A viral social media video this week claimed that employees at a Norwood Park Starbucks wrote “Loser” on a drink ordered in honor of slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. An online furor followed, and the coffee shop even closed temporarily.
But Starbucks now says that time-stamped footage from the store at 6332 N. Northwest Highway does not show any of its workers writing that message. Instead, the note appears “to have been added after the beverage was handed off, likely by someone else,” a spokesperson told Block Club.
The controversy started with a post Tuesday from Jacqueline Garretson, who, according to her X bio, is the Illinois state director for The Conservative Caucus and previously worked as a staffer for failed Republican attorney general candidate Thomas DeVore. Garretson wrote that a relative, whom she later identified as her mother-in-law, ordered the Mint Majesty tea with two honeys — an order known to be Kirk’s favorite drink — from the Starbucks. When the order was completed, the cup had “Loser” written on it, Garretson said.
Garretson encouraged followers to call Starbucks and report the incident. She later posted two videos of her and an unidentified man confronting workers at the Norwood Park Starbucks.
“I’m talking 5 p.m. today, I want some form of action to the employee that represents this business that wrote ‘Loser’ on my mother’s cup,” the man, who is not seen on-camera, can be heard saying in the video, which was posted Wednesday. “We’re looking for not corporate bureaucracy. I want immediate accountability; and if not, I will have this whole intersection lined with patriots today, I’m not even joking,” the man told a Starbucks employee.
The videos received more than 40,000 likes on X. On Wednesday evening, Garretson posted that she went back to the Norwood Park Starbucks at 5 p.m. and found a sign that said the business was temporarily closed. “Thank you to everybody that called, stopped in to order Charlie’s drink and put in complaints with corporate. Over the past 24 hours we have SHUT THEM DOWN,” Garretson wrote in text over the video.
In an email to Block Club, a Starbucks spokesperson confirmed the Norwood Park location was closed for “a portion of the day” Wednesday. However, the spokesperson said the company reviewed timestamped in-store video footage and found the note was not written by a Starbucks employee. The note appears “to have been added after the beverage was handed off, likely by someone else,” the spokesperson said.
The Norwood Park Starbucks was back open Thursday, the spokesperson said.
She just wanted in on the fun. Everyone else got someone fired for saying something they didn’t like. Why shouldn’t she just because she couldn’t find anyone who’d done it?
And anyway, it’s good career move. She’s got game.
All the very best conservative lawyers in the country just happen to be models and pageant queens. So weird.
Trump has appointed that person, LIndsey Halligan to be the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia where she will prosecute Letitia James since he fired the other Trumper prosecutor who could find enough evidence to do it. He seems quite sure she will find it.
Lindsey Halligan is an American lawyer who is currently serving as a Special Assistant to the President in the second Trump administration. She previously practiced insurance law in Florida, before joining Donald Trump’s legal team in 2022. Trump has tasked her with removing “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution.
In a series of social media posts by Trump on September 20, 2025 where he called for prosecution against his political enemies, he said was appointing Halligan for U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Her predecessor, Erik Siebert, resigned from the position after the Trump administration pressured him to bring criminal charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James.Halligan has no prosecutorial experience, having primarily practiced law related to insurance claims.
Education and early life
Halligan attended Holy Family High school, and after graduation attended Regis University in Denver and earned a degree in political science and broadcast journalism.She competed in the Miss Colorado USA pageant twice in 2009 she was a semifinalist, and in 2010 she was third runner up. She was admitted to the Florida Bar in 2014.
Law career Insurance law
Halligan was a partner at Cole, Scott and Kissane in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and handled residential and commercial insurance claims.
Halligan was second chair to another lawyer defending an insurance company at a two-day trial against three Miami homeowners who had suffered damaged roofs. A judge would not award her attorneys fees because he ruled that her team did not act “in good faith.”
Halligan has represented Donald Trump since 2022. By August 2022, she had never handled a federal case. She was at Mar-a-Lago during the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, quickly became involved in Trump’s lawsuit in October 2022 against CNN for allegedly comparing Trump to Hitler, and has been involved in his defense against the federal government in the classified documents case.
Trump’s Save America PAC paid Halligan $212,000 from June 2022 to June 2023.
In a March 2025 executive order, Trump tasked Halligan and JD Vance with removing “improper ideology” regarding portrayal of race in American history in the Smithsonian Institution. She currently serves as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Associate Staff Secretary in the second Trump administration.
Honestly, I don’t know why he doesn’t just put Laura Loomer in the job. Nobody would stop him. But I suppose her real impediment is that she never won a beauty pageant like Alina Habba and this equally unqualified woman lawyer he hired for obvious reasons.
Good luck with that prosecution. Letitia James is a real lawyer.
Karl: You've said you restored free speech in America. Is that free speech including for people who are harshly critical of you?
Trump: I've become immune to it… That's why your network paid me $16 million.. That's why CBS paid me a lot of money too. And that's why I sued The… pic.twitter.com/5oLBjOw80W
Karl: You’ve said you restored free speech in America. Is that free speech including for people who are harshly critical of you?
Trump: I’ve become immune to it… That’s why your network paid me $16 million.. That’s why CBS paid me a lot of money too. And that’s why I sued The New York Times
Karl: The judge threw it out
Trump: I’m winning…. And for you to stand there and act so innocent and ask me a question like that… The reason I won that lawsuit is you were proven to be dishonest. You’re not a wonderful person. You’re a terrible reporter. You know it and I know it.
One Republican state lawmaker in Oklahoma now wants to require every public university in the state to erect statues to slain far-right activist Charlie Kirk.
On Friday, Jeffrey Sachs — an assistant professor at Nova Scotia’s Acadia University — called attention to a bill by Oklahoma state senators Shane Jett (R) and Dana Prieto (R) that would mandate every public university in the Sooner State build a “Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza.” The bill, which has been filed as Senate Bill 1187 and does not yet have a formal name, would force universities to set aside a portion of real estate in a visible public location — like the quad, the student union or main entrance pathways — “to maximize public awareness and utilization.”
Senate Bill 1187 would also make it a requirement for schools to erect a statue of both Kirk and his family, and to include a plaque honoring Kirk as “a voice of a generation, modern civil rights leader, vocal Christian, martyr for truth and faith, and free speech advocate.”
“We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.” — Charlie Kirk
“Square or plaza plans shall include a statue of Charlie Kirk sitting at a table with an empty seat across from him or a statue of Charlie Kirk and his wife standing and holding their children in their arms as a central element of the square or plaza design. The statue design and size shall be approved by the Legislature as part of the overall design review and approval process,” the bill reads.
CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): The Civil Rights Act, though, let’s be clear, created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon.
Our goal should be to urge normies to get off their couches. Photo public domain by Max Vakhtbovycn.
Are we anxious this week? Between the “suspension” of Jimmy Kimmel and Vladimir Putin testing NATO’s “doorknobs” and “discovering is the US President is not at home,” you’d have reason to.
Over at Vox, Zack Beauchamp considers where all this is heading:
The kind of authoritarianism I fear is emerging in the United States, which political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism,” doesn’t involve the outright criminalization of the opposition or formal martial law. Instead, it depends on perverting the law, modifying and twisting it with the intent of incrementally undermining the opposition’s ability to compete fairly in elections.
Such a government can be constructed along the lines of what Princeton University’s Kim Lane Scheppele calls a “Frankenstate:” that is, “an abusive form of rule, created by combining the bits and pieces of perfectly reasonable democratic institutions in monstrous ways. … No one part is objectionable; the horror emerges from the combinations.”
Fascism will come to America hugging a flag and carrying a grudge.
The Frankenstate targets opposition parties through burdensome tax audits, dubious criminal investigations, and uneven application of campaign finance regulations. It also focuses on attacking the civil foundations of the opposition — meaning attacking the donors who might fund them, the activist groups who might stand up for their rights, and the free media they depend on to get their message out.
Silence or coopt enough of these voices, and the ruling party doesn’t actually have to outlaw political opposition or stuff ballot boxes. The opposition will simply be weak enough that letting them compete poses little threat.
There’s a lot here, including some advice for fighting back. As Beauchamps suggests, we need more senators to speak out and more corporations to step up. But waiting for that to happen is a fool’s game. The people we need to reach are not the teminally online.
And it means individual citizens attending protests and volunteering with the organizations under threat, as well as with political campaigns that could change things in 2026.
I continue to believe that actions you take must be visible and persistent. The people we need to reach are not the teminally online. More normies need to see and hear what’s happening to their country from their neighbors, the more who will get off their couches and into the streets. Activating them should be our immediate goal, including younger people who tend to dismiss politics as pointless.
I look at Niall Harbison’s feeds every morning first thing. I honestly believe it’s what keeps me from total despair sometimes. He rescues street dogs in Thailand, feeds them, gets them medical attention and in many cases finds them homes all over the world. His story is inspiring. He was a successful marketing person in Ireland suffering from depression and alcoholism who moved to Thailand to try to get his life straight. He hit bottom there and decided to devote himself to the dogs he was feeding around the town he lives in.
He saves them but he says they saved him and I believe it.
He is reproducing his rescue operation all over Asia and has a massive social media following where he shares stories of the dogs he’s saved from various difficult and sometimes horrific situations and we watch them respond to love and care from humans — and it just makes your heart melt. I need to see it like I need a cup of coffee in the morning.
The world feels very heavy right now, dark even. I’m sure I’m not the only one feeling that as I scroll my little black depression device while having my morning coffee.
Even in messages and chats with friends I get a sense of unease, tension and rising anger about a variety of issues.
I wanted to give everybody some hope through the lens which I see the world ; Through my interactions trying to save street dogs…
Things I Witness
Trying to help street dog is an incredibly hard thing to do. I can’t even begin to explain some of the things I have to see. Recently they include…
What links all of these cases is human involvement and they are the tip of the iceberg in terms of what I share. One major reason I choose to help street dogs is because they are a species that humans domesticated and who then became loyal to us. Dogs are very bad at caring for themselves and need our help but like so many things in this world, many humans discard them, abuse them and move on.
If you think the world is tough for us right now then you should see what it is like for street dogs! But there is hope…
People Also Give Me Phenomenal Hope
It would be easy to cast all humans as bad. Thats just not what I see. I could pick from 100s of examples I see on a daily basis but three recent stories pop into my mind that are dog related (and in the pics below)…
Maximus was also chained up, close to death and supposedly “vicious”.
Humans put them in those positions but it was also humans who saved them and gave them hope…
Trooper had his life saved by a series of operations that were funded by the community. He made it because Jam drove with him for 14 hours to Bangkok keeping him alive en route. He has had about 30 kind humans involved in saving his life to date.
After 3 years of rebuilding her life with us, Britney found her hero in Sam. He flew to Thailand to adopt her and he is training her and giving her the happy life she never knew she could have.
There is so much bad in the world but it is more than balanced out by all the good. Look at the smiles in those photos. I see that in messages, real life and around dogs every single day X100 despite all the stress and bad situations I often find dogs in.
Fixing Big Problems Needs Hope
To me It feels like the world lacks any sense of hope and optimism at the moment.
When dealing with dogs it would be easy for me to become bitter and lose all hope. To respond to dog abusers with outrage and to scream at those who are indifferent to the problem. That feels to me how much of the world is behaving right now on a whole range of issues. It doesn’t really get you anywhere constructive.
There always has to be dialogue, education and differences of opinions. Maybe I am stupidly naive comparing everything to dogs but to see the suffering they face and the odds they battle against yet they still constantly bounce back with optimism fills me with hope.
Take little Chance for example who was stabbed in the stomach 4 months ago but look at her now.
We Can All Learn A Lot From Dogs
I always think we can learn a lot from dogs. Kindness, loyalty and compassion to name but a few of their best traits.
More importantly they often bring out the very best in all of us humans. If you’ve ever been to a dog park you’ll know what I mean. You’ll often find yourself talking to all sorts of people you might normally never say a word to. The race, age, sex or status of the other person often fades away as you stand there gushing over dogs with big silly grins on your face.
Dogs bring us together in the most wonderful and meaningful ways and that is true online also. I believe one of the biggest reasons we have so much division, hate and animosity in the world is because of social media algorithms. People disagreeing is good for business for the platforms. Social media feels so toxic to me at times that were it not for the dogs I would delete it fully.
In fact one of the most surprising parts of this mission is the impact the positive dog content has had on humans. I see what we share as injecting a little positivity into the online world to keep everybody sane. I know from many messages I get that the dogs offer a little ray of light in many people’s day among all the gloom.
To do that means to offer a vision and a mission of hope. Not one coming from a place of anger and frustration no matter how much I feel those emotions myself from tough situations.
In tough times when I think it is impossible I’ll look at dogs like King Whacker, Buster, Phoenix & Faith, Billy, Rusty or Candy. All dogs who were at rock bottom. To see them now shows that with hope anything in life is possible.
I know these might just be some words about street dogs in Thailand but I think we all need to grab onto as much positivity right now. Things will always get better in life and as the dogs show there is always Hope.
Take care of yourselves and spread a little positivity in whatever way you can to dogs but also to fellow humans. The world needs it right now.
Big Love
Niall
P.S You can support the mission by just subscribing to this newsletter or donating to Happy Doggo here.
REPORTER: “Regarding Antifa being a terrorist organization….”
TRUMP: “Who are you with?”
REPORTER: “NPR…”
TRUMP: “NPR? I thought they were gone. They’re still here? Oh, good. Congratulations. Not for long…”
REPORTER: “How do you target [Antifa]?”
TRUMP: “Do they have anything to do with YOUR network, Antifa?”
REPORTER: “No.”
Trump: When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump… They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that. pic.twitter.com/kSsqkmWZBU
Trump thinks that the Constitution gives him the power to do anything he wants. He literally believes that and is acting accordingly. But apparently, some members of Congress are worried that he might not actually have the right to kill people indiscriminately as he’s doing down in the waters off the coast of Venezuela (and soon elsewhere) so they want to make it explicit:
Draft legislation is circulating at the White House and on Capitol Hill that would hand President Trump sweeping power to wage war against drug cartels he deems to be “terrorists,” as well as against any nation he says has harbored or aided them, according to people familiar with the matter.
A wide range of legal specialists have said that U.S. military attacks this month on two boats suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea were illegal. But Mr. Trump has claimed that the Constitution gave him the power he needed to authorize them.
It was not clear who wrote the draft congressional authorization or whether it could pass the Republican-led Congress, but the White House has been passing it around the executive branch.
The broadly worded proposal, which would legally authorize the president to kill people he deems narco-terrorists and attack countries he says helped them, has set off alarm bells in some quarters of the executive branch and on Capitol Hill, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity about sensitive internal deliberations.
Some people think that Trump’s extrajudicial killings, which he takes great pride in (when he’s not lobbying for the Nobel Peace Prize) could be a problem:
Critics have also said that Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have given illegal orders, causing Special Operations troops to target civilians — even if they are suspected of crimes — in apparent violation of laws against murder.
What are these laws against murder you speak of? Haven’t they heard that the president can do anything he wants and is immune from all accountability no matter what?
It seems there’s a tiny bit of concern among some Congressional Republicans about all this:
At a Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing on Thursday, several Democrats asked questions about the legal authority for the military strikes. But a Pentagon nominee said he was unable to answer them. At the end of the hearing, the Republican chairman of the panel, Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, said the administration must respond.
“The questions about what happened in the Caribbean are going to have to be answered,” Mr. Wicker said. “This committee has congressional oversight responsibility. Members are entitled to ask the questions that they’ve asked, and answers will be given. And I just think it’s important for every American to understand that obligation.”
David Ignatius wrote about the military’s role in all this which should be of concern. They aren’t supposed to carry out unlawful orders. But, as Ignatius points out, Pete Hegseth has purged the military of most of its lawyers, recently even sending 600 of them to become immigration judges. He is overwhelmingly hostile toward them:
Hegseth has a 20-year beef with military lawyers. He ridiculed them in his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors,” writing that the JAGs “are often not so affectionately known as ‘jagoffs.’” He claimed that “most” JAGs prosecuted U.S. troops rather than “bad guys” because “it’s easier to get promoted that way.” His resentment, by his account, dates from a 2005 JAG briefing in the south of Baghdad, where his platoon was advised not to shoot someone carrying a rocket-propelled grenade unless it was “pointed at you with the intent to fire.” Hegseth, a young lieutenant in the National Guard, said he told his platoon, “That’s a bullshit rule that’s going to get people killed,” and ordered them to, if they saw a threat, “destroy the threat.”
Hegseth’s antipathy deepened when he became a Fox News commentator. His friend Parlatore, who had represented him in a divorce proceeding, was a lawyer for a Navy SEAL named Eddie Gallagher who was accused of war crimes in the 2017 death of an Islamic State prisoner in Mosul, Iraq. Parlatore told a military jury that the case “should be terrifying … to anybody that has to go down range and then have their actions questioned by investigators like this,” according to author David Philipps.
Parlatore helped Hegseth publicize the case on Fox, and Trump, then in his first term, was an avid viewer. According to Philipps’s book, “Alpha,” Trump phoned Navy Secretary Richard Spencer and demanded that Gallagher be released from the brig — then he phoned again and said, “I want you to call Pete Hegseth at Fox and tell him what you’re doing.”
Gallagher was convicted of desecrating the corpse of the prisoner, but Trump overturned the verdict and restored his Navy SEAL insignia. At the time, critics warned that presidential intervention at the urging of a Fox commentator could undermine military justice.
The Gallagher case was Hegseth’s “origin story” as defense secretary. During his confirmation hearing in January, he didn’t budge in his opposition to what he called “burdensome rules of engagement.” And a month after he took office, the attacks on military lawyers began.
Ignatius points out:
The U.S. military has always emphasized obeying the laws of war, for all the difficulties that might cause. George Washington appointed the first judge advocate only a few weeks after taking command of the Continental Army; he wrote that “an Army without Order, Regularity & Discipline, is no better than a Commission’d Mob.”
George Washington was a loser. What did he know?
This is very, very bad. Trump seems to want to wage war in our hemisphere. His loose talk about “taking” countries like Greenland and Canada, the obvious attempt to create regime change in Venezuela, threats against Mexico, all of it adds up to some kind of imperial ambition.
At the same time he’s obviously on the verge of abandoning Europe and our Asian allies except as countries to strongarm into giving him money. He’s ignoring Putin’s military encroachments on Eastern Europe, saying in the UK this week that it doesn’t have anything to do with the United States:
Trump on Russia's war on Ukraine: "It doesn't affect us because, like, we have a big ocean in between." pic.twitter.com/Yopo4HIvUj
This is a foreign policy from hell and I don’t think anyone fully understands it, least of all Trump. But that’s exactly how things can go sideways in a hurry.
Any president has the most power in this area and Trump sees no impediments anyway. Now it appears that the Congress would like to completely abdicate any responsibility for national security and just let him have his way. Keep your fingers crossed that nobody makes a catastrophic mistake.
President Trump said he is aiming to regain control of Bagram Air Base, which has been under Taliban control since U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021.
“We gave it to them for nothing. We’re trying to get it back, by the way. That could be a little breaking news, we’re trying to get it back because they need things from us,” Trump said Thursday of the base.
“We want that base back but one of the reasons we want the base is, as you know, it’s an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons,” he added
The president, while speaking at a press conference in the United Kingdom with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, did not expand on plans to get the base in U.S. hands and did not explain what he meant by the Taliban needing “things” from the U.S.
The base was the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan and fell to the Taliban during the chaotic withdrawal under the Biden administration. Trump in February asserted the U.S. should have kept control of the base and claimed that China’s People’s Liberation Army had taken control of it, which China previously denied.
Tom shared the compendium of late night show responses to Trump’s censorship. But you really need to see the full episode of The Daily Show. We need laughs. Badly.
