Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

Foreign nationals accounted for 79 percent of all arrests for theft on trains in Britain last year, and 40 percent of all railway arrests, new data from British Transport Police has revealed.

The figures were published as part of a Freedom of Information (FOI) request submitted by the Centre for Migration Control (CMC) think tank.

They showed that, despite comprising a minority of the overall population, foreign nationals were disproportionately responsible for several categories of offenses, including theft, drug violations, sexual offenses, and violent crime.

“Of the 9,771 arrests in England, Wales, and Scotland, nearly 3,700 were foreign nationals. We have imported a huge problem,” the organization wrote in an X post on Thursday.

EXC: Data from the BTP shows that foreign nationals accounted for 40% of all railway arrests last year.

This includes:
79% of arrests for theft
40% of arrests for drug offences
37% of arrests for sexual offences
36% of arrests for violent crime

Read more below 👇 pic.twitter.com/NGDFNaw8cC

— Centre for Migration Control (@migrationCtrl) January 15, 2026

It noted that 79 percent of those arrested in 2025 for theft on British trains were foreigners, while migrants arrested for drug offenses, sexual offenses, and violent crime comprised 40 percent, 37 percent, and 36 percent of all detentions, respectively.

For all offenses, foreign nationals were involved in 37.7 percent of arrests.

Speaking to GB News, CMC’s research director Robert Bates said of the British government, “They have made our trains unsafe. It is the responsibility of any sane government to end immigration and begin a programme of mass deportations to protect the British people.”

Last week, the CMC published its findings from multiple other FOI requests to police forces across England and Wales, and found that 172,889 foreign national arrests had been made for the year ending March 31, 2025.

This, it noted, equated to 474 arrests every day, or an arrest every 183 seconds.

Of those arrests, 51,212 were for violent offenses, while 11,264 were in connection with a sexual offense.

🚨 Julia Hartley-Brewer BANGS her head on the table in disbelief over the “incompetence” of Britain’s detention facilities.

Migration expert Robert Bates explains that, after a certain period of time, illegal migrants are let out if they can’t be deported.@JuliaHB1 pic.twitter.com/TijZQ88HuD

— Talk (@TalkTV) January 13, 2026

In several recommendations the think tank made to the government following its findings, the CMC called for Britain to “follow the example set by [U.S. President] Donald Trump and introduce a ‘red list’ of countries that are unable to obtain visas.”

It also called for the government to “amend legislation so that any foreign national convicted of a crime immediately becomes liable for deportation and, crucially, actually begin deporting them.”

This reality is not just seen in Britain but across wider Western Europe.

In September last year, the French statistics agency INSEE revealed that 64 percent of violent robberies, physical and sexual violence on public transport in Paris are committed by foreigners, with 43 percent of this number being North African, who represent only 3.4 percent of the population.

Similarly, in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, foreigners are responsible for 62 percent of all crimes in the German state on public transport, despite being only 16 percent of the population, according to data published following an inquiry for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) state lawmakers in June last year.

Data from November 2024 showed that across wider Germany, foreigners commit 59 percent of all sexual crimes in trains and at train stations.

Alternative for Germany (AfD) MP Martin Hess recently warned, “Train stations, once places of mobility and peaceful encounters, are increasingly becoming no-go areas,” after it had been revealed that the number of violent crimes at Berlin’s central station tripled between 2019 and 2024.

In recent weeks, railway employees and their unions in Italy have expressed concerns about welfare following several high-profile attacks against staff, including the fatal stabbing of a 34-year-old train conductor on Jan. 5 outside Bologna’s main railway station by a migrant.

Earlier this week, a homeless foreigner accused of sexually harassing female railway workers on three separate occasions at Ravenna train station was issued a one-year banishment order after union complaints and police intervention.

“The workers are terrified,” said Manola Cavallaro, regional secretary of FIT CISL Emilia-Romagna. “The fear isn’t just physical, it’s psychological. You go to work knowing there’s this person wandering around, watching you, approaching you. And you don’t know how far he will go.”

Read more here…

Macy’s will close its two fulfillment centers in Cheshire later this year, a move that will affect nearly 1,000 employees, according to a company notice released Tuesday and reported by WFSB. 

The facilities on Knotter Drive and West Johnson Avenue will shut down. A small group of maintenance workers will remain through spring 2027 to assist with the closure, but most employees are expected to lose their jobs this year.

Cheshire’s town manager said the community was notified and is working with state and regional agencies to help displaced workers. In a statement, the town said:

“The Town of Cheshire is deeply saddened by Macy’s decision to close its Logistics Fulfillment Center, resulting in the elimination of nearly 1,000 jobs. Macy’s has been a valued member of our community since 1986 and has consistently been one of Cheshire’s top ten employers, making this a significant loss for our town.

Our thoughts are with the employees and families impacted by this decision. The Town has been in contact with Macy’s management, the Northwest Regional Workforce Board, and the Connecticut Department of Labor to coordinate assistance for affected workers, including plans for a job fair and access to employment and transition resources.

Cheshire remains committed to supporting impacted employees and will continue working with our regional and state partners during this transition.”

The announcement follows the October decision to close Macy’s South Windsor distribution center in early 2026. Layoffs there include warehouse workers, equipment operators and supervisors, with job eliminations occurring between December 28, 2025, and January 10, 2026.

Macy’s said the changes are part of a broader effort to streamline operations. “Macy’s, Inc. is continuing to simplify and modernize our supply chain to better serve customers and operate more efficiently. As part of this work, we are concluding Backstage operations at our South Windsor, CT facility and centralizing them at our dedicated off-price facility in Columbus, OH. Other operations at South Windsor will continue. We’re committed to supporting our colleagues through this transition,” the company said.

Authored by Andrew Korybko,

The Somali Defense Minister’s request for Saudi Arabia to replicate its South Yemeni campaign in Somaliland coupled with reports about those two’s and Egypt’s impending alliance that would thus de facto include their Eritrean ally strongly suggest that something big might soon be afoot.

Reports have recently circulated about three separate but complementary military pacts in which Saudi Arabia might soon participate, which could form the core of an “Islamic NATO”. 

Bloomberg got the ball rolling by reporting that Turkiye wants to join September’s “Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement” between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Former Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, who’s still influential, then proposed including Egypt and presumably his own country too.

Bloomberg reported right after that Saudi Arabia is finalizing a military pact with Turkish-allied Somalia and Egypt for curtailing the UAE’s influence in Africa, the concept of which was analyzed here regarding how those three, Pakistan, and Turkiye could jointly advance this goal. On that note, it’s relevant to add that Pakistan clinched its own security pact with Somalia over the summer and then its top military official visited Egypt to discuss regional security, thus signaling Pakistan’s growing role in Africa.

The members of this emerging Saudi-centric coalition all oppose Somaliland’s 1991 redeclaration of independence, which was recently recognized by Israel. Somaliland also has close ties with the UAE and Ethiopia, and all three of its top partners are close with one another too. Ethiopia’s MoU with Somaliland on 1 January 2024 for recognizing its redeclaration of independence in exchange for access to the sea was exploited by its historic Egyptian rival to assemble a containment coalition with Somalia and Eritrea.

Although this nascent “Islamic NATO” might first aim to defeat the allegedly UAE-backed “Rapid Support Forces” in Sudan, they’re much more heavily armed and battle-hardened than the Somaliland Armed Forces, the latter of which might be perceived as so-called “low-hanging fruit”.

Moreover, South Yemen’s “Southern Transitional Council” was just steamrolled by Saudi air support and local Yemeni forces, which might have emboldened Riyadh and its partners to consider replicating that campaign in Somaliland.

It would take time to position Saudi (and possibly Egyptian, Pakistani, and/or Turkish) warplanes in the region (likely based in reoccupied South Yemen if this comes to pass) and for its emerging coalition to train the Somali National Army so this probably won’t happen anytime soon.

Additionally, UAE-aligned Puntland between Somaliland and rump Somalia must first return to the federal fold for enabling an invasion of Somaliland, unless Djibouti joins the coalition and allows its territory to be used for this.

Israel’s recent recognition of Somaliland’s 1991 redeclaration of independence and the possibility of it basing troops there as well as entering into their own mutual defense pact might deter them, however, as could Ethiopia doing the same (whether in coordination with Israel or independently thereof). On that note, it should be pointed out that Israeli, Emirati, and Ethiopian interests converge in Somaliland, which is where the nascent “Islamic NATO’s” do too but for the opposite reasons. This spikes the risk of conflict.

The Somali Defense Minister’s request for Saudi Arabia to replicate its South Yemeni campaign in Somaliland coupled with reports about those two’s and Egypt’s impending alliance that would thus de facto include their Eritrean ally strongly suggest that something big might soon be afoot. Time is therefore of the essence, and if Somaliland’s top partners don’t soon act in meaningful ways to deter the emerging Saudi-centric coalition, then it might not be able to defend itself from this existential threat.

Dutch students forced to live side-by-side with 125 refugees in a woke government plan to aid the refugees’ ‘integration’ were subjected to years of sexual assault and violence, according to an investigation. 

The experiment – held at Stek Oost located in the Watergraafsmeer district of Amsterdam – placed a total of 125 students and 125 refugees together, where they were encouraged to ‘buddy up’ so that the migrants would quickly assimilate into life in the Netherlands.

Instead, the refugees started raping. 

Students told the Dutch investigative documentary program Zembla that they faced frequent sexual assault, harassment, violence, stalking, and gang rape.

One woman said she regularly saw “fights in the hallway and then again in the shared living room,” while a man told the investigators that a refugee threatened him with an eight-inch kitchen knife. 

In another case fro 2019, a female student said she was raped by a Syrian refugee after he invited her to his room to watch a film, and then refused to let her leave. 

“He wanted to learn Dutch, to get an education. I wanted to help him,” said the woman, who identified only as Amanda. She described how he asked her several times to come to his room. After she eventually agreed, she became extremely uncomfortable being alone with him and asked to leave, only for him to trap her in his room and rape her.

The students – including Amanda – said that authorities ignored multiple reports. 

Six months after Amanda reported her rape, which authorities dropped for lack of evidence, another woman living in Stek Oost reported the same Syrian, telling the housing association that runs the complex that she was concerned for her safety and the safety of other women living there. 

According to the Zembla documentary, the local authority claimed it was impossible to evict the man. 

In March, 2022 he was formally arrested after having left the housing complex and was later convicted of raping Amanda and another resident, for which he received just three years in prison in 2024. 

“You see unacceptable behaviour, and people get scared,” said Carolien de Heer, district chair of the East district of Amsterdam. “But legally, that’s often not enough to remove someone from their home or impose mandatory care. You keep running into the same obstacles.”

The firm that runs the complex, Stadgenoot, suspected that a 2023 gang rape took place. 

Since opening in 2018, Stek Oost has faced multiple similar allegations. In 2022, Dutch TV station AT5 reported that a refugee had been accused of six sex attacks between 2018 and 2021.

He was involved in a protracted legal battle with local authorities, who fought to force him to leave Stek Oost.

For its part, Stadgenoot wanted to shut the complex down as early as 2023, but the local authority refused.

It will, however, be shut down by 2028 after the contract to run the site expires. –Daily Mail

The staff at Stek Oost, meanwhile, are reportedly exhausted from their experience living and working there. 

“We were completely overwhelmed. We no longer wanted to be responsible for the safety of the complex,” said Mariëlle Foppen, who works for Stadgenoot. “It was just too intense. As the manager of these colleagues, I would say: “If I can’t guarantee their safety, I’m going to have a really bad night’s sleep.”

When will liberals stop feeding their daughters to monsters?

According to a recent podcast appearance by geopolitical analyst and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, the Arab Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia (the Gulf Cooperation Council) are increasingly behind the scenes pushing pack against those who advocate for regime change in Iran. This marks a serious potential de-escalation in what is a decades-long (or even centuries long) Sunni-Shia rivalry and war for influence in the broader Middle East. In a sense, the pro-Sunni Gulf-NATO axis has already ‘won’ – Assad was overthrown in Syria, and Hezbollah’s leadership was decimated last year – now less a threat to Israel and also Gulf interests. 

Dr. Mearsheimer days ago appeared on on “Judging Freedom” talking with the Judge about a variety of topics, but most importantly on the evolving situation in Iran. As Mearsheimer describes, he laid out his thinking on:

1) what the US and Israel were trying to do in Iran — upend the regime and wreck the country;

2) how we planned to do it — with the usual playbook;

3) why the strategy failed;

4) why the US has not bombed Iran when it appeared a few days ago that an attack was imminent;

5) whether Israel planned to attack Iran with the US or the US planned to attack alone; and

6) what the strategic consequences are of what is happening in Iran.

On this last point, there is growing evidence that the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, are more and more coming to view the US-Israeli tag team – not Iran – as the greatest threat to stability in the Middle East.

If true, wrecking Iran and turning it into another Syria would just further embolden Israel and the US to pursue reckless policies in the region, which would not be good for the Gulf states.

Already, Israeli warplanes have attacked Syria literally hundreds of times since the new Jolani/Sharaa regime came to power. This was part of a divide and conquer Israeli strategy, and to ensure Damascus can never again be a threat.

While Israel is appearing to ‘tolerate’ the new Sunni hardline government, it remains clear that Syria has been more weakened than ever, with no more anti-air defenses to speak of (after Assad had the most feared Russian anti-air system in the region). Now only Iran is left standing.

Could the West and Israel now be ready to unleash the ‘Syria proxy war playbook’ on the Islamic Republic in the Persian heartland? Is that what the least two weeks have been about? Mearsheimer and Napolitano address this issue and more. Watch above.

Authored by vittorio on X,

Bill Ackman quote-tweeted a graph showing the partisan gap between young men and women almost doubled in 25 years.

Political scientists & data quants have been telling us this for half a decade.

Women have moved *radically* leftward, at a scale & speed with no modern precedent, while men have, on the whole, remained largely steady & unchanged.

And you can see it across the data: https://t.co/3uvlTDRwMg pic.twitter.com/Vh6zwPkKUI

— Zarathustra (@zarathustra5150) January 15, 2026

Women moved radically left. Men stayed roughly where they were.

Good question. Most answers I’ve seen are either tribal (“women are emotional”) or surface-level (“social media bad”). Neither traces the actual mechanism.

Let me try.

First, notice what Wanye pointed out:

It seems pretty clear to me that what we’ve been told about radicalization for the last 10 years is exactly the opposite of what’s happened in reality.

We’ve been told that men are increasingly radicalized to the right and that this is a bad thing.

What’s actually happened is…

— wanye (@xwanyex) January 15, 2026

We’ve been told for a decade that men are “radicalizing to the right” and that this is dangerous. The actual data shows the opposite. Men barely moved. Women moved 20+ points leftward.

The story we are told is exactly inverted from reality. And when female leftward movement does get discussed, it’s framed as progress: “women becoming more educated, more independent, more enlightened.”

They’ll tell you the graph shows enlightenment and progress.

Wrong.

What the graph shows is capture.

This Isn’t Just America

Before getting into the mechanism, something important: this pattern isn’t only American. It’s global.

The Financial Times documented last year that the gender ideology gap is widening across dozens of countries simultaneously. UK, Germany, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Poland, Brazil, Tunisia. Young women moving left on social issues, young men either stable or drifting right.

This matters because it rules out explanations specific to American politics. It’s not Title IX policy. It’s not #MeToo. It’s not the specific culture war of US campuses. Something bigger is happening, something that rolled out globally at roughly the same time.

South Korea is the extreme case. Young Korean men are now overwhelmingly conservative. Young Korean women are overwhelmingly progressive. The gap there is even wider than the US. Contributing factors include mandatory military service for men (18 months of your life the state takes, while women are exempt) and brutal economic competition. But the timing of divergence still tracks with smartphone adoption.

Whatever is causing this, it’s not American. The machine is global.

The Substrate

Start with the biological hardware.

Women evolved in environments where social exclusion carried enormous survival costs. You can’t hunt pregnant. You can’t fight nursing. Survival required the tribe’s acceptance: their protection, their food sharing, their tolerance of your temporary vulnerability. Millions of years of this and you get hardware that treats social rejection as a serious threat.

Men faced different pressures. Hunting parties gone for days. Exploration. Combat. You had to tolerate being alone, disliked, outside the group for extended periods. Men who could handle temporary exclusion without falling apart had more options. More risk-taking, more independence, more ability to leave bad situations.

(Male status still mattered enormously for reproduction, low-status men had it rough. But men could recover from temporary exclusion in ways that were harder for pregnant or nursing women.)

This shows up in personality research. David Schmitt’s work across 55 cultures found the same pattern everywhere: women average higher agreeableness, higher neuroticism (sensitivity to negative stimuli, including social rejection cues). Men average higher tolerance for disagreement and social conflict. The differences aren’t huge, but they’re consistent across every culture studied.

Not better or worse. Different selection pressures, different adaptations.

But it means the same environment affects them differently. Consensus pressure hits harder for one group than the other.

The Machine

Now look at what we built.

Social media is a consensus engine. You can see what everyone believes in real time. Disagreement is visible, measurable, and punishable at scale. The tribe used to be 150 people. Now it’s everyone you’ve ever met, plus a world of strangers watching.

And look at the timeline. Facebook launched in 2004 but was college-only until 2006. The iPhone was launched in June 2007. Instagram in 2010. Suddenly, social media was in your pocket and in your face, all day, every day.

Look at the graph again. Women were roughly stable through the early 2000s. The acceleration starts around 2007-2008.

The curve steepens through the 2010s as smartphones became universal and platforms became more sophisticated.

Women are by nature more liberal, but the radicalization coincides with the rise in smartphone adoption.

The machine turned on and the capture began.

The mental health collapse among teenage girls tracks almost perfectly with smartphone adoption, with stronger effects for girls than boys. The same vulnerability that made social exclusion more costly in ancestral environments made the new consensus engines more capturing.

This machine wasn’t designed to capture women specifically. It was designed to capture attention. But it captures people more susceptible to consensus pressure more effectively. Women are more susceptible on average. So it captured them more.

Add a feedback loop: women complain more than men. Scroll any platform and it looks like women are suffering more. Institutions respond to this because visible distress creates liability, PR risk and regulatory pressure. In addition, women are weaker and inevitably seen as the victim in most scenarios. The institutional response is to make environments “safer”. Which means removing conflict. Which means censoring disagreement. Which means the consensus strengthens.

The counterarguments get removed or deplatformed and the loop closes.

The Institutions

Universities flipped to 60% female while simultaneously becoming progressive monoculture. The institution young women trust most, during the years their worldview forms, feeds them a single ideology with no serious opposition.

FIRE’s campus speech surveys show the pattern clearly: students self-censor, report fear of expressing views, cluster toward acceptable opinions. This isn’t unique to women, but women are more embedded in higher education than men now, and the fields they dominate (humanities, social sciences, education, HR) are the most ideologically uniform.

Four years surrounded by peers who all believe the same thing. Professors who all believe the same thing. Reading lists pointing one direction. Disagreement is not even rare, it’s socially punished. You learn to pattern-match the acceptable opinions and perform them.

Then they graduate into female-dominated fields: HR, media, education, healthcare, non-profits, where the monoculture continues. From 18 to 35, many women never encounter sustained disagreement from people they respect. The feedback loop never breaks.

Men took different paths. Trades. Engineering. Finance. Military. Fields where results matter more than consensus. Fields where disagreement is tolerated or even rewarded. The monoculture didn’t capture them because they weren’t in the institutions being captured. (mostly because they were kicked out of them, but that’s a different piece)

The Economics

Marriage collapsed. This probably matters more than people think.

Single women vote more left than married women. This is consistent across decades of exit polls. Part of this is likely economic: single women interact with government more as provider of services, married women interact with government more as taker of taxes. The incentives point different directions.

The marriage gap in voting is one of the most consistent predictors. And marriage rates have collapsed precisely during the period of divergence.

Men saw marriage collapse differently. Family courts. Child support. Alimony. The rational response was skepticism of expanding state power.

Same phenomenon, different positions in it, different political responses.

The Algorithms

Algorithms optimize for engagement. Engagement means emotional response. Time on platform. Clicks. Shares. Comments.

Women respond more strongly to emotional content on average, they are more empathetic, they can be more easily manipulated with sad stories. That higher neuroticism again, higher sensitivity to negative stimuli. The machine learned this. It fed them content calibrated to their response patterns. Fear. Outrage. Moral panic. Stories about danger and injustice and threat and wars and “victims”.

Men got different feeds because they responded to different triggers. The algorithm doesn’t really have a gender agenda. It has an engagement agenda. But engagement looks different by demographic, so the feeds diverged.

Women ended up in information environments optimized for emotional activation. Men found alternatives: podcasts, forums, cars, wars, manosphere etc.

The Ideology

Feminism told women their instincts and biology were oppression and wrong. Wanting children was brainwashing. Wanting a provider husband was internalized misogyny. Their natural desires were false consciousness installed by patriarchy.

Many believed it. Built lives around it. Career first. Independence. Freedom from traditional constraints.

Now they’re 35, unmarried, measuring declining fertility against career achievements. And here’s the trap: the sunk cost of admitting the ideology failed is enormous. You’d have to admit you wasted your fertile years on a lie. That the women who ignored the ideology and married young were right. That your mother was right.

I think this is why you see so little defection. Not because the ideology is true, but because the psychological cost of leaving is higher than the cost of staying. Easier to double down. Easier to believe the problem is that society hasn’t changed enough yet.

The Other Capture

I should be honest about something: men weren’t immune to capture. They were captured differently.

Women got ideological conformity. Men got withdrawal. Porn. Video games. Gambling apps. Outrage content. The male capture wasn’t “believe this or face social death.” It was “here’s an endless supply of dopamine so you never have to build anything real.”

Different machines, different failure modes. Women got compliance. Men got passivity.

The male line on that graph staying flat through 2020 isn’t necessarily health. It might just be a different kind of sickness, men checking out instead of being pulled in. Or it may be that everyone and everything moved more left and women moved lefter.

The Line Is Moving Now

Here’s the update: the male line isn’t flat anymore.

Post-2024 data shows young men shifting right. Recent surveys all show the same thing. Young men are now actively moving more conservatively.

My read: women got captured first because they were more susceptible to consensus pressure. The capture was fast (2007-2020). Men resisted longer because they were less susceptible and less embedded in captured institutions. But as the gap became visible and culturally salient, as “men are the problem” became explicit mainstream messaging, as men started being excluded from society because of lies, as masculinity, or the very thing that makes men men became toxic, men had to start counter-aligning.

The passivity is converting into opposition. The withdrawal is becoming active rejection.

This doesn’t mean men are now “correct” or “free”. It might just mean they’re being captured by a different machine, one optimized for male grievance instead of female consensus. Andrew Tate didn’t emerge from nowhere. Neither did the manosphere. Those are capture systems too, just targeting different psychological vulnerabilities.

The graph is now two lines diverging in opposite directions. Two different machines pulling two different demographics toward two different failure modes.

Some people will say this is just education: women go to college more, college makes you liberal, simple as that. There’s something to this. But it doesn’t explain why the gap widened so sharply post-2007, or why it’s happening in countries with very different education systems.

Some will say it’s economic: young men are struggling, resentment makes you conservative. Also partially true. But male economic struggles predate the recent rightward shift, and the female leftward move happened during a period of rising female economic success.

Some will point to cultural figures: Tate for men, Taylor Swift for women. But these are symptoms, not causes. They filled niches the machines created. They didn’t create the machines.

The multi-causal model fits better: biological substrate (differential sensitivity to consensus) + technological trigger (smartphones, algorithmic feeds) + institutional amplification (captured universities, female-dominated fields) + economic incentives (marriage collapse, state dependency) + ideological lock-in (sunk costs, social punishment for defection).

No single cause. A system of interlocking causes that happened to affect one gender faster and harder than the other.

So What

If this model is right, some predictions follow.

The gap should be smaller in countries with later smartphone adoption or lower social media penetration. (This seems true: the divergence is less extreme in parts of Eastern Europe and much of Africa, though South Korea is a major exception due to other factors.)

The gap should narrow among women who have children, since parenthood breaks the institutional feedback loop and introduces competing priorities. (Exit polls consistently show this: mothers vote more conservative than childless women.)

The gap should continue widening until the machines are disrupted or the generations age out of them.

Here’s the part I don’t know how to solve: these systems are self-reinforcing. The institutions aren’t going to reform themselves. The algorithms aren’t going to stop optimizing. The ideology isn’t going to admit failure. The male counter-capture isn’t going to produce healthy outcomes either.

Some women will escape.

The ones who have children often do since reality is a powerful solvent for ideology. The ones who build lives outside institutional capture sometimes do.

Some men will stop withdrawing or stop rage-scrolling.

The ones who find something worth building. The ones who get tired of the simulation.

But the systems will keep running on everyone else.

The Question

Bill asked why.

The answer isn’t “women are emotional” and it isn’t “social media bad.” The answer is that we built global-scale consensus engines and deployed them on a species with sexually dimorphic psychology. The machines captured the half more susceptible to consensus pressure. Then they started capturing the other half through different mechanisms.

We’re watching the results in real time. Two failure modes. One graph. Both lines are moving away from each other and away from anything healthy.

I don’t know how this ends. I don’t think anyone does. I don’t think it will.

Both machines are still running.

In the days since Renee Good tried to run over an ICE agent in Minneapolis and was shot and killed by an ICE officer, the liberal media has found yet another offensive word to whinge over. 

“The far-right has coined a new derogatory term for white women, which has gained traction following the fatal shooting of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, in Minneapolis earlier this month,” reports The Independent. 

The objectionable term is the acronym AWFUL, which stands for Affluent White Female Urban Liberal. Another variant is AWFL.

For example:

Liberal white woman LOSES HER MIND over duck hunters..

These people are insane. lmao pic.twitter.com/2xRNSDE9fl

— American AF 🇺🇸 (@iAnonPatriot) January 15, 2026

The New York Times was the first paper to report on this new “offensive” term.

“Beyond labels and name-calling, the death of Ms. Good and the protests and anger in its wake have sparked a response from many on the right that is particularly targeted at white women in the streets, even though men have been just as involved,” the paper wrote. “A majority of college-educated women, including white women, have long been skeptical of President Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, and that skepticism has been growing, according to exit polls after the 2024 election. And for months now, such women are attracting the ire of the president’s supporters.”

The term AWFUL is not the first derisive name targeting white women. People across the political spectrum once gleefully targeted so-called Karens, a term meant to denigrate women — usually white and middle-aged — caught using their privilege to bend the world in their direction.

And the use of AWFUL emerged well before Ms. Good was killed. Conservative critics began attaching it to female protesters at least as far back as last summer.

The acronym so scandalized the New York Times that it even tattled to the Department of Homeland Security about it and its growing popularity. “I’m more concerned with facts on the ground than I am about acronyms,” DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told the paper in a text message.

The Times leaned heavily on academic experts to medicalize and psychologize conservative criticism of affluent white liberal women, transforming political disagreement into pathology. 

But for the broader core of Mr. Trump’s followers, the description of white, urban women as violent radicals obstructing mass deportations seems to reflect older anxieties around race, gender and immigration among the white, non-college educated men who make up the core of Mr. Trump’s movement and perceive their place in society slipping, said Dr. Shauna Shames, a political scientist at Rutgers and co-editor of the book “The Right Women: Republican Party Activists, Candidates, and Legislators.”

[…]

Liberal academics have been diagnosing what they see as the problem. Laura K. Field, author of the book “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right,” said social, demographic and economic changes had left men with a sense that they have lost status.

“Women are, for many of them, the place holder for their ‘stolen’ status,” she asserted.

 While the Times objects to calling affluent white female urban liberals what they are, it recently published opinion pieces comparing ICE to a “secret police” and portraying Trump as a fascist. In the past week, the paper has published columns demeaning Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as “a Virtual Secret Police” and accusing the agency of “Waging War on Blue Cities,”framing routine enforcement as an attack on liberal opposition. Columnist Michelle Goldberg also described Trump’s actions as textbook fascism.

After years of using terms like “Nazi” and “fascist” against Trump and Republicans, the paper’s outrage over AWFUL rings hollow. The acronym simply states observable demographic and ideological facts. Affluent, white, female, urban, and liberal are not slurs. Yes, the acronym is clever, but its implied criticism is far milder than the relentless, extreme rhetoric the New York Times has long published against the right, particularly President Trump. 

Authored by Zach Boren via RealClearEducation,

For the better part of a year, the Trump Administration said little about apprenticeships. Then, almost out of nowhere, it announced a $145 million funding forecast aimed at expanding Pay for Apprenticeship—one of the largest investments we’ve seen in years.

That move matters because it follows a long gap between rhetoric and reality. Early on, the President issued an Executive Order calling for one million apprentices and indicating apprenticeship as a central workforce strategy. But that ambition amounted to little more than lip service, as Biden-era apprenticeship contracts were either canceled or stagnated.

For decades, the federal government has underinvested in apprenticeships, relying instead on small, bespoke grant programs that helped grow apprenticeships by nearly 80 percent over a decade, but never at scale. That’s real progress, but apprentices still make up just three-tenths of one percent of the labor force.

The Pay for Apprenticeship forecast is the first meaningful signal that the administration’s promises could be fulfilled—and perhaps finally move apprenticeships from the education margins to the mainstream.

Pay for Apprenticeship — also known as Pay for Success — ties public dollars to real results: apprentices hired, trained, and retained. In a frozen labor market, this policy focuses on what works, not what makes headlines. That makes it a welcome—and somewhat surprising—dose of pragmatism in a policy landscape often driven by ideology.

What’s actually different this time

Unlike traditional workforce grants that fund training without accountability for outcomes, Pay for Apprenticeship funds employment outcomes. Grantees are rewarded for hires and apprenticeship contracts signed—not paperwork, pilots, or press releases.

The forecast also acknowledges a basic truth long ignored in Washington: employers rarely build apprenticeship programs on their own. They rely on intermediaries—industry associations, unions, nonprofits, and technical experts—to design training, manage registration, recruit apprentices, and maintain standards. Without this infrastructure, apprenticeship policies remain aspirational rather than operational.

This funding approach mirrors what our international competitors already do. The UK, Germany, and Australia invest heavily in apprenticeship systems that share training costs and pay for results. Overseas, apprenticeships aren’t an alternative — they’re a competitive advantage and valued on par with the university track.

Why apprenticeships meet this moment

The U.S. faces acute labor shortages across critical sectors. We are short nearly one million electricians. AI and tech companies and their data centers and energy infrastructure projects are driving unprecedented demand for skilled workers.

Bachelor’s degrees, for the first time, are losing their earnings premium, even as the first rung of the career ladder disappears.

Registered Apprenticeships combine paid, on-the-job training with structured instruction, allowing workers to earn while they learn—and employers to train talent to real-time needs. Unlike college students taking on debt, apprentices are paid by their sweat, and the average graduate earns about $80,000 annually –exceeding entry-level bachelor’s degree wages. Employers see returns as well—apprenticeships deliver a positive ROI, with high retention and strong employer satisfaction.

For young men, these pathways matter even more. Today, there are three times as many men who are not in education, employment, or training (NEET) as there were in the 1980s. That is not a cyclical downturn. It is a slow-rolling structural failure. For boys underserved by the traditional classroom, apprenticeships offer a practical path forward. In fact, roughly 85 percent of American apprentices are men.

A step forward, not the finish line

This investment alone will not solve the nation’s workforce challenges—but it is a solid step in the right direction.

To meet the moment, Congress must go further, faster. A large-scale, national Pay for Apprenticeship initiative—designed to reach millions of young people over the next decade—is within reach. And, it does not require new debt. Apprentices pay taxes, and their availability reduces reliance on public assistance. They begin paying into the system almost immediately.

For too long, American society and federal policy have defaulted to a college-for-all approach, even as evidence mounted that the system was badly out of balance. When more than 90 percent of Congress has a bachelor’s degree, it should not surprise anyone that policy has repeatedly doubled down on college as the only answer. Washington’s groupthink has crowded out other proven educational paths to the middle class.

It’s time for a reset.

The $145 million Pay for Apprenticeship forecast is a good bet—but it’s not a silver bullet. If Congress builds on it, rather than treating it as a one-off, apprenticeships could finally become what they should have been all along: a central pillar of a working-class–building strategy.

And it doesn’t require more debt to get there—just pragmatic investments in our future, rather than borrowing against it. Few other workforce policies can claim this consistent result across workers, employers, and taxpayers. The evidence is clear: apprenticeships work.

Zach Boren is the Senior Vice President of Policy and Government Affairs at Apprenticeships for America.

Iran’s streets have at this point been relatively calm for the last several days, after two weeks of large-scale protests rocked the country amid an ongoing economic crisis and Washington threatened to intervene by hitting government sites.

When protests and unrest turned to riots and clashes with police, which in some locations resulted in deaths on both sides, Tehran authorities moved to impose a complete internet and messaging blackout – believing this would thwart or slow any foreign plotting seeking to exploit the protests.

After eight days of no internet access, Iran has begun easing these restrictions Saturday, restoring short messaging service (SMS) nationwide. State media describes there will be a phased plan for bringing back internet and messaging services.

Al Jazeera cites state authorities who say terror cells and a foreign conspiracy had been disrupted, but now the situation is stable:

Quoting officials, the agency reported that the decision followed what it described as the stabilisation of the security situation and the detention of key figures linked to “terror organizations” behind the violence during protests over rising prices and economic hardship that erupted on December 28 in several Iranian cities.

Authorities said the internet blackout had “significantly weakened the internal connections of opposition networks abroad” and disrupted the activities of the “terror cells”.

On this, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has also weighed in, claiming that actors linked to the United States and Israel were responsible for killing “several thousands” during the anti-government protests.

“Those linked to Israel and US caused massive damages and killed several thousands” he said Saturday. The US and Western allies have repeatedly rejected these Iranian claims of ‘foreign plotting’. And more via Bloomberg:

Some of those were killed “brutally and inhumanely,” Khamenei said without offering detail in a public meeting broadcast on state TV.

This marks the first time any top Iranian authority described the casualties as being in the “thousands”. Some US-based ‘monitor’ groups as well as American media earlier in the week raised eyebrows and skepticism in claiming 12,000 were killed – a huge figure.

As for the possibility of foreign plotting, the Financial Times appears to be the first mainstream outlet to describe black-clad and well-organized groups who unleashed chaos and anti-police violence amid the protests…

“There were groups of men in black clothes, agile and quick. They would set one dustbin on fire and then quickly move to the next target” They “look[ed] like commandos” …“They were definitely organized, but I don’t know who was behind them”

FT offers one of the first acknowledgments by Western media of well organized cells wreaking havoc on Iranian cities

“There were groups of men in black clothes, agile and quick. They would set one dustbin on fire and then quickly move to the next target”

They “look[ed] like… pic.twitter.com/Fwq2ab8ZHI

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 17, 2026

Iran has said that hundreds of police and security personnel were killed or wounded, and has cited videos showing armed supposed ‘protesters’ seeking to wage an insurgency against government positions. It should come as no surprise that Israeli or Western intelligence should seek to hijack and steer the protests toward some kind of regime destabilization goal. But this scenario is always hard to prove amid the fog of war and thick propaganda coming from all sides.

Authored by Jack Phillips and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times,

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, revealed that health care fraud in Minnesota is more significant than previously known, according to his interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders,” premiering at 5 p.m. ET on Jan. 17.

After speaking to whistleblowers across the state, Oz said there has been a “cover-up” for years and that it reaches the “highest levels” of state government.

Oz made reference to Somalian Americans and Somalian nationals who have a significant presence in the Minneapolis-Twin Cities area, who have recently been accused by administration officials of engaging in the defrauding of federal government entitlement programs, including Medicaid.

“For example, the Somalian sub-population, who have different cultural norms than the folks who have historically been in Minnesota, might be taking advantage of systems that were built for ‘Minnesota Nice’ people,” Oz said.

“And this is what was told to me by people working in the Department of Health and Human Services there, from folks who are police, law enforcement, they were witnessing it.”

The administration has gained “evidence now that we might be seeing that in other Somalian populations” in the United States, Oz said, adding that “they talk to each other.”

“Once you figure out that no one’s watching the till, you begin to steal money in other areas,” he said. “In any case, we are aggressive on this.”

Providing an example, Oz said that investigators in the Twin Cities discovered a building with “boarded-up windows” that allegedly had “400 businesses running out of there in the last couple of years that had generated about three $80 million in bills” for the federal government and Minnesota.

“And these are all social service businesses. So as you start to probe into how this beehive of corruption arose, the question does come up, you know, who owns the building? Like, how did this even come about? The building owner would not let us go into the building,” he added.

The state has been under the spotlight for years for Medicaid fraud, including a $300 million COVID-19-related fraud case involving the Feeding Our Future nonprofit.

Federal prosecutors said it was the largest COVID-19-related fraud scheme in the United States, and that the defendants exploited a state-run, federally funded program meant to provide food for children.

Since 2022, 57 people have been convicted, either by pleading guilty or by losing at trial. The majority of the defendants who were charged in the case are of Somali origin. Numerous other fraud cases are under investigation, including new allegations involving child care centers.

Aside from the Medicare and Medicaid agencies, the Treasury Department also announced last week that it will investigate financial transactions between Minnesota residents and businesses in Somalia, as the government ramps up an operation targeting illegal immigration in the state.

The Department of Homeland Security, too, has deployed thousands of agents to Minnesota as part of that broader federal effort, although protests have erupted in recent days over the shooting of a protester.

The Trump administration said late last month it would freeze child care funds in Minnesota unless officials there provide more data about the programs, and in a January statement said it would freeze a program that allows states to pay child care providers without attendance requirements.

A video that went viral on social media in December featured influencer Nick Shirley, who alleged significant daycare fraud involving the theft of state government funds. The clip was amplified and referenced by Vice President JD Vance and tech billionaire Elon Musk on X.

Responding to the claims, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has been critical of the Trump administration’s efforts in his state while arguing that his office has already taken steps to reduce fraud.

Meanwhile, the ongoing federal operations in Minneapolis are “a direct threat against the people of this state, who dared to vote against him three times, and who continue to stand up for freedom with courage and empathy and profound grace,” Walz said earlier this week.

The Epoch Times contacted the governor’s office for comment on Jan. 16.

Fraud Investigation Expanding

The administration’s ongoing investigations into entitlement fraud are being expanded, namely in California, Oz told “American Thought Leaders.”

“What we’re seeing in Minnesota is the tip of the iceberg, because it is dwarfed by what I saw in California, which is whole-scale cultural malfeasance around health care,” Oz said.

“There is an acceptance that you need to be in the fraud business, especially in Los Angeles, and the magnitude of fraud there, we believe, is approximating $4 billion just in hospice and home health care.”

Oz described Southern California’s situation as a pervasive “tolerance and acceptance of fraud” and that “it’s so rampant that you don’t even know how to get your arms around it.”

“We have the unions being involved in some of these endeavors and lobbying as well” to get certain individuals elected, he added.

U.S. Attorney’s Office officials speak at a news conference inside the U.S. Courthouse in Minneapolis, detailing fraud in Minnesota, on Dec. 18, 2025. Kerem Yücel/Minnesota Public Radio via AP

Oz said he believed foreign-based gangs were perpetrating fraud in hospice and home health care programs, but he did not provide detailed examples.

The alleged fraud “might be part of a much larger scheme to change how we elect our officials, and that is very chilling for us to think that you might be using social programs designed to help all Americans who are struggling or who have vulnerabilities, using that as a tool to change who gets elected,” he said.

Last week, Oz, along with First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, said at a news conference that federal officials will investigate allegations of fraud involving hospice centers in the state, describing the crimes as pervasive.

Both Oz and Essayli suggested that foreign-based gangs were behind the fraud targeting hospice centers and home health care programs, while Oz elaborated on those claims on Friday by saying that a “Russian Armenian … mafia” was targeting California’s health care systems.

“These hospice programs are created when the most common reason that you enter it is cancer. But these days, not everyone with cancer dies, but also you put a lot of people with Alzheimer’s, other conditions, in there … so it became a little harder to police whether people were going into hospice,” he said.

A post from California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office account on X on Jan. 6 said that the state had stopped tens of billions of dollars in fraud, specifically unemployment fraud, and also criticized the Trump administration.