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Trump’s Empire of Hubris and Thuggery

The 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) recently released by President Donald Trump presents itself as a blueprint for renewed American strength. It is dangerously misconceived in four ways.

First, the NSS is anchored in grandiosity: the belief that the United States enjoys unmatched supremacy in every key dimension of power. Second, it is based on a starkly Machiavellian view of the world, treating other nations as instruments to be manipulated for American advantage. Third, it rests on a naïve nationalism that dismisses international law and institutions as encumbrances on US sovereignty rather than as frameworks that enhance US and global security together.

Fourth, it signals a thuggery in Trump’s use of the CIA and military. Within days of the NSS’s publication, the US brazenly seized a tanker carrying Venezuelan oil on the high seas—on the flimsy grounds that the vessel had previously violated US sanctions against Iran.

The seizure was not a defensive measure to avert an imminent threat. Nor is it remotely legal to seize vessels on the high seas because of unilateral US sanctions. Only the UN Security Council has such authority. Instead, the seizure is an illegal act designed to force regime change in Venezuela. It follows Trump’s declaration that he has directed the CIA to carry out covert operations inside Venezuela to destabilize the regime.

American security will not be strengthened by acting like a bully. It will be weakened – structurally, morally, and strategically. A great power that frightens its allies, coerces its neighbors, and disregards international rules ultimately isolates itself.

The NSS, in other words, is not just an exercise in hubris on paper. It is rapidly being translated into brazen practice.

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Antisemitic Social Media Posts Force Mamdani Appointee to Resign

Zohran Mamdani hasn’t even taken office, yet his administration is already showing signs of trouble.

On Thursday, disturbing antisemitic comments shared online by Mamdani appointee Catherine Almonte Da Costa, set to step into the role of Director of Appointments, resurfaced, causing a firestorm.

The vile rants included comments about “money-hungry Jews” and saying the Far Rockaway train “is the Jew train.”

The Anti-Defamation League of New York and New Jersey shared Da Costa’s posts and demanded answers from the Mamdani administration.

The group said on X, “Mayor-Elect Mamdani has announced Catherine (Cat) Almonte Da Costa as his Director of Appointments, tasked with ‘bring[ing] top talent into this administration.’”

“Her social media footprint includes posts from more than a decade ago that echo classic antisemitic tropes and otherwise demean Jewish people. Tweeting about ‘Money hungry Jews’ is indefensible.”

“We appreciate Da Costa has relationships with members of the Jewish community, but her posts require immediate explanation — not just from Ms. Da Costa, but also from the Mayor-Elect.”

“Vetting the appointment of city leaders will be Ms. Da Costa’s responsibility and the Jewish community deserves to know:

1) Were these comments previously identified by the Mayor-elect’s team? If so, why were they excused?

2) What will be the policy of the new Administration if comments like these are discovered during the vetting process?”

The organization shared screenshots of Da Costa’s tweets, which remained up until Thursday, when it appears she deleted her account.

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Senators press toy makers on AI-powered toys exposing children to inappropriate content

“Many of these toys are… exposing children to inappropriate content, privacy risks, and manipulative engagement tactics.”

“These chatbots have encouraged kids to commit self harm and suicide, and now your company is pushing them on the youngest children.”

US Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) sent a letter to the Chief Executive Officers of Little Learners Toys, Mattel, Miko, Curio Interactive, FoloToy, and Keyi Robot sounding the alarm on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in their toys. The Senators demanded answers on what safeguards these companies have in place to protect kids from sexually explicit, violent, or otherwise inappropriate content for children.

AI Chatbots in Toys Pose Serious Risk to Children’s Healthy Development

“We write today to express our concern with the sale of toys powered by artificial intelligence (AI). These AI toys—specifically those powered by chatbots imbedded in everyday children’s toys like plushies, dolls, and other beloved toys—pose risks to children’s healthy development.

While AI has incredible potential to benefit children with learning and accessibility, experts have raised concerns about AI toys and the lack of research that has been conducted to understand the full effect of these products on our kids.

Many of these toys are not offering interactive play, but instead are exposing children to inappropriate content, privacy risks, and manipulative engagement tactics. These aren’t theoretical worst-case scenarios; they are documented failures uncovered through real-world testing, and they must be addressed.”

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US Suspends $41 Billion Tech Deal with UK over Online Censorship Laws

The great transatlantic tech romance has hit the skids. What was sold as a landmark agreement binding Silicon Valley brains to British ambition has been shoved into neutral, all because Britain decided it quite fancies telling American machines what they are allowed to say.

Washington has now suspended the much-trumpeted US-UK technology agreement, a decision driven by mounting alarm over Britain’s new censorship law, the Online Safety Act.

The idea that a British regulator might fine or muzzle American firms has landed in Washington like a dropped wrench.

One participant in the talks put it bluntly, telling The Telegraph, “Americans went into this deal thinking Britain were going to back off regulating American tech firms but realized it was going to restrict the speech of American chatbots.”

The Online Safety Act gives Britain the power to fine companies it believes are enabling “harmful” or “hateful” speech, concepts elastic enough to stretch around just about anything if you pull hard enough.

The communications regulator Ofcom has not been shy about using these powers.

Enforcement notices have already landed on the desks of major American firms, even when their servers, staff, and coffee machines are nowhere near Britain.

From Washington’s perspective, this looks less like safety and more like Britain peering over the Atlantic with a ruler, ready to rap American knuckles.

The White House had been keen on the £31 ($41) billion Tech Prosperity Deal, seeing it as a front door to closer ties on AI research and digital trade.

Instead, officials began to see the Online Safety Act as a mechanism for deciding what American platforms, and their algorithms, are allowed to say. Chatbots like ChatGPT or Elon Musk’s Grok suddenly looked like potential defendants in a British courtroom, accused of wrongthink.

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Transportation Secretary’s Daughter Calls for Complete Eradication of TSA After Nightmare Airport Experience

The daughter of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy exploded at the Transportation Security Administration Thursday after an interaction she said almost caused her to miss a flight.

“I nearly missed my flight this morning after the TSA made me wait 15 minutes for a pat-down because I’m pregnant and didn’t feel like getting radiation exposure from their body scanner,” Evita Duffy-Alfonso posted on X.

“The agents were passive-aggressive, rude, and tried to pressure me and another pregnant woman into just walking through the scanner because it’s ‘safe,’” she posted.

“After finally getting the absurdly invasive pat-down, I barely made my flight. All this for an unconstitutional agency that isn’t even good at its job,” she posted.

“Perhaps things would have gone more smoothly if I’d handed over my biometric data to a random private company (CLEAR). Then I could enjoy the special privilege of waiting in a shorter line to be treated like a terrorist in my own country. Is this freedom?” she wrote.

She summarized her experience as “ Travel, brought to you by George Orwell — and the privilege of convenience based solely on your willingness to surrender biometric data and submit to radiation exposure?”

“The ‘golden age of transportation’ cannot begin until the TSA is gone,” she wrote.

That post followed a briefer eruption.

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Trump HUD Hunts Down Fraud in Colorado: 221 Dead People Were Getting Housing

Ready for another exciting episode of “Rampant Welfare Fraud Costs the Taxpayers Billions?” Well, here we are; this time it’s Colorado, and the fraud has to do with housing assistance from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Investigators have uncovered 221 people receiving federal housing assistance who have no business receiving it, unless one can consider a coffin or an urn “housing.” 

That’s right. 221 dead people, out of almost 3,000 people in Colorado who were improperly receiving benefits from HUD.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is investigating whether Colorado providers helped nearly 3,000 people swindle taxpayer money from Uncle Sam, The Post has learned.

The investigation comes after an internal HUD audit found that benefits were granted to 221 dead people, while another 87 were otherwise ineligible.

The department also said that another 2,519 beneficiaries will need to undergo additional verification.

Here’s the question: Were these just mistakes, the results of bad record-keeping, or deliberate fraud? Not that either is exactly a comfortable finding; when the answer is either criminality or gross incompetence, the taxpayers take a bath either way. And HUD is calling this apparent fraud.

“From deceased tenants to individuals receiving HUD housing benefits who were never supposed to, the Department has questions for HUD-supported housing providers in Colorado, and we expect prompt answers and enforcement action,” a HUD spokesperson told The Post.

The apparent fraud took place in most of the Rocky Mountain State’s 59 public housing agencies (PHAs) and was particularly pronounced in the Denver Housing Authority, a source said.

HUD officials are set to demand PHAs perform additional verification of beneficiaries and remove both deceased tenants and ineligible beneficiaries from their rolls.

And what else is going to happen?

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It Seems Biden’s FBI Hid Stats Showing Armed Civilians Stopped Criminal Shooters

Democrats want our guns, and they want to repeal the Second Amendment. They’ve been very clear about their agenda for quite some time now. Unfortunately for them, jurisprudence and good, old-fashioned American stubbornness are not on their side. Americans own hundreds of millions of firearms, ranging from handguns to various rifles.

Why? Because guns save lives. Far more often than they’re used in criminal acts. That fact is inconvenient for Democrats, however, who routinely conflate gun death stats by including 19-year-old gangbangers as “children” who are victims of gun violence, and by classifying a shooting that took place near an elementary school at 2 am as a “school shooting.”

But this latest video takes the Democrats’ lies to a whole new, and dangerous, level.

“This is fricking huge,” the woman said. “Armed citizens stopped 48 percent of all criminal shooters last year, and the FBI was just caught massively lying about those numbers in their public reports.”

“They recorded, get this, none of them. Zero percent,” she said. “Now you and I and everyone else have seen those local heroes on social media, but rarely do we ever see those stories on mainstream media.”

“Well, the script is about to flip,” she continued, “because a new study by the Crime Prevention Research Center reveals that armed civilians stopped over one-third of active criminal shooters between 2014 and 2024. Nearly ten times higher than the FBI’s reported 3.7 percent average.”

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“Fraud tourists” traveled to Minnesota after a friend told them state programs were “a good opportunity to make money,” prosecutors say

Federal prosecutors announced new indictments Thursday in the widening Minnesota fraud scandal, this time involving two Philadelphia-based men accused of traveling to Minneapolis after a friend told them the taxpayer-funded programs there presented “a good opportunity to make money.”

Anthony Waddell Jefferson and Lester Brown are accused of siphoning millions from federally funded programs administered by Minnesota officials that were meant to help people with disabilities and those suffering from addiction.

Unlike many of the individuals previously caught up in the state’s sprawling fraud scandal, they don’t appear to have ties to Minnesota’s large Somali-American community. Prosecutors say they don’t appear to have ties to Minnesota at all.

“Minnesota has become a magnet for fraud, so much so that we have developed a fraud tourism industry — people coming to our state purely to exploit and defraud its programs,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson, who brought the new charges. “This is a deeply unsettling reality that all Minnesotans should understand.”

Court filings allege the men submitted up to $3.5 million in “fake and inflated bills” for Medicaid reimbursements after they set up a company intended to provide housing and other services to individuals who qualified for the program. They allegedly fleeced the housing program in Minnesota despite “living on the other side of the country and having no network in or connections to Minnesota or its communities.” 

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Soros-Backed Fairfax DA Repeatedly Dropped Charges Against an Illegal Immigrant — Now Someone’s Dead

The Democrats’ soft-on-crime, pro-illegal immigration policies are deadly. There have been far too many stories about career criminals with multiple arrests being given slaps on the wrist before they’re turned loose on our communities to rob, rape, and murder innocents.

But this story out of Reston, Virginia, takes the cake. Illegal immigrant Marvin Fernando Morales-Ortez, from El Salvador, has been charged with several crimes in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Including a first-degree murder charge in 2021.

But the Soros-backed Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney Steve Descano entered a nolle prosequi and declined to prosecute not only that first-degree murder charge, but several more of Morales-Ortiz’s criminal offenses dating back to 2020.

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Haitians Allegedly Bilked Taxpayers Out Of Millions In SNAP Scam

United States Attorney Leah Foley of the District of Massachusetts announced Wednesday that two Haitian immigrants to the United States were facing food stamp fraud charges.

Antonio Bonheur, 74, of Mattapan, and Saul Alisme, 21, of Hyde Park, were each indicted on a single count of food stamp fraud over a scheme that bilked over $7 million in benefits from two bodegas in the Boston area, according to a Department of Justice (DOJ) release. Foley described how the bodega owners ripped off taxpayers during a press conference.

“These defendants exchanged SNAP benefits for cash, which they pocketed. Bohneur, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Haiti, owned the Jesula Variety Store. Alisme, a lawful permanent resident also from Haiti, owned the Saul Mache Mixe Store,” Foley told reporters. “These two businesses were co-located within a single storefront in Boston. To be certain, these were not supermarkets. They were not full-service groceries. It would be a huge stretch to even call them convenience stores.”

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