No more handouts for high-fructose hustlers



Political courage is rare, and common sense now gets dismissed as a conspiracy theory. This week, however, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took a step that should have been taken decades ago. He told Big Soda: “Not on the taxpayer’s dime.”

“If you want to buy a sugary soda, the U.S. taxpayer should not pay for it,” Kennedy said, in remarks that rattled the food-industrial complex. “The U.S. taxpayer should not be paying to feed kids, the poorest kids in the country, that will give them diabetes.”

Banning soda and candy from SNAP removes the government’s role as the sugar daddy of the sugar industry.

The sugar lobby, soda executives, and professional grievance-mongers will no doubt howl, accusing Kennedy of “food policing” or “waging war on the poor.” But defending Pepsi purchases with food stamps as a civil rights cause doesn’t just miss the point — it reveals how far detached these elites are from reality.

State-subsidized sickness

“We are spending $405 million a day on” the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Kennedy said. “About 10% is going to sugary drinks. If you add candies to that, it's about 13% to 17%.” That’s roughly $60 million a day funneled into sugar water and junk food — paid for by you, the taxpayer.

This is state-subsidized sickness. America’s diabetes epidemic didn’t happen by chance — it’s the inevitable result of a system that promotes poor nutrition, rewards ultra-processed junk, and ignores the long-term damage.

More than 11% of Americans now live with diabetes. It’s not just a blood sugar problem — it’s a direct path to amputations, blindness, kidney failure, and premature death.

The American Diabetes Association puts the total economic cost of diagnosed diabetes at $412 billion annually. That’s a national crisis, not a mere lifestyle choice. And the bitter irony? The same government programs paying for treatment are also funding the sugar that drives the disease.

Stop footing the bill

Kennedy’s move isn’t cruel. It’s compassionate. It’s “making America healthy again.”

The opposition is already lining up. The usual suspects will cry “nanny state,” as if forcing taxpayers to underwrite Mountain Dew is some sacred constitutional principle.

Others will insist people have the right to choose what they eat — and they do. But choosing to guzzle liquid diabetes is not the same as expecting everyone else to pick up the tab.

No one’s banning soda. Buy it. Swim in it, if you like. Just don’t expect SNAP funds — meant to keep vulnerable families from going hungry — to cover your 64-ounce daily dose of high-fructose heartbreak.

Kennedy’s proposal isn’t radical. The Women, Infants, and Children program already limits purchases to nutritionally approved foods, prioritizing health over indulgence. SNAP should follow the same logic.

Our national health model is failing. As Tim Keller, founder of U.S. Diabetes Care and a fierce critic of reactive medicine, puts it: “Western medicine is broken. Doctors treat a symptom, not a patient.”

A broken health paradigm

Keller is right. We’ve built an entire health care system on the back of symptom suppression — pills for blood pressure, injections for insulin, meds for cholesterol — while ignoring the root causes.

Instead of handing patients more prescriptions, approaches like Keller's emphasize science-backed lifestyle changes that reverse diabetes altogether. These tools don’t just manage symptoms; they seek to reverse diabetes altogether using modern tools like diabetes management apps, empowering patients with real-time data, meal tracking, and coaching.

The result is a digital frontline in the war against chronic disease. “Diabetes is not a life sentence — we’re here to prove it,” says Keller.

But all the apps, education, and healthy lifestyle coaching in the world mean nothing if we keep dumping sugar down the throats of the nation’s poorest citizens with federal blessing. You can’t cure diabetes while simultaneously funding it.

Drawing a red line

MAHA needs to draw a firm line. It can’t posture as the party of platitudes while taxpayer billions bankroll chronic disease.

The United States spends more on health care than any nation on Earth, yet it trails most developed countries on nearly every health measure. That’s no accident. It’s the inevitable result of subsidizing failure and calling it “freedom.”

RELATED: RFK’s highly anticipated MAHA report paints dark picture of America’s health crisis

Photo by DNY59 via Getty Images

Removing soda and candy from SNAP is a simple, necessary first step to reversing this decline. It preserves personal choice while ending the federal government’s role as sugar daddy to the sugar industry.

MAHA’s moment

Conservatives should seize this moment. If we’re serious about cutting waste, improving public health, and restoring dignity to our social safety net, we should champion reforms like this — not shy away from them.

Nothing is “pro poor” about enabling chronic disease. Nothing is “compassionate” about funding metabolic illness. And nothing is “American” about trapping people in a system that feeds them into the health care meat grinder.

Let’s Make America Healthy Again. Let’s end the era of federally funded junk food. And let’s prove that health, like liberty, starts with responsibility.

They’re lying to you about the ‘big, beautiful bill’ — how it’s actually FIXING health care



The media has wasted no time labeling the recent Medicaid reform in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act cruel, as 4.8 million Americans will lose health care coverage.

BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey and her father, Ron Simmons, are well aware that the left is upset over the reforms, but they also know why they’re wrong.

“What are we hearing on health care? ‘Oh, we’re going to kick grandma off Medicare and Medicaid,’” Simmons tells his daughter. “Again, not true. Totally not true.”

“Medicaid and Medicare are different. Medicare is for people generally that are age 65 or 66, older, depending on ... when you were born and all those types of things,” he explains, noting that Medicaid is “set up primarily for people that are disabled or their income levels are such that they actually receive it free.”


“And what the ‘big, beautiful bill’ is doing,” he continues, “they are requiring them to work, be looking actively for work, or be in some type of educational or training program. I mean, doesn’t that just seem simple to get what I would call ‘freeloaders’ off of the free health care?”

“Why should you and I be paying for their health care when they’re able to work but not willing to work?” he adds.

However, there is a “little bit of truth” to what the Democrats have been claiming.

“There will be people that absolutely lose their health care under Medicaid. But it’ll only be those people that are able-bodied and should be working, or at least should be looking for work, or getting trained so that they can go to work,” Simmons explains.

“That’ll make our health care system actually financially more responsible,” he adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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Drug middlemen launch attacks against MAGA allies pushing for health care reforms



Pharmacy benefit managers like CVS are going after President Donald Trump's allies who are seeking meaningful health care reforms for their constituents.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) and Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) have become the primary target of PBMs, which are threatened by their push to implement reforms in drug costs. Threatened by MAGA allies, PBMs have now escalated these conflicts to legal disputes.

'These massive corporations are attacking our state because we will be the first in the country to hold them accountable.'

RELATED: Who is bankrolling the anti-MAHA movement?

Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

In April, Huckabee Sanders signed legislation banning PBMs from "engaging in anticompetitive practices" by owning pharmacies. PBMs are tasked with negotiating drug prices between pharmacies and insurance companies, but by buying up pharmacies, they are able to take advantage of the health care system and inflate the cost of pharmaceuticals, pushing competitors out of business, according to Huckabee Sanders' press release.

“For far too long, drug middlemen called PBMs have taken advantage of lax regulations to abuse customers, inflate drug prices, and cut off access to critical medications," Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. “Not any more. These massive corporations are attacking our state because we will be the first in the country to hold them accountable for their anticompetitive actions, but Arkansas has never been afraid to be a conservative leader for America.”

The Pharmaceutical Care Management Association promptly retaliated and filed a lawsuit challenging the legislation, calling it a "fundamentally flawed law" that they say "could shutter pharmacies, restrict access to critical medications for patients and families, increase health care costs, and eliminate jobs."

RELATED: Pharmacy middlemen didn’t break health care — the feds did

Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Landry has become involved in his own legal disputes with PBMs. Landry, alongside Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, filed three separate lawsuits against CVS in June for allegedly interfering with legislation that also would have prevented PBMs from owning and simultaneously operating pharmacies.

"PBMs are not health care providers," Landry said. "They are corporate profiteers inserted into the most intimate part of your life and your health."

Although several of Trump's allies have been targeted by PBMs, criticism of the pharmaceutical industry is generally bipartisan.

Mark Cuban recently called out Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts for claiming that Big Pharma is responsible for high drug costs when, he says, PBMs are the real culprit.

"It's because PBMs corrupt healthcare," Cuban said in a post on X. "Big Pharma wishes they could set their own pricing. They don't. PBMs control formularies and manipulate prices, in exchange for providing pharma access to patients. It's how they maximize rebate revenue. In fact, 3 PBMs NEGOTIATE MORE THAN 90% OF REBATES for commercial insurance plans. That's your area of expertise, and you have done nothing."

Cuban's criticisms promptly earned the unlikely praise of some of the most prominent voices in MAGA world.

"Didn’t think I’d be RTing Mark for a while, but he’s 100% right on this issue," Donald Trump Jr. replied in a post on X.

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Republicans Doing Nothing Could Actually Yield A Win, For Once

'A whopping 40 states' residents saw an over 100% rise in their monthly premiums'

When bureaucrats rule, even red states go woke



If it’s happening in Georgia, you can bet it’s happening all over the country. Embedded bureaucrats are quietly rewriting the policies voters put in place.

Georgia’s Medicaid program exists to serve the state’s most vulnerable — low-income children and foster youth, pregnant women, and disabled adults. It was never meant to be a vehicle for radical politics. But recent revelations about how the state awarded multibillion-dollar Medicaid contracts show exactly how far left-wing ideologues inside government agencies will go to push their agenda.

When the bureaucracy pushes a progressive agenda behind closed doors, the public has no choice but to push back. Loudly. Clearly. Immediately.

Internal documents reveal that senior staff at Georgia’s Department of Community Health inserted ideological land mines into the bidding process for companies seeking to serve more than 1 million Medicaid recipients — most of them children. This included a scenario question focused on how insurers would treat a hypothetical “fourteen (14) year-old, transgender White female (assigned male sex at birth but identifies as a female).”

Responses that didn’t align with leftist orthodoxy were penalized. In other words, companies lost points unless they promised to steer kids toward hormone therapy — despite state laws banning gender reassignment procedures for minors. That isn’t just dishonest. It’s a direct subversion of the law.

Just this year, Georgia’s legislature passed bills barring men from girls’ sports and locker rooms. But inside the state’s Medicaid agency, officials rewarded insurers for endorsing gender transitions for minors. One winning bidder justified its position by claiming such treatments “could come up in the future.” Never mind that they’re illegal in Georgia.

One losing insurer offered to connect the hypothetical child with a range of community resources, including faith-based organizations. That response was met with scorn. A state official actually complained that faith-based groups shouldn’t have been included — because they weren’t mentioned in the scenario.

Never mind that faith-based organizations have served Medicaid populations for decades. They often provide the only consistent care in struggling communities. But for these bureaucrats, churches and people of faith pose a bigger danger to kids than radical gender ideology.

This is no small issue. Georgia expects to spend $4.5 billion next year on Medicaid and PeachCare, the program for uninsured kids. That makes this one of the largest contracts in state history — and leftist staffers nearly hijacked the entire process.

RELATED: Why is deep-red Oklahoma paving the way for the Green New Deal?

Photographer: Angus Mordant/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Lawmakers have a duty to step in now. During the last session, they considered a bill that would have barred ideologically charged questions from state procurements. It didn’t pass. That needs to change.

There’s still time. The Medicaid contracts haven’t been finalized. Legislators must act. They should demand a full rebid, remove these radical questions, and ensure that reviewers score responses based on biology, patient welfare, and fiscal responsibility — not on whether companies genuflect to left-wing doctrine.

Georgia’s leadership has worked hard to uphold conservative values and protect taxpayer dollars. But as we’ve seen in Washington, unelected bureaucrats can — and will — undermine that progress if no one stops them.

When the bureaucracy pushes a progressive agenda behind closed doors, the public has no choice but to push back. Loudly. Clearly. Immediately. We must call it out, correct course, and pass the kind of reforms that ensure this never happens again.

GOP’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill Act’ lets Big Tech and Big Pharma run wild



The Republicans’ bizarrely named “Big Beautiful Bill Act” includes two egregious provisions that would strip states of their power to regulate key agenda items pushed by globalist elites.

Anyone who still understands what the word “conservative” means can see the truth: The Republican budget bill is a mixed bag of deficit bloat, missed opportunities, and the odd policy win. Whether the House bill was worth passing as a “take it or leave it” deal depends on one’s political calculus. But the result is underwhelming and fails to rise to the moment.

Stripping states of authority and subsidizing green fantasies are the exact opposite of the anti-globalist message that won Trump the White House.

Supporters of the bill — particularly President Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) — argue that it’s the best possible outcome given a razor-thin House majority packed with RINOs from purple districts in blue states. Set aside that debate. If it’s true, then conservatives should focus their energies in deep-red states where Republicans hold supermajorities. That’s where we can — and must — do the work Congress won’t.

Instead, Republican leaders included two provisions in the bill that actively prevent red states from pushing back against green energy mandates, land-grabs, surveillance schemes, and a growing transhumanist agenda.

Green New Deal jam-down

Thanks to Republican Freedom Caucus stalwarts, including Reps. Andy Harris of Maryland and Chip Roy of Texas, much of the Green New Deal faces rollback — assuming, of course, the Senate doesn’t block the repeal. But one key subsidy survives: federal incentives for carbon capture pipelines. Worse still, the bill strengthens protections for these projects by stripping states of regulatory power.

Section 41006 spells it out: “Notwithstanding any other provision of law,” once the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission grants a pipeline license under an newly amended section of the Natural Gas Act, state and local governments can no longer block or delay the project using zoning, permitting, or land-use laws.

In plain English: carbon dioxide pipelines, backed by federal subsidies, get the same privileges as oil and gas pipelines. That includes eminent domain powers and “certificate of public convenience and necessity” status — bureaucratic code for “we’ll take your land whether you like it or not.”

But carbon pipelines aren’t oil and gas. Oil fuels the economy and delivers a clear public good. Carbon capture, by contrast, sucks up CO2 and buries it to appease climate hysterics. It serves no market need and survives only through government handouts. It exists to sanctify the fiction that carbon dioxide is a pollutant.

This isn’t an oversight. It’s a direct response to South Dakota ranchers, who successfully fought to ban eminent domain for carbon capture projects. Lawmakers in Iowa and North Dakota have followed suit, targeting Summit Carbon Solutions’ proposed pipeline, which would have plowed through private ranchland to serve a project with no public value.

The rebellion in South Dakota ranks among the most important conservative grassroots victories in recent history. Yet this bill spits in the face of those landowners. It overrides red-state laws and rural rights on behalf of globalist, green-energy profiteers.

A 10-year pause on state bans

Funny how Republicans said budget reconciliation couldn’t include policy changes. That was the excuse for not pursuing immigration reform or judicial restructuring. And yet when it suits the priorities of Big Tech and globalist interests, lawmakers found a way to insert sweeping federal mandates into the bill.

Out of nowhere, either the White House or GOP lawmakers added a provision banning states from regulating artificial intelligence or data center systems. Section 43201 of the bill states: “No State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act.”

That’s not compromise. That’s total pre-emption — no exceptions.

Florida and other red states have already passed laws prohibiting the use of AI in enforcing gun control or violating medical privacy. More states are following suit. Legislatures across the country are debating how to safeguard civil liberties and property rights from tech overreach. But this bill would kneecap every one of those efforts.

Then come the AI data centers — massive, power-hungry, water-consuming facilities that are cropping up in rural areas and harming communities in their wake. Bipartisan state efforts aim to regulate them through zoning and environmental protections. Yet under this bill, Congress could override even the most basic local safeguards. If a township tries to limit where these centers operate or how they’re built, that could be viewed as “regulating AI systems” and thus outlawed for a decade.

Why does this matter? Because tech moguls aren’t hiding their intentions.

RELATED: The Republicans who could derail reconciliation

Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images

At Trump’s January 22 launch event for Oracle’s Stargate platform, CEO Larry Ellison gushed about mRNA vaccines. “One of the most exciting things we’re working on ... is our cancer vaccine,” he said. “Using AI, we can detect cancers through blood tests and produce an mRNA vaccine robotically in about 48 hours.” That’s the model. AI plus big data plus biotech equals unregulated medical experimentation — powered by infrastructure no local government can block.

Red states have started pushing back, attempting to pass 10-year moratoriums on mRNA technology. But the federal budget bill would do the opposite: It could impose a 10-year federal moratorium on state bans.

So here’s the question: Do we really want Arab-funded special interests building AI spying centers in our heartland with no recourse for state and local governments to regulate, restrict, or place common-sense privacy guardrails on these new Towers of Babel?

That question raises another: Should localities be forced to accept carbon pipelines by federal decree, with no power to defend their land or water?

These policies — stripping states of authority, empowering transnational corporations, subsidizing green and biotech fantasies — are the exact opposite of the anti-globalist, America First message that won Trump the White House and won Republicans the House.

We deserve answers. Who inserted these provisions? And more urgently, who will take them out?

Trump takes aim again at prescription drug prices — could drop '30% to 80%'



President Donald Trump announced Sunday that he would be signing an executive order to cut prescription prices "almost immediately, by 30% to 80%."

The vehicle for these price reductions will be a new "MOST FAVORED NATION'S POLICY" mandating that the U.S. pays the same price for drugs as whichever country pays the lowest price globally.

Trump has long discussed using an index of international drug prices — in countries such as Canada, Britain, and Japan — to set the price that Medicare would ultimately pay for drugs administered stateside by doctors. The plan, and related legislative initiatives, faced significant opposition by the pharmaceutical industry and its bipartisan allies in Congress.

After signing a slew of executive orders in 2020 aimed at controlling and lowering drug prices, Trump issued an order on Sept. 13, 2020, seeking to establish most favored nation pricing for Medicare drug payments and to ensure that "Americans [do] not bear extra burdens to compensate for the shortfalls that result from the nationalized public healthcare systems of wealthy countries abroad."

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services subsequently issued an interim final rule implementing the executive order, which multiple pharmaceutical industry trade groups sued to kill.

Not long after courts blocked the most favored nation rule, the Biden administration rescinded it.

Trump evidently figures he has a better shot this time around, even though many of the price reduction plan's opponents are still in office.

'We are going to do the right thing, something that the Democrats have fought for many years.'

"For many years the World has wondered why Prescription Drugs and Pharmaceuticals in the United States of America were SO MUCH HIGHER IN PRICE THAN THEY WERE IN ANY OTHER NATION, SOMETIMES BEING FIVE TO TEN TIMES MORE EXPENSIVE THAN THE SAME DRUG, MANUFACTURED IN THE EXACT SAME LABORATORY OR PLANT, BY THE SAME COMPANY?" the president wrote on Truth Social. "It was always difficult to explain and very embarrassing because, in fact, there was no correct or rightful answer."

According to recent analysis conducted by RAND Health Care on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. drug prices for both brands and generics were nearly 2.78 times as high as prices in comparison countries. Even after adjustments for American rebates, U.S. prices for brand drugs were apparently at least 3.22 times as high as in other countries.

"The Pharmaceutical/Drug Companies would say, for years, that it was Research and Development Costs, and that all of these costs were, and would be, for no reason whatsoever, borne by the 'suckers' of America, ALONE," continued Trump. "Campaign Contributions can do wonders, but not with me, and not with the Republican Party. We are going to do the right thing, something that the Democrats have fought for many years."

'It jeopardizes the hundreds of billions our member companies are planning to invest in America.'

Trump noted that while relative costs will come down for American buyers, they will "rise throughout the World in order to equalize and, for the first time in many years, bring FAIRNESS TO AMERICA!"

Big Pharma lobbyists began complaining in advance of Trump signing the executive order, which the president indicated last week would be "one of the most important announcements that have been made in many years about a certain subject."

"This Foreign First Pricing scheme is a bad deal for American patients. Importing foreign prices will cut billions of dollars from Medicare with no guarantee that it helps patients or improves their access to medicines," Stephen Ubl, the CEO of the lobbying group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said in a statement obtained by The Hill.

"It jeopardizes the hundreds of billions our member companies are planning to invest in America, making us more reliant on China for innovative medicines," added Ubl.

Trump has already taken action on the drug pricing front this year, directing his administration in February to increase enforcement of drug price transparency requirements and to promote "universal access to clear and accurate healthcare prices."

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Report: Health Centers That Care For Women Outnumber Planned Parenthood By 15 To 1

From 2021 to 2022, abortions, not screenings, made up approximately 97 percent of Planned Parenthood’s ‘pregnancy resolution services.’

Federalist Investigates: Serbian Revolutionary Linked To USAID Now Works For ‘Bidenbucks’-Affiliated Group

This 'looks like an insidious intersection of the Bidenbucks and USAID scandals,' said Adam Gibbs, Foundation for Government Accountability.