Day: December 18, 2025
GOP, Democrats clash on Capitol Hill as Republicans target cartels and Dems push to curb ICE partnerships
House Democrats unveil PROTECT Act to restrict federal-local immigration partnerships, while Republicans push competing bill to expand anti-cartel enforcement funding.
Zelenskyy calls for US to respond to ‘signals’ Russia is ‘preparing to make next year a year of war’
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy is calling on America and other allies to respond to “signals” that Russia is “preparing to make next year a year of war.”
Australian Police Foil New Suspected Terror Plot Days After Bondi Beach Attack
Australian police carried out a counterterror operation in a Sydney suburb on Thursday, intercepting two vehicles and briefly detaining seven men after receiving intelligence that a violent act was possibly being planned.
The post Australian Police Foil New Suspected Terror Plot Days After Bondi Beach Attack appeared first on .
Meme Wars – Everywhere There Are Meme Wars
Last night’s presidential address was part of the ongoing meme wars. Democrats and their willing allies in media are trying desperately to make this administration look bad. They report the bad, ignore the good and spin whatever they can. Every administration, every one, does good and bad. What makes an administration good or bad in the end is the balance between the two and, perhaps more importantly, the stories told about that administration. Deep reads into history (if anybody does that anymore?) will reveal administrations thought awful contemporaneously, but proven quite good by history – and vice versa. But contemporaneous accounts are what move elections and so the battle rages on.
The post Meme Wars – Everywhere There Are Meme Wars appeared first on The Hugh Hewitt Show.
‘This is a must-win’: These 4 Republicans voted against banning trans surgeries on children
The House GOP passed a bill outright banning transgender surgeries for minors, yet some Republicans still objected.
Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bill Protect Children’s Innocence Act passed in a 216-211 late-night vote on Wednesday. This legislation would make it a felony to perform sex changes or provide puberty blockers and hormone therapy to children.
‘I wish that Republicans were as hell-bent on protecting children as Democrats are when it comes to mutilating them.’
Although the bill was passed largely along party lines, both Democrats and Republicans had some defectors.
On the Republican side, Reps. Mike Lawler of New York, Mike Kennedy of Utah, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, and Gabe Evans of Colorado voted against criminalizing transgender surgeries for children. Only three Democrats voted in favor of Greene’s bill: Reps. Henry Cuellar of Texas, Donald Davis of North Carolina, and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas.
RELATED: ‘Send in the next guy’: Nicki Minaj savages Newsom over his desire to ‘see trans kids’
Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Greene’s legislation is one of two GOP-led bills on the docket targeting transgender interventions for minors. Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, outlined the key differences between Greene’s Protect Children’s Innocence Act and Texas Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s bill the Do No Harm in Medicaid Act.
“It’s necessary because it bans the procedure outright,” Schilling said of Greene’s bill. “We need this nationwide, because children in California should be protected from these procedures just as much as the kids in Texas or Oklahoma or Alabama or Mississippi or Florida.”
“If we can’t get the full ban done, we should at least make sure the taxpayers aren’t paying for it, right?” Schilling said of Crenshaw’s bill. “If you want a sex-change procedure, you should have to pay for it yourself. These are so expensive. They’re so harmful to the individual. Why are you making us participate in this?”
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Both bills are useful because they force lawmakers to go on the record, articulating their degree of support for transgender ideology. Greene’s bill saw near unanimous support from Republicans as well as near unanimous condemnation from Democrats. Crenshaw’s bill puts forward a softer legislative approach, leaving room for moderates on either side to clarify their views on transgender interventions for children.
“I wish that Republicans were as hell-bent on protecting children as Democrats are when it comes to mutilating them,” Schilling told Blaze News. “There’s a difference between the two parties and how fired up they are when it comes to their principles. I think not giving kids sex changes is so commonsense. But these guys will figure out a way to make it controversial and debatable.”
“If Republicans can’t deliver on these things, or at least show that they’re trying to deliver, voters are going to give up on us morally, financially, and politically,” Schilling added. “This is a must-win for Republicans.”
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This is what ‘abolish America’ looks like in practice
Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles announced that four members of an anti-capitalist extremist group were arrested on Friday for plotting coordinated bombings in California on New Year’s Eve.
According to the Department of Justice, the suspects planned to detonate explosives concealed in backpacks at various businesses while also targeting ICE agents and vehicles. The attacks were supposed to coincide with midnight celebrations.
Marxists, anarchists, and Islamist movements share a conviction that the United States, like Israel, is a colonial project that must be destroyed.
The plot was disrupted before any lives were lost. The group behind the plot calls itself the Turtle Island Liberation Front. That name matters more than you might think.
When ideology turns operational
For years, the media has told us that radical, violent rhetoric on the left is mostly symbolic. They explained away the angry slogans, destructive language, and calls for “liberation” as performance or hyperbole.
Bombs are not metaphors, however.
Once explosives enter the picture, framing the issue as harmless expression becomes much more difficult. What makes this case different is the ideological ecosystem behind it.
The Turtle Island Liberation Front was not a single-issue group. It was anti-American, anti-capitalist, and explicitly revolutionary. Its members viewed the United States as an illegitimate occupying force rather than a sovereign nation. America, in their view, is not a nation, not a country; it is a structure that must be dismantled at any cost.
What ‘Turtle Island’ really means
“Turtle Island” is not an innocent cultural reference. In modern activist usage, it is shorthand for the claim that the United States has no moral or legal right to exist. It reframes the country as stolen land, permanently occupied by an illegitimate society.
Once people accept that premise, the use of violence against their perceived enemies becomes not only permissible, but virtuous. That framing is not unique to one movement. It appears again and again across radical networks that otherwise disagree on nearly everything.
Marxists, anarchists, and Islamist movements do not share the same vision for the future. They do not even trust one another. But they share a conviction that the United States, like Israel, is a colonial project that must be destroyed. The alignment of radical, hostile ideologies is anything but a coincidence.
The red-green alliance
For decades, analysts have warned about what is often called the red-green alliance: the convergence of far-left revolutionary politics with Islamist movements. The alliance is not based on shared values, but on shared enemies. Capitalism, national sovereignty, Western culture, and constitutional government all fall into that category.
History has shown us how this process works. Revolutionary coalitions form to tear down an existing order, promising liberation and justice. Once power is seized, the alliance fractures, and the most ruthless faction takes control.
Iran’s 1979 revolution followed this exact pattern. Leftist revolutionaries helped topple the shah. Within a few years, tens of thousands of them were imprisoned, executed, or “disappeared” by the Islamist regime they helped install. Those who do not understand history, the saying goes, are doomed to repeat it.
RELATED: The right must choose: Fight the real war, or cosplay revolution online
Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg via Getty Images
This moment is different
What happened in California was not a foreign conflict bleeding into the United States or a solitary extremist acting on impulse. It was an organized domestic group, steeped in ideological narratives long validated by universities, activist networks, and the media.
The language that once circulated on campuses and social media is now appearing in criminal indictments. “Liberation” has become a justification for explosives. “Resistance” has become a plan with a date and a time. When groups openly call for the destruction of the United States and then prepare bombs to make it happen, the country has entered a new phase. Pretending things have not gotten worse, that we have not crossed a line as a country, is reckless denial.
Every movement like this depends on confusion. Its supporters insist that calls for America’s destruction are symbolic, even as they stockpile weapons. They denounce violence while preparing for it. They cloak criminal intent in the language of justice and morality. That ambiguity is not accidental. It is deliberate.
The California plot should end the debate over whether these red-green alliances exist. They do. The only question left is whether the country will recognize the pattern before more plots advance farther — and succeed.
This is not about one group, one ideology, or one arrest. It is about a growing coalition that has moved past rhetoric and into action. History leaves no doubt where that path leads. The only uncertainty is whether Americans will step in and stop it.
Growing up in the Hebrew Roots movement — and why I eventually had to leave
Several years before my husband and I met, one of his friends told him, “Modern youth are hungry for truth, and they are looking to the oldest forms of traditional orthodoxy to find it. This leaves them with two main choices: Catholicism or Hebrew Roots.”
My husband hadn’t heard of Messianics before this, or he had heard just enough to scoff at the idea of marrying someone who “pretended to be a Jew.” Nevertheless, his friend’s statement stuck with him. Who were these Protestants LARPing as Jews that they could draw intelligent youth in search of truth away from Catholicism?
We were all encouraged to study our Bibles for ourselves and to test one another. When the family home-churched together, it was always lively.
Relishing the chaos
Some would call us Judaizers.
We are certainly not ordinary Protestants. In fact, my family and most Messianics I grew up with believed that the Catholic Church is the whore of Babylon and the Protestant churches are her daughters. Most Christians were “too Catholic” in our opinion because they went to church on Sunday and celebrated Christmas, two practices instituted by Catholicism.
Despite how odd Messianics might be, they are too disorganized to be classified as a cult. There are somewhere around 200,000-300,000 Hebrew Roots people with no central figure, and there are countless groups within the movement. Some of them are self-identifying Torah followers who may lead isolated lives or fellowship at home with a few like-minded people. Others are members of organized Messianic denominations.
The movement has very few real Jews in it, and for the most part Messianic believers reject modern-day Jewish practices. Instead we endeavor to interpret the Old Testament as literally as possible. This, of course, is nearly an impossible feat and the main cause for disunity in the Hebrew Roots movement.
Perhaps what makes this expression of group interesting is the fact that it is a movement that can’t really be defined as a whole, and yet all the members of it believe that the truth they have is absolute, even though all their like-minded compatriots disagree with them on how to execute this truth. To those raised in the movement, the disorder and chaos are natural and even relished. To those watching from the outside, I can only imagine how bizarre we appear.
Family tradition
My mom chose my name because it was old-fashioned. Most of the rest of the family didn’t like it and tried to give me various nicknames. But my parents named me perfectly.
Keturah — meaning a sacrificial aroma/incense — may be strange-sounding, but it also uniquely fits in all the worlds I’m most interested in. It is both a Jewish and an Amish name and, oddly, has a deep Catholic meaning. It has served me well in the secular world, too, with its unique sound. My name has made it possible for me to blend in among both Christian hippies and woke misfits.
I never considered how odd it was that my great-grandfather basically invented the religion I grew up with (with heavy modifications made by my grandfather). What should have been a red flag — why did nobody figure this out before my great-grandfather? — was instead championed as proof of our righteousness.
My great-grandfather had been a Pentecostal pastor. But he started reading his Bible one day. This led him to preaching on things that his congregation was not ready for, because “the ways of the world were too comfortable.” He left his church, took another wife (his first wife left him with their three children because his beliefs were getting strange), and began a road ministry that my grandfather eventually took over.
I was often told the story of the Rechabites, a family who were saved from being utterly wiped out because they obeyed the words of their great-grandfather. My great-grandfather, too, had left us an inheritance, and if we cherished it, we would be saved from the horrors of the world. I believed this.
RELATED: Deliverance requires memory — and America is forgetting
Photo by Heritage Images/Getty Images
Lively debate
I was neither brainwashed nor raised in a cult. There is nothing more American than leaving the beaten path to make your own way, especially when it comes to religion.
The women in my family are too mouthy and bratty, myself included, for the family to ever have fallen into true patriarchal suppression. We were all encouraged to study our Bibles for ourselves and to test one another. When the family home-churched together, it was always lively.
Even I, at the ages of 10 through 14, would get pulled into the heated dialogue with religious opinions of my own, carefully researched and passionately presented. I was obsessed with writing theological essays during those years.
We were not cosplaying as Jews any more than Amish are LARPing as peasants. We were more interested in what the Bible had to say than the traditions of modern-day Jews. In fact, anything that was “traditional” must be too much like Catholicism. We didn’t want to follow customs, but the law of Yahweh.
Although my great-grandfather and grandfather invented our faith, there was room for fluidity. It has changed much over the years. My great-grandfather kept the Saturday Sabbath and refused welfare for his family although they were poor and had 13 children. They did not eat pork, but ate according to Leviticus 11. We call this eating kosher, but it’s more accurately referred to as eating “clean.”
My grandfather started using the “Sacred Names” to refer to God when my father was young and warned against “calling upon the name of Jesus” because Jesus, he argued, was another form of Zeus. We argued over whether to spell the Messiah’s name Yahshua or Yeshua. We never referred to God as “God” or “the Lord” because those, too, were pagan names. It was always “Father” or “Yahweh.”
Which Sabbath?
When I was 9 years old, my grandfather realized that Saturday was not the true Sabbath. He had discovered an idea called the Lunar Sabbath.
The Sabbath is determined by the phases of the moon. At the end of the month when the moon goes dark, the Sabbath is two or three days long until the new moon appears and resets the Sabbath. And so Sabbath might be on a Tuesday one month and then Wednesday or Thursday the next month. If it were cloudy, it might be difficult to see the moon, and sometimes we would be keeping Sabbath wrong for a week or so until we were able to clearly see what the sky said. It was also difficult for making plans and having social relationships.
When I was 14, I sat down and did a long study on the Sabbath using encyclopedias, various Bibles, and concordances. After three months I presented my research to my family. I explained the pros and cons for the Lunar Sabbath, Saturday Sabbath, and Sunday Sabbath. I had become convinced that Sunday was still not the true Sabbath and that we should stop doing the Lunar Sabbath and revert to Saturday. My parents and siblings could not argue with my evidence. We voted. After five years of living by the moon, we unanimously agreed to revert back to Saturday Sabbath.
This situation taught me several things: We were not a cult, but most of my family was intellectually incapable of interpreting scripture for themselves. It was cool that my family changed after my research. But also why hadn’t they studied this properly at the start? I was 14 years old, and yet I had convinced my parents to make a major theological change. This both inflated my ego and left me feeling insecure and unstable because I was truly alone and could not go to my parents for answers about God.
This is part one of a two-part essay. Part 2 will appear next week. It was adapted and edited for length from an essay that first appeared on the Substack Polite Company.
Carla Abellana, Ashley Ortega, more Kapuso stars grace ‘Shake, Rattle & Roll: Evil Origins” premiere night
Stars gathered on Thursday evening for the grand premiere of “Shake, Rattle & Roll: Evil Origins,” held at Gateway 2 Cinemas in Quezon City, marking the official big-screen unveiling of the project.
Marco Masa after his PBB journey: ‘There is still so much more ahead’
Marco Masa has nothing but a grateful heart for his “Pinoy Big Brother: Celebrity Collab Edition 2.0” journey.
