Open Thread

On a tip from Wiggins.

Seattle Residents Reduced to Blocking Streets to Hold Back Violence

As liberal rule erodes civilization in moonbattery-addled Seattle, residents have taken to barricading streets to defend their homes from criminal violence.

WNEP reports:

Residents near North 98th Street and Linden Avenue North spent part of the Memorial Day weekend piling dirt, gravel, logs and chunks of concrete into roadblocks that now partially block access to three residential streets near Aurora Ave.

Supporters of the barriers said they are desperate to stop shootings they believe are tied to prostitution-related activity along the Aurora corridor.

The barricades pose an obvious problem should emergency services be required. Some think it is worth the trade-off.

Over the past month, residents documented at least eight shootings within roughly 10 blocks of their homes using incident numbers, surveillance footage and shell casings, according to neighbors who have tracked incident numbers, surveillance footage and shell casings.

Normally the police attend to matters like this. But in Seattle, the police take their orders from pro-criminal Democrat Mayor Katy Wilson. They are lucky not to have been defunded completely out of existence.

Wilson uses the police to gather information on ICE agents on behalf of illegal aliens so they can be doxed and potentially killed for bounty. Maybe the police will prove useful for punishing the residents who attempted to defend themselves with barricades.

As predicted before Wilson was elected,

Remember CHOP? If she wins, the whole city will be CHOP.

Those who do not like bullets whizzing through their windows will soon leave, further securing Katy Wilson’s hold on power by steepening Seattle’s descent down the Democrat Death Spiral.

On a tip from Anonymous.

Welfare State Wastes Hundreds of $Billions on Overpayments

You wouldn’t put a Black Lives Matter mob in charge of a shopping mall. Why would you put liberal bureaucrats in charge of other people’s money? The inevitable result is the same: an orgiastic looting spree.

The New York Post reports:

The federal government overpaid welfare and social services recipients by a stunning $186 billion in fiscal year 2025, a startling surge of $24 billion from the previous year’s total.

According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), 15 federal agencies made up the massive improper payments overage spanning 64 programs, with approximately 82% of the overages the result of overpayments.

This does not count the hundreds of $billions lost to straightforward fraud of the type Somali colonists multiculturally enrich us with.

JD Vance is heading a task force intended to address the fraud. These efforts will be abandoned the day Democrats retake the White House.

Overpayments included $57 billion from Medicare, $37 billion from Medicaid, $21 billion for unearned Earned Income Tax Credit, and $10 billion for food stamps. Some highly suspect programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families were not counted.

These numbers are dwarfed by the actual scale of the problem. It could be argued that every penny doled out by the welfare state is an overpayment. It is not the proper role of government to confiscate money from those it belongs to so as to hand it out to those it does not.

As the welfare state continues to feed on itself, the waste will become ever more extravagant until it collapses the entire economy, as per the Cloward-Piven strategy for imposing communism.

On a tip from patthedog.

Jacob Frey Replaces Fallen Servicemembers With George Floyd on Memorial Day

Even the vilest of up and coming Democrats will have to dig deeper to achieve the depths of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Here’s how he acknowledged Memorial Day yesterday:

Honoring heroes who died to defend America is not Frey’s cup of tea. He would rather pay his respects to a scumbag career criminal whose death has been exploited to attack America from within.

Not even Frey is too clueless to be aware that despite the railroading of Derek Chauvin by a kangaroo court, Floyd was not murdered. Per the autopsy, he died of a fentanyl overdose, a fitting end to a disgraceful life.

As if trying to reignite the Black Lives Matter riots, Frey posted on Floyd repeatedly yesterday. Via Daily Wire:

The leftist mayor went on to drone about “painful truths,” “policing,” and “global significance,” essentially treating the federal holiday like a taxpayer-funded advertisement for his city’s Black Lives Matter re-education camp.

After receiving furious backlash, Frey finally put up a boilerplate tweet dutifully acknowledging veterans, less sincere even than the tears he publicly shed over Floyd:

Floyd is what liberals present in place of the heroes we honored yesterday. Frey is what they present in place of leaders.

On tips from Varla and abcanc.

Coordinator of Bataclan Terrorist Massacre Gets Prison Leave

No matter how horrific the atrocities they inflict, Muslim terrorists have loyal friends in the moonbats running Europe, who have even granted prison leave to Mohamed Bakkali, a logistics coordinator of the Bataclan theater massacre in Paris that killed 130 people and injured hundreds more.

From BX1 via Frontpage Magazine:

Mohamed Bakkali, currently detained in Ittre prison, has been granted six prison leaves of 36 hours each. The decision was made by the Brussels Sentence Enforcement Court (TAP) on May 11, according to the daily newspaper La Capitale.

Bakkali was sentenced to 30 years for Bataclan plus 25 for planning a terror attack on a Thalys train from Amsterdam to Paris. But until terrorists have been executed, they are always subject to release by sympathetic liberals.

Prosecutors have no right to appeal Bakkali’s release.

According to the media outlet, Mohamed Bakkali has already benefited from several leave permits since July 2025. The French national anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office had also reduced the maximum legal sentence to 30 years in 2022. Following his transfer to Belgium, Bakkali is subject to the Belgian sentencing regime, which notably allows for the possibility of parole after serving one-third of his sentence, La Capitale further reports.

The New York Post has more on the Bataclan atrocities. From 2016:

The Islamic State terrorists who attacked the Bataclan theater in Paris last November not only killed scores of innocents — they also gouged out the eyes and sliced up the genitals of some of the victims, according to testimony in a disturbing French report.

Some victims’ bodies from the second floor of the theater had been beheaded, eviscerated and otherwise mutilated, according to two secondhand accounts reported to a parliamentary commission set up to investigate the attack.

Testicles were cut off and stuffed into victims’ mouths. Investigators were reduced to weeping and vomiting by the horrors they discovered.

This offers a window into the future of the last Europeans if they are not able to overthrow left-wing rule and repel the Muslim invasion.

On a tip from WL.

Down on the Democrat Farm: James Talarico

Mai Vang. Brad Lander. Graham Platner. Maureen Galindo. Shelby Campbell. Raymond Chandler. The list of upcoming Democrat talent running for high office this year is not complete without James Talarico:

More on Low-T Talarico here, here, and here.

If Democrats can win with this creepy ultraleft soy boy in Texas, America is doomed.

On a tip from seaoh.