So young, and already a Democrat….

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Deciding that a person who has not been charged with, let alone convicted of, insurrection is guilty of insurrection and therefore cannot run for president…that is “protecting our democracy” in action…

Whenever that term is used, one can be assured that the democracy they are referring to has no semblance to any actual democracy.

Steve Sailer.

So, Canadian colleges get to privatize the handing out of lifelong permanent resident visas, which ought to be the possession of the Canadian citizenry as a whole, for an increment of about $13,000 per year for a few years.

The people making the decisions about who get to be the next generation of Canadian residents are utterly obscure public college bureaucrats trying to fend off budget cuts.

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The tribe’s fight against Rome-based Enel began in 2011 and is the longest-running legal battle over wind energy in American history.

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When he appeared on CNN last week, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was confronted with a video from one of his speeches — a video CNN clipped to convey a false impression that he had compared Covid restrictions to conditions in Nazi Germany.

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The elite are the useful idiots of the security state. They enable it and protect it with their divisive antics. The dirty secret of the security state is that it’s not about the security of the state, that is, of the nation known as the USA. Its about the security of the people running the security state, the agency heads and their officers in the Intel Community and all its spinoffs, the State Department, the Justice Department, and the Defense Department and their accomplices in Congress and the federal judiciary.

What does this security state need protection from? From accounting for all its prior cumulative crimes against the nation. These crimes slowly accreted over the decades after the Cold War and then blossomed in 2016 — slowly, and then all at once — when the security state was rocked by the election loss of its avatar, Hillary Clinton. Mrs. Clinton had many crimes of her own to conceal, most of them committed with the help of the security state, such as the Uranium One grift, the Skolkovo transfer of US computer tech to Russia, and the Clinton Foundation’s financial escapades following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, to name a few biggies.

Read it.

Australia is the latest country to reject a request from the United States to send warships to the Red Sea under the command of the Pentagon’s Operation Prosperity Guardian to protect commercial vessels along the critical maritime trade route from Iran-backed Houthi.

Defense Minister Richard Marles told Sky News that Australia’s military would not send a “ship or a plane” to the Red Sea but would triple the number of troops for the US-led maritime force.

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An Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander said the Mediterranean Sea could be closed if the United States and its allies continued to commit “crimes” in Gaza, Iranian media reported on Saturday, without explaining how that would happen.

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A new analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) reveals that almost 60% of all illegal aliens households in the United States are benefiting from at least one form of taxpayer-funded welfare benefits.

Breitbart reports that the study, written by CIS’ Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler, found that illegal aliens households, as well as legal immigrants, use “significantly more” welfare than actual American citizens. Of illegal aliens currently occupying land in the U.S., 59% are on welfare that is funded by legal American citizens; 52% of legal immigrants are also using welfare. Meanwhile, less than 40% of American citizens use welfare.

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It was 32 years ago — on Christmas Day, December 25, 1991 — that the world rejoiced at the final dissolution of the Soviet Union after seven decades in which the totalitarian communist state inflicted war, poverty and despair on its own people and the rest of the world.

The end had been in sight since communist hardliners failed in their coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev four months earlier. Russian President Boris Yeltsin and throngs of ordinary citizens stood against the coup, and Gorbachev was freed after 48 hours of house arrest. Following the coup, power quickly flowed from the communist party and the central Soviet government to the U.S.S.R.’s 15 individual republics, of which Russia was by far the largest.

For a world that had for decades feared the Cold War might lead to a global thermonuclear apocalypse, this was the best possible outcome — for the long-suffering people of the now-defunct Soviet Union, as well as those in the free nations they threatened. But some in the media refused to blame the communist system for its failures, even as they treated Gorbachev, the last communist, better than his Western counterparts and his anti-communist successors.

Read it.

I read a heart-warming story this week in The Farmville Herald about a live nativity scene put on by a Baptist church in Powhatan County, Virginia. Powhatan is a rural county southwest of Richmond, about two hours’ drive from here.

When I saw the photo reproduced at the top of this post, it made me think of the report from earlier this week about the town of Rüsselsheim am Main in Germany, where life-size nativity figures were beheaded by persons unknown, as shown in the photo below.

Read it.

On December 3, a radical group hosted a “teach-in” titled “From Minnesota to Palestine.” The panelists linked America and Israel as “settler colonialist” nations–the only ones, apparently, in world history–and thus the source of all evil. This is the whole thing. It goes on for more than two hours, and I don’t recommend that you watch it. Among other things, the panelists celebrate the Hamas massacre of October 7 as a model for “indigenous” uprisings.

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While most people forgot about Al Gore a decade ago, the 75-year-old environmental tycoon with a net worth in the hundreds of millions (also a former vice president) has doubled down on his flavor of green fascism in the name of saving the planet from everyone but himself.

Gore is making $2 million a month from his “green investment firm” which has been having some problems. Its assets fell from $39 billion to $30 billion and its biggest fund suffered a 28% decline. And investors may be rethinking whether a firm that pays Gore $2 million a month so it can claim it’s saving the planet by buying Microsoft, Amazon and Adidas stocks is worth it.

But Gore is keeping busy. At COP28, the UN climate summit, he demanded that voting rules be changed so that a majority of countries, rather than a full consensus of nations, could impose mandates on the United States and oil-producing nations. That means a bunch of third world countries would have veto power over our entire economy. Good for them, really bad for us.

Read it.

Former Chicago Alderman Ed Burke, one of the state’s longest serving Democrat lawmakers, on Thursday was convicted of racketeering, bribery, and attempted extortion, the New York Post reports.

Burke, indicted for using his power to win private law business from developers, “had his hand out time and again demanding money and benefits from the very people he was supposed to be working on behalf of,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur said during closing arguments.

…

Burke is the 39th former Chicago alderman charged with crimes since 1972, according to the Chicago Tribune.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised. As Scott Adams said, ‘It would be a surprise if a Democrat politician in Chicago were NOT corrupt.’

Read it.

Just in time for Christmas, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Friday released his 2023 “Festivus Report,” with this year’s roundup documenting more than $900 billion in government waste over the past year.

Read it.

The Washington Free Beacon would like to celebrate the esteemed journalist’s contributions to American political discourse by highlighting 10 of her most insightful articles published in the Times in 2023.

1) “Nikole Hannah-Jones Reviews Two Picture Books About American History.”

2) N/A — Hannah-Jones only wrote one article for the New York Times in 2023.

3) N/A

4) N/A

5) N/A

6) N/A

7) N/A

8) N/A

9) N/A

10) N/A

Jonathan Turley.

As the House of Representatives goes into high gear in its impeachment proceedings (and possible contempt resolution against Hunter Biden), the Biden family legal problems continue to mount. In one week, it was revealed that President Biden’s brother James was caught on an FBI audiotape in a corruption investigation, while Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter, is now also facing demands for unpaid taxes.

James Biden is expected to appear before the House for questioning in the coming weeks.

The appearance may solidify a new line of defense for the Bidens: that they are harmless grifters.

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Most Clarence Thomas hit pieces can’t stand up to perfunctory scrutiny. But the newest doesn’t even make any sense.

In a new article with five names in the byline, anti-Supreme Court outfit ProPublica takes a decades-old offhand complaint that Thomas made about his salary and spins it into a nefarious conspiracy. In 2000, Thomas apparently groused about his pay to a “vocal conservative,” then-Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla. (The justice was hardly alone. It was a big issue in the 2000s.)

This interaction, we are informed, “set off a flurry of activity across the judiciary and Capitol Hill.” By “flurry of activity,” ProPublica means a single memo in which the possibility of raising justices’ salaries was discussed.

Like all SCOTUS smears, the piece is loaded with performative journalistic jargon—”newly unearthed documents,” for instance—meant to make it look like ProPublica is engaging in acts of reporting rather than activism.

Read it.

The Houthi war on commercial shipping in the Red Sea just escalated in a big way, at least in the minds of national security officials. Western intelligence sources have issued new statements alleging that Iranian intelligence is directly assisting Yemen’s Houthi forces with targeting information, after more than two months of war in Gaza has seen some one hundred or so drones and missiles threaten both US warships and container vessels in regional waters.

“Iran’s paramilitary forces are providing real-time intelligence to Yemen’s Houthis that the rebels are using to direct drones and missiles to target ships passing through the Red Sea, Western and regional security officials said,” a Friday report in The Wall Street Journal says. This is reportedly via one or more Iranian spy ships which patrol the same waters.

Just think how much more peaceful things would be if there were no Muslims in the world.

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Former Attorney General Edwin Meese and two constitutional scholars claim the appointment of Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutional because he is holding a position that was never created by Congress.

In an amicus brief filed Wednesday with the Supreme Court, Meese and professors Steven Calabresi and Gary Lawson state that lower federal courts should dismiss all of Smith’s prosecutions, including all of his pending charges against former President Donald Trump.

“That appointment was unlawful, as are all the legal actions that have flowed from it, including citizen Smith’s current attempt to obtain a ruling from this Court,” the brief said.

I knew Steve Calabresi at Yale.

Read it.

Recently, media attention has focused on Spain because of the public protests against its left-wing government. Widespread disapproval of the government is hardly surprising given the government’s unpopular policies regarding the economy, mass immigration, the constitution, education, and other important issues. Furthermore, with the mass influx of illegal Muslim migrants into Spain and the severe decline in Spanish birth rates, the nation finds itself at a crossroads, with its future far from certain.

A major problem that prevents many people from understanding Spain’s history with Islam is the false historiography, or even propaganda, that rewrites the history of Muslim-occupied medieval Spain and tries to portray it as a ‘bastion of peace and multiculturalism.’

After Islam’s emergence in Arabia during the 7th century, one of the first objectives of invading Arabs was the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in Europe. Parts of Spain and Portugal (which the Muslims called ‘al-Andalus’) were occupied and ruled by a succession of Islamic dynasties for almost 800 years, beginning in the 8th century. With the expansion of Islam, the Muslims seized almost the entirety of the Iberian Peninsula in less than a decade, from 711 to 718. The Visigothic Christian kingdom was defeated, and its last king, Rodrigo, was slain by the invaders.

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The increase in Islamist attacks in France in recent months has particularly affected the teaching profession. State schools have long been a symbol of the French nation and the Republic, which explains this focus by terrorists.

Since the beheading of history teacher Samuel Paty in October 2020, who was murdered for commenting on cartoons depicting the Islamic Prophet Mohammed in a lesson on freedom of expression, terrorist acts targeting teachers have increased in France.

Schools have become the battleground of choice for Islamists, whose influence is growing among teenagers who ingest the rhetoric of jihad via a number of influential social media accounts. The aim is for these budding fighters to bring the battle to school. From there, everything becomes a pretext for stirring up controversy and demanding respect for Sharia law or Mohammed in the classroom.

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A friend asked me to recommend a book about Whittaker Chambers as a Christmas gift for her smartly conservative daughter several years ago. Chambers stands at the center of an incredible drama and several fantastic books about him. There is still much to be learned from him and his case. Here I revisit and expand the list with a little help from the eminent historian Harvey Klehr:

If you have never read WITNESS, you need to do that.

Read it.

Governor Katie Hobbs has had a change of heart over the immigration crisis on Arizona’s southern border. She recently reversed an earlier decision against deploying the National Guard, now sending over 200 Tucson sector troops and committing up to $5 million in Arizona taxpayer money to send troops to the Lukeville Port of Entry.

Hobbs also demanded the federal government reimburse Arizona $512.5 million for “migrant transportation, drug interdiction and law enforcement” expenses incurred under the Biden administration. She also promised to seek reimbursement “regularly” from the feds for Arizona’s border crisis mitigation.

What sparked the flurry of activity from our heretofore passive chief? Finally, the direct expenses to Arizona could no longer be ignored. They’re affecting Arizona’s budget and future financial viability.

For Hobbs and scores of other Democrat mayors and governors, compassionate sympathy with the plight of illegal immigrants was a good image so long as the expense was borne elsewhere. Hundreds of sanctuary cities were formed. Mayors from New York Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities basked in assuring that theirs was an open, caring place. Like Biden himself, they welcomed illegal immigrants to our shores. Sure, they heard the reports of complaints from border communities suffering from growing hordes of needy illegal immigrants, but those were mostly just red state conservatives anyway.

However, when the influx of visitors became so overwhelming that they had to be exported around the country, perspectives changed. Too late Hobbs and the others realized the growth was out of control and the fiscal demands truly unsustainable. Their pleas for help from the feds were ignored.

Read it.

It has been obvious for quite a while that Americans are deserting blue states in favor of red states. Thus, after the last census states like California and New York lost seats in the House, while states like Florida and Texas gained seats. Just-released census data show that migration from blue to red continues.

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In the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack against Israel, left-wing nonprofit Climate Justice Alliance expressed “unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle” and blamed the attack on Israeli “settler-colonialism.” Now, the Biden administration is entrusting the group to distribute $50 million in taxpayer funds.

President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency announced the move in a Wednesday press release, which named Climate Justice Alliance as one of several “national grantmakers” tasked with doling out $50 million to local organizations in the name of “environmental justice.” In order to receive the taxpayer funds, those organizations will primarily work with the alliance, not the Biden administration. As a “grantmaker,” the left-wing nonprofit is tasked with awarding “subgrants”—which range from $150,000 to $350,000 each—and implementing “tracking and reporting systems.”

The decision raises questions as to how Biden’s EPA landed on Climate Justice Alliance for the program, given that the group has publicly condemned the administration over its support for the Jewish state. Climate Justice Alliance, a network of nearly 90 left-wing environmental groups from across the country, issued an Oct. 20 statement accusing Biden of using “US taxpayer dollars … to support a policy of genocide.”

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For the 10th consecutive year, Illinois lost population. Only West Virginia was worse.

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A United Nations official said in an interview last week that Palestinians who kill Israeli soldiers are not guilty of crimes because such killings are in line with their “right to resist,” in the latest controversial comments by the anti-Israel official.

“If the Palestinians target civilian objects, they commit war crimes,” said Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, in an interview on the podcast Makdisi Street. “If they target military objects, they do not commit war crimes—they are in line with acts of resistance.”

Albanese went on to criticize “Western media” outlets that have condemned “every Palestinian action,” including attacks on soldiers.

“The killing of soldiers—it’s, I mean, frankly, it’s a tragedy, but it’s not a crime,” Albanese said. “Instead, very often, when Palestinians manage to attack soldiers, they are portrayed as terrorists. And this is a misunderstanding that needs to be addressed.”

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California lieutenant governor Eleni Kounalakis (D.), the George Soros-backed candidate for governor in 2026, on Wednesday urged the state’s elections official to “explore every legal option” to boot former president Donald Trump from the primary ballot.

Kounalakis said she was inspired by Colorado’s all-Democrat supreme court, which in a split decision on Tuesday barred Trump from that state’s primary ballot on the grounds that the former president “engaged in insurrection.”

“California is obligated to determine if Trump is ineligible for the California ballot for the same reasons described in [the Colorado case],” Kounalakis wrote. “The Colorado decision can be the basis for a similar decision here in our state.”

Kounalakis’s letter comes as she tries to build her political profile in a bid to succeed Gavin Newsom as governor. Early this year, she became the first person to announce a run for the office. Democratic megadonor George Soros in June gave the maximum amount allowed to her campaign with a $36,400 contribution.

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Broadcast networks are still angry about a bill signed into law Tuesday by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, which empowers state and local law enforcement to arrest and deport illegal aliens.

This is the second round of whining we’ve seen in response to this law; the first bout came when the Texas legislature passed the bill several weeks ago. At that time, the common refrain from talking heads was that the bill necessarily would lead to “racial profiling” and “discrimination.”

Broadcast reporters this week raised that same objection, while also touting pending litigation by outraged open borders advocacy groups (which they described as “civil rights” organizations).

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Mayor Muriel Bowser’s leadership in Washington, DC, has become a spectacular disaster. The nation’s capital is grappling with a massive surge in carjackings and murders – no thanks to her failed social justice reforms (such as defunding the police).

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This week saw a surge in citizen journalist reports on social media platform X, detailing how ‘migrants’ from the southern border are being jetted around the country through US airports.

On Tuesday, a post from X user Ashley St. Clair sparked the first major concern that perhaps the government and or non-government organizations were flying migrants from processing centers to Delta Airline planes at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport and then across the nation.

However, Community Notes responded: “There is absolutely no evidence of the people at the gate being “migrants””.

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At least three teachers have lost their day jobs after using OnlyFans for a side hustle.

Two high school teachers from Missouri were placed on leave after word got out that they had personal OnlyFans accounts, Fox News Digital reported. The move received both praise and ridicule.

Megan Gaither and Brianna Coppage, both now-former teachers at St. Clair High School, apparently started “selling racy content to pay off student loans.” Gaither had $125,000 in student loans to pay off and turned to the digital prostitution site to supplement her income. Coppage, who makes only $42,000 annually as a teacher, is now “among the platform’s top creators, raking in nearly $1 million since she began the account over the summer,” Fox News Digital added.

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People need to realize the Left is using the alleged “existential” threat of global warming to wage war against liberty, against the Western world’s (not China’s) economy, and against joy.

The automobile, that magnificent enhancement to human freedom and joy, is a target of the Left.

The idea that individuals should be able to go where they want when they want in their own car is anathema to the Left. It provides way too much individual liberty.

Ideally, almost no one should own a car. We should all aspire to live in a high-rise apartment building in a major metropolis and use public transportation, ride bicycles, or walk. If for some reason we have to travel a longer distance, let us say to conservative relatives who selfishly own their own homes in the suburbs, we can use public transportation, and if none is available, we can use Uber or Lyft.

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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has acknowledged there is no data supporting the co-administration of vaccines for mpox, COVID-19, and influenza, in contradiction of advice a top agency official gave to the public.

“There are no data on administering JYNNEOS vaccine at the same time as other vaccines,” the CDC said.

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Journalist Judy Woodruff retired from the PBS NewsHour anchor desk in 2022, but spent 2023 on a cross-country tour filing reports on political polarization, some of which ended up in this year-ending hour-long election special America at a Crossroads, used as connective tissue to go along with new content.

The special’s thin patina of objectivity — there were limited mentions of Donald Trump — was amusingly broken by Woodruff herself, with some liberal slant via an archive clip nearly 40 years old, from Woodruff’s days reporting for PBS’s McNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (later to be renamed the PBS NewsHour).

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott continued his controversial practice of having his state pay for migrants to relocate to northern cities by flying about 100 to Chicago this week.

I wish he were in charge of our foreign policy.

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On Tuesday, Spanish National Police, working with their Moroccan counterparts, dismantled a terror recruitment cell by arresting nine in the North African exclave of Melilla and another person in the city of Nador, just across the Moroccan border, El Mundo reports.

The General Directorate for the Surveillance of Moroccan Territory (DGSN) said that the suspects were attempting to recruit new jihadists. Among those arrested was one suspect who is believed to be a member of a terrorist group operating in the African Sahel region.

“This joint security operation is part of a continuous and distinguished security coordination between the Moroccan security services and their Spanish counterparts, which confirms once again the importance of the security partnership between the two countries,” the DGSN said in a statement.

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At Georgetown University Medical School, a flurry of social media posts from future medical professionals justifying Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre is raising a troubling question: Can doctors support terrorism?

An array of Georgetown Med students since the attack have taken to Instagram to praise the “Palestinian resistance” and argue that violence against innocent civilians is “inevitable” given Israel’s “apartheid” and “settler colonialism,” screenshots obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show. One student, Nicole Olakkengil, even urged her classmates who refuse to “stand … with the resistance” to “maybe try entering a different field,” as “medicine is inherently political.” In some cases, those students are already working in Washington, D.C.-area hospitals.

The students’ willingness to justify, defend, and even praise the worst attack against Jews since the Holocaust raises questions as to how those students will treat Jewish patients when they become doctors—and whether doctors can support terrorism while staying within the bounds of medical ethics.

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To summarize Goddek’s list, he noted that the extraction process for vegetable oils like canola, soybean, and corn oil involves unnatural methods such as high heat and chemical solvents, leading to oxidation and trans fats. These oils, a modern dietary phenomenon, have seen tremendous use since the early 1990s, paralleling the increase in chronic health issues.

He pointed out that Omega-6 fatty acids can cause chronic inflammation and are linked to autoimmune diseases due to an imbalance with Omega-3. Studies link diets high in vegetable oils to oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, genetic damage, and an increased risk of cancer and heart disease.

Read it.

While videos of smash-and-grab robberies in California circulating on social media are attracting attention worldwide, lawmakers say finding solutions to stop the crimes is challenging.

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A judge this week ruled that the Biden administration must stop removing razor wire from barriers along the Texas-Mexico border, handing a victory to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan wrote in a court order filed on Tuesday that a district court “legally erred” when ruling against the state of Texas, which had attempted to block removal of the razor wire.

Read it.

My, what a surprise.

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“It’s over” – comments investigative journalist Kit Klarenberg after noticing that The Washington Post quietly deleted a prominent tab from its Masthead.

What was a long featured “War in Ukraine” tab, which had been there from the start of the war going back to Feb. 2022 has disappeared.

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Leftists hate being exposed as hypocrites. Much of their social influence depends on two false notions – That they are rebels against the establishment and that they are the victims of oppression. In reality, the political left is the favored movement of the establishment and they are only ever victims of their own incompetence, lust for power and delusions of grandeur. The humanitarian costume they wear is easy to tear away – All you have to do is demand they follow through on their “principles” instead of only serving their own interests.

This is how Texas Governor Greg Abbot (among others) has taken the legs out from under pro-sanctuary Democrats – By giving them exactly what they claimed they wanted.

Tens of thousands of illegal migrants have now been bused to multiple sanctuary cities including Chicago, New York And Washington D.C. And needless to say, the progressives in these places are not happy. Texas towns deal with millions of illegals every year due to the Biden Administration’s asylum policies and open border policies. The issue is growing more out of control with each passing month and 2023 is set to become the worst year ever for migrant crossings. Yet, a handful of the same migrants are now crippling the welfare apparatus of multiple blue cities.

The far-left Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is furious in the face of the overwhelming economic strain created by the influx of migrants. The same mayor proudly declared Chicago a sanctuary city in May of this year.

NewsMax.

Railroad companies and business groups are pressing the U.S. government to reopen trade routes on the Texas-Mexico border, after authorities closed two crossings in response to a rise in migrant crossings in recent days.

U.S. Border Patrol apprehended about 10,800 migrants at the southwest border Monday, according to an internal agency report reviewed by Reuters. About 40% were families or unaccompanied children.

Several current and former U.S. officials said the number of migrants encountered Monday was near or at a single-day record high.

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The head of a hospital in Gaza confessed to being a Hamas general, according to video of an interrogation the Israel Defense Forces released Tuesday, in the latest evidence that the terror group uses medical facilities for military purposes.

In the video, Ahmad Kahalot, the chief of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, said he has been a member of Hamas since 2010 and reached the rank of “Amid,” which is equivalent to the rank of brigadier general. Kahalot also said that 16 doctors, nurses, and other staff in the hospital are members of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing. He added that Hamas would hide other “military and civilian officials inside the hospital.”

“Because for them, the hospital is a safe place,” he said when asked why the officials hid in the facility. “They won’t be targeted when they’re inside the hospital.”