• Gender-Affirming Care Needs a Lobotomy by Louise Perry

  It’s easy to look back at the uncritical acceptance of medical wrongdoing in the past and see what C.S. Lewis described as “chronological snobbery.” It seems obvious now that bloodletting and trepanning were acts of idiocy. But the widespread acceptance of “gender-affirming” medicine in our own time ought to cure us of this hubris.

  Perhaps the closest historical analog to the emerging scandal around gender medicine is the practice of lobotomy, a type of brain surgery that doctors performed approximately 50,000 times in the U.S., most between 1949 and 1952, with the same goal: to relieve the symptoms of mental illness.

  The most important figure in the rise of lobotomy in the U.S. was Walter Freeman, a talented surgeon who came from an esteemed medical family and could trace his lineage back to the Mayflower. This was an era when that kind of prestige conferred enormous power on doctors, and Freeman pursued his experiments with very little restriction, although plenty of his colleagues voiced concerns. As his biographer Jack El-Hai wrote, “Freeman made it plain that he found such ethical complaints a waste of time.” He refused to be deterred from his humanitarian mission.

• America Needs a New Generation of War Scouts by Tim Hwang

  While we’re starting small, our goal is to build a network of field researchers, traveling outbound across the world and returning with knowledge that the nation will need as it plots its path through this fantastically dangerous century. Over time, we see this cohort rivaling (and debating) the “serious” pundits who influence the machinery of foreign policy and defense strategy: Who knows better? Who can make better predictions? Who offers better ideas?

  It goes without saying that the mission is risky. We suspect that if you are the right person, you will return from this trip with insights more valuable that the vast majority of defense “intellectuals” with more prestige and less courage.

  It should not be rare to study war by going into battle. Indeed, we must demand it.

• This ‘Wuthering Heights’ Will Drive Purists Mad by Christian Toto

  This “Wuthering Heights” is aimed at those with little patience for period romances. Comic relief abounds, and over-the-top touches keep modern audiences engaged. 

  The two-plus-hour running time is a mistake, but there isn’t a sequence that isn’t lovely to behold.

  Fennell shrewdly sketches the class divide impeding this pulpy romance, but its woven expertly into the narrative. Other flourishes are more curious, once again keeping us off balance while the source material peeks out from the surface.

  Your mileage may vary, but those willing to accept a story that’s merely influenced by a literary classic will come away entertained.

• US employers add 130K jobs in January in strong start to 2026 by Taylor Herzlich

  The federal government sector lost 34,000 jobs in January. Since reaching a peak in October 2024, federal employment is down by 327,000, or 10.9%, according to the BLS.

  In a positive sign for the labor market, the labor force participation rate for those aged 25 to 54 – considered prime working years – jumped to 84.1%, its highest level since 2001.

  “Today’s report reinforces a theme we’ve seen before: the labor market is not collapsing, but it is not roaring either,” Mark Malek, chief investment officer at Siebert Financial, said in a note Wednesday.

• The UAE–Binance–Trump Affair: A Comprehensive Timeline by Andrew C. McCarthy

  Prior to the establishment of WLF by Donald Trump and Steve Witkoff, Tahnoon was already a heavily invested business partner of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner — the president’s former and oft-time current Middle East emissary.

  Tahnoon is a close associate of Changpeng Zhao, who was convicted of felony money-laundering charges in the United States arising out of his stewardship of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. In 2023, Zhao and Binance admitted guilt to the charges that stemmed, as the Justice Department alleged, from Zhao’s turning Binance into a covert funding channel for terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers. While Zhao and his allies (including the UAE) lobbied for a pardon of Zhao, Binance and the UAE contributed technical know-how to help WLF develop a stablecoin, USD1, which it first introduced in March 2025.

  Just weeks later, on May 1, WLF announced that another Tahnoon entity, MGX, had purchased $2 billion worth of the new, unproven USD1 stablecoin, which he would invest on Zhao’s Binance exchange. While the Trump-Witkoff-controlled WLF portrayed this eye-popping purchase as a global market vote of confidence in its stablecoin, neither WLF nor the UAE revealed that Tahnoon had secretly purchased 49 percent of WLF for $500 million just four months earlier, right as President Trump was entering office. Nor was it revealed that two board members of Tahnoon’s MGX (who were also executives of Tahnoon’s G42 entity) were also WLF board members.

  Shockingly, President Trump pardoned Zhao in October 2025.

• New York Post Publishes Long Excerpt From “Rage and the Republic” by Jonathan Turley

  If American democracy is to survive in the twenty-first century, it must, again, break the Saturn cycle. The country—and the world—are facing profound economic and social changes.

  The causes may be different in the form of robotics or AI, but challenge remains the same in maintaining political stability during a period of economic unrest with hard-stratified class divisions, subsistence income, and greater social separation. The answers may be found in what occurred 250 years ago and how revolutionary pressures were vented within a Madisonian system. We are witnessing the convergence of radical movements with ominous economic conditions developing in this century due to changes in technology and the workplace.

  In the United States, the political divide has become deep and increasingly violent. At the same time, the country is facing what could be the most significant economic shifts since the Industrial Revolution with the increase in robotic manufacturing, AI, increased undocumented migration, and widening wealth stratification. After the last industrial revolution, social upheaval and displacement were followed by political instability. Yet the massive rise in production and wealth eventually brought prosperity to this and other nations. It is less clear that the new economic and technological advances will produce the same wealth infusion for the middle class, let alone the lower class.

• The New York Times Changes Its Tune on Marijuana, at Last by Jim Geraghty

  I like libertarians. I could live very happily in a world or country run by libertarians. But the heart of the libertarian philosophy is the notion that human beings are responsible adults who — and this is the important part — accept the consequences of their own actions and recognize the likely consequences of their actions on others.

  The problem is that every day we encounter examples of people who don’t. If you get behind the wheel stoned, you are ignoring the likely consequences of your actions on others.

  One of my favorite pieces of reporting from National Review in recent years was Ryan Mills’s work out in Portland, Ore., where advocates of the decriminalization of hard drugs started living with the consequences of that policy and determined they had made a terrible mistake, with deadly consequences. We must wonder if Americans are belatedly recognizing that the development of a legal weed industry has offered a more widespread but less severe version of that grim outcome — and similar lessons to the ones that Portland learned the hard way.

• US medicine must choose between a collapsing consensus on pediatric trans surgery and kids’ well-being by Gerald Posner

  American medicine now faces a choice.

  It can continue defending a collapsing consensus, exposing itself to mounting legal liability and public mistrust.

  Or it can follow the evidence, acknowledge past errors and rebuild pediatric care around caution, humility and genuine informed consent.

  It can put the pediatric patients ahead of ideology and a profit-driven business model.

• Thank Heaven for ‘Gigi’ on TCM by Kyle Smith

  In the last 20 years or so, however, “Gigi” has inspired so much outrage from denunciation dunces that TCM deserves extra respect for continuing to air it. “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” has been recast by idiots as an ode to pedophilia. No, Honoré isn’t saying he’s attracted to little girls, but that he reserves the right to be attracted to them when they’ve grown up. Everyone used to grasp this distinction, before culture writers learned they could make a living being stupid in public. The news-for-morons site BuzzFeed denounced “Gigi” as the worst best picture honoree of all time because it was supposedly “the creepiest, most pedophiliac movie ever to win.” Eh?

  Gaston isn’t a pedophile either; whether we approve or not, physically mature girls in their teens were considered suitable marriage material in 1900, when the film is set, and for decades thereafter. Gigi is costumed as a schoolgirl in the early stages of the film, but she’s developmentally an adult; Ms. Caron was at the time of filming a 26-year-old mother. (Jourdan was 36.)

  Today Ms. Caron is 94. She gave an interview in 2021 in which she dismissed all attempts to find fault with the story and said, with a laugh, “It’s well known that the French are very naughty and not correct in that sort of department.” She doesn’t sound like she thinks she was used to advance a pedophilia propaganda scheme. “Gigi” remains what it has always been: celluloid Champagne.

• LDP secures supermajority in Lower House election victory

  Voters overwhelmingly gave a mandate to Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on Feb. 8, sending her Liberal Democratic Party to its most resounding Lower House election victory since its founding in 1955.

  The LDP is certain to secure more than the party record of 300 seats won in the 1986 Lower House election under the Yasuhiro Nakasone administration.

  In fact, the LDP gained a crucial supermajority exceeding two-thirds, or 310 seats, in the 465-seat Diet chamber. This marks the first time since World War II that a single party has won more than two-thirds of the seats in the Lower House.

• Stop Listening to the Pessimistic Chaos Agents. America Kicks #@!. by Ben Shapiro

  In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote of the lassitudinous condition that could arise in such a situation. He described “an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives.” That multitude would be governed by an “immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate.” The people, in such a condition, would be reduced to enervation: “The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

  This hits too close to home. Far too close to home.

  A people that has lost hope, and has retreated from fractious, risky individualism to the comfort of centralized power; a people that has surrendered its autonomy in the mistaken belief that its autonomy was always an illusion.

  But that is merely the first step. Because once the people are made subjects—once they begin to believe that their choices aren’t their own, that broad and powerful systems are to blame for their individual problems—then they are ripe for something far worse. They are ripe for tyranny.

• China critic Jimmy Lai sentenced to 20 years in jail after landmark Hong Kong trial by James Pomfret, Jessie Pang

  Hong Kong’s most vocal China critic, media tycoon Jimmy Lai, was sentenced on Monday to 20 years in jail, ending the city’s biggest national security case that has fueled global concerns about Beijing’s clampdown on freedoms in the ex-British colony.

  Lai’s sentence on two counts of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and one for publishing seditious materials ends a legal saga that has lasted nearly five years.

  The 78-year-old British citizen had denied all the charges against him, telling the court he was a “political prisoner” facing persecution from Beijing.

• What to Do About Vice by Aaron Renn

  …The old unofficial institutionalization of a generic Protestantism was a product of an America that no longer exists. It wasn’t created by the government in the first place, and can’t be recreated by political means. The fundamental social reality when it comes to vice is that Americans at present want it to be legal and socially approved of.

  So what can we do? It’s not obvious but here are a few tracks.

  We can work to mitigate the worst negatives, such as by tightly controlling marijuana distribution and its public use, or making it more difficult for minors to access porn.

  People can begin incubating new, outside of the Overton Window cultural and moral movements. This is how social liberalization was achieved.

  Various subcultures and organizations, such as churches, can firmly reject vice as a condition of membership.

  The American leadership class can re-adopt a vision that they abandoned long ago of our people as our country’s greatest asset. Elevating our people, developing our human capital, is critical to America functioning well and to our economic competitiveness. To the extent we are working on this, we will be working on vice, even if only indirectly.

• The Middle Finger Majority by Erick W. Erickson

  Every time an American citizen is arrested, Homeland Security gives an excuse. Some of them are legitimate. Increasingly, they appear to be fictions designed to make it through a news cycle. Americans got fed up with Joe Biden gas lighting them. Now, Democrats are ahead in the polling average on which party is better able to handle inflation. That the Republicans are losing that question is a damning indictment on the present operation.

  President Trump has always had impulse control issues and loves to be the center of attention. In his first term, his team provided a better economy, more consistent and principled leadership, and policies Americans benefited from. It took the 2018 drubbing for the President’s team to get that coherence and, but for COVID, he probably would have won re-election in 2020.

  Now, the President has time to reset, be honest, and focus on the issues that get Americans to vote Republican, instead of giving them the middle finger. The denials and protests and gaslighting need to end. Twenty-nine Republicans are leaving Congress this year. They know where this is headed. There is still time for a course correction, but not if the truth is drown out with bullying and lies.

• Lindsey Vonn hits the 2026 Winter Olympics slopes for the first time on her torn ACL by Haley Ott

  American star Lindsey Vonn participated in an official Olympic training event for Women’s downhill skiing on Friday, hitting the slopes at the Winter Games for the first time after rupturing her left ACL when she crashed in a World Cup race in the Swiss Alps a week ago.

  Friday’s run was the first official downhill training to take place ahead of the Games, after an event scheduled for Thursday was canceled due to the weather. It was delayed briefly over weather concerns before being resumed.

  Vonn, the 41-year-old ski racer from Colorado, completed the run without any apparent issues. Her first competitive Olympic event, the women’s downhill, is scheduled for Sunday.

• Notes from Upstream: Conspiracies and Their Witches by Max Cossack

  The conspiracy monger need not identify the conspirators. In fact, it can profit her not to. The audience will tune in again for those promised future revelations sure to come. Her vagueness generates the clicks and views and likes which form the currency of podcasting.

  When the monger finally turns her vague theory into a witch hunt, previously passive viewers get to join the pack. That’s why Candace Owens appeals for “Candigators” to help her out. The thrill of the hunt is part of the fun.

• These Boots Aren’t Made for Talking by Masada Siegel

  According to Allied Market Research, the global Western wear market is projected to exceed $136 billion by 2031, nearly double its 2020 revenue levels. While North America commands more than 40% of this market, Europe is not that far behind at more than 30%. In Italy, the epicenter of fashion, cowboy boots generated over $22 million in 2025 alone.

  Back home in Phoenix in November, I attended the sold-out Hondo Rodeo at Chase Field, which featured cowboys and cowgirls riding and roping in a dirt-filled arena. These were athletes filled with spirit and grit who shared among them more than 70 world championship titles.

  It felt good to see American pride on full display alongside tens of thousands of spectators dressed head-to-toe in Western wear—denim skirts, sparkly boots, big cowboy hats and American flag scarves. The denim company Wrangler, one of the event’s sponsors, says it makes clothes “for people who put in the work, blaze their own trail, and wear their independence with pride.”

  Talk is cheap, but fashion isn’t. What people chose to wear tells a story of what they admire and who they want to become. Cowboy culture and couture has made a comeback around the globe. I won’t be surprised in the coming years if the American brand does, too.

• Wes Moore Says the KKK Chased His Great-Grandfather Out of South Carolina. Historical Records Tell a Different Story. by Andrew Kerr

  Detailed church archival records, as well as contemporary newspaper coverage, indicate that Thomas, a Jamaica native, on Dec. 13, 1924, made an orderly and public transfer from South Carolina to the island of his birth, where he was appointed to succeed a prominent Jamaican pastor who had died unexpectedly a week earlier, on Dec. 6, 1924. Amid the copious documentation of the life and career of Moore’s great-grandfather, there is no mention of trouble with the Klan, which operated openly in 1920s South Carolina but never had a chapter operating out of Pineville, according to Virginia Commonwealth University’s Mapping of the Second Ku Klux Klan.

  Many families tell larger-than-life stories about their forebears that wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny. But your typical family-tree fabulist isn’t preparing to run for president. And Moore’s fantastical tale of his great-grandfather’s escape from the Ku Klux Klan to exile to Jamaica adds yet another asterisk to his remarkably inflated résumé—about which the press have asked him very little.

  Moore falsely claimed that he was born and grew up in Baltimore, which he did not; that he was inducted into the Maryland College Football Hall of Fame, an organization that doesn’t exist; that he received a Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan, which he had not; that in 2006 he was considered a foremost expert on radical Islam based on his graduate thesis, which he never submitted to Oxford University’s library and can no longer locate; that he was a doctoral candidate at Oxford in 2006, a claim he has no documentation to support and on which Oxford refuses to comment; and that he had “a difficult childhood in the Bronx and Baltimore” despite attending New York City’s elite, private Riverdale Country School—where John F. Kennedy went to school—as a child and not living in Baltimore until college, when he attended Johns Hopkins University, another elite private school.

• Bernie Sanders spent over $550K in 2025 campaign funds on private jets, filings show by Alec Schemmel, Cameron Cawthorne

  Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, who crisscrossed the country last year on a Fighting Oligarchy tour with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, spent over $550,000 in 2025 on private jet travel for himself using campaign funds, a Fox News Digital review of Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings found.

  The majority of the spending came in the first two quarters, which cover up until July. That is also when Sanders and AOC had the majority of their tour stops across the country.

• Khamenei Can’t Give Washington What It Wants by Nadim Koteich

  The tragedy of the Islamic Republic is its structural inability to evolve. It is a brittle system that has mistaken rigidity for strength. When Khamenei says the American demands are impossible, we should believe him. The regime he has spent a lifetime fortifying is designed to break, not to bend.

  The task for Western policymakers is no longer to negotiate a transformation that cannot happen, but to manage the consequences of a fracture that is now historically inevitable.

• Vice and the Crisis of Liberalism by Ross Douthat

  I’ve written elsewhere, at some length, about the problems with this vision. Among other things, it lacks a persuasive account of why integralism lost to liberalism in the first place, a compelling theory of how to get the diverse and divided American public to vote for a politics of faith and virtue and an adequate engagement with why post-liberal experiments in the 20th century defaulted so often to authoritarianisms that corrupted Christianity rather than restoring it.

  But the alternative vision can also feel inadequate. If you think the liberal order needs some version of what we once enjoyed with American Protestantism, some kind of “softly institutionalized” moral and religious vision that prevents us from devolving into addiction and despair, but you don’t think that politics can do much more than gently create preconditions for that vision, then aren’t you still stuck inside the Yglesian framework, hand-waving vaguely at the social problems that are eating your order from within?

  If I had the answer, I wouldn’t write so many open-ended newsletters on this subject (while urging my fellow Americans toward religion every chance I get). But it’s important to be clear about the dilemma: The absence of a credible replacement for liberalism doesn’t mean that there’s an obvious cure within the system for its vices.

• The Loss of Trust in Legacy Media by John Kass

  There’s a Ray Bradberry story from 1963 that I’m fond of, “To The Chicago Abyss,” a dystopian tale of an old man about my age now.

  He travels through a bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape where cultural memory has been forbidden or lost, subversively reminiscing about the wonderful foods, items, and sensory experiences of the past—such as hot coffee, real butter, chocolate, and crisp autumn air—to remind people of what they have lost; vacuum-packed coffee, fresh milk, chesterfield cigarettes and candy bars.

  He’s a threat to the establishment, and his reminiscing is seen as dangerous, and it tries to suppress him.

  Please keep your eye on the door in case the authorities try bursting in, but I’m not going to tell you of canned cream corn or chunky candy bars or big macs and fries in beef tallow.

• Baby Mine, Don’t You Cry by Matthew Hennessey

  The Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute announced on Tuesday the birth in captivity of an Asian elephant calf. It’s the first time in nearly 25 years that the zoo has hosted a live elephant birth. Cause for celebration!

  Asian elephants—aka Elephas maximus—are an endangered species. Only 30,000 to 50,000 exist in the wild.

  The proud parents are Nhi Linh (12) and Spike (44), who bred in 2024. Remarkably, according to the zoo, Asian elephant pregnancies can last for almost two years. Nhi Linh was pregnant for 21 months.

• Do Conservatives Read Good? by Noah Rothman

  If these were conservatives’ reading habits, we’d be treated to an endless series of think pieces about how the conservative mind has siloed itself in a comforting information ecosystem that is allergic to questioning itself. Oh, wait . . . we were! Right-of-center readers were bombarded in the last decade with the self-congratulatory accusation from the left that the right had succumbed to “epistemic closure,” cosseting itself in a “reactionary,” “racist,” and, worst of all, “very online” cocoon.

  Yglesias studiously ignores that the top Substacker slot goes to the Free Press, which can hardly be described as a bastion of left-wing like-think. Nor does he contend with the successful right-of-center media enterprises that spun off from their Substack incubator, like The Dispatch.

  I know that was a chore to slog through, but you did it! Hopefully, you encountered something of value in all that arduous text. We can hold out hope that Yglesias and those who seek out self-affirmation in the guise of dispassionate analysis will encounter this critique. But, judging from the left’s reading habits, they’ll never see it.

• Can He Ski At All? by Lloyd Billingsley

  Robin Williams famously described the biathalon as “Norwegian drive-by” and comedian Franklyn Ajaye took on “Mr. Agony,” from the famous “Wide World of Sports” intro, the only man in Olympic ski-jump history “who could not ski at all.” That prompted people all over American to wonder, “who the hell is that? Can he ski at all? Can just anybody get in the Olympics? Don’t you have to be able to do something?” Mr. Agony even launched a surge in Olympic walk-ons. No, they hadn’t trained but “you let that cat ski, man!”

  The 2026 games might supply a worthy heir to Mr. Agony, along with many thrills of victory. At age 41, Lindsey Vonn can still get downhill in a hurry, so feel free to chant “USA! USA! USA!” like they did back in 1980. As Trump likes to say, we’ll have to see what happens.

• First Major Medical Org Comes Out Against Trans Surgeries for Minors by Haley Strack

  The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) released new guidance on Tuesday cautioning physicians against performing gender-transition surgeries on minors, marking a significant breakthrough for critics of the procedures who have long called on major medical associations to be transparent about the harms associated with medicalizing gender dysphoric children.

  The new ASPS guidance acknowledges that there is insufficient evidence to prove that irreversible gender-related surgical interventions have longterm benefits for adolescents and therefore recommends that surgeons delay gender-related breast, genital, and facial surgery until “a patient is at least 19 years old. The association has “substantial uncertainty” about the longterm benefits of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

• Telling “the Full Story” of George Washington by Jeffrey H. Anderson

  A less-biased account would have noted that, like most of the founding generation, all of whom had inherited slavery from the British, Washington sought slavery’s gradual elimination. In 1786, he wrote to John Francis Mercer, describing it as “being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by the legislature by which slavery in this country may be abolished by slow, sure, and imperceptible degrees.” Washington’s hope was that slavery would fade away, without causing economic ruin for any portion of the population.

  Washington played a role in drafting the Fairfax Resolves at Mount Vernon in 1774, which condemned the slave trade as “wicked,” “cruel,” and “unnatural,” and called for putting “an entire Stop” to it. Later that year, he served in the Continental Congress, which adopted an agreement that the 13 colonies would “wholly discontinue the slave trade, and will neither be concerned in it ourselves, nor will we hire our vessels, nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who are concerned in it.” As president, Washington signed the Northwest Ordinance (when it was re-passed under the Constitution), which banned slavery in the Northwest Territory (by far the most significant U.S. territory at the time), and the Slave Trade Act of 1794, which prohibited use of American ships in the slave trade.

  The President’s House Site noted none of this. Then again, it did not note the Civil War, either, though it did manage, on its “Slavery Timeline,” to acknowledge Juneteenth. Nor did it observe, as biographer Ron Chernow writes in Washington: A Life (2010), that the enslaved people Washington brought to Philadelphia enjoyed “a modicum of freedom to roam the city, sample its pleasures, and even patronize the theater,” with Washington himself purchasing the tickets.

• Costa Rica elects a conservative as Latin America shifts to the right by Ryan Dubé

  Costa Ricans elected Laura Fernández, a former government minister who promises to crack down on crime, as president of the Central American country, making her the latest right-wing candidate in Latin America to win office amid concerns about drug-fueled violence.

  Fernández, the 39-year-old handpicked candidate of President Rodrigo Chaves, received more than 48% of the votes, enough to avoid a second-round runoff vote. Her four-year term begins in May.

  Fernández’s election marks the latest victory for conservatives in Latin America, boosting the number of potential allies for President Trump as he focuses American military and economic might on the region.

• Trump’s Jeffersonian Foreign Policy by John Yoo

  A President orders American forces to attack a hostile foreign regime without prior congressional authorization. He authorizes covert action to overthrow the regime’s ruler. He funds these operations in secret and notifies Congress only after the mission succeeds. When the smoke clears, Congress does not challenge the intervention either by cutting off funds, passing a statute, or impeaching the President. This scenario describes the Trump administration’s ongoing conflict with Venezuela. The United States is fighting a war in all but name against the regime in Caracas. The United States has imposed a blockade on Venezuela’s oil exports, closed its airspace, sunk alleged drug-running boats leaving its ports, and, of course, launched a snatch-and-grab operation of its head of state, Nicolas Maduro. Not only did the American armed forces capture Maduro and return him to the United States for trial, but it also destroyed Venezuela’s air defenses and killed the security detail guarding him. The Trump administration is now engaged in a slow campaign of regime change that has it negotiating with Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodriguez, but also hosting the leader of the opposition, Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado.

  But this scenario also describes President Thomas Jefferson’s campaign against the Barbary States. In that operation, President Jefferson ordered the U.S. Navy to attack principalities of the Ottoman Empire and then launched our nation’s first significant covert action to overthrow their leaders – all without explicit congressional approval. Two centuries later, President Trump has followed the same playbook in Operation Absolute Resolve to capture Maduro. But while Jefferson’s actions prompted only constitutional silence and congressional acquiescence, Trump’s have encountered accusations that he has violated both the Constitution and international law. Trump’s critics today would do well to learn from the example of Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, founder of the Democratic Party, and leading critic of government power. Indeed, Jefferson might well have applauded Trump’s campaign in Venezuela.

• Monday Morning Notebook by Steve F. Hayward

  The biggest story of the moment is not Iran (well maybe it the bombs start falling by the time you read this), any and all things Trump, or more Epstein nonsense, but the jury verdict on Friday awarding $2 million in damages for a malpractice claim against a doctor who mutilated a minor in the name of “gender-affirming” care.

  I have been predicting for several years now that it would be trial lawyers who brought an end to this insanity with malpractice suits. It took longer than I expected, but I now expect a cascade of similar lawsuits. Many of them you will never hear about, because doctors, hospitals, and their insurance companies will rush to make confidential settlements. But at some point these gender-bending practices will become uninsurable.

• America Is Awash in Vice by Aaron M. Renn

  The decline of the Judeo-Christian moral consensus in America was supposed to liberate people from obsolete, repressive norms. But what it actually accomplished was unleashing a tidal wave of vice. The U.S. never had a state church, but for much of its history it had a softly institutionalized generic Protestantism.

  The strong Protestant influence created an emphasis on moral reform and vice suppression. Examples include the Comstock Act of 1873, which banned the sending of obscene material in the mail; the Mann Act of 1910, which banned interstate prostitution; and most famously, the temperance movement, which culminated in Prohibition. While some of these efforts may have gone too far at times, they served to keep a lid on the private harms and public blight associated with vice.

  This system began to unravel in the 1960s as religious adherence and church attendance declined. Academics and cultural figures called into the question the old religious moral framework. By the 1980s, evangelical Christians still viewed themselves as speaking for a “moral majority,” but were feeling beleaguered. Since roughly President Obama’s second term, a new and different public moral order has replaced the old one. This one has no problem with vice.

  The mainstreaming of destructive vices is but one unforeseen negative outcome of the decline of Christianity in America. It’s unlikely to be the only one.

• January 30, 2026 by Christopher B. Barnett

  It is with this in mind that [Gabriel] Marcel turns to the overarching theme of his book: “The universal against the masses.” Specifically drawing on Plato, Marcel identifies “the universal” with “spirit or mind—and spirit or mind is love.” But, he goes on, only an individual can properly love, and only an individual can properly think. These are “the most concrete things in the world,” which no political movement or technical apparatus can instantiate. Almost perfectly describing the Others in Pluribus, Marcel writes:

  The masses partake of the human only in a degraded state, they are themselves a degraded state of the human. Do not let us seek to persuade ourselves that an education of the masses is possible: that is a contradiction in terms. What is educable is only an individual, or more exactly a person. Everywhere else, there is no scope for anything but a training.

  What appears to be a flourishing society, then, is actually the “abnormal and unhealthy life…of a cancer-tissue.” That is why Marcel views his work as a kind of warning, as if he were a doctor prescribing emergency treatment. The goal of the human endeavor, he says, can never be an optimized society as such, because optimization, construed poorly, can very well come at the expense of the irreducible dignity of the concrete individual. And, as Marcel writes, “There can be no authentic depth except where there can be real communion… The very notion of intersubjectivity…presupposes a reciprocal openness between individuals without which no kind of spirituality is conceivable.”

  With this in mind, it is notable that the first season of Pluribus ends with an alliance, so to speak, between Carol and Manousos. They have different personalities, and they speak different languages. In fact, they don’t really like each other at all. Therein, paradoxically, lies the kernel of optimism that Gilligan sows in Pluribus. The Others lack genuine inwardness or, to use Marcel’s term, “availability” (disponibilité). There is a certain hollowness—indeed, an abstractness—to their interactions. Not so with Carol and Manousos. If the world of the Joining has reduced all human beings to a function, the respective doubt, indignation, and mettle of Carol and Manousos give birth to hope—both their hope and ours. Indeed, as Marcel puts it, “Hope is possible only where the human being is not treated as a thing.”

• Trump picks Kevin Warsh to chair Federal Reserve amid pressure campaign to cut rates by Joe Walsh

  If confirmed by the Senate, Warsh will helm a Federal Reserve that has faced months of intense pressure from Mr. Trump to dramatically slash rates — a move that could boost economic growth, but at the risk of sparking higher inflation. The Fed has lowered rates three times since September, most recently on Dec. 10, but Fed officials indicated in a projection earlier this month that they expect just one cut this year.

  Warsh suggested earlier this year he’s open to lower interest rates, and he’s been deeply critical of the Fed’s handling of inflation in recent years, arguing the central bank has a “credibility crisis” and is in need of “regime change.” But he has also called it “essential” that the Fed maintain its independence over monetary policy.

• Two Decades Of Inconvenient Inaccuracies

  “Both ‘Inconvenient Truth’ movies have a lawyer’s bias, a one-sided approach with a goal of making people see the proponent’s way instead of the scientists’ ‘question everything’ approach to learning the truth about how our universe works,” says Ric Werme, a contributor to Anthony Watts’ widely followed climate science site, who attended a special screening of the second film.

  Don’t expect the media, which celebrated the movie as if it were an impartial and honorable enterprise in truth-telling, to admit that it was riddled with lies and exaggerations. For them, it was just another opportunity to get behind progressive policies that lay the foundation for socialism, agitate for international climate pacts designed to choke prosperity in the West and replace cheap, reliable energy sources with unreliable and costly renewables.

  If legacy journalism were anything but a narrative servant for the left, the media would lead a charge to force Gore to return the Oscar. They won’t because in their world the truth is whatever they want it to be.

• Kids Need Adventures—Without Their Parents by Lenore Skenazy

  A lot of us are revisiting Rob Reiner’s classics, for obvious reasons. Watching “Stand By Me” and comparing the preadolescents of the 1950s with the anxious generation of today made me realize what today’s kids are missing: the chance to journey, literally and metaphorically, to adulthood. They can’t do that if we’re right there reminding them to hydrate.

  “Stand By Me” follows four friends on the cusp of junior high who mislead their parents about their whereabouts to go on a two-day trek about 20 miles from home in search of a kid killed by a train. It’s gobsmacking how competent they are. After grabbing sleeping bags and canteens, they’re off, not a healthful snack in sight. No sunscreen, no adults, and no way to reach mom to say, “I forgot my retainer.” When it’s time to cook dinner, the boys know how to make a fire. They have matches—for cigarettes, naturally.

• Braveheart by Eve Barlow

  Instead of fighting to control an impossible situation, we accepted we could not, and we became believers. Robust and defiant. Despite the noise, despite the doubters, despite the deafening volume of opposition and erasure. We believed we could bring forth a miracle. We put yellow ribbons on our lapels, we set an extra chair at our Shabbat and Passover tables, we recited their names, we kept putting posters up, despite the defacing and the destruction of the losers who live among us. We never stopped. Not for a day.

  We recognized the limitations of our brains and our understanding. We surrendered to the moment but we never gave up on the possibility. We trusted that the IDF and President Trump would do what they promised to do. We exercised a little something called faith.

  The clock stopped on October 7 finally on day 843. The large counting monitor in Hostage Square in Tel Aviv ceased to tick. The IDF worked throughout the previous night in an unthinkable operation called Braveheart.

• The Deaths of the Faith Are Not the Last Word by Michael Brendan Dougherty

  In The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton’s response to H. G. Wells, there is an arresting chapter in which Chesterton outlines what he sees as previous times in history when the Christian faith seemed to be fading away, only to suddenly return with vigor and strength. Forgive the long passage:

  There are people who say they wish Christianity to remain as a spirit. They mean, very literally, that they wish it to remain as a ghost. But it is not going to remain as a ghost. What follows this process of apparent death is not the lingerings of the shade; it is the resurrection of the body. These people are quite prepared to shed pious and reverential tears over the Sepulchre of the Son of Man; what they are not prepared for is the Son of God walking once more upon the hills of morning. These people, and indeed most people, were indeed by this time quite accustomed to the idea that the old Christian candle-light would fade into the light of common day. To many of them it did quite honestly appear like that pale yellow flame of a candle when it is left burning in daylight. It was all the more unexpected, and therefore all the more unmistakable, that the seven branched candle-stick suddenly towered to heaven like a miraculous tree and flamed until the sun turned pale. But other ages have seen the day conquer the candle-light and then the candle-light conquer the day. Again and again, before our time, men have grown content with a diluted doctrine. And again and again there has followed on that dilution, coming as out of the darkness in a crimson cataract, the strength of the red original wine.

  I had this in mind this morning when I came across a YouTube video of a young woman, raised by secular atheists, who has spent the last 365 days praying the rosary. We tend to think that conservatives raise children and then the culture draws them away from the traditions we wanted to pass on. But, more and more I see the reverse, with the culture driving young people back to a tradition from which they had been disinherited.

• Americans can defend lawful deportations and condemn wrongful enforcement by Erick Erickson

  Noem elevated Bovino over Tom Homan, the White House border czar, who favored a more controlled plan of targeting known criminals, gang members, drug dealers and undocumented immigrants detained by local authorities as suspects, people arrested for driving under the influence, etc. Homan also favors detaining recent arrivals. His plan makes sense.

  Importantly, Homan’s plan can be executed without mass roundups, which he opposes. But his plan still requires local law enforcement cooperation to flag undocumented immigrants who are detained. In many places, like Minneapolis, the local government prohibits such cooperation. Without it, agents need to stay in Minneapolis. Deporting undocumented immigrants is sound public policy. The United States is not stolen land. It is a sovereign nation and its borders and enforcement of those borders must mean something.

• The U.S. Spent 25 Years Trying to Deport a Somali Man Who Molested a 10-Year-Old Girl by Daniel Greenfield

  By the time ICE busted Mohamed, it had been over 25 years since his original crime and his victim, if she’s still alive, is pushing forty while her abuser continued to live freely in Minnesota.

  Did Mohamed abuse any other girls in the period between when the Obama administration dropped efforts to deport him and the Trump administration’s decision to take him into custody?

  Were any other little girls victimized by Mohamed since 1998? No one knows.

• It’s Time to Teach Civic Literacy by George Leef > We need to do far better with civics education, and in today’s Martin Center article, Richard Johnson and Thomas Lindsay discuss a good program in Texas that is hoping to make a difference. > They write: > At a time when we Americans routinely worry about the health of our civic culture, the U.S. Department of Education has made a notable investment. Earlier this month, the department approved a $1.9-million grant for The American Civic Tradition at 250, a joint initiative of Texas Southern University and West Texas A&M University aimed at improving civic literacy in underserved communities. > Students will study the primary documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers — to learn what the Founders sought to accomplish and why. - Might the “New Right 5.0” Be the Old Fusionism? by Steven F. Hayward > As [Frank] Meyer ended his essay, “The establishment of a free constitution is the great achievement of America in the drama of Western Civilization. The struggle for its preservation against Utopian corrosion is the continuing history of the United States since its foundation, a struggle which continues to this day and which is not yet decided.” - Tim Walz, ICE and Thomas Jefferson’s very WORST idea by Rich Lowry > There is some chance, though, that Minnesota is going to get away with it. > The political reaction to the tragic deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti has the administration suddenly singing a different tune on the Minneapolis operation, and allies calling on President Trump to stand down. > Maybe he can get a deal worth having with Minnesota. > But imagine if a state like Florida took a page from Walz’s book and decided it doesn’t like paying federal income taxes, then used massive grassroots resistance to wring concessions from the IRS. > More than 200 years after the Kentucky Resolutions, a version of nullification still lives — and is just as noxious. - Minnesota’s Post-Assimilation Reality by Ayaan Hirsi Ali > What we are witnessing is the inversion of sovereignty. Authority migrates away from neutral institutions and toward organized blocs. Law becomes conditional. Citizenship becomes symbolic rather than substantive. At that point, the nation-state still exists on paper, but its essential functions—boundary enforcement, even-handed governance, shared duty—are already in retreat. What remains is administration without cohesion, elections without a demos, and rights severed from obligation. > By abandoning a common civic creed, Minnesota invited competing loyalties. By rejecting assimilation, it rewarded separatism. The result is a system that no longer knows what it is trying to produce. Citizenship becomes a label rather than a discipline. Belonging is decoupled from obligation. The state asks for nothing in return, and therefore receives nothing it can rely on. In such an environment, organized blocs predictably outperform individuals, and networks built on blood, faith, or grievance steadily replace rule-bound institutions. > The cure is not cosmetic reform but a return to first principles. Immigration must once again be selective, conditional, and unapologetic. Entry should be extended only to those willing to accept the host nation’s laws and culture without negotiation, and to do so in practice rather than rhetoric. There can be no automatic entitlement, no presumption of permanence, and no tolerance for systematic abuse. Residency and citizenship are privileges, not humanitarian vouchers. When they are treated otherwise, they lose all meaning. - My Female Hero Is a Wild West Warrior by Emma Collins > Writer Amanda Fortini, who has chosen to make a home in the American West, once wrote about her effort to learn the female art of self-defense. She enlisted in a daylong shooting class called Women on Target. Why? Because safety is important, and she is “delicately built, with bird-bone wrists and arms,” she wrote. “I didn’t want to be perceived as a human orchid.” Although acquiring this new skill was petrifying to her at first, it triggered “an immediate, exhilarated reaction . . . a sense of a limit overcome.” > Oakley’s neighbor Thomas Edison captured her mastery in a short clip of her rifle-shooting in 1895, filmed at his studio in West Orange, N.J. Made with a kinetoscope, a new invention that allowed the viewer to watch a silent “moving picture,” the footage is moving, indeed. It shows all the grace and relentlessness of a great American woman, a perfect archetype for anyone aiming higher. > “The free woman must be ready to make her own way in the world,” Ms. Paglia said. That is exactly what Annie Oakley did.

• Gunmen open fire at soccer field in Mexico, killing 11 people and wounding 12

  Gunmen opened fire at a soccer field in central Mexico on Sunday, killing at least 11 people and wounding 12, authorities said.

  Salamanca Mayor Cesar Prieto said in a statement posted to social platforms that the gunmen arrived at the end of a soccer match.

  Ten people died at the scene and one died later at a hospital. The mayor said a woman and a child were among the wounded in the “regrettable and cowardly” attack.

  Prieto said the attack was part of a “crime wave” in the city and appealed to President Claudia Sheinbaum for help to control the violence.

• A Conservative’s Guide to the 2026 Best Picture Nominees by Giancarlo Sopo

  One of conservatism’s enduring insights is that aesthetics carry real stakes because culture shapes the affections long before reason weighs in. That’s why film is worth caring about. But caring about cinema isn’t the same thing as treating the multiplex as a ballot box. That’s what books and, God help me, our Twitter feeds are for.

  What matters is where a film turns our gaze. Does it begin from a posture of gratitude for what endures, or does it stir resentment toward our inherited traditions and institutions? The former is in conversation with the conservative imagination. The latter might be well made. I might even enjoy it. But it’s playing in a different key.

  Notice I haven’t said anything about a movie’s take on whatever issue is dominating the news cycle. That’s ephemera. Consider what stays with you when you leave the Vatican Museum. Is it where Raphael’s frescoes fell in the papal intrigues of Julius II, or the glimpse they offer of the eternal? One is trivia. The other speaks to the Permanent Things.

• Israel says remains of last hostage recovered from Gaza, clearing way for phase-two of ceasefire with Hamas

  Israel said Monday that the remains of the last hostage in Gaza had been recovered, clearing the way for the next phase of the ceasefire that stopped the Israel-Hamas war. The announcement came a day after Israel’s government said the military was conducting a “large-scale operation” in a cemetery in northern Gaza to locate the remains of Ran Gvili.

  The return of all remaining hostages, living or dead, has been a key part of the Gaza ceasefire’s first phase, and Gvili’s family had urged Israel’s government not to enter the second phase until his remains were recovered and returned.

• The Storm Is Coming to Washington, D.C. by Jeffrey Blehar

  If the Supreme Court upholds the Trump administration’s wildly expansive interpretation of executive branch power, I foresee little but disaster: Bond markets will probably crater, and Trump will be emboldened to wield tariffs as a child wields crayons. Further and greater executive overreaches seem sure to follow such a ruling. (And that’s before the Newsom/Spanberger administration takes office in 2029 with all the precedents and laws of the land newly laid low before them.)

  If the Supreme Court rejects the Trump administration’s arrogation of taxing power . . . then what? Does anyone expect Donald Trump to meekly submit to having his entire political agenda declared unconstitutional? I expect a wholesale rhetorical war of the most destructive and toxic sort imaginable. Set aside the very real possibility that Trump might pull an Andrew Jackson and simply openly defy the Court. Imagine instead the language that MAGA would suddenly be required to direct at the one last truly conservative political institution in America. It has long been the object of the left to destroy the credibility and prestige of the Court, over which they lost ideological control. Imagine a world where they are joined by the most voluble activists and grifters on the MAGA right.

  Batten down the hatches, Washington — the true storm is coming, and perhaps sooner than you think.

• Iran’s Weekend of Blood by Shay Katiri

  The future is unwritten, and a potential US attack could change everything. Nonetheless, we should watch the regime’s rank and file for their reaction once the dust settles, expecting defections and a possible revolt from within the system. There has already been anecdotal evidence to give hope for defections. The daughter of a commander called an opposition television station in London to apologise for her father’s sins. “I hate him,” she said, adding that most of the regime’s commanders abuse their own children. Despite the lack of internet access, an officer in the special unit tasked with cracking down on riots posted a video of himself in uniform to denounce the regime, his face visible.

  People like to say that nobody likes their country bombed, but many Iranians appear to disagree. Every message coming out of Iran is begging for foreign intervention. More than that, I am yet to talk to anyone who does not have their own list of targets. They think they have done everything within their power, but that is not enough. There is optimism among Iranians that the might of the American military will come to their aid, mixed with a fear that it might not, and they will have to resign themselves to the fact that their butchers will never be toppled. The catastrophe has been larger than any of them expected.

• The Institutional and Moral Case for Free Enterprise, According to Milei by Veronique de Rugy

  Javier Milei’s recent address at Davos is impressive. It’s also a very timely reminder of many important lessons that are often forgotten.

  The Argentinian president presents free enterprise not merely as an efficient economic system, but as a moral and institutional order rooted in Western ethical traditions. Rejecting the supposed tradeoff between justice and efficiency, Milei explains that true economic efficiency emerges only from institutions grounded in private property, voluntary exchange, and the non-aggression principle. In his view, policies that reject principles in order to pursue short-term political advantages are not only immoral but dynamically inefficient, ultimately leading to economic and social collapse. Free enterprise capitalism, Milei contends, is the only system that is both just and capable of sustaining long-run growth because it respects natural rights and enables entrepreneurial discovery.

• What I Learned From a Jane Austen Binge by Emma Camp

  Reading full-length, classic books provides a distinct form of cultural education that’s much harder to come by on the big or small screen. So many of our culture’s tropes, metaphors and references are literary in origin. Reading the works they come from in their full, uncondensed form allows for an appreciation for the oft-missed details. You get a bigger picture.

  I have an English degree and a fondness for period dramas. But I didn’t read Jane Austen closely until adulthood. Within the span of a summer, I devoured all seven of her novels, plus a collection of her unfinished works. I felt like I had unlocked a chamber of cultural information that had been previously closed to me.

  Austen’s stories did more than teach me about love and human nature. They helped me appreciate “When Harry Met Sally” and “The Materialists” more fully. They gave me access to the kind of deep insight that can’t be gained from a paragraph-long excerpt or a 30-second clip.

  When we stop reading full books, when schools push quick glances at great works and teenagers flee to bite-size media, more than our appreciation for literature suffers. Our appreciation for everything else does, too.

• Wall Street braced for a private credit meltdown. The risk of one is rising by Hugh Son

  “You’re seeing a lot of competition now for the same type of lending,” Zandi said. “If history is any guide, that’s a concern … because it probably argues for a weakening in underwriting and ultimately bigger credit problems down the road.”

  While neither Zandi nor de Fontenay said they saw an imminent collapse in the sector, as private credit continues to grow, so will its importance to the U.S. financial system.

  When banks hit turbulence because of the loans they made, there is an established regulatory playbook, but future problems in the private realm might be harder to resolve, according to de Fontenay.

  “It raises broader questions from the perspective of the safety and soundness of the overall system,” de Fontenay said. “Are we going to know enough to know when there are signs of problems before they actually occur?”

• The mission behind Trump’s Board of Peace is simple — and critics keep getting it wrong by Jonathan Schanzer

  While some critics have charged that the board is Trump’s international loyalty test, this perception could actually redound to Trump’s benefit.

  He should demand that Qatar and Turkey banish Hamas from their territories and end all support. This should be the condition for their continued inclusion.

  If Gaza becomes a success story, then one could easily imagine the board addressing other global challenges, from the Russian war against Ukraine to the appalling humanitarian crisis triggered by the conflict in Sudan.

  The jackals at the UN are watching nervously. If Trump succeeds, it will be a further sign of their failures.

• In Ominous Sign for Regime, Iran’s Protests Began in Conservative Stronghold by Jared Malsin, Margherita Stancati, Benoit Faucon, and Elvan Kivilcim

  The bloodiest crisis in Iran’s recent political history started in a conservative bastion: Tehran’s market area.

  Bazaar workers and other merchants historically have been some of the Islamic Republic’s most loyal supporters. They helped to propel its leaders to power in 1979, and largely sat out the mass protests that swept Iran in past years. This time, they were the ones who initiated the uprising.

  They were soon joined by Iranians of all backgrounds, including the young and secular who were the driving force behind earlier waves of antiregime protests. What stood out about this wave is that it was sparked by segments of society that traditionally backed the Islamic Republic, with regime heartlands—such as the clerical center of Qom and the holy city of Mashhad—witnessing some of the largest uprisings in decades.

  It is an ominous sign for the religious clerics that run Iran and reflects widespread discontent with their rule. A wave of violence that killed thousands has quashed the unrest for now but the dissatisfaction remains.

  The trigger of the latest protests was the collapse in the value of the local currency, the rial, which drove up import costs and fueled inflation in an economy that was already battered by sanctions. Even middle-class Iranians were struggling to cover everyday expenses such as meat and other food. This posed a threat to many shopkeepers.

• The Conspiracy Keeps Growing - The 49ers Are Now Officially ‘Investigating’ If The Electrical Substation Is Truly Causing All Their Injuries by Reags

  I love it. Nothing and I mean nothing gets me going like a good sports conspiracy theory. Now, obviously, you don’t want it to be centered around injuries and a team getting decimated because its stars missed a ton of time. But I’m going to be reading this report like none other and somehow finding a connection to my Achilles tear and an electrical substation. I refuse to believe any other theory if it comes out that this did lead to a minimum 1 injury.

  I want every sort of test done. Also very football guy stuff of John Lynch to be like yeah there’s numbers out there, no idea what the fuck that means. Actually, that’s just normal guy stuff. We don’t know. We can’t pretend to know. We see a conspiracy theory and run with it. I need a camera, documentary team, anything for this conspiracy theory to be proven one way or another.

  Until then, we blame the electrical substation.

• U.S. murder rate hits lowest level since 1900, report says by Josephine Walker

  Murders fell 21% last year in 35 large U.S. cities — the biggest one-year drop ever and likely the lowest rate since 1900, Axios-reviewed data shows.

  Why it matters: The decline signals a complete reversal of the COVID-era crime wave.

  By the numbers: 11 of 13 tracked crimes were lower in 2025 than in 2024, according to data compiled by the Council on Criminal Justice.

• The Soundtrack of American Order by Gregory McBrayer

  Arguably, the most famous example of a patriotic (if a bit melodramatic) popular culture song in postwar America, is Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” Frankly, it’s curious that America’s most patriotic genre hails from the land of the Old Confederacy. It’s stranger still that Stone Mountain, the birthplace of the modern Ku Klux Klan, which infamously features an engraving of three Confederate generals, has for decades had a laser and fireworks show featuring Lee Greenwood blaring he was “Proud to be an American.” Displaying the Stars and Stripes on a monument that celebrates the Stars and Bars is a jarring juxtaposition, but the song shows that many Southerners have managed to combine or reconcile their love of the South with a deep American patriotism. (Elvis Presley’s “An American Trilogy” also stitches together these rival elements). While perhaps intellectually incongruous, it’s no doubt socially salutary.

  Lastly, Country is the popular genre most hospitable to religious belief, particularly Christianity. Country music has been washed in the blood of the Lamb, and it looks askance at anyone who wasn’t. This is true of plenty of mainstream country songs (“God’s Country,” “I Saw God Today,” “Me and Jesus,” and “Why Me”) and gospel albums have been released by many a country artist, including Alan Jackson, Randy Travis, Reba McEntire, and Dolly Parton. Religion and tradition go hand in hand with support for the law.

• The ‘ET of Varginha’ captivates Brazil 30 years after sighting dismissed by a military investigation by Naiara Galarraga Gortázar

  The Varginha ET case did not fade into oblivion, unlike many other accounts of alien encounters or UFO sightings investigated by the Brazilian Armed Forces and meticulously preserved by the National Archives. After a few months, the story gained traction thanks to anonymous military testimonies, their voices distorted, collected by ufologists. They claimed the alien was captured alive, taken to a hospital, then to the Três Corações barracks — in Pelé’s hometown — and from there to a secret university laboratory in Campinas for analysis.

  The story then grew more complex. It was no longer just an encounter with an extraterrestrial; the military was now accused of covering it up. One of the soldiers recounted that “it barely had a nose, its eyes were very red, and its mouth was small.” Several residents claimed to have seen a UFO fly over the area before landing.

• America’s Energy Revolution Continues by Steven Hayward

  The United States is now in the enviable position of producing a surplus of primary energy — perhaps the only major industrial nation that does so aside from Russia, Canada, and tiny Norway. In retrospect, it was roughly 20 years ago that America’s energy prospects were starting to turn around, though no one in Washington was aware of it at the time, and that’s likely a good thing, because if the political class knew of the large transformation that was underway, they would surely have tried to stop it. In fact, there has seldom been such a significant change in any large area of economic activity toward which public policy was more irrelevant, when it was not in fact a deliberate hindrance. Twenty years ago, energy discourse was awash in buzzwords and concepts such as “smart grid” and “hydrogen highway.” These ideas now seem as quaint and obsolete as rotary dial telephones. And the more recent “Net-Zero” slogan seems to be dying fast.

  The most common one-word explanation for this startling turnaround in American oil and gas production is “fracking,” short for hydraulic fracturing. In case you’ve been hiding under an un-fracked rock, hydraulic fracturing involves injecting high pressure fluid into tight cracks deep underground to release oil and gas previously inaccessible to conventional oil and gas drilling technology. However, fracking is not a new technology; it has been used for “enhanced oil recovery” in older conventional oil and gas wells for more than 50 years. What was new 20 years ago were breakthroughs in directional drilling technology and a more detailed grasp of underground fluid dynamics, which enabled cost-effective production of previously inaccessible resources.

• Trump Walks Back Greenland Tariff Threat, Announces ‘Framework’ of a Deal with NATO by Brittany Bernstein

  President Trump on Wednesday announced he would drop his plans to impose tariffs on eight NATO allies that are not “going along” with his plans to annex Greenland, saying he had “formed a framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland.”

  The president previously said the eight countries, including Denmark, would be hit with 10 percent tariffs. His initial plan included raising the tariffs to 25 percent on June 1 and keeping them at that level until “such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

  “Based upon a very productive meeting that I have had with the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, we have formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday afternoon.

  “Based upon this understanding, I will not be imposing the Tariffs that were scheduled to go into effect on February 1st,” he added.

• Favorite Films of 2025, Part 2 by Victoria

  20. Don’t Let’s Go the Dogs Tonight, dir. Embeth Davidtz. When casting the lead for her adaptation of a portion of Alexandra Fuller’s best-selling memoir, director Embeth Davidtz was looking for a grubby-faced wild child who could ride a horse and a motorbike and who had never acted before—and she found one in a small village in the South African bush in Lexi Venter, whose performance as eight-year-old Alexandra, aka “Bobo,” is extraordinary. The movie depicts the life of Bobo, a white Rhodesian, on her family’s cattle farm during the final stages of the Bush War in the late 1970s, in which Black Rhodesians fought for independence from their white (British and British-descended) colonizers. Bobo is plucky and imperious and says outrageous things, some of which she’s heard from adults; family chaos, racial tensions, and national politics are narrated from her perspective, innocent (in the sense of simple, candid, ingenuous) and ignorant as it is. Davidtz plays Bobo’s mentally unstable mother, who drinks heavily to deal with her grief, not primarily over a collapsing way of life but over something more personally wrenching.

  The title is a British idiom meaning “Let’s avoid ruin” or “Let’s not act in degrading ways,” an admonition spoken especially before parties—let’s not become like spoiled food thrown to the dogs. It originated with a poem by the English humorist A. P. Herbert, who writes, “Don’t let’s go to the dogs tonight, / For mother will be there.”

• Iranians Living Under Virtual Lockdown After Deadly Protests by

  The usually bustling streets of Iran’s capital are largely empty as security forces reassert their control after crushing unprecedented protests against the country’s clerical rulers.

  Residents of Tehran describe a city under virtual martial law, with security personnel deployed on the streets and residents largely staying indoors. Many shops and restaurants close in the evening.

  “The feeling of martial law is completely in place at night,” a man in his 70s who left Iran on January 17 told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda.

  “One of the reasons for that,” he added, “is that the armed forces randomly stop cars. They check the entire car and also mobile phones. They ask people to unlock their phones.”

• Q&A: Masih Alinejad on Iran by Tunku Varadarajan

  [Tunku Varadarajan:] And you want the separation of religion and state, a secular Iran?

  [Masih Alinejad:] Definitely. We’ve had enough of Shia militias. We’ve had enough of Islamism in our country. Many people don’t want to say it, but I say it: When people burn mosques in Iran right now in this uprising, it isn’t anarchy. Don’t panic. This is not Islamophobia. This is the rage against 47 years of Islamism ruining the normal life of Iranians. It’s not chaos when they burn mosques. It’s sending a signal that this is a progressive revolution. This is a signal that we, the people of Iran, are not just protecting our land or ourselves. We are protecting the whole world from a most dangerous cancer, that of Islamism. This is a revolution against the Islamic Republic, against Ali Khamenei, against his gang of killers…against Islamism.

  I’ve seen with my own eyes people on American university campuses chanting, “I am Hamas.” And I was like, “Wow, you don’t know who Hamas is. Hamas hangs us, Hamas rapes us.” There is the danger of growing Islamism here. So when we are fighting against the Islamic Republic, we are also fighting for the future of America, for the future of Europe.

  [Varadarajan: ] Do you believe in Islam? Are you a Muslim?

  [Alinejad:] No, I was born in Iran. When you are born in Iran, you don’t have any other choice. It’s so cruel that you, because of the geography of your birth, have only one option—to be Muslim. In Iran, if you say that you don’t want to be Muslim, you will be hanged as an enemy of God. I’m not Muslim. I don’t believe in Islam. People in the West often say, “Oh my God, all your activities are against Islam.” I say, wait a minute, my activities are demanding the right to sing, the right to dance, the right to remove my hijab. Having the right to criticize Islam. Having the right to just walk out from Islam. Having the right to have a normal life. This is all against Islam in your eyes. But you’ve never asked a simple question: Why is Islam against women? Why is Islam against me?

• The Fearless Fourth-Down Gamble That Won Indiana the National Championship by Robert O’Connell

  “One Mike” wasn’t exactly Indiana’s signature weapon. The play was a quarterback draw, calling for Mendoza to pause for a beat in the backfield, let the defense flow around him and then run straight into the teeth of the opposition. It was a counterintuitive choice, turning the guy who led the country in touchdown passes into a rusher whose gangly 6-foot-5 frame sometimes made it look like he was sprinting on a frozen lake.

  “Everybody on the team, including Coach, makes fun of my running style,” Mendoza said.

  As it turns out, that was exactly what made “One Mike” such a useful ploy. Choosing between playing the pass or anticipating the run, Miami spread out to blanket Indiana’s receiving options, guarding against the right arm that could soon make Mendoza the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft. At that moment, the Hoosiers knew they had the Hurricanes right where they wanted them.

  “The safeties were wide enough, and the linebackers were out. It was a light box,” said quarterback coach Chandler Whitmer. “I felt like he was getting the first down.”

• Inside Iran’s Wikipedia War

  Since protests erupted in December 2025, Wikipedia’s 2025-2026 Iranian Protests page has drawn from over 400 sources. Authorship remains relatively distributed—no single editor controls more than 8% (as of time of writing).

  But the Talk Page reveals the pressure campaign in real-time. Some argue that calling the Iranian government a “regime” violates neutrality, despite most sources using that term. One editor claims Reza Pahlavi, a prominent opposition figure, shouldn’t be mentioned as notable.

  User SwedishDutch disputed reported casualty figures, claiming that two sources that have provided critical coverage of the regime—Sunday Times and Iran International—were unreliable. The SwedishDutch account had been created just two hours previously and has since been deleted.

• Fury over Jennifer Lawrence’s dog reveals a culture that puts kids last by Bethany Mandel

  Wanting a dog that fits your life, your household and your children isn’t heartless — it’s responsible.

  And refusing to sign your kids up for an animal-rescue experiment isn’t a failure of compassion, it’s responsible parenting.

  Many of Lawrence’s loudest critics have never been parents.

  They’ve never felt the cold panic of realizing your adult decision failed to protect a child.

  Parenting strips away the luxury of idealism: When the safety and security of your child is in your hands, risk becomes real — and you don’t get to pretend it away.

• College basketball players among 26 charged by FBI in connection with point shaving, fixing outcome of games by Will Backus, Matt Norlander

  Federal prosecutors charged 26 people on Thursday, including several former and current college basketball players, in an alleged point-shaving scheme, according to an indictment obtained by CBS News. The indictment states that more than 39 college basketball players on at least 17 Division I teams “fixed and attempted to fix” over 29 games.

  Seventeen former college basketball players are listed as defendants in the indictment. Fifteen of those players participated in the 2023-24 or 2024-25 seasons. A few have also played this season.

  Four of the current players listed in the indictment are: Kennesaw State’s Simeon Cottle, the preseason Conference USA Player of the Year, who was averaging 20.2 points; Delaware State’s Camian Shell (8.0 ppg); Eastern Michigan’s Carlos Hart (13.1 ppg); and Texas Southern’s Oumar Koureissi (4.9 ppg).

  The list of schools with current or former players alleged to have participated in game-fixing: Abilene Christian, Alabama State, Buffalo, Coppin State, DePaul, Eastern Michigan, Fordham, Kennesaw State, La Salle, New Orleans, Nicholls, North Carolina A&T, Northwestern State, Robert Morris, Saint Louis, Southern Miss and Tulane.

• Of Roots and Adventures by Peter J. Leithart

  Kingsnorth misses most of this, I think, because he conceives the original human condition as a “state of questless ease.” Not so. Before the Fall, downstream from Eden, Genesis tells us, was the land of Havilah, with its deposits of good gold, bdellium, and onyx (Gen. 2:11–12). That looks very much like a divine incitement to a quest: Had the Creator wanted Adam to stay put, he should have deposited the gold in the garden. 

  Human beings are suspended between longing for rest and an equally strong longing for risky quests. Kingsnorth says moderns are in the grip of what Spengler calls the “Faustian Idea,” the insatiable drive to expand, conquer, invent, explore, the restless incapacity to pause to say, “Stay! You are so fair!” Sabbath-free living is indeed inhuman, but it distorts a deeply human motivation. Roots are, as Weil says, a basic human need, but so is adventure or, as Weil herself calls it, risk, which, she argues, should be “a permanent presence . . . in all aspects of social life,” lest life run aground on boredom and fear.

• My Experience With Artificial Intelligence by Thomas Sowell

  Tragically, the AI impersonation fraud is part of a much larger and much longer lasting undermining of the very concept of truth. At one extreme are those intellectuals who speak loftily of “my truth,” as if it were private property, exempt from challenge by facts or logic. But a privately owned truth is irrelevant to communication between people.

  More important are whole institutions—including education and the news media—whose basic reason for existing is to convey truth, but who cannot resist the temptation to seek power instead.

  If there are no serious consequences for either individuals or institutions that create frauds—whether by AI or by silencing other viewpoints—we will have no basis for settling our inevitable differences other than violence.

  And once violence takes over, it may not matter what issues set it off, as violence and counter-violence take on a life of their own. At that point, the issue is no longer which vision will win, but whether we shall survive as a free society, or survive at all.

• Favorite Films of 2025, Part 1 by Victoria Emily Jones

  The Shaker settlements of colonial-era New York and New England, the forests of early twentieth-century Idaho, a juke joint in Jim Crow Mississippi, the political prisons of 1970s Brazil, a crumbling ranch during the Rhodesian Bush War, a night market in Taipei, the beaches of a remote Welsh island—these are some of the places where the stories unfold. They explore parent-child relational fracture; the grief of losing a child or a spouse; the experience of spiritual ecstasy; the beauty of building a life and a family; the pressures of unemployment; the struggles of settling into a new city, country, or living arrangement; the horrors of adolescence; the consuming urge for revenge against an oppressor, and what to do when you’re confronted with their humanity; art making in (virtual) community; and the complicated process of healing from the trauma of sexual assault; among other themes.

• The Bankruptcy of the Democrats’ Elvis Presley Approach to Immigration by Ruy Teixeira

  Obviously, the current Democratic vogue for treating all ICE activities as illegitimate and susceptibility to dumb maximalist slogans like “Abolish ICE” points them in precisely the wrong direction for dealing with the thorny and complex realities of the immigration issue. They’re just setting themselves up for future failure.

  In short, it’s time to stop coddling the “In This House, We Believe” crowd and adopt a serious, grown-up approach to immigration and immigrants. “Don’t Be Cruel” isn’t gonna cut it.

• Reps. Tenney, Min Lead Letter Urging Action to Support Iranian Protesters Amid Internet Blackout

  Peaceful protests erupted across Iran in late December 2025, driven by severe inflation, economic collapse, and long-standing political repression. What began in Tehran quickly spread to more than 185 cities across all 31 provinces. According to several reports, at least 2,000 people have been killed and more than 10,700 arrested as the regime violently cracked down on demonstrators. On January 8, 2026, Iranian authorities escalated their response by imposing a nationwide communications shutdown, cutting mobile data, restricting cellular networks, and attempting to block access to satellite-based services. In their letter, Reps. Tenney and Min urge the administration to leverage existing and emerging technologies, including secure internet freedom tools and satellite-based communications, to help Iranians bypass regime-controlled infrastructure and stay connected during this critical moment.

  “The Iranian regime is trying to crush peaceful protests by cutting the Iranian people off from the world,” said Congresswoman Tenney. “Access to information is not a luxury, it is a lifeline. When authoritarian governments use violence and censorship to silence their citizens, the United States has both a moral responsibility and a strategic interest to help people communicate, organize, and speak freely. I applaud President Trump for his statements, which made it clear that the United States will stand with the brave Iranians standing up to the brutal mullahs. This letter urges President Trump to continue leveraging every available tool to support the Iranian people as they fight for freedom, dignity, and a future free from tyranny. The Iranian people have no greater friend in their fight to Make Iran Great Again than President Trump.”

• A Bogeyman Called ‘Far-Right’ by Daniel J. Mahoney

  Economic growth alone cannot sustain a free and civilized political order. To his credit, Kast understands this well. The moral culture of a free society must be actively defended and preserved.

  Kast is committed to the rule of law, the integrity of Chile’s borders, and a form of popular capitalism that resists statism while bringing the disadvantaged fully into what Pope John Paul II called the “circle of productivity and exchange.” His coalition is patriotic and anti-revolutionary, though less uniformly socially conservative than he himself is. Governing will require a balance of principle and prudence — the enduring mark of statesmanship. One can only wish him well.

  In Chile, at least for now, democratic conservatives have successfully resisted the designs of the revolutionary Left. The lesson is heartening, and not only for Chile. Yet it must still penetrate powerful ideological and institutional barriers. Americans, too, must resist the systematic obfuscation of political language that prevents clear judgment about political realities at home and abroad. Democratic conservatism should not be conflated with a mythical “far right,” nor should the far left’s continuing threat to liberty and decency be denied. As Orwell understood, political clarity depends on linguistic honesty.

• Has the U.S. Cracked the Havana Syndrome Mystery? by Jim Geraghty

  If you’re the defense minister of some country and you’ve bought Chinese-built anti-stealth radar systems, ask for a refund. When it comes to protecting your country, you really don’t want the Temu brand.

  On January 12, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth visited SpaceX in Texas. Introducing him, Elon Musk said, “I’ll tell you a little bit just about the purpose of SpaceX. It’s like we want to make Star Trek real, okay? We want to make Starfleet Academy real, so that it’s not always science fiction, but one day the science fiction turns to science fact.”

  Maybe the U.S. military already has a version of a Star Trek phaser that can stun or incapacitate, instead of killing a foe.

• Confessions of a Recovering Liberal White Woman by Sasha Stone

  Hearing those words by Renee Good’s wife just before disaster hit and the bullets killed her instantly, I thought of Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise.

  Back then, the controversial ending where they drive off a cliff and we assume crash to their deaths seemed like a twisted form of empowerment, but all it really meant was that they had to give up on a world that had given up on them.

  Liberal white women in the past 20 years have lived the most privileged lives of almost anyone on the planet. But even having everything somehow wasn’t enough. They needed to still feel like Thelma and Louise, like they had no other choice but to scream in the faces of the ICE agents, no other choice but to resist, no other choice but to step on the gas.

• Disorder Ends in Violence by Abe Greenwald

  The act of obstructing is all the argument that’s needed. Resisting law and order is, among a large swath of the left, a good in itself. This notion, too, goes back a few years. And anti-ICE activists wouldn’t feel so emboldened to break the law had they not been provided the template by those who came before them. 

  During the summer of 2020, the liberal establishment sanctioned riots as “mostly peaceful protests”—arson, looting, and fatalities notwithstanding. After the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, the anti-Semitic mobs that hit the streets and campuses chanting terrorist slogans verbatim and violating the civil rights of Jewish students were deemed “pro-Palestinian activists.” In both cases, police stood down lest they furnished the thugs with another flashpoint moment.

  Everyone expected that this arrangement would persist indefinitely. In left-wing minds, law-enforcement officials—local and federal—exist to absorb abuse. But common sense says otherwise: Their job is not to smile in the face of apoplectic fanatics; it’s to serve and protect, which means, you know, enforcing the law. And the return of that status-quo understanding threatens the activists’ entire gameplan. Police and federal agents were supposed to remain punching bags. That’s what enabled radicals to get in their faces and tell them they were fascist killers.

  The left is still committed to this two-sided cosplay. I hope they quickly come to grips with the fact that the other side isn’t playing anymore. It would spare us further senseless tragedies.

• Evil and Modernity’s Unbelief by Kale Zelden

  What young, serious Catholics seek, therefore, is not a pure and rigorist ecclesial Vallhalla, but a Church where forgiveness, mercy, compassion, and empathy are not interpreted via the path of antinomianism, but as the gateways to a sanctity of cruciform intensity. They seek eternity via a Church whose outer life, despite its sins, clearly and unapologetically calls us to the repentance of the way of the cross. A Church from the cross, of the cross, and for the cross. A Church that once again knows itself as a lantern in the darkness, no matter how feeble the flame, which can grant to us the gift of hope.

  Young Catholics of today want Christ and Him crucified. This is why our ecclesial leaders must cease the narrative that views these young Catholics as “rigid indietrists” who are “fundamentalists” seeking a simplistic “epistemic certitude” in the midst of life’s “complicated concrete situations.” This is the monumental pastoral blindness of too many prelates in our era who fail to read the signs of the times as an agonistic search for eternity. They routinely misinterpret the thirst for an experience of eternity through the living adventure of the quest for sanctity as a form of religious neurosis in need of therapeutic ecclesial remediation.

  But this is a fundamentally incorrect pastoral reading of our times. It is a tragically wrong reading of our times. And it has led directly to a Church that marginalizes young, fervent Catholics as neurotics even as Fr. Rupnik continues on in good standing.

  Such a Church cannot kiss modernity’s aged, bloodless lips.

• Who radicalized the Mississippi synagogue arsonist? by Salena Zito

  Local news reports show Pittman was an honor student and an outstanding baseball athlete who graduated from St. Joseph in 2024. Since then, he has been an outfielder at Coahoma Community College.

  Three days ago, around the time of the attack, a post on what investigators believe is Pittman’s Instagram account suggested his interests extended beyond baseball. The account featured an image of Princess Clara, an animated character from Drawn Together known for religious fanaticism and bigotry, pushing Mumble O’Algo, a secondary character depicted wearing a Star of David and carrying bags of money, into a pool while shouting, “A Jew in my back yard! I can’t believe my Jew crown didn’t work. You are getting baptized right now!”

  The question is who radicalized this young man, with seemingly no ideological bent, from posts about baseball and faith to attempting to burn down a house of worship and using phraseology like “Synagogue of Satan.”

• The Cloying, Narcissistic, Theatrically Militant ‘Resistance’ Is Back by Noah Rothman

  The militant delusions that fueled Resistance-style politics in the first Trump era are back in vogue. Establishmentarian Democrats held out for as long as they could.

  They suffered their voters’ censure when those voters objected to the behavior of the progressive lawmakers who heckled and brought props to disrupt Donald Trump’s 2025 address to a joint session of Congress. They were told that they had to be “willing to get shot” in the name of anti-Trumpism because “there needs to be blood to grab the attention of the press and the public.”

  Establishment Democrats’ palliative activism couldn’t hold a candle to captivatingly eschatological tracts like the provocative essay by George Mason University Ph.D. student Nicholas Decker, “When Must We Kill Them?” They failed to dissuade their base voters from joining Resistance-style clubs that train activists to confront law enforcement and put themselves at risk — one of which Good herself belonged to. For a certain sort of progressive agitator, engaging in tense confrontations with armed police has become a sport.

• Quantum cameras could remake space-based intelligence by Patrick Tucker

  “You basically have light coming through a lens; it hits a sensor, and then that sensor takes a JPEG, an image, and then you can view it… or you can run AI on top, right, and detect things,” Galatsanos said. “Whether in space with high-resolution digital cameras or old-fashioned pinhole cameras, that process hasn’t [changed].”

  That traditional method limits what can effectively be photographed based on diffraction, the process by which light beams pass through an aperture. It’s also a reason why high-resolution imaging satellites, like the WorldView-3, are large and heavy: like a telescope, they are mostly glass lenses and empty space. This is a reason why launches cost an average of about $50 million per satellite, and why why only a few countries have access to high-resolution satellite imagery.

  Quantum science opens the possibility of collecting images using sensors that don’t require the same dense, heavy components. One of Diffraqtion’s cameras is the size of a small suitcase, launchable for just half a million dollars.

  That just might be the key to shooting down highly maneuverable hypersonic missiles, as envisioned by the White House’s Golden Dome effort. The method proposed by Diffraqtion might lower the cost of the imaging systems on space-based interceptors, or even reduce the number needed to do the job.

• The joy of Dilbert: Scott Adams brightened our lives by mocking everyday indignities by James Bovard

  Scott Adams, the cartoonist who gave the world “Dilbert,” passed away Tuesday after a valiant public fight against prostate cancer.

  His glorious BS radar deserves to be prominently displayed in the Smithsonian Institution. No one had a sharper ear than Adams for contemporary American bloviating.

  The “Dilbert” cartoon strip was launched in 1989 and caught fire in the 1990s. For many downtrodden office workers, posting a “Dilbert” cartoon in their cubicle became a tiny flag of independence.

• Iran’s Humanitarian Crisis by Eve Barlow

  This time it is different because as Iranian civilians rise up to overthrow the Ayatollahs, and as the IRGC martyrs them in the thousands in the process, the West is left holding the bag of what it has supported and allowed to grow over decades. Now the West’s hypocrisy is fully exposed.

  The weaponization of “Islamophobia” can no longer stand when civilians under Islamist rule are torching hijabs and mosques to rid their once thriving society of the poison that has kept them whipped and chained from cradle to grave for 47 years.

  This time it’s different because the uprising of brave Iranians has put the West’s life on the line, too.

  Mr President, the world is waiting to see if you will take the opportunity of a lifetime. For Iran. For the West. For civilization itself.

• Security camera catches person splashing liquid inside Mississippi synagogue before fire ignited by Molly Minta and Emily Wagster Pettus

  The video footage has become part of a joint federal, state and local investigation.

  The fire was reported shortly after 3 a.m. Saturday, and firefighters extinguished it before sunrise. No congregants or firefighters were injured.

  Beth Israel’s congregation president, Zach Shemper, said in a statement Sunday that damage assessment continues, and several churches have extended offers for Beth Israel congregants to use their buildings for worship space. He said the congregation has established a donation fund for rebuilding, with a link on the congregation’s website.

  “We are a resilient people,” Shemper said. “With support from our community, we will rebuild.”

• Whistling Past the Graveyard at the Golden Globes by Kyle Smith

  The Golden Globes is supposed to be the funsy, unpredictable little brother of the Oscars and Emmys, and last night was certainly the first awards show I’ve seen that stopped dead to stage a promotional plug for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, recently acquired by Paramount Skydance, which also owns CBS.

  Being the Avis of awards shows can be liberating; five times the show has lent its mic to a comic who clearly hates everyone in the room (Ricky Gervais). Yet it has also seemed on occasion to be like a political convention with more cleavage. Accepting a lifetime achievement award nine years ago, Meryl Streep turned the speech into a broadside aimed at then-president-elect Trump. In 2020, when Patricia Arquette won, she denounced Mr. Trump for bringing the country to “the brink of war” because two days earlier he had killed Qassem Soleimani with a drone strike.

  The principal beneficiaries of that act, the Iranian people, are rising up against their oppressive, religiously fanatical government right now. But they earned no notice on Sunday night’s telecast. Nor did anyone speak out about events in Minneapolis or Venezuela. Host Nikki Glaser was more interested in the new leadership at CBS News: “And the award for Most Editing goes to: CBS News! Yes, CBS News: America’s newest place to see B.S. news.” This swipe can’t have pleased Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, who has every right to wonder why, of all the things a host on a CBS broadcast might mock, it had to be CBS News.

• The Way to the Temple

  In ancient Greece, when the concept of theater was still new, it wasn’t the casual form of entertainment it would later become in Elizabethan England and post-Renaissance Italy. Citizens of Athens would walk by the thousands to the south slope of the Acropolis and fill the stadium-style seats of the massive Theater of Dionysus. They would sit in the sun from dawn to dusk and watch three tragedies and a satyr play. This was a sacred event, not an everyday pastime — shows were presented only during special religious festivals held two or three times each year. The agora was where people gathered daily to gossip, hear news, and watch street performers. The theater was where they went to experience something transcendent. Our modern agoras are bursting with diversions, but the same conditions that give us convenience and abundance make real rapture stubbornly rare. Our theaters are settling into a new position atop the mountain. There are things up there we all need. As long as we stay human, there’s hope that enough of us will keep making the trek up the slope.

• On Football and Pain by Charles C. W. Cooke

  Did you notice that word: “we”? My mother makes fun of me for that. “What do you mean, ‘we‘?” she asks. She has lots of questions like that. “Why do you care so much?” she says. “You don’t know any of the players, and you aren’t on the team.” Another of hers: “It’s just a ball. How can you possibly be depressed about what happened to it?”

  This is all fair. But I am depressed about what happened to it. Goodness me, I am. Truly, it hurts. I barely slept last night. Instead, I replayed all of the game’s hinge points over and over again. What if we’d kicked the field goal on fourth and one? What if that spot hadn’t been overturned? What if the safety hadn’t been beaten to that pass? What if we’d got a stop in the fourth quarter? We only needed one stop! I even fantasized about things going another way. I replayed throws, but added Jaguars interceptions. I rendered the last play of the game as a 50-yard touchdown pass, instead of a Bills pick. Millions of years of evolution, and I’m using my brain’s imagination for that.

  But I love it. I really do. I hate it, too. It makes me elated and frustrated and happy and sad and angry and relieved. I’m interested in it, intellectually. I’m attracted to it, aesthetically. When watching, I’m even — rare for me! — drawn willingly into a mob. Why? It’s just 11 men trying to move a piece of leather up a field. I have some theories about man’s need for tribes, and faux-danger, and war-by-other-means, but I also don’t particularly care. It is what it is. I’m a football fan. I know no other way of being.

• Efficiency Is Making Us Less Human by Alexandra Hudson

  But Ellul’s concern is about far more than technology. Ellul is concerned that in our fixation with specialization and technique, especially in our modern universities, we’ve lost a holistic vision of the human person—and have thereby imperiled the education required to cultivate truly whole persons.

  And on this score Ellul is again in good company.

  Socrates said that techne (Greek for knowing and making) could be good only when deployed with sophia (Greek for wisdom). Many years later, C.S. Lewis, a contemporary of Ellul, echoed this idea in his famous essay, The Abolition of Man: technique that is not guided by wisdom has the potential for disastrous consequences, including the very abolition of mankind itself.

  For Ellul, technique and the modern “cult of efficiency” come at the expense of thinking holistically and globally. Have you ever been encouraged to “Think globally, act locally?” Ellul actually coined that phrase: He wrote in his Perspectives on Our Age, “By thinking globally I can analyze all phenomena, but when it comes to acting, it can only be local and on a grassroots level if it is to be honest, realistic, and authentic.”

• Wikipedia Bans Gang of 40 Editor for Systematic Narrative Manipulation

  Iskandar323’s site ban marks a rare moment of institutional accountability on Wikipedia. But the mechanisms that enabled years of systematic narrative manipulation remain intact. The editing patterns documented here are not the work of a lone actor but reflect a broader infrastructure of influence that operates largely invisible to the platform’s hundreds of millions of users.

  Wikipedia’s power lies in its perceived neutrality. When that neutrality is systematically compromised on the most contested geopolitical issues of our time, the consequences extend far beyond any single article or edit war.

• The Soul Of Iran by Eve Barlow

  Today there are many evil forces at large determined to keep the fight of Iran in the blackout that the regime has - since last night – subjected the nation to. There are also evil forces at large determined to continue banishing us - the allied voices of truth – from the communities we built in the West, by any means necessary.

  But I’ll tell you this with certainty. The influence of the left won’t last. For a start, their only oxygen is libel. And there is no heart in a lie. There is only cold cruelty.

  In Iran’s enforced darkness, we must be a light. Witnesses say that last night approximately 50 protesters were shot and murdered with machine guns in the city of Fardis. Yet they continue to pour into the streets. Theirs is a revolution that could smash the devilish triangle of Iran, Russia and China. It has the power to change the map of the world.

• The Minnesota incident by Scott Johnson

  On September 30, 1962, President Kennedy issued Executive Order 11053 to provide “assistance for the removal of unlawful obstructions of justice in the State of Mississippi” in relation to integration of the University of Mississippi. The entire Mississippi National Guard (Army and Air) was placed on active federal service on the same day. The Mississippi National Guard called this period “Operation Rocky Road” while the United States Army called it the “Oxford Incident.” We’ve had too many Minneapolis incidents to denominate this one in the singular, but that’s what we have here.

• Minnesota ‘ICE Watch’ Group Renee Good Belonged to Trained Activists to Interfere with Agents, Block Vehicles by Haley Strack

  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.

• When Ramming ICE Became a Liberal Trend by Daniel Greenfield

  It’s the same exact program that played out during the sixties and seventies.

  Having a ‘martyr’ will allow leftists to force Democrats to back the elimination of ICE and with it immigration enforcement, which under their administrations had barely become an afterthought, and to justify increasing violence against a law enforcement organization that they demonized.

  The great mistake we made with international terrorism was to chase the terrorists instead of targeting those behind them. It would be unfortunate if we continued making the same mistake with domestic terrorists, arresting those violent, criminal or radical enough to drive their SUVs at ICE and Border Patrol personnel, instead of the political infrastructure behind it all. That’s the same mistake we made with BLM and it quickly overwhelmed local and federal law enforcement. With over 100 car ramming attacks, a number sure to continue increasing, immigration enforcement personnel rightly see themselves in the ‘line of fire’, but they will now also face pressure to avoid another fatal shooting like the one in Minneapolis.

Having watched quite a few segments this week, I must say that the CBS Evening News reboot, under Bari Weiss leadership, has been accurate, honest, and frankly the only new program on TV worth a damn.

• Removal of Maduro reinforces anti-Left wave in Latin America by Conrad Black

  It has been disappointing but not entirely surprising to see the widespread hysteria in Europe in support of the illegitimate Maduro gangster regime in Venezuela, and the new round of anxiety about a possible US military seizure of Greenland. The pedantic fuss-budgetry about the legality of the American action in Venezuela is nonsense. Former President Maduro and his wife were authentically indicted in New York during the Biden administration as drug traffickers intimately involved in illegally bringing into the United States large quantities of lethal narcotics. President Trump is correct in his conclusion that this traffic caused the death of thousands of Americans every year and amounted to an act of war against the United States and a serious threat to the legitimate interests and national security of the United States. As president and commander-in-chief, he has the duty and the right to protect the national interest and to enforce the laws of the country.

  The only remaining shadow of doubt on the probity of his conduct was the general recognition that leaders of the governments of sovereign countries should not be apprehended and removed by other countries, but it is notorious than Maduro stole the last two elections, has illegally transformed the legislature into an impotent talking shop, packed the Supreme Court, suppressed and intimidated a free media, and repressed the entire country. He has for some time not been recognised as legitimate leader of Venezuela and therefore does not benefit from the presumption of immunity to overthrow and removal by another country against which he has committed acts of war.

• Notes from Upstream: Our Vines Have Tender Sour Grapes by Max Cossack

  Whatever their personal motives, inveterate prattlers Carlson and Owens are hacking away at one of the organizations critical to America’s ongoing success, an organization full of people who do the hard practical work of winning supporters and elections.

  There’s nothing admirable about that.

• Socialism is a hate crime by James Pierson

  R. J. Rummel, a noted scholar of political violence and totalitarian movements, coined the term “democide” to describe large-scale government killings for political purposes—in other words, politically motivated murder. While communists and socialists have not had a monopoly on democide, these movements have been responsible for far more political killing than any other political movement or form of government in the modern era.

  After looking at the facts, Rummel, writing in 1993, drew this conclusion:

  In sum the communists probably have murdered something like 110,000,000, or near two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course, the total itself is shocking. It is several times the 38,000,000 battle-dead that have been killed in all this century’s international and domestic wars. Yet the probable number of murders in the Soviet Union alone—just one communist country—well surpasses the human cost of wars.

  Rummel suspected that the estimate of 110 million killed may be too low. In fact, he believed the death toll from socialist democide in the twentieth century may be as high as 260 million.

• Things Worth Remembering: Orwell Saw This Coming by Charles Lane

  This humbling encounter with the actual working class, as opposed to the abstract one of socialist theory, inspired Orwell to reflect on the cultural gap between workers and the progressives who claim to speak for them. Though a committed socialist, he was compelled to train his formidable polemical powers on fellow leftists. This section of The Road to Wigan Pier makes the book unforgettable—and uncannily relevant to the era of Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani:

  We have reached a stage when the very word Socialism calls up, on the one hand, a picture of aeroplanes, tractors, and huge glittering factories of glass and concrete; on the other, a picture of vegetarians with wilting beards, of Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half gramophone), of earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control fanatics, and Labour Party backstairs-crawlers. Socialism, at least in this island, does not smell any longer of revolution and the overthrow of tyrants; it smells of crankishness, machine-worship, and the stupid cult of Russia. Unless you can remove that smell, and very rapidly, Fascism may win.

  There’s no precise analogy between the British socialists of Orwell’s day and contemporary U.S. woke progressives. Yet it’s close: If you substitute “electric cars” for “aeroplanes,” “trans kids” for “birth control,” and “Free Palestine” for “the stupid cult of Russia,” Orwell could be writing about academics in the Bay Area or Mamdani’s fan base in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Substitute “MAGA” for “fascism” and the parallels are even clearer.

• Understanding ‘The Warmth Of Collectivism’ by Rod Dreher

  Solzhenitsyn, in The Gulag Archipelago, came to understand how he too, as a young Communist, had been implicated in its evil:

  It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience; how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil.

  Think of a small but nonetheless shocking act of evil: the kidnapping of the Jewish child Edgardo Mortara from his parents in Bologna, in 1858, on the orders of Pope Pius IX, who was the sovereign of the Papal States, which still existed at the time. The Jewish child had been secretly baptized by a Catholic servant. When the Inquisition found out, they seized the boy, because canon law forbade a Christian child from being raised by non-Christian parents. The Church provided the systematic ideology that justified this atrocity. Pius IX served as a foster father; young Mortara grew up to become a Catholic priest. He died in 1940.

  It could happen to any of us, as Solzhenitsyn warned: that we could become so possessed by ideology that we could commit, or accept the commission of, evil deeds. If this doesn’t scare you about yourself, well, it should.

• ICE Shooting Roils Minnesota [Update: Walz Threatens Civil War] by John Hinderaker

  ICE agents are out in force in Minneapolis, arresting criminal illegal aliens. They encountered opposition from the beginning, with local officials denouncing their presence and supporting the violation of our immigration laws. Liberal “protesters” turned out as well, illegally interfering with the ICE agents.

  The inevitable happened: a liberal woman used her vehicle to block a street so that ICE agents were hemmed in and could not leave a residential neighborhood. Officers approached the woman’s vehicle to arrest her and told her to get out of the car. Instead of complying, she gunned her engine, driving directly at another ICE agent who was in the street. That agent shot the woman in self-defense, killing her.