Links - 13th June 2026 (3 - False Rape Claims)

Cathy Young 🇺🇸🇺🇦 on Twitter - "I'm a bit late to this but apparently Armie Hammer's career was destroyed over unsubstantiated allegations and some creepy fantasies?" The Sexual Assault Allegations Against Actor Armie Hammer Explained - "After an investigation into his actions led to a two-year halt in his career, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office announced that it would not bring any sexual assault charges against actor Armie Hammer, bringing an end—for now—to scandal that’s plagued the Hammer name."

Eleanor Williams jailed for eight and a half years after rape and trafficking lies - "A woman has been jailed for eight and a half years after being found guilty of lying about being raped and trafficked by an Asian grooming gang, and making false rape claims against a series of other men.  Eleanor Williams, 22, from Barrow-in-Furness was convicted in January of nine counts of perverting the course of justice... Her claims went viral during lockdown in May 2020 when she posted photographs of herself on Facebook covered in shocking bruises, with a black eye and a partially severed finger. She said she had been beaten and made to attend “sex parties” by “evil yet clever” Asian men, mostly Pakistani business owners.  The allegations soon spread far beyond Cumbria and sparked a global solidarity campaign, Justice for Ellie, with more than 100,000 Facebook members. It had its own line of merchandise, featuring a purple elephant, and prompted rallies all over the UK, amid allegations of a police cover-up.  Cumbria police recorded 151 crimes linked to the case in 2020, including malicious communications and harassment, as well as criminal damage and public order offences. Hate crimes tripled in Barrow that summer... Despite the focus on Asian groomers, by the time Williams made her Facebook post, she had been charged with multiple counts of perverting the course of justice.  These included making false rape claims against three young white men, one of whom, Oliver Gardner, simply had the misfortune to ask her for a light in the street. Another, Jordan Trengove, spent 73 days in prison on remand after she falsely accused him of raping and drugging her at knifepoint.  But Williams reserved her wildest allegations for a Barrow businessman, Mohammed Ramzan, known locally as Mo Rammy. Ramzan, now 43, told Preston crown court he had only met Williams once, briefly, at a family party. Williams said he was in fact the head of an international grooming gang, who first had sex with her aged 12 or 13, and then trafficked her and dozens of other girls around north-west England and abroad.  Trengove, Gardner and Ramzan all said they tried to kill themselves as a result of being falsely accused... Williams had six mobile phones she used to create fake identities, and manipulated the Snapchat accounts of real men she had met – via the dating app Tinder, or subscribers to her account on OnlyFans, the erotic photo-sharing site – to make them look like they were Asian abusers... Williams gave police a list of 60 girls, half from Cumbria and half from elsewhere, who she said had been pimped out by Ramzan’s gang. But when police knocked on the girls’ doors they were met with blank faces.  One of them, Chloe (not her real name), told the Guardian of her confusion at being confronted with the suggestion she had been groomed and abused with Williams, who was in the year above her at Walney school in Barrow... Chloe was as shocked as everyone else in Barrow when she saw Williams’ Facebook post in May 2020. She still struggles to believe her injuries were self-inflicted, as a forensic pathologist concluded they were, with a hammer Williams bought from Tesco a few days earlier.  Chloe bought a Justice for Ellie T-shirt and joined several solidarity protests. “Everyone had something of Justice for Ellie. Everyone. And if it wasn’t on you, it was on your car or on the front of your house.” She says she feels “stupid” to have joined the rallies for someone who made up so many lies. “It got very nasty very quickly.”  Trengove had “rapist” spray-painted on the side of his house. Ramzan received more than 500 death threats and had to leave Barrow for months. A reporter from the local Mail newspaper also left the town temporarily on police advice after receiving dozens of threats in response to a report she wrote about Williams’ first court appearance. Indian restaurant owners in the town repeatedly had their windows smashed after a list circulated on Snapchat purporting to show businesses complicit in Williams’ abuse. One Muslim restaurateur, who asked not to be named, said he lost at least £80,000 worth of custom after being named on the list. Orders dropped from 70-80 a night to two or three, and he was pursued down the street by people on skateboards who used the P-word and sprayed beer in his face.  During Williams’ sentencing hearing at Preston crown court, Judge Altham asked if the prosecution was asking him to sentence on the basis that the offences were motivated by racial hatred. Jonathan Sandiford KC said no, noting the jury had heard evidence of Williams’ “affectionate and emotional” relationship with at least one Asian man."
Yet Americans love vigilante "justice" so much

Man doused in acid and shot in the face by boyfriend of 'one night stand' - "A man was shot in the face and doused in acid in an execution carried out by the boyfriend of a woman he had a one night stand with, a court has heard. Liam Smith, 38, was killed by Michael Hillier, 39."

Rape, DNA and injustice: a timeline of the Andrew Malkinson case - "After spending 17 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, the 57-year-old’s conviction was finally overturned last month"
Clearly convicted rapists need to be executed so the recidivism rate is 0%

Regret Isn’t Rape - "“Not guilty.” There are no finer words for a criminal defense attorney to hear – nor for the defendant, of course. So when we received the “not guilty” verdict on July 27, 2018, our faith in our country’s criminal justice system was reaffirmed.  Our client was Michael Williams, represented by our managing partner David Eldridge, a former University of Tennessee Knoxville football player, who along with his teammate A.J. Johnson were indicted for aggravated rape charges nearly three and a half years ago after a woman claimed both men raped her during a victory party on Nov. 16, 2014.  As a result of the accusation, Johnson and Williams were suspended from the team less than 48 hours after the party and never played for Tennessee again. Johnson had been a star linebacker, and Williams was a starter in the secondary.  The thing is, there was not enough evidence that a crime had taken place. The prosecution did not introduce any forensic evidence, there no eyewitness testimony to corroborate the alleged rape, nor any other physical evidence to support the charges, let alone sufficient to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Further, there were a number of inconsistencies between what the woman said in court and what she had previously told investigators. There were also significant inconsistencies between how she and her friend described the events before the alleged rape took place.  The prosecution did not preserve the alleged victim’s and her friends text communications or social media data, and as a result that information was lost forever. We also learned as a result of our efforts to obtain this information that she and her friend, a witness for the prosecution had both replaced their phones around the same time.  We argued that the woman had consensual sex with both men at the same time, and then claimed it was rape after she quickly realized all there were going to learn that she had had sex with two guys at the same time. Once she made the claim of rape, her allegation was like a snowball rolling down a hill, getting bigger and with more momentum, each time was called upon the repeat the false claim – first to her friends, then to the responding officer, then to the investigators and so on. She regretted it, so we also reminded the jury that regret isn’t rape."
A lot of people got very upset when I pointed out that not all rape allegations were equal

Woman admits lying to police about being raped, sexually assaulted by colleagues - "A woman who had consensual sex with two of her colleagues later lied to the police that she had been raped and sexually assaulted.  Siti Junaidah Azahar, 22, pleaded guilty on Wednesday (Sep 20) to one count of giving false information to a public servant, with a second similar charge to be considered in sentencing...   She said she had lied as she wanted to leave the hotel room but did not have money with her. As she was unable to get home, she sent a text message to her cousin, lying that three men did something to her, so that her aunt would book her a Grab ride home.  After this, her aunt booked her the Grab ride, but also accompanied her to lodge a police report."

Woman, 22, gets jail for falsely reporting rape to police after quarrel with boyfriend - "Upset over a quarrel she had with her boyfriend, Zhang Lutian called the police late in the night, claiming that she was injured and he was preventing her from leaving.  On arrival, officers were told by Zhang that she had been sexually assaulted by her partner, which led them to deploy even more officers to the scene.  The accusation and others that she made turned out to be false and Zhang officially withdrew them slightly a month after the incident.   The 22-year-old was on Monday (Oct 2) sentenced to five weeks’ jail after pleading guilty to one count of providing false information to a public servant...   She said that the incident happened barely a few weeks after she turned 21, adding that her “cognitive ability” and awareness of the seriousness of the offence “was still immature”... She said that she suffered from severe depression and anxiety, which added to her emotional state when making the police report.  When asked by Senior District Judge Ong Hian Sun if she had any evidence of her mental condition, Zhang said that she had wanted to return to China to get a medical report because she could not afford to seek psychiatric treatment here."

‘This will forever change who I am’: Ashely Jansen acquitted - "For Ashley Jansen, proving her innocence in court came with little relief after living under the cloud of a false sexual assault allegation for more than a year.  Jansen, who lives in Northumberland County, was arrested in September 2022 and accused of sexually assaulting a student in 2018 when she was working as an educational assistant (EA) at a Clarington school. Jansen was fully acquitted of the charges in an Oshawa courtroom on Nov. 24, but says the verdict doesn’t negate the trauma her and her family have been through since Children's Aid Society knocked on her door in the summer of 2022 and informed her she could not be in the house with her children.  “We didn’t even know what the allegation was for another two weeks,” said Ashley’s husband, Ken Jansen. “They extracted her from our lives and all they would tell us was that there was ‘an active investigation.’”   From there began 15 months of “pure hell” for the family, according to the couple, which included Ashley losing the dream job she had started after leaving the EA profession in 2019, as well as facing judgments and gossip in the community... It was an ordeal that the Jansens should never have had to endure, according to a ruling from the bench by the Hon. Peter Tetley, presiding judge, on Nov. 24. The judge pointed to several inconsistencies in the complainant’s version of events, including describing the room the alleged incident occurred as having a locked door when it did not, not accurately remembering many details of the incident, changing their statement several times, as well as the complainant’s history of violent and abusive behaviour, as issues that should have led to further investigation. “The crown’s case consisted solely of testimony provided by the complainant,” he explained.  “The characterization and factual considerations might reasonably have been expected to call for a careful, impartial, comprehensive investigative response to independently confirm certain aspects of the allegation that could be subject to confirmation or verification. Unfortunately, that did not occur despite the foreseeable consequences of this complaint in relation to the defendant, consequences that included loss of employment, loss of reputation in the community, restrictions to the defendant’s ability to care for her own children, compromises to the defendant’s mental health and well-being and marital stress... The nightmare is far from over for the Jansens, who are dealing not only with the financial fallout of more than $200,000 in legal fees, but also the lasting trauma on the family. “We went to a parade last weekend and when my three-year-old saw the police she started crying saying they were going to take mommy away,” Ken recalled, noting the impact has been similar on the rest of the couple’s five children.   “We’re really, really having a difficult time with how this was allowed to happen,” Ken said, noting the victim had assaulted Ashley in the past and made multiple threats to other staff members while being restrained during violent outbursts, saying that they would “tell someone you touched me.” “It’s inhumane what they were allowed to do. My wife’s life is destroyed, our family’s life is destroyed,” he continued, noting both Ashley’s former union and the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board not only did not provide any assistance throughout the ordeal, but several school staff members testified that they were specifically instructed by superiors not to speak to police on the matter... Ken credits a Durham investigator hired by the family for bringing the truth to light by conducting an investigation he believes should have been completed by police, including talking to staff, visiting the location of the allegations and more.” Damn judge who believes in rape myths! Doesn't he know that trauma means victims can't remember details and become violent, and we should believe victims unconditionally? He is double raping the victim by putting him through all this instead of convicting the accused just on the victim's say so!

Toronto city councillor falsely accuses Doug Ford of threatening Pfizer head with sexual assault - "A Toronto city councillor is standing her ground after accusing Premier Doug Ford of threatening to sexually assault a Pfizer CEO. Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam tweeted on Tuesday, "Premier threatens to sexually assault someone, if he doesn't get what he wants."  Her statement is in reaction to Premier Ford sharing his frustration with Pfizer, which has delayed shipment of the COVID-19 vaccine to Canada. "I would be up that guys ying-yang so far with a firecracker he wouldn't know what hit him," said the Premier in relation to the Pfizer CEO."
From 2021. If everything is rape, nothing is

Probation for woman who had consensual sex but lied to police, claiming she was raped - "As part of her sentence, Siti Junaidah Azahar, 22, has to remain indoors from 10pm to 6am every day, and perform 60 hours of community service...   Siti said she lied as she wanted to leave the hotel room but did not have money with her.  As she was unable to get home, she sent a text message to her cousin and lied that “three boys did something” to her.   She said that so her aunt would agree to book her a Grab ride home"

Liberal Jane on X - "🌸 It’s not consent if I’m afraid to say no. 🌸"
So basically no means no but yes also means no and you can't trust what women say because they have no agency
Ironically the image of the individual in here is very unattractive

Father acquitted of all charges of raping 12-year-old daughter, sexually abusing her - "A man who mounted an "all-or-nothing" defence by denying all 13 charges which include sexual abuse and rape levied against him by his biological daughter was fully acquitted by the High Court..   Justice Valerie Thean went through the details of each charge to explain why she found the evidence of the daughter inconsistent and not "unusually convincing" enough to warrant convictions.  The girl's evidence did not cohere - what she said in court pertaining to dates and what sort of acts had happened differed at points from what she said in police statements, to her school counsellor and her psychiatrist...   The girl also gave conflicting answers as to when a sex toy was first used on her.  At first she said it could have been when she was in Primary 5, but this was inconsistent with her accounts to a psychiatrist and school counsellor respectively.  Justice Thean said there was little reason for the girl to provide different dates to the psychiatrist and school counsellor, who both questioned her on the same day.  At trial, the prosecution obtained receipts to show that the two sex toys were bought online and delivered only on Aug 20, 2019.  This was well after the dates the girl used, and no evidence was adduced to suggest her father had any other sex toys, said the judge."

Father denies raping 12-year-old daughter; testifies about her alleged lies, self-harm behaviour - "he used to punish his daughter by caning her if she misbehaved. He would also scold her and confiscate her phone, which she was first given in Primary 1.  His lawyer then brought him through several incidents where his daughter purportedly lied. When the girl was in Primary 1, she purportedly pushed a boy and her teacher called the girl's mother about this.  "When we confronted her, she actually denied until we told her the teacher has called us, then she told us what happened," said the man.  On another occasion, he and his wife saw the girl poking her brother's head and pushing it against the bed on closed-circuit television (CCTV).  When they talked to her about it, she denied it until they told her that they had seen everything on the CCTV camera...   At a parent-teacher meeting when the girl was in Primary 5, the teacher told the man and his wife not to cane their daughter...   The accused said the mention of the caning was significant because his wife had threatened their daughter, saying that she would be caned twice per mark if she scored anything short of 90 marks.  After the meeting, the accused questioned his daughter and she denied telling her teacher about the caning threat.  "That's where I asked her - if you didn't share this, why will the teacher bring this up? That's where she told me, yes, she did share this with her teacher," the man said.  He also said his daughter was in a choir. On one occasion, he went to school a bit earlier to pick her up and saw her with a friend at the side of the school, appearing jumpy.  "I asked - I thought now is during choir, why are you all here? She said they are having a 15-minute break," said the man.  Feeling something amiss, he got his wife to check with the teacher if their daughter had attended choir, and the answer was no.  He said this was not his daughter's first time skipping choir. When he fetched her home that day, he questioned her but she denied skipping the co-curricular activity.  "I told her that, look, your mother has already called the choir teacher and we know that you didn't attend choir. That's when she told me she skipped choir and she was complaining about the choir teacher," said the accused.   He said he and his wife changed their daughter's phone from a Samsung model to a Nokia phone when the girl was between Primary 1 and Primary 2.  "We did this because we found out that she was accessing adult materials," he claimed. "By changing phone, Nokia phone is 2G, no Internet access, so she can't access any of this material."...   He also denied sexually assaulting her in a storeroom. He said the storeroom was filled to the brim with items and he did not ask anyone to help him in the storeroom because the things inside were very heavy.  "Can two people go inside?" asked Mr Tiwary.  "No," answered the accused, saying he did not think that even one person could enter."
Of course, someone claimed that she lied because of the physical punishment. Might as well say any discipline would make a child lie, so you shouldn't do it

Pennsylvania Woman Lied About Man Attempting to Rape and Kidnap Her Because He Looked 'Creepy,' Gets Him Jailed for a Month - "Anjela Borisova Urumova, 20, identified as a Bristol Township resident, has now been charged for lying about the attack. Bucks County District Attorney Jennifer Schorn's office said that Urumova falsely accused Daniel Pierson, 41, of pulling her pants down and striking her outside of a Redner's supermarket in Middleton Township on April 16.  Pierson went on the face felony charges and spent exactly 31 days behind bars before charges were dropped last Friday and he walked free, the DA said, noting that neither surveillance footage nor Urumova's iPhone corroborated her claims."

Ground News - False rape accusations | Sentenced to pay $200,000 for “terrible” allegations - "A Montreal woman will have to pay $200,000 to a man whose life she “ruined” by falsely accusing him of rape, justice recently ruled."
Fausses accusations de viol | Condamnée à payer 200 000 $ pour de « terribles » allégations - "Tanya Zajdel, une ancienne infirmière, a utilisé tous les moyens de communication à sa disposition pour dénoncer un supposé viol collectif orchestré par Kenneth L. Herman, un Américain de passage dans la métropole québécoise en 2015.  Elle a notamment inondé les réseaux sociaux de ses accusations, les a transmises à l’employeur de M. Herman et a même autoédité un livre mis en vente sur Amazon...   M. Herman a vécu le « cauchemar des cauchemars » dans la foulée de sa visite à Montréal : il a perdu son emploi et a passé plusieurs années à « se sentir comme un paria », écarté par des amis et des voisins. Il avait « une réputation étincelante dans l’écosystème technologique de New York » avant cette affaire... Selon sa page LinkedIn, elle offre des « thérapies de reconnexion » en lien avec les traumas passés... Mme Zajdel a témoigné qu’elle avait rapidement commencé à avoir des flash-back dans les jours suivants, selon lesquels Herman « et ses amis l’ont droguée et brutalement violée ».  Elle dépose ensuite une plainte au Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM), dont l’enquête démontrera que la présumée victime se contredit et que ses souvenirs sont incompatibles avec la réalité : une caméra de surveillance montrait que le duo était seul dans la chambre d’hôtel et des données de géolocalisation disculpaient totalement les amis de M. Herman."

Man killed after threesome goes wrong - "Christopher Membreno, 24, has been arrested and charged with murdering Manos Ikonomidis, 20... He reportedly was seen earlier in the apartment building with a man and woman. The three got involved in a sexual act together when one of the men tried to record the affair, but the woman became angry... The woman and man left the apartment, leaving Ikonomidis behind. A tenant living in the building told the Daily News that the woman called her partner, Membreno, who reportedly was not part of the affair, and alleged that she was raped.  Membreno and two other men allegedly went into the apartment building and chased Ikonomidis with baseball bats, police said. The men reportedly also stabbed the young man."

UP Woman Jailed For Exact Period Man She Falsely Accused Of Rape Served - "A district court in Uttar Pradesh's Bareilly sentenced a woman to four years and five months in jail for filing a false case of rape against a man, recanting her statement and turning hostile during the trial. She was also fined ₹ 5.88 lakh for robbing the man of earning opportunities during the time he was in jail as an undertrial.    The court came down heavily on the woman over the fake case and said, "The real victims have to suffer due to the actions of such women. This is a very serious situation for the society. It is objectionable to use the police and the court as a medium to achieve one's objective. Women can't be allowed to attack the interests of men for unfair advantage."  In 2019, the mother of the survivor, then 15 years old, filed a case of kidnap and rape against one Ajay, alias Raghav. Ajay, 21 years old then, worked with the teen's sister at a jagrata company and would often visit their home. Soon, he became friends with the 15-year-old as well. In her complaint to the police, the teen claimed Raghav drugged her with spiked prasad, took her to Delhi, locked her up in a room, and raped her"
It's interesting it was a false rape accusation, but she's still a "survivor"

Shaykha Alia on X - "I feel so empowered knowing that any man I hate or even find mildly annoying I can accuse of drunkenly groping me 35 years ago without evidence and his life will be destroyed. Thank you feminism!!!"

Meme - Lena Dunham: "Things women do lie about: what they ate for lunch. Things women don't lie about: rape."
"Heartbroken mother, 55, of teenager who hanged himself over false rape allegations kills herself after first anniversary of his death because she 'couldn't see a future without him'"

Meme - Heather O'Neill @ @lethal_heroine: "If you have sex with someone knowing full well it is going to be a one time thing, but the other person believes they are embarking on relationship, I don't think you can really consider the sex consensual. (Although this opinion gets me into trouble at dinner parties.)"
_jo_l_: "You can't give consent when not fully informed and/ or coerced/ manipulated So yes that's rape"
No wonder rape rates are so high nowadays
When you reduce everything to "consent", every sex a woman doesn't like is "rape"

Meme - "Women making false accusations despite being recorded. Why you can't believe women."
"New mile stone marker, I've hit 300 sexual harassment claims in three years
Little back story. I do contract work for an international company, an IA officer. (internal affairs) I hunt down people committing fraud, selling company secrets, looking to quit and take proprietary information with them etc. Most of the times these people I catch are put into an interrogation style room while I review numbers, files, emails, testimony (think the accountant, but I'm no Ben Affleck or super agent) this room is filmed. It is not announced yet it has a small sign on the door saying this room is mic'd and video recorded, yet I still get accused of sexual harassment even though it's recorded from 6 different angles and a high def microphone. Today I was pulled into my three hundredth Sexual harassment inquiry in a 5 year contract. It is company policy to review every complaint. And we usually laugh at the ridiculous excuses and reasons given. and out of the 274 of them were women who thought by claiming harassment they would some how dodge a charge. The most common excuse for doing it by far 217 of them was "because of the glass ceiling I can't advance so I'm taking what is mine.. so tonight im go ng to celebrate and watch a few reels of the most ludicrous excuses ive ever heard. Cheers!!"

PA 911 operator fired after accusing boss of sexual harassment despite their alleged years-long affair - "Maille Russell Bonsall, 40, was fired by the County on February 28th according to the Philadelphia Inquirer after county officials found that she had been illegally recording conversations with her superiors, even those she accused of retaliating against her for the sexual harassment lawsuit.  The outlet reported that Bonsall accused her supervisor former county emergency services director Tim Boyce of “unwanted verbal, physical and sexual harassment during and after work hours,” and masturbating in her presence in his office. She alleged that Boyce made her feel unsafe at the office after she reported this, ignoring her and blocking her access to systems required for her role... County authorities responding to Bonsall’s lawsuit disputed her claims and stated that sexually explicit texts and nude images the two sent to each other using their county-issued cell phones revealed a “longstanding romantic relationship” lasting for years. Citing this evidence they asserted that there was no evidence to suggest that Boyce’s advances were unwelcome to Bonsall and pointed to texts in which she repeatedly professed her love for him. Investigators also discovered texts in which Bonsall told Boyce that she was high at work after using marijuana on the clock, had reportedly altered her own timecard, and refused to cooperate with the investigation... Boyce has plead not guilty and denied any wrongdoing."

‘I was driven out of my policing role in Bradford for offending Muslims’ (Islamophobia in the UK)

‘I told police that criticising Islam wasn’t illegal. Then they sacked me’
A whistleblower reveals how questioning a focus on Muslim sensitivities led to her being sacked as chairman of a hate-crime panel

"It was in October last year, when two men were killed in a terrorist attack at a synagogue in Manchester, that Elaine (who has asked for her name to be changed) realised the awful truth about West Yorkshire Police. Even after the attempted mass murder of Jews, officers in Bradford prioritised the feelings of Muslims and censored any criticism of Islam.

“I could not believe what I was hearing,” Elaine recalls. “I was taking part in this emergency Teams meeting hosted by West Yorkshire Police that day after the horrific attack on the synagogue. It was chaired by a white female inspector. She was very fair, very strict and didn’t take any nonsense, but she was under constant pressure from the Muslim men in the meeting...

“The whole meeting wasn’t about what it should have been about. [It should have been about], ‘How can we protect the Bradford synagogue and the Jewish population?” Instead, she says, much “[was about], ‘We Muslims need protecting because we are now at risk of anti-Muslim reprisals.’”

“The perpetrator hadn’t been [named] yet,” Elaine adds, but a significant number of those on the call – about 25 people – seemed to think there was a good chance he was Muslim. “Community leaders, people from the council and police... were all insisting we couldn’t possibly know who the killer was or what his motives were. At the same time, [community leaders] were demanding: ‘What are you going to do to protect Muslims? We’re going to be attacked because of this, so the mosques need 24/7 security.’”

Elaine, a whistleblower who has bravely come forward to tell her story to The Telegraph, says there was a “clear contradiction” between Muslim members of the panel claiming “immediate victim status”, as well as their insistence that “we don’t yet know the identity of the attacker”.

As a retired senior academic with a distinguished international record in biosecurity, Elaine was approached in 2022 to serve on West Yorkshire Police’s Bradford Hate Crime Scrutiny Panel, made up of members of the public and local officers. The panel’s purpose was to monitor how the police responded to hate crime reports, but it also covered stop and search, as well as incidents when force was used.

“I think I was invited to join because I had wide experience with intercultural practical matters, and I had lots of committee and policy experience in my professional life”...

Elaine tells me she enjoyed the panel’s unpaid work, which drew on the cultural and diplomatic skills she had developed as a consultant on complex security issues in the Middle East and the higher education sector. Some on the panel could be highly critical of the police, but Elaine was usually supportive, often pointing out what a difficult job officers had to do in one of the UK’s most ethnically diverse areas.

From time to time, however, she did have cause to wonder about the impartiality of the authorities. In the “random” selection of cases that the panel was given to appraise, why did so few feature British-Pakistanis who dominate the inner-city areas of Bradford? If that thought occurred to her, she quickly dismissed it.

In November 2024, Elaine was driving into Shipley when she passed a large electronic sign by the side of the road – the type usually reserved for announcements about speed limits and accidents – flashing the message: “Have you been a victim of Islamophobia?” She emailed a police contact to establish who was behind the sign saying: “I think it’s highly divisive and deprioritises all other sorts of ‘hate crimes.’” She never found out who was responsible.

Another incident would come back to bite her. A man had been charged with a hate crime after he rang a police helpline and ranted to the Muslim operator about the Prophet Mohammed marrying a nine-year-old girl, calling him a “paedophile”. Reviewing the case, Elaine was reminded of the so-called “Quran burner” who had been acquitted of a religiously aggravated public order offence by the High Court following a judicial challenge by the Free Speech Union.

“I thought what the caller had said was deeply unpleasant, and I don’t agree with it, but I didn’t think it was criminal,” Elaine recalls. “In Britain, you are allowed to criticise a religion – it’s free speech, isn’t it?” Elaine feared that the police’s initial response, which presumably was not unique to this man and this police force, was tantamount to Britain having a blasphemy law by the back door.

She arranged to see Chief Superintendent Richard Padwell, the district commander for Bradford, and expressed her concerns during an apparently constructive 90-minute meeting on May 19 last year. Padwell told her that a senior legal panel had agreed with Elaine’s assessment that the comments about the Prophet Mohammed were not a crime, and the man’s charge was downgraded to a non-crime hate incident, with his name being struck from police records.

Padwell said there had been a “very heated” meeting about the case, including Muslim officers. Elaine learnt that Muslims in that meeting had been very angry about the outcome, but had been persuaded to change their minds. Elaine wasn’t convinced the Muslim officers had changed their minds – still, she felt the matter was amicably resolved, and at least justice had been done. What she couldn’t possibly know was that the meeting would soon be produced as evidence to support allegations that she had displayed inappropriate, racist behaviour – and used to terrorise her.

For three years, Elaine served dutifully on the Hate Crime Scrutiny Panel, eventually becoming chairman. Despite winning a vote to lead the panel, there was a clear reluctance to tell her so and to depose the incumbent (a Muslim man). It was only after repeated nagging over several months that Elaine’s appointment was finally confirmed in December 2024. “It’s my understanding that, when I was chair, Bradford was the only police scrutiny panel in West Yorkshire not to be chaired by a Muslim man,” she says.

It was in her capacity as panel chairman that Elaine was invited to that emergency meeting after the deadly attack at the synagogue. “I was totally gobsmacked by what I heard,” she says. The woman police inspector who was chairing said: “Our activities are intelligence-led. There is no intelligence of any danger to any mosques.” She repeated that fact several times. “But the men kept on about how worried they were, [saying]: ‘Our women are too afraid to go out, and we need police protection and CCTV.’”

Although there was a promise of police presence “for a while” at the Bradford synagogue, in more than an hour’s discussion, the terrorist atrocity in Manchester was barely mentioned, Elaine says. She reckons the meeting was about half Muslim and half non-Muslim, but “even the non-Muslim people, especially those from the council, were taking the Muslim line”.

She was appalled by the “accepted perspective” of the meeting. “They were totally flipping the argument from ‘Jews are at risk’ to ‘Muslim safety must be our focus’. It was shocking,” Elaine recalls. Another meeting attendee insists the focus was on safeguarding Jews, but Elaine says the only voices offering another point of view were the female police officer and a Jewish community representative. “He was very sad, and he spoke eloquently about his fears and the impact on his family,” she adds.

Bradford’s synagogue was founded in 1873 by German Jews who moved to the city for the wool trade. The Jewish man told the meeting that his great-grandfather had been the first rabbi there, but, sadly, the Jewish community was now tiny and felt increasingly unsafe. With the rise in anti-Semitism, Jews might have to leave Bradford altogether.

The next day, the Teams meeting reconvened, but the white female police inspector had been replaced by a Muslim male inspector. (No explanation was offered for the change at the time.) He began by saying that “all places of worship in Bradford” would now be monitored, Elaine says. By then, they knew the identity of the Manchester terrorist, Jihad Al-Shamie, a Muslim of Syrian descent. Surely, the job of the Hate Crime Scrutiny Panel should be to discuss ways to address the problem of extremism within parts of the Muslim community?

Elaine was astonished when it became clear that, despite everything that had been said the previous day, additional security measures would now be put in place for mosques. “So, 24 hours ago, there was no intelligence of any threats to any mosques, and suddenly, we’ve got a 180-degree turn. I’m sure that lobbying had gone on,” she says.

As the meeting went on in the same surreal, evasive vein, Elaine finally decided to say something. “Of course, I was intimidated. I knew that I was sticking my head over the top, but I had such a sense of injustice about the victims and the rest of the Jewish community that I knew I had to speak out. To have stayed silent in order to keep in line with a false narrative about the synagogue attack putting Muslims at risk would have been unconscionable.”

She deliberately chose her words with care, telling the meeting that the people there represented all communities in Bradford. She said they had to address “the elephant in the room. We know who the attacker is and what community he comes from. We’ve got to be able to address this openly, and if we can’t do it here, there’s no hope.”

The chairman of the committee immediately jumped in and started talking loudly over Elaine. She refused to back down, saying: “Chairman, you said that all places of worship in Bradford will be kept an eye on. Does that include churches?” The chairman floundered and waffled “word salad”, eventually saying there was no intelligence of any threat to churches. “OK, that’s fine. It’s just mosques. Thank you,” Elaine recalls herself saying. It rankled that the panel had initially refused to acknowledge that they were talking about securing mosques, not, as the chairman claimed, all places of worship.

Another meeting had been planned for the following Monday, but Elaine didn’t get the usual notification ahead of time. She soon found out why – she had been sacked. An unpleasant letter from Padwell said complaints had been raised by six separate individuals (community members and police officers) who had been on the Teams meeting. He inaccurately quoted Elaine’s comments – “We all know which community is behind the attack” (she doesn’t recall using these words), “There is a need to address the elephant in the room”, and “Just say you won’t be paying attention to the churches” (Elaine says she never used these words, simply posing the question about churches) – which were deemed to be “divisive and inflammatory”.

Elaine’s observations, said Padwell, were based on “stereotypical assumptions, pointing blame at a community as a whole”. (“That’s a lie,” says Elaine.) Padwell then supported his decision to remove her from the panel by citing the meeting that he and Elaine had in May 2025 (“A background of previous concerns”), managing to make it sound like it had been some kind of disciplinary hearing (“Regarding your comments… which was one of the reasons leading me to speak to you”). As he knew full well, it was Elaine who had sought the meeting to express her anxiety that a back-door blasphemy law was being used to convict people who had merely been offensive, not criminal. (The lawyers had agreed with her and clearly found nothing racist or hateful in her remarks.) 

For the record, Chief Superintendent Richard Padwell is Jewish. Shame on him.

“I was frightened,” Elaine says. “And I don’t frighten easily. I have worked nationally and internationally at a very high level, including lots of work at the UN in Geneva and Washington DC on biosecurity. All my teaching has been about how scientists can protect their work from terrorists and their own governments.

“I’ve been contracted by the Ministry of Defence and the US State Department for multiple pieces of research. I’ve travelled for this all over the world. I even taught biosecurity to Iraqi weapons scientists in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussain for the US state department, for goodness sake! I managed to get the Biological Weapons Convention to change their regular annual agenda to include biosecurity as a standard agenda item. I have worked regularly with Muslim men in many countries and been treated with nothing but courtesy and huge respect.”

Elaine points out that she has taught in the Middle East and former Soviet states. “I’m used to dealing with difficult matters in sensitive situations. Yet, here in Bradford, the most basic, anodyne comments and questions are shut down and accused of hate crime. Supported by the police! What on earth? It is really shocking to realise that our taxpayer-funded police service is, in effect, in the hands of Muslim activists. I am not saying they are all extremists, of course not. But it is totally unacceptable to see the police behaving like this.”

It is utterly outrageous actually. It makes me think of something a senior source at Essex Police said to me: “What you have to bear in mind is what the police fear most is the Muslims kicking off.”

I am not surprised that Elaine was frightened. In his letter, Padwell conceded that her offence (ahem) “is not being recorded as a hate crime”. It might be a tad awkward for the deposed chairman of the Hate Crime Scrutiny Panel to be charged with that one, eh, Richard? What came next, though, is truly chilling. After saying that he would “not be sharing the circumstances of your departure with other community members on the scrutiny panel”, Padwell added: “Nor will I be providing your personal details to those community members who have concerns about comments you made on Oct 2.”

“It sounded like a threat,” Elaine says, and I see this confident, chatty woman across the table suddenly blench at the memory. “Why would he mention sharing my details unless people had asked for them? Who wants them and why? It’s really horrible. It does knock you off balance. It does. Because you know you’re a decent, law-abiding person and suddenly you’re being treated as if you’re the opposite.”

Elaine sent an exceedingly polite reply to Padwell. “I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing how much he’d upset me.” But she immediately contacted the Free Speech Union, who flew into action, lodging a subject access request for Elaine with West Yorkshire Police. They uncovered a number of troubling remarks from “deeply offended” Muslim officers.

“I have serious concerns regarding the comments made and endorsed by [Elaine], specifically those directed at Prophet Mohammed and Muslims. These remarks are troubling given they appear to be largely promoted by Right-wing groups,” complained one. “[Elaine] seems to think the Prophet married a nine-year-old, and it’s ok to call him a paedophile,” said another. A third simply called her “infuriating” for articulating opinions with which the vast majority of Britons would agree. Members of West Yorkshire Police also took issue with “derogatory opinions of the Islamic faith that the [chairman] held, and stated they were influenced by far-Right rhetoric that was particularly upsetting to those of the Islamic faith”.

The qualifications of all of Elaine’s police critics combined would not add up to one tenth of her degrees and scientific doctorates, yet they felt confident dissing this immensely knowledgeable and humane Yorkshirewoman as a “Tommy Robinson” tribute act. One of the complaints about her comments in the meeting, which came from a West Yorkshire Police email address, said: “I don’t know the lady in question... some of the wording used on the meeting today, I noted in my daybook, ‘There is one community that this is coming from’, ‘Just say it how it is, we are not stupid’. It appeared she was insinuating that the hate towards the Jewish community was from the Muslim community only, and Muslims (two billion or so worldwide) themselves.”

A second complaint from a police email address said: “A lady... made some absurd comments which I believe to be outright hate and racism. [She] mentioned that we need to address the ‘elephant’ in the room, which was referring to the Muslim community. [She] mentioned that we should say things as they are, as we all know which community is responsible for the attacks in Manchester, again referring to the Muslim community.”

Another complaint, also made by someone using a West Yorkshire Police email address, said: “[She] made a number of comments that I found deeply troubling... I found her remarks highly inappropriate and concerning.” A fourth email from within West Yorkshire Police, marked “importance: high”, said: “This is the second occasion on which concerns have been raised regarding her behaviour.”

Three out of a total of six complaints were made by West Yorkshire Police staff within the space of two-and-a-quarter hours on Oct 3, the day of the meeting and the day after the attack on the synagogue.

West Yorkshire Police insist “legal advice supported our view that... the attendee’s comments did not demonstrate impartiality and had breached both the Terms of Reference and Code of Conduct. As such, she was removed from the role.”

You know, there are times when you bury your head in your hands and wonder, “What kind of country are we living in?” This is one of those times. As Lord Young of Acton, the general secretary of the Free Speech Union, says: “You couldn’t ask for a clearer example of two-tier policing. West Yorkshire Police seems more concerned with protecting the feelings of Muslim community leaders than protecting Jews from terrorist attacks. It’s little wonder public confidence in the police is declining.”

Lord Young is right to place Elaine’s case in a much wider context. Historically, West Yorkshire Police has faced multiple accusations of appeasing Muslims at the expense of the wider community. Like turning a blind eye to rape gangs to avoid provoking “community tensions”, aka upsetting Muslims. (Bradford has, quite remarkably, largely escaped scrutiny for industrial-scale depravity by Pakistani-origin men, and may yet turn out to be the worst of all.)

Meanwhile, West Midlands Police recently disgraced themselves by using falsehoods about Maccabi Tel Aviv football club to ban them from a match in Birmingham which would – oh, yes – provoke “community tensions”. The Islamists in the local community got what they wanted and the Jews stayed away. In London, the Metropolitan Police have allowed the pro-Palestine marchers to get away with murderous chants and now, too late, denounce the attacks their tolerance encouraged.

In Bradford, a senior officer in the very police force that was denounced for not protecting a Batley Grammar School teacher from Islamist intimidation and threats, has punished Elaine for drawing “inappropriate” attention to “the elephant in the room”, even as it becomes a herd of raging pachyderms. Among members of the public, there are growing anxieties about sectarianism influencing public life, not least in areas like Bradford, where segregation is rife and there have been heated rows between councillors over the war in Gaza.

In her highly critical 2024 report into West Yorkshire Police’s handling of the Batley Grammar affair, Dame Sara Khan stated that the teacher was “not treated as a genuine victim, despite facing serious intimidation and threats”. (Shamefully, the poor man is still in hiding with his family.) She said police were focused on managing community tensions rather than firmly defending lawful expression and the safety of staff. The police response “showed a failure to understand the seriousness of freedom-restricting harassment”. This is Dame Sara’s term for intimidation that pressures people into silence or self-censorship.

Isn’t that exactly what Elaine experienced in the aftermath of the Manchester synagogue attack? She was not supposed to discuss the one thing that mattered.

West Yorkshire is, notably, the force whose Chief Constable John Robins said last year that he wants discrimination against white British job candidates to be legal in order to boost the number of ethnic minorities among his officers and across the country. Elaine’s insight shows how much sensitivities towards ethnic minorities are affecting the force and its decision-making. Meanwhile, religious language has become commonplace in meetings and around the force’s headquarters, to her bafflement.

“I mean, can you imagine if a load of Christian fundamentalists were walking round police HQ saying: ‘Hello, brother. Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Let’s read the Bible every two minutes.’ There’d soon be something said about it, but the police are too scared of seeming racist to object.”

One grain of hope, perhaps, lies in the fact that Reform UK and the Conservatives – both of which have been challenging the state’s capitulation to Islamism – stormed to first and second place in the Bradford local elections on May 7. Those who hate the separatism in places like Bradford, and the refusal of public institutions to tackle it, are not going gentle into that good night.

Sadly, Elaine is far from alone. “We’re seeing huge numbers of people being punished for criticising Islam or Muslim cultural practice,” says Benjamin Jones of the Free Speech Union. “Since Keir Starmer came to power, it has increased times four. And that’s before the new anti-Muslim hostility definition.”

“It beggars belief that we have come to this through the craven tolerance of successive governments,” says Elaine. She says she knows that she will probably be recognised from this article and that may put her in danger. But, in Yorkshire, they make their women strong like their tea, thank goodness.

As we get up to leave, I give her a hug and I feel so damn sorry. Sorry she lost the role you she was doing so well. Sorry that the state doesn’t share the view that Jews should be the ones protected after an attack on a synagogue. Sorry that defending the right of someone to make comments critical of Islam (or any other religion) is called hate. Sorry that she coped splendidly with Saddam’s weapons scientists, but was brought down by a toxic and cowardly Chief Superintendent."

Links - 13th June 2026 (2 - Left Wing Economics [including Doordash & Taylor Lorenz])

Meme - "Inflation is bad"
"Inflation is bad or you ordered a private taxi for your burrito"
"Private taxi for my burrito"

Wall Street Apes on X - "This American works full time in the operating room at a hospital and just got off a 12 hour shift.  It’s after midnight and she must now go drive DoorDash after being on her feet for 12 hours because the cost of living is so high in America.
“I work in the operating room and I just worked a 12-hour shift in the operating room and I cannot afford my rent. I can't afford my rent. I can't afford gas. I can't afford groceries. I can't afford any of my endless other bills that I am responsible for because I am an adult.  After working a 12-hour shift in the operating room. So you know what I have to do? I have to DoorDash, and it's 12: 30 at night after I've been on my feet in the operating room for 12 hours all f*cking day. I'm now out DoorDash driving”
I’ll never shop sharing these stories because we must ALL advocate for a drastically lower cost of living.  We cannot accept this is the way things are. We cannot accept this is the direction we’re going and things will just keep getting more expensive"
EducatëdHillbilly™ on X - "So she’s either a janitor in the operating room or she’s spending an ungodly amount of money because any RN is making over $90,000/year as an OR nurse."
MarbleRabbit on X - "Her video about having to drive doordash comes exactly 3 posts after the recap of her vacation to the French Riviera"
Proof that the working class is underpaid, that we need to "tax" billionaires and that Capitalism has Failed. Anyone who disagrees is a Bootlicker

Meme - Allie+ @allie_voss: "The younger and poorer the generation, the more they eat out and DoorDash. This is part of the problem"
"How each generation spends on food (January to September 30, 2023)
Gen Z - 22% delivery, 32% grocery, 46% restaurant
Millennials - 15% delivery, 46% grocery, 39% restaurant
Gen X - 9% delivery, 53% grocery, 38% restaurant
Baby Boomers - 4% delivery, 62% grocery, 34% restaurant
Interwar Generation - 2% delivery, 69% grocery, 29% restaurant"

Meme - Taylor Lorenz @Taylorlorenz: "This is bc they do not have the time or capacity to create home cooked meals. It's an issue countless pal have tried to raise w leftists but big leftists online continue to poor ppl for being forced to rely on these services for meals, which act as a tax on the poor"
Taylor Lorenz @TaylorLorenz: "I Seamlessed a $22 avocado toast and this is what just arrived *crummy avocado toast*"

Meme - Taylor Lorenz: "l am pretty into the disability justice world bc of my health stuff and I volunteer doing meal delivery to ppl who are struggling financially and can't make their own food. I hope you can get out of your bubble! You'll see that a single person's experience is not universal."
Bridget Phetasy @BridgetPhe...: "You can just say you work for DoorDash! There is no shame in it!"

The Fat Electrician on X - "We are unironically moments away from people legitimately declaring DoorDash is a human right."

Disinformation Expert Lizzy on X - "This is complete BS. It's cheaper and healthier to cook your own meals. Spend a few hours on the weekend batch cooking and freezing your meals for the week or the month. People have been doing this for years and there are infinite resources to teach people how to meal prep."

LB on X - "Taylor Lorenz has to be top ten social media personality who is completely out of touch with the real word"
Vanessa on X - "Thread starts with that graph showing Gen Z spends 46% of food money at restaurants. Then she inexplicably says they don’t have time to eat at a restaurant bc they’re all working two jobs (??) then ends it with “this is actually about the elderly and disabled” lol amazing"

Meme - Jack @whothehellsjack: "No I work in retail where I can quite literally see how much money I'm making the company. I'll do anywhere between $600 and $2000 in a 5hr shift while only making $71. It's more radicalizing to see the dramatic extent at which your surplus labor is being extracted"
Mago Berlino @MagoBerlino2: "Translated from Italian We're all leftists until we start working"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "The figure is sales revenue, not profit; typical net profit margins in retail are around 3%, meaning the company profits only from those sales after deducting costs of goods, rent, utilities, and overhead."
Left wingers don't understand the difference between revenue and profit. That's why they're poor

Yogi on X - "Bezos went on CNBC yesterday and said "You could double the taxes I pay and it's not gonna help that teacher in Queens."  And all the bureaucrats and socialists lost their minds.  Promise the teacher a raise. Tax everyone. Launder the money through Washington. Then blame the billionaire. We aren't morons Ro, we've seen this before.  Bezos said the bottom half of earners should pay zero federal income tax.  A nurse in Queens making $75K hands the IRS $12K a year. He said cut it to zero. She keeps her full paycheck. No bs refund, paperwork or shady government program.   Simple.   They won't do it. And you should ask yourself why.  They don't ACTUALLY want to help anyone. They just want to pretend they tried and get your votes while making you hate the ppl they scammed.  They want the money to flow through Washington, the city, every ponzi department and consultant and charity so each one can wet their beak.   By the time it reaches the teacher it's maybe $100, if that...  And then they'll blame the billionaire who hasn't paid their "fair share." Right Warren???  Lets take a gander at Mamdani's education budget.  NYC spends $42K per student per year, 3x the national average ($15K). Highest in America. Florida pays $9K.   NYC spends more per pupil than most people pay for private school or college. Its frickn insane.  The budget has gone up every year, enrollment has gone down. With all that money only 3 out of 10 kids can read in the 8th grade. Cuba can read better english and they speak spanish lol.  So where is the money going? Def not to teachers. but shh, ro doesn't want you to know that.   A starting teacher in NYC makes $65K. Mamdani's city spends $42K per kid, runs a $40B budget. You could pay every teacher six figures with that money and have 12 kids per a classroom. But thats too logical.  It goes to administrators. Consultants. Overtime. Unions. Friends and family businesses. Pensions for people who left a decade ago. Studies about studies. Buildings that take ten years to renovate. Everyone else but the kids, teachers and actual schools  THERE IS ENOUGH MONEY.  Politicians decide where the money goes. Teachers are underpaid because of how government spends money. Not because Bezos doesn't pay enough.   Then they stand outside a billionaire's apartment with a camera and tell you he's the problem.  That's the SCAM.  Ro Khanna says tax billionaires to fund $60K teacher salaries. NYC already spends enough to fund $100K teacher salaries. The money's there, Ro. Your people are the ones who won't give it to her.  Federal level is the same story. DOE spending up 649% since 2000 and kids aren't any smarter. GAO found $186 billion in improper payments last year. $3 trillion in errors since 2003. It’s criminal.   Stop taxing the nurse. No bureaucracy. Just let the woman keep her full paycheck.  Outrage is deflection.   They'd rather she pay.   Because her keeping her own money doesn't fund the machine and they lose the one thing that keeps the whole racket going: a billionaire to blame."

John Rain on X - ""Why do anxious people lean left?" According to this study, anxious individuals are more likely to support welfare programs and wealth redistribution, but not other left-wing policies. The researchers interpreted this as evidence that anxious people are mainly motivated by concern for their own material security, rather than any abstract sense of "injustice.""
Beki on X - "So... insecurity driven by illegal immigration, crime, and debt will lead to more leftist voters, who then elect more people who increase illegal immigration, crime, and debt. Feedback loop."

Meme - Robert Reich @RBReich: "There are basically 5 ways to accumulate a billion dollars:
1) Profiting from a monopoly
2) Insider-trading
3) Political payoffs
4) Fraud
5) Inheritance
Don't believe the self-made myth."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "Research shows most billionaires accumulated wealth by founding and building successful companies. A University of Chicago study found 69% of the 2011 Forbes 400 started their own businesses."

Meme - Magatte Wade: "If you look at the Doing Business Index, it's easier to do business in any Scandinavian country than ANYWHERE in sub-Saharan Africa. That's why they're rich and we're poor. We have mineral wealth and land wealth - we should be mind-blowingly rich if we were unchained like Denmark."
Magatte Wade: "Why is Africa still poor today? Because it's the hardest place in the world to do business."
How ignorant. Don't they know it's all colonialism? That's why Vietnam and Singapore are so poor today

Lauren Chen on X - "Biden's FTC literally went after bulk pricing as "discriminatory".  It sounds ridiculous, but it's real.  They argued it was unfair smaller retailers were charged more than big brands.  But they didn't get that the big brands paid less per unit because they bought bigger quantities.  Antitrust is supposed to protect consumers, but bulk pricing is a standard business practice, and the entire concept behind companies like Costco.  This is what happens when bureaucrats dont live in the real world 🤡"

Opinion | Labor Department redesign makes tracing union spending easier - The Washington Post (aka "The federal government’s most efficient use of $600 ever?") - "Turns out it’s possible to improve a government website without wasting gobs of money on contractors and consultants. A tiny office in the Labor Department has made big strides to improve transparency for union members at negligible cost to taxpayers. Federal labor law says that once a union is certified or recognized in a workplace, it is the exclusive bargaining agent for all workers there. That means every certified or recognized union is a government-backed monopoly. With government-granted power comes government-mandated transparency. A 1959 law, passed after a series of corruption scandals, requires unions to file public disclosure reports detailing their activities each year with the Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS). OLMS has posted those reports on its website for years. But they’re difficult to read, they could only be viewed one at a time, and they’re sometimes hundreds of pages long. As part of the Trump administration’s effort to modernize government websites, OLMS has added a new “Visualization” column. All the reports are available the same as before, but now some also have a more user-friendly version. The data are searchable and sortable, and users can view multiyear comparisons, with charts, at a glance. This fix has made it much easier to see, for example, that the Amalgamated Transit Union has 18 vice presidents, and they all make more than $215,000 a year. Or that the Laborers’ International Union of North America spends just $30.53 per member on representational activities while its president and secretary-treasurer each make over $740,000 a year. Or that a single lobbyist for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees made more money than any of the union’s officers in 2025. Or that the United Steelworkers’ largest single expense last year was $2.9 million to Caesars Entertainment Corporation, for its Las Vegas convention. This significant improvement didn’t require a protracted bidding process. OLMS Director Elisabeth Messenger said the visualization feature was made in-house in 78 business days and the software was less than $600. She added that the visualization feature will be expanded to cover other reports the agency receives, including from employers. Will this upgrade lead to a massive improvement in the lives of most Americans? Not really. But a small government office significantly improving the way it fulfills its mission for less than $600 offers a model for others. And it’s a win for union members who want to know how their dues are being spent."
Richard Hanania on X - "Absolutely shocked that unions don’t actually represent the interests of workers but union bosses instead."
This is why left wingers promote union membership. Of course, their "solution" is to just expand the graft so everyone can eat instead of reducing it

Vijay on X - "This is an absolutely incredible interview with the former Democrat Governor of Washington state. Her criticism of the current legislature is sharp and well made. The current leaders of Washington are way out of their depth and leading the state off a fiscal cliff:
-----------------------
Questioner: Do you think majority leaders understand—do you [think] our legislature understands the impact of [the] policy environment as it relates to [the] economy?
Christine Gregoire: No. I really don’t. As evidenced by… You mentioned estate tax. I argued with some folks about [the] estate tax. We were the highest in the country, tied with Hawaii at twenty percent. We went to thirty-five. We’re not just the highest — we are beyond the highest. And I said, “You understand the consequences of this? Can I see your fiscal note because I’d like to help [craft] it? Because here’s what you can expect: Those people are not homeless. They will not [be] paying [taxes] when they leave. They stop paying cap gains. When they leave, they stopped giving significantly to philanthropy which would otherwise be necessary by government. So do you understand that you see consequences of what you’re doing?” And the answer is no. I left office with a budget of 33 billion and the budget today is 80 billion. Uh, I think that’s a little bit too much of growth. Yet how we find ourselves [is that] every legislative session now is in whole projected to be in the hole. We don’t really have an income problem. We have a spending problem. And we’re answering it by stacking one more tax, one more rule, one more regulation. The one thing that the business community doesn’t need is that lack of predictability. How many people in either of [the] Democratic caucuses have come from a business past? So if you haven’t come from it, you don’t know it, you don’t understand it. And therefore, to me, we all collectively — and Chris and I have talked a lot about this — have to educate from the outside in. We have to explain things like sales tax on services. [You] thought [it] was a nice attack on big business. And here are the small businesses that have been tremendously adversely impacted as well as customers."

Rethinking Economics, the movement changing how the subject is taught
Tellingly, the article barely talks about what they think is wrong with mainstream economics, but it looks like it's just pushing neo-Marxism instead of claiming that mainstream economics is factually wrong, which is not surprising

Opinion | Europe Is in Decline. Good. - The New York Times - "Among contemporary European writers, the novelist Michel Houellebecq is not known for his optimism. In his oeuvre spanning three decades, a leitmotif has been the inexorability of human decline, from the quality of internet pornography to European civilization itself. “France has given up on progress,” he wrote in 2014. “We are all not only tourists in our own country, but also willing participants in tourism.” Today, Mr. Houellebecq’s comments sound darkly prophetic. Economic growth across the continent, long anemic, has dwindled toward nought, with even Germany’s industrial behemoth slumping. Dynamism has disappeared, replaced by painful dependencies: Europe’s technology comes from America, its critical minerals from China. The continent’s transformation into an arid playpen for tourists, with its economies geared to serve the visitors, is no longer the stuff of dyspeptic speculation... it is undeniable that Europe has been “provincialized,” as the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer once termed it. The negotiations to end the war in Ukraine show that the bloc has been steadily reduced to a second-rate participant in world affairs. In President Trump’s eyes, it is “decaying” and at risk of “civilizational erasure.” All of this sounds menacing enough to Europeans. Yet perhaps demotion need not be traumatic. Rather, a reckoning with European decline — cultural, political and, above all, economic — could give rise to a healthily modest approach to the present. After a century in which Europe was in charge, with highly ambiguous results, it might even free Europeans of the burdening neurosis of mastery. At least Brussels no longer suffers from denial; across the spectrum, there’s an awareness that the continent is falling behind. A paradigmatic acknowledgment came last year from the former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi. In a quietly blistering report, Mr. Draghi — widely credited for saving the euro after the financial crisis — enumerated the woes of the European economy, from lack of so-called competitiveness to lagging productivity. Yet many of the remedies in circulation today are likely to aggravate the disease they purport to cure. The far right offers a familiar prescription: a racial cordon around the continent. Europe’s center, in turn, vaguely gestures at a strategy of renewal through remilitarization and technological advances. The left, for its part, either rails against European overreach or welcomes the continent’s retreat. What is needed is a new “politics of decline,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Eric Hobsbawm, one that looks both inward and outward. Internally, it requires a break with the austerity fetish that has gripped European policymakers since the 1990s. It is with good reason that the economic historian Adam Tooze has castigated E.U. technocrats as “the Taliban of neoliberalism” for their intransigent attachment to market principles in an age that has declared them obsolete. Jettisoning this dogma is crucial; loosening the fiscal rules for member states would facilitate economic catch-up, on the back of a serious strategy of public investment. On the political front, that would mean conscious centralization and pooling of sovereignty... If Europe is to reinvent itself, it must think in more heterodox ways. Mostly, it will have to contemplate something considered beyond the pale in Brussels: critical integration with China... No longer in the driver’s seat of history, it can shed its damaging delusions of grandeur. On geopolitics and climate mitigation, it can meet its targets even if it no longer gets to be the star player. That will require downsizing some expectations: The aim should be what British soccer fans call midtable stability, rather than league leadership."
When you can't deny decline anymore, the next cope is to embrace and celebrate it instead of striving for excellence and double down on disastrous left wing policies

Meme - Hannah Cox: "Anti-capitalists think they're virtuous but at the end of the day they actually just want a slave class working for them for free."
Kostas Moros @MorosKostas: "Then go make art and be in your garden. Nobody is stopping you. If you say "but then how will I pay rent and eat!", then your actual complaint is you want stuff to be handed to you for free. Which means *others* have to work to provide for you, and not make art or be in gardens."
BIG ttIMI @OrevaZSN: "I just really, really hate the concept of capitalism. I don't want to work my job every day. I want to make art. I want to be in my garden. I want to feel something."

Meme - Richard Hanania @RichardHanania: "Yeah sorry, coming more and more to believe that abundance as a left- wing project isn't going to work. At best it'll make things better on the margins in a few policy areas like housing. But unless you're willing to go to war with organized labor, this will keep happening."
Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi: "Both the democratic frontrunners for governor want to kill more people by reversing the autonomous vehicle rules that the CA DMV already approved"
Xavier Becerra @XavierBecerra: "Let's be clear: When it comes to automation, jobs and safety come first. Trucks still need drivers. Driverless trucks - the heaviest vehicles on our roads and highways - must take a backseat to jobs and safety."
POLITICO: "California politics could cause a reversal on autonomous trucks"
Left wingers are luddites after all

Clay Travis on X - "Here’s Mayor Pete announcing the Biden administration’s decision to fight the Jet Blue and Spirit merger so they could protect consumers and ensure low fares. Now the airline doesn’t exist and passengers are stranded across the country."
Ian Miller on X - "It really is remarkable how awful the Biden administration was. A mixture of spectacular incompetence, malicious disregard for common sense, and political extremism It flies under the radar because Biden was mentally gone, but the whole thing was a massive trainwreck"

Robert Sterling on X - "Joe Biden killed Spirit Airlines. And anti-business, anti-market politicians like Elizabeth Warren celebrated as he did so.  Spirit has been in financial distress for years. Its ultra low-cost operating model simply no longer works. Back in 2022, though, JetBlue offered Spirit a lifeline.  JetBlue bid to acquire the struggling airline for $3.8B, and Spirit’s shareholders accepted the deal. The Spirit brand would have been retired, and the interior of the jets would have been somewhat reconfigured (more premium seats, more legroom, no more inserting a quarter to use the lavatory, etc.). The core of what made Spirit “Spirit”—good, bad, and ugly alike—would have changed. But the majority of flight routes would have been preserved, and most Spirit employees would have kept their jobs.  Given the sizable challenges to Spirit’s business model—as well as the company’s weak balance sheet—it was the best outcome any of its stakeholders could have hoped for.  But that wasn’t good enough for the Biden administration, nor for politicians like Senator Warren (who has never seen a dollar of shareholder value she didn’t wish to tax, regulate, or otherwise strangle out of existence).  In 2023, the Biden DOJ sued to block the deal. In January 2024, a judge ruled in the DOJ’s favor, and the deal was dead by March. By November 2024, Spirit was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy; after emerging with a restructured balance sheet in early 2025, it would file for Chapter 11 again—a rare “double dip” bankruptcy process—less than a year later, in August 2025.  And now, possibly as early as this weekend, Spirit will enter liquidation. Its planes will be parceled out to the highest bidders, where they will likely fly completely different routes across the US. Its pilots will land safely on their feet (though they, too, may have to relocate their families to new home bases), as will some flight attendants. Most mechanics and other ground crew are probably out of luck—and jobs.  The Biden administration’s lawsuit against JetBlue all but guaranteed this. And the worst part is, anyone could have predicted it (in fact, countless people across the aviation and finance worlds did just that).  When the DOJ or FTC sues to block an M&A deal, it typically does so by arguing the post-transaction market will be too concentrated (you’ll hear something called the Herfindahl-Hirschman index referenced to argue this; and don’t worry, the rest of us can’t pronounce it either). But this was not the argument the Biden DOJ made.  The DOJ instead argued that Spirit, as an independent company, charged so little that it created a disproportionate downward pricing effect that affected the rest of the airline industry. In other words, Spirit was so cheap that it couldn’t be allowed to be acquired by a competitor, lest the entire airline industry be able to raise prices.  It’s analogous to saying the dirty Arby’s in my town can’t shut down, or else the steak house across the city might be able to charge more.  But here’s the thing: Those disproportionately downward prices meant Spirit wasn’t viable as a business. Unlike legacy carriers such as United—which now generate a large share of profit from premium seats—Spirit does not offer premium seats with which it can subsidize its lower-cost fares. ALL of Spirit’s fares are ultra low-cost tickets, with ultra low margins for the company.  And now, the company is about to die.  So way to go, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Lina Khan and all the rest of you who—despite barely having held private-sector jobs, let alone built companies or been responsible for payroll—know what a business should do better than its shareholders, board of directors, executives, employees, investment bankers, and lawyers.  Job well done. I hope you’re proud."
Jeremy Carl on X - "Best short explanation I've seen of how the Biden admin (and Elizabeth Warren) killed Spirit Airlines.  I think the most notable thing is the incredibly unusual justification they used to kill the JetBlue merger.    They essentially said not that it would have created unaccountable monopoly power (which it clearly would not have) that it would have created upward pricing pressure to let the merger go through-- which is true after a fashion, because Spirit's low fare business model was selling dollar bills for ten cents-- It didn't work anymore as a business.  So prices were going to be going up in any event.  But if, like Elizabeth Warren and the Dems, you've never run a buisness, this sort of fact eluded you.  Now strict honesty compells me to say that you would have had *some* of today's outcome even with the merger-- some routes would have gone away, prices would have gone up to what was needed to make the routes profitable, etc.-- but it would have been done in a much more controlled way that would have been FAR better for both flyers and Spirit's 14,000 employees, many  fewer of whom would have lost their jobs."

Don Keith on X - "🚨Stacey Abrams has some explaining to do. Her NGO snagged $2 billion in taxpayer cash for eco-friendly refrigerators in Georgia. Only 67 people actually received one! She bragged about it on TV anyway. Massive fraud in plain sight and still zero arrests."
Jason Robertson on X - "Sadly, this program is a prime example of exactly how all of these programs are designed to work.  The $2 Billion was never intended to buy refrigerators.  It was intended to fund an NGO and pay a bunch of leftists salaries.  It was also intended to spend advertising money on media outlets and other leftist platforms promoting the platform.  All of those people then are expected to vote for and donate to the leftist politicians.  Honestly the part that that should surprise us is that they accidentally figured out how to buy 67 Fridges, that part had to be an accident"

Polymarket on X - "NEW: The EU is pushing for “tech sovereignty” to reduce its reliance on the U.S."
Melissa Chen on X - "Wake up, Europe.   You have exactly two choices: America’s tech stack or China’s.  You cannot build your own. You cannot complete anything at scale. All you do is pass legislation, issue fines, write stern letters of concern, and hold press conferences about “digital sovereignty” while your cloud infrastructure, AI models, semiconductors, and platforms remain overwhelmingly dependent on foreign technology.   Pretending you’ll magically “build European champions” by taxing, fining, and hamstringing the only people who actually ship product at global scale is delusional. Decades of evidence prove it. Brain drain continues. Investment gaps widen.   We know what the data says: Europe lags behind in AI, cloud, semiconductors, and consumer platforms because of the regulatory moat you build and maintain around mediocrity.  So you can push for sovereignty but it will not materialize because you’re unwilling to do what it takes to get there."

Hamas Psychology & Oct 7th

John Spencer on X

Hamas captured documents show they believed they could destroy Israel with their October 7th attack, sought more Iran, Hezzbollah, others. But Israel was not destroyed and all the terrorists with their big plans are dead, their organizations decimated, dismantled, or greatly degraded. An amazing report by

@AmitSegal

https://substack.com/home/post/p-197079048… In the Middle East, there is an entity that believed it could wipe out its arch-enemy in one grand operation. In pursuit of this goal, it dragged its allies into a war they did not believe in, and one they would ultimately lose. I speak, of course, of Hamas. According to an analysis of captured Hamas documents by the Hebrew University’s Dr. Daniel Sobelman, Hamas’s thinking was the precise opposite of Israeli intelligence assumptions. By 2019, the terror group had come to believe that it was Israel that was deterred from action. In the words of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh, “Any violation of the red lines... the resistance will be capable of deterring.” The turning point came in 2021. In early January, a top-secret Hamas military command document emphasized the need to bring Jerusalem into its “rules of engagement.” That May, Hamas initiated a 12-day conflict over tensions on Temple Mount. Israel responded with Operation Guardian of the Walls. Israel’s head of IDF Military Intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, came out of the operation with the now-painfully overconfident assessment that “five years of complete calm with Gaza” was achieved. In Gaza, however, Hamas was celebrating a paradigm-shifting strategic victory. The fighting had sparked unprecedented Arab Israeli uprisings—an internal vulnerability Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar realized could be weaponized as a “nuclear bomb” to destroy Israel. The war had also seen the organization’s first active wartime coordination with Iran and Hezbollah via a joint situation room. Most of all, Hamas watched Israel scramble to contain the domestic violence and avoid a larger regional war. Paraphrasing Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, they assessed Israel was “weaker than a spider’s web.” Far from a deterrent, the 2021 conflict was a highly successful “dress rehearsal” for the full liberation of Palestine. But to fund their big plan, they needed Tehran. In June 2021, Sinwar, Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, and deputy commander Marwan Issa sent urgent telegrams requesting $20 million a month and training for 12,000 fighters to “uproot this dirty entity.” By the spring of 2022, Hamas’s leadership had coined a name for the impending war: “the big project.” That timing wasn’t a coincidence. In late 2022, Israel swore in a new, right-wing government. In a “Top Secret” internal assessment, Hamas’s leadership concluded that the unprecedented domestic political crisis protesting the new government was “melting the glue” that held the Zionist entity together. Furthermore, Sinwar believed that the highly publicized actions of Israel’s new ministers regarding Muslim holy sites would provide the ultimate religious catalyst to convince his hesitant regional allies that an immediate, coordinated attack was justified. But even with a plan in place, Hamas had not secured a solid commitment from the Axis of Resistance. In June 2022, ahead of a critical diplomatic trip to Lebanon, Sinwar sent Haniyeh a five-page letter titled “Uniting the Fronts and the Decision to Seize the Opportunity.” Noting that his military wing was fully prepared for immediate implementation, Sinwar outlined three distinct scenarios for joint action: Scenario One (The Promise of the Hereafter): A full-force, multi-arena surprise confrontation involving Hamas, Hezbollah, and other regional forces (with Iran supporting from the sidelines) to immediately bring down and end the State of Israel. Crucially, this relied on simultaneous, massive uprisings in Judea and Samaria and among Arab Israelis. Scenario Two (The Medium-Level Battle): Designed to humiliate Israel and crush its morale. Hamas would enter with full force, but Hezbollah would commit only a third or a quarter of its capabilities. The goal was to trigger mass Israeli emigration, release prisoners, and liberate Judea and Samaria—driven by violent internal revolts from Arab Israelis and Palestinians. Scenario Three (The Scenario of Necessity): Hamas goes it alone. Hezbollah does not join the fight, but remains on standby and permits Hamas to activate its own forces from within Lebanese territory. To compensate for the lack of foreign military support, Hamas planned to “blow up the situation” from within, banking heavily on an Arab Israeli uprising to destabilize the country. Days later, Haniyeh sat down in Beirut with Nasrallah and Said Izadi, the head of the IRGC Quds Force’s Palestine Branch. In a highly urgent telegram back to Gaza, Haniyeh reported a massive breakthrough: Nasrallah had expressed “clear and resolute” support for the first scenario, believing the immediate end of Israel’s existence was “realistic and achievable.” Izadi, however, pumped the brakes. He supported the plan “in general,” but insisted they needed to study capabilities and investigate hurdles before moving forward. Sinwar had actually accounted for this from the start. He had long assessed that the Axis operated on a “completely different” strategic calculus, prioritizing the protection of Iran’s nuclear program over Gaza’s ambitions. His suspicions were explicitly confirmed a year later, during a June 2023 visit to Tehran. There, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei bluntly rejected Hamas’s push for an immediate, decisive battle, advising them instead to focus on Judea and Samaria while Israel was “gradually” encircled. Still, Sinwar gambled that once the first shots were fired, even if his allies didn’t fully commit to his grand vision, the sheer scale of the attack would drag them into the battle as at least a secondary force. Israeli police on the streets of the central Israeli city of Lod, where synagogues and cars were torched by Arab rioters, 2021. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90) But while he was willing to gamble on foreign support, Sinwar left nothing to chance regarding his most indispensable ally: the internal front. Violent uprisings in Judea and Samaria and among Arab Israelis were an absolute requirement in every single scenario. Even in the minimal “scenario of necessity”—the contingency where Hezbollah decided to sit the war out entirely—Hamas planned to “blow up the situation in the West Bank and the inside,” banking heavily on Arab Israelis to destabilize the country from within. To light that internal powder keg, Sinwar needed a spark. This necessity explains one of October 7’s most gruesome aspects. Sinwar was convinced that capturing and broadcasting “explosive images” right at the start of the offensive would “trigger a surge of euphoria, frenzy, and momentum” among Palestinians and Arab Israelis. The goal was to spur a violent mass uprising while simultaneously paralyzing the Israeli public with terror. That is why Hamas terrorists wore body cameras and gleefully livestreamed their own atrocities. Hamas originally intended to spring this trap in April 2023, timing the slaughter with the Jewish holiday of Passover. The only reason October 7 didn’t happen in April is that the IDF picked up on faint intelligence signals and raised its alert level. Tragically, when the holiday passed without incident, Israeli intelligence concluded it had been a false alarm, plunging them even deeper into a false sense of security. Yet when zero hour arrived, Hamas’s foreign allies were caught completely off guard. According to Israeli intelligence, leadership in Beirut and Tehran were “deeply surprised.” As the slaughter unfolded, Hamas commanders Deif, Sinwar, and Issa fired off desperate telegrams to Nasrallah and the IRGC, begging them to “hurry to take part.” They believed a concentrated, immediate bombardment from Hezbollah would finally trigger Israel’s “quick collapse.” But the Axis of Resistance was furious at being handed a fait accompli. In his first public speech following the attack, Nasrallah delivered a veiled rebuke of Hamas’s attempt to inflict a single “decisive blow.” He stated flatly that the Axis had not yet acquired the capacity to defeat Israel that way, and that resistance movements instead must “win by points” through an “accumulation of achievements.” Privately, the backlash was even more blunt. One senior Hezbollah official later summarized Hamas’s grand operation with two bitter words: a “catastrophic success.” It is tempting to dismiss fanatics as simply irrational, but Sinwar’s blueprints reveal a remarkably shrewd calculator. He accurately predicted Tehran’s hesitancy and understood exactly how to force his allies’ hands. But in the end, his allies were right. Israel was not as weak as a spider’s web, and the Axis did not have the capability to destroy it for good. By forcing their hand, Sinwar didn’t achieve a “Promise of the Hereafter”; he merely ensured that almost every name in these documents would eventually be found in a rubble-strewn grave.