Well this is a horrifying story — a free speech advocate was arrested for saying something she never said, and was falsely accused of racism, until an out-of-control prosecutor finally admitted there was no support for the claim. https://t.co/OmN7KXe1NI

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) May 15, 2025

More:

I never thought I’d end up in handcuffs and a jail cell for something I didn’t say.

But last May, police in New Haven, Conn., arrested me — because a parking attendant falsely claimed I had used a racial slur against him nearly a year earlier.

I denied it. I asked the cops to check the parking lot’s surveillance video.

They didn’t — and the state charged me first with disorderly conduct, then with three counts of breach of peace in the second degree.

It took almost a year, tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and endless stress before the nightmare ended on March 27, when the prosecutor finally dropped all charges.

Why? “Insufficient evidence,” “inconsistencies,” “credibility issues,” video that “clearly contradicted” the accuser’s claims — and a possibility that I wasn’t even the right person.

The judge dismissed the case.

If this can happen to me — a First Amendment advocate with resources, legal counsel and a public reputation to defend — it can happen to anyone.

Maybe that’s the point, to put the Fear of the State into people without Lauren Noble’s resources.

THIS COULD PROVE TO BE THE BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT FROM TRUMP’S MIDDLE EAST TOUR: Who Needs China? Saudi Arabia Steps Up As Big Buyer Of AI Chips.

The Saudi AI projects could be worth $3 billion to $5 billion in annual chip sales and $15 billion to $20 billion in total spending over a multiyear period, BofA Securities analyst Vivek Arya said in a client note Tuesday.

“Sovereign AI nicely complements commercial cloud investments with a focus on training and inference of LLMs (large language models) in local culture, language and needs, and could be 10%-15% or $50 billion-plus annually in the longer-term $450-$500 billion global AI infrastructure opportunity,” Arya said.

He added, “Sovereign AI could also help address limited power availability for data centers in U.S., plus offset headwinds from restrictions on U.S. companies shipping to China.”

While Nvidia and AMD are the main beneficiaries of the Saudi AI ventures, other companies in the AI ecosystem will benefit as well, Arya said. That includes AI stocks Broadcom (AVGO), Coherent (COHR) and Marvell Technology (MRVL), he said.

Keeping the Middle East’s oil kingdoms oriented toward the West instead of China might be as much about chips as it is about planes and ships.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: No Comfort in Dems Admitting We Were Right About Biden’s Mush Brain. “There is no sweetness with this vindication, however. Being right doesn’t erase all that went on leading up to having it be proven. The damage done to the Republic while it was being run by a drooling moron and his commie handlers is going to be difficult to undo. President Trump is doing his best, but the Biden puppet presidency was an absolute wrecking ball.”

SEIZING IS EASY, FARMING IS HARD:

90% of farms seized from the Boers by the Bantu commies are lying derelict.

Nobody told the Bantus that farms require hard work, so they didn't bother.

This was a catastrophe for the farm animals, most of which had to be euthanized. pic.twitter.com/jHNJA6IKM6

— Wanjiru Njoya (@WanjiruNjoya) May 15, 2025

Maybe Commies collectivize farms because force is the only way to get people to work under Communism.

JOE CUNNINGHAM: The question Democrats won’t answer.

If President Trump were this existential threat and our democracy hung in the balance with the 2024 election, why did the party and its leaders continue to back such an unpopular sitting president most of the country thought should not have run in the first place? What does it say about a party if it knew ahead of time the consequences of a Trump election yet backed candidates who were almost predetermined to lose? Why, in the face of such peril, would no leader stand up earlier and ask, “Are we sure we are putting our best foot forward?”

The answer is simple but comes in two parts:

1. Trump was never an existential threat.

2. Having a meat puppet in the Oval Office suited Democrats just fine, each one figuring they could get whatever they wanted from the autopen.

ICYMI: Gavin Newsom Twisted So Hard Right That He Might Get Impeached.

THIS SEEMS LIKE KIND OF A BIG DEAL:

🚨 April shocker: U.S. Treasury posts $258B surplus — 2nd largest ever.
• Tax receipts surged to $850B
• Customs duties (Trump tariffs) doubled to record $15.6B
• Borrowing needs down $53B this quarter

For a gov’t hooked on deficits, this is a rare fiscal win—driven by new…

— Quantus Insights (@QuantusInsights) May 14, 2025

April is a good month for federal receipts because of Tax Day, but the second-biggest ever — with Trump’s tariffs accounting for only a small fraction — deserves more attention.

THIRD TIME’S THE CHARM? Germany Will Build Strongest Conventional Army in Europe.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz pledged to turn the Bundeswehr into the strongest conventional army in Europe by giving it all the financial resources it needs to become so. Merz also said he would introduce a new volunteer military service.

“Strength deters aggression. Weakness, on the other hand, invites aggression,” Merz said in his first statement to the Bundestag as chancellor, laying out his coalition government’s priorities, Die Zeit reported.

European allies have stressed the urgency of growing and improving their military capabilities to counter an increasingly belligerent Russia. The Trump administration has also urged NATO allies in Europe to shoulder more of the burden for their own defense.

Big words from Merz but we’ve heard them before.

NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU DESPISE THE MEDIA…: CNN Finds the Weirdest Way to Spin Lower Egg Prices to Make Donald Trump Look Bad.

COLONIALISM, STRAIGHT UP:

The city council of Providence, Rhode Island, is hosting a flag raising ceremony at the City Hall.

What flag, you ask? A Palestinian flag…

Providence, RI has been conquered. pic.twitter.com/pSXC6RuK1v

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 14, 2025

THE 2028 GAME IS AFOOT: Gavin Newsom Twisted So Hard Right That He Might Get Impeached. “That’s a joke, obviously. Democrats never impeach their own, even after they become liabilities; they just exile them to the political wilderness. You and I have spent the last week or so watching them attempting to do just that to a sitting Democrat senator, Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman. If Republicans had the same ruthless instincts, John McCain’s last public appearance would’ve been around 1990 — on the side of a milk carton.”

MISSISSIPPI RISING: Look South for progress in reading achievement.

In 2003, Mississippi was worst in the nation, next to Washington, D.C., for fourth-grade reading on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), Daly writes. Now, Mississippi ranks fifth. “When the Urban Institute adjusted national test results for student demographics, Mississippi ranked first in fourth-grade reading and math, fourth in eighth-grade reading and first in math.

Black students in dirt-poor, low-spending Mississippi outperform black students elsewhere by large margins, Daly writes. “The average black student in Mississippi performed about 1.5 grade levels ahead of the average black student in Wisconsin,” which “spends about 35 percent more per pupil.”

The success of Mississippi and other Southern states “have been dutifully and perfunctorily name-checked in news stories,” Daly writes, but he sees “a reluctance among national voices to extol Deep South examples as worthy of emulation.”

That last bit speaks volumes about our elites putting snobbery over results.

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

We have the hardest working President in US history and the laziest Republican Congress in US history.

Something has to give.

— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) May 14, 2025

HEH:

I love it here 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/TBzzcHpNdf

— M2 (@Amer1can_Barbie) May 14, 2025

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Trump admin reverses Biden’s gas stove ban, take aim at climate-inspired start-stop car tech.

The Trump administration has slashed regulations concerning standards over the width of shower heads, bans on a swath of gas stoves, as well as other regulations for standards ruling over other household appliances that were imposed by the Department of Energy. This also comes as EPA head Lee Zeldin is taking aim at start-stop technology in cars, or the system that automatically turns off a car when it is stopped at a light to save gas.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the Energy Department took sweeping actions on Monday to slash dozens of regulations for household appliances from dishwashers to dryers that were issued under former President Joe Biden. The regulations included restricted sales on certain types of gas stoves, faucets, shower heads, and microwaves.

“It should not be the government’s place to decide what kind of appliances you or your restaurants or your businesses can buy,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright commented about the regulations. “Everybody wants clean air and wants to lower their energy costs and run their factories good as they can. The big hand of government doesn’t actually help that process at all.”

Indeed.

KING KLAUS I: The Unraveling of the King of Davos.

I tried to find a juicy excerpt but this WSJ report is a longer one with juicy details all the way through — so the link goes to a non-paywalled version.

MEXICO: Mayoral Candidate Murdered During Livestream.

LONG PAST TIME: Time to Fix the Navy’s Frigate Problem.

Most recent reports on the construction of the first U.S. Navy Constellation-class frigate are grim and filled with unwelcome news.

The first ship of the class is only 10% complete despite years of construction. The design of the ship has not been completed, and changes continue, no doubt accounting for rising costs and lengthening delays in construction.

Senior leaders at Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) continue to blame industry for these problems, industry blames the Navy, and Congress penalizes the program in response.

While U.S. designs like the DDG-51 have been a “gold standard” for survivability, the Navy must strike a balance between ability to resist and sustain damage and rapid construction, perhaps across multiple ship flights, to field warships in needed numbers.

The current outlook for frigates is questionable, and does not look to improve soon. Still, the frigate is essential to the U.S. Navy force structure. The fleet has become increasingly imbalanced with more high-end ships like the DDG-51 used for low-end missions like counter-piracy and show the flag port visits.

Navies always find a need for larger numbers of smaller warships in wartime. It’s time to fix the frigate, and produce it in numbers, even at the expense of the larger DDG, and pair all manned combatant ships with unmanned “sidekicks” that add additional firepower and more options for distributed capacity.

The Navy couldn’t take a proven design like the FREMM without twisting it into something that can’t come in anywhere close to on time or on budget.

THE BIGGEST STORY EVERYBODY MISSED, A THREAD:

🧵 I went looking for the actual text of the EO on prescription drug prices since no one is actually linking that and I have to do everything around here and I found this that was issued on Friday and I missed it.

I cannot stress how important this is.https://t.co/wuOpqoDjjt pic.twitter.com/d4LUmR6YuK

— alexandriabrown (@alexthechick) May 12, 2025

A few bullet points:

What does this do? The most important part is that every agency has 365 days to list out all the regulations that have a criminal penalty and then that report has to be made public.

All future regs have to state criminal offenses clearly. Mens rea is back on the menu! The default will be to require mens rea.

This EO is tremendously important and will have direct, and hopefully immediate, affect on more or less everyone in America. And did you hear anything about it? Anything at all?

Read the whole thing.

ROBERT SPENCER: Trump Shocks the World — Again. “In many ways, Trump’s meeting with al-Sharaa is as momentous, and could be more momentous, than his first-term overtures to Kim Jong Un. The two meetings come from the same wellsprings: Trump is attempting to break longstanding logjams and end the status quo that the foreign policy establishment, both inside the U.S. and elsewhere, had come to take for granted.”

“WEAK” IS THE WORD:

Prior to his day in court, George Santos was expelled from Congress for lying.

Something all politicians do, but both Democrats and Republicans supported tossing him.

Republicans have body cam footage of a House Democrat assaulting a federal agent and they’re unwilling to pull…

— Breanna Morello (@BreannaMorello) May 14, 2025

SAY ANYTHING: Wait, What? New Jersey ‘Scientists’ Say ‘Gun Violence’ is a Side Effect of Poor Dental Health.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: New Beard, Same Buttigieg. “The beard jokes write themselves, but I’m not here to take cheap shots at Buttigieg; I’m here to take high-class, data-rich cheap shots.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE:

Just before the Starship flight next week, I will give a company talk explaining the Mars game plan in Starbase, Texas, that will also be live-streamed on 𝕏 https://t.co/cxztHrK285

— gorklon rust (@elonmusk) May 13, 2025

I’d just add that the New Space Race would only be half as exciting without SpaceX’s unprecedented transparency for a launch company.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: 9 Times Jake Tapper Dismissed Biden’s Decline, Claimed He’s ‘Sharp Mentally.’

Coming soon: The Zero Times Jake Tapper Admitted to Helping the White House Cover Up Biden’s Decline and Won Back Some Public Trust.