Inflation beat expectations by dropping to 2.4% in January, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “President Trump has defeated Joe Biden’s inflation crisis in record time. Inflation is low, wages are up, and the American economy is booming — all thanks to President Trump’s pro-growth agenda,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told The Daily Signal. “President Trump is working hard to Make America Affordable Again — just like he promised.” The consumer price index rose 0.2% on a monthly basis in January and trended down to 2.4% on a year-over-year basis. This marks a small decrease from 2.7% in December. Economists had predicted overall and core inflation to rise 0.3% in January. Income is rising faster than prices, food inflation is slowing, and energy prices are deflating—meaning prices are falling, and core inflation has dropped to its lowest level in almost five years, said EJ Antoni, Heritage Foundation economist and former Trump nominee to serve on the BLS. “Furthermore, we have evidence to believe that inflation is even lower than what’s being reported,” Antoni told The Daily Signal in a statement. “The largest contributor to the increase in the CPI in January was the shelter index, which measure housing costs, but many metrics show housing costs are actually declining today.” Rent prices in several major metropolitan areas like Austin, Dallas, Phoenix, Miami, and Tampa have fallen significantly, as well, Antoni added. Housing costs, which make up more than a third of the overall index, rose just 0.2% for January. The metric tracking the rental cost of owned housing was up 3.3% compared to the same time last year. Real wages grew by $1,400 in President Donald Trump’s first year in office, according to the CPI report. “Housing inflation notably continues to cool, while prescription drug prices actually fell in 2025 — with even more price relief ahead for American patients thanks to President Trump’s Most Favored Nation drug pricing deals and the Great Healthcare Plan,” White House spokesman Kush Desai wrote on X. “With inflation now low and stable, America’s economy is set to turbocharge even further through long-overdue interest rate cuts from the Fed.” The CPI report comes days after job growth unexpectedly accelerated in January and the unemployment rate fell to 4.3%, according to Labor Department statistics. The post White House Celebrates Inflation Beating Expectations in January appeared first on The Daily Signal.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said his committee could clear legislation in the next two weeks to crack down on sanctuary jurisdictions.   In an interview with Just the News, Jordan said sanctuary jurisdictions include 11 states, 18 major cities and three counties, as well as the District of Columbia. He said this represents about one-third of the nation’s population.   “We’re looking at passing a bill to deal with this sanctuary jurisdiction issue,” Jordan said. “We think we’re going to have a markup in two weeks in our committee to address this. That may be, well, you know, there’s various ways to look at it.”  A sanctuary jurisdiction declares that it will not cooperate with federal immigration law enforcement, and in some cases places restrictions on federal immigration authorities’ capacity to conduct enforcement in public spaces.   Jordan brought this up amid the chaos in the Twin Cities region. Jordan wasn’t specific on how the legislation would work, but said it would involve a requirement that state and local law enforcement contact federal law enforcement when they encounter criminal illegal aliens.   He said the sanctuary jurisdictions make it difficult for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to apprehend illegal aliens when they are released from state and local detention centers.  “They got a guy in their jail. ICE knows it’s an illegal migrant who’s also been charged with some other crime; they get a notice saying it’s a detainer notice saying, ‘Hey, if you’re going to let this guy out, just give us a heads-up. Give us 48 hours. We’ll come and arrest him there at the jail,’” Jordan said.   “Instead, they release him to the streets. That’s a problem there,” Jordan continued. “We should work at some way in our federal law that you can’t do that. You have to work with federal law enforcement, when you have that scenario.”  The post Jordan Vows Crackdown Bill on Sanctuary Cities, States appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Who are America’s public universities really for? A growing backlash argues that domestic students—many with near-perfect test scores—are being edged out in favor of full-pay international enrollments.  Steve Cortes’ new documentary, “The Foreign Student Crisis Destroying American College Admissions,” focuses on the University of Illinois where more than 6,000 Chinese nationals are enrolled at this publicly funded, land-grant school.  Cortes emphasizes that his concern is not about race, but about citizenship.  Stanley Zhong, an Asian American student, experienced the effects firsthand. “He had near-perfect SAT scores, 1,590 out of 1,600, and a 3.97 GPA at a highly prestigious Palo Alto High School,” Cortes said. He applied to UCLA, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Illinois, and was rejected by all three schools. Later, Zhong was hired as a Google engineer.  Cortes poses the question, “What level of untapped talent exists in this country that a combination of DEI and immigration have basically cut out of the loop?”  He is not only concerned about education for American citizens, but also about national security.  He calls the influx of Chinese students “organized infiltration backed by a hostile regime masked as education,” and explained that there have been three students at the University of Michigan caught smuggling agricultural bioweapons and a Chinese engineering student at Illinois Tech convicted of espionage after being recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security.  Marsha McClary is an Illinois native and a mother of five. She explained her frustration both as a taxpayer and as a mother. “A lot of our students cannot get into U of I … and then they have to go out of state and pay higher tuition.”   She continued by saying, “We’re paying a lot of taxes into the university system in the state, and we should be able to take advantage of that as a priority for our students.”  Stephen Kleinschmit, a professor at Northwestern University, explained how many foreign students come to the university with questionable credentials and are unable to speak English.   Many of the applications are careless; applicants sometimes leave the wrong university name on their cover letters or indicate they don’t understand the program they’re applying to.  Kleinschmit also warned of “institutionalized corruption” involving bribing test proctors and even the government itself.  Cortes ended his documentary by giving his solution to the matter: “The total number of foreign students must be capped. One or 2% of total enrollment seems perfectly sensible. The total number of Chinese nationals should be zero, none. Not welcome here. United States schools for United States citizens.”  The post Are US Universities Prioritizing International Students Over Citizens?  appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I’d like to talk about our two cold wars, the one that we won against Russia and the one that we’re de facto in against China. They’re very different. And I would argue that the 45-year Cold War with Russia was much easier to win, despite their 7,000 nukes, than it will be with China for a variety of reasons that we should all be aware of. No. 1, Russia was Russia, kind of a pariah state. It was isolated from the so-called free world. Europe was Europe, and Asia and the United States had guardrails against it. There were no students de facto from Russia in the United States. None. Statistically, almost none. There was no conduit for espionage or the expropriation of American scientific and engineering knowledge out of our Ph.D. programs, MBA programs, you name it. There was very little espionage by students. There were very few Russian nationals in the United States. We just didn’t let them in. There was no American investor class in Russia. Remember how controversial Armand Hammer was? He was the head of Occidental Petroleum. He had the pencil monopoly in Russia. His parents had been living in Russia. They had been pro-communist, at least his father, as I recall. And then they’d gone back to the United States. He’d grown up part of his youth in Russia. He spoke fluent Russian. And he was our de facto business liaison with the communist government. Every time there was a JFK or Nixon or Johnson administration, and they wanted a back channel, they called up Armand Hammer. I don’t know quite what his sympathies were, but he was about the only one, and he was a pariah. People were angry at him. Take the example with China today. It’s much different. And funny, there was a sense that Russia had very bad propaganda. People thought that Russians were crude. They thought they were cruel, that nobody liked them in the Third World when they came in. Even today in Hollywood, have you noticed that almost every villain in every movie is a Russian? He has that kind of guttural Russian accent. He’s got a shaved head. He has a tattoo when he takes off his shirt. He’s covered with tattoos. There’s the three-bar Orthodox cross. It’s a very cruel caricature, but we don’t do that with China. And remember that we thought we were going to be blown up by Russia. They had 7,000 nuclear weapons. They had the mother of all bombs. I think it was a 50- or 100-megaton bomb they dropped. It was all over our childhood in school. That propaganda wasn’t propaganda. Actually, it was the truth. I can remember having to do drills. So, we were clear who the enemy was and what they were capable of. China is very different. They were an ally of ours in World War II. But unlike Russia, that we did not include in the Marshall Plan, and we stopped Lend-Lease right after, we had a much more empathetic view. China was deindustrialized. It didn’t really have a chance. It hadn’t made a deal with Hitler as the Russians did. It had been preyed upon by Japan. And so, there had been American missionaries, not colonialists or imperialists. We never had an imperial project in China. But it was sort of a goodwill. It wasn’t even lost during the Korean War. We had this good feeling about China, and there are 300,000 students. People in the administration, I don’t know why, are thinking of having 600,000. If you have 1% engaged in active espionage, that would mean you would have 3,000 students who are actively trying to glean information in labs, in research projects, in joint endeavors with American academics, sending that home. Almost every student who leaves the United States and goes home to China is interrogated by the intelligence arms of the People’s Liberation Army. It’s nothing—the Russians had no such clout. There were almost no, as I said, no Russians here. Three to 5 million people are foreign-born from China. I think 3 million of them who are in the United States are not U.S. citizens. They’re residents. That would be unheard of in the Cold War with Russia. I don’t know how much investment there is, but it seems like every American capitalist has made a fortune in China. People have suggested it might be trillions of dollars over the last 40 years. I’m not saying they have dual loyalties, but there’s an insidious idea that China’s not really an enemy because of the massive amount of money that has been invested there. And that means, put the Chinese students, the Chinese residents, the foreign investment, and our history of empathy with China—it’s very, very hard to tell people that China is an existential enemy in the way that Russia was. And we all know that they played the DEI, woke propaganda card. Especially, we saw that with COVID. It wasn’t just that we were supposed to believe that crazy idea that a sick pangolin or a bat 100 miles away gave the world COVID when the Wuhan lab was right there, a level 4 lab with American expertise, instrumentation, and some money provided by whom? Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak, and others, Francis Collins, perhaps. And so, what I’m getting at is, every time that we tried to criticize the corruption of the World Health Organization or China, they came back and said, here you go again. You’re racist. You’re racist. This is the Yellow Peril all over again. This is the Rape of Nanking, your style. It was almost as if they had studied the DEI mosaic in the United States, and they had tapped into it in a way that the Russians couldn’t. They were lily-white, guttural-speaking enemies on the Hollywood big screen. And the result of that is, as we speak today, can you imagine if there were Russian bio labs? One was about 10 miles from here. I used to work there in high school at the packing house. It was used later by this operative of the Chinese Communist Party. There was one in Las Vegas. There may be more. Can you imagine if the Russians bought farmland next to U.S. high-security military bases? We would have never allowed that to happen. We would have never funded a Russian lab. So, there are so many different ways that China has infiltrated the cultural, social, economic, political life, the military life of the United States, that they are much more insidious, much more powerful. And of course, they have 1.4 billion people. The Soviet Union at its height, I think, had 240 million. So, they are a much more formidable enemy, and they’re much more adept at knowing where we are strong and especially where we are weak. Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. The post China’s Quiet Infiltration of America appeared first on The Daily Signal.

“I learned a long time ago, keep your d— mouth shut if you want to stay in show business,” said the great Dolly Parton. Do you know where she stands on immigration enforcement, veganism, or Gaza? Me neither.  Uninformed virtue signaling is a staple of the U.S. entertainment industry. Freeing Tibet, global warming, masking and vaccines, all had their day. Now, the performers have collectively agreed to honor the First Woke Commandment: You Shall Have No Borders. The woke swarm has collectively decided that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal sub-agency charged with enforcing immigration law, should not enforce immigration law. In practice, this means that the U.S. should admit anyone who wants to come here, and that we should not expel them under any circumstances once they are in. That used to be a radical, ultra-Left, or even anarchist view. Paid athletes and performers now pretend ICE agents are unsanctioned storm troopers in President Donald Trump’s private army, rather than federal agents carrying out valid law enforcement to the best of their ability–in the teeth of deliberate, organized disruption by paid activists. You’d think that creative artists would be more imaginative, but comparisons to Nazi Germany are their usual go-to. At last September’s Emmy awards, which are for television shows I don’t watch, Hannah Einbinder of HBO’s “Hacks” skillfully mixed sports with domestic and foreign policy by saying “go Birds, f— ICE, and free Palestine.” Einbinder, who is Jewish, wants to boycott Israel, to persuade them to–I think–allow Hamas to rearm and continue their benevolent rule in Gaza. Einbinder’s co-star Jean Smart sported a “Be Good” badge, a reference to Minneapolis resident Renee Good who was killed last month while obstructing federal agents in an organized campaign. Smart, Mark Rufalo, Wanda Sykes, and other actors wore the same badge. None of them, as far as I know, ever wore a badge in memory of an American killed by an illegal alien. At the recent Grammy music awards, a musician called Bad Bunny said “ICE out” and rambled about love. Two of my favorite singers, Carole King and Joni Mitchell, sported anti-ICE badges. Yet I won’t be burning my vinyl of “Tapestry or Court and Spark,” just like I didn’t burn Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Carry On” because Neil took his music off Spotify in 2022 when Joe Rogan critiqued Covid vaccine mandates. I expect musicians to let their freak flags fly. But I bought their product and I’ll keep it. Someone named Shaboozey also sported an anti-ICE badge. I won’t burn his album either, because I don’t have it, and also I don’t think the medium he uses to publish his music is flammable. Justin Bieber did not wear a badge on the boxer shorts he wore to perform, nor was an anti-ICE message part of his body-encompassing tattoo collection. Probably an oversight. Performers Billie Eilish, SZA, and Kehlani reportedly took precious award-stage time to criticize ICE. Eilish reassured us that “no one is illegal on stolen land,” though she seems intent on keeping people off hers. Last weekend, Mr. Bunny presented the half-time show at the Superbowl. Though not wearing a dress, he presented a message about Latin American solidarity to whatever portion of the audience was fluent in both Spanish and mumbling. “The only thing more powerful than hate is love,” summarized the Jumbotron in English. How profound. In the sports world, we now have the winter Olympics. The temptation for our athletes to signal virtue as well as talent is strong. Team USA changed the name of their hospitality house from Ice House to Winter House. Did they imagine Italians confused it with a detention center? The gist seems to be to equate enforcing federal immigration laws with “hate and fear” and law-breaking activism with “peace and love.” Some athletes want to represent only part of America. This summer, we’ll endure the FIFA World Cup of soccer. Gary Lineker, a retired player and long-time television commentator from England, sold his podcast to Netflix and will want to be in the USA to cover the games. Lineker is a leftist who dislikes our president. He favors mass migration, and in 2023 compared the former Conservative government’s attempt to stem asylum fraud as “immeasurably cruel,” likening the home secretary’s choice of language to–wait for it–Germany in the 1930s. Back in 2018, journalist Laura Ingraham asked basketball star LeBron James to “shut up and dribble” and stop talking politics. She caught hell for it but coined a neat catchphrase. So Gary, if you shut up and dribble, you are welcome to come to America to talk about soccer. I doubt President Trump knows who you are, and I don’t think he’s a big footie fan so you should be under his radar. And to Team USA, please just shut up and slip, slide, and jump. The less you say, the more we’ll marvel at your talent. As for the acting, music, and entertainment crowd, we’ll never be that lucky. They are so used to speaking the words of great writers that they arrogate profundity to their own opinions. The post Shut Up and Slide, Team USA appeared first on The Daily Signal.