Saturday, February 21, 2026

Tragedy Averted As Suspect's Plan to Torch ICE Facility Fails to Ignite

Tragedy Averted As Suspect's Plan to Torch ICE Facility Fails to Ignite

MattGush/iStock/Getty Images Plus

We’ve seen plenty of violence by anti-ICE activists, but this latest stunt in Idaho could have ended up in serious tragedy. Luckily, the miscreant failed, but he’s still on the loose. (Note: I am using the pronoun “he” to keep things clearer, but the gender of the suspect is not known at this time.)

The unknown attacker’s plot was pretty sinister: he reportedly stole an ambulance in the city of Meredian on Wednesday night, stuffed it with gasoline cans, and then rammed it into a Department of Homeland Security facility. The plan would have been successful — if he’d managed to ignite the accelerant, which he had also poured around the vehicle, but he was not able to before law enforcement scared him away. He was wearing a black shirt, tan pants, and a medical-style mask.

Good thing he was inept, because it could have been ugly:

Just because the arsonist failed to burn the whole building down doesn’t mean it wasn’t a serious crime, said Meridian Police Chief Tracy Basterrechea.

We want to emphasize that this was a serious criminal act. The theft and destruction of an emergency vehicle not only created a risk to responding personnel, but it also temporarily removed a critical medical resource from the community.

He continued, arguing that the constant anti-ICE rhetoric only fanned the flames:

There has been a lot of rhetoric surrounding the Department of Homeland Security leasing office space at this location.

Comments on social media, such as 'property damage isn't violence,' is absolutely false.

This was absolutely an act of violence, and if the suspect had not been interrupted, there is no doubt this building would have been burned, putting the lives of first responders and others at risk.


MORE: School, Who Needs School? LA HS Students Ditch Class for Anti-ICE Protest, Hit Officer in Head With Pole

Watch: Unhinged Woman Sets Fire at Building in Kansas City, MO, Reportedly Considered for ICE Facility


The feds certainly don’t think it’s a joke:

Basterrechea says he’s not going to discuss any further details until they have more information:

The Meridian Police Department is leading the investigation in coordination with the FBI, ATF, DHS, Idaho State Police and other regional law enforcement partners.

"Any information that we believe would hinder our investigation will not be released at any time," Basterrechea said. "We want to make sure that this investigation is as clean as possible and that we bring the people responsible to justice."

The Left will doubtless continue their inflammatory rhetoric against federal law enforcement, and this type of event is exactly what naturally ensues. The next time, we might not be so fortunate.

https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2026/02/19/tragedy-averted-as-suspects-plan-to-torch-ice-facility-fails-to-ignite-n2199361?utm_source=rsmorningbriefingvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

What Do the Dems Do After They’ve Done Their Worst and It Flops?

What Do the Dems Do After They’ve Done Their Worst and It Flops?

What Do the Dems Do After They’ve Done Their Worst and It Flops?
AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

When you hear that Donald Trump and, by extension, we patriots are the most fascist, racist, sexist, corrupt, perverted, and also fascist monsters in the history of ever, you have to wonder something. You don’t wonder why they’re saying it. You know why they’re saying it. They’re liars and dirtbags, and they are losing their grip on power, and they’re desperate. What you have to wonder is “Where do they go from here?”

That’s a great question. Pity the Democrats. They’re kind of in a quandary. Where do you go next when you call somebody “literally Hitler” and nothing happens? Where do you go when you call somebody “racist” and he doesn’t care? Where do you go when you call somebody “sexist” and he wonders what’s wrong with being sexy? Where do you go when you label somebody “corrupt” and he starts a bitcoin company? Where do go after you scream that someone is Epstein‘s pal, and the world doesn’t collapse because you called him Epstein‘s pal?

Where do you go next when you say the worst things imaginable about someone, and it doesn’t matter?

That’s where we are now, and it should be no surprise to anybody who has ever heard about the boy who cried “Wolf.” Maybe the left doesn’t like that fable because they’re assuming the gender of the brat who fakes alarms over dreaded predators and finally gets gobbled up when the dreaded predator arrives, and nobody believes him, her, or them. Regardless, they’re not paying attention to the moral of the story.

Nobody who doesn’t already believe the Democrats believes them now. We’ve had ten years of Trump, and by extension, we patriots, being bombarded with the worst possible accusations and…nothing? Calling somebody “Hitler” should mean something. Hitler was bad, really bad, and to equate somebody with Hitler should be something that one takes seriously because no serious person would casually equate another with Hitler, unless the accused had done something positively Hitlerean. But that’s not the case today. It doesn’t mean anything because everything they say, every lie, epithet and slander, is meaningless. They call Trump “Hitler.” Everybody knows he’s not Hitler. So, no one cares that he gets called “Hitler,” least of all the guy who’s supposed to be Hitler 2.0.

What they make are objectively false claims. That goes without saying. It’s an interesting tangent to ponder what the people offering these slanders actually think. There are two options. First, they are stupid people who actually believe these stupid lies. That’s entirely possible. Being a Democrat is closely correlated with being a moron. But being a Democrat is also closely correlated with being a cynical exploiter of morons. The second possibility is that these Democrats think their constituents are morons, and more often than not, they are correct.

But whether they believe it or not is really beside the point.

The point is that hyperbolic slander is the best they’ve got. This is their only weapon right now, and it’s firing blanks. Remember, they don’t have any power other than what we give them. For them to rule over us requires that we allow them to rule over us. In the past, we defaulted to the American political system, where one party would win the election, and it would take power, exercise power, pass laws the opposition didn’t like, then have another election, and then things would eventually change. We took turns running things. America operated on the consent of the governed. We never really thought about not consenting because the system seemed to work pretty well, not perfectly, but pretty well. 

But things changed a couple of decades ago. The Democrats convinced themselves that we conservatives are morally unfit to participate in our own governance, that the act of exercising electoral power won at the ballot box by anyone who wasn’t a leftist was inherently illegitimate. We’re Americans, we’re citizens, we’re voters, and we need to shut up and do what we’re told because everything we want to do is bad, and we can’t do them because Democrats stopped consenting to being governed when it is our turn to govern.

But of course, we can do them if we choose. We can choose not to cede our power to them. And we made that choice in 2024 when we put President Trump in the White House again, and we gave both houses of Congress to the Republicans. But the Democrats don’t believe we had the right to make that choice. We don’t have the right to do anything, in their minds. 

Cue the resistance. They manifest their lack of consent through active civil disobedience and uncivil disobedience – besides trying to murder Donald Trump, and actually murdering Charlie Kirk, leftists have already murdered several people, including illegal aliens at that ICE facility they shot up. They also support and applaud judicial shenanigans where judges make up law out of whole cloth to stop us from enacting the conservative we voted for. There’s that lack of consent to be governed thing again; for them it’s option, for us it is mandated by their divine right to rule.

But their loudest tactic this slander spasm. We have Democrats and their adjuncts screaming these lies 24/7, on social media, on leftist outlets, and in the regime media. What’s the purpose of this campaign of hysterical hyperbole? It has several purposes. One of them is that it is to the benefit of leftist actors to become more extreme, because they build their personal brand that way and get more attention. Another reason is that it demonstrates some sort of resistance. It keeps up their morale even as Trump enacts based policy after based policy. And it’s also designed to try to sway the weak away from patriotism and to the left. Now, this works on some normals who don’t have any other frame of reference. It also works on weak-willed Republicans, of whom there are far too many. 

The incessant screaming about how everything Trump or someone Trump-affiliated has done is literally the worst thing that anyone has ever done in all of mankind’s history can make the wimpy waver, but people with even a little bit of brains and self-respect don’t fall for it. They tune it out. They don’t care. Do you even remember the Lion King video scandal that was supposed to lose us the midterms? That’s what they were saying just a couple of weeks ago. Like every other scandal du jour, it has faded away into the ether. None of this stuff matters after 72 hours anymore. Trump talks about buying Greenland? Oh well. Some leftist judge writes a soon-to-be-reversed opinion in the style of a teenage girl scribbling her feelz in her dream journal about how Trump is violating the rights of people who shouldn’t even be here? Whatever. Some leprechaun-licking mick gets locked up after sticking around on an expired visa for 20 years? Erin go home! A couple of communist dummies get themselves ventilated while hassling cops? File them under “Cindy Sheehan.”

Every vile epithet, every fake scandal, every incident that’s supposed to tug on our heartstrings goes nowhere; as far as we’re concerned, they can go tug something else.

It doesn’t work anymore. They’ve been crying “Wolf!” except there’s no wolf.

But it’s all they’ve got. They don’t have any power in government or in the courts except to slow things down. Donald Trump is pursuing his agenda with a vengeance, or his vengeance with an agenda – either way is good with us. The only power they have is the power to convince us to stop, and now that we’re not listening to them and their nonstop parade of phony horribles, they’ve hit a wall. Where do they go from here?

That’s where it gets concerning. There are two ways they can go. They can try to take power back in the appropriate and proper way, which is by winning elections. Whether screaming like five-year-olds having a tantrum because Mommy took their blankie will work to convince the American people to trust Democrats with power again is an open question. If the economy continues to boom, the Republicans stand a pretty good chance of defeating the historical trends against them in the midterms, regardless of how shrilly Dems and their affiliates scream. If people perceive the economy is still Biden-bad, the Republicans are going to lose because of that, regardless of what the Democrats say.

But remember that these are religious fanatics, and their religion is leftism. The fight against Republicans is not just a political match but an actual jihad. Again, we’ve already seen people murdered. That should be no surprise. One of the collateral effects of all this screaming about how Donald Trump, and we, are the enemies of humanity who are literally the worst people who have ever existed is that some of these leftist creeps believe it and will act on it. When you simultaneously label your political opponents as outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse, while also losing to those political opponents, you create a level of frustration that is going to drive some of your acolytes to violence. And that won’t be entirely unwelcome to the Democrat establishment. As we’ve seen, they don’t mind violence. They see it as politics by other means – ironically, since Clausewitz is a dead cisgender male identifying person of pallor. But what we’re talking about here is wide scale, targeted violence, at least on the level of the small-scale insurgency by the left that detonated thousands of bombs and killed hundreds of people in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Those “Days of Rage” could happen again. And it could be even worse, because now you have state governors and officials collaborating with the left. That takes it all up a notch. The potential is real for real trouble. The hate is out there, and it’s being fueled by the very language we’re talking about here. But on the right, we’re not in the mood to take any more casualties. We’re not in the mood for games. We are not giving up our dogs to please Dem constituents. And we are definitely not in the mood to become second-class citizens in our own country. 

If there’s a fight coming, we’ll fight back.

This could get very ugly. These people are playing with fire, but they don’t understand that we’re not going to play along. The conflagration they ignite may very well end up burning them instead of us.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2026/02/19/what-do-the-dems-do-after-theyve-done-their-worst-and-it-flops-n2671469?utm_source=rsmorningbriefingvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

 

How Deep Is the Deep State?

https://amgreatness.com/2026/02/15/how-deep-is-the-deep-state/

How deep is the deep state?  That’s a question I have thought and written about a lot.  I had something to say about it recently at The Spectator on the occasion of Abigail Spanberger’s recent election as governor of Virginia. It saddens me to report that every time I think I have taken the measure of the Leviathan that is the deep state, new precincts and vistas open up beyond the boundaries I had delineated.

Sometimes I think the deep state is like an onion. Peel back one layer, and another layer presents itself.

Sometimes I think it is like a basement with an endless procession of sub-basements. Excavate one, and you encounter another below it.  It is like that bit of Hindu cosmology that envisions the world resting on the back of a turtle, which rests on the back of a larger turtle, which rests on the back of a still larger turtle.  Asked what that larger turtle stands upon, the answer is that it is “turtles all the way down.”

That said, I suspect that the difficulty in surveying the deep state is not its depth but its extent.  That is, I suspect that its roots are shallow while its area is both indefinitely large and protean.

The deep state also seems to resemble the Lernaean Hydra of Greek mythology.  Hercules was sent to dispatch this multi-headed monster in the second of his twelve labors. Not only did the beast have poisonous breath, but its blood was so toxic that even its scent was fatal. Furthermore, the hydra had this alarming characteristic: if you cut off one of its heads, two grew back in its place. Hercules overcame this problem by having the stump of each head cauterized as soon as he had cut it off.

Another curious feature of the deep state is that exposure often fails to elicit effective condemnation.  This is due in part to the propaganda arm of the deep state, sometimes called “the media,” which does not so much report the news as echo the narrative fabricated by the deep state.

Consider the revelations about the Somali fraud in Minneapolis.  I thought, and I continue to think, that that massive fraud perpetrated by Democrats will (to continue with Hercules) cauterize one head of the deep state hydra.  What is interesting, though, is the alacrity with which the deep state stepped up to replace or at least drown out that revelation with the cacophony about ICE murdering innocent protestors.  At the end of the day, I do not think that gambit will work in the court of public opinion. If you drive your car into an ICE agent, you should first be sure that your life insurance premiums are current.  The same can be said about carrying a military-grade handgun to a protest and then getting into a fight with ICE agents.  It’s not a recipe for longevity.

Nor has the deep state been effective in countering the ongoing revelations pouring out of Georgia about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Democrats have denounced the actions of the Trump administration, going so far as to try to prevent it from investigating election records, ballot boxes, and voting machines across the country.  A bad look, that.

Also ham-handed was the attempt by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) to smear Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, over a fake whistleblower complaint. Gabbard skewered that effort like Errol Flynn dispatching a baddie. “It is a hoax,” Gabbard wrote on X. “And they don’t even bother rewriting the script: same deep state, same counsel, same playbook. Democrats in Congress & the propaganda media fall in line every time.”

You can’t blame the Democrats for wanting to shut up Gabbard.  She has been one of the administration’s most effective tools for exposing deep state corruption.  The latest revelations concern the direct, personal involvement of Barack Obama in the effort to take down Donald Trump in the aftermath of his election to the presidency in 2016. Karoline Leavitt, the White House Press Secretary, outlined the findings in a press conference with Gabbard:

While pretending to engage in a peaceful transfer of power, Barack Hussein Obama, in private, went to great and nefarious lengths to sow discord among the public and sabotage his successor, President Trump.

The new evidence released by the Director of National Intelligence confirms that the Obama administration manufactured and politicized intelligence, which was later used as justification for baseless smears against President Trump—an effort to delegitimize his victory before he even took the oath of office.

The truth is that President Trump never had anything to do with Russia, and the Russia collusion hoax was a massive fraud perpetrated on the American people from the very beginning. The worst part is that Obama knew the truth, as did all the other officials involved, including former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and many others.

I suspect that other stumps are about to be cauterized. Last summer, in another meditation about the persistence of the deep state, I drew upon J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books to describe its astonishing longevity.  Voldemort, Rowling’s chief villain, had a clever way of preserving himself. Rightly worried that the forces of good might try to destroy him, the Dark Lord devised a way of infusing living bits of himself into various objects and people. Rowling called the resulting magical charm a “Horcrux.”

“If the body of a Horcrux owner is killed,” we read in a Potter gloss, “that portion of the soul that had remained in the body does not pass on to the next world, but will rather exist in a non-corporeal form capable of being resurrected by another wizard.” Nice work if you can get it. As I said last July,

I have often wondered whether the architects of the deep state have been inspired by Rowling’s tale. For, like Voldemort, they have taken care to distribute their essence in external objects and institutions. Wizards like Donald Trump and Elon Musk pronounce anathema upon their activities. They cast death spells that evaporate the elixir that imparts life—dollars in all their glory—but somehow the deep staters manage to evade death.

One problem is that a Horcrux cannot be destroyed by conventional means. It cannot be destroyed by being smashed, ripped, or burnt, for example. What is needed is Basilisk venom, the Sword of Gryffindor, or a magical, inextinguishable flame. You won’t find any at your local Costco or Walmart.

That’s one bit of bad news. Another is that it is generally difficult to discover where a Horcrux resides.  Often, they take up residence in unlikely people or places. How many smiling GOP faces, ostensibly anti-deep state campaigners, are actually hosts for the agents of darkness?

One bit of good news is that Donald Trump and his lieutenants, like Hercules, have unraveled the mystery and the methods of the deep state.  Initiatives like the SAVE Act, for example, which requires individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections, will help frustrate the efforts of the deep state to rig elections.

What is needed to destroy the deep state is patience, persistence, and power.  Donald Trump, in his second term, has marshaled all three. The deep state is clever. It is insidious. But it is not invulnerable. Trump and his team have assembled an extraordinary range of legal and political weapons to undo the machinations of the deep state. Trump has also managed a sort of economic miracle, bringing down inflation and the cost of many consumer goods while boosting wages, the stock market, and employment.

Will all that be sufficient unto the day? I hope so. I think so. It is not too much to say that the future of the republic depends on its being so.

https://amgreatness.com/2026/02/15/how-deep-is-the-deep-state/