Over the last several years, criminals have exploited the culture of "Minnesota nice" to steal billions of dollars in taxpayer funds in one of the most egregious frauds in our nation’s history.

Under Democrat Gov. Tim Walz, these fraudsters—many of whom are not even American citizens—lined their pockets with money that was initially intended to feed hungry children, house disabled seniors, and provide services for young students with special needs.

Last week, I traveled with my team to Minneapolis to meet in person with the investigators, prosecutors, legislators, and community members on the front lines of combating this crime. Their frustration was palpable. There, we learned more about a transnational money laundering scheme that festered under President Joe Biden and the state’s political leadership.

The scandal was unprecedented in its scope and scale. But so is President Trump’s plan to fix it by attacking fraud at the source—both in Minnesota and across the country.

When the Trump administration sent some 2,000 immigration agents to the Twin Cities area, they were met by activists who trailed their movements and harassed them outside their hotels.

The activists are members of radical groups that together have received millions of dollars from the Left's premier foundations and dark money networks, including George Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and the Sixteen Thirty Fund.

At the center of the unrest is the Sunrise Movement, a left-wing group founded to fight climate change that has since directed its local chapters to fight the Trump administration. For Sunrise Twin Cities, that means tormenting ICE agents on the ground.

The group holds in-person "action trainings" on how to "stop ICE & build a revolution." It also maintains a running list of the Twin Cities hotels housing ICE agents and organizes late-night "noise demonstrations" aimed at making it "impossible" for those hotels to operate.

It’s interesting that our liberal friends are all fainting this week because of the death of Renee Nicole Good on January 7 at the hands of an ICE agent during a “peaceful protest” where she was using her SUV to block ICE operations.

Almost exactly five years ago on January 6 our liberal friends had no problem with a Capitol police officer shooting Ashli Babbit as she climbed unarmed through a broken window into the Capitol in an “armed insurrection” against the United States government.

What is going on with our liberal friends training divorced mothers of three to engage in protest against ICE agents searching for illegal aliens as prescribed by law?

Let’s analyze the January 6 and January 7 narratives from the liberal point of view.

For our liberal friends the violent Capitol riots on January 6 were an existential threat to the System. OMG! What if the Senate had thrown out the official results of the 2020 election and considered alternate slates of Electors! It would have been the end of the world as we know it.

Er, no, dear liberal friends. But we might have got a look into the national problem of mail-in voting and ballot harvesting.

In an age where complexity is often mistaken for sophistication, it is easy to forget a principle that has guided human understanding for thousands of years: truth is usually simple.

Thomas Sowell captured this perfectly when he observed that people who pride themselves on complexity often overlook the fact that reality itself is not complicated -- what becomes complicated is the debate about reality.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the current national conversation surrounding biological sex, gender identity, and the question before the Supreme Court this week regarding transgender participation in women’s sports.

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments on whether states may restrict biological males who identify as female from competing in women’s sports, the issue has been wrapped in layers of ideology, emotion, and political rhetoric. But when we strip away the noise and return to first principles -- biology, history, law, and common sense -- the truth becomes remarkably clear.

The Iranian uprising is one of the three most moving expressions of human defiance so far this century. If the regime is toppled, it will constitute a fulcrum in the history of the world. Yet the hypocritical response from the liberal establishment has been as nauseating as it has been infuriating.

From Keir Starmer to Tucker Carlson,  a startling number of our loudest “human rights” voices seem to be taking the words of the Persian mystic Rumi – “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there” – rather too literally.

Surely, if there was ever a moment not to go beyond “ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing”, now would be the time. Yet, armies of Western notables are either downplaying or simply ignoring this dramatic struggle for freedom.

These are the people that are passionate when their activism harms the West, but whose voices seem to desert them when the tyrant wears a turban.