Eric Swalwell cowers in billionaire pal’s $26M mansion — as rape claim sparks career freefall
Source: New York Post · Bias: Right
Summary
Rep. Eric Swalwell’s political career is collapsing at a shocking speed. Within 24 hours, the Bay Area congressman has gone from Democratic frontrunner for California governor to facing pressure to not only end his campaign but resign from Congress — while now being the subject of a criminal sexual assault investigation into allegations by a...
Eric Swalwell cowers in billionaire pal’s $26M mansion — as rape claim sparks career freefall
Right
Rep. Eric Swalwell’s political career is collapsing at a shocking speed. Within 24 hours, the Bay Area congressman has gone from Democratic frontrunner for California governor to facing pressure to not only end his campaign but resign from Congress — while now being the subject of a criminal sexual assault investigation into allegations by a...
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.
Right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel is accusing Pope Leo XIV of doing the work of the Chinese Communist Party with his criticisms of artificial intelligence.According to a Thursday report from CNN, Thiel told the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado on Tuesday that the pope was inadvertently serving as a “Chinese communist agent” when he released a 42,000-word encyclical that called for strict regulation of AI, a technology that the pontiff said heightens the “risk of dehumanization” throughout the world.Thiel argued that this sort of thinking was dangerous, CNN reported, because it could result in the US losing the “race” to build more advanced AI to China. Because of this, Thiel continued, the pope is essentially “working for the Chinese communists” by trying to tap the brakes on AI development.Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has long decried AI critics in harsh terms. Over the last year, he has been delivering a series of lectures in which he has said that opponents of AI development are working as agents for the Antichrist.Journalist Christopher Hale, who writes the Letters From Leo newsletter, noted on Friday that Thiel in the past has even speculated that Pope Leo could be “a manifestation of the Antichrist.”Thiel has said that he instructed Vice President JD Vance, a longtime political ally who received major funding from the tech billionaire for his 2022 Senate campaign, to ignore the pope’s moral guidance despite influencing Vance to convert to Catholicism, Hale added.“Thiel seeded the vice president’s Catholic faith,” Hale wrote, “and he now tells wealthy festival audiences that the leader of that faith works for a communist government.”In addition to his attacks on the pope, Thiel also warned about “a democratic-socialist takeover of the Democratic Party,” pointing to recent victories in New York and Colorado of candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America.Thiel said that this “takeover” would doom the US, arguing that “when the Democratic Party goes, this country is over,” according to CNN.The New York Times reported in May that Thiel has grown so concerned about the political situation in the US that he’s created a “foothold” for himself in Argentina, which is currently being governed by ideologically likeminded libertarian President Javier Milei.“Thiel, who has a history of collecting backup countries as he hedges his bets against the United States, is considering making Argentina another Plan B,” the Times reported. “Born in Germany and raised in the United States, he received citizenship in New Zealand in 2011, and applied for a passport in Malta in 2022.”
Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico not only has a long history of strange comments about trans children and a nonbinary God — he’s now campaigning with Bobby Pulido, who BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales warns is a “pedo protector.”“Bobby Pulido is not just close with James Talarico. Bobby Pulido is besties with the entire Texas Democrat team, I guess, because Bobby Pulido kicked off the entire Texas Democrat convention last week as per his own tweets,” Gonzales says, explaining that Pulido is a famous musician.“In his band, he employs an accordion player by the name of Frankie Caballero. Now, Frankie’s not a good guy. Frankie is in fact a total creep, because you see, Frankie is on the sex offender registry for sexually assaulting an 8-year-old in 2014,” she says, warning that this is the most egregious offense on his lengthy rap sheet.“Be that as it may, the offense wasn’t enough for Pulido to stop touring with him, because both before and after Caballero went to prison for this, for four years, he was touring with the band. He was part of the band,” she explains.And while the band was touring, they headlined an Axios school benefit. So Pulido headlined a school benefit with a registered sex offender.“Children were welcome and present at the event, which was held at the Flores Stadium several miles from the middle school grounds according to the promotional materials. So he’s like, ‘Hey, you just busted out of prison for doing unspeakable things to an 8-year-old child. Want to go to a middle school event with me?’” Gonzales says.“I mean, it takes just the lowest of the low person to do something like that,” she continues.It was until after 2021 that Pulido stopped touring with Caballero, which Gonzales points out was after he pled guilty to assaulting his daughter and “impeding her normal breathing.”While Pulido claimed he didn’t know about Caballero’s prior convictions, Ramon Rodriquez, a south Texas bass player, told the New York Post that he “performed with Caballero as recently as 2020 and that the child sex conviction became ‘a known fact in music circles’ in the immediate years after.”“Seems kind of weird that James Talarico and the rest of the Democrats are hanging their hat on this guy who’s associating with an actual convicted pedophile,” Gonzales says, adding, “That’s what blows my mind.”Want more from Sara Gonzales?To enjoy more of Sara's no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
An author who has written four books about President Donald Trump claimed on Thursday that first lady Melania Trump has concocted a "preposterous" new way to try and silence him. Michael Wolff, co-host of the "Inside Trump's Head" podcast with Joanna Coles of The Daily Beast, said during a new episode that Melania Trump's legal team has moved to sanction the lawyers representing Wolff for bringing a frivolous lawsuit against her. A federal judge threw out Wolff's anti-SLAPP lawsuit against Melania Trump in May, which he filed after she threatened to bring a $1 billion lawsuit against Wolff for his claims about the Trump family's ties to disgraced financier and convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. “Essentially, they are moving to sanction my lawyers for doing nothing more than bringing the lawsuit against Melania Trump,” Wolff said on the podcast. “So this is preposterous on its face.”Wolff also claimed that he found out about the move from Boris Epshteyn, a lawyer close to the Trumps, whom Donald Trump has described as someone who will "say anything" to make him happy. He claimed that hearing about the move from Epshteyn revealed that the strategy behind the lawsuit “was being coordinated at the highest levels of Trump law.”
President Donald Trump stunned his critics on Thursday with a remark he made about his kids during an interview on CNBC. Trump was asked by CNBC's Joe Kernen about allegations that his children are using insider information to gain favorable business deals. The president recently disclosed that he earned more than $2 billion during his second term, alarming many political analysts and ethics experts. "I feel bad in a way for my kids because every time my kids do, if they invest in a stock or if they go and do a bill, anything they do, because the presidency is so powerful, so big, everything if they buy a cupcake company, well, the energy to make the cupcakes is sort of like, how’s my energy policy?" Trump told Kernen. "So therefore, you have ... almost anything they do, if they buy an energy-efficient truck, they have inside information. So it’s pretty tough in that sense. I tell my kids, 'Stay away from as much as you can stay away from.' But they also have a life.”Questions about the investments made by Trump's children, Don Jr. and Eric, have swirled following the release of Trump's financial disclosures. For instance, Trump's sons recently invested in a mining company in Kazakhstan that later won a nine-figure contract with the federal government. Trump's critics sounded off on social media after the CNBC interview was over. "He actually says this? Wow," Stephen Soldz, a psychologist and researcher in Boston, posted on Bluesky. "Pure corruption. I look forward to the congressional hearings," Zak Williams, a political consultant at Zenith Strategies, posted on Bluesky. "The most corrupt administration in American history and it’s not even close," Max Berger, co-founder of the Momentum Training Institute, posted on Bluesky. "Looking forward to all the Hunter Biden critics weighing in. Especially on Fox," David Corn, Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, posted on Bluesky.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche sent a letter Thursday to International Criminal Court President Tomoko Akane declaring that the United States “unequivocally rejects” any attempt by the court to assert jurisdiction over U.S. citizens and vowed the Justice Department would not cooperate with ICC investigations involving Americans. “The United States Department of Justice unequivocally rejects […]
WHAT’S HAPPENING TODAY: Good afternoon and happy Thursday, readers! Daily on Energy will be suspended tomorrow for the long-Independence Day weekend. Our regularly scheduled programming will pick back up on Monday! 🦅🇺🇲 If you’re in Washington D.C. for the festivities, this year’s fireworks are expected to start around 10:30 p.m. or 11 p.m. It will […]
