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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.

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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.

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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.

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When  priciples meet money, money always wins.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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….

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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….

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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.

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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.

NBC News, a Voice of the Crust.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting — which helped fund NPR, PBS and many local radio and TV stations — is officially shutting down, months after Congress passed spending cuts that stripped it of more than $1 billion in funding.

CPB’s board of directors voted to dissolve the private, nonprofit corporation after 58 years of service, the organization announced in a news release Monday.

“For more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans—regardless of geography, income, or background—had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling,” said Patricia Harrison, CPB’s president and CEO.

And the Deep State is PISSED.

CNBC, a Voice of the Crust.

The Department of Homeland Security on Monday blasted Hilton Hotels, saying that DHS officers had a reservation abruptly canceled by a Minneapolis hotel because of their work on immigration enforcement.

The price of Hilton shares dipped by around 2% after the criticism by DHS in a social media post.

“NO ROOM AT THE INN!,” DHS said on its X social media account.

“HiltonHotels has launched a coordinated campaign in Minneapolis to REFUSE service to DHS law enforcement,” the tweet said.

“When officers attempted to book rooms using official government emails and rates, Hilton Hotels maliciously CANCELLED their reservations,” DHS said. “This is UNACCEPTABLE. Why is Hilton Hotels siding with murderers and rapists to deliberately undermine and impede DHS law enforcement from their mission to enforce our nation’s immigration laws?”

Apparently shareholdrs don’t want to get in the line of fire between a woke corporation and the Trump troop.

ATQUE: Hilton Hotel Plunges Into PR Crisis Mode After “Coordinated Campaign” To Cancel ICE Agent Bookings

UPDATE: Hilton Says Minnesota Hotel Apologized Over Cancelled DHS Rooms (Hadriana Lowenkron/Bloomberg)

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Brand-new Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson is denying allegations that one of her orders ends arrests of public drug use in the city.

The Seattle Police Officers Guild on Sunday issued a statement stating city leaders issued a directive halting such arrests and instead promoted diversion program recommendations.

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SEIU, the massively powerful and radical health care union, claims that California faces a ‘healthcare collapse’ due to what it calls ‘federal funding cuts’ and only an ’emergency’ 5% tax on the total net worth of anyone with over $1 billion in assets will save the state’s health care.

There are no actual ‘cuts’, what SEIU and much of California’s Democrat machine falsely describes as cuts is actually MediCal (California’s name for Medicaid) getting work requirements for healthy adults and paperwork requirements expected to force illegal aliens off MediCal.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s efforts to provide free health care to illegal aliens is what actually endangered the state’s health care funding. The only people losing MediCal are the people who shouldn’t have it in the first place. California Democrats are however too beholden to SEIU and its rival the California Nurses Association to graciously accept the much needed reforms.

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NYC Mayor Zorhan Mamdani’s newly appointed tenant advocate called to “seize private property” and called home ownership a “weapon of white supremacy” in several posts on her now-deleted X account.

In another tweet from August 2019, she said “Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy.”

Ah, the Warm Glow of Socialist Hate.

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Dutch migration researcher and social scientist Ruud Koopmans has described the current rapid naturalizations as a “demographic time bomb” that could lead to 7 million Syrians in Germany within 50 years. Koopmans says that family reunification is the main factor, and with many relatives of these newly naturalized migrants having the right to reunification, it could transform Germany.

he last far-left German government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

“One must consider whether refugees should be given access to German citizenship so quickly. If they are German nationals, there is no limit on family migration. Then any possibility of managing these migration flows is gone,“ he said in an interview with Cicero.

“This rapid naturalization can be considered a demographic time bomb in the long run,” he added.

He stated that the so-called “turbo naturalization“ after three years was removed by the current ruling government. The reality is that this option for receiving German citizenship after three years applied to very few people, sometimes numbering less than 10 people in certain German states.

However, standard naturalization is still possible after five years.

Read it.

It is six years now since the advent – and normalization of – sickness psychosis (also known as weaponized hypochondria) and it shows a remarkable persistence.

Because of course it has been normalized.

More than that, actually. It continues to be affirmed as a reasonable rather than aberrant behavior.

This business, that is, of seeing but pretending not to notice people walking around with a surgical mask over their porthole.

The Foundry.

Survey says: Yes.

The fundamental deal was that citizens gave the state a monopoly on violence and punishment, in exchange for the state keeping them safe. But is that deal still holding?

In Charlotte, North Carolina, in August, Iryna Zarutska was stabbed to death on a train by a fare-jumper who was out on bail after countless prior arrests. Her killer was walking free because a local judge didn’t think his obvious mental illness and violent past merited prison. And transit authorities, like many across America, didn’t enforce the requirement to buy a ticket.

In Chicago in November, another young woman, Bethany MaGee, was set on fire on public transport by another recidivist. In December, an illegal immigrant who had previously been deported allegedly stabbed a man on the same light rail line where Zarutska was murdered.

These are just three of so many tragic, preventable instances where the state failed its part of the bargain. It failed to keep dangerous, unstable people in jail or institutionalized. To enforce basic civility like having to buy a ticket to access buses and trains. To keep out dangerous foreign nationals who have no right to be here.

Read it.

A Milwaukee judge who was found guilty last month of obstructing federal agents by letting an illegal immigrant slip through a side door at her courthouse has resigned.

Saves them from having to impeach her.

Judge Hannah Dugan, who was convicted last month on a federal felony charge, was charged by federal prosecutors after she distracted federal agents who were trying to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican citizen who had entered the United States illegally and was scheduled to appear before Dugan for a hearing in a state-level battery case.

The indictment, dated May 13, 2025, accused her of obstructing the law by assisting Floriz-Ruiz to evade arrest, and falsely advising ICE agents that they required a judicial warrant to arrest him.

Dugan was found guilty by a federal grand jury on Dec. 18, 2025 on one count of violating Section 1505 of Title 18 of the US code. Her resignation comes as GOP members of the Wisconsin State Legislature were preparing to impeach her and remove her from office following her conviction.

Read it.

Yesterday’s spectacle would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

How much misery would have been saved if Eisenhower would have done that to Castro in 1956? He would never have done it, of course.

Donald Trump retrieved Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela and brought him to New York to be arraigned in the Southern District. Venezuelans in the diaspora celebrated the symbolic end of a tyrant’s impunity. Meanwhile, in the United States, something stranger happened: American socialist organizations erupted in rage.

Not strange at all. A pillar of the American Left is embracing anyone who could be characterized as an enemy of freedom and/or the United States.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) issued a statement condemning the action and demanding Maduro’s release. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani—a DSA member—reportedly consulted with Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer infamous for representing al-Qaeda figures, and allegedly called President Trump to “register his opposition.” At the same time, Neville Roy Singham’s network hosted a pro-Maduro protest in Times Square, even as Venezuelan exiles celebrated freedom from the man who ruined their country.

So we must ask the obvious question: why? Why are ostensibly American organizations so emotionally invested in the fate of a foreign dictator? Why does the capture of a Venezuelan strongman trigger outrage in gentrified Brooklyn, rather than relief?

The first answer is ideological. Socialists, even those who insist on calling themselves “democratic”, do not fundamentally support American interests.

The branding is marketing. “Democratic socialism” is designed to sound like Scandinavia with better coffee. In practice, their heroes are Havana and Caracas, not Helsinki. They tell voters they want the Nordic model; what they defend, reflexively and ferociously, is the Cuban and Venezuelan model: centralized power, ideological conformity, and permanent opposition to the United States.

White people ought to sue them for cultural appropriation.

Read it.

Dominic Cummings, the political strategist who oversaw Brexit, has dropped a bombshell warning to Nigel Farage: the UK establishment is plotting to crush him and Reform UK by any means necessary, including illegal tactics, to prevent a populist takeover.

As Reform surges in polls and eyes major gains in the 2026 local elections, Cummings has revealed how insiders view Farage as the next Trump-style threat they must eliminate early and ruthlessly.

Speaking on The Spectator’s Quite Right! podcast, Cummings told hosts Michael Gove and Madeline Grant: “They’ll leak medical records, they’ll leak tax records.They’ll bug his phone and leak that. They’ll do anything that they need to.”

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2026 started with a bang for pdsroponents of the human right of armed self-defense, as a US appeals court on Friday ruled that California’s de facto statewide ban on openly carrying firearms violates the US Constitution. However, there’s reason to think it will flip the other way as the litigation proceeds to the next phase. For now, though, leftists are recoiling. California governor and likely 2028 presidential candidate Gavin Newsom said “Republican activists on the Ninth Circuit” want to “return to the days of the Wild West.”

If we were still in the days of the Wild West, Newsom would have been swinging from a tree long ago.

The Foundry.

This year doesn’t just mark the 250th anniversary of the United States—it also means another year of President Donald Trump’s second term and impending midterm elections.

Last year, we saw the same leftist groups that staffed and advised the Biden administration gear up to oppose the president’s agenda, from filing lawsuits to block his executive orders to advising illegal aliens on how to evade immigration officers.

Trump is remaking the executive branch and planning another bill for the reconciliation process, but the Left won’t just bend over. Here are a few left-wing activist groups to watch in the year ahead.

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Kyle Hedquist, a convicted murderer who was sentenced to life in prison for shooting a teenage girl to death in cold blood, has been reappointed to serve on Salem, Oregon’s police review board – all in the name of his so-called “perspective” on the criminal justice system.

Hedquist, an Oregon native, was convicted of the aggravated murder of 19-year-old Nikki Thrasher, whom he lured down a remote rural road and shot in the back of the head to prevent her from revealing his involvement in a series of robberies. In 2022, then-Governor Kate Brown (D) played a key role in securing Hedquist’s early release, insisting that the killer “shouldn’t be locked up for life” simply because he was 17 years old at the time he executed Thrasher.

At the time of the commutation, Nikki’s mother, Hollie Thrasher, rightly condemned the decision to free her daughter’s murderer.

You can’t make this stuff up.

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A divided federal appeals court voted to revive a lawsuit by school district employees who say they were forced to self-censor and make statements they disagreed with to finish so-called anti-racism training.

On Dec. 30, 2025, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit voted 6–5 in Henderson v. Springfield R-12 School District to reactivate the employees’ lawsuit, holding that the chilling effect from the mandatory 2020 training gave them standing to sue for First Amendment violations.

Standing refers to the right of someone to sue in court. The parties must show a strong enough connection to the claim to justify their participation in a lawsuit.

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This year, the fight over free expression in American higher education reached a troubling milestone. According to data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, efforts to censor speech on college campuses hit record highs and across multiple fronts—and most succeeded.