The Department of Homeland Security extended the Temporary Protected Status program enrollment for those nations, giving them an additional 18 months. Around 600,000 people from Venezuela will be eligible for the program, which is causing concern among immigration control advocates considering the alarming number of crimes committed by nationals of that country.

Nearly 100,000 Migrants Will Receive Refunds

President Biden’s initiative, “Keeping Families Together,” was intended to give temporary legal status as well as a streamlined path to permanent residency to around 500,000 noncitizens who are married to legal citizens. The plan was announced in June, and migrants flocked to pay the $580 application fee. However, the federal court struck down that plan and now the US has to refund a total of about $55 million to those who applied.

The program would have provided parole status to those who were eligible, providing a green card and offering temporary work permits. Qualified individuals had to have lived in the US for at least ten years without committing a serious crime. If the initiative had been approved, it would have also included an estimated 50,000 migrant stepchildren of American citizens.

Acting ICE Director Criticizes the Administration

Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director P.J. Lechleitner told NBC News in an interview that Biden could have done more to tighten border security. He claimed that ICE agents could not adequately do their jobs because they were understaffed and underfunded, plus they had to lend personnel to help Customs and Border Protection. […]

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An Upside-Down Paradigm

As Liberty Nation News Senior Political Analyst Tim Donner has pointed out, progressives have been in power for 12 of the last 16 years, raising the question: Is the push for “equity” a cultural imperative whose time has come or a top-down mission that has been sold to the American people by their political masters. Mr. Donner writes:

“The clever strategy of progressive ideologues was to place the words ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion,’ largely favored by everyday Americans, first and last in the DEI acronym, surrounding the word revealing the true intent of their philosophy, ‘equity.’”

Did culture demand that “equity” be the driving force in all things political? It seems unlikely, especially when one considers that huge swaths of the nation cannot even define what the pernicious concept entails. A case in point would be Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) March 2023 interview with Bill Maher.

Maher asked the senator (who has held elected office for more than 40 years), “How would you differentiate between equity and equality?” To mild laughter from the audience, Sanders responded, “Well, equality, we talk about – uh, I don’t know what the answer to that is.” When pushed to specify which side of the equality-vs-equity debate he favored, he chose the former. Notably, his website still contains a section headed: “Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” which states:

“This campaign is committed to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in hiring, in programming, and in all other aspects of the work we do. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are deeply connected to our mission, our success, and to serving the American people.”

But does this suggest that Bernie is responding to a cultural uprising – and perhaps just not understanding it? If that were true, the term “equity” would necessarily be a component of American parlance. It is not. And it’s not the only phenomenon that appears to have its roots in politics rather than culture. […]

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Now You See It

The Global Engagement Center (GEC) officially closed on December 23. Its mission – according to the State Department – was to “direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate U.S. Federal Government efforts to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.” Quite the statement of purpose. However, House Republicans accused it of efforts far more nefarious.

GOP committees said that it had targeted Americans on social media for expressing their own opinions when those beliefs go against the official government narrative. As Liberty Nation News reported:

“[The GEC] has been accused of working to silence conservative voices and, most notably, has flagged Americans’ social media accounts as ‘Russian personas’ for questioning whether the Wuhan bioresearch lab was the source of the COVID-19 outbreak.”

Funding was withdrawn, and that should have been the end of the story for the GEC. But the magicians of DC had other ideas.

A Washington Examiner exclusive revealed in a “non-public letter to members of Congress” that the State Department intends to “realign” staff and funding from the GEC into other “hubs.” […]

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The Ins and Outs of Florida’s Social Media Ban

While most Americans seem to agree that social media has negative consequences for the mental health of minors, many believe the ban is too extreme, especially without first trying other options. Still, “lawmakers have rushed headlong toward restricting protected expression as a first response rather than as a last resort,” suggests FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) in an article published on its website.

Posts on social media – images, videos, audio, and text – are considered expressive acts, and numerous people think these forms of expressions are – or should be – protected by the Constitution. Unless a post fits into one of the First Amendment’s exceptions, “[t]he government can’t restrict it without surviving the applicable level of constitutional scrutiny,” as FIRE put it. Not to mention, “it would teach them [children] the First Amendment doesn’t really mean what it says and that the government knows best. That’s a dangerous lesson for the next generation of Americans to learn.”

Youths are legally considered to have mostly the same rights as adults, to an extent. Minors “are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection, and only in relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances may government bar public dissemination of protected materials to them,” according to the Supreme Court’s ruling nearly fifty years ago in Erznoznik v. City of Jacksonville, a case regarding restrictions at drive-in movie theaters. Jumping ahead to 2011, in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the Court overturned a law prohibiting kids under 18 from buying or renting “violent video games.” Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, said even though the government “possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm,” it does not give it “a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.”

Yet several states, including Ohio, Arkansas, Utah, and California, have attempted to limit minors’ access to social media. Most of these attempts, however, have been postponed by lawsuits challenging their constitutionality. […]

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Red States Could See Big Changes in 2030

Binyamin Appelbaum, lead writer on economics and business for the editorial board at The New York Times, recently analyzed data covering two decades of migration patterns. By his estimation, if people continue to relocate as they have in the last two years, California will lose four electoral votes after the 2030 census, New York will lose three, and Illinois two. Other blue states, such as Minnesota, Oregon, and Rhode Island, will each lose one electoral vote. All 12 would go to the red states people moved to and be locked in until 2040.

The impact of these relocations would affect not only the Electoral College, though. “Using the new data [from the Census Bureau], the Brennan Center estimates that if trends of the last two years continue, the South will gain nine seats in the reapportionment of congressional districts after the next census — the largest single-decade gain for the region in history,” said Michael Li, senior counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy organization, in a recent article.

Florida and Texas could each gain four seats, maybe even five for the Lone Star State, and North Carolina could also add a seat. “Meanwhile,” said Li, “California and New York, which have seen significant population outflows this decade, are projected to lose four and two districts respectively.” Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin could each lose a seat, too.

But why are so many Americans flocking to conservative-led states? Some seek manufacturing jobs or tech hubs, claims Appelbaum, but most appear to be teachers, police officers, and dentists, people searching for a lower cost of living. However, Americans have been dividing themselves for decades, culturally and politically. Journalist Bill Bishop, author of the 2008 book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, told NPR in 2022, “They are still sorting themselves in ways that end up that places are increasingly Republican or increasingly Democratic.” The problem is that people in groups with similar views “tend to become more extreme over time in the way that they’re like-minded,” Bishop told NPR. This means fewer people gravitate to the middle of the political spectrum, making politics “less about solving our problems” and more “about cheering for our side,” said Bishop. “And so we’re stuck.” […]

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“Campaigns, in many ways, are last-mile marketers that exist on terrain that is set by culture, and the institutions by which Democrats have historically had the ability to influence culture are losing relevance,” Kamala Harris’ deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty, acknowledged to Semafor on December 15 in a stunningly blunt admission. “You don’t get a national eight-point shift to the right without losing hold of culture.”

Flaherty even specifically pointed out the total uselessness of having the dominant press in the party’s back pocket.

“There’s just no value – with respect to my colleagues in the mainstream press – in a general election, to speaking to The New York Times or speaking to The Washington Post, because those are already with us,” he told the news site.

Epiphany for Democrats: ‘They Don’t Trust All This Stuff’

Here’s the worst part for the floundering party: It’s not only the media. An entire cozy credentialed elite orbiting the blue nexus has seen its “ability to influence culture,” as Flaherty puts it, completely collapse over the four-year course of a deeply unpopular Biden administration. […]

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Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) may not be the upper chamber party leader anymore, but he has handed the baton to a close ally, Sen. John Thune (R-SD), and he will still be a force to be reckoned with over the final two years of his current term. Upon announcing in February that he would step down as Senate GOP leader at the end of 2024, McConnell took pains to stress a core conviction that will drive him through 2026. “I believe more strongly than ever that America’s global leadership is essential to preserving the shining city on a hill that Ronald Reagan discussed,” he asserted.

With a 53-47 Senate GOP majority, it only takes four McConnell-contingent Republicans to pass Democrat-backed “global leadership” legislation or thwart Trump-supported initiatives.

McConnell is showing all the signs of a man digging in for a fight as Trump Part II approaches. During an address at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, on December 7, the 82-year-old senator, who has been in his seat since 1985, took a not-so-subtle swipe at Trump’s America First agenda.

‘Force-Multiplying Institutions and Partnerships’

“Within the party Ronald Reagan once led so capably, it is increasingly fashionable to suggest that the sort of global leadership he modeled is no longer America’s place,” McConnell asserted. “But let’s be absolutely clear: America will not be made great again by those who are content to manage our decline.” […]

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Red States March Right On

Donald Trump made a spectacular comeback on Election Day 2024, taking not just the electoral vote, but the popular as well – the first time in two decades a Republican presidential candidate has done so. Since his win, GOP leaders across the nation have rushed to advance far more conservative agendas before he even takes office.

In Idaho, lawmakers are working on legislation to allow school staff to carry concealed firearms without prior approval and to make it easier for parents to sue districts in library and curriculum disputes. Oklahoma schools may soon be required to display the Ten Commandments.

Arkansas Republicans are working to create a felony offense for “vaccine harm,” making pharmaceutical companies or their executives criminally liable if their products hurt or kill people. The left, of course, is outraged about this – despite their desire to do the same for firearm companies. The difference, of course, is that they want to make firearm manufacturers criminally liable when criminals misuse their products. What lawmakers in the Natural State hope to do is hold Big Pharma accountable when their products used as directed still hurt or kill people.

Ironically, while the left calls the firearm industry the only one in America protected from legal liability when their products hurt people, the truth is gun makers can still be sued if their products malfunction and cause injury or death, just like any other industry … except for vaccine makers. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 actually made vaccine makers immune to wrongful injury and death lawsuits – the only industry in America that is. […]

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In 2016, after serving as a successful governor of Florida, Jeb Bush finally stepped up to do what his family always envisioned and sought the presidency. He was the early favorite to follow in the footsteps of his father and brother and become the third member of the Bush dynasty to reach the Oval Office. And if the Mitt Romney-John McCain neoconservative party of yore had carried on with business as usual, his heavily financed candidacy might have succeeded or at least been highly competitive. But no one, least of all the Bushes, counted on the rebellious emergence of Trump, who flattened Bush early on, calling him “low energy Jeb.” Bush never recovered, once famously having to prompt an audience to clap for him, and pulled out of the race after three primary contests, having won the paltry total of four delegates.

But Trump wasn’t done with the Bush dynasty. In a debate before the 2016 South Carolina primary, The Donald called the Iraq War, initiated by George W. Bush, “a big fat mistake.” He then shocked everyone in the military-friendly state by channeling Democrats’ standard talking points: “They lied! … They said there were weapons of mass destruction … and they knew there were none,” adding that the war cost taxpayers $5 trillion that could have been used to rebuild American infrastructure. The Bush family never forgave Trump, with Bush 41 and 43 refusing to endorse the eventual GOP nominee. They knew their dynasty was done.

Bullseye on the Clintons

Next came the Clintons. Like Jeb Bush in the GOP primaries, Hillary Clinton was considered a heavy favorite in the 2016 general election. Having served as First Lady, senator, and Secretary of State, her credentials were impeccable. And if she had won, Bill Clinton would have returned to the White House as First Gentleman in a third Clinton term. Yet the voters proved to be unimpressed or uninterested in Hillary’s resume. They wanted to shake things up profoundly in the DC Swamp, and Trump was the only one who promised to do exactly that as a genuine outsider who had already accumulated enough fame and fortune for a lifetime.

Despite her extensive experience and voluminous position papers, Clinton was drawn into the trap of campaigning not on her merits but on the horrors of Trump. Once she labeled his supporters deplorable and irredeemable, she forfeited the high ground and suffered the most shocking defeat in decades – so much for the Clintons. […]

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Education Takes a Backseat

“Chronic absenteeism” means a teacher has missed ten or more days in a school year, excluding vacations and paid holidays. CPS isn’t the only district in the Chicago area to experience this trend. Nearly 43% of teachers at Evanston-Skokie School District 65 were chronically absent, the same as CPS, and 38.5% at Oak Park-River Forest District 200. The issue is not new, though. Since the pandemic, numerous schools nationwide have had an increasing number of chronically absent teachers.

In New York City, during the 2022-23 school year, almost a fifth of public schoolteachers missed 11 or more days, slightly higher than the previous year. Each week in the 2023-2024 school year, nearly 15% of Michigan teachers were absent. Last September, Springfield High School and Junior High in Ohio were forced to close for a day because too many teachers had called out, and, like many public schools across the country, not enough substitutes were available.

“The shortage of substitutes has grown more acute since the pandemic,” said Sarah Mervosh, an education reporter, writing in The New York Times. “[F]ewer people are entering the teaching profession compared with a decade ago, and there has been more teacher turnover in recent years.”

An important factor that many media outlets somehow seem to overlook is that “[t]eacher absences can result in significant learning loss and can have negative impacts on nonacademic and behavioral outcomes for students,” explained The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. […]

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