Vance's tiny crowd at Turning Point event sparks mockery: 'Humiliation tour continues'

Apr 15, 2026Far Left

Vice President JD Vance was brutally mocked after he spoke to a small crowd at the University of Georgia during a Turning Point USA rally on Tuesday. Vance was scheduled to appear alongside Erika Kirk, the widow of late conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who pulled out just hours before the doors opened due to unspecified "threats." The event was held at a time when the Trump administration and the Republican Party are growing anxious about the 2026 midterms as Democrats continue to notch election wins across the country. At the event on Tuesday, MS NOW reporter Jake Traylor noted on X that TPUSA seemed to "overestimate" attendance, as several seats remained open while Vance spoke. He shared a video of the arena as well. Political analysts and observers mocked the video on social media. "The JD Vance humiliation tour continues," political commentator Molly Jong-Fast posted on X."Reminds me of the Trump Tulsa rally in June 2020 right in the middle of COVID," photojournalist Justin Fleenor posted on Bluesky. "Tens of people!""Looks like Stegeman after Mike White's squad goes down 30 points at half," political communications expert Joel Mendelson posted on Bluesky. "Lol Go Dawgs," Steven Godfrey, founder of Falcon Scott Productions, posted on Bluesky.Turning Point USA seems to have misestimated crowd size for Vance. Akins Ford Arena less than 25% filled for the vice president. pic.twitter.com/K2SnkmuATh— Jake Traylor (@jake__traylor) April 14, 2026

Growing surveillance state under Trump admin sparks nationwide backlash

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7 hours ago

Growing surveillance state under Trump admin sparks nationwide backlash

Resistance is mounting across the United States against the increasing use of surveillance tech company Flock Safety’s cameras, with a growing number of cities canceling contracts as the artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers are quietly being installed in thousands of locations nationwide.State and local police departments first used the Atlanta-based company’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems for standard law enforcement purposes, but they are now being employed for a much broader range of uses, including immigration-related searches and other actions supporting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the Trump administration’s deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.“We have cameras that are used for everything from illegal dumping to drug houses to hotels that are just big problems,” Flock Safety engineer Kevin Cox told prospective customers during a demonstration of the company’s Condor Camera, according to a Thursday report in The Washington Times.“There are endless, endless uses for what we can do with these things,” Cox added.Those uses include spying on constitutionally protected protest activity and enforcing abortion bans by tracking pregnant people’s travel across states—even ones in which the medical procedure is legal.The ACLU—which recently launched a “Get the Flock Out” campaign to “fight creepy ALPR cameras”—says there are currently between 80,000 and 100,000 Flock devices installed nationwide that conduct more than 20 billion scans per month. More than 5,000 law enforcement agencies use the cameras, and some of them keep their locations a secret.“Flock’s ALPR cameras aren’t like your normal traffic cameras,” the ACLU explained. “This surveillance technology records and tracks every car that comes into view, and then an AI algorithm catalogs the make, model, color, license plate number, bumper stickers, and even scratches. This personal information is then uploaded into a nationwide database that any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can search—with few regulations or oversight on how they use what they find.”The backlash against creeping state surveillance has even transcended the partisan divide.“I think our country is in a kind of uniquely anti-surveillance environment right now, which is to say that, in a time where it seems there is nothing that is not partisan, opposition to government surveillance is nonpartisan,” ACLU privacy and surveillance attorney Chad Marlow told The Washington Times on Thursday.There is growing action—both legal and otherwise—to end the use of ALPRs across the country.According to the public information project Ban Flock Cameras, 82 Flock contracts were terminated across 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026, with 39 of those cancellations occurring in the first five months of 2026 alone.Even Amazon-owned Ring announced earlier this year that it would stop doing business with Flock Safety.Susie O’Hara, a member of Santa Cruz, California’s nominally nonpartisan City Council, told WBUR earlier this year that she grew increasingly concerned about local use of eight Flock cameras last year after learning that police were sharing data gleaned from the cameras with the company’s national network without city officials’ knowledge, a violation of state laws banning the practice.O’Hara became increasingly convinced that Santa Cruz should cancel its Flock contract after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good, a US citizen, in Minneapolis in January.“I have goose bumps on my arms thinking about the absolute chaos that was happening in Minneapolis,” she said. “And just the absolute insanity of what we were seeing... It was totally clear to me that we should in no way consciously be in this system at all—just no way.”Less than a week after Good’s killing, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to terminate the city’s Flock contract, becoming the first municipality in California to do so.“For us, the threat to our civil liberties was greater than any benefit we could get from the flawed product,” Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley told KQED at the time.Chad Kemp, who represents District 32 on the nonpartisan Dane County Board of Supervisors in Wisconsin—which in April voted to stop funding two dozen cameras leased from Flock—told The Washington Times that “there’s a public safety issue here, but there is also a privacy issue.”“There are serious concerns about individuals who can be monitored without their knowledge, or if it is even constitutional or ethical to track people without a warrant,” he added.At the national level, US Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) last year launched an investigation into the use of Flock cameras to track pregnant people across state lines for abortion care and to conduct unauthorized immigration enforcement operations.Krishnamoorthi and Sen.

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Vance's tiny crowd at Turning Point event sparks mockery: 'Humiliation tour continues'

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Vance's tiny crowd at Turning Point event sparks mockery: 'Humiliation tour continues'

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