Spanberger faces ‘bait-and-switch’ backlash in final hours before redistricting referendum
Source: Latest Political News on Fox News · Bias: Right
Summary
Virginia's redistricting referendum faces fierce opposition as Republicans accuse Gov. Spanberger of reversing her pledge not to redraw congressional maps.
Spanberger faces ‘bait-and-switch’ backlash in final hours before redistricting referendum
Right
Virginia's redistricting referendum faces fierce opposition as Republicans accuse Gov. Spanberger of reversing her pledge not to redraw congressional maps.
Attendance had been thin to Trump’s ‘unbelievable’ event before an increase on Friday – and then the high temperatures swept inEven by Trumpian standards, the event was promoted with intense hyperbole: nothing short, the US president suggested, of the “the most unforgettable birthday party any country has ever seen”.“It’s gonna be great,” Donald Trump proclaimed on the opening night of the Great American State Fair, the centerpiece of the US 250th anniversary celebrations. “It’s gonna be unbelievable.” Continue reading...
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.
As Americans prepare to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday this holiday weekend, organizers of Freedom 250 events in Washington are scrambling to deal with the extreme heat. Some 200,000 people have attended the Great American State Fair and FIFA Fan Fest so far, according to a Freedom 250 spokesperson, and even more are expected to…
President Donald Trump said Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh may not be able to compel his colleagues on the central bank to do what the new chair wants on monetary policy.
David Hearn, the former Olympian who was arrested and charged with a misdemeanor for destruction of property for vandalizing the Lincoln Reflecting Pool last month was indicted by a grand jury on felony charges on Thursday.
The post BREAKING: Grand Jury Indicts Former Olympic Canoeist David Hearn on Felony Charges For Vandalizing Reflecting Pool – Faces 10 Years in Prison (PIrro Presser) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
On Wednesday, an anchor at what the Daily Beast calls President Donald Trump’s “most hated network” exposed the hypocrisy of his second-term grift by showing a montage of the many times he’s attacked his rivals for profiting off their positions. “The insiders wrote the rules of the game to keep themselves in power, and in the money,” declared then-candidate Trump at a New York event in July 2016. “Hillary Clinton has perfected the politics of personal profit, and even theft,” he said, attacking his main Democratic opponent at the time. The montage showed many other wide-ranging instances of Trump accusing “corrupt politicians” of enriching themselves by “bleeding America dry,” suggesting they “ran for office promising to protect American workers” only to “line their pockets with special-interest cash.” According to Trump, only he could “dethrone the failed political class” and “drain the Washington swamp,” once asserting, “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government, while the people have borne the cost.”After playing the montage, CNN anchor Laura Coates noted the hypocrisy, saying, “For nearly a decade, that has been his case against Washington. Now, his own financial disclosure — is it Exhibit A against him?” Disclosures of Trump’s finances filed earlier in the week highlighted the parallels between the president’s policy decisions and his investments. As the Daily Beast explains, “His accounts snapped up 327 stocks valued at up to $12.8 million last April, just one day before he hit pause on his global tariffs, sending the S&P 500 stock market index up almost 10 percent, according to an analysis of the 927-page document by Sludge. The April haul was not the only buy with lucky timing. One of his accounts picked up Intel stock worth between $250,000 and $500,000 on Aug. 18. Four days later, he revealed that Washington would take a nearly 10 percent stake in the chipmaker, worth roughly $8.9 billion, prompting its shares to climb 6 percent. Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan had sat down with Trump at the White House only a week ahead of the purchase.”He bought up large quantities of Palantir stock as his administration expanded the data company’s government contracts, including controversial contracts with ICE. Trump also bought shares of the private prison company GEO Group as it ramped up its detention capacity to accommodate deportation arrests. What’s more, according to the Daily Beast, “The disclosure clocks more than $1.4 billion flowing to Trump from crypto holdings in 2025. His $TRUMP memecoin, widely derided as a scam, raised $635 million, while World Liberty Financial, the digital asset venture founded by his sons, brought in north of $500 million. The president has spent the same period rolling back regulations across the sector.”All of this comes amid revelations that Trump’s sons are poised to profit off a billion-dollar mining deal struck by their father. This has prompted even ostensible Trump allies to criticize the president’s corruption. For example, conservative commentator Megyn Kelly admitted earlier this week that “the Trump family is grifty.”
