Charlotte, N.C., is making headlines this week because dozens of construction sites have gone silent. ICE swept through the region, and the labor force evaporated almost instantly.

A major American city discovered, in real time, that its building boom was being held together by workers who couldn’t legally be there.

Watching that footage hit me hard, because I’ve seen it before — not on the evening news, but in the slow collapse of my own childhood community.

I grew up forty miles north of Louisville, Ky., in a one-stoplight town held together by tobacco, construction, and the kinds of gritty jobs that built the region’s character.

My dad ran a small construction contracting business and held a small tobacco base, which gives you the legal right to grow a certain weight of tobacco.

My brothers and I worked tobacco as teenagers, starting at 12 or 13, and my brothers did construction with Dad as soon as we were old enough to hold a hammer.

Then illegal labor arrived, and things began to shift.

In 2020, we figured out that Democrats were manipulating elections to win, whether through changing the way votes were cast and counted or through out-and-out fraud.

In early 2025, DOGE taught us that innumerable Democrat institutions functioned solely because of taxpayer money. And now, as 2025 draws to a close, we’re seeing that the Democrats have presided over corruption at a previously unimaginable scale in America. With each of these pillars exposed, and the financial ones being cut down, can the Democrat party survive much longer?

Let’s you and I count the ways it may not.

For America.

We’ve decided to mimic Time Magazine and use "Person of the Year" even if it's a whole bunch of people. Worry not, I won't be mimicking anything else from Time.

It is with great pleasure and honor that TTP announces that the agents of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are/is the Person of the Year for 2025. No one deserves it more than them.

Here's a reality check on what ICE does from something a friend of mine conveyed:

For decades, the monolithic and sacrosanct international climate change hierarchy went unquestioned.

Western nations in particular spent trillions of dollars over the past half-century to subsidize expensive but erratic wind and solar energy while demonizing carbon fuels as toxic threats to the planet.

Like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion dogma, climate change orthodoxy was embedded into every aspect of Western culture, from the corporate boardroom to the university campus.

Question whether man-made global warming was truly responsible for increased temperatures rather than natural, often centuries-long cycles of heating and cooling of the planet, and one was labeled a climate crank.

Everything from declining fertility to forest fires was ridiculously attributed to climate change.

But the causes of both demographic crises and charred landscapes were more likely the result of new affluent lifestyles that saw child-rearing as too expensive and time-consuming, and misguided forest policies or underfunded firefighting.

Yet reality has caught up with the near-religious climate change cult.

It was strange for an American President famous for denouncing “Fake News” to believe the claim of a Russian President famous for providing almost nothing but Fake News: Trump Says of Alleged Ukraine Attack on Putin: 'I Was Very Angry About It'.

Especially when: Russia Declines To Provide Proof Of Alleged Drone Attack On Putin's Home, Says Will 'Toughen' Negotiating Stance.

That’s because no evidence can be found that the attack overnight Sunday-Monday (12/29) ever took place beyond the Kremlin’s own claims.

Ukrainian officials led by President Volodymyr Zelensky have widely rubbished Russian reports that Putin’s secluded and heavily guarded residential complex near the Novgorod region village of Valdai was ever targeted. Moreover, they accused the Kremlin of inventing the attack as a pretext for Russia to back out of participation in ongoing peace discussions.

There is compelling and extensive evidence that Ukraine had conducted extensive and often successful drone strikes against targets elsewhere in Russia or in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory that night, but no  proof or even potentially credible evidence that Putin’s home had ever come under attack.

The USS Gerald R. Ford’s gray silhouette cutting across the Caribbean horizon marks a decisive shift in American statecraft:  U.S. foreign policy is focusing intensely on the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific.

From the Ford’s slow approach to Venezuelan waters to escalating trade tensions with Canada and early signs of a harder U.S. line toward Mexico and migration, Washington’s attention is once again concentrated on the regions most vital to its security and power.

This is no tactical coincidence. It reflects a deliberate recalibration under President Trump, binding hemispheric defense to the broader logic of great-power competition.

The United States is refortifying its neighborhood not as a retreat from global leadership, but as the bedrock from which it intends to sustain it.

The official story, of course, is that the Ford’s presence off Venezuela is part of an anti-drug, anti-cartel mission.

The larger calculus, however, is clear enough: it is about demonstrating and regaining U.S. maritime and aerial supremacy in its southern approaches, and about showing that no outside power — China, Russia or Iran — will be allowed to establish a permanent presence in the Americas.