Authored by Troy Myers via The Epoch Times,

A deputy inspector general revealed in a Jan. 14 Senate hearing that tens of thousands of Afghan refugees could not provide key identification when entering the United States through a Biden-era parole program.

Additionally, lawmakers revealed that more than 50 individuals in the United States with confirmed or suspected terrorist ties were allowed into the country under the same program. The joint hearing was held with the Senate Border Security and Immigration and Crime and Counterterrorism subcommittees, which spiraled into arguments between Republican and Democratic lawmakers over whether vetting or counterterrorism is to blame.

Under Operation Allies Welcome, a 2021 initiative under President Joe Biden to resettle Afghans in the wake of what was widely called a botched U.S. military withdrawal from the Middle Eastern country, roughly 76,000 evacuees were let into the United States. The operation was meant to help Afghan allies who helped American forces and faced a serious threat from the Taliban because of that employment.

“There was missing information from the [Operation Allies Welcome] population, including first, last names, and date of birth,” Deputy Inspector General Craig Adelman for the office of audits in Homeland Security said.

“There was about 11,000 to 12,000 that did not know their date of birth.”

Although Afghan refugees were asked to provide identification, Adelman testified that about 36,000 could not provide any form of it.

When asked if the Department of Homeland Security systematically interviewed or conducted mental health screenings of evacuees before they were allowed into the United States, Adelman simply replied “no” and “not that I’m aware of.”

The hearing was called “Biden’s Afghan Parolee Program – A Trojan Horse with Flawed Vetting and Deadly Consequences.”

Democrats said this title was misleading and demonized thousands of Afghan individuals.

Republicans said the hearing was appropriately named, and above all else, the safety of Americans should be prioritized over refugee programs. This wasn’t taken into consideration during Operation Allies Welcome, the GOP senators said.

“We have no idea of their potential terrorist connections, and in many cases, we now have no idea where they are or what they’re doing, who they’re connected with, or what they’re capable of,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said.

One report shows the total number of refugees reached a much higher amount at more than 200,000 Afghan nationals through the Biden administration’s policies, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.

“Contrary to popular narratives, most Afghans admitted during and after the evacuation had nothing to do with the U.S. government or any of its contractors,” senior researcher Nayla Rush said in her report. “They were not U.S. ‘allies,’ nor were they ‘persecuted’ individuals in need of refugee resettlement.”

Another senior researcher with the Center for Immigration Studies, Simon Hankinson, testified Wednesday that he has no doubt there are hundreds of Afghan nationals who should be deported.

In December 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said at least 2,000 Afghan refugees in the United States have terrorism ties.

One of the Afghan men who entered the United States through Operation Allies Welcome is the suspect accused of the November 2025 shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, killing one and seriously injuring the other. The FBI called the attack an act of terrorism.

“How did this murderer come to be let in the United States in the first place?” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said. “How do we know that there are no other such Afghan nationals in the United States who might carry out another similar attack?”

Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday argued the Afghan refugees were in fact vetted multiple times, and the shooting of the National Guard members was due to a failure of counterterrorism, not because of a failure of vetting.

Sen. Alejandor Padilla (D-Calif.) pleaded in the hearing that “we not condemn the many for the inexcusable act of one person.”

Multiple witnesses at the hearing, including another deputy inspector general with the Defense Department and one with the State Department, testified that vetting did occur, but their offices found flaws and inadequate practices.

Republican lawmakers said Americans’ safety should still take precedent over letting thousands of Afghan refugees into the United States with insufficient vetting.

Cornyn put this question to the witnesses at the hearing, asking three of them if they disagree that an absolute non-negotiable requirement of any visa or parole program should be the safety and security of the American people. None of the witnesses spoke up.

The first day of the UBS Greater China Conference in Shanghai wrapped up earlier today. It is one of the largest investment conferences hosted by the global wealth manager and investment bank, with a particular focus on Asia.

“Robotics has climbed the agenda from previous years, but humanoids in every home remain many years off,” analysts from the bank said while covering highlights from day one.

The analysts noted another developing theme:

AI will divide nations into “AI‑developed” and “AI‑developing” economies, with China firmly in the former. The US is pursuing a capital‑intensive drive towards AGI, whereas China has a more capital efficient focus on more immediate applications; like governance gaps elsewhere, regulation is lagging the technology.

At the company level, Zhang Shipu, CEO of Noetix Robotics, told the audience that China’s humanoid robotics development has superior motion control and is considered ahead of the US.

UBS analyst Jolie Ho provided more color on Shipu’s comments:

China’s humanoid robots are built around rotary‑joint architectures, enabling highly flexible, multi‑degree‑of‑freedom movement, Zhang Shipu, CEO of Noetix Robotics, said at the UBS Greater China Conference. He highlighted the robots’ impressive progress in hardware stability, control precision, and whole‑body coordination. Importantly, these advancements do not require very high costs, positioning China at a leading transitional stage relative to the US. Yuan Bingbing, Vice President of Robot Era, echoed Zhang’s view in the same panel discussion, emphasizing Chinese robotics’ notable strengths in motion‑control technology. She also stressed the importance of software and hardware advancing together, drawing parallels to Tesla’s integrated development approach.

This development is particularly concerning, given that the humanoid AI robot race appears to be Tesla’s Optimus versus Chinese Unitree robots.

Separate from the humanoid robot race, Ho cited comments from another industry insider that said mass production of these robots hinges on just three things:

Yuan Bingbing, Vice President of Robot Era, said at the UBS Greater China Conference that three factors are required for humanoid robots to reach mass production. First, their performance must be close enough to that of a human; only then will customers be willing to buy them. Second, the economics must work: customers need to be able to “do the math” and justify the purchase.. Third, companies need strong engineering and mass‑production capabilities, meaning the ability to supply reliably at scale. Once these three conditions are met, the industry enters the mass‑production stage, Yuan said. She added that today, the largest market opportunity is in logistics, where robots are being deployed in factories to supplement human labor.

Related:

Trump’s Next National Strategy Will Center On Humanoid Robots

2026 Will Be Breakout Year For Autonomous Driving And Humanoid Robots; Deutsche Bank

Comments from the UBS conference suggest the U.S. may be falling behind China in the global robotics race, highlighting the importance of Tesla’s robotics unit. It also serves as a reminder that the Democratic Party was rooting for Tesla’s bankruptcy. 

Tim Walz last year: “Tesla $225 and DROPPING. Gives me a boost.”

Tim Walz today: “I’m DROPPING out of the governor’s race.”

Tesla is up, Walz is down.
pic.twitter.com/gJqiBYTRc2

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 5, 2026

At times, the Democratic posture appears anti-American and, more curiously, sympathetic to China and to adversarial foreign nations. Why is that? 

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The revolutionary fervor in Iran today has deep political roots and invites every theory concerning outside influences that have a deep stake in the kind of regime that rules this country. But amidst all the speculation about what’s really happening here, there is an overwhelming factor rarely mentioned.

Iran has experienced the sort of inflation that brings down whole governments. This is why so many among the merchant class have joined the revolutionary movements.

For many years, the regime had pursued an inflationary monetary policy that devastated the value of the currency, the rial. Over a 10-year period, worsening in the last two years, the currency has experienced 3,500 percent inflation. Crucial in this country’s financial structures is the value of the currency on international exchanges. It is now one of the worst, making business nearly impossible and banking highly volatile.

The tipping point has been identified by the Wall Street Journal:

“Late last year, Ayandeh Bank, run by regime cronies and saddled with nearly $5 billion in losses on a pile of bad loans, went bust. The government folded the carcass into a state bank and printed a massive amount of money to try to paper over all the red ink. That buried the problem but didn’t solve it.”

“After decades of engineering workarounds and using shadowy flows of cash to keep the country’s battered economy functioning,” the analysis continues, “Tehran had reached a dead end, with no tools to address a deepening economic crisis or meet the needs of an increasingly desperate population. Hundreds of merchants, who don’t typically join the country’s mass protests, took to the streets of Tehran to demand relief.”

This is a familiar story. Money printing can create the appearance of temporary prosperity. Once it begins to fall apart, there are only two choices: retrenchment and recession or making more loans to continue the illusion.

Iran’s banking system backing vast projects of fake opulence had become wildly overextended. At some point, the house of cards collapsed and the currency along with it.

This is the essential pre-history to grasp in order to understand why people hit the streets and have been unwilling to be intimidated by shows of force. In these cases, even executions do not work to restore order. Indeed, this only creates martyrs that fuel more boldness and revolutionary fervor.

There is nothing unusual historically about this. In an inflation that wrecks peoples’ livelihoods, people find every problem with the regime that rules them even if they put up with its features in the past. In Iran, the blame falls squarely on the heads of the Islamic fundamentalists but it could have been otherwise even under a wholly secular regime. It’s the inflation and financial collapse that is the trigger.

The recent inflationary bout in the United States was mild by historical standards but you could feel the anger in the population rise. A major reason for the defeat of the party in power traced to the loss of purchasing power. Inflation works like a tax but a deeply surreptitious one. It steals your money’s value by increasing the quantity of money in circulation beyond which is supported by existing rates of economic growth.

The previous bout in U.S. history was in 1979–1980 and it too led to the equivalent of a revolution. Jimmy Carter was a decent man and a hard-working president who governed in a moderate way. But none of this mattered once inflation hit double digits and started wiping out the value of savings and saved capital. It felt like a pillaging. Carter was blamed even though it was the supposed independent central bank that was really at fault.

Inflation is the force behind many political revolutions. The story of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is not usually about the money but inflation played a big role. The ruling monarchy had used money printing as the means by which it paid for its involvement in the Great War. This hit the population hard even as regular people were being drafted into the army and killed in a foreign war.

It was this wicked combination of inflation and conscription in an unpopular war that destabilized the Czar’s rule and led to the Bolshevik Revolution. It was not the case that the population had suddenly and strangely converted to the teachings of Karl Marx. Russian culture is centered on three points: religion, family, and ownership. Marxism attacked all three, that which the people loved more than anything else. Inflation is such a powerful force that it even leads people into their own worst political hell.

Going back in time, inflation was the key to the destabilization that led to the French Revolution and the murder of the king and the overthrow of the monarchy. People today tell stories of royal opulence but the reason those stories resonated had to do with high inflation that people experienced in their own lives. They wondered why they were getting poor while the monarchy was getting richer. They sensed that the regime had become rapacious and they were correct.

The French Revolution began in high ideals but collapsed into a bloody mess of political execution and chaos. Even to this day, the country has not quite recovered.

Then there is the most famous case of all: the devastation of the Weimar inflation (1921–23) that destroyed the German currency and certainly ushered in the rise of Hitler and Nazi party rule. When the money fails, totalitarianism often rises. This is a lesson of history.

Everywhere you look today you see the hidden hand of inflation behind political revolutions. In Venezuela, inflation hit 800 percent in 2016, 4,000 percent in 2017, and 130,000 to 2,000,000 percent in 2018. This is one of the one of the worst hyperinflation episodes ever recorded. The cycle was a familiar one: public fury, regime crackdown, and eventual upheaval, this one assisted by the United States who flat-out arrested the leader of the country without a great deal of resentment by the public.

Any political leadership that presides over inflation is playing with fire that can end up burning down the entire house. Commentators most often look at the failure of governance and the rationale behind the regime to explain revolutions, the French Revolution being the most obvious case. But once you understand the underlying economic dynamic, all becomes clear. The key to maintaining the rule of law, longevity in leadership, and regime stability is sound money, zero inflation, a money on which people can depend, and a banking system that serves the public rather than collaborates with industrial elites.

This is why the Founders put a line in the U.S. Constitution about the kinds of money states could issue: only gold and silver. How did they know? Because of the experience of hyperinflation during the War of Independence. The phrase “not worth a Continental” comes from a time when the currency was utterly wrecked. The new country was born with a fear of what inflation could do.

“It is worthy of observation,” wrote Thomas Paine, “that every case of failure in finances, since the system of paper began, has produced a revolution in governments, either total or partial.”

Paine was correct. The slogans of a regime are largely beside the point.

If they cannot manage the money well and allow the logic of high leverage to take its course, it risks being overthrown, always and everywhere.