Read it.

Target has been sued for allegedly concealing the risks of its diversity and social initiatives, leading to a backlash that caused customers to flee and the stock price of the Minneapolis-based retailer to plummet.

In a proposed class action lawsuit filed Friday, shareholders led by the City of Riviera Beach Police Pension Fund in Florida said Target defrauded them into paying inflated prices for its stock and unknowingly supporting management’s “misuse of investor funds to serve political and social goals.”

The lawsuit said the retailer, CEO Brian Cornell and other officials failed to disclose the risk of consumer boycotts stemming from Target’s Environmental, Social and Governance and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives.

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials are taking seriously threats made by Mexican drug cartels that have authorized the use of kamikaze drones against federal officials along the southern border.

An internal memo that cited social media posts and other sources cautioned federal agents “to remain cognizant of their surroundings at all times” in the face of the new threat, the New York Post reported Monday.

“On Feb. 1, 2025, the El Paso Sector Intelligence and Operations Center received information advising that Mexican cartel leaders have authorized the deployment of drones equipped with explosives to be used against U.S. Border Patrol agents and U.S. military personal currently working along the border with Mexico,” the memo, titled “Officer Safety Alert” stated, according to the Post, which obtained a copy of the document.

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York signed a bill on Monday intended to give the state’s health care providers an extra layer of protection to shield them from prosecution in states that ban abortion.

The newly signed law comes days after a New York doctor was indicted in Louisiana for prescribing and sending abortion pills to someone in the state. The charges represented an escalation in the fractious battle between mostly Republican-led states that ban abortion and Democratic-led states seeking to protect or expand abortion access.

The law, which takes effect immediately, will allow health-care practitioners to avoid putting their names on prescriptions for medications used in abortions, and instead use the names of their medical practices.

Ms. Hochul, a Democrat, said the goal was to better conceal the identity of providers in hopes of protecting them from criminal, civil or other legal action that anti-abortion states try to take against them.

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The Honduras Supreme Court has declared charter cities, including Prospera, unconstitutional.

The background: in the mid-2010s, the ruling conservative party wanted charter cities. They had already packed the Supreme Court for other reasons, so they had their captive court declare charter cities to be constitutional.

In 2022, the socialists took power from the conservatives and got the chance to fill the Supreme Court with their supporters, though this time it was routine and not fairly describable as “packing”. In September, this new Supreme Court said whoops, actually charter cities aren’t constitutional at all. They added that this decision applied retroactively, ie even existing charter cities that had been approved under the old government were, ex post facto, illegal.

Prospera’s lawyers objected, saying that the court is not allowed to make ex post facto rulings. But arguing that the Supreme Court is misinterpreting the Constitution seems like a losing battle – even if you’re right, who do you appeal to?

So the city is pursuing a two-pronged strategy. The first prong is waiting. Prospera is a collection of buildings and people. The buildings can stay standing, the people can still live there – they just have to follow regular Honduran law, rather than the investment-friendly charter they previously used. There’s another election in November, which the socialists are expected to lose. Prospera hopes the conservatives will come in, take control of the Supreme Court again, and then they’ll say whoops, messed it up again, charter cities are constitutional after all.

Socialism is why we can’t ever have nice things.

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Columbia Business School professor Avi Friedman has resigned, citing the university’s decision to appoint a Hamas-praising professor, Joseph Massad, to teach a course on Zionism, according to a letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

In his letter, dated Jan. 29, Friedman called his resignation “months in the making” and “unavoidable” given the “events of October 7, 2023, and the university’s subsequent response.” Friedman said he found himself “making excuses” in defense of Columbia and its administrators in the wake of Hamas’s terror attack but “can no longer mask what has become inexcusable and systemic.”

“The university’s decision to appoint Joseph Massad to teach a class on Zionism represents a complete abandonment of academic integrity and unbiased scholarship,” wrote Friedman. “This appointment was no oversight—it represents a deliberate choice that aligns with the university’s ideology.”

Massad, Friedman continued, “stands as a celebrated figure in the intifada movement—a status that Columbia now continues to endorse.”

Victor Davis Hanson.

The diversity, equity, and inclusion project, often seen as a major element of the so-called “woke” creed along with green fanaticism, keeps popping up as a possible subtext in a variety of recent tragedies.

In the case of the Los Angeles fires, Mayor Karen Bass, who cut the fire department budget, was warned of the mounting fire dangers of the Santa Anna winds and parched brush on surrounding hillsides. No matter—she junketed in Uganda. When furor followed, on cue, her defenders decried a racialist attack on “a black woman.”

Her possible stand-in deputy mayor for “security” was under suspension for allegations that he called in a bomb threat to the Los Angeles city council—a factor mysteriously forgotten.

Read it.

The following video is a plug for an anti-migration French magazine called Frontières, narrated by one of its reporters, Jordan Florentin. It’s a hard-sell promotion, but this brief blurb contains some useful information, and the magazine appears to be worth looking at (for those who read French).

Canada’s Trudeau announces tariffs on US in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs (Reuters)

Global alarm, condemnation as Trump tariffs hit Mexico, Canada and China (Al Jezeera)

Canada hits back against Trump tariffs: ‘We will not back down’ (Politico)

With tariffs and threats, Trump turns on America’s closest allies (Washington Poop) Allies act like allies. Mexico and Canada don’t act like allies.

Elon Musk Plans to Take Over GSA Next—With Disturbing Plan of Action (The New Republic)

Trump administration directs 70% cut to internal OPM staffing, programs (Federal News Network)

Musk’s DOGE Accused of Seizing Sole Control of Essential Federal Databases (Truthout)

RFK Jr. confirmation could hinge on his embrace of false vaccine-autism link (Washington Poop)

The Republican doctor who could be a hurdle to RFK Jr.’s confirmation (NBC News)

RFK Jr. disparaged vaccines dozens of times in recent years and misled on race (Washington Poop) Straight-up character assassination.

“There is no common ground with fascists”: Progressives rip Klobuchar’s call for bipartisanship (Griffin Eckstein/Salon)

‘Make them pay’: Canada puts Trump’s ‘first friend’ Elon Musk’s Tesla in the crosshairs of tariff war (Business Today)

Military Strikes On Cartels Inside Mexico “On The Table”: Hegseth

Trump administration sued for halting legal aid for detained immigrants (Rachel Uranga/Los Angeles Times)

Trump Says Tariffs Are Coming on Computer Chips, Steel and More (Wall Street Journal)

‘He’s Such a P*S’: MSNBC Makes Reagan Airport Tragedy All About Trump

‘This is not right’: Outrage as major government agency accused of ‘breaking the law’ (David McAfee/Raw Story)

DOGE Staff Had Questions About the ‘Resign’ Email. Their New HR Chief Dodged Them (Makena Kelly/Wired)

John Brennan’s Protests To President Trump Lifting His Security Clearances Are Absurd

BREAKING NEWS: CDC orders mass retraction and revision of submitted research across all science and medicine journals. Banned terms must be scrubbed. (Jeremy Faust/Inside Medicine)

Trump administration gives Musk allies access to Treasury payment system (Politico)

DOJ’s deletion of Jan. 6 records triggers legal challenge (Scott Macfarlane/CBS News)

B.C. premier announces countermeasures against U.S. tariffs, including ban on ‘red-state’ liquor (CBC News)

Mexico’s President Claims She Has ‘Plan A, Plan B, Plan C’ In Response To Trump Tariffs

CDC advisers push agency to explain data removal, say when info will be restored (Usha Lee McFarling/STAT)

DOGE is ripping out the guts of government (Henry Farrell/Programmable Mutter)  Good.

Education Department employees placed on leave for attending diversity training (Bianca Quilantan/Politico)  The horror!!

U.S. Chamber: Tariffs Are Not the Answer (U.S. Chamber of Commerce)

Trump’s DEI purge targets federal workers who did not work in DEI (Washington Post)

End Appears Near for U.S. Aid Agency, Democratic Lawmakers Say (Karoun Demirjian/New York Times)

Mexican president orders retaliatory tariffs against U.S. (Reuters)

USA Today’s Report on Trump Blaming DEI for Air Crash Exposes Ugly Truth About SPLC

Stanton Leads 40+ House Democrats in Letter Calling on Trump to Immediately Rescind Tariffs on Mexico and Canada (Congressman Greg Stanton) Me! Me! Look at me!

Kristi Noem’s week-one blitz (Politico)

‘We Have No Coherent Message’: Democrats Struggle to Oppose Trump (New York Times)  Except Orange Man Bad.

Trump Favors Blunt Force in Dealing With Foreign Allies and Enemies Alike (Peter Baker/New York Times)  Very refreshing after decades of ineffective ‘nuance’.

NPR Helps MSNBC’s Chris Hayes to Trash Trump, ‘Attention Capitalism’

Hockey fans boo U.S. national anthem at Ottawa Senators game after Trump imposes tariffs (William Eltherington/CTV News)

Trump Administration to Remove 4 Major News Outlets From Pentagon Office Space (Katie Robertson/New York Times)

Memo to Elon: Know Your Boss (Jonathan Martin/Politico)

China to retaliate after Trump fires first salvo in trade war (Zia Weise/Politico)

Germany’s Pistorius pushes back on Trump’s NATO spending demand (Chris Lunday/Politico)

We do not know what exactly Elon Musk is doing to the federal government (Zachary B. Wolf/CNN)  How lame is modern ‘journalism’…?

The Logic of Destruction – What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. (Timothy Snyder/Thinking about)

Education Officials Placed on Leave in Trump’s Sprawling Effort to Curb D.E.I. (New York Times)

The Republicans’ Choice: Tax Cuts for the Rich or Health Care for Americans (Aaron E. Carroll/New York Times)

DOGE Gains Access to Payment System Doling Out Trillions to Americans (Wall Street Journal)

Trump’s Tariffs May Complicate Efforts to Tame Inflation (Colby Smith/New York Times)

Trump Kicks Aside Congress With Sweeping Claims of Presidential Power (Aaron Zitner/Wall Street Journal)

Some Hospitals Stop Transgender Surgeries On Children After Trump’s Order

Wrecking ball: Trump’s war on ‘woke’ marks US society’s plunge into ‘dark times’ (David Smith/The Guardian)

GOP pollster says Trump voters ‘tired’ of being accused of racism (Sarah Fortinsky/The Hill)

Senior USAID security officials put on leave after refusing Musk’s DOGE access to agency systems (CNN)

Trump is waging war against his own government (NBC News)  It’s not his government … yet.

The coup rolls on, but we will prevail. (Robert B. Hubbell/Today’s Edition …)

USAID security leaders on leave after trying to keep Musk’s DOGE from classified info, officials say (Ellen Knickmeyer/Associated Press)

The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover (Vittoria Elliott/Wired)

Why Write About the Illegality of What Trump and Musk are Doing? (Samuel Bagenstos/Inside/Outside)  Because you get paid to do so?

Top F.B.I. Agent in New York Vows to ‘Dig In’ After Removals at Agency (New York Times)

Musk on USAID: ‘Time for it to die’ (Politico)

More USAID staff ousted as Trump administration dismantles aid agency (Reuters)

Read it.

New York City, Chicago and Boston are among the sanctuary cities collapsing after waves of migrants stormed across the open borders. Even cities that once boasted of providing sanctuary to illegal aliens from federal immigration enforcement are now running away from the name.

Sanctuary cities were always intended to be destructive. They were not, as many Democrats now wrongly claim, about providing safe harbor to refugees, but about bringing down America.

The sanctuary cities did not emerge in response to the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide or any actual genocide, but to provide support and sanctuary for Marxists fleeing the civil wars they had started in Latin America, and then later for Islamic terrorists after September 11.

Sanctuary cities were not about helping refugees, but about harboring America’s enemies.

Washington Poop, a Voice of the Crust.

The framers of the Constitution imagined Congress as the preeminent branch of government. But many Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill seem content to play second fiddle.

That hasn’t been true since Wilson (a Democrat) and FDR (a Democrat). Try to keep up, guys.

Read it.

They’ve hacked everything else in the U.S., so why would we be surprised to find out that patient health data collected by Chinese-made health monitors was being sent, via ‘backdoor’ to China.

Now China has access to Janet Yellen’s photos (god we hope there’s no nudes) and your blood pressure on a random Tuesday.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warns that Contec CMS8000, a widely used patient monitoring device, contains a backdoor that transmits patient data to a remote IP and downloads executable files, according to BleepingComputer.

Suddenly I don’t trust my iPhone….

Read it.

fighting a class action lawsuit alleging it denied 1,000 people air traffic controller jobs based on diversity hiring targets, according to the New York Post.

The lawsuit, originally filed in 2015, resurfaced following a fatal midair collision in Washington, DC, that claimed 67 lives—the deadliest U.S. aviation disaster in nearly 25 years. Hours later, a small private plane crashed in Northeast Philadelphia, putting emphasis on the role of air traffic control.

At the time of the blackhawk helicopter incident, staffing levels were reportedly “not normal.” Andrew Brigida, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, criticized the FAA’s focus on diversity and inclusion, suggesting it contributed to the likelihood of such an accident.

The New York Post report says that the lawsuit claims the FAA, under the Obama administration, replaced a skill-based hiring system with a “biographical assessment” to increase minority hires.

The Other McCain.

There are layers and layers to the story of the radical vegan transgender death cult known as “Zizians,” whose existence became newsworthy after two reputed associates of the cult, Teresa “Milo” Youngblut and Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt, got into a shootout in Vermont that killed a Border Patrol agent on Jan. 20. In the first few days after the shootout, in which Bauckholt was also killed, the news accounts were mysterious. What were Youngblut, a Seattle native, and Bauckholt, a German citizen in the U.S. on a work visa, doing up in Vermont near the Canadian border?

Jessica Taylor (@jessi_cata), who knew Bauckholt in New York City circa 2022 and tried to warn him about the cult following of Jack “Ziz” LaSota, connected the dots early, but it was Andy Ngo who was the first journalist to follow up on Taylor’s information.

Read it.

The entertainment sector has been at the core of the woke movement over the course of the last ten years, integrating Critical Race Theory, feminism, gay and trans propaganda, climate change hysteria, anti-gun rights messaging and pro-socialist rhetoric into their content at breakneck speed. There has always been progressive politics in movies and TV, but this new social justice takeover was a highly coordinated tidal wave; a Blitzkrieg of hard-left ideology into every possible media space.

One group of consumers noticed the threat very early on – Gamers picked up on the leftist subversion of their hobby almost immediately in 2013. They would go on to launch “Gamergate” in 2014, a movement to expose the feminist hijacking of games journalism and the hobby at large. They were punished for their foresight, accused of “misogyny”, “bigotry”, “racism” and even terrorism, but they were correct. There was indeed a far-left agenda to dominate the gaming world and extort companies into adopting social justice propaganda.

The plan succeeded spectacularly. Most corporations eventually folded and instituted DEI programs outright. Gaming developers were some of the worst perpetrators and their products quickly became replete with woke indoctrination. The one thing they didn’t count on, though, was a consumer revolt.

Read it.

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach appeared Thursday on Fox Business to discuss concerns regarding the diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring practices in the aviation industry.

An American Airlines passenger plane collided with a military helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday evening, resulting in fatalities for everyone involved. During an appearance on “The Bottom Line,” Kobach said DEI hiring increased operational errors in the air that resulted in hundreds of incidents.

“It’s too early to know if the air traffic controllers made any mistakes,” Kobach said.

Read it.

Late Wednesday night, Columbia University’s leading anti-Israel group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), shared a video of its latest act of anarchy. At Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), toilets were clogged with cement. A Columbia Business School building, meanwhile, was soaked with red paint.

Columbia quickly released a statement calling the acts of vandalism “unacceptable and abhorrent,” adding that such acts “will not be tolerated at Columbia.” Just months before, however, Columbia’s student radicals met within the walls of a recognized student organization to train each other on all things anarchy. Included among the suggested readings was a manual written for “aspiring revolutionaries” that outlined the sewage cementing and graffiti soaking tactics used on Wednesday. And the student organization that played host appears to be in good standing with the school.

The apparently premeditated nature of the attack suggests Columbia could have impeded it by cracking down on the event’s attendees and its host, Alpha Delta Phi (ADP), a literary society. While the ADP house is controlled by an outside organization and technically off campus—it sits between several other houses and dorms that Columbia owns—Columbia recognizes ADP as a student organization, according to its website, and provides it with services like WiFi, Ph.D. student Alon Levin told the Washington Free Beacon.

New York Post.

The murder of a US Border Patrol agent near the Canadian border appears to be linked to a radical leftist trans militant cult accused of killings across the country.

Around a week before the Jan. 20 attack, federal law enforcement had been surveilling German national Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt and University of Washington student Teresa “Milo” Consuelo Youngblut.

Staff at a Lyndonville, Vermont, motel alerted authorities about seeing the duo with a firearm and black tactical clothing.

Read it.

Another win for the Green New Deal.

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The latest National Report Card from the National Assessment of Educational Progress paints an abysmal picture of education across the U.S.

The report card is published every two years and assesses the average reading and math scores for fourth and eighth graders. The report showed significant declines for students when it was published in 2022, but the decline was somewhat expected in the wake of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. But the assessment completed in 2024 and published Wednesday show little to no improvement in students’ math and reading proficiency.

UPDATE: Denver schools under investigation over all-gender bathroom (The Hill)

UPDATE: US Dept Of Education Investigating All-Gender Restroom At Denver High School

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Rebecca Jordan-Young, a gender studies professor at Barnard College, is a member of the school’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter. Last spring, she volunteered to serve as a “protest marshal,” part of a group of faculty members and staff who helped student radicals secure the perimeter of their illegal encampment and stood by as those students stormed a Columbia University campus building, photos obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show. Now, she will lead the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

Barnard named Jordan-Young the center’s interim director on Friday. The role opened up after Premilla Nadasen, a Barnard history professor, resigned last month, citing her discontent with stricter campus event rules and “surveillance cameras” implemented in the wake of the illegal encampments that roiled Barnard and Columbia.

Jordan-Young’s appointment ensures that another ally of anti-Israel students will lead the center, which was established in 1971 to “assure that women can live and work in dignity, autonomy, and equality.” It has since expanded its scope to encompass a wider array of social justice projects, including the “gay liberation movement,” the “histories of racism, slavery, and colonialism” in the field of botany, and the “intersections of social reproduction, racial capitalism, care, the state, and liberatory social change.”

Victor Davis Hanson.

Mexican nationals, likely cartel members, recently crossed the border and shot and wounded an American hiker. Did they assume that Joe Biden was still president, and so it was still a veritable open season on Americans without consequences?

Mexico also recently balked at allowing a U.S. transport plane to land, returning its own nationals apprehended as illegal aliens.

Was its attitude that Alejandro Mayorkas was still Homeland Security Secretary and thus working with Mexico to ensure that millions of illegal aliens could stay in the U.S. indefinitely?

After four years of Biden’s appeasement, Mexico seems to assume that it has a sovereign right to encourage the flight of millions of its own impoverished citizens illegally into the U.S. and further assumes that it can fast-track millions of Latin Americans through its territory and across our border.

Read it.

We recently spotlighted how Walmart remained America’s “price discount juggernaut” retailer amid an ongoing value war with other supermarket retail chains. The latest high-frequency data indicates that consumers are increasingly trading down as the inflation storm triggered under the Biden-Harris regime continued to strain household finances in the early days of the Trump-Vance administration.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

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Suzanne Bowdey is editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.
It’s a shrinking club, but there are still headstrong CEOs who refuse to bend to the anti-woke winds. None have grabbed more headlines than Costco, the big box holdout who’s clinging to diversity, equity, and inclusion while a stampede of businesses run the other way. After voting down a shareholder resolution last Thursday to return to neutral, the heat is on. And if consumers won’t change the company’s mind, maybe 19 state attorneys general will.

In a surprise move, a coalition of red state law enforcers wrote to the wholesaler, warning that under the new Trump administration and the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, these extreme identity politics would no longer be tolerated.

“Although Costco’s motto is ‘do the right thing,’” the AGs point out, “it appears the company is doing the wrong thing — clinging to DEI policies that courts and businesses have rejected as illegal. Costco should treat every person equally and based on their merit, rather than based on divisive and discriminatory DEI practices. That reflects President Trump’s executive order encouraging the Private Sector to End Illegal DEI discrimination and Preferences.”

Read it.

In a huge development which significantly raises the stakes for any future potential Trump-backed negotiations related to seeking ceasefire in the Ukraine war, President Vladimir Putin has said that he won’t negotiate with Ukraine so long as President Volodymyr Zelensky is in power, and on the other side of talks.

“If he wants to take part in negotiations, I will select such people, it’s not an issue. The question is about the final signing of the documents,” Putin said in a state broadcast TV interview on Tuesday. He argued that because of canceled elections Zelensky’s legitimacy has expired, and this means he “does not have the right to sign anything.”

Read it.

The U.S. State Department has issued the highest-level travel warning for some Mexican towns next to the U.S.–Mexico border due to elevated risks over kidnappings, gun battles, and improvised explosives devices (IEDs).

A bulletin released by the U.S. Embassy and Consulates in Mexico said a “Level 4: Do Not Travel” advisory has been issued for parts of Tamaulipas state. It cites Reynosa, Rio Bravo, Valle Hermoso, and San Fernando, where IEDs have been found. The area borders the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.

The warning also confirmed that officials are “aware of increasingly frequent gun battles occurring in and around Reynosa in the late night and early morning hours.”

“An IED destroyed a Government of Mexico (Conagua) official vehicle in Rio Bravo and injured its occupant on January 23,” the statement said. As a result, U.S. government officials were ordered to avoid travel near Rio Bravo and Reynosa outside of daytime and to stay away from dirt roads across Tamaulipas state, which shares a lengthy border with southern Texas.

‘Quad-demic’ Hitting US With Flu, COVID-19, RSV, Norovirus Surging (Forbes)

7 Charged In America’s Biggest COVID Tax Credit Fraud Scheme

The Largest Tuberculosis Outbreak in U.S. History Is Happening Right Now in Kansas (Charles P. Pierce/Esquire)

“No Consistent Patterns”: Scientists Find No Evidence That Closing Schools Materially Reduced Transmission

Kansas’ tuberculosis outbreak is now the largest in the U.S. since the 1950s (Bek Shackelford-Nwanganga/KCUR)

Senator Ted Cruz is trying to block Wi-Fi hotspots for schoolchildren (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)

Scoop: Trump offering buyouts to all federal workers, source says (Axios)  Sure, I believe that.

D.C. federal judge temporarily blocks Trump plan to pause federal aid spending (Daniel Barnes/NBC News)

MSNBC’s Katie Phang Equates Trump on DEI to Woodrow Wilson on Segregation  Forgetting, perhaps, that Wilson was a … Democrat.

All undocumented immigrants are “criminals,” Trump administration says (Axios)  Which they are. A simple statement of fact.

Exhausted Media Begs Trump To Take A Day Off (Babylon Bee)

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Virginia Beach resident Jacob Hiles is a charter boat captain arrested for crimes related to the protests on J6. He ultimately plead guilty to one misdemeanor count of parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building. In exchange for Hiles’ guilty plea, the Department of Justice dropped the remaining three misdemeanor charges against him. He was given two years probation.

However, Hiles says there’s a lot more to the story that he could not tell the public until he was officially pardoned by Donald Trump last week.

The boat captain tells a local NBC affiliate, WAVY-TV 10 that he has video proof of capitol police acting to incite the riots. At least 9 minutes of his video is posted to WAVY-TV 10, though it appears to be heavily edited.

Read it.

Prosecutors in California have reached a plea deal to end a nearly decade-long court fight with an anti-abortion activist and journalist who together exposed Planned Parenthood for allegedly trafficking fetal body parts.

David Daleiden, founder of the Center for Medical Progress, and journalist Sandra Merritt, said Monday the criminal cases against them have ended, with the California Attorney General’s office agreeing to a plea deal that includes no prison time or fines, Live Action reported Monday.

Videos taken by Daleiden and Merritt exposed the scandal after they went undercover at various locations, including the National Abortion Federation’s 2014 and 2015 convention and trade shows. The videos, some of which were also taken from inside Planned Parenthood offices, showed executives discussing price negotiations and sales of human body parts.

In a properly ordered society, such people would be celebrated, not prosecuted. But we don’t have that.

After some videos were released, former Vice President Kamala Harris, then California’s Democrat attorney general, met with Planned Parenthood officials in 2016, Live Action reported, after which she ordered criminal investigations into Merritt and Daleiden, including a search of Daleiden’s home.

Harris’ successor as attorney general, Democrat Xavier Becerra, who would become Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services under President Joe Biden, charged them both with violating California’s recording law. The state had never criminally prosecuted undercover journalists for recordings made in the public interest, according to Liberty Counsel, a Christian legal group that represented Merritt.

Merritt and Daleiden were each charged with 14 felony counts of unlawfully recording a conversation and one felony count of criminal conspiracy.

No good deed goes unpunished–by Democrats.

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As the tide of totalitarian wokeness recedes from the swamp, some of its ugliest and most toxic creatures will find refuge as employees or grantees of tax-exempt nonprofits. In our pluralist and democratic society, we must, to some degree, tolerate organizations with intolerant, inhuman, or wicked purposes, not least because we should have the intellectual humility not to judge every cause on our present knowledge. Who knows what valuable chemotherapy will come from the poison mushroom the Sierra Club is fighting to save?

True, we need, or at any rate must suffer, the plague of foundations—for fear of an unhealthy political monoculture in which our own miscues and misdeeds go unchallenged. That does not mean these foundations’ current powers and privileges should go unscrutinized. The Ford Foundation was set up in 1936 and now controls about $17 billion in assets, and long since passed out of the effective control of the Ford family. The Rockefeller Foundation controls a mere $6 billion but is so alienated from its roots in Standard Oil money that it is divesting from fossil fuels.

These foundations, and the endowed nonprofit sector more broadly, have been captured by a set of woke officers largely unsupervised by equally woke boards of trustees. They are globalist and frequently antihuman, but they benefit from tax privileges at the expense of the American people. The Ford Foundation has given hundreds of millions to Black Lives Matter and similar causes, and nothing to those whose homes and businesses were destroyed by BLM rioters. The Rockefeller Brothers Foundation pays anti-Semitic protestors on Ivy League campuses while claiming to be balanced because it funds the no less murderously intentioned astroturf organization, the Orwellian-monikered Jewish Voices for Peace.

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Even before the Los Angeles wildfires broke out, 6 in 10 Californians said the state was heading in the wrong direction. Add in the blazes that have since exposed Gavin Newsom’s incompetent governing, and it’s clear that Newsom’s flacks have their work cut out for them.

We can almost sympathize, then, with the Newsom administration’s pathetic response to a deeply sourced report from our Andrew Kerr and Susannah Luthi that detailed Newsom’s decision to disband a volunteer firefighting unit known as Team Blaze.

The move left the California National Guard without a complete firefighting force in L.A. for 10 days. We’re not the only outlet on the story. And yet Newsom’s press team responded not by disputing the facts but by calling Kerr—an award-winning reporter—a “pizzagate peddler.” They also called the firefighting unit “inadequately trained.”

“That’s weird,” our editors write, “because the Newsom administration tapped the group to help fight the 2021 Dixie Fire, the largest single-source wildfire in California state history, according to the transcript of a September 2021 National Guard press briefing, and the volunteer unit, which was funded by generous donors, met federal standards for combating wildfires set by a little-known federal agency known as the National Wildfire Coordinating Group.”

The Antiplanner.

Scientific American blames the Los Angeles fires on climate change. A Yale University publication agrees. An article in Quartz predicts that climate change is going to make housing “uninsurable.” Instead of insurance, a New York Times op-ed by a former California insurance commissioner argues that oil companies should be forced to pay for fire damages.

It’s a neat argument that appeals to homeowners eager to blame the loss of their houses on anything other than their own decisions to buy or build flammable homes with flammable landscaping in a fireplain. Yet there are valid reasons to believe that climate change is not the issue, and that even if climate change is occurring, it won’t make homes uninsurable. In fact, people who believe climate change is the problem should be all the more interested in making sure that homes and landscaping are fireproof.

A key weakness in most of the arguments for anthropogenic climate change is that they rely on data that goes back only about 55 years or so. The 1970s were one of the coolest decades in the 20th century, so any data that start from there will make it appear that temperatures are rising. The Yale article cites one study that uses data back to 1971 and another that goes back to just 2001.

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Standing in line at a Target, I glanced at the books for sale. Every work of fiction, with the exception of those two elderly stalwarts, James Patterson and Stephen King, came from a female author. While older male writers still have a large presence on bestseller lists and in the book world, newly published male fiction authors have become rarer than blue moons.

This phenomenon reported on in stories like NPR’s “Women Now Dominate the Book Business” and “Women Are Now Publishing More Books Than Men” (which describe it as a sign of progress) helps shed light on another phenomenon that the media has been rubbing its head over in articles like The Atlantic’s “How Gen Z Came to See Books as a Waste of Time” and Psychology Today’s “Why Aren’t College Students Reading?”

There is a generational decline in reading across Gen Z, but it’s also a gender divide. While there’s always been a gender reading gap, by 2018, 44% of girls loved to read, while only 24% of boys did. One study found that adult women were reading 39% more than men did.

The Guardian.

That’s because the Crust keep trying to make it like Britain’s NHS or the Canadian mandatory government-provided health care, both of which are abject failures.

UPDATE: Since 2018, Over 75,000 Canadians Died Waiting For Health Care

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The latest spotlight on the crisis in American manufacturing may be on steel, but our nation has traded its manufacturing might for financial gains across all sectors – making the same fateful mistake that has befallen great civilizations throughout history. As a founder, CEO, and advocate for American industrial renewal, who’s building the world’s most advanced, efficient factories to counter China’s chokehold on manufacturing, I can tell you that America has just three years – not 10 – to rebuild our industrial base before falling critically behind.

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Sure, open up the border! Let ’em all in! What could possibly go wrong?

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Critical race theory, social and emotional learning, DEI, social justice, and other forms of wokeness are nothing new to the American education system.

Some buy into the divisive concepts, but most parents simply want their children to be proficient in math, reading, science, and other subjects when they graduate high school.

The past four years saw the public square become overtly obsessed with sexual and gender rhetoric. News cycles have been dominated with divisive education issues, such as attempted changes to Title IX, transgender rights, and the use of locker rooms and restrooms.

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‘You basically have auto workers across the nation subsidizing these trust fund graduate students’

Unions are run by activists, whose lives revolve around politics. This is not a surprise.

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delman has once more released its annual Trust Barometer, capturing a snapshot of how people around the world feel about today’s leaders.

The findings are hardly positive, with survey data revealing that an increasing proportion of respondents across the 28 polled countries worry that government and business leaders as well as journalists and reporters are purposely misleading people by saying things they know are false or are gross exaggerations.

Gothamist.

Seven men have been indicted for what authorities say was their involvement in a deadly, gang-related shootout in front of young children at a Richmond Hill baby shower last year. One of the men has yet to be apprehended.

The shooting resulted in the death of 24-year-old Great Neck, Long Island resident Jefari Dobie-Reinhardt and injuries to three others in attendance, according to Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz’s office.

More than 40 people, including four children, were in attendance at the baby shower, which took place on May 4 at the Volume Seventeen event venue on Atlantic Avenue, the DA’s office said in a statement Friday. It said two people first opened fire at a crowd of about a dozen people outside, before panicked attendees ran indoors, and then several people fired guns back out through the venue’s windows to the sidewalk.

At least 35 bullet casings, one fired bullet and two live cartridges were recovered at the venue, authorities said. In the statement, Katz described the shooting as “a scene out of the Wild West.”

Imagine how low the crime rates would be if young black males were prohibited from possessing firearms.

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Last year, the British government decided to end tax breaks for wealthy foreigners, a decision that may have contributed to 10,800 millionaires fleeing the U.K. in 2024, Bloomberg noted. Now, though, Reeves is considering an amendment that would lessen the impact of those plans, multiple people familiar with the matter told the outlet, requesting anonymity as the details have not yet been publicized. That amendment would allow some people to more easily access the temporary repatriation facility (TPF), which lets non-doms bring in previously earned foreign income and gains at a reduced tax rate.

“The temporary repatriation facility is designed to encourage non-doms to bring their funds to the U.K., encouraging them to spend and invest this money here,” the Treasury said in a statement cited by Bloomberg. The current program is available for three tax years from 2025, with a tax rate of 12 percent for the first two years and 15 percent for the third year. The planned amendment wouldn’t change the tax rates or the length of the TRF, people familiar with the situation told the publication.

While the proposed changes to the tax regime may be celebrated by some high-net-worth individuals in the U.K., they may not largely affect the outflow of millionaires.

Once the government gets the idea that your money is its money, it’s hard to go back.

The Other McCain.

He must be a white supremacist, right?

I’m sure the analysts at the FBI will have fun trying to discern some kind of coherent ideology in his manifesto, but it’s really just a collage of nihilistic craziness — “soyjak” memes, tributes to various mass murderers, “groyper” stuff, etc., and honestly what I want to say to these kids is simple: Y’ALL NEED JESUS!

Seriously. These kids see no meaning or purpose in their lives, which is an inevitable consequence of the de-Christianization of our culture. Our education system is openly hostile to Christianity, based upon the liberal secular humanist belief that Christianity is harmful, but if our Soros-funded cultural overlords were ever to make the mistake of inviting me to speak at one of their confabs at Davos or Aspen, I’d wake them up from their secular pipe dream: You think the “Religious Right” is dangerous? Wait until you get a look at what the Atheist Right has in store for you.

UPDATE: Antioch school shooting: Nashville suspect, 17, posted alt-right paraphernalia, photos from past school shootings (Angele Latham/The Tennessean)  Who are you going to believe, a journalist or your lyin’ eyes?

UPDATE: Alleged Nashville school shooter appears to have praised Hitler and shared neo-Nazi content

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Three weeks of intense wildfires have ignited speculation on X, with many questioning whether arsonists may be to blame for the ignition source of the wildfires. There have been several instances where arsonists were arrested. Meanwhile, mainstream far-left media outlets have struggled to convince the public that evil ‘global warming’ is the primary cause.

When government workers spend their time focused on who gets the spoils rather than on doing their jobs, dystopia arrives on big iron-shot hooves.

Quillette.

In January, the world’s second-largest restaurant chain, McDonald’s, and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, both joined the long list of multinational corporations that have announced they are discontinuing their formal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. It’s a trend that also includes such household names as Amazon, Walmart, Molson Coors, Ford Motor Co., John Deere, Lowe’s, Harley-Davidson, Toyota Motor Corp, and, as of this week, the U.S. federal government: Donald Trump’s administration has ordered all federal workers staffed in DEI roles to be placed on paid leave.

In explaining its move, McDonald’s cited the “shifting legal landscape”—specifically, a June 2023 US Supreme Court decision that struck down race-based affirmative-action programs in college admissions as unconstitutional. In its memo to employees, Meta likewise cited Supreme Court jurisprudence, as well as the fact that “the term ‘DEI’ has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.”

While Trump’s name doesn’t appear in these memos, the president’s previous comments likely played a role in corporate decision-making. This week’s anti-DEI executive order was no surprise, as Trump had pledged to “eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the entire federal government”; and his most vocal conservative supporters typically attack DEI as being inspired by “woke” or even Marxist principles—an affront to the merit-based ethos.

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Like the Left Coast, the Ivy League has descended into a dystopia of wokery that will, unless they come to their senses, eventually destroy them.

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The United Kingdom has confirmed that one of its Royal Navy nuclear-powered submarines surfaced close to the Yantar, a notorious Russian spy ship late last year, to make it clear it was being observed. The revelation came as the Royal Navy was once again closely tracking the Russian ship after it returned to British waters. According to the U.K. defense secretary, the Yantar has, in recent months, been “mapping the U.K.’s critical underwater infrastructure,” at a time when NATO, in general, is increasingly concerned about apparent sabotage to undersea cables.

The Yantar was sailing in British waters in November last year, during which time U.K. Defense Secretary John Healey said it had been “detected loitering over U.K. critical undersea infrastructure.”

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Covid-19 Inquiry they were forced to form their own support systems after being ignored by the authorities and made to feel like “an uncomfortable truth” of the rollout.

Kate Scott, speaking on behalf of the group Vaccine Injured and Bereaved UK (VIBUK), said they felt they were “almost being pushed into the shadows” as the overwhelming official message continued to be that the jabs were ”safe and effective” in spite of their experience.

Last week’s hearing also heard from a victims’ group in Scotland which raised concerns that the vaccine had been rolled out at such speed that public safety had been sacrifice

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On Friday’s Erin Burnett OutFront, the show played a report by correspondent Natasha Chen in which she informed viewers of the difficulties caused by electric cars during the Los Angeles wildfires.

It turns out that the batteries used by electric cars have their own environmental consequences when they catch fire, creating hazardous pollution and a blaze that is much more difficult to extinguish than in gas-powered cars.

Gothamist.

A man died in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening after police say he was beaten and robbed in the back of a ride-hail car by two men who got into the car at an intersection.

Michael Shelonchik, 53, was sitting in the back of the vehicle around 6:15 p.m. at the intersection of West 5th Street and Neptune Avenue in Coney Island when the men opened the door, began assaulting him and snatched a chain off his neck, NYPD officials said on Wednesday.

The driver tried to drive away from the perpetrators but only made it a few blocks before Shelonchik lost consciousness, police said. First responders were called and took him to Maimonides Medical Center, where he died.

NYPD officials said it was still unclear whether Shelonchik knew the suspects, and police made no immediate arrests. The NYPD was investigating the case early Wednesday as a potentially suspicious death, while Shelonchik’s cause of death was being determined.

Time to leave.

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As you may recall, just before Christmas a Saudi psychiatrist drove his vehicle at speed through a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg, killing six people and wounding hundreds more.

Now comes word that the federal Prosecutor General does not identify the incident as an act of terrorism, because… Well, just because. Maybe it’s because the perpetrator wasn’t a “neo-Nazi”.