Robust Homeland Security Must Be Funded, Not Shut Down
Americans deserve a DHS strengthened by recent resource increases, and as agile and effective as possible in carrying out its core mission.Americans deserve a DHS strengthened by recent resource increases, and as agile and effective as possible in carrying out its core mission.Cartel and Chinese Drones Demand Immediate FAA Action
The Border Patrol and the military need clear authority to deploy counter-drone systems in sensitive areas without endless FAA vetoes.
Trump’s Oil Tanker Seizure: Another Shocking And Unprecedented Act That Isn’t Shocking Or Unprecedented
The seizure of a stateless oil tanker carrying Maduro’s oil is aggressive, but it isn’t clearly reckless or an act of 'sleepwalking.'Mexico has cartel armies. Blue America has cartel politics.
Detroit is synonymous with autos, Los Angeles with motion pictures, and Texas with oil. Pittsburgh still conjures steel. When a product or service anchors a region’s economy, that sector has power. Politicians court industry. Industry demands representation and, ideally, protection.
What’s true regionally is just as true nationally. That’s why K Street exists and lobbyists make big bucks. Fortunes rise and fall, but if our GDP slips even 3%, the usual talking heads sprint to the cameras to declare the American economy on the verge of collapse — and always under whichever Republican is in office. When a Democrat presides over a faltering economy, the political media prefers to drive the getaway car.
Harassing users did nothing to stop the poison. Blowing up supply at sea does. Every sunken shipment dents the cartels’ profits. Every explosion represents a tangible loss.
If any of us invented a product that added 3% to national GDP, we’d enjoy the influence over policy and legislation that naturally comes with living in a representative republic with a market economy. Innovation and competition fuel prosperity.
So here’s a question the blue-city, blue-state establishment doesn’t want asked: What percentage of its GDP comes from narcotics trafficking?
Recently a member of our self-styled House of Lords, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, erupted in outrage over the Pentagon’s lethal targeting of drug traffickers in the Caribbean. He said he was “deeply disturbed” by these operations. Was Reed ever equally disturbed by narcotics deaths in Providence or Pawtucket?
Some Democrats insist the traffickers are “impoverished fishermen.” Reed himself defended them on the grounds that “they are just trying to make money,” as if they weren’t waging chemical warfare on our civilian population. And he reassured us that the men killed weren’t running fentanyl — only cocaine. As though cocaine were some kind of civic improvement!
By any honest analysis, an overnight eradication of drug addiction in America would collapse an entire NGO ecosystem — along with the payrolls of the consultants, therapists, and bureaucrats who perpetually “mitigate” our crises of addiction, alcoholism, and dereliction. Given the nature of addiction, that blessed day will never come.
Look south. By my estimation, two-thirds of Mexico’s economy is directly or indirectly tied to narcotics. No, that’s not the Wall Street Journal’s number; nobody has the real statistics because the books are kept on scraps of paper known in DEA argot as “Pay/Owe” sheets. My estimate comes from observing the level of protection the trade enjoys at every tier of Mexican governance — local, rural, national. Narcotics are so economically essential that cartels decide who can run in elections with preordained outcomes. Their influence rivals that of the Democratic Party’s super delegates, if you’ll pardon the comparison.
Big Narco commands private armies, armored vehicles, anti-tank missiles, machine guns, uniforms, rules, and courts. The narcotics sector has effectively stalled Mexico’s political maturation.
And it’s affecting us too.
RELATED: Trump cracks the Caracas cartel code
In past administrations, the so-called war on drugs looked more like a war on addicts and their families, with only token strikes on the international criminal organizations moving the product. The Trump administration has reversed that. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is hitting the cartels directly. Harassing users did nothing to stop the poison. Blowing up supply at sea does. Every sunken shipment dents the cartels’ profits. Every explosion represents a tangible loss.
The hysterics from Jack Reed and others suggest these interdictions are hurting the economies of blue cities and states more than they care to admit. You’d think the destruction of cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl — inflicting daily carnage — would spark celebration. In Los Angeles County alone, the coroner processes six dead Americans per day from overdoses. Last year, it was eight. Fathers, mothers, runaway teens, derelict addicts — Americans, dead every day.
And yet Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) — raw with presidential ambition — insists the leading cause of death for young Californians is firearms. This is false of course. But to blue-city politicians, gun control makes for better PR than confronting thousands of overdose deaths. Meanwhile Sacramento’s ruling cabal has passed a thicket of laws, regulations, and policies that effectively protect narcotics trafficking in the Golden State.
Guns hardly register in California’s GDP. Big Narco does.
Jailed Venezuelan kingpin praises Trump; drops bombshell about the narco regime
Once upon a time, retired three-star Venezuelan General Hugo Carvajal Barrios was one of the most powerful men within the Caracas socialist regime. Now, he’s writing letters to President Trump and the American people from his jail cell, which he landed in after voluntarily pleading guilty in the U.S. to a narco-terrorism conspiracy.
And while many politicians, including Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), are criticizing President Trump for actions taken against Venezuelan narco-terrorists, BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is in full support of Trump — alongside Barrios.
Gonzales points out that Paul is “going out and giving these little, like, press junkets where he’s telling people, like, ‘Well, these guys weren’t armed. You need to prove that they’re armed first.’”
“You know what they’re armed with, Rand? Drugs that they’re bringing into our country to kill Americans with,” Gonzales says, adding, “That’s what they’re armed with.”
And in his letter, Barrios confirms Gonzales’ sentiment.
“I see the need to address the American people about the reality of what the Venezuelan regime truly is — and why President Trump’s policies are not only correct, but absolutely necessary to the United States’ national security,” Barrios began in his letter.
“I personally witnessed how Hugo Chavez’s government became a criminal organization that is now run by Nicolas Maduro, Diosdado Cabello, and other senior regime officials. The purpose of this organization, now known as the Cartel of the Suns, is to weaponize drugs against the United States,” he continued.
“The drugs that reached your cities through new routes were not accidents of corruption nor just the work of independent traffickers; they were deliberate policies coordinated by the Venezuelan regime against the United States,” he added.
Barrios went on to claim that the plan has “been successfully executed with help from FARC, ELN, Cuban operatives, and Hezbollah.”
“The regime has provided weapons, passports, and impunity for these terrorist organizations to operate freely from Venezuela against the United States. The regime I served is not merely hostile — it is at war with you, using drugs, gangs, espionage, and even your own democratic processes as weapons,” he wrote.
Barrios added, “I absolutely support President Trump’s policy towards Venezuela, because it is in self-defense and he is acting based on the truth.”
“He’s already been sentenced. He’s serving time in federal prison. And he’s like, ‘I just want to make this right within my soul.’ So I’m going to explain all of this to you,” Gonzales says.
“It probably makes a whole hell of a lot of sense why the Trump administration is going so hard on Venezuela regardless of whether they’re armed with guns. … Innocent Americans are dying, and they don’t have to, because of the Venezuelan government.”
“We need to do something about that,” she adds.
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Turns out that Hegseth’s ‘kill them all’ line was another media invention
Under his authority as commander in chief, the president can blow up pretty much anybody on Earth whom he deems a national security threat. He does not need permission from Congress, the media, or a panel of self-appointed commentators. The missile strikes on drug-running vessels operated by a designated terrorist group are lawful, routine, and predictable. What made the episode explosive was that it enraged exactly the faction that always reacts this way: the political left.
Impeachment is the only real consequence available to the administration’s critics, and after two failed efforts, that prospect does not keep President Trump awake at night. Republican control of the House makes even a symbolic attempt unlikely.
It is time to put a moratorium on the online laws-of-armed-conflict ‘experts’ who materialize whenever a strike hits a target they sympathize with.
So the disloyal opposition defaults to its remaining weapon: information warfare. Media outlets, activist networks, and hostile bureaucrats have been carpet-bombing the information space with false claims designed to sow dissension among the ranks and mislead the public.
The country needs a president who can act decisively in defense of national security, without media gatekeepers, rogue judges, or partisan lawmakers running armchair military campaigns from the sidelines. The “Seditious Six” tried to undermine the president’s authority and cast doubt on lawful orders. The Washington Post attempted to turn that fiction into fact by quoting anonymous sources with unverifiable claims.
The central allegation is that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth issued an order to “kill everybody” on the vessel. The Post framed it this way: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. ‘The order was to kill everybody.’”
The headline amplified the accusation: “Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all.”
A “spoken directive” means no record. The quote is a paraphrase. Nothing indicates that the source actually heard the Hegseth say those words. This is an anonymous, secondhand characterization of an alleged statement — precisely the sort of raw material the Post loves to inflate into scandal.
Even if the words had been spoken, the context would determine legality. If a commander asks, “How big a bomb do we drop on the enemy location?” and the answer is, “Use one big enough to kill everybody,” that exchange would not be criminal. It is a description of the force required to neutralize a hostile asset.
If these anonymous sources truly believed the secretary issued an illegal order, they were obligated to report it through the chain of command. Their silence speaks louder than any paraphrase. The most plausible explanation is that someone misunderstood — or deliberately distorted — an aggressive statement by Hegseth and nothing more.
The United States targets terrorists. The implication behind the Post’s story is that survivors remained after the first strike and that either the secretary or JSOC ordered a second engagement to kill them. No evidence supports that claim. No one outside the direct participants knows what the surveillance picture showed or what tactical conditions existed immediately after the first blast.
RELATED: White House names names in new ‘media bias tracker’ in wake of ‘seditious’ Democrat video
President Trump stated publicly that Hegseth told him no order was given to kill survivors. The fact that U.S. forces recovered two survivors from the submersible drug vessel undercuts the Post’s narrative even more. Pete Hegseth is far more credible than Alex Horton and the newsroom that elevated this rumor.
— (@)
It is time to put a moratorium on the online laws-of-armed-conflict “experts” who materialize whenever a strike hits a target they sympathize with. They insist that the presence of wounded combatants instantly transforms a hostile platform into a protected site and that destroying the vessel itself becomes a war crime. Even the New York Times — no friend of the administration — punctured that claim:
According to five U.S. officials … Mr. Hegseth’s directive did not specifically address what should happen if a first missile failed to accomplish all of those things … and his order was not a response to surveillance footage showing that at least two people on the boat survived the first blast.
The mobs demanding Hegseth’s scalp will be disappointed. The voters who supported this administration expected firm action against terrorist cartels and open-ocean drug networks. Another hostile vessel was reduced to an oil slick, and most Americans see that as a success.
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