Source: Orange County Register
by Sal Rodriguez

“By now you have seen the reports about alleged widespread welfare and social services fraud in Minnesota. And by now, you have seen the right fixate on the state’s Somali community. The most prominent example of fraud took place via a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future, which bilked taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of federal COVID dollars as it falsely claimed to distribute meals. The founder of the organization, a white American named Aimee Bock, was convicted of her crimes. … If there’s blame to go around, it seems first aimed at the individual wrongdoers themselves. And then, as a systemic critique, the reckless throwing around of public funds. But, what do you know, MAGA world has chosen to make this not about the need to hold individuals liable for their actions or the need to better manage taxpayer funds. Instead, they made it about Somalis for being Somali.” (01/04/26)

https://archive.is/IpoLN

Source: New York Post
by Natalya Murakhver

“‘How dare you?’ Remember that fiery 2019 United Nations speech, when a 16-year-old Greta Thunberg stared down world leaders and accused the adults in the room of stealing her future by ignoring climate change? The moment catapulted the perpetually pinch-faced teen towards unfathomable stardom as a self-anointed champion for human rights and the planet’s survival. But fast-forward to today, and Greta is falling quite short of that promise. She’s not a savior — in fact, she’s a malignant force trying to erase the horrors inflicted on some of the world’s most vulnerable, the victims of Hamas’[s] Oct. 7 massacre. How can someone who built her life around securing youth a future be so hell-bent on obliterating the past, silencing Jewish voices and denying the suffering of children burned alive, women raped and families slaughtered? Let’s look at her latest escapades.” (01/05/25)

https://nypost.com/2026/01/05/opinion/greta-thunberg-is-a-warning-to-parents-raising-ideologically-captured-kids/

Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman

“George Orwell got some things right; unlike most political partisans, he saw the problems with the position he supported. He also got quite a lot of things wrong. … The problem is that Orwell, like many of his contemporaries (and ours), did not understand economics and thought he did. Since he wrote we have had extensive experience with free competition, if not as free as Hayek would have wanted, and the result has not been the nightmare that Orwell expected.” (01/04/26)

https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/orwells-mistakes

Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Karthik Sankaran

“Within hours of U.S. military strikes on Venezuela and the capture of its leader, Nicolas Maduro, President Trump proclaimed that ‘very large United States oil companies would go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, and start making money for the country.’ Indeed, at no point during this exercise has there been any attempt to deny that control of Venezuela’s oil (or ‘our oil’ as Trump once described it) is a major force motivating administration actions. One irony here is that even as the White House is proudly embracing fossil-fuel imperialism in global oil, the markets are vastly different.” (01/04/26)

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/venezuela-oil/