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Trump DOJ Opens Investigation Into Texas Democrat PAC After Operative Caught on Tape Bragging About a “Roundabout” Way of “Paying People” for Votes

The Justice Department has opened an investigation into Texas Majority PAC after a viral undercover video showed a since-fired organizing manager spelling out what he called a “roundabout way of paying people for their votes” ahead of the midterms.

A source familiar confirmed the probe on Wednesday. The investigation was first reported by Fox News Digital, which said two sources familiar with the matter confirmed the department is looking at the Democrat operation that dumps millions into flipping Texas blue.

The footage that forced the feds’ hand was released by Townhall on September 16. Sky McAdams, then an organizing manager for Texas Majority PAC, sat down with an undercover journalist and walked through the loophole he said the group uses to skirt federal election law while boosting Democrat U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico.

“We are paying people $25 to attend a one-hour Zoom class to learn why voting is important and why the Republicans are causing all of these bad things,” McAdams said on the tape. “So it’s like a roundabout way of paying people for their votes, essentially.”

He did not stop there. McAdams told the undercover reporter you cannot hand someone cash and say, “Here’s $25, go vote for me.” What you can do, he said, is pay them to sit through a class. “And then the class just talks about the importance of… It’s a little gray.”

He named the program. “It’s called the Paid Relational Program.” He added that he thought “Rally Texas” was the official name. Then he said the quiet part out loud: “If I was a Republican, I would be pissed. I would be like, that’s shady as f**k.”

The Gateway Pundit reported the tape the day it dropped. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican Talarico is trying to beat, did not mince words.

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Did Thomas Matthew Crooks Try To Kill Donald Trump?

There has been a historic update in the investigation into Thomas Matthew Crooks, the man responsible for firing eight rounds from a semi-automatic AR-15-style rifle at President Donald Trump during his July 2024 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

President Donald Trump made a statement on the status of the investigation into Crook’s Butler assassination attempt last week that changes the entire outlook of the shooting.

The President wrote on his Truth Social feed that the Department of Justice, under former President Joe Biden and former FBI Director Christopher Wray, had largely deleted any information pertaining to Crooks or the assassination attempt before he took office in January of 2025.

The President wrote on his feed: “Everybody knows the Crooked Joe Biden FBI didn’t do what they should have with respect to the Lunatic who shot me in Butler, PA. By the time I got into Office, on January 20th, most of the information was missing, altered, corrupted, or gone. New info was just found! Why wasn’t it seen long ago? This was all a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election, that failed. Dirty Cop Christopher Wray should pay a price for the way he handled this assassination attempt, and certainly for the things he said. GOD BLESS AMERICA, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

President Donald Trump’s statement reveals yet another one of the greatest political scandals of our time.

Joe Biden and the Democrat Party, working with elements of the Deep State and former FBI Director Christopher Wray moved to cover up an assassination attempt against their chief political rival. This revelation further raises questions as to the authenticity of Crooks, and who he may have been communicating with prior to the rally.

The President’s comments came just hours after documents from the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed that Thomas Matthew Crooks had his cremation paid for by an ‘anonymous donor’ after his parents refused to pay for his cremation for financial reasons.

That same report also revealed that Crooks had ordered his firearm through the mail, with pieces delivered to a ‘Bob Dole’ at his home address.

The Many Anomalies Of The Near-Assassination of President Donald Trump on July 13th, 2024

I have been reporting on the anomalies surrounding the Crooks Assassination attempt since that fateful day in Butler, of which there are many.

Local officers (Beaver County Emergency Services Unit countersnipers) saw Crooks using a rangefinder and looking toward the stage before the rally in Butler began that day.

They photographed him and radioed/texted the concern. One contemporaneous message around 5:38 p.m. said he was “looking towards stage” with the device.

FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that Crooks flew a DJI drone over the area around 3:50–4:00 p.m. (roughly two hours before the shooting) for about 11 minutes, approximately 200 yards from the stage. He watched a live feed on the controller. The drone and controller were later recovered from his car.

Crowds pointed and shouted about a man on the roof for roughly two minutes before shots.

The AGR complex (the building Crooks used) was left outside the Secret Service secure perimeter despite known line-of-sight to the stage. No one from any agency was assigned to the roof. Local snipers inside the building thought the outer area and roofs were someone else’s job.

Video posted after shooting shows what appears to be Crooks shuffling on the roof prior to the shots being fired at President Donald Trump.

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Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave

On the morning of Saturday, February 28, people across Iran began their day like any other. It was one week into the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, and people were preparing for their work and school week. Parents hustled their children out the door for school as the notorious morning traffic jams filled the streets of Tehran and other cities.

In the southern Iranian city of Minab, preschool teacher Hossniyeh Salem was getting ready to leave the house. “Like any other day, I got my child ready at 7 o’clock—because my son is in fifth grade and attended the same school,” she recalled. “I got Yassin ready and headed to school. Yassin went to the boys’ school and I stayed at preschool, in my own class.”

It was Salem’s seventh year as a teacher at Shajareh Tayyebeh, a well-respected, private school. “The upper floor was for girls and the downstairs was for boys. One section was for preschool. You can say there were three schools there. The preschool was in the same building,” she said. “There were students there from all walks of life—children from working class families, educators. We had all kinds of students there.”

Among the students at the school was 6-year-old Fatemeh Yazdanpanah from the fishing village of Gurzang, about eight miles from Minab. The village is well known for its daily fish market—a bustling, strategic hub where fishermen trade their catches from both the Minab River and the Persian Gulf. There is a girls’ school in Gurzang, but Fatemeh’s father, Yaghoub Yazdanpanah, saw gifts for poetry in his daughter and he wanted to secure for her the best education he could find.

“Fatemeh’s mother and I had noticed Fatemeh’s overflowing intelligence. I am a poet myself. When I would write poetry, edit poetry, I would repeat the poem. After hearing the poem once or twice, Fatemeh would immediately memorize it. When we would tell her a story, she would never forget the story and she would recite the story moment by moment, word for word,” recalled Yaghoub, who teaches Persian literature. “I wanted to find a school that would address Fatemeh’s needs and her active mind. I visited several schools myself. Certainly, you would do the same thing. Any parent would take their child to a good school for a brighter future,” he said. “Thank God,” he recalled thinking, “I found Shajareh Tayyebeh School.”

That morning, Yaghoub kissed Fatemeh goodbye before walking to the local school in Gurzang where he taught.

Iranians had gone to bed the night before with the news that negotiations between government officials and the Trump administration aimed at averting war were proceeding smoothly and a new round of technical talks would soon be held in Vienna. The foreign minister of Oman—the longtime mediator in the U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations—was in Washington, where, after meeting with Vice President JD Vance, he announced that recent negotiations between the two sides had “yielded substantial, momentous, and unparalleled progress” that could pave the way for “an honorable agreement” to halt the U.S. drive to war.

“We were very optimistic about the negotiations that were taking place,” said Pouria Askari, a prominent Iranian international law expert, who recalled being stuck in his car that morning on his commute to the university where he lectures. “We were not expecting the beginning of the war.”

At Shajareh Tayyebeh in Minab, the little girls gathered that morning in the prayer hall in observance of the day when Shia Muslims across the world commemorate the passing of Umm al-Banin, the wife of Imam Ali and the mother of four martyrs who died at the battle of Karbala in the year 680.

After the prayers, Salem laid out for her students a breakfast sofreh, a traditional Iranian fabric placed on the floor to serve meals. The small girls of the preschool had not yet reached the age of fasting during Ramadan. They did some lessons and then went out to the playground for recess. It was around 9:30 a.m. when Salem received word that the U.S. and Israel had begun attacking Iran.

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16 U.S. Trucking Companies File For Bankruptcy In Less Than A Month As Diesel Prices Soar

Diesel prices have exploded over the past month, creating another major cost shock for an industry that was already operating on thin margins. The national average climbed from roughly $5.60 per gallon at the end of August to a record $6.53 in late September, an increase of about 17% in just a few weeks. Prices have eased slightly from that peak, but the EIA’s latest weekly reading still puts diesel at $6.38 per gallon, compared with $5.60 at the end of August.

Now the financial damage is beginning to show up. Sixteen American trucking companies have entered bankruptcy proceedings in less than a month, affecting more than 250 jobs, according to FreightWaves and the Independent. Eight filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, allowing them to continue operating while restructuring their debts, while seven entered Chapter 7 and are liquidating their assets and shutting down.

Among the larger companies seeking Chapter 11 protection are Xoco Transport and Globemaster. Neither specified the cause of its financial problems in federal court filings, and diesel is hardly the industry’s only problem. Carriers have also been grappling with rising labor, insurance, maintenance and regulatory costs, while seasonal slowdowns can leave them without enough revenue to absorb those increases.

But the sudden surge in fuel costs adds another layer of pressure because trucking companies have limited options when diesel jumps this quickly. They can absorb the expense and sacrifice margins, pass it through with higher freight rates and risk losing business, or cut workers and equipment. The latter can keep a company alive temporarily, but it also reduces shipping capacity and the amount of revenue the carrier can generate.

And for now, there is little reason to consider the diesel problem resolved. Prices remain near historic highs and are still heavily tied to the war with Iran and the resulting disruption to global energy supplies.

Even as crude shipments through the Strait of Hormuz have begun recovering, refined-product flows remain constrained, inventories have been depleted and damaged Middle Eastern refining infrastructure continues to limit supply. Until those disruptions ease materially, diesel remains another major transmission mechanism through which the Iran war is feeding directly into the U.S. economy.

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Hilton Mocks Becerra for Saying Tax Breaks for Those Earning Under $150K Benefit ‘the Wealthiest’

Democrat California gubernatorial hopeful Xavier Becerra started his CNN debate by claiming that his Republican opponent, Steve Hilton, supports tax breaks for the “wealthiest” Californians. Hilton immediately pointed out that the tax breaks will actually benefit people who earn under $150,000 a year.

One of the key points to take away from the debate interchange below, besides the fact that Democrats are going to have to cheat egregiously to boost an obviously sour and disconnected Becerra, is that Democrats are never content with targeting billionaires. All those deluded taxpayers who think they will vote for higher taxes on the wealthy should remember that Democrats’ definition of “the wealthy” is pretty much anyone who earns a good enough salary to be independent of government assistance and government programs.

Becerra lectured at the Wednesday debate, “If you start making tax breaks for the wealthiest, you damage our working families like my parents, Mr. Hilton.” Grinning, Hilton shot back, “I love the way that Xavier says the wealthiest are people who are earning less than $150,000 a year, struggling. But first of all, I just want to say thank you to CNN for bringing Xavier out of hiding. He’s barely been seen in public since the primary, four months ago.”

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Israeli PM Netanyahu Makes Most Of FlyDubai Terror Attack As Elections Approach

It is too early to determine whether Iran was behind Monday’s alleged attempt to sabotage Flydubai Flight FZ1073, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in overnight media interviews.

However, the Israeli premier said his country would help determine the motives of the attacker and any other accomplices. Netanyahu spoke to Fox News’s Sean Hannity and CNN in the interviews, given overnight, after he had told the media earlier in the day that a co-pilot had stabbed the captain of the Boeing 737, which was carrying 174 people, including 174 Israeli citizens, and attempted to crash the plane over Israel.

He described the incident as “an extremely serious security incident” that had been averted by the “heroic” actions of the passengers and crew on board, preventing what he termed “a 9/11-type disaster.” Flight FZ1073 took off from Dubai’s Airport on Monday at 1:15 p.m. Local time, and had been en route to Tel Aviv, in Israel, when it suddenly began plummeting downwards, issuing a distress signal, as it dropped some 14,000 feet in less than half a minute, according to the flight-tracking service, Flightradar24, cited by the news service Reuters.

The plane managed to make an emergency landing at the Al Mulayah Airfield in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. All 174 passengers, including the majority of Israeli citizens on board, were safely returned to Israel.

The two pilots on board, including the captain, Smit Machchhar, an Indian national, were hospitalized for wounds sustained during the attempt to sabotage the plane. The captain is reported to be in stable condition, according to the Indian Embassy in Saudi Arabia.

A Shin Bet delegation is set to travel to the UAE in order to conduct security talks with the Emirates’ authorities, ahead of the return of the hundreds of Israeli travelers who were stranded in Dubai following the Flydubai suspension of all flights to and from Israel pending an investigation into the causes of the near catastrophe.

In his initial assessment of the attempted sabotage, Netanyahu said that a pilot who was identified as the co-pilot of FZ1073, an Omani national, had attacked the captain with a weapon, in an attempt to bring down the plane carrying 174 people over Israel. The stabbed captain had managed to open the cockpit door and the passengers and crew, including another pair of pilots from Flydubai who were traveling on the plane as passengers, had collectively managed to overpower the co-pilot and take control of the plane in order to land safely in Saudi Arabia.

Netanyahu said that he had spoken with Saudi authorities and that they had arrested the pilot and were questioning him in connection with the attempted sabotage of the plane carrying 174 people, mostly Israelis, on Monday. An Israeli passenger, Yaniv Hayun, had entered the cockpit and subdued the attacking co-pilot with the help of another crew member, enabling the two other pilots from Flydubai to take over the plane, in order to land safely with all 174 passengers on board, the premier said, hailing the heroic actions of the passenger and the two pilots in saving the lives of 174 people.

Netanyahu had written on his social media pages earlier in the day, saying that he had met the heroic Yaniv Hayun and captain Machchhar, who had fought back against his attacker and opened the cockpit door, enabling the passengers to overpower the co-pilot and take control of the plane in order to save 174 lives. The premier wrote that “we will get to the root of this attacker, whether he had accomplices, whether Iran was behind it.

It is too early to say.” In his interview with Hannity, Netanyahu said that he had spoken with UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and that the two leaders had agreed that Israel would join the investigation into the cause of the attempted sabotage. The premier said that he had received no specific warning or intelligence about any possible threat to the flight, although there were threats of possible attacks by Iranian jihadist proxies against Israelis abroad, which were generally known to Israeli security services.

As a result of the attempted sabotage, Netanyahu said that he had instructed all relevant security institutions to prepare and to increase security in order to deal with any possible “worst case scenarios” that may arise, as well as to tighten checks on pilots flying into Israel.

The incident was described by Defense Minister Israel Katz as an “attempted jihadist attack” that had been thwarted by heroic Israeli passengers. Flydubai has suspended all flights to and from Israel, pending an investigation into the causes of the near disaster, and cautioned against speculating about the possible causes of the attempted sabotage of the plane.

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Texas Man Accused of Plotting Attack on State Capitol Posts $75,000 Bond Just Hours After 3 A.M. SWAT Arrest — FBI Then Takes Him Into Federal Custody

A Texas man accused of planning to shoot up the state Capitol was booked before dawn Wednesday and, according to county jail records, walked out on a $75,000 bond before most of Austin had finished coffee.

Benny Caldera Jr., 40, of Converse, northeast of San Antonio, was taken from his home around 3 a.m. Wednesday by Texas Department of Public Safety SWAT after DPS received a tip Tuesday about a violent attack planned for Thursday, October 1.

He was charged with felony terroristic threat against a public servant and hauled to the Bexar County Jail.

According to the Washington Examiner, jail records showed him released on that $75,000 bond just before 7 a.m., roughly four hours after the raid, and was placed on pretrial supervision.

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Polish Foreign Minister Says Ukraine War Should Keep Going No Matter What

The foreign minister of Poland, Radosław Sikorski, once more expressed the stance of his country in relation to the conflict in Ukraine, stating that it is not a war that needs to be ended.

The negative perception of Russia that can be gleaned from the comments of Sikorski and his country’s institutions, including their foreign policy and mainstream media, is part and parcel of the arguments currently employed by them in order to establish the view of Russia as a failed state. Furthermore, historical grievances which can still be utilized as tools to be employed against Russia in order to bring it to its knees are being consistently emphasized and brought to the forefront of Polish foreign policy.

Poland’s stance in relation to Russia is in lockstep with the remainder of the EU and the structures of NATO, the principal goal of foreign policy being to ensure the continued goals of these two organizations. In other words, as long as these are able to function in a suitable manner in the region from the perspective of their leadership, Poland will continue to support the war.

These comments reveal that Sikorski views Russia through the prism of economic underachievement. He once calculated the position that Russia would occupy had it developed at the same rate as Canada from 1913 onwards and arrived at the conclusion that by then it would have reached the level of the economy of the United States. Alas, we are told that, instead, the economy of Russia has been decreasing and is now even smaller than that of Italy.

The point Sikorski’s comments make is that of Russia’s economic underdevelopment and how it should be used in order to continually put even greater and greater pressure upon it, while, at the same time, also curtailing its existence. Sikorski would continue to advocate further degradation of the economy of Russia in order to force it to negotiate and to insist that any concessions that may be granted to it in terms of geography would in reality amount to nothing more than a reward to aggression on its part.

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The Usefulness of a Massacre

On Sunday morning, without notice, a private plane carried Benjamin Netanyahu out of Israel and into Abu Dhabi. Channel 12 broke the story while he was still on the ground. A day later both governments confirmed the meeting with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, calling it a conversation about bilateral relations. The Israeli account gave the errand away. Netanyahu had gone to ask the Emirati president to deny publicly a report that he had telephoned Netanyahu days before 7 October 2023 to warn that Hamas was preparing a major assault.

A prime minister who wanted the record corrected would send a lawyer or a spokesman. This one flew across the Gulf in secret, a month before an election, to ask a foreign head of state to say a warning never happened. The method is the tell, and it points at everything the errand is meant to protect.

What October 7 opened is visible on the ground before it is visible anywhere else. By the reckoning of an Israeli newspaper, Israel has seized more territory from its neighbors since that day than in any comparable span in decades. The war did not stay in Gaza. It moved outward on every front where a border could be pushed.

In Gaza the army holds more than half the territory after the autumn ceasefire, and the plan for what remains was drawn up in Washington. A proposal built around Donald Trump would place the enclave under American trusteeship for at least a decade and rebuild it as a coastal resort on cleared land. Netanyahu’s cabinet approved the voluntary transfer of Gazans to third countries, and his defense minister ordered the army to prepare for a mass departure. A UN commission gave the campaign its legal name last September, finding that Israel had committed genocide and that its object was permanent control of Gaza and a Jewish majority across the land it holds. Israel rejects the finding. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over the conduct of the war, which his office calls false.

The other fronts complete the picture. In the West Bank the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, pushed through the E1 settlement, some 3,401 homes on the corridor that severs the territory, and said its approval buries any Palestinian state. His cabinet colleagues inaugurated two new settlements last week, and Smotrich has demanded the army wage in the West Bank what it waged in Gaza. In Lebanon the military sits on some 234 square miles of the south. In Syria, after the fall of Assad, it crossed the old disengagement line into the UN buffer zone and dug into nine positions, including the peak of Mount Hermon. The war opened on Iran this year runs on the same logic. The Atlantic Council, no enemy of Israel, describes an emergency response to October that has hardened into a permanent doctrine of forward defense. None of this was concealed as intent. Handed a map of the promised land on live television last August, Netanyahu said he felt very attached to the idea of a Greater Israel reaching into Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.

A war that produces this much cannot be allowed to end, and it has not been. When the fighting began, the expectation across Israel was that it would close within months, the coalition would fracture, and Netanyahu would answer for the worst security failure in the country’s history. A New York Times investigation later set out how the opposite came to pass. He stretched the fighting past the point his own commanders judged necessary and added war aims as ceasefire talks matured. In April 2024 a six-week truce that would have freed more than thirty hostages reached the edge of a cabinet vote, and Smotrich ended it with a line, warning Netanyahu that if the deal passed, you no longer have a government. In March 2025 Israel broke a standing ceasefire, which brought the departed Itamar Ben-Gvir back into the coalition. The hostages were the cost, paid in installments.

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Why Observational Studies Lie to You

If you’ve spent five minutes paying attention to medical news, you’ve undoubtedly seen the headlines: “People who take statins have 30% fewer heart attacks!” or “Breast cancer screening makes women live longer!” or “Menopausal Hormone therapy lowers Alzheimer’s risk.”

These all sound wonderful, don’t they? Just swallow a daily pill, or submit to regular screening, and you’ll join the ranks of the immortal. Were only life so simple. 

Yet before you rush off to demand a prescription, let me introduce you to one of the sneakiest, most persistent mirages from the world of medical research, which we call the “Healthy User Bias.”

Readers of Brownstone were recently introduced to this concept related to the Covid vaccines in an article entitled “A Hall of Mirrors of the Healthy Vaccinee Effect,” which demonstrated that those who were vaccinated were not the same as those who weren’t. Very frail people and those close to death were less likely to get vaccinated, which is understandable, and so those who didn’t get the jab died at a higher rate than those that did. Simple, right?

Understanding this single concept may not, overnight, elevate your medical BS detector from “gullible consumer” to “battle-tested skeptic,” but to be fair, it might help. 

The Kale-Eating, 6 AM Jogger Effect, and the Placebo Effect

What is the Healthy User Bias? It’s embarrassingly simple. In observational studies—where researchers merely watch what people do in the real world rather than running an experiment—the people who voluntarily take preventive drugs or pop daily supplements are fundamentally different from those who don’t. No surprise there, right? 

On average, “healthy users” are wealthier, better educated, and more health-obsessed. They are seriously more obedient when it comes to vaccines (including the Covid vaccine). These sorts of people want to do the best they can within their powers, which includes things that involve some friction: they eat organic kale, jog at dawn, wear seatbelts, don’t smoke, and visit their doctors regularly. They love tests of all kinds. 

A 2006 meta-analysis quantified the healthy user effect (which they called the healthy adherer effect) across 21 studies. What they found is mind-blowing in its implications. It found that those who religiously took their prescribed pills (which we call ‘good adherence’), even if it was a placebo, showed a 44% reduction in mortality (which was identical to adherence to proven beneficial therapy). All this shows is that the obedient, healthy people are more likely to do what most physicians want: they take their medication as ordered by their doctors.

When researchers observe people over ten years and notice they have fewer heart attacks and fewer strokes the light goes on. Hey, they might live longer! This is where pharmaceutical cheerleaders jump up and down, declaring: “Look! It was our pill!”

No. Sorry, it most likely wasn’t the pill. It was the person who took the pill. It was the fact that the patient was already doing 27 zillion other things to stay healthy. Maybe they had a gene that said: don’t do stuff to excess that are known to be bad for you (ie: smoking, drinking, committing violent crimes, extreme sports, being grossly overweight, being a couch potato, etc)

The pill was just along for the ride. Observational research routinely mistakes a healthy lifestyle for pharmaceutical magic. 

By now you’re saying, Okay Mr. Alansmartypants, gimme some examples. 

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