Liberal outlets cry about Pentagon's new media rules — Hegseth bids them farewell



The Department of War has implemented new rules concerning press privileges and news-gathering at the Pentagon.

Even though the policy concerning reporter access is far less restrictive than an earlier version — the draft of which was floated last month — liberal publications have thrown fits and refused to acknowledge the new rules in exchange for press credentials.

'Pentagon access is a privilege, not a right.'

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell emphasized last week that reporters and publications do not have to agree with the new "common-sense media procedures" but "just to acknowledge that they understand what our policy is."

Despite acknowledging that press credentials are conditioned on an understanding of the rules, not an agreement with them, the Pentagon Press Association characterized the rules as a form of intimidation, going so far as to suggest that they dishonor American military families.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth used an emoji to wave goodbye on Monday to the Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Washington Post when they pushed the PPA's framing and pronounced on X that they were not going to sign the agreement by the 5 p.m. Tuesday deadline.

Matt Murray, the Post's executive editor, who received Hegseth's pixelated adios, stated, "The proposed restrictions undercut First Amendment protections by placing unnecessary constraints on gathering and publishing information."

Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic's editor in chief, who has pushed his weight in fake news, and NYT Washington bureau chief Richard Stevenson similarly complained that the rules violated their teams' First Amendment rights.

The Associated Press, Breaking Defense, CNN, Newsmax, Reuters, Task & Purpose, and the Wall Street Journal are among the other publications that have indicated they will not agree to the new policy by deadline.

After bidding the liberal publications farewell, Hegseth noted for edification of "DUMMIES" in the media that the new rules are, in essence, that reporters can no longer roam free through the halls of the Pentagon; members of the press must wear visible badges; and the "credentialed press [is] no longer permitted to solicit criminal acts."

RELATED: Hegseth restores warrior ethos after years of woke Pentagon rot

Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Hegseth added that "Pentagon access is a privilege, not a right." Blaze News reached out to the Pentagon for clarity about that statement.

Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson noted that "despite good faith negotiations with representatives of the Pentagon Press Association, reporters would rather clutch their pearls on social media than stop trying to get warfighters and DOW civilians to commit a crime by violating Department-wide policy."

"We stand by our media policy," continued Wilson. "It's now up to them whether they'd like to report from the Pentagon or their newsroom."

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Here’s What’s In Major Defense Bill The Senate Just Passed During Shutdown

The Senate approved its annual defense policy bill Thursday, ending weeks of gridlock over the massive $879 billion package and marking a rare move in approving major legislation during a government shutdown. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which authorizes $879 billion in funding for the U.S. military and directs national defense strategy, passed in […]

While the lights are off, let’s rewire the government



The United States faces an existential threat from the accelerating military power of communist China — a buildup fueled by decades of massive economic expansion. If America intends to counter Beijing’s ambitions, it must grow faster, leaner, and more efficient. Economic strength is national security.

The ongoing government shutdown may not be popular, but it gives President Trump a rare opportunity to make good on his campaign pledge to drain — and redesign — “the swamp.” Streamlining the federal government isn’t just good politics. It’s a matter of survival.

A government that builds wealth rather than expands debt can out-produce China, sustain deterrence, and restore the American ideal of self-government.

George Washington ran the nation with four Cabinet departments: war, treasury, state, and the attorney general. The Department of the Interior came later, followed by the Department of Agriculture, added by Abraham Lincoln in 1862 when America was an agrarian power.

The modern Cabinet, by contrast, is a bureaucratic junkyard built more in reaction to political problems than by design. The Labor Department was carved from the Commerce Department to appease the unions. Lyndon Johnson invented the Department of Transportation. Jimmy Carter established the Department of Energy in response to the Arab oil embargo. The Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence emerged after 9/11.

The result is a patchwork of agencies wired together with duct tape, overlap, and patronage. A government designed for crisis management has become a permanent crisis unto itself.

Enter the Department of National Economy

A return to first principles starts with a single question: How can we accelerate American productivity?

The answer: consolidate. Merge the Departments of Commerce, Labor, Agriculture, Transportation, and Energy into a Department of National Economy. One Cabinet secretary, five undersecretaries, one mission: to expand the flow of goods and services that generate national wealth.

The new department’s motto should be a straightforward question: What did your enterprise do today to increase the wealth of the United States?

Fewer bureaucracies mean fewer fiefdoms, less redundancy, and enormous cost savings. Synergy replaces stovepipes. The government’s economic engine becomes a single machine instead of six competing engines running on taxpayer fuel.

Fold Homeland Security into the Coast Guard

Homeland Security should be absorbed by the U.S. Coast Guard, which already functions as a paramilitary force with both military and police authority, much like Italy’s Carabinieri. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, DHS personnel would share discipline, training, and accountability.

FEMA would cease to be a dumping ground for political hacks. Any discrimination in disaster aid — such as punishing Trump voters — would trigger a court-martial.

The Secret Service would focus solely on protective duties, handing its financial-crime work to the FBI. The secretary of the Coast Guard would gain a seat in the Cabinet.

Restoring intelligence to the OSS model

The Office of Director of National Intelligence should be re-established as the Office of Strategic Services, commanded by a figure in the tradition of Major General “Wild Bill” Donovan. Elements of U.S. Special Operations Command would be seconded to the new OSS, reviving its World War II lineage.

All intelligence agencies — CIA, DIA, FBI, the State Department, DEA, and the service branches — should share common foundational training. The current decline in discipline and capability at the National Intelligence University, worsened by the DEI policies of its leadership, demands urgent correction. Diversity cannot come at the expense of competence.

RELATED: Memo to Hegseth: Our military’s problem isn’t only fitness. It’s bad education.

Photo by Isaiah Vazquez/Getty Images

Law enforcement and the flat tax

At the Department of Justice, dissolve the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Shift alcohol and tobacco oversight to the DEA, firearms and explosives to the U.S. Marshals.

Let the DEA also absorb the Food and Drug Administration, which would become its research and standards division.

Return the FBI to pure investigation — armed but without arrest powers. Enforcement should rest with the U.S. Marshals. Counterintelligence would move to the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, reinforced by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

The IRS should be dismantled and replaced with a small agency built around a flat-tax model such as the Hall-Rabushka plan.

Move the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response to Homeland Security. Send its Office of Climate Change and Health Equity to NOAA — or eliminate it entirely.

At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, expand the inspector general’s office tenfold and pay bonuses for rooting out fraud.

Restoring deterrence

The Pentagon needs its own overhaul. Because of China’s rapid military buildup, the Air Force’s Global Strike Command should be separated from U.S. Strategic Command and report directly to the secretary of war and the president under its historic name — Strategic Air Command.

Submarines and silos are invisible; bombers are not. Deterrence depends on visibility. A line of B-1s, B-2s, B-52s, and 100 new B-21 Raider stealth bombers, all bearing the mailed-fist insignia of the old SAC, would send an unmistakable message to Beijing.

RELATED: Exclusive: China behind massive nationwide SIM farm network that directly threatens American critical infrastructure

Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Toward a leaner republic

With Trump back in the White House, this moment is ripe for radical efficiency. A government that builds wealth rather than expands debt can out-produce China, sustain deterrence, and restore the American ideal of self-government.

George Washington’s government fit inside a single carriage. We won’t return to that scale — but we can rediscover that spirit. A lean, unified, strategically organized government would make wealth creation easier, limit bureaucratic overreach, and preserve the republic for the long fight ahead.

Hegseth restores warrior ethos after years of woke Pentagon rot



When Secretary of War Pete Hegseth first announced the unorthodox step that he would gather all generals and admirals at Marine Base Quantico on short notice, many speculated that this could be a sign that we might be heading toward another war. Hegseth did declare war, but not in the way many pundits expected. He’s going to war against declining standards in the military.

In every respect, this was a historic speech. The convening itself was historic, but more significantly, Hegseth’s speech carried the weight of history. Hegseth’s purpose was to align all of the flag officers around one mission, as he put it, "The only mission of the newly restored War Department is this: warfighting.”

For too long, side quests have taken the military’s focus off lethality. Military standards were changed to accomplish partisan distractions.

By contrast, Hegseth’s predecessor, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III, oriented the military around climate change, social justice, and other side quests. For example, in 2021, Austin declared, “We face all kinds of threats, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does."

War on wokeness

The Pentagon’s mission under the Biden administration was to fight a war on the weather, even going so far as to prioritize climate plans over the duty to build warships. These side quests weakened our military and our nation.

Even worse, Austin’s leadership ushered in an era of politically motivated promotions that prioritized sex and skin color characteristics over merit. To this end, retired Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown, who served as the 21st chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Biden administration’s final years, famously wrote a memo mandating racial and sex quotas. This firmly committed our military away from promotions based on wars won and lives saved toward a process infused with the radical agenda of the left.

Warrior ethos restored

This was the context of Hegseth’s speech. Within the Pentagon, competing priorities eclipsed the primal imperative of being prepared to kill the enemy before they kill us. The woke agenda pushed by the radical left caused a slow rot that shifted focus from warfighting to social engineering, greatly frustrating many senior military officials.

Hegseth vowed to excise this type of decay inflicted by “foolish and reckless politicians.” He outlined several concrete steps to do just that, including restored grooming standards, stricter enforcement of physical training requirements, leadership and accountability reforms, and changes to training to focus on core warfighting elements.

But if the meeting was only about outlining these seemingly mundane reforms, why gather these high-ranking generals and admirals in one place? Couldn’t the content of his speech have been sent in an email? No, it could not. This was far more important than updating senior leaders on reforms; this was a cultural moment for military leadership. The era of hiding behind systemic racism and sexism to undermine the mission of the military while projecting woke platitudes as a defense of those actions is officially over.

Hegseth understood the mission, which was tough talk to tough people to prepare them for tough times. Some will whine that it’s uncouth for a secretary of sar to say, “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. ... We are done with that s**t.”

The whiners need to realize that many warfighters have prayed that someone would say this to their senior leaders. Hegseth did exactly that. This can’t be captured by a mere email.

Symbolically and practically, it’s meaningful that the secretary of war said this directly to their faces, immediately reinforced by a speech from the commander in chief. Saying this face-to-face is not hostile; it’s a sign of respect among tough people.

Hegseth’s admonitions, from calling out fat generals to reminding them that personnel is policy, are best summed up in this statement: “It's like the broken windows theory of policing. It's like when you let the small stuff go, the big stuff eventually goes. So you have to address the small stuff.” This principle should be understood by our military leadership, but it became a vestigial sentiment that was no longer actively practiced.

Aligned for lethality

For too long, side quests have taken the military’s focus off lethality. Military standards were changed to accomplish partisan distractions. Whether it was diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives or the climate agenda, the leaders in the Quantico audience accomplished these side missions ruthlessly and effectively — to the detriment of their primary purpose.

RELATED: Pete Hegseth just ended the era of woke brass in the military

Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Going forward, this speech empowered the military to fight against the entropy of distractions and declining standards. Whether they wear five stars or one, all of our star-ranked officers have been aligned to a new standard: lethality. This means effectively and ruthlessly accomplishing the only mission that matters: warfighting.

History, which favors winners, will view this as the moment the U.S. military was made great again. This will be remembered as the day the Trump administration aligned the stars, one in which our senior military officials were liberated to align their leadership with basic common sense.

Tim Kaine trying to weasel a ban on Hegseth changing base names into the military budget



Democrat Senator Tim Kaine (Va.) has weaseled an amendment into the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2026 that would handcuff Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth when it comes to the naming of certain military bases and other Pentagon assets.

Erasure

The Department of Defense took part in the iconoclastic Biden-era sweep of American history that saw graves dug up, statues toppled, animals renamed, busts melted down, and church windows removed.

Pursuant to the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2021 — which survived a Dec. 23, 2020, veto by President Donald Trump — former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin established a commission to identify, for the purpose of removal, "names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia to assets of the Department of Defense that commemorate the Confederate States of America or any person who served voluntarily with the Confederate States of America."

Austin ultimately embraced all of the commission's recommendations.

As a result, nine Army installations took on new names: Fort Bragg in North Carolina became Fort Liberty; Fort Benning in Georgia became Fort Moore; Fort Gordon in Georgia became Fort Eisenhower; Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia became Fort Walker; Fort Hood in Texas became Fort Cavazos; Fort Lee in Virginia became Fort Gregg-Adams; Fort Pickett in Virginia became Fort Barfoot; Fort Polk in Louisiana became Fort Johnson; and Fort Rucker in Alabama became Fort Novosel.

Restoration

These changes delighted Democrats and other leftists.

Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner (Va.), both on the Senate Armed Services Committee, were among those who celebrated the condemnation of memory, claiming in a joint statement that the name changes were "proof that progress is possible."

RELATED: Exclusive: Moses Ezekiel’s historic sculpture finally set for installation in Arlington Cemetery, by the Southern graves it once marked

Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Trump signaled a desire to reverse the changes.

Months after Hegseth restored the names of Forts Bragg and Benning, the commander in chief told a North Carolina crowd that the other seven Army installations were similarly getting their proper names back.

Among the Democrats prickled by this twist of fate was Kaine, who told reporters in June that Trump lacked the authority to make the name changes, stating, "The president can't change the law on a whim, and his court jester Pete Hegseth can't do it either."

Prohibition

The U.S. Senate plans to vote this month on its version of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act.

'We learn from our triumphs and our pains, which makes our country stronger.'

The bill currently contains an amendment, section 349, which would require Hegseth to use the names of Pentagon assets in the Commonwealth of Virginia, including military bases, that were adopted by the Biden-era naming commission.

This amendment, which Kaine's office confirmed to Blaze News was the Virginia Democrat's handiwork, bars Hegseth from overriding the Virginia-specific naming recommendations of the commission.

If the NDAA 2026 is passed as is, Forts A.P. Hill, Lee, and Pickett will become Forts Walker, Gregg-Adams, and Barfoot, just as the Biden-era revisionists intended.

When pressed on whether there was a conversation about limiting this prohibition to Virginia, the office of one Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee told Blaze News, "NDAA deliberations are held at a classified level, so we cannot comment on the process involved in the inclusion of this provision."

Blaze News reached out to several Republicans on the committee to ask whether they would fight the amendment but has so far received no confirmations.

Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said in a statement to Blaze News, "Past administrations have tried to rename bases that should [never have] been changed in the first place. Here at the Pentagon, we honor our American history and traditions; we don't erase it."

"We learn from our triumphs and our pains, which makes our country stronger," added Wilson.

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Congress must kill DEI before it kills our military readiness



In June, with four months left in fiscal year 2025, the Army announced that it had surpassed its goal of enlisting 61,000 recruits. Female recruitment surged in particular across every branch, a shift many credit to President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s return to a “warfighter” ethos.

Yet Republicans in Congress still haven’t done their part to cement this new direction in law.

Congressional Republicans must seek a permanent end to the regime that has so disastrously compromised the military’s lethality.

The misguided and weak leadership of the previous administration allowed the ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion to run rampant at the Pentagon, strangling recruiting efforts and sidelining the military’s true mission.

Under Joe Biden, the Army fell nearly 30,000 recruits short. Misguided priorities drained confidence in the service and hollowed out the ranks. If the “Trump bump” holds, it could reverse those losses and begin restoring the military’s strength and credibility after years of neglect and ideological tinkering.

Lingering progressive activism

Racial and gender identity politics defined the Biden administration so deeply that simple executive orders cannot uproot them — especially in the military. Former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s 2022-26 Strategic Management Plan spelled it out, imposing race-based quotas on every service member and civilian across the force.

The Trump administration must insist that Congress make it impossible to return to this decades-long embrace of race and gender essentialism. Such action is necessary for Secretary Hegseth to continue sharpening the edge of American military power with confidence.

Congress has started moving in the right direction. The Senate Armed Services Committee recently advanced the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act with two measures aimed at curbing DEI. Section 547 blocks race and identity from influencing service academy admissions. Section 920 repeals several provisions that embedded DEI in the Defense Department.

These changes, though welcome, fall short. Congress must go farther if it wants real impact. Identity politics must be banned not just in admissions, but throughout the military. And for Section 920 to matter, DEI cannot simply be buried — its presence should disqualify applicants from future government service.

Ending DEI-based admissions

Another urgent target for repeal is the 2021 DEI selection board mandate, which forces military boards to “represent the diverse population of the armed force concerned.” That order undermines their core mission: choosing the most capable leaders to win wars.

Early signals from the House and Senate Armed Services Committees show they recognize the problem, but they have yet to commit to locking in Trump-era reforms. America’s depleted readiness should be evidence enough. Lawmakers must act decisively — restore the military’s lethality and bury DEI for good.

RELATED: How DEI took a sledgehammer to the US military’s war ethos

Photo by Ivan Cholakov via Getty Images

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) has pushed consistently to root DEI out of the military. But he works with razor-thin majorities in both chambers, where entrenched Armed Services Committee staff — Republicans in name only — resist meaningful reform.

Trump’s political resurgence leaves no excuse. Republicans in Congress must break this pattern and confront the bureaucrats blocking change.

Republicans have their chance

Lawmakers now face their moment. The current Senate and House drafts of the NDAA fall short. Republicans must seize this chance to codify President Trump and Secretary Hegseth’s reforms and restore warfighting as the military’s sole organizing principle.

To end the tyranny of DEI and race quotas, Congress cannot stop at praising executive action. It must legislate a permanent end to the ideology that has gutted readiness and crippled lethality.

AI can be used to develop biological and chemical weapons



The greatest threat to America may be something we cannot see.

Biological and chemical weapons can spread debilitating fear and wreak havoc on populations. Unfortunately, the threat of these kinds of attacks on American soil is only rising, empowered by the unique capabilities of artificial intelligence. To prevent catastrophe, we must use AI to counter the danger that this advanced technology can unleash.

We are only one misstep away from catastrophe. The most recent close call came last month, when two Chinese nationals, who received funding from their communist government to work on a noxious fungus, were caught smuggling the pathogen into the United States. The FBI arrested them just in time.

AI could spark the next pandemic and be an unparalleled tool in the hands of terrorists.

This was no ordinary fungus. It was what scientists call an “agroterrorism weapon” that would have decimated America’s grain farms, sickened the U.S. population, and disrupted our nation’s food supply.

Those who lived through the fraught days immediately after 9/11 likewise remember the anthrax scare, as toxic letters were sent through the postal service, killing five people and making everyday Americans terrified to open their mailboxes.

Every few years, some new suspect threatens our military bases, political leaders, or someone else with ricin, a deadly poison derived from the castor plant.

And just a few short years ago, millions died and the entire world was thrown into a tailspin when COVID-19 — which many experts now believe originated from questionable handling and a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — crossed borders with abandon.

AI bioweapons are already happening

The rapid rise of AI is only making this problem more prevalent. In 2022 — months before ChatGPT was released, bringing large language models to the masses — an AI designed to develop drugs invented 40,000 new chemical weapons in a mere six hours.

In 2023, AI was used to provide a recipe for poisonous chloramine gas, which it called “Aromatic Water Mix.” AI experts and government officials have been warning for years that AI could spark the next pandemic and be an unparalleled tool in the hands of terrorists.

Such events have inspired a growing number of rightfully concerned individuals to demand a pause on AI development. We have enough problems with biological espionage, terrorism by mail, and lethal lab leaks. Why would we put potential biological and chemical weapons generators in the hands of anyone with a computer?

But responding to this threat is not so simple as pulling the plug. First, while AI has the potential to be used for evil, it also has immense power for good. The same tools that could be used to make biological weapons are also being applied to cure currently untreatable diseases.

Additionally, America can’t stop others from developing AI for whatever uses they desire. COVID-19 and the recent agroterrorism fungus both came from China, and you can bet China will have no problem unleashing AI for even more destructive ends if it serves China's interests, as will every other bad actor in the world.

So what else can we do?

Achievable protections

First, the administration should continue to aggressively investigate and thwart potential acts of biological and chemical terrorism. The recent FBI arrest of the Chinese fungus-smugglers proves that America’s law enforcement is aware of this threat and still capable of preventing attacks before they happen.

Likewise, President Donald Trump acted presciently in his first administration by launching the first-ever National Biodefense Strategy in 2018, which outlined how our nation can defend against natural outbreaks and intentional biological attacks.

This strategy, coupled with the president’s swift military action against Syria for its use of biological weapons that same year, reveals that the current administration will still use the immense power of American deterrence to stop the use of these deadly weapons.

Yet with AI poised to rapidly exacerbate biological and chemical weapons proliferation, traditional tools are not enough. We must use AI to respond to AI.

The private sector is already on the case. Companies like Renovaro and OpenAI, two U.S.-based AI firms, are already applying machine learning to both prevent AI from producing recipes for weaponry and to identify and counter biological and chemical threats before they can spiral out of control.

RELATED: The AI takeover isn’t coming — it’s already here

Photo by Vertigo3d via Getty Images

New coding produced by top AI experts can be applied to any large language model to prevent it from teaching users how to make weapons of mass destruction. For those pathogens that slip through the cracks, Renovaro’s AI has the potential to develop antidotes to biological and chemical samples within five days, light-years faster than the long months it took to develop vaccines and effective treatments for COVID-19.

President Trump promised a Golden Dome to protect America from missile attacks — a worthwhile initiative. Yet the next war may be started not by a missile, but by a microbe. We need a biological Golden Dome, and AI can make it.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.

Ron Johnson Presses Pentagon On Reinstatement Of Troops Fired For Not Bowing To Biden’s Covid Shot Mandate

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., is pressing the Pentagon on its efforts to reinstate military troops fired by the Biden administration for forgoing the Covid shot, the senator revealed Thursday. In his Tuesday letter, the Wisconsin Republican asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to provide an update on what the Defense Department is doing to return service […]

Further Data Shows Media Wildly Overestimated Number Of Trans Troops

In the weeks surrounding Trump’s inauguration, the left-wing media insisted the administration’s effort to remove trans troops from the military would weaken the force — some outlets fearmongered that up to 15,000 service members would be booted. But numbers recently obtained by journalist Chris Bray from the Department of Defense indicate that only four “transgender servicemembers” have been “removed […]

The terrorists run Syria now — and Christians, religious minorities are paying the price



Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, up until this month recognized by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, was formed as the result of the merger of al-Qaeda's Syria affiliate, al-Nusrah Front, and other extremist groups committed to a "popular jihad."

HTS, which in recent years tried to rehab its public image, led the Turkish-backed Islamic militants who seized the Syrian capital of Damascus in December and ultimately overthrew the Assad regime — a regime change made possible with the help of the Obama CIA and the Pentagon.

Despite the HTS' murderous history and threats to the existence of Syria's Christians, Alawites, and Druze, Western neocons celebrated the replacement of Bashar al-Assad as president with HTS leader Muhammad al-Jawlani, who now goes by Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa.

'The current political environment in Syria remains deeply unstable and ambiguous for Christians.'

The Washington Post's foreign policy columnist Josh Rogin, for instance, wrote, "Syria is free. The rebels won. The people liberated themselves from tyranny." Trump critic Bill Kristol wrote, "The fall of a brutal dictator is rare enough that we should take the opportunity to celebrate it, and pay tribute to those who brought it about." Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur (Ohio) expressed hope in December that under the new terrorist leadership, Syria would "be a tolerant society accepting of people from all religious confessions."

Recent massacres, bombings, rapes, and kidnappings committed by al-Sharaa's forces, friends, and fellow travelers have provided strong indications that such celebrations were premature.

A source who routinely travels to Syria and who has been in recent contact with people in the country has shared with Blaze News insights about life for Christians and other religious minorities under the new regime.

RELATED: Syria's terrorist regime just killed an American citizen — more Christians, Druze are next

The Syrian regime's security forces roll into the Druze city of Suwayda on July 15. Photo by SAM HARIRI/AFP via Getty Image

"The current political environment in Syria remains deeply unstable and ambiguous for Christians and certainly dangerous for other religious minorities, with recent events in the governorate of Sweida tragically underscoring this reality," said the source, who asked to remain anonymous over security concerns. "On July 15, 2025, Sweida experienced a large-scale massacre resulting in the deaths of hundreds of civilians."

Between July 13 and July 20, over 1,200 people were were killed in clashes between Sunni Muslim Bedouin clans, which were aided by al-Sharaa's forces, and Druze-linked militias in Syria's southern Druze-majority Suwayda province, according to the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

There have reportedly been numerous religiously-motivated assassinations across the country in the days since.

The source noted that "among those killed was a prominent pastor of the local evangelical church, along with his entire family."

Khaled Mazhar, the pastor of the Good Shepherd Evangelical Church in Suwayda city "who had converted from another faith tradition, was known for his peaceful integration and for serving as a respected leader within both the church and the wider community," added the source.

The SOHR indicated that members of al-Sharaa's Ministry of Defense were responsible for the pastor's slaying.

In response to the historic bloodletting, Blaze News' source indicated that religious communities, including Orthodox and Catholic Christians, have opened their churches as a place of refuge, and "overcrowding is now common."

"This recent crisis highlights both the persistent vulnerability of religious minorities in Syria and the profound challenges they face in the current political landscape. The urgent calls for international protection reflect a widespread sense of abandonment and a desire for tangible, effective action from the global community," the source said.

Fr. Tony Boutros, a Melkite-Catholic priest in Suwayda who was among the Christian clergymen abducted by radicals in 2015, said in a recent video statement, "We ask the U.S., Europe, the Vatican, and the whole world for international protection for this region of Sweida, all of it, for us and for our Druze brothers, my dear ones. Look at the massacres that happened to us in Sweida."

'The biggest thing that gets lost is complexity.'

The source indicated that everyday life for Christians and other religious minorities in Syria can "appear relatively normal," but such appearances are deceptive, as "underlying fear and uncertainty are constant realities."

RELATED: New massacre, old problem: How Syria can protect its religious minorities

Photo by Ali Haj Suleiman/Getty Images

"Most recently, the bombing at the Mar Elias Church in Damascus on June 22, 2025, during a Sunday liturgy, resulted in at least 20 deaths and dozens injured — demonstrating how quickly violence can erupt even in seemingly safe spaces," the source said. "In Sweida, the 'Suwayda Massacre' and other attacks have deepened a sense of vulnerability. Even where no violence is occurring, minorities remain wary, practicing their faith discreetly and living with a persistent sense of fragility, knowing that the situation can deteriorate suddenly and dramatically."

While life under the terrorist regime remains precarious, the source indicated that family presently in Syria believe "the situation is much better than what it was during the previous regime," although there is disagreement on this point.

"I used to say that nothing in the universe will be worse than the Assad regime. They were absolute monsters. However, if you ask someone from Sweida now, their answer would be different," the source said.

When pressed on whether something has been neglected in other reports that readers should know about the situation in Syria, the source noted, "The biggest thing that gets lost is complexity."

"Too often, reports paint Syria in black and white, but the reality is anything but simple," the source continued. "The situation shifts from city to city, even from one household to the next. It changes every day. Any responsible reporting has to acknowledge just how nuanced things are and resist the urge to generalize. Oversimplifying only does a disservice to the real lived experiences on the ground."

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