JD Vance, Pope Francis and Immigration thumbnail

JD Vance, Pope Francis and Immigration

By MercatorNet – A Compass for Common Sense

On the day of his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order called “Protecting the American People against Invasion”. It was not language designed to ingratiate himself with the American people’s Catholic bishops. The president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, described the executive order as “deeply troubling” and predicted that it “will have negative consequences, many of which will harm the most vulnerable among us”.

To defend the new Administration’s initiative, Vice-President Vance, a Catholic convert, invoked his favourite theologian, the 5th century bishop and philosopher, St Augustine, whose opinion was that people who deserve our good will are ranked in a hierarchy. “Just google ‘ordo amoris’,” he tweeted in response to a critic. “Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone?”

By the way, in answer to Vance’s rhetorical question, yes, there really are people who think that their duties to children in Zambia are the same as duties to their children. The leading one is the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer along with his acolytes in the “effective altruism” movement. They are nuts.

However, that’s not to say that Vance is correct. In the Vice-President’s hands, “ordo amoris” is Latin for MAGA. As his boss’s executive order put it:

Enforcing our Nation’s immigration laws is critically important to the national security and public safety of the United States. The American people deserve a Federal Government that puts their interests first and a Government that understands its sacred obligation to prioritize the safety, security, and financial and economic well-being of Americans.

And he has described immigrants in dehumanising ways which I am certain would have distressed St Augustine: “These aren’t people, these are animals”. Or “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.” Or they’re “poisoning the blood of our nation”.

He has justified his plans to deport 10 or 12 million illegal immigrants by describing them all as criminals. “When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag,”he said shortly after he was elected.

So Vance is partly right and partly wrong. But the part that is right is trivial and the part that is wrong is a distortion of his Church’s teaching. Obviously, it’s right that he should feed his own kids before feeding kids in Zambia. But it’s wrong to sprinkle Latin tidbits over the executive order and to imply that it is applied Catholic social teaching. The English translation of “ordo amoris” is “charity begins at home”, not “mass deportations of animals masquerading as humans”

In any case, “ordo amoris” or ordered charity, is probably not the right frame for the knotty question of immigration, in the US or elsewhere. As Benedict XVI explained in Deus Caritas Est: “Love of neighbour, grounded in the love of God, is first and foremost a responsibility for each individual member of the faithful.” Charity towards our neighbour is by no means irrelevant to the plight of immigrants, legal and illegal. But the first way to determine what a government’s obligations are is through the lens of the virtue of justice. If obligations to migrants are regarded only as acts of charity, they may seem simply supererogatory (google it, to quote Mr Vance). In other words, nice idea but I’m having lunch.

Trump’s plans for those mass deportations may be mostly bluster for his fans. His words are inflammatory and repulsive, but vague. They allow lots of wriggle room for reneging on his more extreme ideas.

However, he is a head of state and his words have to be taken seriously. That must be why Pope Francis has reacted so strongly to Vance’s coopting Catholic social doctrine for Trump’s ambitions. “The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality,” he wrote to American bishops this week. And he went on to say:

This is not a minor issue: an authentic rule of law is verified precisely in the dignified treatment that all people deserve, especially the poorest and most marginalized. The true common good is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all — as I have affirmed on numerous occasions — welcomes, protects, promotes and integrates the most fragile, unprotected and vulnerable.

Trump’s language about immigrants is an affront to human dignity. It’s no wonder that it has incensed the Pope.

JD Vance is an amazing person with astonishing achievements on his CV. Not the least of them is to have been rebuked by the Supreme Pontiff. A few years ago, he wasn’t even a Catholic. This week he became a theological punching bag. The Pope wrote: “The true ordo amoris (a very pointed dig at Vance) that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’, that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

Without launching into theological exegesis of the parable of the Good Samaritan, the first thing to observe is that he didn’t call the wounded Jew an “animal”. What would Trump have done?

Vance had an acerbic exchange with former British diplomat and politician Rory Stewart over “ordo amoris”. Stewart wrote: “We should start worrying when politicians become theologians, assume to speak for Jesus, and tell us in which order to love…”

To which Vance responded: “I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: the problem with Rory and people like him is that he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130. This false arrogance drives so much elite failure over the last 40 years.”

Stewart is way, way, way down there in Vance’s “ordo amoris”, so far down that perhaps he looks like the vermin to which Trump has compared immigrants. Perhaps we should just let this arrogant sneer from America’s foremost exegete of St Augustine speak for itself.


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AUTHOR

Michael Cook

Michael Cook is editor of Mercator

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EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Team Trump and the Euros

By Kenneth R. Timmerman

When the Euros take offense at statements by U.S. officials, you know something must be going right.

This week’s Munich security conference, an annual confab with our NATO partners, was full of verbal fireworks. First, you had the Europeans frothing at the mouth at the very thought that Donald Trump might actually talk to Vladimir Putin.

Remember, Biden shunned the Russian leader, whom he called a cold-blooded murderer, for over three years, and most of the Euros were pleased.

The EU’s top foreign policy official, former Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas, actually trotted out the Munich word: appeasement. That was her description of Trump’s phone call to Putin, which she said was “giving them [Russia] everything they want even before the negotiations have started.”

Wrong. I was happy to see Ms. Kallas upbraided by Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, who described the European position as “to support killing as long as it takes.”

“While President Donald Trump and President Putin negotiate on peace, EU officials issue worthless statements,” he added. My kind of guy.

The Euros were also upset to hear the unvarnished truth from Pete Hegseth, now our Secretary of Defense. Pete told them its was “unrealistic” to talk of Ukraine joining NATO, and the Euros exploded.

This one has always bemused me, it’s so obvious. The NATO charter prohibits extending membership to any country at war, and ceasefires don’t cut it. Ukraine has to have a negotiated peace with Russia before any thought can be given to NATO membership. That could be decades away, if ever.

Of course, what really irked them about Pete was his sheer masculinity, joining U.S. grunts at 6 AM for PT — jogging, push-ups, and bench presses. None of the champagne-caviar crowd could even think of such a thing. Muscles? What’s that?

But the real skunk at the Euros garden party was Vice president JD Vance. He began with a lecture on the failed Biden policy in Ukraine – failure to actually arm Ukraine early on, failure to truly pressure Russia later — and then drove home Trump/s mantra about NATO members needing to contribute more to their own defense.

But the real kicker was his speech to the conference. Instead of wonky details about missile defense, or nuclear deterrence (or the price of caviar), JD hit them where they were expecting it the least: in their hypocrisy.

WATCH: JD Vance Hammers EU at Munich Security Meeting

You see, in Europe, hypocrisy is a vital organ, like the heart or the lungs. And he hit it hard.

I loved Politico’s description of it. Vance “launched a blistering attack on European governments on Friday, chastising them for ignoring the will of their people, overturning elections, ignoring religious freedoms and not acting to halt illegal migration.

“It was a U.S.-style MAGA, red meat speech that… hit on some recent hot button cultural issues, from abortion laws in Britain to the recent election in Romania.”

This is the rag that until DOGE came along was being subsidized with tens of millions of US taxpayer dollars, disguised as subscriptions. Now they will have to work for a living like the rest of us.

Oh, and JD’s criticism of Romania was because a court in November annulled its presidential election results on the pretext the winner had benefited from a “Russian-style” social media campaign when in fact the justices just didn’t like the conservative winner.

Here is JD, telling it like it is:

““The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia. It’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within,” he said “The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America….

“Shutting down media, shutting down elections … protects nothing. It is the most surefire way to destroy democracy … If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.”

Trump and his team offered the Euros a reality sandwich, and after the first delicate nibble, they were appalled.

Yours in freedom.

©2025 All rights reserved.


I talk about this as well as the reckoning underway in Tehran by a regime seriously worried about its future, and the possibility of a joint US-Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, on this week’s Prophecy Today Weekend.

As always, you can listen live at 1 PM on Saturday on 104.9 FM or 550 AM in the Jacksonville, Florida, area, or by using the Jacksonville Way Radio app. If you miss us live, you can listen to the podcast here.

Pam Bondi Vows To Prosecute FBI agents, Government Officials Who Leak Info On ICE Raids thumbnail

Pam Bondi Vows To Prosecute FBI agents, Government Officials Who Leak Info On ICE Raids

By The Daily Caller

THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE — U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed on Wednesday to prosecute any FBI agents, or other members of the government, who leak information on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids.

White House Border Czar Tom Homan suggested on Monday that someone within the FBI may be leaking information on the raids, potentially putting officers’ lives at risk. The Daily Caller asked Bondi at her first press conference what the consequences would be for those within the FBI if they were ultimately caught leaking information about the raids.

“Has the DOJ gotten any closer to determining if these leaks are coming from within the FBI? And what will the consequences be if they can identify the leakers from the FBI?” the Daily Caller asked.

“The great men and women in law enforcement standing behind me today, they deserve, they must be protected, and anytime anyone leaks or tips off anything regarding a pending investigation that jeopardizes lives. You’re telling a bad guy what’s about to happen. It could jeopardize the lives of all the men and women in law enforcement,” Bondi began.

“We will not stand for it. We will find you. We’re going to investigate it, no matter what agency it came from. We don’t know for certain. We have an open investigation, so I can’t talk about it in detail, but we will do everything in our power to hold you accountable and it is a crime, and you will be prosecuted when we find you,” she finished.

🚨 AG Pam Bondi Addresses Concerns That Ice Raid Leaks May Be Coming from Within the FBI 🚨

Daily Caller Reporter @reaganreese_: “What will the consequences be if they [the DOJ] can identify the leakers from the FBI?”

Pam Bondi: “We will not stand for it. We will find you.… pic.twitter.com/P4EFSFwdsD

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) February 12, 2025

The most recent leak was reported by the Los Angeles Times, who obtained a document about ICE’s plans to target the city next with “large scale” action. Homan told Fox News host Sean Hannity that they believe the leaks are coming from inside the administration and that in addition to jail time, anyone convicted of leaking such information will lose their jobs or their pensions. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Meet The Worst Criminals ICE Arrested This Week … So Far)

Because of another leak, members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua were allegedly able to avoid apprehension by ICE agents because of the leaked information, according to a Fox News report.

The FBI is so corrupt. We will work with any and every agency to stop leaks and prosecute these crooked deep state agents to the fullest extent of the law. https://t.co/HNW1ujf0Gd

— Secretary Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem) February 9, 2025

“It’s only a matter of time before we walk into a place where there’s going to be a bad guy who doesn’t care. He’s going to be sitting and waiting for the officers to show up and ambush them. This is not a game,” Homan told Hannity.

At her first press conference, Bondi also announced that the Department of Justice is filing a lawsuit against New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and state Attorney General Letitia James for allegedly failing to enforce immigration laws.

“We sued Illinois, and New York didn’t listen, so now, you’re next,” Bondi said.

AUTHOR

Reagan Reese

White House correspondent. Follow Reagan on Twitter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

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10 Bills That Would Codify Trump’s Executive Orders into Law

By Family Research Council

President Donald Trump wasted no time enacting the agenda that won him the White House in the 2024 election, signing a series of executive orders and regulatory actions nearly every day of his second administration. Yet executive orders last only as long as a friendly president holds office. There is now a movement afoot to codify President Trump’s executive orders into statutory law. Here are 10 bills members of Congress have introduced to make the 47th president’s executive actions permanent.

1. Jamie Reed Protecting Our Kids from Child Abuse Act

Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) re-introduced his Jamie Reed Protecting Our Kids from Child Abuse Act. The legislation would cut off federal funding to any medical institution or university affiliated with an institution that carries out transgender procedures on minors. It would also create a private right of action, allowing those who underwent such procedures to sue medical practitioners who administered them, as well as pediatric gender clinics and the hospitals/universities associated with them.

“Our children should no longer suffer from irreversible and dangerous child mutilation procedures, which the Biden administration enabled and promoted,” said Hawley. “I welcome President Trump’s strong action to reverse this child abuse and look forward to working with his administration to advance legislation that protects our kids.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation

2. No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act of 2025

Senator Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) introduced the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act of 2025 (H.R. 7). The bill would bar the U.S. government from funding abortion directly, underwriting abortion through federally funded health care insurance plans (including Obamacare) and carrying out abortions at VA hospitals.

“Abortion violence must be replaced with compassion and empathy for women and for defenseless unborn baby girls and boys,” Smith, co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, told The Washington Stand.

“No matter which party holds power in Washington, Americans should never be forced to fund the violence of abortion with their tax dollars,” Marilyn Musgrave, vice president of Government Affairs at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told TWS. “Despite Americans’ strong support of this policy, pro-abortion members of Congress attack the Hyde Amendment in every spending bill. The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act would finally apply Hyde principles permanently across the whole federal government, including stopping abortion subsidies in Obamacare.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Enforcing the Hyde Amendment

3. FACE Act Repeal Act

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) reintroduced the FACE Act Repeal Act (H.R.5577) last month. The Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that activist justices wrongly invented a “constitutional right” to abortion in Roe v. Wade, yet the Biden-Harris administration continued Democratic presidents’ decades-long practices of weaponizing the 1994 Federal Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act against pro-life advocates until the day he left office. Roy’s bill would purge this now-irrelevant bill from the federal register for good.

“We should make this a permanent change so that no future president has to pardon, as President Trump did … individuals who were unfairly politically targeted and charged under the Department of Justice,” Roy told his former colleague, Jody Hice, the regular Friday host of “Washington Watch,” on the day of the 2025 March for Life.

“Americans just spent the last four years being targeted by a weaponized justice system. The FACE Act was one of the primary weapons of abuse — being used to politically target, arrest, and jail pro-life Americans for speaking out and standing up for life” he said in a statement emailed to TWS upon reintroducing the bill.

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Ending The Weaponization Of The Federal Government,” “Enforcing the Hyde Amendment,” and “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias”

4. No Taxpayer Funding for the United Nations Population Fund Act

Congressman Chip Roy (R-Texas) reintroduced the No Taxpayer Funding for the United Nations Population Fund Act (H.R.436) last month.

“The United Nations Population Fund is a globalist, Orwellian, propaganda machine that shills for the Chinese Communist Party its brutal mandatory abortion practices. President Trump was absolutely right to end taxpayer funding to this corrupt and anti-life organization during his first term and I look forward to him doing so again,” Roy told TWS. “At the same time, Congress has a duty under our constitutionally vested powers to ensure that U.S. tax dollars — regardless of which administration is in the White House — can never flow to this dystopian propaganda machine under any future administration. That’s why we need to put this bill on the president’s desk right away.”

For years, UNFPA worked closely with the Chinese Communist Party’s population police, which brutally enforced the nation’s One Child policy.

“The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has worked hand-in-glove with the abortion industry to promote unlimited abortion in other countries,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life. “Taxpayer dollars should never be going toward the Left’s anti-life, anti-family agenda,” agreed Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project. “We encourage all Republicans to support this effort and do whatever it takes to make it law.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: When President Trump signed three pro-life executive orders on January 25, the White House noted Trump “[c]ut all funding to the United Nations Population Fund, which supports coercive abortion and forced sterilization” in his first administration. This bill would help return global abortion policy to the pre-Biden status quo.

5. WHO is Accountable Act

Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) has introduced the WHO is Accountable Act (H.R. 600). The bill would prohibit the use of funds to seek membership in the World Health Organization or to provide assessed or voluntary contributions to the World Health Organization unless the administration certifies:

  • WHO no longer covers up the Chinese Communist Party’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic and does not persist under the CCP’s control.
  • WHO increases transparency and accountability to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse.
  • WHO adopts meaningful reforms to end the politicization of humanitarian assistance.
  • WHO grants observer status to Taiwan.
  • No funds are diverted to such human rights abusers as North Korea and Iran.

“President Trump was right to pull the United States out of the CCP-controlled World Health Organization,” said Arrington. “Now, Congress must take action to ensure future presidents can’t foolishly rejoin this corrupt organization without major reforms. I have long said that I will fight against any attempt to surrender our sovereignty and cede regulatory power over the United States through a treaty, agreement, or arrangement. The World Health Organization aided and abetted China in covering up their incompetence with COVID-19, all while spending American tax dollars promulgating woke and radical ideology. This is why I’m proud to lead my colleagues in ensuring President Trump’s America First agenda endures.”

“The WHO is a globalist, CCP run entity that disproportionally charges the U.S. compared to other countries and pushes their CCP and progressive ideology on the American people and the world,” said Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.), who co-sponsored the legislation. “This ends now.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Withdrawing The United States From The World Health Organization

6. No Taxpayer Funding for the World Health Organization Act

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) introduced the No Taxpayer Funding for the World Health Organization Act (H.R.401). The bill states that “The United States may not provide any assessed or voluntary contributions to the World Health Organization.”

“The World Health Organization (WHO) doesn’t serve our interests and doesn’t deserve our money. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic this body ran interference for the Chinese Communist Party — arguably helping that regime make the entire outbreak worse,” Roy told TWS.

President Trump withdrew from WHO in 2018, only to see Joe Biden rejoin the global governance body on his first day in office. Last month, President Trump withdrew again.

WHO, which regularly repeated CCP propaganda about COVID-19 at face value, attempted to foist a WHO Pandemic Agreement on the world which would limit national sovereignty, claim ownership of 20% of all U.S. vaccines and medications, implement a “One Health” philosophy equating human well-being with animal and plant life, and embolden social media companies to suppress alleged “misinformation.” Family Research Council warned the controversial accord creates “a web of freedom-strangling entities, legal regulatory mandates, and relationships” that could be “switched on to function as a ‘turnkey totalitarian state.’

“Taking money from hardworking families struggling with the aftermath of Biden’s inflation crisis to send it to a bunch of leftist ‘health experts’ and bureaucrats in Geneva is unacceptable. I have full confidence that President Trump will cut the WHO’s funding off — as he did last time — but this legislation will ensure that no future administration can restart it,” Roy told TWS. “Let’s get this done.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Withdrawing The United States From The World Health Organization

7. R.1123: “To abolish the United States Agency for International Development, and for other purposes”

Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas) introduced a bill “To abolish the United States Agency for International Development, and for other purposes” (H.R.1123). Investigators at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uncovered billions of dollars in wasteful and often-offensive grants made by USAID, a body intended to supply foreign aid to the world’s most vulnerable populations, including funding of transgender propaganda around the world.

“As chairwoman of the DOGE Subcommittee,” which held its first hearing on Wednesday, “I’ve launched the War on Waste, and USAID is a major culprit lighting over $40 billion on fire each year. It’s time to do what DOGE does best: cut the waste,” said Greene.

“I am pleased that the rot and corruption is finally getting the attention and action it deserves from the Trump administration, but Congress needs to back this effort up and end this problem permanently,” said Roy. “With $36 trillion in debt, we have to get our fiscal House in order; but we can start right now with getting rid of USAID.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Reevaluating And Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” as well as numerous executive actions, such as a mass firing reducing USAID from more than 10,000 employees to just 294.

8. Dismantle DEI Act

Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) and Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) introduced the Dismantle DEI Act. The bill terminates all DEI-based programs, offices, trainings, and grants — including identity-based quotas and anything rooted in critical race theory (CRT) — and does not allow the government to rename or repurpose them. Significantly, the legislation extends beyond government entities themselves to include federal contractors and accreditation bodies. It also creates a private right of action for individuals to sue offenders.

“Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs have plagued our federal government, academic institutions, and other aspects of our society, cheapening standards while disregarding merit,” said Schmitt in a written statement emailed to TWS. “Moreover, taxpayer dollars should not be wasted on this poisonous, divisive ideology.”

“The DEI agenda has no place in our federal government,” agreed Peter Holland of the Foundation for Government Accountability.

“DEI was never about fairness or opportunity — it was a Trojan horse for left-wing political social engineering that fosters division, not unity,” noted Cloud“Hiring and promotion should be because of someone’s merit, excellence, and hard work, regardless of race, religion, or creed.”

“I’m grateful to President Trump for reversing these harmful policies on day one of his administration,” Cloud told TWS. “His leadership put an end to these divisive, un-American programs, and it’s now Congress’s job to follow through and codify the permanent elimination of DEI from our government.”

Should it reach the president’s desk, it should face little opposition. The Dismantle DEI Act’s Senate sponsor in the last Congress was then-Senator J.D. Vance.

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferences,” “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” as well as a memo from the Office of Personnel Management firing DEI officials and closing DEI programs.

9. R.899: “To terminate the Department of Education”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) reintroduced a bill “To terminate the Department of Education” (H.R.899).

Conservatives have proposed eliminating the U.S. Department of Education since its founding under President Jimmy Carter, which was widely seen as a kickback to teachers unions for dependably supporting Democratic candidates. President Ronald Reagan campaigned on eliminating the agency and repeated his desire to shutter the Education and Energy departments during a televised address on September 24, 1981. “Education is the principal responsibility of local school systems, teachers, parents, citizen boards, and State governments. By eliminating the Department of Education less than two years after it was created, we can not only reduce the budget but ensure that local needs and preferences, rather than the wishes of Washington, determine the education of our children,” said President Reagan.

“Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development,” agreed Massie, who supports a strict constructionist reading of the U.S. Constitution. “Parents have the right to choose the most appropriate educational opportunity for their children, including home school, public school, or private school.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: As of this writing, President Trump has not yet signed a much-anticipated executive order closing the Department of Education. (Experts question whether a Cabinet-level position established by legislation can be abolished by executive order.) However, he has repeatedly stated his hopes of closing the department.

10. H. Res. 9: “Resolution reaffirming that the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute and does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court”

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) reintroduced his “resolution reaffirming that the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute and does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court” (H. Res. 9). President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute, creating the ICC, shortly before leaving office on New Year’s Eve 2000 but never submitted the treaty to the Senate for ratification, as required by the Constitution. Article 125 of the Rome Statute states that it is “subject to ratification, acceptance, or approval by signatory” nations. In 2002, President George W. Bush said the U.S. had no intention to join the body.

The ICC created international controversy last November when it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant for committing war crimes against Palestinians, including starvation and the intentional targeting of civilians. On February 6, President Trump sanctioned the ICC via executive order.

The latest resolution, which does not have legally binding authority, expresses the sense of Congress that the U.S. “does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.” It also formally condemns the ICC’s arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, and it proclaims America’s “unwavering support for the State of Israel and its right to defend itself and its leaders from unwarranted international legal actions.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.


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Rewiring American Power — Bureaucracy

By Lyle J. Rapacki, Ph.D.

The clock struck 2 AM on Jan 21, 2025.

In Treasury’s basement, fluorescent lights hummed above four young coders. Their screens cast blue light across government-issue desks, illuminating energy drink cans and agency badges. As their algorithms crawled through decades of payment data, one number kept growing: $17 billion in redundant programs. And counting.

“We’re in,” Akash Bobba messaged the team. “All of it.”

Edward Coristine’s code had already mapped three subsystems. Luke Farritor’s algorithms were tracing payment flows across agencies. Ethan Shaotran’s analysis revealed patterns that career officials didn’t even know existed. By dawn, they would understand more about Treasury’s operations than people who had worked there for decades.

This wasn’t a hack. This wasn’t a breach. This was authorized disruption.

While career bureaucrats prepared orientation packets and welcome memos, DOGE’s team was already deep inside the payment systems. No committees. No approvals. No red tape. Just four coders with unprecedented access and algorithms ready to run. “The beautiful thing about payment systems,” noted a transition official watching their screens, “is that they don’t lie. You can spin policy all day long, but money leaves a trail.” That trail led to staggering discoveries. Programs marked as independent revealed coordinated funding streams. Grants labeled as humanitarian aid showed curious detours through complex networks. Black budgets once shrouded in secrecy began to unravel under algorithmic scrutiny.

By 6 AM, Treasury’s career officials began arriving for work. They found systems they thought impenetrable already mapped. Networks they believed hidden were already exposed. Power structures built over decades revealed in hours. Their traditional defenses—slow-walking decisions, leaking damaging stories, stonewalling requests—proved useless against an opponent moving faster than their systems could react. By the time they drafted their first memo objecting to this breach, three more systems had already been mapped.

“Pull this thread,” a senior official warned, watching patterns emerge across DOGE’s screens, “and the whole sweater unravels.” He wasn’t wrong. But he misunderstood something crucial: That was exactly the point. This wasn’t just another transition. This wasn’t just another reform effort. This was the start of something unprecedented: a revolution powered by preparation, presidential will, and technological precision.

The storm had arrived. And Treasury was just the beginning.

THE FOUNDATION

“Personnel are policy.”

For decades, this principle, articulated by conservative strategist Troup Hemenway, remained more theory than practice. Previous administrations spent months, even years, trying to staff key positions. Trump’s first term saw barely 100 political appointees confirmed by February 2017. Every delay meant another victory for the permanent bureaucracy.

But this time was different.

While media focused on campaign rallies and political theater, a quiet army was being assembled. In offices across DC, veteran strategists mapped the administrative state’s pressure points. Think tanks developed action plans for every agency. Policy institutes trained rapid deployment teams. Former appointees shared battlefield intelligence from previous administrations’ failures.

By Inauguration Day, over 1,000 pre-vetted personnel stood ready—each armed with clear objectives, mapped legal authorities, and direct lines to support networks. This wasn’t just staffing; it was a battle plan decades in the making.

“This is the new normal,” Vice President JD Vance declared from his West Wing office, studying real-time data flows across agency systems. “He’s having the time of his life,” he added, referring to the President’s relentless drive. “We’ve done more in two weeks than others did in years.”

The secret wasn’t just speed—it was precision. Instead of waiting for Senate confirmations, the transition team prioritized non-Senate-confirmed positions. While Democrats prepared for traditional confirmation battles over cabinet posts, an army of aligned personnel was already moving into place. Strategic positions were identified. Legal authorities were mapped. Support networks were established.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” the President reminded his team daily. “Four years is a lot of time in political life but it’s not a long time in real life.”

This urgency drove innovation. When DOGE’s young coders breached Treasury’s payment systems, pre-positioned legal teams neutralized resistance within hours. When career officials tried revoking system access, they discovered DOGE’s authority came from levels they couldn’t challenge. When leaks surfaced, rapid-response units fed counter-narratives to alternative media almost instantly. “When you look at the people surrounding the president,” Vance noted, “we’re trying to make it sort of easy for him to do what he wants to do in government. When you have the entire team firing on all cylinders you can get a lot done.”

The permanent bureaucracy never saw it coming. They were prepared for resistance. They were ready for protests. They had plans for leaks and legal challenges. But they had no defense against an opponent who had spent years preparing for this moment.

This wasn’t just about filling seats—it was about building a machine designed to transform American governance. Every position mattered. Every appointment carried weight. And behind it all stood a president counting down not years or months, but weeks and days, driving his team forward with relentless energy.

The foundation was set. And the revolution was just beginning.

THE SPREAD

USAID fell next. No midnight raids this time. No secret algorithms. Just a simple memo on agency letterhead: “Pursuant to Executive Authority…”

Career officials panicked—and for good reason. Created by Executive Order in 1961, USAID could be dissolved with a single presidential signature. No congressional approval needed. No court challenges possible. Just one pen stroke, and six decades of carefully constructed financial networks would face sunlight. “Pull this thread,” a senior official warned, watching DOGE’s algorithms crawl through USAID’s databases, “and a lot of sweaters start unraveling.”

The resistance was immediate—and telling. Career officials who had barely blinked at Treasury’s exposure now worked through weekends to block DOGE’s access. Democratic senators who had ignored other moves suddenly demanded emergency hearings. Former USAID officials flooded media outlets with warnings about “institutional knowledge loss” and “diplomatic catastrophe.”

But their traditional defenses crumbled against DOGE’s new playbook. While bureaucrats drafted memos about “proper procedures,” the young coders were already mapping payment flows. While senators scheduled hearings, pre-positioned personnel were implementing new transparency protocols. While media allies prepared hit pieces, DOGE’s algorithms exposed decades of questionable transactions.

The scale was breathtaking:

EPA climate initiatives? Not just mapped—found unauthorized programs in 47 states. Education’s DEI maze? Not just exposed—revealed coordination across 1,200 programs. Intelligence community black budgets? Not just traced—uncovered patterns hidden for 30 years. “The administrative state runs on two things,” a senior advisor explained, watching patterns emerge across DOGE’s screens. “Control of information and money flows.” His eyes tracked new connections forming in real-time. “We’re not just exposing their networks—we’re rewriting their DNA.”

The cracks began showing in unexpected places. A career EPA director, tears streaming: “Everything we built…” A USAID veteran, hands shaking: “They’re inside all of it…” A Treasury lifer, closing his office: “They move faster than we can think.”

Across Washington, officials who had weathered every reform since Reagan began quietly updating LinkedIn profiles. A Deputy Director: “Open to opportunities.” An Agency Chief: “Exploring new challenges.” A Bureau Head: “Time for change.”

DOGE’s algorithms weren’t just programs—they were archaeology tools, excavating decades of buried networks. Each data point connected to another. Each discovery revealed new targets. Each pattern exposed larger systems.

“It’s beautiful,” one of the coders whispered, watching connections form across his screen. “Like watching a galaxy map itself.”

For the permanent bureaucracy, this wasn’t just change. It was an extinction-level event. Their power came from controlling who got paid, when they got paid, and what they got paid for. Now those controls were evaporating like dawn burning away darkness.

The pattern was devastating in its simplicity:

  • Map the money flows
  • Deploy aligned personnel
  • Expose the networks
  • Restructure the systems

By the time bureaucrats drafted objections to one breach, three more had already occurred.

The revolution wasn’t just spreading. It was accelerating.

THE IMPACT

The first bulldozer arrived in Springfield, Ohio at 6 AM on a Tuesday. By noon, three blocks of notorious potholes were filled. Local news crews arrived to find not just construction crews, but data analysts with laptops, mapping every dollar spent against real-time progress.

This wasn’t just road repair. This was revolution in action.

A woman grabbed the analyst’s arm, tears in her eyes. “Twelve years,” she whispered. “Twelve years I’ve been calling about these potholes.” He turned his laptop, showing real-time data flows. “Look,” he said. “Your tax dollars. Actually working.” She stared at the screen. “My God,” she whispered. “It’s really happening.” Across America, funds once lost in administrative mazes suddenly found their way to actual problems needing solutions. In rural Tennessee, broadband expansion projects long buried under bureaucratic red tape broke ground overnight. In Michigan, water treatment plants received upgrades that bureaucrats had studied for decades but never approved.

The transformation was measurable. In just two weeks:

  • Tens of thousands of redundant programs identified
  • Billions in waste exposed
  • Hundreds of unauthorized initiatives halted
  • Countless local projects unleashed

But the real metric? Trust in government rising for the first time in 50 years.

The revolution spread with surgical precision:

  • Real-time tracking replaced quarterly reports
  • Algorithmic oversight replaced review boards
  • Local solutions replaced federal mandates
  • Results replaced process

“He’s done more in two weeks than Biden did in four years and Obama did in eight,” Vance noted from his West Wing office. “But this isn’t just about speed. This isn’t just about tech. This isn’t just about personnel. It’s all three, perfectly aligned.”

For ordinary Americans, the impact was undeniable. Roads repaired. Schools revitalized. Water purified. But more importantly, something else was being restored: trust.

For the first time in generations, people saw their government not as an obstacle but as a tool for positive change. The permanent bureaucracy had long operated on a simple assumption: presidents come and go, but they remain. That assumption now lay shattered, replaced by a new reality: when preparation meets presidential determination, nothing is permanent. “They thought we’d slow down,” Vance said, studying real-time data flows across agencies. “They thought we’d get bogged down in process. They thought we’d play by their rules.”

He smiled. “Instead, we’re just getting started.”

THE NEW DAWN

The sun rises early in Washington. On this morning, its first rays caught the classical columns of the Treasury building, casting long shadows across streets still quiet. But inside, beneath the marble and granite, screens still glowed blue. DOGE’s algorithms never sleep.

“The administrative state was built over decades,” a senior advisor explained, watching new patterns emerge across the displays. “Built to resist change. Built to outlast presidents. Built to preserve power.” He paused, tracking a particularly interesting data flow. “But they never imagined this. They built walls against political attacks. Defenses against media exposure. Shields against congressional oversight.” “They never prepared for algorithms that could map everything. For personnel pre-positioned everywhere. For a president who counts every week like it’s his last.”

The numbers tell the story: In Treasury—networks mapped, waste exposed, systems rewired At USAID—decades of hidden flows revealed, power structures dismantled Across agencies – redundancies eliminated, authorities realigned, missions refocused.

But numbers aren’t the whole story.

Imagine, changes, coming to a community near you:

Springfield, Ohio, potholes that plagued residents for twelve years actually disappeared overnight. Rural Tennessee, where children can finally connect to high-speed internet their parents were promised decades ago. In Michigan, people truly drink clean water while bureaucrats’ memos about “studying the problem” gather dust. This isn’t just reform. This isn’t just change. This is American governance reimagined.

“The pace is going to be the same,” Vice President Vance declared this week. “It’s just the priorities that are going to change.” The permanent bureaucracy built their administrative state over decades, brick by bureaucratic brick. They thought it would last forever. They thought it was too big to map, too complex to understand, too entrenched to change.

They were wrong.

Four young coders with laptops proved that. One thousand pre-positioned personnel proved that. A president counting weeks proved that. The sun continues rising over Washington. Classical columns still cast their shadows. But inside those buildings, everything has changed. The administrative state finally met its match: preparation plus presidential will plus technological precision.

This isn’t the end of the story. This is just the beginning.

The revolution isn’t just continuing. It’s becoming the new normal.

And for those who thought the D E E P S T A T E would rule forever?

They’re about to learn what happens when smart strategic minds meet determination. When preparation meets opportunity. When a new generation decides it’s time for change.

The storm isn’t just gathering. It’s here to stay.

The sun continues rising over Washington. But now, for the first time in generations, it illuminates something new:

A government that works.

A bureaucracy that serves.

A system that delivers.

The revolution isn’t just beginning.

It’s already won.

©2025 All rights reserved.


Please visit the Arizona Today substack.

Biden’s HHS Left Taxpayers on the Hook for $22.6 BILLION for Giveaways to Illegals for Cars, Homes, Startup Businesses thumbnail

Biden’s HHS Left Taxpayers on the Hook for $22.6 BILLION for Giveaways to Illegals for Cars, Homes, Startup Businesses

By The Geller Report

You don’t hate them enough. More evidence of why the Democrats has been so defensive about DOGE and Mr. Musk exposing the enormous reckless and corrupt spending.

By Josh Christenson, NY Post, Feb. 13, 2025:

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) ramped up grants for migrants from 2020 to 2024 — which included cash assistance to buy cars, homes and even build credit for startup businesses, according to a shocking watchdog report that found taxpayers were left on the hook for $22.6 billion.

HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) — which came under fire last year for having lost track of 32,000 migrant kids in the US — handed out the high sum to a host of nonprofits, effectively acting as a “giant magnet” for those crossing the US border and claiming asylum, auditors from the money monitor OpenTheBooks revealed exclusively to The Post.

Tasked with settling migrants, asylum seekers and other refugees in America, ORR drastically increased the number of noncitizens eligible to receive funding over the bulk of President Joe Biden’s term, with more than $10 billion shelled out to grant-receiving organizations just in fiscal year 2023.

That coincided with all-time records being set for southern border crossings into the US, with 2.4 million apprehensions by Customs and Border Protection over the same period.

Non-governmental groups bilked taxpayers for up to $1.7 billion in services including dollar-for-dollar matching savings plans for cars, homes, college educations or startups; small-business loans of up to $15,000; loans to repair credit history of up to $1,500; “cultural orientation,” “emergency housing support,” legal assistance and Medicaid care.

Some programs were only available to migrants or refugees who had been living in the US for several years, who were employed or who were making around double the federal poverty level or less, among other stipulations.

The most funding, however, was spent on unaccompanied migrant children, with $12.4 billion obligated over the five years — even as federal whistleblowers were calling out ORR for placing many of the 291,000 kids in their care with unvetted and at times abusive sponsors.

“The Shining City on a Hill, with its walls and doors, makes room for legal immigrants and legitimate refugees and asylum seekers, but the ORR has made a mockery of that vision in recent years,” OpenTheBooks CEO John Hart told The Post.

“ORR is part of a troubling trend of using nonprofit groups as ideological proxies. Vast sums are being outsourced to evade accountability and prop up an immoral, exploitive system that is hurtful to both American citizens and people in other countries who are longing for a better life.”

Thursday’s report comes after the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) came under fire for sending around $80 million — subsequently clawed back by the Trump administration Tuesday — to put migrants up in New York City hotels and provide other services.

More than $2.6 billion went out the door in fiscal year 2020, $2.3 billion in fiscal year 2021, $3.3 billion in fiscal year 2022, $10 billion in fiscal year 2023 and $4.2 billion in fiscal year 2024.

Continue reading.

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permisison. ©All rights reserved.

Former IDF General: Trump plan ‘shook system’ of Arab views on Gaza thumbnail

Former IDF General: Trump plan ‘shook system’ of Arab views on Gaza

By NEWSRAEL Telling the Israeli Story

“The entire region is shaken now, and it’s good,” Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Effie Defrin told reporters. “Because for more than seven decades, eight decades, we have repeated the same mistakes.” 

U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to relocate Palestinians from Gaza has “shaken the entire system” of regional thinking on how to approach the Palestinians, a former general in the Israel Defense Forces said on Thursday.

Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Effie Defrin told reporters at an event hosted by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) that Trump’s plan to rebuild Gaza while Palestinians are housed in third countries has scrambled the approach of Arab leaders throughout the region.

“He actually shook the system. He shook the box,” Defrin said. “The entire region is shaken now, and it’s good. It’s good for the cause. Because for more than seven decades, eight decades, we have repeated the same mistakes and same solutions to the old problem without any progress.”

One sign of how far the acceptable range of discourse on Gaza has shifted since Trump took office came at the UAE-hosted World Government Summit in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday when Yousef Al Otaiba, the Emirati ambassador to Washington, said that he does not see any alternative to Trump’s plan.

“I don’t see an alternative to what’s being proposed. I really don’t,” the Arab diplomat said. “So if someone has one, we’re happy to discuss it, we’re happy to explore it, but it hasn’t surfaced yet.”

Defrin described how different Arab states have reacted to the potentially explosive political fallout from a plan for the United States to “own” territory they have long insisted should be part of a future Palestinian state.

“The Jordanians are trying to walk in between the raindrops without getting wet,” Defrin said.

‘They built a very nice concrete wall’

During his visit to Washington on Tuesday, Jordan’s King Abdullah II demurred on the Trump plan, saying that it was premature to endorse any plan before the Arab countries agreed to a forthcoming, Egyptian-led counter-proposal.

“We will be in Saudi Arabia to discuss how we can work with the president and with the United States,” Abdullah said. “Let’s wait until the Egyptians can come and present it to the president, and not get ahead of ourselves.”

The Egyptians are likely to be much more “blunt” about insisting that the Palestinians of Gaza remain within the coastal enclave with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi saying “from day one” that Egypt “won’t accept even one Palestinian refugee,” according to Defrin.

“They love the Gazans so much, they built a very nice concrete wall, six meters high, right behind our fence—between the fence between Gaza and Egypt,” he said.

Questions about the future of Gaza hinge on whether Hamas releases the three hostages scheduled to be exchanged on Saturday under phase one of the ceasefire plan and whether they release the remaining 14 phase-one hostages over the course of the following week, according to the terms of the negotiations.

Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Yaakov Amidror, speaking at the same JINSA event on Thursday, said that should the ceasefire collapse, the resumption of the war in Gaza would look nothing like the previous rounds of fighting.

“It would be all out,” said Amidror, who served as Israeli national security advisor from 2011 to 2013. “There would be much less constraint than in the past.”

Amidror said he believed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have to balance the demands of the Israeli public with what is possible within his governing coalition in negotiating phase two of the ceasefire with Hamas and the release of more hostages.

“The prime minister will have to find a fine line,” Amidror said. Some “65% to 75% of Israelis from all aspects of the political spectrum believe that we should continue negotiations.”

“I think it is more about what the prime minister can do within its own coalition, in which there is a strong wing declaring that they will not allow any negotiations about a second [phase],” he added.

RELATED ARTICLES:

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What the Hostages Have Endured

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EDITORS NOTE: This JNS — Jewish News Syndicate column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

We’re In for a Rude Awakening on Cybersecurity thumbnail

We’re In for a Rude Awakening on Cybersecurity

By Corbin K. Barthold

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

America remains ill-prepared for Chinese hackers targeting critical infrastructure.

It’s a crisis that almost no one is talking about. The Chinese Communist Party is now the world’s preeminent practitioner of cyber warfare. Once notoriously loud and clumsy, the CCP’s hackers have become stealthy and sophisticated. They’re intercepting the calls and texts of our leaders and infiltrating servers at our ports, power plants, and water-treatment facilities. Yet hardly anyone seems to care. When Congress held hearings on cybersecurity late last year, only a handful of journalists bothered to cover them.

In September, the Wall Street Journal revealed to the public a Chinese hacking operation known to American authorities (thanks to the naming conventions of wonks at Microsoft) as Salt Typhoon. Since mid-2023, if not earlier, the group has been assaulting our telecom firms, compromising at least nine of them. It has focused on breaking into wireless networks in and around Washington, D.C. The campaign has won the CCP access to revealing data, such as call, text, and IP logs, on more than 1 million targets. Beijing appears, at minimum, to have gained a thorough understanding of when and how senior American officials communicate with each other, but in many instances, it has obtained the content of calls or texts, as well. The haul likely includes conversations featuring Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, top congressional staffers, and members of the intelligence agencies.

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To stop the bleeding, the FBI has instructed federal employees to use end-to-end encrypted apps such as Signal, an abrupt and ironic about-face from an agency that has long pressed for backdoor access to such services. It will be some time before FBI officials can again argue for more backdoors with a straight face—especially given that Salt Typhoon has also exploited existing ones that our government uses for domestic snooping. The flaws in these wiretap systems have presumably gifted the CCP invaluable insights into which of its spies we know about and which we don’t.

Maybe the most disturbing thing about Salt Typhoon is that, almost a year after discovering it, Washington still doesn’t have a handle on the problem. No one knows if the hackers have been ejected. Some national security officials worry that we may never know.

Then there is “Volt Typhoon.” Since at least 2019, this group of Chinese hackers has been entering, exploring, and preparing to disrupt computers used to run critical infrastructure. We must assume, at this point, that malware lies dormant in the digital underbelly of our railroads, airports, electricity grid, gas pipelines, and more. Though these hidden bugs could be used in many frightful ways, the CCP seems primarily to be laying the groundwork for the conquest of Taiwan. As it launches an invasion, it will seek to ensure that the U.S. military cannot move troops or supplies or communicate with bases or ships, and that ordinary Americans must sit by without water, power, Internet, or transportation. The goal will be to foist on us both military incapacitation and societal panic, the better to defeat us in war and discredit liberal democracy.

While we cannot know what steps the federal government has taken behind the scenes, the Biden administration’s public posture was unequal to the seriousness of the threat. Chinese companies that assist Salt Typhoon, while doing no business here, have nothing to fear from the Treasury Department’s sanctions. The CCP probably laughed when Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, “sent clear messages” (his words) not about how the U.S. will retaliate for Volt Typhoon now, but about what the U.S. might do if the CCP unleashes its uploaded viruses. That Biden issued an executive order on cybersecurity a mere four days before leaving office underscores his lack of urgency.

The Trump administration must do better. The expert witnesses at a recent hearing before the House Homeland Security Committee broadly agreed on the most urgent tasks. We need more and better planning for “continuity of the economy”—making sure, as one witness put it, that our infrastructure can still “operat[e] in a degraded state” following a cyber-attack. We must streamline federal, state, and local cybersecurity regulations. We should create ROTC-style programs that train computer-science students, then channel them into the federal workforce. Above all, we must maintain our lead in AI research and development. On that front, Trump is off to a good start. He has repealed the Biden administration’s caution-first AI executive order, endorsed a massive AI investment program, and asserted, in one of his own executive orders, that we must “solidify our position as the global leader in AI.”

One of the unsung achievements of Trump’s first term was the creation, in 2018, of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has strengthened the federal government’s cyber defenses and coordinated the private sector’s response to Chinese (and Russian, Iranian, and North Korean) cyber-attacks. CISA drew Trump’s ire when its then-director vouched for the integrity of voting machines in the 2020 election. The agency also angered conservatives by facilitating the removal, from social-media platforms, of content declared disinformation by election officials or Internet researchers. Nearly half of House Republicans once voted to reduce CISA’s funding, and Kristi Noem, the incoming Secretary of Homeland Security, has vowed to “refocus” the agency…..

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JD Vance Hammers EU at Munich Security Meeting thumbnail

JD Vance Hammers EU at Munich Security Meeting

By Royal A. Brown III

Listen to this great speach by JD Vance at Munich Security Meeting where he righteously hammered the EU and NATO.

Summarizing what he said was the reasons for the Failed Project Europe was their allowing “mass migration” of Arabs, Africans and Middle Easterners ; their left wing (socialist) economies and their lawfare against freedom of speech including social media especially anything negative about LGBTQ; Islamic Jihadism; Pro-Life, etc. All of this has negatively impacted their traditional Christian values. Europe has become a museum of its former self, former culture and values.

Following is a combination of commentary from Charley Kirk and myself based on JD Vance’s speech. EU and NATO are too reliant on USA for defense and use Russia as the excuse for all their problems. Remember the false narrative using Russia for fighting against the election of Trump and his impeachment. The EU and NATO can no longer depend on US subsidies to defend the home of our forefathers. The shutdown of freedom of speech including social media by making it illegal to unfavorably address such topics as LGBTQ; Pro-Life; Islamic Jihad, etc. and arresting/jailing people for doing so is another area of great concern to our current govt.

The German Minister of Defense then criticized Vance while he was still in Germany stating his speech was “unacceptable” even though he knows Germany is the original architect for un vetted “mass migration” which has led to an increase in crime and the deaths of German and other EU citizens because their govts. have fallen on the swords of Islamic Jihadists. He hypocritically lectured Vance on Democracy, Freedom of Opinion etc. even though they have become a weak, pathetic version of their former selves and are ruled by unelected Oligarchs and recently canceled the Romanian election..

Other information on Vance’s meeting with Ukraine President Zalensky while in Europe includes Zalensky’s failure to sign an agreement where Ukraine will not continue to pursue joining NATO. This would be akin to us agreeing to the takeover of Mexico by China and the insertion of nuclear missiles into Mexico. Also the agreement included Ukraine reimbursement for Billions $ in US support by trading for rare earth minerals found in Ukraine.


TRANSCRIPT OF VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES JD VANCE’S COMMENTS

Well, thank you, and thanks to all the gathered delegates, luminaries, and media professionals. Thanks especially to the host of the Munich Security Conference for being able to put on such an incredible event. We’re, of course, thrilled to be here. We’re happy to be here.

One of the things that I wanted to talk about today is, of course, our shared values. It’s great to be back in Germany. As you heard earlier, I was here last year as a United States senator. I saw Foreign Secretary David Lammy and joked that both of us last year had different jobs than we have now.

But now it’s time for all of our countries, for all of us who have been fortunate enough to be given political power by our respective peoples, to use it wisely—to improve their lives.

I want to say that I was fortunate, in my time here, to spend some time outside the walls of this conference over the last 24 hours. I’ve been so impressed by the hospitality of the people, even as they are, of course, reeling from yesterday’s horrendous attack.

The first time I was ever in Munich was with my wife—who’s here with me today—on a personal trip. I’ve always loved the city of Munich, and I’ve always loved its people. I just want to say that we are very moved, and our thoughts and prayers are with Munich and everybody affected by the evil inflicted on this beautiful community. We’re thinking about you, we’re praying for you, and we will certainly be rooting for you in the days and weeks to come.

Now, I hope that’s not the last bit of applause that I get.

We gather at this conference, of course, to discuss security, and normally, we mean threats to our external security. I see many great military leaders gathered here today. While the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, we also believe that it’s important, in the coming years, for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense.

However, the threat that I worry most about for Europe is not Russia. It’s not China. It’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within—the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values that are shared with the United States of America.

I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.

Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears.

For years, we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values.

Everything—from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship—is billed as a defense of democracy.

But when we see European courts canceling elections, and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.

And I say “ourselves” because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them.

Within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against tyrannical forces on this continent.

Consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, closed churches, and canceled elections. Were they the good guys?

Certainly not. And thank God they lost the Cold War. They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty—the freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, to invent, to build.

As it turns out, you can’t mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can’t force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe.

We believe those things are certainly connected. Unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners. I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest, the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be “hateful content.”

Or to this very country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online, as part of “Combating Misogyny on the Internet: A Day of Action.”

I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.

And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britain in the crosshairs.

A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes.

Not obstructing anyone. Not interacting with anyone. Just silently praying on his own. After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply: “It was on behalf of the unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aborted years before.”

Now, the officers were not moved.

Adam was found guilty of breaking the government’s new “buffer zone” law, which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person’s decision within 200 meters of an abortion facility.

He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.

Now, I wish I could say that this was a fluke—a one-off crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person.

But no.

This last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called Safe Access Zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law.

Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizen suspected guilty of thought crime.

In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.

And in the interest of comity, my friends, but also in the interest of truth, I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation.

Misinformation like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China.

Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.

So, I come here today not just with an observation, but with an offer.

And just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite.

And I hope that we can work together on that.

In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town, and under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square, agree or disagree.

Now, we’re at the point, of course, where the situation has gotten so bad that, this December, Romania straight up canceled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors.

Now, as I understand it, the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections.

But I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective.

You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections.

We certainly do.

You can condemn it on the world stage, even.

But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.

Now, the good news is that I happen to think your democracies are substantially less brittle than many people apparently fear.

And I really do believe that allowing our citizens to speak their minds will make them stronger still.

Which, of course, brings us back to Munich, where the organizers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations.

Now again, we don’t have to agree with everything—or anything—that people say.

But when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them.

To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion, or, God forbid, vote a different way—or even worse, win an election.

Now, this is a security conference, and I’m sure you all came here prepared to talk about how exactly you intend to increase defense spending over the next few years, in line with some new target.

And that’s great.

Because as President Trump has made abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent.

We don’t think—you hear this term “burden sharing”—but we think it’s an important part of being in a shared alliance together, that the Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger.

But let me also ask you—how will you even begin to think through the kinds of budgeting questions if we don’t know what it is that we are defending in the first place?

I’ve heard a lot already in my conversations, and I’ve had many, many great conversations with many people gathered here in this room. I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course, that’s important.

But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly, I think, to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?

And I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people.

Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making.

If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.

Nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.

You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years. Have we learned nothing—that thin mandates produce unstable results? But there is so much of value that can be accomplished with the kind of democratic mandate that I think will come from being more responsive to the voices of your citizens.

If you’re going to enjoy competitive economies, if you’re going to enjoy affordable energy and secure supply chains, then you need mandates to govern—because you have to make difficult choices to enjoy all of these things. And of course, we know that very well in America. You cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail. Whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news. Nor can you win one by disregarding your basic electorate on questions like who gets to be a part of our shared society.

Of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration. Today, almost one in five people living in this country moved here from abroad. That is, of course, an all-time high. It’s a similar number, by the way, in the United States—also an all-time high. The number of immigrants who entered the EU from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone. And, of course, it’s gotten much higher since. And we know—the situation didn’t materialize in a vacuum.

It’s the result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent, and others across the world, over the span of a decade. We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday, in this very city.

And, of course, I can’t bring it up again without thinking about the terrible victims—who had a beautiful winter day in Munich ruined.

Our thoughts and prayers are with them, and will remain with them. But why did this happen in the first place? It’s a terrible story, but it’s one we’ve heard way too many times in Europe, and unfortunately, too many times in the United States as well. An asylum seeker, often a young man in his mid-20s, already known to police, rams a car into a crowd and shatters a community.

How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction?

No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.

But you know what they did vote for? In England, they voted for Brexit. And, agree or disagree, they voted for it. And more and more, all over Europe, they’re voting for political leaders who promise to put an end to out-of-control migration. Now, I happen to agree with a lot of these concerns, but you don’t have to agree with me. I just think that people care about their homes. They care about their dreams. They care about their safety and their capacity to provide for themselves and their children. And they’re smart. I think this is one of the most important things I’ve learned in my brief time in politics.

Contrary to what you might hear a couple mountains over in Davos, the citizens of all of our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy.

And it’s hardly surprising that they don’t want to be shuffled about or relentlessly ignored by their leaders. And it is the business of democracy to adjudicate these big questions at the ballot box.

I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns, or, worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections, or shutting people out of the political process, protects nothing.

In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.

And speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference, even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential.

And trust me, I say this with all humor—if American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.

But what German democracy—what no democracy, American, German, or European—will survive is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.

Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There’s no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle, or you don’t. Europeans—the people—have a voice. European leaders have a choice. And my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future.

You can embrace what your people tell you, even when it’s surprising, even when you don’t agree. And if you do so, you can face the future with certainty and with confidence, knowing that the nation stands behind each of you.

And that, to me, is the great magic of democracy. It’s not in these stone buildings or beautiful hotels. It’s not even in the great institutions that we have built together as a shared society. To believe in democracy is to understand that each of our citizens has wisdom and has a voice.

And if we refuse to listen to that voice, even our most successful fights will secure very little. As Pope John Paul II, in my view, one of the most extraordinary champions of democracy on this continent or any other, once said:

“Do not be afraid.”

We shouldn’t be afraid of our people, even when they express views that disagree with their leadership.

©2025 All rights reserved.

USAID Paid $3 Million to Gaza ‘Rapper’ Raffoul Saadeh to Create Jew-Hating Music thumbnail

USAID Paid $3 Million to Gaza ‘Rapper’ Raffoul Saadeh to Create Jew-Hating Music

By The Geller Report

Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse….

End USAID. Period.

JFeed: A shocking investigation has uncovered that USAID provided $3.3 million in taxpayer money to a Gaza-based organization whose leader produces anti-Semitic rap content comparing Israel to Nazis, raising serious questions about oversight of U.S. foreign aid programs.

The organization “Tomorrow’s Youth,” led by rapper LXIV 64 (Raffoul Saadeh), received the substantial grant in 2022 under the guise of peace-building initiatives, despite evidence of the leader’s inflammatory content. The funding came through the Nita M. Lowey Middle East Partnership for Peace Act (MEPPA), which was intended to foster peace and understanding between Israelis and Palestinians.

Palestinian Media Watch exposed that Saadeh’s musical content includes explicit anti-Semitic themes, with his song “Scars of Gaza” containing direct comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany – the exact opposite of the program’s stated peace-building mission.

Congressman Mike Lawler (R-NY) has demanded accountability: “American taxpayer dollars are being used to fund hatred and anti-Semitism under the false pretense of peace-building. This is unconscionable and demands immediate investigation.”

The funding was part of a larger $250 million MEPPA program, raising serious concerns about potential misuse of other grants. Critics point to a systematic failure in USAID‘s vetting process and question how an organization led by someone producing anti-Semitic content could receive millions in U.S. aid money.

The revelation comes amid broader concerns about U.S. aid money potentially supporting anti-Israel activities in Gaza, with calls growing for stricter oversight and immediate suspension of similar programs pending thorough investigation.

Taxpayer dollars are being disbursed through a fund named for a former New York Democrat congresswoman, Nita Lowey, to support Palestinian Arab causes.

By Anthony Grant | March 6, 2024

As Israel’s prime minister stresses “deradicalization” as one of the central pillars of the country’s strategy for post-war Gaza, questions are emerging about the role of America in funding projects with extremist elements, and lacking sufficient vetting.

Raising the alarm is Itamar Marcus, the director of Palestinian Media Watch, a group that monitors Palestinian Arab society and culture for extremism and support for terrorism. “The United States should be using its money to fight radicalization, and not to intensify it,” Mr. Marcus tells the Sun.

The centrality of deradicalization to Israel’s vision for Gaza was outlined by Prime Minister Netanyahu in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in December and reiterated last week in a Fox News interview.

“Gaza will have to be deradicalized,” Mr. Netanyahu wrote. “Schools must teach children to cherish life rather than death, and imams must cease to preach for the murder of Jews. Palestinian civil society needs to be transformed so that its people support fighting terrorism rather than funding it.”

At issue for Mr. Marcus is a charity innocuously called Tomorrow’s Youth Organization. The group is using millions of dollars from a fund named for a former New York congresswoman, Nita Lowey, to support Palestinian Arab causes even as that organization’s executive director does double duty as a rapper who glorifies illicit drug use and hatred of Israel.

In December 2020, Congress passed the Nita M. Lowey Middle East Partnership for Peace Act. America’s major civilian foreign aid agency, USAID, is tasked with doling out the $250 million fund, in coordination with the Department of State, for cultural “dialogue” efforts it deems worthy. Prominent among them is Tomorrow’s Youth, whose executive director, Raffoul Saadeh, writes and performs rap songs under the name LXIV 64.

One such ditty is “Scars of Gaza,” which contains the lyrics, “Auschwitz reincarnated brought back to life by the victims who were burned by the Nazis.” According to Mr. Saadeh’s Facebook page, a video for the song, which ends with a call for violence, was posted to YouTube in May 2021, but has subsequently been removed.

Federal records show that in 2022, USAID committed nearly $3.3 million to Tomorrow’s Youth, whose flagship office is situated at what it refers to as “Nablus, Palestine.”

Mr. Saadeh’s lyrics are bristling with other spurious and defamatory references to Israel — another video, according to PMW, is “one continuous demonization with lies and libels against Israel with yet another Holocaust comparison.” The video for the  song “From the Ghetto,” which also demonizes Israel, was seemingly scrubbed from YouTube following a PMW report mentioning it last March.

Mr. Saadeh “writes and sings rap songs about Palestinian issues in which he compares Israel to Nazis and his life in Jerusalem to being caged in a ghetto,” PMW states, adding that “he also writes love songs, including Snow White, in which he presents the use of illegal drugs and gun violence as normal behavior.”

How all this squares with Tomorrow’s Youth Organization’s stated aim of “implementing specific mental health, psychosocial and educational interventions and programming” for Palestinian Arab youth is not addressed in the USAID-funded group’s literature. Mr. Saadeh as well as Ms. Lowey did not respond to the Sun’s requests for comment. It is unclear if Ms. Lowey believes that directly or indirectly underwriting hate speech “builds the foundation for peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians” as the fund enacted in her name is supposed to do.

Mr. Saadeh, for his part, describes himself on his LinkedIn profile as someone with “vast experience in Palestine and Lebanon” and cites as assets his “personal and professional relationships with NGOs and donors.”

Mr. Saadeh’s songs, which are available on various public music platforms and are viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, “demonize Israelis and normalize the use of guns,” Mr. Marcus says. Mr. Marcus is concerned that “as a successful rapper, Mr. Saadeh naturally is a role model for youth who are exposed to his hate and normalization of violence.”

Is there any oversight mechanism in place to monitor how the group under Mr. Saadeh’s stewardship spends the hundreds of thousands of dollars Americans are sending it? In response to a query from the Sun, a USAID representative would say only that it takes precautions.

“We take,” the spokesman says, “every precaution to safeguard all U.S. taxpayer-supported assistance for its intended purpose and to support Palestinian civilians directly. USAID’s work with Tomorrow’s Youth Organization is specifically to support over two hundred women entrepreneurs and dozens of women-led small businesses, while fostering coexistence and reconciliation within and across communities.”

The record, though, shows that of the more than $3 million already spent, none of the money went to Jewish Israeli or Arab Israeli youths’ communities — it all flowed to the “West Bank.”

The “radicalization of Palestinian youth, through the demonization of Israelis,” Mr. Marcus says, “plays a major role in inciting Palestinian youth to see terror, including killing Israelis, as a worthy option.” This impact, he says, is also tied to the horror of the October 7 attacks on southern Israel.

“There is no doubt that the decades of demonization of Israelis and glorifying of terror is what led to the Hamas terror atrocities” of that day “and the Palestinian population’s overwhelming support for the attack.”

USAID would not disclose what monitoring, if any, there is of the use of its funds. Another wrinkle is that in some cases, as with Tomorrow’s Youth, funds committed are invariably mixed in with monies from the Qatar Fund for Development to support “various projects in the West Bank.” One of the worst-kept secrets in the Middle East is that Qatari money — lots of it — has also flowed into Hamas coffers in Gaza.

Some of what Partnership for Peace Fund money does is support advisory board meetings during which members, not all of whom are American citizens, spend time thanking each other for efforts that are not clearly delineated.

Examples of tangible achievement appear to be few. One such achievement, described at a meeting last August, involved transporting an 8-old-boy with cerebral palsy, along with his father, to Tel Aviv from Ramallah to “connect with Israeli and Palestinian engineers and designers” and to go for a swim using an adaptive surfboard. The cost of a private taxi to Tel Aviv from Nablus is a relatively inexpensive $170.

The $250 million is meant to be spent over the course of five years.

USAID’s administrator, Samantha Power, recently stated that “in addition to getting more assistance into Gaza, more must be done to protect aid workers putting their lives on the line to deliver that assistance.” Ms. Power, who served as America’s ambassador to the UN under President Obama, made no mention of the suffering that Gazans have brought to bear on Israeli civilians as well as soldiers on and since the October 7 attacks.

USAID, according to its own website, now prioritizes “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

With an annual budget of $27 billion, money is less of an issue for the agency than how and where it is being spent. The junior senator of Indiana, James Risch, last year questioned Ms. Power at a hearing on a USAID budget request related to famine — or “food insecurity,” as it’s known in Washington — in Ethiopia. Mr. Risch now heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The Sun has reached out to Mr. Risch for comment about growing speculation that the Partnership for Peace Fund’s monies are ending up partly in some sullied hands.

In January, several Western countries, including, America suspended funds from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the world body’s agency for serving Palestinian refugees, after it emerged that hundreds of the group’s employees were members of terror groups. Some of them actively participated in the attacks on October 7. Much of the funding, including from the European Union, has already been restored.

“At a time when hate, violence, and terror by Palestinians is something the United States is trying to eliminate,” Mr. Marcus concludes, it is “unimaginable” that America should be funding an “organization headed by an individual whose public image is promoting the problems that the United States is trying to overcome.”

Source:Click here

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Trump Judges Defend Jewish Students on Campus thumbnail

Trump Judges Defend Jewish Students on Campus

By Jihad Watch

While Obama judges empower campus terrorist supporters.

“The Court is dismayed by Cooper Union’s suggestion that the Jewish students should have hidden upstairs or left the building,” Judge John Cronan wrote, blasting the Manhattan college’s bid to dismiss a lawsuit by Jewish students who were trapped in the library by a mob of terrorist supporters. “These events took place in 2023—not 1943—and Title VI places responsibility on colleges and universities to protect their Jewish students from harassment, not on those students to hide themselves away in a proverbial attic.”

The strong language in the ruling was similar to how Judge Mark Scarsi had criticized UCLA.

“In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith,” Judge Scarsi wrote in response to the university’s complicity in Hamas supporters setting up checkpoints and encampments to harass Jews.

The two federal judges who spoke forthrightly in defense of Jewish students had two things in common: both were conservatives associated with the Federalist Society.

And both men had been nominated by Trump.

To fully appreciate the moral courage of Judge Scarsi and Judge Cronan, compare them to their colleagues who had been nominated by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

When Jewish students at Harvard and MIT turned to Judge Richard Stearns, a Clinton nominee, he dismissed the MIT lawsuit entirely, claiming that MIT had not reacted “in a clearly unreasonable manner”, and dismissed the lawsuit charging that Harvard had discriminated and retaliated against Jewish students, but allowed the lawsuit accusing the university of maintaining a “hostile educational environment” to move forward.

He did concede that, “Harvard failed its Jewish students.”

Judge Fernando Olguin, an Obama appointee, however sneeringly dismissed a complaint by Jewish parents and students against the antisemitic Los Angeles ‘ethnic studies curriculum, claiming that he could not understand it. Olguin, who had worked for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a proponent of ethnic studies curriculums, proved to be one of the most unsympathetic judges yet.

In Pennsylvania, Judge W. Scott Hardy, a Trump appointee, refused a request by Carnegie Mellon to dismiss a lawsuit by a Jewish student who had been harassed by a professor over her Jewishness and Israel’s war on terror, upholding an allegation of “deliberate indifference” against the university.

Judge Haywood Gilliam, Jr, an Obama appointee, however showed outright skepticism of a lawsuit against the California College of the Arts in San Francisco brought by a Jewish professor who had been put through the wringer at her school for challenging Students for Justice in Palestine’s pro-terrorist student activists.

Judge Gerald Austin McHugh Jr, another Obama appointee, dismissed a complaint by Jewish students against Haverford College, mocking it as a collection of “every frustration and disagreement of Jewish students and faculty” that “reads more as an opinion editorial’ and tipping his ideological hand, accused them of strategically “seeking to blur the line between Zionism as a political philosophy and Zionism as a component of Jewish identity, and in the process implicitly sweep any and all criticism of Israel into the basket of antisemitism.”

The handling of lawsuits filed by terrorist supporters also varied wildly by federal judges.

Judge Peter Messitte, a Clinton nominee who had worked in Yemen, issued a preliminary injunction requested by CAIR, which had supported the attacks of Oct 7, to allow a pro-terrorist event on Oct 7. Messitte, now deceased, had also insisted on blocking a Trump order during his first term allowing local officials to stop terrorist refugee resettlement in their communities.

By contrast, Judge Mitchell S. Goldberg, a Bush appointee, had rejected a lawsuit by the Faculty for Justice in Palestine group against the University of Pennsylvania trying to force the university not to cooperate with a congressional investigation of campus antisemitism.

In Texas however, Judge Robert Pitman, an Obama nominee and the “first openly gay judge” in the Fifth Circuit, backed a lawsuit by CAIR and Students for Justice in Palestine, a campus hate group whose chapters cheered the Oct 7 attacks, against Gov. Abbott’s antisemitism policies.

And back in California, Judge James Donato, an Obama appointee who had waged a judicial war against the Trump administration, allowed pro-terrorist activists to help defend the University of Berkeley against Jewish students alleging campus antisemitism.

While much has been written about the direct actions by the Trump administration on behalf of Jewish students, President Trump’s judicial appointments are playing a significant role in challenging campus antisemitism. The moral clarity brought by Judge Scarsi redefined how judges could speak directly and succinctly about the state of hate on college campuses.

And Judge Cronan’s equally strong and forthright words show that is becoming the new norm.

Meanwhile the behavior of Obama appointees like Messitte, Olguin and Pitman show the other side of the equation, and what the stakes are for American Jews in federal judicial appointments. Trump appointees have stood up for the civil rights of Jewish students while Obama appointees, true to their president’s policy, have enabled campus antisemitism.

Democratic Jewish groups have warned about the alleged ‘extremism’ of President Trump’s judicial appointments and championed confirming Biden’s extremist judicial appointees..

“We urge the Senate to confirm President Biden’s judicial nominees and fill all 44 judicial vacancies before Trump and the GOP return to power,” the Jewish Democratic Council of America had pleaded.

That included Adeel Abdullah Mangi, who had served on a think tank that had promoted Islamic terrorist figures, calls for BDS and “vile antisemitic propaganda”. By contrast, fourteen conservative judges, most appointed by Trump, visited Israel after Oct 7.They included Judge Lee Rudofsky, a Trump appointee who had warned that he would reject any law clerks that supported Hamas.

Are American Jews better off with Judge Rudofsky or with Mangi on the bench?

AUTHOR

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Did the FBI Leak Deportation Raid Plans to a Gang? Border Czar Homan Thinks So thumbnail

Did the FBI Leak Deportation Raid Plans to a Gang? Border Czar Homan Thinks So

By Family Research Council

After an internal leak jeopardized a deportation mission, President Donald Trump’s border czar is alleging that bad actors within the FBI may have been responsible. Border czar and former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief Tom Homan confirmed Monday night that he’s closer to identifying the individual who leaked information regarding an ICE raid in Aurora, Colorado to members of the Tren de Aragua (TDA) gang. The raid, carried out last week, initially targeted at least 100 TDA members, but ICE officers ultimately only arrested one, after the leak provided gang members a chance to evade ICE.

“We think it’s coming from inside. And we know the first leak in Aurora is under current investigation. We think we’ve identified that person,” Homan said in a Fox News interview. He explained that leaking information regarding ICE operations is more than just “giving the bad guys a heads-up so they can escape apprehension,” but is actually “putting officers’ lives at risk. It’s only a matter of time before we walk into a place where there’s going to be a bad guy who doesn’t care. He’s going to be sitting in wait to ambush an officer. This is not a game.”

Homan confirmed that “some of the information we’re receiving tends to lead toward the FBI” as the source of the leak. He added, “I talked to the deputy attorney general all this weekend. They’ve opened up a criminal investigation, and they have promised that not only will this person lose their job and lose their pension, they will go to jail.” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi committed to prosecuting the individual responsible for the leak. “If anyone leaks anything, people don’t understand that it jeopardizes the lives of our great men and women in law enforcement,” she said in an interview Sunday. Bondi pledged, “If you leaked it, we will find out who you are, and we will come after you.”

U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem also named the famous federal law enforcement agency as a likely culprit after information regarding another ICE raid in Los Angeles was leaked. “The FBI is so corrupt. We will work with any and every agency to stop leaks and prosecute these crooked deep state agents to the fullest extent of the law,” Noem declared.

Shortly after Trump returned to the White House, a planned ICE raid in Chicago had to be rescheduled after information regarding the raid was leaked to The Wall Street Journal. Homan reported Monday that the leaks will not stop deportations. “I’m going to double the manpower in those sanctuary cities,” he warned, adding, “If we can’t get them in their homes, we’ll get them at their place of employment.” The border czar continued, “Sanctuary cities are a sanctuary for criminals, bottom line. So, we’re going to do everything we can to find them. Regardless of what it takes, [we’ve] got a strong president in the White House; he’s giving us all the authority we need. We’re coming.”

According to reports ICE has posted on social media, the agency made over 8,200 arrests from the time Trump returned to office and the end of January. The agency has not yet posted data for the month of February. Although he has explained that deportation numbers may seem low while ICE focuses its efforts on arresting violent illegal immigrants, Homan affirmed late last month that he intends to increase the number of daily arrests and deportations. “We’ve got to do more. We’ve got to open that aperture up, which we’re going to do,” he said at the time, adding, “And we need more deportations, a lot more deportations, and that’s what we are working on.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: EXCLUSIVE: Meet The Worst Criminals ICE Arrested This Week … So Far

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

EXCLUSIVE: Meet The Worst Criminals ICE Arrested This Week … So Far thumbnail

EXCLUSIVE: Meet The Worst Criminals ICE Arrested This Week … So Far

By The Daily Caller

As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been conducting raids across the country, illegal immigrants, criminals and gang members have been taken in en masse, with several big arrests occurring Monday alone, the Daily Caller has learned.

As of Jan. 29, ICE has made a minimum of 4,829 arrests since President Donald Trump was inaugurated and the widespread raids began, according to NBC News. In the last week of January, the Trump administration was averaging 753 arrests per day. Though the number of total arrests Monday is so far unclear, ICE arrested several big criminals, including an MS-13 gang member, the Daily Caller has learned.

ICE Corpus Christi arrested Sergio Arquimides Pineda on Monday, an aggravated felon and MS-13 gang member who was in the U.S. illegally, a White House official told the Caller.

Pineda, who was criminally convicted for assault, was first ordered for removal by an immigration judge in May 2015 and had an outstanding order of deportation for failing to appear at his immigration hearing, according to the information shared with the Caller. He has since been processed for removal and will remain in ICE custody.

On Monday, ICE Miami arrested Cuban citizen Dario Gonzalez, who had previously been convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison for lewd or lascivious acts with a minor, the White House official shared with the Caller. Also previously sentenced to ten years in prison but arrested on Monday was Silvester Kagwe Akola, a citizen of Kenya who was taken in by ICE Baltimore, the Caller learned. Akola had previously been convicted of robbery.

Also on Monday, ICE Houston arrested Mexican citizen Jorge Hernandez, who was previously convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to five years in prison, the official told the Caller.

The White House’s Twitter account announced other major arrests that came Monday in the raids, including the arrest of Ciro Teodoro-Rivera, a Mexican national and registered sex offender who was found in Cincinnati, Ohio. Teodoro-Rivera reentered the country illegally without being admitted, and had previous convictions for sexual imposition and aggravated assault, the tweet explains.

In Dallas, on Monday, ICE arrested Guatemala citizen Juan Ramos-Alonzo, who had been convicted of lewd or lascivious acts with a minor and sentenced to 25 years in prison, the White House Twitter account shared.

MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN: Ciro Teodoro-Rivera, a Mexican national and registered sex offender, was arrested by ICE Cincinnati on February 10, 2025. Prior convictions: Sexual imposition and aggravated assault. Teodoro-Rivera illegally reentered the U.S. without being admitted. pic.twitter.com/csrLKgwqNx

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 11, 2025

MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN: Jose Miguel Perez-Perez, a Mexican national, was arrested by ICE Chicago on February 10, 2025. Conviction: Sexual assault of a child. Perez was sentenced to 6 months in jail. pic.twitter.com/7kY3b3jSor

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 11, 2025

ICE Chicago arrested Mexican citizen Jose Miguel Perez-Perez, who had previously been convicted of sexual assault of a child and sentenced to 6 months in jail, according to the White House.

Trump campaigned on the promise to conduct the largest mass deportation operation in the country’s history. In the first few weeks of the Trump administration, daily ICE arrests have increased and deportation officers have taken enforcement actions in more areas across the country.

Under the Biden administration, there were roughly 8.5 million migrant encounters along the southern border, an era of unprecedented illegal immigration into the country. According to Customs and Border Protection data, Border Patrol agents made nearly 120,000 encounters specifically with criminal non-citizens during Biden’s time in office.

AUTHOR

Reagan Reese

White House correspondent. Follow Reagan on Twitter.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Kristi Noem Suggests ‘Corrupt’ FBI Agents Leaked ICE Raid Details To Corporate Media Outlet

First Deportation Flights Touch Down In Venezuela In Major Victory For Trump Agenda

No, Trump Does NOT Have to Abide by Mythical “Judicial Supremacy”

USAID Funded Terrorist Regimes That Killed Thousands of U.S. Soldiers

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Trump’s Gaza Plan May Work! thumbnail

Trump’s Gaza Plan May Work!

By NEWSRAEL Telling the Israeli Story

44% of young Gazans considered emigrating even before the war. 

The question being asked today around the world is whether President Donald Trump’s plan to resettle Gazans in other countries can succeed. Judging by a poll taken just prior to the war, before much of Gaza was destroyed, Trump’s proposal is reasonable.

The poll by the top Palestinian polling agency, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, found that a full 44% of Gazan youth between the ages of 18-29 were considering emigrating. Nearly a third (31%) of the entire population considered emigrating.

Gazans’ “most preferred destination for immigration is Turkey, followed by Germany, Canada, the United States, and Qatar,” the poll found.

The largest percentage said they want to leave for economic reasons; second and third reasons are “political” or educational opportunities. The fourth reason is security, and the fifth is corruption.

Since such a large number wanted to leave when there was no war and no destruction, there is no doubt that today, the numbers will be much higher.

Facing years of life in tents and rubble, breathing dust and hearing endless construction noise, the number wanting to leave today, especially among the youth who desire to start a life and build a future, will be far above 50%.

PA and Hamas will reject the plan

Two important things must be noted: Firstly, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas undoubtedly will reject this plan for political reasons, even though it is best for the residents. Neither the Palestinian Authority nor Hamas has put the good of its people ahead of political considerations. They will fight it in every possible way.

Secondly, if pollsters ask Palestinians what they want now, they might not choose emigration because of fear of being called traitors.

Accordingly, if Trump wants his plan to succeed, he must bypass the Palestinian Authority and Hamas and work directly with the people. Gazans who choose to leave must be guaranteed secrecy and protection during the process.

Once people start leaving, those left behind will feel jealous of those already out of the Gaza hell. Once those who are resettled start sending messages about their new lives and pictures of their new homes, the floodgates will open.

AUTHOR

Itamar Marcus

Itamar Marcus, Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch, is one of the world’s foremost experts on the Palestinian Authority (PA). He travels the world speaking to members of Congress, parliaments, and governments presenting PMW’s findings that have literally changed the way the world sees the PA.

Marcus wrote the reports that exposed how the PA names schools, sporting events, and streets after terrorist murders; revealed the hate and terror promotion in the PA’s schoolbooks; brought to the world’s attention the PA’s indoctrination of its children to seek Martyrdom; and uncovered that the PA rewards all terrorist prisoners with high salaries. As a result, four countries have cut off all funding to the PA, and many more countries have significantly cut funding.

The PA has long disparaged PMW and Marcus. Palestinian official Hanan Ashrawi called PMW a “toxic organization,” and Jibril Rajoub, the #2 in the PA, called Marcus “the Goebbels of the 21st Century.” In contrast, ZOA, EMET, and Israel Media Watch all honored Marcus and PMW with prestigious awards, and The Algemeiner named Marcus one of the world’s “top 100 people positively influencing Jewish life or the State of Israel.”

RELATED ARTICLES:

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Resettling Gaza

Palestinian refugees in Syria tell Gazans: ‘Don’t leave your land’ even if it means ‘becoming martyrs’

RELATED VIDEO: King Abdullah of Jordan has this to say to President Trump

EDITORS NOTE: This Palestinian Media Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Resettling Gaza thumbnail

Resettling Gaza

By Jihad Watch

Is it the right thing to do and can it work? Yes it can.

After President Trump proposed resettling the Arab Muslim settlers currently living in Gaza, there was an outbreak of furious objections from politicians, activists and media outlets.

The objections could be roughly divided into the moral and the practical. The ‘moral’ objection was that it was ‘wrong’ to resettle the population currently occupying Gaza, and the ‘practical’ objection was that it would be impossible to accomplish. Both objections do not hold up.

The Jewish population of Gaza was resettled twice, once after the Egyptian invasion and the conquest of Gaza during the War of Independence, and the second time after the 2005 ‘disengagement’ forcibly eliminated 21 Jewish communities and expelled families living there.

Not only did politicians and the media not object to the forcible removal of the Jewish communities of Gaza, but they celebrated it as a step forward for peace in the region.

Many, if not most ‘peace plans’, propose the further resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Jews living in Judea and Samaria to make way for a ‘Palestinian’ state. Even as they object to  resettling Gazan Muslims in Arab countries, they refer to Jews living in the ‘West Bank’ as settlers, to their communities as ‘settlements’ and propose that they be resettled elsewhere.

UN Resolution 242 has been interpreted by many politicians and the media to mean that Israel must withdraw from territory, including parts of Jerusalem, where 450,000 Jews live. The same people who insist that it’s morally wrong and impractical to resettle 2 million Muslims out of Gaza also argue that it’s morally right and practical to resettle nearly half a million Jews in Israel.

Opponents of Trump’s proposal don’t believe it’s wrong to resettle a population, they would just rather expel and resettle Jews than expel and resettle the Arab Muslim colonial population.

They don’t oppose resettlement, they support terrorism.

With the moral question out of the way, what about the practical one: is it even possible?

Some say that the Gaza Arab Muslim population could not be moved without ‘door-to-door fighting’. But Israel’s recent experience in the war after Oct 7 shows that’s clearly not true.

Despite the false claims of genocide, the Israelis kept civilian casualties to a minimum by evacuating as much as the ‘civilian’ population as possible from one part of Gaza to another.

Despite being told it was impossible, Israelis evacuated hundreds of thousands of Gazans to make way for military operations. During the beginning of the  war, around 1 million Gazans left the north for the south and the UN would later claim that as many as 1.5 million Muslim settlers in Gaza had been displaced. Most of those in Gaza followed orders and got out of the way.

Looking to examples beyond Israel, the Black September war between Jordan and the PLO resulted in the deaths of some 4,000 terrorists, as many as 25,000 civilians, according to Yasser Arafat, and some 20,000 ‘Palestinians’ were resettled in ‘refugee camps’ in Lebanon

After the Gulf War, Kuwait punished the ‘Palestinians’ who had collaborated with Saddam Hussein, by expelling some 280,000 of them in a mass purge that was later joined by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf allies for a total estimated by ‘Palestinian’ advocates at 400,000.

Kuwait shelled ‘Palestinian’ neighborhoods and sent in death squads to massacre them. Tanks and troops were deployed, checkpoints were set up and most of the ‘Palestinians’ were driven from their country and their neighborhoods were eliminated. Parts of Hawally, where the ‘Palestinians’ used to live, were bulldozed and turned into an amusement park.

This was done with the support of the first Bush administration.

“I think we’re expecting a little much if we’re asking the people in Kuwait to take kindly to those that had spied on their countrymen that were left there, that had brutalized families there, and things of that nature,” President George H.W. Bush told reporters at a press conference.

Saudi Arabia deported over 50,000 ‘Palestinians’, Bahrain, the UAE and Qatar, which has since become a state sponsor of Hamas, also began firing, expelling and deporting ‘Palestinians’

None of these events occasioned much protest or commentary, they occurred with the support of western governments who, like President Bush, compared it to the reactions of the French against collaborators after the Nazi occupation, and life soon went on as it had before.

The resettlement of large numbers of ‘Palestinians’ has happened before in the Middle East. While the resettlement of Gaza would take place on a larger scale, it would not be that much larger than the resettlements during the war or in the aftermath of the Gulf War.

Such a resettlement is both practical and morally defensible since there are no other options.

The underlying problem in the conflict is that Israel resettled some 800,000 Jewish refugees from the Muslim world, while the Arab Muslim nations who attacked it failed to do likewise. Along with the UN, they insisted on maintaining them under the fake identity of ‘Palestinians’ as a perpetual army of occupation: forming into terrorist groups for an endless war with Israel.

“You have to learn from history. You can’t keep doing the same mistake over and over again,”  President Trump pointed out.

Every possible effort has been made to create a ‘Palestinian’ state for over 30 years. After multiple peace proposals, land concessions, endless rounds of negotiations and taxpayer funding (over $2 billion through USAID to the ‘Palestinians’ since Oct 7 alone) nothing worked.

When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, leaving behind greenhouses and plans for new industries, along with sizable international funding, Hamas turned it into a war zone.

Two-state solutionists continue to argue that if Israel were to offer even more land, expel and resettle more Jews, the Muslim terrorists would finally agree to a permanent peace.

But there has never been a single shred of evidence that would work. None of the Israeli proposals or concessions undertaken since the late 1980s have led to any kind of peace. The PLO and Hamas used terrorism at every turn to press for more Israeli concessions while giving nothing in return. Their leaders have said again and again that they intend to destroy Israel.

After Oct 7, everyone is finally taking them at their word.

Diplomats insisted that peace could not come without the expulsion and resettlement of Jews from Judea and Samaria. President Trump flipped the table by suggesting that it can’t come without the resettlement of Arab Muslims from Gaza. Which makes more sense?

Debate is still going on about President Trump’s proposal for an American role in Gaza. Many Americans and Israelis see the move as unnecessary. They would prefer to have Israel take care of business alone with the political support of the United States. Just as Bush provided political support for the Kuwaitis to expel the ‘Palestinian’ population from their country.

President Trump is a visionary and his idea reframed the entire view of the conflict, and while it may only be an opening for a negotiating position, like his talk of annexing Canada or Greenland, there is no doubt that it has shaken up all the conventional wisdom in the Middle East. His basic  premise, that Gaza is a lovely place that will be a source of conflict as long as it is populated by Islamic terrorists and their supporters, is fundamentally sound.

The objections to it, both moral and practical, are groundless. Resettlement is feasible and moral. If the Kuwaitis and the Jordanians could resettle the ‘Palestinians’ out of their countries on far less grounds than the atrocities of Oct 7, the Israelis certainly have the right to do it.

The politicians, diplomats and reporters who advocated for the mass resettlement of nearly half a million Jews have no moral grounds for opposing the resettlement of Gaza Muslims.

And after trying everything else, including decades of failed efforts to make peace with the terrorists or trying to coexist with them in the absence of peace, it’s time to do what makes the most sense for everyone, and the only thing that has any hope of bringing peace to the region.

AUTHOR

RELATED ARTICLES:

What Do Young Gazans Want?

Syrian Army Enters Lebanon to Take On Hezbollah

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Wife of Radical Far-Left Judge Blocking Trump’s Agenda is a USAID Recipient thumbnail

Wife of Radical Far-Left Judge Blocking Trump’s Agenda is a USAID Recipient

By The Geller Report

USAID: The swamp is deep. One of the activist judges blocking Trump’s agenda, Judge John Bates, is married to the founder of a USAID-funded NGO.

Carol Rhees is a Democrat lawyer who started Hope for Children in Ethiopia a long-time USAID grant recipient. (Amuse ON X)

You see how that works?

John Bates is the judge who ordered the Trump admin to restore website info on gender ideology and sex change operations.

Elon Musk on Wednesday criticised a federal judge’s decision to reinstate government web pages removed under President Donald Trump’s executive order on gender ideology, calling it “truly absurd.”

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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DOGE is Investigating Wealthy Federal Employees With High Net Worth Despite Low Pay

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman Accused Of Helping Chinese Illegals Avoid ICE thumbnail

Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman Accused Of Helping Chinese Illegals Avoid ICE

By Eireann Van Natta

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Democratic New York Rep. Dan Goldman is defending himself after sending out a series of tweets in Spanish and Chinese on Wednesday guiding migrants on how to handle an encounter with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“Every New Yorker has rights when they interact with immigration enforcement,” Rep. Goldman tweeted. “No matter what the next four years bring, stay informed, stay safe, and stay together.”

Goldman was accused by numerous X users of trying to shield criminal illegal aliens from deportations, which is a violation of federal law. Trump’s border czar Tom Homan told the Daily Caller News Foundation in December, “There are federal statutes on the books for knowingly concealing and harboring an illegal alien away from ICE officers. There are statutes on the books about impeding federal law enforcement officers – they’re all felonies.”

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Goldman’s tweet included a video where the congressman lamented the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies, citing “raids” in New York City. He’s previously claimed ICE raids are about “intimidating migrant communities.”

“The Trump administration has carried out deportations, raids all across the country including here in New York City,” Rep. Goldman said during the video. “These are certainly uncertain times but no matter what it’s important that you know your rights when interacting with law enforcement.”

He proceeded to provide instructions on how to interact with ICE agents and linked to his website, which advised migrants on “mak[ing] a plan for ICE encounters.” It also linked to legal resources, including a Department of Justice (DOJ) link that provided a list of pro-bono legal service providers.

A spokesperson for Goldman’s office disputes the idea that his message was targeted at illegal aliens, telling the Daily Caller that his video was intended for American citizens and legal immigrants who had been wrongly detained by ICE. Goldman’s office claimed that American citizens had been detained already by ICE, which is currently carrying out a mass deportation operation.

“President Trump has a well-documented pattern of abusing his power by detaining American citizens and legal residents,” Madison Andrus, a spokesperson for Goldman, told the Caller. “The Congressman will always provide his constituents with information to protect them from extrajudicial threats and intimidation, and only someone who supports the use of threats and intimidation would take issue with him doing so.”

A source familiar with the agency’s operations also rejected Goldman’s office’s claims that they had detained citizens, asserting that American citizens are “not subject to arrest.” They added that ICE only arrests individuals when there is “probable cause” demonstrating the person is an unauthorized noncitizen who can be removed from the country.

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ICE told the Caller that agents may encounter American citizens during their operations and ask for identification.

“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement may encounter U.S. citizens while conducting field work and may request identification to establish an individual’s identity,” an ICE spokesperson told the Caller.

Rep. Goldman’s office pointed the Caller to purported examples of ICE detaining U.S. citizens under President Trump.

In one instance, the owner of a seafood store in Newark, New Jersey told PIX11 News that ICE agents raided the business and detained a U.S. military veteran. However, an ICE spokesperson said a manager “gave the officers permission to enter” and denied that ICE detained the U.S. citizen, The Washington Post reported.

Another example from the Daily Beast was based on a Telemundo Puerto Rico report which claimed Puerto Rican American citizens in Milwaukee were allegedly detained after someone heard them speaking Spanish.

Except, ICE did not appear to have any record of that case.

Rep. Goldman cast a wide net with his message to migrants, repeating the post in Spanish and Chinese.

Radio host Mark Levin quipped that Goldman should be “expelled from the House,” while other X users outright accused him of treason for allegedly aiding one of America’s major foes.

Illegal immigration from China spiked under the Biden administration. In December 2023, the number of Chinese nationals who illegally crossed the southern border reached a total of 5,951 encounters. That was greater than the combined total of fiscal years 2021 and 2022, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

An investigation by the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) revealed that a social media group spearheaded by a self-proclaimed agent of the Chinese government was helping facilitate illegal immigration into America.

Republican North Carolina Rep. Mark Harris ripped Goldman for the posts, saying his Democratic colleague was trying to “aid illegals” and “obstruct President Trump’s agenda.”

“It’s completely disgraceful that Democrats are going to such extreme lengths to aid illegals — even going as far as using their official accounts to give instructions on evading ICE!” Harris told the Caller.

“This is just the beginning of their extreme tactics to obstruct President Trump’s agenda. Speaking in Chinese or Spanish won’t hide the Left’s message: they care more about criminal aliens than the safety of the American people.”

Notably, Rep. Goldman serves on the Committee on Homeland Security, which lists “Border Security and Enforcement” as a top issue, and the Judiciary Committee, which is tasked with reviewing legislation pertaining to the judicial process, including on immigration issues.

He has previously voted to shield some illegal aliens accused of crimes from deportation.

Rep. Goldman was among the 156 House Democrats who voted against the Laken Riley Act — named after Laken Riley, a nursing student killed by an illegal migrant. The bill, which Trump recently signed into law, mandates that federal immigration law enforcement detain illegal aliens who were arrested for theft-related crimes. (RELATED: ‘Needs To Go’: Dems Shielding Illegal Migrant Criminals Should Be Helping ICE Round Them Up Instead, Fetterman Says)

ICE has increased its arrests under the Trump administration.

On Jan. 29, ICE announced that it made 1,016 arrests. ICE has arrested an illegal migrant with suspected ties to ISIS, an MS-13 gang member and a convicted child rapist, according to the White House.

*****

This article was published by the Daily Caller and is reproduced with permission.

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Trump Hits Highest Approval Mark of Either Term as New Poll Finds America Loves His Policies thumbnail

Trump Hits Highest Approval Mark of Either Term as New Poll Finds America Loves His Policies

By The Geller Report

President Trump is dismantling the corrupt deep state. In doing so, Trump is giving this country back to the American people where it belongs. And the American people are loving him for it. Expect President Trump’s popularity to continue to surge in the months ahead.

President Trump is the GOAT POTUS! He should end up on Mount Rushmore in the years ahead.

Trump hits highest approval mark of either term as new poll finds America loves his policies

By Yahoo, Feb 11th, 2025

What a difference four years can make.

Polls are showing Donald Trump’s early moves in office are yielding the highest approval ratings of either of his terms in the White House, a stark change from when he left office in early 2021 with the lowest support in his presidential career.

Overall, 53 percent of respondents approved of the job Trump was doing, according to a CBS News / YouGov poll conducted in early February.

AUTHOR

Geller Report Staff

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VIDEO: PM Netanyahu: Hamas has until Shabbat thumbnail

VIDEO: PM Netanyahu: Hamas has until Shabbat

By NEWSRAEL Telling the Israeli Story

Israel demands release of all nine “Phase A” hostages by Shabbat afternoon — or else! 

PM Netanyahu in a video statement to the Israeli people: 

Hamas violated the agreement and therefore there will be no progress in the further implementation of the agreement and in negotiations on Phase B – without the return of our hostages. The cabinet expects the release of all nine Phase A hostages by Shabbat noon.

“The decision that I passed unanimously in the cabinet is this: If Hamas does not return our hostages by Shabbat noon – the ceasefire will end, and the IDF will return to intense fighting until Hamas’s decisive defeat.”

NEWSRAEL: We see there is some ambiguity in the government decision, but according to several sources, the meaning is for all remaining NINE hostages from Phase A.

WATCH: Hamas has until Shabbat

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EDITORS NOTE: This Newsrael News Desk column with video is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


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Iran’s Dangerous Push To Become An AI Superpower thumbnail

Iran’s Dangerous Push To Become An AI Superpower

By Middle East Media Research Institute

Iran | MEMRI Daily Brief No. 715

Heads of state, top government officials, leaders of international organizations, tech CEOs, and academics from over 90 countries are meeting this week in Paris for the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit. In his speech at the summit, Vice President JD Vance, who led the U.S. delegation, stated: “We will safeguard American AI and chip technologies from theft and misuse, work with our allies and partners to strengthen and extend these protections and close pathways to adversaries attaining AI capabilities that threaten all of our people.”

One such adversary not invited, for good reason, was Iran. In its approach to AI, Iran is following its successful development of drone technology, which began with the reverse engineering of a U.S. RQ-170 Sentinel drone it downed in 2012 by using its technology to produce its Shaheed drones. As it now develops its AI expertise via theft, copying open-source software, and collaborating with Russia and China, the Iranian government – which recently acknowledged its failure to reverse-engineer a Tesla electric vehicle – is quietly pursuing AI advances for military, cyber, and defense purposes.

The world has already witnessed the dangers of Iran’s drone program, and Iran’s development and destructive capabilities have surprised Western military and intelligence agencies. If proper attention is not given to another nascent Iranian threat now emerging: a clandestine yet intensifying rush for mastery of AI – this too will become another national security threat.

Iran’s investments into its AI engineers seem to be paying off. So far in 2025, Iran has announced the following: it is allocating $115 million to AI research, it has added an “advanced data-processing” warship equipped with AI to its naval fleet and 1,000 new combat drones, some with AI navigation, to its army; and it has boosted the precision of its missiles using AI, and many of these new weapons will be stationed as part of electronic warfare units in the strategic port of Jask on the Gulf of Oman. It also announced it is testing ‘smart’ combat robots.

According to findings released by Google on January 29, 2025, Iranian groups are using the company’s Gemini AI chatbot for researching defense organizations to target with hacking attempts, to generate content in English, Hebrew, and Farsi to be used in phishing campaigns, and other purposes.

For Iran, AI is an inexpensive path to power. It is already using it for cyberattacks and influence operations abroad, and to upgrade its drones and ballistic missiles, deploy swarms of unmanned watercraft, surveil and repress its citizens, and control its borders. Alarmingly, it could now be exploring AI’s potential nuclear applications.

The U.S. government’s October 2024 landmark national security memorandum on AI reflects awareness of such threats, and details how the U.S. “must develop safeguards for its use of AI tools, and take an active role in steering global AI norms and institutions.” The memorandum sets out guidelines for the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, and national security organizations to add “guardrails” to prevent AI from being hijacked by hostile governments such as Iran, to develop nuclear weapons or “generate or exacerbate deliberate chemical and biological threats.” It also calls on intelligence agencies to begin protecting work, and the chips used to power it, as national treasures.

The Iranian government has already conducted successful campaigns using AI. The Iranian covert influence operation known as Storm-2035 used ChatGPT to disseminate disinformation and generate false news reports on a variety of topics, including the U.S. presidential election.

On numerous occasions, the Iranian leadership has declared its intent to make the country an AI superpower. By November 2021, it completed an official “study of the national artificial intelligence development roadmap,” and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has since then publicly discussed Iran’s strategy to master AI. He said that “one of Iran’s goals is to be among the top 10 countries in the area of artificial intelligence,” and asked Iranian scientists to focus on this goal.

Less than two months after Iran’s launch of its national AI center, Khamenei stressed, in August this year, that Iran must act fast to “master all layers of AI.” He went on to warn of “attempts by the world’s opportunists and those seeking power to target Iran by “establish[ing] an IAEA-like body [to regulate] AI” and “prevent countries’ progress in this field.”

Based on their ongoing public cooperation, it should be deduced that Russia and China have already provided AI technology and knowledge to Iran. In 2020, the Iran-Russia Cooperation Group on Communications and Information Technology began working together on AI, and this year, the two countries signed an official agreement on AI cooperation. Iranian Army deputy chief of staff Brig.-Gen. Mehdi Rabbani attended a Beijing forum on topics including AI back in 2019. By January 2022, the vice chancellor of a top Iranian university was pointing at the 3,000 Iranian students already in China and stressing that the 25-year Iran-China agreement of March 2021 offered a “golden opportunity” to boost the two countries’ AI cooperation.

The most dangerous potential of Iranian mastery of AI is for military uses and nuclear weapons technology. Ali Akbar Salehi, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), said in January 2021 that the organization was striving to use the quantum technology it had been developing since 2016 for AI.

The IRGC and Iran Army added to their arsenals in July 2023 an Iranian-made missile that, Iran claimed, “has artificial intelligence and stealth capabilities.” IRGC commander Gen. Hossein Salami said in February 2024 that Iranian missiles and vessels were “equipped with highly accurate AI technologies,” adding that “today, we can move from [the Iranian nuclear facility at] Bushehr to the American coasts.” IRGC Aerospace Force commander Brig.-Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh boasted, in January 2021, about “the use of artificial intelligence technology” in Iran’s surface-to-surface ballistic missiles. Just yesterday, on February 10, IRGC Naval Commander Ali Reza Tangsiri announced the unveiling of supersonic cruise missiles with a range of 2,000 kilometers, saying: “All these missiles are sophisticated – designed and manufactured on the basis of artificial intelligence – and will be unveiled next year.”

The October 2024 U.S. security memorandum gives the U.S.’s new AI Safety Institute (AISI) the power to help inspect AI tools prior to release to make sure that they cannot be used by terrorists and bad actors to build weapons of mass destruction or help hostile nations improve missile accuracy, as Iran admits doing. Amid reports in 2023 that the IRGC navy had developed AI-enhanced unmanned military vessels, that could be used for mass attacks, commander Tangsiri said that the navy had developed AI-equipped long-range strategic cruise missiles. In August, IRGC naval exercises featured AI-enhanced unmanned vesselsTangsiri explained that the IRGC had fitted drones with AI for improved range, precision, and radar evasion, and that the IRGC was implementing AI in the drone, missile, vessel and submarine industries.

As AI development is moving at the speed of light in Iran, Khamenei is right to worry about international efforts to stop Iran from using it for advancing its military aims. But these efforts, like efforts to slow Iran’s nuclear program, will be difficult to bring to fruition. They will need to include the usual measures, such as leveling sanctions any time the country is caught trying to obtain technology by illegal means.

The new Trump administration will need to act fast to strengthen guardrails to ensure that America’s enemies such as Iran are not able to access its technology. The severity of the threat was reflected in statements by the head of the Pentagon’s newly created Artificial Intelligence Office, who acknowledged in December that “AI adoption by adversaries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea is accelerating and poses significant national security risks.” This week China surprised the world with its DeepSeek AI, action should be taken to make sure Iran doesn’t have the same opportunity with its own AI model.

AUTHOR

Steven Stalinsky

Steven Stalinsky, Ph.D., is Executive Director of The Middle East Media Research Institute.

EDITORS NOTE: This MEMRI column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.