More Portland

Following Judge Immergut's restraining order against Trump's activation of the Oregon National Guard, Trump successively ordered members of the California and Texas National Guard to Portland.

Immergut later expressed frustration that the Trump administration had defied the court order and that Hegseth had authorized the Texas National Guard to enter the state, Oregonlive reported.

. . . The broader order on Sunday will halt National Guard members from being relocated from any state for federal service in the state of Oregon, including the California National Guard.

. . . “President Trump exercised his lawful authority to protect federal assets and personnel in Portland following violent riots and attacks on law enforcement,” a spokeswoman told The Post.

At this point, it isn't clear how this will play out.

Yesterday, I began an effort to tally the number of demonstrator arrests in Portland vis-a-vis Los Angeles as a way of assessing the relative threat to federal facilities in each city, This would give a rough indication of how justifiable sending the National Guard into Portland might be. I discovered that there are additional problems in comparing the two cities:

As protests continue nightly outside the Portland ICE facility, there have been multiple reports of people getting arrested or detained — but figuring out who is in charge and what happens afterward isn't always straightforward.

At times, protesters are interacting with city police, county deputies or federal agents, and each agency handles arrests differently, which makes it harder for the public and journalists to track what is exactly happening.

. . . For instance, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Oregon announced Thursday morning that a woman was in federal court on a felony offense of assaulting a federal officer Tuesday night at the ICE facility.

According to court documents, the woman had "applied red paint to the driveway of the ICE facility," and while being processed by federal officers, allegedly "struck one." That woman has been released pending further court proceedings. She pleaded guilty Friday and will be sentenced in December.

In contrast, KGW also received a statement from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, saying that six people were arrested for various offenses Tuesday night — but with no names or details.

Reports indicate that Portland police do not involve themselves when demonstrators attack the ICE facility directly, leaving enforcement to ICE personnel. In addition, police interaction with demonstrators is, apparently by policy, mostly limited to Dialogue Liaison Officers, who do not wear police uniforms and do not make arrests. Nevertheless, arrests were made by federal law enforcement at last Saturday's demonstration, for example:

Federal agents took several protesters into custody and deployed gas and pepper balls at least three times against a crowd of hundreds who gathered for a demonstration in front of the Portland ICE facility Saturday afternoon.

There was a noticeable contingent of counter-protesters among those gathered at the ICE facility throughout the day.

The events initially began as a march from Elizabeth Caruthers Park to the ICE facility organized primarily by Portland Contra Las Deportaciones (PDXCD).

One of the protesters into taken into custody was Holly Brown, one of the organizers of the march.

Brown, who was released around 5:30 p.m., said it was “really horrible inside.”

“There’s different holding cells with, like, really harsh fluorescent lights. There’s no bedding. It’s just like concrete. And the phones didn’t work. They didn’t have phones working in the entire facility,” Brown told KOIN 6 News. “There’s, all these different, like, posters on the wall encouraging people to self-deport. It’s a really horrible, horrible place.”

She said she was charged with trespassing on federal property.

According to the KGW link above, since federal arrestees aren't taken to the Multnomah County Jail, media doesn't tally these totals, but it's reasonable to infer that arrests by federal law enforcement must add considerably to the published Portland totals I cited in yesterday's post.

But there's an additional problem with the generally favorable coverage of the demonstrations in Portland media, which starts with the mention of Holly Brown, who is apparently affiliated with Portland Contra Las Deportaciones (PDXCD), the organizer of Saeturday's protest. The KOIN link just above relies heavily on the account of someone identified only as Rainbow:

“What we did not expect in the targeted arrests was the full-on pushing that they did,” protester Rainbow told KOIN 6 News. “In the pushing, I ended up getting clocked in the eye by one of the federal agents, then they started tear gassing really bad.”

Rainbow said she saw an elderly couple in the group of protesters. The woman got hit in the head with a tear gas canister and began bleeding, eventually receiving help from medics. Rainbow claimed federal agents “tear-gassed the heck out of” the man who was using a walker to move around.

Who is Rainbow? The story doesn't identify her any other way but as a "protester". Is she, like Holly Brown, affiliated with PDXCD, the organizer? She identifies an elderly couple, with the woman hit in the head with a tear gas cannister, as well as a man using a walker. Why would elderly people choose to expose themselves to this sort of stuff? Who encouraged them to attend? This all seems to be part of a scripted event:

Hundreds of protesters marched to the Portland Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention Facility on Saturday afternoon.

It is the latest demonstration since President Donald Trump announced last week he would deploy up to 200 members of the Oregon National Guard to Portland. Late Saturday afternoon, a federal judge temporarily blocked the deployment.

Before the temporary restraining order was known publicly, protesters gathered Saturday morning at nearby Elizabeth Caruthers Park in the South Waterfront neighborhood.

They later marched a few blocks toward the detention facility at around 1 p.m. and blocked the road in front of the building. Crowds gathered peacefully and mostly stayed concentrated in front of the facility. Soon after, federal law enforcement marched out of the center and fired tear gas and smoke canisters to disperse the crowd. They also fired pepper balls at people.

. . . Brittanee Carr of Milwaukie brought her 5-year-old daughter to the protest. She said her family has been following the protests on TikTok the past few days.

“I want to show her you know that this is not OK, that you can stand up for what you believe in, and we can come out here and we can protest peacefully,” Carr said.

Throughout the afternoon, federal law enforcement officers would occasionally walk out of the facility to disperse crowds and let federal vehicles inside the facility.

In fact, other accounts show the confrontation lasting until 9:00 PM. If the crowds -- amounting to several hundred -- were blocking the street or blocking access to the facility, then a law enforcement action was justified, but it appears that the Portland Police were unwilling to take enforcement action themselves. Compunding the problem is either the extreme naivete or deliberate connivance of elderly and disabled people and young children being placed in a dangerous situation. If tear gas and pepper balls were deployed, why did any of these stay there?

Beyond that, even if Portland is more or less quiet on certain nights, it's plain that PDXCD and similar groups can order up several hundred demonstrators, including elderly people with walkers and five-year-old children as potential victims, any time they want. So far, I don't think we're getting the whole story on the Portland riots.

UPDATE: This vignette took place in Portland Sunday night. Portland media has been calling the latest demonstrations "family-friendly events".

Portland Update

As I noted yesterday, both Portland city and the State of Oregon sued to block the use of National Guard troops to protect the ICE facility and maintain order in the area. The judge said she would rule on their request for a temporary restraining order over the weekend. This she did:

US District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump nominee, ruled Saturday that deploying active-duty troops to secure the “war ravaged” Oregon city would violate the US Constitution and federal law barring military involvement in domestic law enforcement.

“The relationship between the federal government and the states, between the military and domestic law enforcement, and the balance of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government,” she wrote in her ruling.

. . . In her ruling, Karin pointed out that scores of demonstrations held outside a south Portland immigration facility were not notably violent or disruptive in the days and weeks before Trump’s order.

“Overall, the protests were small and uneventful,” she wrote.

This has been the position of Portland's mayor and other local officials all along. However, the photo at the top of this post is from a protest just yesterday afternoon, and it suggests that the gathering was significant, and arrests were in fact apparently made. According to The Oregonian,

Federal officers have arrested more than two dozen people outside Portland’s ICE building since June, with the majority in the first month that demonstrators started to gather to protest President Trump’s immigration crackdown.

The pattern of arrests appears to reflect what Gov. Tina Kotek, Mayor Keith Wilson and Police Chief Bob Day repeatedly said Saturday as Trump authorized sending federal troops to the city:

. . . Relatively low-key demonstrations by a small group of people have continued at the building with law enforcement oversight throughout.

People have been accused in federal court of vandalizing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office, disrupting the electronic key card reader operating the building’s gated entrance, blocking federal vehicles from leaving the property, throwing rocks or sticks at officers, shining green lasers into officers’ eyes, disrupting the internet service inside by removing fiber-optic cables and barricading the entry gate with traffic cones, lumber, tables and electronic scooters.

. . . Most of the arrests, 18 of about 29, occurred in June, when demonstrations peaked with hundreds of people at the building. Four more people were charged on July Fourth after another large protest. In recent weeks, no more than several dozen people have gathered outside the building on South Portland’s waterfront.

However, it's difficult to compare arrest statistics from the Portland demonstrations with those in Los Angeles this past June: by the accounts of Portland officials, the Portland Police Bureau has generally left law enforcement around the ICE facility to federal forces, while in Los Angeles, LAPD was active during the protests. In addition, the Los Angeles District Attorney has a tough-on-crime stance, unlike Portland's. For instance,

The Los Angeles County District Attorneys Office and the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office charged at least 71 people with crimes allegedly committed during recent protests against federal immigration enforcement.

. . . The cases stem from downtown Los Angeles protests almost all in June, with one case in July, where 75 people are accused of throwing rocks, fireworks, beer cans and water bottles at officers, driving motorcycles into police lines, and spray-painting “[redacted] ICE” on a building. Others face allegations of looting stores during the demonstrations. Charges range from failing to disperse to assault on police officers.

Again, Portland employs “dialogue liaison officers” rather than uniformed police to deal with protesters, and their treatment is generally more lenient than LAPD. Dialogue Liaison Officers, wearing white uniform shirts, act as liaisons to demonstrators, their role is not enforcement, and they do not make arrests.

Nevertheless, according to The Oregonian, over the same period mostly in June, Portland had 29 arrests, while Los Angeles had 71. These totals, although Portland's is arithmetically lower, are in the same order of magnitude, double digits, especially considering the differing roles of "dialogue liaison officers" vis-a-vis LAPD uniformed officers. If Trump was justified in sending troops to Los Angeles to protect federal agents and facilities, he has about the same justification for sending them to Portland. At the first link above,

The temporary restraining order blocking Trump’s move will expire in 14 days.

The White House disputed the ruling, insisting the president would be “vindicated” by a higher court.

“President Trump exercised his lawful authority to protect federal assets and personnel in Portland following violent riots and attacks on law enforcement — we expect to be vindicated by a higher court,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told The Post.

What's Going On In Portland?

Conflicting reports have come out of Portland, OR on the status of ICE enforcement, violent protests, attacks on and arrests of conservative journalists, and the Trump administration's reaction. For context. the YouTube video embedded above gives an idea of the day-to-day routine downtown.

The restaurant owner conducting the tour attributes much of the problem to major businesses that allowed office workers to work from home during the pandemic, but never required them to return to the office afterward, abandoning public space to the Lumpenproletariat, who in the video look like nice college kids who are nevertheless all nodded out.

The political alignment in Portland appears to be an entitled bourgeoisie aligned with homeless but middle-class-looking young white druggies and violent leftist radicals, against the working class broadly defined.

A conservative journalist, Katie Daviscourt, said she was attacked Tuesday night by an Antifa-affiliated protester who gave her a black eye.

The local police department, she claims, refused to do anything to help.

“I immediately ran to a Portland police officer, hunted down the suspect, chased her through the streets and said, ‘This is my assault suspect, can you guys finally do something?’ and I had eyes on her for about 35 minutes,” she said.

“Portland police refused to come in and make an arrest and I had three officers just standing there, watching me try to hunt down the suspect,” she told [Fox anchor Jesse] Watters.

The Portland Police Department issued a press release Wednesday asking for the public’s help in identifying the suspect — but police denied that they refused to help the journalist.

One of the department’s “dialogue liaison officers” followed the suspect and confronted her, police said.

“The Dialogue Officer attempted to talk to the suspect to hear her side of the story. She would not stop, so the DLO told her she was being detained. She refused the lawful police order to stop and she fled,” police said.

Police said they met with the victim and that the case is being investigated by its Major Crimes Unit.

A woman, possibly the same one, attacked another conservative journalist, Nick Sortor, Thursday night. Accordinbg to the AP,

Sortor, 27, who’s a regular guest on Fox News and whose X profile has more than 1 million followers, was arrested Thursday night with two other people outside the city’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement building. The Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office said it was reviewing the case and would make a decision on whether to proceed with charges before Sortor’s arraignment Monday.

What led to the arrests was not immediately clear. Portland police said they moved into the crowd to make arrests as fights broke out. They arrested Sorter and two others.

All three were charged with second-degree disorderly conduct. Sorter was released Friday on his own recognizance, according to Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office’s online records.

But as of Thursday morning, Fox News was reporting a completely different situation:

For the first time in months, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency building here was not besieged Wednesday night by Antifa creeps, who have clearly been scared off by the Trump administration’s increased presence on the ground.

It's a funny thing, just as in President Trump’s crackdown on crime in Washington, D.C., once there are consequences for breaking the law, things get awfully quiet.

It was obvious as I approached the facility just before nightfall that something had changed. Gone for the most part was the menacing gang of masked Antifa with their sticks and flagpoles that I had seen prowling the previous night.

It sounds as though the rejoicing was premature, and the menacing creeps were back Thursday night, along with the dialogue liaison officers, who were apparently there to dialogue, not to enforce the law. By yesterday,

The U.S. Department of Justice says it will launch a widescale probe of the Portland Police Bureau following the arrest of a conservative online journalist and influencer Thursday.

. . . Speaking to the media later Friday morning, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the arrest “extremely troubling,” claiming that Sortor was “ambushed by antifa and was defending himself.”

Sortor said the investigation will be led by Harmeet K. Dhillon, who is serving as assistant attorney general for civil rights, and in earlier years represented Andy Ngo, editor-at-large at The Post Millennial, in civil litigation.

On social media, Dhillon posted a letter addressed to the city attorney and Police Chief Bob Day, warning the city may be using its policing powers to engage in “viewpoint discrimination.”

The letter cited as evidence the arrest of Sortor, the lack of the arrest of a suspect in the assault reported by Post Millennial reporter Katie Daviscourt at a Tuesday protest, as well as recent moves by the City Council finding the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in breach of its land-use permit.

Dhillon's letter is reported to demand:

• All bodycam footage of Sortor’s arrest and the alleged assault on Daviscourt.
• All incident reports, arrest reports, and force reports related to the events.
• All complaints filed against the PPB for its handling of the incidents.
• All internal communications regarding the decision to target the ICE facility with zoning enforcement actions.
• Any communications directing PPB officers on how to respond to ICE protests in the last 30 days.

As of Thursday, before Sortor's arrest, Fox News reported,

Federal immigration officials say their Portland, Oregon, facility has come under nightly attack, with little help from local police because of political directives from city leaders.

In an exclusive interview with Fox News’ Bill Melugin, Cammila Wamsley, director of Portland’s ICE office, said the facility has faced violence for more than 100 consecutive nights, with Portland police largely absent under guidance from the mayor and city council.

. . . She said nightly protests have escalated beyond chants and signs, with bottle rockets striking the ICE building, rocks shattering windows, lasers targeting officers’ eyes and barricades blocking vehicles.

. . . Wamsley said the Portland Police Department has been slow to respond — and sometimes doesn’t respond at all — because of city policy. She explained that assaults have occurred outside and across the street from the building, but police have either taken too long to arrive or not shown up at all.

"That is not the stance they would take six blocks from here, but it is the stance they take with us because of guidance from the mayor and city council," Wamsley said.

According to Axios,

The city and state filed for a temporary restraining order seeking to block the arrival of troops, which was the subject of Friday's hearing.

Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield also filed a lawsuit seeking to block the deployment, alleging the move violates the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits using troops for domestic law enforcement.

However, there are exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act, particularly the Insurrection Act, which allows a president to use federalized Guard units to suppress domestic violence that hinders the execution of state or federal law and deprives people of their constitutional rights. Given Assistant Attorney General Dhillon's letter to Portland authorities, it's likely that the Justice Department will argue that the deployment is lawful on this basis.

The judge, a Trump appointee, said she would issue a ruling later Friday or over the weekend. Thus key developments, both the judge's ruling and the District Attorney's decision to proceed with disorderly conduct charges against Sortor, are imminent.

UPDATE:

Breaking: The first of the Portland Antifa ICE rioters has been federally convicted.

Trantifa militant Julie Winters, formerly Christopher Hudson, has pleaded guilty to felony intimidation of a federal officer and resisting arrest. Other serious charges were dropped as part of… https://t.co/tMs7sAXnMr pic.twitter.com/KLpUSJ1mx6

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) October 3, 2025

AOC Bows To Nancy Pelosi, But It Doesn't Make Much Difference

On Tuesday, AOC said,

". . . I saw some Republican members of Congress saying, ‘Oh, well, if we have this shutdown, it’s because of AOC,’” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Well, if that’s the case, my office is open and you are free to walk in and negotiate with me directly, because what I’m not going to do is tolerate 4 million uninsured Americans because Donald Trump decided one day that he wants to just make sure that kids are dying because they don’t have access to insurance. That’s what’s not going to happen.”

I read this as saying, in effect, "Yes, I'm driving the shutdown, and Republicans may as well negotiate with me directly." One person who was not amused at this was Nancy Pelosi:

.@SpeakerPelosi suggests @AOC lacks 'experience' to be Democratic leader in government shutdown. https://t.co/NhbhkYQFqQ pic.twitter.com/cv9jJ4LrUY

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) October 1, 2025

Her reply to the reporter's question about AOC's remarks was barely suppressed rage. "Why are you saying such a ridiculous thing?"

"She’s wonderful, she’s a real team player, and the rest of that," she told the reporter. "You started by saying Republicans say that she’s directing this. She is not, Hakeem Jeffries is, and this takes a lot of experience, a lot of unity from the caucus in terms of the point of view, and that’s what this is."

AOC implicitly walked the remarks back by yesterday evening:

Ocasio-Cortez made it clear in an interview with NBC News that Democratic leadership is driving the party’s strategy.

“They’re saying this stuff about me in the press, and the fact of the matter is I can tell you, in the seven years that I’ve been here, they [Republican leaders] have never given me a single phone call, because they know what the truth is,” she said. “They know that the people that they need to be negotiating with, and who they are negotiating with, are Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer,” the House and Senate Democratic leaders, both of New York.

But this doesn't change the situation on the ground, which even Chris Cilizza, formerly of CNN and the Washington Post, who now claims to be "independent" on YouTube, understands:

He says,

I think Alexandria Ocasio Cortez may be the thing, the codex that explains why we are where we are in a government shutdown. To go forward, we need to go back, back to March. In March, Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, from New York, announces that he is going to vote to keep the government open. He doesn't want to run the risk of allowing Elon Musk and his DOGE people to have a chance to cut even more federal workers by closing down the government, so he's gonna keep it open, he's not gonna get any concessions from the Trump administration.

. . . Now, Schumer probably figured he was gonna take some flak for that, but I do not think he thought he was gonna take the amount of flak from the left that he took. . . . And one of the voices that was most promenent in speaking out against that was Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. . . . Chuck Schumer, . . . who is up for reelection in 2028 to a fifth term, looks at the landscape, and he says, "All right, well, we need to get something from Republicans this time around and Donald Trump. So I'm going to say we need to get the extension to these health care subsidies for Obamacare."

I think Schumer knows it's very unlikely he's going to get that. Trump is in control, Trump thinks a shutdown is fine for him. . . . Chuck Schumer has been in the Senate since 1998. . . . He is currently 74 years old. He'll be 76ish in 2028. . . . Schumer hasn't said whether he wants to run for another term or not, but I think he absolutely wants to keep that possibility open. . . . He doesn't want the narrative to be in 2028 that he retired to run away from certain defeat in a Democratic primary. He wants there to be a credible, plausible opening for him to run for another term.

. . . He looks at the situation, he looks at the outrage from the left. . . and he says, "If I don't get something big and deliverable for Democrats out of this showdown, I'm screwed politically, I will lose this race. So I am going to go forward with this shutdown, and I'm going to keep my Democratic caucus in line, and I'm going to make sure we don't give the Republicans the seven votes they need to keep the government open." He does all of this in large part because of the worry about Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. . . . But the thing is, AOC is 35 years old. She is 40 years Chuck Schumer's junior.

In the end, although Cilizza doesn't go that far, Schumer's problem is the clock, and what is true of Schumer is even more true of Pelosi. What Cilizza has said here is that Schumer is letting AOC set his priorities, but she's forced him into a game he's bound to lose. Whatever he holds out for from Trump, anything he could potentially point to as an important deliverable, Cilizza thinks he won't get it -- but Schumer's the one who's going to lose, not just to Trump, but to any primary oppenent in 2028.

Meanwhile, AOC is 35. This is just as much Pelosi's problem, or even more so. We must assume Pelosi threw a behind-the-scenes tantrum and forced AOC to walk back her implicit announcment that she was running the shutdown, but that doesn't change the fact that Schumer is at the end of his career, and although Pelosi has formally retired as Speaker, she's continuing to run the House through Jeffries, who is little more than a ventriloquist's dummy. I asked Chrome AI mode about this, and it answered,

A narcissist's refusal to acknowledge the passage of time is a defense mechanism rooted in a fear of losing their inflated sense of self. To a narcissist, the physical decline and diminishing social influence that come with aging are existential threats to their core identity, which is built on a fantasy of superiority. They may use a range of tactics to deny reality and cling to a distorted, timeless past where they felt most powerful.

But if we're talking about refusal to acknowledge the passage of time, we're right back to where we were with Joe Biden. Somehow all the senior Democrats are living in a fantasy world where they're still powerful, and they're refusing to acknowledge that things have changed.

I Think Bp Barron Was About To Get Involved

Via The Pillar:

Illinois Senator Dick Durbin declined on Tuesday a lifetime achievement award he was scheduled to receive from the Archdiocese of Chicago’s office of human dignity and solidarity.

Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich issued an announcement on the subject at the same time senior leaders at the U.S. bishops’ conference were confidentially preparing to release a statement on the Durbin award, and had already informed the Vatican’s U.S. representative of their plans, according to several sources close to the process.

The President of the USCCB is Abp Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese of the Military Services, who I'm confident is a wise, capable, and holy man, but neither his name nor his position is well known, probably not even to rank and file US Catholics. On the other hand, Bp Robert Barron is now the most prominent Catholic spokesman since Abp Fulton J Sheen. While as many as ten current Catholic bishops had already spoken out publicly agaionst Cdl Cupich's move, most appear to have waited for clearer guidance, whether from the USCCB or the Almighty Himself, and Bp Barron was probably more aware than any of the gravity of such a move.

But clearly something was in the works. From the link,

Conference spokesperson Chieko Noguchi declined to comment Tuesday afternoon, but several senior U.S. sources told The Pillar that some conference leaders were confidentially preparing a statement on the subject, which they expected to issue in coming days, presumably from the president’s office, or from the conference’s administrative committee.

And Vatican and senior U.S. sources told The Pillar that conference leaders had notified the apostolic nunciature in Washington that a statement related to the Durbin award was expected to be issued by the bishops’ conference.

It is not clear what prompted Durbin’s withdrawal or Cupich’s Tuesday afternoon announcement. Some bishops suggested to The Pillar Tuesday that a pending USCCB statement catalyzed the move, with Cupich not eager to be seen as opposed by the body of U.S. bishops, or that the U.S. apostolic nuncio urged Cupich to shut down the award before public division among the bishops intensified.

Bishop of Springfield, IL Thomas Paprocki was among the first to speak out against Cupich, and he appears also to have been the architect of the solution:

In an interview on EWTN’s “The World Over with Raymond Arroyo” on Sept. 25, Paprocki called on the Chicago cardinal to either withdraw the award or Durbin himself to decline it.

A spokesperson for Durbin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Durbin appears eventually to have recognized this would be the best path:

Durbin told NBC News he was surprised by "the level of controversy" and had withdrawn from accepting the award "because the reaction has been so controversial against the Cardinal who proposed it, and I see no point in going forward with that.”

The Catholic News Agency reported that US bishops were "grateful" and "relieved" at Durbin's decision:

Arlington, Virginia, Bishop Michael Burbidge, meanwhile — who previously served as chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ pro-life committee — said on Oct. 1 that he was “relieved” at Durbin’s decision.

. . . Numerous other U.S. bishops had previously expressed disapproval over the proposed award, including Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska; Bishop James Wall of Gallup, New Mexico; and San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone.

In a statement on X on Oct. 1, Cordileone extended Durbin “complements” for withdrawing from the award, which the prelate described as a “great display of magnanimity.”

“In such a contentious issue that threatens even greater division, Sen. Durbin chose to take the higher moral ground,” the prelate said. “Such an act required tremendous humility on his part. We need more humility in our country.”

So what we seem to be hearing is this: Cdl Cupich's intent to give Sen Durbin an award had become unexpectedly controversial, we might speculate in particular in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination on September 10, since Kirk, although not Catholic himself, advocated for positions on reproduction, marriage, and sexuality that Catholics also support. It appears that neither Cdl Cupich nor Sen Durbin recognized the strength of such support among Catholics.

Neither, I suspect, did all but a dozen or so US bishops, at least at first.

Durbin’s backing down from receiving the award came following a CatholicVote petition on its online CatholicVote Action Center, where users could directly message Cardinal Cupich’s office, asking him not to honor Durbin for his support of immigrants. As of Monday, more than 20,000 had signed; by Wednesday morning, signatures had surpassed 40,000.

It sounds as though, by last weekend, the US bishops felt the need to get ahead of the problem. If more bishops began to speak out against Cupich, this would at minimum be an embarrassment, but pressure from rank-and-file Catholics was apparently rising, enough for the USCCB to report to the papal nuncio that there could be an issue, and they might be forced to make a statement. And if the USCCB made a statement, this could well provide cover for Bp Barron to make an observation of his own, however cautiously worded.

This would amount to an enormous loss of face, principally for Cdl Cupich, who simply doesn't have the prestige of Bp Barron, and any statement Barron could make short of unwavering support for Cupich would detract from Cupich further. But then, Cupich was a clear Francis favorite, and this would be a blow to the Francis faction in the Church, when Leo, at least at this point, wants to avoid schism and keep the Francis faction more or less on the reservation.

So Leo issues an official on one hand, on the other hand, dialogue, blah blah blah, Durbin declines the award, Cupich saves face, and schism is avoided. But I think the real driving factor was the threat that Bp Barron would get involved. Even Leo understands about Bp Barron. Barron understands his position, too, and has been handling it mostly quite well.

The Naval Academy Acts Like An Ivy

Welp, that's a race. https://t.co/0ADfjmlvk0

— Rich Baris The People's Pundit (@Peoples_Pundit) September 30, 2025

It turns out that the US Naval Academy's admissions and disciplinary policies have become an issue in the New Jersey governor's race:

New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill is facing fresh scrutiny following the revelation that her two children were accepted into the highly competitive Naval Academy — days after her campaign was rocked by news of her involvement in a notorious cheating scandal as a midshipman.

The Democratic congresswoman’s office announced in June that her two kids, Lincoln and Margaret Hedberg, were among nine students from her district to land spots in the Naval Academy, whichacademy Academy recordsd weerre unblemi9shed.

. . . Netizens, such as the Libs of TikTok, questioned how two of her children managed to get in at the same time in light of the highly selective process.

“What are the chances?” the popular right-wing social media account wrote on X.

Sherrill insists that everything was done aboveboard.

“In order to remove even the appearance of a conflict of interest, my children did not compete in my office’s service academy nomination process,” Sherrill said in a statement to The Post.

“Instead, they applied to the offices of the US senators from New Jersey, who also run academy nomination processes each year, and I am proud that they each earned nominations on their own.”

It is unclear whether Booker or Helmy made either of Sherrill’s children their principal nominee or if the congresswoman played any role in trying to lobby on their behalf.

Both Sherrill and her husband, Jason Hedberg, are graduates of the Naval Academy, which would make their children "legacies" in Ivy parlance. But neither mom's nor dad's academy records were unblemished.

For days, the Sherrill campaign has been rocked by questions regarding her role in a cheating scandal that kept her from walking with her graduating class in 1994.

. . . When confronted with questions from reporters last week, Sherrill admitted she was punished in 1994, but not for cheating.

"I didn't turn in some of my classmates," Sherrill said, "So I didn't walk."

Sherrill seemed to change her story on Friday while campaigning in Plainfield.

During that event, she offered this explanation: "There was a test at the school that was stolen. I did not realize it was stolen. I took the test."

Sherrill then explained that after the test was completed, she heard the rumors of it being stolen. She said she was punished because "I didn't come forward with that information."

Via the New York Post,

A source close to a rival campaign questioned that statement.

“Nobody, including Mikie Sherrill, was barred from graduation ceremonies for covering for their friends,” claimed this person, who has reviewed the documents. “That’s a bunch of bulls—. Midshipmen were, however, punished for lying to Naval investigators.”

While no evidence has surfaced that the future congresswoman was punished for being untruthful to school officials, there are also indications that she has not been up front about what transpired.

Multiple midshipmen acquired and shared answers to a Dec. 14, 1992, exam for Electrical Engineering 311, a mandatory class for all non-engineering majors. The test was administered to 663 students, according to the lawsuit that involved Hedberg.

In a 2002 episode of CBS News’ “48 Hours” that reported on the scandal, one of the students involved estimated that “probably 80% of the people who took that test had knowledge and had seen it the night before.”

The day after the test was administered, academy officials caught wind of the cheating and went on to open a series of investigations — including by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), multiple Honor Boards (disciplinary panels), and the Office of the Naval Inspector General.

Ultimately, 88 were found guilty of participation in the dissemination of the exam, the Washington Post reported at the time, with two dozen expelled and 64 receiving lesser penalties such as late graduation.

At the same link,

Democratic New Jersey gubernatorial hopeful Mikie Sherrill’s husband was also caught up in the Naval Academy cheating scandal that has rocked her campaign, court documents exclusively obtained by The Post show.

Jason Hedberg was one of about four dozen midshipmen who sued top officials at the Naval Academy, Navy and Pentagon in 1994 in a desperate bid to block an Honor Board at Annapolis from deciding whether they should be dismissed from the school.

“In compliance with the orders of their superior military officers, each named plaintiff was compelled to make inculpatory statements to Navy Inspector General investigators,” read the complaint, which charged that the students were denied due process.

The details of any “inculpatory statements” by Hedberg are unclear. However, his name is included in the 1994 commencement program, suggesting that he — unlike Sherrill — was cleared to take part in exercises some three months after the suit was filed.

This follows allegations from her opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, that she has tripled her net worth since being elected to Congress in 2018.

The question of how certain applicants are able to beat the odds in the selective college admissions process has interested me since before I started blogging. On one hand, there's clearly a Navy old-boy network that extends to the Academy -- take the example of Sen John McCain, himself an Academy graduate, largely because his father and grandfather were both four-star admirals and Academy graduates themselves. He was a legacy as much as any Ivy applicant following his own dad and granddad. His pedigree apparently compensated for his poor early performance as a Naval aviator:

McCain began as a sub-par flier who was at times careless and reckless; during the early to mid-1960s, two of his flight missions crashed, and a third mission collided with power lines, but he received no major injuries.

It looks like there have always been ways to play the angles in the Navy, and Mikie Sherrill and her husband have just found the latest version -- just like in the Ivy League. But a bigger, and much less examined, question is cheating. I asked Chrome AI Mode, "How many cheating scandals have there been at the Naval Academy?" It answered,

At least three large-scale cheating scandals have occurred at the U.S. Naval Academy in recent decades, impacting midshipmen in 1974, 1992, and 2020. Most recently, renewed attention has been drawn to the 1992 incident due to a political campaign.

In the 1992 scandal that affected Sherrill and her husband, the Navy's inspector general implicated more than 130 midshipmen in the theft and distribution of the exam. Approximately 80 midshipmen admitted to cheating, and 29 were recommended for expulsion. However, the numbers at one link above suggest far more were involved -- the test was administered to 663 students, and "probably 80%" had seen it the night before. That comes out to 530 students who saw the exam before they took it.

So, why were only 130 "implicated" and only 29 recommended for expulsion? I think it's because if the true size of the cheating problem were to become known, it would be beyond embarrassing to the Naval Academy and the Navy, so it had to be minimized. It would lead to serious questions about the competence of Naval officers and the value of an Academy degree. But the mere fact that cheating scandals reoccur at places like the Naval Academy is an indication that the problem hasn't been addressed.

But why should it be limited to the Naval Academy, or even the other US military academies? I asked Chrome AI mode, "How many cheating scandals have there been at Harvard?" It answered,

Multiple cheating scandals have been reported at Harvard, with several major cases involving large numbers of students having occurred in recent decades. It's impossible to know the exact total number of cheating incidents, as many go unreported, but publicly known scandals highlight periods of high academic dishonesty.

These included the 2012 Government 1310 scandal, in which approximately half of the 279 students were investigated for collaborating or plagiarizing on a take-home final exam; The 2017 Computer Science 50 scandal, in which about 10% of the course's enrollment during the fall semester were referred to the Honor Council; and the 2020–2021 Honor Code violations, a surge in academic dishonesty cases during the COVID pandemic, when the Honor Council reviewed 138 cases that academic year, with 27 students required to withdraw.

My own teaching experience in the 1970s was that plagiarism was extremedly common, and my graduate assistant colleagues recognized that plagiarism was so rife in freshman comp classes that it simply wasn't worth mentioning. But it was also understood that if the English Department, say, were to undertake serious enforcement of the honor code, first, nobody would have time to do anything else, and second, nobody would sign up to take English courses, so life simply went on.

The upshot is that truthtellers like Mike Rowe are slowly beginning to emerge who are questioning the value of a four-year degree, and cases like Mikie Sherrill are beginning to emerge who illustrate the corruption endemic in higher education, if not in public life overall.

What Do We Still Not Know About January 6?

Legacy media has immediately pooh-poohed the release of FBI documents placing 274 FBI agents in the crowd at the January 6, 2021 Capitol incursion. From Newsday:

TRUMP: “As it now turns out, FBI Agents were at, and in, the January 6th Protest, probably acting as Agitators and Insurrectionists, but certainly not as ‘Law Enforcement Officials.’”

THE FACTS: This is false. The alleged FBI documents to which Trump is referring state on page 46 that 274 agents from the FBI's Washington Field Office “responded to” to the U.S. Capitol and other nearby locations on Jan. 6. They do not contain any credible evidence to suggest that federal agents were acting as agitators or insurrectionists.

“This number includes agents that responded to the Capitol grounds as well as inside the Capitol, the pipe bombs, and the red truck that was believed to contain explosive devices as well as CDC/ADCs,” the documents read.

The mention of “pipe bombs” refers to the devices planted outside offices of the Democratic and Republican national committees in Washington on the eve of the attack, while “the red truck” refers to a pickup truck filled with weapons and Molotov cocktail components that was parked near the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

But what is indisputably new is the information that something like 274 employees of the FBI's Washington Field Office were dispatched to the US Capitol that day, and for whatever reason, the FBI had not previously released this information. How it might be interpreted depends in part on what the meaning of "agents" is. CNN also disputes Trump's version:

As CNN previously reported, no undercover FBI agents were at the Capitol during the January 6 riot, according to a Justice Department watchdog. However, the DOJ inspector general said that 26 paid FBI informants were in Washington, DC, that day.

Well, OK, but the information we've just received is that 274 FBI employees were also purposely sent there. So far, we don't know what their job classifications were, or what they were supposed to be doing, and Trump is asking good questions:

“I want to know who each and every one of these so-called ‘Agents’ are, and what they were up to on that now ‘Historic’ Day. Many Great American Patriots were made to pay a very big price only for the love of their Country. I owe this investigation of ‘Dirty Cops and Crooked Politicians’ to them!” Trump continued.

In fact, the information that was released over the weekend simply expands the set of unknowns connected with January 6. The legacy media interpretation of the 274 "agents" (if that's what they were, we aren't really sure) is that they were sent in at the last minute for crowd control, because they were in offices just down the street, or something like that. But let's look at the situation from the testimony of Steven Sund, Capitol Police Chief on January 6, to the US Senate:

We [the Capitol Police] were monitoring the actions and demeanor of the crowd, which at the time did not raise any concerns, when we received word at 12:52 p.m. that a pipe bomb had been located at the Republican National Committee Headquarters, immediately adjacent to Capitol Grounds. . . . We also dispatched resources to look for other explosive devices, suspects, and vehicles. At almost the exactly same time, we observed a large group of individuals approaching the West Front of the Capitol. When the group arrived at the perimeter, they did not act like any group of protestors I had ever seen. Unlike other heated protests, these protesters did not simply congregate to angrily voice their grievances. As soon as this group arrived at our perimeter, they immediately began to fight violently with the officers and to tear apart the steel crowd control barriers, using them to assault the officers. . . . This mob was like nothing I have seen in my law enforcement career. The group consisted of thousands of well-coordinated, well-equipped violent criminals. They had weapons, chemical munitions, protective equipment, explosives, and climbing gear. A number of them were wearing radio ear pieces indicating a high level of coordination.

This is a little puzzling. "Violent criminals" would normally be street thugs, who aren't well-coordinated. These were apparently both well-trained and well-equipped, and frankly, this doesn't sound like Mr and Mrs MAGA. Earpieces? Climbing gear? Chemical munitions? Sund sent a letter to Speaker Pelosi and other parties on February 6, after the riot:

"Having previously handled two major post-election demonstrations successfully utilizing an action plan that was based on intelligence assessments that had proven to be credible, reliable, and accurate, we reasonably assumed the intelligence assessment for Jan. 6, 2021, was also correct."

On Jan. 4, the Capitol Police Intelligence and Inter-Agency Coordination Division "assessed "the level of probability of acts of civil disobedience/arrests occurring based on current intelligence information," as "Remote" to "Improbable" for all of the groups expected to demonstrate on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021," according to Sund.

But the Justice Department's pursuit of charges against the rioters appears to be at variance with Sund's description of "thousands of well-coordinated, well-equipped violent criminals" who were somehow able to keep their detailed plans from intelligence assessment teams. For instance,

By the end of 2021, 725 people had been charged with federal crimes. That number rose to 1,000 by the second anniversary of the attack, to 1,200 by the third anniversary (three-quarters of whom had by then been found guilty) and to 1,500 before the fourth anniversary.

. . . Early on, the majority of charges filed against the rioters were for disorderly conduct and unlawful entry. Ultimately, about one-third of the defendants were charged with assault on or interference with law enforcement officers. Other charges included trespassing; disrupting Congress; theft or other property crimes; weapons offenses; making threats; and conspiracy, including seditious conspiracy.

All these might apply to Jacob Chansly, the "QAnon Shaman", not disciplined, well-organized brown shirts wearing earpieces:

Chansley, who pleaded guilty to a felony charge of obstructing an official proceeding, was among the first rioters to enter the building. He has acknowledged using a bullhorn to rile up the mob, offering thanks in a prayer while in the Senate for having the chance to get rid of traitors and scratching out a threatening note to Vice President Mike Pence saying, “It’s Only A Matter of Time. Justice Is Coming!”

Though he isn’t accused of violence, prosecutors say Chansley, of Arizona, was the “public face of the Capitol riot” who went into the attack with a weapon, ignored repeated police orders to leave the building and gloated about his actions in the days immediately after the attack.

The "weapon" was a stage spear, and Chansly was pretty clearly a harmless nut. The scenes from inside the Capitol were in fact farcical. But we have Sund's testimony in several forums that there were well-coordinated, well-equipped forces involved -- so who were they? Where were they, precisely? Frankly, earpieces are the sort of thing federal agents wear, not wackos in costumes, or indeed just Mr and Mrs MAGA.

Sund also brings up the pipe bombs and a truck loaded with explosives. We've heard almost nothing about these. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino has announced that the bureau is revisiting the case.

On the night of Jan. 5, 2021, someone carrying a backpack and wearing a grey-hooded sweatshirt, mask, gloves, glasses, and a pair of Nike Air Max Speed Turf sneakers dropped two pipe bombs outside Republican and Democratic headquarters in the nation’s capital.

While the explosives did not detonate, the FBI assessed that they were “viable.”

Then-Vice President-elect Kamala Harris visited the Democratic National Committee headquarters the next day, shortly before the Capitol riot began, and was evacuated after the pipe bombs were identified by a passerby.

. . . While the explosives did not detonate, the FBI assessed that they were “viable.”

. . . In a House GOP report released in early 2025, lawmakers claimed initial inquiries “yielded a promising array of data and revealed numerous persons of interest” — but “little meaningful progress” has been made since.

Sund suggests that the timing of the pipe bomb discoveries may have been intended to distract the Capitol Police from the incursion on the Capitol grounds, and this would suggest a fairly intricate conspiracy -- so it's intriguing that while there were 1500 people prosecuted for things like trespassing or interfering with law enforcement, there have been no prosecutions, as far as we can tell, of trained, well-equipped, well-financed professionals with climbing gear that Sund testified were on the Capitol grounds.

In other words, we still know almost nothing about January 6.