Abbe Lowell Is Busy!

Last Wenesday, Trump fired Centers for Desease Control Director Susan Monarez. The conventional wisdom goes like this:

Monarez had refused to go along with the anti-vaccine madness of Trump’s “health czar,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK). Trump had named Monarez as CDC director just a month ago. At her Senate confirmation hearing, Monarez said that “vaccines save lives” and that their use should continue to be supported. If Trump and RFK thought they could just strong-arm Monarez to go along with their anti-vaccine crusade, they were proven wrong.

Monarez had much to say:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention leadership was in stunning disarray Wednesday evening after the Trump administration fired the agency’s director hours after she refused to resign under pressure.

The director, Susan Monarez, said she was resisting being ousted by the nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for political reasons after about a month in office.

“When CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts, she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda. For that, she has been targeted,” said her lawyers, Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell.

Abbe Lowell is best known recently for his role as lead counsel for Hunter Biden in two criminal cases on federal gun and tax evasion charges. Hunter was convicted of the gun charges and pleaded guilty to the tax changes; only a last-minute pardon from Joe kept him out of prison. Since then, he's founded hs own law firm that specializes in representing clients who've gotten themselves crosswise with Trump; he's taken on Letitia James and Lisa Cook, and he's now also representing Susan Monarez. Her firing

sparked a near-immediate leadership exodus from the CDC, which is charged with safekeeping the public health of the more than 300 million people in the United States.

At least four top officials announced their resignations, including Dr. Debra Houry, the chief medical officer; Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; and Dr. Jen Layden, director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology.

On one hand, this seems to be a direct outcome of the whole COVID debacle. The day Director Monarez was fired, Secretary Kennedy posted this on X:

I promised 4 things:

1. to end covid vaccine mandates.

2. to keep vaccines available to people who want them, especially the vulnerable.

3. to demand placebo-controlled trials from companies.

4. to end the emergency.

In a series of FDA actions today we accomplished…

— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) August 27, 2025

The core objection appears to be this:

The federal government has removed COVID-19 vaccines from the list of shots recommended for healthy pregnant women and children, federal health officials announced Tuesday [May 27}.

"I couldn't be more pleased to announce that as of today the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule," Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced in a video posted on X. "We're now one step closer to realizing President Trump's promise to make America healthy again."

The decision will make it much harder for parents to get their children vaccinated and for pregnant people to get the shots because insurance companies will likely no longer pay for them.

"Last year the Biden administration urged healthy children to get yet another COVID shot despite the lack of any clinical data to support the repeat booster strategy in children," Kennedy said.

So far, Trump appears to be backing up Kennedy:

President Donald Trump on Monday appeared to raise fresh questions about the Covid-19 vaccines that were first developed on his watch, saying his top public health agency is being “ripped apart” by debate over the success of the shots.

. . . The post represented Trump’s first public comments about the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since the agency’s former director, Dr. Susan Monarez, was abruptly fired on Wednesday, less than a month into her tenure amid a dispute over vaccine policy.

. . . Trump’s comments came after the US Food and Drug Administration announced that it would narrow its approval for the next Covid vaccine, a move that prompted criticism from public health experts and widespread confusion over who will be eligible to receive the shot.

On Monday, commissioner Marty Makary defended the decision in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, arguing that drug makers haven’t justified the need for people who are under 65 or who don’t have certain health conditions to get the vaccine.

“No one knows how many shots a healthy person should get in his natural life,” Makary wrote. “The FDA’s new framework preserves vaccines for those who might most plausibly benefit, while generating evidence for most Americans, who are voting with their feet (or their upper arms) against an eternal annual booster campaign.”

The decisions to limit approval for future COVID boosters reflects a belated recognition that the CDC's handling of COVID and its endorsement of lockdowns seriously damaged its credibility and indeed, the credibility of vaccines overall. Just why, aftrer all, did Biden see the need to give Dr Fauci a blanket pardon with much of his own family?

In the final minutes of his presidency, Joe Biden pre-emptively pardoned several family members, including his brothers James and Frank Biden, and sister Valerie Biden Owens.

Biden said the pardons were intended to shield his family from politically motivated attacks and should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment of any wrongdoing.

The eleventh-hour move follows another set of pardons issued to Covid response chief Anthony Fauci and members of the House 6 January riot investigation to prevent what he called "unjustified... politically motivated prosecutions".

There's a great deal we have yet to learn.

More On The Alliance Between The Ultra-Wealthy And Marx's Lumpenproletariat

I can't ask for a better illustration of my thesis on the problem that's beset US inner cities since the 1960s than Trump's latest chioice of opponents:

President Donald Trump on Saturday took aim at Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) on Truth Social, citing Chicago’s violent crime numbers and vowing that federal support could be on the way.

“Six people were killed, and 24 people were shot, in Chicago last weekend, and JB Pritzker, the weak and pathetic Governor of Illinois, just said that he doesn’t need help in preventing CRIME. He is CRAZY!!! He better straighten it out, FAST, or we’re coming! MAGA. President DJT,” Trump wrote.

I asked the web, "What is the Pritzker family's net worth?" and "AI" replied,

The total net worth of the Pritzker family is not a single reported figure, but rather a collection of individual fortunes held by numerous family members, with individual net worths often in the billions. For example, in May 2025, Governor JB Pritzker had an estimated net worth of $3.7 billion, while his sister Penny Pritzker had an estimated net worth of $3.9 billion. The Pritzker fortune is a vast inheritance from the family's founder and the Hyatt Hotels empire.

Ferdinand Lundberg (1902-1995) is so far the most prominent theoretician of concentrated family wealth in US society, but his 1968 The Rich and the Super-Rich doesn't mention the Pritzkers at all. The best-known Pritzker enterprise, Hyatt Hotels, got its start in the late 1950s and grew with the expansion of air travel in the following decade. Thus the Pritzkers had only begun their rise to visibility by the time Lundberg wrote his best-known book.

Accordimg to Wikipedia,

The Pritzker family is an American family engaged in various business enterprises and philanthropy, and one of the wealthiest families in the United States (staying in the top 10 of Forbes magazine's "America's Richest Families" list since the magazine began such listings in 1982). Its fortune started in the 20th century, particularly through the expansion of the Hyatt Hotels Corporation by Jay Pritzker.

In 1995, Jay Pritzker stepped down and Thomas Pritzker took control of The Pritzker Organization. When Jay died in 1999, the family split the business into 11 pieces worth $1.4 billion each (choosing to settle a lawsuit from two family members, who apparently received $500 million each in 2005). By 2011, the dissolution had been completed and the cousins had gone their separate ways, with some pursuing business and others philanthropic or artistic ventures.

The father of both Illinois Gov JB Pritzker and his sister Penny, who is effectively chairman of the Harvard board, is Donald Pritzker (1932–1972), who was co-founder of Hyatt and one of Jay Pritzker's children. Whatever their nominal business and philanthropic titles, they are effectively third-generation rentiers of the Pritzker fortune, among their many siblings and cousins.

While the family is too recent to have figured in Lundberg's overall picture of US wealth, it clearly functions in a role very similar to the role the Rockefellers played in the mid-20th century, with John D Sr's grandsons John D III, Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop, and David serving as three state governors, running Chase Bank, and involved in numerous Ivy League and other charitable endowments.

But the Rockefellers themselves were apparently too busy to concern themselves with the problems in the cities, which arose in the 1960s. Tom Wolfe mentions the Roockefellers only four times in Radical Chic, but only to characterize them as "old money" or "old Society", not the sort of people who'd hobnob with Black Panthers. It's a different set who'd build the alliance with Marx's Lumpenproletariat:

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels coined the word in the 1840s and used it to refer to the unthinking lower strata of society exploited by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces, particularly in the context of the revolutions of 1848. They dismissed the revolutionary potential of the Lumpenproletariat and contrasted it with the proletariat. Among other groups, criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes are usually included in this category.

If Marx and Engels had the insight to recognize criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes as a separate class, distinguished in interests from the proletariat, we see a very similar set of class interests in the US inner cities today, street thugs, homeless, illegals, drug traffickers, addicts, pimps, and prostitutes. They tend to control public spaces in ever-expanding areas surrounding the inner cities, but the legitimate residents in the same areas tend to be either their direct victims, or the quality of their daily lives is severly diminished by their presence. These solid citizens are part of the current proletariat.

In the context of the Pritzkers and conditions in (but not limited, even in Illinois, to Chicago), their ally Mayor Brandon Johnson seems oblivious to this distinction:

On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Briefing,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson stated that the Trump administration is focusing on Chicago for immigration enforcement and crime “because there’s clearly a disdain for working people.” And the actions aren’t about crime, but the Trump administration is “working to, not only divide communities, but conquer them.”

What Johnson seems dimly to perceive is that in Washington, DC, the working class has suddenly recognized that a crackdown on street crime, homelessness, and illegals is in their interests -- which he sees as divisive. Polls both nationally and within the District show increasing popularity for Trump's approach:

"Fifty-four percent approve of the president’s approach, using the National Guard in D.C.," [pollster Mark] Penn explained. "That's interesting. Any time I apply the word 'Trump,' it’s very hard to get above 50%. If I take his name off the policies, I get 60, 70, 75, even 80% support—for example, locking up criminals who are here illegally. But when you put his name, the country is so polarized that Democrats won’t concede a single inch."

"So when he gets 54% approving, I think, wow, that’s like a normal 65%. That means there are people who approve of it, but won't say they do if you put the name Trump in the questionnaire."

What this says is that Trump recognizes a basic issue, that the class interests of the Lumpenproletariat are separate from and opposed to the interests of the proletariat. For reasons that aren't entirely clear, new generations of the very wealthy have aligned themselvew with the interests of the Lumpenproletariat, leading to tolerance of street crime, drugs, and homelessnes in the inner cities, under the false pretense that they're looking out for the interests of the proletariat, which are completely separate.

Trump has been extraordinarily perceptive in choosing his opponents. DC Mayor Bowser has deftly managed to avoid being caught in Trump's crosshairs and has reluctantly acknowledged the success of Trump's crackdown. Meanwhile, Chicago Mayor Johnson and Illinois Gov Pritzker are presenting a united front of opposition. The Pritzkers in particular are unattractive and out of touch, defending Harvard and street crime, just the sort of opponents Trump wants -- and his strategy is starting to look like a winner.

Abbe Lowell Pounds The Table

How did Cook afford to take out three mortgages in a matter of a few months? Most lenders would throw a big red flag at this in general—raises more questions: https://t.co/N4E8F4N9qd

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) August 29, 2025

On Thurssay, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte issued a second criminal referral to the Justice Department for Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook:

As Director of the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency," Pulte wrote in an Aug. 28 letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Special Attorney Edward Martin, "I reiterate the referral on August 15, 2025, and provide new information concerning a 3rd property for Lisa D. Cook ('Cook') and what appears to be multiple false representations to the United States Government by Cook while she was a Governor of the Federal Reserve."

In response, Cook's attorney Abbe Lowell said,

This is an obvious smear campaign aimed at discrediting Gov. Cook by a political operative who has taken to social media more than 30 times in the last two days and demanded her removal before any review of the facts or evidence," the attorney asserted in the statement. "Nothing in these vague, unsubstantiated allegations has any relevance to Gov Cook’s role at the Federal Reserve, and they in no way justify her removal from the Board.

As the saying goes, If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table. Abbe Lowell is pounding the table. That he would say nothing in the allegations has any relevance to Cook's role at the Federal Reserve is a little like David Hume's claim that if someone throws a brick at a window, it has no relevance to the fact that a brick broke the window.

There's a problem that won't go away in Cook's mortgage applications, notwitstanding they were made roughly a year before she was formally confirmed. According to Reuters,

Cook's annual financial disclosure, filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, shows one mortgage for an investment property and two mortgages for personal residences. All were dated 2021, when the Georgia native was a professor at Michigan State University and before her May 2022 confirmation by the Senate to the Fed Board of Governors.

. . . A public records search identified a $203,000 mortgage in Cook's name in Washtenaw County, Michigan, dated June 18, 2021, and a $540,000 mortgage, also in her name, in Fulton County, Georgia, dated July 2, 2021. The mortgages were originated by the University of Michigan Credit Union for the Michigan property and Bank Fund Credit Union for the Georgia property.

. . . Cook also took out a $361,000 mortgage, originated by Bank Fund Credit Union, for a condo in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 7, 2021, Middlesex County records show. The Cambridge property has a "second home" rider that requires it be held primarily for use by the owner and not regularly rented out.

At this time, according to Wikipedia, Cook was an associate professor of economics at Michigan State University. Glassdoor indicates the salary range for a Michigan State University associate professor is $99,000 to $159,000 per year.

On that salary, she applied for $1.1 million in mortgages over a four-month period. A followup poster on the thread asked,

Regular people would never be able to take out three mortgages! I guess you're special if you're in a position of power?

But of course, she wasn't in a position of power then, she was just an associate professor. Another poster added,

It’s call Fed Gov. leverage… she knew she was on the list and so did the lender.. and in case they didn’t know, I’d bet good money she made sure they were aware.

Ah, the "list". In other words, her nomination was wired well before it took place. Wikipedia helps out, at least a little:

In November 2020, Cook was named a volunteer member of the Joe Biden presidential transition Agency Review Team to support transition efforts related to the Federal Reserve.

Before that,

Cook served as a senior economist on the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama from 2011 and 2012 — as well as a senior adviser on finance and development in the Treasury Department’s Office of International Affairs from 2000 to 2001, under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

She also had longtime ties with the civil rights wing of the Georgia Democrat Party. The specifics of her battle for nomination and confirmation as a Fed governor suggest she'd worked for years to position herself, or been positioned, as a high-profile DEI hire. Back to Wikipedia,

In 2021, Senator Sherrod Brown reportedly pushed the Biden Administration to nominate Cook to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. President Biden officially nominated Cook to be a member of the Board of Governors on January 14, 2022. She is the first black woman on the Federal Reserve's board.

It appears that Sen Brown was her champion throughout the nomination and confirmation process, which began in 2021, and it at least suggests that the mortgage applicatons took place in that context and in that time frame. The comments on the X thread embedded at the top of this post suggest that some form of influence had to have been involved in the mortgage approvals, even if Cook's formal nomination hadn't taken place.

Cook's Senate confirmation battle was lengthy, with no Republicans voting in favor and Vice President Harris casting the tie-breaking vote.

A court hearing on Cook's motion for a temporary restraining order to keep Trump from firing her as a Fed governor took place yesterday:

Friday’s court argument centered around allegations made by Trump’s Federal Housing Finance Authority Director Bill Pulte. He has claimed that Cook committed mortgage fraud before she became a Fed governor.

Late Thursday, Pulte said he made a "2nd criminal referral" to the Justice Department regarding Cook's mortgages. Pulte said it included "alleged misrepresentations about her properties to the United States Government during her time as Governor of the Federal Reserve."

. . . The Trump administration. . . asked the court to deny Cook's temporary restraining order, saying she offered no defense of the charges in public or private. "Removal for 'cause' is a capacious standard, and one Congress has vested in the discretion of the President," the administration's filing said.

The judge ended the hearing without issuing a decision. The problem I see is that there's plenty of room for more to come out about Cook's mortgage applications and any political influence that may have surrounded them, even during the current court proceedings. Certainly Abbe Lowell's protestations that the mortgages have no relevance to her position as Fed governor seem weak even now, but my sense is that more is yet to come out.

Trump Has Maneuvered Democrats Into Supporting Crime

In a trip to Minnesota, J D Vance asked a question:

Why is it that you have mayors and governors who are angrier about Donald Trump offering to help them than they are about the fact that their own residents are being carjacked and murdered in the streets?

Other remarks are reported elsewhere:

We were having lunch yesterday and the president said, ‘JD, I don’t know how I did it? I have actually gotten the Democrats to come out in defense of crime.’ If Donald Trump came out tomorrow and said he really likes puppies, you would have AOC come out and say ‘Puppies are terrible.’

Actually, I think there's an answer. Let's recall that at least since Dukakis ran against Poppy Bush, the Democrats have represented an alliance between the upper class and the Lumpenproletariat, Marx's urban criminal underclass (Clinton made himself a deliberate exception). Marx had the instinct to recognize that the criminal underclass was not a reliable ally of the working class, but that's just a special case of the more general principle that crooks, pushers, adddicts, and hookers aren't reliable allies of anyone.

This impulse was first detected by Tom Wolfe in his 1970 essay Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s:

In fact, this sort of nostalgie de la boue, or romanticizing of primitive souls, was one of the things that brought Radical Chic to the fore in New York Society. Nostalgie de la boue is a 19th-century French term that means, literally, “nostalgia for the mud.” . . . Nostalgie de la boue tends to be a favorite motif whenever a great many new faces and a lot of new money enter Society. New arrivals have always had two ways of certifying their superiority over the hated “middle class.” They can take on the trappings of aristocracy, such as grand architecture, servants, parterre boxes and high protocol; and they can indulge in the gauche thrill of taking on certain styles of the lower orders. The two are by no means mutually exclusive; in fact, they are always used in combination.

On one hand, an ostentatious display of sympathy -- not for just the "lower orders", which covers a lot of ground, but for the urban criminal class in particular -- has social cachet among the wealthy, but I think there's an additional factor, which stems from the motive behind Fabian socialism, the wish to bargain a postponement in the world revolution, which in turn stems from the Enlightenment notion that man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

The upper classes in the mid to late 19th century hoped to avoid expropriations and massacre by implementing social insurance, although the Great War and the Depression did a great deal to undo these reforms, eliminating the constitutional basis for the aristocracy in Germany, Austria, and Russia, as the Revolution had already done in France. But another specter arrived in the 1960s, the Helter Skelter race war:

The Helter Skelter scenario is an apocalyptic vision that was supposedly embraced by Charles Manson and members of his Family. . . . {Manson trial prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi in a subsequent book] presented evidence that, in a period that preceded the murders, Manson prophesied what he called Helter Skelter, an apocalyptic war that would arise from racial tensions between black and white people.

I think this vision drove those who attended Leonard Bernstein's "radical chic" party much more than fear of a proletarian world revolution, but their motive wasn't too far from the 19th century European elites -- they wanted to postpone, or even forestall, the inevitable, insofar as it was possible. They did this by inviting the Black Panthers into their homes and holdiong parties for them, as Tom Wolfe explains it:

That huge Panther there, the one Felicia is smiling her tango smile at, is Robert Bay, who just 41 hours ago was arrested in an altercation with the police, supposedly over a .38-caliber revolver that someone had, in a parked car in Queens at Northern Boulevard and 104th Street or some such unbelievable place, and taken to jail on a most unusual charge called “criminal facilitation.” And now he is out on bail and walking into Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s 13-room penthouse duplex on Park Avenue. Harassment & Hassles, Guns & Pigs, Jail & Bail—they’re real, these Black Panthers. The very idea of them, these real revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on the line, runs through Lenny’s duplex like a rogue hormone.

The implicit deal: when the race war comes, do what you like with the white suburbanites, the middle class, even the working class in your own neighborhoods, just leave us alone. In return, we'll support politicians who'll treat you leniently if you're caught and look the other way over your criminal enterprises.

The problem is that the working class in places like DC has gotten wise to the deal: the Lumpenproletariat has gotten a freer and freer hand in all but the swankiest areas of the District, and the people interiewed in the video clips at the top of this post are recotgnizing that Trump's crackdown is in their very visible, immediate interest.

Nevertheless, the politicians who've had the support of the upper class in the post-1960s alliance with the Lumpenproletariat aren't changing their stance: the reason is that the upper class, via figures from George Soros to Laurene Powell Jobs to Bill Gates is still donating to their campaigns, while payoffs from drug syndicates still enrich inner-city politicians. They're all in favor of crime, because they're still geting money from big donors and baksheesh from the hood.

Right now, their problem is that they still have money, while the middle and working classes in both the suburbs and the inner city are beginning to recognize they have votes. The DC crime crackdown is turning out to be a major win, and it's forcing the upper class to admit they've bought off the Black Panthers and their successors by turning them loose on the working and middle classes.

Missing The Point On The Trans Minnesota Shooter

"If you don't give trans people hormones, they'll shoot themselves!"

Well, if you do give them hormones, they'll shoot young Christian children

— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) August 27, 2025

Most of the reaction to Robert/Robin Westman's attack on Annunciation Church in Minneapolis yesterday either focuses or refuses to focus on Westman's self-identification as transsexual. A few writers have noted, as I have earlier this year, that trans people turn up remarkably often in incidents of high-profile violence. A few have noted that Audrey/Aiden Hale, who killed three nine‑year‑old children and three adults at a Presbyterian school in Nashville in 2023, was trans as well.

Even fewer have made the point, as Alex Marlow did, that we need to "start diagnosing the trans stuff as a mental disorder as fast as humanly possible.” But oddly, nobody is taking much of a look at the Christian stuff. Think about it for a moment. FBI Director Patel wants to characterize the shooting as a hate crime against Catholics, but Westman will never be charged with a hate crime enhancement, because he'll never face trial.

He'll never face trial because he's dead. There might have been a time when the dead part would reverberate, but apparently not now. Nevertheless, we must assume that some proportion of religious people believe that now that Westman is dead, he faces, or preaumably has already faced, judgment. Scripture is pretty plain about the judgment someone like Westman gets for killing children; Jesus says in Matthew 18:10:

See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven always look upon the face of my heavenly Father.

Conversely, in Matthew 5:10-12,

10 Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 11 Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you [falsely] because of me. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven. Thus they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Westman was a former student at the Annunciation School, and his mother worked for the school before her retirement, so we may assume he was exposed to Catholic teachings in his childhood. These would have included the teachings on suicide, especially in the Cathechism, paragraphs 2280-2283:

Suicide contradicts the natural inclination of the human being to preserve and perpetuate his life. It is gravely contrary to the just love of self. It likewise offends love of neighbor because it unjustly breaks the ties of solidarity with family, nation, and other human societies to which we continue to have obligations. Suicide is contrary to love for the living God (#2281).

It appears that Westman's plan to commit suicide was integral to his expressed overall intention to kill children at a Catholic mass. So from a religious perspective, particularly a Catholic one, he deliberately set out to do two of about the worst things a Catholic can do, murdering children at mass and then committing suicide, which barring extenuating factors is going to send him to hell, flippin' the Almighty off on the way. We must assume this has now been explained to him.

Both Westman and Hale, the Nashville shooter, left written or recorded manifestos behind, and I think we may fairly characterize both as angry. Really angry. Really, really angry. So angry they wanted to kill Christian children to get even. Both in fact attended the religious schools where they killed students, although this would have been after they had become trans and grown into unhappy adulthood. In fact,

Audrey Hale felt no hatred against anyone at the school where the former student gunned down six people. In fact, the 28-year-old relished fond memories of The Covenant School and wanted “to die somewhere that made her happy,” Nashville police said.

Although Westman scribbled mottoes like "Kill Donald Trump" on his weapons,

The deranged gunman mused about assassinating President Trump and Jews — but ultimately decided that killing “children of innocent civilians” would bring him “the most joy,” the translated journal entries read.

“I can’t really put my finger on a specific purpose. It definitely won’t be for racism or white supremacy,” Westman wrote as he deliberated a motive for the shooting.

Westman can't put his finger on just why he did it, except there's a good chance that his Catholic education stressed traditional gender identity -- and Hale's education at a conservative Presbyterian school probably implied it as well. Yet by the time they became mass shooters, they had specifically rejected this teaching, and they were deeply disturbed, angry, and unhappy, apparently wanting to lash out at people, especially children, who were simply happier and less angry.

I think they were basically both angry at God. We need to reflect on this. They seem especially to have wanted revenge over natural law. Somehow this seems to be embedded in trans ideology.

Motor Vehicles Become A Focus For Immigration Enforcement

As I commented the other day, one big circumstance in which ordinary police agencies encounter illegals is on traffic patrol, where on one hand, the illegals don't obey traffic laws, while on the other, they either don't speak English or refuse to speak it when pulled over, and they frequently turn out not to have drivers licenses, registration, or insurance. What some agencies see as a problem has turned out to be an opportunity in other situations.

For instance,

Florida officials announced that under a new immigration enforcement program, truck weigh stations in the state will be used as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) checkpoints.

Truckers without valid licenses or who don't speak English are referred to immigration enforcement. The recent accident involving Harjinder Singh highlighted how frequently illegals cause traffic accidents, especially when they aren't properly licensed or don't follow traffic laws.

This has turned out to be a key feature of Trump's crackdown on DC crime:

Federal agents and officers from the federalized Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) recently conducted a joint operation in Washington, D.C., targeting delivery drivers across the city. Witnesses say officers in tactical gear seized scooters and mopeds, loading them into trucks already filled with impounded vehicles.

The MPD says the operation is part of an effort to address unsafe driving. According to officials, more than 1,200 scooters have been impounded and 139 arrests have been made since the initiative began. However, the department did not address the visible involvement of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

. . . “It’s very clear ICE is targeting delivery drivers because they’re outdoors, which makes it easier to do warrantless arrests. It’s a population that ICE is aware is very immigrant-heavy. And frankly, it’s easy for ICE to go after them,” said Michael Lukens, executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights. He added that many of those arrested are recent Venezuelan immigrants and could be subject to fast-tracked deportation.

. . . A growing number of food delivery workers in the D.C. area are illegal immigrants, especially from Venezuela, who often lack work permits, insurance, and vehicle registration. Many of these workers use unregistered mopeds and scooters while waiting for legal asylum or work authorization. Locals have expressed concern about reckless scooter driving.

So far, major food delivery platforms such as Uber Eats, Grubhub, and DoorDash have not commented on the arrests or the broader issue of illegal alien workers on their platforms.

In fact, the food delivery apps have been aware of the problem nationally at least since last year:

Online food delivery platform DoorDash has adopted changes to its driver verification system months after U.S. lawmakers questioned whether it and similar services were being co-opted by illegal migrants "gaming the system." Some wonder whether it will be enough.

On December 12, DoorDash announced more rigorous safeguards to better deter "bad actors" from profiting off deliveries and the platform. In April, Republican Senators Marsha Blackburn, Mike Braun and Ted Budd sent letters to DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats as part of a probe demanding to know whether illegal migrants are "gaming the system" while using fake identities. Immigration was a top campaign issue for President-Elect Donald Trump.

Venezuelan migrants told The Daily Mail that food delivery is a good way to integrate into the U.S. and make quick money, while others online flaunt driver IDs for sale on social media sometimes for hundreds of dollars.

The Daily Mail covered the story a year ago:

Hundreds of Venezuelan migrants are illegally working as food delivery drivers across America, DailyMail.com can reveal, showing up to your door under names and identities that don't belong to them.

The troubling development is a consequence of the one million Venezuelan citizens who have flooded into the US, largely illegally, during President Joe Biden's time in office, with many entering through the US-Mexico border.

It raises huge concerns about the safety of the home delivery apps and the consumer's ability to trust who is actually delivering food to their home and family - with customers' personal information potentially placed in the hands of dangerous street gangs.

In February of this year, the problem had reached the financial press:

While DASH represents a successful Silicon Valley story, one of its key risks has been underplayed in more of the coverage it has received. The platform is highly reliant on migrant labor and a significant chunk of them have been operating illegally in the US. These employees pose a serious threat as they have access to the personal information of US citizens. The minimal verification allows these dashers to operate with fake names and registration numbers. With the Trump administration cracking down on illegal immigrants, it is only a matter of time before DASH is held accountable for the burgeoning count of such employees.

This latest attention to immigration enforcement in DC suggests the food delivery apps haven't made a serious effort to address the problem, while the high public visibility of the drivers makes them an easy target for ICE, especially when their mopeds and scooters are unregistered and uninsured.

Defenders of the migrant delivery workers insist they're doing honest work and aren't criminals, but their reckless driving and frequent lack of insurance raises insurance rates for everyone else, while those who rent accounts under false names create a continuing risk for the customers.

The upscale DC residents who complain that ICE enforcement is creating a shortage of DoorDash drivers are actually unhappy that it's suddenly become harder for them to exploit illegal immigrants -- but the same applies to the empoloyers like DoorDash. who tolerate and enable the system that allows the account owners to skim the earnings of the illegals by renting the accounts.

So, How Was Harjinder Singh Able To Fly Back To California?

Here's a question nobody's asked: the accepted narrative of the illegal U-turn on the Florida Turnpike has Harjinder Singh wandering expressionlessly around the scene after the accident and then, apparently free to leave, flying back to California, where the US Marshals tracked him down and arrested him several days later. But here's the rub:

Passed by Congress in 2005, the REAL ID Act enacted the 9/11 Commission's recommendation that the Federal Government “set standards for the issuance of sources of identification, such as driver's licenses.” The Act established minimum security standards for state-issued driver's licenses and identification cards and prohibits certain federal agencies from accepting for official purposes licenses and identification cards from states that do not meet these standards.

The official purposes for which a REAL ID is required include boarding federally regulated commercial aircraft. As it happens, my California Drivers License expires in November, so I've been undertaking the process of upgrading it to meet the REAL ID requirements. On one hand, I can't opt out of the REAL ID requirement; I simply have to upgrade my ID to meet its standards, or I can't drive legally. On the other, I can't fly on a commercial airline without displaying a REAL ID, either. (Luckily, I haven't needed to.)

The restriction on anyone flying without a REAL ID began this past May 7. I would have had to upgrade my drivers license early to fly since then, or I would have had to present another form of ID acceptable under the REAL ID Act. The most cited alternative is a current US passport:

The card, itself, must be REAL ID compliant unless the resident is using an alternative acceptable document such as a passport.

While a passport will get me on a plane in a pinch, it alone isn't sufficient for me to renew my drivers license to be REAL ID compliant. But this brings us to my question: it's after May 7, and Harjinder Singh was able to get on a plane, presumably without a valid REAL ID. In fact, as we see above, the whole purpose of REAL ID was to avoid having sketchy foreign nationals like the 9/11 hijackers get on a plane in the US -- but Harjinder, a sketchy foreign national, was able to do just this.

And he was able to do it without the highly bureaucratic process legal residents of the 50 states must undergo to upgrade their own ID. California's requirements are standard:

To apply for a REAL ID, you must present several documents, including ONE proof of identity document from the list below. This document must include your date of birth and your full name (first, middle, and last).

The list includes Valid U.S. passport or passport card (Preferred); Original or Certified copy of U.S birth certificate (issued by a city, county, or state vital statistics office). “Abbreviated” or “Abstract” certificates are NOT accepted; Certificate of Naturalization or Certificate of U.S. Citizenship; and on down a list. There are two important exceptions, which I'll get to below.

I've held a US passport for most of my life, but passports expire, and as part of preparing to upgrade my ID, I had to renew it yet again, a process that takes weeks at best -- and since at my age, I'm unlikely to leave the country again, this would have been otherwise completely unnecessary. But in addition,

To prove that you live in California, you must present TWO DIFFERENT printed documents that show your California mailing address. BOTH documents must show your first and last name with the same mailing address that is listed on your REAL ID application.

Use a P.O. Box? One document MUST show both your P.O. Box and physical (residence) address, and one document may show only the P.O. Box.

So this is another new step, and it's fraught with bureaucratic gotchas. I saw a post from a Pennsylvania woman who had one utility bill with her first, middle, and last names and another with just her first and last names, and the state forced her to get the utility to change the billing data on the one bill to add her middle name to the bill. This will likely take weeks of extra effort in itself. I can only assume Pennsylvania has stricter requirements than California.

In addition, the only practical way to get through this process -- that is, without going back and forth to the DMV office to wait in line and deal with all this in person, probably over several days or weeks -- is on line. But this requires not just a computer, but a scanner to scan the various documents, and considerable computer literacy. A semiliterate or illiterate illegal who quite possibly speaks no English won't be able to do this. But that's not a bug, it's a feature, right? It should be not just difficult, but impossible for sketchy foreign nationals to get REAL ID.

Not so fast! There's a big exception for sketchy foreign nationals! Farther down on the list of acceptable identity documents are these:

Valid Employment Authorization Document (EAD) Card (I-766) or valid/expired EAD Card with Notice of Action (I-797 C)

Documents reflecting TPS benefit eligibility.

in Harjinder's case, the I-766 card, for which he was rejected under Trump 45, but which he was later granted under Biden, was enough to get California to issue him a commercial drivers license in 2024, and it was enough to get him on the plane back to California last week. TPS benefits are "Temporary Protected Status", under which hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, Haitians, and Cubans who shouldn't have been were settled in Middle America.

In other words, the REAL ID program sets up enormous bureaucratic hoops and barriers that solid citizens have to jump through and climb over, requiring patience and civic-minded cooperation over many weeks and months in order to keep sketchy foreign nationals off planes -- unless you happen to be a sketchy foreign national like Harjinder Singh, in which case, welcome aboard! You want to escape being arrested in Florida, no problemo, just show your I-766 work permit for sketchy foreign nationals, and your seat is 26C.

Something needs to be done about this.