What if newcomers to the United States refuse to assimilate?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an immigrant herself who recognizes the value of Western culture, writes that “Putting Clan over Country Will Ruin America” at The Free Press. “The Minnesota fraud scheme shows that only full assimilation can change certain immigrants’ sectarian tendencies,” Hirsi Ali argues. She begins:
Minnesota takes pride in its restraint, decency, and an earnestness that sometimes verges on self-parody. Yet that identity is complicated by the presence of one of the world’s largest Somali communities, which hasn’t simply settled in Minnesota but has clustered, tightly and predictably, with the same social logic that governs life in Mogadishu, where I was born. Anyone who knows Somali culture has long known where this would lead. Anyone familiar with Edward Banfield could have predicted it twice.
Banfield, the sociologist who conducted a now-famous study of a small village in southern Italy, argued that some societies are held back not by a lack of resources or brains but by a worldview he called “amoral familism.” The villagers of Chiaromonte were neither lazy nor unintelligent. They were trapped in a system that encouraged them to seek the short-term interest of their kin but punished cooperation beyond the family. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society irritated all the right people. It arrived in 1958, just as multiculturalism was beginning its ascent, and it offended the new orthodoxy to such a degree that critics all but buried it.
In “Minnesota Vice,” Minnesota native Dave Kansas writes in The Free Press about what corruption did to his home state.
You and I have pretty much known about the Biden border crisis for quite a while. It just eluded some folks, though, but now they are catching up. “The NY Times Suddenly Discovers the Biden Border Crisis — Long After It Matters” is the headline on Daniel McCarthy’s New York Post analysis:
The New York Times has invented a new genre of reporting — covering big stories showing Democrats in a bad light years after the events that matter.
At the tail end of 2025, the Times has broken the news that the Biden administration flooded the country with illegal immigrants, partly for ideological and partisan reasons, partly out of sheer incompetence.
Who knew?
The nearly 4,000-word story by Christopher Flavelle, with 14 colleagues contributing additional reporting and research, is certainly well-sourced, but none of its facts have just come to light.
“Listen to the People, President Trump — They Really DO Feel Economic Pain,” an editorial in the New York Post urges. President Trump yesterday announced a $12 billion aid package for farmers affected by the tariffs. Politico reports on how the funds, which the administration sees as a bridge to when its policies help the economy, will be allocated.
President Trump still hasn’t persuaded Senator and economics professor Phil Gramm that tariffs are the right way to go. Gramm is coauthor this morning of a Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined “World Trade Grows Without the U.S.” The Washington Post, whose opinion pages are evolving, publishes an editorial headlined “How to ‘Solve’ a Self-created Trade Mess,” which criticizes subsidies and protectionism.
Meanwhile, President Trump, who says tariffs are essential as a political tool, is threatening a 5% tariff on Mexico over water treaty violations affecting Texas farmers. Bright Spot: Larry Kudlow says that “sometimes facts speak louder than political conjectures or biased polls,” noting record spending on Black Friday. Meanwhile, the liberal Politico reports that President Trump is trashing European leaders as weak. Powerline is thinking this over.
New Twist on “Justice Expert.” New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has appointed a rapper who did seven years for armed robbery as his new “justice adviser” (the new adviser appears on the cover of the New York Post in a T-shirt with the fetching motto “Boycott Black Murder”). The Justice Adviser won’t feel lonely. Stu Smith of City Journal notices that “many members of the mayor-elect’s Committee on Community Safety have long histories of anti-law-enforcement radicalism.” A snippet:
Many believe that the government’s primary responsibility in criminal-justice matters is to prevent and punish crime. Some on Mamdani’s transition team seem to think otherwise. Brooklyn College professor Alex Vitale, the author of The End of Policing, has argued, for example, that policing is “fundamentally a tool of social control to facilitate our exploitation.” He has also described police as “violence workers,” who should be turned to only as a “last resort.” …
Many are openly hostile to policing as a practice and reject the very concept of a carceral system. The question for Gotham is whether pragmatic voices can push back against this bloc, or whether they will strike an unholy alliance to secure a share of the billion-dollar budget. For now, New Yorkers are test subjects in what may become the largest anti-policing experiment in the world.
“Medical Reparations” are also coming to New York. Need a kidney? Don’t be white. “NYC Health + Hospital’s new kidney-function formula will yield worse outcomes for all patients,” Stanley Goldfarb suggests at City Journal.
“Waging War Lawfully Is Crucial to Defending Civilization” is the headline on Gerard Baker’s Wall Street Journal column. Baker opens with a fascinating discussion of one of the great war movies, “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” “Pete Hegseth might have gone too far in applying the lesson of ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’,” Baker writes. (It’s complicated.) Meanwhile, The Federalist suggests “The Ops Against Pete Hegseth Are Designed to Further a Color Revolution.”
Rep. Jasmine Crockett launched her bid to unseat Texas Senator John Cornyn. Former Rep. Colin Allred dropped out to give her a better shot in the Democratic primary. Crockett said:
“There are a lot of people that said, ‘You gotta stay in the House. We need our voice. We need you there,'” Crockett told her supporters as she launched her campaign Monday night. “And I understand. But what we need is a bigger voice.”
A bigger voice? You gotta be kidding. The GOP is having fun over Crockett’s announcement. Conservatives are laughing now, but they’d better take her seriously (I know. It’s hard.)
Hot Air says that “of course” the New York Times “is fawning over Jennifer Welch.” Welch, you might remember, attacked Riley Gaines in a profanity-laced tirade:
[I]t was inevitable that the NY Times was going to do a fawning profile of Welch, just as they’ve done of fellow leftist creep Hasan Piker. And given how vile, Welch routinely is toward the right, the thesis of this NY Times article is that she’s really tough on, you guessed it, Democrats. In fact, it’s titled “Is This Former Bravo Star Democrats’ Toughest Critic?“.
Helen Joyce – director of advocacy at Sex Matters—talks to Spiked Online’s Brendan O’Neill about why puberty blockers for minors must be stopped in the U.K. It appeared that the Cass Review had ended such dangerous practices, but the U.K. government is restarting the dangerous puberty blockers experiments. A clinical trial featuring 220 children has been announced. Joyce comments:
Instead of doing this trial, they could have looked at the 2,000 children who have already been given puberty blockers. The disadvantage is that those children didn’t have a standardised intake – their IQ, bone density and so on weren’t measured at the start. But you can still look at where they are now. If their current IQ or bone density is average, that tells you something. If it’s much lower than average, that also tells you something, because that’s unlikely to have happened by chance. But they’re not doing that. They’ve gone straight to this new trial. I’m genuinely amazed it got ethical approval.
