There’s been another ICE-involved shooting in Minneapolis, this time after their target, believed to be an illegal from Venezuela, either struck and officer with a shovel or at least took a swing . . .

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The U.S. experienced negative net migration in 2025 for the first time in at least half a century as a result of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, according to a report released Tuesday by the Brookings Institution.

A new report from the Brookings Institution shows the United States experienced negative net migration in 2025 for the first time in at least 50 years. The report, released Tuesday, estimated between 10,000 and 295,000 more people left the country than entered it last year.

For the first time in 50 years, the U.S. experienced negative net migration in 2025 because of the Trump administration's crackdown on illegal border crossings and heightened deportation efforts, an enormous victory for the White House as it faces renewed backlash against its heavy-handed enforcement tactics.

You probably saw on Wednesday that Bill Clinton failed to appear before the House Oversight Committee, which had lots of questions for him about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Hillary Clinton was due to appear before the committee Thursday, and it was fairly obvious she was going to refuse the appearance as well. As a result, contempt of Congress proceedings will commence next week. Everybody knows why the Clintons are hiding from the committee. There are no good answers they can provide to a couple of basic and unavoidable questions. One regarding the purpose of Epstein’s 17 White House visits in the eight years the Clintons occupied the White House. The other regarding the 27 trips Bill Clinton reportedly took on Epstein’s jet, including to the celebrity pimp and blackmailer’s private “pedophile island” in the Caribbean, where rich and powerful sleazebags were plied with underage girls. The Clintons are making a very weak effort at deflecting from the painfully obvious implication that Bill was the leading avatar of Epstein’s sleazeball clientele. Given his shocking history as a serial sexual predator protected by power and position from proper redress by victims like Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, and Kathleen Willey, there are virtually no Americans who believe he’s an innocent bystander on the periphery of the Epstein scandal. Still, the Clintons are attempting to virtue-signal their subpoena-dodging with a pompous and verbose statement. Breitbart provides a summary: In response to the growing pressure, Bill and Hillary Clinton posted a joint statement to their personal X accounts, captioned: “This is not about Right or Left, it’s about Right and Wrong.” Comments were disabled on both posts. The Clintons open their statement with a broad condemnation of recent government actions, writing: “This past year has seen our Government engage in unprecedented acts, including against our own citizens.” Among those actions, they write, “People have been seized by masked federal agents from their homes, their workplaces, and the streets of their communities.” They remarked that “every person has to decide when they have seen or had enough and are ready to fight for this country, its principles and its people, no matter the consequences. For us, now is that time.” While acknowledging their positions afford them protections, they added: “We are not blind. Every day we see the country we have dedicated our lives to improving take step after step after step backwards.” Criticizing the committee’s focus, the former president and first lady stated: “You have done nothing with your oversight capacity to force the Department of Justice to follow the law and release all its Epstein files, including any material regarding us as we have publicly called for.” Anticipating the likelihood of contempt charges, the Clintons declared: “This is not the way out of America’s ills, and we will forcefully defend ourselves.” They continued, “Indeed, bringing the Republicans’ cruel agenda to a standstill while you work harder to pass a contempt charge against us than you have done on your investigation this past year would be our contribution to fighting the madness.” They asserted that other witnesses were treated differently: “You subpoenaed eight people in addition to us. You dismissed seven of those eight without any of them saying a single word to you. You made no attempt to force them to appear.” They argued that their subpoenas are “legally invalid” and said they have provided “the same or more than seven of the other eight individuals you subpoenaed regarding the handling of the Epstein investigations and prosecutions,” which they suggested may explain why the committee has “not publicly released their written statements.” “You will say it is not our decision to make,” the Clintons make clear their stance: “But we have made it. Now you have to make yours.” ICE officers are wearing masks, in order to avoid doxxing and keep their families safe, as they raid cartel thugs’ hideouts. And because of this protective measure a serial statutory rapist Democrats put into the White House doesn’t have to face the music for his Epstein connections amid a congressional investigation? The subject of an investigation is not in a position to be a particularly compelling critic of how that investigation is conducted. Everyone understands this, whether it’s convenient to admit it or not. Something else everyone understands is the Left in this country, like the Clintons, has little or no legitimacy remaining. They’re in the streets because they’re being mobilized by dark-money overlords to do so. But why? Not because there is injustice afoot. For one thing, injustice has always been afoot. And even during the Obama and Biden presidencies, ICE was deporting illegal aliens. The volume of the deportations has grown, to be sure — but the practice of forced deportations of people who don’t belong here is an old one. And it is not an injustice. It’s law enforcement. So why are these haughty harridans blocking roads and blowing whistles to prevent ICE from doing their jobs? It isn’t complicated. It’s exceedingly simple. In 2030, America is going to have a census. Given how population has shifted in the United States, blue states are set to lose a number of electoral votes and congressional seats while red states are set to gain. If the current trends hold, future presidential elections could… — Theo Wold (@RealTheoWold) January 14, 2026 Angry lesbians and organized grievance-mongers aren’t attempting vehicular homicide of ICE officers like Johnathan Ross in red states. ICE deportations in red states are generally going off with scant few hitches. Generally speaking, local law enforcement is cooperating with them and the deportations are accelerating as ICE staffs up with thousands of new recruits. But in blue states it’s happening and the cops are protecting the protesters rather than the federal officers doing their jobs. Remember that better than two in three of the people being deported by ICE and the Border Patrol are either criminals — meaning, not only did they break the law in coming here, but they’ve committed other crimes while here — or they’ve already been given a judicial deportation order. Generally speaking there is an awful lot of both. The public is beginning to recognize there are well-funded leftist NGO’s training emotionally unstable women to “resist” ICE on behalf of cartel thugs and sex traffickers, identity thieves and welfare cheats. And attempting to virtue-signal as they’re doing so. This, at a time when the pressure cooker triggered upon the revelations of looting of the federal treasury, aided and abetted by blue-state Democrat politicians, by immigrant communities emanating out of awful Third World countries, is on its highest setting. It isn’t a very good time for haughtiness. Not if you’re the Clintons, not if you’re Gavin Newsom, not if you’re Tim Walz. And with the Supreme Court just having to wade through oral arguments in a breathtakingly simple case surrounding a state law banning men from participating in women’s sports, the foundations of leftist legitimacy erode all the faster. This will make your head hurt. It’s more clear now than ever that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is not qualified to sit in her current seat. She has no freaking clue what in the hell she is talking about. Justice Jackson: “I’m still struggling to understand why the state would have to have perfectly tailored… pic.twitter.com/karUYdgIB3 — Sylent Mayhem (@SylentMayhem) January 13, 2026 And this won’t help the situation. The Left is not qualified for the power they crave. To qualify for power, you must have a firm grasp on reality, without which you cannot wield that power in a productive or just way. And the Left hates reality. They build whole institutions devoted to the denial and defeat of… https://t.co/qxcCshSVDj — Scott McKay (@TheHayride) January 14, 2026 There was a time, in a bygone era of American politics, when the active ingredient of the American Left wasn’t race communism but rather Kennedy/Moynihan liberalism and it could be argued without the refutation of experience that their ideas had merit. Put differently, that liberalism had answers to the world’s problems. Nonviolent resistance could overcome brute power. Righteous protest could overcome racism and bigotry. Social programs could alleviate poverty. It could be argued, though never conclusively, that the Left could lead the country into the sunlit uplands of enlightenment, shared prosperity, and harmony among men. But the 1960s are over, and history has judged American liberalism… not favorably. That’s why the liberals are gone and it’s the naked communists who are the active ingredient on the Left. That these are wolves in sheep’s clothing is undeniable. The clothing can’t possibly fit. Queers for Palestine proves that. Their arguments on behalf of Renee Good fell apart utterly on Wednesday when it came out that Ross suffered internal bleeding from the injuries Good caused him as she ran into him. That didn’t stop many of these people from openly accusing Ross and ICE of “faking it.” .@EdKrassen you and your brother are the ones misleading the public. Video evidence clearly shows the ICE officer getting hit by the car. pic.twitter.com/X9lNkdPuHy — Hunter Goodwin (@Gh3ttotwinkie) January 9, 2026 One is tempted to line the naysayers up and let them take turns getting “grazed” by that Honda Pilot so they can share Agent Ross’ “lived experience” and judge his actions with some perspective. It’s doubtful there will be many takers. Their arguments in favor of trans ideology disintegrated into a shambles at that Supreme Court hearing. And their Epstein narrative is in ruins thanks to the Clintons and their inability to sacrifice them at the Trump The Pedophile altar. Everything is a lie. The entire argument is discredited. I’m reminded of Matthew 7:16-20: “You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thornbushes, nor figs from thistles. So every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore, by their fruits you will know them.” The bad trees are poisoning America, and it’s impossible to deny it any longer. The question is by what method the poison trees should be removed. The American Left is no longer a political adversary. Those days passed when all of their policy arguments failed and they doubled down on them. The virtue is gone, along with the good faith, and they’re still signaling it. They speak to us as enemies speak, and their fruits are poison. What alternatives are we offered but to act accordingly? READ MORE by Scott McKay: White Girl George Floyd Isn’t Working Five Quick Things: Minnesota Goes to Hell (Again) You’ve Never Heard of the Citgo Six, and We’re Going to Change That Right Now

“The middle class is shrinking” might be the assertion of the decade. Progressives and populists alike use it to justify nearly all government interventions, from tariffs to minimum-wage hikes to massive spending to income redistribution. But before we accept its validity, we should ask a simple question: shrinking how? Is the number of Americans considered part of the middle class diminishing? Or the amount of wealth they can realistically build? Or the value of what they can buy? A new study by economists Stephen Rose and Scott Winship usefully reframes the debate. Most studies define the middle class relative to the national median, which makes the dividing line between haves and have-nots rise automatically as the country gets richer. Rose and Winship instead use a benchmark of fixed purchasing power, so that if real incomes (those adjusted for inflation) rise, more people are shown moving into — or beyond — the middle class in a meaningful sense. Under this approach, the “core” of the middle class does indeed shrink modestly. But crucially, the middle class shrinks because people are moving up the income ladder, not because they’re falling down. Since 1979, the share of Americans in the upper-middle class has roughly tripled — from about 10% to 31% — while shares of those considered lower-middle class or poor fell substantially. Much of the political rhetoric, such as former President Joe Biden’s warning of a “hollowed-out” middle class, implicitly suggests downward mobility and national immiseration — a story difficult to square with data showing an overwhelmingly upward directional movement. In the end, the American middle class may be a smaller share of the population by some relative definitions, but it’s also significantly richer than it was a generation ago. So why does its supposed downfall resonate so powerfully? I can think of two reasons. One is that the middle class has never been just an income bracket. It’s also a social identity and a claim to civic pride. For much of the 20th century, belonging to the middle class meant more than just achieving a certain living standard. It meant occupying the cultural and civic center of the country — being the representative American whose tastes, habits and aspirations have largely defined us. As our prosperity has dramatically grown, our culture has diversified and fragmented. A richer and freer society offers more choice: more media, more platforms, more lifestyles, more ways of living well. We no longer all watch the same television programs or consume the same news. Fewer institutions define a single cultural mainstream. This fragmentation is often experienced as loss. Without one cohesive middle serving as an obvious center of gravity, upward mobility no longer comes with the same affirmation of middle-class status or belonging. The mirror that once reflected a common identity has splintered. But this is only one side of the story. The fragmentation is also a sign of success. It reflects abundance, pluralism and the eroding ability of society’s gatekeepers to dictate what’s normal. Still, when middle-class life feels messier or less satisfying, populism offers a tempting but misleading response: Blame elites and free markets. It recasts the disorienting effects of abundance and choice as evidence of economic decline. The real danger is not cultural fragmentation but conflating the costs of success with failure. This leads to a second, more concrete reason for our fears: Washington hasn’t destroyed the middle class, but it is putting most Americans in a frustrating squeeze. The largest cost pressures today are concentrated in sectors where government has distorted markets the most. Housing, health care and higher education — three of the largest household expenses — are among the most heavily regulated and subsidized parts of the American economy. Barriers on who can provide these essentials, how much can be supplied and how other regulatory complexities raise prices and reduce choice. Even as incomes rise, the pressures are real. But they are the product of government failure, not evidence that economic growth has stopped working. Recognizing this does not justify populist economic policies that mistake the source of our discontent. Rose and Winship rightly urge skepticism toward policies sold as “middle-class restoration.” The impulse to reimpose uniformity or respond to an economic challenge in ways that suppress growth turns real gains into real losses. Restrictions on free trade, cartel-like favoritism for government-favored industries and other heavy-handed interventions undermine the very dynamics that allowed the middle class to expand in the first place. When more families cross into the upper-middle class, that’s a success. You might be frustrated by lost status and broken institutions. Just don’t allow politicians to misdiagnose the problem and sabotage the upward mobility that is still delivering real gains despite government barriers. Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. To find out more about Veronique de Rugy and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

In his latest Bloomberg op-ed piece, Hal Brands, the globalist academic at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a fellow at the Trilateral Commission, claims that the world is gradually transitioning away from the “liberal international order” of the post-1945 era. We have entered, he writes, a “more cutthroat age” where “raw strength” matters more than rules. Brands’ evidence: the U.S. destroys drug boats and captures an indicted foreign leader; great powers redraw or attempt to redraw borders; international law and arms control are unraveling while “strategic rivalry intensifies.” Who is largely to blame? You guessed it: President Trump. Brands blames Trump for “tearing down” the liberal world order, accusing the president of disdaining the post-1945 order that Brands describes as “comparatively humane and enlightened.” Historians, he writes, will view the fading post-1945 world order as a “golden age” of peace, prosperity, and expanding freedom. Thanks largely to Trump (though China and Russia share some of the blame), Brands writes, “[c]rucial norms and principles are coming undone.” Brands’ column proves that even well-educated people can sometimes view history and the world through rose-colored glasses. Brands appears to be living and thinking in an Atlanticist’s bubble, where since 1945 the great issues have not been decided, to use Bismarck’s phrase, by iron and blood, but instead by international rules and global governance. Let’s take a closer look at the post-1945 liberal order that Brands mythologizes as “comparatively humane and enlightened.” The post-1945 world included Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s absorption of many nations in eastern and central Europe, deporting whole populations under Soviet control, filling up his Gulag camps with perceived political enemies, bringing down what Churchill called an “iron curtain” across half of a continent, imposing a land blockade of West Berlin, occupying parts of Austria and northern Iran, and supporting communist parties throughout Europe and Asia. This “golden age” of “peace and prosperity” also included the renewal of a bloody and destructive civil war in China, which claimed millions of lives and caused terrible destruction; the Korean War, which claimed between one million and two million lives; the French Indochina War, which killed between 500,000 and 1.2 million soldiers and civilians; China’s attacks on Kinmen and Matsu, which produced a U.S. nuclear threat; U.S. interventions in Iran, Guatemala, and Lebanon; the Soviet military crackdown in Hungary, the Suez Crisis, France’s debacle in Algeria; Castro’s triumph in Cuba, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Berlin crisis, and the Cuban Missile Crisis; Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which resulted in up to 30 million dead; the India-China war; Mao’s Cultural Revolution; the second Indochina War, which claimed over three million lives; U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic; the Six-Day War in the Middle East; the Soviet crackdown in Czechoslovakia; the Soviet-Chinese clash along the Ussuri River; the Yom Kippur War; Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia; China’s brief war with Vietnam; the Iranian Revolution; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the rise of an international terror network (PLO, IRA, ETA, Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof gang, Shining Path, Tupamaros); the Iran-Iraq War; the U.S. invasion of Grenada and intervention in El Salvador and Nicaragua; the Tiananmen Square massacre; Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the First Gulf War; ethnic cleansing in the Balkans; the 9/11 attacks and the Global War on Terror; the Afghan and Iraq wars. Need I go on? Donald Trump had nothing to do with any of these events. Brands quotes Trump adviser Stephen Miller: “We live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power… These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Just so, but Brands characterizes these words as “[not] exactly wrong” but “incomplete.” Miller was right, and so was Bismarck: “[I]t is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time are decided . . . but by iron and blood.” READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: America’s Urban Guerillas The Experts Were Wrong About Pete Hegseth The ‘Warmth of Collectivism’ Comes to New York

There’s a sense of triumphalism in the headlines. “Texas A&M is banning Plato, citing his ‘gender ideology,’” one caption at Literary Hub read. “An ancient Greek philosopher falls victim to campus culture wars,” another headline at the Washington Post said. “This Is No Way to Run a University,” the New York Times assured its readers. The Left, you see, has caught the Right in a bit of hypocrisy — or so it thinks. It wasn’t so very long ago that the Right was loudly protesting teachers and schools that criticized (and sometimes banned) great authors like Shakespeare for challenging our modern progressive morality while traumatizing our students with accounts of extreme weather. Now, suddenly, the Right is the one doing the canceling. To make it even better, they’re canceling one of the fathers of the very Western civilization they so often claim to defend. (READ MORE: A Nation That Can’t Explain 1776 Urgently Needs a Civic Education Revival) So, how exactly did Plato get scrubbed from a philosophy course at Texas A&M? Well, its administration is (understandably) a bit nervous about the Trump administration’s determination to cut funding to institutions indoctrinating their students in the creed of gender ideology. So, a new policy requires school presidents to ensure all syllabi are free of gender and race ideology. That policy was implemented days before the spring semester began and it affects some 200 courses (mostly those dedicated to philosophy, literature, film, sociology, communications, and ethics). Some of those problematic classes will no longer count toward core requirements, others will be revised. Among the latter is an introductory philosophy course (PHIL 111, Contemporary Moral Issues) taught by Martin Peterson. According to the Texas Tribune, Peterson was informed that he had to either “remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, including readings from Plato, or be reassigned to teach a noncore philosophy course.” The problem, the university told the Tribune, wasn’t Plato, per se, but the specific reading: a telling of the “Myth of the Androgyne” taken from Plato’s Symposium. It’s a relatively short passage in which one of Plato’s characters, Aristophanes, waxes mythological on the nature of Love, positing that men and women were once joined in a single, four-legged, bug-like form until the gods determined that they were entirely too revolutionary and split them into two individuals. Love, he argues, is simply the desire to return to that original state of union with man’s other half. As a sort of side note, Aristophanes remarks that “the sexes were three … because the sun, moon, and earth are three; and the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon.” He then goes on to appear to justify lesbian attractions on the basis of humanity’s original construction. (READ MORE: ‘Experts’ Warn US Is on Brink of ‘Trans Genocide’) It’s certainly possible that the leftist journalists and philosophers protesting Plato’s cancellation are correct in assuming that the university administration found the passage intrinsically problematic, and therefore determined to excise it. It’s also possible that the head of the department and the school’s president looked at the syllabus, noted that the passage was invoked in a module on gender ideology, and concluded, based on the context, that its inclusion was intended to aid a mission of indoctrination. After all, there are two ways to interpret this passage in the context of gender: You could, of course, interpret it as a kind of justification for homosexuality. The argument goes thus: the ancient founders of our Western civilization clearly didn’t have a problem with homosexuality, modern prejudices against it are just that, modern. Arguing that LGBTQ ideology is immoral actually breaks from our Western tradition. Gotcha. Or, you could pair it with a reading of God’s creation of man in Genesis and His subsequent destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah for their deviant sexual practices. You could note that Aristophanes isn’t all wrong (Christ, after all, makes it clear in the New Testament that man and woman “become one flesh” in marriage), but that he, like most pagans both ancient and modern, had an understanding of sexuality that proved too broad. You could use this tidbit of philosophical history to suggest that Christianity didn’t just build on ancient greats like Socrates and Aristotle, it sanctified them. Maybe I’m being unfair to Peterson, but I suspect he wasn’t planning to espouse the latter interpretation. READ MORE by Aubrey Harris: Blame Everyone for Grok’s Perverted Porn Problem