Tag: donald trump

US OBLITERATES 3 More Venezuelan Drug Boats Just Hours After President Trump Designates Fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

United States Southern Command on Monday announced that Joint Task Force Southern Spear took out three narcotrafficking vessels in the Eastern Pacific. 

A total of eight “narco-terrorists” were killed in the strikes. “Intelligence confirmed that the vessels were transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and were engaged in narco-trafficking,” US SOUTHCOM said.

Video from the strikes shows massive explosions on each boat, turning them into burning piles of rubble.

US Southern Command said in a statement on X,

On Dec. 15, at the direction of @SecWar Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted lethal kinetic strikes on three vessels operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations in international waters. Intelligence confirmed that the vessels were transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and were engaged in narco-trafficking. A total of eight male narco-terrorists were killed during these actions—three in the first vessel, two in the second and three in the third.

Trump signed an executive order earlier on Monday to designate fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) and empower his administration to take on the “concentrated, large-scale terror attacks by organized adversaries.”

This will likely be used to justify the defense of America against drug cartels further, as the order directs the Secretary of War and Secretary of Homeland Security to “update all directives regarding the Armed Forces’ response to chemical incidents in the homeland to include the threat of illicit fentanyl.”

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President Trump Drops a Bomb: “The Election Was Rigged in 2020. We Have All the Ammunition… It’s Coming Out in Truckloads”

President Donald Trump made a shocking admission this past weekend. His statements were making waves in political circles.

Trump says his administration is about to release “truckloads” of evidence PROVING the 2020 election was “RIGGED” by Democrats.

He added that he has evidence Gavin Newsom is rigging California elections with mail-in ballots.

“They’re professionals at cheating because we won in 2016 by a lot. The election was rigged in 2020. We have all the ammunition, all the stuff, and you’ll see it come out. It’s coming out in truckloads”

“California more than any other place is so rigged. It’s such a rigged election — If the vote in California was legitimate, which it’s not, they have 38 million ballots. Everything is mail-in voting. They mail out 38 million ballots, and they come in. Where the hell did they go, and where did they come from?

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Trump Is Using the ‘Misinformation’ Censorship Playbook Republicans Attacked Biden For

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson recently complained about alleged “lies, smears and AI deepfakes that are designed to deceive Americans” about President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda. Pressed on whether the government was talking with social media platforms to stem this purported misinformation, the spokesperson said, “Yes and we are also putting resources forward to ensure DHS combats this.”

It wasn’t so long ago that candidate Trump and his Republican allies were decrying the Joe Biden administration for pressuring platforms to police misinformation. The Trump administration seems to have warmed to the idea. 

Many on the left, who previously supported giving the government greater power to combat so-called misinformation, are and should rightly be fearful of a Trump administration empowered to censor speech it disagrees with.

The DHS announcement signals a deeper shift toward government-driven moderation of online speech—a shift that threatens to turn every administration into a speech arbiter. The power to dictate what can be said on the internet is inherently prone to abuse, no matter who holds it. The stakes are high.

Jawboning for Me but Not for Thee

Under the First Amendment, federal and state governments cannot censor speech they dislike, so instead of blatantly shutting down a news organization or online platform, government actors often try to force a company to do their bidding through more subtle means. These demands often happen behind closed doors, backed by an implicit—or sometimes explicit—threat that refusal will bring government retaliation. Because the government wields so much power over businesses, these companies understand they are in a weak position to resist. This practice is called “jawboning.”

When the Biden administration made public and private demands that social media companies remove “misinformation” and “disinformation” related to the COVID-19 pandemic, it ended up at the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri. The Court ultimately punted by ruling that individual social media users who claimed their speech was suppressed lacked standing to sue. 

This was disappointing. Internal emails from various social media companies showed that senior leaders felt they had no choice but to comply with the administration. Meta’s leaders internally said that they needed to change policy because they had “bigger fish to fry with the Administration.” YouTube claimed it needed to keep Biden officials happy since they wanted to “work closely with the administration on multiple policy fronts.” Amazon moved to “accelerate” its policy changes ahead of a call with Biden officials. Thankfully, the Supreme Court did at least uphold the principle that jawboning is wrong and unconstitutional in another case, NRA v. Vullo. 

Today, the Trump administration appears to be invoking Murthy as cover for its own pressure campaigns against online platforms. Apple removed an app that allowed users to report sightings of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in real time. After complaints from Attorney General Pam Bondi, Meta removed a Facebook group that shared information about ICE agents. Now, the DHS says it is communicating with social media companies about supposed immigration misinformation. It would be naive to suppose it hasn’t applied any pressure during those talks.

It is entirely possible that the government can point to specific acts of illegality. It’s also possible that some of this content violates platform policies. For example, Meta claimed it removed the Facebook page with information on ICE agents for violating its “policies against coordinated harm.” It is possible this group was persistently violating this policy. But as long as these companies remain vulnerable to government pressure, we cannot simply trust officials who insist their demands are legitimate.

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The Siren Song of War

In October of 2002, I shocked many in my Congressional District and beyond by voting against giving President George W. Bush authorization to use military force in Iraq.

The night before that vote, my older sister told me a Knoxville television station had conducted a poll which found that in its viewing area 74 percent were for the war, 9 percent were against, and 17 percent were undecided.

When I pushed the button at about 3:00 the next day to cast that vote, I wondered if I might be ending my political career. My vote was so highly publicized that it was clearly the most unpopular thing I had ever done.

However, after three or four years and much to my amazement, that vote became the most popular of the more than 16,000 I cast during my 30 years in the U.S. House.

Unfortunately, the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) that the Congress passed then is once again relevant because President Trump and his advisers seem to think it gives them authority to go to war in Venezuela without the declaration by Congress called for in our Constitution.

When we went to war in Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein’s total military budget was about 2/10 of one percent of ours. Venezuela’s is even less. Neither of those two countries were or are capable of attacking us in any serious way. Neither has even threatened to do so.

Two polls in late November by CBS News/YouGov and Reuters/Ipsos both showed that about 70 percent of the American people were opposed to going to war in Venezuela, and probably most of the other 30 percent did not really want such a war but just did not want to oppose President Trump.

While the overwhelming majority of the American people do not want more dangerous illegal drugs coming into this Country, far more drugs are coming from China and Mexico and various other places. If we take action against Venezuela, which country is next?

Just before we went to war against Iraq, U.S. News & World Report had a story headlined “Why The Rush To War?” We should be asking the same thing today.

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Ending the Woke Monopoly: White House Takes Aim at Higher Ed’s Ideological Capture

Last week, the White House convened an education roundtable with U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon titled, “Biased Professors, Woke Administrators, and the End of Free Inquiry on U.S. Campuses.”

Secretary McMahon opened the event by stating, “It was an honor to be at the White House today with this dedicated coalition of students, faculty, institutional leaders, and policy advocates to highlight the issue of woke ideology and the capture of our institutions of higher education. DEI policies have turned universities from free marketplaces of ideas to purveyors of manufactured ideological conformity, chilling free speech and undermining academic rigor.”

She explained, “We are committed to working with higher education leaders to reverse course from these decades of decline.”

The Secretary highlighted actions taken by the Trump Administration, including dissolving DEI programs, enforcing merit-based practices, and guiding universities to comply with federal law, noting that over 400 institutions have made substantive changes. The U.S. Department of Education is working to incentivize universities to operate with fairness, academic rigor, and civil discourse.

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Decades of Global Drone War Made Trump’s Caribbean Killing Spree Possible

On September 2, 2025, a small fishing boat carrying 11 people was targeted by a U.S. Reaper drone off the coast of Venezuela. Hellfire missiles were fired. Two survivors clung to the wreckage. Their identities and motives were unknown. Their behavior showed no hostility. Moments later, the drone operator launched a second strike — the so-called “double tap” — killing the final survivors. This scene is shocking, but it should not be surprising to anyone who has followed the trajectory of the U.S.’s drone wars. This tactic is familiar from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and, most recently, Gaza, where the Israeli military has used much worse violence to conduct genocide.

The U.S.’s first drone strike in the Caribbean, and the footage of the incident, reignited a debate about a conflict that Washington refuses to call a war — because it isn’t one. Instead, the Trump administration is using sheer violence to terrorize non-white populations and, as usual, has normalized lethal force far from declared battlefields and without any legal mandate.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has approved at least 21 additional strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since September, killing at least 87 people. He has aggressively defended the very first operation, insisting he would have authorized the second strike as well — despite claiming he did not see it. Hegseth even misinterpreted the visible smoke on the video as the “fog of war,” seemingly unaware that the term refers to uncertainty in conflict, not the physical aftermath of a missile strike.

The details matter because they reveal something essential: the senior leadership overseeing these operations does not appear interested in the law, accuracy, or the basic meaning of proportionality. Instead, it has embraced escalation and mass murder as official policy.

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The Case Against American Intervention in Venezuela

As the USS Gerald R. Ford—the largest aircraft carrier afloat—casts its shadow along the Venezuelan coast, the United States must confront an uncomfortable question: What national interest is being protected by threatening a country that poses no military, territorial, or existential danger to the American republic?

The answer, made clear by an array of respected American scholars, former officials, and ex-military insiders, has nothing to do with security. Instead, it arises from a familiar mixture of ideology, geopolitical control, and the old reflex of imperial overreach. This is not defense. This is theater—one part provocation, one part political opportunism, and no part necessity.

Among the clearest voices cutting through the rhetoric is professor John Mearsheimer, perhaps the most prominent American realist in international relations. He does not mince words: Venezuela is not a threat to the United States. Its military lacks both the capacity and the intention to project power beyond its borders. Suggesting otherwise is “laughable,” he notes, because the true irritant is ideological. Venezuela’s Bolivarian model—imperfect and embattled as it is—represents a deviation from Washington’s preferred political order, a deviation the US has repeatedly sought to crush in Latin America for decades. For Mearsheimer, even if one entertained the fantasy of using force to change the regime, the idea collapses immediately under logistical absurdity and moral bankruptcy. Invading a nation of 28 million people, and then attempting to occupy and “stabilize” it, would be catastrophic in cost, chaotic in outcome, and impossible to justify.

The national security pretext collapses further under the testimony of Sheriff David Hathaway, a former Drug Enforcement Administration supervisory agent with firsthand experience in Latin America. He dismisses the drug-trafficking narrative not just as false, but as deliberately false. Cocaine originates in Colombia and Peru, not Venezuela, and the US fentanyl crisis has nothing to do with Caracas. There is no vast Maduro-led drug conspiracy, Hathaway explains, only a political fiction designed to mimic past excuses for intervention. He is blunt in stating that Washington has repeatedly used narcotics accusations as camouflage for intrusion, sabotage, and coercion. This is not about drugs. It is about dominance.

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Trump Calls for National AI Framework, Curbing ‘Onerous’ State-Based Regulations

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order calling for a national policy framework on AI regulation, curbing states from pushing “onerous” laws.

The Trump administration seeks to have America dominate in this “new frontier” of technology. The executive order would protect American innovation while seeking to prevent a costly regulatory regime from various states by:

  • Ordering the attorney general to establish an AI Litigation Task Force to challenge “unconstitutional, preempted, or otherwise unlawful State AI laws that harm innovation”
  • Directing the Commerce secretary to evaluate state-based AI regulation that conflicts with the national AI framework and withhold non-deployment Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) funding from any state with onerous state AI rules
  • Instructing the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to take actions that would hamper states’ ability to force AI companies to embed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and other models that would violate the Federal Trade Commission Act
  • Calls for the development of a national AI legislative framework to preempt state AI laws that curb AI innovation

A White House press release noted that state legislatures have introduced over 1,000 different AI regulatory bills, which would create a “patchwork” of rules and other requirements. It also argues that left-leaning states such as California and Colorado are pushing AI companies to censor certain output and insert “left-wing ideology” in their models.

“The most restrictive States should not be allowed to dictate national AI policy at the expense of America’s domination of this new frontier,” the White House press release stated.

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Trump: Strikes on Venezuelan land could begin ‘pretty soon’

President Donald Trump indicated on Thursday that U.S. military strikes on Venezuelan soil could come “pretty soon,” following a recent seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker.

On Thursday, President Trump was asked by a reporter whether the military campaign against Venezuela is still about stopping drugs from entering the United States, or if the administration is motivated by the nation’s oil resources after the interdiction of a Venezuelan oil tanker.

“Well, it’s about a lot of things, but one of the things it’s about is the fact that they’ve allowed millions of people to come into our country from their prisons, from gangs, from drug dealers, and from mental institutions, probably proportionately more than anybody else,” Trump responded.

“We had 11,888 murderers come into our country, many of them are from Venezuela. We had thousands of Tren de Aragua – the gang – come in from [Venezuela], which they say is the most violent gang,” he continued. “So it has to do with a lot of things, they’ve treated us badly, and I guess now we’re not treating them so good. If you look at the drug traffic, drug traffic by sea is down 92%… anybody getting involved in that right now is not doing well.”

“… And we’ll start that on land too, it’s gonna be starting on land pretty soon,” Trump added without providing further detail.

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Trump Education Department Announces They’ve Found More Than a BILLION in Student Aid Fraud

The Trump Education Department has been focusing on identifying student loan fraud and they have a lot to show for their efforts. They just announced that they have uncovered more than a billion dollars in fraud.

Trump’s Education Secretary, Linda McMahon, may be the last cabinet official of her kind if Trump has his way. Like many Republicans going all the way back to Ronald Reagan, Trump wants to do away with the department completely.

McMahon and Trump have successfully done away with a number of horrible Bide-era policies on student loans and financial aid, which has helped them to identify all of this fraud.

The Education Department released this statement:

U.S. Department of Education Prevents More Than $1 Billion in Federal Student Aid Fraud This Year, Additional Crackdowns Expected in 2026

The U.S. Department of Education (the Department) today announced that it has prevented $1 billion in Federal student aid fraud since January 2025. Earlier this year, the Trump Administration implemented enhanced fraud controls governing how institutions of higher education distribute financial assistance, including mandatory identity verification for certain first-time student applicants. This effort has halted more than $1 billion in attempted financial aid theft by fraudsters, including coordinated international fraud rings and AI bots pretending to be students.

The Biden Administration’s decision to require identity verification from less than one percent of students created a prime opportunity for fraudsters to exploit the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA®) process and steal taxpayer funds. Colleges and universities across the country reported being under siege by highly sophisticated fraud rings and requested the Trump Administration for help.

“American citizens have to present an ID to purchase a ticket to travel or to rent a car – it’s only right that they should present an ID to access tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to fund their education,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “From day one, the Trump Administration has been committed to rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal government. As a result, $1 billion in taxpayer funds will now support students pursuing the American dream, rather than falling into the hands of criminals. Merry Christmas, taxpayers!”

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