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Is your hope in maga? Do you think Trump, Vance and the conservative movement are the great hope for America’s future?

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You should think twice. Irreparable fissures are opening up in this movement. Battle lines have formed over support for Israel, anti-Semitism, foreign-policy priorities, Jeffrey Epstein and more. The question is, is anything out of bounds? Can a Holocaust-denier or a kooky conspiracy theorist or a brash immoralist be part of the team?

At Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix over the last few days, these cracks were on full display. Ben Shapiro openly lambasted Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Megyn Kelly for platforming pariahs; Kelly declared their friendship over; Bannon called Shapiro a “cancer.” Meanwhile, Carlson’s biggest concern seems to be Islamophobia in America. It seems without Charlie Kirk’s unifying presence, the movement is fracturing.

JD Vance, who looks like Republicans’ choice to succeed Trump as president, is trying to stretch the tent to be as big as possible. “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless self-defeating purity tests,” he said. “[I]f you love America … you have a home on this team.”

As proof, one surprise guest at the event was hip-hop star Nicki Minaj, famous for her outrageously sexual, profanity-laden songs and videos. The Turning Point crowd gave her a raucous standing ovation. “If you don’t want Nicki Minaj in this movement, you don’t want to win,” wrote one commentator. She endorsed Trump and Vance, so she’s on the team.

This is the team that is supposedly leading a religious revival in America. But take an honest look at where “conservatism” in America is today. No truly moral movement stands a political chance. The nation is morally adrift. Purity is “self-defeating.” To win votes, leaders must embrace immorality, which normalizes it all the more. We bargain with dictators, we fete terrorists, our principles are endlessly adaptable, we exclude nobody but those who would exclude anybody.

This is no place to put your hope for America’s future.

Somalia’s main source of income: defrauding Minnesota? Fraudsters have stolen about $9 billion in taxpayer money, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson said last week:

What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes. It’s a staggering, industrial-scale fraud. It’s swamping Minnesota and calling into question everything we know about our state.

U.S. authorities are unsure of the exact amount stolen. But Thompson said that of the $18 billion the state has spent on Medicaid since 2019, “on the order of half or more” has likely been taken.

• Take Salim A. Said and Abdulkadir Nur Salah, for example. They set up a restaurant in Minneapolis and claimed to be feeding 5,000 children a day, earning them $16 million from Minnesota’s child nutrition program. They used that money to buy a luxury mansion just down the road. Qamar Ahmed Hassan and Sahra Mohamed Nur were also involved in the scheme, buying a block of shops close by, before ultimately pleading guilty to money laundering and wire fraud. The fraud was enabled by “Feeding Our Future,” a “nonprofit” apparently set up to enable fraudulent claims and then take a cut.

Most of the thieves involved in this particular scheme—and many others—are from Somalia. The total value of everything produced by Somalia’s economy in one year is $14 billion. Defrauding Minnesota may be Somalia’s largest source of income.

And that’s just one state. As the Wall Street Journal points out:

Something is profoundly wrong with the U.S. welfare system—a problem that runs far deeper and is more dangerous than the shocking fraud in Minnesota that has been making headlines.

They did the math. If you take the $1.4 trillion the federal government spends on welfare and divide it equally among the 19.8 million families the government classifies as poor, they’d each get $70,000.

So just how much fraud is happening across America’s 50 states? What about in Britain, Canada, Australia and others? Are we being drained of billions or even trillions of dollars?

It’s a self-inflicted curse that brings to mind Moses’s description of what would happen to us if we failed to follow God: “The fruit of thy land, and all thy labours, shall a nation which thou knowest not eat up; and thou shalt be only oppressed and crushed always.”

Reuters: Putin aims to re-create the Soviet Union: Reports from six United States intelligence agencies consistently caution that Russian President Vladimir Putin still intends to conquer all of Ukraine and other former Soviet territory in Europe, Reuters reported on Friday.

The agencies have consistently warned since the beginning of Putin’s full-scale war in February 2022 that his ambitions extend far beyond Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. This aligns with the assessment of European governments.

The intelligence has always been that Putin wants more. The Europeans are convinced of it. The Poles are absolutely convinced of it. The Baltics think they’re first.
—U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley

Divergent claims: The reports paint a picture dramatically different from that of U.S. President Donald Trump and his negotiators, who maintain that Putin seeks peace. After special envoy Steve Witkoff concluded his sixth visit to Russia on December 2 and discussed the war with Putin, along with President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump said, “He would like to end the war. That was their impression.”

The intelligence reports also run contrary to claims from Putin himself, who insists that he does not plan to invade Europe.

The Trumpet has long maintained, based on Bible prophecy, that Putin is intent on rebuilding the Soviet Union.

In his booklet The Prophesied ‘Prince of Russia,’ Mr. Flurry points to Putin’s role in prophecy. A passage in Ezekiel 38 lists various names for disparate parts of Russia—including Moscow in the west and Tobolsk toward the east—showing that Putin would seize more of the former Soviet territory. He writes: “This giant swath of land indicates the prince will probably conquer more nations of the former Soviet Union.”

This booklet was written in 2017, long before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and before Russia had gained as much control over other former Soviet nations such as Georgia and Belarus. Today, it is plain that Putin is making significant gains over the former Soviet territory, and these U.S. intelligence agencies are right that his objectives extend well beyond current gains. His ongoing rule means that even darker days lie ahead for the people of Russia, Ukraine and beyond. But Mr. Flurry stresses that there is also great cause for hope tied to these developments. To understand, order your free copy of The Prophesied ‘Prince of Russia.’

Epstein files put Bill Clinton back under scrutiny: The U.S. Justice Department released 300,000 pages of files on the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein on Friday, including documents, phone recordings and videos. These files reveal that Epstein deliberately targeted teenage girls for sexual exploitation. Marina Lacerda, who was abused by Epstein from the age of 14, said Epstein required girls to show identification proving they were younger than 18 years old; she said he was furious when an 18-year-old was brought to him, immediately sending her away.

Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, Angel Ureña, has attacked the Trump administration for releasing these files but has offered no defense of Clinton’s behavior. Prince Andrew was stripped of all his royal titles for abusing a 17-year-old girl on Epstein’s private island, so it is highly likely that Clinton could be the next major political figure to finally face consequences for the vile sexual sins he committed with Epstein’s help.

Scandals such as those revealed by the Epstein files are the result of broken law. While the left wants to destroy Donald Trump’s presidency by hypocritically singling him out for partying with Epstein on a few occasions, the fact remains that Republicans and Democrats alike are guilty of transforming America into a perverted society. The Epstein files should be a politically nonpartisan issue. They should provoke a call to national repentance.

IN OTHER NEWS

Can ‘Project Sunrise’ fix Gaza? The Wall Street Journal reported Friday on a “sensitive but unclassified” U.S. proposal to convert Gaza from the bombed-out husk it is today to a Mediterranean paradise of futuristic cityscapes, advanced technology and luxury. “Project Sunrise” is designed to encourage foreign governments to help cover an estimated $112 billion over 10 years, with the U.S. contributing almost $60 billion. Yet as Egypt’s foreign minister noted on Thursday, the U.S. plans do not require an unconditional surrender from Hamas, asking instead for the terrorist group to gradually and voluntarily give up its terrorism and weapons. As the Trumpet reported in our November-December issue, U.S. plans for Gaza “will not bring ‘eternal peace.’”

France will invest $12 billion in a new aircraft carrier, French President Emmanuel Macron announced Sunday. “In an age of predators, we must be strong in order to be feared, and especially strong at sea,” Macron said. The new-generation, 78,000-ton, nuclear-powered carrier is projected to be Europe’s largest warship and will replace the current Charles de Gaulle carrier by 2038. Germany is set to spend twice as much as France on defense by 2029, so France is struggling to remain relevant in an ongoing power struggle over European military leadership. The Bible reveals that France’s military power will become subordinated to Germany.

‘The lives of Jewish children are worse than ever since 1945.’ This was German-Jewish author Michel Friedman’s warning at the Conference of Education Ministers in Berlin on December 18. He highlighted the fact that Jewish children in European educational institutions are insulted, belittled and sometimes even attacked and must either endure it or attend Jewish schools protected by police. Friedman said the latter is reminiscent of the ghettoization in Nazi Germany. Since the savage Hamas massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s resulting war against Hamas in Gaza, anti-Semitism has risen sharply around the world. “Most have allowed an unrestrained surge of overt anti-Semitism in the public sphere,” said Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar at a Hanukkah candle-lighting event in Rishon LeZion on Sunday. He urged Jews worldwide to move to Israel. All of this is a sign of worse to come.