PVUSD threat suspect arrested
A 22-year-old woman accused of threatening the Pajaro Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees last month has been arrested.
Tanya Diaz was charged with making a criminal threat, a felony. She was booked into Santa Cruz County Jail on $25,000 bail, according to jail records. She was no longer in custody as of Friday afternoon.
Police do not believe there is an active threat to the community or PVUSD staff.
Board President Carol Turley did not respond to a request for comment.
Watsonville Police did not specify the nature of the threat.
Trustee Misty Navarro said during the board meeting Wednesday that it came after the May 20 meeting, when the board voted 5-2 to approve more than 100 teacher layoffs.
Navarro then read a comment she said was posted on the Lookout Santa Cruz website.
“Who do we need to shoot for this? I think we should start taking these people out, they’re not going to stop just saying.”
A handful of people had “liked” the comment, Navarro said, adding that it remained on the Lookout website for six hours before it was removed despite her requests.
The Pajaronian has reached out to Lookout for comment.
Navarro said the threat reflects the often vitriolic culture that has come to define board meetings.
Navarro pointed to comments made during Wednesday’s board meeting, including Trustee Gabe Medina calling her a “racist” and a “white supremacist” without offering evidence.
“I have a balance of logic and emotion, and I will vote in the way that I believe is the best for my community,” Navarro said. “But I will not do so at my own peril. And I do not believe that my volunteer service warrants a death threat, which is why I said 100 percent, please prosecute this person to the full extent of the law.”
After the district reported the threat, investigators served a search warrant at Diaz’s residence in the 200 block of Mesa Verde Drive.
No firearms were found during the search, and no guns are registered to Diaz, police said. During the investigation, she admitted that she wrote the threatening social media comment.
“The Watsonville Police Department takes all threats seriously, whether made in person or online,” WPD stated in a Facebook post. “Every threat is thoroughly investigated to ensure the safety of our community.”
“I raise this tonight because it does not exist in isolation,” Navarro said, pointing to a recent San Jose Mercury News story detailing a significant rise in threats against public officials, particularly women.
“This district is not exempt from that trend,” she said. “We owe one another and the public we serve a basic standard of conduct when it does not include language inviting violence against elected trustees. I ask that Lookout and this community hold the same standard.”
He made your free video player run smoothly. Now he’s doing that for robots.
Tickets to Sister Act – Preview Night
Tickets to Sister Act
Juneteenth evokes resilience as Trump continues war on Black history
Juneteenth is the celebration of Black emancipation from slavery in the United States. The commemoration began after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the news finally reached Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, freeing 250,000 Black people still enslaved in the isolated state. It became a federally recognized holiday under President Joe Biden in 2021.
New cards for 2026
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Go eyes robotaxis and acquisitions after Japan’s biggest IPO of 2026. Here’s why it matters
Aura’s impressive e-ink photo frame doesn’t even look digital
Before SpaceX IPO, investors in China secretly acquired stakes
One previously unreported SpaceX investor has ties to Chinese military contractors. The information was revealed only after ProPublica went to court to obtain it. By Justin Elliott and Joshua Kaplan for ProPublica A businessman with ties to Chinese military contractors was among the overseas investors who acquired stakes in SpaceX while it was still a private company.
Memorandum of capitulation
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DOJ Refuses to Officially Say Trump’s $1.8 Billion Slush Fund Is Dead
The Trump administration is refusing to declare in writing that the president’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is actually dead.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ordered that “Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Jr., and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent FILE a declaration under the penalty of perjury that they will not take any action to create or operate the Anti-Weaponization Fund, and that the Anti-Weaponization Fund will not proceed in any manner, or under any name,” issuing a preliminary injunction and giving the government a deadline of June 19.
The deadline arrived on Friday, and the Department of Justice responded by refusing to file such a declaration due to “serious separation of powers concerns.” The DOJ claimed that Blanche’s congressional testimony earlier this month that the fund is “not going forward, period” is enough, along with similar statements from other administration officials.
This raises questions as to whether the Trump administration is sneakily trying to keep the fund alive in some form. After Blanche’s congressional testimony, Trump was asked if he was ending his slush fund plans. “No, a court ruled against it,” Trump said, going on to argue that “these are people that have been decimated” and “they should be reimbursed for a crooked government.”
Last week, The Atlantic reported that White House officials were still telling President Trump’s allies that they would get some form of payment, even with Blanche’s public statements disavowing the fund.
Department of Justice lawyers also refused to declare the fund dead in writing to another federal judge, Richard Leon, more than a week ago. At the time, anonymous sources told The Atlantic that work was continuing on the fund inside the Trump administration in secret. With that in mind, Friday’s court filing from White House officials makes it seem like they are trying to skirt the law and create the slush fund anyway.
Report: ICE Caused Humanitarian Crisis in Minnesota
The global NGO Human Rights Watch released a report Thursday alleging widespread human rights violations by the federal government during “Operation Metro Surge,” the massive ICE deployment in Minnesota this past winter in which ICE arbitrarily detained approximately 4,000 immigrants, the vast majority of whom had no domestic convictions, killing two US citizens and injuring, harassing, and surveilling others.
Researchers interviewed more than 130 people, including immigrants who spent weeks or months hiding, lawyers whose clients were affected, health care workers and educators.
Now, months after Operation Metro Surge, the report details the scale at which people are still putting their lives back together.
Calls to local suicide hotlines increased precipitously during Metro Surge, researchers learned.
“There is no amount of press coverage that could ever fully document the scale of the ripple effect of trauma that this has on the city of Minneapolis,” one resident told HRW. “And when these cameras go away, we’re still going to be here grieving and traumatized.” Calls to local suicide hotlines, the researchers learned, increased precipitously; in some cases, previously mentally healthy people became suicidal “because of the threat of being detained.” One medical provider told the researchers that ICE was “writing a recipe book” for PTSD.
Marcus Schmit, the executive director of the youth mental health organization NAMI Minnesota, called the ongoing mental health effects particularly acute for children living in neighborhoods “where friends are interrogated, assaulted, or taken away.”
“I’m terrified of being here because I don’t want that to happen to my dad again,” said a 7-year-old girl whose father was taken by ICE during a raid on their home in December. Her father, who was later released, said that his daughter sometimes begs him not to leave the house. Her mother, who was pregnant, did not leave the house for months after the raid, even for prenatal appointments.
Since Operation Metro Surge, ICE has continued raiding American cities. This month, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan threatened to raid New York City, saying he would send “more agents than you’ve ever seen before.” Some who protested during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, meanwhile, are still facing legal threats, as in the case of 15 Minneapolis protesters charged with felonies this week.
“The federal government sent hordes of masked, armed agents to grab people off the street, whisk them away in shackles, and abuse those who sought to bear witness,” said Reagan Williams, crisis and conflict researcher at Human Rights Watch. “National-level action is needed to ensure accountability, end ongoing abuses, remedy the harm, and prevent another crisis of this scale.”
DOJ Refusing to Release Old Epstein Emails That Could Expose Trump
The Department of Justice claims that it’s released every document that’s required under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. But the agency previously said it collected more than six million pages of material during its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, and it only released around three million. So what’s in the rest of the Epstein files?
The DOJ claims that the other three million pages are either duplicates, unrelated to Epstein, or protected by legal privilege. But because of the administration’s lack of transparency in regard to Epstein, many are concerned that something is still being hidden.
CBS News analyzed the available files to try to figure out which documents appeared to be missing, and found a number of notable omissions: questionable redactions, missing emails from older accounts, lack of massage scheduling records after 2009, missing prison surveillance footage, and more.
Notably, most of the emails in the released files were from an email account created in 2008, around the time Epstein went to jail: jeevacation@gmail.com.
But Epstein had other, older email addresses that were mentioned in only a few, highly redacted publicly released files. One missing account, littlestjeff@yahoo.com, was from the early 2000s—the time when Epstein was most in touch with Donald Trump.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that he is innocent of all charges when it comes to his connection with Epstein. But, as this analysis by CBS reveals, we may still be missing major pieces of the puzzle.
These books make a helluva case for another reconstruction in America
We’re gonna need a Third Founding. Or a Second Reconstruction. Take your pick, but whatever you call it, the post-Donald Trump era in the United States is going to require so much rebuilding and so much grappling with the past as much as the present. Eric Foner—“The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution” Conservatives have hated the…
Goal!
A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | ‘I love the inflation’: Yes, Trump actually said that.
U.S. Intel Warns Netanyahu Will Try to Blow Up Trump’s Iran Deal
U.S. intelligence is warning that the Israeli government is probably going to try to undermine the Trump administration’s peace deal with Iran.
The Washington Post, citing unnamed former and current U.S. officials, reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is going to continue bombing and occupying Lebanon, even though the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding demands a “permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon.”.
“Continuing to occupy part of Lebanon is a recipe for disaster,” an unnamed U.S. official told the Post. “Without a full Israeli withdrawal, the likelihood of resumed hostilities between the [Israeli military] and Hezbollah is all but certain.”
ّIsraelis have publicly denounced the 14-point MOU, with media commentators in the country calling it a “catastrophic capitulation” and a “diplomatic Oct. 7,” referencing the Hamas-led attack from 2023. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on Friday seemingly advocated for a genocide in Lebanon, posting on X in Hebrew that “for every tear shed by an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers should cry. All of Lebanon should burn.”
Netanyahu has used constant warfare, from relentless war crimes in Gaza to bombing Iran and Lebanon, to deflect against corruption charges and save his political fortunes. Any end to these conflicts would only hurt his chances in Israel’s October elections. He and his far-right, fascistic political allies in Israel are willing to slaughter countless innocent people across the Middle East to save themselves and continue their settler colonialism.
HHS Pushes Fetal Personhood in New Grant Guidelines
A recent funding notice from the Department of Health and Human Services seems to contain a message for the anti-abortion movement: the administration hasn’t entirely forgotten them. The announcement offers applicants nearly $2 million in grant support to promote embryo adoption—and while the program isn’t new, it’s now couched in the fundamentalist language of fetal personhood.
“This revised grant language to call embryos ‘children’ may seem small, but it could have enormous consequences for abortion, IVF treatment, and birth control access for people nationwide,” Gretchen Borchelt, vice president for reproductive rights and health equity at the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement.
Embryo adoption was the Christian right’s response to the rise in popularity of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in the early aughts. The fertility treatment involves generating far more embryos than any prospective parent is likely to use, since (as with natural conception) most fertilized eggs don’t survive, often leaving IVF patients with numerous frozen embryos.
Those embryos were sought after for stem cell research, which put some politicians on the right in a bind. While supporting legislation that moved stem cell research forward, President George W. Bush first established the federal embryo adoption grant program in 2002. Ever since, it’s been a bone that conservative officials have dangled in front of anti-abortion groups in hopes of taking the political edge off of their support for IVF.
The Trump administration’s new funding announcement sweetens the pot for proponents of fetal personhood. The total funds have nearly doubled, and the notice not only uses the words “child” or “children” a total of 37 times, but specifically refers to the unused embryos as “children who already exist and are in need of a family.” It’s far more strident than the program’s previous framing, which is still available on the website of the HHS office that administers the funds.
This opportunity is also only available to those organizations that seek to distribute frozen embryos in the name of fetal personhood. It excludes the few secular groups in this field that refer to the practice as “embryo donation,” a more medical phrasing (you might donate a kidney versus putting your kidney up for adoption).
“There has always been this interest in setting as many precedents as you can for recognizing fetal personhood” among anti-abortion groups, “even in contexts that don’t directly bear on what abortion opponents are most interested in,” says Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis who studies reproductive rights and its opposition.
But that might be all that the Christian right is getting out of this funding announcement. “Everyone is still looking to read tea leaves about what the Trump administration is going to do after the midterm,” Ziegler says. “I think the question with all of this is whether there’s actually ever any muscle behind it, or if it’s just feel-good talk for social conservatives so the administration can keep their support without actually doing anything.”
While Trump has rolled back key protections for reproductive care, according to many anti-abortion activists, the president hasn’t done nearly enough. Some have threatened to pull their support ahead of the midterms unless they see further action from the federal government on their agenda—which would then alienate a much wider swath of the country.
“The Trump administration sees the same polling everybody else does, which is to suggest that doing a lot of what the Christian right would want would be really unpopular,” Ziegler says. Public approval hasn’t necessarily stopped Trump before, but “I don’t think these are issues about which he’s really personally passionate.”
One sign that this isn’t more than messaging is that the anti-abortion movement isn’t really interested in embryo adoption anymore. Even among proponents, very few people were ultimately interested in giving away or adopting embryos, and when the process was relabeled as an adoption rather than a medical donation, it became even pricier and more arduous, involving home visits and legal fees. That’s unlikely to change. So while the addition of personhood language might be something anti-abortion activists can chew on, that’s about it.
“It’s like running a playbook that worked in 2002 when the movement has moved much further to the right on this issue,” Ziegler says.
But perhaps the administration realizes it doesn’t need to do more. Where else will its firmest anti-abortion supporters go?
“The alternative here to what is still objectively a pro-life and pro-family administration—and pro-life and pro-family president—is a party that ran on abortions with no restrictions whatsoever,” a White House official told Politico. “The choice here is very clear, I think, if you’re someone on the pro-life side of things.”
Fortunate Son: Crypto Senator’s Kid, 22, Raises $30 Million
A twenty-two-year-old man graduated from Stanford University last Sunday.
While there, he wrote for Peter Thiel’s right-wing Stanford Review, worked at venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm.
Now he’s starting a new futures exchange with a $30 million venture capital investment that values his fledgling company at $300 million.
His name is Theodore Gillibrand, and he’s the son of pro-crypto Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-New York.
From Fortune reporter Ben Weiss, who broke the story:
The 22-year-old son of a crypto-friendly senator plans to launch his own exchange for a type of derivative popularized by digital asset traders. Theodore Gillibrand, whose mother is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), has drummed up $30 million in a fundraise led by the venture firm Lux Capital, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The deal valued Theodore’s startup at $300 million, said the sources, who asked for anonymity to discuss private business dealings.(Read the full story: Exclusive: Son of pro-crypto New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand raises $30 million to launch a derivatives exchange)
The story describes Gillibrand as “a key Democratic ally for the crypto industry” and “part of a group of lawmakers who first introduced the Genius Act, or legislation that regulates stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency pegged to real-world assets like the U.S. dollar.”
“My son is a grown adult starting his own independent business,” Gillibrand said in a statement to the New York Post. “I have no involvement in it whatsoever. That said, I’m enormously proud of him and wish him nothing but the best.”
The Post describes Sen. Gillibrand as “one of Capitol Hill’s most prominent boosters of cryptocurrency legislation.”
During his time at Stanford—while his mom was pushing the crypto agenda—Theodore interned at Andreessen Horowitz and did a fellowship at Paradigm, two venture capital funds heavily invested in crypto.
I often warn that Republicans aren’t the only problem when it comes to the tech fascist takeover of our democracy. The crypto, AI and venture capital barons have enough money to try to buy both sides. That’s why it’s disturbing that Democrats who ought to know better—including Gavin Newsom—are cozying up to crypto.
Surely, it’s just a coincidence that the beneficiary of this miraculous VC investment is the son of a pro-crypto senator.
Nice work if you can get it.
As one commenter put it on BlueSky: “Welcome to the age of Nepomaxxing.”
Related:
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