From it’s continued use, ‘Gun Industry Profits™’ is apparently the latest talking point the gun grabbers are using.

Gun Control Crowd Explodes After Trump Admin Pulls ATF Display

The Trump administration removed a memorial from the main atrium of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) for victims of gun violence that was put in place under the Biden administration.

As you can imagine, the move has tightened the jaws of folks on the anti-gunner left, which praised how the prior administration weaponized the agency against responsible gun owners. From The Washington Post:

Justice Department spokesman Chad Gilmartin said that the decision to remove the portraits was not political and that officials are considering different ways to honor victims.

“The ATF will continue to honor the memory of all victims of violent crime while at the same time preserving the rights of law-abiding Americans,” Gilmartin said, referring to the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Former ATF director Steven Dettelbach — who was appointed by President Joe Biden — created the memorial at the agency’s Northeast Washington headquarters last April to remind employees of the human toll of gun violence. The display includes photos of police officers killed by gunfire, children slain in mass school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, and Parkland, Florida, and other victims.

A nearby kiosk told the stories of each, and many of the victims’ families would visit the memorial.

“The ‘Faces of Gun Violence’ exhibit is a permanent reminder of what ATF comes to work to do every day — a reminder of why agents risk their lives and why everyone at ATF dedicates their careers to this mission: to honor the fallen and protect the living,” Dettelbech said at a ceremony unveiling the memorial last year. “This exhibit both honors and tells the stories of the victims of firearms violence. And it reminds us to keep front and center the lives, the stories, and the courage of those who have been impacted by firearms violence.”

The White House wants to slash the agency’s approximately $1.5 billion annual budget by about a third, or nearly $500 million, according to budget documents released Friday. The proposal appears to cut much of the regulatory arm of ATF while saying it would leave resources for gun tracing and investigating gun traffickers. But more modest cuts in the past have forced cuts to ATF law enforcement, and if the agency loses a third of its budget, it would probably lead to law enforcement reductions.

One gun control advocate whose deceased father was featured in the memorial criticized the move, saying, “The ATF used to be an agency dedicated to fighting for people. Now, it’s crystal clear that its mandate has become fighting on behalf of gun industry profits.”

Gilmartin said the decision to take down the memorial isn’t political. But I have no qualms with discussing the politics of this situation.

The Biden administration exploited these victims to make a political statement: The government must curtail gun ownership at all cost, or else there will be even more victims.

As someone who has lost a family member to gun violence, I understand how horrific it can be. Yet, California, where my cousin was murdered, has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation. Not a single one of these restrictions saved her life.

If gun control is such an effective policy, why are so many unarmed people dying at the hands of armed thugs who don’t obey these laws? These people promise that if we enact a few more restrictions, everyone will be safe. Then, they act surprised when criminals continue gunning people down in the streets in California and New York.

The only people the ATF protects are criminals who refuse to be disarmed. Instead of pushing “feel good” solutions like gun control, the nation would be better served if we stop making it difficult for responsible people to arm themselves while addressing the root causes of violent crime.

I think that Operation Nitro Zeus never really ended.

Quip O’ The Day: ‘Cardboard factory’, suuuure

What the Hell Is Going on in Iran This Time?

Iran is on fire — literally, again — and nobody knows why. A massive power plant and a “cardboard factory” caught fire bigly in Iran over the weekend. But there is impressive new video of Iran’s port explosion from last week.

Iran International reported that a “series of incidents unfolded in Alborz Province, west of Tehran, on Saturday evening, including two fires, reports of an explosion, and a magnitude 4.0 earthquake, according to official statements and eyewitness accounts.”

Israeli action? Typical authoritarian regime attention to maintenance issues? God just doesn’t like the mullahs’ regime? Who knows.

For reasons yet unknown, the Montazer Ghaem power plant in Karaj, just west of Tehran, caught fire on Saturday. Here’s that video:


Those cooling towers make Montazer Ghaem look like it might be a nuclear power plant, but it burns natural gas and other fossil fuels.

Tehran posted undated video of the plant not on fire and claimed that there was nothing to see here, move along.

In the same province, also on Saturday, a “cardboard manufacturing factory” was seen burning brightly.

Don’t take advice on guns from the New York Times’ “Ethicist.”

In a country with more guns than people (there were some 393 million firearms in civilian hands alone in 2017, according to the Small Arms Survey), it’s easy to see why your husband might feel that owning one himself could give him some control, some shield against chaos. But your instincts are sound. As you’re aware, bringing a gun into our homes doesn’t seem to tip the odds in our favor. Studies show little evidence that guns protect against injury or loss during a crime. Instead, they raise the risk of harm within the household, through accidents, impulsive actions or suicide.

You’re imagining your regret were civic life to unravel, and you had failed to prepare. Maybe there’s a “Last of Us” scenario flickering in your heads, where bandoliered bad guys roam a collapsed society, but even then, I doubt that whatever firearm your husband is contemplating would help. In a world where some are armed to the teeth, being armed to your toes seems unlikely to do anything but escalate the dangers for you. What’s more to the point is that you feel safe in your city. Your recognition that guns bring more harm than good isn’t naïve. Real control lies in holding fast to your reasoned beliefs, not in giving way to fear.

— Kwame Anthony Appiah in My Husband Fears Political Violence. Should We Buy a Gun?

It is a basic principle of a tyrant to unarm his people of weapons, money and all means whereby they resist his power.
– Walter Raleigh

Cinco de Mayo

Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day, a popular misconception.
Instead, it commemorates a single battle.

In 1861, Benito Juárez—a lawyer and member of the Zapotec tribe—was elected president of Mexico. At the time, the country was in financial ruin after years of internal strife, and the new president was forced to default on debt payments to European governments.

In response, France, Britain and Spain sent naval forces to Veracruz, Mexico, demanding repayment. Britain and Spain negotiated with Mexico and withdrew their forces.

France, however, ruled by Napoleon III, decided to use the opportunity to carve an empire out of Mexican territory. Late in 1861, a well-armed French fleet stormed Veracruz, landing a large force of troops and driving President Juárez and his government into retreat.

The Battle of Puebla
Certain that success would come swiftly, 6,000 French troops under General Charles Latrille de Lorencez set out to attack Puebla de Los Angeles, a small town in east-central Mexico. From his new headquarters in the north, Juárez rounded up a ragtag force of 2,000 loyal men—many of them either Indigenous Mexicans or of mixed ancestry—and sent them to Puebla.

The vastly outnumbered and poorly supplied Mexicans, led by Texas-born General Ignacio Zaragoza, fortified the town and prepared for the French assault. On May 5, 1862, Lorencez gathered his army—supported by heavy artillery—before the city of Puebla and led an assault.

The battle lasted from daybreak to early evening, and when the French finally retreated they had lost nearly 500 soldiers. Fewer than 100 Mexicans had been killed in the clash.

Although not a major strategic win in the overall war against the French, Zaragoza’s success at the Battle of Puebla on May 5 represented a great symbolic victory for the Mexican government and bolstered the resistance movement. In 1867—thanks in part to military support and political pressure from the United States, which was finally in a position to aid its besieged neighbor after the end of the Civil War—France finally withdrew.

CP nails it again

Cynical Publius

I feel like I have been sleepwalking for years and just woke up.

It’s kind of embarrassing as I have always considered myself to be very astute and alert when it comes to American politics.

But Trump 2.0, DOGE and civilian heroes like Data Republican woke me up.

For DECADES, the Deep State has been taxing us at obscene levels, all the while claiming through their media mouthpieces that it was all going to national defense and untouchable entitlements, and there really wasn’t any fat in the budget to cut.

But there WAS fat. Lots of it.

And here’s the thing: that fat was seized from our pockets at the point of a gun, added to the federal budget, then dispersed to NGOs tasked to carry out ostensibly useful tasks which were in reality a concerted effort to undermine and destroy our Constitutional Republic. We were paying for our own demise, and were oblivious to it. We were like a parasite’s host, growing weaker day by day and totally unaware of the parasite thriving on our life’s blood.

What’s worse is that the cycle of America-hating NGOs also wrapped an entire class of Democrats in luxury. Exploiting the basic goodness of Americans to help those in need, we were in reality funding grift and graft whereby Democrats cycled from elected office, to lobbyists, to industry, to NGOs, and back again on an endless loop where the only true value was enriching themselves. Five of the seven richest counties in America are on the Washington DC Beltway. I just explained why that is so.

Now I know there are some who will belittle the cuts we are seeing as being inconsequential in the grand scheme of the entire federal budget and the national debt, and as a solely mathematical analysis this may be true. But this minority portion of the federal budget has nevertheless had an enormous and outsized impact on the destruction of the United States of America.

Cutting off the dollars we have been paying to these parasites will silence their voices of hate and American destruction, and allow us room to maneuver to recover our nation, all in the nick of time.

Ending the doom loop of America-destroying NGO graft is the greatest thing Donald Trump is doing. He deserves a statue on the National Mall for this alone. (With little statues of Elon, Big Balls and Data Republican.).

Thank you, Trump 2.0 Team, for saving us from funding our own demise.

Obama Judge Goes Full Theater Kid, Declares It ‘Unconstitutional’ for Trump to Pull Security Clearances

As lower and district court judges continue to one-up each other with absurd usurpations of clearly stated executive authority, another contender has entered the ring.

U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled on Friday night that the President of the United States does not have the power to pull government security clearances from Perkins Coie, a private law firm. Yeah, that would be the same Perkins Coie that worked with Democrats to gin up the Russian collusion hoax. 

In her order, Howell decided that quoting Shakespeare was appropriate. I guess our judiciary is full of theater kids.

“No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue in this lawsuit targeting a prominent law firm with adverse actions to be executed by all Executive branch agencies but, in purpose and effect, this action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,’” Howell wrote in the 102-page order on Friday. 

Howell alleges that the Trump administration violated the First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments, with her basic argument being that the executive order in question amounted to illegal coercion. In arguably politicized fashion, she went on to express animosity toward the law firms that cut deals with the administration to keep their clearances.

All of this will undoubtedly and justifiably seem ridiculous to onlookers, regardless of what legal arguments may or may not actually exist. Control over security clearances is a vested power in the executive branch, and if the president decides he doesn’t want a law firm that literally targeted him on behalf of Hillary Clinton to have access to classified materials within his administration, one would think he should be able to do so.

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I like to see the left get a dose of their own medicine

Reaping What You Sow: AOC Townhall Descends Into Chaos As Protester Shrieks, ‘You’re a Liar!’

The Democrats love chaos and unhinged protests—except when it’s directed against them. But sometimes, the chickens come home to roost, and NY Dem Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez found that out the hard way as she was heckled and shouted down at her town hall Friday night.

Remember: no matter how woke you are, there’s always someone even woker:

Not surprisingly, it was a protester who had her knickers in a twist about the supposed Palestinian “genocide,” but didn’t have a word to say about the savage October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel where terrorists killed and raped over 1,200 innocents and took hundreds hostage. That seems to be OK in some of these people’s minds.

A hysterical protester yelling about the “genocide” in Gaza interrupted a district town hall event being held by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., shortly after it began on Friday night.

As Ocasio-Cortez first began speaking, she pulled up a PowerPoint presentation for the night’s event. She was then interrupted before even getting through her first slide discussing the Trump administration’s budget cuts, including alleged cuts to local healthcare systems.

“I am a healthcare worker and I want to know what you’re doing about the genocide in Gaza!” the protester started shouting at the congresswoman.

The female protester epitomized the unhinged leftists that we’re getting all too used to seeing:

“Shame on you, you’re a liar. You’re a liar!” the woman screamed as others began to boo at her.

“Shame on you, I used to support you,” the woman shouted as she exited. “You’re a war criminal! War criminal! War Criminal!”

The intellectually challenged congresswoman is many things, mainly an anti-American values provocateur, but even I, as a harsh critic, don’t think she fits the bill of “war criminal.”

This is the world that Democrats have created, though—they’ve celebrated far-left “defiance” and radical protests and unhinged diatribes… It’s actually kind of beautiful when it comes back to haunt them.

Enjoy it, AOC, this is your world.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t done, of course, she had more—and it may come back to haunt her. She taunted Border Czar Tom Homan, which in my view is not a particularly smart thing to do:

“Come for me,” she shouted out to the man my colleague Ward Clark likes to call “The Hammer.” She may well get her wish, but I don’t think it will go well for her.

While Left Wants Ban on ‘Assault Weapons,’ They’re the Reason They Won’t Get One

Earlier this week, Democratic Senators Adam Schiff and Chris Murphy unveiled their new assault weapon ban bill. This is just the latest iteration of something they’ve pushed for regularly since the last assault weapon ban sunset in 2004.

Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth, offering support on X, referred to these as being “designed for war.”

And I’m not going to debate her on it.

Nope.

But I am going to point out a few things that perhaps the left needs to keep in mind as we go forward.

They’re a big chunk of the reason that so many people have these so-called weapons of war. Popularity started back in the 1990s when the move to ban them first started. It continued as people bought ban-legal versions of these weapons and realized they were great. When the ban sunset, they were firmly entrenched as part of our American gun culture.

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NIH investigates Biden last-minute $89 billion grant to ‘seemingly dormant’ University of California nonprofit

Nonprofit founded in 2022, never raised nor spent a dime

The National Institutes of Health will look into an $89 billion, 25-year grant awarded to the Alliance for Advancing Biomedical Research in the last days of President Joe Biden’s administration.

The nonprofit “operate[s] exclusively for the benefit of” the University of California system, according to its tax filings. However, the nonprofit, formed in 2022, has never raised a dime nor spent a dime.

Furthermore, the California-based nonprofit would operate the lab at Maryland’s Fort Detrick, taking the contract away from Leidos Biomedical Research. As reported by The Washington Free Beacon, Leidos “held that role for about 30 years.”

The Washington Free Beacon reported the “seemingly dormant” Alliance for Advancing Biomedical Research now faces an investigation, after Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley raised questions about the massive grant.

“It’s outrageous Biden’s NIH shoved a nearly $90 billion contract out the door just days before President Trump returned to office,” Grassley told the news outlet.

“Even worse, the money would have flowed to an organization that can’t clearly protect itself from adversaries like China,” Sen. Grassley said. “I’m very glad HHS heeded my calls to reverse course and is now re-evaluating its initial proposal. I urge the department to ensure efficient use of taxpayer dollars as it works to defeat cancer and save lives.”

The Free Beacon reported further:

Grassley also said he was concerned about the University of California’s well-documented failure to protect its labs from security breaches by China’s government.

“It has been reported that between 1987 and 2021, at least 162 scientists who had worked at Los Alamos [National Laboratory] returned to China to support a variety of domestic research and development programs, including at least 59 who were involved with China’s talent programs,” Grassley wrote [in a letter to the NIH]. “It appears that the University of California’s inability to keep China out of U.S. R&D is an issue that spans nearly four decades.”

Leidos previously expressed its disappointment in January, when it lost the contract.

“While we are disappointed that we may not continue this particular work and partnership, we expect to receive more information on our proposal in the coming days, which will help us better understand the evaluation process and next steps,” the Frederick News-Post reported on Jan. 23.

Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his administration have sought to root out waste and abuse, with a particular emphasis placed on the National Institutes of Health and its billions of dollars in research funding.