Category: The American Spectator
MLK Day Celebration Backed by Top Teachers’ Union Disinvites Rabbi Over Support for Israel
A San Diego rabbi was disinvited from giving a benediction at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) over his support for Israel, according to the rabbi, his synagogue, and the organization that hosted the event.
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$300M frozen: California allegedly forced Americans to fund illegal alien Medicaid — so Dr. Oz drops the hammer
The Trump administration officials are pushing California to return over $1 billion in federal taxpayer funds that may have been used to cover the health care costs of illegal aliens.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced in May that it was increasing oversight on states that illegally used Medicaid funding to provide illegal immigrants with health care services, noting that Medicaid funding is generally available to illegal aliens only for emergency medical services.
‘We are teaming up to combat healthcare fraud so the money can be used for American citizens who need it!’
As part of the announcement, the CMS declared that states could be forced to reimburse the federal government for funds spent on noncitizens.
CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz revealed in October that the agency found more than $1 billion of federal taxpayer funds were spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.
“And my team is getting it back,” he remarked.
Oz called CMS’ findings “shocking.”
“In a preliminary review of six states, we found those states improperly using federal tax dollars for their allegedly state-funded program and providing coverage to individuals, including some with criminal records of murder and assault,” he stated.
Those findings included $1.3 billion in California, $2.1 million in Washington, D.C., $30 million in Illinois, $2.4 million in Washington, $1.5 million in Colorado, and $5.4 million in Oregon.
RELATED: Dr. Oz exposes the nonprofit lie at the heart of US health care
Mehmet Oz, Bill Essayli. Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images
Oz explained that the states had been notified and that “many” had begun issuing refunds to CMS. However the administrator provided an update on Wednesday, stating that additional uncovered data revealed the total had reached $1.8 billion across eight states.
He announced that the CMS is withholding nearly $300 million from California, which Oz labeled “the worst offender,” until the state’s leadership proves “they’re spending the money properly.”
Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, stated, “California must return more than $1 billion to the federal government after an audit by @DrOzCMS and his team uncovered federal dollars being spent on healthcare for illegal immigrants. We are teaming up to combat healthcare fraud so the money can be used for American citizens who need it!”
California officials have rejected claims that the federal funds were misused.
The California Department of Health Care Services previously told the New York Times, “Claims that California improperly used federal Medicaid dollars to provide health care to undocumented immigrants are flatly false and misrepresent both federal law and standard administrative practice.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
RELATED: Illegal-alien patients drain Texas hospitals, racking up billion-dollar bill — in less than a year
Gavin Newsom. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Washington, D.C., has agreed to pay back over $650,000 to CMS by mid-November.
An Illinois Medicaid spokesperson previously told PolitiFact, “Once again, the Trump administration is spreading misinformation about standard uses of Medicaid dollars.”
“This is not a reality show, and there is no conspiracy to circumvent federal law and provide ineligible individuals with Medicaid coverage. Dr. Oz should stop pushing conspiracy theories and focus on improving health care for the American people,” the spokesperson added.
A Washington State Health Care Authority also pushed back on CMS’ claims, calling the estimates shared by Oz “inaccurate.”
“We were very surprised to see Dr. Oz’s post, especially considering we continue to work with CMS in good faith to answer their questions and clear up any confusion,” the spokesperson said.
Colorado’s Department of Health Care Policy & Financing also insisted the state did not break the law.
“Our payments for coverage of undocumented individuals are in accordance with state and federal laws,” a spokesperson told PolitiFact. “The $1.5 million number referenced by federal leaders today is based on an incorrect preliminary finding, and has been refuted with supporting data by our Department experts.”
Oregon Health Authority previously told KOIN that CMS’ claim was “false and mischaracterizes not just this essential part of our nation’s emergency care infrastructure, but also an ongoing, routine audit process.”
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Taxing Lawnmowers, Gym Passes, And DoorDash Proves Dems Actually Hate ‘Affordability’
Affordability carried the day — until Democrats actually got into office. Within weeks of Election Day, Virginia Democrats have made clear that “affordability” was never more than a campaign slogan.
Gun Rights Attorney Reminds Sonia Sotomayor Hawaii Is Part Of United States
‘Part of the United States’
Pritzker sides with criminals once again, signing controversial ‘Clean Slate’ bill into law
Despite an appalling violent crime problem in Chicago, Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker has signed a bill protecting convicts, making it easier for them to get past hiring filters and find jobs in Illinois.
On Saturday, Pritzker signed the Clean Slate Act, which will enable officials to seal non-violent criminal records for over 1.7 million people in Illinois, Fox 32 Chicago reported.
Just last month, Gov. Pritzker fortified the state’s sanctuary laws.
The new law will require eligible records to be sealed by 2029.
The law applies only to non-violent convictions and dismissed or reversed charges and arrests. More serious crimes, such as sexual violence, DUI, or any crimes that require sex offender registration, are not eligible for automatic sealing.
While this particular law excludes violent felonies, it comes at a time when violent incidents on Chicago trains are making national headlines.
Moreover Pritzker has a long history of siding with suspected law-breakers over victims. In 2023, cashless bail became the law of the state, thanks to the SAFE-T Act he signed previously. Just last month, he fortified the state’s sanctuary laws, prohibiting federal immigration agents from conducting operations near courthouses, hospitals, university campuses, and day-care centers.
RELATED: Chicago Bears may leave city over rift with Democrat leadership
John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
The Clean Slate Act is celebrated by the Democrats as a jobs initiative, since many businesses use background checks to filter out candidates with prior convictions. Once the records are sealed, that traditional filter will be less robust, allowing potential former convicts to remain in the running.
“There is no reasonable public safety justification for making it hard for returning citizens to get a job or housing or an education,” Pritzker said, according to Fox 32. “It’s a policy guided by punishment rather than rehabilitation.”
The Clean Slate Initiative lists Pennsylvania, Utah, New Jersey, Connecticut, Michigan, Delaware, Virginia, California, Oklahoma, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York as states that have passed legislation that meets their criteria for Clean Slate laws. Washington, D.C., is also listed.
The criteria include automation of record sealing, including arrest and misdemeanor records. The Clean Slate Initiative also includes a “strong recommendation for laws to include eligibility of at least one felony record.”
Sheena Meade, CEO of the Clean Slate Initiative, stated: “Our coalition partners — including Live Free Illinois, the Illinois Coalition to End Permanent Punishments, the Workers Center for Racial Justice, Impact for Equity, and Code for America — and bill sponsors Rep. Jehan Gordon-Booth and Sen. Elgie Sims have shown the resolve, persistence, and heart needed to drive real change.”
The new law will take effect June 1.
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America now looks like a marriage headed for divorce — with no exit
Marriages rarely end over one argument. They fall apart through a long breakdown in communication, a growing inability to resolve disagreements, and the slow realization that two people no longer walk toward the same future.
Healthy marriages don’t require full agreement on every subject. They require compromise on the decisions that shape daily life: money, children, priorities, responsibilities. They also require shared goals.
No tidy divorce court exists for a nation-state. We share one flag, one legal framework, and one public square.
When those goals diverge — and neither side will realign — the relationship becomes unsustainable. The law calls the condition “irreconcilable differences.”
America now lives in that condition.
We remain bound under one nation, one Constitution, and one civic home. But we no longer share a common purpose. We no longer share a common story about what the country is, why it exists, or whether it deserves to endure.
This conflict no longer turns on tax rates or regulatory policy. It turns on the legitimacy and direction of the American experiment itself.
The modern left no longer argues about how to preserve the American system. It treats the system as the problem. Democratic leaders and activists call for “fundamental transformation,” flirt with socialism, and talk about the founding less as a flawed but noble legacy than as a moral failure that demands replacement. In that worldview, America doesn’t need reform. America needs erasure.
The right still believes the country can be repaired and preserved. The left increasingly treats the country as something to dismantle.
This rupture shows up in concrete ways. In 2021, the National Archives placed a “harmful language” warning on the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence — the documents that define the nation. That doesn’t signal ordinary partisan dispute. It signals contempt for the country’s moral foundation.
Socialism sits at the center of this divide. It contradicts the American system at its roots. America rests on the premise that rights come from God, not government. Socialism elevates the state over the individual and makes rights conditional on political approval. It centralizes power in the name of enforced equality — “equity.”
RELATED: Americans aren’t arguing any more — we’re speaking different languages
Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
America protects private property as an extension of liberty. It channels ambition into innovation and prosperity. Socialism treats success as a social offense and demands equality of outcome. When people refuse to surrender the fruits of their labor, socialism turns to coercion. Coercion requires centralized authority. Centralized authority punishes dissent.
The pattern repeats: less freedom, greater dependency, and a governing model incompatible with constitutional self-rule.
The irony remains hard to miss. The left calls Donald Trump “Hitler” while cheering figures like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an avowed socialist. Yet the Nazi Party sold itself as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party — a collectivist project built on centralized power and state control.
The same left often excuses Antifa, a movement built on intimidation, street violence, and political enforcement designed to silence opposition. Those tactics don’t belong to liberal democracy. They belong to regimes that fear debate.
Even basic reality has become contested. The left and right can’t agree on something as elemental as what a man or a woman is. The Supreme Court recently showcased the collapse when ACLU attorneys arguing sex-based discrimination refused to define “woman.” When a society refuses to name biological facts that every civilization once treated as obvious, compromise collapses with it.
This crisis goes deeper than polarization. It reaches the level of knowledge itself. The left increasingly treats biology, history, and moral limits as malleable social constructs. The right still believes objective reality binds us all.
These aren’t normal disagreements. They describe incompatible worldviews. And incompatibility carries consequences.
During the COVID era, polls found majorities of Democrats willing to endorse coercive measures against the unvaccinated, including house arrest. Nearly half supported imprisoning people who questioned vaccine efficacy. Those numbers didn’t represent a fringe. They revealed a growing comfort with state force in service of ideological conformity.
After Trump’s 2016 election, many friendships survived political conflict. By 2020, after years of dehumanization — after constant accusations of “Nazism” aimed at ordinary voters — many of those relationships broke. The political battle stopped sounding like disagreement and started sounding like moral extermination.
RELATED: Washington, DC, has become a hostile city-state
Photo by Astrid Riecken For The Washington Post via Getty Images
In September 2025, someone assassinated Charlie Kirk. Large segments of the left didn’t just rationalize the killing. Many celebrated it.
After Scott Adams died following a long fight with cancer, prominent voices responded with mockery instead of decency. People magazine ran a headline labeling him “disgraced.” Even death became a political verdict.
This is what irreconcilable differences look like at a national scale.
A country cannot endure when one side believes the nation stands as fundamentally good — worthy of preservation and reform — while the other believes it stands as irredeemably evil and must be dismantled. Marriages end when partners stop seeing each other as allies and start treating each other as enemies.
Nations fracture for the same reason.
America cannot solve this the way a couple dissolves a marriage. The Constitution binds us to one civic order. No clean separation awaits. No tidy divorce court exists for a nation-state. We share one flag, one legal framework, and one public square.
When irreconcilable differences exist but separation remains impossible, the danger grows.
Only three paths remain: recommitment to constitutional principles, enforced coexistence through expanding coercion, or escalation into open conflict as dehumanization becomes normal.
Pretending this amounts to another election cycle, another policy dispute, or another cable-news food fight invites catastrophe. A nation cannot survive when its people no longer agree on what it is, why it exists, or whether it deserves to continue.
Unlike a failed marriage, America can’t walk away.
Glenn Beck: Iran’s regime is crumbling — and the REAL villain isn’t China
Iran’s streets continue to erupt in one of the most intense nationwide uprisings since the 1979 revolution. Thousands have been killed, tens of thousands arrested, and a brutal regime crackdown with live fire, mass detentions, and a near-total internet blackout has largely smothered visible protests for now. And yet whispers of regime fragility grow louder.
But there’s more to this story than meets the eye. Iran’s real vulnerability, says Glenn Beck, lies not in its inability to squash a protest movement but in its oil-dependent economy, propped up by shadowy deals that could unravel overnight.
Glenn breaks it down brilliantly with a simple, chilling apple farmer analogy that exposes how global banks and China’s “teapot” refineries have kept the regime afloat through sanction-skirting barter schemes … until the buyer suddenly says “no more.”
Glenn’s story begins with an apple farmer named Mo and an apple buyer named Ming.
“[Mo] starts out small. He has a few trees, a few crates. He works hard and everything, and he reinvests all the time. He plants more trees. He buys more land. He takes out loans for trucks and storage and refrigeration,” Glenn begins.
His business keeps growing and then “one day something incredible happens. A massive single grocery chain [run by Ming] picks up Mo’s apples — not a few apples, all of the apples. Which is good because what I didn’t tell you about Mo is he thinks he’s a good guy, but he’s pissed every other apple store off in the world,” he continues.
Ming tells Mo his plans to “refine” the apples into “apple cider and apple juice.” Mo, thrilled that now “demand is guaranteed,” expands even more.
“The trucks are financed. The warehouses are leased. The future looks locked in,” says Glenn.
But then one day, everything comes to a screeching halt. Suddenly “Ming says, ‘Yeah, we can’t take any more apples. We’re at capacity.”’
This news wrecks Mo’s world – without Ming, there’s nothing to keep his business empire afloat.
Almost immediately, apples begin to pile up, and the trucks loaded with supplies are parked. Then “the police are like, ‘Why are all these trucks on the sides of the roads?’ … Then they realize, ‘Wait a minute, you don’t have a license to ship apples. In fact, you don’t have a license on this truck,”’ Glenn continues.
It turns out Mo hasn’t been making any money from his apple farm because Ming has been paying him in equipment and infrastructure the entire time. Mo’s business collapses immediately because he never actually owned anything.
“The banks did,” says Glenn — not because they trusted Mo but because they trusted Ming, who took out the insurance policies.
“Ming is actually the refinery in China, and Mo is the oil in Iran,” he finally reveals.
The banks and insurance companies knew that China couldn’t legally purchase Iranian oil because there’s an embargo on it. But they were perfectly fine with a barter system — where China provided goods, services, and infrastructure in exchange for oil. As long as there was “no money changing hands,” the banks would sign.
This prospect is already enough to give Glenn “a brain aneurysm,” but sadly the story takes an even darker turn.
“The farmer Mo — he has sons, and each one ran a different part of his farm,” he says, returning to his analogy.
Ming’s sudden decision to bail stirs up tension in Mo’s family.
“One son says, ‘Sell the land while it’s worth something.’ Another says, ‘No, hold on — the store might come back.’ Another one says, ‘No, you know what? I’m not with either of you’ and starts moving equipment out of the barn in the middle of the night, and he’s just going to get onto a plane and disappear at some point,” says Glenn.
“This is when countries go down because each son stops asking how do we save the farm, and they start asking how do I get out before it collapses. The farm doesn’t change hands in a ceremony. It just empties out.”
It starts with Mo’s sons, then the farm workers, and then the security team. Protests erupt outside Mo’s gates, and he is forced to cope with the fact that his apple farm has rotted from the inside out.
“This is what’s happening in Iran,” says Glenn.
To hear more of his analysis, watch the video above.
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A protest doesn’t become lawful because Don Lemon livestreams it
What should have been a peaceful Sunday service at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, turned into a political ambush. Roughly 30 anti-ICE protesters pushed into the sanctuary mid-worship, chanting slogans and confronting church leaders as families tried to pray.
Disgraced former CNN anchor Don Lemon was there, too, livestreaming the chaos.
If activists can storm a church mid-service, scream at families, and then hide behind the First Amendment, the standard becomes simple: The loudest mob sets the rules.
The Department of Justice has opened a formal investigation and signaled that federal protections for houses of worship may apply. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon noted on the “Glenn Beck Program” that the activists’ conduct could implicate the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which bars intimidation, obstruction, and interference with the free exercise of religion in places of worship. The protesters may have also violated the Ku Klux Klan Act, a post-Civil War law that makes it illegal to terrorize and violate the civil rights of citizens.
According to multiple reports, the demonstrators were tied to the Racial Justice Network and aimed their protest at a church leader they accused of working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The protest followed rising tensions in Minnesota after the fatal shooting of anti-ICE activist Renee Nicole Good during a confrontation with federal agents.
Lemon framed the entire spectacle as civic virtue. He insisted he was “not an activist, but a journalist” and argued that protest inside a church remains constitutionally protected speech.
The footage tells a messier story.
Video released after the incident shows Lemon interacting with the group beforehand, appearing familiar with organizers and the plan. One outlet described the operation as “Operation Pull-Up.” That undercuts the narrative Lemon later pushed — that he simply arrived to document an event that unexpectedly “spilled” into a worship service.
Intent matters. So does outcome. The outcome looked like this: a sanctuary overrun, a service derailed, congregants shaken, and children crying while activists shouted and gestured at the pews.
That is far from “peaceful assembly.” It is targeted disruption.
The First Amendment protects speech. It does not grant a roaming license to invade private spaces and commandeer them for political theater. Rights have edges because other people have rights too. Worshippers do not lose their liberty because activists feel righteous.
That basic distinction keeps a free society from collapsing into a contest of intimidation.
RELATED: Americans aren’t arguing any more — we’re speaking different languages
Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images
This case matters because it tests whether the country still draws that line. If activists can storm a church mid-service, scream at families, and then hide behind the First Amendment, the standard becomes simple: The loudest mob sets the rules. Next week it will be another church. Then a synagogue. Then any gathering that activists decide deserves punishment.
The Justice Department is right to examine the FACE Act here. Congress passed it to stop coercion dressed up as protest — the use of obstruction and intimidation to prevent Americans from exercising basic freedoms. That principle doesn’t change because the target shifts from an abortion clinic to a church sanctuary.
The press corps’ selective outrage makes the problem worse. Cultural elites demand “safety” and “inclusion” in every other arena, but many of them treat Christian worship as an acceptable target. They police speech in classrooms and boardrooms, then shrug when activists shout down prayer.
That double standard signals something deeper than hypocrisy. It signals permission.
Lemon’s defense captured the rot in one sentence: Making people uncomfortable, he said, is “what protests are about.” Fine. Protest often makes people uncomfortable. But discomfort does not justify trespass. It does not excuse intimidation. It does not cancel someone else’s right to worship in peace.
A society that cannot protect sacred spaces will not protect much else for long. If the law refuses to punish conduct like this, the lesson will spread fast: Invade, disrupt, harass — then claim virtue and dare anyone to stop you.
America does not need a new normal where mobs treat churches like political stages. It needs consequences.
‘NOW IT IS TIME!’: Trump Blasts Denmark for Failing to Contain Russian Threat — Says ‘It Will Be Done!!!’
In a Sunday night TRUTH Social post, President Donald Trump claimed Denmark has failed to deal with what he called the “Russian threat” near Greenland — and declared the time for action has arrived.
