The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
Now over a year into the new congressional term and moving toward the midterms, the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress has been racking up one major victory after another. Don’t believe it? Just look at the facts.
The Babylon Bee has the receipts with the following list of things the GOP has accomplished while in power:
1. Got Little Debbie Zebra Cakes added to the Capitol cafeteria: The far-reaching magnitude of this cannot be overstated.
2. Thought long and hard about doing something: They’re not sure what it was, but they definitely considered it.
3. Added a cool light show to the Washington Monument: And it reportedly only cost American taxpayers $7 trillion.
4. Issued a record number of sternly worded letters: Shape up, or they’ll send one to you, too.
5. Convinced Mike Johnson to try parting his hair on the other side: This required months of tough negotiation.
6. Released six heavily redacted pages of the Epstein files: They’re serious about accountability.
7. Exempted the National Mall landscapers from all ICE operations: They can’t afford to lose José and his crew.
8. Passed legislation to fund the federal government for the next 8 minutes: Isn’t that amazing? Oh, wait, time’s up, and the government is about to shut down again.
9. Lost the midterms earlier than any other Republican Congress in history: And that’s saying something.
No one can say the GOP hasn’t been getting things done. What else have Republicans accomplished while controlling both chambers of Congress for the last year? Add your thoughts in the comments.
To anyone who thinks there is a chance Vice President JD Vance will change his continuing disdain for the Jews, as New Yorkers say, fuhgeddaboudit!
January 27 was Holocaust Remembrance Day, which recognizes, not all the dead of WWII or the victims of the Nazis, but very specifically, the Jews whom the Nazis sought to exterminate entirely from Earth. Here’s how JD Vance acknowledged a day remember that unique, targeted evil:
I was not the only one to notice that omission. Perhaps not coincidentally, the BBC, which is notoriously antisemitic, also forgot to mention the Jews when it acknowledged Holocaust Remembrance Day. With a nod to Ilhan Omar, it’s as if both said, “Some people did something…”
As you can see, Vance’s post included photos of the vice president and his wife, Usha, in 2025 visiting a Holocaust memorial site at the Dachau Death Camp, where he signed a guestbook. Please look to see if it’s signed “JD Vance” or “Tucker Carlson.”
How in the hell (as in the hell of a Nazi death camp) could anyone reference what happened in the Holocaust and not mention Jews? For those keeping count, the Nazis won the game by 6 million.
Imagine someone talking about the American Revolutionary War without mentioning George Washington. Or the Civil War without saying Abraham Lincoln’s name. Or the Great Depression, and omitting Franklin Roosevelt from the discussion. Except it’s worse than that because while Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt were all major players in those historical events, the Holocaust is specifically, by definition, about the Jews.
Vice President JD Vance didn’t mention the Nazis systematically murdering European Jewry because he is Tucker Carlson with a beard. Thus, Vance avoids anything that even remotely gives Jews or Israel a sympathetic view.
From the official White House statement to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s post, there was mention of Jews or antisemitism in their own commemorations of Holocaust Remembrance Day. But not Vance, who seems to want to represent the Woke Reich of the Republican Party.
With much regret, it is now definite that VP Vance is a “groyper,” those Republicans who lean to the Woke Reich. As Commentary Executive Editor Abe Greenwald wrote in an email entitled “JD Vance Has Made His Choice”:
So, let’s also stop looking for Vance to change his tune. He’s dancing with the one that brought him to the party, and that’s Carlson. According to multiple accounts, Carlson was heavily involved in getting Donald Trump to pick Vance as his running mate. That’s a favor you don’t take for granted. Especially if you’re as calculating as our current vice president. If he’s not going to disown the racist right for insulting his wife and child, he’s certainly not going to do it for the Jews. He’s decided that the Republican future belongs to anti-Semites.
Every night when I say my prayers, I ask G-d to protect President Donald J. Trump. Those prayers take on a stronger meaning out of worry that the “Woke Reich” will put Vance in the Oval Office before the next presidential election, when many Americans are looking to SOS Marco Rubio to be the presidential nominee and continue MAGA.
Robin M. Itzler is a regular contributor to American Thinker. She is the founder and editor of Patriot Neighbors, a free weekly national newsletter and can be reached at PatriotNeighbors@yahoo.com
Homan said he was deployed to Minnesota earlier this week to help restore law and order and remove dangerous criminal illegal aliens from local communities.
He made clear his focus is public safety — not politics or headlines.
Sanctuary cities are “sanctuaries for criminals” who endanger communities, President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said Thursday morning in his first press conference after arriving in Minneapolis.
Homan said he was deployed to Minnesota earlier this week to help restore law and order and remove dangerous criminal illegal aliens from local communities.
He made clear his focus is public safety — not politics or headlines.
Ii didn’t come to Minnesota for photo ops or headlines,” Homan told reporters. “I came here to seek solutions.”
Homan said more than 10 million illegal aliens entered the country under the Biden administration, including millions of “gotaways” who evaded authorities.
Many, he warned, pose national security and public safety threats.
Trump, he said, promised voters he would reverse those failures and prioritize the safety of American communities.
The border czar said he has spent the past several days meeting with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey — all Democrats — as well as law enforcement leaders and others.
“We didn’t agree on everything. I didn’t expect to agree on everything,” Homan said. “But you can’t fix problems if you don’t have discussions.”
One key area of agreement, Homan noted, was that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a legitimate law enforcement agency with a duty to enforce federal law.
Homan said the administration was working on drawdown plan to decrease presence of ICE in Minnesota.
“As we drill down on these great agreements [with Minnesota officials] we’ve got, this great understanding we have means less so we can draw down those resources,” he said.
“When the violence decreases, we can draw down those resources. But based on the discussions I’ve had with the governor and the AG, we can start drawing down those resources.”
He added the drawdown “can happen even more if the hateful rhetoric” stops.
He emphasized that his request is not for local officials to become immigration officers, but for cooperation to remove criminal aliens already in custody.
“Jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities are sanctuaries for criminals,” Homan said. “Sanctuary cities are sanctuaries for criminals and endanger the residents of the community.”
Homan praised Minnesota’s Department of Corrections for honoring ICE detainers and said that cooperation has made communities safer — not only for residents, but for law enforcement officers as well.
He also announced progress with Ellison, who clarified that county jails may notify ICE of release dates for criminal illegal aliens so agents can take custody lawfully and safely.
“That’s common sense,” Homan said, noting that arrests inside jails are safer than attempting to locate dangerous suspects after release.
He dismissed claims that cooperation with ICE discourages crime victims and witnesses from coming forward.
“Victims and witnesses don’t want the bad guy back in their neighborhood either,” Homan said.
Homan said continued cooperation will reduce crime, save resources, and fulfill Trump’s commitment to put American safety first, especially in cities that he said have paid the price for years of failed border policies.
President Donald Trump is moving to rip fraud out by the roots.
In a Jan. 28 announcement on Truth Social, Trump named Colin McDonald as the first-ever Assistant Attorney General for National Fraud Enforcement, a brand-new division at the Department of Justice created to hunt down, expose, and prosecute the fraud networks that have been bleeding American taxpayers dry for years.
“I created this Division to catch and stop FRAUDSTERS that have been STEALING from the American People,” Trump wrote, pointing to massive schemes recently uncovered in states like Minnesota and California that he says have siphoned off hundreds of billions of dollars from public programs.
This is not another symbolic task force or press-release office. This is a direct strike force.
A White House–Directed Fraud Purge
The new division will operate with nationwide jurisdiction and report directly to the White House—bypassing the usual DOJ bureaucracy that critics say has looked the other way while fraud exploded across federal programs.
Vice President JD Vance made clear this will be a no-nonsense operation.
“We are creating a new assistant attorney general position who will have nationwide jurisdiction over the issue of fraud,” Vance said. Enforcement actions will begin immediately, starting in Minnesota—ground zero for some of the most shocking fraud revelations in the country.
The position carries Special Counsel–level authority, but unlike past special counsels who chased political narratives, this office is being run out of the White House, under direct presidential supervision.
Translation: no cover, no delays, no sacred cows.
McDonald: A Prosecutor Who Actually Puts Criminals Away
Trump praised McDonald as a proven fighter who has delivered justice in some of the most complex and high-stakes cases in the country.
McDonald currently serves as an associate deputy attorney general and previously worked as senior counsel to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. His background includes years as a federal prosecutor in Southern California and Hawaii, as well as service as a judicial law clerk.
While in Hawaii, McDonald helped convict former Honolulu Police Chief Louis Kealoha and his wife—both entrenched insiders—on multiple charges including bank fraud and conspiracy. A federal judge said their crimes “staggered the community” and shook confidence in governing institutions.
That résumé matters.
This division isn’t being handed to a political climber or a bureaucrat—it’s being handed to someone with a record of taking down powerful fraudsters who thought they were untouchable.
Fraud Wasn’t an Accident—It Was Allowed
The creation of the National Fraud Enforcement Division follows mounting evidence that fraud was not just missed, but tolerated under prior leadership.
Federal investigators are now probing sprawling schemes tied to programs like Feeding Our Future, Housing Stabilization Services, Medicaid, and early childhood intervention initiatives—many of them centered in Minnesota. Billions meant to help vulnerable Americans instead flowed into shell companies, luxury purchases, and organized fraud rings.
For years, taxpayers were told these were “isolated incidents.”
They weren’t.
They were systemic.
The Message Is Clear
This move sends a blunt warning: the era of open-season theft from federal programs is over.
No more fake nonprofits. No more politically protected grifters. No more bureaucratic excuses.
With McDonald at the helm and the White House backing the mission, the Trump administration is signaling that fraud against the American people will be treated for what it is: a major crime against the nation.
As Trump put it succinctly:
“Congratulations Colin—STOP THE SCAMS!”
Big League Politics
Big League Politics is a fast-paced news site led by a team of top-level investigative reporters, filmmakers, and citizen journalists all over the country. We take on the powerful and report the truth that the mainstream media wants to silence.Subscribe
Brothers Hamid and Vahid Arzanlou were two well-known entrepreneurs in Iran’s furniture industry who despite their wealth still chose to raise their voices in anti-government protests this month and paid with their lives.
During mass killings by security forces in the Tehranpars area east of Tehran on January 9, Hamid Arzanlou was shot in the head and Vahid was shot twice in the neck while trying to save him, according to sources close to the family.
Both brothers later died from their wounds.
At their funeral, a third brother Kiomars Arzanlou asked mourners to clap if they believed his brothers had chosen the right path, and the mourners responded by applauding the two Arzanlou brothers.
According to the sources, security agencies demanded more than one billion tomans (about $6,670) from the relatives in exchange for handing over the bodies.
Hamid and Vahid, the sources added, actively supported and helped organize walkouts during the early days of strikes in Tehran’s central bazaar beginning late last year.
The large‑scale strike on January 7 at the furniture market in the Delavaran district was organized partly through their efforts and became one of the biggest strikes in eastern Tehran.
Sources close to the family say the two brothers were also among the first on the streets on the night of January 8, standing alongside other protesters for hours before security forces unleased a two-day crackdown which killed them along with thousands of other demonstrators.
Hamid and Vahid were owners and managers of the Aysa Mobl Kian furniture company which is one of the best‑known brands in Iran’s furniture industry.
At its peak, this group created jobs for at least one thousand people directly and indirectly and employed about 200 workers directly.
The two brothers hailed from a working‑class family and grew up in Tehran’s Khak‑e Sefid neighborhood and had built up wealth through their hard work and thrift, the sources added.
Vahid was the father of three children while Hamid is leaves behind two young children. Their mother, 68, survives them.
Minnesota’s defiance of federal immigration law echoes pre–Fort Sumter nullification, forcing Trump to choose between enforcement and letting blue states slide toward open rebellion.
In the months before the April 12, 1861, firing on Fort Sumter, there were lots of sharp divisions in the North about the proper reaction to the first seven Confederate states that had already left the Union.
Not all Unionists believed that war was inevitable. Some, in fact, were happy to be done with the departing South and thus see their stain of slavery gone from the Union. Similarly, others agreed that the emerging Confederacy was not worth the trouble and costs of war, and the secessionists could just form their own nation and stew in their own backward, servile juice.
But after Fort Sumter, Lincoln—who was hated as much by the Confederates as Trump is by the woke and socialist left—gained a consensus that the Constitution had no clauses about any lawful departure from the union. But it did operate under a clear supremacy clause that made state obstruction of federal law and occupation of federal property veritable sedition.
Lincoln and the preservationists felt that they easily had the moral high ground of abolition versus the continuance of slavery. Nor did they want a North America of fragmenting, warring nations in the manner of Europe.
Something similar is emerging over Minnesota, the South Carolina of our age.
Once sanctuary states, cities, and counties had established the precedent that, with impunity, they could nullify federal immigration law, then what followed was a logical and mounting descent into the current open defiance of the federal government. How odd that self-described progressives are now acting out the visions of prior kindred nullificationists and neo-Confederates from John C. Calhoun to George Wallace.
The reaction of the rest of the nation, especially its conservative half, to Minnesota resembles the 1861 disconnect in the North over the insurrectionary states.
Some believe that if Minnesota wants to protect its approximately 1,300 jailed illegal alien murderers, rapists, and assorted felons, so be it, and ICE should leave such a dysfunctional and dystopian state to its own self-destructive path.
In this way of “See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya” thinking, Trump should stick to the red and purple states, clear them of criminal aliens with the help of local enforcement, but without the organized performance-art leftist resistance. Then he could contrast the nation with the difference between low crime, noncontroversial deportations, versus the blue-state model of protecting illegal alien criminals and their indifference to the mayhem they inflict on the innocent.
If Minnesota further wants to be a state like 1861 South Carolina that openly defies the federal government, then also so be it. But it should accordingly not expect federal funding for its pick-and-choose approach to federal law and property.
Has Minnesota forgotten that, like blue-state America, it cheered on Barack Obama’s DOJ when it successfully sued Arizona in 2010, insisting that it was Obama’s right as a federal custodian not to enforce federal immigration law at the border—and thus not legal for Governor Jan Brewer to use her state resources to enforce a federal law that derelict federal officers would not?
But on the other hand, contemporary Unionists objected that such live and let suffer is defeatist. Moreover, there are millions of Americans inside insurrectionary Minnesota who do not support their neo-Confederate leaders. Millions in Minnesota properly see themselves as Americans first and Minnesotans second.
In this line of argument, just as Lincoln refused to give up federal armories, property, and offices inside the South—most notably Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor—to insurrectionists, so too the Trump administration has an obligation to protect federal property and offices in Minnesota and to enforce federal law throughout the nation, at least if it is to continue as a nation.
Very soon, Trump will have to decide which strategy is preferable and politically viable before the midterms.
Meanwhile, Minnesota’s highest elected officials have ordered local and state police not to protect federal immigration officers from the very street violence that they fuel. Indeed. Governor Walz, Mayor Frey, and Attorney General Ellison are actively encouraging Minnesotans to obstruct federal officers from enforcing federal laws—despite the mounting violence that follows their collective prompts.
The three know that organized and well-funded groups organize the protests and incite the violence. And perhaps the trio even welcomes would-be martyrs to use their vehicles to ram ICE officers or to arrive at protests armed with military-grade, semi-automatic pistols with plenty of magazines and ammunition to spare.
Walz and company further quietly accept that they could easily mitigate the violence by simply turning over roughly 1,300 criminal illegal aliens in various Minnesota jails to federal authorities. To do so would lessen the chances of violence, make Minnesota a safer place, and expedite the rotation of ICE out of Minnesota.
But, of course, Walz, Frey, and Ellison have no such intentions, given their schemes are elsewhere.
Given the failure of an increasingly socialist Democratic Party in 2024 to offer a more popular and convincing agenda than Trump’s, they believe their future lies in an increasingly redistributionist America, fueled by unlimited, unaudited immigration from the former Third World. They view as a political asset millions of arriving poor in dire need of massive federal health, food, housing, and education subsidies and entitlements, imbued with DEI victimhood, and nursed on America as toxic at its birth and ever more pathological ever since.
So for the Minnesota state officials, screaming for ICE “to get the f**k out of Minnesota” is more than mere braggadocio. It is a reminder that the Democratic Party wants a safe place for illegal immigration, the fuel of a future dependent constituency—as the architecture of the recent massive Somali frauds attests.
They also believe that the more turmoil, the more violence, the more resistance, and the more a general sense of chaos and unrest swirl around the Trump administration, the more they can drive down its popularity before the midterms.
They still cherish the months of riot, violence, and arson in the George Floyd “summer of love” in 2020 as critical in defeating Donald Trump.
Now as then, the left believes they can create a lose/lose dilemma for Trump: send in the National Guard to restore order, and he confirms that he is a “Nazi” and using the “Gestapo” to quell “peaceful” protests. Stand down, and the left owns the street, exasperating the MAGA base that mysteriously Trump has allowed the criminal left to nullify the enforcement of federal law in near-secessionist fashion.
So for the Minnesota state officials, screaming for ICE “to get the f**k out of Minnesota” is more than mere braggadocio. It is a reminder that the Democratic Party wants a safe place for illegal immigration, the fuel of a future dependent constituency—as the architecture of the recent massive Somali frauds attests.
There are other Democratic agendas, both short- and long-term.
The Minnesota Democrat apparatus either knowingly turned a blind eye to, protected, or silently partnered with the architects of likely the largest theft of federal welfare and entitlement monies in U.S. history—largely by the Somali community, both immigrants and their second-generation apparatchiks. The Democratic elite counted on the prophylactic cry of “racist!” to exempt the Somali community from any legal accountability. And so far, they seem right in that assumption.
And the public?
Polls reveal its trademark ambiguity. A majority voted for Trump to enforce immigration law, close the border, end illegal immigration, and deport those who broke federal law. But that hope and the reality of implementing it are two different things—especially when a state like Minnesota has not just institutionalized illegal immigration but nearly canonized foreign nationals illegally residing in the U.S.
To sum up public opinion, the proverbial people want all criminal illegal aliens deported as soon as possible, and they may even support the deportations of all 10-12 million illegal aliens who came en masse, unaudited, and with the de facto blessing of the Biden administration.
But that said, they want the act of deportation of the non-criminal to be out of sight, out of mind—as if magically they can simply disappear and thus either self-deport or assemble at ICE stations eager to be sent at no cost home.
For now, Walz, Frey, and Ellison are upping the rhetoric, fanning the violence, and talking openly about how best to nullify federal law and impede federal enforcement. They are convinced that they have galvanized national opposition to the hated Trump, smothered the Somali fraud scandal, and stopped ICE deportations of their constituents.
In all of those assumptions, they have little idea they are following the Confederate script to the letter. And like their spiritual forefathers of 1861, they grow ever more cocky, boastful, and defiant as they create martyrs, spread narratives of victimhood, and daily slouch toward another Fort Sumter.
About Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O’Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — If there’s been a soundtrack to life in Minneapolis in recent weeks, it’s the shrieking whistles and honking horns of thousands of people following immigration agents across the city.
They are the ever-moving shadow of the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge.
They are teachers, scientists and stay-at-home parents. They own small businesses and wait tables. Their network is sprawling, often anonymous and with few overall objectives beyond helping immigrants, warning of approaching agents or filming videos to show the world what is happening.
“I think that everyone slept a little better knowing that Bovino had been kicked out of Minneapolis,” said Andrew Fahlstrom, who helps run Defend the 612, a hub for volunteer networks. “But I don’t think the threat that we’re under will change because they change out the local puppets.”
What started with scattered arrests in December ramped up dramatically in early January, when a top ICE official announced the “largest immigration operation ever.”
Masked, heavily armed agents traveling in convoys of unmarked SUVs became commonplace in some neighborhoods. By this week, more than 3,400 people had been arrested, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. At least 2,000 ICE officers and 1,000 Border Patrol officers were on the ground.
Administration officials insist they are focusing on criminals in the U.S. illegally, but the reality in the streets has been far more aggressive. Agents have stopped people, seemingly randomly, to demand citizenship papers, including off-duty Latino and Black police officers and city workers, area officials say.
They smashed through the front door of a Liberian man and detained him without a proper warrant, even though he’d been checking in regularly with immigration officials. They have detained children along with their parents and used tear gas outside a high school in an altercation with protesters after detaining someone.
To be sure, federal agents are barely a presence in many areas, and most people have never smelled a whiff of tear gas. But the crackdown rippled quickly through immigrant-heavy neighborhoods. Patients are avoiding life-saving medical care, doctors said. Thousands of immigrant children are staying home. Immigrant businesses shut down, cut their hours or kept their doors locked to everyone but regular customers.
They smashed through the front door of a Liberian man and detained him without a proper warrant, even though he’d been checking in regularly with immigration officials. They have detained children along with their parents and used tear gas outside a high school in an altercation with protesters after detaining someone.
To be sure, federal agents are barely a presence in many areas, and most people have never smelled a whiff of tear gas. But the crackdown rippled quickly through immigrant-heavy neighborhoods. Patients are avoiding life-saving medical care, doctors said. Thousands of immigrant children are staying home. Immigrant businesses shut down, cut their hours or kept their doors locked to everyone but regular customers.
Pushback comes quickly
Activist groups rapidly organized across deeply liberal Minneapolis-St. Paul and some suburbs. Small armies of volunteers began making food deliveries to immigrants afraid to leave their homes. They drove people to work and stood watch outside schools.
They also created interlocking webs of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of rapid response networks — sophisticated systems involving thousands of volunteers who track immigration agents, communicating with encrypted apps like Signal.
Tracking often means little more than quietly reporting the movement of convoys to dispatchers and recording the license plates of possible federal vehicles.
But it’s not always quiet. Protester caravans regularly form behind immigration convoys, creating mobile protests of anger and warning that weave through city streets.
When agents stop to arrest or question someone, the networks signal the location, summoning more people who sound warnings with whistles and honking, film what’s happening and call out legal advice to people being detained.
Many protesters come expecting trouble
Sometimes it all can feel performative, whether it’s Bovino in body armor tossing a smoke grenade, or young activists who rarely take off their helmets and gas masks, even when law enforcement is nowhere to be seen.
But crowds often lead to real confrontations, with protesters screaming at immigration agents. Agents respond only sometimes, but when they do it’s often with punches, pepper spray, tear gas and arrests.
Those confrontations worry some in the activist world.
Take the recent afternoon in south Minneapolis, where dozens of protesters, some in gas masks, clashed with immigration agents in south Minneapolis. Protesters screamed at agents, threw snowballs and tried to block their vehicles. Agents responded by shoving protesters who got too close, firing pepper balls and finally throwing tear gas grenades and driving away. Demonstrators without masks wretched in the streets as volunteers handed out bottles of water to flush their eyes.
By then, even many of the people in the protest weren’t sure what started it, including the city council member who soon arrived.
Minneapolis has a long tradition of progressivism, and Jason Chavez is a proud part of that.
He bristled when asked about the confrontation.
“I didn’t see anybody ‘confronting,’” said Chavez. “I saw people alerting neighbors that ICE was in their neighborhood. And that’s what neighbors should continue to do.”
Tracking immigration in an immigrant neighborhood
To understand this world, talk to a woman known in the rapid response networks only by her nickname, Sunshine. She asked that her real name not be used, fearing retaliation.
A friendly woman who works in health care, she has spent hundreds of hours in her slightly beat-up Subaru patrolling an immigrant St. Paul enclave of taquerias and Asian grocery stores, watching for signs of federal agents. She can spot an idling SUV from the tiniest hint of exhaust, an out-of-state license plate from a block away, and quickly distinguish an undercover St. Paul police car from an unmarked immigration vehicle.
On the messaging apps, she’s simply Sunshine. She knows the real names of few other people, even after working with some for weeks on end.
She hates what is happening, and feels deeply for people living in fear. She worries the Trump administration wants to push the nation into civil war, and believes she has no choice except to patrol — “commuting” it’s often called, half-jokingly — every day.
“Sometimes people just want to pick up their kid and walk their dog and go to work. And I get that. I get that desire,” she said while driving through the neighborhood last week. “I just don’t know if that’s the world we live in anymore.”
She runs constant equations in her head: Should she report an immigration vehicle to the network’s dispatcher, or honk her horn as a warning? Would honking unnecessarily scare residents who are already afraid? Are agents leading her around? Are federal vehicles moving to launch a raid, or are they distracting observers while other agents make arrests elsewhere?
She is careful and avoids confrontation. She also finds hope in the community that has been created, and how offers to volunteer exploded after the Jan. 7 killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent. And she understands the anger of the people who face off against agents.
“My strategy, my approach, my risk calculation is different than other peoples’. And at the same time, the vitriol, the frustration, I get it,” she said. “And sometimes it feels good to see someone unleash that.”
Not everyone agrees. Even nationally, some activist groups have pushed back against protest strategies that could lead to clashes.
“Loud does not equal effective,” a group in a heavily immigrant Maryland county said in a recent social media post, explaining why their volunteers don’t use whistles. Among other things, the Montgomery County Immigrant Rights Collective warned that whistling can “escalate already volatile ICE agents who don’t respect our rights” and “increase the likelihood of aggression toward bystanders or the detained person.”
“This is not an action movie,” the post says. “You are not in a one-on-one fight with ICE.”
The following guest post is by Dominic J. Grigio, author of The Disastrous Pontificate: Pope Francis’ Rupture from the Magisterium.
During the Most Holy Mass for the Inauguration of his Pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI said something quite remarkable, ‘Pregate per me, perché io non fugga, per paura, davanti ai lupi — Pray for me, that I may not flee for fear of the wolves.’[1]
The wolf is a powerful Christian symbol for wickedness and deceit within the Church, especially among those exercising pastoral leadership such as popes, cardinals, bishops and priests. These connotations of deceitful wickedness can be traced back to a warning from Our Lord, ‘Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.’ (Mt 7:15). The Greek word for ‘ravenous’ used by Matthew is harpax which has two meanings — rapacious or ravening, and robbery by a swindler[2]. In the context Matthew’s Gospel our Lord’s warning about the ravening wolf disguised as a sheep conveys the danger of the disguised evil of those pastors who steal salvation from souls through imposing doctrinal error.
The enormity of this evil is so appalling that the faithful, understandably, have difficulty comprehending it — popes, bishops and priests who steal salvation from those under their care. We have to be absolutely clear about this: teaching heresy and affirming mortal sin puts unrepentant sinners in danger of eternal punishment in Hell. Spiritual fathers who teach heresy are literally in danger of stealing eternal life in heaven from their spiritual children.
This is the worst form of spiritual abuse by men in positions of authority and power in the Church. It is a type of spiritual abuse that impacts the faithful and unrepentant sinners in very different ways — faithful Catholics are distressed, even at times distraught, to see the Faith attacked by those entrusted to cherish and guard it, while misguided, unrepentant sinners rejoice to be confirmed in their sin. As Peter Kwasniewski put it during his conversation with Eric Sammons, living through the pontificate of Pope Francis as a faithful Catholic ‘was like being an abused child and waking up every day fearing how you were going to be abused next.’[3]
When I was working on this book, there were many times when I wanted to flee for fear of the wolves. It got to the point that I was very reluctant to immerse myself in the heresies and duplicitous, cunning actions of this disastrous pontificate. It affected me physically, psychologically and spiritually. A friend kept reminding me to pray for spiritual protection, warning me of the danger inherent with the work, ‘He that toucheth pitch, shall be defiled with it.’ (Ecclesiasticus 13:1). I was very much tempted to walk away and try to forget the whole, sordid thing.
However, in retrospect I realise I was given the grace to persevere and was sustained by the three theological virtues. I love the Faith, especially as expressed through the sacred dogmas and doctrines of the Church. In the midst of the chaos and confusion caused by Bergoglio’s words and deeds, I found stability in the doctrinal pronouncements of previous councils, popes and saints. I fostered the hope that my book would help pass on the true Faith to those seeking the Truth now and in the future, and I saw my book as expressing the fundamental act of Christian love — caring for the salvation of souls.
I totally understand those who just want to forget the Bergoglian pontificate and get on with their lives. However, the fact of the matter is that though Jorge Bergoglio is dead (RIP), the evils he inflicted on the Church remain a clear and present danger to souls and the unity of the Church. As Fr Davide Pagliarani, the Superior General of the SSPX, expressed it recently:
After the pontificate of Pope Francis, we find ourselves in an emergency situation. Although the Pope has passed away, his decisions remain epoch making, problematic, and far reaching. This pontificate exemplifies the state of necessity within the Church from start to finish. In ordinary parishes, the means for the salvation of souls are often lacking. The preaching of the truth and the administration of the sacraments are no longer guaranteed.[4]
Many of the cardinals and bishops who collaborated with his heretical agenda remain in positions of power; his many error-ridden documents remain unchallenged as part of the ordinary magisterium of the Church, and countless millions of souls remain confused and misguided about the Catholic Faith.
God has called those of us who can clearly see this appalling state of affairs to take part in the great work of restoring the truth of divine revelation in the life of the Church. He created us for this moment and this work. Just as He called the faithful during the Arian crisis and the Protestant revolt, He calls all of us to defend doctrine and challenge heresy during the Bergoglian crisis. What would have happened to the Church if the faithful had said they’d “heard enough of” Arius or Luther and “just wanted to forget about these heresiarchs and get on with their lives”?
We must re-discover the deep, abiding passion for sacred doctrine that previous generations of Catholics possessed, sometimes at the cost of persecution and martyrdom. After the doctrinal and catechetical chaos of the post-Vatican II period, many have lost a sense of the importance of doctrine for their salvation. The saintly Pope Pius XII warned in the early 20th century that ‘perhaps the greatest sin in the world today is that men have begun to lose the sense of sin.’[5]
It seems to me that those who have lost the sense of the importance of doctrine are the very ones who have lost the sense of sin. This is exemplified in their permissive attitude about a whole range of sins — from sexual sins to sins against the Faith, such as sacramental sacrilege, atheism and religious indifferentism. Only bishops who have completely lost a sense of the importance of doctrine would advocate the acceptance of contraception, masturbation, same-sex unions, and homosexual acts, as many German bishops did under the banner of synodality.[6] Only a pope who had completely lost the sense of the importance of doctrine would advocate to a group of young people the grave sin of religious indifferentism, as when Pope Francis proclaimed that all religions led to God and that Christianity was not more important than any other religion.[7]
We need to regain the passion for doctrine that Catholics of the fourth century possessed when the sailors, dockworkers, and ordinary faithful sang sea-shanties about the divine nature of Christ. We need to regain the zeal for doctrine that led St. Francis de Sales and his cousin, Fr. Louis de Sales, to slip apologetic pamphlets under the doors of Calvinists because they were banned from public preaching, resulting in the conversion back to the Faith of 100,000 Protestants. We need to regain the courage for doctrine that led St. Edmund Campion S.J., to risk his life by not only returning to England as a priest on penalty of being hanged, drawn and quartered, but also by sneaking 400 copies of his pamphlet Decem Rationes (Ten Reasons), challenging Protestant heresies with Catholic doctrine, into the heart of England’s intellectual establishment.
How do we regain this passion, this zeal, this courage for doctrine after sixty years of heterodox catechesis and preaching? Only through a correct understanding of sacred doctrine. This is one of the reasons why I wrote The Disastrous Pontificate: to reveal the beauty, consistency and truth of genuine sacred doctrine by contrasting it with the gravely erroneous teaching of Pope Francis and his collaborators. Goodness, Beauty, and Truth stand out more clearly when contrasted with evil, ugliness and lies.
worked on the book it became obvious to me that there are four keys to the authentic Catholic hermeneutic of sacred doctrine:
1. As St. Paul expresses it, we accept sacred doctrine as originating from God, and not from human thinking (Gal 1:11-12; 1 Cor 2:13).
2. We insist that the Word of God contained in sacred Scripture, and safeguarded by sacred doctrine, judges our thoughts and actions, rather than our thoughts and actions judging the Word of God.
3. We uphold St. John Henry Newman’s true understanding of the development of doctrine which was frequently misrepresented by Pope Francis and his collaborators to justify their blatant contradiction of sacred doctrine. Authentic development of doctrine means the Church, through the Holy Spirit, attains a deeper understanding of doctrine that:
– maintains the original divine truth;
– ensures that the underlying revealed truths remain permanent and consistent;
– appreciates that the deeper understanding of doctrine can be accepted by the Church without changing her apostolic, hierarchical nature and tradition;
– knows that the deeper understanding is logically inferred from, and implicit in, apostolic doctrine, and not imposed abruptly or arbitrarily;
– safeguards, strengthens, and explains doctrine rather than undermining or contradicting it, as this deeper understanding acts to preserve the past rather than overthrow it.
4. We realise that the principle lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi is vital to the life and wellbeing of the Church. It is a threefold cord that cannot be broken. In the context of the Latin-rite church, the worthy, reverent worship of God through the traditional Latin Mass is not a matter of personal or aesthetic taste but is essential to the correct understanding, safeguarding and expounding of sacred doctrine.
These four keys to a correct understanding of sacred doctrine are absolutely necessary if we are to see through the doctrinal chaos and confusion caused by Pope Francis’ disastrous pontificate, which failed every single one of Cardinal Newman’s premises for the genuine development of doctrine.[8] As St. Vincent of Learns advised the faithful, ‘What if some novel contagion seek to infect not merely an insignificant portion of Church, but the whole? Then it will be his [the believer’s] care to cleave to antiquity, which at this day cannot possibly be seduced by any fraud of novelty.’[9] This must be our care: to regain our sense of sin through our love, defence and adherence to true doctrine.
Democrat running to be Ohio’s attorney general promised to kill President Donald Trump if he wins the November election.
Elliot Forhan, a former state representative and current attorney general candidate, posted a plan outlining how he would “kill Donald Trump.”
“I want to tell you what I mean when I say that I am going to kill Donald Trump,” Forhan said in a video. “I mean I’m going to obtain a conviction rendered by a jury of his peers at a standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt based on evidence presented at a trial conducted in accordance with the requirements of due process, resulting in a sentence, duly executed, of capital punishment. That is what I mean when I say I am going to kill Donald Trump.”
Trump narrowly survived his first assassination attempt on July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania. The president was again targeted just weeks later while golfing in Palm Beach, Florida.
Notably, Forhan responded to the political assassination of Charlie Kirk by posting “Fuck Charlie Kirk.”
Forhan’s comments — disturbing as they are — are par for the course for Democrats.
Just this past November, Virginians willingly elected Jay Jones to serve as the state’s attorney general despite him fantasizing in a 2022 exchange with a colleague about killing former Republican House Speaker Todd Gilbert.
“Three people, two bullets. [Republican House Speaker Todd] Gilbert, [H]itler, and [P]ol [P]ot. Gilbert gets two bullets to the head. Spoiler: put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know and he receives both bullets every time,” Jones said.
Jones also reportedly suggested that he wished Gilbert’s wife “could watch her own child die in her arms so that Gilbert might reconsider his political views,” as the National Review reported.
When Jones’ colleague later pushed back, Jones only doubled down.
“Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy,” he wrote in a message. “I mean do I think Todd and Jennifer [Gilbert’s wife] are evil? And that they’re breeding little fascists? Yes.”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
I’ve been working for Article V, off and on, since 1983. That’s when the Alaska Legislature passed a Resolution calling for a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA), using Article V. I was serving in the Alaska Senate. At the time, the national debt was $1.8 trillion.
From 2013 to 2018, the campaign for fiscal reform, using Article V, was my sole preoccupation. My sons Darren and Brendan and I co-founded the Reagan Project to promote it. I gave it everything I had.
But I basically gave it up, because left-wing dark money (Soros et al.) had entered the game in Montana in 2015. There was no money to oppose them and no national figure of stature to take the lead in the campaign. We were dead in the water.
Now things have changed. The debt has increased twentyfold, to $37.85 trillion. And Congress remains unwilling to restrain its deficit spending. In 2025, the debt increased $2.23 trillion.
Most importantly, our movement now has Florida governor Ron DeSantis as its leader. He was in Idaho a few days ago, imploring its state legislators to pass the same bill I voted for 43 years ago.
There are different ways of counting how many states have passed resolutions calling for an Article V BBA. Thirty-four are needed. There may be litigation soon to argue that that threshold has already been crossed. But the outcome of such a lawsuit is uncertain, and the safest way to proceed is to put the current count at 27 and run a campaign to get seven more state legislatures to act.
Believe me — this won’t be easy. In addition to the left-wing dark money problem, the ultra-far-right John Birch Society is adamantly opposed, claiming to fear the boogeyman of a runaway convention. They are a real force in states like Idaho and Montana. Getting to an undisputed 34 states will take several years at a minimum.
At the end of this year, Gov. DeSantis will be term-limited out of his job. What better way to spend his time than by traveling the country, promoting a BBA using Article V? If the American people were made aware that there is a way to force Congress to stop spending this country into bankruptcy, they would demand that their state legislators take action and pass the needed resolutions.
The best way for DeSantis to promote Article V is by running for president. He’d have the bully pulpit and could use it to inform the voters that there really is a way to deal with the debt and with deficit spending.
He wouldn’t be running against Vance, or Rubio, or Newsom or any Democrat. He’d be running against Congress. The American people, of all political persuasions, are well aware of the dismal state of the United States Congress. In a bipartisan manner, it is dysfunctional, corrupt, and incapable of reforming itself.
The Framers of the Constitution, George Mason in particular, foresaw the possibility of such a Congress and gave the states a way to bypass it and propose congressional reform amendments to the Constitution without congressional approval. This was the way the 17th Amendment, the direct election of United States senators, came into being. At the time, 32 state Article V resolutions were needed for an Article V Amendment Convention. When the count reached 30, the Congress, in order to prevent such a convention from taking place, rolled over and proposed the 17th Amendment.
So we may not need to get 34. If we get five more states, for a total of 32, Congress may propose an amendment itself. An actual Article V Convention would be avoided, and congressional power would not be challenged.
Ron DeSantis may or may not ever be elected to the presidency. But if he can lead a successful Article V campaign, he will have made a more significant contribution to this country than a whole lot of presidents have ever done.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 