After some Trump supporters rioted at the Capitol in 2021, the national media aggressively reported on people who showed disrespect for the Capitol Police and for the rule of law itself. They touted groups like “Sedition Hunters” who aided President Joe Biden’s Justice Department in prosecuting Trump backers inside the Capitol, the violent and the nonviolent. But now, with the parties in power switched, suddenly it’s the media who favor “sedition,” in disrespecting law enforcement and the rule of law itself, especially on mass deportation. Exhibit A is National “Public” Radio and Odette Yousef, NPR’s so-called Domestic Extremism Correspondent. In January 2022, Yousef touted the “Sedition Hunters” for seven minutes, never once classifying them as on the Left. They were “independent researchers” and “online sleuths.” Some of these hunter heroes weren’t even Americans. Yousef gushed about the Dutch: “Mary has been working with a group called Capitol Terrorists Exposers from her home in The Hague.” But you couldn’t use her last name, because heroes face villains. These days, it’s somehow not “domestic extremism” when radical leftists seek to undermine attempts to enforce immigration laws and capture illegal immigrants, both the violent and the nonviolent. Instead, Yousef and NPR championed the “ICE Resistance” in two days of reports lasting 15 minutes on the badly named show “All Things Considered.” On Nov. 19, the headline online was “Grassroots resistance swells in the wake of the immigration crackdown in Chicago.” Anchor Juana Summers began by noting the deportation effort has “touched the lives of citizens and non-citizens deeply,” leading to “a swell of grassroots resistance.” Yousef chronicled a group called Protect Rogers Park, a “community defense network,” and went riding around with “community organizer” Gabe Gonzalez. They banded together against “an expected onslaught of federal immigration enforcement.” Their goal? “To make the work of immigration enforcement as inefficient as possible.” To rage against the machine, in leftist parlance. But no one was identified as the Left. NPR also interviewed activist Jill Garvey and described her take: Their project is opposing “an authoritarian strategy that, unchecked, could ultimately eat away at the freedom and rights of everyone in this country.” Garvey claimed President Donald Trump is forming a “national police force” to “occupy” and “terrorize” cities. None of this is pernicious conspiracy theorizing or “domestic extremism.” On the night of Nov. 20, Yousef leaked out one label about Protect Rogers Park: “It’s known for its international diversity and as kind of a hotbed for lefty activism.” This makes them a pile of NPR listeners, for sure. Anchor Ailsa Chang described it as “hyperlocal grassroots work to counter enforcement activities.” Yousef said the group’s goal was “getting people to the scene of an ICE arrest to make it annoying—you know, loud, slow, and ultimately expensive.” In this second report, Gonzalez claimed Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s goal is “kidnapping people.” Yousef allowed a brief rebuttal from the Department of Homeland Security: “Illegal aliens are not kidnapped. They are arrested for breaking the law.” But the leftists performed “continuous proactive patrolling” to foil “aggressive immigration raids.” NPR wrapped up with Garvey touting their work to “protect vulnerable people” with “a little bit of contagious courage.” Chang repeated: “A little bit of contagious courage.” This is not how NPR would describe right-wingers blocking an entrance to an abortion clinic. You could describe that activism as “protecting vulnerable people” with “contagious courage.” It’s designed to be loud and make abortion clinics “as inefficient as possible.” But that’s not heroic at NPR. Performing the abortions is heroic. This is why conservative taxpayers are happy that NPR was defunded. They’ve never “considered all things.” 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 Journalists Can Promote ‘Sedition’ When It’s ‘ICE Resistance’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

In this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler explore the troubling phenomenon of immigrants attacking the cultures they chose to join, including attacks on Christmas markets in Europe.Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of 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.  Jack Fowler: Victor, let me get right to this story. All over Europe, Muslims are desecrating churches and holy places and disrupting seasonal Christmas markets. So, last night—we’re recording on Sunday the 30th. So, this was Saturday, Nov. 29. I’m reading from an X post in Brussels:“In a terrifying sight, Muslims stormed the opening night of the Christmas market in Brussels, waving Palestinian flags, setting off smoke bombs and scaring families. Coming to your town if Islam is not exiled from the West.” Victor, I’ve seen numerous other videos. Germany, particularly, has these Christmas seasonal things in their plazas, and now many places they’re surrounded by these massive concrete blocks to prevent any car bombings, etc. I don’t know that German citizens are going to be car bombing their Christmas seasonal markets. It’s all because of the growing and intensifying local Muslim outrage at these kind of institutions. Also, we see many signs of church masses being disrupted, priests being smacked, urinating at St. Peter’s, etc. This is getting more prevalent. Your thoughts?  Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I’ll just enumerate them. There are many. No. 1, there’s no reciprocity. Thank God. I mean, do you really believe that if you were a Christian, and there’s a few left in the West Bank, but if you were in the West Bank and you decided to go to the feast of Ramadan, go desecrate a mosque, I don’t think you’d be alive. No. 2, what is the reaction of the authorities to this, the government? Well, the reaction of the government is, we are left-wing secularists, maybe agnostics or even atheists. So, we look at our Christians as deviant people. So, if you want to go torment them, we’re not going to get involved. In fact, DEI postulates that we should favor the non-white, non-European, non-Christian movement over its antithesis here in Europe or the United States.  So, these people who desecrate Christmas ornaments, festivities, shrines do so on the prompt basically, implicit though it is, that they can get away with it because the authorities either are so guilt-ridden and ashamed of their own culture and civilization and inheritance or, as secular leftists, they feel that they despise Christians too. And then, when you confront them, like Greta Thunberg, she was on a ship with a bunch of radical Islamists, and they were not very sympathetic to the trans movement or the gay movement. So, there’s all these contradictions between the Left and radical Islam, but compared to their mutual antipathy toward Christians, it’s not much. Then there’s the question, not just of reciprocity and the inaction of authorities, but what is the purpose of it, Jack? Why do people come from the failed states of the Middle East or Turkey and come over here, here in the West, I’m speaking broadly of the United States and Europe, and then no sooner they get here, they create a chauvinist, rah-rah superiority of Islamic countries and Arab countries over their homeland in Europe. Is it, we’re going to take over and that Europe belongs to us and our demographics are 3.5 to 4.0 children per family in Europe’s 1.4? So, they’re vanishing at 20 million a year and we’re increasing by 5 million and we’re going catch them. Is that the plan or is it just a complex of inferiority? Well, I came over here and everything works and it’s so much nicer. Who do these people think they are? There must be something they did to us in Syria or Iraq or Egypt or Jordan or the West Bank. It’s not like this. Maybe it was the Crusades. I don’t know. But it’s a very strange mentality for them to come to United States or to Europe and then so boldly to attack an icon of the civilization that you wanted to join. I don’t mean you have to go to church. I don’t mean you have to know anything about the Bible. I’m just saying just don’t desecrate it. But they think they can and will be rewarded in some ways by the exemptions they’re given. It’s going to get worse because the demographics are on their side and the immigration policies are on their side. And there’s going to be one great pushback.  And we’ll see what happens. Whether it will be centrist, organized and political, or it will be violent and hard, hardcore right wing. But there will be a pushback. And all of those governments in Western Europe are threatened. The Macron government has no popular support. [British Prime Minister Keir] Starmer is the least popular prime minister in the last … 12% [approval], I think. The Dutch government is a coalition of conservative governments. [Italian Prime Minister Giorgia] Meloni is still solid. She’s conservative. The Spanish socialist government, we’ll see how long that lasts. But there is a pushback in Europe against it. And it’ll be the last hurrah because demographically this will be about the last chance, really, if the immigration policies proceed that you’ll see an organized effective saying, “No more, not here. We’re not going to do it anymore. I’m sorry.”  Fowler: What if there are more mosques than operating cathedrals in Europe?  Hanson: See, it’s very different than here in the United States because we do have a melting pot. Until recently, it worked. When I talk to, let’s say, Mexican American couples or families that are 45, and I’m in the local supermarket, and the person ahead of me cannot speak a word of English and basically speaks an indigenous language from Chiapas or Michoacan and has four or five different EBT cards, and the person who is the clerk and the person ahead of me in line are Mexican American citizens and they’re very patriotic and proud. They look at that in the same way I would look at it if a bunch of Swedish illegal aliens came over and abused the system, and I had a member of my family depended on dialysis or something and couldn’t get service. Because we acculturate people, at least we used to when they came in diverse numbers and they were manageable and we believed in our civilization. They don’t have that tradition of the melting pot. They were pretty much like the Japanese. They were uniformly French. The decolonization started it. Enoch Powell, “Rivers of Blood” and all that. They were aware of what was going on in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, but not like now.  And they have no mechanism to acculturate.  Fowler: Can you imagine, though, in 75 years, if the demographics proved the destiny of Europe, what Europe would be like? Germany is now essentially Jordan and in all its ways and operation and economy.  Hanson: I think it would be historically sort of like around 900 BC, when you were in the Greek Dark Ages and you walked around and you looked at these Mycenaean palaces that were crumbling and what was that Lion’s Gate? Hmm. My brother fell into a Tholos tomb. Who built these? They were gods. Somebody did it. Or maybe the sixth century in Western Europe in the beginnings of the Dark Ages and you’d go by and say, wow, the Roman Forum.  What’s beneath all that brush? All that overgrowth. What was this harbor at Ostia that now is all clogged? Who were these people who built this stuff? We use this aqueduct, but we don’t know how to fix it. Who built it? Wow, there’s a sewer here in Lyon. I don’t know how it came here. So, that’s going to be the attitude. They’re going to come in there, and they’re going to be living in an infrastructure that somebody built, but they have no interest in knowing who that was. And we get in the news of the violence they have no interest in assimilating into the body politic and enhancing European culture in the sense of its economy, military, politics.  Fowler: Right. There’s no Protestant work ethic in the Syrian refugees.  Hanson: No. So, they’re just going to be bizarre. Who was Leonardo da Vinci? What was the Duomo? Who did this? Perseus? Saulini? I don’t know what this statue is. Who did this? I could care less. The bridge still works. I’ll use it till it collapses. That’s the attitude.  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: Targeting Christians at Christmas, Attacking the Culture They Chose to Join 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. Ukraine is in the news again. There’s been some peace proposals submitted by U.S. President Donald Trump to the international community, apparently. A lot of hysteria, a lot of controversy, whether they were too lax, too strong, too punitive, not punitive enough vis-a-vis Russia. But I thought it would be wise just to review some basic questions, maybe offer a few answers, how we got in this mess in the first place. So, why did Russian President Vladimir Putin invade? Why did he invade Ukraine? Well, he invaded Ukraine because of two reasons. One, there was no deterrence. He had invaded Ossetia in 2008 during the weakened lame-duck Bush administration and Georgia. In 2014, he felt that President Barack Obama, especially after the hot mic exchange in Seoul, South Korea, in 2012, wouldn’t do anything. And he was right. So, he took Crimea and he took the Donbas. And then in 2022, on Feb. 24, he invaded again. Why? Because there was still that lack of deterrence. President Joe Biden said his reaction would depend on whether it was a major or minor invasion. He’d been very weak on hacking. He said, if you’re gonna hack, do not hack particular humanitarian sites. So, Putin, again, correctly thought that the United States and the West in general would not attack. Next question: Why does he keep fighting? This has been going on for four years. We don’t know what the dead, wounded, and missing—that is, the total casualties—are. It could be over 1.5 million. Russia may have lost a million dead and wounded alone. So, why is he doing this? He’s doing this because he feels that there is a magical DMZ line somewhere where the battlefront is today that he has to get beyond. Because if he doesn’t—and every dictator doesn’t have sole power, he has to report to certain constituencies, public opinion. But in Putin’s case, the Russian military and the Russian oligarchic class. And if he says to them, “I lost 1.2, 1.3 million Russians, wounded or dead. I destroyed the reputation of the Russian military, and I crashed the Russian economy. And all I got was 60 or 70 miles westward of where we were before Feb. 24, 2022,” that’s not enough. So, he’s trying to push westward. Most of the peace negotiations and the outlines are clear. We all know what they are. Putin can tell the Russians, his constituencies, “I institutionalized my theft of Crimea and Donbas. I moved westward somewhat. I ensured that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians would not be in NATO.” And Zelenskyy is going to say, “I’m a hero. He wanted the whole country. He only got 10% more than he did when he invaded in 2022. We stopped him, and we’re gonna be in the EU. We may not be in NATO, but we stopped him, and he suffered four times the amount of casualties that we did.” So, they each think they can win. And what is the dispute left about? Ukraine’s not gonna be in NATO. Putin knows that. All it is, where is the DMZ? Does Putin get to push areas westward that Ukraine, Ukrainians are currently in and fighting successfully and he can’t dislodge, or not? So, that’s what the dispute is over, and the security guarantees. If Ukraine is not in NATO, how can it defend the next invasion from Russia? Well, it’s the greatest military in Europe right now. It’s battle-hardened. It’s got a huge army. It’s well supplied. Will that continue? Will the EU or NATO continue to arm it? Will the United States back them up in extremis? That’s all. That’s the only two issues: security guarantees and where we draw the DMZ line. Why does NATO or the West not supply Ukraine to win the war? “I mean, give them Tomahawk missiles,” we’re told. “Give them F-16s. Russia’s on the ropes.” And the reason is that Putin engages in nuclear blusters. He has 6,000 nuclear weapons. So, from time to time, a Russian oligarch, a Russian media host, Putin’s inner circle say, “We’re gonna use a nuclear weapon if you do this or that.” And we recoil. No Tomahawks are willing to use a nuclear weapon. Ninety-eight percent of that is bluff. Two percent may not be a nuclear poker. You can’t take those odds. So, that is one reason why we have restricted. The other is the MAGA brand. I mean, there’s a base of Donald Trump’s support that says, “We don’t want forever wars. Don’t get involved. We don’t want advisers. We don’t want anything. We’ve given $170 billion. That’s enough.” There’s realists who say, “We have to think of the geostrategic consequences. We want to play Russia off against China. We don’t want them to join. We want to go back to history, Henry Kissinger’s paradigm. No better friend are we to Russia than we are to China and vice versa.” There’s a lot of people in the United States that may be pro-Putin. They feel, “Wow, you know, he’s Christian, he’s fighting for the West, no DEI, no trans. He’s no more corrupt than Zelenskyy is.” So, I don’t know if that is—there is a more sizable constituency, which says that the borders always change over there. This was all part of the Soviet Union. Ukraine was created in 1939, when Josef Stalin ganged up against the West with Adolf Hitler and got what is now Western Ukraine, which used to be, for a thousand years, Christian, Polish-speaking Poland. And it was ethnically cleansed during World War II, and the Soviets never gave it up, and the postwar agreements gave Poland parts of Pomerania and East Prussia in compensation. As far as the Donbas area, that was an anti-Soviet jurisdictional matter. We’ll let Ukraine be semi-autonomous on this border, so they don’t have a national liberationist front or something. Crimea—it’s been Russian since 1783. So, a lot of Americans say, “We don’t want countries coming in here and discussing our changing borders with Mexico. So, we don’t want to get involved at all.” I think that’s why NATO hasn’t used its full powers to defeat Russia, which it could vis-a-vis this proxy. Why do we support Ukraine? A lot of people say we should support Russia. Well, Ukraine was invaded. Russia wasn’t invaded. Russia was the aggressor. We like to support the underdog and Europe. Ukraine is quasi-European. It’s corrupt, but it’s quasi-European and quasi-Western. Putin is not. Ukraine, if it wins the war, it doesn’t want any more territory. If Putin wins the war, he wants to continue going. And Ukraine also is a very capable ally. We don’t have any friends in the world that are militarily competent—maybe Israel, maybe Ukraine—outside of some NATO country. So, when we see a country that’s defending itself and fighting heroically against enormous odds, like Israel, we tend to feel we should continue to support it. Another question, isn’t this amoral, feeding Verdun, feeding Stalingrad? There’s, you know, are we gonna go all the way to 2 million? The only politician who says it is is Donald Trump. He’s complained that it’s amoral. He’s talked about it in human terms. It is. So, one side has to win and one side has to lose to stop the carnage, if you can’t have a peace. So, what will stop the war? The war will stop if Putin, if we pull out or NATO pulls support from Ukraine, Putin will bury Ukraine and take it all, or it’ll take a large swath. That would end the war. Or, if we continue to give aid to Ukraine and Putin, at some magical point, feels he can’t win, and he’s removed from office or his autocratic successor feels that they can’t win, they might have a negotiation. Or, as I said at the beginning, if Putin feels that he gets a little bit more westward than the current battle line, and they agree on the other terms, which we reviewed, then he’ll probably say, “For now, I got a lot for Russia and we’re beyond where the fighting is now. We’re westward of that.” All in all, it’s a mess, and it’s a reminder that when you lose deterrence, wars follow. If you want peace, the Romans said, prepare for war. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post What Will Finally End the Russia-Ukraine War? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Texas Republican Rep. Ronny Jackson introduced a bill Wednesday which, if signed into law, would move the headquarters of the United Nations out of New York City. “This bill sends a clear message: America is done propping up a city that rejects our values while claiming to represent our nation on the world stage,” Jackson said in a statement to The Daily Signal. “Under President [Donald] Trump, strength and security are back, and when the U.N. gathers in America, they should see a city that reflects that strength, not the chaos and weakness we see in New York today.” In November, New York City elected self-identified Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as its mayor. The bill would direct the Secretary of State to formulate a plan to move the United Nation’s headquarters from New York City, where it has resided since construction was completed in 1952. Specifically, the secretary would seek to negotiate a new headquarters with the United Nations and submit a list of relocation options to the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations Committees. Jackson, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, has represented the Texas panhandle area since 2021. The post Texas Rep. Jackson Introduces Bill to Move UN HQ Out of New York appeared first on The Daily Signal.

China is outpacing other advanced economies in the addition of renewable energy systems, and is “winning the clean energy race,” according to Axios, but the reality of the situation is more complex, climate experts explain.   “What race? The notion of ‘a race’ is a rhetorical tool used to evoke emotion and feelings of competition when no such race actually exists,” Jack Spencer, a senior research fellow for energy and environmental policy at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal.   “The real issue, and the only one that U.S. policymakers should care about, is whether American families and businesses have access to affordable, reliable energy,” Spencer said, adding that the U.S. is “failing,” in this regard.   “But we are failing not because we haven’t built enough wind and solar, but because politicians and special interests have forced us to spend scarce resources on so-called green energy when we should have been investing in reliable energy like natural gas, coal, and nuclear.”  Citing data from the McKinsey Global Institute, Axios reports that while the U.S., EU, and other “advanced economies” have slowed their share of “global solar and wind generation capacity additions” in the past several years, China has grown its significantly.  From 2022 to 2025, China increased its share of wind and solar generation capacity by about 30%, while the U.S. and nations with robust economies saw a decline.   “China is one of the few countries on the planet that can add significant renewable energy systems to its grid without compromising the grid integrity or incurring brownouts and blackouts,” Gregory Wrightstone, executive director of Co2 Coalition, told The Daily Signal. The reason China is capabile of this, according to Wrightstone, “is because their additions of electricity power generation from fossil fuel powered plants (coal and natural gas) are outpacing the renewable additions.” In other words, while China is expanding wind and solar energy system, it is also increasing use of fossil fuels.   In February, Reuters reported that China began construction on over 94 gigawatts of coal-fired power in 2024, making it the largest year for such new construction projects in China since 2015.   China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world and has pledged to control its emissions, but power shortage concerns have spurred new construction of coal-fired power.   “These thermal energy sources supply reliable abundant electricity that back up the intermittent energy from wind and solar that only produce energy when the wind blows and the sun shines,” Wrightstone said.   “The Western world has been decreasing its reliance on dependable coal and natural gas and turning more toward the renewables, and the result has been skyrocketing electricity prices and grid instability,” he added. “Every gigawatt of renewables needs to be backed up by a similar amount of reliable thermal power generation.”   Electricity costs have increased across all sectors over the past decade, according to the Energy Information Administration, rising from $10.41 in 2015 to $13.66 today.  If the U.S. wants to gain ground in energy production in comparison to China, it should focus on nuclear power, according to Spencer.   “There are around 60 power reactors being built today, and China is building half of them. They are building them faster and cheaper than any Western nation,” the Heritage expert said.   “If the U.S. doesn’t get its act together,” Spencer warns “China and Russia will be the global suppliers of commercial nuclear energy, and this will undoubtedly result in geopolitical advantage for those nations.”   The post Fact Check: Report Claims China Is ‘Winning the Clean Energy Race’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.