November 26, 2025

Now, on to the news…

Mere days after Christopher F. Rufo and Ryan Thorpe exposed sprawling fraud in Minnesota’s Somali community, including schemes that allegedly siphoned billions in taxpayer funds, some of which ended up in the hands of the Al-Shabaab terrorist group, President Trump moved to revoke Temporary Protected Status for the state’s Somali migrants. Progressives denounced both the reporting and the policy response, suggesting that they were racist.

In a new essay, Rufo dismantles this charge, arguing that the key question is not whether facts are “racist” but whether they are true, and that Americans are entitled to weigh group-level cultural patterns when setting immigration policy. Different cultures produce different norms and outcomes, he writes, and a rational government must respond when large-scale fraud and failed assimilation show that a decades-long experiment has not served the national interest.

Read Rufo’s case for why it’s not racist to notice Somali fraud—and why Trump should stand firm.

The AI revolution, like those of other groundbreaking technologies before it, will change our world in ways no one can fully anticipate. Yet there is some predictive power in finding the right historical analogy, argues Mark P. Mills. But with what technology should we compare AI? The Internet, automobiles, trains, or electricity?

Read here to see why Mills believes the “arrival of chemical science” at the end of the nineteenth century points to a similarly “expansive and revolutionary” future for AI.

The new documentary 15 Days examines school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic and the devastating effect they had on children’s learning. “15 Days reveals that what ultimately drove pandemic-era school policy was not ‘science,’” Adam Lehodey writes, “but interest groups. Union leaders were one of the main proponents of stricter public school Covid measures.” Indeed, unions were fighting for partial closures despite schools receiving $189 billion in additional funding.

Read Lehodey’s review of a documentary he says is worth watching.

Why is an environmental organization co-founded by the folk-rock duo The Indigo Girls bankrolling the anti-Israel extremist group Palestinian Youth Movement?

Stu Smith’s latest investigation for City Journal explores how Honor the Earth, a green activist group founded in 1993, came to position itself as “part of a global resistance to ‘racial capitalism’ and ‘settler-colonialism.’”

Honor the Earth’s ties to extremism point to the need for more vigorous enforcement of the tax code, argues Smith. Read here for more details.

“Chicago’s municipal pensions are only 24% funded. The Illinois state constitution prohibits reducing pension benefits, but how are those pensions to be paid when there are no assets with which to pay them?”

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MartinLawford, commenting on the Windy City’s dire financial straits

Photo credit: Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune via Getty Images