Tag: donald trump

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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Explosive Epstein photo release shows Trump, Clinton and ex-Prince Andrew… as disturbing images expose pedophile’s sick private world

House Democrats have released over a dozen new photographs of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein parading around with Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.

Democratic lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee unveiled 19 intimate photos from the estate of the disgraced financier.

The photos also depict graphic sex toys but it is unclear the location or dates of the images. 

The photos do not implicate any of the individuals in Epstein’s crimes. Democrats have selectively released 19 photos of a collection of 95,000 unseen images from Epstein’s estate. 

It is unclear why House Democrats have chosen to release these specific photos. The estate provided the House Oversight Committee with the images as part of the lawmakers’ investigation into Epstein. 

The President is pictured in the release on three separate occasions. 

One photo shows a bowl of condoms with a caricature of Trump’s face along with a sign saying, ‘Trump condom $4.50.’ Each condom shows Trump’s face with the text, ‘I’m HUUUUGE!’

‘These disturbing photos raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world,’ said Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee. ‘We will not rest until the American people get the truth.’

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The Bipartisan War on Prices Is Coming for Your Credit Card

In a scene that perfectly captures the strangeness of American politics today, President Donald Trump, a billionaire and self-styled champion of American business (at least the ones he likes) was all smiles during an Oval Office visit from Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist and mayor-elect of New York City.

For months, the two men traded the harshest of insults. Mamdani was a “communist” and “radical left lunatic”; Trump a “fascist” and “despot.” Yet with New York’s mayoral election over and cameras clicking, the insults were on hold. The men praised each other as “rational” and “productive.” Trump even joked that Mamdani might “surprise some conservative people.”

Give them points for collegiality, just don’t be surprised. Trump and Mamdani are only the latest example of the right and the left converging on economic issues. One likes price floors, the other likes rent control. They’re both waging the same “war on prices,” as the Cato Institute’s Ryan Bourne calls it. And this war enjoys rising bipartisan support.

Take legislation introduced earlier this year by what would have once been an unlikely duo: Sens. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) and Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.). Their “10 Percent Credit Card Interest Rate Cap Act“—also reflecting a Trump idea from the 2024 campaign—sounds compassionate. Who enjoys paying 25 percent interest?

In practice, price controls of all sorts are disastrous. Credit card interest rates are high because unsecured consumer lending is very risky. They’re the price for the lender taking a chance on a person. If the government artificially caps rates far below the market rate, banks will stop lending to riskier borrowers. That doesn’t just mean broke shopaholics. It includes the working single parent using a financial last resort before payday.

Just as rent controls can create a housing shortage by reducing the attractiveness of supplying those homes, interest-rate caps can create a credit shortage. They put millions of working-class Americans—the people proposals like these are supposed to protect—at risk of being “debanked.” Stripped of their credit cards, some will turn to payday lenders, loan sharks, and pawn shops, whose charges are far higher.

It gets worse. A cap this low wouldn’t merely shrink credit availability; it would invert it. At 10 percent, banks would only lend to the safest, highest-income borrowers. Credit cards would become a luxury product for the affluent—a financial advantage while everyone else is pushed into the financial shadows.

Then there’s the fact that millions of small businesses rely on credit cards. According to a Federal Reserve survey of small businesses, half of employer firms use them to fund operations. Cards function as unsecured working-capital lines for firms that lack collateral or a long credit history. A 10 percent cap would push them toward far costlier and riskier alternatives.

And forget about travel miles or cash back. Those programs are funded by interest charges, which a 10 percent cap would wipe out. When lenders cannot price risk through market rates, they shift the cost to higher fees, shorter grace periods, and more hidden charges. Consumers don’t necessarily pay less; they just pay differently and more opaquely.

Finally, because credit cards are the primary way tens of millions of Americans build credit histories, a cap would destroy a crucial ladder into the financial mainstream.

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The Global War You’ve Never Heard Of

American actions involving Venezuela have stirred up a flurry of theories and narratives around the United States’ strategic intentions.  Some theories highlight apparent contradictions between rhetoric and policy, such as President Trump’s pardons of major drug-traffickers despite his public anti-drug stance. Others frame potential U.S. military threats against Venezuela as being driven primarily by America’s dependence on oil.  Additional narratives have revived allegations of Venezuelan interference in U.S. elections, including claims from a former Maduro regime official about a “narco-terrorist war” against the United States.

In my effort to better understand the factors driving the building tensions around Venezuela, I decided to strip away all the explanations and start with what we know is happening.  The United States is striking small vessels, referred to as go-fast boats, reportedly carrying cocaine meant to be transferred onto ships bound for the Gulf of Guinea.  This sea route and the next step of the voyage have come to be known as Highway 10 because Venezuela is connected to the Gulf of Guinea via the 10th Parallel North on the globe.  The gulf includes several countries that tend to lack the resources necessary to patrol for and prevent the shipments.  From there, the payload can be passed on to the even poorer countries of the Sahel desert, where al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Russian mercenaries of the Africa Corps (not to be confused with the German unit of World War Two) have a certain level of autonomy and can move the cocaine to the Mediterranean Sea.  From there it enters the hands of Europe’s various iterations of the Mafia.  This drug route and the players involved has been laid out in a pretty detailed manner by the Argentine independent journalist Ignacio Montes de Oca under his X handle, @nachomdeo.

With this new information in mind, we can then apply events that we know have happened.  At the starting point of Highway 10, you have the United States destroying the go-fast boats before they can liaison with the ships bound for the Gulf of Guinea.  In the middle of the drug route you have the countries on the Gulf of Guinea, two of which have had coups in the last two months.  The first took place on November 26 in Guinea-Bissau, a key stopping point on Highway 10.  The second appears to be a failed coup that took place on December 7 in Benin, another country known to be on the Highway 10 route.

So at the starting point of the route, you have the U.S. striking go-fast boats.  In the middle, you have coups.  What’s happening at the finish point?  Well, in Italy, the Carabinieri are carrying out large-scale operations against the unpronounceable ’Ndrangheta.  The ’Ndrangheta happens to be one of the criminal organizations the independent journalist Montes de Oca cites as central to this route.  For his part, French president Emmanuel Macron has been leading the call to intensify the fight against organized crime in Europe.  France even sent a battleship to the Caribbean.

I have no idea if the strikes on boats, the coups along the Gulf of Guinea, and the crackdown on organized crime in Europe are all coordinated or even connected, but I do know that within a small time frame, a series of events have taken place that make it difficult to be involved in the drug trade at the beginning, middle, and end of Highway 10.

So how do you condense all of this into a concept we can discuss without getting lost in tropes about war for oil or American imperialism?  Well, the first thing to do is give it a name to make it more manageable.  The Highway Ten War feels succinct to me.

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There They Go Again in Venezuela

Mark Twain allegedly quipped, “God created war so Americans would learn geography.” Whether or not he actually said that, it would be a good test – for the world’s mightiest military power to be prevented from waging war if a majority of Americans failed to find the alleged enemy on a world map.

This should not need to be said, but the United States has no legal authority to attack Venezuela (or Iran, Sudan, Somalia, or any other country). Nor does it have the legal right to engage in covert action to overthrow any government, including that of Venezuela. Should the United States do so, it will be opposed by everyone south of the Rio Grande, and it will rightly be seen as a racist resumption of the Monroe Doctrine. Whatever one thinks of the current government there, nearly 30 million people live in Venezuela, and they don’t deserve to be demonized or threatened for the policies of their president, since Venezuela poses no threat to the United States.

The American people get this. A recent CBS News poll shows widespread public skepticism and disapproval of any U.S. military attack against Venezuela, properly so, with 70 percent opposing the United States taking military action.

Moreover, the current U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean is an unnecessary and dangerous provocation. U.S. Navy warships and Marine deployments to the region should be reversed to ease tensions. The United States would not likely invade Venezuela with ground forces as even gung-ho-for-blood Secretary of War Pete Hegseth must know a quagmire would ensue, but the Trump administration may see political advantage to have this as a simmering, manufactured “crisis” to distract from the Epstein files, Trump’s sagging popularity, and his failed domestic and foreign policies. And Trump’s declaration closing Venezuelan air space has zero legitimacy, though it did scare many airlines into changing flight routes.

An obvious question: Is this really about oil, not drugs? Fentanyl is not coming into the United States via Venezuela, and the alleged drug ring run by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro does not exist. However, Venezuela does have the world’s largest known oil reserves.

I can’t imagine anyone wants a rerun of the Iraq wars. Let’s not test the adage that “history may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme” (which again, Mark Twain may or may not have said). We don’t want to have to dust off our “No War for Oil!” protest signs. And there is also already a metastasizing problem with violent competition for rare earth minerals in Venezuela. 

The brouhaha about the second attack on the alleged “drug boat” on September 2 possibly being a war crime misses the point, though Hegseth should be held to account. No evidence has been presented that it was a “drug boat” and even if it was, there was no legal authority to attack it, once or twice. All the attacks on the alleged “drug boats” are illegal, and unauthorized by Congress.

Speaking of which, Congress needs to not only investigate these shady “drug boat” attacks but assert its constitutional authority by passing a War Powers Resolution to stop the out-of-control Trump administration from further attacks or escalation. The U.S. Senate failed to pass such a measure last month, 51-49, with all Democrats voting in favor and all but two Republicans voting against upholding the Constitution. The “world’s greatest deliberative body” should try again. Perhaps Republicans can read the polls better now.

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