Day: January 25, 2026
Trump’s economic agenda needs a Vegas test — and a Vegas win
Las Vegas is a mirror. When it works, America works. When it struggles, the problem isn’t local — it’s national.
Vegas was built on a simple idea: value. Give people a reason to come, treat them fairly, and let them choose how much risk they want to take. No lectures. No stupid political games. No government hand in your pocket every five minutes.
A great city doesn’t nickel-and-dime its customers. Value matters. People don’t expect cheap. They expect fair. That lesson applies nationally, too.
That formula built the entertainment capital of the world. And right now, it’s under pressure.
The neon lights have dimmed
Vegas is getting squeezed from both ends, and the pressure feels familiar because it’s the same pressure families across the country have felt.
Under the Biden administration, inflation surged. Housing costs jumped. Groceries, energy, airfare, and insurance rose together. Families didn’t get richer. Their dollars just bought less.
Reckless spending, energy restrictions, and regulatory overreach drove the damage. Washington acted like prices were somebody else’s problem.
Southern Nevada also felt the economic whiplash. Tourism collapsed during the 2020 lockdowns, wiping out billions and driving unemployment as high as 33% at its peak. Visitor spending returned slowly, then softened again in 2025 — after wages, rents, and debt had already risen on the assumption that demand would keep growing.
For locals trying to raise families, that meant higher baseline costs and less margin for error. Housing, rent, and transportation ate paychecks. Hospitality wages rose, but many workers still lost ground as commuting costs and rents climbed faster.
A gamble on progress
Under President Trump, the trend has started to reverse — not overnight, but directionally. Energy production is up. Supply chains have stabilized. Regulatory pressure has eased. Inflation cooled. Costs didn’t snap back, but the bleeding slowed.
That matters because affordability is competitiveness. Vegas shows what happens when value breaks.
For decades, Vegas understood the middle-class customer: a weekend trip, a decent room, a good meal, a show, maybe a little gambling — and you left feeling like you got your money’s worth.
That perception is cracking. Resort fees that feel like a second room rate. Paid parking where it never used to exist. Food and drink prices that make people stop and stare. Fees stacked on top of fees, revealed at checkout. The experience starts feeling less like entertainment and more like an airport terminal.
Visitors notice. And when people feel squeezed, they don’t just complain — they change their behavior.
RELATED: America tried to save the planet and forgot to save itself
Photo by Timothy Fadek/Corbis via Getty Images
Vegas runs on volume. When fewer visitors come, fewer dollars circulate. The pain hits the dealer, the server, the bartender, the stagehand, the hotel staff, and the rideshare driver long before it reaches the executive suite.
Zoom out, and you see America facing the same dynamic.
The United States used to win because we offered the best value on earth. Not the cheapest — the best deal. A place where costs made sense and life felt attainable.
That edge has been eroding, especially in housing. When home ownership becomes a fantasy, workers can’t relocate, young families delay building stable lives, and talent looks elsewhere.
Meanwhile, competitors are building. Riyadh. Dubai. Macao. Singapore. They’re creating new tourism and entertainment hubs designed to pull dollars away from legacy markets like Las Vegas.
They’re betting America forgets how competition works.
Make Vegas Vegas again
Federal policy matters here. Washington still treats Vegas like a cash register, with outdated rules such as taxing gambling winnings and forcing IRS reporting thresholds stuck in the 1970s. That doesn’t just annoy visitors. It tells the world America doesn’t understand modern consumer behavior.
Ending the federal tax on gambling winnings isn’t radical. It’s strategic. Updating IRS reporting levels isn’t reckless. It’s realistic. Both would improve the visitor experience and help Vegas compete.
The industry also has work to do. A great city doesn’t nickel-and-dime its customers. Transparency matters. Value matters. People don’t expect cheap. They expect fair.
That lesson applies nationally, too.
America doesn’t win by lecturing consumers or ignoring affordability. America wins by making this country the best place on earth to live, work, build, and spend money.
Vegas is telling that story in real time. If Washington listens, the rest of the country benefits.
Forget Greenland — we’re losing the real green land that feeds America
The world is abuzz with chatter about the United States’ pursuit of Greenland, but Daniel Horowitz, Blaze Media host of “Conservative Review with Daniel Horowitz,” says we ought to consider prioritizing a different kind of green land: “our pastures, our farms, our ranches.”
America’s food security, or lack thereof, is an issue that should deeply concern every American, he says. Between rising beef prices, the “endless shrinkage of ranchers exiting the farming business,” “the consolidation of corporate farms,” the “corporate monopoly of meat processors,” “inflation-driven land depreciation,” and the “government’s steering capital to data centers instead of ranches,” America’s ability to feed her people is growing weaker by the day.
Horowitz confesses he has grown weary of the Trump administration’s geopolitical distractions and obsession with building AI data centers when “the future of [America’s] food security is what matters.”
“We should be pushing for a Manhattan project for cheap and abundant food, for more ranchers, more farmers, more utilization of the land to produce American-made beef rather than cloud-based AI slop that’s actually now about to pop as a bubble and is not really getting us anything,” he says.
Yet Horowitz sees this prioritization not as a purely conservative misstep, but as a clever pivot by the left.
The shift toward prioritizing AI over food production, he argues, is just progressives’ latest trick in their long game: “jiu-jitsuing” conservatives’ support for “functional energy” and funneling it toward “building their surveillance, transhumanist cloud” to create a world where “we own nothing, are dependent on government,” small businesses (including ranchers and farmers) are crushed, and we’re all forced to “put our lives on the cloud.”
Based on several Davos speeches delivered at this year’s World Economic Forum conference, it appears that fossil fuels are back in style with the elites, but Horowitz warns that their plan is to “siphon it all off for their cloud-based, transhumanist” trashing of the internet.”
“Consuming all of our land — not for food, farming, ranching — but for cloud. That’s what this is all about,” he says.
He accuses the Trump administration of “literally digging our own grave” by handing power-hungry elites tax breaks, streamlined regulations, and priority land access for massive data centers, all while pushing policies that would block states and localities from using basic zoning rules to safeguard farmland and ranching.
In short, their efforts are paving the way for the destruction of farmland to build “massive power-sucking dung holes,” where our data will be stored and likely used to surveil us.
What this administration should be doing, Horowitz says, is “getting out of the way of ranchers and farmers so that we have safe, healthy, abundant, cheap food and protein in this country.”
To learn more about the boots-on-the-ground fight for food security in America, Horowitz interviews Texas cattle rancher and co-founder of the Beef Initiative Cole Bolton.
To hear their conversation, watch the full episode above.
Bad Bunny blitzes Super Bowl fans with super ‘queer’ halftime show
An insider report claims that Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny has plans to make the Super Bowl LX halftime show awfully political.
Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny, stirred controversy for most of 2025, both before and after being named as the performer for the big game. This included telling audiences they “have four months to learn” Spanish to understand his performance and releasing a parody of President Trump in his music video song “NUEVAYoL” on the fourth of July.
‘The NFL has no idea what’s coming.’
Now outlet Radar said that members of the musician’s style team have revealed he plans on delivering a “political thunderbolt” during the halftime show.
Glam squad
Insiders described as a stylist and a member of the singer’s “glam team” alleged that Bad Bunny plans on wearing a dress during the halftime show to honor Puerto Rican “queer icons” and “generations of drag, resistance, and cultural rebellion,” the outlet wrote.
Photo by Daniel Shirey/MLB Photos via Getty Images
“He loves controversy. He lives to push envelopes,” a stylist involved in Bad Bunny’s clothing choices allegedly told Radar.
Dress mess
“He is 100% going to wear a dress. A political thunderbolt disguised as couture,” they added.
A second source also explained, “He’s not playing it safe. The NFL has no idea what’s coming. Zero.”
An apparent third source, listed as only “a pal” of Bad Bunny’s, said that critics are free to complain, but “the dress is already being sewn.”
RELATED: Trump administration responds to Bad Bunny’s promise to perform in Spanish for ‘woke’ halftime show
Photo by Aaron M. Sprecher/Getty Images
Harebrained
The NFL has been accused by the president of passing the responsibility of the booking on to the promoters, as the content seemingly is at odds with the league’s core fans.
“Apple Music, the NFL, and Roc Nation announced that 3x Grammy Award-winning global recording artist Bad Bunny will perform at the Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif. on Sunday, February 8, 2026, airing on NBC,” the NFL wrote in a press release last September.
Apple Music’s key figure is listed as Oliver Schusser, vice president of Apple Music and international content.
Roc Nation is also involved. That company was founded by rapper Jay-Z and has been working on Super Bowl halftime shows since 2019.
Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter said in the same press release that Bad Bunny’s “unique ability to bridge genres, languages, and audiences makes him an exciting and natural choice to take the Super Bowl halftime stage.”
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‘Gross’: WEF elites push for fake, lab-grown meat
Social media users reacted to elites discussing the consumption of lab-grown meat products during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this week.
A video clip circulated on social media on Thursday of Andrea Illy, an Italian businessman and chairman of the coffee company Illycaffè, pushing for the adoption of tech foods.
‘This, I know, it’s kind of a cultural revolution.’
Sam Kass, a former White House chef and senior policy adviser for nutrition under former President Barack Obama, said, “A lot of what we’re starting to see are these replacements for these core foods. I’ve tasted a bunch of, you know, ‘future coffee, fake coffee.’ How do you see that application?”
Kass asked for Illy’s opinion on the matter, noting that, while the technology of cultivated food is “smart” and “interesting,” “from a values perspective” and as a chef, he does not want to see a future “where we’re starting to drink coffee from a factory as opposed to from a tree.”
Illy responded, “There is a terrible cultural resistance from [the] consumer to accept tech foods. But in my opinion, they represent the way forward.”
“We know from statistics … that 70% of the ecological footprint of agriculture is due to animal proteins,” Illy continued.
RELATED: Say no to synthetic: America needs real meat, not lab slop
Andrea Illy. Photo by Robin Marchant/Getty Images for illy caffe
He argued that the “excessive consumption” of meat “is the first cause of noncommunicable diseases,” which he claimed is “the number one health problem in the Western society.”
Illy suggested reducing meat consumption to a “healthy” level, while considering “the environmental impact.”
“Why should I use animals when I can cultivate meat and get only the best part of it?” Illy questioned.
RELATED: Bugs for thee, beef for me: How big business monopolizes meat
Andrea Illy. Photographer: Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg via Getty Images
“This, I know, it’s kind of a cultural revolution,” he added, estimating that it would take decades to get people to adopt lab-grown meat as the new norm.
The WEF website boasts the adoption of cultivated meat. The organization explains that lab-grown meat begins with “extracting stem cells from a small sample of animal tissue” and placing those stem cells in a bioreactor. The WEF claims that cultivated meats offer “a multitude of benefits,” including reduced environmental impacts, lower resource use, elimination of the need to slaughter animals, and elimination of antibiotic use.
X users in the comments seemed less than enthusiastic about tech foods.
“They will eat steaks from the finest beef. Everyone else cancer cells cultivated in a laboratory,” one user wrote.
“Gross,” another stated.
“WEF is full of demons,” a third wrote.
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Philippine Women”s Open: Schedule, draw, and other details you need to know
Manila will witness world-class tennis action as the main draw of the Philippine Women”s Open gets underway on Monday at the Rizal Memorial Sports Complex.
Federal officials dig in on Minneapolis shooting narrative despite video evidence
Senior Trump administration officials on Sunday defended the fatal shooting of a US citizen by immigration agents in Minneapolis even as video evidence contradicted their version of events and tensions grew between local law enforcement and federal officers.
Can ICE agents be prosecuted for Minneapolis shootings?
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot and killed two US citizens in separate enforcement actions in Minneapolis this month as part of President Donald Trump”s hardline immigration crackdown.
DHSUD launches townhall meetings with HOAs to address community concerns
The Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development (DHSUD) has recently launched townhall meetings to engage homeowners” associations (HOAs) and guide them towards community development.
LTFRB vows to dismantle illegal, run-down PUV terminals
The Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB) on Sunday vowed to intensify its operations against illegal transport terminals across the country, citing corruption and risks to public safety.
