Christmas generally means one of two things to people: Jesus Christ; or capitalism, meaning the gifts and material or secular celebrations.

In today’s culture, Christmas is more important than ever before. Businesses practically close down for the entire month. (Have you tried getting business done with a bank, an insurance company, or just about anything other than a retail store during Thanksgiving to Christmas? Or tried to find a job? Or get even minimal service from a government agency?) Black Friday shopping sprees now top summer vacation and almost eclipse Christmas itself.

Yes, Christmas is all about either Jesus or capitalism. Yet these are two things disparaged by cultural and corporate elites (all leftist, now even Communist) who rule over us. Interesting. Why do they approve of Christmas when it’s made possible by the two things they loathe the most: capitalism and Jesus?

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Nothing says “hope and change” quite like bulldozing a beloved public park for a 235-foot phallic tower dedicated to oneself. Welcome to the Obama Presidential Center (OPC), an $830 million (and rising) vanity project in Chicago’s historic Jackson Park. The man who once preached community organizing couldn’t find a single non-park site in his hometown for his monument. I get angry every time I see a story about this thing. It feels as if Obama is giving America a gigantic, double-barreled middle finger. No honest observer can look at this monstrosity and feel inspired. Like the modern Democrat Party, the OPC has zero redeeming features.

Let’s start with the trees: over 800 mature oaks, many a century old, were felled for parking and “campus” space. Environmentalists who paralyzed industries to save a single spotted owl suddenly decided trees are renewable when a favored Democrat is involved. A Frederick Law Olmsted-designed urban oasis was sacrificed without a shrug. The community hated it from the start. Bronzeville residents, preservationists, and even Obama voters begged the foundation to build somewhere, anywhere else — abandoned lots and shuttered factories were plentiful. Instead, the Obamas demanded federally protected parkland for a private foundation that will one day charge admission. Lawsuits were filed, federal reviews manipulated, and courts eventually capitulated.

The building itself defies description. Critics call it Stalinist, Brutalist, or a rejected Bond-villain lair; supporters claim that it’s “bold.” It offends traditionalists and competent modernists alike. It resembles either a North Korean guard tower or a Star Wars Jawa sandcrawler — take your pick.

Cost was originally pitched at $500 million; it’s now past $830 million with no end in sight. A promised $470 million endowment meant to offset neighborhood damage and future maintenance has only $1 million in it and no realistic funding plan. The Chicago machine, as usual, simply looked the other way.

Staff salaries are equally shameless. Valerie Jarrett, an old Obama confidante, was installed as director at nearly $750,000 a year despite the museum remaining unbuilt. By opening day (if it ever comes), she’ll have collected almost $2 million — much of it apparently from early donor funds — while taxpayers will cover ongoing upkeep.

Construction, handled by the hand-picked Lakeside Alliance, promised diversity and local hiring. It delivered federal indictments instead. The safety record was catastrophic — workers fell, fingers were severed, racial slurs scrawled on site. Minority subcontractors say they were stiffed while prime contractors cashed in.

Inside, visitors won’t find presidential papers (those are digitized elsewhere, safely away from scholars). They’ll get immersive exhibits about Barack’s greatness, Michelle’s garden, and probably a hologram slow-jamming the news. Run by a private foundation, the “library” can charge whatever it wants for access. Transparency you can believe in. Jackson Park, once a free public space for picnics and pickup games, is now a gated, security-patrolled compound where ordinary Chicagoans will pay to admire murals of the Great Leader. Frederick Law Olmsted spins in his grave.

The OPC perfectly embodies elite Democrat hypocrisy: lecture the country about sacrifice and community, then raze a public park, burn through a billion dollars, and erect a concrete eyesore — all while keeping actual records under private lock and key.

Strip away the renderings and PBS specials, and the Obama Center is a 235-foot park-gobbling “up yours” to the country he once pretended to serve. A private fortress in a working-class public park (used heavily by black Chicagoans), ringed by bollards and ticket booths. A “presidential library” with no papers. A tower that announces the rules — preservation, open records, environmental review, basic aesthetics — are for little people only.

Every over-budget yard of concrete screams: We got ours; you get selfies at the gift shop. The couple who scolded us about carbon footprints clear-cut ancient oaks. The administration that demonized “millionaires and billionaires” vacuumed anonymous nine-figure donations while the South Side bled and the city teeters on bankruptcy. When workers were maimed, subcontractors stiffed, and costs exploded, the response was always a polished shrug and another gala.

This isn’t just narcissism; it’s contempt poured in concrete and glass on ground that once belonged to everyone. The Obama Center isn’t a monument to a president. It’s a tribute to a ruling class that no longer hides its disdain for the rest of us.

Psalm 123 comes to mind: “Have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy. For we are filled with contempt. Our soul has had enough of the scorn of the rich, of the proud man’s disdain.”

Kevin Finn, American Thinker

Listening to the news, how often do you feel gaslighted? Lied to? I’m guessing quite often. Again, we’re being lied to about Islam; you know, the “religion of peace.” Last week, a practicing Muslim gunned down two National Guard (NG) soldiers in Washington D.C. Immediately, the claptrap media warned against Islamophobia, that the murder had nothing to do with Islam. Right, and abortion has nothing to do with infanticide. Do people actually believe such lies? Obviously, they do, because media such as MS-NOW (former MSNBC), CNN, the NY Times, NPR, and all the other leftist media blamed President Trump for instigating and inciting the Muslim to action. A quick review will help.

Prior to the late 1960s and early 70s, most in the West didn’t think much or often of the Middle East or threats posed by Islam. We were more occupied with the Soviet threat. Nevertheless, Muslim/Islamic terrorists were killing people all over the world — particularly targeting Israel and Jews, hijacking planes, shooting up airports, bombing embassies, and the like. When Iranian Muslims captured the U.S. Embassy in Tehran (1979), and held Americans hostage for 444 days, we took notice. In the ensuing decades, Muslim terrorists and Islamic madmen have been on the march across the globe — the U.S. Embassy in Beirut was bombed (April 1983 — 49 killed); the Marine barracks in Beirut were bombed (October 1983 — 241 killed); Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed (1988 – 270 killed); World Trade Center was bombed (1993 — six killed); the Khobar Tower was bombed (1996 — 19 airmen killed); U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed (1998 — hundreds killed, thousands injured); the USS Cole was bombed (2000 — 19 sailors killed); and the 9/11 attacks (September 2001 — killed thousands). Since 9/11, Islamic terrorist attacks targeting Americans, both here and abroad, have almost become routine — the Shoe Bomber, the Underwear Bomber, the Fort Hood shooter, the Boston Marathon Bombers, the San Bernadino attack (2015 — 14 killed), the Orlando Nightclub Shooting (2016 — 49 killed), the NYC truck attack (2017), the New Orleans truck ramming (2025 New Years Day — 14 killed), and last month’s shooting of two NG soldiers in D.C. 

The above attacks were some of the major ones against American targets. Muslims have targeted just about every country in the world beginning with attacks against Israel’s Olympic Team (Munich 1972 — 12 killed); Beirut became a hellhole (1970s and 80s); the Bali Nightclub attack (2002 – 202 killed); the Madrid Train bombing (2004 – 193 killed, thousands injured); the London Subway bombing (2005 — 56 killed); the Mumbai, India attacks (2008 — 175 killed); the Charlie Hebdo attack (2015 — 17 killed); the Paris Nightclub suicide bombings (2015 — 130 killed); the Nice, France truck attack (2016 — 86 killed); and the Moscow Theater Attack (2024 — 145 killed). Let’s not forget the Hamas Oct 7, 2023 attack on Israel that killed over 1,200 and took 250 hostages. These were the Muslim attacks that garnered large media because they were against western countries and killed westerners. 

Elsewhere, Christians in Nigeria are being genocided by Muslims. Also daily, in Africa/Muslim/Arab/Islamic countries there are terrorist attacks that kill one, two, or dozens and receive little media attention. Apart from non-Muslims being killed by Muslims, Muslims kill more of themselves far and away than they kill of others.

If you think these attacks by Muslims are one-offs and happen infrequently, think again. According to the website “thereligionofpeace.com,” worldwide last month there were 92 Islamic attacks in 17 countries that killed 378 people and injured 210. The website admits they don’t catch all attacks, because some are not immediately reported or claimed by a terrorist group. Actually, November was a light month. The previous month saw 152 Islamic attacks in 18 countries that killed 2,548 and injured 458. In all of 2025, there have been 1,875 Islamic attacks in 48 countries, 13,337 people killed and 6,139 injured. In 2024, worldwide there were 1,762 Islamic attacks in 52 countries, 9,587 people killed and 8,464 injured. Every year prior had similar numbers, all carried out by Muslims.

It is obvious that Islam is at war with the world and even among themselves. Islam is not using standing armies; instead, it has deployed millions of propagandized foot-soldiers around the world. Islam is a broke culture and ideology, incompatible with civilized society. It oppresses half its population (women) and turns the other half (men) into oppressors who treat other cultures and peoples as subservient. If Satan founded a religion, it would be Islam, because Satan deceives and oppresses; ditto for Islam.

The terrorist shooting of the National Guard soldiers in Washington was carried out by an Afghan Muslim refugee, who was granted asylum status but “struggled to adapt” to the United States. Dems and leftists are the only ones surprised that third-world Muslim refugees “struggle” and don’t assimilate into American culture. There is almost zero chance that any Muslim refugee will assimilate into American culture, because nothing here is remotely similar to Afghanistan or to any other Muslim country. Yet, the Biden regime brought in tens of thousands, knowing they wouldn’t assimilate and labelling all those who thought they should racist/xenophobic. Our language, religion, culture, and way of life are incompatible with Islam because Islam is an ideology of oppression that wraps itself in the cloak of religion.

At one time, immigrants were not allowed into this country unless they could 100% support themselves and their families. Now, the Dems import illegal immigrants from third-world hellholes, and wantonly support them with $$$ Billions in freebies. After this latest Muslim terror attack, President Trump announced a halt to all visas to third-world countries (except for tourist visas). Also, he ordered a complete re-examination of all Afghan asylum seekers. Those announcements are a good start, but given that Islamic ideology is incapable of existing alongside the U.S. Constitution, all Muslim asylum seekers should be reviewed.

No surprise, the Dems are hoppin’ mad because the Trump administration is cutting funding to illegals, deporting illegals, and deporting unvetted asylum seekers. They’re upset because by deporting illegals and other extremists, their voting base is being deported. Dems know they cannot win debates based on ideas. So, they brought in millions to replace the voters who are fleeing them in droves. 

Sloan Oliver, American Thinker

An unattributable aphorism says, “You can vote your way into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out.” Most Americans of just a decade ago would think it no more than a witty phrase. It couldn’t happen here, right? We wish we could be sure of that today, but we can’t.

New York City elected a self-identified Democratic Socialist who denies he’s a communist but whose policy platform is dead red, his playbook tracking with Karl Marx’s nasty polemic.

Portlanders elected Katie Wilson to be their mayor. Her wish list reads as if it could have been written by Eugene V. Debs, the socialist who ran five times for president but, mercifully, never received a single electoral vote.

Minneapolis almost elected a Somali socialist from the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party as mayor, but instead voted in incumbent Jacob Frey – who inspires no confidence among the defenders of liberty and capitalism.

As disturbing as these events are, more concerning are the results of a poll that show 51% of likely voters from 18 to 39 want a democratic socialist to win the 2028 presidential election. The Rasmussen Reports survey, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, found that only 36% in that age group aren’t wishing for a democratic socialist to win in 2028, while 17% simply don’t know.

How did this happen? More than half, 54%, of those who want a socialist president, “said their parents or guardians were favorable toward democratic socialism to the best of their recollection when they were growing up.”

Sounds like the offspring of the many – far too many – university professors who no longer teach academics but see their role as proselytizers twisting young minds toward hard-left dogma.

If not their parents, they were influenced by what they were fed in academia: 52% of the under-40 voters said that while “attending school, most of their teachers and professors were favorable toward democratic socialism, including 22% who say their teachers were very favorable toward it.”

This is alarming. Socialism is nasty and unsuitable to humanity for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it attracts the worst among us, the sort who thrill in having control over others, to be its leaders.

“They are precisely the kind of people who elevate power over persuasion, force over cooperation,” says economist Lawrence Reed. “Government, possessing by definition a legal and political monopoly of the use of force, attracts them just as surely as dung draws flies.”

Reed wrote that almost 20 years ago. But he could have been writing about Democrats today and the blue state voters who “have a penchant for voting for the worst that their party has to offer.“

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali who grew up under that country’s socialist boot before she fled to the Netherlands, saw firsthand how socialism fails to “see individual human beings as having inherent dignity.” Based on this concept, socialism divides “society into two clashing, competing classes: the group that was economically oppressive (the capitalists) and the group that was economically oppressed (the workers).”

“In this worldview, individualism as a concept became not merely meaningless but suspect,” she says.

A Pew Research poll from 2019 indicates that positions on socialism have shifted in just a few years. That survey found that 55% of Americans had a negative view of socialism, and their reasons were on the mark. They opposed socialism, they said, because it undermines the work ethic and increases dependence on government, and they noted its unbroken line of historical failures.

The 42% who had a positive view of socialism said they held that opinion because it “creates a fairer, more generous system.” But nowhere has socialism created a fairer system, and there’s zero generosity in forcibly taking from some to give to others.

It’s discouraging that so many Americans fall for the fables of Karl Marx that the likes of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani preach. (This short list of cranks confirms the assertion that the worst always end up at the top in socialist systems.)

Socialism in any form is tyrannical, requiring submission to the state. It crushes souls (see North Korea, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and East Germany, for starters). It makes a few, its “leaders,” fabulously wealthy, while holding the masses in poverty. Its promises are cruel lies intended to deceive.

We hope we never reach the point where those of us who don’t want to be part of the commune that is ordered about by kakistocrats have to shoot our way out of socialism. That would be tragic, but less so than living with a hammer over our heads and a sickle at our throats.

Issues and Insights Editorial Board

The White House has paused all immigration applications from 19 countries and canceled citizenship ceremonies across the US, citing national security and public safety concerns.  

The freeze could affect more than 1.5 million people who had asylum applications pending and more than 50,000 who received asylum grants under the Biden administration, The New York Times reports.

President Donald Trump is also considering expanding the travel ban to more than 30 countries, according to the New York Post. 

The new policy memorandum, released Tuesday night, cites last week’s ‘terror attack’ in D.C. where Afghan man Rahmanullah Lakanwal was arrested for allegedly killing one National Guard member and wounding another. 

The ban applies to citizens of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen while the restricted access applied to people from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela. 

It puts a stop to all immigration related activities, including a temporary suspension on the completion of citizenship ceremonies, involving legal permanent residents of the 19 countries, per CBS News. 

‘The Trump administration is making every effort to ensure individuals becoming citizens are the best of the best. Citizenship is a privilege, not a right,’ said US Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman Matthew Tragesser.

We will take no chances when the future of our nation is at stake.’ 

According to a Department of Homeland Security memo obtained by The Washington Post, anyone attempting to migrate to the US will need to be vetted again. 

‘This memorandum mandates that all aliens meeting these criteria undergo a thorough re-review process, including a potential interview and, if necessary, a re-interview, to fully assess all national security and public safety threats,’ it states.

It also allows DHS to potentially block applicants using a broad definition of ‘inadmissibility or ineligibility’.

Todd Pomerleau, an immigration attorney recently in the news for representing the mother of Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s nephew in court, said it will be challenged in court ‘before the ink is dry’.

‘This is basically allowing for the targeting of people because of their nationality, because of where they’re born, who they may associate with, and any ideas they may have, religions they may practice,’ he said. 

Trump first announced the sweeping bans last week when he blasted former president Joe Biden for letting unvetted migrants into America – claiming he allowed the Afghan shooting suspect into the US during the disastrous 2021 withdrawal. 

He has also stepped up his rhetoric against Somalis in recent days, calling them ‘garbage’ and declaring ‘we don’t want them in our country’. 

Trump announced in a Truth Social post last Thursday night that he would ‘permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the US system to fully recover’.

‘Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation,’ he wrote in the Truth Social post, as he vowed to end all federal benefits for noncitizens, denaturalize migrants who undermine the US, and deport any foreign nationals deemed a security risk or ‘non-compatible with Western Civilization’.

Secretary of State Kristi Noem doubled down on Monday and revealed plans for a ‘full travel ban’ on countries that are sending ‘killers, leeches and entitlement junkies’.

Should the US halt immigration from these 19 countries?YesNo

‘Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom – not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.’ 

Federal officials have described the move as a ‘full scale, rigorous’ process and a dramatic escalation triggered by the D.C attack near the White House.

Sarah Beckstrom, 20, was killed in the shooting, and 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe is now fighting for his life.

The shooting suspect, Lakanwal, arrived in America in 2021 as part of the disastrous US withdrawal from Afghanistan after serving as an ally of Special Forces troops in his CIA-backed ‘Zero Unit’.

During the withdrawal incredible photos and video showed hundreds of Afghans running to board cargo jets. On one plane 640 migrants were overloaded into an aircraft designed to carry 150.

Lakanwal was granted asylum in April – which made him eligible for a green card after one year in the US. 

The dad-of-five is now facing first degree murder charges after Beckstrom succumbed to her injuries on Thanksgiving Day.

But this is not the first time Trump has limited immigration since taking office for the second time.

In June, the president signed a proclamation to ‘fully restrict and limit the entry of nationals’ following an antisemitic firebombing attack in Colorado, which was allegedly perpetuated by Mohamed Soliman, an Egyptian national in the US on an expired tourist visa.

The 19 countries included in Tuesday’s travel ban were then subjected to partial restrictions announced in June.

When Trump initially put the restrictions in place, he said that the tragedy in Boulder ‘underscored the extreme dangers posed to our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted. 

‘We’ve seen one terror attack after another from foreign visa overstayers… thanks to Biden’s open door policies today there are millions and millions of these illegals who should not be in our country.’ 

Under the new policy, pending immigration applications are paused and all immigrants from the list of countries are required to ‘undergo a thorough re-review process, including a potential interview and, if necessary, a re-interview, to fully assess all national security and public safety threats’.

President Donald Trump suggested Tuesday that Americans may “not even have income tax to pay” in the near future, saying tariff-driven revenue could allow for the historic elimination of the federal income tax under his tenure.

Trump told a press gaggle after his cabinet meeting that “at some point in the not too distant future you won’t even have income tax to pay,” arguing that revenue the government is collecting under his administration is now “so great… so enormous.”

“Whether you get rid of it or just keep it around for fun or have it really low, much lower than it is now, but you won’t be paying income tax,” Trump added.

If enacted, abolishing income tax would mark the most ambitious overhaul of the American tax system in more than a century. Trump’s repeated public support for replacing income tax with tariffs makes this the most explicit endorsement yet.

Earlier in his second administration, the president floated a tax plan eliminating income tax for individuals earning under $150,000, with tariffs proposed as a replacement.

“It’s time for the United States to return to the system that made us richer and more powerful than ever before,” the president said back in January. “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich foreign nations, we should be tariffing and taxing foreign nations to enrich our citizens.”

When asked if he was serious about eliminating personal income taxes by podcaster Joe Rogan, then-candidate Trump responded, “Yeah, sure, why not?” and said tariffs could fund the government instead of wage taxes.

His views on the income tax have changed — as part of his prospective run for president in 1999 under the Reform Party, Trump considered a one-time “net worth” tax on those with wealth over $10 million.

If serious, Trump’s proposal would require major tax-code changes and likely face legislative hurdles with a narrow House majority.

Abolishing the income tax has long been a fringe idea, but with Trump pushing aggressive tariff revenue, the concept has moved closer to the mainstream debate stage.

A third of Minnesota’s non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) reviewed in a recent audit by the Department of Transportation (DOT) were illegally issued, Sec. Sean Duffy announced Monday.

The review was conducted by the DOT’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on “unqualified non-citizens” endangering Americans on the roads.

The state has 30 days to come into compliance and revoke the illegally-issued CDLs, or risk losing up to $30.4 million in federal highway funding, a department press release stated.

Officials wrote that Minnesota now has two choices going forward — “follow the law or lose funding.”

Duffy directly called out Gov. Tim Walz (D) in a statement:

Our audit exposes yet another example of foreigners taking advantage of Minnesota services under Governor Walz’s watch. Minnesota failed to follow the law and illegally doled out trucking licenses to unsafe, unqualified non-citizens – endangering American families on the road. That abuse stops now under the Trump Administration. The Department will withhold funding if Minnesota continues this reckless behavior that puts non-citizens gaming the system ahead of the safety of Americans.

A letter from the FMCSA sent to Walz and Minnesota Department of Public Safety Commissioner Bob Jacobson outlined the audit’s findings, detailing how the state gave non-domiciled CDLs to drivers whose lawful presence in the U.S. had expired, whose lawful presence in the U.S. had not been verified, and who were prohibited from obtaining such a license in the first place.

The DOT is now “demanding” that Minnesota execute a corrective course of action, including a pause on issuance of non-domiciled CDLs and identifying all unexpired non-domiciled CDLs that fail to comply with the regulations.

“Minnesota is openly and blatantly defying our rules, plain and simple,” said FMCSA Administrator Derek D. Barrs. “Under the Trump Administration, states have two choices: meet our standards or face the consequences. Following the law is not optional.” 

The latest review of Minnesota is part of the DOT’s overall nationwide audit of CDLs after foreign truckers were accused of causing deadly crashes in several states. 

Federal and state authorities arrested nearly 250 foreign commercial truck drivers in November alone, Breitbart News reported.

Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Newly released results of a medical exam proved what many had suspected for years, as an MRI confirmed that President Donald Trump suffers from incurable advanced-stage patriotism.

The results of the scan affirmed speculation that had run wild throughout the nation’s capital and across the country for the last decade, with lawmakers and journalists alike alleging that Trump was riddled with love for America that had spread throughout his entire body.

“It’s far more widespread than anyone thought,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters in a briefing. “His liver, his lymph nodes, even in his bone marrow. President Trump’s body has been fully consumed by patriotism. We’ve been informed by all medical experts that there is, in fact, no cure.”

When asked directly about his condition, the president was blunt. “Nobody’s got a case of this like mine,” he told the media in brief comments in the Oval Office. “The doctor told me he’s never seen anything like it. He said he was surprised I was still alive with how much of it I have everywhere in my body. It’s like I’m superhuman, he said. That’s what he told me. Most people wouldn’t survive such a severe case of loving their country. It’s just the way I am. I’m not like other men, believe me.”

At publishing time, medical professionals issued a warning that President Trump’s incurable, advanced-stage patriotism was likely to be dangerously contagious and could be spread to any people who spent time around him.

Babylon Bee

They were promised lucrative and stable careers if they “learned to code” and earned a degree in software engineering.

Instead, many Americans in the tech industry have been left disillusioned as they face mass layoffs and chronic unemployment — a crisis they say stems from an addiction to cheap foreign labor pipelines that are made accessible through programs like H-1B, and are touted by companies as a way to hire the “best and brightest.”

“At this point, I’m doing something else,” Jonathan, a cybersecurity professional who is leaving the industry entirely out of frustration, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “My career is basically dead in the water because of these problems.”

Jonathan lost his job in the industry in November 2024 and in the months since, he’s submitted well over 200 applications for tech-related positions in the Seattle area, but received a grand total of zero offers — despite five years of experience and purportedly demonstrating high competency in every interview assessment thrown his way.

He wished to be identified only by his first name out of fear of retribution from past and potential employers, as did most of the seven tech employees who spoke with the DCNF.

Controversy surrounding the H-1B program, which very publicly split President Donald Trump’s inner circle shortly before he began his second term, has once again shot onto the national scene as the White House gives mixed signals on the program’s benefits. The issue has proven divisive for the Republican leader, who was elected to office on a pro-worker platform, but also has powerful allies in the tech world.

When reached for comment, the White House referred to recent statements made by press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

“The president does not support American workers being replaced,” Leavitt told a group of reporters earlier in November. “The president has a very nuanced, common-sense opinion on this issue … but ultimately [he] wants to see American workers in those jobs… There’s been a lot of misunderstanding of the president’s position.”

‘Disillusioned’ Public data suggests that many American engineers are being passed over for foreign workers.

Throughout 2025, major technology companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Intel underwent layoffs — continuing what has been a years-long trend in the industry. The workers interviewed by the DCNF were not employed at these specific tech companies.

Roughly 428,000 tech workers lost their job between 2022 and 2023, and a total of 384 tech companies handed pink slips to roughly 124,000 workers in 2024, according to the Institute for Sound Public Policy (ISPP).

While H-1Bs have an outsized influence on the tech world, workers across all major industries are impacted by imported foreign labor.

The flow of H-1B workers into the U.S. has largely kept apace despite these mass layoffs, with the ISPP finding that the number of H-1B visa workers has grown 80% since the Great Recession low in 2011. Experts estimate that nearly 660,000 H-1B workers were living in the U.S. in October 2024.

Established by Congress in 1990, the H-1B program was originally intended to utilize “highly specialized” foreign labor, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Although it’s a nonimmigrant visa, H-1B holders can eventually become eligible to apply for legal permanent residence, allowing them to stay in the country indefinitely.

The tech industry dominates the use of H-1Bs, with tech companies accounting for nearly 70% of H-1B petitions annually, according to Nation Connections, a site dedicated to helping individuals navigate immigration laws in different countries.

Other American-born tech workers have shared similar experiences to Jonathan’s, and have stayed silent due to fear of retaliation.

“I do feel kind of disillusioned with the industry,” said Riley, who graduated with a software engineering degree in 2021. “Software engineers have a higher unemployment rate right now than art history majors.”

Art history majors have a 3% unemployment rate, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which compiled data released in February. Computer engineering majors, on the other hand, currently suffer from a 7.5% unemployment rate.

Riley said he noticed a monumental shift in the hiring practices of an Austin-based company he worked at for several years. He claims the company — which had faced consistent complaints from engineers about pay — increasingly staffed its engineering departments with employees from South America and eventually established an office in Colombia to better utilize the continent’s workforce.

“I believe that that was done in order to, you know, reduce their labor costs so that they could get engineers without negotiating with [the American-born engineers] or caving to their demands,” Riley said.

Jonathan described a similar situation after the California-based company he worked for introduced an India development center. Roughly six months after the center was launched, he said the company stopped hiring outside of India altogether. About a year after he left, Jonathan’s former coworker informed him that around half of the company’s security personnel was let go.

“You’re going to lose advancement opportunities, you’re going to have HR problems and you’re going to be not a team player if you don’t advocate with open arms the idea of an Indian development center being opened up to your company or a billion H-1Bs flooding the market,” Jonathan said about the situation he was facing and the continued pressure to not speak out.

‘We’re All In The Process Of Being Replaced’ India stands far above any other nation as the top source of foreign labor, making up 72% of all H-1B recipients between October 2022 and September 2023, per a March 2024 report from the Department of Homeland Security.

“We’re all in the process of being replaced,” John, who worked for an insurance company in Connecticut, told the DCNF.

John said there were around 350 IT employees — all purportedly American — at his company when he first began in 2006. Throughout his decade at the company, he claims they were all steadily booted out in favor of foreign workers.

“Most of the time they had them train their Indian replacements before they left as a condition of receiving their severance,” he told the DCNF. “So what I saw over a period of time was a whole bunch of lives being destroyed.”

“A lot of the younger kids can’t find employment,” John said of the industry. “They spent a whole bunch of money learning all of this stuff — computer programs, cloud platforms, this that the other thing — but they can’t find work.”

The tech employees who spoke to the DCNF are struggling to find work in the U.S. at a time when college debt has skyrocketed to historical highs. Roughly 44 million Americans owe more than $1.7 trillion in student debt, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Engineering degrees in general are consistently ranked as one of the costliest to earn.

Like his coworkers before him, John was ultimately “replaced” and handed a severance agreement that forbids him from discussing the matter publicly.

“Coming home to western Washington from Alaska, I assumed that finding a better-paying job would be no issue — we are home to some of the nation’s largest tech companies,” Luke Hawthorne told the DCNF. “I spent nearly a year over 2022 and 2023 searching for my current job, a job which pays me about the same as I was making before.”

While Hawthorne still considers himself lucky to be employed, he said his current salary “doesn’t even approach” the threshold it takes to afford a home in his area of Washington State. His home state’s software developer workforce grew by more than 16% through H-1B certifications over just a 9-month period, with 83% of these positions approved at or below Washington State’s median wage, according to public data he analyzed and shared with the DCNF.

“The ‘best and brightest’ argument simply doesn’t square with how the program is being used,” Hawthorne said. “Another important aspect of it is that you aren’t competing just with the new arrivals, but with all of the tech workers who have been replaced — I have friends with talent and experience who have been out of work for years.”

Many of the tech workers who spoke to the DCNF have since become involved with U.S. Tech Workers, an advocacy group that highlights the plight of American employees negatively affected by the H-1B program and pushes Washington, D.C., for change.

Trump, who has implemented some of the most hawkish immigration policies since returning to office, has appeared to give mixed signals on the issue as major players within his own inner circle disagree over reform.

The president’s coalition appeared fragmented in the weeks leading up to his second presidential inauguration, with business magnate Elon Musk touting H-1Bs in December 2024 and Vivek Ramaswamy suggesting that the U.S. needs foreign talent because American culture “venerated mediocrity over excellence.” Georgia GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former a top Trump ally who is resigning from Congress, said in November she would introduce legislation completely phasing out the H-1B program, accusing tech companies of abusing the system at the expense of Americans.

Trump initially appeared to side with the pro-H-1B faction, declaring in December 2024 that he was “a believer” in the visa program. In what appeared to be a major shift into the pro-American worker camp, Trump in September signed a proclamation slapping a $100,000 fee on all new H-1B applications, but opponents of the program have criticized the fee’s limitations and workarounds. Earlier in November, Trump once again publicly touted the need for H-1Bs to import foreign workers.

As Washington, D.C., continues to debate the value of H-1Bs, American tech workers say they’ve been left out to dry.

“I graduated college seven years ago and I remember in high school them telling us, ‘learn to code and you’ll have a good job,’” Joseph Ibrahim, an unemployed tech worker based in Florida, told the DCNF. “Well, it turns out they outsource the coding jobs also, not just the manufacturing jobs.”

Ibrahim got a degree in information systems, business analytics and information systems, but has been struggling to find work since April. Unlike many of the tech workers who spoke to the DCNF, he had no problem being identified by his full name.

“What are they gonna do?” Ibrahim asked. “They’re already not hiring me.”

“You know, if I went into college and on the pamphlet, there were like, ‘pros and cons of studying something in computer science: you may have to train your replacement at some point in your career,’ I would have never studied this,” he said.

Jason Hopkins, Daily Caller

The video of the ambush is brief and sickening. Two young National Guard soldiers, barely into adulthood, walk their post near the White House. An Islamic terrorist rounds the corner, raises a revolver, and opens fire. By the time other guardsmen tackle him, Specialist Sarah Beckstrom is fatally wounded and Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe is fighting for his life. The suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is not some random drifter. He is a former member of the CIA’s elite Afghan “Zero Units,” a paramilitary strike force trained for kill capture missions in the Taliban heartland. He came here through President Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome program and was later granted asylum. The war in Afghanistan did not stay over there. We flew a piece of it into our own neighborhoods.

To see why this matters, we have to understand what the Zero Units were. During the later years of the Afghan war, the CIA quietly created Afghan only commando teams that operated outside Afghanistan’s ordinary military chain of command. Human Rights Watch describes these formations as CIA backed strike forces that conducted high risk night raids, often without meaningful Afghan government oversight, and documents repeated allegations of extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, and attacks on medical facilities. ProPublica’s multi year investigation into one of these units concluded that its night raids killed hundreds of civilians even in a limited four year sample, with total casualties likely far higher. These are not speculative claims from partisan blogs, they are the product of painstaking field reporting, interviews with survivors, and cross checking with morgue records and satellite imagery.

The Kandahar based 03 Unit, where Lakanwal served, operated out of Firebase Gecko, a former Taliban compound repurposed as a CIA hub. Journalists and human rights investigators have chronicled raids in Kandahar and Helmand in which 03 operators separated women and children, dragged men from homes, and left bodies in courtyards. Afghan witnesses spoke of school principals executed in front of their families and detainees taken away and never seen again. A 2019 Human Rights Watch report listed at least 14 separate Zero Unit operations with credible evidence of war crimes, including the killing of women and children during night raids. ProPublica’s Lynzy Billing, who spent years interviewing Zero Unit soldiers and their victims, quotes one fighter saying bluntly that Americans pointed out the targets and Afghans “hit them,” then signed battle damage assessments that reported no civilian deaths even when women and children lay in the rubble.

The defenders of these units reply that they were also extremely effective against Taliban and ISIS commanders. That is likely true. CIA officers and US special operators did not invest years in training useless proxies. But the moral problem is not efficiency, it is method. These units were built to be deniable, to operate in the shadows, to shoot first and count bodies later, if at all. The whole architecture was designed to insulate American political leadership from hard questions about who was being killed in the dead of night. It is one thing, though already questionable, to use such forces on foreign soil in an existential war. It is quite another thing to fly them, with minimal rethinking and minimal safeguards, into US suburbs.

Operation Allies Welcome was Biden’s signature evacuation policy in the chaotic weeks after Kabul fell. By the administration’s own count, almost 100,000 Afghans were brought to the US under its umbrella. Among them were interpreters and embassy staff, but also large numbers of Afghan special operators, including at least 2,000 Zero Unit members. Major outlets now report that whole clusters of Zero Unit veterans were resettled in and around Seattle and other major US cities. Rolling Stone describes the Zero Unit diaspora in America as “the CIA’s secret Afghan army starting new lives in the US,” with many still in touch with former handlers. There is something deeply strange about that phrase. Secret armies are not supposed to have American zip codes.

The case for evacuation was presented in moral terms. These men fought beside us, we were told, and so we owed them a safe haven. There is an emotional appeal here, and it is strongest in cases where Afghans risked their lives as linguists or civil society allies. Yet moral debts are not unlimited IOUs, and they do not negate governments’ first obligation to protect their own citizens. Even if we bracket, for the sake of argument, the contested human rights record of the Zero Units, it takes only a moment’s reflection to see the hazard in resettling thousands of heavily conditioned commandos into a civilian culture they do not know, in a language they barely speak, with no plan beyond dropping them in apartments and wishing them good luck.

The facts emerging about Lakanwal’s life in the US are depressingly predictable. He arrived with his wife and five children and settled in Bellingham, Washington. Reports from local advocates and landlords describe a man drifting into isolation, cycling through unstable jobs, taking sudden long road trips, and sinking into what one email called “dark depression.” The Associated Press obtained correspondence from a community worker who repeatedly warned that he was becoming severely withdrawn, neglecting his children, and showing signs of self harm. At the same time, national security officials now say, he was almost certainly radicalized after arrival, consuming online material that reinforced a sense of grievance and martyrdom.

In other words, we took a man whose only adult skill set was lethal violence in a CIA designed environment of deniability, dropped him into an alien culture with minimal support, and then hoped that social services and refugee nonprofits would do what years of discipline, trauma, and ideological conflict could not. This is not a serious immigration system. It is a wish.

The problem is not that Afghans, as a people, are uniquely prone to violence. The problem is that the Zero Units are not a random cross section of Afghans. They are a very specific population, selected precisely because they could be turned into uncompromising instruments of violence, taught to kick in doors at night, trained to push past the inhibitions most human beings feel when a rifle is pointed at another man’s chest in front of his children.

Human rights groups that are generally sympathetic to refugees have been warning about this design flaw for years. When Biden announced evacuation flights, Human Rights Watch stressed that members of abusive Afghan forces, including Zero Unit veterans, might themselves require third country relocation or prosecution, not quiet importation into Western cities. Billing’s reporting in ProPublica documents how some Zero Unit soldiers, wracked by guilt, described themselves as “broken men” who struggled to sleep and drank heavily between missions. Kurdish German trauma specialists interviewed for those investigations warned that repeated exposure to violence produces complex, multi generational trauma and that without structured treatment, the risk of self destruction or outward violence remains high.

The administration’s answer has been that Operation Allies Welcome vetting was “multi layered” and “rigorous,” involving intelligence databases, biometric checks, and interviews. We should be clear about what such vetting can and cannot do. It can sometimes catch known terrorists, known criminals, and individuals flagged by existing records. It cannot see inside someone’s mind. It cannot tell you which of two Zero Unit team leaders is quietly unraveling, or which one will process the loss of a comrade by reading his way into extremist forums. To rely on vetting alone is to confuse a background check with a psychological evaluation.

Defenders also stress that Zero Unit fighters were among the most thoroughly vetted Afghans during the war itself. That simply proves the point. The same system that supposedly vetted them overseas also produced, by every serious independent account, a record of civilian killings, botched raids, and unaccountable night operations that poisoned local support for the Afghan government. ProPublica’s tally of at least 452 civilians killed by only one Zero Unit, the 02 force in Nangarhar, over four years is likely an undercount, yet it was enough to shock even members of Congress who saw the numbers. If that is what “thoroughly vetted” looked like overseas, we should not be reassured by the claim that those very same systems filtered who got on the evacuation flights.

One might ask what the alternative was. Should we simply have left Zero Unit members to face Taliban revenge? The Taliban have in fact hunted and killed former 03 officers, as Human Rights Watch documented after the fall of Kandahar. So the danger to them is real. Yet granting that fact does not force the conclusion that the only humane response is permanent admission to the US……SNIP