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Rand Paul Makes His Move Against Fauci

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told Dr. Anthony Fauci last week exactly what would happen if he stonewalled Congress. Fauci ignored him. Now Paul is delivering on that promise, and conservatives who have waited years for this moment have every reason to celebrate.

Paul introduced a resolution Tuesday to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress. The move comes after the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director sat before a Senate committee and refused, again and again, to answer a single question.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which Paul chairs, subpoenaed Fauci on July 22 to testify as part of its investigation into risky life sciences research and the true origins of the virus that upended the world in 2020. Fauci showed up Wednesday and gave Republicans nothing. He invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times. It didn’t matter if it was about the origins of COVID-19 or what day of the week it was; Fauci’s answer was the same: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.”

Sen. Paul was not amused.

“I ordered him to answer and warned him about contempt, yet he still refused,” Paul said, calling Fauci’s defiance obstruction of a congressional investigation the committee plans to act on.

The committee will vote on the contempt resolution Thursday, and Paul has already dismantled Fauci’s legal excuse for hiding behind the Fifth. Before leaving office in January 2025, then-President Joe Biden gave Fauci a preemptive pardon, an unusual move clearly aimed at protecting one of Donald Trump’s most prominent critics from prosecution. Paul, in a statement on Tuesday, explained that the pardon wiped out any basis Fauci had for pleading the Fifth in the first place. Fauci also gave up whatever privilege remained the moment he delivered opening testimony at the hearing.

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Kim Yo Jong Threatens Japan With ‘Additional Military Options’ — Calls Tokyo A ‘War Criminal State’ As North Korea Targets Tomahawk Tests And US Alliance

Kim Yo Jong, the most powerful figure in North Korea after her brother Kim Jong Un, issued a direct military threat against Japan on Wednesday, warning that Pyongyang would develop “additional military options” in response to Tokyo’s expanding defense posture — and explicitly accusing Washington of enabling what she called the revival of a “war criminal state.”

The statement, published by the Korean Central News Agency, was both specific in its grievances and deliberately vague in its threatened response. Kim cited Japan’s recent test-firing of Tomahawk long-range cruise missiles — American-supplied weapons that give Japan’s Self-Defense Forces their first real offensive reach — as well as Japan’s May participation in U.S.-led military exercises in the Philippines. She accused Tokyo of moving to “formulate the possession of the capability for preemptive attack” and said those actions were entering “the stage of actual act.” In a direct shot at Washington, she condemned the United States for using Japan and South Korea as a “shock brigade” in the Asia-Pacific, encroaching on the security interests of neighboring states.

“Japan, a war criminal state, is accelerating its transformation into a war state, taking advantage of the acute and variable trend of the present international situation,” Kim stated per KCNA. “We will never remain a passive onlooker to the military evolution of Japan, which may pose a grave threat to the security of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” She concluded with a formal declaration: “I make it clear upon authorization that the armed forces of the DPRK and the military leadership will set up additional military options, which are obviously due to Japan’s transformation.”

Japan’s defense posture has shifted dramatically over the past two years. Under Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s legacy framework and continued by his successor, Japan has committed to doubling defense spending as a share of GDP — a structural break from the postwar pacifist constitution’s constraints that Tokyo spent eight decades trying to work around. Japan has deployed Type-12 surface-to-ship missiles and U.S.-supplied Tomahawk cruise missiles to its Southwestern Islands, the chain that runs between Kyushu and Taiwan, directly complicating any Chinese or North Korean calculus in the region. Tokyo’s defense minister stated as recently as Tuesday that Japan’s military needs to be expanded with a “sense of urgency and crisis,” per Channel News Asia, following a new government threat assessment that specifically named China, Russia, and North Korea as growing dangers requiring an immediate response.

The framing Kim Yo Jong deployed is worth unpacking, because Pyongyang’s propaganda rarely wastes specific language. By invoking Japan’s colonial-era record — a reference that carries enormous weight throughout East Asia — and then linking it to current military policy, she is positioning North Korea as the historical victim entitled to a security response. This narrative has more resonance in China and across Global South capitals than Western audiences typically appreciate. Beijing uses similar framing about Japanese militarism when it wants to create diplomatic space for opposing U.S.-Japan defense cooperation, and Pyongyang coordinates its messaging with Beijing more closely than most Western analysts acknowledge. The question is not whether Kim Yo Jong’s statement constitutes an existential threat on its own — it does not — but whether it signals an upcoming weapons test, a new missile deployment, or an acceleration of Pyongyang’s tactical nuclear force positioning toward Japan.

The timing is also notable in that Japan is watching Taiwan’s Han Kuang war games begin on the same day. Japan understands better than most Western nations that a Taiwan contingency is a Japan contingency — U.S. bases in Okinawa and on the main islands would be the immediate staging grounds for any American response to a Taiwan blockade or invasion. North Korea’s ability to threaten those bases with short-range missiles is real and has been since at least 2017. A Pyongyang that feels emboldened by China’s regional pressure campaign, or that calculates it can extract economic concessions by rattling sabers while Washington is distracted in the Middle East, has every structural incentive to escalate its rhetoric in exactly this direction.

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Can’t Beat Em: Over 1,000 Lawyers Call for Ban of German Anti-Mass Migration AfD Party

A group of over 1,000 left-wing lawyers in Germany have demanded the government ban the anti-mass migration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party as it has surged to become the most popular in the country.

The self-described leftist Republican Lawyers’ Association issued a public appeal to the German government and lawmakers in the Bundestag to launch proceedings to ban the AfD, which it argues “contradicts the central fundamental values” of the country and its constitution, Die Welt reported.

Chairwoman Angela Furmaniak said that banning the leading opposition party would be necessary for the sake of “the human dignity of all people.”

The petition, which was signed by 1,051 legal professionals, notes that the “Basic Law” constitution provides the mechanism to ban political parties if a case is brought before the Federal Constitutional Court.

Such a case can be initiated by the federal government, the Bundestag parliament, or the Bundesrat senate, who would have to successfully argue that the party in question “not only takes an anti-constitutional attitude but aims to act on that attitude in a militant and aggressive way.” The party would need to be demonstrated to have acted to “deliberately undermine the functioning of Germany’s free democratic basic order.”

Furmaniak said that “politicians must no longer hide behind specious arguments, but must act before it is too late.”

At present, the country’s top left-wing party, the Social Democrats (SPD), is in favour of a ban on the AfD. However, despite being in a governing coaltion with the SPD, the centrist Christian Democrats (CDU) have so far refused to back a ban.

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AIPAC Burns $90 Million In Michigan — And Loses Anyway As Abdul El-Sayed Crushes Establishment Senate Pick

The most expensive Senate primary in Michigan history ended in a stunning defeat for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Tuesday night, as progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed defeated establishment-backed Rep. Haley Stevens in a race that exposed the outer limits of foreign lobby money in American elections.

NBC News projected El-Sayed the winner early Wednesday morning after an all-night count that swung dramatically through the hours. He overcame what NBC estimates at nearly $65 million in outside spending — the bulk of it funneled through AIPAC and its affiliated dark money arms including the United Democracy Project — to beat Stevens by roughly two points. Total AIPAC-aligned spending in the race, including coordinated outside advertising, reached $90 million according to multiple tallies, a record for any single Senate primary in the organization’s history.

El-Sayed, a physician and former Wayne County health director of Egyptian descent, ran an explicitly anti-AIPAC campaign, calling out the lobby by name at every stop and telling Michigan voters: “This is what democracy looks like — when the people vote and the money loses.” He was outspent 11-to-1 by Stevens, who had the backing of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and the full weight of the Democratic establishment. None of it was enough.

AIPAC’s singular focus was keeping El-Sayed — who has called for ending unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel and said The Jewish State should not exist specifically as an ethno-state — out of the Senate. The lobby’s affiliated super PAC set a single-race spending record in this contest. And it still failed. “The Democratic establishment threw everything it had at Abdul El-Sayed,” wrote Dan Pfeiffer, a senior Obama White House aide turned political analyst. “If he wins, the reverberations will be felt far outside of Michigan.”

The broader Michigan primary results compounded the drama. The Democratic Socialists of America — not a fringe club but an organized political machine — also scored wins on the down-ballot. DSA-backed William Lawrence won Michigan’s 7th district congressional primary, territory Trump carried by just one point in 2026. Former Rep. Cori Bush, attempting a comeback in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District, did lose her race to incumbent Wesley Bell — himself the beneficiary of a 27-to-1 AIPAC-funded spending advantage, one of the few bright spots for the lobby in an otherwise black night.

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The Steps to Establishing Marxism — And How the U.S. Is Slipping Left

Since the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that brought Vladimir Lenin to power in Russia, every communist system has ultimately failed. From Russia to North Korea, Laos, Cuba, Cambodia, Eastern Europe, and China, communism promised to make everyone equal but, in effect, made nearly everyone equally poor, except for a handful of wealthy party cadres at the top.

To maintain this unnatural system of collectivization, every communist country became a totalitarian dictatorship. In order for the Communist Party to remain in power, restrictions on normal freedoms, such as freedom of speech, assembly, the press, religion, and political affiliation, were enforced by secret police, coupled with centrally controlled courts, prisons, and gulags.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ 1848 Communist Manifesto laid out ten measures for abolishing capitalism. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 book The Road to Serfdom argued that even well-intentioned central economic planning tends to erode political liberty and personal freedom. In 1958, W. Cleon Skousen published The Naked Communist, which included a list of 45 goals he said represented a communist strategy for the gradual takeover of the United States. On January 10, 1963, Rep. A. S. Herlong Jr. of Florida read the list into the Congressional Record.

Across the United States, there are examples of nearly every one of these steps toward communism. California and New York are the most obvious examples, but the militant left, the extreme left, and Democratic Socialists are pushing similar policies at the state and federal levels.

These include state-run enterprises that undercut private businesses, direct price controls in place of market pricing, government seizure of private real estate, confiscatory taxation of accumulated wealth, and jurisdiction-level withdrawal from uniform federal law enforcement.

They also include organized ideological movements capturing the leadership of core public institutions, coalition networks linking avowedly socialist organizations to mainstream advocacy groups, federal proposals to nationalize parts of strategic industries, the political normalization of these ideas beyond the socialist fringe, and the rebranding of confiscation, nationalization, and seizure under administrative or otherwise benign-sounding terminology.

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Mamdani admin. denies that shoppers will need state photo ID or face mandatory door checks to buy food at upcoming city-run grocery stores

A national political firestorm erupted on Monday following viral social media claims that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani would require shoppers to present identification to purchase food at proposed municipal grocery stores, prompting sharp criticism from conservative leaders, left-wing New Yorkers and a subsequent clarification from City Hall.

The controversy stems from comments made during a press conference addressing the Mamdani (D-N.Y.) administration’s new flagship “food affordability program.” Last week, Mamdani announced a $70 million initiative to open five city-owned, publicly subsidized grocery stores — one in each borough — offering a 30% discount on essential kitchen staples like meat, produce, and pantry goods.

During the press conference, which transpired in late July, a reporter asked the mayor, “How are you going to keep people from taking advantage of that deal, basically? And is there going to be a limit on the number of items that someone can take that are discounted at that level from that essential basket?”

“So our RFP (Request for Proposal) makes very clear this is a program for New Yorkers to be able to put food on the table, not a program for people to be able to make a quick buck through reselling,” Mamdani responded.

Jeanny Pak, the CFO of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, then floated the idea of a residency verification mechanism, mentioning a potential “library card-esque thing” or looking into state IDs to manage buyer eligibility and target local New Yorkers.

However, following the social media buzz, Mamdani’s office later issued a statement denying that shoppers will need to present a state photo ID or undergo door checks to enter or buy food at the proposed city-owned grocery stores.

Regarding the current official status, the Mamdani administration has not formally enacted a mandatory ID policy. They stated they are “still exploring options” to verify local residence, but no final decision has been made ahead of the planned 2027 opening in the Bronx, New York officials emphasized.

Nonetheless, prior to the clarification, video clips of the exchange circulated rapidly across political circles online, sparking immediate accusations of political hypocrisy. Prominent Republican figures seized on the clip to draw comparisons between food access policies and federal election laws.

Billionaire Elon Musk posted to X calling the situation ironic, while Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.) labeled it hypocritical, arguing that advocating for residency verification at city grocery stores while opposing mandatory voter ID bills was inconsistent.

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Mexican Town Set Ablaze After Military Arrests Terrorist Cartel Leader

Members of the United Cartels set fire to a town in the Mexican state of Michoacan following a military raid where authorities arrested one of the top leaders of the terrorist organization. That leader had previously been a top official within the Michoacan state police forces and still held sway over local law enforcement.

The riotous acts of destruction took place over the weekend in the town of Los Reyes and nearby communities, when cartel gunmen set up numerous blockades and torched vehicles and buildings in response to a military raid targeting their leader, Alfonoso “Poncho La Quiringa” Fernandez Magallanes. Fernandez is a known drug lord wanted by the U.S. Department of Justice, which offered a $5 million reward for his capture.

The raid took place on Saturday afternoon, when Mexican military and federal police forces arrested Fernandez and several of his close allies with Carteles Unidos. Soon after the arrest, his gunmen set up blockades, torched vehicles and buildings throughout Los Reyes and surrounding communities in an attempt to pressure Mexico’s government into releasing the man known as La Quiringa. While the tactic had worked in the past, this time, Mexico’s federal government did not budge.

Soon after, Mexico’s top security official, Omar Garcia Harfuch, announced Fernandez’s capture. On Sunday, his staff released additional information about the wanted drug lord and his organization. According to authorities, La Quiringa has been one of the leaders behind the hiring of Colombian terrorists and guerrilla fighters, as well as the use of drones to drop explosives on their rivals and military forces.

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Trump demands oil companies lower gas prices for American consumers

President Donald Trump has taken to Truth Social to criticize Chevron CEO Mike Wirth following a television interview in which the executive touted his company’s success.

On Monday, the president argued that in the interview with Fox Business, Wirth failed to credit the administration’s efforts to assist oil companies, which the president said provided necessary strength and stability to the U.S. energy sector.

“The only thing he conveniently forgot to mention is that, without the genius, foresight, strength, and stability, of the TRUMP Administration, the Oil Industry, and our Country itself, would be DEAD!” Trump wrote.

Trump pointed to Chevron’s operations in Venezuela as an example of the administration’s influence, before calling on oil executives across the industry to lower fuel prices for consumers immediately.

“Get your consumer (retail!) Oil Prices DOWN, NOW!” the president stated.

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The Pentagon’s Hidden Housing Scandal: Outsourcing Duty Of Care

Sen. Jon Ossoff released a report on July 8 documenting lead exposure in a newborn, mold-related emergency room visits, and a cockroach infestation living inside a family’s oven, all in privatized military housing at Fort Benning and Fort Stewart. Read it and you’d think it was written in 2022. It wasn’t. That’s the scandal: the Pentagon outsourced a duty of care to private landlords and never enforced the contracts meant to keep it intact.

I’ve spent thirty years in institutional investment management and now serve as an expert witness in fiduciary litigation. The pattern is one I recognize immediately: an institution hands a core obligation to a private operator, collects a fee for oversight it doesn’t actually perform, and treats the delegation itself as if it discharged the duty. It didn’t. Outsourcing a duty of care doesn’t outsource the duty.

Congress created the Military Housing Privatization Initiative in 1996 to fix decrepit on-base housing without loading the capital cost onto the Pentagon’s books. Private companies would own, renovate, and maintain the homes under leases running as long as fifty years, with servicemembers’ Basic Allowance for Housing flowing straight to the landlord as rent. The Pentagon would keep oversight, backed by incentive fees for good performance and penalties for bad. On paper, a clean alignment of interests. In practice, a guaranteed revenue stream with an oversight function nobody actually staffed.

Fort Stewart’s housing has been run by Balfour Beatty Communities since the base was privatized. In December 2021, Balfour Beatty pleaded guilty to one count of major fraud against the United States, agreeing to pay more than $65 million in criminal fines, restitution, and a related civil settlement. The company’s employees falsified maintenance records and destroyed resident comment cards between 2013 and 2019 to fraudulently collect incentive fees they hadn’t earned. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said the fraud was “a consequence of BBC’s broken corporate culture” that put profit ahead of servicemembers’ welfare.

Four months later, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found the conduct hadn’t stopped. Its bipartisan staff report on the mistreatment of military families in privatized housing documented that Balfour’s post-2019 behavior mirrored the misconduct behind its guilty plea; in the same period the company was under active federal investigation. A company can plead guilty to defrauding the government over housing conditions and keep collecting Basic Allowance for Housing checks from the families living in the homes it failed.

Fast-forward to this month. Fort Stewart is still Balfour Beatty’s. Fort Benning’s housing is run by a different company, the Michaels Organization’s Villages of Benning. Ossoff’s report found nearly identical failures at both: mold, lead, cover-ups, families told their complaints were handled when they weren’t. That detail should stop anyone from treating this as one bad company. Two operators, two installations, the same pattern. The failure sits in the oversight structure, not the logo on the leasing office.

The government’s own auditors have said as much. In an April 2023 report, the Government Accountability Office made 19 recommendations to improve DOD’s oversight of privatized housing, including a priority recommendation that the Pentagon set clear, consistent, department-wide home inspection standards, after finding that comparable maintenance problems were getting graded differently depending on who held the clipboard. As of GAO’s most recent public status update, that priority recommendation was still open, with DOD not expecting signed guidance until mid-2025 at the earliest. Congress had to legislate the fix GAO had already recommended.

This is the same structural failure I’ve written about previously in public pension governance, wearing a uniform instead of a suit. A pension trustee who delegates asset management to an outside manager doesn’t delegate away fiduciary responsibility for the outcome; the law is explicit that the duty stays with the trustee. The Pentagon’s relationship with its housing contractors works the same way as a matter of principle, even though the enforcement mechanism is a lease rather than ERISA. Both share the same defect: an incentive-fee structure that pays out on paperwork instead of results, and an oversight office too thin to catch the difference until a senator’s staff does the job for it.

That fix is now in the books. The Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, signed in December, directs the Secretary of War to establish a standard inspection and audit program for privatized and government-owned housing using independent, qualified inspectors, and separately tightens the rules on when a housing company may close a maintenance work order. Falsified paperwork closed BBC’s work orders and inflated its bonuses for six years before anyone with subpoena power looked at the underlying data; an inspector who doesn’t answer to the landlord closes that loophole.

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Report: Colombian Marxist Terrorists Using TikTok to Recruit Children

Armed narco-terrorist groups in Colombia are utilizing TikTok and other social media platforms to push recruitment videos targeting young children and teenagers, the Colombian newspaper El Colombiano reported on Monday.

According to El Colombiano, armed groups such as the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) terrorist group and the Clan del Golfo are engaged in a scheme described by the newspaper as “Recruitment 2.0.” The strategy sees the use of social media platform algorithms to push content towards Colombian children and teenagers in vulnerable economical situations, seeking to entice them into joining said insurgent organizations.

El Colombiano pointed out that the tactic specifically targets demographic groups of children as they are deemed more “influenceable” and because local criminal laws are more lenient towards children in the event of a future arrest.

The contents, which El Colombiano affirmed are mostly found on TikTok, entice Colombian minors with promises of future riches and luxuries. Other pieces of content reportedly used in the recruitment scheme involve deceitful offers such as false “talent-seeking” soccer tournaments and fake job offers promising competitive wages, all with the same goal of luring victims to join their ranks.

El Colombiano explained that it created a fake TikTok profile for the purposes of its report. Within “one hour,” the newspaper said, the TikTok account’s “For You” section began displaying videos of raspachínes coca leaf collectors, young people in camouflage clothing flaunting their affiliation with guerrilla groups, and individuals showing off cars, motorcycles, liquor, and luxuries, accompanied by ninja emojis — a “recurring visual code across various armed groups.”

Although TikTok has allegedly placed content filters blocking certain guerrilla-related keywords, El Colombiano explained that armed groups are completely bypassing the filters by simply using abbreviations instead of the group’s full name, such as “EP” as a replacement for FARC — the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia Marxist terrorist group, which attaches the EP (“People’s Army”) suffix to its initials.

“TikTok blocked the word ‘gaitanistas,’ for example. That is why digital recruiters tend to be more sophisticated and use coded language involving emojis,” Juan David Velasco Montoya, advisor at the Investigation and Prosecution Unit (UIA) of Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction of Peace (JEP), told El Colombiano. The Clan del Golfo sometimes refers to itself as the “Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia.”

JEP is a Colombian transitional justice mechanism established nearly a decade ago after FARC and the administration of former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos signed a “peace deal” in 2016 that allegedly saw the “dismantlement” of FARC. In reality, FARC remains active in Colombia ten years after its supposed dismantlement, committing numerous terrorist attacks over the past decade.

A UIA report cited by El Colombiano documented a 66-percent surge in the recruitment of children by Colombian insurgent groups on social media between 2022 and 2025. According to the UIA report, 44 percent of all child recruitment cases documented by the group in 2025 occurred on social media.

UIA reportedly described TikTok as the “most problematic” of the social media platforms for said recruitment. The content allegedly published by the groups on TikTok mainly targets teenagers and predominantly feature messages of money, weapons, and a “life of party and excesses.”

In 2024, Colombian authorities denounced that FARC had been using TikTok to publish content enticing minors to join the Marxist terrorist group. El Colombiano affirmed on Monday that, although Colombian authorities established guidelines to reduce the risk of recruitment by minors last year, “no concrete action has been taken” by the Chinese social media platform.

On the other hand, the recruitment content allegedly published on Facebook targets young adults instead of minors, while content allegedly published on YouTube are instead of a “political” tone. Instagram is allegedly used by Colombian armed groups to push content related to “armed confrontation and the handling of drones turned into weapons.”

UIA also reportedly found that, in addition to organizing the content’s type by platform, the posts also target boys and girls differently by “reinforcing gender stereotypes.” El Colombiano explained that, for example, content seeking to entice girls reportedly centers around the “glorification of physical beauty, dancing, and posing,” while content targeting boys highlights “strength, virility, financial means, weapons, and alcohol as a status symbol.”

According to the UIA report, the group projects that, if the situation were to continue existing as-is, Colombia could face roughly 2,321 new cases of child recruitment between 2026 and 2030 — at an average rate of one new minor every 12 hours.

Luis Fernando Quijano, director of the social services group Corporation for Peace and Social Development (Corpades), explained to El Colombiano on Monday that his organization has been documenting the alarming social media recruitment phenomenon for months.

In some cases, Quijano warned, the recruitment offer is “direct,” with some of the contents directly asking for minors between the ages of 12 and 13 to send a direct message if they want to join an insurgent group. In other cases, the recruitment enlists for international conflicts instead.

“It is recruitment through handouts, through images of young women and young men, and by portraying the illegal military life as very appealing. That is an open invitation for children and adolescents to go there,” Quijano said.

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