Posts on Thursday, February 5, 2026

For nearly a decade Natalie Starbird has been one of the most influential academic voices shaping how "misinformation" is defined, studied, and ultimately moderated online. Her research helped supply the intellectual framework used by major platforms, government agencies, and NGO's to justify sweeping censorship of election-related speech after 2016 and 2020. (snip) Now, Starbird is applying the same framework to a new domain: immigration. A recently published paper (snip) coauthored by Starbird (snip) does not investigate falsehoods, it investigates political dissent. Specifically how Americans use government data to criticize immigration policy.

Nashville Electric Service (NES) made the live stream of its Tuesday press conference hosted by YouTube private on Wednesday, leaving the video inaccessible to the general public. The decision came some time after The Michael Patrick Leahy Show analyzed the claims by CEO Teresa Broyles-Aplin on Wednesday morning, concluding the top NES executive appeared to falsely conflate the company’s budgeting for tree trimming and vegetation management with the amount it actually spent. As The Tennessee Star reported on Tuesday, Broyles-Aplin on Tuesday appeared to contradict the NES 2024 annual report she previously signed, which detailed a $7 million cut to tree trimming expenses helped generate a 6 percent decrease to operating expenses.

When your enemy is down, that's a really good time to kick him in the head. And right now, the Iranian mullahs are down. Israel took out their air and cyber defense systems. We took out their nuke program. Their economy is collapsing thanks to President Trump's sanctions; there are no more pallets of cash coming with a nice note from Ben Rhodes. The Persian people are rising up. All our forces are finally in place. It's time to kick them in the head. Let's take these bastards out of the picture for good – and hopefully, as you read this, that's what is happening.We can't let this opportunity slip away.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson continues to dismay. Her attendance at the rancidly partisan anti-ICE Grammy Awards on Sunday was a joke. The 55-year-old Biden DEI candidate was nominated for a Grammy for narrating the audiobook of her memoir “Lovely One,” which she unashamedly believes herself to be.

The baseball world is mourning the loss of a player who made history with the Detroit Tigers. Mickey Lolich, remembered as the Tigers’ hero in the 1968 World Series, has died, the Tigers announced. He was 85. Lolich is the last MLB pitcher to win three games in the World Series. He was named World Series MVP that year. The Tigers said Lolich’s wife informed the franchise that Lolich was recently in hospice care. The cause of death was not released.

Hamas terrorist Muhammad Issam Hassan al-Habil, who, according to the Israel Defense Forces, killed 19-year-old surveillance soldier Corporal Noa Marciano while she was held hostage in Gaza, is no longer with us, the IDF reported Wednesday. The Hamas cell commander was eliminated in an airstrike in Gaza City’s Shati refugee camp, they announced. The IDF alleged that the savagely violent group violated the fragile ceasefire negotiated by the Trump administration, and that this was the consequence. So long:

California’s already sky-high gas prices are expected to surge after Valero abruptly shuttered its Benicia refinery amid a spiraling “oil crisis,” a new report claims. The Benicia refinery began shutting down on Saturday, four months earlier than planned, a former Valero manager told the California Globe Tuesday. Thermal imaging showed the facility went cold as the Crimson Pipeline – which transports crude oil from Southern to Northern California – was also taken offline. “We are in an unprecedented oil crisis,” oil expert Mike Ariza told the publication. Valero Energy Corp. announced its plans last spring to pull the plug on its 145,000-barrel-per-day refinery by April,

Embattled Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass secretly altered the official Palisades Fire response report to downplay the failures made by the city and fire department when the deadly blaze erupted, a new report said. Bass, after seeing an early draft of the after-action report, wanted key findings of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s shortcomings scrubbed or watered down — and even warned then-interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva the unedited conclusions could expose the city to legal liability, sources close to the Democrat’s staff told the Los Angeles Times. Bass was cautioned that the self-serving tweaks in with the report was a “bad idea” that could torpedo her political career,

It’s a worn-out trope by now to conjure yet again Yeats’s immortal poem, yet perhaps forgivable if we dissect its most famous phrase, “the center cannot hold.” Because exactly what we mean by “the center,” and how we determine what holds it together, may answer the question of how we might do exactly that. As it is, one example of the “center” is millions of friendships that remain strong, held between left-of-center pro-business Democrats who are skeptical about MAGA, and right-of-center Republicans who believe MAGA policies are the best route to our country achieving goals we all share: broadly distributed prosperity and an affordable middle-class lifestyle. But those friendships are fraying.

With nothing else to run on, Democrats appear to think that demonizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers will be enough to win them control of Congress come November. “In their campaigns, Democrats across the country are responding to the anger felt by many communities over the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations,” reports CBS News. If they can sustain today’s anger, the argument goes, voters will turn out in droves to clip the Trump administration’s wings in his last two years in office. But there are a multitude of reasons why this strategy isn’t likely to work. First, November is a long way off.

Every so often there’s a piece of content in The New York Times or a similar publication that’s meant to create suspicion but without saying exactly why, usually for the purpose of politicizing something mundane. The story this week about National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard being on site during an FBI operation in Atlanta is one of those pieces of content, but in this case, the reason for the manufactured suspicion is obvious. The Times on Monday wrote that it was “unusual” for Gabbard to appear at an FBI field office following the agency’s seizure of 2020 ballots from an election center in the ever-so-seedy Fulton County.

Nearly two-thirds of likely 2026 midterm election voters support deporting illegal aliens from the United States, a new poll released Monday shows. In its latest survey of 1,004 likely 2026 voters, the political polling firm Cygnal found that respondents support removing illegal aliens from America and sending them back to their country of origin by a nearly 2:1 margin (61 to 34 percent). The poll also found strong support for ICE enforcement of federal immigration laws and agreement that illegally entering the United States is a violation of such laws.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has made a move to secure the deliberations, private discussions, and working drafts of the court. According to the New York Times, Roberts is requiring all clerks and permanent staff to sign a non-disclosure agreement. The writer writes about this in a hushed tone, as though she is laying out the plot of a murder mystery. But there is nothing mysterious about the erosion of the court's integrity, which points directly to publications like the NYT and POLITICO happily disseminating what is leaked to them. The chief justice acted after a series of unusual leaks

In yesterday afternoon’s Wall Street Journal Best of the Web column, James Freeman asks the question: “Who watches the ‘ICE watchers’?” The answer to Freeman’s question is Christina Buttons/City Journal. Another answer to the question is not the Star Tribune. That much I can tell you. I’m afraid Freeman would include the Star Tribune publisher, editors, reporters, and columnists among “the incurious media” to which he refers at the top of his column. That does not do justice to the phenomenon. Ms. Buttons reports on what she found watching the ICE watchers

Every civilization eventually confronts the same problem: how to measure value, settle obligations, and store trust across time. Money is often treated as a technical instrument—an accounting tool, a policy lever—but history reveals something deeper. Money is a political institution first, an economic one second. It encodes power, defines sovereignty, and silently disciplines or enables entire populations. Today’s global monetary order—dominated by dollar-denominated fiat currencies and managed by central banks—did not arise because it was optimal. It arose because it was survivable. The question now confronting the world is whether it remains so.

Tennessee has roughly 186,000 illegal aliens. California has over 2.2 million. We have absolutely no idea how many Californians are murdered, raped, assaulted, or victimized by illegal aliens, because Gov. Gavin Newsom refuses to track the data or share it with the federal government. It’s allowed Democrats to argue that illegal aliens are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. Only it’s probably not true. Because, unlike California, Tennessee actually tracked its year-to-year illegal alien crime statistics. And what they discovered was shocking and appalling. From the Chattanoogan.com: 21,648 total criminal charges [against illegal aliens] in 2025 2,183 violent offenses 41 homicides 1,592 assaults 145 sexual offenses 11 child rapes