If a group's entire world view is built on the notion that they are perpetual victims because of their race, every time something bad happens to them they are going to go looking for racism as the scapegoat. In other words, they are going to see "racism" under every rock and behind every tree. They will even see racism in a power outage.
When it come to the black community in the US, though, most of the bad things that happen in their neighborhoods are directly caused by their own behavior.
In mid-August a powerful windstorm hit northwest Indiana. Gusts reached around 99 mph in Gary, comparable to a Category 2 hurricane. The violent weather toppled trees onto lines, snapped hundreds of poles, and damaged transmission structures and substations.
The repairs have been difficult and slow moving. This week NIPSCO (the Northern Indiana Public Service Company) reported that 99% of customers in the region had their power back, however, Gary Mayor Eddie Melton (Democrat and mayor since 2024) took to the left-wing media to make political hay out of the incident.
In an interview with far-left activist "journalist" Don Lemon, the mayor answered in the affirmative when asked if he thought the large black population of Gary was the reason the utility companies were slow to finish repairs, suggesting that there was a racial element to the city's longer wait time.
After a heavy storm in Gary, Indiana, the mayor went on the Don Lemon show and implied that the power was off for 13 days because of racism because Gary is a predominantly black city.
But, the electric company, NIPSCO, claimed that they were being shot at while they were trying… pic.twitter.com/ZfPUpU84VD
Other media outlets also asserted that Gary was being singled out for slower repairs because of the community's 75% - 80% black population; comparing the event to the disastrous FEMA response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Indiana Governor Mike Braun (a Republican) has called for an investigation into the two week power outages in some areas of the state, though he has not supported any arguments of racial discrimination.
The delays in Gary can be easily explained by simply asking NIPSCO and checking with local police: The company had to hold off on repairs and find extra security for their line workers after scouts identifying damages were shot at in a predominantly black neighborhood. At least one NIPSCO vehicle was hit multiple times by gunfire and the workers pulled out of the area.
Police were called to the scene but never found the shooters. This news was widely reported, yet the Gary Mayor and the left-wing media have apparently ignored it.
As a result of the attack, the city had to coordinate with city police, Indiana State Police, and state officials to ensure crews were protected during the restoration process. The city added that ISP sent additional troopers to assist local forces. This takes time and adds extensive delays.
In other words, the violence inherent in black neighborhoods led to their own suffering. The inability to behave, even during a grid-down crisis, made it impossible for work crews to do their jobs.
The opportunism of activist politicians looking for racial victim-points is a dying business. Americans have had enough of race hysteria, BLM and the eternal quest for minority handouts and pity. Mayor Eddie Melton and agitators like Don Lemon will likely be dragged by the public for their behavior here.
That said, the crisis represents yet another example of leftist activists deliberately jumping to conclusions. They are so desperate to make the public believe "systemic racism" is real that they are willing to agitate and exaggerate for the sake of narrative. Eventually, they will end up creating the very anti-minority sentiment that they claim to be fighting against. Keep accusing people of racism after they tried to help you, and they will stop helping you.
Tyler Durden Thu, 08/27/2026 - 21:20By Diana DiGangi of UtilityDive
Aspects of the Trump administration’s energy policy - such as the rollback of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits, the introduction of new tariffs and offshore wind lease buybacks - could cause the U.S to lose between 390 GW and 540 GW of new wind, solar and energy storage capacity over the next decade, according to projections from the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“Crucially, these lost projects are not actually replaced with other sources of new power,” the NRDC said in a Wednesday report. “At most, only 9 GW of additional gas capacity is added with Trump’s policies in place.”
The report cited near-term supply chain bottlenecks for gas turbines, volatile fuel prices, “and the general cost-competitiveness of new renewables relative to gas” as reasons for the NRDC’s low estimate for new additional gas investment.
An August report from Global Energy Monitor counts 189 GW of gas-fired capacity currently in the announced, pre-construction, and construction phases in the U.S., a number which “nearly doubled” in the first half of the year, “but uncertainty persists about how and when this capacity gets built.”
“Two-thirds of gas-fired capacity in development globally, and more than half of projects tied to data centers, do not have a named turbine/engine manufacturer,” Global Energy Monitor said. “Nearly one-quarter of projects earmarked for data centers do not have a named start year. Turbine supply constraints, financing uncertainty, local data center moratoriums, and mounting public opposition leave the true scale of the gas power buildout uncertain.”
Amanda Levin, NRDC’s director of policy analysis, said during a Tuesday press call that the group’s modeling still anticipates “significant growth in renewables under this administration. But we don’t go nearly as far, and we lose more than half of everything that we expected to be able to build with the combination of market forces and proactive policy.”
Both Levin and the Global Energy Monitor report noted that due to order backlogs for gas turbines for combined-cycle plants, developers who need to bring firm power online quickly are turning to alternatives like simple-cycle or reciprocating engine plants, which “are less efficient than combined-cycle plants and carry higher emissions per unit of electricity generated,” Global Energy Monitor said.
Levin said this trend supports the NRDC’s position that the Environmental Protection Agency’s gas power plant emissions rule should not be repealed, though the Trump administration has announced its intention to do so.
The trend “highlights actually the value of these types of standards … which is that the market is not acting in a perfectly rational economic way,” she said. “These types of regulations could prevent this type of highly polluting type of power generation by requiring us to think about how we are building out this gas that we’re trying to build over the next few years to meet this growing load.”
The NRDC’s report also forecast an increase in power costs due to a need to “rely more heavily on the existing, higher-cost legacy fossil fuel system” in absence of new renewables generation. The power sector will spend $5 billion to $15 billion more on fossil fuels, the NRDC said, while claiming $45 billion less in IRA tax incentives, relative to the group’s January 2025 Snapshot case.
“By 2035, average household electricity rates are projected to increase by an additional 4.2% to 5.5% nationwide, relative to the January 2025 Snapshot case,” the NRDC’s report said.
Tyler Durden Thu, 08/27/2026 - 20:55A Trump-appointed judge just dismissed a lawsuit by Elon Musk’s X seeking to void a New York state law requiring social media companies to disclose how they define and monitor hate speech, extremism, harassment, foreign political interference and disinformation.
U.S. District Judge John Cronan in Manhattan rejected X’s argument that the Stop Hiding Hate Act violated the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment by exposing it to lawsuits and big fines unless it disclosed "highly sensitive and controversial speech" that the state found objectionable.
Additionally, Cronan dismissed the case with prejudice, prohibiting X from refiling an updated claim on the same issue.
New York Attorney General Letitia James formally filed for the case to be dismissed in November 2025, saying the law helped consumers understand what to expect from social media, without blocking platforms from speaking out or exercising their own judgment when moderating content.
Most notably, X Corp. pointed to a separate lawsuit it brought against California’s Assembly Bill 587, which it argued was “identical in all material respects” to S895B.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees California, held that AB 587’s content-category reporting provisions compelled non-commercial speech about contested political topics, which triggered strict scrutiny of the law under the First Amendment.
However, Cronan wrote that “[t]he First Amendment poses no obstacle to New York’s law."
He added:
“Businesses might not always want to share every detail about the products or services they offer. But when the government requires those businesses to speak truthfully about their offerings, the First Amendment typically allows for that kind of disclosure requirement.”
Musk’s company also said it already dedicates resources to regulating “hateful conduct” and that this would not be recognized under New York’s categories of “hate speech,” “racism,” or “extremism.” It also listed its efforts to regulate what it calls “manipulated, or out-of-context media that may result in widespread confusion on public issues, impact public safety, or cause serious harm,” but that would not be recognized by the New York law.
Nevertheless, the law was struck down on First Amendment grounds.
In this case, Cronan dismissed the California case (X Corp vs Bonta) stating that the level of scrutiny applicable was “Zauderer scrutiny,” which is “more relaxed than ordinary intermediate or strict scrutiny.”
Under the 'Zauderer standard', the government can usually force a business to state purely factual, uncontroversial information about what it sells, so long as the requirement is reasonably related to preventing consumer confusion and is not unduly burdensome.
Calorie counts, ingredient lists, and “you may still owe costs if you lose” in a lawyer ad are the classic examples.
Cronan put the Stop Hiding Hate reports in that box, analogized them to menu-labeling, and applied the relaxed standard.
He also held Section 230 does not preempt a reporting duty that attaches to incomplete or false filings rather than to the moderation decisions themselves.
The problem is the categories.
The law does not just say “publish your existing terms of service.”
It requires platforms to state whether and how they define “hate speech or racism,” “extremism or radicalization,” “disinformation or misinformation,” “harassment,” and “foreign political interference,” then report enforcement data sliced by those buckets.
However, those labels are not commercial product specs, they are contested political and legal concepts.
Platforms that refuse the state’s taxonomy, use different terms (“hateful conduct,” “violent speech,” “synthetic media”), or treat some of those categories as viewpoint-laden rather than objective, are being forced to translate their editorial judgments into the state’s vocabulary under threat of $15,000-a-day fines.
That is closer to compelled speech about contested public issues than to “this yogurt has 140 calories.”
A Trump-appointed SDNY judge reaching the opposite result from a Ninth Circuit panel is not a partisan surprise; it is a circuit split on a hard First Amendment question.
However, choosing to rule with prejudice” and no leave to amend is aggressive.
X’s theory is not frivolous; a sister circuit already accepted a version of it, as we detailed above.
Dismissing the case so that X cannot replead after discovery or after further appellate development in Bonta treats a close constitutional question as settled when it is not.
Tyler Durden Thu, 08/27/2026 - 20:30