Justice Isn’t Blind -- She’s Just Looking the Other Way

American  Thinker 

Over the past months, prominent political figures have attempted to convince Americans that those illegally in the country have not committed any crime. By their argument, immigration violations are civil offenses, not criminal offenses. Sure, laws were broken -- but no “crime” has been committed. By this reasoning, those illegally in the country have not committed any crime; therefore, removing them is wrong.

It’s an odd assertion: to suggest that breaking laws is not a crime. The Founders envisioned a nation governed by laws that were clear and impartially enforced, but our “nation of laws” is eroding. The idea of a nation with liberty and justice for all is being destroyed by those who capriciously choose which laws to enforce and which to ignore, and by judges who decide who gets punished and who walks free.

Our nation of laws is becoming lawless -- and Americans see it. Police stand down while buildings burn and businesses are looted. Victims who try to defend themselves risk being arrested, while their attackers are released without consequence. The price is paid not by the guilty, but by the innocent.

Large cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, have adjusted the way they report violent crime to fool voters into believing crime rates are lower. Felonies are downgraded to misdemeanors. In some jurisdictions, law enforcement officers are urged to report serious offenses, such as aggravated assault, as minor incidents or not to file reports at all.

In the midst of this chaos, Democrats across the nation are calling to defund the police. Like a dystopian Mad Max sequel, a segment of America is promoting criminal anarchy. It is as if we are part of a dystopian nightmare masterminded by an evil villain salivating at the prospect of watching the impending violence and bloodshed.

City streets are given over to vagrants and substance abusers, who take over parks and defecate on sidewalks. Allowing people to sleep on the streets is branded as compassion, but there is no dignity in living on the streets. Nor is there dignity in using the sidewalks for a toilet, like a dog. In many cities, it is common to see addicts frozen in time like Lot’s wife, bent in a posture known as the fentanyl fold. No person of conscience believes it is compassionate to enable people to destroy themselves. Laws used to protect people from the menace of vagrancy, loitering, and public intoxication.

In California, drug use and shoplifting have been decriminalized. Burglary and retail theft fund the lifestyles of crime rings and addicts. Retail customers find empty shelves or the products they need locked up behind glass. Those charged with theft are released to offend again -- and again. It isn’t a victimless crime. Retailers close their doors. Customers lose their pharmacies and grocers.

It isn’t just the worst elements of society enjoying this criminal free-for-all. Reports of corruption are commonplace, from the smallest municipalities to the federal government. Money laundering, embezzlement, fraud, and pay-to-play kickbacks are routinely uncovered, yet indictments rarely follow.

Recent reports of fraud in the Somali population of Minnesota suggest federal programs were used to bilk taxpayers out of at least a billion dollars. Worse are allegations that elected officials, including Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, not only knew of the grift but may have benefited from it.

Part of the blame goes to voters who elect candidates whose personal histories should be disqualifying:

• Angela Walker, a recently elected council member in Bangor, Maine, spent eight years in prison after being convicted of beating a man, then suffocating him with sand.
• Newly elected District Attorney Jay Jones sent texts fantasizing about shooting a political adversary and wishing to see the man’s wife hold her dying children. This is who Virginia chose as their so-called “top cop.”

Representative Henry Cuellar (D-TX) was under federal indictment for money laundering and accepting bribes in exchange for advocating on behalf of Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank, but was allowed to remain in office.

He is only one of many who have taken money from nations hostile to America or gotten cozy with spies -- think Linda Sun or Eric Swalwell. Despite the allegations, there are rarely consequences. In fact, despite having been involved with a Chinese spy, Eric Swalwell is still in Congress, and plans to run for governor of California.

Is it any wonder Americans distrust the government?

Without the rule of law, every citizen is vulnerable to the whims of those for whom justice is optional. Prosecutors -- often Ivy League Marxists -- twist the law to serve their own ideology, and the courts offer no remedy. Gone is the judiciousness of the bench. Many of today’s judges are gussied-up versions of Boss Hogg, hiding behind the legal authority of black robes.

Under the banner of “restorative justice,” race becomes a get-out-of-jail-free card, and prosecutors offer flimsy rationales to convince the public that crimes committed by some people shouldn’t be punished. In the eyes of the law, all defendants are equal, but through the eyes of the courts, some are more equal than others.

Then there are the crimes committed by those illegally in the country. Every week, headlines report assaults, rapes, or murders committed by people who should never have been allowed here. Even when they are guilty of crimes or have a history of criminal behavior, efforts to deport them are portrayed as a cruel injustice.

When the guilty go unpunished, the laws do not protect the innocent; they protect wrongdoers. The American ideal of “justice for all” has become meaningless. Under her blindfold, Lady Justice surely has a black eye.

Entertainment and podcast thread for Dec 11

 

Sure hope this winter isn't getting you down.

America’s Real War: The Enemy Within

American  Thinker 

For a brief, shining moment in 1945, the United States stood astride the world like a colossus. In four years, we had built the greatest military machine in human history, liberated half the planet, and dropped the sun itself on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to prove the point. Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan (three empires that had terrorized the globe) lay in smoking ruins. The message was unmistakable: try America on the battlefield and you will be annihilated.

Our enemies learned the lesson. They have not seriously attempted a direct military confrontation since. Instead, they (and the ideological heirs of the totalitarians we defeated) chose a slower, more insidious strategy: death by a thousand cuts from the inside. What we are living through in 2025 is not a series of unrelated crises; it is the culmination of an eighty-year campaign to hollow out the greatest republic the world has ever known.

The blueprint was simple and brilliant in its evil. If you cannot invade America, infiltrate her. Capture her universities and turn them into indoctrination camps. Capture her media and make truth itself subjective. Capture her culture and convince her children to despise the very civilization that gave them freedom. Capture her institutions (the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon) and bend them toward the destruction of the country they once served. And above all, capture her borders, her currency, and her sense of herself as a sovereign nation.

Look around and tell me it hasn’t worked.

The same intellectual descendants of the Marxist-Leninist movements we spent the Cold War containing now openly run university departments, teachers’ unions, and human-resource divisions in every Fortune 500 company. They do not fly the hammer and sickle anymore; they fly the rainbow flag and preach “equity,” but the goal is identical: the abolition of the traditional family, the Christian church, private property, and the nation-state itself. Critical theory, cultural Marxism, wokeism (call it whatever you like) is just communism with better marketing and tenure.

The corporate media, once a proud Fourth Estate, now functions as the propaganda arm of a permanent bureaucratic class that hates the historic American nation. When a genuine populist movement arises (think Tea Party, think MAGA), the combined forces of Big Tech, Big Media, and Big Government mobilize with a coordination that would have made the NKVD blush. Elections are “fortified,” dissenters are debanked and deplatformed, and parents who complain at school boards are treated as domestic terrorists.

Our southern border is not merely “porous”; it has been deliberately erased. More than ten million illegal entrants since 2021 (many of them military-age males from countries that hate us) are not sending their best. This is not incompetence. It is demographic replacement dressed up as compassion, a modern-day population transfer designed to dilute the political power of the people who built and sustained this country for 250 years.

Our financial system has been captured too. The Federal Reserve, unaccountable to any voter, prints money without limit, deliberately eroding the savings of the working and middle classes. The national debt now exceeds $36 trillion (an amount so large it can only be understood as a weapon). Every dollar debased is a tax on every American who believes in hard work and thrift. The same globalist elites who lecture us about climate change from their private jets while they ship our factories to China, the same totalitarian state we once contained and now fund with our own consumer dollars.

And the institutions that once protected us? The FBI spends more time hunting down January 6 grandmas than cartel killers. The Department of Justice prosecutes pro-life grandmothers while ignoring Antifa firebombings. The Pentagon obsesses over “white rage” and proper pronoun usage while China builds a navy to rival ours and Iran races toward a nuclear bomb.

This is not paranoia. This is pattern recognition.

The tragedy is that most Americans still don’t see the war because it isn’t fought with tanks rolling down Main Street. It is fought in classrooms where children are taught to hate their country, in boardrooms where CEOs impose racial quotas, in newsrooms where stories are killed if they threaten the narrative, and in courts where unequal justice has become the new normal.

But here is the good news: the American patriots are waking up in numbers not seen since 1776. Skyrocketing homeschooling, the rise of parallel economies, and the election of outsiders who refuse to bow to the regime tell me the enemy has overplayed its hand. When you push a free people too far, they push back twice as hard.

We defeated the Axis powers in four years. We contained Soviet communism for forty-five. We can defeat this fifth-column insurgency too (but only if we name it for what it is: a deliberate, decades-long attempt to finish the job that Hitler, Tojo, and Stalin could not).

The America that turned the tide at Midway and Normandy is still in us. The spirit that said “nuts” to the Germans at Bastogne still lives. The question is whether we will recognize the enemy within before it is too late, or whether we will allow the greatest experiment in human freedom to die not with a bang, but with a whimper of “tolerance” and “diversity.”

The hour is late, but it is not over. Not yet.

There’s Nothing Funnier Than Fussy, Furious Euroweenies

Townhall 

Hearing disturbingly feminine, Somali corruption-curious Minnesota governor Tim Walz complaining that, because of Donald Trump, people are driving by his house shouting “Retard!” should’ve been the funniest thing that happened over the last few news cycles, but our European friends have done it one better. Actually, they’re not our friends. They’re annoying layabouts who do nothing but whine and complain as they feed off the corpse of the civilization they inherited like cultural trust fund babies. They have gotten very upset because Donald Trump’s national security strategy accurately recognizes that Europe is unable to defend itself and is increasingly unworthy of us squandering more time, blood, and treasure to do it for them. So, they’re lashing out, threatening to be responsible for their own defense.

Yeah, that’ll show us. Throw us in that briar patch, Horst. There aren’t enough “LOLs” on the Internet for how funny it is to see you stomping your feet because we’re done picking up the check.

This is personal to me because I’ve spent a substantial part of my life doing the jobs that Europeans would not do. From November 1988 to April 1991, with a multi-month tangent to the Persian Gulf War, I was part of NATO in what was then West Germany. It's always great to have people tell me how important NATO is when I was part of it, and they weren’t, but let’s put that aside. I was there at the end of the Cold War. We were still doing things like having REFORGER exercises and going out on alerts at 3 a.m., where we would shiver in our assembly areas knowing that if the balloon really went up, our role was to die in place so the locals could continue to consume strudel and bitch about Ronald Reagan. Then, for a year between 2004 and 2006, I left Irina with a little kid and went to Kosovo to keep those Europeans from killing each other. I got a non-Article 5 NATO medal out of that. None of this makes me some sort of hero – in Germany, I ran a heavily armed car wash, and in Kosovo, I largely shared my legal and business experience with the locals. But I was away from America and my family, cleaning up Europe’s messes for the Europeans. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a little gratitude for my time – and the time of millions of other Americans.

Spoiler: There’s never going to be any gratitude. There can't be. The fact that we uncouth hicks from the New World had to come back to unscrew the mess the Europeans have made of Europe was never going to get us anything like a simple danke schön. That they needed us grated on them then, and it grates at them now that big, loud Yankees were the only thing keeping their sorry butts from chaos. The eurotrash always imagine themselves as the pinnacle of human achievement, though it was really their ancestors who did the civilizational heavy lifting. These sorry sons of greater fathers look at the castles and cathedrals, the culture and the art, and imagine they had something to do with it other than receiving it on a silver platter and promptly turning it over to the horde of seventh-century savages they invited into their country to do all the dirty work that they imagine they themselves are too good for and to pay into the welfare state in place of the babies they were unable to make because of their cultural and physical impotence.

You know that parable about the servants the master gives coins and one of them goes and makes multiples in profit, and he gets praise (Matthew 25:14-30)? Another makes a little less, but he also gets praise. The third buries his talents because he doesn’t want to lose any, and he loses even that in the end. The Europeans have managed to do even worse. They didn’t even preserve what they were given. Instead, they spent their cultural bounty on the equivalent of hookers and blow, and now some imam with five wives and a scimitar is living next door while the call to prayer keeps the euroweenies up at night.

But don’t tell the Europeans that. They don’t want to hear it. In fact, they don’t want to hear anything. That’s why they’re trying to sue Elon Musk and X out of existence with EU fines over transparent nonsense. They’re not mad because his blue checks aren’t sufficiently blue-check-worthy. They are mad because Elon Musk allows their citizens to see and say forbidden things, things they can’t control, and they understand that the only way they can retain power is by limiting debate to a narrow range of views that reaffirms their authority and confirms their own power. The idea that these tin-pot goofs imagine that they get to dictate free speech to Americans is hilarious. Several American officials, including JD Vance and Marco Rubio, have weighed in, warning them that they’re getting a little too big for their lederhosen. But the fact is, censorship and political oppression are becoming part and parcel of Europe once again. You can get arrested for saying things, as primitive and unspeakably horrible as that is. The European junta feels perfectly entitled to ban even the largest plurality parties because those parties won’t genuflect at the altar of the approved globalist catechism. Part of the justification for defending Europe was that we were protecting like-minded allies and their freedom from hideous dictators who, among other things, limited free speech and banned dissenting political opponents. You can see the problem.

In fairness, there are still some good things about Europe. It's cute, sort of a Disneyland for people who like cathedrals and cafés. I’m not saying I was miserable the whole time I was stationed in Germany. I liked the beer, the lack of speed limits on the Autobahn, and being able to take a weekend up in Amsterdam – just remember that the safe word is "Flüggåәnkб€čhiœßølįên."

It’s nice to go back to Europe and visit. I liked Portugal earlier this year – very good wine and surprisingly based people. There are a lot of cool Europeans. They’re just overshadowed by the fascist bureaucrats who rule over them and the vast number of Europeans who are ridiculous, pompous has-beens with a truly inexplicable amount of self-regard.

Now, they have taken to jumping on the Twitter machine, the online forum that they hope to someday control, informing us that they’re very mad and that, in light of Donald Trump breaking with the nearly 80-year-long tradition of America pulling Europe’s weight, the Europeans are going to show us what for by doing it themselves. The guys who can’t put together a tank battalion or a flotilla of ships on par with that of your basic Venezuelan drug cartel are going to create a military to pick up the slack for the United States because we’re an unreliable ally now. Good. We don’t want you to rely on us. We want you to rely on yourselves. 

But that’s going to be a problem. It’s going to cost money, and you’ve been spending it on importing zillions of Third World barbarians and paying your own people not to work. It’s unclear where you’ll get the money to do all this rearming but go for it. Sincerely. We want you to. Of course, your own people don’t want to do it. The Germans can’t recruit anywhere near as many soldiers as they need, so they took the most basic step towards conscription, which was sending out a questionnaire, saying, “Fritz, could you be in der Bundeswehr if we needed you?” and the Teutonic teenagers chimped out. Why, defending their country is the job of Nebraskan farm boys and eager Appalachians, not the precious heirs of Arminius!

Vets like me and @CynicalPublius, along with a bunch of others who also served in the Cold War, in Europe, and/or with Europeans, are taking a special delight in watching our alleged allies squirm. They didn’t like us all that much then, and they don’t like us all that much now, but they love having Uncle Sucker forking out the cash and corpuscles to keep their Ponzi continent alive. A lot of you guys reading this feel the same – I was at Nelligan Kaserne in the VII Corps AO near Stuttgart, and if you pounded the same plätze, I don’t need to translate that (throw where you were assigned into the comments!). But those of us who helped protect the European ingrates over the years will understand that when they cry, we just shrug and say “macht nichts.”

🎭 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓

 

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Jim Acosta Claims President Trump Is Growing Tired...There's Just One Problem

Townhall 

Democrats are still doing everything they can to undermine Trump's credibility. After years of playing cover for Joe Biden and his health issues, and severe mental decline, they are now trying to accuse President Trump of the same, with many saying he is too old and too tired to be president.

Jim Acosta was the latest attempt; the only problem was, he made his claims on the same day President Trump held a massive rally in Pennsylvania.

He seems extremely tired and I will tell you, having covered him, you know, up close, where are the press conferences? He doesn't do press conferences. The most he can do now is he brings the little kids into the room and he screams at them, and calls them names, and then he sends them away. That's the extent of him doing question and answer time now, is on Air Force One or in the Oval Office. He doesn't do press conferences, he doesn't do rallies! Remember that special election in Tennessee, where he literally phoned in, he called Mike Johnson, and Mike Johnson held the cell phone up to the cameras and Donald Trump was talking about how they can't lose, this ruby red district in Tennessee. In the old days, he would have done the hanger rallies, where he flies in and gets off Air Force One and costs taxpayers a billion dollars; he doesn't do that anymore.  

Acosta seems to have contradicted himself in his own reasoning as well. Why would President Trump be speaking to reporters a lot aboard Air Force One? Probably because he’s actually working diligently to Make America Great Again, traveling to Egypt, Israel, and all across Asia in a matter of weeks. But somehow, the left’s biggest critique is that he seems “tired.”

President Trump himself has grown tired of the accusations, prompting the White House to release both the results of his physical and his Oval Office schedule. The president's doctor said Trump is in excellent health, and his released schedule shows a president routinely working 12-hour days, excluding weekends, well above the workload of the average American.

US sedan-sized nuclear reactor MARVEL selects first end users for global AI power

 MARVEL is a thermally powerful, sodium-potassium-cooled microreactor using uranium zirconium hydride fuel.

By Aman Tripathi  |  10 Dec 2025  |  For Interesting Engineering

The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) has announced the initial selection of five teams to conduct the first end-user experiments on the Microreactor Application Research Validation and Evaluation (MARVEL) test bed. 

These efforts, which include powering data centers for the artificial intelligence (AI) race and advancing water desalination, aim to unleash private-sector innovation and expedite the deployment of commercial nuclear energy.

First-of-a-kind microreactor test bed

MARVEL is a first-of-a-kind microreactor test bed designed to pioneer the integration of nuclear power into non-traditional applications. Physically compact, the reactor is approximately the size of a sedan car and stands just 15 feet tall. 

It is slated for operation at the Transient Reactor Test Facility at the INL, providing a rare platform for the private sector to demonstrate innovative use cases on a live system.

Despite its small footprint, MARVEL is a powerhouse of thermal capabilities. It acts as a sodium-potassium-cooled microreactor using uranium-zirconium hydride fuel—similar to that used in university research. 

The system employs natural circulation cooling to operate at a temperature range of 500°C to 550°C, producing 85 kilowatts (kW) of thermal energy and approximately 20 kW of electricity.

“Nowhere else in the world will you find this level of support for public sector innovation in nuclear energy,” said John Jackson, national technical director for the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy’s Microreactor Program. 

“With access to MARVEL, companies can explore how microreactors will potentially help us win the global AI race, solve water challenges, and so much more. The MARVEL testbed exemplifies how nuclear energy can open the door to a stronger, safer, and more prosperous future for our country.”

Team of major industry leaders

The five competitively selected teams include major industry leaders and academic institutions focused on demonstrating viability in critical sectors. 

Amazon Web Services proposes coupling MARVEL with a modular data center. This project aims to create a self-sustaining system for defense and government agencies that can operate independently of traditional power infrastructure. 

Similarly focused on computing power, DCX USA and Arizona State University plan to demonstrate the feasibility of a microreactor powering a data center for artificial intelligence, gathering data on how to provide the stable, continuous power required for AI processing. Operational advancements and resource management are also key focuses of the selected experiments. 

General Electric Vernova intends to demonstrate remote and autonomous reactor operations to establish control standards for broader commercial application. At the same time, Radiation Detection Technologies will test advanced high-performance sensor technologies to monitor the performance of advanced reactors. 

Finally, a consortium comprising Shepherd Power, NOV, and ConocoPhillips will launch a pilot-scale desalination project using nuclear-generated process heat to address challenges posed by “produced water” in oil and gas operations.

The selected teams will now coordinate with the Department of Energy and national laboratory experts to create implementation plans and determine the feasibility of their proposed applications. These efforts may lead to full demonstration opportunities, with final agreements for the proposed projects anticipated to be announced in 2026.

Photo: Fabrication of the first large component for MARVEL – the guard vessel.

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/us-sedan-sized-nuclear-reactor-marvel

The Supreme Court Should Overturn Wong Kim Ark

The modern court has the chance to restore the 14th Amendment and end the judicially invented version of birthright citizenship.

The Federalist

The Supreme Court’s decision to hear challenges to President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship has triggered predictable outrage from the left, which insists the Constitution “plainly” guarantees citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. They cite more than half a century of practice and supposed precedent, in particular the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark.

But the Supreme Court has never been bound to preserve a decision simply because it is old, especially when that decision is wrong.

Wong Kim Ark did more than just misinterpret the 14th Amendment. It effectively rewrote the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment according to English feudal principles that the founders — and framers — rejected. In doing so, the court created a doctrine that the amendment’s authors surely never intended.

The Supreme Court now has the chance to correct that mistake.

Wong Kim Ark was born in 1873 in San Francisco to Chinese parents who were subjects of the Emperor of China but were “domiciled residents” at the time of his birth. After visiting China as an adult, Ark was denied entry into the United States on the grounds that he was not a citizen.

The question before the court was whether a child born to “subjects of the Emperor of China, [who] have a permanent domicile and residence in the United States … becomes at the time of his birth a citizen of the United States.”

A 6-2 majority, led by Justice Horace Gray, said yes. But the reasoning that got the majority to its decision is indefensible. Gray based his entire opinion on the idea that the 14th Amendment must be understood in terms of English common law.

“In this as in other respects, it must be interpreted in the light of the common law, the principles and history of which were familiarly known to the framers of the Constitution,” Gray reasoned. “The language of the Constitution, as has been well said, could not be understood without reference to the common law.”

Gray further argued that “the Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens.”

But as scholar Edward Erler argued in his book United States in Crisis: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Nation State, the phrase “‘subject to the jurisdiction’ is alien to the common law.”

Erler also explains that English common law historically based membership in the king’s dominion on allegiance, but the “framers of the Citizenship Clause intentionally avoided using the word ‘allegiance’ in the clause because they wanted to dispel any idea that citizenship derived from the common law.”

“Thus, Justice Gray’s argument in Wong Kim Ark — that the plain language must yield a common law result — is demonstrably wrong; it was intended to yield the opposite result. The express intention … was to avoid any possible inference that the Citizenship Clause derived any meaning from the common law.”

But Gray dismissed that intention outright. He even wrote that congressional debates were “not admissible” in interpreting the amendment — a bizarre claim given that the debates and statements of purpose are routinely used in interpreting amendments. “[T]he intention of the Congress which framed and the states which adopted this Amendment of the Constitution must be sought in the words of the Amendment; and the debates in Congress are not admissible as evidence to control the meaning of those words,” Gray wrote.

Gray only dismissed the framers’ debates because if he would have properly acknowledged them, he could have never reached the conclusion he did, as Erler points out. In short, Gray substituted English monarchical doctrine for the framers’ republican understanding of law and their own intentions.

The dissent in Wong Kim Ark also observed that such a reliance on common law was incorrect: “[W]hen the sovereignty of the Crown was thrown off and an independent government established, every rule of the common law and every statute of England obtaining in the Colonies in derogation of the principles on which the new government was founded was abrogated,” the minority argued.

In other words, the Revolution itself severed any claim that English feudal concepts governed American citizenship. Therefore, it is unreasonable that Gray’s entire decision is based upon a concept that was expressly rejected by the founders themselves when they created this country. (Notably, as Erler points out, the framers of the 14th Amendment saw themselves as finishing the work of the founders in regard to natural rights and natural law, and therefore they could not have been trying to resurrect the idea of English common law in the land. 

The dissent also argued that “the framers of the Constitution were familiar with the distinctions between the Roman law and the feudal law, between obligations based on territoriality and those based on the personal and invisible character of origin, and there is nothing to show that, in the matter of nationality, they intended to adhere to principles derived from regal government, which they had just assisted in overthrowing.”

Such an understanding wasn’t unique to the dissenters either. In the aftermath of the 14th Amendment’s ratification, Republican Rep. Frederick Woodbridge argued the doctrine of perpetual allegiance “is based upon the feudal system under which there were no free citizens … and the individual man [had] no personal rights; and it was from this source and system that Blackstone derived his idea of indefeasible and perpetual allegiance to the English Crown. … [But] the old feudal doctrine stated by Blackstone and adopted as part of the common law of England, that once a citizen by the accident of birth expatriation under any circumstances less than the consent of the sovereign is an impossibility. The doctrine … is not only at war with the theory of our institutions, but equally at war with every principle of justice and of sound public law.”

As Erler points out, “Thus, the general sense of the Congress in the wake of the passage of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was that the English common law was incompatible with the principles of the Founding.”

When this understanding (that is, a detachment from English common law) is coupled with the framers of the 14th Amendment’s explicit comments during the debate process — which Gray did not consider admissible evidence — it is unmistakable that Wong Kim Ark got it wrong.

Framers of the amendment, like Sen. Jacob Howard, were clear that the clause was “simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States.”

The “law of the land” was the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which specified “that all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, and hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.” As Erler points out, that means that Congress, just prior to ratifying the 14th Amendment and its citizenship clause, was “committed to the view that foreigners (and aliens) were not subject to birthright citizenship.”

The modern court has the chance to restore the original meaning of the 14th Amendment by overturning Wong Kim Ark and ending the judicially invented version of birthright citizenship.

GOP Supercut Video Takes Up Crockett's Challenge on Finding a 'Clip of a Democrat Invoking Violence'

RedState 

The GOP took up a challenge from Democrat Rep. Jasmine Crockett (TX-30) for people to find proof that Democrats were "invoking violence," and it couldn't have backfired on her more spectacularly.

As RedState reported, Crockett made headlines on Tuesday when she officially announced her run for a Senate seat in the great state of Texas. 

In response, numerous clips have resurfaced of the crazy things the Democrat representative has said. In one example, Crockett made comments during her appearance in October on The Breakfast Club radio show (which features host Charlamagne tha God), following Charlie Kirk's assassination a month earlier.

Apparently, Crockett was so unaware of the massive numbers of Democrats who have incited violence against those on the right, that she apparently thought it would be hard to prove. But if you are a RedState reader, you know all too well that the proof is everywhere.

During the lawmaker's appearance on the show, she said the following (It comes at the 7:12 minute mark):

"I challenge somebody to go and find a clip of a Democrat invoking violence."

So, the GOP has accepted the challenge, sharing a short video on X on Wednesday with many clips of the vile comments, made by Democrats, calling for violence.

Watch:

Here's just a sampling of what you hear in the video.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY-8): "We're going to fight it in the courts. And we are going to fight it in the streets."

Dem Rep. Eric Swalwell (CA-14): "When they go low, we're going to bury them below the Capitol. That's what we're going to do."

Dem Rep. Ayanna Pressley (MA-7): "There needs to be unrest in the streets as long as there's unrest in our lives."

Democrat California Governor Gavin Newsom: "We're walking down a damn different path. We're fighting fire with fire. And we're going to punch these sons of [....] in the mouth."

Democrat Rep. Derek Tran (CA-45): "Fight back, punch back and make sure they stay down, and you know what, kick them when they're down. Because they deserve it."

Even Crockett is featured in the clip several times, with her own invocations for violence.

"I think that you punch," Crockett said. "I think you punch. I think you're okay. You okay with punching."

"We are not only going to punch you back, but we are going to knock you out," she added. "Not only are we going to punch back, but we about to beat you down." 

Did Republicans Actually Trick Jasmine Crockett Into Running for Senate?

This is just more proof that those inciting/invoking violence against the other side of the political aisle are the Democrats and those on the left, not the other way around.

Crockett's self-own might be funny if it weren't so disgusting and damaging to our country.

Legacy Media Report Leaves Out an Important Detail on ICE Purchasing Planes for Deportations

RedState 

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed a Washington Post report that the agency has inked a deal for the purchase of six planes for nearly $140 million, which will aid Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in deportations, allowing them to bypass charter airlines.

The Post report read:

The Department of Homeland Security recently signed a contract worth nearly $140 million to purchase six Boeing 737 planes for deportations — a move that will allow the agency to operate its own fleet after receiving a massive funding increase from Congress.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the arm of DHS that carries out deportation flights, has long relied on charter planes, but two officials familiar with the contract and records reviewed by The Washington Post indicate ICE has broader plans.

In a post on Wednesday on X, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin reacted to the WaPo report about DHS reaching an agreement to buy several Boeing 737 planes for deportation flights. 

McLauglin pointed out what she said the outlet had failed to do: that the deal is going to "save the U.S. taxpayer $279 million."

"I guess they didn't want the public to know?" she wrote. "These planes will allow ICE to operate more effectively, including by using more efficient flight patterns."

 "President [Donald] Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem are committed to quickly and efficiently getting criminal illegal aliens out of our country," she added.

McLauglin shared a statement with the outlet that the department was "delighted to see The Washington Post is highlighting the Trump administration's cost-effective and innovative ways of delivering on the American people's mandate for mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens."

The exciting news comes following a report from my RedState colleague Teri Christoph in August, about Noem looking into ICE having its own deportation fleet.

Christoph wrote:

A report popped up on Wednesday that Noem was looking to use an influx of cash into ICE, courtesy of the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), to equip the agency with the equivalent of its own airline that can be at the ready for deportation flights. Right now, ICE relies on charter planes to get the job done.

She added:

The cost of acquiring a fleet of airplanes would undoubtedly be costly. The Pilot Institute estimates it can cost anywhere between $80 million and $400 million to buy a commercial airliner; purchasing in bulk could lower the per plane cost, but it's still a substantial investment—likely well into the billions. Luckily, the OBBB just allocated ICE billions of dollars to ramp up its operations and hire additional agents, but it's unclear if there's enough in the kitty to cover the costs of airplanes.

This is truly fantastic! And a very innovative way to keep President Trump's promise to deport illegal aliens and keep his agenda rolling.