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On Jan. 6, 2021, a Capitol Police officer named Michael Byrd fatally shot Ashli Babbitt — an unarmed, married, 36-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran — as she attempted to climb through a broken window inside the U.S. Capitol. Democrats and the media hailed Byrd as a hero. He was later promoted. They offered no sympathy for Babbitt. She was not treated as a victim of a tragic or excessive use of force, but as a villain whose death was justified by her politics. Her military service, her lack of a weapon, and the circumstances of her death were dismissed. She was MAGA, and therefore disposable. Six years later, in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026, an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old woman who repeatedly refused to comply with federal agents’ lawful commands. Good was using her SUV to block an ICE vehicle. The agent had his weapon drawn throughout the encounter. The fatal shooting occurred after Good hit the gas and accelerated toward the agent standing in her path. (RELATED: Was the Minnesota ICE Shooting Justified?) This time, Democrats and the media immediately declared the federal agent a criminal and Good an innocent victim. Both incidents were tragedies. A woman died in each. So why was a Capitol Police officer celebrated, and Ashli Babbitt demonized, while an ICE agent was vilified and Renee Nicole Good sanctified? The answer is moral relativism. The Left’s judgments are not based on facts, law, or consistent standards. They are based on political allegiance and the lies they tell themselves — and each other — about who deserves humanity and who does not. (RELATED: The Price of Democrats’ Extremism) Democrats have fully dehumanized anyone they disagree with. That reality became impossible to deny nearly four months ago, when Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Across the country, from elected officials to professors to college students, Democrats openly justified his murder. Some contextualized it. Others excused it. Many celebrated it outright. (RELATED: Charlie Kirk and the Shame of the ‘However’ Progressives) The response from the left hinged on one question: Was the victim one of us? The reaction was shocking — yet eerily familiar. It echoed scenes from the Middle East after September 11, when jihadists danced in the streets as Americans mourned thousands murdered on American soil. Once someone is placed in the Left’s basket of deplorables, their life no longer has value. Like the jihadists who declared war on America and the West, the radical Left — now fully synonymous with the Democratic Party — has declared war on the Trump administration, MAGA, law enforcement, and anyone who refuses to join their crusade against the Constitution and the rule of law. ICE agents, like MAGA supporters, Charlie Kirk, and President Trump before them, have been categorized as enemies — Nazis to be targeted, dehumanized, and destroyed. Once someone is placed in the Left’s basket of deplorables, their life no longer has value. That is why Michael Byrd was declared a hero and Ashli Babbitt a criminal whose death was deserved. She was viewed as the enemy. That is why the ICE agent is branded a villain and Renee Nicole Good a martyr. She was viewed as one of their own. The facts of the encounters are irrelevant to this worldview. Context does not matter. Law does not matter. Humanity does not matter. Only politics. I explore this pattern in depth in my book, For Christ and Country: The Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk — not as a biography, but as an examination of how dehumanization, moral relativism, and political hatred culminate in real-world violence. Charlie’s assassination was not an aberration. It was the inevitable result of a culture that has decided some lives are expendable if they stand in the way of the Left’s ideological goals. This is not justice. It is tribalism. The Left applies no consistent moral standard to violence. Violence committed against their enemies is excusable — even righteous. Violence committed by their enemies is unforgivable, regardless of circumstance. That is how Ashli Babbitt’s death is mocked. That is how Charlie Kirk’s murder is rationalized and celebrated. That is how law enforcement officers enforcing federal law are treated as legitimate targets. Dehumanization always comes first. Political violence always follows. America cannot survive this moral sickness. The issue is not whether every use of force is morally or legally identical. It is that the Left decides in advance whose life has value and whose does not. Once that determination is made, facts no longer matter. Law no longer matters. Context no longer matters. If the person killed is politically useful, they are canonized as a victim regardless of their actions. If the person killed is politically inconvenient, their death is justified, mocked, or ignored — no matter the circumstances. That is not a commitment to justice. It is a commitment to power. A society that assigns human worth based on ideology does not prevent violence. It incentivizes it. And history shows exactly where that road leads. The Left’s refusal to apply one moral standard to all is not just hypocrisy. It is dangerous. And it is getting people killed, including their own indoctrinated activists. Drew Allen is a publicist, author of For Christ and Country: The Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk, and host of the Drew Allen Show podcast.

During a Fox and Friends broadcast Thursday, First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli branded California Gov. Gavin Newsom “the king of fraud.” He didn’t stop there. He declared, “There’s never been this much fraud in American history.” By just one metric, Essayli’s claim holds true: the funds stolen via California’s Employment Development Department during COVID. The state has acknowledged $20 billion in fraud, but many have argued the real number is much higher. The CEO of Lexis Nexis’s Risk Solutions, Haywood Talcove, has pinned the amount stolen at $32.6 billion. (RELATED: Is Minnesota or California the Fraud Capital of America?) Compare these fraud numbers to what rocked Minnesota and derailed Gov. Tim Walz’s reelection campaign. It has been alleged that as much as $9 billion was stolen via Medicaid schemes in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. That, of course, pales in comparison to the vast scale of the fraud in California under Gavin Newsom’s leadership. (RELATED: Minnesota Welfare Scandal Is the Fraud Warning Americans Finally Noticed) This was pointed out Friday by Will Swaim, the president of the California Policy Center, in National Review. Swaim argued that Fox News’ recent assessment that the fraud in Minnesota represents the “nation’s largest COVID-era scheme” is incorrect and that California, by far, is the holder of that distinction. Newsom and other California officials were warned about the massive fraud coursing through the Employment Development Department and the dangers posed by the department’s lax anti-fraud measures. And yet the fraud went on. In fact, Newsom himself urged the department to act as rapidly as it could to dole out unemployment insurance checks during the early days of the COVID pandemic. In an April 17, 2020, appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, Newsom said, “We’re doing everything to try to get those unemployment insurance checks out as quickly as possible.” An inquiry later found that Julie Su, then the secretary of the Labor and Workforce Development Agency, had ordered EDD to cease its typical anti-fraud procedures in a bid to speed up its work in the spring of 2020, corresponding with Newsom’s Ellen DeGeneres Show declaration. (RELATED: To Harvard and Back with Julie Su) In November, Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said, “We have asked and implored the governor to get involved himself to turn the spigot off.” Evidently, however, that request was to no avail. There continued to be, in the district attorney’s words, “no cross-matching between the incarceration data and EDD on a routine basis like is done in 35 other states.” That meant felons were receiving unemployment insurance without inhibition. California has still not resolved the problems with its Employment Development Department, Swaim explained in National Review. A December 2025 report from the state auditor found that the department “continues to have high rates of improper [unemployment insurance] payments, including fraudulent payments” and that it “failed to meet acceptable levels in more than half of the measures on which the federal government evaluates its performance.” As for Su, she has been let off scot-free. She became the (acting) labor secretary under President Joe Biden before softly landing this month as “deputy mayor for economic justice” for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. ***** Assistant U.S. Attorney Essayli cited the EDD scandal as his first piece of evidence that Newsom is the “king of fraud,” but he also pointed to fraud in healthcare, homelessness, and the state’s high-speed rail project. In fact, Essayli’s appearance on Fox and Friends related primarily to the fraud the feds are uncovering in California’s homelessness programs through the Homelessness Fraud & Corruption Task Force. So far, only two men have been charged for alleged misuse of homelessness grant money, but Essayli said those initial charges are just the “tip of the iceberg” and that more arrests are coming. But the real fraud here may not be stolen homelessness grants, but the fact that much of Newsom’s homelessness programs have exacerbated homelessness rather than reduced it. Essayli noted that over $24 billion has been spent on combating homelessness in California in just the past four years alone. And yet homelessness has continued to tick up year after year, with Newsom hopelessly clinging to the few statistics that found that the rate of growth was slowing. (RELATED: Hike Taxes to Help the Homeless?) Check out my book, Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power, for a full accounting of why Newsom’s homelessness policies were destructive rather than helpful. On Thursday, however, Newsom claimed that for the first time during his seven years as governor, the homeless population had actually declined… by 9 percent. That remark came as part of his State of the State address, which he delivered in grand fashion to the California Legislature as a sort of pre-presidential-announcement resume speech. His claim has been met with much skepticism. For its part, Capitol Radio described Newsom’s 9 percent number as “a figure that’s already being questioned, given that many California communities didn’t conduct a homeless count last year.” The Sacramento Bee added, “Beware of his numbers.” The biggest fraud, however, was Newsom’s claim, made during his State of the State address, that California is a “beacon.” “We are a beacon,” he said. “The state is providing a different narrative — an operational model, a policy blueprint for others to follow.” Newsom cited the many advantages and significant wealth California has as an attempt to defend his record in California, particularly the state’s institutes of higher education and big tech innovation. But those plentiful advantages and wealth serve only to make the job Newsom has done running the state look worse. California has so many advantages, and yet it faces an $18 billion deficit; visible homelessness infecting and destroying numerous cities (with 187,000 Californians homeless); the nation’s worst cost-of-living crisis; the nation’s worst poverty rate, the nation’s worst unemployment rate; housing costs that are out of control and follow only Hawaii’s; the sixth-highest violent crime rate in the nation; the highest energy prices in the nation; streets littered with trash and human feces; high rates of outmigration by residents and corporations; heavy regulations that stifle the business environment; and student test scores that remain below pre-pandemic levels. California is the richest state in the nation by total economic output, and yet Newsom has left it in an egregious state seven years after taking power. If Newsom wants to run for president on his record in California, good luck to him. He would be better off ignoring everything he has done in office and instead coming up with a new plan to sell to the American people. Perhaps Newsom realizes this. In an interview he gave to the Atlantic for a tell-all article on himself published this week (you can find much of the information in the article and more in my book), he “slap[ped] his hand” on the memoir of his political hero, former President Bill Clinton, and told reporter Helen Lewis a piece of wisdom from Clinton: “Given the choice, the American people always support strong and wrong versus weak and right.” Clinton’s wisdom applies well to campaigning when one has a record of achievement that falls into the category of “wrong.” Matt Bennett, a Democratic strategist, noted to the New York Times this week that Clinton drew very little on his record as governor of Arkansas when he defeated George H. W. Bush in the 1992 presidential election, and that he instead focused on his vision for the Democratic Party. Newsom’s strategy in his State of the State address of fraudulently claiming he achieved greatness in California may just be his interim plan while he remains in office. Once he leaves the governor’s office, he may rush past California’s disasters and hope voters never look too closely at the record he leaves behind. READ MORE from Ellie Gardey Holmes: ‘Experts’ Warn US Is on Brink of ‘Trans Genocide’ Canadians Fear US Invasion After Maduro Seizure New York Times Reaches Whole New Level of Willful Blindness Image licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

“You know, I’ve seen a lot of people walkin’ ’round / With tombstones in their eyes … But the pusher don’t care if you live or if you die.” When Steppenwolf released “The Pusher” in 1968, it wasn’t a riff about casual hippie vice, but a cautionary tale about the business incentives of hard drugs. The pusher doesn’t moralize. His job is simple: keep the junkie hooked and the money flowing. But what happens when the pusher gets hooked — when he gets high on his own supply? Things spiral out of control, and this is exactly the dilemma our out-of-control government spending has locked the American people into. (RELATED: Minnesota Welfare Scandal Is the Fraud Warning Americans Finally Noticed) First, look at the demand side of this Janus-faced addiction. Minnesota’s smoldering welfare-fraud scandal is another shivering symptom of the government’s spending habit. The staggering scale of the welfare scam allegedly committed by members of Minnesota’s Somali community is, according to one federal prosecutor, estimated to be $9 billion in Medicaid fraud alone since 2018. The City Journal reported that taxpayer-funded programs were particularly prevalent within the state’s Somali community. These programs were funded with little verification, permitting the fraudsters to collect vast sums with little oversight. (RELATED: How Medicaid Made a Billion-Dollar Crime Inevitable) Many of the “business owners” later charged had direct or familial ties within the Somali community, and prosecutors alleged that portions of the stolen funds were funneled to organizations linked to al-Shabaab, a Somalia-based, al-Qaeda-linked Sunni Islamist terrorist organization, considered by U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) to be “the largest, wealthiest, and most lethal Al Qaeda affiliate in the world today.” But instead of confronting the obvious malfestence head-on, Minnesota officials and their pals in the media often hesitated to ask basic questions, fearing accusations of racial bias. This reluctance, of course, allowed the fraud to metastasize and expose the obnoxious virtue-signalling of the entire redistribution enterprise beneath it. And no incentive structure is more corrupting than spending other people’s money on other people — especially when political reward flows from distribution rather than results. Milton Friedman warned this would happen. “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results,” he wrote in Free to Choose. Government, Friedman argued, should be evaluated by incentives, not moral claims. And no incentive structure is more corrupting than spending other people’s money on other people — especially when political reward flows from distribution rather than results. But as with any addiction, the supply side is the most destructive, and comes in all the money taxpayers lose in a country that has run up over $38 trillion national debt, is a full-blown addiction — government borrowing and spending like a dope fiend, with no real plan for restraint or rehab on the horizon. Here we have a drug-addled incentive structure that rewards distribution over accountability. (RELATED: The Bureaucracy Has Become the Mission) The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) January 2025 report projects interest costs alone will surge from about $952 billion in 2025 to nearly $1.8 trillion by 2035, blowing up budgets from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. This is Sid Vicious-level dependence. (RELATED: How Did We Reach a $38 Trillion Debt During a ‘Shutdown’?) But why do we continue to let this happen? Because we’re like a battered family members left to live with an addict, we argue about the secondary details: whether the press was slow (not really), whether independent YouTube journalists are reliable (they can be), whether critics are unfairly targeting immigrant communities (they are not), and whether Tim Walz is an incompetent empty suit (of course). These arguments are sideshows to the big show: A system in which the government is both pusher and addict is inherently unstable. (RELATED: Walz Can’t Escape the Somali Fraud Scandal) This two-faced addiction will always prioritize distribution over effectiveness or efficacy, as the government will always prioritize expanding the flow rather than improving outcomes. How much more junk can we shoot into our veins? This is what a government high on its own supply looks like. Instead of borrowing to build, it has to borrow to maintain the high. Every dime we spend servicing the debt is a dollar not spent on infrastructure, defense, etc. But addicts don’t think long-term, only their next fix. Alexander Hamilton knew all about debt and warned that it is the “natural disease of all governments.” He knew that sober borrowing could be useful, but only when the government had a plan to repay the debt. But does anyone know Washington’s plan to remedy this problem? Of course not, because our government’s pusher/addict model is going to put us on Skid Row, but that doesn’t matter as the pusher couldn’t care less if the customer dies and the junkie just wants another hit. All the while, it is we, the taxpayers, who just walk the streets getting mugged year after year. READ MORE from Pete Connolly: John Cheever’s ‘Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor’ Bread, Circuses, and Outrage Buyer Beware: The College Edition

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