The Trump administration has deployed a new weapon in the war on fraud: vigilant Americans.

Last week, Vice President JD Vance called on citizens to join him in “taking the pledge to protect Americans from fraudsters” and to condition support for political candidates on their willingness to similarly make this commitment.

‘Going to keep a lot of people honest.’

Joined in the Oval Office on Tuesday by Vance and other members of what he dubbed the “untouchables,” President Donald Trump wedded an incentive program to this anti-fraud campaign.

Under the new Fraud Whistleblower Incentive Program, citizen whistleblowers, including journalists, can receive a bounty ranging from $10,000 to $30,000 for information leading to criminal fraud charges as well as a potential 1% commission for recovered funds.

“If it’s $10 million, $200 million, $400 million — we’re giving a 1% commission to that person,” said Trump.

The president noted further that in the event of a dispute over who deserves a particular bounty, he will weigh in as arbitrator.

The Justice Department said that whereas most existing government whistleblower programs don’t issue rewards until after the criminal matters are resolved, this program “rewards whistleblowers at a much earlier stage of prosecution.”

RELATED: Trump administration breaks record cleaning up Social Security files in HUGE fraud-prevention move

President Donald Trump shakes hands with Nick Shirley. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images.

Whistleblowers are asked to go to america.gov/fraud and submit tips pertaining to federal health care offenses or fraud on programs or benefits administered by federal agencies. Tips are reviewed by the Treasury Department, then referred to the relevant federal office. If the information leads to charges or the recovery of money stolen by fraudsters, qualifying whistleblowers may be rewarded for their efforts.

Trump said that this program “is going to keep a lot of people honest.”

Vance said that the program already has one bounty claimant: investigative journalist Nick Shirley.

The president celebrated Shirley’s successful efforts to expose fraud, including the unflattering light he shone on alleged fraud in the now-infamous Quality Learing Center and other taxpayer-subsidized, Somali-run day-care facilities in Minnesota.

“Partially as a result of Nick’s work, since I took office, 115 Minnesota fraudsters have been arrested and charged,” said Trump.

The president further highlighted that Shirley’s efforts to date have been so effective that “California recently passed the Stop Nick Shirley Act, an outrageous attempt to crush free speech and to stop the corruption from being exposed.”

The young man is reportedly getting a $10,000 bounty for his efforts.

“The Fraud Whistleblower Incentive Program (WHIP) offers everyone the opportunity to be part of the solution, help expose fraud, and be rewarded quickly for their efforts,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement. “I urge all Americans to use this program and play an active role in bringing fraudsters to justice.”

“From day one of my administration, we’ve waged an unprecedented war on corruption and fraud, and will not let our country be looted and plundered by thieves, and pirates, and foreign fraudsters — and, basically, scum,” said Trump.

According to the White House, an estimated $260.7 billion in fraud has been uncovered since January 2025 and $72 billion in fraud has been stopped per year as the result of actions taken by the administration.

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​Fraud, Jd vance, Donald trump, Nick shirley, Justice department, White house, Minnesota, Politics 

Oprah Winfrey has spent roughly four decades helping Americans discover who they really are. Apparently, the job isn’t finished.

Next April, the 72-year-old former talk-show queen will descend on the Las Vegas Sphere for “AHA,” a four-performance extravaganza featuring music, poetry, storytelling, and what its promoters call the ultimate “aha” moment.

What happens when you look inside and don’t find any light? What happens when your ‘authentic self’ turns out to be selfish, foolish, or cruel?

Winfrey calls the production the culmination of her life’s work.

Culmination is an interesting word.

After 25 seasons of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” a magazine, a book club, her own television network, countless spiritual teachers, wellness programs, podcasts, and several decades of encouraging Americans to discover their authentic selves, one wonders what remains to be discovered.

Have Winfrey’s followers finally accumulated enough wisdom? Will the great journey toward self-actualization at last be complete? Or is there another missing piece of the human soul that requires an enormous LED screen to locate?

Sphere of influence

This is familiar territory for Winfrey. As early as 2001, she was charging $185 for all-day Live Your Best Life workshops. Two years later, she brought the program to Seattle, where 2,700 admirers assembled for seven hours of inspirational instruction.

A reporter covering a 2003 session in Seattle described a spiritual revival, complete with a congregation and a preacher wearing diamonds and high heels.

In 2014 came an eight-city arena tour called “The Life You Want Weekend,” with spiritual advisers, exercises in self-discovery, and corporate sponsors. Another arena wellness tour followed in 2020.

So there is nothing particularly surprising about Winfrey selling enlightenment in Las Vegas. The Sphere is a perfectly plausible venue for her particular brand of uplift.

Nor is there anything inherently hypocritical about charging people to help them improve themselves. The more interesting question is what Winfrey has been teaching all these years and whether her extraordinary life actually supports it.

The preacher girl

Oprah Winfrey is a remarkable American success story.

Born in rural Mississippi in 1954, she endured poverty, instability, and sexual abuse before becoming one of the most successful broadcasters in television history. Her rise required tremendous determination, but determination alone doesn’t explain it.

Winfrey possessed an extraordinary gift for communication. She could listen to a stranger with such apparent concentration that millions of people watching at home felt included in the conversation. She understood instinctively where the emotional center of a story lay. She could coax a confession, recognize a moment of vulnerability, or make a famous person seem briefly ordinary.

The origins of that talent are worth examining.

Oprah grew up in the Baptist church. Her grandmother taught her to read, using the Bible among other texts. By the age of 3, Oprah was standing before congregations reciting verses about the Resurrection.

The women in the front pews told her grandmother that the little girl was gifted. Winfrey heard this often enough that she began to believe it.

Her Christianity was no casual inheritance. In a 2015 interview with AARP, Winfrey recalled being baptized around 8 years old, after agonizing for days over whether she was prepared to renounce sin.

“And, my God, did I take it seriously!” she recalled.

Indeed, she described herself as “a zealot who irritated every one of my third-grade friends.” Her classmates had a nickname for her: “the preacher girl.”

Soon she was performing poetry and sermons in churches around Nashville. In an interview with the Academy of Achievement, Winfrey traced her broadcasting career directly to those childhood performances.

But Christianity gave Winfrey more than her first audience.

A child of God

By her own account, Christianity gave Winfrey the confidence to imagine a future radically different from the one her circumstances seemed to promise.

At 14, after years of sexual abuse, Winfrey became pregnant. She has spoken about the shame and despair she experienced, including thoughts of ending her life. In that same AARP interview, she recalled turning to God in her desperation. If she was going to die, she reasoned, God would have to take her life. Otherwise, she would live and somehow find a way through.

She survived. Her baby, born prematurely, did not.

What stands out in her account is that she didn’t describe suddenly discovering some unsuspected reservoir of inner strength. She described appealing to God.

Growing up without a father had made the preacher’s assurance that God was her Father especially powerful. She took it literally. Jesus, she reasoned, was her brother.

In a 2015 podcast appearance, Winfrey explained that believing she was a child of God, and that she could do all things through Christ, gave her confidence even when she felt alone and unloved. She credited that relationship with God for helping make her the person she became.

From Christ to ‘Christ consciousness’

Winfrey has never disavowed the Christian faith of her childhood. When explaining how she survived those early years and became who she is, she continues to credit the old-fashioned Christianity she grew up with.

But the eclectic, New Age-inflected spirituality of higher consciousness, personal truth, and divinity within the self that she has since built into a billion-dollar empire represents a very different theology from the one expressed in Philippians 4:13.

Perhaps its clearest expression came in 2008, when Winfrey hosted a series of online seminars with spiritual writer Eckhart Tolle, whose book “A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose” she had selected for her book club.

During the seminars, Winfrey recalled hearing a preacher describe God as jealous when she was in her late 20s. The idea troubled her. How could an all-loving, omnipresent God also be jealous? She said the experience began a search for something beyond doctrine. She had finally come to understand Jesus as a teacher of “Christ consciousness,” a way of awakening to a divine presence within.

It’s easy to see the appeal of this more accommodating Jesus. But one wonders how well such a theology would have served that desperate, lost 14-year-old.

RELATED: Your body isn’t God: Jen Hatmaker’s New Age lies exposed

Emma McIntyre | Getty Images

The gift of self

Transformation in Christ famously requires a kind of death. The ultimate victory comes at the price of surrender.

The gospel according to Oprah offers an altogether different revelation: You already possess everything you need to become your best self.

Winfrey was unusually well equipped to preach it. She knew the power of personal testimony and understood how a painful experience could become a story of transformation. Her television program had long featured confessions, reconciliations, and dramatic changes of heart. Increasingly, these became lessons in how to live.

And there is much to admire in her message. Self-examination, gratitude, and the effort to overcome destructive habits are worthwhile pursuits. Nor is there anything dishonest about charging for guidance.

But the promise of self-discovery has a peculiar problem: How do you know when you’ve discovered enough?

Somewhere within you is a truer, better, more fulfilled version of yourself. A book helps you glimpse it. A guru reveals another obstacle. A workshop uncovers another wound. You experience an awakening, only to discover that another breakthrough awaits.

There is always another aha moment.

The way and the truth

Christianity’s central revelation, by contrast, concerns something that has already happened: Christ came, died, and rose. Believers may spend their lives struggling to understand and live according to it, but they aren’t waiting for Christianity’s next installment.

And Christianity makes demands that Winfrey’s therapeutic spirituality tends to soften. It insists that truth exists independently of our preferences, and that some of our desires may be wrong.

What happens when you look inside and don’t find any light? What happens when your “authentic self” turns out to be selfish, foolish, or cruel?

These questions are particularly awkward in Winfrey’s case.

She knows where she found the strength to survive. What is less clear is whether the spirituality she now offers millions could have provided the same strength.

Perhaps Winfrey is a prophet who misunderstands herself.

She preaches the dignity of the individual, the possibility of redemption, the power of hope, and the conviction that suffering need not determine one’s future. Her own life is persuasive evidence for these truths. Yet the faith she credits with making that life possible located its source outside herself.

For decades, Winfrey has told Americans that the answers are already inside them. Next April, they can finally discover those answers on one of the world’s largest LED screens.

Tickets start at $145.

​Las vegas sphere, Oprah winfrey, Spiritual teachers, Christianity, New age, Self-help, Christ consciousness, Christian living, Lifestyle, Culture, Faith 

Conservatives say they believe in competition. So why on earth do we tolerate a political system in which one man effectively picks our candidates before voters have a chance to examine them?

Friedrich Hayek understood why monopoly is dangerous: “Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy.” That principle applies to political candidates as surely as it does to products. Competition forces people to earn our support. Coronations teach them that our votes are theirs by right.

Trump’s terrible endorsements are not a minor blemish on an otherwise beloved political figure. They are a debilitating obstacle to rebuilding the right.

Instead, Republican voters have been handed one establishment dud after another, especially in states where the GOP should have the freedom to nominate a fighter. Then, when the general election arrives, we are ordered to fall in line because the Democrat is worse. That is a political monopoly, and it is killing the conservative movement.

Consider the 22 Senate contests this November in states Donald Trump carried in 2024. The incumbent Republicans include Dan Sullivan in Alaska, Tom Cotton in Arkansas, Jim Risch in Idaho, Roger Marshall in Kansas, Ashley Moody in Florida, Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi, Pete Ricketts in Nebraska, Jon Husted in Ohio, Mike Rounds in South Dakota, Bill Hagerty in Tennessee, and Shelley Moore Capito in West Virginia. South Carolina has an appointed incumbent, Darline Graham, seeking a full term.

The other nominees include Barry Moore in Alabama, Mike Collins in Georgia, Ashley Hinson in Iowa, Andy Barr in Kentucky, Julia Letlow in Louisiana, Mike Rogers in Michigan, Kurt Alme in Montana, Michael Whatley in North Carolina, Ken Paxton in Texas, and Harriet Hageman in Wyoming.

How many of these 22 are Ron DeSantis-tier conservatives? How many would fight the interests that actually control Washington? How many would champion an immigration moratorium, end vaccine liability immunity, oppose government subsidies for Flock surveillance cameras and data centers, or take a machete to federal spending? How many would even answer those questions without consulting a donor?

My count is maybe four decent conservatives and no genuine superstars. Feel free to dispute my rankings. The larger scandal is that Republican voters rarely got a serious contest in which to test these candidates and force them to take positions on the issues that count.

The reason is Donald Trump’s primary endorsements and the Republican establishment that treats them like royal decrees.

No, the president has not canceled elections. He didn’t need to. His endorsements routinely settle them in practice. Ballotpedia reported a 97% primary success rate for his endorsed candidates as of July, with every endorsed congressional candidate who had faced a primary by then advancing. That is a remarkable record for a man who claims to oppose the swamp.

Sometimes a stronger conservative alternative ran and lost. Sometimes the endorsement deterred a challenge in the first place. Either way, candidates escaped the serious ideological cross-examination they should have faced. They learned to court Trump instead of courting conservative voters.

Montana supplies the most outrageous example. Sen. Steve Daines withdrew from his re-election bid minutes before the filing deadline, just after U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme filed for the seat. Trump endorsed Alme almost immediately. With no time for other Republicans to enter, the primary was effectively over before it began. Call that a coincidence if you like. To me it looks like a backroom succession plan that stripped Montana conservatives of a meaningful choice.

RELATED: Democrats may ride a blue wave on a red script

Id-work/Getty Images

Does Alme support an immigration pause? Would he end vaccine liability immunity or subsidies for data centers? Would he actually stand in the way of runaway spending? Those questions should have been contested in a primary, not left to be answered after a nominee was already installed.

The consequences extend beyond conservative principles. North Carolina Republicans rallied behind Michael Whatley, Trump’s choice for an open Senate seat, only to see him struggle badly against Roy Cooper in the general-election campaign. This is a state Republicans have carried in every presidential election since 1980 except 2008. An endorsement is no substitute for a candidate who can persuade voters.

Even where Republican nominees survive November, what then? Hinson, Sullivan, and the rest are supposed to lead the fights conservatives actually care about. On what evidence? Where were the primary debates on spending, immigration, government surveillance, and corporate welfare that might have forced their hands?

Trump’s terrible endorsements are not a minor blemish on an otherwise beloved political figure. They are a debilitating obstacle to rebuilding the right. We cannot claim to oppose a ruling class while allowing one man to decide which members of that class get another six years in power.

RELATED: Pray for the country. Then do your part.

Imagedepotpro/Getty Images

I am not writing this to relitigate every lost primary in 2026. I want to know what conservatives intend to do before the 2028 cycle begins.

Recruitment and organizing start well before Election Day. If prospective challengers assume Trump will automatically bless the incumbent RINO or an establishment favorite for an open seat, many will never bother running. And the people who claim to speak for the grassroots will shrug and tell us to vote Republican anyway.

That problem needs an answer on November 4, the morning after these midterms, not when the next slate of candidates has already been anointed. Find and recruit challengers. Demand debates. Make candidates state their positions. Stop treating the president’s endorsement like a substitute for the judgment of the voters who built this movement.

And yes, the same standard should apply to the 2028 Republican presidential primary. Even a candidate we like should have to sweat through hard questions about electability, the failures of GOP leadership, and why the next Republican trifecta would accomplish more than the last.

Thomas Sowell wrote that “competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.” Conservatives understand that when discussing monopolies in the marketplace. If we refuse to apply it to the politicians who govern us, we deserve every political dud we get.

​Conservatives, General election, Michael whatley, Monopoly, Montana, North carolina, Politicians, Primaries, Roy cooper, Thomas sowell, Voters, Opinion & analysis, Donald trump 

A violent criminal who had been convicted of rape and was on the run was found dead in San Diego, police say.

Merle Wakefield, 69, was being supervised on California’s conditional release program when officials got a tamper notice from his monitoring device on Sept. 25.

‘As long as the state keeps releasing sexually violent predators into our neighborhoods, families are one tampered ankle monitor away from this. These people don’t belong anywhere near our communities.’

When the officials arrived at his workplace in Rancho Bernardo, they found the GPS device, but Wakefield was gone.

Nearly a month later on Monday at about 9:30 a.m., San Diego police responded to a report of a dead body and found human remains in a riverbed in San Diego.

The San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the remains as Merle Wakefield. His cause and manner of death will be determined by an autopsy.

The rapist’s remains were found about 20 miles south of the location where he was last seen.

Wakefield had been convicted of rape as well as lewd acts with a minor under 14, along with eight other convictions and 20 arrests.

He was granted conditional release in Nov. 2024.

It’s unclear how Wakefield died.

San Diego police said they are continuing to investigate the man’s death.

RELATED: California man allegedly coerced 21 children to produce sex videos via online apps, FBI says

San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond criticized the state of California after Wakefield vanished.

“The unfortunate reality is that what happened with Merle Wakefield could have happened at any time,” Demond said.

“As long as the state keeps releasing sexually violent predators into our neighborhoods, families are one tampered ankle monitor away from this. These people don’t belong anywhere near our communities. They belong locked up in a secure state facility. Period.”

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​Ankle monitor, California, Rapist, Sexual predator, Crime 

The timing couldn’t be better.

Just as an Anthropic safety researcher resigned over the company’s irresponsible behavior and another researcher warned that AI developers are creating systems with a 10% chance of killing all humans in the next decade, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is enthusiastically lobbying our medical system to entrust AI to become our primary physicians.

Now, as a physician who has practiced internal medicine for nearly 30 years, I appreciate Emanuel’s enthusiasm. I really do. But he is simply wrong.

When it comes to our best and worst moments in life, we will always want another person with us.

Let’s begin with his recent essay in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the flagship journal of internal medicine. Citing “studies” showing AI-only medical care is likely to be better than physician-alone or AI-physician hybrid care, Emanuel identifies five AI-superior areas: eliciting medically relevant information; establishing a differential diagnosis; specifying diagnostic testing; prescribing guideline-concordant treatment; managing chronic diseases.

But the devil is in the details.

First, none of the studies Emanuel cites meets the gold standard: a randomized, double-blind, multicenter, placebo-controlled trial with hard clinical end points. Instead, he relies largely on small observational studies, simulated clinical cases, and meta-analyses. Each has limitations that complicate any attempt to draw definitive clinical conclusions.

If anything, these studies raise more questions than answers. This is no problem if Emanuel’s assertion is that we need to perform more studies. However, when he repurposes his JAMA articles into a jaunty Atlantic Monthly essay, he insists that cautious medical minds are “ignor[ing] available evidence and could hold untold numbers of Americans back from better health.”

My question to Emanuel is, in light of his low-quality studies, what sound, available evidence?

Second, Emanuel seems enamored with algorithms. Established clinical pathways can provide valuable, evidence-based guidance for evaluating symptoms, treating disease, and determining the standard of care. But experienced physicians know that clinical judgment cannot be reduced to an algorithm.

Our patients and their problems are not simply algorithmic. Every day, physicians encounter complexities and confounders, curveballs, and exceptions. We need more than book knowledge and flowcharts. Open-mindedness, intuition, and common sense — all of which are born of experience.

Emanuel strikes me as one of the rationalists that stirred up philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s ire. The rationalists are those who worship at the altar of technical knowledge (knowledge of experts that can be written in a book), yet blithely dismiss indispensable practical knowledge (knowledge gained by life and experience). It seems good in theory, but it all falls apart in practice.

RELATED: You can medicate despair. You can’t manufacture meaning.

Merovingian/Getty Images

Third, Emanuel has great confidence in consensus statements and practice guidelines. These are recommended diagnostic paths or treatment plans offered by august bodies of medical deliberation or the best available evidence. Sadly, most of this evidence is moderate to weak at best.

As Abba Eban once observed, “A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.” While AI draws from an immense fund of knowledge, physicians (while using AI) can add wisdom that asserts purifying qualifiers such as “it depends” or “up to a point.”

If Emanuel’s further criticism is that human beings are hampered by their propensity for error, is it not error-laden human knowledge that informs artificial intelligence? Inadvertently and ironically, the muddled human condition is baked into artificial intelligence.

Finally, Emanuel seemingly forgets about the human touch. Surely, as a capable oncologist, he recalls moments when he pushed away from the computer, took off his glasses, leaned forward, and truly engaged with the patient. At that moment of profound and unfettered intentionality, the luminous wonder of the physician-patient relationship came vibrantly alive.

Are we to be convinced that this relationship doesn’t matter? That it is simply an expendable byproduct in a life’s journey through sickness and health? The iconic 19th-century godfather of medicine, Dr. William Osler, would be aghast at such an assertion. “The good doctor treats the disease,” he once insisted. ‘The great doctor treats the patient who has the disease.”

RELATED: Now they’re saying the AIs built ‘secret civilizations’ — the truth is far worse

Ole_CNX/Getty Images

Perhaps the studies will come. Perhaps, at some point, artificial intelligence will demonstrably outperform physicians (or even physicians aided by AI), and we who practice will need to bow to our computerized overlords as they, like C-3PO, dispense medical wisdom with their soothing metallic voices and remarkable programmed empathy.

But I’m not convinced.

There is a story of a man openly weeping in a massive crowd upon hearing of the death of President Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. A nearby reporter approached him and asked if he personally knew the president. “No, I didn’t know President Roosevelt,” he answered. “But he knew me.”

When it comes to our best and worst moments in life, we will always want another person with us. Someone who can help us, who cares about us, and who knows us.

Artificial intelligence is a wondrous tool, but it doesn’t know us. Find a good physician who does.

​Ai, Doctors, Physicians, Anthropic, Jama, Internal medicine, Studies, Atlantic monthly, Evidence, Human connection, Common sense, Experience, Algorithm, Michael oakeshott, Knowledge, Consensus, Abba eban, Opinion & analysis, Ezekiel emanuel 

I spent 24 years enforcing immigration law. I know what government looks like when officials stop taking enforcement seriously. In June, I wrote in Lyceum that Belfast’s riots exposed a collapse of public trust and that lawful enforcement offered the peaceful way to restore it. France has now delivered another warning.

On October 17, masked rioters looted businesses and set fire to public buildings across France. Police made more than 2,400 arrests, and nearly 1,000 officers were injured, seven of them seriously. Cities imposed curfews. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez acknowledged that police had failed to anticipate the scale of the unrest and offered to resign. President Emmanuel Macron refused his resignation and publicly condemned the violence.

Publish the data regularly, explain what the numbers show, and let citizens judge. If the numbers support the policy, why hide them?

French officials blamed ultra-left militants and opportunistic looters. The protests began in September over the cost of living and deteriorating schools. More than half a million people marched on Oct. 17, most of them peacefully. I accept those facts. I do not accept that the government’s explanation ends the inquiry. Officials who admit they failed to anticipate what happened on their own streets should expect the public to ask tougher questions.

Start with the government’s own immigration figures. France issued about 377,000 first residence permits in 2025, up 9.2% from 2024, according to revised Interior Ministry figures. Permits issued for humanitarian reasons rose 56.8%. The increase is partly explained by protection for people fleeing conflict in Afghanistan and Ukraine. But who calculated the effects on the communities expected to absorb them?

Consider the schools, where the protests began. France’s 2026 plans eliminated more than 3,000 existing teaching positions in certain categories even as the Education Ministry budgeted thousands of other posts. Teachers complained about vacancies, and students described classes of 32 to 36. The ministry points to a historic decline in enrollment. I take it at its word. That makes it all the more important to show how officials reconcile nationwide enrollment projections with the needs of particular neighborhoods.

Who weighs residence permits against available classrooms, housing, local services, and employment? Who decides where resources will follow the people who arrive? If officials have made those calculations, publish them. A government that can count permits can explain their second- and third-order consequences. If it does not ask those questions, it cannot expect the public to believe it cares about the answers.

RELATED: Employee at French GameStop store goes viral in heroic ‘battle’ against rampaging rioters

David Sepeau/Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty Images

Here is another test. France publishes residence permits by nationality, including the numbers issued to Moroccans and Afghans. After the riots, the Interior Ministry reported arrests, but I have not seen a comparable public breakdown of who was arrested. Publish the numbers and let the public assess them. Silence is no substitute for evidence.

Spain has felt its own pressures. In 2025, an assault on an elderly man in Torre Pacheco became the spark for several nights of anti-migrant clashes. In April this year, Madrid opened an extraordinary program to regularize undocumented migrants, originally expected to reach about half a million people. Housing protests intensified, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called a snap election for November 29. I read these events as a bill coming due for political leaders who must answer for their decisions.

Belfast offered a more immediate example. On June 8, a man was stabbed, and a Sudanese asylum seeker was charged with attempted murder. Mobs then set fire to homes and a city bus. Lists of addresses supposedly belonging to immigrants circulated online. Police brought in reinforcements from Great Britain and used plastic bullets.

Attacking people because of where they live is a crime, and no immigration policy excuses it. But governments cannot ignore demands for public order and then profess surprise when disorder follows. I made that argument in Lyceum, and I stand by it.

Poland chose a different response. In March 2025, it suspended most asylum applications from people crossing its border with Belarus, strengthened border enforcement, and maintained a visible security presence. On October 18, Prime Minister Donald Tusk defended that policy, emphasizing border control and the removal of people who violate Polish law.

RELATED: Macron watched France burn — then blamed the ‘French people.’ Trump: ‘The migrants have taken over.’

Benoit Tessier/POOL/AFP/Getty Images

Poland has not escaped demonstrations. Anti-immigration marches took place in more than 80 cities in July 2025, and police separated marchers from counterprotesters. But I have not found riots on the scale of Belfast or France. Critics note that the OECD put Poland’s foreign-born population at only 2.2% in 2023. The country also hosts more than a million refugees from Ukraine, and human rights groups challenge its asylum restrictions. Poland proves neither that every restriction works nor that it has settled every concern. It does show a government acting openly on a question voters have pressed it to answer.

Americans should learn from this. Enforcement can rebuild trust; secrecy corrodes it. The Oversight Project sought deportation statistics from the Department of Homeland Security. According to an October 9 Daily Caller report, DHS supplied a fully redacted summary of voluntary departures. I called that a slap in the face, and I meant it.

France should explain its arrests and immigration decisions. The Trump administration should publish the deportation figures it uses to defend its record. Both governments ask the public to trust them. Publish the data regularly, explain what the numbers show, and let citizens judge. If the numbers support the policy, why hide them?

​Collapse of trust, Immigration policy, Masked rioters, Peaceful protests, Emmanuel macron, Dhs, Rioters, France, Poland, Opinion & analysis, Donald trump, Belfast 

Last weekend, hundreds of thousands of people across France marched in protest of living costs and deteriorating public services. Those marches were quickly overtaken by violent, masked groups who looted shops, set cars and buildings on fire, and clashed with police in cities including Paris, Marseille, Lyon, and Limoges.

Even though more than 2,000 people were arrested, police largely failed to contain the chaos in several cities.

But that chaos and destruction, says Glenn Beck, had “nothing to do with the schools” or any other valid grievance.

It has everything to do, he argues, with the budget the French Parliament was scheduled to vote on yesterday, although it ended up being postponed to a later date.

“The street was sending Paris a message before the vote, and the government is now stuck in a trap with no good door,” says Glenn.

He explains how cutting spending infuriates the mob because it means fewer services, but not cutting spending worsens the debt crisis, which also infuriates the mob.

“If they vote it down, the lenders get nervous and the interest rates climb. Then the borrowing costs rise. Then the jobs disappear, and everything costs more, which is exactly what the people are marching about in the first place, so either way somebody loses,” he says.

The best-case scenario, says Glenn, is they “agree on a budget” and vow to “pay this loan back,” even if it means financial constraints. If the meeting “falls apart,” however, he predicts a snowball effect, where lenders raise France’s borrowing costs, the government has to borrow even more just to cover its bills, rates climb farther, and the debt spiral spreads pressure across Europe while France’s ability to fund basic services keeps shrinking.

“That’s Italy. That’s Greece. That’s Germany, and it’s already starting. Their borrowing costs went up this month, and France now pays more to borrow than either of them,” says Glenn.

The third potential outcome is what will happen if the budget falls apart and nobody does anything about it. In this scenario, the European Central Bank will either step in with harsh conditions that make daily life even harder and fuel more unrest — or break its own rules to bail France out, which signals that the rules no longer matter and spreads the crisis further.

This should matter to Americans, says Glenn, because America is teetering on the same debt trap as France — spending more than it earns. And if lenders lose confidence in the U.S. the way they’re losing confidence in France, Americans will feel it in higher mortgage rates, higher car payments, and job losses.

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

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​Debt crisis, France, Glenn beck, Blazetv show