Yesterday, we wrote roughly 5,000 words on the shooting in Minneapolis, and didn't even get to half of the things we intended to discuss. That's the price of admission around here, we suppose; everyone knows that if you're someone who needs 10,000-20,000 words to say what you want to say, the punishment is that you either have to: (1) go to grad school in history or (2) go to law school.
The Minneapolis shooting is still a big story, and we've been collecting material for this item for 4 days. So, we're going to break it into sections. Buckle up, because it's going to be a bumpy ride.
In his recent viral essay, "The Lost Generation," published in Compact, Jacob Savage describes how U.S. media and academia in the 2010s closed their doors to millennial white men. The self-righteous, racist ideology of diversity, equity and inclusion wasn't a problem only within those rarified fields. It also infected the U.S. armed forces. Under President Biden, senior officers worked to make our military less white, precipitating a recruitment crisis. Read more
An Empty Bliss Beyond This World
In a social media post, Trump defended the aggressive immigration enforcement actions being carried out across Minneapolis as part of his deportation agenda.
Over the weekend, boot polish companies across the United States reported record sales.
The Trump administration is ending temporary protection status (TPS) for Somalia, affecting several thousand Somalis currently living in the U.S. and several hundred currently living in Minnesota under the protection. Somali migrants with TPS will be required to leave the country by March 17. "Temporary means temporary," DHS Secretary Kristi Noem told Fox News Digital in a statement. "Country conditions in Somalia have improved to the point that it no longer meets the law's requirement for Temporary Protected Status."
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Tuesday in Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., which challenge laws that reserve women's and girls' sports divisions in government schools exclusively for females. The great majority of Americans recognize that because men are generally far taller, heavier, faster and stronger than women, co-ed competition is unfair in most sports. But more is at stake than fairness. Those same physical differences mean that allowing male bodies on the court with girls or women is dangerous. We don't allow children to play contact sports with adults because of the obvious physical risk. Similarly, though some variability exists within the male and female pools, the normal range of physical traits differs so widely between the sexes that allowing men to compete in women's sports will inevitably expose women to a heightened risk of physical harm. Read more
A former Republican congressman who resigned after pleading guilty to misusing campaign funds for extramarital affairs with lobbyists and family spending sprees, and subsequently received a pardon from Donald Trump, is now using his remaining political influence to seek clemency for a childhood friend convicted of child sexual abuse material possession. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, Hunter is currently operating as a lobbyist and working to secure a presidential pardon for Raymond Liddy, who was convicted in 2020 of possessing child sexual abuse material.
Two dynamics are fundamentally reshaping the structure and functioning of the American government. The first, which is quite well known, is Congress's decline. The second, perhaps somewhat less appreciated but no less significant, is the Supreme Court's ascent"its expansion of its power into areas previously thought to be off-limits. These dynamics share a root cause: the partisan polarization that has reshaped American politics over the past four decades. But the connection is deeper and more complex than that. Whereas polarization weakened Congress, it emboldened the Court to dismantle laws and, in the process, undermine Congress's ability to make laws at all, reinforcing Congress's sclerosis.
Scott Adams, creator of the "Dilbert" comic strip, who became controversial for his right-wing statements, has died following a battle with metastatic prostate cancer. He was 68. Members of The Scott Adams School (formerly called Coffee With Scott Adams) shared the news of Adams' death on Tuesday. Adams started writing blog posts praising Donald Trump in 2015, and his daily video podcast featured a range of conservative guests. His writings and podcasts began to question the Holocaust and oppose the COVID vaccine. Read more
U.S. consumer prices increased in December, lifted by higher costs for rents and food as some of the distortions related to the government shutdown that had artificially lowered inflation in November unwound, cementing expectations the Federal Reserve would leave interest rates unchanged this month. Nonetheless, expensive food, with prices increasing by the most in more than three years, and rents underscored the affordability crisis facing President Donald Trump, partly blamed by economists on the White House's policies, including sweeping import tariffs.
Former President Bill Clinton appears to have defied a congressional subpoena to appear before the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday morning. Clinton was compelled to sit for a sworn closed-door deposition in the House's bipartisan probe into Jeffrey Epstein, but Fox News Digital did not see him before or after the scheduled 10 a.m. grilling. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., had threatened to begin contempt of Congress proceedings against Clinton if he did not appear Tuesday.
Remote US Army base Fort Greely Alaska, which has a key role in intercepting incoming ICBMs in the event of a nuclear war, is struggling to keep its dining facilities operating following an exodus of staff under Elon Musk's DOGE budget-slashing campaign.
Fort Greely Alaska
Gavin Newsom' and his staff have quietly talked to the champion of a controversial wealth tax proposal seeking an off-ramp to defuse a looming ballot measure fight. The conversations, reported here for the first time, have occurred intermittently for months as SEIU-UHW's ballot initiative targeting billionaires migrated from the backrooms of California politics to the center of a raging debate about Silicon Valley and income inequality, sparking tech titans' wrath and vows to move out of state. Read more
Whoever replaces Jerome Powell as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve in May knows one thing: If they don't do what President Donald Trump wants, they risk being criminally prosecuted. That was the unambiguous message in Powell's extraordinary statement yesterday, in which he vowed to continue to set monetary policy independently despite the federal grand jury subpoenas investigating his statements to Congress about alleged cost overruns in the renovation of the Fed's headquarters.
