New York Communist Muslim totalitarian mayor Mamdani will not pay for the piling trash and inoperable streets. In dictatorships like Cuba, Russia and China, the people are too frightened to protest. In New York City, the woke voters in the majority are too stupid and ignorant to protest. Many of them are Muslim and want a new Iran. They will put up with ANYTHING, so long as it’s not Trump or any other Republican.

The majority in New York City deserve what they’re getting, but they also (perversely) want destruction. As for the minority who voted Republican–they should get the hell out, and hasten the inevitable collapse of the Big Apple. Create great cities elsewhere. Democratic and nonleftist America, on our present course, will be splitting up. Get to freedom while you can. And buy weapons.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Donald Trump did not win the 2024 election because America suddenly became meaningfully more Republican.

He won because voters, many of them independents and crossover Democrats, many of them young, had lost trust in the system and believed he was willing to confront it. I’m the head pollster for Rasmussen Reports. In our final 2024 polling, 42% of Trump’s electorate came from independents and Democrats.

That is not a MAGA monoculture. It is a fragile coalition built on one thing: accountability.

Voters did not elect Trump to manage decline. They elected him to fix things that were not working. That is why DOGE mattered. For a brief moment, it validated what Americans, particularly younger voters, already believed: that the federal government is bloated, corrupt, self-dealing and largely insulated from consequences.

Under-40 voters, the most disillusioned cohort by many measures, were the most supportive of DOGE, the most open to arrests for corruption and the most likely to agree with the statement that “he who saves his country violates no laws” (57%).

Trump’s approval among voters under 40 briefly hit 60% almost exactly when Google search interest in DOGE peaked. That alignment should have frozen Republican politics in Washington in place.

Instead, DOGE was quietly sidelined, and Trump’s approval among younger voters has since fallen sharply into the low 40s. That is not coincidence. It is a signal.

Rather than doubling down on systemic accountability, the last few months have felt unfocused, with counter-signaling on affordability and jobs, infighting, the Epstein saga, renewed foreign entanglements and a governing posture that feels reactive rather than intentional.

Voters are noticing.

Despite Trump’s unsurprising personal approval rating today (net -7), the Democratic lead on the generic ballot has steadily widened to D+6. That should set off alarms. The November 2024 election was Trumpy, not Republican, and off-cycle special elections continue to reinforce that reality. Momentum, enthusiasm and turnout are not automatic for Republicans.

The Republican Party has not helped. Its legislative output is thin. Its ability to deliver tangible wins is questionable. Even the bare minimum — serious accountability investigations — has largely failed to materialize. There is no clear path to a 2026 victory if this continues, which is why what happened in Minnesota mattered so much.

Voters are noticing.

Despite Trump’s unsurprising personal approval rating today (net -7), the Democratic lead on the generic ballot has steadily widened to D+6. That should set off alarms. The November 2024 election was Trumpy, not Republican, and off-cycle special elections continue to reinforce that reality. Momentum, enthusiasm and turnout are not automatic for Republicans.

The Republican Party has not helped. Its legislative output is thin. Its ability to deliver tangible wins is questionable. Even the bare minimum — serious accountability investigations — has largely failed to materialize. There is no clear path to a 2026 victory if this continues, which is why what happened in Minnesota mattered so much.

Losing focus

The discovery of rampant alleged fraud in Minnesota was a gift. It offered a rare opportunity to shift the national conversation away from Republican dysfunction and toward something Americans overwhelmingly agree on.

Three-quarters of voters are angry about the level of waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has cited figures as high as $300 billion to $600 billion annually. That is not budget trimming. That is empire-fatal kleptocracy.

This was the moment for a full-scale, anti-blue-state fraud push. Follow the money. Subpoena everything. Make examples. Send every agency in, even the 80,000 armed IRS agents we should have fired. If fraud is that widespread, maybe austerity is not the answer. Maybe arrests are.

Instead, the focus shifted.

ICE was surged into Minneapolis. What could have been a systemic fraud investigation became a performative deportation spectacle. Predictable protests followed. Then escalation: more ICE presence, masks, tear gas, aggressive enforcement.

Within days, the headlines were no longer about uncovering fraud. They were about clashes, optics and ultimately the tragic shooting deaths of two protesters.

The ICE red meat might be cathartic for some. But politically effective, no.

Our polling has been consistent for years on this point. Americans want illegal immigration stopped. That is not in dispute. They want criminals deported. They want the border enforced. But they also want fairness, not brutality, and they recoil when enforcement looks indiscriminate, theatrical or excessive.

A plurality of Americans now say ICE tactics are too harsh, even while still supporting deportation in principle. That tension is not ideological. It is emotional.

What voters want

Americans do not just want illegal immigrants removed. They want the hiring magnet destroyed. They overwhelmingly support punishing companies that employ illegal labor. That policy outperforms Trump’s personal approval by nearly 30 net points. It is not even close.

So the obvious question follows: What is stopping this administration from going after the employers? Likewise, a federal E-Verify mandate is ridiculously popular. Why have Republicans been unable to pluck this low-hanging fruit?

Is it donor pressure? Fear of market volatility? Is Trump, the tribune of the forgotten voter, being restrained by plutocratic interests? From the outside, it increasingly looks that way.

There was a clean path forward. Keep DOGE front and center. Launch relentless investigations into blue-state fraud hubs. Hammer corporate lawbreaking and worker exploitation. Restore trust through accountability. Instead, the administration chose theatrics over results, and is paying the price politically.536

What do you think? Post a comment.

This can still be fixed, but only if Trump remembers why he was elected. Not to manage the system. Not to appease donors. Not to chase viral moments. Make the System Fear Consequences Again.

Americans are not asking for chaos. They are asking for justice.

And they are still waiting.

Mark Mitchell, New York Post

Governments habitually lie. They lie so often that it is peculiar for governments to claim “authority” on anything other than falsehood. Before the Gutenberg press and general literacy, “authorities” announced self-serving lies in the public square. With the arrival of newsprint, “authorities” disseminated State propaganda as daily news. Radio and television revolutionized the mass manipulation of minds. The adoption of the personal computer, the rise of the Internet, the commercialization of pocket computers posing as handheld phones, and the sticky web of an ever-growing social media complex have made it possible for government “authorities” to reach inside every human brain and squish it into compliance. AI-powered machines now manufacture and disseminate lies faster than human-powered governments ever could.

Most people are only now realizing that — even in so-called “free” countries — government-sanctioned propaganda, censorship, and misdirection are pervasive and routine. To the surprise of citizens taught to “trust the authorities,” the unvarnished truth is a bitter pill to swallow: Governments regularly employ psychologically manipulative, and even exploitative, forms of information warfare against their own citizens. Politicians and generals tell lies to mobilize the American public for war. Economists and central bankers tell lies to justify money-printing that robs from the middle class and rewards wealthy elites. Government regulatory bodies tell lies about the safety of food and medicine before taking lucrative jobs inside the global food and pharmaceutical industries. The Chamber of Commerce calls the offshoring of blue-collar jobs and the importation of slave-produced crap “free trade.”

How can the word “authority” maintain any positive meaning when “authorities” are always wrong?  At least since the First World War, scientific “authorities” have promised that human industry and mass commercialization would kill the planet in the “next few years.”  After Trump thumped Hillary like a drum, Intelligence Community “authorities” concocted an elaborate scheme to frame the MAGA outsider as a Russian agent who threatened national security unless removed from office.  When Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, and the World Economic Forum sank the globe into mass COVID hysteria, health “authorities” promised that children would die unless they sat behind plexiglass-enclosed desks, their parents got experimental injections every few months, and every stranger wore at least three masks!  

Since the Second World War, trust in “authority” has evaporated.  Why?  Perhaps because “authorities” routinely lie, keep secrets, and cover up crimes.  Roughly three-quarters of Americans think the CIA killed President Kennedy.  A top FBI official transformed a rather mundane Watergate scandal into a successful operation for taking down President Nixon after his landslide re-election victory.  President Bush I pushed the “new world order.”  President Clinton “did not have sexual relations with that woman.”  President Bush II gave us endless war with few long-term successes.  President Obama told us we could “keep” our doctors before doubling the cost of healthcare instead.  Secretary of State Clinton was never prosecuted for keeping classified documents on an unsecured private server in her home, but President Biden made sure to send an FBI SWAT team to bust down President Trump’s doors.  

Politicians, prosecutors, judges, and news media mouthpieces told us that 2020’s mass riots, arson, robbery, and murder were justified civil rights “protests” against racism.  Those same “authorities” told us that J6 protesters seeking free and fair elections were “insurrectionists” and “terrorists.”  Now those “authorities” tell us that anti-ICE insurrectionists terrorizing citizens and attacking federal agents are “protesting” for civil rights once again.  When “authorities” describe riots as “protests” and protests as “insurrections,” words mean nothing.

Meanwhile, the average member of Congress enters office as a salaried “public servant” and exits office a millionaire!  Inside every institution of “authority,” corruption is king!

A writer named Lucas Leiroz argues that revelations within the Epstein documents prove that “nothing legitimate remains in the Western world.”  Predicting the “moral collapse of the elites,” he thinks the “systematic, organized, and ritualized” nature of their perversions and crimes constitutes nothing less than a civilizational “rupture.”  Why?  “When evidence emerges of extreme violence against children, of practices that go beyond any conventional criminal category, the discussion ceases to be legal and becomes civilizational.”  The reason why people are fascinated with this scandal is that it undermines the legitimacy of so many powerful people in positions of “authority.”  The very elites who have been exposed as monsters “continue to decide elections, wars, economic policies, and the fate of entire societies.”

Leiroz sees the Epstein scandal as the final straw for broad swaths of the public.  “How can one continue to accept the authority of institutions that shielded this level of horror?” he asks.  “How can respect be maintained for laws applied selectively by people who live above them?”  Those are good questions.  As “authorities” have been exposed as liars, the public has lost trust in them.  Now that “authorities” have been exposed as “pedophiles, satanists, and cannibals,” the public is disgusted with them.  When members of society “still retain some sense of limits” and members of the “ruling class” behave as if they were “outside the common human species,” the structures of power forfeit moral legitimacy.

Leiroz says, “After Epstein, nothing can continue as before.”  In the months ahead, we will see whether he is correct.  This much is certainly true: For three-quarters of a century, trust in “authorities” has steadily declined.  Over the last couple decades, those “authorities” have proven to be frauds, grifters, and liars.  Now many of these same “authorities” have been exposed as sick and depraved perverts whose actions are, as Leiroz describes, “vile and essentially evil.”  How are ordinary citizens supposed to ignore “absolute evil,” while so many devils maintain positions of “authority”?

J B. Shurk, American Thinker

Melinda Gates reacted to the release of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails involving her ex-husband Bill Gates, including horrific allegations Epstein made such that Bill was attempting to dose her with antibiotics to fight an STD without her knowledge, by saying Bill and other Epstein associates “need to answer to those things.”

Bill Gates has openly acknowledged, repeatedly, that he believes the world is overpopulated and unspecified steps should be taken to do something about that. He’s trying to buy up farmland in order to control the food supply, and he advocated forcing medical experiments on the American population manufactured by government-subsidized companies with zero product liability.

Are you seriously surprised by evidence he tried to secretly drug his wife after knowingly exposing her to STDs? Bill Gates is a sadist and a psychopath.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

An Olive Garden cook has died after he dunked his own head into a searing hot deep fryer — as his co-workers frantically tried to thwart his gruesome suicide, authorities said.

The employee, who hasn’t been identified, stripped his clothes off and thrust his face into the fryer at the chain’s restaurant in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, last Friday afternoon, the Smoking Gun reported.

A male victim went head first into the fryers,” dispatchers could be heard saying in grim 911 audio.

“I don’t have a lot of details, lot of people screaming, some kind of a burn victim,” another operator could be heard saying.

The cook was rushed a nearby hospital to be treated for his severe burns, but he later died from his injuries, authorities said.

A female employee suffered minor burns after she and several other workers tried to stop the cook from injuring himself even further.

At least one customer also tried to intervene.

Both Olive Garden and authorities refused to release any details about the ordeal, only describing it as a “suicide attempt.”

The restaurant shut down for several days in the wake of the incident but has since reopened.

Democrats have spent years insisting illegal immigrants do not vote, yet Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries just gave the whole game away.

In a letter to GOP leadership, they demanded a slate of “reforms” to immigration enforcement as the price for funding the Department of Homeland Security, including targeted enforcement, no masks, mandatory use of body cameras, and other demands, several of which I suspect are nonstarters.

I don’t see Democrats getting anywhere with these, but the big thing is that buried in that list is a rather revealing demand:

Protect Sensitive Locations – Prohibit funds from being used to conduct enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, child-care facilities, churches, polling places, courts, etc.

Polling places?

They went out of their way to include polling places right alongside hospitals, courts, and churches. There is only one thing that happens at polling places that would matter to illegal immigrants, and it is not the bake sale.

Democrats have insisted for years that illegal immigrants cannot and do not vote, and that the whole issue is a right-wing myth. If that is true, then why is “polling places” even on their list of protected zones for immigration violators? No one accidentally adds “polling places” to a policy letter being negotiated at the leadership level. This is deliberate. It gives away what they are worried about… and what they are counting on.

“Democrats just admitted they think illegal aliens need to be protected at polling places. Why exactly would illegal aliens be at polling places? We MUST fully fund DHS AND pass the SAVE America Act,” Senator Katie Britt (R-Ala.) posted on X.

That is the obvious question Democrats do not want to answer. If illegal immigrants are not supposed to be anywhere near the ballot box, then immigration enforcement near polling sites ought to be a non-issue.

Related: Tom Homan Pulls 700 Agents Out of Minnesota. Here’s Why That’s Bad News for Democrats.

This comes as Republicans are pushing election reform through Congress with the SAVE Act. The SAVE Act is a straightforward concept: safeguard federal elections by ensuring only American citizens can cast ballots, and that an ID is required to vote.

Schumer’s response has been to smear the SAVE Act as “Jim Crow 2.0” and brand it “racist” and “dead on arrival.” That is the Democrats’ go-to play whenever Democrats feel threatened: slap a “Jim Crow” label on common-sense election rules and scare minorities into thinking Republicans are trying to stop them from voting.

The problem is that even minorities aren’t buying it. As PJ Media previously reported, polling has shown consistent and overwhelming support for Voter ID laws for years. That consensus cuts across both party and race, with huge majorities of Republicans, Democrats, whites, Latinos, and black Americans all agreeing that you should show a photo ID to vote.

Why are Democrats pushing so hard against common sense and trying to help illegal immigrants vote even though they’re not supposed to? Recent census projections show blue states are bleeding population while red states are gaining it, which will shift House seats and electoral votes after the 2030 reapportionment. As people flee high-tax, crime-ridden, Democrat-run states for freer red states, Democrats face shrinking power at the national level. That gives them every incentive to import a new population, shield it from enforcement, and eventually convert them into votes, one way or another.

That’s why Democrats have no qualms fighting so aggressively against overwhelmingly popular election reforms. For them, it’s a matter of survival.

Matt Margolis is a conservative commentator and columnist. His work has been cited on Fox News and national conservative talk radio, including The Rush Limbaugh Show, The Mark Levin Show, and The Dan Bongino Show. Matt is the author of several books and has appeared on Newsmax, OANN, Real America’s Voice News, Salem News Channel, and even CNN.

Recently, I wrote a piece that received some pushback. I wondered if Donald Trump was making the same mistake as George Bush Sr. did when he broke his “Read my lips: No new taxes” pledge.

If you read my work regularly, you’ll notice a decidedly clear bias towards warnings of doom. It’s not my default position that life is nothing but doom and gloom. On the contrary. I actually have a website that explicitly talks about how good we have things and encourages gratitude for the American entrepreneurs and inventors who made our lives possible. In a universe where most of history was characterized by scarcity, war, slavery, and early death, most Americans today have relatively extraordinary lives.

Everything we have today came about as the result of the hard work of generations of people who left us this legacy. From the Founding Fathers leaving us the Constitution to Grant defeating the South to Rockefeller rationalizing energy to Jobs putting the Internet in our hands, everything we have in the 21st century came from the efforts of countless numbers of long-dead people, as well as (often) our own efforts.

To the degree that one can identify the elements that made the last 250 years so different from any prior period, it was this combination of individual freedom, free markets, private property, and limited government. Those elements laid the foundation for a nation to spread across a continent, become an industrial juggernaut, and become an economic powerhouse able to promote freedom and prosperity to billions of people around the world.

That anger you sometimes see reflected in my writing stems from the government’s efforts over the last 50 years to do just about everything in its power to undermine that success. On almost every front, the government has gotten itself involved in areas where it has no place, no constitutional authority. Moreover, regardless of how ineffective, pernicious, or downright harmful its actions are, nobody ever does anything about it.

1960s: 4.5%

1970s: 3.2%

1980s: 3.1%

1990s: 3.2%

2000s: 1.9%

2010s: 2.4%

2020s: 2.4%

To understand how much of a problem that is, understand that in the 1950s, computers were the size of a house and could do 5,000 calculations per second. Today, a computer fits in the palm of your hand and is literally billions of times faster. Yet our GDP growth is almost half as much. It should be double.

If you want to know why, even though we are so much more efficient and have far better and more tools at our disposal, our GDP is half what it used to be, the answer is the government. Perhaps the only thing that has grown more than computer power over the last half-century is government power.

Today, the government intrudes on practically every single aspect of our lives, from mandating the ability to remotely turn off our cars to requiring those tags on our mattresses to telling us the makeup of our neighborhood. And sadly, while government operatives, both politicians and bureaucrats, are busy promoting the butchering of some children and the trafficking of others, they fail at the basic responsibilities of government, such as maintaining law and order, keeping our borders secure, and not sending money to dead people.

The government’s tentacles are everywhere, like a cancer that knows no bounds and for which there is no cure. Of course, theoretically, there is a cure for all of this: elections.

However, the government has somehow managed to manipulate them so that, regardless of who gets elected in either party, we basically get the same policies. Sure, some things may change around the edges, but for the most part, the Swamp reigns, and nobody does anything about it. The budgets basically remain the same, the programs largely stay the same, and the controlling elites basically rotate between government, NGOs, and corporate boardrooms.

And here’s where my piece talking about Trump betraying his voters comes into play. I could spend my time showcasing the great things he has done, and he has done many, but I focus on the fact that if he doesn’t deal with the gun pointed at the head of the Republic, none of that matters.

For Democrats, cheating is simply their MO. Between importing new illegal voters, manipulating the voting apparatus, and fighting Voter ID, Democrats have basically wiped out GOP representation in New England, even though 30-40% of the population in those areas is Republican. Democrats will destroy the Republic the next time they get power, and if Donald Trump doesn’t start acting like a leader with something to fight for, there won’t be anything left to fight for.

Once back in power, Democrats will kill that American goose. They will manipulate voting rules to turn the country writ large into the dysfunctional cesspools they’ve created in Illinois, Maryland, California, etc. They will expand the problems of San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, et. al., into the suburbs and eventually across the country. They will utilize every lever of government power to eviscerate the foundations of freedom that made the country great in the first place.

But it doesn’t have to be. But unfortunately, we’re watching Senate leader John Thune betray Americans on easily the lowest hanging fruit ever in American history, the SAVE Act. You can say that Trump doesn’t run Congress or the Senate, which is true, but he is still the president with the largest soapbox on the planet, on an issue so powerful that even a majority of Democrats support it.

Trump should call on and or call out every GOP Senator who is standing in his way. He should do rallies in their states and encourage citizens to reach out and sway them. He should use every available lever of power to convince the Senate to pass the SAVE Act.

The reality is, the SAVE Act (which isn’t perfect, as it currently doesn’t outlaw the insane policy of letting illegals have Social Security numbers) and its companion deportations are where the rubber hits the road relative to a free Republic. Literally, if we do not put in place guarantees for honest elections now, the country will be as blue as the California House delegation within a decade.

The SAVE Act is not sufficient to guarantee honest elections, but it’s a first step. As for my regular warnings of doom, I wish I could spend my time commenting on the new arch going up in Arlington or the new White House ballroom, but the reality is, those are of no real consequence. If Donald Trump doesn’t focus on guaranteeing secure elections, neither will matter because both will end up as symbols not of a great hero who saved the Republic, but rather of the man who failed to save it when he had the chance.

Vince Coyner, American Thinker

According to the bookies, Sir Keir Starmer is odds-on to leave No 10 this year, and if they are right, history might look back on Feb 4 as the day his departure became inevitable.

With two U-turns in the space of a day, with his political guru Morgan McSweeney standing on a trapdoor, and with Angela Rayner biting at his ankles, Sir Keir’s authority has been shredded.

Even before the Mandelson row exploded underneath him, Sir Keir was the least popular prime minister on record, dismissed by the public as useless and by his own MPs as a deadbeat.

Rumours of a leadership challenge had been dominating Labour politics for months, with only the timidity of his rivals keeping him safe. May’s local elections – despite Sir Keir’s attempt to game the result by cancelling lots of them – were seen as the moment of maximum danger.

All that has changed, though, with the wholly avoidable scandal brought down on Labour by Sir Keir’s highly controversial, and possibly career-ending, decision to appoint Lord Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to Washington in February last year.

Sir Keir was the man who promised to “turn the page” on the chaos and scandals that dogged the Conservatives, but instead he has put his party at the centre of the biggest political betrayal since Profumo. The anxiety felt by Labour MPs over the opinion polls (dominated for a year now by Reform UK) has turned to anger.

Whenever prime ministers are toppled mid-term, there is a moment when the mood turns irreversibly against them, even if they manage to limp on for a while longer.

Gordon Rayner, The Telegraph

Moldovan President Maia Sandu has caused a furor.

In an interview with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, two British political figures turned podcasters, she openly stated she would vote for unification with Romania if there were a referendum.

Unionists on both sides of the River Prut were elated. For more than three decades, they have been pushing for the removal of the border which had separated the two sister countries since 1940, when Romanian-speaking Moldova was annexed by the Soviet Union.

Pro-Russian factions in Chișinău lashed out, decrying Sandu’s “betrayal of national interests,” and calling for her resignation.

With passion running high on both sides, it was no surprise the Moldovan government rushed to reassure the public, insisting the latest statement merely reflected Sandu’s personal choice and not her official position.

But those who have been paying attention, particularly to the energy sector, will have noticed some intriguing developments in recent years.

Moldova’s electricity and gas policies have been aligning closer with Romania’s, and the step is arguably one of the most critical towards the unification of the two countries.

There’s no conspiracy here; it’s simply that the alignment has been driven by necessity.

Much of the impetus has come from Kremlin meddling. Since 2021, Russia has sought to trigger repeated energy crises, expecting to blackmail Moldova’s pro-EU government and derail the country’s aspirations to join the bloc.

Until then, Moldova had depended for all its gas consumption and three-quarters of its electricity demand on Russian-controlled resources.

It’s hardly an exaggeration to say the country’s single biggest vulnerability to Moscow’s blackmail was its extreme reliance on Russian energy resources.

But Russia’s plans to destabilize the small country of 2.5million people have backfired.

By limiting gas supplies to Moldova in winters 2021 and 2022 and then cutting deliveries altogether to Transnistria in winter 2025, the Kremlin lost its grip over the whole country.

Moldova acted fast to diversify away, while Transnistria, a breakaway Russian-speaking province internationally recognized as being part of Moldova, could soon see major structural changes since the Kremlin is no longer able to use free gas supplies to fuel separatism.

Chișinău’s gas diversification plan was the first step towards severing its links to Russia.

Moldova can now buy gas in any neighboring European country, but to bring them home it uses an interconnector with Romania, which entered operation only a few weeks before the first energy crisis of winter 2021.

Since then, Moldova has taken other critical steps to align with Romania.

It passed rules allowing it to shift the operation of its strategic gas transmission infrastructure from a company majority owned by Russia’s Gazprom to the operator of the Romanian-Moldovan gas interconnector. The latter is a daughter company of the Romanian gas grid operator, Transgaz.

Technical experts say the two gas markets should now merge to streamline operations and cut costs.

Moldovan companies have secured licenses to trade in Romania, just as Romanian energy exchanges, suppliers, and producers have been opening subsidiaries in Chișinău.

Romania’s commitment to Moldova is even embedded in its national energy strategy up to 2035.

The document specifically mentions that the integration of its electricity and gas infrastructure with that of Moldova is of “strategic importance.”

It also notes that Romania’s energy security is unequivocally tied to that of Moldova’s and that it “should be in a position to guarantee all of Moldova’s energy needs for an indefinite period of time and under any circumstances.”

The strategy is taking shape.

Within a few weeks, Moldova will also boost its electricity supply security as a much-delayed direct, high-voltage line linking it to southeastern Romania is expected to come into operation.

Moldova had been using lines built in the Soviet era that passed through Transnistria to import electricity from Romania, presenting a major security risk.

Two additional electricity interconnectors with eastern Romania scheduled for operation later this decade will also boost Moldova’s security of supply, as the country will be able to import more electricity from Romania.

Even Transnistria, which depended on free Russian gas deliveries to sustain its separatist structures, has been relying on Russian-funded exports delivered via Romania.

Although Moscow uses Hungary and Dubai-based companies to buy and deliver the gas to Transnistria, the arrangement is difficult to sustain amid international sanctions against Russia.

If circumstances persist, Transnistrian authorities will have to consider structural reform, which would inevitably align it with Moldova and implicitly Romania.

Unification may not enjoy widespread popular support on either side of the River Prut, at least for now (polls suggest a majority oppose such a move, with around 30% in favor).

However, the rapid convergence of the two countries’ energy sectors shows that alignment is already underway, primarily driven by security concerns.

For Bucharest, regional stability is linked to Moldova’s energy security. The events of the last five years showed Russia was ready to use the energy lever to destabilize the country and the wider neighborhood.

For Chisinau, Romania is a guarantor of resilience, which it requires on its path to EU integration.

The countries may tactfully avoid the subject of unification, and it will be argued that this isn’t on the cards for now. But the truth remains that work is underway to ensure that in a sudden crisis, the barriers to union could be overcome.

Aura Sabadus

Ninety-one percent.

That’s the share of young liberal women who oppose deportations of illegal immigrants. In a country where 61% of voters support deportation efforts, one demographic has positioned itself further from the American mainstream than any other group in modern polling.

This hasn’t shown itself in just one issue. It’s a pattern. And understanding it explains a lot about our current political dysfunction.

The inversion here is striking. White young liberal women oppose deportations at 94%. Their non-white counterparts? Eighty-three percent opposed.

The women who look least like the people being deported hold the strongest opposition. The women who share ethnic backgrounds with many deportees are 11 points less absolute in their position.

We’re not measuring empathy. We’re measuring ideology. The positions don’t correlate with proximity to the issue. They correlate inversely with it.

Women 55 and older support deportations 66-27. Men of all ages support them by similar margins. But women under 55 flip to 42-53 opposition. Drill into that cohort and you find young liberal women driving the entire gender gap single-handedly.

A chasm separates them from the general electorate. It goes beyond disagreement to being in a parallel universe.

The Algorithm Did This

Values didn’t change generationally. Your grandmother and your 28-year-old cousin both believe in fairness, family, and compassion. What changed is information architecture.

Forty percent of young liberal women are highly online, 40% are watching national broadcast news, and a third get news from TikTok. They’re triple-dosing on media that reinforces identical narratives from different platforms.

Compare that to the general electorate: only 8% use TikTok as a news source. When one group’s primary information channel differs from everyone else’s by a factor of four, they’re not seeing the same country.

Brent Buchanan, Daily Signal