STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC

h/t The Burning Platform

Not surprisingly, legacy media isn’t following up on Nick Shirley’s Somali video. Their criticism is reserved for Shirley. From Tim O’Brien at pjmedia.com:

You knew this would happen. An independent journalist scoops the legacy media, and they go after him. It’s happened before, and it will happen again. Nick Shirley has made CNNCBSABCNBCNYT and all of the other leftist media look bad, and now they will try to make sure he pays.

Our own Eric Florack captured the essence of what Shirley accomplished just a few days ago: 

This is most likely the single biggest story ever covered by an independent journalist. In one video alone, Nick Shirley has exposed over $100 million in fraud. I suspect he’s merely scratched the surface on the story.
 
Keep in mind, this is right in the backyard of the big paper in Minneapolis, the Minnesota Star Tribune, a paper with far more in the way of resources to lean on than Mr. Shirley could ever hope to field. They can’t be bothered. Or perhaps they’re shielding us from something. As you can imagine (and I suspect some viewers can see) the video has had over 100 million views so far. You can imagine why. Nobody, including the Tribune, is covering the story well enough.

Eric is right. The legacy media couldn’t be bothered, that is, until Shirley’s discoveries spurred on more investigations in Minnesota and elsewhere, and a pattern has emerged. There is a ton of corruption in the Somali-American communities, and we’re paying for it, as PJ Media’s Victoria Taft revealed: 

In the state of Washington, one internet sleuth began going through the grants and found 539 Somali daycare centers. Some of these centers are in people’s homes. Many of these taxpayer-subsidized centers do not list an address.

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The government doesn’t care about freedom, but that was obvious long before 2025. From John and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

Some years chip away at freedom. Others tear the mask off.

2025 was the year the government stopped pretending it was constrained by the Constitution—when executive power expanded openly and unapologetically, surveillance became ambient, dissent became dangerous, and the machinery of militarized government embedded itself into daily life.

Under Trump 2.0, the erosion of civil liberties gave way to something more brazen: the dismantling of constitutional government itself.

What made 2025 different was not any single abuse of power, but the relentless accumulation of them. The losses mounted week by week, crisis by crisis, executive order by executive order, until exhaustion itself became a political condition.

Outrage no longer led to accountability; it simply rolled into the next emergency.

What follows is not a list of grievances or a catalogue of partisan disputes. It is a record of the year freedom lost its guardrails—and of a nation torn apart from within by the very individuals and institutions entrusted with preventing such tyranny.

Donald J. Trump entered his second term promising revenge, retribution, and sweeping transformation. In that regard, he has been utterly successful.

Where he has failed—spectacularly—is in honoring his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution. He has failed to represent all of the people, opting instead to serve only those interests that inflate his ego and advance his personal and financial ambitions. He has failed to unite the country behind any shared civic vision, choosing instead to deepen divisions through rhetoric and policies that inflame hatred, entrench discrimination, and normalize cruelty. Racism was emboldened, bigotry encouraged, misogyny amplified, and corruption reframed as governance. Authoritarian instincts were no longer masked; they were embraced.

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The Venezuela operation is already a huge waste of money, and it may turn into a waste of blood, too. From David Stockman at antiwar.com:

Talk about attacking a gnat with 1,000 pounds of TNT!

We are referring, of course, to the Donald’s latest gambit of sending a $40 billion carrier battle group to the coast of Venezuela in order to help kill a few fishermen (46 to date) on $400,000 speedboats, who run a side-gig of bringing cocaine across the Caribbean to distribution points to the US market. These hapless fishermen have been relabeled as “narco-terrorists” by the Washington War Machine, but as we show below, that’s pure barking hogwash.

The real reason for all the bellicose posturing from the Donald and the pathetic wanna be Navy Seal who got made Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is yet again “regime change”.

To be sure, Maduro is a relentlessly destructive socialist dictator, but so what? He doesn’t have even a tinpot military that could get out of port if it tried.

Moreover, if the Washington neocons have failed to notice a notable event, we haven’t. To wit, the Cold War ended 34 years ago – so the remnant of the World Communist Menace in China and Russia is no longer even a remote military threat to the Homeland Security of the US, even if the US spy satellites can identify an operative or two from these nations stumbling around the ruling courts of Caracas.

In short, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to be sending the state-of-the-art Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) carrier battle-group to the Venezuela coast on the hoary grounds of national security. In fact, this hideous exercise of the mighty US Navy is a reminder of the pure idiocy of the $200 billion per year that Washington spends on the Surface Navy and Marines.

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Does Zelensky really think victory with Russia can be pulled from the CIA’s or MI6’s bag of tricks? From Lorenzo Maria Pacini at strategic-culture.su:

It is time for Zelensky to go. Either willingly or by force.

Imagine you are on a cold winter afternoon, while everything around you flows normally, in the slowness dictated by the climate and the anticipation of Christmas and the new calendar year. Imagine that the whole world is slowing down to make room for the holidays that involve billions of people around the globe, and even in the mainstream media and in the movies, everyone is talking about being kinder, while children sing songs about peace. Imagine all this.

Then imagine that 91 drones were launched from Kiev on Vladimir Putin’s residence in Novgorod.

Now try not to call this act “pure stupidity.”

These are strong words, perhaps, but not as strong as those used by Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president and deputy chairman of the Security Council, who commented harshly on X about the absurdity of the Kiev regime, which is trying to boycott any peaceful solution. Because this is exactly what Volodymyr Zelensky, with no dignity left, is constantly trying to do.

Once excluded from the negotiating table, Zelensky tried in numerous ways to tamper with the negotiations and detonate the situation: from pilgrimages to the British Court and the European Commission, to threats and incitement to murder. Now, drones against the Russian president’s residence.

Zelensky’s behavior, in addition to his lack of strategic sense and dignity—already lost during his television shows where he played the piano and guitar naked—reveals the last gasps of a character who has now reached the final act of his script.

Of course, Zelensky is currently convenient for everyone: for Russia, he is a useful enemy, easy to manage in terms of public opinion, already well known and hated by practically everyone, even outside the country; for the US, he is the right person to sacrifice, now at the end of his ‘term’, having already lost the blessing of the White House and now adrift, waiting to be liquidated ‘for better or for worse’, but not before he has finished destroying Ukraine and led the European Union to spend its last remaining cents on futile weapons for a senseless war.

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Plenty of the jobs taken by immigrants would be done by Americans, but not at illegal alien wages. From Douglas Flint at lewrockwell.com:

In the eighties, I had a friend who worked for me on and off.  He was a competent handyman and could do an oil change without screwing it up, something that was always useful in an auto shop, which I ran.  Eventually, however, he got a better paying job as a drywaller.

Anyone who has ever done a home project with even a small drywall repair knows how difficult it is not to have even a small repair stick out like a sore thumb.  Stevie was good and patient.  He has that ability to measure with his eye.  And so he was a very good drywaller, making a respectable wage with some benefits.

But about a decade later, he came back to my shop, needing work.  He explained that his business had been taken over by mostly Hispanic workers, who worked as sub-contractors and were paid not by the hour, but by the number of sheets of drywall they hung.  No benefits, of course.  Their work may not have been great, but it was acceptable.

In all likelihood, many if not most of these new drywallers were illegal aliens.  And in a one-decade cycle, drywalling became one of those jobs Americans just won’t do.

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If the incompetence that leads to fires like the ones in Maui and Pacific Palisades is disgusting, the malfeasance and corruption that occurs afterwards is infuriating. From John Leake at lewrockwell.com:

In September 2023, I posted an essay on this newsletter in which I presented evidence that the August 8, 2023 Lahaina, Maui fire was a Predictable & Predicted Disaster. That the lovely, historic town was in grave danger of being incinerated by wildfire was obvious to everyone who noted that a similar fire almost incinerated the town on August 24, 2018.

On that day, a wildfire broke out on the hillside above Lahaina, driven by high winds resulting from the low pressure of Hurricane Lane that passed south of the Hawaiian Islands. The fire destroyed 2,100 acres, 21 houses, and 27 cars, and caused $4.3 million in damage, but stopped just short of incinerating the town.

In response to this near miss, Maui County made little if any investment in preventing the same thing from happening again, which it did exactly five years later under eerily similar meteorological conditions. However, this second fire could not be stopped on the east end of town, but ended up burning all the way to the waterfront and destroying every building in the historic district.

According to FEMA estimates, approximately 1,800 residential structures (homes and apartments) were destroyed, displacing approximately 5,000 permanent residents whose families had lived in Lahaina for generations. As of October 27, 2025 — over two years later—Maui County had issued 478 permits for residential construction in Lahaina.

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One of the horrors coming out of Europe is the contradictory euphemisms from the clearly totalitarian rulers trying to hide what they’re doing. It’s downright Orwellian. From Jonathan Turley at jonathanturley.substack.com:

Below is my column in The Hill on the move by the Trump Administration against five leading figures in the European censorship movement, including Thierry Breton, the former European Union commissioner responsible for digital policy. The United States is finally responding to what is an existential threat to American values. It is worth noting, as I discuss in my new book, Rage and the Republic, that the EU is not only exporting its censorship rules but threatening American companies that do not meet its environment, social and governance (ESG) policies. It is time for Congress to follow suit and get into this fight.

Here is the column:

“We are the free world now.” Those words from Raphael Glucksmann, a French socialist member of the European Parliament, captured the pearl-clutching outrage of Europeans after the Trump administration did what no prior administration has ever done — stand up to Europe to defend the freedom of speech.

This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio barred five figures closely associated with European censorship efforts from traveling to the U.S. This includes Thierry Breton, the former European Union commissioner responsible for digital policy.

In a post on X, Rubio declared that the U.S. “will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship” and will target “leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States.”

Breton achieved infamy as one of the architects of the massive EU censorship system, which is now being globalized. Armed with the notorious Digital Services Act, Breton and others threatened American companies and officials that they would have to yield to European standards of free speech. After Breton learned that Musk was planning to interview Trump before the last presidential election, he even warned the X owner that he would be “monitored” and potentially subject to EU fines.

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The Somali fraud in Minnesota was so blatant that it had to have been known to and tolerated by the powers that be. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:

i’m not sure who needs to hear this, but there is nothing even remotely sophisticated about these endless somali and NGO/immigration frauds. not PPP, not food, not autism, and not daycare or welfare or SNAP or free rent.

it’s all blatant, hammer in the face stuff.

yes, this is a real sign. yes, the misspelling is real. you cannot make this stuff up.

it did not go on for years because the perpetrators were crafty. it went on because the DA’s, prosecutors, police, judges, mayors, governors, and congress critters were relying on this demographic for vote harvesting.

all these politicians and purported public servants knew full well what was occuring.

they were all a part of it.

they bragged about it. listen to tim walz from the presidential debates.

(this aged like a bait bucket left in the trunk of a car in july.)

[see article for video]

this new somali scam, fake daycare, will also run into the billions. these folks have stolen multiples of the GDP of somalia, and that’s just from minnesota. and their reach is far from confined there.

this is modern day barbary piracy.

the only difference is that it was invited in and protected by its patrons.

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If an individual exercising coercion and violence on another individual is immoral, can any system other than anarchy be moral? From Doug Casey at internationalman.com:

You’re likely aware that I’m a libertarian. But I’m actually more than a libertarian. I don’t believe in the right of the State to exist. The reason is that anything that has a monopoly of force is extremely dangerous. As Mao Tse-tung, lately one of the world’s leading experts on government, said: “The power of the state comes out of a barrel of a gun.”

There are two possible ways for people to relate to each other, either voluntarily or coercively. And the State is pure institutionalized coercion. It’s not just unnecessary, but antithetical, for a civilized society. And that’s increasingly true as technology advances. It was never moral, but at least it was possible, in oxcart days, for bureaucrats to order things around. Today it’s ridiculous.

Everything that needs doing can and will be done by the market, by entrepreneurs who fill the needs of other people for a profit. The State is a dead hand that imposes itself on society. That belief makes me, of course, an anarchist.

People have a misconception about anarchists. That they’re these violent people, running around in black capes with little round bombs. This is nonsense. Of course there are violent anarchists. There are violent dentists. There are violent Christians. Violence, however, has nothing to do with anarchism. Anarchism is simply a belief that a ruler isn’t necessary, that society organizes itself, that individuals own themselves, and the State is actually counterproductive.

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