As a leftist Muslim immigrant from Somalia, radical Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., is wonderfully blessed with a diversity, equity, and inclusion press. She is perennially assumed to be a victim of racism, sexism, and xenophobia whenever she is criticized, and especially when she’s verbally targeted by President Donald Trump. At the end of a typically syrupy interview with Esme Murphy from the local CBS station WCCO in Minneapolis on Sunday, Omar claimed her 19-year-old son Adnan Hirsi was pulled over by Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel. “Yesterday, after he made a stop at Target, he did get pulled over by ICE agents, and once he was able to produce his passport ID, they did let him go,” Omar asserted. She said her son “always carries” his passport with him, because she tells him ICE agents “are racially profiling, they are looking for young men who look Somali that they think are undocumented.” The CBS anchor didn’t question any of this. The station later reported that ICE’s acting Director Todd Lyons said the agency has ‘absolutely zero record of its officers or agents pulling over Congresswoman Omar’s son” and accused her of trying to “unfairly demonize our law enforcement officers.” On Wednesday, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer oozed all over Omar on “The Situation Room.” Blitzer turned to her accusations against ICE. “I know that the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has become very personal for you, even though you’re a member of Congress. You have said that federal immigration agents actually pulled over your son on Saturday and asked him to prove his citizenship. He is, of course, a U.S. citizen, as are you.” But at least Blitzer made one soft offering of a rebuttal: “The Department of Homeland Security says—and I’m quoting them—‘ICE has absolutely zero record of its officers or agents pulling over Congresswoman Omar’s son’ and have accused you of seeking to—quote—‘demonize ICE as part of a P.R. stunt,’ their words. What do you say to that?” Omar presented “zero record” of her son’s supposed stop, just some word-salad demonization of ICE. “Well, if ICE is saying that they have documentation of every single person that they have pulled over in Minneapolis, we would love to see that record … they have not been able to provide a single information.” Blitzer just moved on. She didn’t have to give CNN “a single information” to back up her claims. The burden of proof is entirely on ICE. They’re guilty until they prove their innocence. Instead, Blitzer turned back to Trump’s taunts. “When President Trump attacked you again a few days later during a separate event in Pennsylvania, his statements were actually met with cheers from the crowd, and many of them were shouting, ‘Send her back,’ their words, ‘Send her back.’ What goes through your mind when you hear that kind—and do you fear at all for your safety?” These interviewers just put the ball on the tee. “Please denounce Trump’s words as dangerous and creepy.” Omar proclaimed, “Somali Americans are here to stay,” and Blitzer agreed: “As they should be. They’re U.S. citizens. Almost all of them are now U.S. citizens, naturalized U.S. citizens.” Omar said that “nearly 60% [were] born in the United States.” Blitzer added: “And they’re very good U.S. citizens, to be sure.” Blitzer made no mention of more than $1 billion in welfare fraud in Minnesota, largely committed by Somali Americans, nor Trump’s claims that Omar married her brother for a few years. That would violate their corporate intent to stay “woke.” 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 Ilhan Omar Can Accuse ICE With No Proof appeared first on The Daily Signal.

In a Wall Street Journal interview a few days ago, President Donald Trump was circumspect regarding his party’s prospects in the 2026 congressional elections. Although no one doubts the president’s supreme confidence that he is doing the right things for the country (“I’ve created the greatest economy in history”), he acknowledged “that he couldn’t predict if that would translate into political gains for Republicans next fall.” The party of the sitting president has picked up congressional seats in midterm elections only twice since World War II: Bill Clinton in 1998 and George W. Bush in 2002. And the case of Bush was far from business as usual. The election followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Patriotism was surging, with Bush’s approval peaking at 90%, and by the 2002 elections, it still was above 60%. Trump’s latest approval rating by Gallup is down to 36%. But the case of President Ronald Reagan shows that, although sticking to principles may create some early turbulence, eventually the right path pays off. Reagan’s approval rating, per Gallup, was down to 36% in the second year of his presidency. Currently, per Gallup, the percent expressing “satisfaction with the way things are going” in the country is 23%. In November 1982, at the time of the midterm elections in Reagan’s first term, satisfaction stood at 24%. In those 1982 elections, Democrats picked up one Senate seat and 26 seats in the House. But by the time of the presidential election two years later, November 1984, Reagan’s approval was over 60% and he won the presidential election in a landslide, capturing 49 of 50 states. The state of the economy when Reagan took office in 1981—double-digit inflation and double-digit interest rates—was decidedly worse than now. However, the overall challenges that Trump faces today are, I believe, greater. Today, federal debt stands at almost 100% of gross domestic product. In 1981, it was less than 25%. In 1980, per Statista, 18.4% of our babies were born to unmarried women. By 2008, it hit 40%, and it has remained steady since. Per USAFacts, in 1980, the percent of U.S. households headed by a married couple was 60.8%. In 2022, this was down to 46.8%. In 1980, the main security threat facing the U.S. was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a security threat but not an economic threat. Today, the U.S. faces both Russia under Vladimir Putin and the enormous economic and security threat from China. In addition, we must deal with the ongoing threat of Islamic terrorism. Per the World Bank, U.S. defense spending in 1980, at the time of Reagan’s election, stood at 5.2% of gross domestic product. Reagan got this up to 6.8% by 1982. Per Statista, projected defense spending in 2025 stands at 3.2% of GDP, hovering around a historic low. Social Security and Medicare, our two largest entitlement programs, which together account for some 45% of the federal budget, are broke. Per their trustees, Social Security will have insufficient funds to pay benefits by 2034, and Medicare Hospital Insurance funding will fall short in 2033. The world has changed dramatically since Social Security was signed into law in 1935 and Medicare in 1965. What firm does business today like it did 50-plus years ago? These programs need thorough modernization. Politicians may not want to talk about it. But citizens know there is something wrong. Although the road of change was rocky at first, Reagan’s unwavering commitment to the USA as “the land of the free and home of the brave” won the day. Today we have historically outsized challenges. It’s obvious that America’s socialists—the Democratic Party—is the wrong address. If we are going to have a future, we need bold, courageous leadership today. Republicans are the only address. To our good fortune, we have great leaders like Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on Capitol Hill. 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 Republicans Will Win In 2026 appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Persecution of Christians in Nigeria is not driven solely by religion, according to Pastor Brad Brandon.   While religion plays a direct role, socio-economic issues are a significant factor contributing to the bloodshed, says Brandon, founder and CEO of Across Nigeria, a Christian organization with the mission of bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the people of Nigeria and supporting persecuted Christians in the African nation.   It is estimated that more than 50,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria since 2009, and about 7,000 in the first half of 2025 alone.   A Missionary Calling   A decade ago, Brandon was pastoring a church in Connecticut when he realized his relationship with God “had become very stale.”   “I cried out to Him and just said, ‘God, I don’t want this anymore. I want to be back close with you and have that side-by-side walk with you again,’” Brandon tells The Daily Signal he recalls praying.   Shortly thereafter, Brandon got involved with Christian missions work in Nigeria. When he traveled to the African nation in 2016, he gave God the credit for leading him to a Fulani Muslim village, which became the start of Across Nigeria.   Brad Brandon stands with a man in Nigeria. (Courtesy of Across Nigeria) Brandon has dedicated much of the past 10 years of his life to serving Christians in Nigeria and building relationships with Fulani Muslims, giving him unique insight into current tensions between Christians and Fulani Muslims.   Why Fulani Muslims Are Attacking Christians   While Boko Haram and the Islamic State—West Africa are driven by their radical Islamic ideology to persecute Christians in Nigeria, many Fulani Muslims are in conflict with Christians over issues of farming and ranching.   “Although there are some militarized radical Fulani Muslims who are ideological in their beliefs and in their actions, I would say many of the Fulani Muslims are in conflict with the Christians … [because of a] lack of good grazing ground for their cattle,” he said.   Boko Haram and the Islamic State are terrorist groups, both of which have a strong presence in Nigeria, but the Fulani Muslims are an ethnic group in Northern Nigeria and are responsible for a great deal of the current violence being carried out against Christians.   “They raise cattle,” Brandon said of the Nigerian Fulani Muslims. “The Christians do farming [and] especially during the dry season, you’ll see an increase in the violence. When the cattle are looking for food, they’ll wander onto a farmer’s crops [and] destroy the crops. The farmer comes out, chases the cattle away, the Fulani come back and retaliate, and before you know it, hundreds of Christians are killed.”  Stopping the Fulani Violence   While the socio-economic issues do not justify the violence from the Fulani Muslims “it gives us an insight into how we can solve the problem,” the Christian missionary said.   “We’re helping those communities with wells, with medical care, with schools, because we want to increase their socio-economic position so that their young people aren’t drawn into radical ideologies and terrorism,” he explained.   To date, Across Nigeria has built eight schools serving over 4,000 students primarily in Fulani Muslims communities. Violence has dropped by 60% to 70% in every area where a school has been built, Brandon said.   One of the solutions to the tensions in Nigeria between Christians and Fulani Muslim is a ranching system that would include fences for cattle, which Brandon says is not a perfect plan, but does have “some good points to it.”   ‘Christian Lives Are Expendable’  Brandon also places responsibility at the feet of the Nigerian government for allowing the persecution to continue.   About 25 years ago, Christians and Fulani Muslims lived peacefully side-by-side, Brandon explained. But because the “Nigerian government has been silent on the issue of Christians being killed,” Brandon says, the message to “the Fulani is that when we have a problem, Christian lives are expendable, and we’re not going to get in trouble for killing them.”   Additionally, Brandon say he believes that the instability in northern Nigeria is viewed as a benefit to and by the Nigerian government.   “It allows them to retain power,” he said the government. “It allows them to be able to do things in the north that they couldn’t do if it was stabilized.” Trump in Action   The persecution of Christians in Nigeria has gained international attention, including from President Donald Trump, who at the end of October announced he was designating Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern.   Trump has also directed members of Congress to look into the issue of Christian persecution in Nigeria and report back to him.   “I’m appreciative of President Trump for drawing attention to this,” Brandon said, adding that “there hasn’t been a president in recent history that has done anything about this.”   When President Joe Biden entered the White House, he removed Nigeria from the Country of Particular Concern list despite the fact that persecution of Christians was taking place at the time.   Trump put Nigeria on the list of countries of Particular Concern during his first term, “so he’s always had his finger on the pulse of what’s happening in Nigeria,” the missionary said.   The post Little-Known Issue Contributing to Deadly Muslim Attacks on Christians in Nigeria   appeared first on The Daily Signal.

As 2025 wanes, and 2026 approaches, the calendar itself offers Republicans a partial solution to its health care woes. Since Obamacare’s 2010 launch, the GOP has floundered while trying to repeal and replace the Democrats’ illegible scrawl of a signature issue. During President Donald Trump’s first term, Republicans junked the program’s individual-mandate penalty, a medical-device tax, and other noxious provisions. Alas, Obamacare survives. Hobbled, yes, but it’s still standing.  Free-market think tanks have performed admirably throughout this effort. They proposed and analyzed countless alternatives. Individual lawmakers embraced many of these ideas and advocated their own reforms. Regardless, Republicans have failed to rally around and pass any single substitute to Obamacare. New York’s Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats shut down the federal government for 43 days—to save illegal-alien health care and Obamacare subsidies. On Dec. 11, they torpedoed a plan by Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Mike Crapo of Idaho to replace Democrat subsidies with deposits in Health Savings Accounts. Republicans, earlier, scuttled Schumer’s three-year subsidy extension. For its part, the GOP House struggled this week to prescribe its own cure to the persistent Obamacare infection.  This is where the calendar becomes helpful. The months from January through December provide an incredibly straightforward way for Congress to authorize a dozen new Association Health Plans, AHPs, that automatically would place participants in separate pools, each large and diverse enough to cushion the impact of covering those with existing conditions and other insurance gambles. Americans would be free to enroll in one of these 12 plans, ideally owned and operated by up to a dozen separate, private companies. Consumers would register by birth month: Those born on Jan. 17 would join the January Plan. Born on the Fourth of July? The July Plan is for you. If your birthday is between today and year-end 2025, welcome to the December Plan. Diabetics, cardiac patients, asthmatics, hypertensives, and others with chronic ailments appear randomly across every year’s 365 birthdates. All 12 months also are rich with physical trainers, yogis, mountain bikers, joggers, swimmers, skiers, cyclists, and other healthy people—born from New Year’s Day through New Year’s Eve. The millions more with average health—neither invalids nor Olympians—would populate the vast majority in each plan. Thus, the high risks and steep costs associated with “sickly” enrollees would be diluted by the much larger “healthy” cohort and their tall waves of incoming aggregate premium revenue and tiny ripples of outgoing claims payments. Enough “healthy” cash from low-maintenance participants should remain to subsidize, in essence, the high-maintenance of the “sickly.” (Similarly, auto insurers pay the car-repair claims of thousands of young, unsafe drivers via the mounds of cash collected from millions of older, safer motorists who rarely wreck their vehicles.)    These 12 calendarcare plans should be free to offer simple, low-premium/high-deductible catastrophic coverage. This would suit millions of younger, fit people. The lion’s share of their premium payments would remain available to underwrite the claims of the smaller population with costlier, comprehensive policies that cover more conditions. These calendarcare plans should be free to dump Obamacare’s rusty bells and twisted whistles. Down with absurd and idiotic mandatory benefits, such as requiring that every Obamacare plan include pediatric dental coverage—even for childless consumers. Calendarcare plans also should be free to reject community rating—in which every participant in a jurisdiction pays the same premium, regardless of age or health. Calendarcare plans could make appropriate adjustments. Assuming each plan’s enormous population, such fine tuning should be modest. Freeing Americans to open HSAs would empower them to husband money when they are spry, to help pay higher premiums, as they grow creaky. Lingering ObamaCare subsidies should be deposited directly into consumers’ HSAs.  Calendarcare plans also should be available across state lines. A Florida-based April Plan, for instance, would welcome Americans with that birth month—from southern California to northern Maine. Price transparency also is vital. Doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies must post their prices. Once patients can compare costs of procedures, treatments, and drugs, competition will curb prices. “Deroy Murdock’s proposal to legalize AHPs and expand HSAs mirrors many of my proposals,” said U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. “For an AHP to successfully bring down premiums, Congress needs to remove all obstacles, so that Costco, Sam’s Club, and Amazon-like collectives can sell insurance.” Sally C. Pipes, president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, observes that Obamacare effectively banned AHPs by burying them beneath countless mandates. “Relaxing those rules—and making it easier to form AHPs—would be a great way to boost access to affordable coverage,” Pipes said. Trump 45 signed an executive order that eased access to AHPs. President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s order.  Calendarcare would give Republicans a simple and understandable health insurance option that Americans could embrace. Democrats can support this idea or, instead, tell voters why they rather would leave the uninsured unmedicated than help Republicans finally show Americans a universally accessible path toward better health.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Calendarcare: One Way Out of GOP’s Health Care Mess appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump recently told The Wall Street Journal he is favoring selecting either National Economic Council head Kevin Hassett or former Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh for the next chair of the Federal Reserve. Trump has said he expects the next Fed chair to cut interest rates. How have the candidates under consideration approached interest rate cuts in the past? Kevin Warsh Following the 2009 financial crisis, Warsh was skeptical of cutting rates. At the November 2010 Federal Open Market Committee meeting, Warsh expressed concerns about the Fed’s plan to stimulate the economy by lowering long-term interest rates through additional asset purchases. “Given what ails us, additional monetary policy measures are, at best, poor substitutes for more powerful pro-growth policies,” he said. Warsh said the Fed should be “leery of drawing inapt lessons from the crisis to the current policy conjuncture.” “But when non-traditional tools are needed to loosen policy and markets are functioning more or less normally—even with output and employment below trend—the risk-reward ratio for policy action is decidedly less favorable,” he said. “In my view, these risks increase with the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet. As a result, we cannot and should not be as aggressive as conventional policy rules—cultivated in more benign environments—might judge appropriate.” Warsh maintained that the Fed should not be treated as a “repair shop for broken fiscal, trade, or regulatory policies.” Despite Warsh’s mixed record on interest rates, economist and former Trump Bureau of Labor Statistics nominee EJ Antoni thinks Warsh understands that the next Fed chair needs to do more than adjust the Fed’s benchmark interest rate. “The entire novel monetary framework that [current Federal Reserve Chair Jerome] Powell and his associates built in 2020 needs to be undone,” Antoni told The Daily Signal. “Powell has so thoroughly botched the job that any of his potential replacements would be infinitely better than him.” Recently, Warsh has criticized Powell for being too hesitant to lower interest rates. He told Fox Business’ “Kudlow” program that he had “some sympathy” for Trump being frustrated with how Powell is handling interest rates. “Economic growth in the U.S. is poised to boom, but it’s being held down by bad economic policies coming from the central bank, bad supervision policies, bad monetary policies, and a very confusing set of standards as we’ve gone from last year to this year,” Warsh said. Kevin Hassett Trump’s other top pick, Kevin Hassett, is a strong supporter of cutting interest rates in his positions in both of Trump’s presidential terms. Hassett told The Wall Street Journal that while there may be “plenty of room” to cut rates, he would not cave to political pressure if inflation was high. He told Fox News’ Bret Baier that if the Fed were data driven, it would lower rates. “The president has expressed frustration with the policy decisions of the Fed,” he said. “And I think that that frustration that he has with the policy decisions is based on pretty sound analysis. The fact is that inflation is way down. Interest rates in the U.S. are amongst the highest anywhere on earth. And reducing interest rates would be sensible and would save the taxpayers lots of money right now.” Christopher Waller Previously, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the short list also includes Fed Governor Christopher Waller and Fed Vice Chair of Supervision Michelle Bowman. In March 2024, Waller said the data did not yet justify immediate rate cuts when inflation was still above target. He said that recent inflation and economic figures reinforced his view that the Fed should wait before lowering interest rates, adding that he saw “no rush” to cut rates. “As a result, in the absence of an unexpected and material deterioration in the economy, I am going to need to see at least a couple months of better inflation data before I have enough confidence that beginning to cut rates will keep the economy on a path to 2% inflation,” Waller said. But he changed his tune over the summer, saying that inflation was cooling and labor market risks were rising, showing it was time to ease policy. “It makes sense to cut the [Federal Open Market Committee]’s policy rate by 25 basis points two weeks from now,” Waller told a gathering of the Money Marketeers of New York University in July. Michelle Bowman In September, when Bowman dissented from the Fed’s decision to cut rates by half a percentage point, she became the first Fed governor to dissent on an interest rate decision in 19 years. She gave remarks at a bankers convention in May 2024 suggesting that illegal immigration was responsible for high housing prices. “There is a risk that strong consumer demand for services, increased immigration, and continued labor market tightness could lead to persistently high core services inflation,” she said. “Given the current low inventory of affordable housing, the inflow of new immigrants to some geographic areas could result in upward pressure on rents, as additional housing supply may take time to materialize,” she continued While Bowman has kept the door open to lowering rates, she has warned against easing policy too soon. She said in August 2024 that rate cuts would be appropriate if inflation moves toward the 2% target. “Should the incoming data continue to show that inflation is moving sustainably toward our 2% goal, it will become appropriate to gradually lower the federal funds rate to prevent monetary policy from becoming overly restrictive on economic activity and employment,” she said. “But we need to be patient and avoid undermining continued progress on lowering inflation by overreacting to any single data point,” she continued. None of the Fed chair candidates could be reached for comment. The post The Tale of 2 Kevins: What the Fed Chair Candidates’ Backgrounds Reveal About If They’ll Cut Interest Rates appeared first on The Daily Signal.