Read it.

Despite UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s pledge to smash people smuggling gangs, small boat crossings to the UK remained at historically high levels last year with growing criticism from opposition figures that government measures have failed to deter illegal migration.

A total of 41,472 migrants arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel in 2025, up from 36,816 the previous year and 41% higher than the 29,437 recorded in 2023. Since Labour came to power in the summer of 2024, around 65,000 migrants have reached Britain via sea.

On December 13th, 737 migrants were confirmed to have crossed in 11 small boats, after a 28-day hiatus. The arrivals pushed the annual total past 40,000, exceeding last year’s figure of 36,816.

Read it.

New York Governor Hochul has been saying for months that the regulations required by law to meet the Climate Act will be ruinously costly to New Yorkers. The draft regs were reportedly finished a year ago. The Governor must be citing their official cost assessment.

So where are the numbers? Why has Hochul not released the cost numbers so New Yorkers can see who gets hammered and how much? Keeping these ruinous cost numbers secret is outrageous. It should be an election issue.

To begin with the legislature, the Assembly, needs to see these big numbers immediately. Clearly the Climate Act must be changed and the Assembly is just gearing up their 2026 session. Hochul should submit a detailed assessment of the ruinous costs to the Energy Committee. Time is of the essence.

If this cost assessment is not forthcoming the Energy Committee should hold hearings and demand to see the numbers. I am not familiar with New York law but under federal law the Committee could subpoena these findings.

The Assembly cannot fix the Climate Act until they know how it is broken.

Read it.

In the coming weeks, school boards across the Land of 10,000 Lakes state will decide on curricula to meet ethnic studies mandates for the 2026–2027 academic year.

There appear to be limited alternatives to the free instructional materials developed with taxpayer dollars and endorsed by the state teachers’ union.

That curriculum instructs 6th graders to learn the 13 guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter movement; 7th graders on how protesters have breached federal buildings; and higher schoolers to “identify plans of action that people have used to resist, refuse, and create alternatives to oppressive systems,” according to the materials developed by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender and Sexuality Studies (RIDGS).

“Students will be able to explain how race is socially constructed and how that social construction has been used to oppress people of color, specifically in relation to Jim Crow, segregation, and racial covenants,” reads the description for the 11th and 12th-grade Jim Crow of the North course.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Small Business Administration Administrator Kelly Loeffler announced late Thursday that nearly 7,000 Minnesota borrowers have been suspended over suspected fraud. The move follows a bombshell report last week by citizen journalist Nick Shirley, who detailed alleged large-scale fraud tied to daycare centers operated by Somali-linked networks. The revelations sparked national outrage, with many Americans angered that their taxes are funding what appears to be industrial-scale migrant welfare fraud.

Oh, say it ain’t so….

Read it.

The Democrat-led state of California has delayed the cancellation of approximately 17,000 commercial truck driver’s licenses issued to illegal migrants.

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles announced it will postpone a planned Jan. 5 cancellation of thousands of non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) for 60 days, pushing the deadline into March and setting up another flashpoint with the Trump administration and federal transportation regulators, the Washington Examiner reported.

The delay comes as the administration ramps up enforcement of long-standing federal rules designed to keep unsafe and unqualified drivers off America’s roads — including the requirement that commercial drivers demonstrate English language proficiency so they can read and obey traffic signs.

Read it.

As additional investigators surge to fraud-plagued Minnesota, federal agents have already arrested 500 illegal immigrants and probed 1,000 immigration-fraud cases during the past two months, a Homeland Security official estimated.

…

Fraud was substantiated in about half of the immigration-fraud investigations, she said, and many of the arrested illegal immigrants were from Somalia.

Somalis dominate the list of nearly 100 people federally charged in various schemes to defraud the government, authorities have said.

New York Post.

Scores of Zohran Mamdani fans who braved freezing temperatures to celebrate the new mayor as he was publicly sworn into office Thursday were left disappointed by the bash the socialist pol had promised.

Socialists are great on promises, very few of which come true.

Around 10,000 supporters stood outside City Hall during the event — billed as an “Inauguration for a New Era Block Party” by Mamdani’s staff — crammed into several barricaded pens without access to bathrooms or any food concession stands.

Welcome to life under socialism. Thought it was going to be better, didn’t you?

tReason magazine.

Only the government could spend 20 years creating a national ID that no one wanted and that apparently doesn’t even work as a national ID.

But that’s what the federal government has accomplished with the REAL ID, which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) now considers unreliable, even though getting one requires providing proof of citizenship or lawful status in the country.

In a December 11 court filing, Philip Lavoie, the acting assistant special agent in charge of DHS’ Mobile, Alabama, office, stated that, “REAL ID can be unreliable to confirm U.S. citizenship.”

Lavoie’s declaration was in response to a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in October by the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm, on behalf of Leo Garcia Venegas, an Alabama construction worker. Venegas was detained twice in May and June during immigration raids on private construction sites, despite being a U.S. citizen. In both instances, Venegas’ lawsuit says, masked federal immigration officers entered the private sites without a warrant and began detaining workers based solely on their apparent ethnicity.

Many ‘libertarians’ are among the Useful Idiots of which Lenin was so fond.

Jacobin, a Voice of the Looney Left.

Mitt Romney recently published a New York Times op-ed arguing for higher taxes on the rich. When he was in a position to actually sculpt the GOP platform and the tax policy of the US, Romney was an ardent supporter of cutting taxes for the wealthy.

My, what a surprise. Why doesn’t he just write the government a check? Takes about two minutes.

Quillette

For decades, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, was regarded as one of the world’s most trusted humanitarian organisations. Its authority rested on a strict commitment to medical neutrality—the principle that humanitarian medicine must remain independent of political causes, even in war. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999, MSF became synonymous with ethical restraint and institutional credibility.

That reputation is now under serious strain.

This video examines how MSF’s response to the war in Gaza reflects a marked departure from its long-standing principles. It analyses the organisation’s adoption of activist language, including public accusations of genocide against Israel, while remaining conspicuously silent on Hamas’s documented war crimes, including the October 7 massacre and the systematic use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes.

Any group whose name incluldes “Without Borders” is implicitly gobalies (i.e. implicitly proglodyte),

“Amnesty International” suffers from the same flaw.

Gothamist.

For decades, the subway fare and the pizza slice — two New York City commodities — cost almost exactly the same amount. But that “pizza principle” is rapidly disappearing.

As the MTA prepares to increase the transit fare to $3 on Jan. 4, pizza prices across town are substantially higher than the cost to ride the train. The typical price of a plain slice of pizza in New York City now approaches $4, according to a decadelong survey of hundreds of slice joints conducted by this reporter across the city. Pizzamakers and experts who have followed the rising prices point to the COVID-19 pandemic and rising inflation as the cause of the increasing disparity between the price of a subway ride and that of a regular slice of pizza.

When I worked in NYC in the late 70s, subway rise were 25 cents. So inflation has been 10x since that time.

Time to leave.

ATQUE: Subway surfing deaths persist despite efforts of MTA, NYPD  Think of it as evolution in action.

Newsbusters.

Saturday’s edition of The Weekend on MS NOW ran a segment that began with clips of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries repeatedly saying that the Democrats’ philosophy is “strong floor, no ceiling.”

Turns out, Jeffries had cribbed that phrase from Oliver Libby, author of a book with that title. The show had Libby on as a guest, and though he is a center-left Democrat, both hosts pushed back against Libby’s belief that there should be no ceiling on the success of Americans.

Substitute host Molly Jong-Fast began the attack, skeptically asking, “is no ceiling really appropriate; is no ceiling really the play?” She finally worked up to suggesting, “Maybe there should be a ceiling!”

Read it.

Just another “normal” day in a Democratic paradise…

A viral photo of a notice posted at a McDonald’s in Uptown Minneapolis has renewed attention on rising crime in the area, Fox News pointed out this week.

The sign reads: “Attention guests, effective Friday, December 5th, our dining room doors will be locked and attended [to] during our normal business hours of 5am-10pm to ensure a safe environment.”

It adds: “We will deny access to any individual who we consider a risk to maintaining a safe environment for our guests.”

McDonald’s confirmed the notice. Local owner Mike Darula said the restaurant has “proudly been part of the Uptown community for more than 30 years” and explained, “At our Uptown restaurant, we’ve made some updates to our security measures to help ensure a safe and welcoming environment for both our crew and customers.”

Read it.

A tragic story came about out of Canada. A 44 year old man died after waiting more than eight hours in an emergency room with chest pain, blurry vision, and a blood pressure of 210.

This story establishes the human cost of delayed care. No one involved acted maliciously. Not the doctors. Not the nurses. Not the triage staff. They were inundated, operating exactly as the system is designed to function under extreme load. This is also unfortunately not a unique experience, as over half a million Canadians leave the ER every year without being seen.

That leads us to some uncomfortable truths.

Healthcare is a scarce resource. If an emergency physician is seeing one patient, they cannot simultaneously see another. The same constraint applies to clinic appointments, operating rooms, imaging slots, lab capacity, ICU beds, and nursing attention. Scarcity is unavoidable.

And if a resource is scarce, it must be allocated.

A minor cough and a major heart attack are competing for the same finite pool of time, staff, and space. The only real question is how that allocation occurs.

In a modern society, there are only two ways to allocate scarce resources: price signals or central planning.

Canada has government-provided health-care that is even more broken than the UK system.

ATQUE: The UK Health Care Disaster Is A Cautionary Tale For America’s Rising Class Of Armchair Socialists

Read it.

This headline is delightfully ambiguous.

There’s a lot of crowing in certain quarters about the 2% decline in U.S. electric vehicle sales in 2025 compared to the year before. Francis Menton, the lawyer who writes the Manhattan Contrarian blog, for instance, claims vindication for his prediction in February 2023 that electric vehicles would not “sweep the country and become the dominant form of transportation.”

The reasoning behind his forecast: “It is always wise to bet against central planning of the economy.” In this case, central planning amounted to state CO2 emissions goals, CAFE mileage requirements and federal and state tax subsidies. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act ended the $7,500 tax credit for EV purchases, and President Trump on Dec. 3 issued an order to roll back CAFE standards “to levels at which combustion vehicles can comply.”

Like Menton, I don’t like central planning. Nor do I support mileage standards or subsidies. Americans have proven in the past that the best route to prosperity and health is free competition without government meddling. Unfortunately, that is not what we have anymore.

Our own government is denying Americans the opportunity to buy the cars of their choice by imposing huge tariffs on low-priced electric vehicles, which are pouring into the rest of the world.

It’s what governments do.

Read it.

Education has become one of the main ideological battlegrounds across the Western world and particularly within the European Union. Although the EU treaties recognise education as a national competence, in recent years Brussels has developed an increasingly sophisticated architecture of programmes, funding streams and partnerships with NGOs aimed at exerting direct influence over what happens in classrooms—especially in areas related to identity, gender and sexuality.

It is in this context that the report Indoctrinating Children: How Brussels Embeds Gender Identity in the Classroom, published by MCC Brussels and authored by sociologist Ashley Frawley, must be understood. The study documents how millions of euros from programmes such as Erasmus+, CERV, and Horizon are channelled into activist-designed educational projects, which are then promoted as ‘best practice’ at the European level—even in countries where such policies have been explicitly rejected by national parliaments or parents.

Frawley, a researcher and author specialising in the analysis of contemporary social problems and the growing use of ‘behaviour change’ as a political tool, warns that these are neither isolated nor benign initiatives. Rather, she argues, they form a coherent project of social engineering. In an interview with europeanconservative.com, she unpacks Brussels’ underlying motivations, the mechanisms used to circumvent subsidiarity, and the democratic consequences of a strategy that, in her view, seeks to “reform the citizen” from childhood.

Newsbusters.

On the night of Christmas — as millions of American Christians celebrated the birth of a savior to a troubled mother — the PBS News Hour thought it was a tremendous occasion for a one-sided discussion on…abortion. The godless tone-deafness was something to behold.

PBS was sharing a piece of their new podcast Settle In, and the guest was pro-abortion activist/journalist Irin Carmon and how she reported on the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. Anchor Amna Nawaz explained her new book Unbearable “tells the stories of five women in New York and Alabama as they navigate a new post-Roe landscape.”

The opportunity for states to outlaw or limit the killing of babies was, to Carmon, treating women like animals and diminishing their humanity — and obviously, with that world view, the unborn child doesn’t have humanity, killing them isn’t diminishing anything.

Nawaz helpfully asked Carmon to explain her statement from the book about “how incomplete our story of American reproduction has been and how much has been unexpressed, hidden or taken for granted.”

Read it.

Georgetown University has dropped its partnership with United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese following a report alleging her support for terrorism and antisemitism, according to UN Watch.

Albanese is no longer listed on the university’s website, and her biography has also been removed.

Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, said the organization welcomed Georgetown University’s decision.

Read it.

As radical Islamist threats continue to plague Australia, politicians are pivoting to policing speech and tightening gun laws on law-abiding citizens—now openly admitting curbs on free expression are needed to shield their multicultural agenda.

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan has unveiled a sweeping plan to combat what she calls rising anti-Semitism, but the measures conveniently sidestep the core issue of unchecked radical Islamism behind recent attacks, focusing instead on doxxing anonymous social media users and reviewing gun laws.

In a joint news conference, Allan announced legislation that would force social media platforms to reveal identities behind anonymous accounts accused of spreading ‘hate’. “Under Victoria’s civil anti-vilification scheme which starts in 2026, the speaker of a vilifying statement generally needs to be identifiable and held accountable,” she stated.

As usual, women are the vangard of galloping totalitarianism.

Read it.

Britain is now the sort of country where you can get an instant answer to ‘What is the carbon footprint of a sausage roll?’. Yet if you ask, ‘Are we importing risk to women along with importing people?’ our nation state stares at its shoes and starts muttering about ‘complexity’.

Let us begin with two official lines that any half-awake citizen can see are rising at the same time.

Line one, sexual violence.

The ONS crime bulletin for the year ending June 2025 reports 211,225 sexual offences recorded by the police in England and Wales are up 9% from the previous year. It also reports 72,804 rape offences, up 6% year on year, with rape making up around 34% of all recorded sexual offences.

The ONS, to be fair, sticks in a big asterisk. Part of the rise is not a sudden outbreak of more predators. It is a change in the bookkeeping. That means some of what now shows up as an ‘increase’ is simply behaviour that was previously recorded differently, or not cleanly separated at all, now being captured under a new label. In short, not every uptick is more men doing worse things in dark alleys.

Fine. Caveat accepted. The numbers are still brutal.

Line two, immigration.

The ONS estimates long term immigration at 898,000 in the year ending June 2025. Of those, non-EU nationals accounted for 670,000, about 75% of the total. Net migration in that year is estimated at 204,000.

The Times (UK).

Taxpayers will be kept in the dark about how much public money is being spent so that union officials can have paid time off work, under the government’s workers’ rights reforms.

Despite new figures showing that last year almost £107 million was spent on so-called facility time, Labour has scrapped powers to cap it and removed the requirement for public bodies such as the NHS and schools to declare it in the future.

At the same time, the right to be paid to carry out union duties has been extended to equality representatives in workplaces to allow them to focus on equality duties.

Democrats pull this shit all the time in the U.S. Fortunately our Constitution gives is tools to pry this sort of information out of them, and a political system that enables people like Trump to erase it.

Read it.

When environmentalists first claimed that polar bears would be extinct by 2050, it seemed like a fairly safe bet. The claim made in 2007 was pegged to 43 years away. Practically an eternity. By 2050, we’d have flying cars, colonies on Mars and Martian environmentalists protesting them.

Media headlines blared “Most Polar Bears Extinct by 2050.” Public school kids were barraged with crying polar bear propaganda and told to recycle or all the cute white bears would die.

But nearly twenty years later, global warming has a major problem. The bears are still here.

With another 25 years on the clock, you would think that there would be signs that a major species is disappearing. Instead the 22,000 polar bear population from 2007 is now estimated at 26,000. The numbers for polar bear extinction, like Gaza genocide, are going the wrong way.

Read it.

Critical Race Theory will get you if you don’t watch out.

A recent report from Defending Education has found that more than half of collegiate social work programs appear to embed anti-racism and diversity, equity, and inclusion standards into their core competencies, admissions requirements, and field work evaluations.

This is not by accident. The sole accreditor of these schools, the Council on Social Work Education, requires adherence to these standards.

This means, in practice, that left-wing ideologies—many of which promote discrimination on the basis of race—are de facto orthodoxy in most of the nation’s social work programs, just so the institution can remain accredited.

This accreditation is required for graduates of these programs to gain licenses necessary to work in their fields.

So, what are students in college and graduate school learning in their social work programs?

Read it.

Britain’s newly appointed equalities chief has triggered a political backlash after dismissing concerns about mass migration and defending the increasingly controversial European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Mary-Ann Stephenson took over this month as chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), an unelected quango with wide influence over equality and human rights policy in Britain. In her first major interviews, she urged politicians and the media to stop “demonising” migrants, arguing that describing migration as a danger to Britain makes life “very, very difficult” for migrants and ethnic minority citizens.

Stephenson dismissed growing calls to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, despite withdrawal now being backed by parties representing a large share of the electorate. Reform UK, currently leading in the polls, has pledged to withdraw from the convention, arguing it enables activist lawyers to prevent the deportation of dangerous migrants. After months of prevarication, the Conservatives later followed suit.

Her remarks mark a clear departure from the stance of her predecessor, Baroness Falkner, who warned last year that integration in Britain was failing amid record levels of legal and illegal migration.

The Telegraph (UK).

Father Christmas is too white and should stop putting children on the naughty list, a museum has said.

Brighton and Hove Museums claimed Santa Claus needed to be decolonised in the name of diversity, in a blog on its website.

The blog also said that Santa should work alongside elves in the name of equality and a “Mother Christmas” would help tackle the patriarchy.

The Telegraph (UK).

The new head of the equalities watchdog has attacked those who describe migration as a risk to Britain.

Mary-Ann Stephenson, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), used her first major intervention since taking the job at the beginning of December to warn against the demonisation of immigrants.

Ms Stephenson, who was chosen by Sir Keir Starmer’s administration to succeed Baroness Falkner of Margravine, also said that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – the treaty that has been blamed by critics for blocking migrant deportations – would be a mistake.

Our future, unless Trump can prevent it.

The Times (UK).

“Bargain-hunting” Arab, American and Chinese multimillionaires are snapping up the London homes being sold by departing UK non-doms — and they intend to use them as “holiday mansions” for only a few weeks a year.

An analysis of official sales data for homes sold for £15 million or more in 2025 shows how London’s high-end demographics are changing thanks to the chancellor Rachel Reeves’ decision to abolish the previously lucrative non-dom status in April.

Non-dom status allowed wealthy UK residents to designate a permanent home — or domicile — for tax purposes as being overseas, which meant they avoided paying tax on overseas income and were only taxed on money earned in Britain. About 68,000 people benefited from the arrangement, but as many as 1,800 have left the country since it ended.

Blast from the past: Listen to the Beatles song THE TAXMAN to get an appreciation of Britain under Labour before Thatcher. Both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones left Britain rather than give up 95% of their income to the government.

Read it.

California is expected to begin reissuing approximately 17,000 non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses that the state had planned to revoke following federal enforcement pressure. The decision comes despite ongoing corrective action requirements from FMCSA and raises fundamental questions about federal enforcement authority when a state openly defies compliance directives.

State transportation officials confirmed to sources that the Department of Motor Vehicles will begin restoring the contested licenses to immigrant drivers who received 60-day cancellation notices on November 6. The state has not clarified the specific process but points to the D.C. Circuit Court’s November 13 emergency stay of FMCSA’s interim final rule restricting non-domiciled CDL eligibility.

What California apparently misunderstands, or is choosing to ignore, is that the court stay addressed only the September 29 interim final rule. It did not address the separate compliance failures FMCSA documented during its 2025 Annual Program Review, which found that approximately 25% of California’s non-domiciled CDLs were improperly issued under regulations that existed before the emergency rule was ever published.

The federal government threatened to withhold more than $150 million in highway funding from California over these pre-existing violations. Those threats remain fully in effect regardless of the court’s stay of the new rule.

Judge Dismisses Complaint against Miami Land Transfer for Trump’s Presidential Library

It’s Time to Kick Trump, 79, Out of the White House–and Into a Padded Cell (David Rothkopf/The Daily Beast)  TDS straight up.

Hysterical Debbie Wasserman-Schultz Declares Trump Larger Threat Than Islamic Terrorism  To Democrats, certainly.

Trump’s Attacks on Rob Reiner and Others Characterize an Uninhibited 2nd Term (Peter Baker/New York Times)  What ‘attacks’? Trump just points out the inconvenient truth, and of course in the proglodyte playbook that equals an ‘attack’.

‘Execution was abysmal’: Trump economy speech doesn’t meet GOP hopes (Eli Stokols/Politico) Disappointing minions of the Narrative Media is what Trump does best.

5 Rules for Reading the Epstein Files (Ankush Khardori/Politico)  Because, of course, you’re too stupid to read them for yourself without a Narrative Media zampolit to guide you.

Lies, Damned Lies and Trump Speeches (Paul Krugman)  The vacuum speaks.

Monkey Sounds, “White Power” and the N-Word: Racial Harassment Against Black Students Ignored Under Trump (ProPublica)  The primary users of “the N-word” are black people. Is anyone going to charge them with racism? The question answers itself.

The legal “defense” for Trump’s ballroom is a joke (Lisa Needham/Public Notice)  Laugh, clown, laugh.

Voters blame Trump for their economic woes (G. Elliott Morris/Strength In Numbers)  Oh, really? (Polling Signals Serious Trouble For Democrats in Upcoming Midterms)

It’s time to accept that the US supreme court is illegitimate and must be replaced (Samuel Moyn/The Guardian)

Trump Is Walloping Construction Businesses. The Industry Stays Quiet. (Catherine Rampell/The Bulwark)  Perhaps because it’s not true?

Kimmel Decries Administration For Saying ‘Men Are Men’ Without Medical Degrees

104 murders in 107 days — One of the more surreal phenomena of the last year … (Radley Balko/The Watch)

White House inner circle seeks to get Trump on script (Julia Manchester/The Hill)

Revealed: FBI opened domestic terrorism investigations into anti-ICE activity across US (Sam Levin/The Guardian)  This is news?

Undaunted in Faith —In our warped political era, bullies and bigots with the chutzpah … (Jennifer Rubin/The Contrarian) Jennifer Rubin loses her shit.

‘A Disgrace’: Dems Erupt As Kennedy Center Board Votes To Rename It ‘Trump-Kennedy Center’  Ah, ah, ah, ah, yankin’ their chains, yankin’ their chains….

As polls show low approval for Trump on the economy, will taking his economic agenda to voters help? (Oren Oppenheim/ABC News)

A Somber Mood at Science Meeting as Trump Budget Cuts Continue (Eric Niiler/New York Times)  Because, as we all know, science is TOTALLY the responsibility of the Federal government—and the Federal taxpayer.

The Horns and Whistles Work (Amanda Moore/Mother Jones)

Trump ousts more Biden-era ambassadors (Nahal Toosi/Politico)  Good.

Smug Dickerson, DuBois Sign Off ‘CBS Evening News’ with Trump Jab, Nod to Gaza

Federal judge temporarily blocks HUD permanent housing cuts for homeless (Cassandra Dumay/Politico)

Read it.

Republican Senator Eric Schmitt has accused European governments of enforcing what he described as a sweeping censorship regime at home and attempting to export it to the United States, warning that American free speech is increasingly being affected by regulatory decisions made in Brussels, London, and other foreign capitals.

In a letter sent to Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah B. Rogers, published on X, Schmitt said, “European governments have imposed tyrannical censorship on their own citizens. Now, they’re trying to impose it on America.” In the letter, he urges the Trump administration to “sanction foreign actors—in the European Union and elsewhere—who aid and abet this censorship regime.”

Read it.

Brussels woke up on Thursday shrouded in smoke, sirens, and the roar of tractors. The European Quarter—the administrative heart of the Union—was transformed for hours into a veritable battlefield. Smoke grenades, police charges, and blocked access points defined a day in which Europe’s countryside decided to make itself heard by force, exhausted by ignored warnings and endlessly postponed promises.

What filled the air was not just another sectoral protest, but accumulated frustration with a bureaucratic class that talks endlessly and delivers little. The violence—growing, undeniable, and deeply uncomfortable—did not come out of nowhere. It is the visible symptom of a political fracture Brussels has spent years refusing to confront.

The protest did not take place in a vacuum. It coincided—by no means accidentally—with yet another last-minute postponement of the EU–Mercosur agreement, a trade deal that has been in negotiation for 25 years and once again failed to reach a conclusion. Italy, under heavy pressure from its farming sector, forced the delay and left the agreement in political limbo, reinforcing an inconvenient truth: Mercosur has never enjoyed broad or genuine support across Europe’s nations. From the outset, it has been a top-down project, driven by offices, committees, and summits rather than by national parliaments or solid social consensus.

Newsbusters.

An illegal alien in Fairfax County, Virginia with a history of arrests, mental illness and apparent ties to MS-13 was arrested and charged with second-degree murder Wednesday – just one day after the illegal sanctuary county chose to release him rather than honor a detainer request by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

On Tuesday, 23 year-old Marvin Morales-Ortez – an illegal alien from El Salvador being held in jail on charges brandishing a gun, assault and causing injury – was released after charges were dropped and the sheriff’s office, led by Stacey Kincaid, refused to honor ICE’s detainer request.

“If Fairfax County would have simply worked to uphold our nation’s laws, then this tragedy may have never happened,” an ICE spokesman said, commenting on the fatal shooting of a man Morales-Ortez lived with, 40-year-old Marvin Ernesto Morales.

“The sanctuary politicians of Fairfax have blood on their hands,” a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson said.

Read it.

Critics are now questioning whether the prestigious institution deliberately disabled security cameras, inadvertently creating blind spots that allowed the shooter to escape detection.

According to the latest reports shared by Headline USA, the shooter was identified as Claudio Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national. He has reportedly been found dead.

Conservative commentator Greg Price posted a video showing a tense moment when a Providence police press conference ended abruptly after a Latino Rhode Island radio host confronted officials. The journalist accused authorities of deliberately removing security cameras at Brown University because of sanctuary city laws designed to prevent recording of illegal aliens.

Read it.

President Trump ordered the suspension of the U.S. green card diversity lottery after federal investigators said the suspect in the Brown University shooting and the killing of an MIT nuclear scientist was a non-citizen who entered the country through the program.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote in an X post late Thursday that, at Trump’s direction, she had ordered U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the Diversity Immigrant Visa (DV) program.

“At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program,” Noem said.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Hannah C. Dugan, a Wisconsin state judge, was found guilty on Thursday of obstructing federal agents, a high-profile victory for the Justice Department in a prosecution of a judge who it said was illegally aiding an undocumented immigrant.

Judge Dugan faces up to five years in prison and, as a person who has been convicted of a felony, she is likely ineligible to continue to hold office as a judge in Wisconsin, according to the State Constitution.

She was acquitted of a less serious charge of concealing a person from arrest.

One of the most deleterious effects of Girl Boss Equality is that it puts women in positions of power, in which they inevitably prefer ‘feels over reals’. Emotion is a bad thing in a judge, because it leads to arbitrary and capricious rulings.

Read it.

In a swift turn toward justice, police have opened an investigation into Michelea Ponce, the leftist agitator caught on video berating an elderly Target employee named Jeanie for daring to wear a Charlie Kirk “FREEDOM” shirt.

The harassment, which exploded across social media, highlights the toxic entitlement of progressives who can’t stomach symbols of patriotism in everyday life.

As we highlighted, the incident unfolded in a Chico, California Target store where Jeanie calmly folded clothes while Ponce unleashed a profanity-laced rant, accusing Kirk of racism and threatening to escalate the matter to management.

Michaela? Not Karen?

The cornerstone of proglodyte ideology is YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE AN OPINION THAT DIFFERS FROM THEIRS. That’s what we have to work with. Be prepared.

The Foundry.

California and Rhode Island judges won our October and November “Dishonorable Conduct Award” for their judicial misbehavior.

The December award winner, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, is a super legislator who identifies as a federal judge. In a ruling in July, Talwani, a Biden appointee in Massachusetts—call us shocked—tried to override Congress’ constitutional authority over the federal purse and force taxpayers to subsidize Planned Parenthood.

Some judges who have tried to use injunctions to change the law were ultimately reversed by the Supreme Court. Talwani was so out of line, even the very liberal U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit caught it first. In a Dec. 8 order, it administratively stayed her injunction.

Read it.

This is the centennial year for the Scopes “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, 1925’s “trial of the century”. In the dock was John Scopes, a substitute high school teacher who was accused of violating the state’s recently passed Butler Act, which prohibited any state school from teaching any theory of the origin of man that contradicted the account in Genesis. Scopes’ conviction was later overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court on a technicality.

By any objective measure, the Scopes trial should arouse no greater attention in 2025 than Dayton’s 1925 Strawberry Festival. It set no legal precedent, led to no repeal of the Butler Act, and everyone involved just got on with their lives. Yet here we are, still talking about it a hundred years later, in commemorative conferences, in high profile commentaries, on podcasts, and even a documentary (full disclosure, produced by me).

Interest in the Scopes trial has been kept alive by a prevailing narrative that has built up over the last century: of two titans of 1920s America, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, squaring off in an epic courtroom confrontation of science versus religion [still a big talking point with the Left], evolution versus creation [an argument as dead as Hitler and Mussolini], academic freedom versus state control of education [which proglodytes have been inverting for the last fifty years].

We have known for some time that little of this narrative is true. The Scopes trial was a put-up job, instigated by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Dayton town luminaries who wanted to bring commerce and publicity to their small town and its sluggish economy. The “epic confrontation” was more performative than substantive, with drama provided by the defense’s claim that evolutionism and Darwinism were crystalline scientific truths, and that any contrary claims, particularly when the doubts were religiously-motivated, posed a threat to civilization itself. Ever since 1925, scientists generally have bought into the Scopes defense’s narrative. But just how strong was their case?

The Scopes trial is kept alive by the same spirit that keeps alive the lynching of Emmet Till, the Ku Klux Klan, the 1619 Project, “reparations”, and all of the other decomposing relics of the past that proglodytes depend on in order to keep their troops in line and de-humanize those who don’t accept the Narrative. It’s why they jump to call everybody they dislike Nazis and Fascists. It’s the Hunt for Heretics and Sinners that keeps their creaking wagon train in motion.

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Santa Claus is alive and psychotic on the Left Coast.

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As farmers storm Brussels, discontent is growing in France, where roadblocks are multiplying. The authorities fear congestion on the roads as Christmas approaches.

Since the beginning of December, protests by farmers have been increasing in response to health measures imposed to stem the epidemic of Contagious Nodular Dermatitis. Roadblocks and demonstrations aim to prevent the slaughter of infected herds but, above all, to alert public opinion to the endless crisis affecting the primary sector in France and in Europe.

Final negotiations on the implementation of the free trade agreement with Mercosur are adding to the anger of farmers, who feel that they are constantly being sacrificed and ignored by the authorities.

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Notwithstanding the current Republican control of Congress and the Presidency, these are perilous times. The next time Democrats take power, things could get very bad, very fast.

Nonetheless, long term, I am fairly serene. In the long run, in America, freedom wins. There has been 250 years of ups and downs, but the Declaration and the First Amendment continually unites us and defines us. The First Amendment ensures America will be great. The Second Amendment ensures that the First Amendment will endure.

I am not serene about the fate of Europe. They have neither the First, nor the Second Amendment. They used to be united by centuries of blood and soil national pride and loyalty. Not today. They imported a population with no loyalty to the land. Worse, they imported a population that holds ancient European culture in contempt. Europe has no history of assimilation, and no assimilation has taken place in the last 50 years. Immigration without assimilation is invasion. When you see the last 50 years of European history, you can’t help but conclude that things will not end well.

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A small French town finds itself in an unprecedented situation: its mayor and the entire municipal council have resigned in protest because they refuse to celebrate the marriage of one of the town’s inhabitants, who has been ordered to leave French territory. The law requires them to proceed with performing the wedding of this individual—who is present in the country in violation of French law. Faced with an increase in this type of absurd situation, members of parliament are attempting to change the legislative framework, so far without success.

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America’s four largest public sector unions spent more of their members’ dues on politics and activism than they did on the traditional “representational activities” for which unions exist (such as bargaining for higher wages and better benefits), according to a new report.

The National Education Association; the Service Employees Industrial Union; the American Federation of Teachers; and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees spent a combined $649 million on political and ideological agendas, and only a combined $642 million on “representational activities,” according to a report from the Commonwealth Foundation.

“Every month, union members unwittingly fund progressive causes,” David Osborne, the foundation’s senior director of labor policy and the report’s author, told The Daily Signal. “Their dues, the money expected to benefit their working conditions, negotiations, and benefits, is instead used to fund a progressive political machine.”

Sarah Hoyt.

Today I ran across an idiot on Twitter talking about how Elon Musk could eliminate homelessness by giving his money to all the homeless.

And then the movie Dan had on was about how this woman wanted to make enough money to eliminate homelessness in LA.

Guys? Seriously?

How many millions do cities like LA and San Francisco plow into homelessness? How much money have cities like Denver spent on the homeless.

What have they got for it? That’s right. more homelessness. Which is absolutely logic.

You get more of what you pay for.

But if I must explain the mechanism, it is this: when you create “homeless services”, like free health care, and shelter and clothing (well, Denver was doing all of that at one point) you will attract more homeless.

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From banning masks for law enforcement officers and requiring gender-neutral restrooms in schools, to enhancing artificial intelligence regulations and completely banning plastic bags in stores, here is an overview of some major laws Californians can expect next year or late this year.

Time to leave.

The American Mind.

Northwestern University recently struck a deal with the United States Department of Education (ED). The university will pay a $75 million fine and guarantee there will be no more Jew-hating on the quad and no race discrimination in the admissions office or on faculty hiring committees. Then, federal money will start to flow again. But can Northwestern be trusted to honor its end of the bargain?

The Trump Education Department seems to have settled on a case resolution strategy to reform America’s ivory-tower malefactors. The trial balloons suggesting direct federal oversight of higher education appear to have been a negotiating tactic. ED will settle for using its longstanding (and frequently abused) practice of imposing policy by means of a “voluntary” agreement with an individual university—an agreement that administrators at every other institution of higher education (IHE) in the country will take as a hint as to how to behave if they want to avoid a federal lawsuit. After all, the Trump Department of Education has reached six anti-discrimination case resolutions with universities: the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, the University of Virginia, Cornell University, Columbia University, and now Northwestern.

The case resolution strategy has generally followed the same pattern: the university pays a sizable fine and then commits to cease tolerating anti-Jewish intimidation, sex discrimination by way of “transgenderism,” and race and sex discrimination in admissions, hiring, and staffing. It also commits to reviewing its dependence on foreign students and international branch campuses. Finally, it agrees to join with the Department of Education in selecting an independent monitor who will make sure the university lives up to its commitments. Or the university president can certify compliance under penalty of perjury. The university is free to run its own affairs. Yet if it breaks its promises, the independent monitor will alert ED, which will then impose new sanctions.

The tools that enabled the Marxist Long March Through the Institutions can also be used to deconstruct what they have built. But that didn’t happen in a day, and its disassembly won’t happen in a day, either. Right-thinking people need to buckle down for a long haul.

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No one spends a dollar better than the person who earned it. That adage reveals the crux of massive fraud and improper payments that plague federal health insurance programs and drive up costs for taxpayers.

According to a report from the Government Accountability Office, more than 95% of the fictitious applications the GAO created and attempted to enroll in Obamacare were approved and enrolled, with insurance companies receiving thousands of taxpayers’ dollars per month on behalf of those fake enrollees.

The details of the GAO report reveal the utter negligence and perverse incentives that result when the federal government puts taxpayers’ money up for grabs to people who didn’t earn it.

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The number of asylum seekers in the UK found to have falsely claimed to be children has quadrupled over the past decade, according to Home Office figures published this week, intensifying scrutiny of Britain’s age-assessment system amid a series of high-profile violent crimes.

Official data show that 224 asylum seekers were identified as adults posing as minors in 2014. That figure has now risen to more than 1,000 a year, with authorities warning that the true number may be higher as many arrivals lack identity documents or destroy them en route to the UK.

The issue has returned to the spotlight following the conviction this week of two Afghan asylum seekers, Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal, who were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for raping a 15-year-old girl in Leamington Spa. Both entered Britain illegally by small boat and were treated as unaccompanied minors.

If there is a system, people will try to game it. The system ought to be set up to make that as difficult as possible. Government employees don’t care to do that, because it’s work, and they’re not there to work—they’re there to pick up a paycheck in return for as little work as possible.

The Foundry.

For years, pharmaceutical executives have insisted that drug prices are out of their hands. Government red tape, research costs, and reimbursement rules are all offered as explanations for why Americans pay more at the pharmacy counter than anyone else in the developed world.

It’s a tidy narrative. It’s also only half-true—pharma could easily drop its prices. But government has ensured that it has little reason to do so.

In a functioning market, companies charge what the market will bear. Those prices typically lower over time due to innovation, competition, and other factors. In only a few industries has the opposite happened—housing, higher education, and health care—all industries where incentives are skewed by government policies.

David Harsanyi.

During oral arguments in Trump v. Slaughter, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor threatened America with a good time, warning that the administration is “asking us to destroy the structure of government.”

Great. It’s about time an unaccountable fourth branch of the state was decimated. Trump v. Slaughter revolves around the president’s ability to fire executive branch officials without cause at “independent” agencies. For one thing, nowhere does the Constitution empower Congress to create “independent” anything. The notion is a concoction of our worst former president, Woodrow Wilson, and it was codified nearly a century ago in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, when the court ruled that the Federal Trade Commission was a quasilegislative, executive and judicial agency.

Google AI still informs me that the Federal Trade Commission is an “independent agency” that is “technically within the executive branch structure,” which is not a real thing. Moreover, even if it were one, the scope of “independent” agencies has expanded significantly since 1934. In some ways, they now have more power over Americans than any branch. There is no conception of the founding that included a sprawling autonomous administrative state empowered to create its own rules, investigate citizens, adjudicate guilt, impose fines and destroy lives. The Supreme Court already overturned the Chevron deference, which granted agencies nearly unfettered powers to create regulatory regimes without Congress. Humphrey’s Executor deserves the same fate.