This is quite messy.
The U.S. Department of Labor Secretary’s husband has been officially banned from the DOL headquarters.
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s husband was banned after two staffers at the DOL accused him of sexually assaulting them.
If you were around in 2016, then you will know President Trump campaigned on building a “big beautiful” border wall.
However, because Congress did not pass spending bills, the wall was put on hold.
Until now!
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has announced that a border wall will be constructed in Texas at Big Bend National Park, which shares a 118-mile border with Mexico.
This Democrat mayor may finally start cracking down on crime.
The Democrat mayor of Oakland had her city-owned car stolen on Monday.
Mayor Barbara Lee, who serves as Oakland’s mayor, had her vehicle stolen after a thief stole her keys from inside her office.
This is dark.
A former American Idol contestant and worship pastor has been arrested in connection with his wife’s murder.
On Monday, Caleb Flynn of Ohio called 911 and reported his wife had been shot by an intruder inside their home.
In Maryland, Democrat Gov. Wes Moore has enacted a law to ban local law enforcement partnerships with ICE.
But, it doesn’t seem to be going how he expected.
The new law has nine sheriffs in the state absolutely furious!
They say that they will defy the ban and continue cooperating with immigration authorities.
Fight! Fight! We have a blue-on-blue fight going on and it's over free speech and, tangentially, Israel.
You should know I am something of an absolutist when it comes to the First Amendment and believe more speech is the answer to "offensive" speech. I am also a Zionist. That I can be both may seem impossible in this one very specific scenario which I am about to lay out for you so I wanted you to be absolutely clear where I stand up front.
With that, we begin.
This blue-on-blue kerfuffle began when Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) posted the below statement on X over an article in the Seattle Times about hard-left activist Hasan Piker getting a talk of his canceled at the University of Washington. She didn't like it. Mr. Piker alleges he was canceled due to his very negative views on Israel. (Which are, in fact, noxious in the extreme.) In other words, Mr. Piker is blaming the jooos for getting him canceled. How very on-brand of him.
Here is Jayapal's X post:
As a Member of the Judiciary Committee, I have been absolutely clear that free speech is a Constitutional right that we must all stand
Let's begin with something most can agree on: high emotion, even rage, and viral imagery increasingly overwhelm logic and reason. Combined with a growing disagreement over what it means to be an American, the result is today's toxic politics, where fellow citizens increasingly see one another not merely as opponents, but as strangers with fundamentally incompatible values attempting to share a common country. That doesn't work!
Americans have also become increasingly distracted, less engaged in the responsibilities of family, community, work, and citizenship that give freedom its meaning. As a friend of mine wrote in an American Thinker Newsletter:
If you've got to watch that new series, old series, or long list of movies, play Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto, scroll endlessly through TikTok watching stupid people do stupid things, or visit your full-service pot store around the corner, everything else becomes less pressing.
She's making a larger point about priorities and distractions. When entertainment, instant gratification, and avoidance become more important than responsibility, family, community, work, citizenship, and the obligations that accompany freedom, people gradually lose sight of the things that give life—and a society—purpose. A society insulated from the consequences of its choices drifts ever farther from those
From Wikimedia Commons: Among the Sierra Nevada, California (Albert Bierstadt, 1868)
Democrat governance in America's major cities has come to signal a process of institutional unraveling and civic erosion. From New York to Chicago and Detroit, and extending westwards to Los Angeles and San Francisco, prolonged one-party rule correlates with rising disorder and fiscal strain, ultimately driving the flight of productive residents.
California, a laboratory for Democrat experimentation, currently governed by Gavin Newsom, epitomizes the ideological artefact of "decivilization." Conservative historian Victor Davis Hanson—himself a fifth-generation farmer of the San Joaquin Valley—has described The Golden State of yesterday as a mismanaged "third-world" entity in which a narrow elite flourishes while the broader population confronts economic contraction, infrastructural decline, and social disintegration. Sadly, his characterization is substantiated across budgets, crime statistics, housing markets, and the state of the public realm.
California's fiscal position reveals chronic imbalance. Massive budget deficits persist alongside soaring unfunded liabilities for pensions and retiree health care. Residents confront some of the highest gasoline, energy, and sales taxes in the nation. These burdens fall disproportionately on the middle class and small businesses, while progressive
Not long ago, I attended a Sunday service at a Methodist church in Denver.
Before the service began, the pastor introduced herself, shared her preferred pronouns, and informed the congregation that we were worshipping on stolen Native American land.
I remember wondering why, if the land had truly been stolen, the church still owned it. I wrote about it on these pages.
Now Denver's City Council wants to add another public ritual to official meetings.
Not a prayer.
Not the Pledge of Allegiance.
Not even a moment of silence.
A labor acknowledgment recognizing slavery and its legacy.
Image created by ChatGPT
The proposal is curious for one obvious reason.
Colorado entered the Union in 1876 — more than a decade after the Civil War ended — as a free state. No one currently living in Colorado was ever enslaved, and no one currently living in Colorado owned slaves here.
Yet before city business can begin, elected officials may soon be expected to acknowledge historical events that occurred generations before anyone in the room was born.
The ritual keeps growing.
First came pronouns. Then land acknowledgments. Now
There are a number of ways in which Western governments are waging war against their citizens. The United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and leftists in the United States do not believe in free speech. These Western governments also spy on their citizens without warrants or probable cause. They have transformed their court systems into ideologically-partisan dictatorships that impose rulings based upon feelings and "political correctness," rather than black-letter law and self-restraint. An offense that often gets overlooked, however, is Western governments' infringement of citizens' freedom of association.
Freedom of association is our natural, God-given right to meet with likeminded people, discuss ideas, express ourselves, and promote our mutual interests. As with freedom of speech, it is fundamental to any notion of liberty. Respect for freedom of association is the bedrock for religious freedom, freedom of conscience, communal identity, and national self-determination.
Countries are born when people of common ancestry, language, history, and customs choose to work together and defend their way of life. Towns spring up when likeminded people settle and develop a region together. Religious congregations grow through common worship. Schools, skilled trade unions, clubs, sports leagues, and civic organizations of all types are formed when people come together to
Japan remains the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities, with holdings still above $1.1 trillion. For decades, that position helped finance American deficits at relatively contained rates. The arrangement, however, is fraying.
The Bank of Japan has raised its policy rate and is gradually stepping back from the extreme yield-curve control that kept Japanese government bond yields artificially suppressed for years. Domestic Japanese yields have risen. The yen has been under pressure, prompting repeated intervention. When Tokyo defends the yen, it often draws on dollar reserves that include Treasuries. The net result is reduced Japanese demand, or outright sales, for U.S. government debt at the precise moment the United States must roll over enormous volumes of maturing obligations against a debt stock that has crossed $39 trillion.
This is a structural shift. Foreign official buyers are no longer the reliable residual demand they once were. Domestic private buyers and the banking system will have to absorb more paper. Markets have already tested higher long-term yields. The political system will not tolerate market-clearing rates high enough to clear the entire supply on purely commercial terms for long.
The available middle road has a name and historical precedent. "Financial repression" is what governments do when default is unacceptable and honest fiscal consolidation is
Six years ago, police in Aurora, CO, drew weapons on Brittney Gillian, a black woman, and four minors—her sister, daughter, and two nieces, ages 17 to six years—forced them to the hot asphalt in a parking lot, handcuffed them, and turned their "Sunday fun day" outing into a nightmare. The officers had misidentified Gillian's SUV as stolen, matching the plates but not waiting to cross-check the description of the vehicle the Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) network alerted them to: an out-of-state motorcycle.
The Aurora police apologized and, three years later, paid Gillian and the others $1.9 million in a civil rights settlement, but the officers were not charged. Their heavy-handed action, perhaps a genuine error, was found to be in keeping with standard procedure. That does not excuse the trauma Gillian and the children suffered. And compensation in one case does not lessen the extent to which ALPRs can be—and have been—used in violation of citizens' privacy and liberty.
With free access to ALPR data, police officers are predictably the biggest abusers. At least 50 officers nationwide have faced charges for accessing ALPR networks for personal reasons—for example, to stalk romantic interests.
