TDS Watch: The 'Convicted Felon' Argument

Townhall 

"Trump is a convicted felon!"

Who hasn't heard this attack line made constantly by critics of President Donald Trump? For them, Trump's conviction settles the debate about his character and fitness for office.

But consider what one prominent legal analyst — not from Fox News, Newsmax or a conservative publication — wrote about the case.

The charge against Trump brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg boils down to this. Trump recorded payments connected to the Stormy Daniels matter as legal expenses. Bragg transformed that into 34 felony counts and secured a conviction in a jurisdiction where Trump remains unpopular.

Elie Honig, CNN's senior legal analyst, outlined his objections in New York Magazine. He was brutal. Honig wrote:

"The judge donated money — a tiny amount, $35, but in plain violation of a rule prohibiting New York judges from making political donations of any kind — to a pro-Biden, anti-Trump political operation, including funds that the Judge earmarked for 'resisting the Republican Party and Donald Trump's radical right-wing legacy.' Would folks have been just fine with the judge staying on the case if he had donated a couple bucks to 'Re-elect Donald Trump, MAGA forever!'? Absolutely not.

"District Attorney Alvin Bragg ran for office in an overwhelmingly Democratic county by touting his Trump-hunting prowess. He bizarrely (and falsely) boasted on the campaign trail that '(i)t is a fact that I have sued Trump over 100 times. ...'

"Most importantly, the DA's charges against Trump push the outer boundaries of the law and due process. That's not on the jury. That's on the prosecutors who chose to bring the case and the judge who let it play out as it did.

"... (T)he charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented. In fact, no state prosecutor — in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere — has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. None. Ever. Even putting aside the specifics of election law, the Manhattan DA itself almost never brings any case in which falsification of business records is the only charge.

"Standing alone, falsification charges would have been mere misdemeanors under New York law, which posed two problems for the DA. First, nobody cares about a misdemeanor, and it would be laughable to bring the first-ever charge against a former president for a trifling offense that falls within the same technical criminal classification as shoplifting a Snapple and a bag of Cheetos from a bodega. Second, the statute of limitations on a misdemeanor — two years — likely has long expired on Trump's conduct, which dates to 2016 and 2017.

"So, to inflate the charges up to the lowest-level felony (Class E, on a scale of Class A through E) — and to electroshock them back to life within the longer felony statute of limitations — the DA alleged that the falsification of business records was committed 'with intent to commit another crime' ... Inexcusably, the DA refused to specify what those unlawful means actually were — and the judge declined to force them to pony up — until right before closing arguments. So much for the Constitutional obligation to provide notice to the defendant of the charges against him in advance of trial. ...

"... Manhattan DA's employees reportedly have called this the 'Zombie Case' because of various legal infirmities, including its bizarre charging mechanism. But it's better characterized as the Frankenstein Case, cobbled together with ill-fitting parts into an ugly, awkward, but more-or-less functioning contraption that just might ultimately turn on its creator. ...

"'No man is above the law.' It's become cliche, but it's an important point, and it's worth pausing to reflect on the importance of this core principle. But it's also a meaningless sentiment if we unquestioningly tolerate (or worse, celebrate) deviations from ordinary process and principle to get there. ... Here, prosecutors got their man, for now at least — but they also contorted the law in an unprecedented manner in their quest to snare their prey."

To sum up, CNN's senior legal analyst describes the prosecution as a "Frankenstein Case," says prosecutors "contorted the law in an unprecedented manner" and warns about "deviations from ordinary process and principle." It appears shouting "convicted felon!" isn't quite the conversation-ending argument Trump's critics think.

This does not mean My Cousin Vinny could win this on appeal. But based on Honig's objections, Trump's odds look pretty darn good.

Podcast thread for June 4th

 

what a busy day

Washington Is Still Chasing Two Rabbits

American Thinker 

If you chase two rabbits at once, you catch neither. That may be the simplest way to describe American foreign policy today. For years, Washington has said that China is the most important strategic challenge of the twenty-first century. Yet in practice, it still behaves as if the unipolar moment of the 1990s never really ended.

On paper, the priorities seem clear. Republicans talk about competition with China. Democrats say much the same. Realists, nationalists, and even some traditional interventionists have accepted that the future of American power will not be decided merely in the Middle East, but in the Indo-Pacific, in supply chains, advanced technologies, strategic industries, semiconductors, shipbuilding, and economic competition with Beijing.

But as soon as a crisis flares up in another corner of the world, the old memory of American foreign policy comes alive again. Washington speaks in a new language. It talks about “America First,” strategic focus, burden-sharing with allies, and the end of endless wars. Yet its practical instinct is often the same old instinct: a return to the role of global policeman.

The issue here is not merely a contradiction in rhetoric. It is a contradiction in strategy.

The rise of China was not simply the addition of one more rival to America’s list of concerns. It called into question the very foundations of America’s view of the post-Cold War world. For three decades, the United States saw itself as the principal guarantor of the international order -- an order resting on American military superiority, the security of allies, the management of regional crises, and a broad military presence across different parts of the world.

But that same order also created opportunities for America’s rivals. Countries that grew under the security umbrella and stability provided by American power were able to devote much of their resources not to security, but to economic development, technology, industry, and trade. China was the greatest beneficiary of this arrangement. Beijing grew within the very world whose security costs Washington was paying.

It was from this point that the need for a change of course in American foreign policy became serious. The issue was not that Donald Trump suddenly pushed U.S. foreign policy off its natural track. On the contrary, Trump was the product of a deeper reality. The “America First” movement was a political reaction to the exhaustion of a large segment of American society with endless wars, unlimited commitments, and costs paid by American citizens while the benefits sometimes flowed to Washington’s rivals and even to some of its allies.

The question was simple: Why should America continue paying the costs of the global order when its own infrastructure is aging, its debt is rising, its industries are under pressure, and its principal rival is using that same order to expand its power?

But diagnosing the problem is not the same as truly changing course.

American foreign policy has changed in language, but in behavior it remains attached to the interventionist logic of the post-Cold War era. Washington wants, on the one hand, an America-centered policy focused on competition with China, and on the other hand, to preserve its role as the principal manager of the global order for its allies. These are the two rabbits America is trying to chase at the same time: focusing on China and preserving global primacy.

The recent confrontation with Iran is a clear example of this contradiction. Regardless of what one thinks about the necessity, legitimacy, or military outcome of that confrontation, America’s very entry into such a crisis revived a fundamental question: What place do such conflicts have in America’s grand strategy? If China is the main priority, how does becoming involved once again in a costly Middle Eastern crisis serve that priority?

If the goal is to preserve American resources for the decisive competitions of the future, why does Washington still allow regional crises to consume its attention, political energy, military capacity, and diplomatic credibility? If the standard is the American national interest, why should the United States continue issuing blank checks for the anxieties, calculations, and adventures of its regional allies?

Defenders of the traditional approach have a ready answer. They say America’s global credibility, deterrence, and the security of allies require Washington to remain active on several fronts at once. That argument should not be dismissed out of hand. Great powers do not have the luxury of ignoring the world. But if this logic is accepted, then it must also be said honestly that America has, in practice, moved away from “America First” and is merely continuing an updated version of the same post-Cold War order under new slogans.

Part of this impasse goes back to the resistance of the traditional foreign policy elite in Washington -- what American critics sometimes call “the Blob,” the entrenched, bipartisan foreign policy establishment. This current was formed in an environment where America was the world’s unrivaled power. For them, any reduction in commitments is a sign of weakness; any act of prioritization is interpreted as retreat; and any burden-sharing with allies is treated as a threat to American leadership.

But the world has changed. Resources are not unlimited. Debt matters. Industrial capacity matters. Ammunition stockpiles matter. Public opinion matters. And above all, priorities matter.

Competition with China requires concentration. Preserving global primacy produces dispersion. The first demands discipline; the second demands permanent readiness to enter new crises. The first sometimes requires saying “no”; the second treats every “no” as a blow to American credibility. These two missions do not easily fit together.

America’s main challenge today is not that it lacks strategic language. Washington has spent years talking about great-power competition, containing China, and rebuilding domestic strength. The problem is that it still has not found the courage to bring its behavior into line with that language.

America cannot forever say that China is its main priority while every regional crisis redirects its attention and resources. It cannot speak of domestic renewal while continuing to pay the full costs of managing the global order. And it cannot promise voters an America-centered foreign policy while, in practice, continuing to behave like the indispensable policeman of the world.

Washington is still chasing two rabbits. Until it decides which one truly matters more, it risks catching neither: not a focused and effective strategy for competing with China, and not the sustainable global leadership it still imagines it can afford.

In the new multipolar world, the central art of a superpower may not be more intervention; it may be the capacity for restraint.

Is Pax Silica The New Avatar Of The Great Reset?

American Thinker 

During the Biden administration, there was extensive discussion of the Great Reset. The avowed aim of the Great Reset — also known as Agenda 21, Agenda 2030, or Sustainable Development — was to foster public-private cooperation to solve the world’s most pressing challenges: environmental protection, global health, and bridging the gap between developed and developing nations and groups.

But its real purpose was to create a globalist, authoritarian regime in which elites controlled the world through their influence over governments and world organizations. This would be achieved through public-private partnerships, aided by a technocracy that dictated every aspect of human life and behavior. AI, chip implants, and granular tracking would create a Digital Panopticon, where authoritarianism would thrive and democracy would die away.

So, what happened to this brainchild of Klaus Schwab and his cohorts at the World Economic Forum (WEF), which Glenn Beck exposed as a dystopian system that spells the end of free market capitalism and imposes severe limits on individual freedom and private ownership? Was it banished to the dustbin of history when President Donald Trump took office? Recent developments suggest it has shapeshifted and is proceeding at breakneck speed under the guise of a program to promote technological advancements and global trade agreements.

In December 2025, the U.S. State Department announced Pax Silica, a U.S.-led global initiative to secure supply chains for advanced technologies, including semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and critical minerals, and to counter China’s monopoly on rare earth minerals and AI infrastructure. Echoing Pax Americana and the Iron Curtain of the 20th century, Pax Silica is a coalition of countries united in building an economic fortress around critical technologies — a silicon Iron Curtain — to ensure geostrategic dominance.

The coalition is based on contributions to the AI ecosystem rather than on geographic location:

• As its leader, the U.S. will provide capital and cloud services from remote data centers.
• Japan, serving as the industrial anchor, will provide the chemicals and machinery for chip manufacturing.
• South Korea, the global hub for High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), will supply the memory stacks needed for the high-speed computing that powers AI.
• Australia, with the world’s largest reserves of lithium, cobalt, tungsten, and copper, will serve as the quarry of critical minerals.
• Israeli expertise will secure and fortify the technological ecosystem.
• India will provide software to enable AI capabilities and labor to manufacture the chips.
• The Netherlands, the U.K., and Singapore will provide additional technologies.
• Qatar and the UAE have joined to provide capital and energy.
• Taiwan, which produces 95% of the world’s semiconductors, has been designated a guest to avoid conflict with China.

While it may seem like a solid front against Chinese global dominance, Pax Silica will ultimately result in the governance of global commerce by AI and other technologies rather than by sovereign states and democratically deliberating electorates. In short, it advances the aims of the Great Reset through other means. Patrick Wood, a leading technology expert, views Pax Silica as “a global operating system that manages all aspects of life without independent human input.” He also describes it as a vehicle for converting “independent citizens into managed tenants.”

It is not inconceivable that Chinese-style monitoring and social credit systems will soon emerge in democracies, which will no longer remain free. This will be achieved through smartphone-based tracking, human ‘chipping’ via the brain-computer interface developed by Elon Musk’s Neuralink, and AI-based controls that shape human thought and action through reward-and-punishment cycles tied to payments and digital assets.

This dystopia is closer than you think. To ensure the smooth domestic implementation of Pax Silica, directives and laws have been enacted or are in development. On his first full day in office, Trump, along with Larry Ellison of Oracle, Masayoshi Son of Softbank, and Sam Altman of OpenAI, announced a $500 billion private-sector initiative for AI infrastructure. Known as Project Stargate, the initiative will build vast data centers and power generation facilities across the U.S.

What is alarming, though, is that the project will be led by tech giants whose executives are active participants in the WEF and are in tune with its dangerous worldview — that ordinary people no longer matter and need not have a say, because a world as complex as ours will survive only if it is run by intellectual elites and their paymasters. Digital IDs, chipping (which will purportedly be voluntary), central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), asset tokenization, and social credit systems — these are all part of the ecosystem of control taking shape and long advocated by the WEF.

In fact, Ellison envisions an AI-controlled world of round-the-clock surveillance of everyone, everywhere, through interconnected cameras, bodycams, dashcams, and security systems, in which “citizens will be on their best behavior.”

A few days after announcing Project Stargate, Trump signed Executive Order 14179 (titled Removing Barriers to American Leadership in AI), which promotes “permissionless innovation” in the tech sector by removing regulatory and other barriers. Federal officials have been directed to develop a comprehensive AI Action Plan and to expedite the development of AI data centers.

However, what will perhaps hasten the arrival of dystopian control the most are two recent pieces of legislation — the Genius Act and the Clarity Act — that address all forms of electronic currency, including cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, CBDCs, and a new type of cryptocurrency called stablecoins (pegged to stable reserves like cash or gold, whose use can be dictated by issuers to be subject to certain terms and conditions). Beyond challenging monetary sovereignty, they will allow tech firms, AI-powered platforms, and autonomous organizations to build alternative value systems and control people’s behavior by dictating how many tokens they may earn or use — or even lose — for performing certain behaviors.

The Genius (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins) Act of July 2025 established rules for stablecoins. Critics argue that integrating stablecoins into traditional banking will pave the way for a programmable monetary system that can be weaponized to undermine financial stability, enforce compliance, and eliminate monetary sovereignty by denying access to funds. A centralized surveillance grid could follow, along with authoritarian financial control. Last November, the Circle Internet Group, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, prohibited users from purchasing firearms— an ideology-driven enforcement action unthinkable with fiat currency.

The Clarity Act (Digital Asset Market Clarity Act) of 2025 creates regulation for cryptocurrency and seeks to define who controls the future of digital finance — stablecoins, tokenized assets, and AI-driven financial agents — in the U.S. It has cleared the Senate Banking Committee but faces opposition from the banking industry, which is worried that cryptocurrency and stablecoins will compete with money people keep in insured bank accounts, causing bank deposits to dwindle and making less money available for loans. Law enforcers say the act does not do enough to prevent illegal transactions, and labor groups are afraid that cryptocurrencies will jeopardize financial stability, especially in old age, by devaluing retirement funds and pensions.

These systems of top-down control — effected through the global Pax Silica initiative, the digitization of assets, and the proliferation of AI for surveillance — are meant to achieve the very goals the Great Reset set out to attain. So, the foundations for an authoritarian world government are already being laid, and local government and individual freedom are gradually being eroded.

The Great Reset hasn’t gone away. It has simply taken the form of Pax Silica.

🎭 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓

 

Welcome to 

The 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓 

Here’s a place to share cartoons, jokes, music, art, nature, 

man-made wonders, and whatever else you can think of. 

No politics or divisive posts on this thread. 

This feature will appear every day at 1pm mountain time. 

Scott Pelley Was A Highly Paid Propagandist

What do you call a political activist who plays the role of a journalist? A propagandist.

The Federalist

CBS News fired Scott Pelley on Tuesday, and his reaction only confirmed what we already knew — Pelley was a high paid propagandist masquerading as a journalist.

NBC News reported that Pelley’s firing came after he accused Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” 60 Minutes during a “heated” meeting with a new 60 Minutes producer.

“She does not love this place,” Pelley reportedly told the producer. “She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

The dispute reportedly involved the firing of correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who clashed with Weiss last year after Weiss postponed the release of a segment about the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelan men sent to prisons in El Salvador. Notably, the original segment was heavily biased and failed to include statements from the White House and Department of Homeland Security, despite the story involving the two entities. Weiss insisted the story include responses from both entities.

In other words, Weiss insisted on basic journalism.

But apparently that was controversial enough — and partially worth losing his career over — for Pelley.

Following his firing, Pelley accused the network of firing him for political reasons in a statement.

“The new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration,” Pelley said. “The waste is heartbreaking.”

“Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.”

But Pelley’s career doesn’t really reflect the commitment to “fairness against the forces of political bias” that he now claims to champion.

A journalist’s job is to challenge powerful people by using interview opportunities to ask the pressing questions on the minds of the American people and then allow viewers to make their own conclusions. A propagandist’s job is to selectively present information and frame stories to guide their audience toward a preferred conclusion.

Pelley did the latter more often than not.

During a 2019 interview with Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director who leaked information to the Wall Street Journal and then lied about it under oath multiple times, Pelley framed the leak as if it were a praise-worthy effort to “correct” a story that was in the public interest. He also accepted McCabe’s excuse that he was merely “confused” by the investigators’ questions when he lied not once, not twice, but three times. Pelley also said “If the inspector general is right about McCabe lying,” as if to subtly question the findings of the report and cast a shadow of doubt. McCabe was also able to claim he was fired because he “opened a case against the President of the United States” and not that he lied under oath.

In his 2023 interview with then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, Pelley asked Garland about the timing of the indictments against Donald Trump. As Garland repeatedly insisted the DOJ was not political, Pelley jumped in to, as The Federalist’s Kylee Griswold wrote, “to clarify the attorney general’s answer.”

“The investigation itself has determined the timing,” Pelley offered to Garland, essentially giving Garland the defense he should have made to sound less politically motivated.

“Yes, exactly right,” Garland replied.

Rather than pressing Garland on why the DOJ chose to bring unprecedented political charges against the leading opposition candidate in the middle of a presidential election, Pelley instead focused on trying to help Garland articulate the DOJ’s decision. But a journalist’s job is to look at anything critically and ask tough questions when needed. A lot of Americans already suspected the DOJ was being weaponized — a good moment for Pelley to grill Garland on some of the concerns Americans had. Instead, he sounded more like a communications advisor.

Or take the time when Pelley interviewed Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich. The segment was supposedly meant to review the “book ban” push by parents concerned about pornography and other inappropriate material in school libraries. But as Auguste Meyrat wrote in these pages, “Pelley and his team shamelessly edited the whole segment to push a leftist narrative about book bans and parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty.”

CBS News cut a portion of the interview where Justice read portions of books that were available in elementary school libraries. Those passages were crucial to the nationwide debate since they allowed readers to judge for themselves whether the books were appropriate. But by removing that necessary context, CBS News (and Pelley) made it seem like Justice and Moms for Liberty were just irrational and objecting to books for no reason.

Just last year, Pelley interviewed left-wing political hack Marc Elias, claiming it was “nearly impossible to get anyone on camera for this story, because of the fear now running through our system of justice.” Notably, a cursory search does not turn up any times in which Pelley spoke of the “fear now running through our system of justice” when then-president Joe Biden’s DOJ was targeting its political adversaries.

Pelley did not disclose to viewers that Elias represented Kamala Harris’ campaign and the Democratic National Committee, nor did he mention that when Elias worked for Hillary Clinton and was responsible for hiring the law firm, Fusion GPS, for opposition research against Trump. Fusion GPS would later hire Christopher Steele to write the phony “Steele dossier,” which was then used the launch the Russia Collusion hoax.

Those things are not minor details. Instead they are the type of facts that viewers would need in order to weigh the credibility of the person speaking (in this case, Elias). But Pelley left them out.

Then of course there was the commencement address that Pelley gave at the Wake Forest University graduation in 2025. Pelley called the time a “moment of crisis” and compared it to the Second World War.

“Our country is in peril,” he told graduates. But that’s how political activists speak, not journalists.

So what then do you call a political activist who plays the role of a journalist?

Well, a paid propagandist.

‘Absolutely Gross’: Leftist ‘Toolkit’ Teaches Kids How To ‘Break School Rules’ And Plot Anti-ICE Protests

The booklet does not define what a protest-worthy issue is, but the pages are covered with children holding leftist slogan signs.

The Federalist 

Investigative grassroots program Defending Education uncovered a 36-page protest “toolkit” designed to mobilize schoolchildren and teach them how to organize and execute left-wing protests. Alliance for Education Justice (AEJ) developed the leftist guide, which anonymous tipsters sent to Defending Education earlier this month to expose political activists targeting children in public schools.

The toolkit aims to turn children into leftist warriors more focused on protesting for “social justice” issues than on their education. As Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives at Defending Education Paul Runko told The Federalist, “[The left] is putting children on the front lines. It’s absolutely gross.”

The toolkit contains bundles of colorful graphics for K-12 children on how to “mak[e] injustice impossible to ignore” while “shifting who holds power in a moment” in the classroom. AEJ’s document opens with this unsettling statement:

Across the country, young people are already angry, restless, and taking action in response to conditions that affect their safety, dignity, and futures. … This toolkit exists because students are already moving. Our role is not to create unrest, but to help young people organize their energy safely, strategically, and toward the people and institutions responsible for the harm.

The toolkit goes on to promote walkouts that “intentionally break school rules” to “interrupt business as usual and demand accountability.” It states that the goal of a walkout is to force school officials into a “decision dilemma: meet the demands and make changes, or respond in ways that expose the injustice being defended.” The toolkit recommends wearing clothing that obscures the face or tattoos at walkouts and utilizing the encrypted messaging app Signal to keep plans secret. Parts of the booklet go beyond encouraging protests to explaining how to organize them. About 20 pages are dedicated to teaching young provocateurs how to create organized groups with appointed roles. Some sections go over setting up a police liaison team, while others teach how to stay out of legal trouble.

The booklet does not define what a protest-worthy issue is, but the pages are covered with children holding leftist slogan signs. One says “Pol-ICE free schools.” Another says, “Where’s the outrage for Renee Good, Alexi Pretti, Keith Porter, and others that were killed by ICE?” Deeper in the booklet, a young man holds a picture of President Trump’s face melting with the words“Defund Walls” printed over his head.

The creator of the toolkit, the AEJ, is a nonprofit “collaborative of 30 youth-led education activist groups” working to “grow the left-progressive movement,” according to InfluenceWatch. One thousand high school students are reportedly a part of the AEJ, and, according to Runko, the AEJ actively drove or participated in the police-free schools movement, the social justice event National Day of Action, and the March for Our Lives anti-gun protests.

The AEJ leverages social media to attract young activists and then uses them to organize school-wide protests. Runko believes that most children do not care about the issues they protest, but they will take an opportunity to skip class.”If the school [has] no consequences for [a] walkout, why not leave class? What’s the consequences? None. That’s how [protests] bolster their numbers,” he said.

The number of school protests has drastically risen over recent years. In 2024, 24 school walkouts occurred. That number increased in 2025 to 59 and exploded to 401 in 2026.

Though the number of school walkouts is on the rise, they are nonetheless violations of attendance law. Under Des Moines v. Tinker, the Supreme Court indicated that school districts should prohibit or stop walkouts if they disrupt the learning environment, Runko said. While some schools claim they are protecting children’s rights by refusing to interfere, the truth is “these walkouts are in fact violating that school ruling, and school districts are just brushing it off,” Runko noted.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was one of AEJ’s initial funders, and the AEJ also receives monetary support from a conglomerate of leftist organizations, such as the Marguerite Casey Foundation, New Venture Fund, and Tides Foundation. Notably, Tides Foundation received $17.2 million from leftist billionaire George Soros through his Open Society Foundations between 2009 and 2022. AEJ seeks to create “police-free” schools as part of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Runko suspects a disturbing motive behind the AEJ and other organizers of school protests: “political revolution.”

Many of the socialist organizations behind left-wing student activism state they desire some kind of revolution. The opening to a political training guidebook by the Sunrise Movement says, “We’re not going to get there overnight, and we’re not here to get back to the status quo. We’re here to win a political revolution.” The Young Democratic Socialists of America say on their website that “[America’s] capitalist system can only be overthrown by workers organizing collectively to take political power from the rich and build a new society.”

Runko thinks leftist organizations are manipulating and targeting the youth because their movements lost power to the right under Trump. “The left far very much wants their political power back. They’re going to amp these [protests] up,” he said.

If children are ever to be safe from leftist indoctrination, Runko believes that education must begin in the home. “[Parents] must talk to their kids about what they’re learning [and] encourage them to seek out the truth,” he said. He also recommends that parents opt their children out of compromised curricula and get involved with local school board committees and meetings, and “then start to tell a better story to sway people to a pro-Western civilization mindset.”

Finally: Senate Republicans Cross the Rubicon, Voting to Consider ICE, CBP Reconciliation Bill

RedState 

They have crossed the Rubicon, everyone. 

We can finally report that the Republican conference in the U.S. Senate has managed to do their jobs, voting on Wednesday afternoon on a party line vote to advance the reconciliation bill to fund CPB (Customs and Border Protection) and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to the upper chamber floor.

As CPAN's Hill producer Craig Caplan noted, the tally was 53-46; one Dem - Sen. Michael Bennet (CO) - was absent.

The voting victory was spurred by the administration officially pulling the plug on the DOJ's Anti-Weaponization Fund, as my colleague Jennifer Oliver O'Connell wrote Tuesday. This came on the heels of a federal judge recently pausing the implementation of the fund, drawn from the president's previous lawsuit against alleged lawfare on him and his family by the Biden IRS. 

Acting AG Todd Blanche also made comments previously in Congressional testimony that it was all but dead. So what about that fund and the current Congressional funding package? Leader John Thune (R-NE) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) shared their thoughts:

First, Thune "acknowledged that there may be some Republicans who weren’t satisfied with Blanche’s testimony, and reiterated that the main goal was to 'get the base bill across the finish line.'" 

He added that "Hopefully, all of our members who have amendment ideas will, as they think through that, and they have the opportunities to have conversations… about their ideas, keep in mind we need to keep the bill together and make sure we’ve got 50 votes for it." 

And what about the now rather anti-Trump Tillis?

...[I]f there's no language that makes its way into the package that addresses the fund, he said, "It's going to be hard for me to vote yes."

"I mean, I think we got to know this is a huge political liability," Tillis told reporters. "I said it was stupid on stilts a week or two ago."

Here's part of what is in the revised package:

A revised version of one part of the package released Wednesday also dropped language that would have provided $1 billion in security funding for the Secret Service, including for President Trump's East Wing renovation, where he plans to build a massive ballroom. That funding faced intense scrutiny from a handful of Republicans, prompting senators to abandon it.

Last month, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees unveiled the initial text of the $72 billion package, which funds immigration agencies through fiscal year 2029.

One of the amendments in the bill is sponsored by the Conservative former state attorney general, Sen. Eric Schmitt (MO) - his provision on Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents getting the green light to take criminal aliens into custody when state authorities spring them from prison - which he celebrated on his X account

He wrote: 

Success—It's been a long road, but the fight was worth it. The provision I authored to ensure ICE can arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens who are released from jails and prisons in jurisdictions that violate federal immigration law is in the reconciliation text.

In 2025, nearly 18,000 aliens were released from jails instead of transferred to ICE.

That is insane. They were already in jail. ICE had already identified them. Politicians let them walk back into American communities.

This is about commonsense immigration enforcement in America. Unlawful aliens. Already in custody. Released instead of transferred to ICE.

There is no serious defense for that.

Indeed, there is not.

Now, what? 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said through a spokesperson that his caucus will keep fighting it duringThursday's vote-a-rama:

Senate Republicans advance reconciliation bill funding immigration enforcement,  53-46. No GOP nos

Vote-a-rama will be tomorrow morning.  Schumer spox: "Tomorrow, we’ll keep forcing Republicans to answer for their priorities: Trump’s corrupt slush fund, his rogue police force, and his endless corruption"

And the House appears to be expecting to take it up in a few days, per Punchbowl News:

And where does Pres. Trump stand on the Fund? He reportedly said, "Ask the lawyers."

Wise answer. As usual on these sorts of stories, RedState will keep you posted on any updates.