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I spent a few years working as an architect in Boston. I know that city. I walked those streets and grabbed coffee in the morning. It was a great city to be in. It’s full of history, and normally, I would recommend visiting. Today, I’m not so sure. One thing I can tell you is that I’d avoid it during pride month.
I honestly almost forgot that pride month is coming. Now I’m filled with so much dread of the incoming virtue-signaling, especially in light of what Boston has planned.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu's office of LGBTQ advancement is burning nearly $1 million in taxpayer money this year on pride programming. That alone is scandalous, but one event in particular breaks through even the most generous threshold of belief.
It's called "Trans Period Pride."
The city is hosting an event centered on "menstrual equity" and the "lived experiences of transgender menstruators."
I’d love to tell you this is satire, but it’s not. That phrase appears on an actual flyer, widely shared on social media, promoting a city-sponsored gathering under the banner of Mayor Wu's office. Attendees are promised a catered dinner. And everyone who shows up gets free period underwear, courtesy of the Boston taxpayer.
This is a major American city spending public funds on what amounts to a niche activist grievance dressed up as public health policy, wrapped in the language of equity, and handed to residents as a "celebration" of pride month.
I've written before about my belief that the tide is turning against the trans agenda. I still believe that. The polling is shifting. Parents are pushing back. Courts are pushing back. Even the medical establishment is starting to retreat. But, for some reason, Democrats haven’t gotten the hint. Events like this remind you that there are still plenty of people inside the Democrat Party who are not just going along with it; they're doubling down.
And that's what makes this particular moment in the culture war so strange. On one hand, you see the backlash building. On the other hand, you see Boston spending a million bucks on period underwear parties for transgender menstruators.
Whatever pride month fancies itself to be, over the years, it has increasingly become a vehicle for pushing content that has no business being in public spaces, let alone near children. We've all seen the footage from pride parades, adults barely clothed, openly exposing themselves in front of kids. Acts that normally get you arrested become “acceptable” in the name of LGBTQ pride, where they are celebrated as inclusion. LGBTQ allyship has become a blank check for predatory behavior. Condone everything, question nothing, or get labeled a bigot.
This is where the ideology leads when no one pushes back. Every escalation becomes the new baseline. Every absurdity becomes the new normal. I'm genuinely relieved I don't work in a major city anymore, because this kind of insanity isn’t limited to Boston.
E. Jean Carroll’s rape allegations against President Donald Trump were never credible, and now she’s under investigation by the Department of Justice for perjury. Now, Byron York is digging into the case and has uncovered what could be the most elaborate political setup in history.
Trust me, the picture coming into focus is damning. Carroll has claimed, without any evidence, that Trump raped her sometime in 1995 or 1996. She can't remember which year. Nothing about her allegations makes any sense. Are we supposed to believe that she simply stayed quiet about it through Trump's rise to fame and politics, through his 2016 presidential run, and through the wave of #MeToo accusations that dominated the news cycle? Carroll said nothing about it for decades, and her stated reasons range from concern over her elderly Republican mother's health to worries that speaking out might actually help Trump win key states.
Right. Sure.
It wasn’t until 2019 that she came forward with her bizarre allegations. But she didn’t tell the police, she didn’t go to an elected official, or even to a journalist. She chose to disclose it in a book. Why? Because no other option would generate royalties.
And Carroll had a history of grifting, too. Before the book even dropped, she was charging admission for her "Most Hideous Men in NYC Walking Tour," a 90-minute #MeToo landmark stroll through Manhattan. The tour started at the Bergdorf Goodman entrance on 58th Street, which just so happens to be exactly where she claims she first encountered Trump the day of the alleged assault. She had been leading paying groups past that spot before she’d told the world what had supposedly happened there.
Now here's where the origins of these allegations get genuinely interesting. Carroll, by then a certified celebrity of the anti-Trump resistance, attended a party at writer Molly Jong-Fast's Manhattan home, a gathering the New York Times described as "Resistance Twitter come to life." The guest list included George Conway, who apparently advised Carroll to sue Trump for defamation.
The case got a critical boost when the New York legislature passed the Adult Survivors Act in 2022, which allowed sexual assault claims to be filed regardless of expired statutes of limitations. Carroll had helped advocate for the bill. The Act went into effect on November 24, 2022, and within hours, Carroll filed a second suit, this time adding a rape allegation in addition to defamation.
As PJ Media previously reported, tech billionaire Reid Hoffman, a virulently anti-Trump donor, bankrolled the whole operation. Yet Carroll testified under oath in October 2022 that no one was paying her legal fees, calling it "a contingency case."
It wasn’t until shortly before the trial that her own attorney wrote to Trump's legal team admitting that Carroll had "recollected additional information" while preparing for testimony. Trump's lawyers noted that the "belated disclosure" raised "significant concerns" about Carroll's "bias and motive."
Hoffman has some skeletons in his closet, too. In 2018, he had to apologize for funding a group that secretly mimicked Russian disinformation tactics to help a Democrat win an Alabama Senate seat.
York's reporting suggests that a criminal probe is now zeroing in on exactly these origins: the anti-Trump resistance party, the politically motivated lawyers, the billionaire backer, the conveniently timed legislation. What conservatives have been saying for years is now getting the scrutiny it deserves.
California Democrats found another way to waste taxpayer money on illegal aliens, providing them “free” refrigerators, windows, and solar panels as part of a program to help low-income farmworkers.
In California, many low-income farmworkers are illegal aliens, which is exactly how the Democrats’ affluent voters want it, because illegal aliens will often work for less money in worse conditions and without benefits. Then again, maybe the aliens are working for benefits after all, considering the number of taxpayer-funded programs that California opened to lawbreaking foreigners. The latest scandal centers around the Farmworker Housing Component of the Low-Income Weatherization Program, according to City Journal’s Christopher Rufo and Austen Hufford.
Hufford and Rufo wrote that this initiative is “part of California’s sprawling, multibillion-dollar ‘cap-and-trade’ system, which taxes carbon producers and redistributes approximately $3 billionper year to energy programs and left-wing socialcauses—all under the banner of fighting ‘climate change.’” $49 million has gone to the farmworkers program specifically since 2019.
As you might expect from a slush fund that is based on woke fiction (catastrophic climate change) and that literally taxes the building block of life (carbon) under the excuse of saving lives, the money generally goes to fund ideologically driven boondoggles, per Hufford and Rufo. The farmworkers program uses a complex and “opaque web” of nonprofits, private contractors, and California’s Department of Community Services and Development.
Nonprofit La Cooperativa Campesina de California is in charge of the program by government fiat, Hufford and Rufo explained. La Cooperativa then partnered with MAROMA Energy Services, which describes itself as “minority owned,” and together they contract out the work of installing solar panels and appliances to private entities.
[City Journal, May 26] These organizations have heavily advertised the program to California’s nearly 900,000 agricultural workers, half to three-quarters of whom are illegal immigrants. In its official documentation, California’s Department of Community Services and Development acknowledges that non-citizens are eligible for the program and that they even accept identification from foreign governments.
In a Spanish-language radio broadcast, Natalie Velores, a program manager for MAROMA, confirmed that participants do not need “legal status” in the United States and can use a matrìcula consular, a common form of identification that the Mexican consulate provides to migrants who have crossed the border, to apply.
Velores said that any ID is acceptable, even if it is not American. MAROMA customer service representative Ángel Quintanilla confirmed to Hufford and Rufo that he provides solar panels to illegal aliens.
And those involved in the program will go to great lengths to ensure farmworkers, even in more obscure rural areas, know about the program. One subcontractor had people driving hundreds of miles a day to talk to farmworkers and tell them about the program. They were disappointed when the Trump administration's immigration crackdown led to fewer illegal aliens showing up for work, meaning the leeches involved in running the program had less business for their wealth redistribution.
A California government spokesman told Hufford and Rufo that the corrupt program was necessary to help “disadvantaged communities” maintain their desired temperature within their homes while also pushing Democrats’ climate alarmist goals.
Here’s what could be the most shocking part:
Despite a $49 million budget and nearly seven years of operation, the farmworker “weatherization” program has only provided services to about 2,000 families. That means the State of California has allocated roughly $23,000 per household for its program to provide free solar panels, refrigerators, and other services—a number that raises serious concerns about financial accountability.
One problem: the same man, Mauricio Blanco, seems to be connected to entities at multiple stages in the flow of funds. Blanco worked as a project manager for La Cooperativa Campesina de California, which has been awarded at least $10.7 million by the state; is currently listed as an executive of MAROMA Energy Services, which has been granted nearly $34 million from La Cooperativa for “weatherization” services since 2017; and is CEO of John Harrison Contracting, a firm that appears to have done much of the solar installation work. He acknowledged but did not address our request for comment.
Programs like this are why California is facing an $18 billion budget deficit.
Happy Thursday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Ansprego struggled to explain his codpiece-knitting obsession to the chickpea farmers who brought him various soups.
Hasn't this great country suffered enough?
After four years of enduring the desiccated husk of Joe Biden and his upholstery-clad wife, DOCTOR Mama Jill, being the theoretical president and first lady of the United States, we should be spared having to see either one of them in the news. The mainstream media loves to keep the Democratic Party's has-beens around, though, and we're getting frequent reminders of them lately.
First, Joe Biden's puppet masters are suing the Department of Justice to prevent the release of what are bound to be some embarrassing transcripts from interviews with a ghostwriter for his 2017 memoir, which Matt wrote about yesterday.
Whatever legacy they're hoping to preserve is a work of pure fiction. Give it up, already.
The insufferable Mrs. Biden's contribution to the news cycle is even more annoying and unnecessary. This is also from Matt:
Anyway, it turns out that Dr. Jill wasn’t so blown away by her husband’s performance that night. In an interview with CBS News, she admitted that she thought her husband was having a stroke while it was happening.
In a newly released clip from a CBS News interview with correspondent Rita Braver, published Wednesday, Jill Biden recalls watching Joe struggle through the debate onstage opposite Donald Trump, his voice hoarse, his sentences trailing off into nothing, his presence diminished in a way that, up until that night, only conservatives were noticing.
Braver asked whether she felt "horrified" watching the man she'd spent decades vouching for fall apart on national television. Jill Biden's answer was revealing. "I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since, never," she said.
Make it stop.
This charade of everyone on the left pretending that they didn't know that Biden's brain had checked out has gone on long enough. Forget about all of conservative media — or even just Townhall Media — the body of evidence on this site alone that there was no "there" there in Joe Biden's brain is overwhelming. My colleagues and I were all writing about that during the 2020 campaign, while he and the wife were doing all of those basement videos.
Saying that she was worried that he might have had a stroke is a far cry from the effusive "Joe, you did such a great job answering every question. You knew all the facts," praise that she heaped upon him immediately after the debate. It was a staged photo-op, but because Democrats don't have any self-awareness, Mrs. B. didn't know how bad she was making him look. She sounded like a mother praising her toddler for pooping on the poddy for the first time.
Jill Biden and the rest of the Democrats aren't going to stop trying to do retroactive damage control on the unmitigated train wreck that was Joe Biden's unfortunate occupation of the Oval Office. Perhaps they figure that, if given enough time, a lot of people will forget what a bumbling moron Biden was while he was pretending to be president. Dr. Jill's decades in public education have greatly contributed to making America dumber, so it just might work.
Democrats who leave the White House feel a need to continue imposing themselves on the American public seemingly forever. Hillary Clinton always crawls out of her box of Franzia just as I've put her out of my mind. You know who I never hear about these days? George W. and Laura Bush. I am blissfully unaware of anything they are doing until a famous politician dies and W. shows up at the funeral.
The Bidens are awful people (Abandoned grandchild, anyone?), and four years of them in the White House were too much. It's time for them to get back to that Delaware beach that Sir Sniffsalot was always absconding to from 2021-2025 and leave all of us alone.
T.S. Eliot wrote, “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”
It must suck to be a manic depressant.
For RINOs this year, May was the cruelest month as MAGA voters primaried those who defied their orders.
In Indiana on May 5, Republican voters rejected six of the seven incumbent state senators who defied the desire to redistrict the state’s congressional map to send two more Republicans to Washington.
In Louisiana on May 16, Senator Wild Eyes Bill Cassidy finished third in the primary meaning he won’t be in the runoff primary that will decide the nomination. Cassidy voted to convict Trump in the second impeachment. MAGA impeached and convicted Cassidy.
In Kentucky on May 19, MAGA voters sent Congressman Thomas Massie packing. He’s headed to the Libertarian Party where he belongs. He’ll replace Jill Stein as their perennial losing presidential nominee.
In Texas on May 26 (last night), MAGA voters toppled Senator John Cornyn in a runoff against primary against Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general. The race was close until Trump endorsed Paxton. That blew Cornyn off the map as Paxton beat him by 27 points.
The media is lying when it frames the issue as Trump’s revenge against perceived enemies.
This is MAGA voters flushing the commode. The electorate has had it with politicians who promise voters everything but give them Dem Lite.
Democrats are on the 20 side of every 80/20 issue and yet Republican representatives and senators keep blocking action on those 80/20 issues.
The opposition to congressional redistricting in Indiana was not over some high-minded principle.
The Senate Republican Caucus decided to take their ball and go home rather than fully fund ICE and the border patrol. In his concession speech, Cassidy said, “When you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way you want it to. But you don’t pout. You don’t whine. You don’t claim the election was stolen. Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans and it is about our constitution.”
But 2020 was stolen—and Cassidy wanted to punish the victim.
Mitt Romney couldn’t help himself. He said, “The Senate to now lose an exceptionally brilliant and creative mind, an M.D. who chairs healthcare, and a person of character. Bill Cassidy’s departure is a loss for the country.”
You know who else is an M.D.? Tony Fauci.
As far as character, a man elected to represent the people does not abandon them time after time in the name of some principle that they never spell out.
The media claims that President Trump earned this rebuke and that Senate Republicans should show him who is boss of the party.
Well, he is. The party has nominated Trump for president three consecutive times. In 2016, he ran on building the wall; Cornyn and company blocked him. In 2024, Trump ran on deportations; Cornyn and company won’t fund it.
The Kool-Aid swilling media spin on Republicans choosing Paxton over Cornyn is this will elect Democrat James Talarico to the Senate.
HINOJOSA: Talarico is well funded. Talarico will continue to raise money, but it’s interesting to me that now Republicans have to worry about deep red Texas because they have a flawed candidate who does not know how to raise. And you’re now seeing that currently play out.
JENNINGS: All these analysis of this race and sort of the differences between what a Cornyn or a Paxton would look like here. I’m thinking about the differences between Talarico and LITERALLY every other Texan.
I don’t know any Texans who believe in six genders other than Talarico. Don’t know any Texans who said it’s immoral to eat meat other than Talarico. Don’t know any Texans who walk around saying things you know God is non-binary. You all are both Texans. Do you know ANY other Texan who even talks like that?
Issues aside, who says these things out loud? When this gets adjudicated, all that money coming in from California and New York, it will be well spent in Texas.
Establishment Republicans see Trump and his voters—wacky birds as John McCain called them—as a threat to their very existence.
For 10 years they weren’t. Now they are.
Presidents usually lose midterm elections. But what was done in May could upend that and give Republicans a November to remember.
The COVID-19 pandemic ended for me on May 28, 2020, almost three months into the state-mandated lockdowns, social distancing, and masking. That was the day I saw the same elected leaders and public health officials who had taken away almost all of my freedoms look the other way when Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa took control of American cities and burned major parts of them to the ground.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf wouldn’t let my wife see her dying father in the hospital or more directly manage his care — which became deplorable once hospital staff knew family couldn’t come in and check on them. Wolf's public health experts told us if we so much as breathed while singing in church we could kill someone’s grandmother, and then he participated in a BLM march, violating any number of his pandemic dictates.
I had made up my mind on COVID-19 before I saw this photo, but this one cemented it for me. The same man who said I couldn’t be in a group of 25 or more people marched and encouraged the marching of thousands of people. The same man who said I had to limit my contact with non-family members, and whose administration said I couldn’t get any closer than six feet away from someone else, was marching arm-in-arm with total strangers. What a joke. And the joke was on me and everyone else who had to follow his rules.
Lest we forget, in Pennsylvania, we weren’t allowed in rooms the size of a large auditorium or banquet space with more than 25 people. Masking was mandated, even outdoors in some places. To work outside the home, you had to be deemed “essential,” like a nurse or a liquor store clerk. No in-person office work, no in-person schooling, no in-person worship. But if you wanted to participate in a little “peaceful protesting” by looting the nearest electronics store, have at it.
This is one of the more blatant examples of how the media tried to gaslight us into believing that the 2020 summer of love was “mostly peaceful protests,” this one being in Kenosha, Wis., in August of that year.
All of this while law-abiding, obedient Americans hid in their homes from a form of the flu with a 99% survival rate.
I didn’t wait until August to decide the pandemic was over. Whatever compliant things I did, like wearing a mask in a grocery store, stopped on May 28. No more mask for me. No more social distancing. No more compliance.
While I couldn’t open up the stores or the places I wanted to go, I decided I didn’t need to stay at home under Anthony Fauci’s and Gov. Wolf’s orders. Not to mention that this strange creature was the Pennsylvania public health czar at the time.
My wife started to force her way into facilities that “cared” for her dying father as much as possible, and it still wasn’t enough. We didn’t cancel a wedding in our family, and instead held it outdoors with more people on hand than what the governor would have approved. And not one person there wore a mask or social distanced.
On social media and in my real life, when I started to follow the lead of those BLM protestors by not obeying the health establishment — without the rioting, looting and arson — a rift emerged between me and some friends and family. After those George Floyd riots started, the lines between common-sense, independent-minded Americans and the more obedient and compliant members of society became more pronounced.
Those who allowed fear and a desire to conform to control them became more resentful of those of us who did not. Some of that persists to this day.
But it wasn’t just the public tenor that ended the pandemic for me. In my work, I had handled the crisis response for a hospital, a transit system, and a couple of other organizations that had to manage their own response to the pandemic.
I’d like to be able to say I got a glimpse behind the curtain, but for the most part there was no curtain to look behind. Society moved in unison under the dictatorial control of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the state health departments. Once one international or federal agency issued a dictate, everyone else followed it, no questions asked.
In the process, I watched and studied how the public health establishment was handling the crisis communications element from the very start of the pandemic lockdowns in March 2020, and I was horrified. Every tenet of responsible crisis communications was turned on its head.
Typically, the first rule is to work to remain calm and to calm the public. The reason is simple. No matter how bad things are or could be, a panicked public doesn’t listen, and it doesn’t cooperate. Panic creates an unsafe environment. But in 2020, the public health authorities were actively trying to gin up panic, justifying this by saying this was necessary to get people to pay attention. That was an institutional lie, and I had concluded so pretty quickly.
The second rule is to try to stick to verifiable facts in communication, and not rely on emotion or partial information, which would only add to rumor-mongering, speculation, and the spread of actual misinformation. But the public health establishment all of a sudden dismissed decades-old conventional wisdom on things like herd immunity, the efficacy of masks, and quarantine procedures.
Prior to COVID-19, if you were sick, you self-quarantined. If you were not sick, you didn’t. But with COVID-19, the public health establishment told you that if you had no symptoms, you really had to quarantine, because you were most dangerous. Words like “asymptomatic” were used to label healthy, non-infected people as pariahs. Gaslighting once again? Yes. And it was disgusting.
If you worked in crisis management then, and you kept your head about you (not all of my peers did), you saw plainly that the public health establishment was conducting a grand experiment that had nothing to do with containing a virus. It had more to do with the engineering of mass psychosis.
By May 28, 2020, all of this was clear to me, and as other events and developments would unfold later in the year and into 2021, everything just reaffirmed what some of us already knew the day those George Floyd protests started.
The pandemic, for how it was billed, was over. After that, I couldn't unsee it for what it was — a naked power grab. I'm not denying that a novel virus was spreading. It was. But the public health establishment's response was nothing less than a massive, complex campaign to manipulate the people so as to put power into the hands of the last people on earth who ever should have had power.
