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Democrats claim shutdown victory after GOP defections revive Obamacare fight
House Democrats, including Rep. Glenn Ivey and Rep. Ro Khanna, say 43-day government shutdown elevated healthcare messaging despite failing to secure Obamacare subsidies initially.
Swalwell campaign in the hot seat after accepting almost $15K from CCP-tied law firm: ‘Stop playing footsie’
Campaign filings show the gubernatorial campaign for Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., received almost $15k from a Beijing-based law firm and one of it’s U.S.-based partners.
Trump slips into French accent while recounting blunt phone call with Macron
President Donald Trump recounted threatening President Emmanuel Macron with 25% tariffs on French goods to raise European drug prices during a White House roundtable.
Taco Bell rolls out new ‘luxe’ $3 value menu as fans debate the tradeoffs
Taco Bell’s new value menu gets mixed reviews from fans. While some praise the $1.99 churros, others mourn the loss of beloved items like the Loaded Nachos.
Mets agree to deal with All-Star Bo Bichette after missing out on Kyle Tucker: reports
The New York Mets reportedly signed Bo Bichette to a three-year, $126 million deal after missing out on Kyle Tucker, transforming their infield with the move.
Democrats Constitutional and Historical Ignorance (Or Is It Convenience?)
Tim Walz has declared war on the federal government. Clearly the man has no understanding of the history of the Civil War or of just how the Constitution works. This seems to be common in Blue States.
The post Democrats Constitutional and Historical Ignorance (Or Is It Convenience?) appeared first on The Hugh Hewitt Show.
Why your aunt hates ICE: A spiritual analysis of liberal women
Are American women experiencing a deeper spiritual crisis beneath today’s political chaos?
BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey believes so, arguing that the most extreme strains of progressive activism are not driven by the majority of women — who largely identify as conservative or moderate — but by a smaller, highly intense subset channeling their natural nurturing instincts into politics.
And the liberal media’s new darling — the perceived victim of the recent ICE shooting in Minneapolis, Renee Nicole Good — is an example of the stereotypical woman who could be identified as having had a spiritual crisis.
“She’s kind of the stereotype of this liberal, white woman. Is this characterization of older, white women as unstable social justice activists accurate? I would argue yes and no. So if we look at the political demographics of the white woman in America, 36% of white women identify as conservative,” she says.
“Most white women don’t actually identify as liberal: 33% is moderate, 28% as liberal. That is still a large percentage, but that is a lower percentage of progressives in our demographic than any other demographic of women in America. So white women are actually the most conservative female demographic in America,” she continues.
However, as Stuckey points out, the women who identify as liberal are “extremely intense.”
“I think it has to do with this idea of misplaced mothering. And this is not just for white women. This is just for women in general,” she explains.
Misplaced mothering is when women — who have a natural biological instinct to nurture children — instead put that instinct into pets, plants, politics, or their profession.
“This kind of disordered channeling of the nurturing, beautifying, cultivating, mothering instinct creates a kind of inner discord and disorder that lends itself to bitterness and can lend itself to instability and lends itself to outsized passion when it comes to social justice projects and social justice causes,” Stuckey explains.
“The illegal alien becomes your child, or the gangbanger becomes your child, or this man who thinks that he’s caught in the wrong body and just wants to go into the girls’ locker room becomes your child. These causes become your children, the perceived victim in these causes become your children,” she continues.
“And this is all triggered by what I call toxic empathy,” she says, pointing out that the more empathetic a person is, the more likely they are to be radicalized.
“The more highly empathetic someone is, actually, the meaner they can be to those that they don’t perceive as the victim. If you perceive this one person as the oppressed … you’re putting all your feelings in how they feel. Everyone that you see as oppressing that victim becomes your enemy, and you become absolutely ruthless to them,” she explains.
This is why so many highly empathetic women are going to bat for Renee Nicole Good, when if you scroll through their social media history, they’re dancing on the grave of Charlie Kirk.
“She feels like she is like a mother and protector of all of these supposedly marginalized groups,” Stuckey says, “Everyone that she sees as the oppressor becomes the enemy, and she is cruel towards them, and she will fight them tooth and nail.”
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California’s abortion ‘trauma’ sanctuary: Newsom refuses to extradite accused doctor to ‘pro-life’ Louisiana
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill (R) blasted California officials this week for refusing to extradite a doctor facing abortion charges.
Murrill said that it was “appalling” to see Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) “openly admitting that they will protect an individual from being held accountable for illegal, medically unethical, and dangerous conduct that led to a woman being coerced into terminating the life of her unborn child.”
Remy Coeytaux was charged on Jan. 8 in St. Tammany Parish with criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs, a crime that carries a maximum sentence of 50 years of hard labor.
‘The trauma of my chemical abortion still haunts me.’
Murrill announced on Tuesday — several months after indicating that she would “pursue anyone and use any legal means available” to hold accountable those who distribute abortion pills in the Bayou State — that a criminal arrest warrant had been signed for Coeytaux and his name had been entered into the National Crime Information Center.
Roughly an hour later, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry indicated that he was “signing the extradition paperwork to bring this California doctor to justice.”
“Louisiana has a zero tolerance policy for those who subvert our laws, seek to hurt women, and promote abortion,” said Landry. “I know Gavin Newsom supports abortion in all its forms, but that doesn’t work in Louisiana. We are unapologetically pro-life.”
Shuran Huang for the Washington Post via Getty Images
Newsom said in response that “Louisiana’s request is denied.”
“We will not allow extremist politicians from other states to reach into California and try to punish doctors based on allegations that they provided reproductive health care services. Not today. Not ever,” said Newsom. “We will never be complicit with Trump’s war on women.”
Newsom suggested that this frustration of Louisiana justice was consistent with his 2022 executive order directing California to decline extradition requests for doctors accused of providing or facilitating abortions.
Nancy Northup, the president and chief executive of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing Coeytaux in a separate civil case, told the New York Times that the allegations “are unproven and should not be reported as fact.”
“Women should also be able to get safe and legal abortion care in their own state,” added Northup. “Thousands of women seek abortion pills via mail every year because abortion is banned in their state, and that will not change until abortion is legal everywhere.”
While characterized as safe, abortion pills not only kill unborn children but endanger women’s lives. The Ethics and Public Policy Center noted in a report last year that over 10% of women “experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.”
Coeytaux is accused in a federal lawsuit of sending abortion pills to a Louisiana woman in 2023 — a woman who has indicated she was pressured to take the drugs and is now “haunt[ed]” by her chemical abortion.
Rosalie Markezich, the recipient of the drug and now suffering from the fallout of the abortion, claimed in a September court filing that despite initially celebrating her pregnancy, her boyfriend “soon changed his mind,” then used her personal email address and mailing address to obtain mifepristone and misoprostol “from an online provider that his sister has used multiple times before.”
A few days after allegedly forwarding to Coeytaux the $150 her boyfriend sent her, Markezich received the drugs by mail.
According to her declaration, Markezich changed her mind about killing her child, but her boyfriend, who “had anger issues and a criminal record,” allegedly coerced her into taking them — and she proved unable to throw them back up.
“The trauma of my chemical abortion still haunts me,” said Markezich.
Coeytaux is also named in a civil complaint filed in July with the federal court for the Southern District of Texas. The Texas complaint alleges that a woman, Kendal Garza, was pressured by her estranged husband to use abortion drugs allegedly obtained from Coeytaux “to murder” Garza’s unborn child by another man.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) ordered Coeytaux on Aug. 14 to cease and desist from mailing abortion drugs into the state of Texas and indicated such conduct not only violates Texas state law but the federal Comstock Act of 1873, which prohibits the mailing of abortion-related drugs.
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Trump promised ‘retribution.’ Congress keeps funding the machine.
Courts can block executive action, so Congress must cut funding. Yet Republicans refuse, leaving the Justice Department and FBI with the same tools Democrats will use again.
That gap between rhetoric and action now threatens to erase everything President Trump promised. In March 2023, he vowed, “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” and pledged to “obliterate the deep state” and fire the bureaucrats who turned federal law enforcement into a political weapon. Those words land with force. Appropriations decide whether they mean anything.
Trump’s ‘retribution’ pledge will collapse into another campaign slogan if Republicans keep funding the same Department of Justice and FBI they claim to oppose.
But if Trump relies on executive action alone, courts will block key moves and the next Democrat in the White House will reverse the rest. Only structural reforms written into law can stop the next round of weaponization.
That reality hits hardest at the Department of Justice and the FBI. A Congress that keeps funding these agencies under the Biden-era architecture keeps the weaponization machine intact.
Yet Republicans just pushed through a Justice funding bill that drew more Democrat support than conservative support.
That vote captures the GOP Congress since 2017. Leadership passes budget bills with less resistance from Democrats than from Republicans. Spending is the battlefield. Everything else fades fast. If your own side opposes your funding bills more than the other side, you are not changing the country. You are managing the status quo.
Here’s the brutal truth: Congress has not structurally defanged the Justice Department’s weaponization or taken a sledgehammer to the FBI’s open-ended mandate. The same deep-state actors who drove January 6 abuses, FACE Act prosecutions of pro-life activists, and FBI operations like Arctic Frost still collect paychecks.
Republicans had one last chance to shrink this machinery before Democrats likely regain the House. The final Justice Department appropriations bill should have cut off funding for the most abusive programs and permanently reduced the department’s ability to target Americans. Instead, Republicans passed a status quo bill that effectively codifies Biden’s DOJ.
The vote breakdown exposes the scam. All but six House Democrats supported the minibus package that included full-year DOJ funding. Meanwhile, 22 House conservatives opposed it.
The package included three appropriations bills: Commerce-Justice-Science; Energy and Water Development; and Interior and Environment. Freedom Caucus pressure forced leadership to hold a separate vote on the Commerce-Justice-Science portion first, and even then, it drew 40 Republican “no” votes. Leadership tried to quiet the revolt by swapping out a $1 million earmark for a Somali-led nonprofit after a welfare fraud scandal in that state. That move changed nothing about the bill’s core failures.
RELATED: The ‘blue-slip block’ is GOP cowardice masquerading as tradition
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Democrats voted for this bill despite calling Trump a dictator because the bill left the regime’s tools in place. On the issues that matter most, it stayed silent.
It did not:
- Bar funding for future January 6 prosecutions.
- Bar funding for FACE Act prosecutions of pro-life activists.
- Address the FBI’s Arctic Frost overreach.
- Defund sanctuary cities, even though sanctuary policies endanger federal agents and courts have repeatedly blocked Trump’s efforts to punish them. If Congress refuses to codify enforcement policy, courts will keep neutralizing it.
- Cut off grants to NGOs that help illegal aliens evade deportation. Other appropriations bills even fund refugee resettlement contractors.
- End incentives for blue states to implement red-flag laws. The bill keeps the $740 million slush fund that bribes states to expand them. It also fails to defund Biden’s pistol brace ban, the “engaged in the business” rule, and the Justice Department’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
- Fund an Election Integrity Office to implement Trump’s executive order on election integrity, even while the bill keeps money flowing to offices that persecute Americans.
- Rein in the Office of Inspector General, which receives $139 million despite lacking an appointed inspector general and operating under an acting career bureaucrat.
The FBI budget barely took a haircut from its record Biden-era levels. Keep the scale in mind: The bureau has more than 35,000 employees, yet only 138 have been fired so far.
Republicans also promised fiscal discipline. This minibus package totals roughly $180 billion and rejects steeper cuts conservatives proposed in committee. It includes nearly $5.6 billion in earmarks for 3,030 projects. Leadership found room for parochial spending while refusing to squeeze the agencies that turned federal power against the public.
Congress holds one real lever to change the regime without begging courts for permission: the power of the purse. If Republicans won’t pass transformative legislation, they must at least defund odious policies through appropriations.
Trump’s “retribution” pledge will collapse into another campaign slogan if Republicans keep funding the same Department of Justice and FBI they claim to oppose. When Democrats vote happily to fund the very departments that targeted Americans under Biden, the conclusion writes itself. Washington will not dismantle the machine. It will keep it humming until Democrats take power again and aim it at us with even fewer restraints.
Did Trump use the ‘Havana syndrome’ weapon on Venezuela?
A Venezuelan security guard, speaking to the New York Post after the January 3 raid that captured Nicolás Maduro, described American forces using some kind of directed-energy weapon that left hundreds of defenders bleeding from their noses, vomiting blood, and unable to stand. According to this account, about 20 U.S. troops from roughly eight helicopters took down hundreds of Venezuelan soldiers without a single American death.
The basic facts are wild enough without the sci-fi angle. Delta Force conducted Operation Absolute Resolve in the predawn hours, capturing Maduro and his wife from Fort Tiuna in Caracas. More than 200 special operations forces participated, supported by about 150 aircraft that disabled Venezuelan air defenses and extracted Maduro to New York to face narco-terrorism charges. Venezuela reported over 100 casualties, with only seven U.S. troops injured.
That’s already one of the most audacious military operations since the bin Laden raid.
Trump wants adversaries, particularly in Latin America, to believe the US has these capabilities.
But then comes the guard’s testimony, shared publicly by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on X. He describes radar systems simultaneously shutting down, swarms of drones, and then this mysterious weapon that made his “head feel like it was exploding from the inside.” Mass collapse. Internal bleeding. Complete incapacitation.
To those of us with long memories, it sounded strangely familiar, hearkening back to the “Havana syndrome” attacks on American personnel starting in Havana in 2016. Those attacks were suspected to have been caused by a secret energy weapon. Now, the United States has its own.
Whether we actually used that weapon or the White House just wants you to believe it did, either way, the strategic effect is the same.
The Havana syndrome connection
Starting in late 2016, U.S. diplomats and CIA officers in Cuba began experiencing bizarre symptoms: sudden onset of severe headaches, hearing strange sounds, vertigo, cognitive issues, and what appeared to be actual brain injuries. Over the next several years, hundreds of American personnel reported similar incidents in China, Russia, Austria, and even Washington, D.C.
The National Academies of Sciences concluded in 2020 that “pulsed electromagnetic energy” was the most plausible explanation for at least some cases. Multiple intelligence panels agreed: Directed-energy weapons were the leading theory. In 2024, investigative reporting linked Russia’s GRU Unit 29155 to research on “non-lethal acoustic weapons.”
For years, American officials have suspected, but couldn’t prove, that hostile actors used these weapons against U.S. personnel. The attacks hit diplomats inside embassy compounds, in hotels, and even at home. Invisible, deniable, and devastating.
Now fast-forward to the January 3, 2026, raid and its darkly ironic twist: 32 Cuban military advisers were killed defending Maduro’s compound, possibly hit with the same type of weapon that may have been used against Americans in Cuba.
If true, it sends a message: We know what you did to our people in Havana, and now you’ve experienced it yourselves.
The Pentagon just bought the Havana syndrome weapon
CNN reported on January 13 that Homeland Security Investigations acquired a device through an undercover operation for tens of millions of dollars in the waning days of the Biden administration, using Pentagon funding. The backpack-size device produces pulsed radio waves and contains Russian components.
That portability matters. One of the long-standing questions about Havana syndrome was how you could make a weapon powerful enough to cause brain injuries that’s also portable enough to deploy against specific targets in embassy compounds, hotels, and homes.
The Pentagon tested it for more than a year and considered it serious enough to brief the House and Senate Intelligence Committees in late 2024. There’s still debate within the government about its actual link to Havana syndrome cases, but the acquisition has, according to CNN, “reignited a painful and contentious debate” about whether foreign adversaries have been attacking U.S. officials with directed-energy weapons.
Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer who went public about injuries he sustained in what he believes was an attack in Moscow in 2017, told CNN: “If the [U.S. government] has indeed uncovered such devices, then the CIA owes all the victims a f**king major and public apology for how we have been treated as pariahs.”
This news breaks days after Venezuelan guards described similar symptoms during the Maduro raid. Interesting timing.
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Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images
But did they actually use it?
The Venezuelan guard’s account describes mass nosebleeds, vomiting blood, and hundreds incapacitated simultaneously. These are more extreme than documented Havana syndrome cases, which typically involved headaches, vertigo, and cognitive issues rather than acute internal bleeding. Could blast overpressure from conventional explosives cause similar effects? Yes. Could shrapnel, concussive force, and chemical irritants from 150 aircraft’s worth of ordnance produce these symptoms? Absolutely.
Here’s what makes me skeptical: Both Maduro and his wife claimed injuries, but they survived and appeared in a Manhattan courtroom days later. The injuries reported (Maduro falling while fleeing, his wife struck in the head) sound like conventional combat trauma, not internal organ damage from directed energy.
And the biggest tell: The White House press secretary amplified this story. The Pentagon just spent tens of millions on a device they suspect is behind Havana syndrome attacks, briefed Congress, and now CNN is reporting on it publicly. If U.S. special forces had actually deployed a classified weapons system and some guard blew the secret, the response would be aggressive operational security and plausible deniability. Instead, we’re getting transparency.
That’s not how you handle a genuine security breach. That’s how you handle a psychological operation.
Why ambiguity is the weapon
The Trump administration wants adversaries, particularly in Latin America, to believe the U.S. has these capabilities. And here’s the brilliance: The technology is real (we have the receipts), but whether it was used remains ambiguous. Venezuela can’t prove it didn’t happen. The U.S. won’t confirm or deny. Adversaries now have to plan for worst-case scenarios.
This is the modern version of Reagan’s Star Wars program. Most scientists knew it couldn’t work as advertised, but the Soviets spent billions trying to counter it anyway. Sometimes the belief in a capability is more valuable than the capability itself.
The United States just demonstrated it can reach into a fortified compound in a hostile capital, extract a head of state, and fly him to New York to face trial, all while suffering minimal casualties. That capability needs no embellishment. But the embellishment serves a purpose: forcing every tin-pot dictator and mid-level drug trafficker in the Western Hemisphere to wonder if they’re next and whether their security forces can protect them from weapons they can’t see or hear.
And for anyone involved in Havana syndrome attacks, whether Cuban, Russian, or anyone else, there’s now a very clear message: If you hit our people with invisible weapons, don’t be surprised when we return the favor. The 32 dead Cuban advisers make that point unmistakably clear, regardless of what weapon actually killed them.
Power projection isn’t just about what you can do; it’s about what others believe you can do.
The bottom line
The truth about Venezuela is probably somewhere in the middle. Electronic warfare to knock out radar and communications? Almost certainly. That’s standard doctrine. Directed-energy weapons causing mass internal bleeding? The technology exists, but the extreme symptoms described don’t match documented effects. Whether they were actually used? Strategically ambiguous.
And that’s the point. The ambiguity itself is the weapon. If they used it, adversaries know America will deploy it. If they didn’t, adversaries still believe they might next time, and uncertainty is often more powerful than certainty.
Here’s a story: Cuba helps Russia attack American diplomats with invisible weapons starting in 2016. Years later, Cuban advisers die defending a dictator when the U.S. raids his compound with technology that sounds awfully familiar. Whether that’s coincidence, retaliation, or just good storytelling doesn’t really matter. The message landed.
That’s worth understanding because we’re going to see more of it in this fifth generation of warfare. The age of warfare where you could independently verify what happened on the battlefield is over. In the era of psychological operations, classified capabilities, and information warfare, the story about the battle matters as much as the battle itself.
Maybe more.
