Named around 71 times in Scripture, Lebanon is both a biblical landscape and a living homeland now marked by war and fragile hope.

Southern Lebanon is not often the first place Christians think of when reading Scripture. Yet both the Bible and long-standing tradition place this region quietly within the story of salvation.

Two cities anchor that connection: Tyre and Sidon.

Both are named multiple times in the Hebrew Bible as centers of trade and power. In the Gospels, they appear again when Jesus travels to the region, encountering the Syrophoenician woman who asks for her daughter’s healing (Mark 7:24–30). This brief episode places southern Lebanon within the lived geography of Christ’s ministry.

Christians in Lebanon

Christians make up about 30% of Lebanon’s population (some estimates suggest even more), the largest share in the Middle East. The Maronite Church is the biggest community, alongside Greek Orthodox and Melkite Catholics.

Southern Lebanon includes historic Christian villages, though many families have been displaced by ongoing conflict.

In Maghdouche, local tradition holds that the Virgin Mary waited while Jesus preached in nearby Tyre and Sidon. Today, the shrine of Our Lady of Mantara keeps that memory alive, not as a scriptural claim, but as a testimony to how early Christians understood the movements of Christ and His mother. (Photo above and below show that shrine.)

Further south, the village of Qana is identified by some local traditions as the site of the wedding feast where Jesus turned water into wine. The Gospel of John specifies Cana of Galilee, and scholars continue to debate the precise location. Still, for many believers in Lebanon, Qana remains a place of devotion tied to Christ’s first public sign.

Traditions regarding Biblical locations do not all carry the same historical certainty. But together they reveal something important: southern Lebanon has long been received by Christians not as a distant land, but as part of a sacred landscape — one touched directly or indirectly by the Gospel story.

That sense of belonging makes the present moment more difficult to accept.

A region under strain

A new phase of conflict is reshaping life in southern Lebanon. According to recent reporting, Israel plans to establish a large buffer zone in the region, with troops taking control of areas south of the Litani River.

Bridges across the Litani have been destroyed, and more than one million people have been displaced, according to BBC. Over 1,000 people have been killed, including children and medical workers. Many residents have been told they will not be allowed to return to their homes until security conditions change.

While southern Lebanon is often described as a stronghold of Hezbollah, it is also home to diverse communities, including Christians whose presence stretches back centuries. For them, this is not only a geopolitical crisis. It is a question of continuity — whether families, parishes, and traditions rooted in this land can endure another period of upheaval.

The Bible’s references to Lebanon often speak of strength: cedars that rise high and endure. Christian tradition, too, has treated this land as a place marked by grace and memory. Today, that same land is marked by uncertainty. Yet its history — biblical and lived — suggests that even under pressure, it remains more than a battlefield.

We’ve cracked the case.

Joan Swirsky | May 9, 2026

No matter how bizarre or puzzling or impossibly complex crime scenes seemed to be, the detective Sherlock Holmes, accompanied by his friend Dr. John Watson — both fictional characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the late 1800s — never failed to solve them.

Using keen observation — actually noting teeny, tiny, sometimes microscopic details that eluded even the sleuths at Scotland Yard — as well as the forensic science of the day, Holmes astounded the experts and ultimately became one of the most popular figures in all of literature…to this day!

Holmes may lie in the realm of fiction, but every now and then, a real-life character comes along who reinforces the concept of exceptionalism, who demonstrates that there are still highly original thinkers among us who can shed light where only darkness once prevailed.

And that Would Be?

That would be Warren Kinsella, a native Canadian with an impressive résumé and a long list of accomplishments.  In this riveting interview, featured on Israpundit.org, he relates how in his experience in running political campaigns — and being the campaign manager for Prime Minister Jean Chrétien (1993–2003) — he instantly recognized that the virtual explosion of worldwide anti-Semitism after October 7, 2023 was significantly similar to…yes, political campaigns, in which those who run them are primarily concerned with (1) Volunteers, (2) Leadership, (3) Messaging, (4) Money, (5) Advertising, and (6) Social Media.

The campaign against Israel, Mr. Kinsella said, was “ready to go” and “kicked off” with 2,500 anti-Israel protests around the world —  “even before Israel started to fight back!”  They were using professional signs, professional organizers, a professional global campaign, and that’s hard to do, but they pulled it off.

Additionally, Mr. Kinsella said that this pro-Hamas, anti-Israel campaign targeted young people who were more “susceptible to conspiracy theories, more susceptible to accept antisemitic tropes — the Holocaust didn’t happen, Jews control the world, et al. — all of that nonsense. Young people, unfortunately, in Canada and the U.S. and Europe, were much more willing to accept those types of lies.”

Mr. Kinsella explained that in this global eruption of Jew- and Israel-hatred, the campaign manager was Iran, Qatar was the banker, China and Russia acted as campaign co-chairs, Hamas and Hezb’allah were on the front lines, and also that “the alphabet soup of NGOs (non-governmental organizations), nonprofits, and charities pushing these hateful messages were ready to move … while October 7 was happening … which was either a hell of a coincidence, or they knew in advance what was going to happen.”

But what puzzled me at the time and raised some red flags in my mind was that the very next day, instantaneously, it seemed, there appeared professionally produced protest signs and placards and enormous crowds of protesters — fueled by the efforts of the late Rev. Jesse Jackson — to fight the Supreme Court decision.

How could they produce those signs and all those people overnight? I wondered.

And that is not to omit Black Lives Matter, the Marxist terrorist group that rampaged across the U.S. in 2021 to protest the death of George Floyd and was responsible for about $2 billion in property damage, devastating arson, widespread theft, the injuries of more than 240 police officers and destruction of hundreds of police precincts, upward of 30 murders, and the defacement and vandalism of synagogues, at which they screamed “F— the Jews and Kill the Police.”  That BLM!  The group that was magically able to mobilize huge crowds of like-minded thugs overnight!  How did they do that?

Oh, and you cannot make this up: While Black Lives Matter raked in $90 billion, guess what they did with some of that money!  They imitated the white people and the capitalists they claimed to detest — but actually envy with blazing green-eyed jealousy — by purchasing a $6-million  mansion in lily-white Belair, one of the toniest residential enclaves of California.  

Even before that, the same questions occurred to me when the protesters from Antifa — the so-called anti-fascist group — so reviled the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016 that they decided to storm through America, committing unspeakably violent crimes.  And then we learned that on various street corners, there were neatly piled mounds of bricks, placed strategically so that they had plenty of ammunition to hurl these missiles through the windows of various businesses, thereby telling the world of their hatred of our electoral system and of capitalism.

Where did those brick piles come from? I wondered.

The Money Angle

Many of these seditious and, I think, treasonous organization are funded by none other than white, leftist, America-hating — and envious — billionaires.

According to writer Vanessa Berg, “most people who participate in anti-Jewish discourse do not wake up thinking, ‘How can I be antisemitic today?’  That’s not how systems work.  They respond to incentives.  Today, hostility toward Jews is not just expressed; it is incentivized — not everywhere, not by everyone — but enough to matter, enough to shape behavior, enough to create a system in which attacking Jews … can be profitable.”

“In previous eras,” Berg continues, “antisemitism spread through institutions like churches, governments, and political movements.  Today, it spreads through markets: attention markets, media markets, political markets.  That shift matters because markets don’t ask whether something is true or just.  They ask whether it works.  And right now, in too many cases, attacking Jews works.”

Words

After the catastrophic terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, when 1,200 Jewish men, women, children, and infants were savagely set on fire, raped, violently tortured, and then murdered, and 251 were taken hostage — also to be tortured and raped in the elaborate tunnels the terrorists constructed underground, with the help of massive international donations of money — untold numbers of passionate pro-Israel commentators and journalists throughout the world expended multimillions of words in Israel’s defense.  Just to mention some of my own: here and here and here and here.

Many of these articles attempted to explain the international volcanic eruption of Jew- and Israel-hatred and the embrace of the terrorists by traditional American conservatives such as the execrable Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, as well as their incomprehensible, bizarre, and equally passionate support for the murderers, rapists, and torturers of Hamas — those ferocious genocidal terrorists who were acting on the mandates of not only their public statements over decades, but also their written charter and, of course, the non-negotiable dictates of their bosses and sponsors, the murderous mullahs in Iran.

I certainly missed many of these articles, but of the ones I read, none succeeded in explaining this “spontaneous” worldwide explosion of in-your-face racism, lawlessness, and deep hatred.

Kinsella succeeds in spelling out the elaborate planning — indeed, orchestration — that has gone into the constant drumbeat of anti-Jew and anti-Israel demonstrations worldwide, of huge crowds blaming Israel for being attacked, of equally “spontaneous” demonstrations on campuses, on street corners, in major cities throughout the world, with demonstrators all decked out in keffiyehs and holding up professionally created placards, all condemning “genocidal” and “apartheid” Israel.

Not only that, but vicious videos like this, with so-called journalists like Megyn Kelly asking quite sneeringly, “Who are they?” — the Jews and Israelis, that is — and Israel-loathing obsessives like Carlson and Owens and Fuentes sharing their vomitus and bile with anyone who has the stomach to watch or listen, and to like-minded racists.

These kinds of demonstrations, Kinsella says, have been going on for years, actually for decades on end.

Indeed, recent headlines attest to this hatred’s pandemic nature.  Here is but a minuscule example:

• Peru’s President Under Fire Over Antisemitic Remarks Blaming Jews for ‘Pushing’ Germany Into World War II.
• Toronto Judaica shop hit by rock in latest antisemitic attack.
• Night of Fear in Los Angeles: Assault Near Synagogue Raises Alarming Concerns Over the Rapid Escalation of Antisemitism
• Masked pro-Palestinian students ‘seize’ Belgian university, cover their faces with keffiyehs and demand the university impose a full academic boycott on Israel
• Spat at, threatened and kidnapped: British Jews tell of rising antisemitism
• Why Are Portugal’s Leaders Silent on Rise of Antisemitic Attacks?

Is There a Solution?

Author Kinsella suggests a number of strategies, all of which involve significantly more accountability and punishment than now exists for the purveyors of antisemitism.  Among them:

• Defeating anonymity so that the thugs who wear masks and use fake names online are subject to new laws that level serious consequences.
• Penalizing the haters to the full extent of the law instead of deporting the non-citizens or allowing turnstile so-called justice.
• Targeting online antisemitism, including all the fake accounts, and using regulatory powers, including imprisonment.
• Forcing social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, X, Instagram, and TikTok to be much stricter in moderating content or else facing serious consequences themselves.
• Funding bias crime units, and if they don’t exist, creating them.

The Pushback

By the same benevolent mercy and justice described in the Hebrew Bible, God blessed Israel by vanquishing from history the immensely powerful empires that sought to extinguish the Jews — the Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Assyrians, et al., all of them extinct for centuries.

And when He observed the psychotic October 7 attack on his “chosen people” as so sinful, so craven, so immoral, so bestial, he sent President Donald J. Trump to aid our closest ally and to instruct a largely racist world about the difference between right and wrong and good and bad, and also what is worthy of defending and fighting for at this fraught time in world history.

Joan Swirsky is a New York–based journalist and author.  Her website is www.joanswirsky.com, and she can be reached at joanswirsky@gmail.com.

Sir Keir Starmer has again insisted he will not quit despite calls from dozens of Labour MPs in the wake of the party’s local election mauling. The Prime Minister warned that if he left No 10 it would “plunge the country into chaos”.

Speaking in south London today, Sir Keir said: “I’m not going to walk away from this; that would plunge the country into chaos. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to respond. It doesn’t mean we don’t need to rebuild. It doesn’t mean that we don’t need to set out the path ahead. That’s what I’m going to do in the coming days.”

He said Labour needs to set out arguments about hope and the future, and appeal to young people, admitting that “the hope wasn’t there enough in the first two years of this Government”.

He added: “I will be setting out those arguments, but more than anything, setting out with clarity the values and convictions that drive me.”

It comes as a string of Labour backbenchers have publicly demanded Sir Keir should either quit or set a timetable for his departure.

Labour lost more than 1,000 councillors in Thursday’s ballots, with Reform UK making stunning gains in the Red Wall.

Sir Keir has brought former prime minister Gordon Brown back into Government in a desperate bid to cling to power.

Katie Harris, Express

President Donald Trump said Friday night that the United States military could decide to relocate the troops that are currently stationed in Germany and move them to Poland.

The president touted his friendship with the country’s leader, President Karol Nawrocki, who assumed office last year. The Pentagon previously indicated that the U.S. would move 5,000 troops from Germany in the next six to 12 months.

“Well, Poland would like that,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We have a great relationship with Poland. I have a great relationship with the president. I endorsed him, and he won. He came from way behind, and he won. He’s a great fighter, he’s a great guy. I like him a lot, so that’s possible.”

Germany is currently home to the largest U.S. military presence in Europe, with more than 35,000 troops currently stationed in the country, and is also viewed as crucial to the U.S.’s presence on the continent.

The United Kingdom and Italy also host over 10,000 U.S. troops each. Poland currently hosts 369 permanently assigned active-duty ​service members and about 10,000 personnel of rotational force, according to Reuters.

Just the News

Great Britain, traditionally considered the anchor of western civilization, is facing an incomprehensibly tragic fate, determined to replace its people and commit cultural suicid

Great Britain once commanded respect worldwide as the irreplaceable anchor of Western civilization. Its institutions—rooted in the Magna Carta’s covenant of liberties, the common law’s impartiality, the Enlightenment’s rational skepticism, and the parliamentary democracy that exported freedom across continents—embodied the West’s highest aspirations: individual autonomy, secular governance, equality before the law, and the unyielding defense of conscience. 

Yet these foundations are now being dismantled. In earlier times, this would have taken a military invasion or revolution. Today, however, the cultural collapse is brought about by mass migration and a demographic transformation whose consequences are as predictable as they are catastrophic. Projections confirm that the White British population, the historic carrier of Judeo-Christian values, will be reduced to minority status by 2063, with the transition arriving even sooner among the young. To be sure, this goes far beyond the exotic “diversity” celebrated by progressives in the past; it is the wholesale replacement of a tolerant, open society by an intolerant culture defined by ideological totalitarianism and systemic discrimination against women, homosexuals, and adherents of other faiths. The inevitable result will be the erasure of Britain as the West’s moral and cultural lodestar, supplanted by parallel societies, thoroughly Islamic powerhouses, governed by supremacist norms that brook no dissent.

The data are irrefutable and accelerating. A 2025 report by Professor Matthew Goodwin for the Centre for Heterodox Social Science forecasts that White Britons will fall below 50% of the national population by 2063, with those under forty crossing the threshold by 2050 and the share collapsing to roughly 33.7% by 2100. These findings echo Professor David Coleman’s 2010 Oxford study, which projected minority status by approximately 2066 under net immigration of 180,000 annually; current realities have rendered that timeline optimistic.

The 2010 University of Leeds analysis already anticipated a drop to 79% White British by 2051. The engines of this transformation are relentless: record net migration, peaking at 906,000 in 2023 and still exceeding 200,000 annually even after recent declines; fertility rates among White Britons languishing at approximately 1.39–1.54 children per woman, versus 1.97–2.03 among foreign-born residents; and the youthful demographic momentum of ethnic-minority cohorts. 

London and Birmingham have already passed the tipping point, their 2021 Census data revealing “minority White British” majorities. By century’s end, nearly half the population will be foreign-born or their immediate descendants. Accordingly, to dismiss the problem out of hand and characterize the demographic trend as “organic evolution” is an insult to the British; rather, it is “engineered displacement,” fueled by elite policies that treat borders as suggestions and native birth rates as irrelevant.

Britain’s historic role as civilizational anchor renders this shift existential. From the Glorious Revolution’s constitutional settlement to the abolition of the slave trade, from Newton’s empiricism to Mill’s marketplace of ideas, Britain forged the template for limited government, free speech, and personal dignity. These were not abstract ideals but lived realities that defeated tyranny, emancipated women, and decriminalized homosexuality. Yet the incoming demographic tide imports a culture fundamentally at odds with this inheritance. The primary vector is not abstract “ethnicity” but the rapid growth of populations from Muslim-majority regions, whose orthodox religious framework—when measured by attitudes in British Muslim communities—reveals an ideological totalitarianism that subordinates individual rights to divine command (as interpreted by imams, community leaders, and theological scholars, depending on time and place).

Polling data expose the gulf. A 2024 Henry Jackson Society survey found that only 28% of British Muslims viewed the outlawing of homosexuality as undesirable (compared with 62% of the general public), while 27% saw outlawing gay marriage as undesirable (compared to 60% of the wider public). Earlier Channel 4/ICM polling (2016) recorded 52% of British Muslims disagreeing that homosexuality should be legal. Support for sharia provisions remains stubbornly high: 23% in 2016 favored its introduction in parts of Britain, and the 2024 survey showed significant minorities endorsing compulsory halal in schools/hospitals (57%), public prayer rooms in secular institutions (66%), and legalization of polygamy (21%). These attitudes are not fringe; they reflect a worldview in which revelation trumps consent, and apostasy, blasphemy, or “insult” to the faith justifies coercion.

The cultural consequences are already manifest and will intensify as demographic weight shifts. Women face systemic subordination. Orthodox Islamic norms—evident in elevated rates of forced marriage, “honor”-based violence, and female genital mutilation within affected communities—treat female autonomy as a threat. The 2024 HJS polling revealed only 17% of British Muslims viewing a more traditional role for women as undesirable, while 39% in 2016 agreed that “wives should always obey their husbands” (Channel 4/ICM).

Rape-gang scandals, spanning Rotherham, Rochdale, and beyond, illustrate the contempt: organized networks disproportionately involving men of Pakistani Muslim heritage preyed on thousands of White working-class girls, with authorities paralyzed by fear of “racism” accusations. Recent inquiries, including Baroness Casey’s 2025 report and the Home Office’s independent panel, confirm over-representation of Asian and Pakistani-heritage suspects in group-based child sexual exploitation and explicitly probe the role of ethnicity, religion, and culture—factors long denied in the name of “multiculturalism.” Victims were branded “kuffar” (infidels), their degradation rationalized through a lens of religious entitlement. This is not isolated criminality; it is cultural entitlement enabled by demographic enclaves.

Homosexuals encounter visceral rejection. In communities where significant pluralities still regard same-sex relations as immoral or criminalizable, public spaces in Birmingham or Tower Hamlets have witnessed harassment, protests against LGBT education, and “no-go” pressures. The ideological totalitarianism increasingly extends to non-Muslims: blasphemy sensitivities stifle criticism, antisemitic incidents surge in tandem with Muslim population growth, and Christian minorities report intimidation. Parallel legal systems—sharia councils—already adjudicate family matters in ways incompatible with British equality.

As White Britons become minorities in their own cities and eventually their nation, Islamic norms will not assimilate; on the contrary, they will dominate, demanding accommodation while offering none. Schools with no White British pupils, hospitals enforcing halal norms, and political discourse paralyzed by fear of “Islamophobia” (i.e., the consequent ostracization, harassment, or assault)—the ultimate heresy from an appeasement point of view—are harbingers of a society where Western liberalism is the minority creed.

The pessimism is warranted precisely because the process is self-reinforcing. Lower native fertility, unchecked migration, and higher immigrant birth rates create a demographic momentum that no modest policy tweak can arrest. Elites, intoxicated by virtue-signaling and terrified of “far-right” labels, have presided over this transformation without democratic consent. The result is not hybrid vigor but cultural suicide: the anchor of the West—its commitment to reason, rights, and restraint—snapped in favor of a totalizing ideology that views pluralism as weakness and dissent as heresy.

By 2063, Britain will not be recognizably British. Its cathedrals may stand, but the values that built them will be relics. The tolerant society that once exported liberty will import the very intolerance that it once overcame. Demographic destiny, absent radical reversal, ensures that the eclipse is total. The light that illuminated the West will flicker out in the land of its birth, leaving a darker, more divided realm where ideological totalitarianism reigns and the discriminated—women, homosexuals, religious minorities—pay the price of elite folly. History is unlikely to record this as enrichment; it is a civilian conquest terminating a civilization.

American Thinker

In case of any doubt about Norway’s commitment to maintain – and expand – its production of gas and oil offshore, the energy minister, Terje Aasland, has a pithy response: “We will develop, not dismantle, activity on our continental shelf.”

This week, to the alarm of environmental campaigners, he announced that three gasfields off the country’s southern coast would reopen by the end of 2028 – nearly three decades after they closed – to meet a shortfall caused by the impact of the war in Ukraine and disruption to supplies from the Middle East.

The decision will help keep gas and oil production at about the 2025 level – which has been stable for almost 20 years – and stay broadly the same for the rest of this decade. Norway has 97 offshore oilfields, three of which came on stream last year, and its Norwegian Offshore Directorate expects “100 and beyond” within the next two years, still producing at least the present level of 2m barrels of oil daily.

The Barents Sea, in the high north, is the new gas and oil frontier – with the prospect of mining for seabed minerals between northern Norway and Greenland, a more distant prospect after initial surveys by the Norwegian Offshore Directorate – an agency of Aasland’s department – showed potential.

“Norwegian offshore production plays an important role in ensuring energy security in Europe,” Aasland tells the Guardian. “The world, and Europe, will have a need for oil and gas for decades to come and it is crucial that Norway continues to develop its continental shelf to remain a reliable and long-term supplier … and (with) a high level of exploration activity.”

As the birth rate continues to plummet to record lows, data shows that a significant percentage of liberals are deprioritizing the importance of marriage and having children, especially among teens. Among conservatives, however, the phenomenon does not appear to be occurring.

In an article published last week by the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), sociologists Brad Wilcox and Grant Bailey highlight how the aspirations that many liberals claim to have about marrying and having children are not lining up with their real-world behavior, which appears to be heavily influenced by negative media narratives.

They note that mainstream media outlets like Bloomberg, The New York Times, and The Washington Post have been publishing a steady stream of articles for decades that “devalue, deny, and discount the institution of marriage.”

Wilcox and Bailey further noted that current data on marriage has made it clear that the anti-marriage messaging is having an effect on the actual marriage rates of left-leaning, college-educated Americans. “No group of Americans is less likely to say marriage matters than liberals, especially the college educated,” they observe.

Among the cohort, only 30% agree that “children are better off with married parents,” according to the 2022 American Family Survey. Interestingly, less educated liberals were more supportive of the principle at 36%.

Conservatives hold strikingly different views on the question (which has been proven to be true time and again by social science data). The survey found that over nine in 10 college-educated conservatives (91%) say that children are better off with married parents, with 73% of less educated conservatives agreeing.

The proof of the importance of worldview regarding marriage is borne out in the actual data of who is married. As Wilcox and Bailey point out, “a majority of conservative men and women are married, and a majority of liberals are not,” with college-educated conservatives aged 22-40 being 50% more likely to be married than their liberal peers.

The bleak marriage picture for liberals becomes worse when considering the data on progressive teens’ views on the institution. A Monitoring the Future study found that since 2010, the percentage of liberal 12th graders who say they expect to get married has plummeted, with boys dropping 22 percentage points to 53% and girls dropping 12 points to 63%.

The outlook among conservative teens is far more positive, holding largely steady at around 83% for boys and 90% for girls over the last decade and a half.

“Despite many on the Left suggesting declines in marriage are largely a class issue, we found that political views were a stronger predictor of being married than college education,” IFS Research Fellow Grant Bailey told The Washington Stand. “Marriage rates are significantly lower among liberal adults, and left-leaning teens are increasingly disinterested in marriage.”

The grim marital outlook and the decreasing number of marriages among liberals, who encompass roughly 48% of the U.S. population, are likely a significant factor in the dwindling American birth rate. This is because the birth rate among married women (81.6 per 1,000) is considerably higher than it is for unmarried women (36.4 per 1,000).

Studies show that what liberals (and conservatives) are missing out on by eschewing marriage and children is happiness and fulfilment. Data collected in 2024 shows that just 66% of unmarried liberals aged 22-40 say they are “pretty” or “very” happy, compared to 86% of liberals who are married.

A considerable (although not as sharp) difference also exists among conservatives, with 90% of those who are married saying they are happy compared to 73% of those who are not.

Policy analysts like Leah Libresco Sargeant argue that those who are married are called to witness how married life brings meaning and purpose to a world hungering for both. “As a married woman, I think marriage is great,” she recently observed. “It shouldn’t be this ‘hard sell.’

We should approach marriage with a real sense of optimism in that we’re trying to invite people into this phase of life that is both challenging and beautiful.”

Originally published at The Washington Stand

The Obamacare marketplace is reportedly facing significant upheaval following the expiration of enhanced federal subsidies.

Cigna announced in late April that it will leave the Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges in 2027, which could further shake up the individual marketplace. CVS’ Aetna ceased offering plans and overall enrollment has declined since Congress refused to renew ACA subsidies, The Hill reported.

“Medical insurance has become unbearably expensive, and this is even before a single service is used,” Jeffrey Tucker, founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “For many people this truly makes no [sense].”

“Crowdsourced alternatives [to the ACA] are doing well even with the legal limits,” Tucker added. “Some people with built up [Health Savings Accounts (HSAs)] who go independent drop medical insurance completely and take their chances. This is actually a rational choice.”

Tucker emphasized that some U.S. insurers are facing “extreme limits” to “leaving the [Obamacare] system now.”

In most cases, carriers who decide to exit the market elect to do so at the end of the calendar year, according to a May 1 report from Healthinsurance.org. Mid-year carrier exits have been highly uncommon in the ACA-compliant individual market.

“There are draconian mandates on business,” he explained, adding that “the exit ramps are too restrictive.” He also said Americans “desperately need universal and unlimited HSAs and we need further to break down the defined benefits mandates.”

An HSA is a type of savings account that allows people to set aside money on a pre-tax basis to pay for qualified medical expenses, according to HealthCare.gov.

A KFF survey published in March found that 80% of returning ACA Marketplace enrollees said their 2026 plan’s premiums, deductibles or coinsurance and co-pays are higher than last year, including 51% of returning enrollees who say they are now “a lot higher.”

Almost 23 million Americans get medical insurance through one of the online exchanges that operate under the ACA, according to Pew Research Center. An estimated 8% of U.S. adults under age 65 who generally worked over 20 hours per week in 2023 got their coverage in the individual market, KFF reported in September 2025.

The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare (CMS) stated in a January fact sheet that the agency is “exercising its full statutory and regulatory authority to protect consumers from unauthorized enrollment activity and safeguard the integrity” of the ACA exchanges.

“CMS is committed to a strong, stable, and competitive Marketplace that continues to deliver meaningful coverage options for millions of Americans,” an agency spokesperson told the DCNF in a statement. “Each year, the agency sees issuers expand and contract on the individual market for various reasons, and while it is concerning when any issuer decides to leave even one county, the agency continues to see strong market participation nationally.”

“Consumers in every state still have access to a range of high-quality plans, and the agency is focused on ensuring the ACA Exchanges remain a reliable pathway to affordable, comprehensive coverage,” the CMS spokesperson added.

Cigna did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment. Aetna declined to comment.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated in October 2025 that 2.3 million marketplace enrollees improperly claimed the premium tax credit via intentional overstatement of income for that year.

The Department of Justice announced in February that two executives were each sentenced to 20 years in prison after being found guilty of being involved in a years-long scheme to defraud the ACA program. The Wall Street Journal editorial board asserted in December 2025 that Obamacare has become a “Mecca for fraud.”

“The ACA exchanges are not in upheaval; they are adjusting after a period of subsidy expansion and a tremendous increase in enrollment, much of it improper,” Gabrielle Minarik, program manager at the Paragon Health Institute, told the DCNF.

“Following the law’s early instability, coverage stabilized during the first Trump administration as reforms expanded consumer options and restored greater market discipline,” Minarik explained. “The 2026 debate reflects a return to the ACA’s original subsidy framework after the expiration of temporary COVID-era subsidy boosts. The enhanced subsidies distorted prices, weakened eligibility safeguards, inflated enrollment, led to widespread improper and phantom enrollment, and imposed substantial costs on taxpayers as well as people enrolled without their consent.”

In 2021, federal spending on the ACA exchanges hit $60 billion, leading to 1.6 million additional Americans obtaining private insurance coverage, according to Paragon Health Institute estimates published in October 2023. U.S. taxpayers paid an estimated $36,798 per each additional private insurance enrollee and $20,739 for each additional non-group enrollee, which was notably more than three times as much as the CBO’s original estimates, Paragon Health Institute reported.

“Some enrollment decline is expected, given the large numbers of improper and phantom enrollments,” she continued. “Republicans and the administration have responded with targeted relief options rather than even higher subsidies to insurers, underscoring a preference for sustainable reforms over fiscal dependency.”

Minarik also said she thinks “a wave of additional insurer exits from the ACA marketplace is unlikely.” She added that “further reductions in effectuated enrollment” in the individual marketplace are likely to occur “as the market returns to more normal subsidy parameters and program integrity measures take effect.”

In June 2025, CMS issued a final rule aiming to finalize “additional safeguards to protect consumers from improper enrollments and changes to their health care coverage, as well as establishes standards to ensure the integrity of the ACA Exchanges.”

A recent report from Wakely Consulting Group, a strategic consulting firm, projects that coverage in the marketplaces may plummet by up to 26% in 2026 compared to the average enrollment in 2025. Top Obamacare provider Centene disclosed in March that its enrollment had declined by over 1.5 million over just a few months, Forbes reported.

As of 2025, 93% of ACA Marketplace enrollees received some form of premium tax credit which subsidized their coverage, according to KFF.

In 2025, for enrollees who received advance premium tax credits the average monthly gross premium was $619, per KFF’s estimates. By comparison, the average monthly gross premium for a benchmark silver plan is $625 in 2026, and the average gross monthly premium for an individual’s lowest-cost bronze plan option is $456, KFF reported.

Health insurance premiums for individuals purchasing coverage on their own rose an average of 10% or more annually during the three years before ACA was enacted, according to a June 2014 Commonwealth Fund report.

Democratic Rep. Brittany Pettersen of Colorado claimed Wednesday in a X post that rising healthcare premiums in the U.S. are “added costs for families who are already struggling to cover gas, groceries, and housing.”

Republican Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri wrote in a Jan. 22 social media post that “after 15 years of a Democrat-created health system under Obamacare, [healthcare] prices have only gone up.”

Analysts previously told the DCNF that surging U.S. medical costs will likely play a pivotal part in the outcome of the November’s midterms. Healthcare currently represents almost one in every five dollars spent in the nation’s economy, KFF reported in March.

The Daily Caller

The term “bloodbath” is being thrown around to describe Labour’s position, and that sounds about right. Of course, just as important as who loses is who wins, and Nigel Farage’s right-wing, anti-immigration, anti-Islamic Reform Party dominated. In just a few years, they have gone from a small upstart, laughed at by the broader press, to being the ascendant political power in the country. Even in far-left Wales, Labour lost its grip on power.

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Alex Armstrong @Alexarmstrong BREAKING:

Labour are conceding defeat in Wales. This will be the first time in the history of the Senedd where Labour have not controlled the country. Historic. 6:46 AM · May 8, 2026 · 13.3K Views

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Here’s a bit of Farage celebrating his victory. You’ll have to ignore the bit of cope from The New York Times reporter who penned the report. The press still doesn’t want to accept that an “anti-immigration” agenda in the UK isn’t a gimmick. It’s a legitimate issue for voters who have been inundated with unvetted Islamic migration and have paid a steep price for their leadership’s haphazard policies.

For more than a year, opinion polls have indicated that Reform U.K., the right-wing populist party, was Britain’s most popular party as its leader, Nigel Farage, imitated President Trump’s anti-immigration agenda and railed against the Labour government.

Now, it’s looking increasingly official.

In early results from a set of local elections on Thursday, Mr. Farage and his party have emerged victorious in more than 400 council seats across England. The wins have come at the expense of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and the Conservatives, the parties who have led the country for decades.

“Labour are being wiped out by Reform in many of their most traditional areas, and what you’re going to see later on today is the Conservative Party being wiped out in their heartlands,” a beaming Mr. Farage told reporters Friday morning.

“It can’t continue to be a fluke or a protest vote,” Mr. Farage said. “I would honestly say you’re witnessing a historic shift in British politics. This is now the most national of all parties.”

So what does this all mean?

On a micro-level, a large number of municipalities across the UK will now have better governance, and that can certainly make a difference on issues like migrant crime, which has become a touchpoint for voters. On a macro-level, though, this portends very bad things for Labour. While the next national election isn’t scheduled until 2029, remember that the UK has a parliamentary system, and it’s unlikely that Starmer lasts anywhere near that long. An election will probably be called well before that, and unless something dramatic changes, it appears that a Reform-led coalition (presumably with what’s left of the Tories) will be in power soon enough.

And that’s the thing about Western politics. Once the ball gets rolling downhill, it doesn’t tend to stop until after the next national election, and the Reform ball is only picking up speed. I’m not even sure what Labour could do at this point to win back the goodwill it has lost, and lost in record time, no less. London will no doubt continue to burn itself to the ground, and as of now, it seems to just be going further left by handing seats to the progressive Green Party, but for the first time in a long time, the majority of the rest of the UK has a chance at redemption and reclaiming their country.

Unfortunately, though, it may be too late. As I’ve written before, there is a point of no return for countries that import Islamism and crack down on civil liberties, and it really feels like the UK crossed it over the last few years. Still, even a managed decline, doing what can be done to slow the bleeding, would be preferable to what they have now.

When the scale of the Medicaid fraud in Minnesota started to emerge, our first thought was that, if it’s that easy to rip off Medicaid, the North Star State can’t be the only place where it’s happening.

Turns out we were right, as the Daily Wire’s exposé of massive fraud schemes in Ohio makes clear. Which means there are almost certainly still more to be uncovered. Which leads to the question of why we are learning about this only now.

Daily Wire is releasing a five-part series that alleges massive fraud in an Ohio Medicaid program – a state that obtained a waiver so it could reimburse “home healthcare.” The idea made sense. Care at home is cheaper than in skilled nursing facilities.

But it threw open the door to fragrant abuse.

As the Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak explains, “Ohio pays people to go to Medicaid beneficiaries’ homes to perform ‘homemaking’ and ‘chores’ like cooking and cleaning. The people performing these ‘personal services’ tasks don’t even have to be healthcare workers — and in many cases, are actually relatives of the Medicaid recipient.”

Rosiak dug into a treasure trove of Medicaid data released by DOGE and found the same thing being uncovered by independent journalists in Minnesota and in California. Obvious cases of fraud. Storefronts that don’t appear to be doing anything other than billing Medicaid. And, as it turns out, lots of immigrants are running these scams.

In the second part of his series, he reports finding 288 “home health” companies in just seven buildings in Columbus, Ohio, that collectively billed Medicaid $250 million.

So now, independent, muckraking journalists have uncovered massive child care fraud schemes in Minnesota, hospice fraud schemes in California, and a bustling “home health” care racket in Ohio.

And in each case, the governors have dismissed the allegations, claiming that their administration is aggressively rooting out fraud and that this is all just MAGA types causing trouble.

Even Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s initial statement – after the Daily Wire’s first article in the series was published – was dismissive of the report, saying that it “does not seem to allege any fraud in the details provided.”

One big problem with Medicaid is that, because of the way it’s financed, fraud actually pays dividends to the states, which get federal matching dollars for every dollar spent on providing Medicaid benefits. So, if the state doles out hundreds of millions of dollars to phony day care, hospice, or “home health” companies, Washington kicks in hundreds of millions, which the state can then use to pay for legitimate healthcare.

So, how many more Medicaid schemes are out there? How many schemes involve food stamps? Obamacare? Medicare?

If the journalism profession weren’t so hopelessly captured by the Democratic Party, every investigative journalist at every major news outlet in every state would be digging into to see if it’s happening in their hometowns.

But our guess is that zero are, because it would be seen as somehow helping Donald Trump.

Instead, reporters are filing stories about the “devastating,” “draconian,” and “deadly” Medicaid cuts Republicans approved as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Typical is an NPR headline from last week: “It’s Day 1 of Medicaid work requirements in Nebraska. People are worried.” The Bulwark, which is so insanely anti-Trump that it now makes the Huffington Post look sensible, cried that “Trump’s Big Medicaid Cuts Are About to Get Very Real.”

You’d think Democrats would be as adamant as anyone about rooting out fraud. After all, every dollar that goes to a con artist is a dollar that isn’t being used to help the needy.

But as we’ve said before, for today’s Democrats, fraud isn’t a bug that needs to be stamped out. It’s a feature that enriches their friends and family — and gets them reelected.