I would so love to debate this highly educated imbecile.
Trump is the first "fascist" in world history whose singular governing principle is to reduce the size, scope and power of the branch of government he lawfully controls.
“Trump is the first ‘fascist’ in world history whose singular governing principle is to reduce the size, scope and power” of government? Calvin Coolidge would like a word here.
Minnesota is not the exception but rather the example Americans finally noticed. Medicaid fraud has been endemic at the state and federal levels for decades. Politicians haven’t done much, even with scholars and journalists raising the alarm.
Medicaid reports $543 billion in “improper payments” over the past decade, though that figure omits one of the largest sources of error: whether states correctly determined the eligibility of the individuals they enrolled and paid providers on behalf of. According to Paragon Institute calculations, this brings improper payments to $1.1 trillion over those 10 years.
Improper payments are not identical to fraud; many involve missing documentation or administrative errors. But that distinction offers little comfort considering how little money is recovered. They are also an open invitation for more abuse.
Actual fraud, meanwhile, is widespread and persistent. In 2024 alone, state Medicaid Fraud Control Units reported more than 1,151 convictions and more than $1.4 billion in civil and criminal recoveries. Federal enforcement recovers a tiny share of what is stolen. Fraud that goes undetected never appears in the data.
That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Medicare, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and many other welfare programs also suffer from massive fraud. The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) exchange subsidies provide another cautionary example.
A day after ending his campaign for a historic third term — and possibly his political career — an animated Gov. Tim Walz offered a preview of how he plans to spend the remainder of his term: defending his record, shoring up his legacy and hammering Republicans with the abandon of a man no longer chasing votes.
“For Republicans here, I have more energy than I’ve ever had. I am committed to this state more than I’ve ever been,” Walz said. “Expect for the next 11 months for me to ride you like you’ve never been ridden to make sure you’re doing your job.”
NATO-aligned states rarely pull non-essential staff preemptively unless they receive high-confidence intel about kinetic escalation. This is a soft tripwire. Once a major Western… https://t.co/nHFK8YO3Y5
THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Crash And Burn – The Steven Seagal Story.
The Drinker dubs Seagal “The Great One,” and like the earlier Great One, Seagal had a sensitive musical side. The Drinker doesn’t mention that part of Seagal’s career, but fortunately, your humble narrator was honored to have been there to document it:
Erich von Däniken, popular author of a series of books about “ancient astronauts,” passed away on the tenth of January. His most famous work was “Chariot of the Gods?, a book that surely did not need the question mark. You can just respond “No,” and move on to the next subject. You probably remember his thesis: mankind was visited by aliens long ago, and they taught us things before heading back to the stars, never to return. You probably don’t know this: next Friday you can [go] to his theme park to get drunk and dance. But we’ll get to that.
I’m sure I found the idea intriguing as a kid, because these unfalsifiable conjectures fire the young imagination. Look at that ancient stone carving, it looks just like an astronaut in a capsule with a control panel wearing a pressurized space suit! Or it’s a lizard in a pot. I can’t say it didn’t happen, but if it did, it probably went like this:
The ship descends, all the humans drop the ground gibbering and bowing: the gods have arrived! Didn’t have that on the bingo card. Everyone bows down. The aliens give each other that look: every time. Always with the bowing.
“Okay, get up, we have work to do. No, we don’t want you to cut up a cow for us. No myrrh, we’re allergic.”
“Yes my lord god! I mean no. What do your greatness commandeth?”
“We’re going to build pyramids.”
“Pyramids.”
“Yes. Big square buildings with pointy tops. Here’s how.”
I’m pretty sure I saw the movie version of Chariots of the Gods — I think the film left von Däniken’s question mark off for savings — when I was a kid, but then the bar for what passed as a “documentary” was awfully low back then. (Seen at Chariots’ Wikipedia page: “Film critic Phil Hall said ‘They don’t make films like this any more, and we should be glad for that.’”)
Bears in SUVs in rugged conditions? Pshaw — America has been training our own cadre of beer drinking, hard riding bears for at least a half century now:
“Anybody got a decent idea for our next commercial?”
“How about some dirty bastard driving a Jeep around like a maniac with a grizzly bear riding shotgun?”
Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has quietly made it harder for federal agents to monitor Tren de Aragua and other brutal gangs in Rikers Island.
Mamdani revoked Executive Order 50 on his first day in office — which gave federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the ability to monitor the brutal Venezuelan gangbangers inside the city jail.
Hizzoner killed the initiative as part of a broad directive that repealed all executive orders issued by his predecessor, Mayor Eric Adams, between Sept. 26 and Dec. 31.
* * * * * * * *
Federal agents are worried because this is the first time the gang’s thugs in the US are just 15 miles apart from their leader, Venezuelan strongman Nicholas Maduro, who’s locked up in a federal jail in Brooklyn.
“Zoran kills exec order No 50 just as we should be more focused on the Venezuelan gang in Rikers — did he know that? Does he think that the gang should have one less pair of eyes,” the source said.
I’d say that’s an exceedingly safe bet, alas:
Zohran Mamdani’s crime advisor Tamika Malory: "I don't give a damn if they burn Target, we learned all vioIence from you"
The Iranian people could use a hand right about now.
Thousands are protesting their cruel, dictatorial government, a brave stance that has stunned the world.
Well, most of the world.
The tiny sliver of land known as Hollywood couldn’t bother to address the matter at Sunday’s Golden Globes telecast. Some predicted that sorry state of affairs.
Still though, points to Hollywood for their epic bravery at times like this:
The bravery of Judd Apatow here in calling out the Trump Dictatorship on live television, knowing full well that he’ll be disappeared by the State within hours for speaking out. I’m in awe https://t.co/WrvmaGA4yy
The question “what is queer food?” is, we’re told by Professor Elias, “a question that’s coming up a lot lately.” If only among academics desperate for an angle, an excuse for claiming a salary and wasting other people’s time. Academics much like Professor Elias.
Elias said she does not have a definition for what “queer food” is, but wants “recognition” it exists.
Welcome to the bleeding edge of human mental activity.
Exit quote: “For a long time, we were—using the Dean Wormer analogy from Animal House—we were Dean Wormer, the evil head of the college, and the left was Animal House. I always felt my role was to somehow flip that. And that’s what you’re seeing now: the scolds, the humorless people—the Karens of the world—are on the left. The people on the right are the ones having fun, being a bit reckless here and there, but that’s part of free speech. We’re sharing the risk. We’re not scared anymore. And I think that’s really the answer to your question.”
DATA REPUBLICAN: Minnesota as a Systems Failure: How NGOs process dissent until reality no longer matters.
Now, consider why [Renee Nicole Good] was there. As Steven Vago, Chris Nesi and Natalie O’Neill of the New York Postreported, Good “was part of a group of activists who worked to ‘document and resist’ the federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota . . . Good became involved in ‘ICE Watch’ — a loose coalition of activists dedicated to disrupting ICE raids in the sanctuary city . . . Coalitions similar to ICE Watch have cropped up all over the country — with activists using phone apps, whistles and car horns to warn neighborhoods when ICE shows up. ICE Watch and adjacent groups can also turn confrontational — with numerous instances of activists ramming agents with their cars in the past.”
As the Post report notes, “ICE agents have faced an unprecedented spike in car attacks, surging by some 3,200 percent over the last year, shocking data released by the Department of Homeland Security revealed to The Post.”
Our own Haley Strack has more in depth-reporting on ICE Watch:
ICE Watch chapters, which have cropped up in communities across the country in recent years, train activists to monitor ICE activity using purpose-built apps and alert allies who have been trained to flood an operation area and interfere with arrests being made. An Instagram account identified as “MN Ice Watch” instructs to report the locations and appearances of ICE agents. The account has posted photos across Minneapolis of law-enforcement agents, vehicle license plate numbers, and ICE officers’ faces; the account generates information via anonymous reports and submissions from local activists.
On a tab titled “Education,” the account promotes information about how to “de-arrest” individuals who have been arrested by law-enforcement by “physically removing an arrestee from a law enforcement officer’s grips, opening the door of a car or pressuring law enforcement officers to release an arrestee.” The “de-arrest primer” goes on to describe the benefits of blocking police vehicles. “If you don’t have a crowd asserting pressure there may be some interference charges that come with blocking a police vehicle that may be more easily handed down for only one or two people blocking a police vehicle, but in many cases these are misdemeanor offenses and catch and release,” the primer notes.
Read the whole thing; this is far beyond simply engaging in protest speech to bring attention to a political controversy or an injustice. It’s a campaign that aims at two ends, neither of which is mutually exclusive: thwarting the enforcement of laws passed by Congress, and/or provoking conflict and confrontation with armed federal agents in the hope of discrediting the enforcement of those laws. And ICE Watch chapters and similar organizations are doing this sort of thing all across the country. Good’s death is the inevitable, and to some extent intended, outcome of this style of direct action, which is designed to create headline-grabbing conflict and drama.
NRO’s Jeffrey Blehar compares “Ice Watch” and their ilk to the libertarian-leaning “sovereign citizen” movement:
There is a vast swathe of people on the activist left who either explicitly or implicitly deny the legal authority of ICE to exist and do what it does – either out of ignorance but more often simply because they believe it to be "unrighteous."
They remind me of nobody so much as…
— Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) January 11, 2026
Tweet continues:
They remind me of nobody so much as “sovereign citizen” types. (Their arguments are of that caliber.) The problem is there are exponentially more of them.
A couple of weeks before Christmas, the YouTube algorithm offered me up police bodycam videos dealing with traffic stops where the drivers plays the “sovereign citizen” card assembled by Sgt. Christopher Curtis, a Marine and former member of the Las Vegas PD. These are people who believe if they just utter the correct magic phrases, including “I’m not driving, I’m travelling,” and “I am a sovereign citizen,” they can get out of a traffic stop, which they think works much the same way that Obi-Wan Kenobi can magically get past the stormtroopers patrolling Mos Eisley spaceport, by waving his hand while telling them “these are not the droids you’re looking for.”
Unlike Obi-Wan, these efforts inevitably end in disaster:
But while the sovereign citizen crowd think that magic words – and magic thinking — can allow them to avoid a speeding ticket, that’s very, very different from actively interfering with law enforcement:
Look at the training “MN Ice Watch” (which Renee Good belonged to) gives:
They train activists to assault law enforcement, to swarm, pressure, and open their car doors.
And they say each “de-arrest” is a “micro-intifada.” Do with that what you will.
The left have decided they get to have the heckler’s veto in America, which one way or another can’t end well:
They assume they’re protected by the same system they seek to dismantle because they have a fanatical belief in their own moral superiority but also because they have no reason to assume otherwise as we live in a relatively safe and comfortable society where luxury beliefs like… https://t.co/uXTtGxoUsr
The ICE officer is the one who got run over, and the stupid commie lesbian is the one driving the vehicle, you dummy. Analogies: how do they work? https://t.co/bPF6jMmOkP
Published days after Khomeini’s return from exile, the article suggested that fears of a theocratic dictatorship were overstated. It argued that Khomeini would act primarily as a moral guide rather than a ruler, that political pluralism would persist, and that his close associates included moderates with records of concern for human rights.
At the time, Iran’s post-revolutionary structure was unsettled. The Shah had fled, institutions were in flux, and many observers believed the broad coalition that overthrew the monarchy would prevent any single faction from monopolising power.
Who wrote it and how did he later reassess it?
The article was written by Richard Falk, then a professor at Princeton University who had met Khomeini shortly before the revolution’s victory. Falk wrote amid widespread Western reassessment of support for the Shah, whose rule was criticised for repression and dependence on US backing.
In later reflections, Falk acknowledged that his optimism did not align with how events unfolded. He has said the New York Times headline was not his choice and that the speed with which clerical authority consolidated power was underestimated. In hindsight, he described Khomeini as a revolutionary figure with a rigid, uncompromising vision rather than a symbolic religious guide, conceding that expectations of pluralism proved misplaced.
Forget “turtles all the way down.” Given their early praise of Hitler, Stalin, Castro, and Khomeini, the Gray Lady is Walter Durantys all the way down.
It’s been a certainty for quite some time that many of the “protestors” tearing up the streets in Minneapolis and Portland, just to name a couple of (leftist) cities, were being paid to be there. Shadowy figures behind the scenes, who may or may not be named Soros, are funneling cash and strangely professional-looking signs into these riots. Ever notice how fast those strangely specific, professionally printed signs turn up? That can’t be cheap.
There is also a guy who organizes protests-for-hire on the up and up. Every cat its own rat and all that, you know. His name is Adam Swart, and he runs an outfit called Crowds on Demand. The difference between the protestors blocking streets in Minneapolis right now and Mr. Swart’s business is that Mr. Swart has scruples. He wants nothing to do with these Minneapolis debacles.
Adam Swart, chief executive officer of Crowds on Demand, told Fox News Digital his firm “would not touch the Minneapolis protests with a 10-foot pole,” citing blocked roadways, obstruction of federal agents, and threats against authorities following a fatal shooting during an ICE enforcement operation.
“Blocking roadways, obstructing federal agents, and threatening authorities are illegal, and we don’t engage in any form of illegal protest,” Swart said, warning the chaos playing out on city streets will have the opposite effect demonstrators claim to want. “The impact of these protests will actually be to increase ICE operations, not decrease them.”
As the late P.J. O’Rourke wrote in his 1991 magnum opus, Parliament of Whores:
Not long after Andy [Ferguson] and I met, we were driving down Pennsylvania Avenue and encountered some or another noisy pinko demonstration. “How come,” I asked Andy, “whenever something upsets the Left, you see immediate marches and parades and rallies with signs already printed and rhyming slogans already composed, whereas whenever something upsets the Right, you see two members of the Young Americans for Freedom waving a six-inch American flag?” “We have jobs,” said Andy.
Yet, why isn’t this being covered in our media? It’s a significant story, a massive one. I understand that we have mayhem in the streets of our cities, spurred by insane leftists who are enraged that one of their own was shot after she accelerated her vehicle toward a federal agent in Minneapolis. Both can be covered, and this tweet explained why it’s being suffocated. It was posted by the Institute for Justice’s Tahmineh Dehbozorgi. It’s a brutal takedown of the media’s coverage of Islam, their refusal to analyze properly, and how woke paradigms and historical illiteracy have framed everything incorrectly as a result:
The Western liberal media is ignoring the Iranian uprising because explaining it would force an admission it is desperate to avoid: the Iranian people are rebelling against Islam itself, and that fact shatters the moral framework through which these institutions understand the… https://t.co/4G0UEvL0YO
Just realized majority of the west thinks Iranian people are Muslim…this explains a lot.
I think BBC etc have been so reluctant to report on this because it breaks the “identity” narrative. The Marxist framing is that people are reduced to a singular identity.…
Today a bunch of celebrities who have deliberately remained silent on the protests in Iran will show up to the Golden Globes wearing a red pin in solidarity with Radical Islamist terrorists and call it “human rights activism.”
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.
* * * * * * * * *
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.”
Even the great comedies of the 80’s featured men of no special ability courageously laying it all on the line for Civilization against overwhelming odds. At the end of “Ghostbusters” after it becomes clear that the only way to stop Gozer from destroying the world is to sacrifice their own lives, blue collar “scientists” Venkman, Egon, Ray and Winston head out to meet their fate with stoic good humor.
“See you on the other side, Ray…”
“Nice working with you Doctor Venkman…”
“Edelweiss… Edelweiss…”
One of the reasons why American men, from Generation X in particular, keep coming back to movies like “Ghostbusters”, “Master and Commander”, “Gladiator”, “Braveheart” “The Great Escape”, “The Lord of the Rings”, and even “Die Hard” and “Predator”, is precisely because, as Men of the West, we are hard-wired to fantasize about how we will meet our own confrontations with “The Big Evil”, when and if those confrontations come. Modern American culture tends to look down upon this uniquely male instinct with ill-humor, if not outright derision. These kinds of male-coded sentiments are considered old fashioned at best, explicitly toxic at worst. Which is a shame, because the big studio movies we once made to cater to this male instinct for adventure, risk-taking and the instinctual defiance of Evil remain some of the greatest and most compulsively rewatchable films ever made.
Hamill was also right on a narrative level. As he pointed out, Star Wars is never strictly “Luke’s story” or “Obi-Wan’s story,” but an ensemble myth where veteran characters guide the next generation. Alec Guinness’ Obi-Wan played a pivotal role without overshadowing Luke’s arc. Bringing Star Wars‘ original trio back would have only reinforced the sequel’s trilogy passing of the torch. Instead, brushing Han, Luke, and Leia aside in the name of focus ultimately weakened the sequel trilogy.
When it comes to storytelling, Hollywood has been determined to defy its audience for many years now, so it shouldn’t be surprised when that audience reciprocates. In 2024, James Lileks predicted the future of AI art and video: Art That’s Just for Me.
In the end, we will watch our own movies more than others, and the theatrical experience will have gone from the great shared silver screen in the communal dark, to niche streaming, to watching our own particular curiosities and desires played on our own glowing rectangles. Millions of hours of movies, made for an audience of one.
Which is the logical conclusion of Hollywood making movies for its boardrooms instead of its audiences.
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