Nepal has reversed its social media ban following nationwide “Gen Z” protests and public backlash.

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"I look up and there he is, this big guy standing in the fucking doorway". The post The moment Johnny Cash asked for Twisted Sister’s autographs: “Oh really?” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

I have a couple of seemingly unrelated stories to tell you. And my contention is that they’re not unrelated at all. In Houston, Nation of Islam radicals are terrorizing Middle Eastern shopkeepers in black neighborhoods because they’re selling beer and Mad Dog 20/20 and Powerball tickets, which are all haram. It’s a special sort of obnoxious thing — those shopkeepers may or may not be Muslims, but they did generally leave the hellholes they came from in order to get away from sharia law, and now some black dude whose name used to be Bill Jones or something before he changed it, and who thought it was a cool idea to get a blood-red dye job on his goatee, is trying to impose it on them in the heart of Texas. (RELATED: A Texas City’s Quiet Claim to Islamic Territory) ISLAMIFICATION: Houston area Islamic cleric demanding shopkeepers stop selling alcohol, pork and lottery tickets to comply with Islamic Sharia laws. pic.twitter.com/fYsnIbCBT9 — @amuse (@amuse) September 7, 2025 As best I can tell, nobody is very active in telling Mr. Soul Brother Ayatollah to cease and desist, and it’s making people very nervous. Why? Well, it’s no secret what’s happening elsewhere in the collapsing West, where, for example, Keir Starmer just put a pro-Hamas jihadist into the job of Home Secretary. So you’ll know, that’s the cabinet-level agency in charge of not just the border but Great Britain’s intelligence community. (RELATED: Is Britain Becoming North Korea?) And the rumor has it that when (not if) the Starmer government falls in the U.K., the next Labour prime minister there, as likely as not, will be Sadiq Khan. I could regale you with stories of Islamic ascendancy in France, Germany, Canada, and a host of other places as well. The West is rapidly declining vis-à-vis Islam. What began really before 9/11 but has accelerated ever since is reaching a phase in which it’s unmistakable. Our society no longer has the muscle to reject the advance of an alternative civilization that doesn’t seem to have a problem sponsoring things like rape gangs, so long as the victims are infidels. (RELATED: Radical Chic Continues at Georgetown) Even if the cultural problem can be solved, and it can quite easily with a simple application of public will, the demographic problem is going critical if not terminal. The non-Muslim birth rates in Western Europe tell that story. How does a clearly superior civilization, such as the West boasts, vis-à-vis that of the Islamic world, simply disintegrate? My answer might surprise you, and you might feel an instinct to reject it. I have a video to show you that you’ve likely seen… Contrary to what’s on the internet, as of this writing, it doesn’t look like the identity of Baseball Karen has been solidified. She might actually be a school administrator — with that haircut, how can she not be? — but it doesn’t look like she was fired on Saturday, the day after this incident occurred. It isn’t that Baseball Karen acted as she did. That isn’t the disease. It’s a symptom, though. Here’s another video… There has been a ton of scrutiny around Drew Feltwell, the father who was bullied into surrendering that home run ball to Baseball Karen. Was his choice the right one? I’m not going to say that this is the moral dilemma of our time, but to an extent? It actually is, somewhat. What would possess Feltwell with the idea that this was the right move? Why would he animatedly cower upon being assaulted — when Baseball Karen put her hand on his shoulder while aggressively berating him, that’s assault — over a baseball he procured for his son fair and square from the near-clutches of someone neither dextrous nor physically fit enough to get it for herself? And why would he confiscate a baseball from his own son to reward an obnoxious harpy? Chivalry, that’s why. It’s been beaten into Western men’s heads that under no circumstances should you hit a woman, and rightly so. Societies where women are physically abused are brutal, backward, and unworthy societies, and they’ve rightly assumed a subservient place on the civilizational totem pole. Except our concept of chivalry evolved from a standard that has disintegrated in modern times, which is that the chivalrous man observes a standard of behavior not so much around women but around ladies. And there was a standard to which a woman purporting to be a lady must adhere. A quite chivalrous 15th-century knight assaulted by Baseball Karen would likely have drawn on her and left her without a limb. Drew Feltwell knew he had no such option if he wanted to set a favorable example for his son and daughters. Particularly with cameras rolling all around him. So what he was left with was what he did. And sure, it worked out. Except Lincoln now knows that he’s consigned to play a subservient role in the face of all the Karens, baseball or otherwise, that he faces in his life. And he will face an awful lot of them. An astonishing poll by NBC News surfaced over the past couple of days… Our NBC News Decision Desk poll asked Gen Z adults (18-29 years old) what they consider important to a successful life. The combination of gender and politics produced two very different sets of priorities: pic.twitter.com/xvm0t4IKaT — Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) September 8, 2025 Look at the results from those young women who voted for the Harris–Walz ticket, and what you see is a whole host of budding Baseball Karens. What they care about in life is career and money, then emotional stability (mostly because the cultural messages fed to them are designed to make them miserable, and do), and then friends. Marriage and family come in last. But when you prioritize aggressive pursuits in your 20s, you will end up angry and alone and stealing baseballs from children in front of Gaia and everyone in your 40s. This is known. Supposedly, Baseball Karen was with a husband or boyfriend when Drew Feltwell outhustled her for that baseball. If so, either she was far too aggressive, or the husband/boyfriend was far too beta, for him to stop her from humiliating herself in seeking to take that ball away from young Lincoln. Neither is a particularly attractive possibility. And this is what that led to… For future reference, I’d suggest a third way of handling the situation, which would be to toss that baseball on the ground at Baseball Karen’s feet and tell her to pick it up if she wanted it so badly. And then the entire section would be laughing at her if she did — or if she didn’t as well, because what’s her next move? There’s no saving face at that point. But that would be something you’d do if you were prepared for a confrontation like this, and most Western men aren’t. Here was one Western man who was, and it happens that the situation involved a couple of aggressive Muslim males harassing a French Christian girl… This how you deal with them?pic.twitter.com/UzoBsNPlWv — NO CONTEXT VIDEOS (@Viralvid_89) August 21, 2025 The point being that we’re at a stage in our civilizational development in which we’ve warped our concept of chivalry, meaning the high standard of conduct between men and women that was socialized into all of us, into what’s essentially a suicide pact while encouraging a large segment of the female population to take advantage of that ideal. The Baseball Karens are scamming the system, and now it’s broken. You can’t ask the Drew Feltwells of the world to play second-class citizen to shrewish bullies in I-want-to-see-the-manager haircuts and Rachel Maddow glasses all their lives. That will not play. Chivalry is ingrained in Western males still, but it’s fraying at the edges, and not surprisingly so… There’s another astonishing bit of social research which made its way into the world of late, and it’s this… All the men like Asian women; none of the men (even black men) like black women. Why? Of the four, which group is most associated with traditional families and traditional feminine roles? Asians. Which group is least thus associated? Black women. You aren’t going to solve the demographic problems in the West this way. The Baseball Karens don’t reproduce. They don’t want to. She didn’t have any kids at the game with her. She wanted that ball for herself, and she was just fine with making an ass of herself to get it. And when those around her gave her a piece of their minds for how she acted, she got aggressive with them as well. And other than the internet finding out who she is and canceling her from the safety of our homes, which hasn’t happened as of this writing, nobody did anything. Pull a stunt like that in public in Tehran or Riyadh or Jakarta, and a split lip is an optimistic result. In Miami, they give you memes. It seems more civilized, but here’s the problem — you don’t win this way. You don’t stand up to tyranny, petty or otherwise, this way. This is how you still have people in face diapers at the airport, it’s how you have welfare queens throwing hands at a Chili’s, it’s how we allow Munchausen moms to trans their kids, and it’s how we have morons with red-dyed goatees trying to disrupt Powerball sales in the Houston hood. C.S. Lewis put it best all those years ago, and his words still ring true… “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” This is not to say that Drew Feltwell is a man without a chest. It is to say our society demands he surrender that chest in the face of a standard and an ideal which our culture has defiled. We are castrating ourselves societally, and we are not fruitful. But the red-bearded ayatollahs of the Houston slums, and the black-bearded ayatollahs of Rothingham and Marseille and Frankfurt are. The Baseball Karens won’t save us. This much we know. READ MORE from Scott McKay: Peter Navarro, Lawfare, and the Death of Executive Privilege They Don’t Really Want To Stand Behind Lisa Cook, Do They? Last Year It Was Kamala, This Year It’s… Arch Manning?

On August 22, 2025, tragedy struck on a Charlotte LYNX Blue Line train when 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, was stabbed to death by Decarlos Brown Jr., a career criminal with a lengthy record. Zarutska had fled war-torn Ukraine, seeking safety and a new beginning. Instead, she found herself violently knifed to death at 10:30 p.m. while simply sitting with headphones and scrolling on her phone. Surveillance video released by the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) paints a chilling scene: she boards the train dressed in her pizzeria uniform, takes a seat, and within minutes is stabbed multiple times in the neck by Brown, who had no prior interaction with her as she sat in front of him. Brown exits the train, drops the knife, is arrested shortly thereafter, and charged with first-degree murder. She ran from war in Ukraine. She came here for safety. And America FAILED her. 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska was butchered on a Charlotte light rail, her throat cut open by a violent repeat offender who had been arrested 14 times and was STILL free. This wasn’t random. This was… pic.twitter.com/woRCbMyioq — Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) September 6, 2025 Brown’s criminal history is extensive. The 35-year-old has been arrested no fewer than 14 times, the New York Post reported, and his mother had him evaluated for aggressive behavior after he was released from prison after five years for armed robbery, according to WSOC-TV reporter Joe Bruno. Brown’s mother had her son involuntarily committed, and he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She kicked him out of her house when he became too dangerous — that’s why the media is making this about a “homeless man.” Much of the media coverage centered not on the victim and her story, but on the assailant — portraying Brown as yet another cautionary tale of mental illnesses and homelessness. While this may be true, the media barely made an attempt to humanize Zarutska. They could have asked why she boarded the light rail so late, why she was working such hours, and whether she had a family. But of course, they didn’t, as headlines and pundits largely sidestepped the violent act itself to focus on the “systemic failures” that supposedly led him there. They want you to believe that the system failed the killer, not the victim. A GoFundMe fundraiser was even launched for Brown, prompting outrage as the narrative pivoted toward pity for the killer instead of justice for the innocent woman whose life he stole. Instead of grappling with the implications of allowing a mentally unstable, repeat violent offender to roam free, media outlets have turned the story into a familiar script: another failure of the system, another man “failed by society.” They want you to believe that the system failed the killer, not the victim. This reframing ignores the hard truth; this was a preventable tragedy, enabled by a justice system more focused on rehabilitation and its political reputation than actual public safety. Just as President Donald Trump prepares to reintroduce law-and-order policies to cities like Chicago — policies aimed at getting dangerous offenders off the streets — the media is busy softening the image of a man who stabbed a young woman to death without provocation. Compare this to how quickly coverage disappeared after a transgender Minneapolis Catholic school shooter gunned down two children, one age 8 and the other age 10, in late August. None of these propagandists wanted to poke holes in the gender identity debate by questioning those mental health implications. And because that murderer used a firearm, media outlets easily pushed their gun control narrative. In Iryna’s case, no gun was involved — only a knife, wielded by a repeat offender that no law could have stopped. (RELATED: Wikipedia Is Trying to Memory-Hole the Minneapolis Shooter’s Transgender Identity) And the Charlotte City Council wasn’t any better in their Sept. 2 meeting discussing the crime — they took a break to eat cake. Here’s the cake pic.twitter.com/2TIOYdbYWh — Joe Bruno (@JoeBrunoWSOC9) September 2, 2025 Despite video evidence and the victim’s permissible immigration status, Democrat leaders remain largely silent, prompting sharp criticism from Republicans, conservative voices, and right-leaning media. President Trump even addressed the murder in remarks Monday to reporters, vowing to “confront” the “evil people” in America. There is a glaring disconnect: the same Democrat officials who displayed Ukrainian flags in their social media profiles, some who waved the Ukrainian flag in the U.S. Congress last year, now hold back comment on this tragic, violent crime. ? BREAKING: President Trump is planning to look into the kiIIing of Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte “Horrible… I’ll know all about it by tomorrow morning.” After the Charlotte Mayor refused to condemn the attacker, the city may need federal intervention. pic.twitter.com/3vefQcnpXK — Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) September 7, 2025 On one hand, Democrats champion the plight of immigrants — codifying them in sympathetic rhetoric and symbolism. Yet on the other hand, they’ve been simultaneously silent or resistant to law and order, especially when a legal immigrant was brutally murdered by a criminal with a documented history. It raises a question: is the political embrace of immigrants conditional — warm when they fit as foot soldiers for the blue agenda, but overlooked when it points to red flags and structural failures? Moreover, many Democrats decry “big business” and “billionaires” by echoing slogans like “eat the rich” while shrugging at the exploitation of cheap labor by illegal immigrants at your Home Depot. Meanwhile, hardworking, law-abiding immigrants like Zarutska, who came here seeking peace — and contribute to local commerce — are left to fall victim to violent criminals in a transit system lacking meaningful security. Unless Charlotte wants to end up with federal troops on its doorstep and its name dragged into Trump’s next law-and-order rally, city leaders better get their act together — fast. The president will not turn a blind eye by pouring money into a local government that will likely go out and buy another cake to congratulate itself while blood dries on the train floor. READ MORE from Julianna Frieman: AI Is Not the Monster — It Is a Mirror Travis Kelce Joins Sydney Sweeney in American Eagle Ads — But Is the Brand Playing Both Sides? Vanity Fair Staff Draws the Line at Melania Trump Cover Julianna Frieman is a writer based in North Carolina. She received her bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is pursuing her master’s degree in Communications (Digital Strategy) at the University of Florida. Her work has been published by the Daily Caller, The American Spectator, and The Federalist. Follow her on X at @juliannafrieman.

All Poles recognize the likeness of Gary Cooper from the 1952 film High Noon. The Polish Cooper holds an election ballot over a backdrop of the Solidarity trade union’s iconic red letters. Below his feet appear the words “High Noon 4 June 1989.” The political poster appeared all over Poland that year, ahead of the first partially free elections of the communist Polish People’s Republic, and it became one of the most enduring symbols of the fall of communism in Europe. Sikorski and Wałęsa count among the Polish liberals clinging to 1989, unwilling to accept that the worldview they have served has become discredited. Last week, Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister Radosław Sikorski presented a copy of the poster, signed by Solidarity leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Wałęsa, to Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Miami. It should have been a banal gesture between politicians, but it will be remembered for its symbolism. Sikorski and Wałęsa count among the Polish liberals clinging to 1989, unwilling to accept that the worldview they have served has become discredited. (Ironically, this acceptance on the part of their communist predecessors is what permitted their ascent to power.) (RELATED: The Enduring Spirit of Solidarity: A Story Still Being Written) To the casual observer, the meeting of foreign ministers might have seemed a logical prelude to the next day’s more notable meeting between President Donald Trump and newly elected Polish President Karol Nawrocki at the White House. The American hosts greeted Nawrocki with a flyover of military aircraft and a warm, choreographed reception. Nawrocki’s camp and a handful of opponents proclaimed this inaugural foreign visit a success, as President Trump confirmed the United States would not withdraw troops stationed in Poland, and indeed had never considered doing so, and personally invited Nawrocki to this November’s G20 summit in South Africa. Buoyed by this success, President Nawrocki flew to Rome for meetings with Pope Leo XIV and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Sikorski, a leading figure in the current government coalition of liberals, leftists, and centrists (elected separately from the president), remained in the United States. The dueling visits of the Polish camps had been uncoordinated. Sikorski insisted his parallel visit was not meant to upstage Nawrocki’s, a claim that strains credulity. With the president back in Europe and the minister lingering in the United States, the pre-visit barbs continued across the Atlantic. Sikorski maintained he was responsible for the G20 invitation. Nawrocki contended that he alone can assure cooperation with the United States, as relations between Washington and Warsaw have been strained since Trump’s reinauguration. Both camps issued their interpretations of who was representing Poland, and how. Several days after the visits should have receded into diplomatic history, the saga took another bizarre turn when Sikorski posted a series of selfies in front of American government buildings in Washington. “It’s just a pathetic embarrassment,” summarized conservative journalist Stanisław Janecki. “Dear Minister Radosław Sikorski, I am already in Poland … I am unable to look at your album from Washington in any other form, but I appeal for seriousness,” wrote the president on social media. “This is not a matter of your good — albeit disturbing — mood. These are matters of state. I believe that as soon as I find the time, and you cool down a little, we will meet for a serious conversation about the disturbing state of Polish diplomacy.” Sikorski retorted, “Your people informed on the Prime Minister and the democratic government of free Poland in Washington, trying to block its access to the White House.” Sikorski’s apparent belief that he had a role at the White House illuminates his boundless ego. The minister has run in powerful circles for decades, and his public outbursts have included calling Trump a “proto-fascist” and inviting pro-Trump American populists to “f— off.” In 2014, a diplomatic scandal ensued when a news magazine published a recording of Sikorski opining that “the Polish-U.S. alliance isn’t worth anything” and “we [Poles] gave the Americans a b— job.” Americans might recall that Sikorski is married to journalist Anne Applebaum, who produces regular bombast for the Atlantic and publishes books on authoritarianism every couple of years for an aging coastal audience. Sikorski’s chief, Prime Minister and former President of the European Council Donald Tusk, is another of the liberal old guard with no prospects in Washington. He has previously accused President Trump of serving Russia, and a 2019 photo of him pointing a finger-gun at the U.S. president’s back has hardly facilitated reconciliation. This generation of Polish liberals assumed their worldview was a foregone conclusion in Poland and across the former Warsaw Pact. After watching its bitter rivals govern for eight years, the Tusk government has begun to flounder less than two years into its term, following Nawrocki’s victory in the presidential race this summer. Polls suggest its constituent parts would have no realistic path to forming a government if elections were held today. The government remains a patchwork coalition united only by contempt for the previous right-wing government. Restive agricultural voices cringe at radical social initiatives; restive leftists insist they are moving too slowly; and both are displeased with the European Union’s heavy hand in Polish markets. Young Poles were supposed to experience the fruits of a wealthy society and become good liberals, but that theory has unraveled. Nawrocki triumphed in both the 18-to-29 and 30-to-44 age cohorts, stymying the liberal Warsaw mayor with impeccable open-society credentials. Urban university-educated women gravitate more naturally to the Left coalition, with its emphasis on abortion and rainbow manifestations, than to the liberals. Young men aren’t convinced their European inheritance is all they’ve been promised. (RELATED: What Next for Poland After Nawrocki Victory?) Nor are the liberals’ key selling points particularly persuasive. Poland experienced unprecedented economic growth during populist-right governments from 2015-23. The two warring political camps are essentially indistinguishable on the topics of the war in Ukraine and the Russian threat. The current government is persona non grata in Washington, and its celebrity status in Brussels counts for less than it did before the damage of European liberal governance became so widely recognized. The narrative that the adults in the room should manage economic and foreign policy has lost its sting. There is historical precedent for this political theater. During World War I, socialist Józef Piłsudski jockeyed with nationalist Roman Dmowski in Great-Power capitals to shape the future of an independent postwar Poland. During World War II, the Polish government-in-exile sought to preserve its legitimacy in the face of a Moscow puppet regime. In both cases, the nationalists lost. Then, why look further than 1989? In that year’s partially free elections, non-communist parties were only permitted to contest 35 percent of parliamentary seats, in addition to all 100 in the Senate. Government strategists prepared for a scenario in which Solidarity would win few or no seats, but the upstart opposition secured all 161 contestable parliamentary seats and 99 of 100 in the Senate. By January 1990, the Polish United Workers’ Party had dissolved. “The postwar consensus trusted that a better future could be achieved by removing barriers, setting aside traditional mores, empowering individual choice, and letting markets decide,” writes American theologian R.R. Reno. This bright liberal future has resulted in Lech Wałęsa — a devout Catholic who famously signed the 1980 Gdańsk Agreement with an oversized pen featuring Pope John Paul II — supporting a government pushing abortion expansion, transgenderism, and depraved sexual “health” lessons for students. The Nobel laureate, whose fall speaking tour is advertised in several American print publications, would do well to reflect on these lessons. READ MORE from Michael O’Shea: What Next for Poland After Nawrocki Victory? Is Poland the Next Victim of Mass Migration? Time to Ditch the Media and NGOs’ Freedom and Democracy Rankings Michael O’Shea is an American-Polish writer and translator. He is a Danube Institute visiting international fellow.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has been hailing a forthcoming 1,000-page report on “what we did right and what we did wrong” during the COVID pandemic, compiled by independent “experts” the governor’s office did not name. That was in late July, and while the report’s release awaits, the governor has created what amounts to a new Centers for Disease Control. Those states imposed the “most draconian” mandates on masks, school closings, and vaccine coercion for children and employees. On September 2, Newsom, Washington State Governor Bob Ferguson, and Oregon Governor Tina Kotek announced the West Coast Health Alliance “to ensure residents remain protected by science, not politics.” As Katy Grimes of the California Globe notes, those states imposed the “most draconian” mandates on masks, school closings, and vaccine coercion for children and employees. In a joint statement, the governors proclaimed: President Trump’s mass firing of CDC doctors and scientists — and his blatant politicization of the agency — is a direct assault on the health and safety of the American people. The CDC has become a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science, ideology that will lead to severe health consequences. California, Oregon, and Washington will not allow the people of our states to be put at risk. The tri-state alliance is based on the “Scientific Safety Review Workgroup,” which claimed to “confirm” in 2020 that “the Pfizer vaccine is safe and efficacious for public use.” The workgroup also “endorses the transparency and objectivity of the FDA and CDC review processes and the rigor, validity and reliability of their analyses” and “recommends that our states avoid any undue delay in providing access to the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.” Such a ringing endorsement of a single medical product from a single pharmaceutical company gives the people cause to wonder. (RELATED: The Wages of COVID — Part Three) Pfizer requested 75 years before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released the documents it relied on to license its COVID vaccine. In 2021, the FDA requested 55 years to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency on the vaccine’s creation process. That would put the revelation in 2076, the 300th anniversary of the American founding, and hardly a model of disclosure. (RELATED: The Wages of COVID — Part Two) In August 2021, Joe Biden proclaimed COVID “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” and his administration “involuntarily separated from service” nearly 8,000 military personnel who declined the vaccination. As those discharged might have noticed, the vaccine failed to prevent infection or transmission of COVID, as the fully boosted Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci confirmed by testing positive. So did the fully boosted Gavin Newsom in 2022, yet the governor still recommended vaccinations and boosters as “the best way to protect yourself from COVID-19.” Dr. Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), recommended the vaccine for children, the least vulnerable group. The vaccines boosted Pfizer’s profits to a record $100 billion, including $57 billion driven by its vaccine and antiviral pill Paxlovid. As people of a certain age may remember, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin gave away their vaccines, effective against the scourge of polio. None of these realities found their way into the tri-state declaration. The alliance might boast more clout if Newsom had first released his 1,000-page report on his own pandemic performance. Some reviews are already in. (RELATED: Dr. Anthony Fauci: What Exactly Did Biden Pardon?) As Luke Wake of the Pacific Legal Foundation explains, Newsom’s emergency order of March 2020 remained in effect into 2022, allowing him to wield unfettered power “without involving the legislature and without opportunity for public input.” Such a one-man rule is “anathematic to America’s free democratic system.” (RELATED: The Wages of COVID — Part One) People may disagree on mask mandates, social distancing, and so forth, but “we should agree that such policy issues are to be decided by elected lawmakers in the legislature, those who represent the diverse interests of all Californians.” Alexandra Orbuch of the Princeton Legal Journal had similar concerns. By his own account, through 71 executive orders, Newsom issued 561 proclamations related to COVID. After lifting more than 90 percent of his COVID executive orders, the governor did not terminate his emergency power at the “earliest possible moment.” As Orbuch noted, “checks and balances are a cornerstone of the American governmental structure” and prevent each branch “from overextending their authority.” In April of 2020, Newsom announced the spending of $1 billion on masks with the Chinese company Build Your Dreams (BYD), which makes motor vehicles, not protective medical equipment. The governor hid details of the deal even from fellow Democrats. Perhaps the lengthy report will explain what happened to the money. As Californians will recall, in November 2020, Newsom and colleagues partied sans masks at the upscale French Laundry, a clear violation of the governor’s own COVID protocols. Newsom has strong ties to the Brown, Getty, and Pelosi families. When he announced the state of emergency, he proclaimed the state was “blessed” to have the leadership of Nancy Pelosi, then House Speaker. The governor’s recent claim that the Trump administration has “politicized” the CDC calls for another look back. The federal government’s first spokesperson on the pandemic was Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD). As the people should know, Dr. Messonnier is a member of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) tasked to prevent viruses from arriving on American soil. In early 2020, Dr. Messonnier delivered a series of press briefings about a “novel virus” from the “Wuhan market” that would spread across the country. When reporters asked about individuals returning from Wuhan, Dr. Messonnier said that was “not something I’m at liberty to talk about today,” and did not reveal who was laying down the rules. That would seem to signal political control of the CDC. Much more remains to be revealed than what Newsom did right or wrong, and his new pact with Oregon and Washington could have unintended consequences. Three states setting up their own health alliance could cause Americans to question the need for a federal CDC and push back against white coat supremacy in general. Let the debate begin. READ MORE from Lloyd Billingsley: Newsom Launches Anti-Crime Crusade Reviewing the Smithsonian When Frank Met Friedrich Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.

America’s immigration system was designed to embody the American social contract — a compact between the individual and the state, in which the government is impartial and bound by law. But when newcomers arrive from societies where government is degraded into barter, bribery, and patronage, they import with them a radically different conception of what citizenship and authority mean. That is the real danger revealed in Louisiana, where Chandrakant “Lala” Patel, an Indian-origin businessman, now faces a 62-count federal indictment for orchestrating a sweeping U-visa fraud. They are parables of how nations decay: not through sudden collapse but through the slow seep of alien civic ethics into their institutions. Federal court records leave little doubt about the scale of corruption. From December 26, 2015, to at least July 15, 2025, prosecutors allege that Patel, a Louisiana convenience-store proprietor, conspired with four law enforcement officers to fabricate police reports in exchange for roughly $5,000 per individual. These reports falsely labeled non-residents as armed robbery victims, enabling them to apply for U-visas — a status intended only for genuine crime victims who aid law enforcement — through fraudulent USCIS Form I-918B certifications. The indictment, handed down in July 2025, charges Patel with conspiracy to commit visa fraud, bribery, 24 counts of mail fraud, and eight counts of money laundering. Patel even secured a U-visa for himself in 2023 under these false pretenses. If convicted, he faces decades in prison and mandatory forfeiture of his ill-gotten gains. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Mike Flynn, Epstein, Trump, and the Scandal-Blob) In Massachusetts, a different Patel entirely — Rambhai Patel, 37, of New Jersey — was sentenced on August 22, 2025, in federal court in Boston for orchestrating a nationwide U-visa fraud conspiracy. Patel received 20 months and eight days in prison, followed by two years of supervised release, and was ordered to forfeit $850,000; he is also subject to deportation. He had pleaded guilty in May 2025 to one count of conspiracy to commit visa fraud. Prosecutors said that from March 2023, Patel and his co-conspirator staged at least 18 fake armed robberies across the country — including five in Massachusetts — so that “victims” could apply for visas. One participant paid $20,000 for the chance to be a “victim.” At least two fraudulent U-visa applications were filed. The scheme earned Patel more than $850,000. Though distinct from the Louisiana case, it revealed the same corrosive logic: U.S. immigration documents were treated not as solemn safeguards but as tradable assets, paving a pathway toward citizenship emptied of its civic weight. What the U-Visa Was Meant to Be Created by Congress in 2000, the U-visa was meant to shield noncitizens who are victims of serious crimes such as trafficking, sexual assault, or domestic violence. In return for helping law enforcement prosecute offenders, applicants receive legal status for up to four years, with a path to permanent residency and citizenship. The intent was noble: protect the vulnerable and strengthen prosecutions. Congress capped visas at 10,000 a year, but demand exploded. By 2023, there were more than 300,000 applications pending, with waits of over five years. That backlog — combined with the life-changing benefits — turned the program into fertile ground for fraud. Certification on Form I-918B, where police confirm a crime occurred, became the point of abuse. In both the Louisiana and Boston schemes, false reports were filed, victims invented, and staged crimes were used to generate petitions. A 2019 DHS Inspector General report warned that the program was “susceptible to fraud,” citing weak verification and forged police paperwork. The Patels did not find a loophole — they exploited America’s assumption of trust. Why It Matters These figures reveal more than graft. They reflect a civic culture where authority is never trusted as impartial but bargained, bought, or bypassed. A licence, a passport, access to education, even welfare benefits — all are understood as items for sale under the table. In such systems, “rule of law” has little traction; the bazaar is the governing metaphor. When people raised in that environment migrate without embracing America’s civic creed, they import not just corruption but a disregard for the very processes that underpin American civic life. For earlier generations of immigrants, American citizenship was the summit of aspiration, prized because it meant submitting to a higher civic order. For these offenders, it is something else entirely: a pawn in a game, a vehicle for schemes, a tool to be manipulated and discarded once its value is extracted. The U-visa became a ticket rack, police reports props in staged dramas. A century ago, Theodore Roosevelt warned against “hyphenated Americanism” and insisted newcomers embrace one civic identity. Early 20th-century America demanded assimilation into its public norms. The Patel affairs prove why. A country cannot remain a republic of laws if it admits those who see law, residency, and even citizenship as commodities. The civic order cannot hold if those joining it refuse to abandon the ethics of the bazaar. This is why the Patel cases matter. They are more than prosecutions; they are civic alarms. They are not just about a few businessmen or a handful of compromised actors. They are parables of how nations decay: not through sudden collapse but through the slow seep of alien civic ethics into their institutions. America’s immigration gate is not abstract. It is real, and today it is at risk of becoming a bazaar. America must harden its immigration system against those who arrive with incompatible civic assumptions. Fraud must be punished, transparency enforced, assimilation demanded. Otherwise, the very value of American citizenship will keep eroding until the social contract itself dissolves into barter. READ MORE from Kevin Cohen: Denmark’s Hard Immigration Lesson — Data Over Illusions Import the Third World, Become the Third World Digital Landmines: Beijing’s Quiet Invasion

Over there on his podcast, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein was blunt. The topic was another potential government shutdown over spending issues. The question: Should Democrats partner with Republicans to prevent a shutdown and keep funding the government?  In his answer, Klein said this: I want to be very clear about what I am saying here. Donald Trump is corrupting the government — he is using it to hound his enemies, to line his pockets and to entrench his own power. He is corrupting it the way the Mafia would corrupt the industries it controlled. You could still, under Mafia rule, get the trash picked up or buy construction materials. But the point of those industries had become the preservation and expansion of the Mafia’s power and wealth. This is what Trump is doing to the government. This is what Democrats cannot fund. This is what they have to try to stop. Amazing. Mr. Klein seems to have developed a serious case of amnesia. Take this line from him on Trump: “…he is using it to hound his enemies….” Hello? As noted here back in January of 2024: As of March 2024, Donald Trump has been personally charged with 88 criminal offenses in four criminal cases. This total reflects charges related to Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, election interference in Georgia, falsifying business records in New York, and mishandling classified records after leaving the presidency. Donald Trump is the first former president in U.S. history to be criminally indicted. It has apparently skipped Mr. Klein’s memory that the record of the Biden government using the federal government (lawfare) to hound Trump — encouraging state and local Democrat prosecutors to do the same — is mind-boggling and completely without precedent. For the record: As of March 2024, Donald Trump has been personally charged with 88 criminal offenses in four criminal cases. On March 30, 2023, a Manhattan grand jury approved a thirty-four-count felony indictment against Trump….. On June 9, 2023, Special Counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with thirty-seven felonies related to his handling and refusal to return hundreds of documents containing classified information. On July 27, 2023, a grand jury issued a superseding indictment alleging additional charges against Trump…. On August 1, 2023, Smith charged Trump with four federal criminal counts after a grand jury investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, culminating in the January 6th insurrection. On August 14, 2023, Fulton County (Georgia) District Attorney Fani Willis charged Trump and 18 others in a 41-count indictment Then there was this story — one of many similar stories: An IRS whistleblower on the Hunter Biden probe told Congress that the president’s son invoked his father to pressure a Chinese business partner and claimed the elder Biden was in the room while he was making deals. The House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday released testimony from two IRS whistleblowers who said the Justice Department, FBI and IRS interfered with the investigation of the tax evasion case against Hunter Biden. One whistleblower, IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley Jr., who oversaw the IRS probe into the president’s son, said the IRS obtained a WhatsApp message dated July 30, 2017, from Hunter Biden to Henry Zhao, CEO of Harvest Fund Management, in which Hunter alleged he was with his father and named him to put pressure on Zhao to fulfill a commitment. In short? To use Klein’s own words: It was Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, who was “corrupting the government…. using it to hound his enemies, to line his pockets and to entrench his own power.” It was Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, who was “corrupting it the way the Mafia would corrupt the industries it controlled. You could still, under Mafia rule, get the trash picked up or buy construction materials. But the point of those industries had become the preservation and expansion of the Mafia’s power and wealth…” In short, Klein has it exactly backwards. Why? Who knows. But one can sense the aroma of Trump Derangement Syndrome rising here. Note. Donald Trump became a billionaire working entirely in the private sector, never having served a day in public office. Mysteriously — or not so mysteriously — Joe Biden and family became millionaires by using his public office to make those millions. Which is to say, the record speaks for itself. And it ain’t good for Democrats and their defenders. READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: Democrats Reject Law and Order Democrats’ Double Standard on Harris, GOP VPs, Losing Secret Service No One Elected Trump-fired CDC, Federal Reserve Bureaucrats