Tag: hypocrisy

Trump’s Pardon of Convicted Drug Trafficker and Former President of Honduras Undermines His Own Reasoning for War on Venezuela

Trump’s recent pardon of convicted drug trafficker and former President of Honduras undermines his own reasoning for the escalation with Venezuela.

President Trump has stated previously that the justification for the escalation in tensions with President Maduro and Venezuela is a hard stance against drug trafficking into the U.S. from Latin American countries. If this was the case, then the recent pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández – a man convicted of working with drug traffickers to smuggle drugs into the U.S. – directly undercuts his own reasoning.

Convicted in February of 2024, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in a United States federal prison. During the 57-year-old’s two terms in office, he allowed over 400 tons of cocaine to flow through Honduras and into the United States in exchange for millions of dollars from cartel drug lords like Joaquín Guzmán, AKA “El Chapo.”

According to the Associated Press, Hernández was even caught on video boasting to drug traffickers during his trial that “together they were going to shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.” Trump’s justification for pardoning Hernández is that people he respects told him Hernández was “treated very harshly and unfairly.”

The problem is that pardoning a man who helped turn his country into a narco-state – while taking bribes from convicted cartel bosses – undermines the exact reasoning Trump and the United States have used to escalate pressure on Venezuela. Tensions first began in 2017 when the U.S. sanctioned Venezuelan Vice President Tareck El Aissami for drug-trafficking activity. Fast forward to 2019, and the Trump administration formally indicted President Nicolás Maduro and senior Venezuelan officials on narco-terrorism charges, arguing that they were responsible for trafficking cocaine into the United States.

These actions were presented as necessary steps to confront foreign leaders who enable cartels, threaten regional stability, and push drugs into American communities. The message from the Trump administration was simple: the U.S. will not tolerate narco-traffickers.

This is exactly why the pardon of Hernández undercuts Trump’s own argument. You cannot escalate against Venezuela because of its alleged operation of a criminal enterprise, then turn around and pardon a man who was proven – through evidence, witnesses, and beyond a reasonable doubt in a U.S. court of law – to have done the very same thing. In Hernández’s case, he did it while presenting himself as a U.S. ally to the public, all while taking cartel money behind the scenes.

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Influencer X accounts try to defend their US patriotism, despite having never set foot in the country

Last week social media platform X revealed the national origins of all its user accounts – divulging many top political voices on hot-button US issues are actually keyboard warriors based in Africa and Asia.

For many, such as fake Native American grievance accounts run from Bangladesh and Nigerians posing as Trump-loving Midwestern moms, their motivation is simple – trying to make money (usually from selling T-shirts).

For others it’s more complicated, such as Ian Miles Cheong, a Malaysian-born, Dubai-based writer and X celebrity with 1.2 million followers.

He’s built his brand on acerbic social criticism and championing the new right in US politics, but says it was all on his followers for assuming he was actually in the country.

The idea that you can’t have a say on anything regarding America just because you don’t live there is kind of silly because what happens in America happens everywhere else,” Cheong, 40, told The Post.

“On top of that, practically every country has a US military base at this point. It’s an empire, like it or not, and people are going to have opinions.”

Cheong became the target of attacks once it was revealed he is actually in Dubai.

“You’ve never set foot in America and yet you spend every day trying to influence our culture and politics. You talk about our country exclusively and never say a word about your own.

“If you don’t see why that might rub Americans the wrong way, I don’t know what to tell you,” one prominent American podcaster wrote to him.

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The Same Democrats Who Said NOTHING When Obama Drone-Bombed 16-yr-Old US Citizen Al-Awlaki Are Furious About Trump Bombing Dangerous Venezuelan Cartel Members in a Boat

Al-Qaeda leader and US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in Yemen in September 2011 in a targeted strike.
Al-Awlaki was born in New Mexico and attended college in Colorado.

Obama dropped a bomb on his head.

In May 2012 The New York Times revealed that Barack Obama was the official who actually made the final call on US drone strikes.

Seven months before the New York Times report, Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old American citizen from Denver, was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in October 2011.

Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi was the son of terrorist Anwar al-Aulaqi. He did not have a trial.  He was sixteen.

Barack Obama dropped a bomb on his head.

In January 2020, the United States killed General Qassim Soleimani, a top commander of Iran’s al-Quds Force, in an airstrike at Baghdad’s International Airport. The strike also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iran-backed militias known as the Popular Mobilization Forces. Seven people were reportedly killed in the airstrike.

Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of dozens of US military men and women in Iraq.

Speaker Pelosi, Democrats and the fake news media were outraged over the death of the world’s number one terrorist.

The media and Democrats hammered President Trump all day.

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Trump pardons convicted narco-trafficking pol amid plot to rig Honduran election

Donald Trump is threatening to destroy the Honduran economy unless the country elects the oligarch-run National Party. Now, he’s even pardoned the last party member to rule the country, who was convicted in 2024 of smuggling hundreds of tons of drugs into the US.

On November 28, US President Donald Trump Trump declared he will be pardoning former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was sentenced to 45 years in a New York prison in 2024 for his role in helping smuggle 400 tons of cocaine into the US in a drug-running scheme linked to the Sinaloa cartel. Hernandez, Trump wrote, had been “treated very harshly and unfairly.”

While Hernandez was President of Honduras, he initiated contracts worth over half a million dollars with Republican lobbying firm BGR Group, after his brother, Tony, was sentenced to life in prison for cocaine smuggling. In the time since, BGR has donated tens of thousands of dollars to the campaign of Marco Rubio, the Cuban American former senator who now serves as Trump’s Secretary of State.

As The Grayzone reported, the US Department of Justice indictment of Hernandez contained explicit and often shocking details of his role in transforming his country into the Western hemisphere’s premier narco-state. The US-backed president “wielded incredible influence and partnered with some of the most notorious narcotics traffickers in Honduras, allowing them to flourish under their control,” a DOJ prosecutor stated.

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Trump Slammed Biden’s $52 Billion CHIPS Act. Then He Used It To Buy a Federal Stake in Intel.

In March, President Donald Trump blasted the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act of 2022. He called it “a horrible, horrible thing.” Passed under President Joe Biden, the CHIPS Act was essentially a $52 billion industrial policy slush fund intended primarily to bolster domestic production of computer chips.

When the law passed in 2022, the Biden administration said it was a “smart investment” that would “strengthen American manufacturing, supply chains, and national security, and invest in research and development, science and technology” while bringing thousands of “good-paying manufacturing jobs back home.”

There was never much reason to believe in the previous administration’s industrial policy boosterism. Early grants largely went either to factories that were already in development and would have been built anyway or to facilities of questionable economic value that might not be completed even with the additional taxpayer funding.

So Trump was on solid ground when he told Congress, “You should get rid of the CHIPS Act, and whatever’s left over…you should use it to reduce debt, or any other reason you want to.” Yet in the months since, Trump has made use of CHIPS funding not to reduce the debt, but to pursue his own questionable industrial policy. His version is even less accountable and may well be even worse for taxpayers.

Among the recipients of CHIPS funding was computer chipmaker Intel, which was set to receive $11 billion to help fund the construction of semiconductor fabs in several states. By late summer, the company said it had already received more than $5 billion of the funds. But Intel struggled to fulfill those commitments, falling behind on factory construction in some places and laying off workers as it suffered from ongoing financial and managerial problems. By the middle of 2025, Intel looked very much like a failing business.

In theory, the CHIPS Act provided a mechanism for the federal government to retract the grant and get all or part of its money back should Intel fail to meet its obligations. It’s not clear whether the federal government would have exercised its option to take the money back, but it was an option—until Trump stepped in.

As the company flailed, Trump met with its CEO, Lip-Bu Tan. Trump first called for him to resign. Then in August, the Trump administration announced that the federal government would just take partial ownership of Intel. Essentially, the U.S. government would purchase a roughly 10 percent stake in the chipmaker, partially nationalizing the company. And funds from CHIPS would be used to do it.

Trump bragged about the deal, saying he planned to “do more of them.” The company’s stock price rose on the news, suggesting that investors liked it. But that’s probably because it was a good deal for the company, at taxpayer expense.

According to public financial filings, the federal government would disburse the remaining funds, about $6 billion, while clearing any obligations for the company to actually complete work on new domestic semiconductor fabs.

In exchange, the federal government would gain partial ownership—as well as all the financial risks stockholders usually have when they invest in companies. Those risks will now be borne by taxpayers. As Carnegie Endowment fellow Peter Harrell pointed out in a social media post, the move came with “a lot of downside risk.”

Fundamentally, Trump gave Intel a federal bailout, removing the company’s public obligations and accountability while loading more financial risk onto the public.

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Chicago Mayor Claims Crime Fell “Because of Him” as Texas National Guard Prepares to Leave

Chicago’s crime crisis did not disappear overnight, but you wouldn’t know that from listening to Chicago’s Democrat mayor.

This week, Mayor Brandon Johnson stood at a press conference and claimed that crime fell “because of him,” while attacking the Texas National Guard and President Trump for “wasting taxpayer dollars.”

The performance would have been comical if the stakes were not so serious.

Just hours before the event, at 11:00 p.m., an unknown individual attempted to start a fire outside City Hall.

Security footage shows the suspect lighting the exterior of the building before fleeing.

A CPD officer put out the flames before they spread. Instead of focusing on the conditions that allow attempted arson outside the city’s central government building, the mayor pivoted to politics.

He called the National Guard withdrawal an “unconditional surrender by the Trump administration,” as if the presence of Texas troops—not Chicago’s own governance—were the reason the city remains unsafe.

According to the mayor, Guard troops “sat idle for six weeks doing nothing,” a claim that conveniently ignores why Texas deployed them in the first place: to support overwhelmed border states and help cities impacted by the migrant influx created by Democrat sanctuary policies.

Chicago asked for migrants, boasted about being a sanctuary city, and then attacked Texas when the consequences arrived.

The mayor also complained that these deployments cost “hundreds of millions of dollars,” even though his own administration spends billions on bureaucracy and programs that have failed to reduce violence.

He criticized federal spending on Argentina while ignoring the billions Chicago spends without improving basic services.

Meanwhile, the attempted arson outside City Hall demonstrates exactly why a heightened security presence has been necessary.

He then targeted CPB official Greg Bovino, whom he claimed “left a trail of tears” and “undermined” the city’s work, even though federal officers arrived in September, and yet the mayor took credit for crime reductions from the summer months.

His argument was so weak that he joked Trump must think “September counts as a summer month.”

What he did not explain is how a city with increasing violence, collapsing public schools, and overflowing migrant shelters can possibly credit its problems to Texas or Trump.

The mayor framed the withdrawal as a victory against “unconstitutional federal overreach” and claimed Trump is waging a “war on poor and working people.”

But under Democrat leadership, Chicago remains one of the most dangerous cities in America, with residents fleeing, businesses closing, and families begging for basic safety.

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Tone Deaf Michelle Obama Shares Behind the Scenes Photoshoot Footage with Glam Team After Complaining About “Necessity” of Glam Team as First Lady

Michelle Obama is coming under fire for her tone deaf antics after posting a video of herself doing a photoshoot while her lowly helpers fix her clothes, hair, and makeup, just weeks after she appeared in a book tour interview, griping about her displeasure of having a “glam team” as First Lady. 

But just a couple of weeks ago, Obama appeared in an ABC special with Robin Roberts to promote her memoir, “The Look,” where she grumbles about her wardrobe, hair, and makeup staff making her life so easy.

While the rest of us plebeians have to dress ourselves and don’t get extravagant vacations on Steven Spielberg’s $250 million yacht in the Italian Riviera, Michelle Obama moans about her time in the White House and how hard it was keeping up appearances.

“I was up for the public, and the days were long,” she complains, describing her “glam team” as not a luxury but a “necessity.”

Roberts obnoxiously interjected words of agreement and affirmation throughout Obama’s tirade about how difficult it was to be the First Lady.

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Anchor Grills Dem Rep: “What Specific Order From Trump Are You Asking Our Military To Object To?”

Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum tore into Colorado Democrat Rep. Jason Crow during a tense interview, pressing him repeatedly on the specifics behind a viral video where congressional Democrats urged military members to defy “illegal orders” from the Trump administration.

Crow repeatedly dodged, with vague allusions to random “Trump bad” rhetoric, and offering no concrete examples of actual unlawful directives.

The exchange highlighted what critics, including senior Trump advisor Stephen Miller, have blasted as Democrats’ desperate call for insurrection, rooted in nothing more than baseless fear-mongering as they cling to power.

In the video, a group of Democrats with military or intelligence backgrounds—including Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA), and Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA)—solemnly intoned messages like: “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders,” and “No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.” 

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Rand Paul Slams Alcohol And Marijuana Interests Over Federal Hemp Ban, Announcing He’ll File A Bill To Reverse It Next Week

A GOP senator says he’ll be filing a bill next week to protect the hemp industry from an impending federal ban on most cannabinoid products. He’s also calling out alcohol and marijuana interests for allegedly “join[ing] forces” to lobby in favor of the prohibitionist policy change, which will restrict access to a plant and its derivatives that are often used therapeutically—including by members of his Senate colleagues’ families.

In an interview on “The Chris Cuomo Project” podcast that was posted on Thursday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) previewed his plan to push back against the hemp ban that was included in major spending legislation President Donald Trump signed into law last week.

Paul has been sounding the alarm for weeks about the potential consequences of the hemp recriminalization provisions, which he says would cause mass job losses and a $25 billion industry to be “wiped out.”

As he previewed during a separate webinar organized by the Kentucky Hemp Association on Wednesday, the senator told Cuomo that he intends to introduce legislation next week that would make it so state policy regulating hemp cannabinoid products—with basic safeguards in place to prevent youth access, for example—”supersedes the federal law.”

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Lindsey Graham Falls Prey to the Surveillance Monster He Championed

Some people find religion after a brush with mortality. Lindsey Graham found the Fourth Amendment after a brush with Jack Smith.

The senator from South Carolina has spent the past two decades helping build the modern surveillance state, and now he’s furious that it turned its cold electronic eye on him.

Federal prosecutors secretly subpoenaed his phone records without his knowledge as part of Special Counsel Smith’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s alleged role in the events of January 6.

Graham says it’s an outrage, a scandal. He’s demanding the impeachment of the federal judge who approved it and threatening to sue someone, though he hasn’t worked out who, for “tens of millions of dollars.”

It’s the kind of melodrama that comes easily to a man who’s never been shy about using the power of the state when it suits him.

This story started last month when FBI Director Kash Patel revealed that phone records of eight Republican senators, including Graham’s, were pulled as part of Smith’s “Arctic Frost” probe.

The data covered January 4 to 7, 2021, and came with gag orders preventing telecom companies from telling the targets they were under the microscope.

“They spied on my phone records as a senator and a private citizen,” Graham complained on Fox News. “I’m sick of it.”

He’s not wrong to be angry. But there’s something deeply comic about Graham discovering his inner civil libertarian only after the dragnet landed on his number.

Graham has been one of the most reliable defenders of the surveillance architecture that is now bothering him.

In 2001, as a House member, he voted for the Patriot Act, the law that kicked open the door for mass data collection. When Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was collecting Americans’ phone records by the millions, Graham didn’t seem alarmed.

“I’m a Verizon customer. It doesn’t bother me one bit for the NSA to have my phone number,” he famously said. “I’m glad the NSA is trying to find out what the terrorists are up to overseas and in our country.”

He later voted to codify those surveillance powers into Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008 and backed every major reauthorization since.

For most of his career, Graham treated Section 702 like a sacred text.

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