It is fair to say that until Kamala Harris chose her running mate in 2024, the vast majority of Americans had never heard of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Known during the campaign for little more than his weak-kneed response to the George Floyd riots of 2020 and for exaggerations about his National Guard service and military rank, he was an ever-grinning, ever-clapping cheerleader for Kamala’s word salads.
However, in light of Minnesota’s “industrial-scale” social services fraud, likely involving billions in tax dollars funneled away from those most in need to those lining their pockets for vacations, jewelry, property, and luxury vehicles, Walz is fast becoming known for something else — as a shockingly incompetent governor asleep at the wheel since his election in 2018.
That massive amounts of money earmarked for programs supporting children and the poor were criminally stolen, with little or no adequate supervision by the Walz administration, is beyond doubt. As a result, legitimate initiatives, including Medicaid, housing assistance, autism services, and childcare assistance programs were denied the funds to which they were entitled.
However, also troubling are assertions that Minnesota welfare fraud money was siphoned to terrorist groups, including ISIS, in Somalia and elsewhere.
In fact, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer has stated that because allegations suggest that “fraudulently obtained funds… were sent overseas to support terrorist organizations,” such a claim is serious enough to justify congressional investigation.
But because Minnesota’s boondoggle bonanza was hatched in a blue state, overseen by a passively inept, asleep-at-the-wheel progressive governor, and involved a large Somali population, the somnambulating legacy media has often downplayed or even ignored the scandal.
In fact, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer has stated that because allegations suggest that “fraudulently obtained funds… were sent overseas to support terrorist organizations,” such a claim is serious enough to justify congressional investigation.
But because Minnesota’s boondoggle bonanza was hatched in a blue state, overseen by a passively inept, asleep-at-the-wheel progressive governor, and involved a large Somali population, the somnambulating legacy media has often downplayed or even ignored the scandal.
That has been so, even though much of the funding came from initiatives created to support the neediest in that community, often children, and from similar programs for other immigrant communities as well.
But even more concerning, the Minnesota social safety net swindle described by former governor Tim Pawlenty as likely revealing the “largest amount of public fraud in the history of our country” is anything but a recent phenomenon.
With documented cases of social service scams dating back to 2015 and with warnings even earlier, federal prosecutors have described Minnesota’s fraud problem as “not small,” “not isolated,” and “staggering.” And supporting those characterizations, the Minnesota Star Tribune disclosed that Minnesota has been dealing with a fraud crisis in its Medicaid and related social service programs “for more than a decade.”
Yet even so, some politically motivated media outlets have ignored the scope of the crisis. Accordingly, since mid-December, when federal prosecutors revealed that fraud in Minnesota welfare programs could exceed $9 billion, CNN and MSNBC have failed their viewers by giving the story scant attention. And even more shockingly, there was not a single mention of the scandal on either network or on their websites through at least Christmas.
During that period, the only indirect mention of wrongdoing was on MSNBC, when on Dec. 18, their moderator played the race card by stating that President Donald Trump “unleashed” an “attack” on Somalis over fraud claims. And Walz woke up long enough to join in attacking Trump for “demonizing an entire population.”
So, overlooking allegations of widespread welfare fraud prompting enormous expense to American taxpayers, the president’s critics branded him racist for justifiably linking some Somalis to the scandal. That predictable smear occurred even though, as of Jan. 1, that group accounted for nearly 90 percent of scandal-related welfare fraud arrests in Minnesota.
Overall, U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson has claimed that grifters may have stolen “half or more” of the $18 billion in federal funds provided to Minnesota social services since 2018. Yet seemingly unconcerned whether the public’s money has been used for its original intent or even legally, Walz claimed that federal prosecutors were only “speculating” about the scope of the fraud for “sensationalism.”
But in the end, Walz has been right about a few things. That is, during the 2024 vice presidential debate, he was pressed on his lies about being in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. In damage control, he acknowledged that he “misspoke” and that he sometimes gets “caught up in the rhetoric.”
But Walz, predictably not seeking another failed term as governor, also admitted to being a “knucklehead at times.” So, given his asleep-at-the-wheel response to Minnesota’s ongoing welfare scandal, and his inflammatory comments regarding the current ICE protests, the thousands of constituents signing his resignation petition would surely judge that admission as his most honest claim of all.
Every Jewish child, even if he knows nothing else, knows one question: מַה נִּשְׁתַּנָּה, הַלַּיְלָה הַזֶּה מִכָּל הַלֵּילוֹת. That question comes from the Passover service, when a child asks those at the table, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The answer, of course, is that Passover is the night on which we commemorate how God liberated the Jews from Egyptian slavery, a moment that led to the seminal Ten Commandments and the Jews’ return to their land.
It is, in other words, an important question: Why is this one thing different from all other things? (For the non-Jewish among us, you can go to Sesame Street for a similar question.)
That same question applies with equal, although entirely non-religious weight, to events in Minneapolis: Why is this city different from all other cities?
Why, in almost all cities across America, are ICE operations conducted peacefully?
Why, in almost all cities across America, are there no reports of ICE agents injuring or killing people?
Why, in almost all cities across America, are there no reports of ICE agents being rammed by cars, beaten, doused with freezing water, verbally harassed, or having their fingers bitten off?
When framed that way, it’s easy to see that the unique factor isn’t ICE, which operates smoothly and peacefully just about everywhere. Instead, the problem is a handful of radicalized Democrat-run cities (e.g., Minneapolis, Seattle, and Portland). They are the common denominator, not for ICE operations, but for violence.
Please note that I cannot confirm Bass’s numbers. However, we know that ICE has removed over 622,000 illegal aliens from across America, yet the only reports of violence against ICE or by ICE come from a few specific locations. The common denominator in violence isn’t ICE; it’s those cities.
If you understand that the problem isn’t ICE but is, instead, Minneapolis and the Democrat party, you can begin to appreciate how false everything else the Democrats say really is. For example, the newest line from Illinois Gov. “Fat Tony” Pritzker is that “we ought to abolish Trump’s ICE and replace it with something else.” ICE, he adds, “needs to be revamped.”
Replaced with what? Revamped with what?
ICE exists to carry out very explicit congressional mandates: Remove and repatriate those people who have no right to be in America. Those people have been identified either as straight-out illegal without a defense or, if they claimed asylum or the benefit of some other process, as having had their claim rejected by an administrative judge. That’s it, that’s their due process. Now, they get evicted, just as any squatter would.
The only way to “replace” or “revamp” ICE is to abandon the law, since ICE’s raison d’etre is to enforce the law—and, again, it does so with stunning success and no violence in all places but for hard-left enclaves. The problem is the enclaves, not ICE.
I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, that Donald Trump needs to bring the hammer down on Minneapolis, just as Eisenhower did on Little Rock, Kennedy did on Mississippi and Alabama, and Johnson did on Selma and Los Angeles. Alternatively, he needs to cordon Minneapolis (and maybe Portland) off from the rest of America (no one goes in and no one comes out), remove all federal forces and funds, install pay-per-view cameras, and help bring down the federal debt by charging people to watch as the city implodes.
Secretary of Housing Scott Turner CONFIRMS Democrats were using American taxpayer dollars to pay for homes for illegals – $5 billion dollars in “overpayment errors” – Taxpayers are paying for housing for 30,000 dead people -Government-backed home loans given to non-citizens “We eliminated non-permanent residents’ eligibility for FHA insured mortgages. And we are auditing public housing authorities to ensure taxpayer dollars don’t support illegal aliens. American dollars should benefit American citizens and American citizens only.” Our Office of the Chief Financial Officer uncovered more than $5 billion in potential payment errors, over 50 billion in total rental assistance for the fiscal year 2024. And that includes money that went to nearly 30,000 dead people. That is ludicrous. It’s ridiculous to even think or talk in such a way. It’s a violation of our sacred trust to American taxpayers, and it has to end, and it will.”
In a shocking video from the ongoing riots in Minneapolis, protesters are seen violently attacking and tackling a federal officer.
The escalating violence follows a fatal shooting on Saturday, where federal agents shot and killed an armed man, 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti, as he agitated and intervened during an immigration enforcement action.
Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in the hours after the shooting, and continued into the night and the following day.
Video footage from the scene on Sunday shows masked protesters pummelling and kicking the officers.
The primary attacker appears to have been quickly apprehended by other officers.
Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, have encouraged protesters to continue fighting ICE amid escalating tensions.
DHS has repeatedly warned about a surge in violence against its officers, attributing it to “radical rhetoric” from sanctuary politicians.
In a statement earlier this month, DHS reported an unprecedented 1,300% increase in assaults on ICE officers and a 3,200% increase in vehicular attacks compared to previous years.
“The hateful rhetoric and resistance against men and women who are simply trying to do their jobs must end. Federal law enforcement officers are facing a more than 1,300% increase in assaults against them as they put their lives on the line to arrest criminals and lawbreakers,” the department said in a statement.
On Saturday, one of the violent rioters bit the finger off of a federal official.
The Gateway Pundit will continue to provide updates on developments in Minneapolis as the situation unfolds.
The Pentagon on Friday night released a long-awaited strategy that prioritizes the U.S. homeland and Western Hemisphere — a stunning reversal from previous administrations that aligns with President Donald Trump’s military strikes in Venezuela and efforts to acquire Greenland.
The National Defense Strategy — a dramatic shift from even the first Trump administration — no longer focuses primarily on countering China. Instead, it blames past administrations for ignoring American interests and jeopardizing the U.S. military’s access to the Panama Canal and Greenland.
The strategy calls for attention to the “practical interests” of the U.S. public and an abandonment of “grandiose strategies.”
The Pentagon’s plan, in contrast to the National Security Strategy released last month, does not focus heavily on Europe or call the the continent a place in “civilizational decline.” But it does emphasize what the administration perceives as its declining importance.
“Although Europe remains important, it has a smaller and decreasing share of global economic power,” according to the strategy. “Although we are and will remain engaged in Europe, we must — and will — prioritize defending the U.S. Homeland and deterring China.”
The document, which usually follows the National Security Strategy, came out after months of delay. POLITICO reported in September that a draft had reached Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s desk. But it stayed there for months as administration officials fought over how to describe the threat to the U.S. posed by China amid trade talks with the country.
The strategy also says the U.S. should “no longer cede access or influence over key terrain in the Western Hemisphere,” including the Gulf of Mexico. But it offers few details on how the Pentagon will accomplish that goal.
The first Trump administration prioritized China in its 2018 defense strategy as the biggest threat to U.S. security. That sentiment was further echoed in the Biden administration’s 2022 strategy.
But the 2026 strategy instead highlights a continued U.S. focus on diplomacy with China — an echo of its recent annual report on Beijing’s military buildup — while “erecting a strong denial defense” in the Pacific to deter a potential war. It does not lay out what U.S. assets the Pentagon might send to the region.
The document mentions threats to the U.S. from Russia, Iran and North Korea, but they are not as prominent.
The head of a transitional Palestinian committee backed by the US to temporarily administer Gaza, Ali Shaath, said on Thursday that the Rafah Border Crossing between Gaza and Egypt — effectively the sole route in or out of Gaza for nearly all of the more than 2 million people who live there — would open next week.
The Gaza side of the crossing has been under Israeli military control since 2024.
Israel has resisted further easing the situation in the Strip before Gvili has been returned. Gvili’s family on Saturday expressed concern that pressure was being directed at Israel to move forward with the ceasefire plan, rather than on Hamas to return the hostage’s body.
“President [Donald] Trump himself said this week in Davos that Hamas knows where our son is. We wonder why the pressure is being directed at the wrong place. The pressure should not be on the Israeli government to continue to fulfill its part of the agreement while Hamas is deceiving the entire world and refusing to return the last kidnapped person, in accordance with the agreement it signed,” the family said in a statement.
The Gvili family called on Netanyahu to tell the US envoys that efforts should be made to return their son if they want to move forward with regional peace and the reconstruction of Gaza.
The Prime Minister’s Office confirmed that Netanyahu had met with Witkoff and Kushner, saying, without further elaborating, that they discussed the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire, but an Israeli official speaking to Hebrew media voiced sharp criticism of the two top Trump aides following the meeting.
According to the Ynet news site, there has been anger in Jerusalem as Witkoff pressures Israel to open the Rafah Border Crossing between Gaza and Egypt this week, even if Hamas fails to return Gvili’s remains.
“We hope Ran Gvili is returned this week and we can go forward,” the unnamed Israeli official was quoted as saying by the outlet, going on to attack the White House envoy.
“Witkoff pushed for placing our big rival Turkey on the border. The clock is ticking backwards to a confrontation with Turkey, which will be a tangible danger to our security,” the official added, according to Ynet.
“Witkoff has become a lobbyist for Qatari interests,” the official charged.
head of a transitional Palestinian committee backed by the US to temporarily administer Gaza, Ali Shaath, said on Thursday that the Rafah Border Crossing between Gaza and Egypt — effectively the sole route in or out of Gaza for nearly all of the more than 2 million people who live there — would open next week.
The Gaza side of the crossing has been under Israeli military control since 2024.
Israel has resisted further easing the situation in the Strip before Gvili has been returned. Gvili’s family on Saturday expressed concern that pressure was being directed at Israel to move forward with the ceasefire plan, rather than on Hamas to return the hostage’s body.
“President [Donald] Trump himself said this week in Davos that Hamas knows where our son is. We wonder why the pressure is being directed at the wrong place. The pressure should not be on the Israeli government to continue to fulfill its part of the agreement while Hamas is deceiving the entire world and refusing to return the last kidnapped person, in accordance with the agreement it signed,” the family said in a statement.
The Gvili family called on Netanyahu to tell the US envoys that efforts should be made to return their son if they want to move forward with regional peace and the reconstruction of Gaza.
The head of a transitional Palestinian committee backed by the US to temporarily administer Gaza, Ali Shaath, said on Thursday that the Rafah Border Crossing between Gaza and Egypt — effectively the sole route in or out of Gaza for nearly all of the more than 2 million people who live there — would open next week.
The Gaza side of the crossing has been under Israeli military control since 2024.
Israel has resisted further easing the situation in the Strip before Gvili has been returned. Gvili’s family on Saturday expressed concern that pressure was being directed at Israel to move forward with the ceasefire plan, rather than on Hamas to return the hostage’s body.
Kan news reported that Israel will operate a remote surveillance system at the crossing, be in charge of granting advanced approval to travelers coming in and out of the Gaza Strip, and be able to scan any computers or other electronic devices passing through.
While the Israel Defense Forces will not be physically present at the crossing, Israeli troops will be deployed nearby and operate their own checkpoint aimed at preventing weapons smuggling.
The crossing itself will be operated by officers from the European Union Border Assistance Mission, founded in 2005 to monitor the crossing, along with non-uniformed members of the Palestinian Authority’s intelligence service, Kan said. The same framework was used during the previous Israel-Hamas ceasefire in January 2025. Israel shuttered the crossing around two months later, and it has remained closed since.
The death toll in Gaza since October 7, 2023, now stands at 71,654, and the death toll since the October ceasefire at 481, according to data from Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry on Saturday. The tolls cannot be independently verified and do not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
The war broke out when Hamas-led terrorists invaded Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping 251.
Earlier this month, Washington announced that the plan had now moved into the second phase, under which Israel is expected to withdraw troops from more territory in Gaza, and Hamas is due to disarm and yield control of the territory’s administration.
These are three outright lies (George Floyd, Renee Good and now Alex Pretti); you are able to definitively triangulate between three to tell what’s going on—two events by themselves would have been enough, but there’s no arguing with three.
The real issue is, not your refusal to “believe your lying eyes”, but, first, the mentality of the insurgents, then, the ultimate motivation for their wanting, to the point of being death-fanatics, to overturn reality, to accomplish, in the term by Friedrich Nietzsche, a “transvaluation of values”, which is just a fancy “philosophical” term for calling evil: good, and good: evil. The end consideration is, where does this turning the earth that was once God’s paradise for men, into hell on earth?
The facts will come out in the end. Just as the facts are known about the case of George Floyd and Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, for anyone who would care about the truth–though it has been made so ugly, that most “decent people” don’t want to know. Lie #1: “Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd.”
(The Truth: George Floyd caused his own death by such a massive overdose of fentanyl that it’s remarkable that he could even stand. Derek Chauvin impeccably followed his police training for the protection of George Floyd. Minneapolis prosecutors and judges were so committed to the living lie that “police disproportionately target African Americans for arrest” that they were willing to totally suborn the judicial process. Derek Chavin has not yet been pardoned by President Trump. Derek Chavin was stabbed 22 times in prison.) The point of the whole exercise was to telegraph an electric shock to all Police Officers that “We DON’T Have Your Back”.
In the same way, the truth can be clearly known by anyone who is willing to trudge through the sewer of stinking lies about the death of Renee Nicole Macklin Good after she was shot by ICE Officer Jonathan Ross. Lie #2, with which you can triangulate to the truth: “Jonathan Ross shot Renee Nicole Good without justification. (The Truth: Renee Nicole Good committed lethal vehicular assault against Officer Jonathan Ross, sending him to the E. R. where he was found to have sustained internal hemorrhaging.)
Lie #2 is in pursuit of justifying the “opinion” that ICE Officers are evil, that undocumented migrants are inherently innocent, that U. S. laws about immigration status are unjust, and that they should be resolutely resisted, to the point of placing one’s life in jeopardy. This means that you as a citizen of good repute have no rights, that your vote counts for nothing, that any criminal from anywhere in the world let in by the Biden Administration can harm your family, that you have no recourse to self-defense or justice, that all you have can be taken from you and you can’t do anything about it.
So now that George Soros is using his nearly unlimited funds to foment revolution in the U. S., highly organized teams of insurgents are flocking to conflict points like Minneapolis, like they did to Milwaukee, Portland and Seattle. It’s 2019 all over again. The press are falling into line like lockstep. No longer are the Big 3 T. V. networks doing the propagandizing, you are seeing the click-bait headline grabbers peddling lies to you, and their overwhelming preponderance has got you believing the lies.
So now if you can get past the ugly truth about the shooting of armed insurgent Alex Jeffrey Pretti, the man in the bald pate and Fu Manchu beard “who was an E. R. Nurse”, if you will look at the footage, with the sound turned down, just to see that officers were trying to disarm him, and suddenly jumped back, as evidence that he brandished a firearm at them, then responded with legally and morally justified force to the lethal threat Pretti posed to them. You will have to run the gauntlet of lies, with Lie Number #3 in our brainwasher’s gallery, “ICE Agents Murdered an Innocent, Un-Armed Protester.”
(Sorry if you don’t like Alex Jones–he predicted the 9/11 Twin Towers attacks three months early, in June; there’s nothing uglier. Here is the footage of Alex Jeffrey Pretti acting like a rabid rattlesnake armed with a gun, at https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/2015215528478900526.)
You should run through past instances of The Big Lie (“repeat it often enough…”). Treyvon Martin posed a security risk in half-African American George Zimmerman’s neighborhood, had Zimmerman down on the ground and was beating him to death. President Obama’s remark that Treyvon Martin could be his own son, is witness to the death-spiral ethos in the fatherless Black community, that YOU ARE MORALLY OBLIGATED TO RESIST POLICE AUTHORITY TO THE POINT OF DYING FOR IT. With the triumph of DEI, now the empty ethos of the fatherless Black community has spread to the morally bankrupt, “educated” white populace.
This ultimately stems back to the influence of Obama’s Communist mentor in Hawaii, Frank Marshall Davis, who thoroughly vested Obama in the Cultural Marxist foundations that were brought to fruition under the influence of “Rules for Radicals” author Saul Alinsky–who dedicated his book to Satan.
Immortal, incorporeal, vastly superior intellects, irrevocably embracing evil, absolutely merciless in seeking to destroy us. You have been seeing it in science-fiction since the original Star Trek t.v. series, but you can’t believe it in real life.
Okay, there’s no Devil. And he is not an enemy of the imaginary God, in a universe that is only driven by the rules of physical science.
Except that the world gives ample evidence that there are weird, tragic, catastrophic phenomena that can’t be due to mere blind chance.
You know that evil has a reality that can’t be explained away by our deliberately-dumbed-down “education” system. Something is terribly amiss.
These “demonstrators” who are chasing people down the street trying to maim or even kill them, are thoroughly imbued with a spirit of evil, that is highly organized and purposeful.
It can’t be explained away by the conventional headline lies.
You are in a war. Your family may not be an immediate target, but they’re coming for you. They intend that you will have nowhere to hide.
You just couldn’t believe that they could be such outright liars.
Saturday on CNN’s “Newsroom Live,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis was an “execution” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Ocasio-Cortez said, “There’s a second angle that appears to be circulating much closer to the incident where you see the victim, I believe his name is Alex Pretti and immediately preceding that incident in ICE officer had pushed violently a woman to the ground and he had come over to help get her up. And that is what precipitated this incident. That very quickly led to an execution, a deadly shooting in the street. What we are seeing here is a momentous, pivotal moment for the United States. And I cannot underscore enough how precipitous this moment is.”
She added, “ICE and CBP, what we’re seeing here, we will see, which agencies were responsible but at the end of the day, under this so-called excuse of border security, where Minneapolis is over 300 miles from the United States border, we have an unleashing of federal agents and violence, exerting a tremendous amount of violence and loss of life against the American people who are well within their First Amendment rights. And in this case, it seems as though well within their Second Amendment rights.”
President Trump has the world playing taps for the New World Order, and that’s a
President Trump has the world playing taps for the New World Order, and that’s a good thing. In the process he dealt the UK’s Keir Starmer what appears to be a fatal blow. And in Minneapolis, a combination of communists and NGO-paid rioters are trying to replay the George Floyd Summer of Love and is instead showing why ICE’s work is essential to good order. The media is trying to help the rioters by concocting a “bait boy” fable.
Davos
Niall Ferguson sums up, ”The reality is that Trump won Davos, hands down. And not only did he win it; he owned it. I have never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important.”
He did it by forcing a realistic assessment of the state of the world, which the Davosinian caviar munchers seem to have ignored for too long. He made clear that globalization was dead, that it failed the U.S., failed Europe, diminished prosperity and made them subservient to their enemies. In a prelude to the meeting, Trump and his administration whipped up the prospect of annexing Greenland. This prompted French president Emmanuel Macron and Canadian prime minister Mark Carney to gasp that such a move would rupture longstanding multinational geopolitics. Once the Davos crowd was all atwitter about the monster U.S. grabbing Greenland, Trump called the whole thing off. It was a deliberate distraction in which he ended up getting exactly what he wanted in Greenland without it costing us a cent.
The problem with all of this is the premise that Trump ever seriously meant to annex Greenland or to impose new tariffs on the Europeans. Why would he when a) the United States already enjoys (under a 1951 treaty with Denmark and a 2004 agreement with Greenland) all the military access to the frigid island it could every possibly need, while the Danes pay for the heavily subsidized inhabitants of the island; and b) Trump means what he says on Truth Social only about half the time, according to The Wall Street Journal’s recent analysis of 2,700 substantive Truth posts. I’ll say it again: Half the time he’s bluffing. And it was the same when he was on Twitter in series one. [snip] Ten years ago, Europeans made the mistake of taking Trump neither seriously nor literally. Now they make the opposite mistake of treating him both seriously and literally. [snip] The fact that Trump carries out only around half the threats he makes on social media is a feature, not a bug — and it’s certainly not a sign of weakness. It is a deliberate tactic designed to leave counterparties uncertain.[snip].
The reason Trump forced Greenland to be the No. 1 topic at Davos, I suspect, was to keep European leaders from meddling in America’s Middle Eastern and Eastern European policy. It was notable on Wednesday how little the president said about Iran and Ukraine. That is because his administration has plans afoot for both countries.
The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and its strike group are currently in the Indian Ocean en route to the Persian Gulf and are preparing strike package options on Iran for the president’s approval. KEEP SCROLLING, MY TABLET IS MESSED UP.
President Trump has the world playing taps for the New World Order, and that’s a good thing. In the process he dealt the UK’s Keir Starmer what appears to be a fatal blow. And in Minneapolis, a combination of communists and NGO-paid rioters are trying to replay the George Floyd Summer of Love and is instead showing why ICE’s work is essential to good order. The media is trying to help the rioters by concocting a “bait boy” fable.
Davos
Niall Ferguson sums up, ”The reality is that Trump won Davos, hands down. And not only did he win it; he owned it. I have never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important.”
He did it by forcing a realistic assessment of the state of the world, which the Davosinian caviar munchers seem to have ignored for too long. He made clear that globalization was dead, that it failed the U.S., failed Europe, diminished prosperity and made them subservient to their enemies. In a prelude to the meeting, Trump and his administration whipped up the prospect of annexing Greenland. This prompted French president Emmanuel Macron and Canadian prime minister Mark Carney to gasp that such a move would rupture longstanding multinational geopolitics. Once the Davos crowd was all atwitter about the monster U.S. grabbing Greenland, Trump called the whole thing off. It was a deliberate distraction in which he ended up getting exactly what he wanted in Greenland without it costing us a cent.
The problem with all of this is the premise that Trump ever seriously meant to annex Greenland or to impose new tariffs on the Europeans. Why would he when a) the United States already enjoys (under a 1951 treaty with Denmark and a 2004 agreement with Greenland) all the military access to the frigid island it could every possibly need, while the Danes pay for the heavily subsidized inhabitants of the island; and b) Trump means what he says on Truth Social only about half the time, according to The Wall Street Journal’s recent analysis of 2,700 substantive Truth posts. I’ll say it again: Half the time he’s bluffing. And it was the same when he was on Twitter in series one. [snip] Ten years ago, Europeans made the mistake of taking Trump neither seriously nor literally. Now they make the opposite mistake of treating him both seriously and literally. [snip] The fact that Trump carries out only around half the threats he makes on social media is a feature, not a bug — and it’s certainly not a sign of weakness. It is a deliberate tactic designed to leave counterparties uncertain.[snip].
The reason Trump forced Greenland to be the No. 1 topic at Davos, I suspect, was to keep European leaders from meddling in America’s Middle Eastern and Eastern European policy. It was notable on Wednesday how little the president said about Iran and Ukraine. That is because his administration has plans afoot for both countries.
The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and its strike group are currently in the Indian Ocean en route to the Persian Gulf and are preparing strike package options on Iran for the president’s approval.
If the Greenland gambit was insufficiently obvious a signal of the U.S. having run out of patience with and regard for the globalists, the president formally withdrew us from the World Health Organization, adhering to the agreement that we had to give a year’s notice (which we did) before leaving. The WHO deserves this for its mishandling of the COVID-19 virus, its very close ties with China, and its mismanagement. Over a year ago, HHS head Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. criticized WHO for becoming “mired in bureaucratic bloat, entrenched paradigms, conflicts of interest and international power politics” along with the fact that we contribute far more than other members.
I think that critique is a fair estimate of all the existing major multinational organizations.
Melanie Phillips says the old world order is dead because Western universalists destroyed it. And as online posters say, she brought the “receipts.”
Carney and other liberal leaders lamenting the end of the globalist game are merely acknowledging that Washington will no longer tolerate it. They fail to admit, however, that they have been propping up an international order that promised liberal ideals but delivered the opposite.
These are the leaders who continue to develop economic ties with China, one of the principal threats to freedom and security in the world.
These are the leaders who, for more than four decades, appeased the fanatical Islamic regime in Iran as it exported terrorism and mass murder around the world, pursued the development of nuclear weapons, waged proxy war against Israel and oppressed its own people. Over the past few weeks, as at least 16,500 Iranians were murdered in their attempt to bring the regime down, these world leaders said virtually nothing and did even less.
Even now, France, Spain and Italy are actually blocking the designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — the main instrument of the regime’s global aggression — as a terrorist organisation.
The leaders in Davos have continued to allow Russia to launder its ill-gotten money through their capitals and have done little more than wring their hands over Ukraine.
They say they don’t like bullying leaders like Trump. But these countries have themselves relentlessly bullied Israel at its time of maximum need.
They have punished it for defending itself against genocide, promoted Hamas lies as truths, and incentivised the Palestinian Arabs in their aim of exterminating Israel by continuing to fund the Palestinian Authority’s rewards for terrorist attacks and the indoctrination of its children in murderous hatred of Jews.
So their hypocrisy in throwing up their hands in horror at what America has become is epic.
In place of the lumbering, corrupt UN, Trump seems to be putting together a Board of Peace. Phillips expresses very rational concerns about some of the invitees, particularly Qatar and Turkey, and of some of his personal characteristics, but on balance approves:
Trump is motivated by love of America, Western civilisation and the Jewish people. His political opponents, on the other hand, are motivated by hatred of America, Western civilisation and the Jewish people — or are chillingly indifferent to those who are.
There’s surely no contest.
Trump’s new world order has emerged because the old one has so catastrophically failed. International law and transnational institutions were created to destroy the power of imperial overreach in the interests of peace, freedom and justice. But that international order has betrayed and abandoned peace, freedom and justice. The outcome is a Caesar in the White House.
The biggest loser of the week was Keir Starmer, who embarrassingly had to abandon his public and widely bruited plan to hand the very strategically important Chagos Islands to Mauritius, which never owned them, and to pay Mauritius, which is now more closely aligned with China, thirty-five billion euros to top off the gift.
Lord Daniel Hannan provides a detailed summary of the importance of the islands and the history of British, U.S., and Mauritius’ connections to them. Trump was entitled, under a decades-long agreement that allowed the joint Anglo-American base on one of the islands, Diego Garcia, to veto any transfer, and he did.
The blow to Starmer’s already weak credibility would appear to be fatal, and I doubt he will survive past May.
For months, Starmer insisted there was no alternative. He spoke of inevitability, of international law, of security imperatives that demanded speed. Yet the International Court of Justice opinion he relied upon was non-binding. No court order compelled action. No hostile force threatened Diego Garcia. No deadline loomed. The urgency was political, not strategic. And that fiction has now been exposed.
The fatal flaw was never Mauritius. It was the treaty Starmer treated as an afterthought. The 1966 UK-US Exchange of Letters is clear. The Chagos Islands are to remain under British sovereignty to ensure the operation of the joint base. That agreement was not obscure. It was foundational. Any competent government would have resolved its status before drafting legislation to hand the territory away. Starmer pressed ahead regardless, confident that the United States would fall into line later.
That confidence was misplaced. Trump’s earlier acceptance was casual and conditional. But when the legal consequences sharpened, and the treaty could no longer be waved away as a technicality, the White House pulled the plug. Trump called the plan an act of great stupidity, and suddenly the bill vanished from the Lords’ schedule. The same government that spoke of urgency now cannot proceed.
This exposes the lie at the heart of the deal. If national security were the driver, the treaty would have been the starting point. If legality mattered, Parliament would have been told the full cost and the unresolved risks. Instead, Starmer claimed the handover would cost just £3.4 billion, a figure he falsely linked to the OBR, while his own officials estimated the real bill at more than £35 billion. Parliament was expected to nod it through after the fact, armed with a number that was never true. He hid behind an authority that had not endorsed the figures and rushed a handover that would have placed British sovereignty in legal limbo while tens of billions flowed out of the defence budget.
What we are watching is not diplomacy gone wrong. It is statecraft conducted by assumption. Assumption that international courts must be obeyed. Assumption that allies will acquiesce. Assumption that Parliament will rubber-stamp. Assumption that Britain should give first and argue later. That mindset is managerial, legalistic, and deeply hostile to the idea of national power.
The bill was pulled because the bluff was called. Once the treaty surfaced, the security argument inverted itself. Once Washington objected, Starmer had nowhere to go. A Prime Minister who claimed there was no choice has now discovered that his choice could not stand.
This episode will endure as a warning. Not about Trump’s temperament or transatlantic spats, but about a governing class that treats sovereignty as an inconvenience and treaties as paperwork to be tidied up after the fact. Britain was inches away from giving away territory in breach of a live defence agreement, on the back of a non-binding opinion, financed by a fiscal fiction, all to satisfy an international audience that does not vote here and does not pay the bill.
Starmer did not stumble into this. He built it on sand. And when the tide came in, it washed away the pretence.
“The moment Washington raised the 1966 treaty, the whole structure gave way. A deal sold as urgent, lawful, and essential to security could not survive contact with reality.”
Wretchardthecat posts that the deal was never popular. Of course it wasn’t. The deal was moronic, and as Lord Hannan shows, without any legal justification. So how did Starmer’s scheme, which had progressed so far, finally lose support? Wretchard attributes that to a “preference cascade,” A fancy way of describing how, like the crowd in the Emperor’s New Clothes, people are too polite to say the deal was nuts. “But once some impolite, crude and tactless person [Trump] started to complain, the rest chimed in.”
As the corruption and graft in Minneapolis are now undeniable, Governor Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey are furiously fanning the anti-ICE communists and leftists paid by what are still referred to as “NGOS,” although largely financed by the government. Public sentiment seems to be overwhelmingly in favor of ICE (the last poll I saw said that 72% supported ICE. And even seven New York Democrats in Congress voted with Republicans to fund ICE this week.)
In desperation, the Minnesota leftists are working to tar the agency and its officers as barbaric thugs. The shtick this week is the legacy press’s pimping a phony story that ICE arrested a cute five-year-old in a darling knitted cap and then used him as “bait” to capture other members of his family. An example of the perfervid, dishonest reporting is this one in the Washington Post’s Style section. (This is the ever-thinner paper’s section aimed at women with such critical news reports as “Boob jobs are shrinking.”)
The mawkish account by Philip Kennicott could not be more fact free or obviously designed to prejudice readers by tugging at heartstrings.
The truth is his father ran off and abandoned the kid in freezing temperatures and the ICE officer had no choice but to keep him close until a proper guardian had been found. The boy’s mother’s home was nearby so they went there. She refused to take custody. The twisted media tale is that having the kid go to his mother was using him as “bait.” He awaits a custodial determination in a clean, warm, well-run facility where his father is being held. It makes much of the child’s cap, “a blue knit with white bunny ears and pompoms” and instead of acknowledging that his family refused to take custody of him, states the boy “was a pawn… The photograph stirs empathy and compassion, the same emotions the ICE agents apparently used to entice adults into make themselves vulnerable to capture.”
The author goes on to compare the photo with a painting by Mary Cassatt. Much more apt would be a comparison between a little boy standing without apparent fear alongside an ICE officer in freezing weather to little Elian Gonzales’ capture by an armed agents of the U.S. Border Patrol under President Clinton, where Elian is obviously terrified and clutched in his aunt’s arms.
The author, an arts writer, slathers on the schmaltz:
”It is evidence, forensic data, snatched from the slipstream of human barbarity, probably by a cellphone camera. But its accidental composition accentuates the boy’s helplessness, and by extension, our own compassion for children standing in the bitter cold, torn from the protection of their parents, subject to the brutal treatment of adults. The boy stares at the truck, as we might stare at a wall if brought to the point of complete moral despair, complete loss of faith in too many of our fellow citizens.
This is an image of universal moral urgency.
John Carter, by contrast, shows how the media twists truth to create the “bait boy” to drum up requisite outrage.
According to reports, the father was spotted in public and fled, abandoning the boy. Like [Kamala] Harris, Craig reminded citizens that “this is a time where we should all be outraged. If this doesn’t pierce through your humanity, as a Republican member of Congress, if you can’t speak out about this, then you’ve got no humanity left.”
The key, again, is the requisite outrage. If you are not outraged, you are not human.
It is often said that we are living in a “post-truth” political environment. The term rose to favor due to the 2016 election of President Trump. Oxford Dictionaries specifically cited Trump when it selected the term as word of the year. The irony is that the proof of post-truth politics is often found among those who use it the most on the left, in the media and academia.
The bait boy hoax is particularly disgraceful. It is common to have minor children present during arrests of all kinds. Officers will often try to get family members to take a child rather than put him into child services.
In this case, ICE officers were trying to detain Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, an undocumented Ecuadorian national, when he bolted and left behind his five-year-old child, Liam Conejo Ramos.
Rather than leave the child in the freezing cold on the street, the officers took the child to his home to get his mother to take him in. She refused to open the door despite agents reportedly saying that she would not be detained. They proceeded to take the boy to McDonald’s, play his favorite music, and take care of him. He was never arrested. They also did not send him into detention. According to ICE, his father asked for the boy to be allowed to stay with him at a detention facility, and ICE agreed.
Maybe news accounts ought not to be written by art critics in Style sections or media hacks.
The Iranian protests reveal the “pro-Palestine” lie. Moment 586. Jan 18, 2026 Mark Changizi. YouTube. Dr. Mark Jangzizi, here’s your science moment. They claimed that they were only pro Palestine, not pro- Hamas. They told us over and over again, “We’re not pro Hamas, we’re just pro Palestine.” Now, never mind that the 10/7 war wasn’t about Palestine at all. It was about Gaza. The Palestine Authority wasn’t even part of the broad conflict that had half a dozen Islamic Republic proxies. Never mind that they never spoke out against Hamas, who had been Gaza’s brutal, unelected oppressor for a generation. They started a war with their neighbor via a massive pogram and then fought from civilian centers. Never mind that they romanticized Hamas by wearing their kafia, believing their data, excusing their behavior. Never mind that they kept quiet about the Islamic Republic of Iran’s oppression of Iranians, which was the mastermind behind the 10/7 war. Now, after the Iranian people rose up in an attempt to throw off the same kind of Islamist fascism that oppresses Gaza and wages war on Israel, we see in full light the lie. The pro Palestine forces were never anything more than allies of Islamist terrorists and dictatorships, allies in their hatred of the West, of the US, of Israel, and of Jews. No matter that the Iranian people are none of those things, all that matters is that the boot on the necks of Iranians has adorned itself with a virtue signal of hatred of the targeted out group of their sick cult. And that was your science moment.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 