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DeSantis proposes new Congressional map for Fla., giving GOP 4 extra seats

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has proposed an overhaul of the state’s congressional map, designed to net the Republican Party 4 additional seats in the U.S. House. This move is widely viewed by Democrats as a strategic “tit-for-tat” response to recent Democrat redistricting victories in states like Virginia and California.

Nonetheless, by establishing a projected 24–4 GOP advantage, the governor’s proposal reportedly seeks to ensure Florida’s congressional delegation accurately reflects the state’s massive shift in voter registration, which now sees Republicans leading Democrats by over 1.5 million voters.

This update would modernize the current split to better align with the state’s significant population growth and clear political mandate. Supporters have described the move as a necessary step to solidify Florida’s influence and provide a decisive Republican firewall in the House ahead of the 2026 midterms.

“Florida got shortchanged in the 2020 Census, and we’ve been fighting for fair representation ever since,” DeSantis (R-Fla.)told Fox News Digital. “Our population has since grown dramatically, and we have moved from a Democrat majority to a 1.5 million Republican advantage. Drawing maps based on race, which is reflected in our current congressional districts, is unconstitutional and should be prohibited.”

“Our new map for 2026 makes good on my promise to conduct mid-decade redistricting, and it more fairly represents the makeup of Florida today,” DeSantis added.

DeSantis’ latest congressional map proposal follows similar mid-decade redistricting efforts in states like Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, which are collectively expected to bolster the GOP’s seat count in the U.S. House.

While the move also coincides with a recent shift in Virginia that will highly likely favor Democrats, sources familiar with the governor’s thinking similarly argued that the Florida redraw is primarily driven by the state’s massive population growth and a significant shift in voter registration since the 2020 Census.

DeSantis has maintained that the update is necessary to ensure fair representation for Florida’s expanded electorate and to move toward a more “race-neutral” map, rather than acting as a direct retaliation for political developments in other states.

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Shutting Down the War Machine

Right at this moment, we are witnessing an unprecedented shift of resources from domestic investments in the United States to the military-industrial complex (aka the war machine). The only comparable period in our history was the buildup to World War II, when the United States confronted a powerful adversary in Nazi Germany with designs to control not just Europe, but the world. The current buildup is breathtaking in scope and will certainly prove devastating in its impact — not just on this country’s foreign and domestic policies but also on the economic prospects of average Americans.

When, in 2023, my colleague Ben Freeman and I first conceived of our book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, we viewed it in part as a cautionary tale about just how high the Pentagon budget might rise in the years to come (absent pushback from Congress and the taxpaying public). By the time our book came out in November 2025, however, the Pentagon budget had already topped the $1 trillion mark and, only recently, President Trump has proposed to instantly add another $500 billion to that already staggering figure and to do so in a single year’s time. And imagine this: such a proposed increase alone is higher than the total military budget of any other nation on Earth. Mind you, the current high levels of spending have already underwritten a provocative, unnecessary intervention in Venezuela and a region-wide war in the Middle East, and the larger costs of all this in human lives and damage to the global economy are guaranteed to shape the lives of the rest of us globally for years to come.

To add insult to injury, the Pentagon announced that it would seek a $200 billion supplemental appropriation to pay for its war on Iran, which has spread across the Middle East. That $200 billion would have been in addition to the $1.5 billion proposed for the Pentagon’s future budget. According to an analysis by Pentagon budget expert Stephen Semler, the Iran war, which started on February 28th with Israeli and U.S. air strikes on that country, cost the United States more than $28 billion just in its first two weeks. And to put that in perspective, $28 billion is more than three times the Trump administration’s proposed annual budgets for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency (at a time when the climate crisis and the need to head off future pandemics are essential to the health and security of all Americans). Worse yet, it’s all for a completely senseless war that should never have been started.

As President Trump alternates between engaging in negotiations to end the war and threatening to wipe Iran off the map — or even just walking away to bomb another day — there are reports that the supplemental budget request to pay for the war on Iran will shrink from the proposed $200 billion to $98 billion. And that $98 billion will include other things in addition to war costs, including disaster relief and aviation modernization.

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Israel Deployed Iron Dome and Troops to Support UAE Defense Amid Iran Attacks — First Deployment Abroad

Israel quietly deployed its Iron Dome air defense system along with dozens of IDF troops to the United Arab Emirates in the early days of the Iran conflict, according to reporting, marking the first operational use of the system outside Israel and the United States as Tehran unleashed a sustained and intense missile and drone barrage against the Gulf state.

According to reports published Sunday by Axios and The Jerusalem Post, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the deployment early in the conflict following a call with UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, directing the Israel Defense Forces to send an Iron Dome battery, interceptors, and several dozen operators to help defend the country as Iran escalated its attacks across the region.

The move represents an unprecedented step in Israeli defense policy, with officials confirming it was the first time an Iron Dome system had been transferred abroad for active use. A senior Israeli official said the UAE became the first country outside Israel and the United States to deploy the system operationally, with another official noting it intercepted dozens of incoming threats.

Iran’s barrage on the UAE was among the most intense of the conflict, with more than 550 ballistic and cruise missiles and over 2,200 drones launched at the country — more than at any other nation, including Israel — with numerous strikes hitting civilian infrastructure, residential areas, and economic hubs in what analysts say reflects Tehran’s effort to pressure U.S.-aligned regional partners.

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See If You Can Spot Why Some Democrats Think President Trump Staged Latest Assassination Attempt

Pssst. Did you hear the conspiracy theory about President Donald Trump staging his own attempted assassination? It’s in the news. 

The conspiracy theory goes that the most transparent president in the history of America staged his own assassination attempt as a false flag. This means that these attempts are his own darned fault because he planned them. 

Yeah, that must be it. 

Besides, Trump is looking too good, too presidential, too heroic for there to be any other explanation for this political violence against him than that he staged attacks to burnish his Q rating. 

Conspiracy theories abounded after the Butler assassination attempt. But they have exploded now. Even as the gunshots sent White House correspondents diving under the tables at their big dinner and giving away lucite blocks and gold plaques like Halloween candy, the conspiracy theory stories have exploded.

Wired ran a story called, “STAGED: Conspiracy Theories Are Everywhere Following White House Correspondents’ Dinner Shooting.” Two days before the latest attempt occurred, CNN ran a story headlined, “How would an assassination attempt be staged?” The day before, CNN ran a story about Trump staging his own attempted assassination in Butler, Penn., titled, “The conspiracy-theory monster that Trump fed may be coming for him.” WaPo reported, “First came the shooting and then came the conspiracies.” And none other than the New York Times bannered a story called, “After Correspondents Dinner Shooting, Rumors and Conspiracy Theories Spread.” The piece was subtitled, “Influencers jumped to fill the information void with conspiracy theories about the attack at the White House Correspondents’ dinner on Saturday.”

Actually, there was no void to fill. Right after the shooting, the president held a presser with multiple Justice officials to discuss next steps. We knew the name of the would-be assassin, had social media information, knew where he lived, and even found his Teacher of the Month plaque from the misguided Torrance, Calif., school that hired this monster. The president spent hours on the phone with reporters on Fox and ABC News throughout the night and the following morning, filling the alleged void.

And still we got the pap about Trump running a false flag to help himself.

Of course, the president has his haters. Remember, there was a swath of reporters who claimed they’d boycott the White House Correspondents’ Dinner if the president showed up. Did they do that to Barack Obama after it was revealed he charged reporters with espionage, tapped the AP’s phones, or spied on reporters or naw? The naws have it.

Or, are a few of those “fake news” conveyors all unhinged like this one, who said while hiding under a table and within earshot of a sitting congressman on Saturday night, “I hope they kill the orange MF.” 

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Military Disasters and the End of Empire

Writing more than 2,000 years ago, the Greek historian Plutarch gave us an eloquent description of what modern historians now call “micro-militarism.” When an imperial power like Athens then, or America now, is in decline, its leaders often react emotionally by mounting seemingly bold military strikes in hopes of regaining the imperial grandeur that’s slipping through their fingers. Instead of another of the great victories the empire won at its peak of power, however, such military misadventures only serve to accelerate the ongoing decline, erasing whatever aura of imperial majesty remains and revealing instead the moral rot deep inside the ruling elite.

There is mounting historical evidence that America is indeed an empire in steep decline, while President Donald Trump’s war of choice against Iran is becoming the sort of micro-military disaster that helped destroy successive empires over the past 2,500 years — from ancient Athens to medieval Portugal to modern Spain, Great Britain, and now the United States. And at the core of every such ill-fated war-making decision lay a problematic leader, often born into wealth and prestige, whose personal inadequacies reflected and ramified the many irrationalities that make imperial decline such a painful process.

During that demoralizing downward spiral, imperial armies, so lethal in an empire’s ascent, can err by plunging their countries into draining, even disastrous “micro-military” misadventures — psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the loss of imperial power by trying to occupy new territories or display awe-inspiring military might. Although such micro-militarism often chose targets that proved strategically unsustainable, the psychological pressures upon declining empires are so strong that they all too often gamble their prestige on just such misadventures. Not only did such disasters add financial pressures to a fading empire’s many troubles, but in a humiliating fashion, they also invariably exposed its eroding power while exacerbating the destabilizing impact of imperial decline in the capitals of empire (whether Athens, Lisbon, Madrid, London, or Washington, D.C.).

In our moment, when the bombs stop falling and the rubble is finally cleared from the streets of Tehran and Beirut, the impact on U.S. global power of such a de facto defeat will become all too clear — as alliances like NATO atrophy, American hegemony evaporates, legitimacy is lost, global disorder rises, and the world economy suffers.

Let me now turn from the disasters of the present imperial moment to the lessons of history to explore the sort of lasting damage that Donald Trump’s micro-military misadventure in the Middle East might be inflicting on this country’s declining imperium.

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Did Biden Send the Bahamas Straight to Beijing?

Let’s take a little trip to the Bahamas and explore what a little Joe Biden-era neglect will get you.  

A little over a week ago, officials from the island nation broke ground for a new speciality hospital, calling it a “new era for healthcare.”  It’s supposed to take 30 to 36 months to complete. 

The project will sit on 50 acres on New Providence Highway in Nassau. The hospital will have 200 beds with “emergency and intensive care services, modern diagnostic labs, and even the country’s first national reference morgue,” which will ease pressure on nearby overcrowded facilities. It will also have have access to state-of-the-art technology and equipment that Health Minister Dr. Michael Darville says “will reduce the need for patients to seek care abroad, and it will allow our healthcare professionals to operate in an environment that supports the level of care that they’re trained to deliver.” 

Sounds like a good thing for the Bahamas, right?  

Maybe it would be if China wasn’t footing most of the bill. Because when China foots the bill, there are always more strings attached than last year’s tangled Christmas tree lights. The reality is that it’s more of the textbook debt-trap Chicom diplomacy that plagues the Western Hemisphere, only this time it’s happening in a nation that’s closest point is literally just 50 miles from Florida. Oh, and the Biden administration apparently just handed it over on a silver platter.   

The healthcare system in the Bahamas isn’t awful compared to some other similar nations, but it is no longer adequate enough for the aging population, and there is plenty of room to improve it. It’s overcrowded, people are often faced with long wait times, and it’s outdated with crumbling infrastructure and various equipment shortages. The Princess Margaret Hospital, which is currently the main facility in Nassau, was built in the 1950s. Patients often come to the United States for specific procedures, and nurses and other trained medical staff often move abroad to take better-paying jobs. 

So, back to this New Providence Specialty Hospital. The framework for a deal between the Bahamas and China was signed last summer, and in January of this year the loan was locked in. But, as China does, this wasn’t just a loan. 

It was a concessional loan, meaning the terms were soft: a 2% interest rate over a 20-year period, after a 5-year grace period with no interest. Often managed by the Export–Import Bank of China, these loans are handed out as an act of “goodwill” and diplomacy, but the reality is that China uses them to build its own infrastructure, exploit natural resources, and expand its geopolitical influence.   

And the Bahamas had to agree to more than just cash. First, the loan and any other financing is governed by Chinese law. That means any disputes must go to Beijing, not the Bahamas and not an international court. The country is essentially welcoming Chinese law onto its own soil, which could end up having a negative effect on its sovereignty down the line. 

Second, there’s a clause that says the state-owned China Railway Construction Corporation Ltd. must be the main contractor on the project. That company is currently on the United States Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)’s restricted investment list due its links to China’s military-industrial complex.    

Third, there’s a 50-50 labor clause, meaning that half of the workers on the project must be Chinese. 

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US “Being Humiliated” by Iran’s Leadership, German Chancellor Merz Says

A seemingly ever-widening rift between Europe and Trump’s America is emerging as the war with Iran drags on, exposing not only strategic confusion but growing skepticism among America’s closest allies.

What began as a show of force has increasingly come to resemble a costly stalemate—one that critics, of whom there is no shortage, argue lacks both clarity and direction. At the center of the latest criticism leveled at the direction of Trump is German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who has sharply questioned his administration’s handling of the conflict.

Speaking publicly to students in Germany, Merz, who leads the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), warned that the United States appears to have entered the war without a viable endgame. “The Iranians are clearly stronger than expected and the Americans clearly have no truly convincing strategy,” he said.

“An entire nation [the United States] is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, especially by these so-called Revolutionary Guards,” the German Chancellor said, adding that he “hopes that this ends as quickly as possible.”

Merz’s comments reflect a broader unease across Europe, where leaders are now grappling with the economic fallout of a conflict they did not initiate. Energy prices have surged, supply chains have tightened, and the costs are being passed directly to European taxpayers.

Additionally, such language signals a dramatic shift from earlier European support for the campaign. While some leaders initially aligned with Trump’s stated objectives, the prolonged conflict and lack of measurable progress have eroded that backing.

It’s worth noting that Merz was one of the liberal-globalist EU leaders that initially baked Trump’s moves in the Middle East. The disruption of the Strait of Hormuz has proven particularly damaging. As one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints, its partial closure has driven oil prices above $100 per barrel, intensifying inflation across already fragile European economies.

Merz did not mince words about the consequences. The war, he said, is “costing us a great deal of money,” underscoring the growing frustration among European leaders who feel sidelined in decisions with global repercussions.

At the same time, diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict appear increasingly chaotic. Planned negotiations between American and Iranian officials have repeatedly stalled, including a high-profile meeting in Islamabad that was abruptly abandoned.

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Shorter Pritzker: Trump Deserved It, and I’ll Justify It by Completely and Hilariously Wrecking Myself

J.B. Pritzker’s contemptible reaction to the assassination attempt on President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner was about as bad as one can imagine, but things devolved into a complete and hilarious self-own when Pritzker’s “Trump started it” rationale was lost in the blur of his own memory. 

Only long-time, discerning readers of PJ Media will appreciate that the joke was on Pritzker.  And, I must say, it’s hard to write when you’re laughing at him so much. I’ll bravely press on, however.

Pritzker was interviewed on CNN Monday — that’s a day-and-a-half after the crazed leftist TDS-afflicted Democrat would-be killer attacked the White House Correspondents Dinner, where Trump was a featured speaker. That means the dieting Pritzker had plenty of time to compose and lose his thoughts in one of his fat rolls before he even thought to fact-check them. 

That’s a lot of time in politics. 

But here was Pritzker, urging CNN’s Manu Raju to adopt his premise that it was all Trump’s fault because he started it. And besides trying to get Raju to ignore all the times the Democrats have called for, organized, and fundraised for political violence, he spectacularly beclowned himself with the following exchange.

“Remember that it’s been Donald Trump and the Republicans that have called for political violence,” Pritzker straight-facedly told Manu Raju. And then, beckoning Raju to take his thought-journey with him, said, “You know, Donald Trump from the very beginning — remember when he talked about a protester at one of his rallies, that they should just beat him up, punch him…

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Harmeet Dhillon Announces DOJ’s Big Win Defending xAI from Colorado DEI Law

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon announced a major win for American artificial intelligence (AI) dominance after her department intervened in a lawsuit challenging a new Colorado law that prohibits “algorithmic discrimination” during an interview on Breitbart News Saturday.

Speaking with Breitbart News political editor Bradley Jaye, Dhillon revealed details on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) recent success at getting the state of Colorado to agree not to enforce SB24-205, which requires AI developers and deployers to satisfy certain disclosure, reporting, and prevention requirements when creating algorithm products designed for services like mortgage lending, student admissions, and job-candidate selection. 

The bill’s text included an explicit carveout for discriminatory algorithms designed to advance “diversity” or “redress historic discrimination,” and AI company xAI filed a lawsuit against the statute on April 9, alleging it is unconstitutional.

Marking the first time that the DOJ has intervened in a case challenging state regulations on AI, Dhillon’s team joined the case on behalf of xAI on Friday. Together, they argued that “embedding AI with state-mandated discrimination is a recipe for disaster.”

Emphasizing that the Civil Rights Division at the DOJ is meant to “protect American citizens, and even American companies, from discrimination on the basis of impermissible racial, gender, et cetera criteria,” Dhillon told Jaye that Colorado had attempted to require companies and municipalities to “look at outcomes and then racially balance and adjust their algorithms to produce outcomes that reflect the demographic population.”

“This is not required by law. In fact, it’s prohibited by federal law,” she stated. “And you know, worse, the statute actually carved out if people or companies are doing discrimination to remedy past discrimination, that’s okay. All of this is just nonsense, and it stifles innovation, and it’s illegal under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

In addition to violating the Fourteenth Amendment, Dhillon noted that xAI also has First Amendment arguments against the bill, “because, effectively, the state is compelling it to utter certain speech in furtherance of these DEI goals.”

“We’re not arguing that because the government doesn’t have that obligation, but we’re stepping in to protect American citizens and American companies,” she explained, before revealing the success of her efforts on Friday. 

“We had a great result yesterday,” Dhillon announced, recounting how Colorado “agreed to not enforce the law against xAI” within just a couple of hours of the DOJ intervening. 

“And by the evening, before we went to bed, we had Colorado agree to not enforce it against anybody until they send it back to the legislature to fix it,” she explained. “So it’s pretty much a total win for American consumers and companies, and the first instance of the United States Department of Justice stepping in on an AI case to really protect this innovation and protect Americans from discrimination by AI algorithmic manipulation.”

Highlighting why civil rights work should be “important” to people on the right side of the political aisle, Dhillon told Jaye that conservatives “have come to look at civil rights as something that’s been weaponized against Americans, but civil rights are for all Americans.”

“So what we’re doing in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division is exactly that — we’re standing up for all Americans, like in this xAI case.”

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Tim Walz Gets Nuked by Scott Jennings and Others for Claiming to be Against Political Violence After WHCD Shooting

After the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this weekend, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz published a tweet claiming that he is against political violence.

He could have fooled us.

Just last week, Walz attended a far left conference in Barcelona, Spain and bashed President Trump as a fascist. Greg Gutfeld later accused Walz of treason for doing this.

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