The Foundry.

Writing at Axios, energy writer Amy Harder says, “The climate agenda’s fall from grace over the past year has been stunning—in speed, scale and scope.” Harder quotes oil historian and S&P Global vice-chairman Dan Yergin as saying, “There’s no handwaving about how ‘We want to cooperate on climate.’ It’s, ‘We’re slamming the door on that issue.’ We’ve gone from over-indexing it to zero-indexing it.”

Polling has never shown climate change as being an issue of primary concern to American voters. Americans have consistently been more worried about issues that impact their daily lives today than about warnings from modern-day P.T. Barnums like U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres about some nebulous “highway to hell” and “the age of global boiling.

The issue had been slowly losing its effectiveness during the Biden years even as that administration tried to memorialize the movement’s objectives in policy.

Read it.

While we watch the insanity in Minneapolis unfold, Floridians have to take comfort, at least for now, that Gov. Ron DeSantis and all of law enforcement are not going to tolerate the attacks on ICE or the police.

A few days ago, a bizarre woman was stopped and pushed back on state troopers:

Jennifer Cruz was arrested outside Mi Pueblo, a Mexican grocery store and meat market in Jacksonville, Tuesday morning after she allegedly jumped out of her car and punched a state trooper in the face while officers were working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said in a post on X.

In case anyone has any misplaced sympathy for this woman, you should know more about her. For starters, she had a traffic violation:

According to a police report reviewed by Newsweek, the encounter began when a Trooper observed Cruz, 40, driving a white Dodge Ram 1500 while recording on her cellphone and tailgating a vehicle and then a marked patrol car in a manner that interfered with her ability to safely operate the vehicle,” Jacksonville Sheriffs Office said.

[snip]

When officers attempted to address Cruz’s traffic violation, a records check revealed her driver’s license had been suspended since June 17, 2025, prompting a tow request.

Cruz, an American citizen, allegedly attempted to flee the scene in her vehicle at around 08:22, but was stopped by patrol cars using emergency equipment. After exiting her vehicle, Cruz refused to surrender the keys and threatened officers, then allegedly struck a trooper in the face with a closed fist, causing injuries to her nose and fingers.

She continued resisting arrest, kicking at multiple officers, including ICE agents, and required deployment of a Taser in drive-stun mode and a hobble restraint to secure her safely.

Footage shared on X shows Cruz kicking and screaming as officers tried to place her in a patrol vehicle, at times laughing, taunting law enforcement, and calling one officer a ‘weak?ass motherf—ker.’

When Gov. DeSantis heard about the incident, his response was not only a class-act but appropriate for the situation:

‘This is not Minneapolis. This is not going to end well for you in Florida. You have a right to go out there and criticize government policy. You can go out there and protest within respected zones, but the idea that you’re going to assault one of our troopers is unacceptable, and you are going to face consequences as a result of that.’

Let’s hope any looney tunes who are prepared to defy the governor’s message will be stopped in their tracks in Florida.

Read it.

Germany in 2025 recorded a significant imbalance in politically motivated violent crime—with left-wing attacks against right-wing targets occurring far more frequently than violence in the opposite direction—according to official data from the Federal Ministry of the Interior.

Figures released in response to a parliamentary inquiry by Alternative for Germany (AfD) show that 606 violent crimes classified as “PMK-left” were registered with the subtopic field “against right” in 2025. By comparison, 182 violent offences were recorded as “PMK-right” with the subtopic “against left.” While authorities note that the final crime statistics for 2025 are not yet complete, the data indicate that left-wing perpetrators carried out more than three times as many attacks against political opponents as right-wing offenders did.

The figures also reveal a sharp year-on-year increase in political violence overall. In 2024, authorities recorded 416 cases of left-wing violence against right-wing targets, meaning the 2025 figure represents a rise of more than 30%. During the same period, right-wing attacks against left-wing targets increased from 147 to 182 cases.

The Foundry.

Global warming has gone cold as an issue. Despite decades of panicked predictions of doom, it’s never been a high priority for voters, and Preident Donald Trump’s bold expressions of “climate denial” went unpunished by voters.

The media still sound allied with the Green New Deal pushers, but the thrill is gone. Last November, leftists blasted ABC, CBS and NBC for barely touching the COP30 global climate summit in Brazil. (PBS gave it nearly 16 minutes, and 10 of it was a John Kerry softball interview.)

Now Axios.com posted an analysis by Amy Harder on this trend, titled “The world’s great climate collapse.” Greenpeace gang, beware: “The last year has seen an epic reversal that spread quickly from governments to boardrooms to pop culture.”

Not only has Trump dismissed climate panic, but Harder noted Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, “once one of the world’s most vocal climate advocates,” is now repealing some of his country’s climate policies. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair also issued a memo questioning the wisdom of pursuing “net zero” emissions policies.

The Telegraph (UK).

A conservative American influencer has claimed he was stabbed at an anti-immigration protest in Minneapolis.
Jake Lang, who previously served four years in prison after storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, said he had been attacked by a “commie Leftist rioter” after taunting Muslims and Somalis.
Minneapolis has been gripped by demonstrations in recent days following the shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an immigration agent on Jan 7.
Donald Trump, the US president, is prepared to deploy hundreds of paratroopers to the Minnesota city, which has become a target for his mass deportation programme following revelations of fraud by its Somali population.
Lang had attempted to mount an anti-immigration protest outside City Hall on Saturday, where, according to The Washington Post, he used a microphone to shout “Go home, Muslims” and “Send the Somalis back”.

Read it.

The recent U-Haul Growth Index shows that people are voting with their feet against Pennsylvania and other purple and blue states that have become inhospitable as places to live, work, and raise a family. And these out-migrators are heading to redder states that welcome them.

In 2025, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee topped U-Haul’s ‘in-migration’ states, measured by one-way customer moves.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania ranked an abysmal 44th.

The impact of losing friends and families — and their wealth — to other states should be the canary in coal mine for Pennsylvanians getting ready for another election year in 2026. We need to recognize that bad state-level policies are driving tax dollars and our neighbors to more friendly environments.

In fact, the blue-to-red migration is profound across the country.

Read it.

That said, Border Czar Tom Homan offered a strategy that could hit those stirring the chaos hard, and of course may set a dangerous slippery-slope precedent for civil rights when the shoe is on the other foot. Appearing on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle Thursday, Homan made clear that while protesters have the right to demonstrate, crossing the line by interfering with enforcement will carry consequences far beyond a court date.

“This job,” Homan told host Laura Ingraham, “and these people who wanna — you know, follow ICE, film ICE — you know what? You can protest; they have that right.” But, he added, “when you cross a line, and we’ve proven it, if you interfere or impede or assault an ICE officer, you will be prosecuted.”

Read it.

How to make ‘affordable care’ unaffordable: Mandate coverage that people don’t want and don’t need because of ideology.

Read it.

Don’t be too surprised if sometime later this day, Friday, the president invokes the Insurrection Act to tranquilize the city of Minneapolis, since aerial spraying of Olanzapine is probably out of the question. Where, oh where, are the mythologized “nice,” and “above-average” people of Minnesota, once praised in song and sketch on those long-ago Saturday nights of The Prairie Home Companion?

They have been replaced by a mutant army of psychotic Transtifa wendigos on the payroll of Arabella Advisors (now operating as Sunflower Services), or the Tides Foundation, or some other Soros-connected money-laundry.

And many have come from other states, possibly even other nations (or planets), to join the Cluster-B viragos native to the city in the crusade to defend “Joe Biden’s” legion of illegally imported Democratic Party voters.

This acute agitation in the streets against federal officers is obviously and brazenly abetted by those in charge: Governor Tim Walz, Mayor Jacob Frey, and Attorney General Keith Ellison. Walz is a huckleberry for the ages.

Did you catch his smarmy sob-story act the day before yesterday, weeping for his “communities” and “neighbors-of-color,” “who continue to stand up for freedom with empathy, blah blah.” Who does this fraudster think he is kidding with his act?

Read it.

Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder and Palantir chairman, has emerged as the first major donor in what is expected to be a high-dollar campaign to block a proposed California wealth tax, The New York Times reports.

Thiel gave $3 million to a political committee aligned with the California Business Roundtable late last year, marking the first publicly disclosed seven-figure contribution to oppose the proposed 5% tax aimed squarely at billionaires.

The donation signals that Silicon Valley’s ultra-wealthy are shifting from private planning to public resistance as supporters of the tax work to qualify it for the November ballot.

Read it.

In an incredible Senate hearing meant to address the dangers of abortion pills sold online without proper oversight, a Democratic witness turned the spotlight on herself by refusing to acknowledge that only women can get pregnant.

Dr. Nisha Verma, an OB-GYN tapped by Democrats, evaded direct questions from Republicans, prioritizing “identities” over scientific fact. This exchange highlights how insane woke ideology has infiltrated even medical testimony, undermining protections for women and enabling potential abuse through lax regulations on chemical abortions.

The hearing exposed real risks, like men coercing women into abortions by easily obtaining pills online—no in-person checks required. Yet Verma couldn’t—or wouldn’t—affirm basic truths, leaving observers questioning how such “experts” hold medical licenses in the first place.

Any purported physician who cannot say—or refuses to say—what a woman is ought to be barred from the practice of medicine.

Fortune magazine, a Voice of the Crust.

California’s proposed wealth tax aims to go after billionaires’ balance sheets, but it largely sidesteps the way many ultrawealthy people actually generate spendable cash: they borrow against their assets, tax?free, and never “realize” income in the first place. As long as that borrowing model stays intact, a one?time levy on wealth may raise money once, but it does little to change the system that lets cash?poor billionaires live richly while reporting very little taxable income.?

California is weighing a ballot measure, the Billionaire Tax Act, that would impose a one?time 5% tax on the total assets of state residents worth $1 billion or more. The tax would apply to anyone who was a California resident on January 1, 2026, with payment due in 2027 and the option to stretch it over five years for an additional charge.?
Supporters, led by a major healthcare workers’ union, pitch the measure as a way to raise roughly $100 billion to backfill expected federal healthcare cuts and force the wealthy to pay what they call their fair share. Gov. Gavin Newsom has warned that the levy could backfire by accelerating a departure of high?net?worth residents, even as he continues to defend the state’s broader progressive tax system.?

To take this example from the abstract into the practical, consider the examples of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Mr. Beast, the world’s most popular YouTuber. Musk does not live on a normal “salary” the way most people do, with most of his wealth tied up in shares of his companies such as Tesla and SpaceX, and he typically finances his spending by borrowing against those holdings and occasionally selling stock. In that sense, he is extremely asset?rich but comparatively low on ordinary cash income, using large credit lines backed by his equity to pay for homes, jets, and other expenses instead of taking regular paychecks.

…

The deeper problem lies in how modern billionaires convert paper wealth into cash without ever showing much taxable income. Rather than selling stock or private?company shares and realizing capital gains, they pledge those assets as collateral, borrow against them, and use the loan proceeds to fund everything from yachts and mansions to new investments.??

Because U.S. tax law does not treat borrowed money as income, these loans incur no income?tax bill, even when they finance lavish lifestyles. Policy analysts often describe this as the “buy, borrow, die” strategy: buy appreciating assets, borrow against them to live, then let heirs inherit those assets with stepped?up basis after death, erasing much of the embedded tax liability.?

Search YouTube for ‘buy, borrow, die’ and you’ll get dozens of videos explaining how this technique works. This is only the tip of a very big iceberg of techniques very rich people use to reduce or eliminate taxable income, if you have the time to go down that rabbit hole.

Watch it.

Elizabeth Davis runs the nmumbers.

Read it.

n October, a politically connected illegal alien was charged with ramming ICE vehicles in Los Angeles. He was shot and wounded by an ICE officer, but after a grand jury indicted the illegal alien, an Obama judge threw out the charges.

The case was all too typical of how commonplace car attacks on ICE and immigration law enforcement had become and how sanctuary cities had conspired to legalize them.

The death of a radical leftist activist accused of attempting to ram ICE personnel with her SUV in Minneapolis, may be the first official fatality, but it’s also the inevitable result of normalizing car attacks, promoting them as a tactic and then protecting their perpetrators from the consequence. Radical judges and activist groups can protect an activist from the law, but not from a bullet, and driving a 5,000 lb SUV at armed men was always going to end one way.

Democrat officials, including Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, have tried to pretend that the fatal shooting showed that ICE is violent and “out of control.” The media has barraged viewers with that same false narrative using misleading and out of context scenes.

But there is a pattern to ICE shootings. Every ICE shooting in the last 4 months involved individuals trying to ram ICE personnel with their vehicles just like the Minneapolis case.

Read it.

President Donald Trump threatened to deploy the U.S. military in Minnesota following attacks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in the state.

“If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial Thursday morning.

The Insurrection Act allows the president to deploy the military to states in certain cases of unrest or to enforce federal law.

Republican lawmakers had previously called on Trump to invoke the law and arrest Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat.

Read it.

Protests erupted again in Minnneapolis after federal law enforcement officer shot a Venezuelan man in the leg Wednesday night after being attacked by him and two others wielding a snow shovel and broom.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the Venezuelan man was an illegal immigrant who fled a traffic stop by federal agents in his car. When he crashed his vehicle, he fled on foot and then violently resisted arrest, the agency said.

At that point, the agent making the arrest was attacked by two more individuals, and “the original subject got loose and began striking the officer with a shovel or broom stick,” the agency said. The agent, “fearing for his life,” fired his gun in defense and wounded the Venezuelan man in the leg. The three alleged assailants then fled and barricaded themselves inside a nearby residence.

Federal agents entered the apartment, arresting the men, according to the local ABC affiliate KSTP. The illegal alien who was shot in the leg was taken to the hospital and was reported in stable condition, according to Reuters.

Read it.

The saga of federal benefits fraud in Minnesota is still being told. Democrat Gov. Tim Walz dropping out of his bid for reelection to a third term is only the latest chapter.

Reports of fraud in child care operations, and the connection to Twin Cities’ Somali immigrants, go back almost a decade. But state politicians and the legacy media initially ignored or downplayed the story, probably because most of the perpetrators were from a minority that carries “intersectional” clout in woke circles and electoral clout for Democrats.

In 2025, the magazine County Highway reported in depth on the scam, followed by the City Journal, and finally even The New York Times. Walz, who has been in power for nearly eight years, tried to shift blame away from himself and from Somalis on to President Donald Trump and conservatives for noticing. It didn’t work.

But there’s an underlying story that is no less important: the much larger cost of absorbing millions of low-skilled immigrants.

Read  it.

Hollywood has mastered the art of moral performance. Award shows have become political stages where actors speak with the confidence of prophets and the certainty of philosophers. But beneath the applause lines and emotional crescendos lies a contradiction that becomes impossible to ignore: the courage they demand from others is courage they themselves will never have to summon.

Read it.

California has always sold itself as more than a place. It is a promise. The weather helps, the coastline flatters, and the mythology does the rest. Come here, build something improbable, become unimaginably rich, and you are not merely rewarded with money. You are crowned. For decades, Silicon Valley’s greatest fortunes were treated as proof that California’s gravitational pull was permanent, that the state could mint billionaires and keep them in orbit through prestige, proximity, and a sense that leaving would be culturally unthinkable.

That story is now unfolding with a quieter ending than anyone expected, written not in moving trucks and farewell speeches, but in trusts, addresses, and entities that change jurisdictions with the ease of a signature.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin called California home from around 1995 onward, long before Google became a verb and long before the Bay Area turned into the modern cathedral of tech wealth. They arrived as students, built Google in the late 1990s, and spent nearly thirty years as the cleanest embodiment of the state’s dream. California did not simply host their success. It framed it, legitimized it, and amplified it into a cultural export. If you had to name two men who should be untouchable by the politics of exit, it would be these two.

There’s a classic fable about killing the golden goose that probably applies here.

Supporters argue the state is staring at the loss of about $100 billion in federal healthcare funding over the next five years, a drop that could hollow out services, close facilities, and erase as many as 145,000 healthcare jobs. Their pitch is moral and urgent. Make the richest pay once, so the system does not break.

Whose fault is it that the system was built to depend on a source of funding that might go away? Well, they didn’t think it could go away. Politicians live in the present. If you’ve got money, you’ll always have money, so go ahead and spend it. “There are still checks in my check book, so my checking account can’t be out of money!”

The California 2026 Billionaire Tax Act is a measure designed to feel politically elegant. A concentrated tax burden on a tiny number of people, paired with a public benefit that touches almost everyone. In theory, it could raise something like $100 billion over five years, with 90% earmarked for healthcare and 10% for K-14 education and food assistance, as pointed out by Baker Botts. The message is clean. If California is about to have billions less to spend on healthcare and education, then billionaires should help absorb the shock.

Note the Aggregation Fallacy. “If California is about to have billions less…” Uh, no. It’s the California government that is about to have less, not California. And when politicians don’t have as much to spend as they think they ought (and especially when they don’t have enough to give the people who voted for them Free Stuff), they look for a deep pocket to steal from. The problem is that pockets are mobile, and deep pockets are more mobile than most.

But what makes California powerful is also what makes it fragile. The state’s finances are unusually dependent on the ultra-rich. Personal income tax accounts for about 62% of the General Fund, and the top 1% of earners typically contribute around 40 to 45 percent of those receipts. This is a structure that prints cash in boom years and becomes brutally volatile when markets soften or when the most valuable taxpayers decide their best move is to stop being taxpayers here.

The only thing to wonder about is that it took them so long to figure that out. Politicians in California are overwhelmingly Democrat. The people who elected them are all Democrat. They ought to know what Democrats are like, and what they do when they don’t have enough money to pass out the Free Stuff for which they were elected.

Read it.

Americans who remember how an incident in Minneapolis six years ago plunged the whole country into a summer of rioting—then years of elevated criminal violence—should think carefully about where the protests over the death of Renee Good are leading.

Like the killing of George Floyd, Good’s tragedy is being exploited for a political purpose, with the radical activists who then called for defunding the police now demanding an end to Immigration and Customs Enforcement—not only the agency, ICE, but the enforcement of the nation’s democratically enacted immigration laws.

It’s the protesters’ veto, an assertion by activists of a right to cancel laws they don’t like.

And it’s already cost lives, including Renee Good’s.

She was shot and killed by an ICE officer when she drove her car toward him.

Why was she having any interaction with ICE at all?

She wasn’t a bystander—she and her wife were activists trying to prevent ICE from doing its job.

“We had whistles, they had guns,” Good’s widow said in a statement that reveals more than she intended.

Law-enforcement officers are supposed to have guns, after all—they risk their lives when they confront criminals.

But the whistles?

Their purpose is to alert the criminals that law enforcement is approaching.

The Goods had whistles to help illegal immigrants evade officers of the law.

Read it.

When  priciples meet money, money always wins.

Read it.

Macomb County Clerk Anthony G. Forlini announced Monday that noncitizens have been appearing in the Michigan county’s jury pool “at an alarming rate” and many of them are registered to vote. The data indicates that many noncitizens have potentially sat on juries and/or illegally voted in elections.

During a press conference in the courthouse jury room in Mount Clemens, MI, Forlini stated that an internal review of the county identified 239 noncitizens selected for jury duty over a four-month period from September 5, 2025, to January 8, 2026.

The jury pool is drawn from the Michigan Secretary of State’s driver’s license database, which does not consistently flag citizenship status, allowing noncitizens—such as lawful permanent residents with green cards—to be included.

Read it.

Much of the Left’s agenda focuses on creating feel-good but nonfunctional programs for the supposed downtrodden and oppressed, while ensuring that they—and their allies—share in the spoils of government largesse.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani could very well be a maestro at giving his leftwing base exactly what they want while doing nothing to solve the problems he says he intends to address.

Mamdani has really stressed the problem of “affordability” and abusive landlords in his so-called “rental ripoff” tour.

Read it

A Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, government agency is promoting an upcoming class by local leftist groups on “civil disobedience” from its social media accounts.

The city’s Commission on Human Relations (CHR) reposted a joint announcement on Saturday advertising the event by the Pittsburgh chapters of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the 50501 Movement on Instagram and X.

The three-hour Tuesday evening talk will feature an unnamed “practitioner and trainer with extensive experience” and civil rights lawyer Mike Healey, according to the posts.

Read it.

Renee Nicole Good, the activist shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis last week after the vehicle she was operating made contact with the agent, appears to have been following aggressive tactics promoted by the leftist-funded organizing group Defend the 612.

Good, 37, had joined ICE Watch, a loose network of activists tracking and aiming to disrupt ICE activities, after discovering the network through her son’s charter school, The New York Post reported.

“MN ICE Watch,” an Instagram page, shared screenshots from a “de-arrest” primer, which gives agitators advice on how to prevent law enforcement officers from taking someone into custody.

dRead it.

Historians of the future, grilling beaver-tail paninis over their campfires, will look back in wonder and nausea at the madness of America — and other regions of Western Civ — in the raging 2020s. It will be clear by then that it was largely a female hysteria, like other departures from social sanity in the annals of the Homo sapiens, such as the outbreak of witchery in the Massachusetts Colony, 1692, the Dancing Plague of Strasbourg, 1518, and the lunacy of Meowing and Biting Nuns that spread through the convents of Europe in the 1400s.

The Lefty-left has devised what’s called a “permission structure” for women to take the lead in acting-out the concocted grievances of their show-runners in the Democratic Party who, in times gone by, once had a coherent political program, but are now chiefly concerned with staying out of jail. I speak of those two orbiting moons, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and their many subalterns, such as John Podesta, Lisa Monaco, Norm Eisen, Adam Schiff. . . you know the huge cast of characters.

In 2020, they put their African-American clients in the vanguard, hoping to provoke Mr. Trump into a bloody suppression of the George Floyd riots. Didn’t really work, though the riots were a grand distraction from Marc Elias’s behind-the-scenes nefarious setup to queer the balloting process in that year’s election — a thumping success! All that mischief propelled brain-dead “Joe Biden” into the Oval Office, the perfect stooge to front for Hillary and Obama in their campaign to disorder the US body politic.

AWFULs are cosplaying revolutionaries in the sure and certain knowledge that nobody is allowed to hit a girl.

Ms. Good’s female wife, Becca Good, wailed in the aftermath, “I made her come down here, it’s my fault.” Come down to do what? To play a part in the show. To use Renee’s Honda Pilot to block the street so that ICE agents couldn’t do their job (which is removing illegal immigrants for processing and deportation). Who told Becca that was a good idea? The Lefty-left’s permission structure told her. So, Becca played her part in the show, ostentatiously recording a video of the scene, yelling taunts at the officers, telling her wife, Renee, to disobey the officer’s command to “get out of the car” and instead to drive away. Becca will have that on her conscience forever, alas. Bet you wouldn’t want to be her.

Sometimes, when you push the envelope, the envelope pushes back—hard.

The Antiplanner.

Quilette.

When Zohran Mamdani took office as the mayor of New York City on 1 January, he promised to usher in a transition from “the frigidity of rugged individualism to the warmth of collectivism.” It was a bizarre and stilted choice of words. “We will govern expansively and audaciously,” he told the people. The message was clear: New York’s political culture was about to change. Mamdani would institute free buses, a rent freeze, universal childcare, and higher taxes on wealth.

The people around Mamdani have been unusually candid about what the new mayor meant by “collectivism.” The Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, Cea Weaver said, “the reality is that for centuries, we have really treated property as an individualised good and not a collective good. And we are going to transition into treating it as a collective good and toward a model of shared equity.” Weaver was clear that this won’t be costless. “It will mean that families, especially white families but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.”

But once you get into the mechanics of this, you quickly run into problems. New York contains eight million people, making millions of daily decisions: where to live, what rent to charge, which job to take, how to run a small business. Each decision rests on local knowledge—information that exists in fragments, held by individuals who understand their own circumstances and priorities in intimate detail.

It is possible to be a collectivist in an individualistic society.

It is impossible to be an individualist in a collectivist society.

That’s the bottom line.

Read it.

A showdown between the U.S. Department of Transportation and the State of California reached a breaking point on Wednesday after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration will withhold approximately $160 million in safety program money from the state.

The move follows California’s failure to meet a January 5 deadline to cancel more than 17,000 commercial truck driver’s licenses that Duffy asserts were unlawfully issued by the state to foreign truckers.

Read it.

In yet another major blow to the German automobile labor market, Mercedes has announced it will be relocating production of its A-Class from Rastatt, Germany, to Kecskemét, Hungary. While Hungary’s foreign minister is taking a victory lap, Germany’s largest opposition party is sharply crticizing he government as signs grow that Germany’s automobile market is faltering.

Trade Minister Péter Szijjártó has officially confirmed Mercedes move, writes Budapester.

Szijjártó credited the success to “an economic policy based on sound common sense and a stable government that continually attracts new investment projects from global companies in America, Asia, and even Germany.”

Get Woke, go broke….

Read it.

A federal judge dismissed a conservative nonprofit’s defamation lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center Wednesday, reversing a previous judge’s theory of the case.

Critics say the SPLC routinely smears mainstream conservative and Christian groups by placing them on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. D.A. King, founder of the Dustin Inman Society, sued the center for defamation after it branded his Georgia-based organization—which opposes illegal immigration—an “anti-immigrant hate group.”

Judge W. Keith Watkins of the Middle District of Alabama allowed the defamation case to move forward in 2023, but Judge Corey L. Maze of the Northern District of Alabama later took the case.

After discovery—the legal process of acquiring documents to prove a case—Maze ruled Wednesday that most of King’s claims fell outside the statute of limitations, and that King further failed to prove the center acted with “actual malice” in re-publishing the “hate group” accusation. King died last year, but his estate is a plaintiff in the case.

Harry Mihet, chief litigation counsel for Liberty Counsel and one of King’s attorneys, told The Daily Signal that Judge Maze took the wrong approach to the case.

“I think the first judge who looked at this issue got it exactly right and the court currently got it exactly wrong,” Mihet told The Daily Signal in a phone call Thursday.

“The first judge looked at this in careful detail and nothing’s changed since. Whether something is time barred is a matter of law, so that should not have been affected by the facts in discovery.”

Read it.

Persuading idiots to perform criminal acts (e.g., assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers, as defined in 18 U.S.C. § 111) is a crime. The fact that the one being urged to commit the crime is a drug-addled, mental defective or emotional basket case is not an excuse or defense.

…

The woman shot in Minnesota was allegedly “trained” to interfere with ICE. Are her trainers guilty of criminal solicitation or even felony murder? And the likelihood that she was not a person of consistently sound judgment would not be a defense in accordance with section (c) and possibly an aggravating factor.

Read it.

The latest iteration of the Democratic Party’s color-revolution-style operation was on full display in recent days as tensions erupted following the fatal shooting of a left-wing activist by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent during a federal enforcement sweep in Minnesota. This incident demonstrates that the protest industrial complex, funded by left-wing billionaires, has been on standby, waiting for a catalyzing event to ignite mass mobilization.

MSM, the Democratic Party, and left-wing nonprofits are working hard to manufacture another ‘George Floyd’-type protest or riot by omitting key context about the woman shot and killed by an ICE agent. They conveniently left out her social justice “warrior” role in Minneapolis, including her reported involvement with “ICE Watch” and other operations to disrupt ICE raids in the sanctuary city. These details matter because MSM attempted to manufacture an outrage news cycle, while nonprofits create artificial multi-city protests aimed at shifting public opinion on ICE operations nationwide.

But Alpha News published cellphone camera footage from one of the ICE agents that confirmed the activist was indeed involved in a confrontation leading up to the deadly shooting.

Read it.

During the 1992 Presidential Debate, independent candidate Ross Perot famously warned that “there will be a giant sucking sound going south” due to the cheaper Mexican labor and lower regulatory demands on businesses. That sound is being heard again, but this time it is coming from California, which is virtually chasing taxpayers and companies out of the state with a massive state deficit, rising taxes, crippling regulations, and wasteful programs.

Recently, Gavin Newsom boasted, “California isn’t just keeping pace with the world — we’re setting the pace.”

Recent data shows he is right.

There is a record number of U-Hauls fleeing the state — more than any other state. Indeed, the only thing harder to find than a wealthy taxpayer in California appears to be a U-Haul.

According to U-Haul’s data, the state is again leading blue states in the exodus. The Washington Post noted this week that “California came in last. Massachusetts, New York, Illinois and New Jersey rounded out the bottom five. Of the bottom 10, seven voted blue in the last election.” Conversely, “nine of the top 10 growth states voted red in the last presidential election,” with Texas again leading the growth states.

The Post wrote that the conclusions are inescapable: “People want to live in pro-growth, low-tax states, while the biggest losers tend to be places with big governments and high taxes.”

The Telegraph (UK).

Cash-strapped councils spent more than £100,000 paying contractors to take down Union flags and St George’s crosses, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

No taking down of Pride flags, of course.

Watch it.

Tim Pool has the video.

Read it.

Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent reportedly involved in the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on Wednesday was dragged more than 100 yards by a fleeing suspect’s vehicle during a June arrest attempt involving a foreign national and convicted sex offender.

That happened in Bloomington, Minnesota, where Ross suffered injuries that required 20 stitches to his right arm and 13 stitches to his left hand, according to court records.

Ross on Wednesday shot and killed Good, 37, in her vehicle in Minneapolis, sparking large protests in the streets.

The Department of Homeland Security says the officer shot her in self-defense after she tried to run him over.

Once burned, twice shy.

Read it.

Two dozen noncitizens cast illegal votes in Alabama, while almost 200 were registered to vote, the state found with the assistance of a federal database.

The Trump administration has made the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services SAVE program–short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements–available to state and local governments for citizenship verification.

“Our elections must be decided by American citizens and only American citizens,” Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen said in a public statement. “While liberal organizations and media outlets claim noncitizen voting is not a problem, my office has proven otherwise.”

Using the SAVE data, the state found 186 noncitizens in the state were registered to vote, while 25 actually cast illegal ballots.

Read it.

It didn’t take long. Within hours of an ICE-involved shooting in the Minneapolis area, the Democratic Party’s protest industrial complex moved into action, quickly creating conditions for coordinated demonstrations across multiple cities. The rapid response suggested these nonprofit activist networks were on standby, waiting for a catalytic event, as an army of radicals intensified pressure campaigns against federal agents, blocking streets, harassing officers, and openly doxxing them.

Shortly after the ICE-involved shooting that left one woman dead, multiple videos of the incident went viral on X. In at least one video, she appears to be blocking the street with her vehicle in an attempt to impede ICE agents and is later shot and killed after advancing toward one of the agents. Numerous angles of the incident are circulating on X, offering competing narratives.

Read it.

More than 1,000 people affected by the Palisades Fire gathered Wednesday in front of the charred remains of the historic Pacific Palisades Business Block building.

Speakers at the rally accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass of negligence before, during, and after the 2025 firestorm that tore through the coastal community, destroying homes, businesses, and landmarks and displacing thousands of residents.

At the “They Let Us Burn” rally, chants of “fire them all — fire them now” were met with loud cheers from the crowd assembled in the village center, a year after the fires reshaped the neighborhood.

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Moving company U-Haul has released its annual migration ranking, which continues to show a sustained outflow from high-tax, crime-ridden, Democrat-run states toward lower-tax states where law and order are cherished.

Right off the bat, the report’s authors note that “Florida ranks 2nd for net gain of one-way customers; California last for sixth year in a row.”

Time to leave.

Read it.

As they do.

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly installed tenant advocate, Cea Weaver – a limousine liberal (socialist), popped out of her apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn Wednesday (a historically black neighborhood until people like Weaver priced out longtime residents) – only to start crying and run back inside when reporters asked her about her mother’s $1.6 million home in Nashville, Tennessee.

Read it.

Harvard University has removed a residential dean after a student-run news outlet resurfaced years of social media posts attacking “whiteness,” condemning police, and defending looting and rioting, prompting renewed scrutiny of ideological bias on elite campuses, the New York Post reported on Wednesday.

Gregory Davis, the former Allston Burr resident dean of Dunster House, was removed from his post effective immediately, according to an email sent to students by Dunster House faculty leadership that was obtained by Fox News Digital.

The decision followed reporting in October by Yard Report, a Harvard student-run outlet, which uncovered posts Davis made on X and Instagram between 2019 and 2024.

Read it.

Larry Page, the Google co-founder and world’s second-richest person, has reportedly left California as momentum builds behind a proposed wealth tax targeting billionaires, The Telegraph reports.

Page has shifted the registrations of several key entities — including his family office and a flying-car venture — from California to Delaware, according to state filings.

Can’t quite make his brain make the shift to Florida or Texas, but he’ll come around.

Time to leave.

Newsbusters.

Yeah,  by people like The Daily Show.

Read it.

Is there something fundamentally wrong with a celebrity being conservative? According to the political left, such a prospect calls for immediate and uncompromising punishment from the woke cult. After all, conservative movie and music stars are rare for a reason – They get blacklisted.

The cancel mob is still around despite numerous political defeats in recent years, and now they want to collect the head of singer Nicki Minaj for their trophy room. Minaj came to the US as a child immigrant from Trinidad to join her legal immigrant parents. The sponsorship status from her family members allows her to reside in the country.

However, because she has not yet received a green card, leftists believe that this is an opportunity to challenge the Trump Administration to “live up to its deportation policies” and remove Minaj from the US. In other words, it’s the classic Alinsky tactic of attempting to make their opponents seem like hypocrites because they won’t apply their principles universally.

Several Change.org petitions to deport Nicki Minaj to her native Trinidad and Tobago have amassed more than 120,000 signatures combined. The most popular petition – garnering over 83,000 signatures – started on July 9, 2025. There are also at least three other petitions created between Dec. 21 and 28, 2025, that coincide with Minaj’s Dec. 21 appearance alongside conservative activist Erika Kirk at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, where the rapper praised President Donald Trump’s administration.

Nobody seriously believes that anyone in the Trump administration will pay any attention to these exercises in virtue-signaling—Alinsky never dreamed of somebody like Trump, who doesn’t give a shit what other people think—except perhaps some of the more delusional narcissists on the fringe. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing….

Read it.

Now that Mamdani is signing executive orders and staffing up for real he’s showing that he is exactly what he said he was. He really is going to give the 51% of people who voted for him exactly what they were asking for, whether they really knew what that meant or not.

In less than a week into office, Mamdani is showing his true colors, as a true believing socialist who sympathizes with left-wing South American dictators and aims to conduct a socialist experiment on what had been the financial capital of the United States.

Read it.

Never did we ever imagine Fox News would run a headline that sounds ZeroHedge-style: “Second front: How a socialist cell in the US mobilized pro-Maduro foot soldiers within 12 hours.”

Yet here we are in 2026. Former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani, now at Fox News, is investigating the left-wing, billionaire-funded dark money networks in the nonprofit world and offering much-needed coverage for mainstream Americans on how these NGOs influence protest movements, unleash riots, and conduct sophisticated political pressure campaigns (color revolutions).

Coverage on the billionaire Democratic kings and their NGO empires that are in an all-out war against President Trump, his MAGA supporters, and anything America First is becoming mainstream in a very quick way, as the censorship cartel from Europe to the Americas has seen a degradation in their ability to control fake news narratives.