Read itl.

Seventeen House Republicans gave California Democrats a late Christmas present this month when they crossed the aisle to vote for extending enhanced Obamacare premium subsidies for another three years.

Not only did they move these massive handouts one step closer to permanent entitlement status, but they failed to advance reforms that would actually lower health care costs, like closing the Intergovernmental Transfer loophole that has cost taxpayers tens of billions over time.

The Senate should stop this bill in its tracks and—in anticipation of pushback from those who have never seen a government expansion they didn’t like—prepare to argue to the public why propping up a broken system won’t reduce health insurance premiums. As I argued in The Hill, these subsidies just mask the true cost of government distortion.

Since the Affordable Care Act passed, average family premiums have exploded to more than $25,000 per year. Government subsidies haven’t stopped that rise. They’ve enabled it—by insulating insurers from competitive pricing and reducing any pressure for meaningful reform.

And while Washington debates whether to extend temporary tax credits, states like California are quietly siphoning off billions in federal Medicaid dollars through legalized budget fraud tied to the Intergovernmental Transfer loophole.

Read it.

California Democrats should listen to The Rolling Stones.

Or the Beatles—The Taxman lays it out directly.

The band famously fled England in the 1970s, heading into tax exile in the south of France.

Mick Jagger and his mates weren’t alone—a generation of rock royalty abandoned the U.K. because of its steep taxes: David Bowie opted for Switzerland; Rod Stewart went to California.

“We left England because we’d be paying 98 cents on the dollar. We left, and they lost out. No taxes at all,” Stones guitarist Keith Richards recalled to Fortune.

Progressives are now transforming California into what Britain was before Margaret Thatcher—and it’s not celebrities who are leaving, but the billionaires who drive Silicon Valley’s economy, and therefore the state’s.

The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act ballot measure is a recipe for reverse alchemy, turning the Golden State into lead.

Read it.

According to plans from the Federal Chancellery, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, is set to significantly expand its surveillance capabilities. The focus is particularly on internet communication transmitted from within Germany abroad, which is to be included in the agency’s monitoring catalog going forward.

After months of heated debate over the expansion of the Brussels censorship apparatus under the Digital Services Act and ‘Chat Control,’ attention to the EU Commission’s surveillance ambitions has temporarily faded in Germany. Now, however, a draft bill from the Federal Chancellery, obtained by WDR, NDR, and Süddeutsche Zeitung, is triggering renewed alarm.

The proposed expansion of BND powers makes one thing unmistakably clear: German policy is moving in lockstep with the EU Commission, with full force directed against the privacy and communication of citizens, journalists, and government-critical organizations.

Read it.

Social media is agog with posts about the usual flurry of bill introductions that accompany a new legislative session, in this case, the Commonwealth of Virginia. A new legislative session began this week following November’s odd-year elections.

The home state of Patrick Henry, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and four of our nation’s first five US presidents opened it’s new Democratic trifecta – nearly a 2:1 majority in the House of Delegates, with Democrats flipping 14 previous GOP seats – and it’s more tenuous 21-19 Senate majority last week, following the inauguration of our former CIA case officer Governor; our first-ever Muslim Lt. Governor; and our reckless driving Attorney General who muses about killing his GOP opponents.

We’re off to a great start.

The influx of Deep State apparatchiks (and their families and hangers-on) to northeast Virginia, and it’s consequent conversion of an Other Left Coast hell-hole, is one of the ongoing tragedies of this century.

Time to leave.

Read it.

A federal law enforcement officer was injured in Southern California on Wednesday after an illegal alien allegedly tried to evade arrest by ramming officers with his vehicle, prompting agents to fire defensive shots, according to the Trump administration.

The incident occurred in Compton, near Los Angeles, as Department of Homeland Security agents moved to arrest what the agency described as “a violent criminal illegal alien” from El Salvador.

DHS said the suspect “weaponized his vehicle and rammed law enforcement” during the attempted arrest, according to a statement posted on X.

“Fearing for his life and safety, an agent fired defensive shots,” the statement said.

Read it.

Investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger has accused the radical left of getting people killed through ongoing delusions and interference with federal immigration enforcement, pointing to the fatal shooting of Renee Good as a prime example.

Appearing on FOX News Channel’s “Jesse Watters Primetime,” Shellenberger highlighted how leftist rhetoric and actions are radicalizing individuals like Good, leading them into perilous situations while obstructing lawful operations.

“I think left is getting people killed at this point. There’s no other way to say it,” Shellenberger stated. “These are not difficult issues, legally, morally. The public voted for a president who is implementing his policies, it’s undemocratic to halt the implementation of those policies, which is what is happening.”

On the other hand, every Leftist cosplayer that gets shot means one less to bother the rest of us. Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Leaders of a Black Lives Matter-aligned coalition claimed responsibility for organizing the mob disruption that shut down a Christian worship service in Minnesota on Sunday, defending their actions even as the Department of Justice launched a federal investigation.

Dozens of anti-ICE activists stormed Cities Church in St. Paul, chanting slogans, confronting congregants, and forcing worship to a halt.

Video posted to social media shows protesters yelling “ICE out” inside the sanctuary in what President Donald Trump on Tuesday called a “church raid.”

The protest was organized by a coalition that includes Racial Justice Network, Black Lives Matter Minnesota, and Black Lives Matter Twin Cities. BLM Minnesota livestreamed the takeover.

If you’re wondering why an organization named “Black Lives Matter” is involved with the death of an AWFUL protester, join the club.

Read it.

Read it.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is investigating the city of Minneapolis’s “comprehensive racialized housing plans,” the department said in a statement on Jan. 16.

The Foundry.

Affordability has become the latest mantra for Democrats as they gear up for midterm elections. Yet, blue states lead the nation in driving up the cost of basic essentials like electricity and water, new studies say.

A recent report by the Institute for Energy Research, titled “Blue States, High Rates,” found that while average electricity prices across America increased by nearly 40% since 2021, Americans in left-leaning states paid significantly more than their conservative compatriots.

The report states that the vast majority of states with electricity prices above the national average are Democrat-led states. By contrast, red states comprised eight of the 10 states with the lowest electricity prices.

“Because of the Federal Power Act, the states have most of the discretion in terms of how they want to structure their electricity markets,” Tom Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research and one of the study’s authors, told The Daily Signal. “We have seen over the past 10-15 years that typically blue states have high rates and red states, especially in the south and southeast, have much more reliable and affordable electricity for their ratepayers.”

The Foundry.

California’s biggest union is once again up to no good. Dissatisfied with the piles of cash they’ve already stolen from California high-earning taxpayers, who are subject to a 14.4% income tax rate (the nation’s highest), double digit sales taxes, and the second-highest tax burden in the country, the SEIU is now clamoring for a “one-time” 5% tax on the net worth of “billionaires” to fund health care for illegal immigrants.

Yes, you read that right. Tax the rich even more to pay for ballooning costs of failing, state-run health care.

The initiative that voters will likely decide upon in November is the pinnacle of progressive envy. It’s not enough that the top 1% of taxpayers already fund half of the state budget. They’re greedy for more, and the initiative’s new authority to tax net worth is a harbinger of unprecedented government intrusion into our lives.

We can first look to the retroactivity clause, which ensures that any taxpayer who did not have the foresight to flee the state by Jan. 1, 2026, will be subject to the tax if voters approve it in November. Progressives are well aware of the millions of people, trillions of dollars, and multiple congressional districts that have already left California for the freer shores of Florida, Texas, Tennessee, and other zero-income tax states. This time around, the victims of their tax hikes won’t have the chance to vote with their feet.

The initiative also singles out the most successful entrepreneurs who built their companies from nothing into unimaginable success. For many founders, the tax could be well over 5%.

Read it.

The United Kingdom is facing an unprecedented surge in small boat migrant arrivals under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with more than 65,800 crossings recorded in his first 19 months in office. Since the start of the Channel crossing crisis in 2018, over 193,500 migrants have arrived, roughly equivalent to the population of Norwich.

In 2025 alone, over 41,474 migrants completed the 21-mile journey, with an additional 23,242 arrivals during Starmer’s first six months. Despite sub-zero conditions in Calais and Dover earlier this month, provisional figures indicate more than 900 have already crossed in 2026. Starmer’s daily average of 117 arrivals far exceeds Boris Johnson’s 58 per day, who reached 65,784 in 39 months.

The rising numbers have serious public safety implications. Analysis from the Centre for Migration Control (CMC) shows that migrants accounted for 79.3% of train theft arrests in 2024–2025, despite making up only 10% of the population. Migrants were also disproportionately involved in violent crimes, sexual offences, and drug-related arrests.

Read it.

The Democrat Left wants Americans to believe that excessively armed ICE agents in Minneapolis and elsewhere are kidnapping law-abiding immigrants en route to church or heading home from work.

New Jersey congressional candidate Analilia Mejia moaned that “grandmothers and gardeners are being targeted by federal enforcement agencies with no accountability.”

Attorney General Keith Ellison, D-Minn., called the people his ilk are shielding, “the most vulnerable neighbors in our community.”

“They haven’t been able to produce any evidence that they are finding people who are undocumented who have committed crimes,” Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., told MS NOW’s evening anchor Chris Hayes. “It is unleashing complete terror on the residents of Minnesota.”

A fresh serving of facts swiftly refuted these Leftist lies.

Read it.

Remember the viral video of a woman screaming ‘I’m a U.S. citizen’ as ICE agents pulled her from a car in the Florida Keys? The media and politicians pounced – ICE ‘arrested an American citizen’. Turns out this person was detained by ICE because she refused to identify herself and was driving her boyfriend’s vehicle. Afterwards, reports disclosed that the boyfriend was in the country illegally. She chose not to comply. Perhaps she wanted the situation to escalate? Much of the debate about ICE has become political theater.

Michael Barone.

Minnesota? Somalis? Nine billion dollars in alleged welfare fraud?

To understand what’s going on from a distance, it helps to understand basic culture. Minnesota was settled largely by people of Scandinavian and German ancestry.

In survey after survey, Minnesota has ranked No. 1 or No. 2 among states, often just behind neighboring and much smaller North Dakota, in social connectedness, civic participation, workforce participation and voter turnout. It has traditionally led the nation in levels of trust and conscientiousness.

This has been coupled with political behavior that resembles Scandinavian patterns. Minnesota, like North Dakota and fellow neighbor Wisconsin, had lively socialist-leaning third parties in the 1930s. It’s still the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, the result of a fusion engineered by future Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1944.

As you might expect, Minnesotans have built a high-tax, high-spending state government. Like Scandinavians, they have trusted the state to provide services and have trusted individuals not to cheat in claiming benefits. Public support for these programs, as in Scandinavia, has traditionally been founded on confidence that aid goes only to the genuinely deserving.

The Foundry.

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

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

[snip]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

The Foundry.

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

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

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

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

The Telegraph (UK).

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

Read it.

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

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

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania ranked an abysmal 44th.

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

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

Read it.

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

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

Read it.

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

Fortune magazine, a Voice of the Crust.

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

Watch it.

Elizabeth Davis runs the nmumbers.

Read it.

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

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

Read  it.

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

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

Why was she having any interaction with ICE at all?

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

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

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

But the whistles?

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

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

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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.