a rule that tells female students who feel uncomfortable sharing bathroom space with biological males must file a mental health accommodation request under federal law if they want privacy.

The move has prompted outrage from parents and others who say that the rule treats those girls who object to sharing private space with biological males as the problem and treating their request for privacy as a type of disability.

Read it.

California, Washington, and New Mexico could lose millions of dollars in federal funding if they continue failing to enforce English language requirements for truckers, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Tuesday.

An investigation launched after a deadly Florida crash involving a foreign truck driver who made an illegal U-turn on Aug. 12 found what Duffy called significant failures in how all three states are enforcing rules that took effect in June after one of President Donald Trump’s executive orders. He said the department was already reviewing enforcement before the crash.

Truckers are supposed to be disqualified if they can’t demonstrate English proficiency. Duffy said the driver in the crash should not have been given a commercial driver’s license because of his immigration status. The crash has become increasingly political, with the governors of California and Florida criticizing each other, and Duffy highlighting the administration’s immigration concerns.

Read it.

Parents are condemning as hypocrisy the fact that a Northern Virginia high school notorious for allowing boys in girls’ bathrooms and girls in the boys’ locker room also has a bathroom specifically designated for “male staff only.”

“This sends a mixed signal to everybody about the expectations of privacy,” a father of a junior at Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn, Virginia, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Tuesday.

“How do they have their own bathrooms if our own students don’t have their own bathrooms?” the father asked.

The Daily Signal reached out to Loudoun County Public Schools and Stone Bridge Principal Timothy Flynn for comment but did not receive a response by press time.

Read it.

Cincinnati’s local response for an attack that occurred one month ago continues to have negative consequences for Democrat Mayor Aftab Pureval, as he received a unanimous vote of “no confidence” Monday night from the local Fraternal Order of Police. This comes as the viral mob attack and Pureval’s lackluster response garnered local, state, and federal level attention.

Read it.

The student debt crisis isn’t a natural market phenomenon; it’s the predictable result of decades of government interference. Since 1980, average tuition and fees have increased by 1,200 percent, while consumer price inflation has risen only 236 percent over the same period. This massive increase has left students and families struggling to keep up, often forcing them to take on substantial debt just to attend college. Today, over 42.7 million Americans owe a combined $1.69 trillion in federal student loan debt. A combination of federal policies, including subsidized loans, government grants, bloated university budgets, and a complete lack of accountability, has fueled the relentless rise in tuition costs. As a result, higher education—once seen as a path to opportunity—has become a debt trap for millions.

Newsbusters.

A judge deemed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to be “unhinged” has blocked the deportation of infamous illegal alien Kilmar Abrego Garcia just hours after U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) took him into custody three days after the judge released him from jail.

“An unhinged judge in Maryland ordered [Abrego Garcia’s] release, despite his status as an MS-13 gang member, being indicted by a grand jury for human trafficking, and being subject to arrest under immigration law,” DHS reported on Friday.

On Monday, U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem announced that ICE had taken Abrego Garcia into custody and intended to deport him to Uganda.

Abrego Garcia’s attorneys immediately filed a habeas corpus petition – and Judge Xinis promptly complied, telling DHS that “Your clients are absolutely forbidden at this juncture to remove Mr. Abrego Garcia from the continental United States.”

Judge Xinis also suggested she will block the deportation of Abrego Garcia to Uganda – because it’s not the illegal alien’s “country of choice,” ABC News reports:

The Times (UK).

He is the boss of one of the UK’s busiest private airports and spends his days catering to Hollywood celebrities and global pop stars. Will Curtis, however, has Sir Keir Starmer in his sights.

Curtis, the managing director of London Oxford airport and London Heliport, claims Britain has become “borderline uninvestable” under Labour.

He said the consensus among ultra-high-net-worth individuals was that “ever-increasing taxation” and “misguided regulation” has led to millionaires not seeing the UK as an attractive place to invest in any more.

The American Mind.

In 1790, the first United States census was a straightforward affair. Marshals rode on horseback, counted people where they lived, and returned with ledgers that would determine representation in Congress. The idea was as simple as it was profound: political power should follow the actual number of people—not estimates, not probabilities, not manipulated figures—residing in each state. This “actual Enumeration,” written into Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, was meant to be one of the republic’s great safeguards of equal representation.

Two hundred thirty years later, the Census Bureau turned that safeguard upside down and thwarted the will of voters. In 2020, it implemented “differential privacy,” an opaque algorithm that deliberately injects false numbers into small-area data. Supposedly designed to protect privacy and identities, it instead scrambled population counts in ways that Harvard researchers found made it “impossible to follow the principle of ‘One Person, One Vote.’”

At the same time, the incoming Biden Administration dismantled the Administrative Records Project, the Trump-era initiative that would have allowed the bureau to use existing federal data to determine citizenship and correct census errors. The result was a census that was riddled with miscounts, opaque to challenge, and constitutionally suspect.

The decision to implement differential privacy was made at the precise moment it became clear that President Trump intended to exclude illegal aliens from apportionment counts in the 2020 census. By scrambling block-level data and erasing the probability of independent verification, the permanent bureaucracy insulated itself from oversight and judicial review. This was the administrative state’s “insurance policy”—to create an algorithm that would outlast any presidential term and ensure that apportionment would inflate blue states. Citizenship status was also buried under layers of statistical noise.

Read it.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has warned that the welfare system in its current form “can no longer be financed with what we produce in the economy.”

Speaking at a conference of his centre-right CDU party in Osnabrück on Saturday, August 23rd, Merz demanded reforms to social spending while at the same time ruling out tax increases on Germany’s medium-sized companies.

He coupled his appeal with a grim assessment of the economy, declaring Germany to be in a “structural crisis” after three years of recession and slipping industrial competitiveness.

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

The Times (UK).

When a satire of the modern-day woke university finally appears, it is likely to make its villain the kind of intolerant, blue-haired, placard-wielding undergraduate who has so shamelessly cast themselves as the protagonist of the past decade’s culture war. The more we have seen of university life, however — as undergrads, then PhD students and finally teaching — the clearer it has become that the damage being done by woke ideology is not confined to student skirmishes, but has infected academia at every level: taught content, research, disciplinary norms and even institutional design.

In fact, the conventional emphasis on the menace of woke student activism risks getting things backwards. There is indeed an important generational component to the malaise gripping universities. But the culpable figures are not students. They are those academics in positions of authority and secure employment who have negligently allowed the culture to be trashed, leaving a mess for the next generation to clear up.

Read it.

Britain’s Home Office will appeal the High Court decision to prevent asylum seekers from being housed at the Bell Hotel, Epping.

A key government concern is that the earlier decision, which stipulates that migrants will need to vacate the premises by September 12, will set a wider legal precedent. The earlier decision ruled in favour of the local council, which argued that owners Somani Hotels Limited conducted an unauthorised ‘change of use’ under English planning laws when they replaced regular paying guests with publicly funded migrants.

Security minister Dan Jarvis announced the intentions of the Home Office, which will oppose the temporary injunction forcing the closure of the controversial Essex hotel. He described the action—formally led by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who is currently interrailing around Europe—as an attempt to ensure the closure of asylum hotels was run in an orderly fashion.

Local concern about the Bell Hotel increased when a ‘small boat’ migrant from Ethiopia was arrested and charged with multiple sexual assaults on a minor. Britain now houses more than 32,000 asylum seekers in more than 200 hotels, with a growing number of local authorities seeking to challenge this.

The Foundry.

Columbia, Brown, and Penn have already settled their disputes with the Trump administration over anti-Jewish, racial, and gender discrimination complaints. Now, several news reports suggest Harvard and Cornell will announce settlements soon—and UCLA, Northwestern, and others may follow soon after.

Many academics and their allies are mystified as to why these universities would agree to settlements. But it’s not that hard to understand.

First, universities are settling because they are guilty. The evidence is overwhelming that several universities failed to protect Jewish students—which they could have done simply by enforcing their own rules against such abuse and suspending or expelling bad-acting students. Instead, they rewarded students who violated the civil rights of Jewish students.

Read it.

And who could blame them?

Read it.

A future Reform UK election victory would mean an end to fish and chip suppers in Britain, according to the Labour government.

Echoing this, a flagship BBC current affairs programme berated Reform’s opposition to Britain’s current Net Zero policies (without which, Labour alleges the warming coastal waters will drive away UK fish stocks).

Meanwhile, Labour has claimed that the launch of a fast-selling “Reform FC” football shirt with “Farage 10” printed on the back is proof of the hypocrisy of Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who usually advocates keeping politics out of sport.

If all three of these lines of attack smell of desperation, there’s probably more to follow.

Farage’s own modest proposal, for Reform to have the right to appoint its own representatives to Britain’s unelected second chamber, the House of Lords, in proportion to its parliamentary representation, has been ignored by PM Keir Starmer. Yet as long-time Farage associate Gawain Towler puts it

It is, in essence, a reasonable and apposite request for a party that has transcended fringe status to become a formidable force in British politics.

Labour’s bipolar response to the populist electoral challenge—ignore or make wild allegations—contrasts with the approach of Reform, which has been to publicise its measures to tackle crime and promise to consolidate its approach to illegal migration.

Even amid the summer parliamentary recess, Farage’s policies are continuing to cut through—which should account for the next round of Labour shrieking, but not the decline of fish and chips.

Business Wire.

Beyond, Inc. (NYSE:BYON) has issued the following statement from Marcus Lemonis, Executive Chairman of Bed Bath & Beyond:

We will not open or operate retail stores in California.

This decision isn’t about politics — it’s about reality. California has created one of the most overregulated, expensive, and risky environments for businesses in America. It’s a system that makes it harder to employ people, harder to keep doors open, and harder to deliver value to customers.

The result? Higher taxes, higher fees, higher wages that many businesses simply cannot sustain, and endless regulations that strangle growth. Even when the state announces a budget surplus, it’s built on the backs of ordinary citizens who are paying too much and businesses who are squeezed until they break.

At Bed Bath & Beyond, our responsibility is to our customers and our shareholders. We will not participate in a system that undermines both. Instead, we are investing in a California strategy that works: 24–48-hour delivery, and in many cases, same-day service. Californians will continue to get the products they love through BedBathandBeyond.com — but without the inflated costs created by an unsustainable model.

Read it.

It may surprise some how eagerly the liberals who claim to believe in gay rights, make abortion their sacrament and worship at the altar of secularism make common cause with the Islamic enemies of all that they supposedly believe in. But it really shouldn’t because they don’t believe it.

From the Hitler-Stalin pact to the white liberal worship of the Black Panthers, it’s long since been clear that what they claim to want is very different from what they really, really want.

Liberals claimed to want civil rights, racial coexistence and integration, but even well before Martin Luther King’s body was cold in the ground, they were enraptured by Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and later outright terrorist groups like the Black Liberation Army and their illegitimate offspring like Black Lives Matter. Well before the official Red-Green alliance between Islam and the Left, white liberals had made common cause with a racist, misogynistic, supremacist and occasionally Islamic terrorist movement bent on destroying America.

The Times (UK).

Labour will accuse Nigel Farage of supporting the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate in a new attack advert and claim his promise to scrap online safety rules leaves young boys vulnerable to radicalisation.

When it goes out on Sunday the advert will seek to exploit comments made by Farage in the Strike It Big podcast last year, when he praised Tate for defending “male culture”.

The podcast, hosted by three young male influencers, offers listeners the chance to “connect with the 1 per cent”. Topics covered by the show include “who controls the world and money” and “how to escape the system”.

Apparently Andrew Tate is The New New Hitler.

Watch it.

YouTuber Sargon of Akkad points out the absurdity of the people protesting Vance on his holiday.

“Embarrassing” is the most polite thing he has to say.

Read it.

Talks on a treaty to address the global crisis of plastic pollution in Geneva ended without an agreement Friday as the session was adjourned with plans to resume at a later date.

Nations were meeting for an 11th day at the United Nations office to try to complete a landmark treaty to end the plastic pollution crisis. They remain deadlocked over whether the treaty should reduce exponential growth of plastic production and put global, legally binding controls on toxic chemicals used to make plastics. Most plastic is made from fossil fuels.

Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said despite challenges, despite the disappointment, “we have to accept that significant progress was made.”

The problem with all of these manufactured crises (Climate change! Pollution! Fossil fuels! Greenhouse gases! Dogs and cats sleeping together!) is that Chicken Little has a very large following but that following is heading off in all directions. A serious problem has an obvious solution–not an easy one, but an obvious one– but no one is willing to be the first to bite the bullet.

Read it.

A new report from the State Leadership Initiative (SLI), released Wednesday, is sounding the alarm on how conservative states are quietly adopting woke policies, driven by little-known national bureaucratic organizations.

The report, first reported by Fox News, details how a web of well-funded national associations, often posing as nonpartisan or professional groups, is behind this trend, pushing what SLI calls “shadow governance.” These groups set policy frameworks, control federal funding, and offer “best practices” that lean heavily into left-leaning priorities, according to Fox News.

Among the organizations exposed in the report are the National Association of State Treasurers (NAST), the National Association of Medicaid Directors (NAMD), and the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE). SLI’s report examined 23 of the largest associations and found widespread embrace of DEI initiatives, transgender ideology policies, and ESG principles.

As I have often said, bureaucrats tend toward Wokery even in Red states. Proglodytes love national organizations of paper-pushers because it means they don’t have to trudge around from state to state doing the real grass-roots work that democracy requires, but can just focus their efforts on a small group of leaders who are by their nature amenable to political and financial pressure. The Long Walk Through The Institutions demonstrates how effective this can be: Capture the professoriate and you mold a generation of college graduates, who then spread out and ruin life for everybody.

UPDATE: Radical U – Part 2: How Students Turned their Professors’ Words into Deeds

Read it.

The Justice Department said Thursday it will seek the death penalty against a member of the cultlike Zizians group accused of killing a Border Patrol agent in Vermont in the latest Trump administration push for more federal executions.

 

Tje Investigative Project on Terrorism

In the span of a few years, American academics have escalated their support for the Palestinian “resistance” from rhetorical to material.

For decades, academics have fostered friendly territory for radical groups and fertile ground for anti-Israel propagandists, but few have endorsed terrorism. It’s safer to massage the language, twist a metaphor or two, and figure out a way to excuse violence without actually endorsing it, or at least use language, often abstruse or cryptic language, to provide a degree of deniability. But that has changed.

October 7 triggered something in many academics who suddenly no longer felt constrained. Rather than stopping just short of applauding terrorism against Israel, they adopted Hamas’s slogans and defended its attacks. Today, colleges and universities have effectively taken the place of the Palestinian terrorist organizations as the primary disseminators of anti-Israel propaganda to Americans. Middle East studies departments and programs in particular have transformed academia into the vanguard of anti-Zionism in a sick perversion of John Stuart Mill’s vision for higher education – turning students into “capable and cultivated human beings.”

Read it.

My, what a surprise.

Three leaders of an anti-police group protesting President Donald Trump’s crackdown on violent crime in Washington, D.C., have criminal records in the district.

Free DC advisory council member Darrell Gaston served sentences of community service for two cases involving violence and threats in the past nine years, while the group’s executive director Keya Chatterjee and campaign director Alex Dodds both have misdemeanors on their records that were dismissed after they paid bond, court records show. Free DC organized a protest downtown on Monday and encouraged residents to “get visible,” “get loud,” and “bang pots and pans” in response to Trump’s law enforcement agenda in the nation’s capital.

Read it.

The return to the political season could turn into a veritable powder keg in France. Since mid-July, the slogan “Bloquons tout!” (“Let’s block everything!”) has spread like wildfire on social media, calling for a total shutdown of the country on September 10. The spark: the drastic cuts announced by Prime Minister François Bayrou, which include a €43.8 billion adjustment, the freezing of social spending, the elimination of two public holidays, and other austerity measures that have lit the fuse of public discontent, primed for years.

This is not just about numbers in a budget. Many French citizens see these cuts as confirmation that they are being asked to make more sacrifices. At the same time, the state has spent enormous sums on mass immigration policies and subsidies that rarely benefit the native population. For large sectors of society, especially in areas hardest hit by crime and unrest, the Islamisation of the country has not come cheap: it has been financed by their taxes, leading to the deterioration of entire neighbourhoods and increasing the feeling of abandonment.

Read it.

The epicenter of America’s power crisis appears to be on the PJM Interconnection grid, with the Mid-Atlantic area at ground zero. Power bills in the Baltimore area are skyrocketing, driven mostly by disastrous green policies that have shuttered reliable, low-cost fossil fuel power generation plants in favor of unreliable solar and wind energy, allegedly to address a climate crisis. Now demand is surging, whether from AI data centers, EVs, or other electrification trends, which means there’s a massive mismatch in power supply versus power demand.

Goldman analysts led by Hongcen Wei have been tracking the power crisis and warned in a note on Wednesday that power market tightening has expanded from the three grids they covered last month (read here) to all regional markets.

“We find that 9 out of 13 US regional power markets have already reached critical tightness this summer, while expecting all but one to reach critical tightness by 2030,” Wei wrote in the note to clients.

Really: Ayn Rand predicted this back in the 1950s in Atlas Shrugged.

Read it.

Common Cause, a group historically opposed to gerrymandering and partisan redistricting said it will not speak out against California’s efforts to redraw its congressional maps to benefit Democrats, Politico reported.

My, what a surprise.

Read it.

British maritime authorities report recovering the largest known single dinghy used, to date, in an illegal Channel crossing.

A ‘mega dinghy’ was found with 107 law-breaking passengers, smashing the previous record for a single boat (96) and pointing to a dangerous new phase in the UK’s migrant crisis. The long boat carried the largest single load to arrive in UK waters overnight prior to its discovery on Wednesday, August 8. Last month, an average migrant boat was carrying around 60 people.

While the inflatable raft was taken to Dover harbour for Border Force inspection, it could point to a change in tactics by people smugglers. The gangs, looking resilient and unsmashed, have already switched to using inland and ‘taxi boat’ launches to ply their risky trade, innovating more quickly than the French and British authorities.

A supply line of larger vessels would accelerate the already record-breaking pace of illegal migration into Britain by sea. Such boats have already been deployed across established Mediterranean smuggling routes. At 18 metres in length, the new vessels—likely made to order in China—are seven metres longer than the current most widely used boats in the Channel.

Who’s providing them with those bright orange life vests? Obviously the French. This is an act of war, but the Labour government isn’t saying a peep about it.

The Guardian, the Voice of Wokery in the UK.

“Dance Against Vance”? Really, you can’t make this shit up.

Since when is the U.S. Vice-President the business of anybody in the U.K.? Wm. F. Buckley rightly said that liberals are the sort of people who reach into your shower to adjust the water temperature.

The Times (UK).

Treasury officials are drawing up options to raise more money from inheritance tax, it was reported, as Rachel Reeves seeks extra cash in the autumn budget.

The chancellor’s tax raising plans are at an early stage but she is widely expected to need to find tens of billions extra to deal with rising costs and gloomier economic forecast.

Officials are looking at options such as tightening rules that allow people to give away assets before they die, according to The Guardian. This could include a lifetime cap on money that can be given away, or adjustments to the rate at which inheritance tax liability tapers in the seven years between a gift and death.

Governments, inevitably faced with problems due to spending more money than is coming in, are always looking for new ‘sources of revenue’ (i.e. deep pockets to pick). Spending less is so far off the table that it’s not even mentioned, by anybody.

UPDATE: Families face fresh inheritance tax grab (The Telegraph)

The Times (UK).

The vast majority of voters fear Labour’s new towns will fail, describing their predecessors as soulless, boring, concrete and full of “roundabouts”.

Town planners are urging ministers to let new town residents design their own homes and experiment with styles and approaches to avoid a repeat of the top-down and rigid post-war generation of new settlements, which remain divisive.

Next month ministers will receive recommended locations for about a dozen new towns which will contain hundreds of thousands of homes. Sir Keir Starmer wants building to begin before the end of this parliament. Ministers have promised to drive through local opposition to towns they deem in the national interest.

“That’s Britain,” I hear you say, “That’s not here; who cares?” Because Britain is a leading indicator of how Wokery is derailing our lives. Shitty things they do there will appear here sooner or later because the same mindset infects the Ruling Class in both places. What Labour is doing is what Democrats would love to do, but can’t easily because of our famous Checks And Balances [TM]–and believe me, Democrats are watching what happens in Britain very carefully.

Read it.

Greta Thunberg’s recent ‘Palestinian rescue mission’ was a total failure, carrying a tiny amount of supplies—enough, said some commentators, for “maybe a dozen people”—and resulting in her deportation from Israel.

So she’s going to do it all over again!

This time, the Swedish activist, best known for her green zealotry, is planning on heading from Spain to Gaza with “dozens of boats,” with the overall intention of “break[ing] the illegal Israeli siege.”

Meanwhile, citizens across the world have been asked to participate in “encampments and demonstrations that will happen simultaneously.”

The initiative has been dubbed the ‘Global Sumud Flotilla’ and will supposedly include activists from more than 40 countries.

Others have dubbed it as yet another attempt to cover Thunberg with publicity.

Read it.

For the past week, around 200 migrants have been camped outside of Paris’ Hôtel de Ville (City Hall) to protest against a supposed lack of proper accommodation.

Outlets have described this as a ‘mobilisation’ by desperate individuals, pointing in particular to the participation of many women and children. But the gathering—like many that have come before it—was actually organised by France’s leftist ‘Utopia 56’ activist group, set up in 2015 to help illegal migrants.

Utopia 56 has been behind many such migrant encampments, including on other occasions outside the City Hall. Indeed, its founder, Yann Manzi, is a campsite manager. The group has even been the target of criminal investigations over its actions at the sieve-like French-UK border, where it carries out its own migrant-friendly coastal patrol.

Government officials have previously described the activists as “anarchists” who want “chaos” and “to put the state in difficulty.” Yet reporters continue to fall for their spin.

During the encampment, a spokesman for Paris City Hall noted that it continues to open “centres in both summer and winter to shelter people and their families.”

The camp was cleared on Tuesday morning after local police officials issued an eviction order. Utopia 56 complained that “no solutions are proposed for the more than 300 people, including around a hundred children, who have been mobilising for a week.”