In this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler take aim at Rep. Ilhan Omar’s trash talking America and how mass immigration without assimilation gives you what you’re seeing in Minnesota. Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment from today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think all of us, we have to just tell the Left be quiet. We don’t care what you say. It’s just true. Somalis stole millions of dollars, probably a billion. I’m not a racist for saying that. You should talk about that community and Ilhan Omar and the message she gave to them. If you’re spokesman is saying, “Something happened on 9/11,” or “Somaliland only for Somalis,” you’re not going to get the leadership you need. She never said to that community, to take an example, “We are in the most wonderful country in the world. We are so lucky to leave our war-torn, impoverished, torn apart state and be in this wonderful country. I want all of us to work, work, work, work. Some of you will have to be on public assistance, but we’ll confine that to as few as possible. And we want to contribute more and take less from this wonderful government.” That was never there. It was either, “This is the worst country in the world,” I’m quoting literally. She said it looked “dirty,” and she said that we had a dictatorship worse than Somalia. So that whole area, what I’m talking about is that classical paradigm of small farms, small communities, close knit, you can still find in America, believe me, in the Midwest that still exist. Hillsdale County is a good example. But it’s gone in California. There are places in Northern California in the foothills that sort of replicate that, but it was a one-two punch when you let in millions of people, which is fine if you want to integrate and assimilate. But if you don’t, and you suggest that they’re victims on top of that … The first debate I ever had at the Hoover Institution, I think I told you, was Milton Friedman and I on immigration, and he was an open borders guy, complete. The debate went downhill. I said, “You’re gonna destroy wages.” He said, “Well, when it gets down to dollar an hour, they won’t come, will they?” And I said, “Yeah, but you’re not gonna be a person trying to get the job when it’s one dollar an hour.” But then he did say something I’ll never forget. He said, “But you’re right. It’ll never work if you’re subsidizing people who come in from impoverished countries with generous entitlements because you’re not letting the market work.” That’s what he said. And I think I had another debate with a friend of his. But if you have generous entitlements, and you let people en masse, and you don’t want to acculturate them or teach them in the values of your civilization you’re a Minnesota every year.  JACK FOWLER: And there may be certain cultures or ethnicities that are less inclined to assimilate into another culture.  HANSON: If your idea is that we’re coming to the United States for the prosperity, security, and freedom, but we want to keep entirely our own culture in an enclave.  FOWLER: Yeah, we talked about the oath of allegiance. Those are words that mean something, and it means I am you. I am an American, and I reject all of this.  HANSON: It’s very different. Where I’m speaking, the Japanese community came in large numbers in the ‘20s.  In 1965, there was a Buddhist temple and there was a Japanese baseball league and that lasted for three generations. It just disappeared because the immigration stopped. They had one of the highest rates of intermarriage. And they’re completely assimilated. And they were never separatists though. Those were enhanced cultural enhancements, but they were the most loyal, wonderful Americans. There was nothing like a Dearborn, Michigan. I don’t know how long Dearborn, Michigan will last. It has to be constantly refueled by immigration because we do have popular culture that can change it. If you want a Dearborn, Michigan, or you want London under Mayor [Sadiq] Kahn or whatever his name is, then the whole idea of a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, but single culture democracy doesn’t work.  And we’re getting close to that right now that it doesn’t work anymore. California’s a good example.  FOWLER: I consider what’s happening in England a preview. So, folks better prepare. They better well prepare to tolerate it or prepare to stop it. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Victor Davis Hanson: I’m Not Racist for Saying Somalis Stole a Billion Dollars appeared first on The Daily Signal.

It’s been a cold winter so far in the Midwest and much of the Northeast, early-in-the-season snow even in Washington, D.C., and temperatures falling to freezing and below in much of the South. Come to think of it, North America’s 2024-25 winter was pretty cold, too. It’s gotten to the point that “polar vortex” is a phrase on just about everyone’s lips. Of course, you are surely aware—as those of us with doubts about inevitably disastrous global warming were often told—that there’s a difference between weather and climate. Weather is anecdote, climate is longstanding trend. And the longstanding trend in climate, we have been told this entire past quarter-century, is toward a hotter climate all over the world, with multiple catastrophic consequences. Now, we seem to have reached an Emily Litella moment—the moment when, on the now half-century-old “Saturday Night Live” program, the befuddled character realized that she had misheard and misinterpreted some anodyne comment and had been propounding an absurd theory, and dismissed it with a hurried, “Never mind.” Playing the Litella role this October was Bill Gates, who, as a mega-philanthropist, makes serious efforts to gauge whether the causes to which he has contributed have been worth the money. Although “climate change will have serious consequences,” he said, using the two-word phrase that replaced global warming as it was becoming apparent that Earth wasn’t uniformly warming in line with predictions, “it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.” Numbered also among the converts—the use of religious metaphor is not accidental; more below—is Breakthrough Institute research director Ted Nordhaus. “I used to argue that if the world kept burning fossil fuels at current rates, catastrophe was virtually assured,” he wrote this fall in The Free Press. “I no longer believe this hyperbole.” He pointed out that the demographic and physical factors on which he based his predictions two decades ago have not come to pass, and that despite measurable warming, some of which is attributable to human activity, people have adapted, and any damage has been well short of catastrophic. As British science writer Matt Ridley notes, claims such as Al Gore’s 2006 prediction of a 20-foot sea-level rise in 20 years have fallen short—by 19 feet and 9 inches. Meanwhile, the undermining of hyperbolic scenarios has, as Wall Street Journal economics reporter Greg Ip wrote this week, led the likes of Canadian Prime Minister (and former British central banker) Mark Carney and BlackRock DEO Larry Fink to downplay the risks of climate change, as most American voters have done some time ago. In all this, I see elements of religious conversion. Advocates of drastic action to address global warming climate change tend to be secular in religion but religious in their devotion to their cause. We have sinned, with our SUVs and corporate jets frying the Earth; we must atone by reducing our (or others’) standards of living; we must faithfully perform daily rituals, adjusting our thermostats and sorting our trash for recycling. The science writer John Tierney reports that The New York Times received a record number of letters in response to his 1996 article that it was economically and environmentally wasteful. It was like telling traditional Catholics their rosaries were a waste of time. For many Americans of a certain age, any change in the climate they remember from the summer when they were 16 is a change for the worse, just like any change from the playlist of songs they remember from that glorious summer. Satellite radio programmers and canned music providers in shopping malls provide the music from that golden moment, and politicians promising to halt climate change promise to provide the golden weather. But my impression is that those musical offerings are, like the baby boomer generation, getting scarcer, and certainly the demand in the political marketplace for restoration of that golden summer’s weather climate seems to have grown weaker too. This is operating within a larger cultural trend, an increasing skepticism of science and scientists. Earlier this month, as a Wall Street Journal editorial was among the few to emblazon, the journal Nature retracted a study that projected climate change could lead to a 62% economic decline by 2100. Among the factors that skewed the results threefold was the 1995-99 data from Uzbekistan. You can almost hear Litella saying, “Never mind.” Such shoddiness seems amusing, at least until you consider the “replication crisis” in which scientists have been unable to replicate the results of dozens of peer-reviewed and journal-published experiments, some of them famous like the Stanford prison experiment. And then there was the effort, successful during the COVID-19 crisis, by National Institutes of Health official Dr. Anthony Fauci, to suppress the now generally accepted theory that the virus spread because of a leak from the lab in Wuhan, China, whose gain-of-function research, deliberately strengthening viruses, was subsidized despite a ban by former President Barack Obama in 2014. So, the public’s skepticism of science and scientists is not surprising, though it’s surely having some unfortunate effects. People can see that expert recommendations, pushed by teachers unions, to close schools despite children’s negligible COVID-19 risk have resulted in long-lasting learning loss. And they are seeing one prominent preacher after another of environmental doom from climate change suddenly saying, like Litella, “Never mind.” COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post We Have Reached the Emily Litella Moment on Climate Change appeared first on The Daily Signal.

There’s a popular idea circulating, especially for young Americans, that the highest form of freedom means having no one need you. It usually comes packaged attractively: summers in Europe, spontaneous road trips, disappearing off-grid on weekends, money invested in “experiences.” On its face, this framing sounds harmless—just another lifestyle choice. But it reveals something deeper and far more troubling about the way modern culture has taught us to think about adulthood, fulfillment and especially womanhood. There has been an undeniable shift in the way culture defines freedom—as an absence of responsibility rather than a deeper sense of purpose. Travel is not new, nor is adventure. Leisure, beauty, autonomy are all things women have wanted for as long as we have existed. What is new is the insistence that responsibility is a threat to a good life rather than the very thing that gives it shape. This cultural script doesn’t spare men, who are increasingly encouraged to delay commitment, avoid permanence and treat responsibility as something to be taken on only once every other box is checked. It is reinforced not only by economic pressure and social norms, but also by modern dating expectations, which financial security, status and total readiness as prerequisites for being chosen, rather than qualities built in partnership. However, it lands differently on women, who are more explicitly told motherhood and marriage are something to be escaped. Motherhood, in particular, is now framed as the experience that ends your life rather than deepens it. Children are treated as a cost center, a limitation, a tradeoff that must be justified while consumption, mobility and self-optimization are treated as unquestioned goods. The difference is not moral but material: Women feel the consequences of postponement more directly. They are more expressly pressured to believe that choosing family is a form of self-betrayal rather than self-authorship. The most common rebuttal to critiques like this is predictable: If people without kids are truly happy, why do they need to announce it? But that misses the point entirely. This isn’t about convincing any single individual their life choices are valid. It’s about the story being told to young women who haven’t yet chosen anything at all. Entire generations of women have been trained to believe they are “missing out” on life by choosing to create it. That becoming a mother ruins their lives. These lies have consequences. We tell women explicitly and implicitly that a life oriented around family, service and sacrifice is a smaller life. That they will “find themselves” in consumption rather than creation. And perhaps most corrosively, that needing and being needed is a form of weakness. This framing collapses under even minimal scrutiny. You can see the world and still build one. You can invest and still create something that outlasts you. You can experience freedom and accept responsibility. These are not all opposing paths. The real choice being offered isn’t between children and travel, it’s between a life oriented toward legacy and one optimized to avoid constraint. We should be honest about which of those our culture now celebrates. “Rich,” we are told, means liquid. Flexible. Untethered. But that definition only works if you believe life’s purpose is to remain perpetually available to experiences and upgrades. It assumes that the highest good is optionality. Yet, the things we most admire in every other context are products of people who accept limits. Who tied themselves to others. Who gave up certain freedoms with the understanding that mastery in every craft and pursuit requires constraint, years spent saying no to other paths to build something coherent and meaningful. No serious person would argue a society can sustain itself on consumption alone. Yet, we increasingly ask women to do exactly that at the personal level. I became a mother recently, and nothing about it fits the caricature young women have been sold. My life did not shrink. My sense of time did not flatten. The world didn’t get smaller; it got more serious and important. No trip has ever rearranged my understanding of purpose the way becoming responsible for another human being has. This doesn’t mean that every woman must become a mother, or that childless people live empty lives. Those are lazy counterarguments, and they’re not what’s at stake here. The problem is not individual choice. The problem is a culture that relentlessly frames creation as loss and detachment as elegant sophistication. A society that teaches women to fear responsibility should not be surprised when it struggles to find meaning biologically, culturally, or morally. At some point, we have to ask whether a life optimized only for freedom is actually free and whether avoiding sacrifice is the same thing as flourishing. Deep down, most people instinctively know experiences don’t replace the slow, unglamorous work of building something that doesn’t end with you. One is designed to keep us moving, chasing endless novelty; the other is built to let us stay in contentment. Europe will always be there—and I have heard they let children in! So will the open road. Different priorities are fine. Different definitions of rich are inevitable. But we should be honest about what we are trading and who we are teaching to make that trade before they even know what they’re capable of building The post Young Americans: Pursue Meaning, Not Just Mobility appeared first on The Daily Signal.

WASHINGTON, Dec 19 (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department released more than 300,000 pages of records from its investigations into the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on Friday, bowing to pressure from lawmakers who forced their disclosure with a new law. The release follows months of political wrangling amid rebellion by some of President Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters over his administration’s reluctance to make public all records tied to probes into Epstein. It was not immediately clear how substantive the new materials were, given that many Epstein-related documents have previously been made public since his 2019 death in jail, which was ruled a suicide. Reuters is in the process of reviewing the latest release. The files included several photos of Democratic former President Bill Clinton, which could conflict with Justice Department policy not to release material related to ongoing investigations. Trump, a Republican, has ordered the Justice Department to investigate Clinton’s ties to Epstein, in what critics viewed as an effort to shift the focus away from his own relationship with Epstein. In one image, Clinton can be seen in a swimming pool with Epstein’s partner and co-defendant, Ghislaine Maxwell, and another person whose face is blocked out. Clinton, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, has previously expressed regret for socializing with Epstein and has said he was not aware of any criminal activity. The Justice Department added a note to the webpage where it posted links to the documents that said “all reasonable efforts have been made” to redact victims’ personal information, but warned that some could be disclosed inadvertently. Not All Documents to be Released In a letter to Congress, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Justice Department had released hundreds of thousands of pages of material and was still reviewing other documents for potential release. He said he thought it would take an additional two weeks to review the rest of the material. There are more than 1,200 names identified as victims or their relatives in the files, he added. Trump had initially urged fellow Republicans in Congress to oppose the new law, warning that releasing potentially sensitive internal investigative records could set a dangerous precedent. But many Trump voters accused his administration of covering up Epstein’s ties to powerful figures and obscuring details surrounding his death in a Manhattan jail, where he was awaiting trial on charges of trafficking and abusing underage girls. Trump, who promised on the 2024 election campaign trail to declassify the government’s Epstein files if elected, has been seeking to move beyond the affair so that he can concentrate on a more pressing concern for Americans – the cost of living – ahead of the November 2026 midterm elections. Just 44% of American adults who identify as Republicans approve of Trump’s handling of the Epstein issue, compared to his 82% overall approval rating among the group, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. “By releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request, and President Trump recently calling for further investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends, the Trump Administration has done more for the victims than Democrats ever have,” the White House said in a statement on Friday. Last month, Democrats in the House of Representatives released thousands of emails obtained from Epstein’s estate, including one in which Epstein wrote that Trump “knew about the girls,” without clarifying what that meant. Trump, in response, accused Democrats of promoting the “Epstein Hoax” as a distraction. House Republicans released more emails the same day, including one saying Trump visited Epstein’s house many times but “never got a massage.” Two days after those disclosures, Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate Epstein’s connections to Clinton and JPMorgan bank JPM.N. The following week, despite White House pressure to delay the vote, U.S. lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to pass a bill forcing the release of the Justice Department records, which Trump then signed into law. New Epstein images released by U.S. Justice DepartmentDownload Former U.S. President Bill Clinton and a woman are seen in this image from the estate of late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, released by the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., U.S., on December 19, 2025. U.S. Justice Department/Handout via REUTERS THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY REDACTED AREAS FROM SOURCE. TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY Trump Denied Knowledge of Epstein’s Alleged Sex Trafficking Trump was once friendly with Epstein until they had a falling out in the mid-2000s, before Epstein’s first conviction in 2008. Trump has not been accused of wrongdoing and has denied knowing about Epstein’s sex trafficking. The law ordering the files’ release allowed the Justice Department to withhold personal information about Epstein’s victims as well as material that would jeopardize an active investigation. Previous disclosures of Epstein records have revealed that even after his 2008 conviction he continued corresponding with high-profile figures, including former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, Clinton’s former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, PayPal founder Peter Thiel and Britain’s former Prince Andrew, now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who was stripped of his royal title over revelations about his links to Epstein. Spokespeople and lawyers for Bannon, Thiel and Mountbatten-Windsor have not responded to Reuters’ requests for comment about their interactions with Epstein. Summers stepped back from positions at Harvard University, OpenAI and other institutions and said he was deeply ashamed of his actions after documents released by House Democrats in November showed that Summers corresponded with Epstein up through 2019, even seeking relationship advice from him. JPMorgan paid some of Epstein’s victims $290 million in 2023 to settle claims that it had overlooked his sex trafficking. The bank kept Epstein on as a client for five years after he was convicted of soliciting a minor in 2008. This is a developing story. The post US Justice Department Releases New Cache of Epstein Records appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Heritage Foundation President Dr. Kevin Roberts told TPUSA’s America Fest on Friday about what will underpin America’s golden age. America may be on the cusp of a golden age, but Americans still have to choose it for themselves. “As we celebrate America’s 250th birthday, we ought to ask the question: What is America going to be like in the next 250 years?” Roberts asked the crowd of 10,000. For Roberts, that question is in response to another question Roberts fields as he travels the country. “The most common question that I’m asked as I travel the country,” Roberts told the audience, “is, ‘Kevin, are you still optimistic about the United States?'” “I give them three answers,” Roberts said. First, “how could you not be optimistic given all of the great successes of the Trump-Vance administration?” “The second reason is,” Roberts continued, that “the future of America is actually here at America Fest.” “The third reason is,” Roberts added, “don’t discount that God hasn’t given up on the American republic.” Coming up next! I hope you’ll tune in. ? https://t.co/9Ijz8xuWYm pic.twitter.com/xkvlndgzHd— Kevin Roberts (@KevinRobertsTX) December 19, 2025 “There are four big ideas that we’re working on,” Roberts said, previewing Heritage 2.0, a mission recently announced by the think tank that looks forward to America’s next 250 years. Heritage 2.0 encompasses four main policy ideas: The American Family The Dignity of Work and the Future of Free Enterprise National Security The American Heritage and Citizenship “We have to be focused on the future of the American family,” Roberts said, in “all of our policies.” “We have to make sure that we are focused on the dignity of work and free enterprise,” Roberts continued, because “those of you who are in college or high school or just out of college know that the free market, as great a concept as it is, has been dominated by corporate welfare—by the big companies being in collusion with big government.” To that, Roberts said, “we need you, and small businesses, to be the successes.” For Roberts, national security is not just international, but, “when we walk out of our own front doors in all of the cities where we live.” Finally, Roberts said American heritage and citizenship seeks to answer the question, “what does it mean to be an American?” Prior to Roberts’ speech, the conference watch an ad made by The Heritage Foundation honoring Charlie and Erika Kirk. God Bless @MrsErikaKirk for showing America the strength, grace, and resolve that comes with salvation. Her testimony and work to continue her husband’s mission should inspire all of us.@Heritage is proud to honor Charlie and Erika with this video airing during tonight’s… pic.twitter.com/bmhf65By1s— Kevin Roberts (@KevinRobertsTX) December 13, 2025 The Golden Age, “is a choice to prioritize families and empower local communities,” the ad says, accompanied by soaring music and a montage of American scenes. “A choice to find dignity in prosperous and honorable work. A choice to prioritize our nation’s safety, protecting our homeland and standing strong against foreign threats. A choice to cherish the greatest gift we’ve been given—waking up every day an American citizen.” The post What Will Bring About America’s Golden Age? Heritage President Responds appeared first on The Daily Signal.