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Trump DOJ Admits Handgun Ban Is Unconstitutional, Still Fights Gun Owners in Court

The Trump administration has admitted that the federal government cannot constitutionally prohibit licensed firearm dealers from selling handguns to law-abiding adults ages 18 to 20. Yet the Department of Justice is still fighting in federal court to prevent gun-rights organizations from securing lasting judicial protection against the very same unconstitutional law.

On November 4, Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) filed a reply brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in FPC v. ATF, formerly Reese v. ATF. The filing challenges DOJ’s attempt to avoid further judicial relief nearly six years after FPC, the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), and the Louisiana Shooting Association first challenged the federal handgun purchase restrictions.

The plaintiffs have already won the constitutional argument. Now they are fighting to ensure that victory actually protects the people whose rights were violated.

DOJ Admits the Federal Handgun Ban Violates the Second Amendment

In January 2025, the Fifth Circuit ruled that federal restrictions prohibiting federally licensed dealers from selling handguns and handgun ammunition to adults ages 18 to 20 violated the Second Amendment. The decision represented a significant victory for young Americans who enjoy the same constitutional rights as other adults but have been denied access to the ordinary commercial handgun market.

On September 17, 2026, the Trump administration’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion agreeing that the restrictions were unconstitutional. The DOJ acknowledged that these adults are among “the people” protected by the Second Amendment and that the government could not justify the prohibition under the Supreme Court’s historical-tradition standard.

But rather than agree to the broader judicial relief sought by the organizations that successfully challenged the law, the Justice Department now argues that its change in legal position makes the remaining lawsuit moot. Essentially, DOJ maintains that because the administration no longer considers the restrictions enforceable, a broader court order is unnecessary.

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Britain’s Online Censorship Law Now Comes With a Crisis Plan for Your Posts

The Online Safety Act – the UK’s censorship law – is getting its “crisis” machinery in place, and in full. As of Monday, November 2, big platforms in the country are expected to have in place a censorship plan that will be waiting in the wings, ready to be launched at a moment’s notice, or even before that – if a crisis is merely “likely to occur.”

This is what the regulator’s own paperwork, released on October 12, reveals, with the rules coming into force three weeks later. The crisis rules are part of amendments to two Ofcom codes – the Illegal Content Codes and the Protection of Children Code.

A crisis is defined as “an extraordinary situation in which there is a serious threat to public safety in the United Kingdom” that is highly likely to cause, or have come from, a surge in certain content. Ofcom also said that “local or regional crises may still meet the definition” and “an overseas event may also meet the definition.”

What is covered is content related to terrorism, hate, harassment, stalking, threats and abuse, and what is referred to as “the foreign interference offence” – which is a reference to the National Security Act, and a “misrepresentation” that “may” include “presenting information in a way which amounts to a misrepresentation, even if some or all of the information is true.”

As for the effect of such “misrepresentation,” the Act says it can influence political processes or decisions, and a foreign power can be not only a state, but also its head or government.

The posts that are at risk of being taken down are described by Ofcom as “the most highly protected forms of expression,” including “political speech.”

When a crisis hits – or is about to – these will be the first to go. “A higher risk of false positives is likely to be proportionate,” Ofcom says.

To be able to do all this, platforms must now have in place a crisis protocol, which they “need not publish” – and watch their own warning indicators.

Then, they should send in a senior crisis team “as soon as reasonably practicable if the provider determines that a crisis is occurring or is likely to occur.” Reviewing the situation afterwards should also be done in secret.

Large services will also open “a dedicated channel for law enforcement to contact the provider on matters related to the crisis.” No court order is necessary for this police hotline to be activated.

All this applies to large services (those with over 7 million monthly UK users) that are considered to be at medium risk, and any service that is at high risk. The rules cover user-to-user content on social media, messaging apps, forums, dating apps, games, marketplaces, and some AI tools.

The government has said that these steps “are not mandatory in themselves” – but a platform that follows them “will be treated as having complied” with the law. In other words, anyone who decides to go another way will have to prove to Ofcom that their method is equally effective.

It’s optional – in the British sense of the word.

And don’t worry, Ofcom has more reassurances: “The measures do not enable Ofcom to declare a crisis, nor do they introduce emergency powers.” But the Secretary of State can direct Ofcom to send a public statement notice to platforms, and they should take this into account when deciding whether a crisis is indeed taking place.

Ofcom has been working on the crisis protocol for a while, finalizing it on June 9 – the same day riots spread through Belfast after a stabbing on the Shankill Road. We reported about it then.

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IT BEGINS: Rep. Thomas Massie Says He Plans to Reintroduce Articles of Impeachment Against Hegseth Unless He Resigns

War Secretary Pete Hegseth may face an impeachment vote before the next Congress is seated, as some Republicans, led by Rep. Thomas Massie, are planning to vote on an impeachment resolution after a stunning midterm loss that is widely attributed to the Iran war.

Massie previously introduced articles of impeachment against Hegseth back in September.

CNN is reporting that some GOPers are expecting the latest impeachment resolution to pass in the House as Republican lawmakers turn on Hegseth.

Trump has defended Hegseth, telling reporters on Tuesday that he is not considering firing him.

“No, I think he’s doing a very good job,” Trump said.

Asked if Hegseth should replace Marsha Blackburn in the Senate after her successful run for Governor in Tennessee, Trump said again, “I think he’s doing a very good job.”

Still, Trump said, “I actually think he’d be very popular if he did that, but I haven’t heard that at all.”

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New Jersey Wants “Accountable” Chatbots, But At What Privacy Cost?

New Jersey is moving to treat AI chatbots as products under the state’s product liability law, and make their makers strictly liable for injuries their products cause – even if the company was careful and had no direct contract with the user.

A bill to this effect, A5607, was introduced on October 5, and after passing the Assembly Public Safety and Preparedness Committee on October 19, has been sent to the Appropriations Committee.

This means that users who are harmed by violations of the bill’s provisions could sue chatbot makers for actual damages or $5,000 per violation, while the attorney general would be able to seek civil penalties of $5,000 per violation.

The New Jersey bill would also restrict the use of chat logs and personal data for advertising, profiling, and training AI. This would represent a real gain for users, who are currently often subjected to this type of data harvesting and exploitation by tech companies.

The bill would also require providers to keep users’ chat logs and allow them to download these logs. What this means is that while on the one hand, users would have more control over their data, on the other, the provider would be forced to keep a record of all conversations that take place on their platform.

That is a store of highly personal and intimate records that can be accessed by law enforcement, other litigants, and hackers.

This is not merely theoretical, as we reported in October about a Florida woman who used the Claude chatbot as a “diary” – and got arrested after the system flagged one of her entries as suspicious. The local sheriff’s office then warned people that they are “never truly anonymous” when using AI.

The New Jersey bill’s provisions that are supposed to protect users’ privacy and safety could ultimately backfire, as the strict liability standard that would be imposed on companies could lead to even more surveillance of users.

As lawyer Scott S. Christie told Law.com, the bill would “open the floodgates” and explained that, “When there’s $5,000 in statutory damages per violation and you don’t have to prove any harm, in addition to the strict liability standard, you’re talking hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of dollars per lawsuit.”

He also explained that the way the bill is written means that if a chatbot provider violates the statute with one user, “it’s probably violating as to all users.”

To avoid this, the obvious course of action for companies would be to watch their users more closely, verify their identities, and report them to the authorities when the algorithm decides that is warranted.

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THIS AGED WELL: Trump Bombing Iran Will Be The End Of His Presidency

Originally posted on April 23, 2025

The neocons want war with Iran, and they will do anything to get it — say anything, do anything, lie, steal cheat…whatever they need to do.

If we value our republic, we must stop this outcome in the Middle East.

America cannot afford another major war, and yes, this will be a major war, touching off a global conflagration.

People you are close to will die.

These deaths will not just happen in the Middle East, Iran has imported a vast cadre of terrorists inside the United States thanks to Manchurian candidate Biden. It could happen at a shopping mall, a gas station, a grocery store, a day care.

America will not be able live ‘life as normal’ after an attack on Iran.

We also can’t afford it. The Biden regime depleted our weapons stores in Ukraine. Our military is up to its eyeballs in DEI, Maoist indoctrination.

A war with Iran will not end well for us.

The globalist cabal sees the Ukraine war ending, time to start another one, to finish off America, and let the Chinese hordes mop it up afterwards.

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Governments around the world are preparing citizens for global crisis

The entire EU, along with nine other countries, have advised their citizens to have enough food, water and emergency supplies to last several days, while others, including Canada, have long-standing emergency preparedness advisories that remain in effect.

The appeals for citizens to be prepared for crisis and war come after NATO reportedly deemed Russia’s military capacity to be “growing” and has assessed Russia’s military threat to “serious” levels, despite efforts to wear Russia’s military down in Ukraine for over four years.

The calls for citizens to be prepared for the worst have caused a wave of speculation and concern online after Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia is ready for war.

Since August, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, the United States, Japan, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, and France have all started or renewed emergency preparedness campaigns.

The European Union has also issued repeated calls to its citizens and member states to have emergency supplies and enough food and water to last at least 72 hours in the event of a crisis.

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Tom Engelhardt on the Empire of Defeat

Honestly, it’s hard to believe that, once upon a distant time, I was born into an America still fighting a world war. No, it wasn’t World War I! I’m not quite that old! My actual birthdate was July 20, 1944, while World War II was still ongoing. And though it ended in August 1945, in some strange sense, American-style war has never truly ended. Stranger yet, despite my country’s endless warmaking since then, the global war that concluded more than 80 years ago was the last truly victorious one this country has fought.

In the decades since 1945, the U.S. did indeed emerge as the world’s greatest power (along with the Soviet Union, which, of course, collapsed in 1991). And like all great powers, it did indeed fight endless wars. Remember, there was Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq (to mention only the most obvious of the conflicts my country hasn’t been able to keep out of since 1945). And even now, the U.S. is still fighting (typically ineffectively) in Somalia (of all places!) and — with more to come after the U.S. midterm elections — Iran. (And I’m not even mentioning past, more minor conflicts in places like Panama or Libya.)

But here’s the strange thing and something I believe to be unique for a great power over the course of its rise and — as the very existence of Donald Trump as president of the United States (twice!) suggests — decline (not to say fall): in not a single one of those wars did my country even come close to winning. They were all functionally defeats (though the Korean War has always been seen, in sports terms, as a kind of a tie, since that peninsula ended up divided between North and South Korea).

And consider that ongoing reality (think: Iran today) all too historically strange, if not simply inexplicable, for a great imperial power. In short, the single most powerful country on the planet couldn’t win a single war — not one! — against distinctly lesser powers!

And then, of course, a near-majority of the American people elected Donald Trump who promised, at least the first time around, to keep us out of such wars (which he did then, except for some unsuccessful combat in Syria), only to launch a significant war against Iran the second time around that — shock! shock! — has turned out just as well as all the other wars I’ve mentioned. In short, you explain it (I can’t), but the greatest power on this planet, which for endless decades has poured literally trillions of dollars into its military and, in just the next fiscal year, is planning to add at least another $1.5 trillion to the Pentagon’s wildly out-of-control budget (and that figure may, in the end, prove a gross underestimate), unbelievably — or do I mean all too believably? — simply hasn’t won a war since the one I was born into in 1944 (and that’s not even to mention some of its other unsuccessful skirmishes in those years). Phew! No sentence can truly hold the full militarized mess this country has created over and over again in those decades.

Worse yet, as Trump’s Iran War suggests, its leadership seems to learn absolutely nothing from that reality — or do I mean surreality?

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Knives Out: Hegseth’s Wife Reportedly Paid By Trump-Connected Firm That Also Worked For Lockheed

Jennifer Hegseth, the wife of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, was paid last year by Watchtower Strategy, a Trump-connected Washington consulting firm that counted Lockheed Martin as a client the same year, according to Hegseth’s annual financial disclosure report, as Politico‘s Daniel Lippman first reported on Wednesday.

The disclosure lists her consulting work for the firm but not how much she was paid, according to Politico. Jennifer Hegseth, a former longtime Fox News producer, is the daughter of a late Lockheed Martin executive.

Watchtower was founded in January 2025 and sells strategic advice, advocacy and communications work. Its roster includes former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Republican operatives Jeff Miller, Arthur Schwartz, Dan Conston and Brian O. Walsh. Lockheed was a Watchtower client last year, according to POLITICO Influence; asked whether it still is, a Lockheed spokesperson didn’t answer directly, saying only that the company routinely works with a number of firms.

Watchtower says she was hired for her TV contacts, not her husband’s job. A spokesperson said she helped the firm navigate conservative TV media and “has not interfaced with any clients nor does she provide any advice to Watchtower on defense matters.” The firm declined to say whether she still works there.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the Hegseths are “in full compliance with all ethics laws and regulations.” Jennifer Hegseth didn’t respond to Politico’s request for comment. She has been an unusually visible Pentagon spouse, and accompanied her husband to meetings with Republican senators during his confirmation fight.

Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who sat on the House Armed Services Committee and was Trump’s first pick for attorney general in 2024, wasn’t buying it.

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The Greatest Existential Risk of the Early 21st Century

Anthropic’s IPO filing on Monday set the stage for the Claude creator to pursue possibly largest initial stock offering in history. According to CNBC, investors are measuring the 5-year-old company’s potential market cap in the trillions, putting it in a category with the world’s most valuable companies, even as the stock market is showing signs of jitters on the AI trade.

Anthropic devoted 94 pages of its 400-page securities registration statement to the “risk factors” section. “If misused, replicated, weaponized, or operated with a high degree of autonomy,” Anthropic acknowledged, “it could pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.”

On September 29, President Trump convened the CEOs of the leading U.S. AI companies and announced a voluntary “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities.” The agreement calls on frontier-AI developers to establish robust internal controls, use independent external auditors, and create board-level committees to review safety assessments. But since it is not legally enforceable, it is neither “morally binding” nor a “constitution” for AI safety.

The AI giants being asked to police AI admit that increasingly autonomous systems can behave in ways their creators did not anticipate. Yet, they are promoting the unpredictable products within the US military-industrial complex. The net effect? A historical acceleration of existential risks.

Weaponizing U.S. technological primacy

Trump has repeatedly framed AI as a competition between the United States and China, saying there will be “a winner and a loser.” He has rejected cooperation with Beijing because he believes the US is already leading.

But the administration is not just pursuing laissez-faire economics. It is constructing an AI-national-security-industrial complex.

In January, war secretary Pete Hegseth issued Pentagon’s milestone AI memorandum, which laid out a plan with a drastic focus on acceleration, not deceleration. “Speed wins,” Hegseth wrote.

In spring, according to the CNN, a U.S. Special Operations Command analyst used a large language model that almost misled the U.S. into instigating a war with China.

And yet, the June 2026 national-security memorandum directed the U.S. national-security establishment to obtain the most advanced AI systems, rapidly integrate commercial and open-source models, build high-security computing infrastructure and establish a strategic reserve of AI expertise.

The objective is a “decisive and enduring AI advantage” over adversaries.

This fosters an odd hybrid of market freedom, enormous public infrastructure, military integration and geopolitical protectionism, without legally enforceable safety regulation.

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CIA Still Runs 12 Secret Border Bases In Ukraine, Even As Trump Breaks With Zelensky

Journalist Aaron Maté told Judge Andrew Napolitano on Tuesday that the CIA is still “running, if the New York Times is to be believed, 12 secret bases inside of Ukraine,” and still controlling Ukrainian intelligence agencies it “effectively rebuilt from scratch after Yanukovych was overthrown in 2014.” He made the claim in an interview for Napolitano’s Judging Freedom podcast, recorded on Election Day, Nov. 3, in an episode titled “CIA and MI6 vs Trump in Ukraine.”

Maté’s source for the bases is a February 2024 New York Times investigation, which as Ukrainska Pravda summarized it, described a CIA-supported network of spy bases built over about eight years, including 12 secret locations along the Russian border, with a partnership dating to 2014.

“How pervasive is the CIA in Ukraine today?” Napolitano asked. To which Maté replied:

“Well, it’s so pervasive that it was the one that orchestrated this drone campaign against Russian energy facilities that Trump recently started opposing. It was Trump’s CIA that came up with that and was helping Ukraine do that. And Trump was on board with it until he needed something to sell voters on ahead of the midterms, whereas war on Iran was causing such a spike in energy prices.”

Maté said Trump has since pulled back and criticized Volodymyr Zelensky, “the CIA, as far as I know, is continuing its operations as normal,” and that it is “still helping out with targeting” and “still providing intelligence.”

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