Connexion
The Senate on Saturday confirmed Todd Blanche as U.S. attorney general in a 50–49 vote. Blanche, who had previously served as President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, had led the Department of Justice as acting attorney general since April.
Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AL) and Susan Collins (R-ME) joined all of the upper chamber’s Democrats in voting against Blanche. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is absent for health reasons.
Blanche’s five months as acting attorney general included a number of controversies about DOJ policy, including an effort to create a $1.8 billion fund to compensate the victims of “legal weaponization” and the settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed against the IRS.
The post Senate Advances Blanche as Attorney General, 50–49 appeared first on The American Conservative.
The administration has made real progress in enforcing the law and reforming institutions, but some people are never happy.
The street fights with ICE seem to have ended for now. So have many of the televised SWAT-style immigration arrests. Did the resistance win? Have the changes made by the second Donald Trump administration helped curb illegal immigration, or has much of this just been for show? A careful look at the sum of the evidence at this point shows the measurable effects are increasingly difficult to dispute, whatever the political debate may be.
No one knows how many illegal immigrants (a catch-all term here for false asylees, visa overstays, border sneaks, the general undocumented, and the like) are in the United States, but various studies suggest it is a large number, maybe 18.6 million people, close to 6 percent of the entire population of the United States. For many years, we had no mechanisms to reliably count them, and in many instances the government did not really want to know. For example, despite issuing as many as 11 million visas a year, the State Department has avoided conducting any comprehensive analysis of how many people overstay or misuse their visas for use as feedback to guide future decisions, claiming in a bureaucratic tussle that the task belongs to the Department of Homeland Security and isn’t any of their business.
So any measurement of Trump’s attempts to lower illegal immigration begin with current, not historical, numbers. The U.S. Border Patrol recorded about 237,000 migrant “encounters” at the southern border in FY 2025, down from more than 1.5 million in FY 2024 and more than 2 million annually during the Biden peak years of 2022–2023. ICE reached a milestone this year of more than 10,000 foreign gang members arrested, many at the border. There are now more Border Patrol agents than any other time in the Patrol’s 102-year history. At the same time, Trump did away with the CBP One app, which allowed would-be asylum seekers to begin the process by smart phone app even before they reached U.S. soil. Trump also restricted asylum processing and toughened standards against widespread fraud, even seeking to punish an American immigration attorney who (allegedly) filed false asylum applications, a rare federal action.
Trump expanded expedited deportations and removals, reinstated tougher ICE deterrence policies and arrests, and made changes to the State Department visa-issuing system abroad to include new and higher fees and bond deposits. He also reduced the number of posts issuing visas at all in fraud-plagued Africa and stopped immigrant and non-immigrant visa issuance entirely in countries that do not cooperate with the U.S. on deportations and fraud prevention.
ICE arrests rose from a long-term average of roughly 350 per day to as many as 1,300 per day, increasing more than three times compared with the final year of the Biden administration. Monthly deportations from within the United States had increased by roughly 4.6 times by the ninth month of Trump’s second term. The use of third countries to accept deportees when their home country refuses to do so has increased significantly, with a new office at the State Department set up just to handle the details. Efforts to encourage self-deportation have yielded almost 90,000 voluntary departures, according to one estimate. ICE detention populations increased substantially, reaching nearly 70,000 detainees at one point, compared with roughly 39,000 when Trump returned to office. Congress also approved tens of billions of dollars for immigration enforcement and detention operations through 2029. Trump toughened up the civics test immigrants must pass in order to become citizens. The Justice Department launched legal challenges in states which allow illegal alien college students to pay the tuition rate reserved for legal in-state residents. Trump disincentivized working illegally in the United States while at the same time cutting into money-laundering by Mexican and other drug cartels with a 1 percent remittance fee on the often untaxed money sent by aliens in the U.S. to their home country.
The administration’s changes were reinforced by two recent Supreme Court victories which allow Trump to regain substantial authority managing the border. In Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the Court ruled an undocumented person must be physically present in the United States to make an asylum claim. Asylum-seekers who are stopped on the other side of the border (i.e., in Mexico, not actually admitted to America) are not “present” in the United States. If treated as inside the country, as under Biden, these individuals would be allowed to enter the U.S. and remain for years, often with work permits, while their asylum claims were pending. Many asylum seekers simply disappeared into the United States as permanent illegals rather than face refusal and deportation. The U.S. Government Accountability Office found the immigration court system does not systematically track hearing attendance anyway, making it impossible to produce a real “no-show rate.”
The Supreme Court also gave DHS a powerful new tool in Mullin v. Doe, upholding the right of the administration to remove temporary protection status (TPS) from more than 356,000 Syrians and Haitians now in the U.S. Congress created TPS in 1990 to allow temporary legal status and work authorization to nationals of countries experiencing armed conflict, natural disasters, or other transient conditions that make safe return impossible. With TPS, Congress intended the emphasis to be on “temporary.” The alien would not be expected to return home in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake, but was expected to return home as soon as possible. TPS as created by Congress never provided a path to permanent residency or citizenship. Yet hundreds of thousands of aliens stayed in the U.S. indefinitely under TPS, often vying for other immigration statuses like asylum when available. Many Haitians affected by the new Supreme Court ruling have been in the U.S. on “temporary” status since 2010, many Syrians since 2012. What was once intended as a temporary humanitarian gesture had been hacked into a de facto permanent immigration status. The new Court ruling allows TPS to return to its original function. Trump is also seeking to end TPS for 13 out of 17 countries that held the designation when Joe Biden left office, covering some 1.3 million people in total. One TPS designation, for Somalis, has been in place for 35 years.
At the same time, Trump’s deportations, arrests, and detentions do continue to face significant legal and political constraints. This shows how deeply entrenched illegal immigration is in our society, and how easily it can be made into an emotional and political football. The article you are reading now, with its statistics about ICE enforcement growing, might be seen by the Atlantic as a call to arms against fascism. But at The American Conservative, many of the same government actions are likely to get a nod of approval. Progressives are driven by the immigration myth that, because their great-great-grandpa immigrated to the U.S. from Warsaw or Palermo, America is obligated forever to allow near-unfettered immigration. Others believe it is the right of any person living under less-than-ideal circumstances anywhere in the world to “have a better life” in the U.S., ignoring that every other nation instead tries to vigorously control its borders and interior with metered immigration.
Finally, so much of the opposition to the administration’s immigration changes is simplistic Trump-hatred. Reasonable Trader Joe’s–type suburban people are willing to suck tear gas and engage in street fights with armed federal law enforcement over points of immigration law they had not heard of a year ago. One resistor was just sentenced to 100 years in jail for trying to murder an officer in an armed assault on an ICE facility. The mayor of New York, unaware apparently of the importance of the rule of law in America, has vowed to resist a recent Supreme Court decision because he feels it is anti-immigrant.
These people’s apparent willingness to risk death or imprisonment over the fate of illegal aliens they do not even know is irrational. What they see as authoritarianism is simply the enforcement, for the first time, of laws on the books for decades. They don’t see immigration enforcement as something that might possibly help America, only through some schadenfreud-inflected calculus that makes it seem Trump is losing a battle against them. This way of thinking blocks any sensible discussion of immigration, one that ultimately could result in reforms to the law. Policies that might once have been debated on their merits are now interpreted almost exclusively through the lens of “resistance.” It is all America’s loss, as chaos replaces democracy in the streets.
The post Trump’s Immigration Success—And Its Discontents appeared first on The American Conservative.
The president needs diplomats willing to advance his America First agenda.
At last count, President Donald Trump had named only nine career Foreign Service officers (FSOs) as ambassadors. Six had been confirmed, while three remained waiting for Senate confirmation. That strikingly small number has predictably put the Foreign Service establishment inside the State Department on the warpath.
Under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the breakdown was roughly 70 percent career diplomats to 30 percent political appointees. Under Joe Biden, it was about 60–40. Even during the first Trump administration, the split was approximately 55–45. But the second Trump administration is taking a markedly different approach, closely screening each potential career nominee. This has considerably slowed the nomination process, but Trump-friendly State Department insiders say FSO nominees, aligned with administration goals, are in fact being identified. Meanwhile, each embassy without a Senate-confirmed ambassador is being led by an FSO chargé d’affaires.
From the outset, the administration has had two broad foreign-affairs objectives: to integrate national-interest priorities into America’s global engagement and to retool the State Department’s bureaucratic machinery. The fight over the ambassador nominees has to do with both goals. Trump is willing to nominate career ambassadors, but the White House is no longer automatically rubber-stamping and sending the Senate the names produced by the State Department’s traditional internal FSO selection process.
Rumors abound inside Foggy Bottom, but the explanation appears straightforward: Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the White House have little confidence in a process too heavily influenced by the Foreign Service old guard. They have no interest in elevating career FSOs who are fundamentally out of step with the administration on foreign assistance, international organizations, visa policy, and other key issues.
Many Trump-friendly insiders see the new approach as a necessary step toward breaking the old guard’s grip on Foggy Bottom. It is a strategy for forging a new Foreign Service—one not captured by the globalist and woke values that dominate professional diplomatic services across much of the developed world. The career diplomatic corps in countries like France, Germany, and Britain appear hopelessly lost, but the administration is trying to salvage the U.S. Foreign Service.
In response, the old guard argues that the State Department’s traditional in-house selection process produces ambassadors with invaluable country expertise, extensive international experience, and the judgment to set aside their anti-Trump biases to represent the president faithfully. Tampering with that system, its defenders contend, means passing over seasoned diplomats for less-experienced candidates and replacing professionalism with partisanship.
It is a set of clever arguments that contains some elements of truth. But in the current national moment, the principal purpose of these arguments is to block Trump’s international priorities and frustrate badly needed reform of the foreign-affairs bureaucracy.
The dispute concerns far more than ambassadorial appointments. It is about who runs foreign policy. The old guard is far too savvy to deny openly that presidents—even Donald Trump—constitutionally direct U.S. foreign policy. Its fallback position is subtler: preserve the State Department’s entrenched and self-interested bureaucracy in the hope that things will return to “normal” after Trump leaves office.
The Foreign Service’s country expertise, professionalism, and on-the-ground experience are unquestionably valuable assets. But nothing in the Trump-Rubio approach to find reliable FSO candidates, aligned with administration priorities, gainsays those qualities. It would be foolish for any White House not to consider whether an officer is willing to implement the president’s decisions fully and faithfully. The public record suggests that reluctance to do so is widespread among senior FSOs, making many of them poor candidates to serve as Trump’s personal representatives in foreign capitals.
Foreign Service old-guard leaders condemn Trump’s approach as “partisan.” But their definition of partisanship is notably fuzzy. It has nothing to do with the Hatch Act, which forbids political electioneering, but largely rests on the assertion that a president has no right to evaluate whether FSOs, based on their past professional performance, are a good fit for senior positions. What triggers the old guard’s charge of “partisanship” is actually a fight about policy; the tactic is a sly attack on the president’s constitutional authority to name the officials who exercise his executive power.
In this debate, the old guard refuses to acknowledge an obvious fact of human nature: Veteran diplomats, some with decades of experience, inevitably develop deeply ingrained convictions about America’s core foreign-policy priorities and its mission in the world. Expecting officers who privately (or sometimes publicly) consider Trump fundamentally unfit for office to become his most effective advocates would reveal remarkably poor judgment on the part of the White House.
That happened in Trump’s first term. For example, some 1,000 officers formally dissented from the president’s 2017 executive order pausing certain visa processing. Those dissenting officers placed themselves on the State Department’s internal record as opposing one of Trump’s signature campaign policies. In the same manner, large numbers of FSOs have also condemned administration policies on other initiatives, such as the abolition of USAID. Nevertheless, Rubio has permitted some Trump-hostile officers to remain in key positions because they have demonstrated they can perform their duties. But based partly on the resistance Trump encountered during his first administration, the president has concluded that he has a right to expect something better from those chosen to serve as his representatives abroad.
To be sure, a significant minority of FSOs welcome the Trump-Rubio initiatives and consider the old guard’s opposition to the administration excessive. That is particularly true when the old guard compares the administration’s State Department reforms to the specter of Joseph McCarthy. In a recent article, former ambassador Bill Burns, a veteran FSO and ardent defender of Foggy Bottom’s ancien régime, made his case:
“Things are quite bad,” says Bill Burns, who served in the U.S. foreign service for 32 years including as ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary of state before heading the CIA under President Joe Biden. Burns argues that Trump’s policies are doing even more damage to the department than the Joseph McCarthy era in the 1950s, when the then senator’s Red Scare campaign led to a loss of expertise on China. “That was on one relatively specific set of issues, and it cost the United States in significant ways for the next 15 years or so until the Nixon-Kissinger breakthrough with China,” he says. “But this cuts across the board. It’s not just about one region or one set of expertise.”
Invoking McCarthyism, even indirectly, is usually a cheap shot. It certainly is here. The implication of Burns’s argument is that inexperienced White House political appointees, if they must serve as senior presidential envoys, should defer to the experts. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff may be easy targets for Burns and his ilk, but their fury over Trump blinds them to contrary historical examples that should give them context.
Kushner and Witkoff, for instance, have more international experience than Woodrow Wilson’s Colonel Edward House, who exerted enormous influence over the 1919 Versailles settlement despite holding no elected office, possessing no formal diplomatic rank, and never having served in the professional diplomatic corps. Harry Hopkins had never held a post in the State Department when Franklin Roosevelt dispatched him to London in 1941 as the president’s principal envoy to Winston Churchill and later Joseph Stalin. House and Hopkins both left extensive diplomatic records. Both often disregarded expert advice. The State Department survived.
What really bothers Burns and the old guard is not that State Department experts are being ignored. That happens in every administration. In fact, Burns no doubt remembers well when the George W. Bush administration ignored his own advice from Moscow on the red-line dangers of pulling Ukraine too far into the West’s orbit. No, what bothers them is that the Trump administration is attempting to make lasting changes inside the State Department’s bureaucratic machinery.
Rubio and his leadership team understand that serving as an ambassador is a crucial credential for FSOs seeking promotion, career advancement, and greater responsibility. Change the composition of the senior ranks, by elevating conservative FSOs focused on America’s national interests, and over time you can remake the institution itself.
It is a smart strategy. Recruiting a new generation of junior FSOs while minting a different cohort of senior officers offers a path toward forging a new mindset, culture, and leadership cadre within America’s diplomatic corps. Such an approach can save the Foreign Service by bringing it into step with the nation it represents abroad.
The issue is not “partisanship” but values. For decades, the State Department’s machinery has reflexively favored the globalist or internationalist FSO over the America-First officer. Now an administration is trying to rebalance the institution.
That this is even a fight demonstrates the power of the foreign-affairs bureaucracy. Its leading representatives—whose role in the constitutional order is simply to carry out the work of the national executive, nothing more—are so entrenched, media-connected, and politically sophisticated that they can mount a domestic ideological campaign against a sitting president and his secretary of state.
The old guard understands that accepting Trump’s approach would mean surrendering much of its power to shape foreign policy. That is why its members defended the corrupt and dysfunctional USAID dinosaur to the end—and continue to do so. They echo the dire pronouncements of international institutions and multilateral organizations resisting reforms that would end Washington’s subsidization of their budgets and drastically curtail their prerogatives.
This is a fight about Washington power, not diplomatic expertise.
As one Trump official observed rhetorically: “What is the State Department’s function? It likes to think it’s the foreign policy center. That’s not true. Its job is to represent the president’s foreign policy, not to make it.” That is precisely the issue.
The post The Fight Inside Trump’s State Department Is About Power—Not Expertise appeared first on The American Conservative.
The paper of record bared all in a piece about America’s 250th birthday.
Regular New York Times readers have long suspected that the paper’s oppressive bias comes not from actual reporters, but from doctrinaire editors, who assign the pieces, then insert those ridiculous second or third paragraphs that interrupt the flow of the piece, but hammer home the party line.
The paper recently put one of these editors on display on our 250th birthday, by interviewing its former national editor, Jia Lynn Yang, about the country’s founding. She’s not as bad as we expected. She’s worse.
The gist of Yang’s conception of our country is that everything swell about it is a “myth” and the only history worth talking about is that we had slavery. (I’m glad someone has finally pointed that out.)
Yang says conservatives are “obsessed with mythmaking,” whereas liberals—especially journalists like herself—are “obsessed with the knowing of facts.” Continuing to tout the left’s devotion to facts, she adds: “We are not interested in myths. We are kind of in the business of anti-myths.” Laying her cards on the table, she admits, not the least bit pretentiously: “I am fully in favor of the truth as a journalist.”
What integrity!
I won’t mention that the Times exclusively refers to biological men with big swinging penises as “women,” provided they put on a dress and call themselves “Brittney.” Also, with amazing restraint, I will not cite Walter Duranty, Jayson Blair, the Duke lacrosse case, Sarah Palin’s “direct link” to the shooting of Gabby Giffords, the 1619 Project, Russian collusion, and on and on.
So what are the myths believed by conservatives? Do not say George Washington and the cherry tree! Don’t do it. Everyone knows that was just a little parable used as moral instruction. DO. NOT. MENTION. THE. CHERRY. TREE.
Guess what Yang uses as her one and only example of the miasma of myths around our founding. Yes—the cherry tree! I.e., a tale thoroughly debunked for more than a century and barely believed at the time, except by those with a simple, trusting nature, like small children and Times senior editors. (Maybe for Christmas, Yang could explode the myth of Santa Claus.)
She specifically assails the “mythology” that our country is “really special… unlike anything anyone has ever seen before… something totally unprecedented.” Unable to get to all the precedents, she only cited none. But I’m sure there were lots of countries back then that had broken away from monarchies based on their bold assertion of God-given rights.
No, I’m sorry, that’s incorrect. None had. With a few minuscule exceptions, in 1776, every other country in the world—in Europe, Asia, and Africa—was ruled by one sovereign, whose authority was said to come from God. No other nation required the consent of the governed.
Yang’s yawning ignorance extends far beyond U.S. history to encompass all of world history. She claims the reason Americans had to build myths around our founding (well, at least one myth, that utterly despicable one about the cherry tree!) is that we didn’t have the things “that usually bind together a people.”
Number one, we had no official language, and number two, we had no official religion. Others might look at those very characteristics and say they are things that make America “really special… unlike anything anyone has ever seen before .. something totally unprecedented.”
But that can’t be. America is not special.
True, there was no “official” religion or “official” language, but America was hardly a tower of Babel, which, ironically is one of Yang’s myths about our country, despite her being “in the business of anti-myths.” According to her, there was “no unique language” and “a bunch of different Christian groups jostling.”
There wasn’t all that much “jostling.” From 1607 until the early 1800s, America was 98 percent Protestant, 1.7 percent Catholic, 0.2 percent Jewish and zero percent Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, etc. Everyone spoke, or was learning to speak, English. The only other written languages in the colonies—Dutch, German, French, Spanish, and Swedish—were all Indo-European, and used the same Latin alphabet.
But I can see why someone of Chinese descent would say, “You call that a country?” Around the same time, China was home to hundreds of distinct, mutually unintelligible languages as well as hundreds of completely different folk religions.
The third way Yang says we weren’t really a country is that “the literal geographic borders of the country are just constantly in flux, to put it nicely.”
Well, I’m glad she put it nicely! Does Yang think other countries have permanently fixed borders? When our founders were signing the Declaration, Europe was dominated by four gigantic empires—British, French, Austrian and Russian. There was no Germany. There was no Italy. It’s changed quite a bit since then, “to put it nicely.”
China controlled Mongolia, Taiwan and large swaths of Central Asia. Over the next couple centuries, it has lost and regained Macau, Hong Kong, Tibet and currently has its eye on Taiwan. (Now that Trump has blown our entire military budget on Iran, it’s theirs for the taking if they have a few BB guns.)
Yang only gets really excited about American history when talking about slavery. She mentions “slaves” or “slavery” a dozen times. She talks more about the slaves of Thomas Jefferson and Washington than about the men themselves. The first words out of her mouth about those monumental figures are: “Jefferson and Washington were slaveholders.”
She tells us “there’s so much to apologize for and to feel really bad about and guilty about”—including “the American Indians.” (Hey, Ms. Yang! Did you know that, on the Trail of Tears, those poor victimized Indians brought their black slaves with them?)
Thanks to this interview, we finally got a glimpse of one of the little known editors making the Times as ridiculously biased as it is, and it turns out, she’s not some seasoned Machiavellian manipulator, she’s an idiot.
The post Inside the Mind of an NYT Editor appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Producer Price Index (PPI), per Wednesday’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report, slowed in June to 5.5 percent year over year and down from May’s four-year high of 6.2 percent. The decline in producer price inflation came as the Straits of Hormuz reopened in mid-June, allowing energy prices to come down from the Iran war’s highs.
Core PPI, excluding food and energy as voliatile items, remained unchanged from May at 5.1 percent growth year-over-year.
Prices for final demand energy declined 6.4 percent in June, following a 28.1 percent increase in energy prices since Iran closed the Straits of Hormuz at the beginning of the Iran war.
The June 17 memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran allowed the opening of the strait, causing energy prices to fall as ships transited the sea lane. The reclosure of the strait, as the conflict resumed this weekend, begins a new upwards trend for oil prices as traffic slows through the Persian Gulf.
The post Producer Price Inflation Slowed in June as Hormuz Reopened appeared first on The American Conservative.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shot a man Monday during a deportation operation in southern Maine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, confirmed the incident occurred as agents were surveilling a home in Biddeford, Maine. According to DHS, ICE agents were trying to apprehend an illegal alien believed to be living at the address when they noticed a car leaving the property. As they initiated a stop, “the vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.” In a separate statement, DHS also claimed that the driver had “weaponized his vehicle [against] law enforcement.”
The victim has been identified as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian man who was authorized to work in the United States and does not appear to have had a removal order. Neighbors said he lived nearby with his wife and 3-year-old daughter.
The officer involved, who has not been identified, was placed on leave. DHS, the FBI, and Maine attorney general’s office are all actively investigating the incident. The Embassy of Colombia has also requested information.
Following the killing, protestors gathered in Biddeford and nearby towns for anti-ICE demonstrations. Some lawmakers blamed the shooting on the White House’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement, with Senator Angus King (I-ME) saying that federal officers “shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
The post ICE Agent Kills Driver in Maine appeared first on The American Conservative.
U.S. home prices surged to an all-time high in June according to a National Association of Realtors (NAR) report released last Thursday.
The report found that the median existing home price in June reached $440,660, an increase of 1.8 percent year-over-year and a new high according to the NAR’s chief economist Lawrence Yun.
Housing sales declined to 2.4 percent month-over-month in June and 2.8 percent, seasonally adjusted, since June 2025. The NAR’s Housing Affordability Index is up 6.8 points since June 2025 at 102.3, signaling that home prices are more affordable relative to the median family income. Yet the index was down 2.8 points from May.
Home affordability has become a contentious issue as “affordability politics” dominates discussions leading up to the midterms. A Harris poll conducted with the Guardian earlier this month saw 45 percent of respondents share that they found trouble affording housing.
Congress recently passed the “21st Century Road to Housing Act,” which aims to loosen regulatory burdens on building and increase the supply of housing. President Donald Trump declined to sign the bill, letting it become law on Saturday following the 10-day window after being passed by Congress but not vetoed.
The post U.S. Home Prices Hit All-Time High appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) slowed to 3.5 percent year-over-year in June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report Tuesday morning, down from 4.2 percent in May.
The bureau’s energy index declined 5.7 percent in June, offsetting increases in other indexes including housing and food. Core CPI, which removes volatile items like food and energy, declined by 0.3 percent to 2.6 percent year-over-year.
Energy prices declined following the June 17 memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran that allowed the Strait of Hormuz to reopen following Iran’s closure of the sea lane. Average unleaded regular gas prices declined from $4.61 in May to $4.20 in June, according to the Bureau’s Average Price Data release.
Markets place an 85.6 percent chance of the Federal Reserve maintaining the current level of interest rates at its upcoming July 29 meeting, as higher-than-target inflation maintains pressure on the Fed to raise rates.
The post Consumer Price Inflation Slows to 3.5 Percent in June appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Price Index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation, rose 4.1 percent year-over-year (YOY) in May following a monthly increase of 0.4 percent. That annual rate is the highest since April 2023.
Core PCE, which excludes volatile items like energy and food, similarly rose 3.4 percent YOY, its highest level since October 2023.
Much of the rise comes from increased expenditures on financial services and insurance, following a rally in the S&P 500.
April’s PCE report had revealed a similar three-year high. The upward trend puts further pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. Markets now price the chance of a rate hike at the July 29 Fed meeting at 30 percent with an 80 percent chance by the end of the year.
The post Fed’s Preferred Inflation Measure Hits Highest Level Since April 2023 appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Department of Justice charged fifteen antifa-related protestors with conspiracy to impede federal law enforcement and other crimes during demonstrations earlier this year against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), officials announced on Tuesday. U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen accused the demonstrators of engaging in crimes that “violently oppose immigration law enforcement.”
The indictment alleges that members of Twin Cities Direct Action, which was later renamed to Direct Action Minnesota, engaged in a concerted effort to interfere with ICE and Border Patrol’s operations. They were additionally charged with solicitation of violence, stalking, and property destruction, among other crimes.
In December 2025, the Trump Administration sent hundreds of federal agents into the Twin Cities as a part of its immigration enforcement efforts. The shooting deaths of two Americans by law enforcement inflamed tensions between protesters and ICE officers in Minneapolis.
The post DOJ Charges Fifteen with Anti-ICE Crimes in Minnesota appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics Import and Export Price Index rose at its fastest rate year-over-year (YOY) since August 2022.
From May 2025 to May 2026, import prices rose 6.7 percent, driven by a 45.1 percent increase in fuel and lubricant import prices. Export prices rose 11.2 percent over the same period led by prices for nonagricultural exports, which rose 11.8 percent YOY.
Prices for U.S. imports rose 1.9 percent from April to May, following a similar increase from March to April of two percent. Export prices experienced a similar increase month-over-month of 1.3 percent, the sixth consecutive increase in the index.
Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz significantly drove up energy prices, increasing the prices of both imports and exports in the United States.
The post Import Prices See Biggest Spike Since August 2022 appeared first on The American Conservative.
Left-wing academic phraseology has corrupted the UK’s justice system.
If police in the UK are told they must believe any racial minority who claims to have been racially abused, what are they supposed to do when they come across an incident where claims of racism are made? Obviously they will be inclined to see the person claiming racial abuse as the “victim,” and the accused as the “criminal.” How can they do otherwise?
This is what happened when the police arrived on the scene of the stabbing murder of the white student Henry Nowak by Vickrum Singh Digwa, a 23-year-old British Sikh in Southampton in December 2025. Digwa had accused Nowak—falsely—of having racially assaulted him. The police believed him. Henry died in handcuffs under arrest despite repeatedly pleading that he had been stabbed.
This episode has become a cause célèbre, a cross-racial version of George Floyd. Nowak even said, repeatedly, “I can’t breathe.” It is becoming very clear that something has gone very wrong with the way the UK police regard race. Certain tendentious and wrong-headed “anti-racist” doctrines and dogmas have been introduced into the theory and practice of law enforcement.
Now, it is quite possible to agree, as I do, that there is or has been racism against minorities in British policing, and also to believe that at the point of engagement the police should not be prejudiced against (or in favor of) certain skin colours. Yet the push for “anti-racism” has long since transformed into a form of anti-white racism, as police constables are told that they must believe every claim of racism, regardless of evidence, and record it as a hate incident. This is how the Metropolitan Police define this category of racial “non-crime”:
A non-crime hate incident is any incident which the victim, or anyone else, thinks is based on someone’s prejudice towards them because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgender. Evidence of the hate element is not a requirement.
Just consider that for a moment. Why would the police record someone for perpetrating a non-criminal act? And why should the person claiming to be the “victim” be believed on grounds of perception alone and with no supporting evidence? This surely violates the foundation of an impartial justice system.
Thousands of these hate incidents have been recorded by police every year and, contrary to some reports, the police still record the name of the person involved in the “non-crime” incident if they “suspect” a crime might happen in future. This is dystopian pre-crime in practice. The UK police really is “institutionally racist,” but not as left-wingers understand that phrase.
Where did this racialization of policing come from? Largely from the legacy of the Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence nearly 30 years ago. That was the first major outing for the claim that British policing was racist at its core.
Cowed by this accusation, chief constables have enlisted activist consultants and “community leaders” to fill in the gaps and to reframe operational policing as non-racist or anti-racist. These predominantly left-wing activists and human rights lawyers often represent no one but themselves and have highly prejudiced attitudes. Yet they are invited to lay down the law on anti-racism, as though police constables need outside agitators to tell them what to do.
Take the Independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board, which oversees the National Police Race Action Plan. This is led by Abimbola Johnson, a barrister who has not only said she has a “hatred” for the Conservative Party (OK, so do many people) but more significantly has supported the policy of defunding the police. As she put it in a lecture last year:
Defunding or perhaps more precisely re-imagining can simply mean investing in what actually makes communities safe. It means moving money from punishment towards prevention.
The very person who is telling them how to do their job on race actually thinks the police should have their finances cut and the resources moved to “community resources” such as mental health, housing, social work, and early legal advice.
The vast majority of British voters want the government to spend more on policing, not less. They want more police on the streets, not more social workers and community activists. That this highly political and partisan lawyer could have been given this role is the most obvious sign that the leadership of the British police has simply lost the plot.
It would be naïve and dishonest to ignore racial data in policing. It is true that black and some other ethnic minorities are more often stopped and searched than white people, and this is regarded as the key metric of institutional racism. But this needn’t be a consequence of individual police officers’ prejudices against minorities. It could equally be because more of them carry knives—as we have seen in the Nowak case.
Members of ethnic minorities are more likely to be prosecuted for crimes than white people and it is claimed they receive harsher sentences. This may be evidence of racism in the prosecution service, but then again it may not. After 30 years of being accused of institutional racism, prosecutors and judges now bend over backwards not to show prejudice in prosecution or sentencing.
If black people commit more crimes, then they will show up more often in court. Their arrest rate is currently 20 per 1,000 in the UK against 9 per 1,000 for non-black residents, according to government figures. There may be social factors that create fertile ground for crime, but that doesn’t excuse it.
Again, police racism may not be the determining factor when it comes to differential rates of arrest. Members of ethnic minorities also tend to live in higher-crime neighborhoods—communities marked by poverty, deprivation and family instability which many academics believe predispose some people to breaking the law irrespective of color.
The police, moreover, tend to concentrate activities in these neighborhoods and are more likely to conduct arrests there. That is not about racism but allocation of resources. The idea that police shouldn’t concentrate their work in areas of high crime would of course be ludicrous—yet that is precisely what the “defunders” like the head of the National Police Race Action Plan actually propose.
This problem arises when academic phraseology related to structural inequalities is taken literally and applied to practical policing on the street.
There is unfairness in society; that is undoubtedly true. But disadvantage is not an excuse in the eyes of the law. A crime is a crime, irrespective of social background. The whole point about justice is that it has to be blind to command broad public respect. Even if we accept that in a certain sense “the system is to blame,” the solution to institutional racism cannot be to treat criminals differently because of their skin color. That way madness lies.
The post The Big Problem With Britain’s ‘Anti-Racist’ Policing appeared first on The American Conservative.
Inflation rose to 4.2 percent year-over-year in May, the highest level since April 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index report. Energy shocks from the Iran War accounted for 60 percent of the price increases.
Energy prices continued to soar, rising by 3.9 percent, following a 3.8 increase in April and 10.9 increase in March.
Exempting volatile items like food and energy, inflation rose 2.9 percent, still above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. This report marks the third consecutive increase in consumer price inflation, which had stabilized in the months before the war in Iran began.
The Federal Reserve group responsible for monetary policy is scheduled to meet on June 16-17, as financial markets predict that the central bank will have to raise interest rates by the end of the year.
The post U.S. Inflation Soars to Highest Level Since April 2023 appeared first on The American Conservative.
Federal prosecutors on Tuesday indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for fraud, alleging the civil rights group secretly used donor money to pay leaders and members of white supremacist and other extremist groups for inside information, the Justice Department said.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Alabama-based nonprofit raised millions of dollars that it used for an informant program that prosecutors say directed as much as $3 million to sources embedded in hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The indictment alleges the SPLC used front organizations to move money through bank accounts without detection and hide the payments’ purposes.
The Justice Department is charging the SPLC with wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The organization denies the allegations and said it would vigorously fight the case.
The post Justice Department Indicts Southern Poverty Law Center for Sending Millions to Hate Groups appeared first on The American Conservative.
No UK political party has an answer to the crisis.
The British nation is already burdened by crushing energy costs and is bracing for a dramatic increase in that load. To gauge the impact of coming energy price rises in Britain, you must first understand what is sometimes called the “unriching” of the UK. This is a supposedly wealthy country which no longer feels wealthy. Real wages have barely risen in real terms since before the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. Brits have been through the longest pay freeze since the Napoleonic Wars.
So the average family was already feeling pretty miserable even before the latest energy shock caused by the war in Iran. The IMF has forecast that the UK is going to be hit especially hard by Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz. It expects rising prices to create a “large and sudden tax on income”.
But here’s the thing: The UK is already taxed to the hilt, and incomes have been squeezed for years. Britons are already sick to death of cutting back.
UK GDP per capita is around 30 percent lower than that of the U.S.—$65,000 against $90,000—according to IMF purchasing power parity figures. The intergenerational contract whereby the younger generation should be wealthier than their parents’ has been broken. Generation Z Britons are emerging into a world where they can no longer expect to own a house, have a family or enjoy a secure pensioned job.
Burdened with student debt, it is the credentialed classes that feel most cheated. Graduate recruitment has flatlined, leaving many educated Britons doing relatively menial jobs. Schooled by the left-wing academics who dominate UK universities, many of the fragile “precariat”, as they are called, are attracted to the Robin Hood politics of the Green Party leader Zack Polanski. He thinks that by abolishing billionaires Britain will somehow become richer. He also used to say he could enlarge women’s breasts by hypnosis.
Those on the lower income deciles are, to a certain extent, insulated from impoverishment by huge wealth transfers from middle and high earners. Britain spends more on welfare benefits than the total revenue raised by income tax.
But lower middle-income Britons are still the most directly affected by the energy crisis, which has landed with devastating effect, plunging some seven million families into “fuel poverty,” defined as paying more than 10 percent of disposable earnings on energy.
Average energy bills, currently capped at £1,700 a year for a typical household, are already 50 percent higher than before the Ukraine war. They are forecast to leap again to around £2,500 a year. That may not seem vastly greater than bills in America, but British houses are much smaller. The average U.S. household gets a lot more energy per buck. UK domestic electricity costs twice as much as in the U.S.: $0.40 per kWh against $0.18.
For millions of Britons, especially the elderly living on the UK state pension of £12,548 ($16,600) a year, it is often a choice between heating and eating. In 2025, Age UK claims that 41 percent of older people had to cut back on heating their homes last year. Inadequate heating has allegedly been causing thousands of premature deaths every winter, especially in colder regions such as Scotland. So energy is literally a matter of life and death in the UK.
But it is perhaps the less dramatic impact of high energy costs on families that is the most politically salient. Put simply, Britons can’t enjoy life anymore. The press is full of accounts of two-earner families on average incomes being unable to afford family outings, not least because of the cost of gasoline. Zoo trips, beach holidays, or even visits to the movie theater have become luxuries. Half of parents, according to polls, can no longer afford a summer holiday.
Britons already pay more than £100 ($133) to fill up a small family car—that’s if they can afford the cost of insurance and vehicle taxes. UK gasoline costs are nearly double those in the U.S., and they are set to increase rapidly because of the disruption to supplies. In the 1970s, after the last great energy price shock, the UK was saved by North Sea oil and gas revenues. Not this time.
A lifestyle that is taken for granted in the U.S. is no longer available to tens of millions of Britons. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the political parties, Labour and the Conservatives, which presided over the Great Stagnation are being punished at the polls.
Populist parties like Reform UK on the right and the Greens on the left have been on the rise. Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party has been leading opinion polls for the last year. The Green Party won the recent crucial Gorton and Denton by-election. Yet neither of those parties has any really coherent idea of how to make Great Britain great again. Cutting net immigration to zero or abolishing billionaires are not the answer.
But there can be no solution that does not start with energy. Heating is unaffordable, factories are closing and transport is becoming a luxury. The NHS is suffering because of the increased cost of pharmaceuticals. Shortages of fertilizer, dependent on natural gas, are going to push food prices ever higher. Not surprisingly, Britons are voting with their feet and emigrating for a better life in record numbers, according to the Office for National Statistics.
An appeal for calm by the Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is already more unpopular than any of his Tory predecessors, has not eased voter frustration. The UK government is, according to many commentators, asleep at the wheel. Unable to lower energy costs without compromising climate policies, and addicted to public spending, Labour politicians have stopped making sense. Britain used to be a relatively tranquil land, not given to political extremes. That could be about to change.
The post The British Energy Crunch appeared first on The American Conservative.
Senators approved a funding package early Friday morning for most of the Department of Homeland Security, a major step toward ending a 42-day partial shutdown, while leaving Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and parts of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) outside the bill after Republicans refused to agree to the list of reforms Democrats proposed to limit the behavior of officers engaged in immigration enforcement.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Democrats had “held the line” against funding ICE and CBP without reforms, while Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota accused Democrats of choosing “politics over policy.”Although the package excludes ICE and parts of CBP, those agencies will continue operating with money from the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Republicans said they will pursue additional border funding later this year.
The bill now heads to the House, where it must pass and be signed by President Donald Trump to end the shutdown.
The post Senate Passes DHS Funding Bill to End Partial Shutdown appeared first on The American Conservative.
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