Voters won’t buy ‘freedom in Iran’ while Minneapolis goes lawless



My buddy Ryan Rhodes, who’s running for Congress in Iowa’s 4th District, drove north to Minnesota to see the chaos in Minneapolis up close. What he found looked worse than the headlines.

“You have a really Islamo-communist set of people who we have imported” to this country, Rhodes told me. “I think you’ve got a lot of Muslim Brotherhood agents in there, people whose message is, ‘We have taken over this city.’ Forget just elections. We lose our country if we keep allowing these people to come in.”

Americans can handle hard truths. They can handle sacrifice. They can handle a fight. What they won’t handle is watching the bad guys win again.

Rhodes wasn’t talking like a guy chasing clicks. He sounded like a guy staring at the map and realizing tyranny doesn’t need a passport. It can sit three hours from your front door.

So forgive me if I don’t have much patience for the foreign-policy sermonizing right now. How am I supposed to sell voters on “freedom in Iran” while Minneapolis slides toward lawlessness and Washington keeps acting powerless to stop it?

That pitch collapses fast with working-class Americans, especially while the economy limps along and trust remains thin on the ground. Republican voters want competence, results, and consequences for people who harm the country. They want accountability at home first.

We’ve lived what happens without it.

COVID cracked Trump’s first term because bureaucrats and “experts” ran wild, issued edicts, trashed livelihoods, and faced zero consequences. Then the George Floyd riots poured gasoline on the fire. Cities burned while federal authorities watched the destruction unfold.

Trump’s comeback last year required more than winning an election. It required overcoming a full-scale assault on the country’s spirit — and on the right to live as free citizens. The machine didn’t just beat Republicans at the ballot box. It hunted them. Roughly 1,400 Americans were rounded up by the Biden regime over the January 6 “insurrection.” They went after Trump too. They went after anyone in their way.

Those four years didn’t just wreck careers in Washington. They reached down to the local level — school boards acting like petty dictators, public health officials issuing mask and jab mandates, and doctors’ offices turning into political compliance centers. Families paid the price.

Now the country watches the same disease spread again.

People see domestic radicals attack federal officers in the streets. They watch Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) posture like a man protecting the mob, not the public. They hear Minneapolis leaders talk like ICE has no right to exist inside city limits. The footage looks like a warning, not an isolated event.

Remember CHAZ/CHOP in Seattle in 2020? That’s the template: Declare a zone off-limits to law, romanticize the lawlessness, and dare the state to reassert control. Every time the government blinks, the radicals learn the lesson: Push harder.

Demoralization has started to set in. I see it on Facebook and on the ground. In Iowa, I’m seeing campaign photos that would’ve been unthinkable in past cycles: small crowds, low energy, people staying home. Iowa has its first open Republican gubernatorial primary in 15 years, and the mood should feel electric. Instead, it feels like exhaustion.

As things stand, fewer Republicans will vote in the June primary than voted in the 2016 Iowa caucuses. That’s unheard of. Iowa has more than 700,000 registered Republicans. I wouldn’t bet on even 200,000 showing up.

That should terrify the White House.

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Trump isn’t on the ballot in Iowa anymore. He doesn’t need to win another primary. But the movement still needs to win elections. It needs to win them in places like Iowa — and it needs to win them while the country watches cities like Minneapolis drift toward foreign-flag politics and open contempt for American sovereignty.

Rhodes put it bluntly: If we don’t stop this, we’re watching an Islamic conquest play out in real time, one “sanctuary” city at a time. Great Britain didn’t fall in a day. It surrendered by degrees.

So what do voters need to see now?

Not another speech. Not another promise. Not another commission. Not another “investigation” that ends in a shrug.

They need to see what they were promised when Trump ran for a second term: accountability.

If the country watches Minnesota slide into open defiance of federal law and nobody pays a price for it, voters will conclude the system can’t defend them. And if the system can’t defend them at home, it has no credibility abroad.

Start with Minnesota. Make it plain that “no-go zones” don’t exist in the United States. Enforce the law. Protect federal agents. Prosecute the people who assault them. Strip federal money from jurisdictions that obstruct enforcement. Treat organized lawlessness like organized lawlessness, not a political disagreement.

Americans can handle hard truths. They can handle sacrifice. They can handle a fight.

What they won’t handle is watching the bad guys win again — without consequences.

America now looks like a marriage headed for divorce — with no exit



Marriages rarely end over one argument. They fall apart through a long breakdown in communication, a growing inability to resolve disagreements, and the slow realization that two people no longer walk toward the same future.

Healthy marriages don’t require full agreement on every subject. They require compromise on the decisions that shape daily life: money, children, priorities, responsibilities. They also require shared goals.

No tidy divorce court exists for a nation-state. We share one flag, one legal framework, and one public square.

When those goals diverge — and neither side will realign — the relationship becomes unsustainable. The law calls the condition “irreconcilable differences.”

America now lives in that condition.

We remain bound under one nation, one Constitution, and one civic home. But we no longer share a common purpose. We no longer share a common story about what the country is, why it exists, or whether it deserves to endure.

This conflict no longer turns on tax rates or regulatory policy. It turns on the legitimacy and direction of the American experiment itself.

The modern left no longer argues about how to preserve the American system. It treats the system as the problem. Democratic leaders and activists call for “fundamental transformation,” flirt with socialism, and talk about the founding less as a flawed but noble legacy than as a moral failure that demands replacement. In that worldview, America doesn’t need reform. America needs erasure.

The right still believes the country can be repaired and preserved. The left increasingly treats the country as something to dismantle.

This rupture shows up in concrete ways. In 2021, the National Archives placed a “harmful language” warning on the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence — the documents that define the nation. That doesn’t signal ordinary partisan dispute. It signals contempt for the country’s moral foundation.

Socialism sits at the center of this divide. It contradicts the American system at its roots. America rests on the premise that rights come from God, not government. Socialism elevates the state over the individual and makes rights conditional on political approval. It centralizes power in the name of enforced equality — “equity.”

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America protects private property as an extension of liberty. It channels ambition into innovation and prosperity. Socialism treats success as a social offense and demands equality of outcome. When people refuse to surrender the fruits of their labor, socialism turns to coercion. Coercion requires centralized authority. Centralized authority punishes dissent.

The pattern repeats: less freedom, greater dependency, and a governing model incompatible with constitutional self-rule.

The irony remains hard to miss. The left calls Donald Trump “Hitler” while cheering figures like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an avowed socialist. Yet the Nazi Party sold itself as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party — a collectivist project built on centralized power and state control.

The same left often excuses Antifa, a movement built on intimidation, street violence, and political enforcement designed to silence opposition. Those tactics don’t belong to liberal democracy. They belong to regimes that fear debate.

Even basic reality has become contested. The left and right can’t agree on something as elemental as what a man or a woman is. The Supreme Court recently showcased the collapse when ACLU attorneys arguing sex-based discrimination refused to define “woman.” When a society refuses to name biological facts that every civilization once treated as obvious, compromise collapses with it.

This crisis goes deeper than polarization. It reaches the level of knowledge itself. The left increasingly treats biology, history, and moral limits as malleable social constructs. The right still believes objective reality binds us all.

These aren’t normal disagreements. They describe incompatible worldviews. And incompatibility carries consequences.

During the COVID era, polls found majorities of Democrats willing to endorse coercive measures against the unvaccinated, including house arrest. Nearly half supported imprisoning people who questioned vaccine efficacy. Those numbers didn’t represent a fringe. They revealed a growing comfort with state force in service of ideological conformity.

After Trump’s 2016 election, many friendships survived political conflict. By 2020, after years of dehumanization — after constant accusations of “Nazism” aimed at ordinary voters — many of those relationships broke. The political battle stopped sounding like disagreement and started sounding like moral extermination.

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In September 2025, someone assassinated Charlie Kirk. Large segments of the left didn’t just rationalize the killing. Many celebrated it.

After Scott Adams died following a long fight with cancer, prominent voices responded with mockery instead of decency. People magazine ran a headline labeling him “disgraced.” Even death became a political verdict.

This is what irreconcilable differences look like at a national scale.

A country cannot endure when one side believes the nation stands as fundamentally good — worthy of preservation and reform — while the other believes it stands as irredeemably evil and must be dismantled. Marriages end when partners stop seeing each other as allies and start treating each other as enemies.

Nations fracture for the same reason.

America cannot solve this the way a couple dissolves a marriage. The Constitution binds us to one civic order. No clean separation awaits. No tidy divorce court exists for a nation-state. We share one flag, one legal framework, and one public square.

When irreconcilable differences exist but separation remains impossible, the danger grows.

Only three paths remain: recommitment to constitutional principles, enforced coexistence through expanding coercion, or escalation into open conflict as dehumanization becomes normal.

Pretending this amounts to another election cycle, another policy dispute, or another cable-news food fight invites catastrophe. A nation cannot survive when its people no longer agree on what it is, why it exists, or whether it deserves to continue.

Unlike a failed marriage, America can’t walk away.

A protest doesn’t become lawful because Don Lemon livestreams it



What should have been a peaceful Sunday service at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, turned into a political ambush. Roughly 30 anti-ICE protesters pushed into the sanctuary mid-worship, chanting slogans and confronting church leaders as families tried to pray.

Disgraced former CNN anchor Don Lemon was there, too, livestreaming the chaos.

If activists can storm a church mid-service, scream at families, and then hide behind the First Amendment, the standard becomes simple: The loudest mob sets the rules.

The Department of Justice has opened a formal investigation and signaled that federal protections for houses of worship may apply. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon noted on the “Glenn Beck Program” that the activists’ conduct could implicate the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which bars intimidation, obstruction, and interference with the free exercise of religion in places of worship. The protesters may have also violated the Ku Klux Klan Act, a post-Civil War law that makes it illegal to terrorize and violate the civil rights of citizens.

According to multiple reports, the demonstrators were tied to the Racial Justice Network and aimed their protest at a church leader they accused of working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The protest followed rising tensions in Minnesota after the fatal shooting of anti-ICE activist Renee Nicole Good during a confrontation with federal agents.

Lemon framed the entire spectacle as civic virtue. He insisted he was “not an activist, but a journalist” and argued that protest inside a church remains constitutionally protected speech.

The footage tells a messier story.

Video released after the incident shows Lemon interacting with the group beforehand, appearing familiar with organizers and the plan. One outlet described the operation as “Operation Pull-Up.” That undercuts the narrative Lemon later pushed — that he simply arrived to document an event that unexpectedly “spilled” into a worship service.

Intent matters. So does outcome. The outcome looked like this: a sanctuary overrun, a service derailed, congregants shaken, and children crying while activists shouted and gestured at the pews.

That is far from “peaceful assembly.” It is targeted disruption.

The First Amendment protects speech. It does not grant a roaming license to invade private spaces and commandeer them for political theater. Rights have edges because other people have rights too. Worshippers do not lose their liberty because activists feel righteous.

That basic distinction keeps a free society from collapsing into a contest of intimidation.

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This case matters because it tests whether the country still draws that line. If activists can storm a church mid-service, scream at families, and then hide behind the First Amendment, the standard becomes simple: The loudest mob sets the rules. Next week it will be another church. Then a synagogue. Then any gathering that activists decide deserves punishment.

The Justice Department is right to examine the FACE Act here. Congress passed it to stop coercion dressed up as protest — the use of obstruction and intimidation to prevent Americans from exercising basic freedoms. That principle doesn’t change because the target shifts from an abortion clinic to a church sanctuary.

The press corps’ selective outrage makes the problem worse. Cultural elites demand “safety” and “inclusion” in every other arena, but many of them treat Christian worship as an acceptable target. They police speech in classrooms and boardrooms, then shrug when activists shout down prayer.

That double standard signals something deeper than hypocrisy. It signals permission.

Lemon’s defense captured the rot in one sentence: Making people uncomfortable, he said, is “what protests are about.” Fine. Protest often makes people uncomfortable. But discomfort does not justify trespass. It does not excuse intimidation. It does not cancel someone else’s right to worship in peace.

A society that cannot protect sacred spaces will not protect much else for long. If the law refuses to punish conduct like this, the lesson will spread fast: Invade, disrupt, harass — then claim virtue and dare anyone to stop you.

America does not need a new normal where mobs treat churches like political stages. It needs consequences.

The left’s ‘fascism’ routine is a permission slip for violence



The alternate reality Democrats have constructed is falling apart in real time. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said the following when asked to comment on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shooting a woman in Minneapolis who was attempting to run over the agent with her car: “What we saw today was a criminal, a criminal, murder a woman and shoot her in the head while she was trying to escape and flee for her life.”

She then called “disgusting” the “editorializing” of those who argue that the ICE agent was in front of the car as it was accelerating, just before he fired. “Watch it for yourself, watch it for yourself,” she concluded, with supreme confidence that any viewer would see with the same skew of her own lens.

A significant portion of the American media and popular culture has normalized the idea that totalitarians have taken over the government.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D) went even harder over the rhetorical cliff in responding to the shooting. He classified interpretations of the ICE officer’s action as self-defense as “bull***t” and demanded that ICE “get the f**k out of Minneapolis.” Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) in New York followed suit, calling the event a “murder” and a “horror.”

It is a stark bit of evidence of how American society has been warped by the twisted rhetoric of the radical left regarding political conflict in our country.

The video from the officer who fired at the vehicle indicates clearly, however, that it was accelerating in his direction, with him close enough to touch the hood. How is it possible to watch video footage and see it as the “murder” of someone “flee[ing] for her life”? The vehicle was illegally blocking a law enforcement vehicle. Instead of complying with the demand to exit the vehicle as any sane person would do, the driver hit the gas, making contact with the law enforcement officer before being shot.

Are we to believe that ICE agents came there precisely to kill her?

The New York Times published a video analysis that supposedly debunks the claim that the agent fired in self-defense. How? Well, the wheels of the SUV turned to the right just in time to avoid hitting the agent. Never mind that the agent was standing just in front of the vehicle when it started to move forward quickly, and he moved to avoid it. By the Times’ logic, the agent would apparently have been justified to use force only after the SUV had hit him.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) said he doubts an FBI investigation of the shooting could reach a “fair outcome.” He’s given no reason why he believes this. But of course, if your view is that all sides not directly aligned with you ideologically are Nazis, this is a logical conclusion.

One might first hypothesize that Ocasio-Cortez, Frey, Walz, Mamdani, and others who share their bizarre interpretation of the evidence are cognitively challenged in some way. We do not wholly discount this possibility.

But the more likely answer is that such things become possible when a significant portion of the American media and popular culture has normalized the idea that totalitarians have taken over the government and are actively looking to kill their opponents. In such a scenario, attempting to run over the totalitarians with your car might not only be an acceptable choice — it might be the most moral one.

The Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin connected the event to the language the far left has been using to describe ICE: “This is the direct consequence of constant attacks and demonization of our officers by sanctuary politicians who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement who are facing [a] 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.”

There is no doubt that political radicals have been foaming at the mouth about ICE and other aspects of the Trump administration’s policies in the most extremist language. They’ve justified using violence against them even since before the first Trump administration took office.

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The alleged assassin who murdered Charlie Kirk in September, who was involved in a relationship with a transsexual, had come to believe that Kirk and other conservatives who criticized the overreach of trans radical activism were such a deadly threat that only lethal force was appropriate. He wrote anti-fascist messages on the casings of the bullets he used.

None of this is a surprise in a culture in which American nationalism is seen as the equivalent of Nazism and violent attacks against the Trump administration and its supporters are cheered on and encouraged. And it is not just the explicitly political media that embraces this insanity.

Witness the response to “One Battle After Another,” the recent film by Paul Thomas Anderson, loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Vineland.” Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn, the film cheerleads for a radical anti-fascist terrorist organization as they wage war on American police and immigration forces. Penn is cast in a stupendously comical role as a caricature of which the left never tires: He is a military figure and a white supremacist who nonetheless is sexually attracted to nonwhites. All of the admirable figures in the film are revolutionary terrorists. The response by critics in the mainstream media has been a virtually unanimous cheer.

We are in a dangerous place. Leftist radicals are giving no indication of cooling their rhetoric — or their actions.

Buckle up. It is going to get rougher before it gets better.

Editor’s note: This article appeared originally at the American Mind.

When human worth becomes conditional, caregiving becomes impossible



Most people can care for an ill or disabled loved one for a week on compassion alone. Some can do it for a month. A few can make it a year or two.

But when care stretches into decades, compassion stops carrying the load. Emotion fades. Circumstances grind. What remains isn’t how someone feels about a life. What remains is whether they believe that life still matters.

When a culture treats reality as optional, action becomes dangerous and courage looks reckless. Without shared moral ground, bravery itself becomes suspect.

Caregiving strips life down to essentials. It forces a question our culture prefers to keep abstract: Why does this life still have value when it costs so much to sustain it?

C.S. Lewis warned that a society cannot survive if it mocks virtue while demanding its fruits. In “The Abolition of Man,” he described “men without chests” — people trained to think and desire but not to stand. Without a formed moral center, courage collapses. Duty feels suspect. Endurance looks irrational.

Caregivers learn this in a harsh classroom.

You cannot sustain decades of care if human worth is negotiable. You cannot rise day after day to guard the vulnerable if life’s value depends on productivity, independence, improvement, or the absence of suffering. Long care requires stewardship — the conviction that a life has been entrusted to us, not evaluated by us.

I once met a man who told me he was dating a woman in a wheelchair. He spoke with genuine enthusiasm about how good it made him feel to do everything for her. He sounded animated, even proud. He talked at length about his experience, his emotions, the satisfaction he drew from being needed.

He said very little about her.

I asked how long they’d been dating.

“Two weeks,” he said, beaming.

I smiled wearily and told him, “Get back to me in two decades.”

Care that depends on how it makes us feel rarely survives once feeling fades. What endures over decades isn’t the satisfaction of being needed. It’s settled clarity about the worth of the person being cared for, independent of what the caregiver receives in return.

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In that man’s excitement, everything centered on his emotions. What was missing was any recognition of her value apart from her condition — or apart from what caring for her did for him.

I didn’t hear, "I’m dating a woman," or "I’ve met someone extraordinary." I heard, again and again, "I’m dating a woman in a wheelchair." The chair became the headline, not the person. He might as well have celebrated the better parking.

She had become useful to him. That’s not the same thing as being valued.

This way of thinking doesn’t stay confined to personal relationships. It scales.

The public reckoning surrounding Daniel Penny exposed it. He acted to protect others he believed were in danger — not because it felt good but because action was required. That kind of clarity now unsettles a society more comfortable with sentiment than obligation.

We claim we want people to intervene, to protect others, to act decisively when danger appears. Then someone does, and we hesitate. We second-guess. We prosecute. We distance ourselves.

We want courage but not conviction.

Lewis wouldn’t be surprised. When a culture treats reality as optional, action becomes dangerous and courage looks reckless. Responsibility suddenly feels threatening. Without shared moral ground, bravery itself becomes suspect.

Francis Schaeffer traced the path forward from that confusion. Once a culture detaches human worth from anything objective, it stops honoring life and starts managing it. Value becomes conditional. And conditions always change.

That logic now shows itself in plain view. When Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.) pushes to legalize medical aid in dying in New York, the same fracture appears. We punish those who act as though life must be defended, while elevating leaders who treat life as something to administer and conclude.

Those aren’t separate debates. They’re the same belief, applied differently.

If life holds value only when it functions well, caregiving becomes irrational. If worth depends on autonomy, dependence becomes disposable. If suffering disqualifies, endurance becomes foolish.

And yet caregivers endure.

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That clarity came back to me during a conversation on my radio show. A man described a brief illness his wife had suffered. The house fell apart. Meals became takeout. Work got missed. Romance disappeared. He sounded exhausted just recalling it.

“What carried you through?” I asked.

He paused. “I guess ... love.”

“How long did this last?” I said.

“Five days.”

“I guess ... love” carried him through five days.

Uncertainty can survive a week. It cannot sustain 14,000 days.

He wasn’t wrong though. Love matters. But love that sustains five days must anchor itself in something deeper to sustain 40 years.

Caregivers may begin with compassion. They endure with conviction.

A life doesn’t become less valuable because it becomes harder to carry.

Caregiving isn’t a special category of moral life. It is a concentrated version of the human condition. What sustains caregivers over time is what sustains courage, faithfulness, and duty anywhere else.

Lewis reminded us that our feelings don’t create value. They respond to it. When we reverse that order, we don’t become more compassionate. We lose our bearings.

Treating human worth as conditional may flatter our emotions. It may even make us feel noble. But it trains us to prize how we feel over the people entrusted to our care.

Over time, that trade leaves us prosecuting men like Daniel Penny while electing leaders like Kathy Hochul.

It might soothe the heart for a moment.

It cannot sustain a society.

Antitrust panic helped kill an American robotics pioneer



Antitrust regulators claim to protect competition. Their decision to block Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot did the opposite. It helped drive an American robotics pioneer into bankruptcy last December and pushed it into the arms of a Chinese creditor.

Antitrust law is supposed to defend consumers and prevent monopoly abuse. In this case, regulators killed a deal that could have kept iRobot alive, preserved American jobs, and strengthened a U.S. company facing brutal Chinese competition. Instead, the collapse of the acquisition forced iRobot into a court-supervised restructuring in which Shenzhen Picea Robotics — its largest Chinese creditor and key supplier — will take the company’s equity and cancel roughly $264 million in debt.

Ultimately, the acquisition’s collapse pushed iRobot into a deal with its largest Chinese creditor.

iRobot began in 1990, founded by roboticists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The company built military and space exploration products before it introduced the Roomba in 2002, the device that turned home robotics into a household category. For years, iRobot stood as a rare American success story in consumer robotics.

Then the market shifted. Chinese manufacturers poured in with cheaper models, tighter supply chains, and rapid iteration. iRobot’s share price peaked in 2021, then slid hard over the next year. The company sought a lifeline and found one in Amazon, which agreed to acquire iRobot for roughly $1.7 billion.

That deal made strategic sense. iRobot needed capital, scale, and distribution power to compete against Chinese rivals such as Roborock, Ecovacs, Dreame, and Xiaomi. Amazon could have provided all three. Consumers likely would have seen faster innovation, deeper device integration, and lower prices, while iRobot kept more of its footprint and engineering talent intact.

Regulators saw a different story. The European Commission objected on antitrust grounds and signaled it would block the acquisition. The commission argued the deal could restrict competition in robot vacuum cleaners by allowing Amazon to disadvantage rival products on its marketplace. American critics piled on, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who framed the acquisition as an attempt to buy out competition, along with privacy fears about Roomba’s mapping technology.

Facing regulatory opposition, Amazon and iRobot terminated the agreement in January 2024. Amazon’s general counsel, David Zapolsky, warned that the decision would deny consumers faster innovation and more competitive prices, while leaving iRobot weaker against foreign rivals operating under very different regulatory constraints.

The warnings proved accurate. After the deal collapsed, iRobot announced deep cost-cutting, including a 31% workforce reduction. The company shifted more production to Vietnam to compete on cost. Chinese brands continued to eat the market.

By December 2025, iRobot filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and announced a restructuring deal that hands control to Shenzhen Picea Robotics. According to iRobot’s own announcement, Picea will acquire the equity of the reorganized company through the court process and cancel about $264 million in debt.

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That outcome should haunt every regulator who claimed to defend competition. Regulators blocked an American acquisition and ended up delivering a storied American company to a Chinese creditor. They did not preserve a competitor. They helped bury it.

The iRobot collapse exposes a central problem with modern antitrust enforcement: Officials often substitute fear-driven hypotheticals for real-world consequences. They imagine a future in which Amazon squeezes competitors and consumers pay more. They ignore the present in which Chinese firms gain market power, American companies lose ground, and U.S. workers pay the price.

Markets discipline failure quickly. Regulators rarely pay for their mistakes. They can block a deal, watch a company fall apart, and declare victory because they prevented a theoretical harm.

This case produced the opposite of the intended result. Regulators killed a merger that could have strengthened an American company against Chinese competition. They weakened competition in the robot vacuum market by removing one of the few U.S.-based pioneers from the field. They also shrank the number of meaningful paths forward for iRobot until only one remained: a takeover by the company’s Chinese lender and supplier.

Policymakers should learn the right lesson. Antitrust action should not operate as a reflex against size or success. Regulators should measure outcomes, not slogans. If officials claim they protect competition, they should not celebrate decisions that end in bankruptcy and foreign control.

From ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ to ‘drive, baby, drive’



The shooting death of Renee Macklin Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has quickly become a rallying point in the broader political battle over immigration enforcement under the Trump administration.

It should also be a lesson for the rest of us to wait for all the facts before making judgments and especially to beware of media narratives that try to simplify complicated events.

When journalists and commentators repeat an unverified transcription as fact, they do more than simplify a complex event. They create a moral narrative that can endanger real people.

Videos of the shooting, which took place on January 7, have been widely circulated, including one taken by Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who fired the fatal shot. You would think that since the shooting, or the circumstances surrounding it, are on video, it would be easy to determine responsibility for Good’s death.

But instead, we have evidence once again that eyewitnesses — in this case all of us who have watched the videos — cannot be depended upon to get the story straight.

I am talking in particular about the near-universally repeated narrative that Good’s wife, Becca, shouted, “Drive, baby, drive!” in the split second before Good was killed. The phrase appears to have traveled with early write-ups of the Alpha News-distributed agent-perspective video, then hardened into “fact” as larger outlets repeated it. That goes for everyone from right-wing Just the News (“Drive, baby! Drive, drive!”) to left-wing CNN (the more common “Drive, baby, drive!”).

From the time I first read this representation, I began publicly questioning the interpretation by posting comments online. I’ve listened to the audio hundreds of times by now, and there is no way I can hear those words. Instead, I watch Becca Good hear an officer shout, “Get out of the f**king car” at her wife, try the passenger door handle and realize it is locked, and then recognize that Renee is preparing to accelerate. At that point, she screams either “Do not drive!” or more likely “Don’t drive!”

Not only do the words fit the audio pattern better, but they also make more sense as a response to the circumstances. Yet throughout the media, everyone repeats the “drive, baby, drive” narrative without any hesitation. I later heard commentator Megyn Kelly argue that Becca Good should be arrested — even suggesting felony liability — based on the assumption that she urged her wife to flee.

Kelly went so far as to say that Becca Good should be in custody now, but that claim depends entirely on a transcription that may not be accurate. What if the wife never even said, “drive, baby, drive” at all? What if it was all just a media invention?

It’s not like that has never happened before. Do you remember “hands up, don’t shoot”?

That was the media narrative to describe the shooting of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, Missouri, policeman in 2014. The progressive left picked up the battle cry and accused Officer Darren Wilson of killing the teenager while he was in the act of surrender.

It wasn’t true, but it took weeks for the truth to come out — that Brown had approached Wilson in his patrol car and tried to wrestle the officer’s gun away from him. Shooting Brown was the only way for Wilson to protect himself and others. Yet because of the media narrative, Wilson was put in danger of arrest and of worse — as angry mobs in Ferguson sought justice based on a fairy tale.

Now, 12 years later, another shorthand narrative was out of control. Unable to find any outlet that had questioned the transcription as I had, I turned to an AI-based audio analysis tool, ChatGPT, to examine the clip more rigorously than the human ear alone allows.

Using slowed playback and spectrogram analysis, it reported its results. Bottom line (short answer):

  • The audio does not support “drive baby drive.”
  • It is far more consistent with “don’t drive” (or “do not drive”) spoken urgently.
  • I would rate confidence moderate to high, given the recording quality.

Asked why “drive, baby, drive” does not fit the sound signature on the audio, ChatGPT responded:

I isolated the quoted moment from the clearest clip available to me and examined it as a time-frequency spectrogram (a standard way to visualize speech). The widely repeated phrase “drive baby drive” doesn’t match what’s in the recording. The utterance is too short for three words, and the audio lacks the distinct consonant bursts you would expect for “baby” (two clear “b” onsets). The sound pattern is more consistent with a prohibitive command such as “don’t drive” or “do not drive,” delivered urgently.

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I’m not asking anyone to treat AI as an oracle — only to notice what happens when the slowed audio and the spectrogram don’t match the confident captioning. Perhaps ChatGPT and I are both wrong. But I don’t think so. After repeated playback, I could not hear anything resembling the word “baby.” And if the argument is that the audio portion of the video recording is too ambiguous for a definitive conclusion, then that point should have been made to the hundreds of media outlets that ran with the “drive, baby, drive” narrative — not with me for questioning it.

Deciding whether Officer Ross was justified in shooting Renee Good does not hinge on what Becca Good said in a moment of panic. But public judgment — and calls for criminal punishment — clearly have. When journalists and commentators repeat an unverified transcription as fact, they do more than simplify a complex event. They create a moral narrative that can endanger real people.

If the audio is ambiguous, that ambiguity should have been reported as such from the beginning. If it is not, then the words attributed to Becca Good deserve correction. Even if I’m wrong about the exact words, the larger point stands: If the audio is ambiguous, it should never have been presented as a definitive quote — and certainly not used to justify calls for prosecution.

In cases like this, restraint is not just appropriate. It is the responsibility that journalists owe their readers. And readers should demand the same restraint from those who claim to inform them.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

Judges now veto Trump prosecutors after the Senate stalls confirmations



One of the core executive powers is the authority to prosecute criminals. Article II of the Constitution assigns “the executive power” — all of it — to the president of the United States. In practice, the power to execute the laws against those who have violated them is delegated by the president to the attorney general, the Department of Justice she heads, and the 93 U.S. attorneys spread across the country.

Yet since he took office for the second time last January, President Trump and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, have had a heck of a time getting their people in place.

The criminal prosecution work of the US attorneys’ offices does not abate while Washington plays out its slow-walking games.

Of the roughly 50 U.S. attorney nominations the president has sent to the Senate, fewer than half — just 19 — had been confirmed by December 15, and all of those but three were confirmed en masse in October, some 10 months after Trump took office. Although another 13 were confirmed en masse on December 18, 14 are still awaiting confirmation as we approach the one-year mark of Trump’s second term.

A good bit of the holdup is caused by the Senate’s “blue-slip” process, whereby nominations will not be considered unless both senators from the nominee’s home state return a blue slip allowing the nominee to be considered.

Originally designed to allow input from the elected senators who presumably are most familiar with the nominee’s qualifications and temperament — the “advice” part of the “advice and consent” process mentioned in the Constitution — the refusal to return a blue slip has become an obstructionist tactic deployed by Democratic senators bent on blocking as much of Trump’s agenda as they can.

But the criminal prosecution work of the U.S. attorneys’ offices does not abate while Washington plays out its slow-walking games, and the president of the United States — the nation’s top executive and chief law enforcement officer, who has the constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” — needs to have people in charge of those offices.

RELATED: The ‘blue-slip block’ is GOP cowardice masquerading as tradition

Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Democratic obstruction

The Constitution’s default rule for the appointment of U.S. attorneys is presidential nomination followed by Senate confirmation. But because U.S. attorneys are “inferior officers” in the Constitution’s language, Congress can allow for appointments by the president alone, by the heads of the executive departments, or by the courts of law. It has done so by allowing the attorney general to appoint “interim” U.S. attorneys for up to 120 days to fill vacancies.

But after the 120-day period expires, the interim can remain in charge of the office only if the district court in that jurisdiction approves. Six of the U.S. attorneys appointed to interim positions have been rejected by their respective district courts: Bill Essayli in the Central District of California, Julianne Murray in the District of Delaware, Sigal Chattah in the District of Nevada, Alina Habba in the District of New Jersey, Ryan Ellison in the District of New Mexico, and John Sarcone in the Northern District of New York. Not surprisingly, five of these district courts are overwhelmingly stacked with Democrat-appointed judges, another outgrowth of the more aggressive “blue-slip” policy that has been deployed by Democratic senators in the last decade.

The Nevada District Court has seven judges, for example, and all seven were appointed by either President Obama or President Biden. It’s the same situation with the Northern District of New York, where all five judges on that court were appointed by Obama or Biden. The New Jersey District Court has 17 judges, and all but two (both George W. Bush appointees, not Trump appointees) were appointed by either Obama or Biden. The Central District of California has 28 judges, and fewer than one-third were appointed by Republicans. And five of the seven federal judges in New Mexico were appointed by Obama or Biden.

Alina Habba, who brought the indictment against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) for interfering with Immigration and Customs Enforcement enforcement operations, was famously disqualified by the District Court in New Jersey after the cumulative 120-day period expired. And Lindsey Halligan — the interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia who obtained the high-profile indictments of former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly lying to Congress and of New York Attorney General Letitia James for allegedly falsely claiming a home in Virginia as her personal residence in order to obtain a more favorable mortgage interest rate — was disqualified by her local district court after the 120-day interim period in that office expired.

The bigger obstacle

The Department of Justice has said it will challenge these disqualifications on appeal. One issue will be whether the 120-day limit on the interim appointment authority is cumulative or successive. That is, if someone is appointed as interim U.S. attorney and then resigns before the expiration of the 120 days, does the attorney general get to appoint a new, different interim to fill the new vacancy for another 120 days, or does the new interim appointee only get to serve until the original 120-day clock expires?

The practice has been the latter, but that leaves the president without someone to exercise his executive authority in charge of the office, as long as the obstruction tactics in the Senate hold. That seems to be a big threat to the president’s ability to take care that the laws be faithfully executed and therefore a big Article II executive authority problem.

An even bigger obstacle for Trump, though one that has not received much attention, is the separation-of-powers problem lurking in this statutory scheme, which requires approval by the district court at the conclusion of the 120-day period.

Yes, the Constitution’s text allows for the appointment of inferior officers by the courts of law, which would technically allow Congress to create a scheme whereby the courts appoint the prosecutors who prosecute cases before them.

There is nothing in the records of sparse debate during the 1787 federal convention to suggest the drafters had such an interbranch appointment authority in mind however. Rather it would seem more likely that they intended inferior executive officers to be appointed by the president alone, or the heads of the executive departments, and inferior judicial officers to be appointed by the courts of law.

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Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images for ESSENCE

When it upheld the independent prosecutor law in the 1988 case of Morrison v. Olson, which had provided for the appointment by a “Special Division” of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the Supreme Court rejected that interbranch argument, but it also pointed out that the independent prosecutor statute was designed to allow for investigation and prosecution of high-ranking officials in the executive branch, and the interbranch appointment process therefore avoided the obvious conflicts of interest.

No such conflict exists in the run-of-the-mill appointment (or rejection) by district courts of interim U.S. attorneys at the expiration of the 120-day interim period. The interbranch appointment authority raises serious separation-of-powers concerns, and the Supreme Court has been particularly solicitous of them in recent years. It also raises serious concerns about the president's ability to take care that the laws be faithfully executed when the people executing them are not the ones he has chosen.

A century ago, in the case of Humphrey’s Executor v. the United States, the Supreme Court upheld congressional restrictions on the ability of the president to remove executive branch officials. But already on the Supreme Court’s docket this term is a case, Trump v. Slaughter, in which most observers rightly predict that it will overrule that old, New Deal-era case and restore a large measure of control of the executive branch to the head of that branch, the president — the only member of the entire executive branch that we the people actually elect.

If the Slaughter case ends up slaughtering the bad constitutional law from Humphrey’s Executor, it does not take much imagination to conclude that the question of judges appointing prosecutors who appear before them — that is, those officials who exercise the core executive function of prosecuting crimes — should also be in for a very serious reconsideration.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.

Scott Adams made Trump plausible before anyone else would



On the timeline of making America great again, two dates in 2015 stand out for anyone who backed Donald Trump before it was safe to do so.

On June 16, 2015, Trump came down the escalator in New York City and announced his run for president. The political class laughed. Conservative pundits mocked him. Commentators treated the whole thing as a stunt. A lifelong Democrat running as a Republican? A celebrity billionaire developer? Please. What a “clown.”

Scott understood something most people never learn: Bad reviews from bad people are good reviews. He also understood how to grieve with honor instead of self-pity.

Then came August 13, 2015.

That day, Scott Adams — the creator of “Dilbert” and a best-selling personal development author — published a blog post that reframed the entire race in a single phrase:

Usual frame:
Donald Trump is a clown.
Reframe:
Donald Trump is a clown genius.

That was Adams’ title: “Clown Genius.” And his point was simple: Trump wasn’t improvising. He was persuading. Adams wrote that Trump’s “value proposition” was to “Make America Great,” which meant selling the world on America again — what Adams called “good brand management.”

It sounds obvious now. It didn’t sound obvious then.

Adams became one of the first major nonpolitical public figures to say out loud what millions of Americans were starting to suspect: Trump wasn’t a joke. The joke was the people pretending they couldn’t see what was happening.

“Clown Genius” by Scott Adams, accessed via the Internet Archive

That post didn’t just defend Trump. It gave people permission. It gave tens of millions of everyday Americans cover to voice support for the one candidate the establishment of both parties hated more than anyone they had seen in decades. Adams called it before the polls did, and he kept calling it.

And, in the process, he helped change the course of human history.

He later packaged Trump’s persuasion methods into a book-length case study, “Win Bigly.” And famously, he assigned Trump a 98% chance of winning in 2016 — at a time when most of the media treated the idea as laughable.

Adams paid for that courage.

When he backed Trump in 2015, he didn’t just lose polite invitations. He lit his career on fire. He traded lavish speaking fees, safe corporate fame, and establishment approval for permanent exile from respectable opinion.

In October 2025, Adams described the price in stark terms:

When I decided ... to back Trump … I sacrificed everything. I sacrificed my social life. I sacrificed my career. I sacrificed my reputation. I may have sacrificed my health. And I did that because I believed it was worth it. … I’m really happy I lived long enough to see it. It was worth it. … It was worth it to be right.

Independent journalist and filmmaker Mike Cernovich made the point even more bluntly. Adams could have kept quiet, kept the corporate speaking gigs, and died richer. Instead, he chose the lonely road and earned something bigger than money. He became a legend.

For millions, Scott Adams was more than a cartoonist or a commentator. Worldwide, listeners of Scott’s daily show, “Coffee with Scott Adams,”knew him as our “internet dad.” If Trump is the father of MAGA, Scott is its honorary stepfather.

People didn’t just read him. They listened to him. They learned from him. They built confidence from his willingness to say what others wouldn’t.

President Trump made America great again. Scott Adams made Candidate Trump plausible in the first place.

After a long, public battle with prostate cancer, Scott Adams died on Tuesday, January 13. He was 68.

President Trump responded with a tribute that said more than many will admit.

— (@)

“Sadly, the Great Influencer, Scott Adams, has passed away. He was a fantastic guy, who liked and respected me when it wasn’t fashionable to do so. He bravely fought a long battle against a terrible disease. My condolences go out to his family, and all of his many friends and listeners. He will be truly missed. God bless you Scott!”

I’m one of those listeners and friends. More than that, I was Scott’s editor, and I remain the publisher of the Scott Adams library. He brought me on as a contributing editor for “Reframe Your Brain,” a book that has helped thousands of readers apply his signature “reframes” to work, money, relationships, and even faith.

As of this writing, “Reframe Your Brain” is the No. 1 best-seller on Amazon.

RELATED: Glenn Beck remembers Scott Adams: ‘A philosopher disguised as a stick-figure artist’

Phil Velasquez/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

Near the end of his life, Scott also made a quiet but meaningful choice. He accepted Pascal’s Wager — the simple risk-reward logic that faith in Jesus Christ is worth the bet. He pinned that profession to the top of his X.com profile in his final statement.

Scott was a father figure to me in the most practical sense. I asked his advice the way a son asks his dad. He was happy to oblige. That’s who he was: sharp, funny, and eager to be useful.

Now critics will rush in to re-litigate his controversies, including the 2023 livestream that helped get “Dilbert” pulled from newspapers. I wrote the truth for Newsweek at the time, after his remarks triggered an organized effort to kill his book deal and erase him from public life.

I worked with an author on a not-quite-banned book recently. Dilbert creator and bestselling author Scott Adams had his long-running comic strip ended by multiple newspapers and his forthcoming book contract canceled over some hyperbolic remarks on race that were intended to stir up discussion. Scott Adams’ books were twice banned, but Amazon reversed the decision. … Adams then went to his audience and let them know that there were people who didn’t want his book published, and they responded by buying it, en masse. Sales shot up.

Scott understood something most people never learn: Bad reviews from bad people are good reviews.

He also understood how to grieve with honor instead of self-pity. As he wrote in “Reframe Your Brain”:

When you experience the death of a loved one, your instincts push you into feeling tragedy, loss, and pain. Once you have had enough of that, and when you are ready, start tossing these five words around to release some of the pain: Gratitude. Respect. Honor. Privilege. Service.

Scott Adams lived those words. And now he belongs to the ages.

Scott won bigly.

Thank you, Scott.

Trump promised ‘retribution.’ Congress keeps funding the machine.



Courts can block executive action, so Congress must cut funding. Yet Republicans refuse, leaving the Justice Department and FBI with the same tools Democrats will use again.

That gap between rhetoric and action now threatens to erase everything President Trump promised. In March 2023, he vowed, “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” and pledged to “obliterate the deep state” and fire the bureaucrats who turned federal law enforcement into a political weapon. Those words land with force. Appropriations decide whether they mean anything.

Trump’s ‘retribution’ pledge will collapse into another campaign slogan if Republicans keep funding the same Department of Justice and FBI they claim to oppose.

But if Trump relies on executive action alone, courts will block key moves and the next Democrat in the White House will reverse the rest. Only structural reforms written into law can stop the next round of weaponization.

That reality hits hardest at the Department of Justice and the FBI. A Congress that keeps funding these agencies under the Biden-era architecture keeps the weaponization machine intact.

Yet Republicans just pushed through a Justice funding bill that drew more Democrat support than conservative support.

That vote captures the GOP Congress since 2017. Leadership passes budget bills with less resistance from Democrats than from Republicans. Spending is the battlefield. Everything else fades fast. If your own side opposes your funding bills more than the other side, you are not changing the country. You are managing the status quo.

Here’s the brutal truth: Congress has not structurally defanged the Justice Department’s weaponization or taken a sledgehammer to the FBI’s open-ended mandate. The same deep-state actors who drove January 6 abuses, FACE Act prosecutions of pro-life activists, and FBI operations like Arctic Frost still collect paychecks.

Republicans had one last chance to shrink this machinery before Democrats likely regain the House. The final Justice Department appropriations bill should have cut off funding for the most abusive programs and permanently reduced the department’s ability to target Americans. Instead, Republicans passed a status quo bill that effectively codifies Biden’s DOJ.

The vote breakdown exposes the scam. All but six House Democrats supported the minibus package that included full-year DOJ funding. Meanwhile, 22 House conservatives opposed it.

The package included three appropriations bills: Commerce-Justice-Science; Energy and Water Development; and Interior and Environment. Freedom Caucus pressure forced leadership to hold a separate vote on the Commerce-Justice-Science portion first, and even then, it drew 40 Republican “no” votes. Leadership tried to quiet the revolt by swapping out a $1 million earmark for a Somali-led nonprofit after a welfare fraud scandal in that state. That move changed nothing about the bill’s core failures.

RELATED: The ‘blue-slip block’ is GOP cowardice masquerading as tradition

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Democrats voted for this bill despite calling Trump a dictator because the bill left the regime’s tools in place. On the issues that matter most, it stayed silent.

It did not:

  • Bar funding for future January 6 prosecutions.
  • Bar funding for FACE Act prosecutions of pro-life activists.
  • Address the FBI’s Arctic Frost overreach.
  • Defund sanctuary cities, even though sanctuary policies endanger federal agents and courts have repeatedly blocked Trump’s efforts to punish them. If Congress refuses to codify enforcement policy, courts will keep neutralizing it.
  • Cut off grants to NGOs that help illegal aliens evade deportation. Other appropriations bills even fund refugee resettlement contractors.
  • End incentives for blue states to implement red-flag laws. The bill keeps the $740 million slush fund that bribes states to expand them. It also fails to defund Biden’s pistol brace ban, the “engaged in the business” rule, and the Justice Department’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
  • Fund an Election Integrity Office to implement Trump’s executive order on election integrity, even while the bill keeps money flowing to offices that persecute Americans.
  • Rein in the Office of Inspector General, which receives $139 million despite lacking an appointed inspector general and operating under an acting career bureaucrat.

The FBI budget barely took a haircut from its record Biden-era levels. Keep the scale in mind: The bureau has more than 35,000 employees, yet only 138 have been fired so far.

Republicans also promised fiscal discipline. This minibus package totals roughly $180 billion and rejects steeper cuts conservatives proposed in committee. It includes nearly $5.6 billion in earmarks for 3,030 projects. Leadership found room for parochial spending while refusing to squeeze the agencies that turned federal power against the public.

Congress holds one real lever to change the regime without begging courts for permission: the power of the purse. If Republicans won’t pass transformative legislation, they must at least defund odious policies through appropriations.

Trump’s “retribution” pledge will collapse into another campaign slogan if Republicans keep funding the same Department of Justice and FBI they claim to oppose. When Democrats vote happily to fund the very departments that targeted Americans under Biden, the conclusion writes itself. Washington will not dismantle the machine. It will keep it humming until Democrats take power again and aim it at us with even fewer restraints.