Anti-ICE activists set up makeshift street “checkpoints” in parts of Minneapolis this week, stopping vehicles, assaulting journalists, and attempting to identify federal immigration agents as tensions remain high following recent enforcement actions in Minnesota. Video circulating online shows demonstrators operating temporary roadblocks using cones, barricades, and parked vehicles, thereby forcing motorists to slow or stop as activists approach their cars. In several clips, individuals at the checkpoints appear to check license plates or question drivers before allowing them to pass. Protest organizers described the actions as “community-driven checkpoints,” framing the effort as civilian “resistance” to ICE officers as well as to Minneapolis police officers, whom they claim are “openly collaborating with ICE.” Subsequent footage depicts the protesters stopping vehicles from outside the state and running license plates to “confirm whether the vehicle is affiliated with abductors” before letting them through their checkpoint. “So now we need permission to drive from these people?” said one Minnesota resident who was stopped at a checkpoint while the protestors appeared to examine her license plate. The resident described the scene: “As we were driving in, we passed a small group of maybe 30 people holding large “F*** ICE” signs, spelled out. Many of the houses in the neighborhood also had signs saying ‘F*** ICE’ and similar messages.” Jorge Ventura, a Daily Caller News Foundation reporter, covered the demonstrations on the ground. He was documenting activity at one of the checkpoints when he witnessed his Uber driver being detained by protesters. “It looks like, in our system, your plate came back as an ICE plate,” a masked protester explained to the Uber driver. Ventura repeatedly told the protester, “He’s just a Somalian Uber driver,” but the individual still proceeded to stop and confront the driver. As Ventura reported from the scene alongside photojournalist Eric Carrera, protesters at the checkpoint assaulted them both. Ventura appeared on The Ingraham Angle to address the attack. He said, “They actually caused my right hand to bleed. They attacked the photojournalist I was with.” He then explained why he believed the activists attacked him:  “And they do this, Laura, because they want to deter journalists like myself who actually show the truth of what’s going on on the ground.” Ventura said traffic cones, wooden materials, and furniture were utilized by the protesters to create what he described as “filter blockade[s]” along neighborhood streets. He observed, “I didn’t see any local law enforcement when I arrived” at the checkpoint that he said “was still up more than 24 hours.”  “The agitators were very aggressive, questioning me,” Ventura recalled. Video of the altercation showed a masked protester saying, “Get in the f*****g car, man,” as he shoved the reporter into his car. As protests over immigration enforcement have intensified in Minnesota, federal officials say they are moving to expand transparency measures for ICE officers operating in the field. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Monday that DHS will begin outfitting federal immigration officers with body-worn cameras, with Minneapolis designated as the first location for implementation. “Effective immediately we are deploying body cameras to every officer in the field in Minneapolis,” Noem wrote. Noem explained that the program will extend beyond the city, “As funding is available, the body camera program will be expanded nationwide,” she said, adding that DHS will “rapidly acquire and deploy body cameras” throughout its law enforcement agencies. This initiative follows a period of intensified criticism surrounding immigration operations after the fatal shootings of ICE protesters Alex Pretti and Renée Good. In response to Noem, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, stated, “It’s about time but why just Minneapolis? DHS officers are abusing Americans all across the country.” READ MORE from Dylan Kresak: ‘ICE OUT’: Celebrities Hit ICE at the Grammys Feminism: The ‘Shadow Church’ Replacing Christianity New Video Shows Alex Pretti Confronting Federal Agents Days Before Fatal Shooting Image licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Dispatches from the Late Republic: The Culture, Politics, and Prophets of American Greatness, Decline, and Rebirth By Michael Anton Encounter Books, 640 pages, $35 This past September, Michael Anton left his perch as the State Department’s director of policy and planning, where he oversaw the completion of President Trump’s National Security Strategy. His service in that post was brief but consequential because, along with Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby, Anton has been one of the principal intellectual architects of the Trump administration’s approach to the world, prioritizing homeland and hemispheric security and deterrence of China while encouraging burden-sharing in Europe and the Middle East. Anton has returned to scholarly pursuits at the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College, and this April, a collection of his essays will be published by Encounter Books with the title: Dispatches from the Late Republic: The Culture, Politics, and Prophets of American Greatness, Decline, and Rebirth. (RELATED: Michael Anton: Trump’s ‘George Kennan’ Pick for Cold War II) The essays span a 15-year time-period and range from musings about California to paying homage to Anton’s teachers and intellectual heroes (Tom Wolfe, Tom West, Angelo Codevilla, Harry Jaffa, John Marini, Michael Uhlmann), to our civilizational difficulties, to foreign policy, and finally to personal diversions. If there is an overarching theme to the book, it is Anton’s concern about the future of America at home and abroad due to the intersection of culture and politics. Our culture is too often influenced, when not dominated, by what Anton calls “San Francisco values” propagated by leftist oligarchs who control city and state governments in California and elsewhere in the United States. Anton is not sure that the republic can be saved, even though he applauds President Trump’s attempt to do so. In lamenting San Francisco’s decline, Anton explains, “Yesterday’s kooks are today’s mayors, supervisors, and state senators — their kookiness having not faded away but become mainstream.” Anton’s description applies equally well to the leftists in Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia, New York, and many other “blue” cities, and to leaders in California, Minnesota, Maine, New York, New Jersey, and other “blue” states. Writing during the Biden administration, Anton saw this cultural and political decline manifested at the national level. “[I]n all important respects,” he wrote in December 2021, “our country is no longer a republic, much less a democracy, but rather a kind of hybrid corporate-administrative oligarchy.” Angelo Codevilla wrote a book about this cultural-political oligarchy titled The Ruling Class, while John Marini focused on the elite’s control of the “deep state” in his Unmasking the Administrative State. Anton listed the policy priorities of our cultural-political elite in 2021: “outsourcing, open borders, financialization, toadying to tech monopolies, democracy wars, critical race theory, race riots, defunding the police, school closures, vaccine mandates, censorship, cancellation, and drug and gambling legalization.” Not much has changed since then, except that Donald Trump gained back the presidency after that ruling class tried to destroy him, just as it had destroyed Nixon over Watergate. And our cultural-political elite has made it clear that if and when they return to power, they will try again to destroy Trump. In the meantime, our cultural-political elites, Anton writes, promote “every imaginable historic form of degeneracy,” acting like “cultural locusts devouring everything in their path.” They want the abnormal to become normal. They not only engage in “defining deviancy down,” to use Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s immortal phrase, but they also seek to render the word “deviance” meaningless. Anton describes them as “anti-American, anti-white, anti-conservative, anti-rural, anti-Southern, anti-Red state, anti-redneck, anti-working class.” Anton’s essays on foreign policy foreshadowed in some respects the 2025 National Security Strategy. China, he writes, has a greater interest in Taiwan than we do based on history, geography, and culture, yet the island may become a flashpoint for great power war between China and the U.S. The best course for the United States, he writes, is building a credible deterrent that will preserve “the status quo for as long as possible.” Russia, meanwhile, is not nearly the threatening power portrayed by European leaders and our own foreign policy establishment who have revived the “lessons of Munich” and the “domino theory” to rally support for Ukraine. Anton includes in this book a lengthy piece on George Kennan, the American diplomat and historian who changed from hawk to dove during the “long twilight struggle” known as the Cold War, and who later opposed NATO enlargement in the post-Cold War world. Anton describes Kennan as a “Machiavellian” who was “clear-eyed and hard-headed about the cold realities of international relations and his country’s true, core interests” and an instinctual conservative “who shared more opinions with today’s populist Right than with the contemporary Left.” Anton is not sure that the republic can be saved, even though he applauds President Trump’s attempt to do so. Trump is, after all, engaged in an existential struggle against what Anton calls the “unconstitutional” and “anti-constitutional” administrative state which “steamrolls the separation of powers, ignores the limits set by the enumeration of powers, and further rejects any limits either to government’s means or ends” and is “unwilling to tolerate rivals.” And in this struggle against Trump, the administrative state has the support of many federal judges and the mainstream media. Perhaps that is why Anton writes that if he had to bet on America’s future, he would place his chips “somewhere between imminent collapse and drawn-out decline.” READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: Bleeding Minnesota and Its ‘Fire Eater’ Predecessors The Myth of the ‘Liberal International Order’ America’s Urban Guerrillas

There are some guys who, when they get dumped by a girlfriend, need to fall in love with someone else immediately. Otherwise, they get confused, they lose their minds, and they start calling their exes in the middle of the night. Something very similar happens to public opinion and ideas. You can successfully eradicate a bad idea, but if you don’t fill the void with good ones, the old order will return. Or it could be even more catastrophic: a new, even worse idea could win the day. During the last election campaign, I suggested that Donald Trump should lead and develop a “right-wing conservationism.” The term is clunky and a bit silly, but it serves to distinguish it from the environmentalism that the far left has been forcing on us for years. We should just call it conservationism, plain and simple. I may not be aware of every action the government is taking in this area, but I do know that the environment has been completely absent from conservative discourse since Trump’s return to the White House — except to reiterate criticisms of Joe Biden’s disastrous “green” initiatives. To paraphrase my mother, all that filth is something the poor little angels will have to sweep up after Judgment Day. Conservatives, like Christians, have ample reason to defend the environment. These range from the purely aesthetic — which, while perhaps frivolous, is not at all crazy — to the strictly Christian: the belief that God created the world for us to use and care for, not to leave it covered in trash. To paraphrase my mother, all that filth is something the poor little angels will have to sweep up after Judgment Day. The era of communist utopias disguised as “green” leftism is over. The only viable environmental measure is one that doesn’t bankrupt us and doesn’t attack the root of the system that has lifted more people out of poverty than any other in history: capitalism. Moreover, the best kind of environmentalism — the one most guaranteed to succeed — is the one where the people involved also make money. (RELATED: Harvard Kennedy School Peddles Ecomysticism) The left thinks that everything wrong with the world can be fixed in Washington. The right believes that Washington tends to make things even worse. That’s why progressives have tried to fill the world with fines and bureaucracy, grossly invading the private sphere and tarnishing the reputation of legitimate industries in the name of environmentalism. (RELATED: Washington’s Reverse Midas Touch) As conservatives, we should fearlessly promote an environmentalism that originates in the private sector: it will probably be better than the government’s version; it will probably be cheaper; it will probably be more effective; it will probably be free of under-the-table bribes; and those involved will probably actually turn a profit. Furthermore, public intervention in environmental matters should be essentially local. Just look at Europe. The implementation of the European Green Deal was like a communist wave that ruined entire sectors of society, persecuted small farmers and ranchers, prevented citizens from freely enjoying the countryside, and yielded exactly “zero” environmental benefits in return. The pact is still in effect, which explains why we Europeans scratch our noses every time we want to take a sip of water; you know, the cap is permanently attached to the bottle because we’re supposedly “saving the planet.” (RELATED: Thank You, Trump, for Reminding Europe’s Leaders How Utterly Stupid They Are) However, the biggest mistake of the Green Deal was its arrogance — the idea that four idiots in Brussels, who have never even seen the business end of a cow, know more about livestock than people who have spent six generations knee-deep in manure from morning till night. If you want a successful environmental policy, start by giving the say back to those who know their land, their forests, and their livelihoods. Let those who actually live there have the final word on their land, their forests, and their livelihoods. Their opinions matter far more than those of a political advisor holed up in an office who has read a couple of thick theses on climate change and could barely tell a camel from a snail. Actions must be preceded by ideas. Roger Scruton is a good starting point. So is Russell Kirk and his defense of the moral obligation to conserve what we have received to bequeath it to future generations. But I find Wendell Berry’s argument increasingly seductive: why on earth aren’t we conservatives defending the local more vigorously? It is there, in the small and the tangible, where good ideas take root best and where tradition is most respected. (RELATED: Wendell Berry, Temple Grandin, and the Idolatry of Abstractions) I still think Trump is doing a great job clearing the shelves of all that woke environmental garbage. But he needs to fill them with an alternative. And if that requires a major debate first — a major conference as an alternative to those idiotic, anti-capitalist globalist summits — then so be it. After all, I refuse to accept that the most sophisticated thing we can achieve in 21st-century environmental policy is a disgusting bike lane — a mere placebo for people who suffer from insomnia when they read the environment pages of the New York Times. READ MORE from Itxu Díaz: Confessions of a Hospital Hypochondriac Diary of a Very Dark Tuesday A Fairly Open Response to ‘An Open Letter to Europe’

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