Category: Conservative Review
Hamas Returns Remains Of Last American Hostage Held In Gaza
‘Israel shares in the deep sorrow of the Chen family’
Colbert on being seen as ‘lefty figure’: ‘I think I’m more conservative than people think’
Comedian Stephen Colbert said that he believes he is “more conservative than people think” in a recent interview for GQ. “People perceive me as this sort of lefty figure,” Colbert said in the interview posted Monday, which was highlighted by Mediaite. “I think I’m more conservative than people think. I just happen to be talking…
How H-1B hires broke USAA’s bond with veterans
The United Services Automobile Association is one of the most venerable names in banking and insurance, a company that prides itself on its service to members of the military and their families. In recent years, however, USAA has run into serious financial trouble due to a combination of mismanagement, fashionable diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, and the firm’s increasing reliance on incompetent and untrustworthy H-1B workers, most of whom are from India.
A significant number of current and former USAA employees have come forward to discuss what they describe as a toxic workplace culture, which has led to an alarming number of employee suicides, and the company’s outsourcing of critical functions to H-1Bs and Indian consultancies, putting at risk the financial data of its customers, which include high-ranking members of the U.S. armed forces.
What began as a cost-cutting strategy in the early 2000s now threatens the stability of an institution long trusted by veterans.
Insiders granted anonymity to avoid retaliation say USAA’s decline began in the 2000s under then-CEO Robert G. Davis, who outsourced IT and other core functions to H-1B contracting firms such as Tata Consultancy Services. Those firms imposed contracts requiring USAA to maintain minimum staffing levels, creating chronic overstaffing. Idle contractors were reportedly assigned “busywork” to meet quotas, with conference rooms converted into laptop farms where workers sat “packed like sardines.”
One insider described the result as “incredibly incompetent” operations. Projects that U.S.-based employees could complete on time were instead handed to H-1B contractors who often lacked the necessary skills and required retraining.
From cost-cutting to collapse
At the same time, USAA repeatedly laid off American staff and replaced them with foreign workers, driving labor costs higher and eroding institutional knowledge. Davis retired abruptly in 2007, but his successors continued his policies, expanding USAA’s offshore footprint with new IT centers in Guadalajara, Mexico, and Chennai, India.
Insiders say H-1B contractors at USAA often lack basic programming skills, compounding inefficiency. In one case, a credit card processing problem baffled contractors for six months until the company brought back a retired American employee, who solved the problem in a matter of days. The constant visa turnover worsens the issue. Skilled H-1Bs leave after six years, draining institutional knowledge. Turnover is even higher at USAA’s Guadalajara facility, where Indian employees reportedly fear cartel violence.
Bureaucratic bloat magnifies these problems. Each team has dual directors, and many systems rely on outdated software. That dysfunction has drawn scrutiny from federal regulators, who fined USAA for failed audits and violations of anti-money-laundering laws. Those failures forced the company to sell off divisions, including real estate, and pushed USAA into persistent losses through much of the decade.
Customers have also felt the effects. Many complain that poorly trained H-1B staff struggle to handle basic service requests. One customer said resolving a fraud alert took hours — and that he now contacts USAA’s top executives directly to get results.
Security risks and cultural decay
USAA’s growing dependence on H-1B contractors and overseas labor has created potential security and compliance risks, according to multiple insiders. The company has outsourced anti-money laundering work to Tata Consultancy Services, which reportedly performs much of that work in India. As a result, the personal financial data of U.S. service members and veterans may be stored or processed abroad.
USAA also shares customer data — including names, addresses, and birth dates — with LexisNexis, with no option for customers to opt out. One customer said he only discovered this practice after receiving a notice in the mail.
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subodhsathe via iStock/Getty Images
Inside the company, these policies have coincided with a marked decline in morale. Mass layoffs of veteran employees have preceded at least three suicides, including one who shot himself in a company parking lot. A former director described intervening to stop another potential suicide. Tensions intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic, when USAA defied Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order banning vaccine mandates.
Employees describe a sharp cultural shift away from USAA’s traditional military ethos toward a mishmash of corporate diversity programming. The company has hosted Diwali celebrations and mandatory DEI events while facing allegations of religious discrimination against Christian employees. One former employee has taken a case to arbitration. Internal surveys reportedly show employee satisfaction at just 33%.
An institution on the brink
Analysts say the company’s reliance on foreign labor and internal instability have eroded its reputation for customer service and financial stewardship. What began as a cost-cutting strategy in the early 2000s now threatens the stability of an institution long trusted by veterans.
Whether USAA can recover will depend on its ability to restore confidence — both among employees and the members it was established to serve.
Editor’s note: The headline and subheadline of this article have been edited after publication.
Trump uses tariff revenue to protect poor mothers and kids hurt by Democrats’ shutdown
Using the revenue of some of the tariffs that liberal critics have fought vigorously, President Donald Trump has helped vulnerable American mothers and, in the process, neutralized some of Democrats’ supposed “leverage” in what is nearly the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.
House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) recently admitted that while the Democrat-induced government shutdown has been painful for families across the country, it is somehow necessary because “it is one of the few leverage times [Democrats] have.”
In their quest for leverage, Democrats have jeopardized critical food assistance and health care for the nearly seven million poor American pregnant mothers, breastfeeding mothers, infants, and at-risk children who rely on the special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children program known as WIC.
‘American families deserve certainty from their government.’
The WIC program, which received roughly $7 billion in fiscal year 2024, is federally funded through the annual appropriations process. The National WIC Association warned last month that unless additional funding was injected into the program, millions of families would lose their benefits as of Nov. 1.
“NWA is calling on the White House to make additional emergency funds available to avoid a short-term crisis for the millions of American families who count on WIC while Congress negotiates full-year funding for FY 2026,” Georgia Machell, president of the NWA, said in an Oct. 21 statement.
“WIC is a lifeline for nearly 7 million pregnant and postpartum women, infants, and young children. Even short-term disruption to WIC’s healthy food benefits, lactation support, nutrition education, screenings, and referrals can have long-term negative impacts on families,” added Machell.
On Friday, the Trump administration tapped a fund of unused Section 232 tariff revenue in order to make $450 million available for the WIC program, reported Reuters.
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Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Federal funding records reportedly show that the money was transferred to the WIC program on Friday from the tariff revenue fund, which was made available to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for commodity disaster assistance. The USDA drew $300 million from the same fund last month to keep the WIC program liquid.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated last month, “The Trump White House will not allow impoverished mothers and their babies to go hungry because of the Democrats’ political games.”
Machell noted in the wake of the White House’s rescue of the program that “this additional funding is a welcome relief, but it is a stopgap, not a solution,” stressing the need for an end to the shutdown.
“American families deserve certainty from their government, not the constant anxiety of short-term fixes, especially when their children’s health is at stake,” said Machell.
While the administration swooped in to bolster the WIC program, it did not similarly drain its pool of tariff revenues to fully fund Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, having indicated that it lacks the authority to use emergency funds for SNAP.
Not only did the transfer temporarily deprive Democrats of the ability to use American pain as political leverage, it served as yet another point in favor of Trump’s tariffs.
House Democrats prophesied in April that Trump’s tariff policy would lead to economic collapse. Even though such calamity has yet to manifest, Senate Democrats passed resolutions last week to eliminate some of the president’s global and country-specific tariffs, namely those imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
According to an Oct. 31 report from the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank focused on tax policy, “Trump’s imposed tariffs will raise $2.4 trillion in revenue over the next decade on a conventional basis” and had raised $174 billion in revenue between January and September of this year.
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‘Operation MRE’: Meals, reform, enforcement
As the government shutdown drags on, media pundits warn about a looming “food insecurity crisis.” That’s liberal shorthand for hunger — and if government numbers are correct, some 42 million Americans are supposedly about to go hungry.
Wait a second. That means 1 in 7 Americans relies on food stamps — or, as Washington now calls it, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
If a family of illegal aliens shows up, feed them an MRE, then put them on a bus to the nearest deportation flight.
Try this simple test: Look around and count the next seven people you see. Does anyone resemble a refugee from a third-world famine? If so, check his green card. If not, hand him one of Kristi Noem’s “get home free” cards and move along.
Among those 42 million, a fair question arises: How many are genuinely hungry — and how many haven’t missed a free government meal in years, maybe decades?
Here’s a modest proposal. The government shutdown could serve an unexpected purpose — sorting the truly needy from the habitual scammers.
Once the electronic benefit transfer cards run dry, the president should declare a national emergency and order the military to help distribute food directly to Americans in need. Set up relief stations at National Guard armories and military bases in every state.
At each station, ask for a valid government-issued ID and the now-worthless EBT card. Record both, take a quick photo, and hand each applicant a copy of the U.S. dietary guidelines. Then provide meals ready to eat — MREs — from existing military stores. Ask recipients to return the next day for actual groceries, in quantities matching the recommended dietary plan.
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Photo by Joe Raedle / Contributor via Getty Images
That’s how you end food insecurity overnight — while also eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” It’s a win-win!
While they’re there, run basic checks for outstanding warrants, duplicate or fake IDs, and phony EBT cards. In this way, every needy American gets fed, and every scammer gets flagged.
If a family of illegal aliens shows up, feed them an MRE, then put them on a bus to the nearest deportation flight.
If the system works, maybe it’s time to replace the SNAP credit-card model entirely. Instead of government-issued plastic that funds junk food and fraud, Americans in need would receive actual food — efficiently and fairly.
The result? Less waste, lower costs, and fewer excuses for corruption disguised as compassion.
And if this plan exposes just how dependent Democrats have become on managing poverty rather than solving it, so much the better. Once it’s clear that the Bad Orange Man can feed Americans and deport freeloaders in a single stroke, watch how fast Chuck Schumer and company rush to vote for that continuing resolution.
Pennsylvania’s Geriatric Supreme Court Judges Seek Another Decade Of Leftist Activism On Bench
Judicial Democrat partisanship has resulted in a decade of leftist decisions on congressional redistricting, election integrity, and abortion.
The triumph — for now — of New York’s Muslim socialist mayor
If the polls are right, New York City is about to elect Zohran Mamdani as its next mayor. An avowed socialist, he’s riding a wave of “free stuff” politics to victory. Mamdani also describes himself as a proud Muslim who says his faith will no longer “hide in the shadows” of American life.
It’s hard to know what he means. Mosques exist in every major city. Muslims worship freely under the same First Amendment protections as everyone else. What Mamdani seems to want isn’t tolerance but cultural submission — not coexistence, but acceptance. To dissent from his worldview, he insists, is “Islamophobia.”
The choice remains what it has always been: guilt or grace, grievance or truth.
That accusation follows the left’s familiar playbook: disagreement equals bigotry. Americans, however, don’t need to fear Islam to reject its false claims about reality.
The politics of pity
Recently, Mamdani told a story — sometimes about an aunt, sometimes about a cousin — who supposedly stopped riding the subway after 9/11 out of fear. The details change, but the purpose doesn’t: to draw sympathy and votes through emotional appeal.
We’re meant to respond, “How cruel Americans are!” The fact that this narrative works says something profound about the collapse of moral imagination among American voters.
“Never forget,” New York once vowed. Now the city seems to say, “We forgot — remind us again, and where’s our free handout?”
After a terrorist attack that killed more than 3,000 people — planned and carried out by Islamic extremists targeting symbols of American capitalism — one might expect some soul-searching. Shame could have led to repentance, reflection, or even conversion. Instead, Mamdani invites Americans to feel guilty for making a Muslim feel uncomfortable after 9/11. The villain becomes America itself.
This is textbook DARVO — deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. It’s the same intersectional ideology that now dominates universities and city halls. Mamdani’s campaign is its political expression: Islam as the newest “oppressed” identity, ready to claim power in the name of liberation from “whiteness.”
Selective shame
Christians, by contrast, are told to feel shame constantly. From kindergarten to college, they are lectured about crusades, inquisitions, and colonialism — most of them centuries past, all of them endlessly exaggerated. Professors call it “deconstruction.” The goal is to make young Christians feel guilty enough to abandon their faith.
So shame is permitted and even celebrated — but only when it weakens Christianity. The moment it might challenge Islam, it becomes taboo.
Why? Because the modern left keeps a hierarchy of sacred victims. In that moral pecking order, Islam isn’t a religion but a protected identity, immune from criticism. That’s why progressives can champion Islam while rejecting Christianity, even though no Islamic society on earth practices the liberal values the left claims to cherish.
The contradiction is glaring, but ideology blinds them. The left despises both Christianity and capitalism, so a Muslim socialist like Mamdani suits prgressive purposes perfectly.
Rival gods, rival visions
Religion isn’t like ice cream. You can enjoy multiple flavors of dessert, but not multiple visions of truth or multiple gods. Religions offer rival accounts of reality: who God is, what man is, and what the good life requires.
Christianity teaches that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God whose atoning sacrifice restores sinners to communion with their Creator. Islam denies that. It teaches that Jesus was only a prophet and that salvation comes through works — keeping the Five Pillars — without assurance of grace.
In the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Islam’s Quran insists that Jesus was merely a messenger. Yet Islam also claims that the Quran itself is eternal and uncreated — the word of God manifested in a book, not a person. Christians believe the Word became flesh. Muslims revere a text instead.
Even the Quran, in 5:68, tells Muslims to uphold the Torah and the gospel. But those very texts affirm Christ’s divinity and the atonement — the truths Islam rejects. This “Islamic dilemma” reveals the irreconcilable divide between the two faiths.
A society built on Islam will not resemble one shaped by Christianity. The two produce fundamentally different understandings of law, grace, family, and freedom — and therefore of government itself. Mamdani has already made clear that his Islamic convictions will shape how he governs.
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Photo by Omar Qattaa / Contributor via Getty Images
The only cure for confusion
In “Healing the Open Wounds of Islam,” Vishal Mangalwadi reminds readers that it was Christianity — not secular philosophy — that transformed Europe from barbarism to liberty. Only the Bible’s message of redemption through Christ can do the same today.
This is a moment for American Christians to recover moral clarity and preach the gospel boldly to Muslim neighbors. Only biblical truth, not multicultural sentimentality, can sustain freedom.
So let’s return to Mamdani’s changing subway story — the aunt, or cousin, or whoever she was supposed to be. Shame can serve a noble purpose when it leads to repentance. After 9/11, the right response to evil wasn’t self-pity but the words of Christ:
“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)
The choice remains what it has always been: guilt or grace, grievance or truth.
Never forget which one leads to freedom.
