Trump to Pull Stefanik UN Ambassador Nomination to Protect Republican House Majority

Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell / March 27, 2025

President Donald Trump is pulling the nomination of Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., to be United Nations ambassador.

The move is designed to protect House Republicans’ slim majority, the president said.

“With a very tight Majority, I don’t want to take a chance on anyone else running for Elise’s seat,” the president said on Truth Social. “The people love Elise and, with her, we have nothing to worry about come Election Day.”

Others can do a good job in the position, so Stefanik “will stay in Congress, rejoin the House Leadership Team, and continue to fight for our amazing American People,” according to Trump.

“Speaker [Mike] Johnson is thrilled! I look forward to the day when Elise is able to join my Administration in the future,” he said. “She is absolutely FANTASTIC. Thank you Elise!”

While Stefanik would likely have had no trouble getting the necessary votes for confirmation, Republicans hold a narrow majority in the House with 218 seats while Democrats hold 213 seats. There are currently four vacant seats.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, was expected to slow-walk the special election to replace Stefanik.

Stefanik’s nomination was expected to move forward on April 2, the day after the Florida special elections, Axios reported last week. She would have been the last of Trump’s Cabinet to get confirmed.

Stefanik is the second of Trump’s Cabinet picks to have their nominations withdrawn, following Rep. Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal in November after it became clear he did not have the votes to be confirmed.

This is a breaking news story and it may be updated.

Watch Our Live Inauguration Day Coverage

Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell / Katrina Trinko / January 20, 2025

The Daily Signal’s Tony Kinnett will be doing live coverage today from Washington, D.C. Catch his show, which you can watch right here, starting at 10:30 a.m. Eastern and concluding half an hour after the inauguration. Stay tuned to get smart commentary from guests, including Scott Rasmussen and Kurt Schlichter, and watch the inauguration itself.

American Tea Parties, Greek Yogurt Parties

Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell / Katrina Trinko / David Azerrad / June 21, 2011

When it comes to crushing debts, unsustainable entitlements and ballooning deficits, Americans and Europeans are all in the same sinking boat. Where they part ways is in their response to the looming crisis.

Faced with out-of-control government spending and the prospect of a bleak economic future, Americans from across the country have rallied under the banner of the Tea Party and sent a clear message to Washington: Enough! In a vigorous manifestation of that greatest of all checks on government—the “vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America”—citizens began a grassroots wave of orderly protests that have since only grown in number and promise to keep the pressure on Washington to pull its financial act together.

Meanwhile in Greece, proposed austerity measures to avert bankruptcy have left the country paralyzed by strikes and riots. Last week in Athens, Greek police fired teargas at protesters who responded by throwing stones and yogurt. This week, the country is being hit with blackouts as the main power company goes on strike. Violent protests have sadly become the norm whenever European governments attempt to tackle their financial woes. Their citizens, coddled by the nanny-state and its promises of cradle-to-grave no-hassle living, do not take well to being told it’s time to face the music.

Cynics will say that Americans aren’t hurling stones and yogurt because the government has yet to touch their benefits, and that when it does, things will get ugly here too. Perhaps. But there are reasons to believe that Americans, who by and large still view themselves as free citizens of a republic rather than dependent wards of the welfare state, will have the fortitude to accept whatever painful cuts are necessary. And thanks to the efforts of the Tea Party, these cuts, when they do occur, will not be as drastic as they would have been had the people sat by in torpor until the crisis hit.

Dave McCormick Pens Inaugural Letter to Pennsylvania Voters

Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell / Katrina Trinko / David Azerrad / Salena Zito / January 11, 2026

PITTSBURGH—In his inaugural letter to residents of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Pa., said that after his first year in office, he believed it was important to hold himself accountable to the people he represents in the U.S. Senate for both his accomplishments and his shortcomings.

In an interview with the Washington Examiner, McCormick said that accountability has been a constant throughout his life—from his days as a high school wrestler, to his service in the military, to his career in business—requiring him to assess where he succeeded and where he needed to improve honestly.

“Being accountable was the standard I held myself to, and I believe it is my obligation to set the same standard of accountability serving in the U.S. Senate,” McCormick said, adding that “the people of our state deserve that.”

McCormick won what many viewed as an improbable victory over three-term Democratic incumbent Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., and he was determined to hit the ground running from the moment he was sworn in.

Even before taking office, McCormick, joined by his wife, Dina Powell, sat down for an hourslong dinner with soon-to-be Democratic colleague Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., and his wife, Gisele, at a Brazilian restaurant in Pittsburgh, a meeting that was later shared on social media.

Within two weeks of being sworn in, he had opened seven offices across the state with a focus on serving constituents everywhere. “Constituent services are so important to the people of Pennsylvania. That is one of our most important jobs,” McCormick told me at the time.

By year’s end, McCormick said his office had closed more than 4,400 constituent cases, saving Pennsylvanians an estimated $15.7 million. In his letter, he added that he has sought to bring the outsider perspective he developed as a West Point graduate, military officer and CEO to his work in the Senate.

“That kind of accountability does not exist in Washington, where elected officials almost never admit mistakes or acknowledge when they have fallen short,” McCormick’s letter reads.

“To that end, I am pleased to deliver this annual report to the people of Pennsylvania—a letter to the constituents evaluating the progress we’ve made compared to my promises, the challenges we still face, and what I see as the path ahead.”

McCormick earned praise in Pennsylvania and nationwide for hosting the state’s first Energy Summit at Carnegie Mellon University in July, which brought together leading figures from academia, the energy sector and business development. The event was attended by President Donald Trump, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and several Cabinet members, and it culminated in commitments of billions of dollars in investment for data centers.

He also played a role in Trump’s historic decision regarding the Nippon-U.S. Steel deal and worked closely with Fetterman on several issues over the past year.

McCormick said, despite the historically busy year in the Senate, in which they have been in session for 197 days, he was still able to make 185 different stops across the Commonwealth.

McCormick said his accomplishments included casting votes for the “Working Families Tax Cut Act,” which he said secured major new tax cuts, expanded child care tax credits, eliminated taxes on tips and overtime, established $1,000 Trump accounts, and cosponsored a new school choice tax credit.

McCormick noted in his statement that the first bill he introduced was cosponsored with Fetterman and focused on coordinating fentanyl enforcement. “Bipartisanship is hard to come by in Washington,” he wrote, “but there is no reason we cannot build consensus around sound ideas to stop fentanyl. I am devoting significant effort to this problem.”

McCormick said he was not afraid to be blunt when he disagreed with his colleagues, such as parts of the “DOGE” effort to cut spending, excise waste, and unwind bureaucracy.

“I did not always agree with how the administration went about it and said so publicly. I criticized the disruptions to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other research funding and lobbied, alongside colleagues, to release it,” he said.

“And, when the tariffs uniquely harmed Pennsylvanians, such as the levies on cocoa, I worked with the Administration to roll them back. I also publicly challenged and encouraged Governor Shapiro, with whom I have built a productive working relationship, to opt into the new school choice tax credit to create equality of opportunity for all families in the Commonwealth.”

2026 COPYRIGHT CREATORS.COM

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

Hollywood vs Individualism

Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell / Katrina Trinko / David Azerrad / Salena Zito / John Stossel / January 11, 2026

Many popular movies make a constructive point: If you work hard enough and push through tough times, you can achieve your dreams.

In “The Pursuit of Happyness,” a struggling father tells his son, “Don’t let anyone tell you, you can’t do something.” The movie is a true story about a man who overcomes homelessness and gets his dream job.

In “Rocky Balboa,” Rocky says, “It’s not about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”

These are good messages.

They fit my libertarian philosophy. We libertarians believe people try harder and do best when individuals are free to pursue their own dreams.

In my new video, I interview libertarian Timothy Sandefur, author of the new book, “You Don’t Own Me.” He says, “The title comes from the famous song by Leslie Gore, saying, I’m in charge of my own desires, dreams. I’m responsible for my own self.”

“That’s kind of obvious.” I point out.

“It should be,” he replies. “Unfortunately, a lot of people ignore this and say, you’re responsible for other people, or other people must be responsible for you.”

He gives examples from Hollywood.

“The original ‘Wizard of Oz’ movie is this optimistic, joyful film about somebody who always had the strength within her to accomplish her dreams.”

But the recent “Wizard of Oz,” “Wicked,” focuses on the Wicked Witch, who is a victim because she’s green. Her dream isn’t to do anything; it’s for others to accept her.

“Very different from a film in which the character wants to accomplish something,” says Sandefur.

She rejects the wizard’s offer of a seat by his side, instead asking him to help society.

Sandefur says the message is, “We should not pursue our own dreams. Instead, curtail our own behavior for the benefit of society.”

Likewise, in the latest “Wonder Woman” sequel, the villain grants individuals’ wishes, but that threatens the world. So Wonder Woman tells everyone to give up their wishes. That saves the day.

As Sandefur puts it: “We should not want things, not desire or dream things, and that will save the world.”

The flop “Strange World” is a kid’s movie about a society that relies on a power source called Pando. Leftist scriptwriters, selling climate hysteria, have the hero say: “If we want to survive, Pando has to go.”

The good guys happily destroy their main source of energy.

Sandefur mocks the stupidity, “Living without today’s energy technology doesn’t just mean doing without warm coffee. It means doing without ambulances when you have a heart attack, doing without an airplane to carry people’s organ transplants. Doing without today’s energy technology would be a colossal disaster for the human race. Yet the movie kind of ridicules that concern.”

When woke movies fail, Hollywood often blames the audience.

After remaking “Charlie’s Angels,” director Elizabeth Banks said, if this movie doesn’t make money, it’s because “men don’t go see women do action movies.”

But that’s just dumb.

Didn’t Banks notice that men helped make the original “Charlie’s Angels” TV series a hit? Did she not notice “Kill Bill,” “Aliens,” “Tomb Raider,” “Resident Evil”—lots of successful action movies feature female leads.

“The reality,” says Sandefur, “is that people are not interested in another lame remake that satisfies all the politically correct tests.”

“Films that are individualistic,” he adds, “tend to be very successful.” But “Hollywood wants to propagandize to us about the evils of individualism.”

To Sandefur, the best message is:

“My life is mine. I don’t exist to make other people happy.”

“Sounds selfish,” I say.

“It is, but it’s also true that I might want to spend my life helping other people that I love, my wife and my kids. When it comes down to it, my life belongs to me.”

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

America Needs More Masculinity

Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell / Katrina Trinko / David Azerrad / Salena Zito / John Stossel / Victor Joecks / January 11, 2026

Society has spent decades telling boys that masculinity is toxic, and now there’s a shortage of skilled tradesmen. The connection should be obvious.

Through his on-again, off-again tariff dance, President Donald Trump has made one thing clear: He wants more things built in America. He’s bragged about already securing more investment dollar commitments than former President Joe Biden did during his entire term. And he wants more.

Trump has long championed the rural communities devastated by factory shutdowns. It’s one reason that he has enjoyed such strong support in Middle America.

In his speech at the Republican National Convention last year, now-Vice President J.D. Vance detailed the importance of remembering that America is both a “nation” and “our homeland.”

The hardworking people I grew up with “love this country, not only because it’s a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home,” he said. He continued, “This is the source of America’s greatness.”

This is why Trump and Vance are so determined to rejuvenate American industry. But there’s a major obstacle to accomplishing this—a shortage of skilled workers.

“For every five tradespeople that retire, two enter the workforce,” Mike Rowe, host of “Dirty Jobs,” wrote in 2024. “That’s a 5:2 ratio, and the math is simply not sustainable.”

It’s not for lack of opportunity.

For instance, the Navy Industrial Submarine Base needs to hire 100,000 skilled tradesmen within the next decade. But the companies working there are struggling to find enough qualified employees.

One reason is that society has relentlessly pushed students toward college.

Former President Ronald Reagan once said, “If you want more of something, subsidize it.” And the government has, dumping trillions of dollars into higher education over the decades.

Sure enough. College enrollment more than doubled from 1972 to 2022, growing from 9.2 million to 18.6 million. In 1972, around a quarter of 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in college. In 2022, it was 39%.

This hasn’t just limited the potential pool of future welders and plumbers. It’s sent the message that those careers are second-rate. That they’re only for people who aren’t smart enough for college.

It’s a terrible and false message. It may not earn you a high SAT score, but understanding how wiring, pipes and parts work in the real world is a much-needed type of intelligence.

Men working with their hands literally built the country.

There’s a more fundamental issue here, too. The skilled trades continue to be dominated by men.

This isn’t the result of a patriarchal society but innate differences between men and women. Men are stronger than women. They’re more mechanically minded. They’re more interested in working with their hands. They’re more willing to do dangerous and dirty jobs, like building the Hoover Dam.

This doesn’t make men superior to women.

It makes men and women different. Women have their own set of strengths, including better language and social skills. Modern feminists rarely praise pregnancy, but growing a baby inside of you is the closest thing human beings have to a superpower.

But society doesn’t nurture the unique strengths of boys.

Most schools want little boys to act like little girls. Doctors prescribe Ritalin to boys who can’t sit still.

Male students see their success in areas like mathematics and engineering dismissed as the result of systemic sexism, not their achievements. Compounding this problem is the growing number of boys living in homes without their fathers.

Little wonder so many men—and potential skilled tradesmen—have disengaged. The labor force participation rate for men 25-54 hit 98% in 1954. In November, it was under 90%.

Masculinity isn’t toxic. It’s what built this country. And rebuilding American industry requires celebrating masculinity, not attacking it.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

Europe Needs to Calm Down About Greenland

Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell / Katrina Trinko / David Azerrad / Salena Zito / John Stossel / Victor Joecks / Jarrett Stepman / January 11, 2026

Is the United States about to invade Greenland?

If you listen to EU politicians and much of the U.S. legacy media, and actually take them seriously, then you might answer “yes.” President Donald Trump is going to unleash Delta Force to spirit away the prime minister before we nuke Nuuk (the capital of Greenland) and send in the Army to mop up survivors.

If you’ve followed this issue from the beginning and have tried to accurately understand how the president operates, then you should conclude that this brouhaha is all about negotiating. You also may think that the U.S. is just pursuing a long-term policy more vigorously, and that our allies in Europe really need to chill.

The issue of Greenland suddenly popped back up in the news recently, and I kid you not, because White House adviser Stephen Miller’s wife posted this on X.

SOON pic.twitter.com/XU6VmZxph3
— Katie Miller (@KatieMiller) January 3, 2026

This sent the European elite straight to their oft-used fainting couches, which they had to stay firmly emplaced on when Trump himself weighed in and said he still aims to acquire Greenland. This has been his goal since 2019 and has been, off and on, a U.S. strategic aim since the 19th century.

When White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked if Trump meant to use the military to acquire Greenland, she said that “utilizing the U.S. military is always an option.”

Was Katie Miller being a bit of a troll? Yes. Is Trump putting Denmark’s collective feet to the fire with his aggressive insistence? Yes.

Here’s Austria’s Gunther Fehlinger-Jahn, the chairman of a committee to bring his country into NATO, saying that European countries should seize U.S. bases on the continent if the U.S. takes Greenland.

NEW: If the U.S. annexes Greenland, we must confiscate all American bases in Europe, says Austria's NATO enlargement committee chairman Fehlinger.

"If you take Greenland, you have to leave".

pic.twitter.com/FYzd3hATpY
— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) January 7, 2026

Keep in mind, the U.S. has been practically begging NATO allies to spend more on their defense, so this is hardly a credible threat. It’s also strange to witness European belligerence on these issues when European countries continue to demand increased American involvement in Ukraine.

For those less hysterical than the very serious Western elites who go into a tizzy any time President Donald Trump says something outside their bland, corporate, and respectfully conventional framework, it’s worth taking a step back and considering what’s really happening.

Trump is basically using his well-worn tactics as a negotiator to secure a long-term goal of the U.S.

He has made it plain from the beginning that he intends to buy Greenland from Denmark. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly communicated as much, assuring lawmakers that the administration’s intent was not to invade the sparsely populated, North American island owned by a NATO ally.

I’d hazard to guess Trump’s reason for potentially using the military is because he virtually always says as much. It is an option, one that he would almost certainly never take. What he wants is to create maximum urgency on the part of a negotiating partner to get a deal done. And that’s what he’s done in the Greenland case. We are closer to acquiring the territory than any time since World War II despite Danish and European protests.

And that’s a good thing.

I’ve written about why Greenland is important for the interests of the American people as far as security, economics, and even to a certain extent national pride. Bringing the island territory fully into the American orbit is not just a pointless media stunt. It has real implications for U.S. strategy vis-à-vis major competitors like Russia and China, countries that have a keen desire to have access to and control of the Arctic.

China has already made overtures to Greenland to control and mine its rare earths mineral deposits.

Is the current security arrangement enough to keep China out and America in? Maybe.

But consider this, on top of the current tension it’s clear that there is a significant independence movement within Greenland. It’s very possible that the tiny population may go independent, enter the “market” so to speak, and seek out an arrangement with a rival of the United States.

The issue can be seen in this joint statement issued by Denmark and a coalition of European countries.

BREAKING: Joint statement by European countries on Greenland pic.twitter.com/9ODVJzIRAo
— The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex) January 6, 2026

Denmark committed years ago to accepting any decision the people of Greenland make about their independence. If Greenland, with a population of around 56,000 people, decides to go independent they can do so theoretically without the Danes stopping it. And as of now, independence is quite popular. But Greenland is also highly dependent on Danish subsidies for its economy and welfare state.

What’s to prevent Greenland from going independent and then selling itself to the highest bidder? At the moment, not much.

And given how much pressure Trump is globally putting on U.S. rivals it makes sense that he’s essentially playing hardball to ensure that Greenland remains and becomes an even more integral part of U.S. national security.

Trump was quite serious about the return of the Monroe Doctrine, or the “Donroe Doctrine” as he calls it.

Nothing personal to the Danes, who have been good allies, or other European nations who’ve been, well, uneven allies. This is just how Trump does business, don’t take it personally.

Minnesota’s Dangerous Surrender of the Rule of Law

Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell / Katrina Trinko / David Azerrad / Salena Zito / John Stossel / Victor Joecks / Jarrett Stepman / Jenny Beth Martin / January 11, 2026

Now that the nation’s attention has turned to Minnesota and its massive welfare fraud – fraud so large (referred to as “industrial-scale” by the assistant U.S. attorney, possibly as much as $9 billion) that Democratic Gov. Tim Walz felt compelled to end his bid for reelection—we should take the opportunity to investigate the possibility of a different kind of fraud, the fraud made possible by Walz’s signature on the so-called “Driver’s Licenses for All” law, which enabled illegal immigrants in Minnesota to receive driver’s licenses from the state.

Let’s be clear about what this policy represents. It’s not compassion. It is not common sense. It is not public safety. It is an open invitation to chaos, fraud, and the further erosion of confidence in our civic institutions.

A driver’s license is not just permission to operate a motor vehicle. In modern America, it is one of the most powerful identity documents a person can possess. It opens doors—literally and figuratively. It allows easier access to banking services, rental agreements, government buildings, employment verification processes, and, yes, in many cases, even voter registration systems.

When a state hands out official credentials to individuals who are in the country illegally, it is effectively laundering unlawful status into something that looks legitimate.

Walz and his allies insisted this policy would make roads safe. That claim collapses under even minimal scrutiny. Driving safely depends on focus and awareness, obedience to the rules, and vehicle readiness for the road, not on redefining who is eligible for official identification. Public safety does not require the state to reward illegal behavior with government-issued credentials. On the contrary, it requires the consistent enforcement of the law.

Vehicle crash data from Minnesota strongly support the contention that granting illegal immigrants driver’s licenses, despite Walz’s assertion, does not increase public safety. In 2022, there were 444 traffic fatalities in Minnesota. In 2023, that number fell to 402. But in 2024—the first full year the new “Driver’s Licenses for All” policy was in effect—the number of traffic fatalities jumped almost 20%, to 475.

But the most troubling consequence of this driver’s license policy is not traffic safety. It is the risk it introduces to the integrity of elections and public programs.

Minnesota, like many states, increasingly relies on identity-based systems for voter registration. While supporters of this bill protest that non-citizens are already denied the ability to vote legally, that is not the point. The issue is vulnerability. When you dramatically expand access to state-issued IDs for people whose presence in the country cannot be legally verified, you dramatically expand the opportunity for misuse, error, and fraud.

Confidence in elections depends on safeguards. It depends on citizens believing that only eligible voters are participating and that the system is not being manipulated. Policies like handing out driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants undermine that confidence—not because every recipient will act in bad faith, but because the system is being made more porous by design.

This is not hypothetical. State IDs are routinely used to register to vote. They are used to access absentee ballot processes. Expanding eligibility without corresponding enforcement and verification measures creates risk. Responsible governance requires minimizing risk, not dismissing it – and certainly not enlarging it.

Beyond elections, the policy opens the door to broader identity fraud. A state driver’s license can be used to obtain credit, enter secure buildings, and access public benefits. Once issued, it becomes exceedingly difficult to revoke. When the state blurs the line between lawful residents and those who entered illegally, it creates downstream consequences for taxpayers and communities who are already stretched thin.

This is a pattern we see again and again from progressive leaders: redefine the law to accommodate illegal behavior, then scold anyone who raises concerns as heartless or extreme. But there is nothing heartless about expecting the law to mean what it says, and there is nothing extreme about insisting that citizenship and legal presence still matter.

Americans are a generous people. We welcome legal immigrants who follow the rules, work hard, and contribute to our communities. What we cannot accept is a government that, rather than enforcing the law, finds ways to accommodate those who break it.

Walz’s decision to sign that bill sent exactly the wrong message. It told illegal immigrants that the state government would step in to shield them from the consequences of federal law. It told citizens that their concerns about election integrity and public safety were secondary to ideological virtue-signaling. And it told taxpayers that they would be expected to absorb the costs—financial and civic—of policies they never asked for.

The Tea Party movement was born from a simple conviction: government must be accountable to the people, and the rule of law must apply equally to everyone. Minnesota’s driver’s license policy violates both principles.

If we want a country that works, we must stop pretending that laws are optional and borders are meaningless. Walz may call his driver’s license policy progress. The rest of us know better.

Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation

The Task That Lies Ahead in Venezuela

Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell / Katrina Trinko / David Azerrad / Salena Zito / John Stossel / Victor Joecks / Jarrett Stepman / Jenny Beth Martin / Armstrong Williams / January 11, 2026

Dictator and narco-terrorist Nicolas Maduro was captured by U.S. forces in a thrilling nighttime raid on his palace in Caracas, Venezuela, in an operation codenamed Operation Absolute Resolve.

The mission involved over 150 aircraft launched from around 20 bases across the hemisphere. It neutralized much of Venezuela’s air defenses, cut power in Caracas, and ended with Delta Force troops detaining Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, as they attempted to reach a safe room.

Within hours, they were flown to New York, where they are now being held to face narco-terrorism charges, among other things.

Most Democrats and left-wing media figures have derided President Donald Trump’s actions as an unconstitutional, unauthorized declaration of war against Venezuela.

But the fact is that the Biden administration and the Trump administration have never recognized Maduro as the legitimate leader of Venezuela. And the Biden administration even put a $25 million bounty on Maduro’s head for information leading to his arrest and conviction.

You see, this was not a declaration of war at all. This was an operation to take down not the leader of a sovereign nation but the leader and enabler of a network of deadly cartels that have imported hundreds of tons of cocaine and other drugs, including fentanyl, into the United States, killing countless Americans. This was an operation to arrest a narco-terrorist, not a head of state.

Trump said after the raid that the United States would “run” Venezuela until a transition has occurred, though Secretary of State Marco Rubio has tried to walk back that statement by denying a formal occupation while still implying a strong U.S. leverage over whoever governs Caracas next. But we’ve seen this story before.

In 2003, U.S. and coalition forces toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq in a matter of weeks. The United States set up the Coalition Provisional Authority, which assumed full executive, legislative and juridical authority over Iraq, and eventually enabled the United States to handpick Hussein’s successors.

The power vacuum and disbanding of the Iraqi army in 2003 fueled a brutal insurgency and civil war, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,500 U.S. troops killed before the formal U.S. withdrawal in 2011.

The chaos also created conditions for groups like al-Qaeda and later ISIS, which at one point controlled large parts of Iraqi and Syrian territory, to gain a stronghold over the nation, eventually forcing yet another U.S. military intervention years later.

If Trump believes that simply taking control of Venezuela is going to be a walk in the park, he would be sorely mistaken. At the very least, though, there are already leaders such as Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia and Maria Corina Machado, who together are estimated by some analysts to command support from roughly 70% of Venezuelans and who claim a clear democratic mandate after the 2024 election.

But there’s always a caveat to this whole thing. Whoever’s in charge will most likely have to play by Trump’s rules.

Venezuela is not only close to the United States but also one of the most important countries in the world in terms of its natural resources. It ranks first globally in oil reserves, with roughly 18% of the world’s total barrels. It also has enormous reserves of natural gas, gold, iron ore, nickel and even rare earth elements.

In fact, Trump has already argued that Venezuela’s oil effectively belongs to the United States. He has described Venezuela’s past nationalizations, particularly from the 1970s through the 2000s, when the government took over foreign-owned oil operations, as “stolen” U.S. property.

One of his top advisers, Stephen Miller, echoed that claim, calling it the “largest theft of American wealth and property.”

The United States faces a serious dilemma after capturing the brutal dictator who caused the deaths of many Americans through narco-trafficking. And even amid Venezuelan street celebrations, a dangerous power vacuum may be brewing. Venezuela’s military is still intact and has explicitly endorsed the sanctioned Vice President Delcy Rodriguez as interim leader; Rodriguez is also backed by Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez and others.

So it won’t be a simple vote that decides Venezuela’s future. There will be fights, maybe even a civil war, just like we had in Iraq all those years ago. Every country has a military, and every country has politicians who want power.

The question that now remains is whether Trump can ensure that those who are in power are supported by the Venezuelan people, and that the military and Maduro’s goons in government won’t get their way.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

Leftist Group Dodges Accountability for ‘Hate Group’ Accusation After Judge Blocks Discovery

Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell / Katrina Trinko / David Azerrad / Salena Zito / John Stossel / Victor Joecks / Jarrett Stepman / Jenny Beth Martin / Armstrong Williams / Tyler O'Neil / January 10, 2026

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.”

Watkins’ Ruling on the SPLC

King sued in April 2022, meaning the SPLC’s initial “hate group” accusation in 2018 fell outside of Alabama’s statute of limitations.

However, the center has repeated its accusation each year since, so Judge Watkins ruled as timely the accusation published in 2021.

Watkins also found that, because the SPLC initially stated in 2011 that the Dustin Inman Society was not a “hate group” before reversing course, the center may have smeared the society despite knowing that it was not an “anti-immigrant hate group.”

Defamation cases face high hurdles due to the Supreme Court’s precedents from New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) onward.

Watkins found the SPLC’s specific claim that the society—which has legal immigrants on its board—”poses as an organization concerned about immigration issues, yet focuses on vilifying all immigrants” likely met the defamation standard of “actual malice,” where the defendant publishes a provably false statement while likely suspecting the statement was false.

Since the SPLC uses this claim to support its “hate group” designation, republished every year, Watkins ruled the claim did not fall outside the statute of limitations.

Maze’s Reversal

Yet Judge Maze reversed the decision, holding that the initial 2018 “hate group” designation, and the subsequent “extremist profile” explaining it, fell outside the statute.

Maze found only one claim timely—the 2021 “hate group” accusation—and he ruled that King failed to show the SPLC acted with “actual malice,” because he had no evidence that the SPLC staffer who made the 2021 decision, Keegan Hankes, had reason to doubt the truth of the accusation.

Maze wrote that the SPLC’s claim that the society vilifies all immigrants “is non-actionable rhetorical hyperbole,” the kind of “loose, figurative language that no reasonable person would believe presented facts.”

260107.KING.Memorandum Opinion.EFS.Doc 134 Download

What Went Wrong?

Mihet, King’s attorney, accused Judge Maze, a Republican and appointee of President Donald Trump, and his magistrate judge of defending the SPLC.

“They really hamstrung our hands in discovery in terms of what we could ask and receive from the SPLC,” the attorney told The Daily Signal. “They protected the SPLC vehemently.”

“Now he complains that we didn’t show him more evidence in discovery,” Mihet added. “It’s because he and his magistrate carefully circumscribed the scope of discovery.”

Mihet said he aimed to reveal a pattern of the SPLC smearing conservatives, but the judge would not allow “this line of questioning.”

Todd McMurtry, King’s lead attorney, told The Daily Signal he has not yet decided whether to appeal the ruling.

“We will review the decision and evaluate next steps,” he said.

The SPLC did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.

Tale of the Twin Cities: George Floyd vs. ICE-Involved Shooting

It took less than 48 hours for protesters to begin burning the city of Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. Law enforcement struggled to control protests as demonstrators set a local police station on fire, looted businesses, and left parts of the city covered in graffiti.

Five-and-a-half years later, Americans wonder if history will repeat itself after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good on Wednesday.

Good, a 37-year-old woman, was an “immigration activist,” according to Fox News, and allegedly was at the scene of ICE operations in Minneapolis on Wednesday in an effort to disrupt ICE activity. When Good was ordered out of her vehicle, a video appears to show Good driving her vehicle toward an ICE agent, who discharged his weapon into Good’s car, killing her.

Protests quickly broke out in Minneapolis following the news of Good’s death, but, at least so far, demonstrations are far from the level of violence and destruction seen in the aftermath of Floyd’s death.

The same Democrat mayor, Jacob Frey, is in power in Minneapolis, and law enforcement were involved in Floyd’s death as they were in Good’s. So, what is different now?

Arguably the most significant difference is the presence of significant numbers of federal law enforcement on the ground at the time of the incident, and perhaps some “protester fatigue” on the part of the radical left.

On this week’s edition of “Problematic Women,” Daily Caller reporter Ashley Brasfield joins the show as we discuss the events that led to the ICE involved shooting in Minneapolis and why protests have not escalated to the level of violence seen in 2020.

Enjoy the show!

Venezuelan Warns His Country ‘Isn’t Free Yet’

Franklin Camargo was only six years old when he stood in a Florida grocery store and stared at the variety of Oreo cookies. In that moment, he says he began to understand that the U.S. was very different from his home country of Venezuela.

When a child “can tell the differences, the huge differences, when it comes to prosperity, happiness, [and] safety between a country and the other one, that’s the biggest sign that a system works and the other one simply doesn’t,” he told The Daily Signal in an interview.

After fleeing Venezuela’s socialist regime as a young man and moving to America, Camargo has spoken out against the Maduro regime.

Franklin Camargo. (Courtesy of Franklin Camargo)

While Camargo says he, and many Venezuelans, are “extremely happy” to see the U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro, calling it the “biggest happiness Venezuelans have had in more than two decades,” he says Venezuelans also understand that their country “isn’t free yet.”

Under the direction of President Donald Trump, the U.S. captured Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores in a military operation on Jan. 3 and brought them to New York City, where they are currently in custody. Maduro pled “not guilty” in a federal court Monday to multiple charges, including narco-terrorism.

Camargo, 28, was born in Venezuela to what he describes as a “strong middle-class family.” Hugo Chávez became president of Venezuela when Camargo was only a year old.

His family continued to work hard as the nation’s economy deteriorated, and when Camargo was six, his parents took him and his brother on a trip to Disney World in Orlando, Florida. It was on that trip to Florida that Camargo says he started to fall in love with America.

Franklin Camargo, left, and his brother at Disney World. (Courtesy of Franklin Camargo)

In time, Camargo says his family went from living comfortably to being concerned about having enough food to eat.

“We lost weight,” Camargo said, adding that his parents “stopped eating meat or protein so they could provide for my brother and for myself.”

Camargo’s parents were not politicians, but he grew up very aware of politics because “when politics is affecting your daily life, you start paying more attention,” he explained.

“When I was a teenager, I became a political activist,” he said, adding that he joined the political organization María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s opposition leader, headed at the time.

Watching his family struggle and his nation devolve under socialist leadership caused Camargo to get into “politics and to try to fight back, to try to do something.”

His willingness to speak out against the socialist regime ultimately led to his expulsion from medical school, and he was accused of being a terrorist. Fearing for his safety, Camargo fled Venezuela the U.S. in 2019 because he had a U.S. visa.

Also fearing for their safety, Camargo’s parents and his brother moved to America shortly after he did, but he still has family members living in his home country.

The current situation in Venezuela following Maduro’s capture is “difficult,” Camargo explains.

It is not uncommon for Venezuelan police or the National Guard to stop citizens to review their messages and social media posts, he says.

“And if they have posted something on social media in support of the capture of Maduro or against the regime, they could get arrested, easily,” he said.

The head of the regime has been removed, but the “mafia is still there,” Camargo says.

Delcy Rodriguez, the acting president of Venezuela who served as vice president under Maduro, and Diosdado Cabello, the nation’s interior minister, are two of the key members of Maduro’s “mafia,” according to Camargo.

Camargo says he thinks Trump has taken “the right path” in regards to the country’s future.

With Maduro in U.S. custody, Rodriguez is acting as the nation’s leader, and Trump says his administration is working with her to ensure stability in the nation.

“It’s not just about what we want, but what’s the best thing to do that is realistic,” Camargo said.

“If Maria Corina Machado, or any leader of the Venezuelan opposition, goes to Venezuela right now,” he said, “they’re going to get arrested, or even worse, they get tortured or even killed.”

“So, the question here is, how do we lead a political transition that is the most pragmatic and realistic?”

The answer, according to Camargo, is to “use those who are still in power, that I do not trust, but that you can basically tell them, ‘hey, you follow what I tell you to do, or you [will] pay the same price that Maduro paid.’”

Even if elections were held today, Camargo says they would not be fair because Maduro’s allies would benefit from the voting structure in place. He added that “radical Marxists” are threatening harm to those who openly oppose Maduro.

Change will not happen “in one day or in one week, or not even in one month,” according to Camargo, but will take time and continued consorted effort.

The Moral Blackmailing of the American People

In Springfield, Ill., in 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln delivered a powerful speech decrying the “ravages of mob law” throughout the land.

Lincoln warned, in eerily prescient fashion, that the spread of a then-ascendant “mobocratic spirit” threatened to sever the “attachment of the People” to their fellow countrymen and their nation. Lincoln’s opposition to anarchy of any kind was absolute and clarion: “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.”

Unfortunately, it seems that every few years, Americans must be reminded anew of Lincoln’s wisdom. This week’s lethal Immigration and Customs Enforcement standoff in the Twin Cities is but the latest instance of a yearslong baleful trend.

On Wednesday, 37-year-old “queer activist” Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.

Good, who had barricaded her vehicle in an attempt to obstruct an active law enforcement operation, ignored agents’ requests to exit the vehicle and instead directed her car at one of the agents.

Good actually then hit the agent, who was briefly hospitalized for his injuries. But before she could do even more damage, the agent shot and killed Good. The federal government has called Good’s encounter “an act of domestic terrorism” and said the agent shot in self-defense.

Suffice it to say Minnesota’s Democratic establishment does not see it this way.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey responded to the deployment of 2,000 immigration agents in the area and the deadly encounter by telling ICE to “get the f—out of Minneapolis,” while Gov. Tim Walz called the shooting “totally predictable” and “totally avoidable.”

Frey, who was also mayor during the George Floyd-inspired mayhem of 2020, has lent succor to the anti-ICE provocateurs, seemingly encouraging them to make Good a Floyd-like martyr and riot accordingly.

As for Walz, he’s right that this tragedy was eminently “avoidable”—but not for the reasons he thinks.

If the Biden-Harris administration hadn’t let in untold millions of unvetted illegal aliens, and if Walz’s administration hadn’t conveniently overlooked hundreds of Minnesotans—of mixed immigration status —defrauding taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars, ICE never would have embarked on this particular operation.

National Democrats took the rage even further. Following the fateful shooting, the Democratic Party’s official X feed promptly tweeted, without any morsel of nuance, that “ICE shot and killed a woman on camera.”

This sort of reckless fear mongering may have already inspired a crazed activist to shoot three detainees at an ICE facility in Dallas last September while targeting officers; similar dehumanizing rhetoric about the National Guard perhaps also played a role in November’s lethal shooting of a soldier in Washington, D.C.

Liberals and open-border activists play with fire when they so casually compare ICE, as Walz previously has, to a “modern-day Gestapo.”

The fact is, ICE is not the Gestapo, President Donald Trump is not Hitler, and Charlie Kirk was not a goose-stepping brownshirt. To pretend otherwise is to deprive words of meaning and to live in the theater of the absurd.

But as dangerous as this rhetoric is for officers and agents, it is the moral blackmail and “mobocratic spirit” of it all that is even more harmful to the rule of law.

The implicit threat of all so-called sanctuary jurisdictions, whose resistance to the federal government smacks of John C. Calhoun-style antebellum “nullification,” is to tell the feds not to operate and enforce federal law in a certain area—or else.

The result is crass lawlessness, Mafia-esque shakedown artistry and a fetid neo-confederate stench combined in one dystopian package.

The truth is that swaths of the activist Left now engage in these sorts of threats as a matter of course.

In 2020, their monthslong rioting following the death of Floyd led to upward of $2 billion in insurance claims. In 2021, they threatened the same rioting unless Derek Chauvin, the cop from the fateful Floyd traffic stop, was found guilty of murder.

In 2022, following the unprecedented (and still unsolved) leak of the draft majority opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court case, pro-abortion activists protested outside many of the right-leaning justices’ homes, hoping to induce them to change their minds and flip their votes.

And now, ICE agents all throughout the country face threats of violence—egged on by local Democratic leaders—simply for enforcing federal law.

In “The Godfather,” Don Corleone referred to this sort of thuggery as making someone an offer that he can’t refuse. We might also think of it as Lincoln’s dreaded “ravages of mob law.”

Regardless, a free republic cannot long endure like this.

The rule of law cannot be held hostage to the histrionic temper tantrums of a radical ideological flank.

The law must be enforced solemnly, without fear or favor. There can be no overarching blackmail lurking in the background—no Sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of a free people, ready to crash down on us all if a certain select few do not get their way.

The proper recourse for changing immigration policy—or any federal law—is to lobby Congress to do so, or to make a case in federal court.

The ginned-up martyrdom complex that leads some to take matters into their own hands is a recipe for personal and national ruination. There is nothing good down that road—only death, despair and mobocracy.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

Tragedy and Reality

Renee Good died on Wednesday in Minneapolis. She had been attempting to block Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents engaged in federal law enforcement activities.

Along with other protestors, Good involved herself in what federal agents were doing and used her car to block them.

Confronted by federal agents, Good accelerated with an agent in front of her car. He pulled his gun, she accelerated and struck him, he opened fire and shot her. She died.

Watching the video footage, it is clear she accelerated with an agent directly in front of her car and struck him. Close observers noted her front wheel appeared to be turned, so not intending to hit the agent. The agent who shot her was not looking down to try to see her tire. The car came towards him on an icy, slippery road. He pulled his gun. She kept accelerating. He fired.

The Democratic Party sent out a tweet that federal agents had murdered an American citizen. The agent, in a very tense situation, operated in self-defense. The whole thing is tragic. Good is neither a hero nor a martyr. She tried to obstruct a federal operation. When confronted, she tried to flee the scene, hitting an officer who drew his gun and shot her.

For four years, Americans witnessed an overrun southern border. Democrats repeatedly denied there was a problem. They falsely claimed the border was secure. Voters decided to vote for President Donald Trump, a man whose supporters had stormed the U.S. Capitol just a few years before, because the voters decided Trump was preferable to the status quo.

Progressives did not handle that rejection well. Despite Mr. Trump winning the popular vote, progressives swung into action to not just obstruct every presidential initiative, but to harass federal agents and protect the very illegal aliens that most Americans want ejected from the country.

Going back to 2019, the local Minnesota press has documented a massive welfare fraud operation. Eighty-nine percent of those indicted are from a Somali community that has failed to assimilate into the United States. In 2019, the Minneapolis Fox affiliate reported Minnesota welfare money was being used to fund Islamic terror. Just a few weeks ago, another report came out documenting that Somali fraud in Minnesota had flowed to an Islamic terror group in Somalia.

Governor Tim Walz has decided not to run for re-election, in part because of the scandal. The fraud, which some estimates put at several billion dollars, happened on his watch. Walz has insisted there is no scandal and it is all racism. Walz and Jacob Frey, the Minneapolis Mayor, both insist federal agents are acting as a Gestapo.

The incendiary rhetoric from Democratic politicians fired up progressive activists. ICE agents have been fired upon. In Texas, several illegal aliens were killed when a progressive activist fired at ICE agents. ICE agents have been hit by cars, assaulted and vilified for trying to clean up the mess created by Democrats.

Progressive activists have turned violent, interfered and now one has been killed. We cannot observe this tragedy without acknowledging not just the incendiary rhetoric of the left, but also the repeated assassination attempts on federal agents. It is a tragedy that Ms. Good is dead and leaves behind a son whose father died a few years ago. But Ms. Good should not have been attempting to obstruct ICE agents. She should not have used her car as a barricade. She should not have ignored the ICE agents. She should not have struck an ICE agent with her vehicle.

The ICE agents are there because Democrats have allowed an illegal alien problem to fester. They are vilified by progressive politicians and have been targeted by progressive activists. Ms. Good would be alive today except she believed the hysteria of people like Tim Walz. She substituted politics for religion and decided to involve herself in political protest and opposition. She is now dead because of it.

This is a tragedy. It was avoidable. But Democrats have grown more shrill and hysterical since she died. There will be more attacks on ICE agents, all of whom are simply doing the job of deporting those the Democrats let flood the country.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

Minnesota Democrats Are Testing How Woke Is Too Woke

What is going on in the People’s Republic of Minnesota?

The Democrat establishment in the Gopher State is nothing like it was back in the Reagan years, with ex-Vice President Walter Mondale or Gov. Rudy Perpich. The insurrectionist echoes of their language about immigration-enforcement cops are eyebrow-raising in the same week the elitist media somberly mourned the attack on police at the Jan. 6 riot.

On Jan. 7, activist Renee Nicole Good used her car to try and block traffic to resist ICE agents. When she refused requests to step out of the car and instead drove her car into an ICE agent, the agent shot her.

That’s a terrible thing. But so was the shooting of activist Ashli Babbitt by a policeman on Jan. 6.

How is running over ICE agents not like threatening the Capitol Police on Jan. 6?

If you don’t believe ICE agents were in danger, then maybe you should read about how Cuban illegal alien Juan Carlos Rodriguez Romero “interacted” with ICE agents last Dec. 21.

On Jan. 5, a Justice Department press release noted when ICE agents initiated a traffic stop with Romero in St. Paul, he “refused to obey commands and attempted to flee in his car.” He accelerated his car toward ICE officers who were on foot. He then lost control of his car, and ICE tried to apprehend him a second time.

Romero again accelerated his car and struck one officer. When ICE officers actually apprehended him, he “bit one of the officers, drawing blood. Two ICE officers were transported to the hospital, suffering from bruised ribs, a dislocated finger, and a bite wound.”

Last September, an illegal alien ran over and dragged an ICE agent in Chicago until ICE shot him dead.

But there was no sympathy for the dragged agent.

CNN and the rest of the press treated that as ICE brutality, absolving the violent cop-dragging. WBEZ, the Chicago NPR station, openly promoted assisting the ICE resisters: “Here’s how you can help us track where ICE agents are being deployed in Chicago.”

The Democrats align themselves with violent leftists resisting ICE. “Get the f—- out of Minneapolis,” proclaimed Mayor Jacob Frey after Good was killed.

Gov. Tim Walz suggested he’d deploy the National Guard: “I’ve issued a warning order to prepare the Minnesota National Guard. We have soldiers in training and prepared to be deployed, if necessary.”

Minnesota Democrats openly allied themselves with Somali Americans who defrauded the federal government of billions of dollars. When Team Trump drew attention to this massive fraud, Walz called it “white supremacy.”

These radical stances underline the wokeness, or the “anti-racism” of Democrats and their affiliated media outlets, who see everything through a lens of oppressive “white privilege.” It’s precisely this wokeness that enabled the massive fraud in the first place, and which now seeks to disable any attempt at deportations.

Will these stances hurt the Democrats statewide in Minnesota?

They already caused Walz to drop out, and Sen. Tina Smith is retiring, so there’s open seats, and Kamala Harris only won the state by four points. Will it hurt Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan in the Senate race?

She recently demonstrated her wokeness by donning a hijab in a video released on Christmas and proclaiming solidarity with our Somali “immigrant neighbors.”

Wokeness damaged Kamala Harris in 2024, but Democrats can’t seem to curb their pandering to illegal immigrants and Somali fraudsters. The “mainstream” media stand with the Democrat extreme on these issues, promoting Frey and Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison and the rest. But biased media voices —hailing their rants as “powerful”—can’t always ensure victory.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

How to Help Small Businesses, Hurt Mamdani All at Once

Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York City, wants affordability and equity through big-government intervention. His platform includes city-owned grocery stores, rent freezes, a $30 minimum wage, free buses, universal child care, and small-business reforms focused on improving compliance.

Mamdani, a self-proclaimed socialist, has a threefold plan: “cut fines and fees for small businesses in half; speed up permitting and make online applications easier; [and] increase funding for 1:1 small business support by 500%.”

While assisting small-business owners in navigating bureaucracy and making it more affordable to operate are bipartisan objectives, Mamdani’s solutions are not as commendable as they may appear.

New York’s small?business problem is not just the cost of compliance; it’s the 6,000 rules and roughly 250 business?related licenses and permits that owners must navigate to open and operate. Rather than simply waiving fees, reducing the sheer volume of these 6,000 rules would reduce confusion, unnecessary agency touchpoints, and delays for enterprising businesses.

For example, in an act of overzealous climate-phobia, NYC tried to ban cooking with coal to the detriment of the famous brick-oven, coal-fired pizzerias that dot New York’s storied landscape.

Small businesses (employing fewer than 50 workers) dominate New York’s private economy. NYCEDC estimates that small businesses account for roughly 94% of all private firms, provide income to approximately 1 million New Yorkers, and generate $250 billion in economic impact.

If Mamdani’s goal is to make it faster, easier, and cheaper to run a neighborhood shop, reforms must reduce onerous interactions between entrepreneurs and city officials.

Before embracing more bureaucracy, specifically Mamdani’s Mom & Pop Czar office or larger help desks, it is worth acknowledging what already exists. Since 2022, New York has run an “education?first” enforcement push, reworking dozens of low?level violations and expanding cure periods under the Small Business Forward Executive Order. The city also launched Business Express Service Teams (BEST) to serve as a single point of contact across agencies.

While both speed and integrity matter for permitting and online applications, the principal impediment for business owners is multi?agency sequencing and unclear timelines. A Comptroller survey found nearly 30% of small businesses waited six months or more for the approvals needed to open. For example, large alterations typically take three to four months, while other smaller ones take four to six weeks.

New York City’s own MyCity Business portal already offers a front door and status tracking. What owners need next are statutory timelines and transparent public dashboards showing median time?to?permit by agency and permit class. Building one cross?agency digital application inside MyCity Business could allow an entrepreneur to upload documents once to autofill into all relevant agency databases.

While Mamdani’s quintupled pledge for one?to?one assistance is compelling, case management will never operate smoothly with so many rules and regulations necessitating onerous paperwork. Ultimately, New York City should pair fine relief on low?severity, first?time issues with rule consolidation—not substitute for it.

Instead of expanding bureaucratic hand?holding, Mamdani should promise a deregulatory budget—a one?in/one?out (or stronger) rule—so that assistance to small businesses grows only as the regulatory maze shrinks. In a recent paper, the Manhattan Institute unveiled its step-by-step guide for the state to implement its own zero-based budgets for regulations.

Additionally, international practice shows how these offsetting tools can keep regulatory costs and confusion down, while preventing the burdens of high regulations from harming small businesses year after year.

The priority for entrepreneurs is fewer steps, fewer forms, and fewer agencies— not halved fines and a reshuffled bill at the end. Prudent deregulation is the answer that allows businesses to enter the market with limited barriers, compete freely, and ultimately provide the goods and services millions of New Yorkers enjoy.

Originally published in The Washington Times

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

Maduro and Mamdani: Two Collectivists Check Into Public Housing

Welcome to 2026, the year we fight collectivism. And we’re already seeing early signs that we’ll have to wage this fight not just overseas but also right here at home.

The new year has been packed with news. Fortunately, it augurs well for those who want to fight collectivism, i.e., the government appropriation of private property to turn it over to “collective” ownership under state control.

In quick succession last week, we saw two collectivists move into public housing in New York. The first was Zohran Mamdani, who took up digs at Gracie Mansion, NYC’s mayoral residence, on New Year’s Day. Three days later, former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro moved into the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, after a well-publicized extraction from Caracas.

These two different stories are tied at the hip. Mamdani could have learned a lot from Venezuela’s own experience with collectivism, as well as that of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, and countless other dark and sad societies that are politically repressive and economic basket cases.

The problem with collectivism is simple. Because the government lacks a profit motive, and government officials are spending other people’s money, finite resources that might have been put to profitable use are mismanaged or even misappropriated, and thus wasted, to the detriment of society.

In the first volume of Capital, first published in 1867, Karl Marx wrote that by acting collectively, individuals would cooperate to create “a new power, namely, the collective power of masses.”

Only that “new power” just never materializes. Instead, we always get penury and repression. As Marx himself recognized, “All combined labor on a large scale requires, more or less, a directing authority.” That authority is the state, which, because it owns all the means of production, also owns the media and can quash dissent.

Venezuela itself is Exhibit A of the problems with collectivism and a command economy. It has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, over 300 billion barrels. Its oil production, however, is less than one million barrels a day, about one-fourth what it produced in 1970.

The United States, with reserves one-sixth the size of Venezuela’s, produces almost 14 times more output per day.

Yes, sanctions against Venezuela because of Maduro’s repressive tactics against his people have not helped Venezuela sell its oil. But mostly it has been mismanagement, a lack of investment, and outright corruption—dysfunctions that always accompany collectivism.

Venezuelan reserves, you see, are mostly in the heavy crude of the Orinoco Belt, and extraction and refining present a problem. As this very good Washington Examiner primer explains, U.S. firms such as Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and ConocoPhillips used to be present, either by controlling some oil fields outright or through joint ventures with Petroleos de Venezuela (PdVSA).

Maduro’s dictator predecessor, Hugo Chávez, nationalized the oil industry in 2007, forcing these firms to renegotiate contracts that had given PdVSA control. The American oil companies left and sued Chávez. They won, but Chávez stopped making payments. Venezuela now owes foreign companies about $25 billion.

PdVSA became, in the words of the Treasury Department, “a vehicle for corruption. A variety of schemes have been designed to embezzle billions of dollars from PdVSA for the personal gain of corrupt Venezuelan officials and businessmen.” Oil revenues also propped up U.S. enemies, such as the Cuban regime.

This is why President Donald Trump says that Venezuela stole American oil. Venezuela needs to get the oil flowing again to repay creditors and restart the economy. Oil production would fund needed repairs to other key economic sectors, such as mining (Venezuela also has a lot of gold).

This is why administration officials think that a political transition, perhaps to the popular leader Maria Corina Machado if she wins a free and fair election, may have to wait until the next stage of the evolution underway in Venezuela.

Mismanagement, underinvestment, corruption — these are the handmaidens of collectivism. Collectivism is precisely how Venezuela, once rich, became pauperized.

But Mamdani has chosen to ignore these lessons. Instead, he’s intent on collectivizing one of New York City’s main assets, its skyline, by forcing landlords to sell their property to the city, which would then run it.

In one of the most chilling lines in an inaugural speech replete with scary messaging, he said, “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

Mamdani has chosen, moreover, to revive the Office to Protect Tenants. Its appointed director, self-avowed communist Cea Weaver, has said she will use the city’s regulation and taxation powers to put the screws to landlords so tightly that they will have no choice but to sell their property to the city.

“For centuries, we’ve really treated property as an individualized good, and not a collective good,” she said not too long ago, “and we are gonna transition into treating it as a collective good, and towards a model of shared equity, will require that we think about it differently, and 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.”

Weaver has said much worse, such as “People like home ownership because they like control, which is rooted in a racist and classist society.” But luckily, we have a free internet now, and an evolving media landscape that is no longer under the monopoly control of the Left, which will allow us to be vigilant about this and point out what is taking place.

Hopefully, it will keep Mamdani, Weaver, and their ilk in check—and prevent them from doing to the Big Apple what collectivism did to Venezuela.

Originally published by The Washington Examiner.

Was Trump’s Maduro Operation Illegal? Here’s What International Law Says

The abduction of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela’s capital has set off extensive debates about its legality. International law scholars overwhelmingly assume that, regardless of its constitutionality, the action violated Venezuela’s sovereignty. In fact, there are strong international legal justifications for the operation.

Indeed, at first glance, the invasion and abduction of Maduro would seem to be a “use of force… against the… political independence of any state,” in the language of the U.N. Charter Article 2(4). However, this is true when the attacked state’s government objects (as is typically the case). If the attacked state’s government consents, there is no violation of sovereignty, and this is the common case of what is known as “interventions” and military assistance.

Certainly, Maduro and his vice president strongly object to the U.S. operation. But the United States “does not recognize Nicolás Maduro as the president of Venezuela,” a policy established by then-Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. So, his lack of consent is irrelevant from Washington’s perspective.

Instead, since the Biden administration, the U.S. has recognized Edmundo Gonzalez, the winner of the 2024 elections, as the legitimate head of the government.

Gonzalez has certainly not opposed the operation.

Instead, his sole public response has been to say, “Venezuelans, these are decisive hours, know that we are ready for the great operation of the reconstruction of our nation,” while reposting a statement by Maria Corina Machado, the Nobel Prize laureate and opposition leader, that “the hour of freedom has arrived.” That could certainly be seen as consent, and even endorsement for the operation.

Some may object that the legality of the operation should not depend on America’s own recognition or non-recognition. But in international law, there can be no other way, as any dealing with a foreign entity requires making determinations about who its government is.

For example, when the United States intervened militarily in Haiti in 1991 at the behest of deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, it was based on the judgment that the military junta was not the lawful government in Port-au-Prince.

When the U.S. decides whether to assist Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion, it would have to be based on a prior decision that the Chinese Communist Party is not the lawful government of the island.

In international law, each country makes such decisions by itself. This, of course, leaves the door open for abuse, as when Russia invaded Crimea at the purported bequest of ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. But this is inevitable in international law, where, lacking any central authority, in most situations, countries are left to interpret for themselves.

In the present context, there is no concern that the non-recognition of the Maduro regime is opportunistic, as the position was first adopted by the Biden administration, which clearly was not contemplating military action. Moreover, many other countries, from Canada and Argentina to Italy and France, recognize Gonzalez as the legitimate president. By contrast, very few states recognize Maduro’s de jure rule.

Alternatively, it could be that Venezuela could have no recognized government, which technically means there is no one who could consent to foreign intervention. This is a fairly harsh and formalist implication of legal doctrine, as, in practice, such countries are ones quite likely to create harmful externalities for third-world countries, who in this view would have no recourse.

Given the bipartisan U.S. view that Maduro is not actually president, and that his regime control was heavily supported by foreign troops (dozens of Cuban security forces died resisting the U.S. operation, Hezbollah has reportedly been welcomed as well), the action to remove him would not be against the “political independence” of Venezuela, and thus not implicate Article 2(4) at all. It would be odd to read 2(4) as allowing foreign powers to use troops to prop up an illegitimate, unelected dictator, but not to remove him.

Originally published in Fox News

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

130 Dems Side With Trans-Identifying Athlete Accused of Sexual Harassment in SCOTUS Case

More than 130 Democratic members of Congress have filed an amicus brief supporting a transgender-identifying athlete—a biological male—at the heart of a major U.S. Supreme Court case on school sports participation. The athlete is not only at the center of a Supreme Court case but has also been accused of sexual harassment and engaging in intimidation tactics against girls.

In November 2025, 130 Democrats submitted the brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold lower court decisions blocking state bans on transgender-identifying biological males competing in girls’ sports. The brief argues that such bans violate Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause in the consolidated cases West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox. Oral arguments are set for next week, on January 13.

The West Virginia case centers on a boy who goes by Becky Pepper-Jackson (referred to as B.P.J. in court documents). He is a transgender-identifying athlete who sued in 2021—at age 11—to challenge the state’s Save Women’s Sports Act, which was designed to protect women from being forced to compete alongside trans-identifying athletes. To do so, the law designates teams by biological sex and bars biological males from girls’ teams.

Lower courts, however, blocked the law’s application to Pepper-Jackson, allowing him to participate on girls’ track and field teams at Bridgeport Middle School (and later high school). In July 2025, the Supreme Court agreed to review the case.

Allegations against Pepper-Jackson primarily emerged from two former female teammates who have come forward to share the experiences they’ve had with him. Adaleia Cross, a Bridgeport High School student and former middle school teammate of Pepper-Jackson, claimed that during the 2022-2023 school year, the trans athlete made sexually explicit comments that constituted as harassment in the girls’ locker room (when Cross was in 8th grade and the athlete in 7th).

Cross’s mother reported that the athlete made inappropriate remarks to her daughter and others, but as her father emphasized, “We received no response from the school after filing the report.”

Adaleia herself expressed her frustration: “They told me they would do a full investigation into what I told them. And then, all of a sudden, it was like nothing else was happening, it was done, and it seemed like they thought nothing of it because they didn’t talk to us about it at all, they just left it there and didn’t tell us anything else, so it just made it [seem] like, yup, it’s done.”

As such, Cross made the decision to quit high school track to avoid further contact with the trans-identifying athlete. These claims appear in sworn testimony from a separate multi-state Title IX lawsuit filed in 2024 challenging federal regulations.

In a separate circumstance, Emmy Salerno, a former Lincoln Middle School track athlete, accused the same trans athlete of using “intimidation tactics” against her in spring 2024 after she and others protested by refusing to compete against Pepper-Jackson in shot put.

After the fact, Salerno claimed she caught him staring, refusing to speak to her, sharing a Snapchat post claiming she had “more testosterone,” and an incident at a basketball game where the athlete allegedly followed her with intimidating stares, raising fears of him wanting to “fight” her.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), representing Pepper-Jackson, has denied Cross’s allegations, stating, “Our client and her mother deny these allegations and the school district investigated the allegations reported to the school by A.C. and found them to be unsubstantiated.” The organization added that it remains “committed to defending the rights of all students under Title IX, including the right to a safe and inclusive learning environment free from harassment and discrimination.”

The Cross family is represented by attorneys at the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), who promptly responded to the ACLU with this statement: “Our client has sworn under oath and under penalty of perjury in numerous cases about the events that took place between her and the male athlete. As a result of the situation, [Cross] had to step away from the sport she loved entirely and sacrifice a key element of her school experience to protect herself.”

According to Fox News, “ADF is also representing the state of West Virginia against the trans athlete in the case that is set to be reviewed by the Supreme Court.”

So far, the ACLU has yet to respond to ADF, nor has it responded to Salerno’s allegations.

Ultimately, the amicus brief, supporting Pepper-Jackson and signed by 130 Congressional Democrats, was led by Congressional Equality Caucus Co-Chair Becca Balint (Vt.), Democratic Women’s Caucus Chair Teresa Leger Fernández (N.M.), and Senator Mazie Hirono (Hawaii). Signatures include prominent names such as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.), as well as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.).

The case could set nationwide precedent on transgender participation in girls’ sports, particularly amid ongoing and fierce debates over fairness, privacy, and safety for female athletes.

As Family Research Council’s Joy Stockbauer said in a comment to The Washington Stand, “I hope that SCOTUS prioritizes the safety, wellbeing, and futures of young women across America in their decision on this case. Every day, young female athletes must face sexual harassment, unfair playing fields, and the loss of opportunities at the hands of troubled young men, or else abandon the sports they love and their own God-given talents entirely.”

“This case,” she concluded, “is not the first instance of a trans-identifying athlete harming young women, and it will not be the last, so long as this madness is allowed to persist.”

Victor Davis Hanson: The Common Denominator of the Issues Troubling Me Most

In this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler weigh the four finalists from their Sour 16 troubling issues, with Hanson explaining what they all have in common.

This content was recorded prior to Victor Davis Hanson’s major surgery on Dec. 30.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment from today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

JACK FOWLER: We had 16 issues that were troubling, and we had head-to-head battles between them, and we’re down to four issues. And the out I want to give you, Victor, is maybe consider these things like the horsemen of the apocalypse. There are four of them that are riding shoulder-to-shoulder as opposed to one.

Maybe you don’t want to go that way. Maybe there is one of these—they are the ruin of cities, the destruction of the nuclear family, the ignorance of children following 16 years of education in America, and the growth in secularism or irreligiosity.

Maybe there’s one of those issues that you find most troubling, but are they all sort of equal in your eyes? What’s your take on this?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: They’re all part of the same monster. They’re all components. The lack of education means that things don’t work. And the blue state, blue city ideology politically ensures that they don’t work. And the morality behind that without a divine sanction shows that they’re not going to work.

We could go on to all 16. It’s all part of a component. It’s like the hind legs, the horns of the Revelation beast, you know what I mean? It’s the tail. And it’s a combination in these blue states where the schools do not train the people. The family is completely destroyed. People are atheist.

And then the blue city tries to address those pathologies by giving, giving, giving, and taking from somebody else who’s productive and the productive people leave, and so a [Chicago] Mayor [Brandon] Johnson or Gavin Newsom or Jasmine Crockett or Elizabeth Warren they’re just the same person with a thousand faces. They really are.

They must have a factory somewhere that makes these people because they all are privileged, whether political power or financial power, and they feel that they want to experiment on the body politic like it’s a white rat, we’re lab rats.

Let’s just try, I know, we’ll mandate mileage, and Ford will have to spend $30 billion on the Ford Lightning, and then we’ll tell them to bill it that it’s a wonderful truck, and then people will buy it.

They’ll pay $80,000, and then they’ll discover that when they’re out on the trail, and they’re loading it up with camping equipment and pulling a boat, it doesn’t get 300 miles. It gets more like 100.

And now we’re going to cancel that $33 billion project.

That’s what they’re going to do. And all of these experiments don’t work. The windmills don’t work. The solar panels are not cost-to-benefit efficiently.

And maybe fusion nuclear power will save us. Maybe more natural gas. Gavin says now he’s going to give 2000 permits. What good would that do, Gavin, if you pump the oil, if you can’t refine it. Especially if you can’t refine it to your very, very, very specific unique one-out-of-50 state requirements for gas.

And you’re going to import gas from Japan probably if you shut down these refineries because there won’t be anybody who can make it because no other state makes it because nobody’s state is as crazy as your state.

And so, all this component we’ve talked to is—I’m not trying to be too depressing on Christmas Eve—but it’s all very worrisome.

But what is good about this country is still the majority. And there’s an antithesis to that.

I try to read the letters as many as can from our viewers and they’re just really heartwarming. “Dear Mr. Hanson, my husband and I worked side-by-side in a factory for 40 years. We bought our house. We have 10 grandkids. My son went to the Gulf War. I went to Vietnam. He went to the Gulf War.”

It’s just really inspirational stories about the people who keep the country going. And it is that model. I think they’re finally saying we’re kind of the proverbial sleeping dragon, and we’ve been poked and poked and poked and poked and ridiculed and made fun of.

We’re sick of the late-night comics, we’re sick of the deplorables, we’re sick that people call us garbage, we’re sick of being called sexist, racist, nativist. We’re not going to listen, we’re not going to take it anymore. And I think that …

FOWLER: Yeah, no more fetal position, yeah.

HANSON: No more fetal positions. Make it all go away.

And then there’s one other element to all of this.

[Donald] Trump, whatever people say about him, I’ve said he’s crude and he’s uncouth, but I mean it in a superficial sense because crudity is being mean to people.

I don’t mean rhetorically. I mean depriving them of economic advantages or getting them blown up in Kabul or not protecting the country’s national interest or a 9.1 inflation rate in one year. That’s cruel. That is cruel. And Trump’s not doing that. And all you have to do is look at the Wall Street Journal and look for the adverb unexpectedly.

And you will see unexpectedly there’s 4.2 growth. Unexpectedly, the inflation rate went down to 2.7. Unexpectedly, most of the jobs that were gained were for citizens and most of the jobs that were lost were for non-citizens.

Unexpectedly, there was a record year in military recruitment. Unexpectedly, there is almost no illegal immigration.

So things are getting very good and I have a feeling that when you combine this calculus of 10 trillion dollars in foreign investment with another 10 trillion in nuclear fusion plants and AI and biotech and all these new technologies that are starting to be reified and the deregulation and tax reductions in the Big Beautiful Bill.

And [Secretary of Interior] Doug Burgum, gosh, I mean, he’s going full blast. And 14 million barrels almost. They’ll get up to 15. That’s incredible.

FOWLER: It’s terrific.

He put out a great analysis of the BS of the wind power the other day. Just really, really quite impressive and almost sinful that these lefties with these turbines, each turbine itself, whatever power could actually generate is less than the power it takes to make the damn thing. So why make it?

HANSON: We just drove back from Stanford on Pacheco Pass, and they’re the biggest turbines I’ve ever seen. It was winter and not one was moving. There was no wind. Nothing. Nada.

And then I’m out at my farm, and I have 44 [solar] panels, and we have had an inversion layer prior to two weeks with no sun. We didn’t see the sun for two weeks. And now we have four days of rain.

And I looked, there’s no generation.

I’m talking to you from the grid and for all the talk about wind and solar, they’re not working in California when it’s an inversion layer and it’s raining.

Right now, we’re dependent on one nuclear plant at Diablo Canyon for 20% and the rest is either imported coal-generated electricity from our neighbors or hydroelectric from Oregon or our own hydroelectric or our own natural gas. That’s it.

It doesn’t work, and I think people will find that out, I hope. And I think we’re going to have an economic renaissance in the first two quarters of next year. I think we’re going to have economic growth well over 4%. I think inflation will be down below 2%.

It’s hard to predict, but I think interest rates are going to fall, and we’re going to see a big—a huge—boom. And we saw this in 2019 and then COVID hit.

And I will guarantee you that the Left will think of something. They’ll either try to shut down the government if they win in the midterm. They’ll try to do something.

But they will not enjoy the bounty that their fellow citizens will have.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

‘MESSAGE RECEIVED’: Inside the White House’s Reaction to Pro-Life Backlash After Trump Comment on Abortion

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—After pro-life leaders rejected President Donald Trump’s admonition to be “a little bit flexible” on the Hyde Amendment, some White House officials are looking to walk back that statement, three sources familiar with the administration’s thinking told The Daily Signal.

Many pro-life leaders objected to the call to be flexible on Hyde, which bans taxpayer-funded abortion, and the administration has received their message, the sources said.

The Hyde Amendment is longstanding policy prohibiting funding of elective abortions in federal health care spending.

Trump told House Republicans at their Members Retreat Tuesday they need to be a “little bit flexible on Hyde” when making a deal with Democrats on health care. Many Republicans in Congress have said they will not support a health care deal without the policy in place to prevent federal subsidies from funding abortion coverage in health plans.

One White House official disputed the idea that the administration is walking Trump’s comment back, but said it is rather clarifying it. The president has delivered the pro-life movement its biggest win in history with the overturn of Roe v Wade, the official said.

When asked about the president’s statement on Hyde at Wednesday’s briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt also clarified the president’s comments.

“The president did not change the administration’s policy,” Leavitt said at a press briefing on Wednesday. “It was President Trump who signed an executive order protecting the Hyde Amendment. It’s the Trump administration that has taken multiple actions on various fronts to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not funding the practice of abortion.”

Trump signed an executive order titled “Reinforcing the Hyde Amendment” in his fourth day in office, which ends “the forced use of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund or promote elective abortion.”

“What the president was saying yesterday was Republicans, and frankly Democrats, too, need to show a little bit more flexibility so we can actually get something done with respect to the issue of health care,” Leavitt continued.

After the president’s statement on Hyde, elected officials and pro-life leaders said the policy was a red line for them.

“We are not going to change the standard that we’re not going to use taxpayer funding for abortion,” Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said. “I’m just not going to allow that to happen.”

“To suggest Republicans should be ‘flexible’ is an abandonment of this decades-long commitment,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of leading pro-life group, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. “If Republicans abandon Hyde, they are sure to lose this November.”

One source reported hearing from the administration that it has been “inundated” with messages from the pro-life community in support of Hyde.

A source familiar with the White House’s thinking says that now that the administration has received the message that pro-lifers will not compromise on Hyde, the pro-life movement is more concerned about the Senate compromising on the policy.

On Thursday, 17 House Republicans joined Democrats to pass a three-year extension on Affordable Care Act enhanced subsidies which do not include Hyde protections against abortion funding. Pro-lifers are concerned that a few Senate Republicans will break ranks to pass a health care deal without Hyde protections.

“We’ve got to hit the Senate with everything we’ve got and make them know that we’re going to be strong and be firm on this issue,” a pro-life movement leader said.

Minnesota Somali Fraud, Illegal Trucking Scandals Share One Thing: DEI

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

This content was recorded by Victor Davis Hanson prior to his Dec. 30 medical operation.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’ve talked in the past about the problems with diversity, equity, and inclusion. That’s the rubric for what, I guess, we could call mandated equality of result, rather than of opportunity. But it’s been in the news lately because there’s a common denominator between the $9 to $10 billion, and climbing, fraud among the Somali community—some of them—in Minnesota.

Here in California, we’re looking at $60 to $70 billion fraud, involving everything from homeless funds that were misspent through corruption, wasted, and unemployment insurance, etc., etc. We have the problem with the truck drivers. We had 17,000 licenses given to illegal aliens in California and put many of us in danger who drive frequently on the California freeways. That’s true nationwide as well.

And then, of course, the unknown number, it’s in the several millions, somewhere between 8 and 12 million, who came in under the Biden administration.

But they were all given exemptions, is what I’m trying to say. And the exemptions were subtle and insidious, but they were characterized that they were DEI. In other words, all of these different groups were categorized by officials as on the victimized, oppressed side of the lecture. And therefore, they were not completely audited. Because, if they had been audited, the cries of racism, nativism, etc., prejudice, bias would’ve been voiced. And people didn’t want to be exposed to that.

What happens, then, when you have DEI, there is no deterrence. The particular groups that are favored on non-meritocratic grounds feel that if the society, at large, does not audit them the way—whether that’s immigration audits or welfare audits, or unemployment audits—then why would they audit them under further circumstances? So, that creates a self-perpetuating, almost a self-motion machine that they will continue to engage in activity for which they don’t feel there will be any consequences. And deterrence is lost.

More importantly, if you are a DEI beneficiary—in other words, you applied to college and your SAT scores or your grade did not otherwise qualify you, or you’re a professor who plagiarized but was given a pass because of DEI grounds—then what happens is you must continually make the case that you are a victim because that alone will explain why you got this position, why you got this admission, when you did not have otherwise standard meritocratic qualifications. And that means you’re always going to be on the hunt for victimization.

If you’re Joy Reid and you can’t do a podcast without spouting racist nonsense, and your audience is crumbling and eroding, then you say that you’re constantly a victim of racism. If you’re on “The View,” and you have a one-dimensional view of race, and you’re boring, and you’re losing market share, you say it’s because of yet another incident of racism that you felt.

The other thing that’s a problem with DEI, there are no qualifications now. Once you destroy meritocracy for one group, then all groups feel, well, these people were given particular advantages. So, why don’t we get them?

And you know, the funny thing about it is we did have a kind of DEI for very wealthy people, very connected people, the children of billionaires, the children of college deans, who were given admission advantages or were hired in what we call the old-boy network. But meritocracy was supposed to be the antidote.

So, DEI was, in a very strange, ironic way, just the twin of the old-boy network, substituting race for money and influence that the old-boy network exercised. That was the fuel that drove that.

Finally, there’s a couple of final things. It’s costly because once you add layer under layer under layer of nonproductive people, who are not teaching in the university, they’re not doing research, but they’re monitoring everybody’s syllabus, they’re looking for DEI owes among applicants, they are perched on hiring committees, they have a huge bureaucracy, and they’re nonproductive.

They’re very similar to the commissar system in the Soviet Union that was very, not just a sin of commission, that they were wasting resources and causing a lot of problems and killing people, but a sin of omission, that by funding the commissars, you were not funding science or you were not funding meritocratic military schools. You were appointing military officers in World War II on the basis of their ideology rather than on their proven excellence on the battlefield. So, it doesn’t have a good history—DEI.

And one thing that we’re watching now, as the Trump administration makes a very persuasive case that DEI violated the civil rights laws of the 1960s, specifically ’64 and ’65, and the Supreme Court ruling of 2023, there is no moral, legal support for it anymore. And yet, we have this vast, top-heavy infrastructure—this ossified, calcified, DEI apparat—and it’s not legally or morally justified.

So, it’s gonna be very interesting to see what happens to the DEI complex. But let’s hope that it dies on the vine, at last.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

One Video Blows Up Countless Media Narratives About Minnesota ICE Shooting

Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell / Katrina Trinko / David Azerrad / Salena Zito / John Stossel / Victor Joecks / Jarrett Stepman / Jenny Beth Martin / Armstrong Williams / Tyler O'Neil / Virginia Allen / Elise McCue / Virginia Allen / Josh Hammer / Erick Erickson / Tim Graham / Miles Pollard / Nicole Huyer / Mike Gonzalez / Eugene Kontorovich / Sarah Holliday / Victor Davis Hanson / Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell / Victor Davis Hanson / Jarrett Stepman / January 09, 2026

One video sank an entire media news cycle of false narratives.

On Friday, Alpha News released a video taken by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent involved in the shooting of a woman in Minnesota by an ICE agent that’s become an international story. The notion that the agent shot her for no reason at all has just gone up in smoke.

Not only does it appear the deceased woman, Renee Nicole Good, was being egged on to behave aggressively by her wife, but it’s clear that she hit the gas of her SUV while seeing the agent was directly in front of her.

Take a look and judge for yourself.

BREAKING: Alpha News has obtained cellphone footage showing perspective of federal agent at center of ICE-involved shooting in Minneapolis pic.twitter.com/p2wks0zew0
— Alpha News (@AlphaNews) January 9, 2026

This video blows up all kinds of narratives that have been peddled about the incident as Ryan Girdusky ably laid out on X.

This video destroys several liberal narratives:

1) they didn't know who the armed men were – they clearly did

2) she was just there coming home from driving her kid to school – no, she was intentionally trying to stop ICE agents

3) she was confused by all the commands being… https://t.co/9oH0Bi7vwm
— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) January 9, 2026

At the end of the day this is still a tragedy, even if it’s one of Good’s own making. Her partner should have never encouraged her to disobey the authorities, she should never have blocked traffic, and it’s terrible that she lost her life for a very bad judgment call. The officer too will have to live with the fact that he shot someone.

But in no way is this story anything like the narrative that’s been generated by much of the legacy media in the last 24 hours. And I’m not even just counting the hot takes. There have been enough bad ones on this incident since Wednesday to blot out the sun. I’m also talking about the reporting.

Frankly, I agree with Vice President JD Vance who said at a news conference Thursday, “The way that the media, by and large, has reported this story has been an absolute disgrace, and it puts our law enforcement officers at risk every single day.”

Vance read a headline by CNN during the press conference, “Outrage After ICE Officer Kills Citizen in Minneapolis.”

JD Vance rips CNN to shreds. This aired on CNN: pic.twitter.com/exijvBcg9R
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) January 8, 2026

That’s the single contextless message the corporate media has collectively wanted the American people to buy since this whole thing began. We are supposed to believe that ICE agents are just going around the country killing American citizens for no good reason. That would be an outrage indeed.

But it’s not just a few dubiously worded headlines that have reinforced this message. Some of reports from major outlets have been deceptive at best.

For instance, the Washington Post reported that “video footage of the killing does not show an officer being run over by a vehicle but instead shooting toward the driver’s-side window as the driver reverses and pulls away.

As many said even before the newest video released by Alpha News, there is no way that’s a reasonable interpretation of even the less clear videos that were released before.

However you interpret the videos, there’s just no way this (in the Washington Post) is an accurate account of what happened: pic.twitter.com/hj1lW3OXkE
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) January 8, 2026

As of my writing this, the Washington Post hasn’t issued a correction.

The New York Times wasn’t much better. The Times reported, after interviewing President Donald Trump–who said the woman ran the officer over—that according to their “analysis” from three camera angles “the motorist was driving away from—not toward—the federal officer when he opened fire.”

Even before this recent video was released it certainly appeared to me that the vehicle was driving toward the officer.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt demanded The New York Times correct this report.

I am hereby calling on ?the New York Times to update their reporting on the ICE Agent’s self defense in Minnesota.

President Trump was right, again. pic.twitter.com/hv0PmPXFuD
— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) January 9, 2026

I don’t know where the media goes from here. Maybe they just move on to other things. Hey, there was another incident in Portland they could twist to fit the narrative (though that one is looking even less useful for their purposes).

Maybe they focus on the fact that the ICE officer cursed under his breath after firing at Good.

Or maybe they just blindly charge ahead as if the most recent video doesn’t exist or that 2+2=5.

I really don’t know.

What I do know is that this incident highlights just how the legacy media long ago lost the trust of the American people. Hopefully this incident will get the investigation it deserves. There are still many unanswered questions about what led up to this incident.

I’m certainly thankful there is a vaster ecosystem, whatever its faults, of alternative media that now exists in this country.

Walz Admin Actually Ordered Fraud Unit to Stand Down Early in His Term, Whistleblowers Say

Whistleblowers have accused Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s administration of squashing criminal fraud investigations as far back as 2019, according to a Republican state representative who oversees fraud prevention in state programs.

Rep. Kristin Robbins, a Republican and chair of the Minnesota House’s fraud committee, told The Daily Signal that four whistleblowers inside the Department of Human Services’ Office of Inspector General revealed they were ordered to stop investigations after revelations of systemic fraud in the state’s Child Care Assistance Program.

The Office of the Legislative Auditor published the revelations in an April 2019 report, citing an Aug. 2018 email by Jay Swanson, manager of the Recipient and Child Care Provider Investigations Unit, that claimed large-scale fraud schemes in child care assistance.

“It was after that that his unit was told they can no longer do criminal investigations,” Robbins, who testified in Congress about the fraud on Wednesday, told The Daily Signal in a phone call Friday. “In the summer of 2019 they were told, ‘You can’t do search warrants, you can’t do criminal investigations anymore’.”

That order to stop investigations “and switching only to investigating ‘overbilling’ and not fraud shows that they were willfully turning a blind eye to actual criminal fraud,” she argued.

?'YOU CANNOT MAKE THIS UP'

Here's @KRobbinsMN's powerful opening statement to @GOPoversight.

"The Walz administration has been gaslighting Minnesotans on the scale of the problem for years."?https://t.co/Skn2e9SpN1 pic.twitter.com/dctYX2GNh9
— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) January 7, 2026

So far, nearly 100 people have been charged with welfare fraud in multiple state scandals. One federal prosecutor has estimated the amount of welfare fraud in the state to have topped $9 billion.

Systemic Fraud Uncovered in 2019

According to Swanson, the state human services department created the Child Care Provider Investigations Unit in 2014, staffing it with four investigators and one manager, as well as two special agents from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which refers cases to law enforcement.

Swanson’s email alleging the fraud notes that his unit found “providers using a similar scheme to successfully steal large sums of taxpayer money from this program.”

While he acknowledges that most responsibility for the fraud “rests with sophisticated criminals,” he nonetheless warns that “an equal amount of responsibility rests with the lack of internal controls involving statutes, CCAP policies, and rules that dictate how this program operates.”

Swanson cites records showing some program recipients transferred money to the Middle East or Africa, and that federal officials warned—as far back as 2015—that some fraud proceeds end up funding foreign terrorist organizations.

He describes a complex system of fraud, where providers engage in “large scale overbilling,” where mothers are pressured to register many children for child care, and where children at child care centers do not eat if their mothers do not work at the same center.

“Investigators have repeatedly heard stories of mothers with 8 or 10 children who have gotten into ‘bidding wars’ with various providers wishing to register those children at their center because of the CCAP billing they would generate,” Swanson writes.

The overall report also identifies many weaknesses in the way the Office of Inspector General sought to monitor fraud in the child care program.

When the legislative auditor “sought to collect basic information about the work of the CCAP Unit,” staff “were unable to easily provide us with information about the number of complaints and fraud case referrals to DHS, or the source, timing, or status of the case referrals.”

The Inspector General administrators also wrote that Swanson’s unit “did not have policies or a formal intake process for screening and prioritizing tips or referrals, such as identifying duplicate cases or cases involving the same providers in multiple counties.”

As of August 2018, the investigation unit “did not have a case management system for tracking pending or closed referrals and the status of ongoing investigations.”

OLA CCAP Fraud Report 2019 Download

Whistleblower Claims

According to whistleblowers, after Swanson’s email was made public, administration staff created a wedge between Swanson’s unit and the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Robbins said.

Administration staff told BCA special agents in Swanson’s unit that “they could no longer communicate with the BCA without prior approval from their supervisor.”

“This is not just one whistleblower,” Robbins added. “I’ve talked to four investigators in this unit now and they all say the same thing.”

A spokesperson with the state’s Department of Public Safety told The Daily Signal on Friday that the state separated the criminal apprehension agents from the human services investigators because of concerns about “the blending of civil and criminal investigations.”

The spokesperson explained that “certain information can be involved in a civil case that would not be available to a criminal investigation without a legal process to obtain the information,” and thus any crossover between the two could pose challenges to criminal prosecutions.

Thus, human services investigators “were provided with instructions on how and when they were to communicate directly” with criminal apprehension agents on cases, and BCA supervisors now meet with the human services department “to ensure ongoing dialogue on cases,” the spokesperson noted.

While Robbins noted that many Minnesota Democrats voted to create tools to investigate fraud, she faulted the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party for failing to hold Walz’s administration accountable for the fraud.

“Not a single Democrat has still ever called him out for this,” she said. “I think they’re all culpable.”

The Daily Signal reached out to Walz’s office, to the state Department of Human Services, and to the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension for comment. None of them responded by publication time.

Is Congress Returning to ‘Regular Order’ in Funding?

The House of Representatives took a major step toward averting another government shutdown when it passed a funding package Thursday.

But perhaps more importantly, House Freedom Caucus members influenced the process around the bill’s consideration in ways they say could help government spending in the future.

The House’s “minibus” package covers three of the 12 funding areas for the federal government: Energy-Water, Interior-Environment, and Commerce-Justice-Science. Appropriators have attempted to reconcile both chambers’ priorities, and the package will be considered in the Senate next week.

But fiscal hawks within the Republican party took issue with the Commerce-Justice-Science section, alleging it was full of earmarks, or lawmaker-requested funding for specific pet projects.

House Republicans agreed to end the practice of earmarks under conference rules in 2011, but both Democrats and Republicans decided to revive it in the winter of 2021.

One earmark in particular—$1 million in funding backed by Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., for a self-described “youth-led East African recovery organization”—drew the ire of caucus members.

“Earmarks are the currency of corruption, and they’re coming back in full force in these products,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, told reporters Wednesday.

I would be remiss if I didn’t note that I am being asked to vote on a CJS appropriations bill TODAY that I saw yesterday and that has significant grant funding & earmarks ripe for fraud, as well as millions to jurisdictions thwarting ICE – without the ability to amend it.
— Chip Roy (@chiproytx) January 6, 2026

Roy also complained that he was “without the ability to amend” the package.

Some top Republicans began to fear the collapse of the whole package due to earmarks.

“I can’t afford to have a million dollar project jeopardize a $184 billion package of bills,” top House appropriator Tom Cole, R-Okla., told reporters, per Politico.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., ranking member on the appropriations committee, also told the press Wednesday she wished to rectify the situation.

“It is under discussion and it will be resolved. That’s the way things go with these community projects. If there’s a difficulty, if there’s a problem, we try to work it out. Or it comes out,” said DeLauro.

This is an earmark that is IN THE GOP HOUSE BILL and would have passed without a second thought if not for the current MN Somali fraud prompting questions.

Earmarks are absolutely corrupt and should be banned. https://t.co/3sli1u407o
— Rachel Bovard (@rachelbovard) January 7, 2026

Before the bill came up for a vote, the House Rules Committee worked to address fiscal hawks’ concerns, ultimately striking the Minnesota earmark through a “manager’s amendment.”

The Freedom Caucus has two members on the committee, Roy and Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C.

The ‘MIRV’ Solution

The rules committee also restructured the vote to allow for separate consideration of parts of the Commerce-Justice-Science bill, a practice sometimes known as a “MIRV.”

The process allows House leadership to hold individual votes on separate elements of one bill, before those elements are joined again into one package that goes to the Senate.

The procedure’s nickname comes from “multiple impact reentry vehicles”—ballistic missiles containing multiple warheads inside of them, each of which separates from the main vehicle and hits its target.

MIRV – refers to a Cold War era missile system that deploys different warheads at different speeds, direction at once.

Legislatively, it is when the House passes what is called a “bifurcated rule”, which allows votes on diff stand alone ideas. What passes gets in the bill. 2/
— Lisa Desjardins (@LisaDNews) December 20, 2024

This maneuver for Thursday’s minibus let House fiscal hawks vote against retaining the Commerce-Justice-Science section, while leadership advanced the whole package using some Democrat votes.

The Commerce-Justice-Science division of the bill was ultimately approved by a 375-47 margin, with 40 Republicans and seven Democrats forming the opposition.

Only three Republicans and three Democrats voted against the other division of the package, which passed 419-6.

“There are some people who would like to have a separate vote. It’s not a big deal,” rules committee chair Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., told The Daily Signal Wednesday before the vote. “It’s been done before. And so we’re going to accommodate that.”

Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., told The Daily Signal Wednesday that he preferred holding separate votes.

“That’s a better situation than just, you know, jamming it all into one package,” he told The Daily Signal.

A Freedom Caucus Win?

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris, R-Md., told The Daily Signal after the vote on Thursday that he views the outcome as a victory for his caucus, which has long called for separate votes on individual appropriations bills.

“We’ve already done away with what we call the ‘Christmas omnibus’ [where] you pile all 12 bills together, you work them out in a smoke-filled room, nobody has any chance to say anything about them,” Harris said.

“What we did today for the first time ever is say, ‘oh, and by the way, we’re going to have a separate vote on some of the bills,'” he added.

Harris also praised the stripping of the “very offensive million-dollar earmark to a Somali led organization where the brother of the organizer was arrested as a terrorist.”

In Harris’ view, the process this process should be replicated in the future.

“The framework we’ve laid out, especially this past week, allows us to… return to… what we call regular order: Each bill considered separately, amendments allowed on the floor—you know, the way it was when I first came here, and the way we should return to.”

The legislation could still face headwinds in the Senate, though, where Paul is complaining of “billions in refugee money” in the bills.

Let’s Be Honest About ICE Shootings, and How We Got Here

We’ve had an avalanche of hot takes since Renee Good was shot in Minneapolis by federal agents.

But there should be no “hot” takes.

There should be cold reasoning—about how we got here and how we avoid things getting worse.

“Hot” indicates anger, a lack of control, lack of thought.

That’s what we saw from Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. He should have expressed his regret at Good’s death—whatever the circumstances—and offered condolences to her family. Then, he should have asked citizens to stay calm and to wait for all the information to be known and evaluated before passing judgment.

Ideally, he’d have expressed support for the beleaguered federal agents who are daily harassed, assaulted, and vilified for doing their jobs as instructed. But apparently that’s asking too much.

Frey is an unparalleled political panderer. He instead gave an emotional, unhinged press conference, in which he blamed federal agents for a situation which he risibly claimed “they created themselves.” He told ICE to “get the f—k out” of Minneapolis.

Then we had Gov. Tim Walz, who said, “we have someone dead in their car for no reason whatsoever.” He was right that the shooting was “preventable” and “unnecessary.”

But he was wrong about why.

Walz and many on the Left blame the government for any injury or damage caused during protests against federal law enforcement for trying to enforce the law. Instead, they should blame activists trying to stop law enforcement using physical means.

“They want a show,” said Walz. By that, he means that the federal government wanted something like this to happen.

If anything, the opposite is true.

Those who oppose the Trump administration in everything it does, but particularly immigration, wanted something like this to happen. They needed a martyr, and they created circumstances to make one.

America is fiercely divided between Left and Right. Between those who want laws enforced, and those who want them abolished or ignored. Between open borders and nationhood. Between socialism and free markets.

On immigration, the Left does not believe any alien in the U.S. should be deported, for any reason.

They believe enforcement of immigration laws passed by an elected Congress is an outrage.

After decades of both parties turning a blind eye to millions of people living here illegally, and especially after four years of Biden positively encouraging illegal immigration, they are incensed to see President Trump doing what he promises—deporting illegal aliens.

Impotent politically, they turned to the streets. They mobilized their army of omni-cause warriors: Antifa, anti-capitalists, Palestinian activists, gender ideologues, socialists, and law enforcement “abolitionists.”

They tapped into the secretive millions of dark money that fund professional left-wing activism and protest. They created the conditions which produced Good’s death.

There was a media rush to paint Renee Good as either a perfect mom peacefully protesting, or as a domestic terrorist.

In truth, she was probably somewhere in the middle. A person who, motivated by passionate beliefs, crossed the line between First Amendment protest and—at best—actively impeded federal law enforcement, which is a felony.

At worst, she tried to run over an officer, which is attempted murder.

Being passionate about politics is as American as apple pie.

But that passion cannot be allowed to spill over into harassment, intimidation, vandalism, or assault against law enforcement or other civilians.

Politicians like Frey, Walz, and several members of Congress should know better. They should not let their blind hatred of Trump, or their militant support of illegal aliens, overcome their basic duty as elected officials to respect the law and those who enforce it.

So long as we have firebrands advocating violent resistance, demonizing law enforcement agents, and refusing to keep the peace, Renee Good won’t be the last to be injured or killed in a public clash between the government and its citizens this year.

I wish I could say I believed that political temperature would cool down and calmer heads prevail.

But I fear that the hot takes, and hot heads, are in the ascendant. The cooler, calmer, reasonable majority of Americans will be left to endure the noise and pick up the pieces.

As Protests and Casualties Mount in Iran, What Are Trump’s Options for Action?

Protests have expanded rapidly across Iran in recent days, with dozens reportedly having been killed amid a crackdown by the Iranian regime.

“Protesters demonstrated in at least 156 instances across 27 provinces on January 8, which almost doubles the number of protests recorded on January 7,” according to the Institute for the Study of War, a national security policy and education nonprofit.

The anti-regime protests are in response to Iran’s failing economy and rampant inflation. The protests are the largest demonstrations against the regime in years, and President Donald Trump has threatened to take action against the regime if its crackdown on protests turned deadly.

“In the past, they’ve started shooting the hell out of [protesters],” Trump said during a recent interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “So they played rough,” Trump continued, “and I said, if they do that, we’re going to hit them very hard.”

.@POTUS on Iran: What they've done is, in the past, they started shooting the hell out of [protesters]… and I said if they do that, we're going to hit them very hard… So far, for the most part, they haven't… The enthusiasm to overturn that regime is incredible. pic.twitter.com/i7SBH349Ke
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) January 9, 2026

Iran Human Rights, a Norway-based NGO, reports that 45 people, including eight children, were killed during the first 12 days of anti-regime protests. Over 2,000 people have also been arrested, according to the human rights monitor.

Now that there have been some casualties, “I think some response is required” from the Trump administration, Robert Greenway, director of the Allison Center for National Security at The Heritage Foundation, tells The Daily Signal.

While Trump has not indicated what kind of response he would consider against the regime, he has a wide range of economic and military actions he could take, according to Greenway, who served in Trump’s first administration on the National Security Council.

Actions Trump Could Take Against Iranian Regime

The U.S. could increase economic pressure on Iran and sanction regime members “engaged in gross human rights violations,” according to Greenway. The UN could also issue a formal condemnation of the regime, he added.

The U.S. could also place additional restrictions on the “movement of Iranian officials abroad,” or sanction Iran’s assets held abroad, Greenway said.

The Trump administration could increase disruption of tanker ships coming and going from Iran that carry oil and other assets, Greenway said.

Trump could also ratchet up military pressure or even strike against the regime for killing protesters, Greenway says. This could include moving fighter jets, air defense assets, and offensive strike military equipment into the region.

The U.S. could also increase its planning and coordination with Israel on “potential offensive strikes,” Greenway said, adding that it is very likely that any strike against Iran would involve coordination with Israel.

The U.S. could use force against the regime “to strike those assets which are responsible for the munitions and the capabilities used to repress the population in the places where they have been killed,” he said.

Finally, and perhaps “most important,” according to Greenway, is “providing independent access to information, both within and outside” of Iran.

Iran experienced a near total digital blackout on Thursday, according to multiple reports accusing the regime of cutting off internet access in the nation amid growing protests.

Warning Against Repeating History

The Islamic Republic, which governs Iran on a legal code based on Sharia law, took power in 1979 following the Iranian Revolution. There have been multiple instances of large protests against the regime in recent decades, including during the Obama administration in 2009.

President Barack Obama “continued to provide resources to the regime” during the 2009 protests, Greenway said–an action that ultimately dissuaded protests from continuing.

The Obama administration gave Iran the “resources needed to repress” the Iranian people and “imposed no cost for repression,” he said.

“But most importantly, it signaled to the people of Iran that they had no support, and they got no support, and without that, it became very, very difficult” to continue the protests, Greenway said. “They were strongly disincentivized.”

Trump continues to speak publicly about the protests in Iran, sharing a large video of protests on his social media platform Truth Social early Friday morning.

If the Iranian regime does collapse, Greenway says it is impossible to predict what would happen next but added that if Iran ultimately poses a reduced threat to the U.S. and U.S. allies in the region, that is a “good thing.”

Portland ‘Couple’ Shot by Border Patrol Was a Venezuelan Gang Member and His Prostitute, DHS Says

The state of Oregon is investigating the shooting of two people by a Customs and Border Patrol agent in Portland on Thursday.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, a Border Patrol officer opened fire on the pair, sitting in a vehicle, after one of them tried to “weaponize” the vehicle during a traffic stop. The agency says one of the two is associated with Tren de Aragua, a violent criminal gang with roots in Venezuela, and the other is a suspected member of the gang.

The agency identified one of the suspects as Luis David Nico Moncada, a “criminal illegal alien from Venezuela and suspected Tren de Aragua gang member” and Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras, a “criminal illegal alien from Venezuela and is associated with Tren de Aragua.”

CNN and some other outlets reported the pair as a “married couple.” However, the homeland security department said that they were “a gang member and his prostitute” and not an “innocent ‘married couple.’”

REVOLTING LIES!

The two criminal illegal aliens who attacked Border Patrol in Portland are a gang member and his prostitute NOT an innocent “married couple.”

The driver of the vehicle, Luis David Nico Moncada is a criminal illegal alien from Venezuela and suspected Tren de… pic.twitter.com/XfwfBtoU75
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) January 9, 2026

DHS further said that Moncada “illegally entered the United States in 2022 but had been released into the country by the “Biden administration.”

“Since then, he was arrested for DUI and unauthorized use of a vehicle. He has a final order of removal,” DHS stated on X.

The agency said that the woman, Zambrano-Contreras, “illegally entered the U.S. in 2023 near El Paso, Texas, and was RELEASED into this country by the Biden administration.”

Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield announced that his department would be investigating the shooting.

“We have been clear about our concerns with excessive use of force by federal agents in Portland and nationally,” Rayfield said in a statement according to Fox 12 Oregon. “We have also been clear about our intent to investigate circumstances involving federal agents to ensure they are accountable to acting within the scope of their official duties.”

According to audio obtained by Fox 12 Oregon, “a Portland police dispatcher” reported to officers that “a caller told them ICE agents shot him and his wife.”

At a news conference on Thursday, Portland Mayor Keith Wilson demanded that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which was reportedly not involved in the incident, “halt all operations” in the city.

The Portland shooting occured just a day after a ICE agent shot and killed a woman in Minnesota whom the agency claimed was driving her car toward the agent. A video of the incident published online by Alpha News on Friday revealed a new vantage point from the agent’s perspective.

BREAKING: Alpha News has obtained cellphone footage showing perspective of federal agent at center of ICE-involved shooting in Minneapolis pic.twitter.com/p2wks0zew0
— Alpha News (@AlphaNews) January 9, 2026

Vice President JD Vance responded on X that the video showed the agent’s “life was endangered and he fired in self defense.”

Watch this, as hard as it is. Many of you have been told this law enforcement officer wasn't hit by a car, wasn't being harassed, and murdered an innocent woman.

The reality is that his life was endangered and he fired in self defense. https://t.co/IfXAAxi9Ql
— JD Vance (@JDVance) January 9, 2026

Trump Provides Solution to Housing Crisis

President Donald Trump announced on Jan. 7 plans to ban institutional investors from buying up homes and renting them back to Americans.

This is a huge policy change that will benefit young Americans and working-families. My father is laser focused on driving down the price of housing so every American has an opportunity to live the American Dream!!!! https://t.co/pvomV2Yx2z
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 7, 2026

You’ll Own Something and Be Happy

Corporate landlord Blackstone’s stock plunged nearly 5% on the move to make housing more affordable.

Trump’s goal is to lower house prices and prevent Wall Street outbidding the rest of us with their unfair access to cheap capital.

And it’s something a lot of Americans have wanted, from the MAGA base to Bernie Bros.

Home ownership has long been a bipartisan goal, as it promotes family formation, promotes community involvement, and lets people build a nest egg.

A recent study found the average net worth of an American homeowner is close to $400,000. The average net worth of an American renter is $10,000.

Ten grand makes for a thin retirement.

The problem, of course, is Americans can no longer afford houses that skyrocketed in price to almost 40% under Biden. Toss in Federal Reserve rate hikes that doubled mortgage rates and, according to Bankrate, the median monthly mortgage payment, which doubled from $1,242 a month in 2019 to $2,207 in 2024.

This then bled to rents—landlords have mortgages too.

Meanwhile, wages for twentysomethings—who should be starting a family—actually went down under Biden. And have only made back part of the lost ground.

This put institutional buyers in the spotlight, who have spent decades quietly hoovering up millions of homes to rent. The buying accelerated dramatically during COVID’s low rates—at one point in 2022 institutions were buying one in four single family homes.

Banning institutional banners will lower prices. But not by much considering they make up just a couple percent of home purchases. So going by price elasticities you might get a 3-5% drop in home prices—possibly closer to 10% in sunbelt cities where institutions are most active.

But this comes with a roughly equivalent 3-5% rise in rents if Blackstone drops the rental business, where price elasticities are similar.

So, slightly cheaper houses, and slightly higher rent.

Both nudge people into owning. At the expense of people with poor credit or no downpayment who will pay more rent.

Moreover, we’re talking 3-5% when houses went up 40% and housing costs doubled.

Buyers need a lot more.

Since he took office in January 2025, Trump’s been trying everything. He’s tried to cut closing costs, promoted simplified local building codes, removed tariffs on construction materials, proposed opening federal land to housing. Additionally, just this week, he deployed $200 billion from government-controlled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to lower mortgage rates.

In the Big Beautiful Bill, he added tax relief for builders, which is already helping multi-family construction. He even floated 50-year mortgages, which lower payments at the cost of paying your mortgage when you’re 92.

And, of course deportations, which have opened over a million houses and are finally lowering rent prices, especially in deportation-heavy cities like Austin.

What’s missing is the two biggest drivers of house prices: inflation, which is driven by federal deficits.

And mass deregulation in home-building, including environmental mandates, zoning, and rent control the National Association of Homebuilders estimates can add $94,000 to the cost of a home.

For these, he needs Congress. Along with local governments like New York or San Francisco, where rent control has led to over a hundred thousand empty units despite citywide shortages and nosebleed rents that delivered New York to Comrade Mamdani.

Affordability and inflation have been the top voter concern all year, and prediction markets currently have 77% odds the GOP loses the House in the midterms.

Given Congress won’t meaningfully cut inflationary spending or regulation in areas like healthcare and insurance, housing costs are the last man standing.

Trump’s doing what he can, but Congress has to do the heavy lifting if they want to keep their seats.

Not Just Minnesota: How Tax Dollars Are at Risk of Fraud in This State

More than $250 million in federal funding for Illinois programs risked misuse due to poor monitoring, state audits show.

With Minnesota facing scrutiny over a massive fraud scandal, Illinois is among other states that have continued receiving federal funding despite scathing audits.

Illinois state officials failed to perform required risk assessments for more than $250 million in COVID-19 housing relief and crime victim assistance, leading independent auditors to issue “adverse opinions” stating that the programs did not comply with federal requirements.

Federal regulations require independent audits for state and local government entities receiving federal funding. Such audits are made available to Congress and federal agencies.

“If a corporation received an adverse opinion, or even a qualified opinion, the IRS, the SEC, and probably Congress would be all over them,” Sheila Weinberg, CEO of Truth in Accounting, an Illinois-based fiscal watchdog group, told The Daily Signal.

“With government agencies, bad reports continue, and nothing ever happens.”

The Illinois Department of Human Services didn’t conduct federally-required monitoring of the $177 million in spending for the COVID-19 House Assistance Fund, according to the fiscal year 2023 state audit, the most recent publicly-available state report. The Illinois Housing Development Authority administered the housing program.

“Failure to perform required risk assessments and to adequately monitor subrecipients may result in the subrecipient not properly administering the federal programs in accordance with laws, regulations, and the grant agreements,” the report from the Illinois Auditor General’s office warned.

Neither the Illinois Department of Human Services nor the Illinois Housing Development Authority responded to inquiries for this story.

The audit cited conversations with Human Services officials complaining of a lack of resources to oversee the program in collaboration with the housing authority.

The auditor’s office recommended that the department implement monitoring procedures in accordance with federal regulations. It said the department “agrees with the finding and recognizes the importance of programmatic reporting.”

In Minnesota, federal prosecutors brought fraud charges against almost 100 people for $9 billion in alleged welfare fraud. Such fraud hasn’t yet been alleged in Illinois, but the audits say the funding is vulnerable.

“For a while, people seem to be paying attention to waste, but I’m hesitant to say this is a turning point,” Weinberg said of the Minnesota fraud case. “People should have been paying attention before. A good solution would be if Congress or federal agencies looked at these state audits and decided not to send more money.”

The same FY 2023 audit report gave an adverse opinion to the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority for not monitoring its allocation of $75.3 million of federal funds on the Crime Victims Assistance program, and failing to conduct on-site visits.

The audit said it found 21 sub-grantees that received assistance and were “designated for high oversight,” requiring a fiscal audit. Of those, only two were actually audited.

“Failure to complete and document reviews of subrecipient single audit reports in a timely manner may result in federal funds being expended for unallowable purposes and subrecipients not administering the federal programs in accordance with laws, regulations, and the grant agreement,” the audit report says.

The Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority acknowledged the inquiry from The Daily Signal for this story, but did not immediately respond.

The agency responded to auditors that it “does not have staff dedicated to this function.” It said it was “actively in the hiring process for a person who will be dedicated to this work.”

A separate audit, the 2023 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, gave a qualified opinion for $6.1 million in federally-funded unemployment benefits paid to 2,828 Illinois claimants.

“Qualified opinions” indicate weaknesses in complying with funding requirements, or insufficient audit evidence. They are not as severe as “adverse opinions” in measuring fiscal compliance.

The state audits also gave qualified compliance opinions for childcare, food stamps and other state programs receiving federal funding.

The state comptroller’s office conducted this audit that found “inadequate controls” over unemployment assistance during the COVID-19 pandemic administered by the Illinois Department of Employment Security.

The state received the funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which Congress passed in March 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Due to the absence of complete and accurate information to support the eligibility of paid and accrued claimants, some amounts in the financial statements could not be audited,” the audit found.

The audit says Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s office replied that the state’s employment security department “continues to implement improved general IT controls and to analyze operational management.”

The Daily Signal reached out to Pritzker’s office, the Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza’s office, and to the Illinois Auditor General’s office for this story. None responded by publication time.

How Trump Finally Buried the Iraq Syndrome

Something crucial happened with President Donald Trump’s recent actions in Venezuela.

In fact, taken together with his earlier moves abroad, they mark the substantive death of what might be called the “Iraq syndrome“—a paralyzing mindset that has distorted American foreign policy for more than two decades.

The Iraq syndrome emerged after the failure of the Iraq War and the long, costly occupation that followed. In the American mind, it became shorthand for a broader fear: that any U.S. use of force overseas would inevitably spiral into a quagmire. But this was not the first time such a syndrome had taken hold.

To understand Iraq syndrome, one has to go back to Vietnam.

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, America’s foreign-policy establishment fell into disarray.

A new conventional wisdom took hold among elites: The war had not been lost because of bad strategy or domestic unrest but because it never should have been fought at all. From this conclusion flowed a much larger claim—that the United States needed to fundamentally rethink its role in the world.

This worldview, later known as the “Vietnam syndrome,” argued that America should abandon assertive foreign policy in favor of restraint or outright withdrawal, lest it stumble into further disasters.

Underlying this posture was a thinly veiled anti-Americanism: the belief that the United States was not a force for good but a malign presence on the world stage. As former Princeton professor Richard Falk put it at the time, “I love the Vietnam syndrome because it was the proper redemptive path for American foreign policy to take after the Vietnam defeat.”

In other words, America was guilty—and the appropriate response was retreat.

That retreat carried real costs. A world without strong American leadership proved far worse than its critics anticipated. America’s self-imposed paralysis helped usher in the Cambodian genocide, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

By the mid-1980s, Ronald Reagan decided it was time to move past Vietnam syndrome.

In 1983, the United States intervened in Grenada, deposing a Marxist government in a swift operation that cost few American lives and restored democracy to the island. Shortly thereafter, then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger articulated six criteria for military intervention: a vital interest at stake, a commitment to victory, clear political and military goals, continuous strategic reassessment, sustained public support, and the exhaustion of nonmilitary options.

Together, the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations applied these principles in Panama and during Operation Desert Storm. By 1989, Vietnam syndrome was effectively dead.

Then came Afghanistan and Iraq.

Both wars began with clear, limited objectives. The war in Afghanistan aimed to depose the Taliban and prevent al-Qaeda from regaining sanctuary. The war in Iraq sought to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Those goals were quickly achieved.

What followed, however, was years of large-scale nation-building—at enormous cost in blood and treasure. The result was a revival of the old paralysis, now rebranded as the “Iraq syndrome.”

This was not a reasonable skepticism about intelligence failures or a caution against nation-building. It was a full restoration of Vietnam-syndrome thinking: the assumption that every U.S. intervention would inevitably become another Iraq or Afghanistan. That belief took hold across the political spectrum, echoed endlessly by both the horseshoe Left and the horseshoe Right.

Predictably, the Iraq syndrome produced the same results as its predecessor. Under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, American retreat became policy. The withdrawal from Iraq enabled the rise of ISIS. Iranian proxies expanded across the Middle East, culminating in the catastrophe of Oct. 7, 2023. Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan left 13 U.S. servicemembers dead and signaled American weakness—encouraging Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and emboldening China’s global ambitions.

But now, at the end of an Iraq-syndrome presidency, something has changed.

Just as Reagan once did, Trump has put the prevailing paralysis to bed.

Trump has done so through what can fairly be called the “Trump Doctrine,” a framework I outlined in November 2024. Its principles are straightforward: America’s interests come first; those interests must be matched to proportional investment; all tools—-from diplomacy to military force—remain on the table; and threats should be explicit, not implied. Deterrence works best when it is public and unmistakable.

Over the past year, Trump has applied this doctrine twice. First, with the June 22, 2025, B-2 strikes on Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility, reestablishing American deterrence in the Middle East and reshaping regional geopolitics. Then, with the ouster of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

In both cases, critics warned—yet again—of World War III. Once more, Iraq syndrome spoke. And once more, it was wrong.

These actions have restored American deterrence without dragging the country into quagmires or endless nation-building. America’s enemies are now on notice. The message is simple: Actions have consequences.

The Iraq syndrome should be dead. If it truly is, it died at the hands of Trump.

America is once again feared on the global stage—an extraordinary turnaround given where the country stood just a year ago.

This is what many of us voted for.

At least those of us who actually want to make America great again in the world.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Danger of Dumbing Down American Students

In this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson explains why the ignorance of American students keeps him up at night more than the threat of radical Islam.

This content was created prior to Hanson’s major surgery on Dec. 30.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment from today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

JACK FOWLER: Yeah, we’re worried about the spreading growth of Islam versus the ignorance of America’s students. I mean, pure ignorance of, pure lack of knowledge, dumbness as products of our educational system.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: That’s another good question. I think it falls into the same category of overt versus insidious. And so, this time I’ll do the insidious.

Well, I’ll do the overt first because radical Islam can’t hurt the United States abroad.

They don’t have the technological wherewithal to do it. And every time that we’ve mistakenly gone into an Islamic country and not done well, whether it’s Afghanistan or Iraq, the reason is that there were necessary restraints or unnecessary, whichever way you look at it, that we didn’t use the full extent of our power.

In other words, we fought that battle on their terms, not ours. We didn’t do what the Russians did. When they wanted to subdue Chechnya, they just leveled Grozny.

So, what I’m getting at, if you wanted to get into an existential war with radical Islam, you could. And you could win it. And a cost of benefit analysis, maybe it wouldn’t be worth it. And a moral [war], maybe it would be questionable. But if you were an extremist, you could do it.

However, the other matter of our youth and not being able to … what was the word, delayed? Would you call it prolonged adolescence?

FOWLER: Well, you might not have prolonged adolescence and still not know what two plus two times three is, right?

HANSON: Yeah, I’m just trying to say it’s something about our young people that there’s not a code, an ethos, that says “I am 10, I’m 11, I’m 12, I’m 13, I’m 14, I’m 15, I’m going to go to school every single day.”

I can tell you that everybody screws—if I could use that word—around in high school, college. But there was, at least when I was in school, an idea that you did come to class, and you did turn in your homework, and you did learn something.

I was from a very poor school. I went to a rural school that was very poor, and I went to a high school that was rural and had not a lot of money. But I can tell you even there when I went to UC Santa Cruz with all these wealthy kids from prep schools in LA and San Francisco, they had a much better education, but I still was able to with hard work keep up.

And so, the education system was … there were no powerful teachers unions. And the teachers were, I would say half of them were excellent. And nobody attacked a teacher, nobody, and everybody did their homework. And there was no what I would call non-academic topics.

There was one class you had to take called senior problems, and they showed you World War II frightening syphilis movies. They showed you marijuana where you go crazy if you smell marijuana in a room.

And they showed you first aid, how if you’re driving—I remember the movie—you’re driving along and a guy’s in a wreck, and you jump out and tear your shirt into six different types of bandages and save his life.

And then how to write a check and how to shake a person’s hand. It was really good, valuable, I didn’t like it at the time, but I thought it was very valuable.

I think what’s happened is the therapeutic curriculum in the school, it demonizes men. It demonizes white people, white men. It does, because it’s DEI. It doesn’t approach minorities the way it used to.

And I know that people will get angry at this. When I was in fourth and fifth or sixth grade, Mrs. Evans, the speech pathologist, would come in. And I had a pathology. I would say W for R. I would say if you wanted to say, “a red rocket,” I’d say, “the wed wocket.”

And she would say, “You know, you’re not Elmer Fudd. You’re going to get in here,” and she would show me how to make my mouth. I can still remember how to make a round circle with my mouth. And then they had an old tape player, and then they would play it back. I was mandatory 20 minutes a week with her.

And everybody had that. And then if you had a strong accent, she would say, she would come to our class, “I have a stick shift Chevy.” And half the class were recent immigrants.

“I got a stick chip chubby.”

“No, you do not have a chubby. It’s called a Chevy. And I’m saying this because I want you to excel, and I want you to speak the King’s English without a trace of accent. And that goes for all of you.”

And it was very valuable. But you would be fired today for cultural appropriation or something like that. But you just have to look at the results.

I live in a town where I’m 72, and I think that almost everybody I went to high school with who’s still alive, who’s Mexican American, is an unqualified success. Everyone. Everyone.

I mean that sincerely. And I can tell you that the next generation below me was a success. But this new therapeutic DEI victim [education emphasis] is not working. Because again, commission and omission.

The omission is you waste time on these therapeutic studies classes, and you don’t give them math, analysis, logic, language, syntax, grammar, biology, and commission. You fill people’s heads that they can’t make it, that they have an enemy holding them back.

You don’t tell people, you wouldn’t dare tell people as we were told, “Well, you’re 18 and we would expect that you, if you’re going go to college or learn a trade by 20, you’re on your way. And we would expect all of you by 21 or 22 to have your house and by 23 at the latest to get married.”

I got married at 23 and I remember I saw a teacher, one of my old teachers, “Well, I was wondering when you were going to get married, what happened to you?”

FOWLER: Old man Hanson.

HANSON: Yeah. “What happened to you?” 23.

I mean, it’s prolonged adolescence. It’s the toxic masculinity. It’s the curriculum. It’s the therapeutic. It’s the DEI.

And the result is I get really tired of all these leftists that brag on themselves. “Look at what we’ve done. Look at what we’ve done. Look at the society we’ve created.”

I just say to them, do you really think that if you took people from 1965 out of a high school class versus today in any major high school they would be better or worse at algebra.

I can tell you they’d be a lot worse today.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The Deadly Consequences of Democrats’ War on ICE Enforcement

Democrat politicians have put countless lives at risk becasue they can’t accept an administration that vigorously enforces U.S. immigration laws.

The tragedy that unfolded Wednesday as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a woman in Minnesota who appeared to be driving at him should never have happened. Democrat politicians, looking to take every action to impede immigration enforcement absolutely created the conditions over the past year for what transpired.

The initial reaction to the incident by the most prominent Minnesota officials, Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, both Democrats, was horrendous, of course.

Frey decided to make his news conference one long, profanity-laced tirade blaming the entire incident on ICE. I’d post a clip here, but I can’t because this is a family-friendly website.

“To ICE: Get the f— out of Minneapolis,” he said at one point.

His harangue was at best unbecoming of a mayor, at worst inflammatory.

Walz was somehow worse. He decided that this was his Confederate cosplay moment. He said, “We’ve never been at war with our federal government,” suggesting that maybe now was the time. He then said that the National Guard could be used against “rogue” federal agents.

Vice President JD Vance on Thursday rightfully called the soon-to-be former Minnesota governor’s leadership a “joke.”

“The idea that he’s some sort of freedom fighter, he’s not,” Vance said. “He’s the guy who has enabled fraud and maybe, in fact, has participated in fraud.”

Thank goodness the American people elected @JDVance as our vice president. Grateful for his level-headed leadership at moments like this.

Meanwhile, neo-Confederate Tim Walz is making a fool of himself in Minnesota, fomenting violence and acting seditious.

? @CNNThisMorning pic.twitter.com/6XZCgXMusF
— Rob Bluey (@RobertBluey) January 9, 2026

How Walz and Frey handled the ICE shooting isn’t surprising, it’s just part of a pattern for Democrats who’ve decided after four years of open borders policies under President Joe Biden they would do everything they could to stop enforcement of immigration law.

The conditions for such an incident to occur in have absolutely been fueled not just by professional leftwing agitators but Democrat politicians like Frey, Walz, and many others.

They have signaled to the country that it’s OK to impede federal authorities when they are carrying out the law, not just with “sanctuary” policies but through direct impediments.

Back in May, Rep. Lamonica McIver, D-N.J., not only tried to force her way into a New Jersey ICE facility with a mob and she was accused of assaulting a police officer.

BREAKING: Rep. LaMonica McIver (red jacket) attacks law enforcement after storming New Jersey’s ICE facility pic.twitter.com/cAx0fk5Rgb
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 9, 2025

McIver has been charged with assault, a case that is still ongoing after a judge refused to grant her legislative immunity.

New York City Comptroller Brad Lander got into a physical confrontation with ICE officers. The Department of Homeland Security said that Lander assaulted their officers, but no charges were ultimately filed.

Democrats have essentially signaled that the actions of ICE agents carrying out the law are illegitimate and that it’s fine to impede their operations. And that’s the messaging that they are going with in Minnesota and elsewhere.

It’s no wonder that attacks on ICE agents have exploded over the last year. The Department of Homeland Security released some of the shocking numbers.

.@DHSgov release on attacks targeting ICE agents in 2025 “who now face a more than 1,300% increase in assaults, a 3,200% increase in vehicular attacks against them, and an 8,000% increase in death threats” compared to 2024 due to “radical rhetoric by sanctuary politicians.” pic.twitter.com/Pw8Tmt3ORg
— Spencer Brown (@SpencerBrown) January 8, 2026

“We are seeing a coordinated campaign of violence against our law enforcement particularly in Minneapolis,” DHS posted on X. “Dangerous criminals–whether they be illegal aliens or U.S. citizens–are turning their vehicles into weapons to attack ICE. The brave men and women of DHS law enforcement will not be deterred and will continue arresting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens.”

We are seeing a coordinated campaign of violence against our law enforcement particularly in Minneapolis. Dangerous criminals – whether they be illegal aliens or U.S. citizens – are turning their vehicles into weapons to attack ICE.

The brave men and women of DHS law enforcement… pic.twitter.com/tDS344zHys
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) January 8, 2026

I agree with conservative commentator Scott Jennings, Democrats have put both federal agents and the public at risk with their constant comparisons of ICE to the Gestapo and jumping to call them “murderers.”

When you have Dem officials repeatedly call ICE agents Gestapo and m*rderers, there are consequences to that kind of rhetoric.

We're seeing that play out today in MN. And yet, Dems like Tim Walz and Jacob Frey are still completely out of control ? pic.twitter.com/Rj0ScmgT1U
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) January 7, 2026

The problem is not the crimes that have been committed by people illegally crossing the border, it’s that the Trump administration is enforcing the laws on the books, Democrats reason. So, when tragedies like what took place in Minnesota on Wednesday take place, they’ve placed all the blame on Trump and the federal government.

Keep in mind, Democrats could make the case to change immigration laws but knowing that most of the country will be against that, they’ve turned to making enforcement as big of a mess as they can.

And when you combine that with the generally lax treatment of protesters who’ve broken the law and have gotten out of line, you can see the seeds of what happened on Wednesday. It was only a matter of time before an anti-ICE activist threatened an officer and ended up in a deadly situation.

So here we are. A mother is dead, Minneapolis is in chaos, and the country is on edge, all because Democrats needed their narrative.

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