A Strange Game

Before Pamela Hemphill stormed the Capitol with thousands of other insurrectionists on January 6, 2021, she posted a photo of herself on Facebook in her living room holding a giant, plastic firearm. “Happy New Year!” the post read. “On my way to Washington DC January 6th!” Once there, Hemphill wandered the halls of the Capitol armed with a selfie stick, according to a court filing from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that included stills from surveillance footage. Eight months later, law enforcement officials arrested Hemphill in Boise, Idaho.

The barrage has begun. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders aimed at reshaping immigration to the United States. He took various actions on top of the orders, too—impacting a wide range of aspects of the US immigration system, from indefinitely suspending refugee resettlement to summoning the military to perform border enforcement. It has been hard to keep track of the already chaotic push to end immigration as we know it.

When FBI agents investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol searched the Florida property of Jeremy Brown, they found a small arsenal. An AR-15-style rifle and a sawed-off shotgun, both unregistered, and two fragmentation grenades turned up in the search, prosecutors said. The Justice Department later alleged that Brown—an Army special forces veteran and member of the far-right Oath Keepers militia—had driven to Washington with those grenades and other weapons as part of the Oath Keepers’ preparations for violence aimed at helping Donald Trump retain power. In 2023, a federal judge in Florida sentenced Brown to more than seven years in prison on weapons charges.

For all the talk of a new class-conscious GOP, the Republican Party sounded much like its old self when, in December, Vivek Ramaswamy laid out the mission of the nascent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security,” Ramaswamy complained. “The dirty little secret is that many of those entitlement dollars aren’t even going to people who they were supposed to.” There it is again: “entitlement” reform.

Leftists apparently prefer performance art over practical solutions, and at this point, I have no qualms about giving them over to their desires.

Embassies will fly Old Glory alone, and not the flags of every special interest out there.