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President Trump said he will ban large investors from buying single-family homes, the administration's first significant move to address the country's severe housing shortage.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he would ban large institutional investors from buying single-family houses, marking a new push in the White House's messages around housing supply and affordability.

President Donald Trump is moving to ban "large institutional investors" from buying up United States homes meant for Americans, a move that is likely to be welcomed with bipartisan support.

This content is for members only. Visit the site and log in/register to read.The post The Thundermans: Undercover (season 1) first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

A hero. The post The musician James Hetfield called his father figure: “He was unafraid” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

It was just before Thanksgiving 2017, and a number of executives of Citgo, the American subsidiary of PDVSA, the Venezuelan state oil company, were called on only 12 hours notice to appear at a corporate meeting in Caracas. The six — Gustavo Cárdenas, Tomeu Vadell, Jose Luis Zambrano, Alirio Zambrano, Jorge Toledo, and Jose Pereira — did not come home for Thanksgiving. Nor did they return to their families for Christmas. Nor in 2018. In fact, the six were sentenced in a kangaroo court to prison terms from eight to 13 years, and for five long years they languished in a dungeon, getting only two hours of fresh air per day and enduring forced nudity, physical abuse, starvation, and deprivation of water and sunlight. Their emaciated condition soon alarmed their panicked families — Vadell lost more than 70 pounds — and not until March of 2022 was Cárdenas released, with the other five allowed to return home in October of that year. Their families did not recognize them when they arrived back in Houston. The executives were freed as part of a prisoner swap; the Biden administration granted clemency for Franqui Flores and his cousin Efrain Campo, two men arrested in Haiti in a Drug Enforcement Administration sting in 2015 and convicted the following year in New York. Flores and Campo were significant enough to trade for the Citgo Six because they were nephews of “First Combatant” Cilia Flores. The Citgo Six, as they became known, have a story that is about as emblematic as any of the rancid and utterly villainous nature of the communist regime in Venezuela that is now swaying to and fro in the aftermath of the capture of its dictator, Nicolas Maduro, and the First Combatant — the title Maduro gave his wife. The Zambrano brothers filed a $400 million lawsuit against Citgo in Harris County District Court in Texas in May of 2024. That came months after Vadell filed his own $100 million suit in March of 2023. Information from those filings, the company’s response, and contemporary news reports tells a story of evil, corruption, and corporate cowardice. By 2017, PDVSA had declined from producing nearly four million barrels of oil per day 30 years earlier to less than half that amount, and the creditors had begun circling. Trish Whitcomb of the Juris Journal Substack blog sets the scene: The petition names Guillermo Blanco as the central figure. Blanco was a Venezuelan military officer who participated in the failed 1992 coup alongside Hugo Chavez. In January 2017, Maduro appointed him VP of Refining for PDVSA. He simultaneously served as chairman of the boards of Citgo Petroleum, Citgo Holding, and PDV Holding. All three defendants in this lawsuit. By November 2017, PDVSA was in selective default. Creditors were circling Citgo. Losing the Houston refiner would have been a political disaster for Maduro, evidence he could not manage the country’s finances or protect its assets. The petition alleges the regime launched a purge to find scapegoats. By mid-November, according to the petition, more than 60 PDVSA employees had been arrested as part of that purge. The petition quotes what it describes as Blanco’s August 5, 2017, social media post: “We must purge PDVSA and all the government ministries of escuálidos.” The plaintiffs characterize the term as a slur the Chavez government used for political opponents. The petition also names Calixto Ortega Sanchez, Citgo’s VP of Finance. Ortega Sanchez’s uncle was a Venezuelan Supreme Court justice sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2020. The petition alleges Ortega Sanchez provided confidential financial documents to DGCIM, Venezuela’s military counterintelligence service, enabling the fabricated charges against the Citgo 6. Ortega Sanchez was present at the PDVSA meeting on November 21, 2017, when masked agents arrested the executives. He was not detained. By 2018, the U.S. had barred him from reentering the country. He went on to become president of the Central Bank of Venezuela. Reports after the fact alleged that the Citgo Six had been arrested on charges of “corruption.” But per the petition, and the statement has not been challenged, the executives were charged specifically with signing unauthorized refinancing agreements — $4 billion in bonds — that would have pledged Citgo as collateral. Venezuelan Attorney General Tarek William Saab announced the arrests the same day, accusing the men of negotiating with Apollo Global Management and Frontier Management Group under terms detrimental to PDVSA. The Zambranos note that neither had anything to do with corporate finance. Citgo’s statements in response to the lawsuits were eye-opening. Denying any liability and casting itself as a fellow victim, Citgo said the six executives had been denied due process, confirmed the charges were meritless, and said “The Citgo 6 were our senior-most executives, and neither they nor Citgo, the company they led, are responsible for the arbitrary acts of [President Nicolás] Maduro’s repressive regime.” Citgo is still owned by PDVSA, but the corporate relationship isn’t an active one. It couldn’t be. In 2019, the U.S. federal government imposed sanctions on Venezuelan oil and recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate president. At that time, a new board was elected at Citgo and it continued operations. Around that time, Citgo began paying something — though nothing like their salaries — to the families of the six executives and helping to defray their legal costs as they attempted to free the six in Venezuelan courts. Before then, they’d been placed on leaves of absence without pay. The Vadell and Zambrano lawsuits against Citgo had little chance of netting much of the sought-for damages. Citgo is still seen as responsible for PDVSA’s American debt. In November of last year, a federal judge in Delaware approved the sale of Citgo’s parent company to Houston-based Amber Energy in a $5.9 billion transaction; Amber Energy is owned, at least in part, by the West Palm Beach-based hedge fund Elliott Investment Management. But that sale was contested by the Maduro government, which appealed the judge’s decision. Now that there is no Maduro and his former vice president, Dulcy Rodriguez, who is now in charge of the regime, has pledged “collaboration” with the U.S. government, it’s a good bet Amber Energy will take control of Citgo. And that might lead to some relief for the Citgo Six. Except as Whitmore notes, they’re going to be in the back of a pretty long line — and she provides a couple of highlights: Even if the Zambranos and Vadell prevail, collecting will be complicated. Citgo’s parent company owes creditors roughly $21 billion. ConocoPhillips alone is seeking more than $11 billion for assets Venezuela nationalized years ago. A Canadian mining company, Crystallex, won a judgment that helped trigger the sale process. So when your Democrat friends thunder away at the Trump administration for their arrest of Maduro, and decry the “regime change” in Caracas on the theory that “it’s all about oil,” ask them if they’ve ever heard of the Citgo Six. Then ask them if they’re OK with defending a regime that committed those grievous human rights abuses against Americans who worked for them. And ask them if making Gustavo Cárdenas, Tomeu Vadell, Jose Luis Zambrano, Alirio Zambrano, Jorge Toledo, and Jose Pereira whole — not to mention ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, who had billions stolen from them by the Chavez/Maduro criminal syndicate in Venezuela — might be worth a little bit of American involvement in that country’s oil industry. READ MORE by Scott McKay: The Toppling of Villains Has Begun in Earnest. It Must Continue. On Venezuelan Oil Tankers, Chinese AI, and American Energy Traitors Five Not-So Quick Things: The Green Shoots Which Will Only Get Greener

The 1990s bestseller How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill asserted that Irish monks, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, preserved essential religious and secular tracts from antiquity through the Dark Ages ensuing from Rome’s collapse. The subsequent reintroduction of these classical texts arguably “recivilized” Europe after centuries of barbarism. The “Great Awokening” ascendant in the West (particular the United States) over the past 15 or so years can hardly be compared to Visigothic bedlam. Nevertheless, Irish monks are an instructive analogue for whether the emerging backlash against progressive cultural dominance will prove sustainable. Who today will assume the mantle from those ancient Irish clerics? The societal madness of the last several years — which reached its apogee during the George Floyd “summer of love,” a period of riots, property damage, and widescale social disintegration not seen in America since the Vietnam protest era of the 1960s — resulted from the displacement of classically liberal values by a neo-religious progressive creed fusing critical theory, racialist identity politics, and broad-gauge collectivism. These and other leftist currents had flowed through American institutions for decades, coincident with the baby boomer generation reaching adulthood and eventually assuming operational control of the private, not-for-profit, and public sector organizations comprising American civil society. Given this decades-long percolation, a consensus has yet to be reached as to what exactly caused woke culture to achieve hegemony in the early 2010s. While technology and social media certainly played a part, there is little dispute as to who installed the DEI bureaucracies and HR infrastructure, each with the attendant stoolies and kapos critical to its maintenance: the boomers. At their professional peak in the late 2000s and 2010s, the boomer generation combined the cultural capital, wealth, influence, and positions of authority to, if not outright steer, at very least allow American society to be pointed in the direction of authoritarian progressivism. The backlash against wokeism began well before President Trump’s reelection in 2024, but has gathered apace since. While still early in this counterrevolution, the scope and depth of societal damage done are only now being thoughtfully examined. A recent piece by Jacob Savage in Compact details how men of the Millennial generation had opportunities that might otherwise have been available to them in prestige fields including media, the arts, and academia foreclosed due solely to possessing the wrong demographic profile. While the collapse of white male participation in these fields over the 10-year period detailed by Savage is staggering, equally jarring is how many of the young men cited actively assented to “diversity” mandates and denying one’s “privilege” without fully appreciating what that might mean for them personally. After all, they were raised by boomers. And this is where Generation X, a small and forgotten cohort barely registering with the intelligentsia, has a ready-made opportunity to turn the cultural tide. Might we be the Irish monks of our day? Gen X wasn’t raised by the boomers (for the most part), but by the aptly named Silent Generation. The Silents imparted pre-boomer era values: reticence, self-discipline, respect for authority, individualism, and self-reliance. Xers not only imbibed these verities of yore through familial inheritance, but later manifested them in stark reaction to the self-indulgence of the boomer generation. When the insult “OK boomer” was initially hurled by Millennials a decade ago, Xers were quick to chime in that “we’ve hated them since before you were born.” More substantively, Generation X is the youngest generation to remember a world with some degree of privacy, before it was extinguished by invasive technology and social media. We are also the last generation to experience a world that didn’t just pay lip service to meritocracy, but actually sought to practice it. Tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk, Alex Karp, and Peter Thiel (to name but a few) are Xers all. Love them or hate them, they represent their generation well as iconoclastic visionaries, the veritable antithesis of the grey “organization men” (and women) preferred by HR departments, faculty senates, and NGO leadership. If the Compact piece errs in any meaningful way, it is that it implicates Gen X professionals alongside boomers in suppressing the hiring of young white males, presumably out of self-interest: nodding to the ideological fashions of the day while preserving one’s own position is framed as moral cowardice. But this analysis inverts accountability and consequence. The “political correctness” gingerly nudged forward in the late 1980s and 1990s by a rising boomer managerial class was easily laughed off by Xers, as the boomers had yet to fully wrest control of the culture from the Greatest and Silent generations. No one then could have predicted how political correctness would cancerously metastasize into DEI and the entirety of what would become the wokeification of American society. A generation of latchkey children, forged in a blast furnace of divorce, drugs, and disease (in the form of AIDS) bracketing age 40 wasn’t about to lift its collective head out of the foxhole to defend young Millennials (largely junior boomers ideologically, until they realized how wokeism hurt them) after finally having graduated from our collective “Microserfdom.” While that may not have been our moment, this one is. The boomer reeducation camps are slowly being shut down as boomers themselves enter retirement. Millennials have awoken (pun intended) from their DEI slumbers and rediscovered that meritocracy can be more than just a fig leaf or slogan. Gen Z is up for grabs; while hyperaware of the fraudulence of the messages they receive from institutions and the wider culture, their absolute immersion in technology can make it difficult for them to separate noise from signal. As Generation X takes fuller command of the levers of cultural power, it can reintroduce the wide spectrum of classical liberalism — free speech, free markets, the rule of law, individual responsibility, the primacy of the nation state, and the rest — to replace the barbarism of the modern-day Visigoths currently beating a hasty retreat. Younger generations’ exposure to the woke era requires that Xers make a sustained effort to entrench liberal values, as the collectivists will mount rearguard actions to reverse any such gains — and their control of the institutions will undoubtedly prove slow to give way. While framed here as a mostly American phenomenon (particularly the significance of generational differences), the challenge to classical liberalism as a governing philosophy is a global one. As the last redoubt of Western Civilization, the U.S. has an opportunity to demonstrate to other polities that have largely capitulated to relativism and secular ideologies suffused with religious fervor that the barbarian hordes can be repulsed. Richard J. Shinder is the founder and managing partner of Theatine Partners, a financial consultancy.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California enters the New Year facing an $18 billion budget deficit, a slow-as-molasses rebuilding from last year’s Los Angeles–area wildfires, and a variety of ongoing problems, including persistent homelessness rates, soaring housing costs, and traffic gridlock. But my first column of the year focuses on something small but symbolic: a new law forbidding grocery stores from providing plastic bags. Passed in 2024, Senate Bill 1053 went into effect on Jan. 1 after the Legislature gave grocers a year to come into compliance. I’m majoring in the minors here because the measure reminds us of the degree to which the state’s “groundbreaking” environmental laws often accomplish little other than annoying the public. When you go to the grocery store, you’re now stuck dragging along those old canvas or non-woven plastic bags you’ve stuffed in the car trunk or under the seat — or purchasing for at least 10 cents each heavy-duty recycled paper bags that were common in the 1970s. SB 1053 “eliminates the exemption of thicker plastic film bags from the state’s single-use bag ban” and “stipulates that only recycled paper bags, as defined, are permitted to be sold at point of sale,” per the Senate Floor Analysis. Bill author Sen. Catherine Blakespear, D-Encinitas, explains the rationale: “Eliminating plastics is about fighting big oil.… To save the planet, our energy transition must go hand in hand with a plastics transition.” You get the gist of it. But here’s the mind-boggling part. In 2014, the state passed Senate Bill 270, backed by a similar litany of environmental groups who pointed to the same laundry list of pollution problems caused by plastic grocery bags. That measured banned those thin supposed “single-use” bags. I write supposed because many of us typically used them twice as we hauled home groceries in them and then used them to line waste baskets or toss the cat litter. The grocery lobby also supported it, arguing that the measure was an improvement over dealing with the multiple municipal plastic-bag bans that were the rage at the time. It didn’t hurt that grocery store could then charge 10 cents a bag for bags that they used to hand out for free. Plastic bag manufacturers were given $2 million to retool their equipment, but they backed a 2016 referendum, Proposition 67. The “yes” vote won and the ban went into effect in 2016. (With referenda, a “yes” vote keeps the law and a “no” vote overturns it.) Bag-ban supporters made all the same promises that SB 1053’s supporters now make. This is from the Yes on Proposition 67 campaign: “A YES vote will help keep discarded plastic bags out of our mountains, valleys, beaches and communities, and keep them beautiful.” Blakespear praised that 12-year-old bag ban as an “incredible step forward” but acknowledged that it didn’t work out as planned. Basically, SB 270 exempted thicker plastic bags, which it described as reusable. At the time, the Senate Environmental Quality Committee raised the obvious question: “Will consumers actually reuse these slightly thicker bags at least 125 times or will these bags be treated more like single-use bags?” Now we have our answer. On a personal level, I found thin “single-use” bags ideal for reusing as they took up little space and had myriad uses. I disliked those thick “reusable” bags because they were too big to be stuffed in my pocket to, say, pick up dog poo on my evening walk. So I immediately chucked those bags. But one need not rely on anecdotal evidence to see what took place since 2016. “[B]ecause of a loophole in its initial ban that allowed grocers to charge for thicker plastic bags, California still dumped 231,072 tons of plastic grocery and merchandise bags in landfills in 2021, according to the state’s recycling agency, CalRecycle. That was a sharp increase from the year the ban took effect — and nearly 100,000 more tons than in 2018,” per a 2024 report from Oregon Public Broadcasting. Instead of recognizing its own failure to properly legislate, California did what it often does: It sued the oil companies. “For decades, ExxonMobil has been deceiving the public to convince us that plastic recycling could solve the plastic waste and pollution crisis when they clearly knew this wasn’t possible,” said Attorney General Rob Bonta. There’s always scapegoat, and government never is to blame. The new law pushes us to use genuinely reusable canvas or even-heavier-duty plastic bags, but those are the same types of bags the state feared could spread germs during the pandemic. I’m guessing that many consumers will simply opt to spend the extra 50 cents or a dollar per shopping trip to buy a few paper bags and then throw them in the recycling bin. Such consequences might be unintended, but they certainly are predictable. As the Recyclable Plastic Ban Alliance argued in opposition to SB 1053, “Passing this bill would likely trigger increased plastic use through the implementation of NWPP bags (as happened in New Jersey), eliminate the use of 183 million pounds of recycled content in California each year, exacerbate our carbon footprint and significantly raise costs for working families.” NWPP stands for Non-Woven Polypropylene bags that often are imprinted with store logos. Keep in mind why Americans switched from heavy recyclable paper bags to thin plastic bags in the first place: “A 2005 life-cycle analysis commissioned by the Scottish government found that manufacturing paper bags consumes 10 percent more energy than manufacturing conventional plastic bags, uses four times more water, emits more than three times the amount of greenhouse gases, generates 14 times more water pollution, and results in nearly three times more solid waste,” reported Reason’s science correspondent Ronald Bailey in 2022. Around and around we go, as lawmakers make grandiose pronouncements about saving the environment — then pass laws that make the situation worse. But at least they make shopping more annoying, which will teach us about the evils of our consumer lifestyle. Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org. READ MORE: Coming Initiatives Inspire Fear in Sacramento LA Is Destroying Its Housing Market California’s Hypocrisy on Property Rights

The New York Times absolutely insists on getting things wrong — deeply and disgustingly wrong — when it comes to the persecution of Christians in Nigeria. On Monday, our Ellie Gardey Holmes called out the Times’ coverage of the massacre of 42 innocents. After detailing the abject flaws in this Times article’s analysis, she concludes by noting that, when it comes to the wholesale slaughter of Christians by Muslim terrorists, “the Times has ignored the obvious for far too long and, in doing so, enabled this continued campaign of violence.” But even as Ellie was exposing the flaws of one Times article, the Times was at it again, finding a creative new way to whitewash evil, this time by actually inverting the moral order of the long-running humanitarian crisis in Nigeria. A Monday Times article, “After U.S. Strikes on Christmas, Fear Grips Muslims in Rural Nigeria,” represents a master class in creative misdirection, all in the service of indicting Donald Trump’s long-awaited action to punish the Muslim terrorists for the ongoing mass murder of innocent Christians. The Times article is a narrowly conceived human interest story, quoting a handful of Muslim villagers from the Nigeria’s Sokoto State, long a hotbed of ISIS and Boko Haram terrorist activity. It finds these villagers fearful and confused by a nearby Tomahawk cruise missile strike, one of the dozen launched on the night of Christmas from a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Guinea.  The fear, no doubt, is real. The Muslim terrorists who operate freely throughout the region have long viewed themselves as able to operate with complete impunity; no one, not the ISIS and Boko Haram gangsters, certainly not the impoverished villages in which they nestle, have experienced anything like the strikes that took place on Christmas night. If the terrorists were caught off guard by these strikes, how terrifying must it have been for ordinary villagers. But to focus on the fear of these few is to utterly ignore — and willfully minimize — what has been going on in Nigeria for over a decade. I’ve been writing about the persecution of Christians in Nigeria for nearly three years, and studying the problem for a lot longer. The slaughter of poor Christian farm families has been going on for over a decade, becoming more brutal and widespread with each passing year. The numbers have been appalling, tens of thousands killed, hundreds of thousands forced from their homes into refugee camps, a litany of brutal murder of the innocent, accompanied all too frequently by rape, torture, and the widespread destruction of Christian churches and Christian livelihoods.  Is it “genocide” or merely “ethnic cleansing?” The authoritative international study group, Genocide Watch, does not hesitate in describing Nigerian Christians as being subjected to genocide, labelling the situation a “severe genocidal crisis.” Truth Nigeria cites Nigerian Catholic leaders in describing a “hidden genocide” being conducted by Fulani Muslim terrorists, in which thousands have been killed, hundreds of thousands chased from their homes into refugee camps, and over 335 Catholic churches destroyed. For all the notoriety of ISIS and Boko Haram, it’s the Fulanis who have taken the lead recently in murdering Christians. The simplest of Google searches offers a long list of articles describing the horrific situation of poor Christian farmers in those regions where Islamist radicals are attempting to create a caliphate. Or start with another of Ellie’s comprehensively researched articles, something the Times writers apparently cannot bring themselves to do. But if the authors of the Times article cannot condescend to reading The American Spectator, perhaps they might at least have studied Nina Shea’s recent testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa.  Shea, the director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, is arguably the foremost American expert on religious persecution worldwide. She has taken a particular interest in the plight of the Nigerian Christians. Her documentation of the horrors being inflicted on these Christians is impeccable and her condemnation of the Nigerian government’s failure to protect the Christian communities is scathing.  Significantly, Genocide Watch and Shea both acknowledge that moderate Muslims have also been targeted by the terrorists, particularly by ISIS and Boko Haram. But they also make it clear that the disparity in numbers is massive. Still, had the Times chosen to ask the right questions, they might have discovered that, particularly in the region afflicted by these particular groups — the region targeted by the Trump missile strikes — Muslim villagers have more to fear from their radical co-religionists than from an errant cruise missile strike. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at how the Times gets it wrong. Back in 2019, the first Trump administration designated Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” with respect to religious persecution. In 2021, the Biden administration rescinded this designation, an action all of a piece with its contention that the conflicts in Nigeria were merely disputes over land use between Fulani Muslim cattlemen and Christian agriculturalists, a conflict exacerbated by “climate change.” But the overwhelming terrorist focus on killing Christians has long put the lie to this narrative. When the Trump administration recently reinstated the “country of particular concern” designation, it came with a warning — if Nigeria continued to fail its Christian communities, the U.S. would take matters into its own hands. The failure continued, with the run-up to Christmas marked by fears of a fresh round of terrorist attacks. The Christmas evening missile strikes followed, as promised. For thoughtful observers, the real concern about these strikes is less, as the Times would have it, the fear engendered in a handful of Muslim villages. The greater concern is that there will be no meaningful follow-up, no more pressure on the Nigerian government to finally defend its Christian citizens, or, if that fails, no more punishment meted out from above to the Muslim terrorists. In fairness, the problem is extremely difficult, and more concrete U.S. action fraught with danger, as I’ve detailed elsewhere. But instead of quibbles about missile parts being scattered across the landscape, the Times might have engaged more forthrightly with these larger issues. It might even have recognized that the missile strikes, if properly followed up, could save thousands of Christian lives. That, however, would have failed to serve the all-powerful narrative. So instead, and quite perversely, the Times eschews enlightening its readers about a true humanitarian crisis. Instead, by highlighting the fears of the handful of villagers while ignoring the larger massacre of Christians, it goes from willful ignorance to outrageous distortion of the true situation. All this in the service of a single purpose, finding yet another cudgel with which to beat Donald Trump. But why should we be surprised. As Ellie and I have both written, repeatedly, over the last several years, the mainstream media cannot bring itself to consider Christians as victims. And as these two recent articles demonstrate, when it comes to ignoring an ongoing genocide, the New York Times is leading the pack. James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. He’s just published his new novel, The Zebras from Minsk, the sequel to his well-received 2022 thriller, Letter of Reprisal. The Zebras from Minsk finds the Reprisal Team fighting against an alliance of Chinese and Russian backed Venezuelan terrorists, brutal child traffickers, and a corrupt anti-American billionaire, racing against time to take down a conspiracy that ranges from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find The Zebras from Minsk (and Letter of Reprisal) on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.