President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have both refused to rule out deploying military personnel to polling places during November’s midterm elections. But the nation’s highest-ranking military officer apparently has different ideas.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin in a letter that senior military leaders have “no plans” to send federal troops or federalized National Guard members to polling locations during the elections, adding that he considers an order directing the military to carry out that role to be unlawful.

Caine wrote that he had “neither received nor anticipate receiving any unlawful order concerning the role of the Joint Force in the upcoming November 2026 midterm elections.”

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Concerns about military involvement in the midterms have intensified following Trump’s unprecedented use of National Guard forces to shut down protests around the country. Veteran journalist Seymour Hersh reported in July that a White House insider told him there was a plan to deploy the National Guard to polling locations. When Trump was asked about the claim, he refused to rule it out.

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Hegseth was directly confronted with the question earlier this year when Slotkin asked whether he would commit to keeping American service members away from polling places during the midterms. Hegseth refused to make that commitment and dismissed the question as a “gotcha hypothetical.”

The prospect of armed or uniformed military service members taking up posts at polling places would raise obvious concerns about voter intimidation and the traditional separation between civilian elections and the military. As stated above, fears of such a deployment have grown specifically because of Trump’s willingness to use Guard forces domestically.

There is an important distinction here: Caine did not say Trump has actually issued an unlawful order, and his letter specifically states that he has neither received one nor expects to receive one.

What’s clear is that senior military leadership currently has no plans to put troops at polling places, and that Caine is publicly saying the military’s potential involvement in November’s elections is a no-go.

Given that Trump and Hegseth refuse to draw a line when given the opportunity, Caine’s decision to do is pretty significant.

Donald Trump has insisted the FBI’s investigation into his 2016 campaign was a politically motivated witch hunt. So when he ordered more Crossfire Hurricane records declassified, the intended message was obvious: Americans were supposed to finally see proof of the “total weaponization” Trump has complained about for years.

The latest batch appears to have been considerably less helpful to him.

According to newly declassified FBI records reported by RawStory, Trump asked a remarkably basic question during an August 2016 counterintelligence briefing about foreign threats.

“Joe, are the Russians bad?” Trump asked FBI supervisory special agent Joe Pientka. “Because they have more numbers, are they worse than the Chinese?”

Trump was receiving a secure briefing at the FBI’s New York Field Office about how foreign intelligence services target U.S. officials for economic, military and technological information. Chris Christie and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn were also present.

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At another point, when an official described the United States as “the world leader in counterterrorism,” Trump interjected: “Russia, too?”

Then came the most awkward moment in the file. As officials discussed accusations that both Russia and China had cheated on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Trump asked, “Who’s worse?” The response was redacted, but the report says Trump and Christie turned toward each other and Christie remarked, “I’m shocked.”

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The documents are part of the 56th batch of records released from Crossfire Hurricane. Despite Trump’s repeated promises that declassification would expose the investigation as “total weaponization” and “a disgrace,” the latest files reportedly contain nothing that undercuts the original rationale for opening the probe.

Some of the material instead adds detail about why investigators were interested in Trump campaign figures in the first place.

The FBI viewed campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page as “the logical conduit” for Russia “to message the Trump campaign” because of his ties to Russia. Informant Stefan Halper had told investigators that Page discussed his relationship with Gazprom and said he had recently been in Abu Dhabi “representing Gazprom.”

Page later acknowledged having worked as an adviser to Gazprom and had previously described himself in a 2013 letter as an “adviser” to the Kremlin.

The files also include an intelligence report claiming Vladimir Putin had “admitted to senior intelligence officials” shortly before the election that Russian efforts “to influence the U.S. presidential campaign failed and were ‘f---ed up.’”

Another report said people involved in the operation were frustrated by the response to material released against Hillary Clinton.

“Those involved were dismayed at the lack of traction of material leaked against Hillary Clinton,” the report said. “They advised that the most compromising material has been put out but that they will ‘drip-feed’ the remaining materials through WikiLeaks.”

The documents are not flattering to the FBI or its sources. They also detail how Justice Department official Bruce Ohr provided the FBI with research his wife, Nellie Ohr, had conducted for Fusion GPS, the firm that commissioned the now-discredited Steele dossier. Nellie Ohr later told Congress, “I did not give the FBI my research,” but a later FBI review found she had “provided demonstrably false information in two aspects of her testimony.” The Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr ultimately declined to prosecute her.

Not exactly the smoking gun Trump had in mind.

Donald Trump made significant gains with young Americans in 2024, helping him win back a demographic that had been overwhelmingly hostile to Republicans just four years earlier. Less than two years later, that achievement appears to be coming apart fast.

A new Echelon Insights poll puts Trump’s net approval among voters ages 18 to 34 at minus 44, the lowest level recorded for that age group in the polling series reviewed by Newsweek. Just 28 percent approve of his job performance, compared with 72 percent who disapprove.

Trump was at net positive 7 among voters ages 18 to 34 in January 2025. By July 2026, he had fallen to minus 30. Then, in just one month, his rating plunged another 14 points to minus 44, amounting to a staggering 51-point decline among young voters since the beginning of his second term.

Voters ages 18 to 29 backed Kamala Harris over Trump by only four points in 2024, 51 percent to 47 percent, according to an analysis of AP VoteCast by CIRCLE. In 2020, that same age group preferred Joe Biden over Trump by 25 points. Young men were especially important to Trump’s improvement, backing him over Harris 56 percent to 42 percent.

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Across the electorate, 40 percent approve of Trump’s performance while 59 percent disapprove, producing a net approval rating of minus 19. That’s lousy enough on its own, but it means Trump is currently 25 points further underwater among younger voters than he is with Americans overall.

The economic picture may help explain why.

Separate research cited by Newsweek found widespread anxiety among younger Americans, particularly over the basic economics of trying to build a life. Ninety-five percent expressed concern about housing costs while 87 percent worried about affording basic necessities, with an additional 83 percent being concerned about mass layoffs threatening their job security. Another 81 percent feared artificial intelligence would make finding work more difficult.

The White House, unsurprisingly, has a much more delusional interpretation.

“No other president in history has accomplished more for the American people than President Trump, who is working tirelessly to create jobs, cool inflation, increase housing affordability, and more,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told Newsweek in an emailed statement.

“The President has already made historic progress not only in America but around the world, and this is just the beginning as his agenda continues taking effect,” the statement added.

Young voters apparently haven’t received the memo. The next test won’t come from another White House statement insisting everything is wonderful. It comes in November, when young voters get to make their voices heard.

The Trump administration has apparently discovered a convenient way to obtain private information about journalists and activists, by using an obscure customs law to bypass a judge and tell the companies receiving the demands to keep quiet.

According to new reporting, the Department of Homeland Security has been using a little-known customs-import provision to demand phone logs, social-media information and financial records with only an agency official’s approval.

One case involving Minneapolis journalist Georgia Fort shows just how far the administration is willing to go.

DHS obtained six months of Fort’s phone records covering more than 10,000 calls and texts. What makes that particularly remarkable is that a federal judge had already rejected the Trump administration’s requests twice.

Fort and former CNN anchor Don Lemon were charged after covering an anti-ICE protest in January. The administration initially sought warrants for YouTube information belonging to the journalists, but a judge rejected those requests and said they should have an opportunity to challenge them.

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Several weeks later, the department served Google with a summons seeking the same information, invoking the customs provision and effectively avoiding the courts. Google refused to provide Fort’s account information, but T-Mobile complied with the government’s demand for her phone records.

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DHS has reportedly used the same tactic to issue summonses to progressive news outlet Democracy Now, conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly, as well as unions and nonprofit organizations, even though none were facing criminal charges.

Legal experts say the government is stretching the statute far beyond its intended purpose.

“It’s outrageous conduct on so many levels,” John Roth, who led the DHS inspector general’s office from 2014 to 2017, said, calling the tactic an “improper use of the subpoena under any circumstances.”

Former DHS attorney Chris Duncan was equally blunt.

“These laws have absolutely nothing to do with a domestic situation at a church, a social media post, even an immigration matter,” Duncan said.

The implications extend well beyond one reporter. The administration is reportedly using a legal authority designed for customs enforcement to obtain sensitive information about journalists, activists and political organizations without first persuading a judge that it is entitled to those records.

For an administration that spent years raging about the “weaponization” of federal law enforcement and government surveillance, the contradiction is glaring.

Charlotte Clymer’s satire has revealed a self-defeating habit that causes progressive coalitions to break down while the MAGA movement builds solidarity.

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The Self-Sabotage of Progressive Purity

Right-wing extremists consistently consolidate power because they demand loyalty over moral perfection.

Donald Trump and the MAGA movement welcome fraudsters, felons, and opportunists without hesitation, knowing that raw coalition size wins elections.

Meanwhile, progressive spaces frequently fall into a destructive trap: exhausting their energy policing potential allies rather than organizing against genuine authoritarians.

This internal audit reflex turns universal cultural moments into ideological trials, alienating newcomers and weakening the broad coalition required to defeat the right.

Satirizing the Social Media Audit

Charlotte Clymer raised this issue immediately after Dolly Parton died at age 80.

Although the country came together across party lines to pay tribute to Parton’s legacy, Clymer initiated a preemptive move against online critics who quickly condemn popular figures for not checking every single activist box.

In order to ridicule those who judge a person’s entire life by obscure criteria, she created an outcry about the non-existent “North American Belly-Winged Dung Beetle” as a mockery of the claim that Parton was “not a caring person.”

Her post struck a responsive chord since social media platforms actively encourage such behavior. The incentives for generating outrage lead people to assert their own moral superiority rather than engaging in the difficult work of building an effective political movement.

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A Contrast in Coalition Building

Progressive politics can be seen as a decentralized federation of movements focused on labor, climate justice, civil rights, and housing.

Activists usually win digital prestige by being the first to identify and criticize ideological flaws. As a result, silence is read as malice, and all cultural figures become potential targets.

Purity ends up replacing actual governing power, since people can condemn a cultural ally without using any legislative authority, leading different groups to monitor and discipline one another rather than enact real policy.

The difference from the approach of the right-wing parties is clear. Conservatives are willing to tolerate serious misconduct, corruption, and major policy changes as long as this ensures that their voting base remains unchanged.

A political movement that can forgive its members can therefore expand and take power.

On the other hand, a movement that subjects every possible ally to a lifetime audit carried out retrospectively will instead shrink down to a small, powerless group.

The High Cost of Endless Litmus Tests

Treating flawed or politically cautious allies as if they were mortal enemies undermines legitimate criticism.

For example, Dolly Parton has for years funded childhood literacy through her Imagination Library, supported LGBTQ communities even when it involved real business risks, and financed vaccine research.

To regard her careful public stance as equivalent to that of malicious political actors nullifies the seriousness of the words required when addressing genuine threats to democracy.

Progressives face a direct choice between ideological isolation and genuine political power. Relentless scrutiny of natural allies only fragments the base and weakens the fight against MAGA authoritarianism. Winning movements succeed by welcoming imperfect people into the struggle rather than enforcing unattainable demands.

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Brevard County’s 2025 Deputy of the Year isn’t doing a very good job of living up the title. Deputy Michael Fultz, 24, resigned in May rather than be fired after Sheriff Wayne Ivey moved to dismiss him for “egregious misconduct,” according to internal affairs records.

News 6 reported that in March, the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office named Fultz Deputy of the Year and gave him its Medal of Valor for an April 2025 fatal shooting.

“Deputy Fultz’s decisive actions and extraordinary restraint under extreme pressure undoubtedly saved the life of a frightened mother,” the agency declared. However, the complaint that sparked the investigation came the same day as the ceremony, in the form of an email from Fultz’s ex-girlfriend.

“My intention in providing this information is not to pursue personal retaliation but to ensure the agency is aware of conduct that, in my understanding, may conflict with departmental policies or professional standards,” she wrote.

Investigators were made aware of a 2023 photo, taken before he was hired, that they said showed him giving a Nazi salute. They also said the photo showed him sporting a mustache in that was “shaved in what appears to be an attempt to mimic Adolf Hitler.”

Fultz admitted posing for the photo, but “denied being racist and stated that the photograph was merely a joke.” He also confirmed text messages in which he repeatedly used a racial slur.

“Deputy Fultz stated he grew up in a foster home with black parents and siblings, and the words became normal to use,” investigators wrote.

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Investigators also cited images of Fultz using a firearm during a sexual encounter with his ex-girlfriend. He said the gun was hism but investigators said it resembled the handgun the agency issued him after the shooting.

“Deputy Fultz admitted to ignoring all firearm safety training that he had received,” they noted.

The ex-girlfriend also provided FaceTime screenshots of Fultz in uniform in his patrol car while allegedly masturbating. He “denied ever masturbating on duty and claimed that he was only ‘pretending’ to masturbate while on the video call.”

A month before the complaint, a Florida Highway Patrol trooper clocked Fultz at 111 mph on a motorcycle. State law allows an arrest at 100 mph or more when the driving threatens people or property, and investigators wrote that his speed and the traffic met that standard.

Trooper Joshua Provencher did not arrest him. “I’m not going to take you to jail, Fultz,” he said, writing a $155 civil ticket instead and telling a sergeant, “I don’t want to ruin his job.”

Ivey’s memo, however, wasn’t so kind to Fultz.

“The nature and severity of your misconduct has irreparably damaged the trust required to perform the duties of a deputy sheriff,” the memo declared.

Fultz resigned May 27. In a statement to News 6 he said, “I do not agree with every allegation or conclusion contained in the administrative investigation.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spent Monday announcing another round of Iran sanctions and batting away the obvious question. Asked whether the administration might be damaging the economy on purpose, he snapped: “Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?”

James Downie, writing for MS NOW, treated that answer as the tell. The record is bad enough, Downie argued, that the simpler explanation is the administration’s own choices, not some run of bad luck from abroad.

The 30-year Treasury yield hit a 19-year high last week. Bessent answered with expanded government debt buybacks. Yields slid, then climbed back. Investors are staring at a $40 trillion national debt, a load Downie, citing Center for American Progress analyst Bobby Kogan, traces in large part to Bush-era and Trump-era tax cuts. That is not a mystery shock from Tehran, it’s a balance sheet the White House helped build.

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The same pattern shows up at the grocery counter. Trump has moved to let in 300,000 tons of tariff-reduced beef just before the midterms, selling the step as a way to knock down ground-beef prices. Downie reads that as an admission the administration already knows: American consumers, not foreign packers, have been eating the tariff.

Meanwhile the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, oil has stayed high, and companies are passing the bill along in beer, french fries, paint, and packaging. Those are not acts of God. They are the downstream costs of a war and a trade policy the administration chose and then refused to treat as connected.

A Mississippi family that held the same two acres for four generations has been driven off their land by the constant roar of a power plant built to feed Elon Musk’s data centers.

Krystal Polk’s relatives acquired the Southaven plot “before people of color were allowed to have land.” They raised chickens and pigs and grew their own food. “We lived a very simplistic life,” Polk told CBS News. That ended a year ago when the plant went up across the street. The noise forced them out.

“It’s like you’re in the middle of the airport where the planes are taking off, but they never take off,” Polk said of the “constant roaring” that still rings in her ears after she leaves. The facility powers data centers operated by SpaceXAI, formerly known as xAI, in the Memphis area. A resident petition demanding it be shut down has gathered more than 1,400 signatures over noise and air pollution.

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SpaceXAI announced in July that it is spending millions on sound walls and “advanced quieting technologies.” Residents report that the single wall installed so far has changed almost nothing. Since 2024 Musk has expanded in the region with the Colossus 1 data center and a newly confirmed site called “Minihard,” part of an investment Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves says will top $20 billion.

The NAACP and other groups sued xAI and its subsidiary MZX Tech in April, alleging the plant “emits significant amounts of harmful pollutants.” The company has moved to dismiss the case. The Justice Department has sided with SpaceXAI, arguing the lawsuit could hinder “the War Department’s use of AI for national defense.” An independent analysis by EmPower Analytics Group found that plans to add dozens of gas turbines would worsen air pollution already concentrated in disproportionately Black communities. The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality declined to comment on the litigation but noted the facility was required to demonstrate compliance with air-quality standards during permitting.

Polk, who has asthma along with other family members, said she worries about becoming one of the “casualties” if the health warnings prove accurate. She has also accused the real-estate firm Cushman & Wakefield of pressuring her to sell on behalf of an unnamed client and filed a Better Business Bureau complaint. The firm denied using “harassment, pressure tactics, or inappropriate conduct.”

Selling is not simple. Keeping the land was her father’s dying wish. “I’m not sure if you could offer a value,” Polk said. Her plans to retire there and pass the property to her children remain on hold while the turbines keep running.

The Pentagon just confirmed it keeps a secret list of journalists it refuses to deal with, by accidentally telling one of them he was about to join it.

An official at U.S. Central Command inadvertently revealed the blacklist to Intercept reporter Nick Turse during a phone call. Richard Allee, an executive assistant with CENTCOM public affairs, warned Turse that continued inquiries would have consequences: “You’ll be put on a list of people to disregard.”

When Turse pressed — “You have a list of people to disregard?” — Allee answered simply, “Yes.” Asked who was on it, he replied: “I’m not privy to give you that information.” He later added, “It’s not a list that we publicize,” and hung up.

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The exchange came after Turse had called multiple times and been placed on hold for more than two hours. Allee told him: “They’re not going to answer your call if you just keep calling and calling.” He also offered advice: a “less accusatory attitude towards the personnel here would go a lot further than badgering them when you don’t get something you want, when you want it.”

CENTCOM spokesperson Capt. Tim Hawkins denied any such list exists. He called The Intercept’s account “a complete misrepresentation of exchanges that occurred” and accused the reporter of having “repeatedly harassed CENTCOM staff who remained professional while expressing that his rude behavior was unacceptable.” Hawkins further noted that Allee is a contractor, not a CENTCOM employee.

Seth Stern, director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, was less impressed.

“Threatening journalists with placement on a blacklist in retaliation for reporting the government doesn’t like is as unconstitutional as it gets,” he said. “This should put to rest the Pentagon’s prior claims that its anti-press policies — like its infamous requirement that reporters sign pledges to only print authorized information — are somehow content neutral.”

The admission comes amid a broader pattern under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

The department has revoked long-standing workspaces and credentials, replaced them with outlets more aligned with the administration, and required remaining journalists to sign agreements forbidding them from gathering or soliciting information, the basic work of reporting.

Last week it fired top leadership and journalists at the military-funded Stars and Stripes, which operates under a congressional mandate for editorial independence.

The Justice Department has decided the FBI agents who searched Mar-a-Lago in 2022 now deserve their own investigation. Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner is not impressed.

On a recent episode of Brian Tyler Cohen’s Legal Breakdown podcast, Kirschner called the move at once “outrageous and infuriating and yet more of the same.” The probe targets the agents who executed the warrant at Trump’s Florida resort. Cohen described the announcement as a “pretty shocking” development. Kirschner saw it as something more deliberate: an attempt to unwind the classified documents case that special counsel Jack Smith had dismissed without prejudice after Trump won reelection.

“So he is trying to do everything he can to try to undo it nefariously, not in accordance with the law, not in accordance with the evidence,” Kirschner said. “Here we go again with Donald Trump trying to save his own criminal a—.”

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He labeled the investigation “searingly corrosive to the operation of law enforcement.” The damage, he argued, will not stay contained. It will ripple through the entire Justice Department and “all 93 of the United States Attorney’s offices around the country.” Agents handling politically sensitive cases will now operate under the assumption that “the next administration wants to take its revenge.”

“Not because we did anything wrong,” Kirschner said, speaking for federal law enforcement agents. “We actually followed the facts and the law, but they want to take revenge on us because of politics.”The larger pattern, in his view, is unmistakable. “This is Donald Trump’s goal to destroy the legitimacy and the perceived legitimacy of every institution of government,” Kirschner said. “And he just wants to rule over the whole mess.”

Civil service protections exist on paper. Kirschner was blunt about their practical value: “the Trump administration doesn’t give a rat’s a— about the laws that protect the people that they want to seek revenge against.” Agents targeted “for the crime of doing their own jobs” still retain constitutional rights, including a Fifth Amendment that “protects not only the guilty person but the innocent person.” Even so, he predicted the administration will force them to “spend not only a lot of money, but...a lot of sleepless nights for themselves and their family.”

The classified documents case was dismissed without prejudice, and new probe looks like an effort to make sure that door stays closed for good.

Watch the segment in the link below:

A Texas appeals court just handed Alex Jones a major break on one of the Sandy Hook judgments against him.

The state’s Third Court of Appeals unanimously cut a $50 million award down to $1.5 million in the case brought by parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis. Their six-year-old son Jesse was among the 20 children and six educators killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012.

Jones spent years claiming the massacre was a staged hoax designed to tighten gun laws. A jury found him liable, but the damages, however, have now been sharply reduced.

The court ruled that Heslin and Lewis failed to prove the harassment fueled by Jones’s lies rose high enough to clear Texas’s $750,000 statutory cap on certain damages. The opinion is a clear win for the Infowars founder on this particular claim. It does nothing to touch the far larger $1.4 billion judgment against him in Connecticut, where other Sandy Hook families prevailed.

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Jones’s trial lawyer, Andino Reynal, had flagged the damages figure as vulnerable from the start. Shortly after the 2022 verdict he predicted it could be brought down to roughly $1.5 million. The appeals court has now delivered exactly that result.

This Texas case was the first time Jones was held financially responsible for the years he spent promoting the false claim that the shooting never happened. Families described relentless harassment, death threats, and conspiracy theorists showing up at their homes after Jones amplified the hoax narrative to his large audience. The jury sided with the parents on liability. The appeals court has now decided the dollar amount must stay inside the state’s damage limits.

Jones has long insisted he was exercising free speech, but courts in multiple states have rejected that defense when the speech involved deliberate falsehoods about murdered children and the parents left behind. The Connecticut judgment still stands as the heaviest financial consequence. The Texas reduction simply trims one piece of the overall picture.

For the parents who sued in Texas, the original $50 million award is gone. What remains is a fraction of that sum and a reminder that even when liability is established, state damage caps can still rewrite the final number.

Pete Hegseth is mad at his own Army, and the Pentagon is scrambling to clean up the mess.

The Defense Secretary blew up after the Army quietly withdrew a new set of academic standards for ROTC cadets just days after announcing them. The memo had set clear benchmarks: a 20 on the ACT, a 1000 on the SAT, or a score in the 50th percentile on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.

Starting in January 2027, cadets seeking to contract into Senior ROTC would have needed a 110 on the ASVAB or proof they hit the SAT/ACT marks.

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Under Secretary of the Army Mike Obadal pulled the memo, saying it required “further staffing and analysis.” That decision did not sit well with Hegseth. According to reporting, he was furious.

The episode has produced some internal drama where defense officials are privately griping that the service should have kept the standards in place.

“The rescission prompted gripes among some defense officials, who privately argue the service branch should have minimum standards in line with Hegseth’s push to raise standards for military officers, which has also included a focus on fitness and grooming,” The Hill reported.

The Army insists it “is not abandoning the effort but will require ‘additional input from senior leadership’” before moving forward. In other words, the standards are on ice until someone figures out how to make the boss happy again.

Hegseth has made raising standards a signature theme of his tenure. Watching his own department yank a concrete step in that direction has clearly tested his patience. Now, the Army is now left trying to rewrite the same memo in a form that will survive the next round of review.

Darline Graham just admitted on a debate stage that she’s not particularly informed on national security, and the internet is having a field day.

The appointed South Carolina senator, sister of the late Lindsey Graham and Trump’s endorsed pick for a full term, was asked during a Republican primary debate whether the United States has a national security interest in Taiwan and the South China Sea.

“I’m just going to be honest here. I’m ... not that informed on national security,” Graham said, adding that “I do support the military” but “I’m not a polished politician up here.”

Lindsey Graham spent decades as one of the Senate’s most outspoken foreign-policy hawks, repeatedly warning about China’s ambitions in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. His sister’s response landed like a punchline.

Conservative columnist Mark Davis did not hide his reaction: “Please. This charade cannot continue.”

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Zeteo News founder Mehdi Hasan went further: “1. Why are you running for the United States Senate if you’re not up to speed on basic national security issues? 2. How are you Lindsey Graham’s sister if you’re not into national security issues?”

Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative, offered a more sarcastic take: “Point in favor of ‘Congress is dead.’ How dare the legislature, expected to have opinions, have views on anything as highfalutin as National Security? All that matters is that you support the troops, as the Founders intended.”

Graham was appointed last month after Lindsey Graham died suddenly of an aortic dissection. She is now locked in a runoff against Rep. Ralph Norman, with much of the South Carolina GOP establishment still unconvinced. Trump’s endorsement has not erased the questions about whether she is ready for a seat that has long demanded fluency on global threats.

Admitting you’re light on national security while running for the United States Senate is a rare kind of candor. Whether voters reward her or punish her remains to be seen.

Watch the moment in the video below:

The Trump administration has found a new way to make life harder for Mexican migrants: instead of simply sending them home, it’s flying them past their own country and dumping them in Guatemala and Honduras.

Two Department of Homeland Security officials confirmed the practice to CBS News. It’s been going on for months, quietly, with no formal announcement. Hundreds of Mexican citizens have already been shipped farther south. The goal, the officials said, is straightforward deterrence by putting more distance between the deportees and the U.S. border so they think twice about trying again.

Mexico is not pleased, and the country’s Foreign Ministry issued a blunt rejection.

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“The Government of Mexico accepts the return of all its nationals. It therefore rejects the deportation of Mexican nationals to third countries and has no such agreement in place,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement."Mexico consistently takes the steps necessary to ensure the safe and dignified return of all its nationals to national territory.”

Immigration experts called the move unprecedented. For years, under both parties, the U.S. has returned Mexicans deep into Mexico itself. Sending them to third countries was usually reserved for people whose home governments refused to take them back. Mexico has never been one of those countries.

Adam Isacson, a researcher at the Washington Office on Latin America, called the practice “almost entirely punitive.”

“It’s the same as the purpose of sending them to Ecuador or Africa or anywhere else: to broadcast the hardship, to make sure people know that this is a possible consequence of remaining undocumented in the United States and to encourage people to self-deport,” he added.

Tim Pool just gave the internet exactly what it wants from him: a dramatic exit, a quick return, and another round of the same civil-war talk that keeps the clicks coming.

On Sunday’s Jubilee “Surrounded” episode, the right-wing podcaster sat in a room with 20 progressives to debate which political party is more prone to violence. The host helpfully introduced him as “politically moderate.” That didn’t last long.

Instagram influencer Mason, better known as OneHandPolitics, went straight for the wallet. He noted that 42 of Pool’s video titles contain the phrase “civil war” and accused him of manufacturing panic for profit. “I’m saying that you say bulls--t in order to get money,” Mason told him.

Pool pushed back hard. “I’ve never called for civil war,” he insisted, claiming his “tracking toward” language simply echoed Atlantic reporting that cited national security experts. Mason wasn’t buying it. “There comes a point where people stop taking your prediction seriously.”

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The two traded historical jabs — Mason pointing to the Hamilton-Burr duel and Andrew Jackson’s era to argue polarization isn’t new, Pool citing the 2020 fatal shooting of Trump supporter Aaron Danielson in Portland as proof of real political violence. Then the temperature spiked.

At the 52:30 mark, Pool stood up and walked off the set, telling the room to “subscribe to Timcast” and “follow us on Instagram” on his way out. He returned a few minutes later. The host greeted him with a polite “Thank you for returning.”

The walk-off comes amid ongoing questions about Pool’s business dealings. Federal prosecutors have said his Culture War podcast received money funneled through Tenet Media as part of a $10 million Russian influence scheme. Pool has called himself a “victim” who didn’t know the source.

Watch the video below:

Donald Trump’s own team is now admitting out loud what a lot of people already suspected: the president has basically checked out of the parts of the job that don’t revolve around him.

Anonymous aides told CNN that Trump will eventually hit the road to fire up MAGA voters ahead of the midterms, but don’t expect him to enjoy a second of it if the trips are about propping up other Republicans.

“He loves to travel, but he hates to travel,” one aide said. They added, “Once he’s traveling, he’s like: ‘Why am I doing this? I want to be doing other things.’”

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Those “other things,” according to the report, include talking about his construction projects, the so-called Arc de Trump, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and his White House ballroom, rather than the affordability crisis that is actually crushing voters. Gas prices and the cost of living are dragging his approval numbers down, and Republican lawmakers are getting nervous that their standard-bearer has become a liability thanks to the war in Iran and his apparent indifference to the economic pain.

Trump finally green-lit using millions from his personal PAC to help vulnerable GOP candidates, after months of hesitation. One adviser spelled out the obvious: “Without a doubt, we’ve got to make sure we get some of these voters who show up for Donald Trump in presidential elections to show up for these congressionals.”

The president, meanwhile, is already preparing his excuse if the party gets shellacked in November. He told Punchbowl News he won’t take any of the blame.

“The question is, will they vote?” he said, before supplying his own answer: “They’re angry at Republicans, but they’re not angry at me.”

That attitude showed up again on Friday in Long Island, where Trump was supposed to be boosting candidates including his gubernatorial pick Bruce Blakeman. Instead he kept circling back to the “young, beautiful girls” he sees at the White House and appeared to forget the name of Saritha Komatireddy, the Republican attorney general candidate he has endorsed, referring to her as the woman he had “just met.”

White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has reportedly ordered staff to keep yanking him back to the affordability message voters care about. It doesn’t seem to be sticking.

A few days ago the official Instagram account of the United States Department of State posted the image above. Trump’s’s face floating in the darkness. Monumental serif type. His personal quote elevated to national scripture, stamped with the seal of American diplomacy.

I was livid. Then I got suspicious of my own anger, because that anger is exactly what this image is engineered to produce, and I’ve been publishing on social media long enough to know when I’m being farmed.

So I ran a 2026 test. When in doubt, consult a LLM, aka artificial intelligence.

I took the screenshot to four AI systems built by four competing companies — Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity — and asked each one the same question:

Four companies. Four training sets. Four corporate incentives to stay bland and inoffensive.

One verdict.

What each of them said

Claude (Anthropic): “The asymmetry is the story — the communism warning fails every empirical test, while the fascism question is a live scholarly debate about a measurable trend. The State Department’s own chiaroscuro leader-portrait counts as a small data point in that debate.”

ChatGPT (OpenAI): “V-Dem recorded a 24% one-year collapse in America’s liberal-democracy score, dropping the US from 20th to 51st worldwide — while the government warns about an authoritarianism that has no domestic pathway at all.”

Gemini (Google): “The calmest of the four: federalism, independent courts, and a free press are real buffers, and even so the risk rating for right-wing autocracy lands at ‘low to moderate’ — while the odds of communist America land at ‘structurally negligible.’”

Perplexity: “In this rhetoric, ‘communism’ stretches to cover universal healthcare, regulation, and Democrats generally; the documented record — election denial, DOJ pressure, ‘enemy of the people’ — maps far more cleanly onto authoritarian nationalism than onto Marx.”

Where they agreed

Every single model, unprompted, landed on the same three findings.

There is no institutional pathway to a communist America.

No party, no movement, no public appetite for abolishing private property, five communist states left on Earth and none of them within six thousand miles of winning a US school board seat. The word, as deployed here, is McCarthy’s old shorthand for “un-American” — even the calmest of the four said so.

The measurable risk runs the other direction.

Independent democracy monitors — V-Dem, Freedom House, Bright Line Watch — have spent the past eighteen months documenting the erosion of exactly the safeguards this poster claims to defend. Concentration of executive power. Pressure on courts, media, universities. The scholarly debate is about how far along the continuum we are, and what to call it. Nobody serious is debating the direction.

And the poster’s own aesthetics testify against it.

Three of the four models flagged, independently, that a government account promoting the leader’s face in dramatic darkness under his personal quote belongs to the visual grammar of the systems the caption claims to oppose. The machines have no politics. They have pattern recognition. The pattern was that loud.

About your anger — and mine

Here is the part I almost missed. This image confirms what you see, then dares you to say it. The moment you name the aesthetic, the reply is pre-loaded:

Your accurate description becomes their punchline. Your outrage becomes their content. Communication researchers call it dominance signaling. The administration’s own online operatives call it trolling. Run through an official organ of the United States government, it’s statecraft, psy-ops on a national scale

Which is why we didn’t answer the image with a hotter image, pointing to the obvious. We answered it with a question, put to four machines that have no stake in the fight.

Now it’s your turn

Don’t take our word for it. Don’t take theirs.

Screenshot the State Department post. Open whatever AI you use — I skipped Musk’s Grok, and Zuckerberg’s MetaAI as a matter of principle. Ask it the question exactly as we did: Which is more probable — a communist America, or an authoritarian one?

Then come back and put its answer in the comments. We’ll be collecting them.

The government told you what to fear. Four machines read the evidence and pointed the other way. What does yours say?

• Ask Claude

• Ask ChatGPT

• Ask Perplexity

• Ask Gemini

• Ask Grok

And even more importantly: what do you say?

Leave a comment

President Donald Trump’s latest attempt to generate revenue from his money-losing Truth Social platform has drawn almost no interest from the traders it was designed to attract.

The revelation comes one day after a federal lawsuit challenged Trump Media’s practice of selling Wall Street firms exclusive early access to the president’s posts for as much as $100,000 a month.

“The lawsuit alleges the service offering paying customers sneak peeks of his posts about U.S. policy on war, tariffs and other issues violates the Constitution,” the Associated Press reported, “and that official announcements should be made available to everyone at the same time.”

“There’s only 6 to 10, apparently, funds that have signed up for this,” MS NOW financial analyst Ron Insana quipped in a recent segment. “And so it’s not really pulling in a lot of money relative to what’s being lost at Truth Social.”

He added that the platform itself remains a chronic underperformer.

“It has not been the most successful effort at social media,” Insana said. “I mean, they roughly run revenues that are far lower than the size of their losses and so it’s not a great business model.”

In case you missed it:

Insana said Trump’s personal promotion of the service has done little to change the outcome.

“Even with the president trying to sell his comments, if you will, for money to hedge funds or quantitative traders in advance of him releasing that information, there’s been very little take up,” he said. “And so it just it is not been a successful enterprise from the beginning. And it’s not getting any better in any way, shape or form.”

University of Michigan economics professor Betsey Stevenson called the entire concept a “terrible idea,” citing the president’s own track record.

“People should be willing to pay a lot for early data,” Stevenson said. “Why has this not been successful? I don’t know the complete answer, but I think the, you know, the unreliability of President Trump and the way he changes his mind, you know, more frequently than he changes his pants is coming home to roost because people are like, ‘Why would I pay a lot for information that’s going to change in an hour or two hours?’”

Watch the segment in the video below, via RawStory:

Former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos said Wednesday he remains baffled by President Donald Trump’s attempt to explain the secret plane switch in Turkey, labeling the president’s remarks the usual “verbal word salad” that collapses under scrutiny.

Polymeropoulos, a 26-year intelligence veteran, appeared on MS NOW and zeroed in on Trump’s rambling answers from Tuesday’s press conference. The White House is still battling criticism that the president left others exposed to a possible foreign attack when he slipped away via catering truck to a different aircraft. Polymeropoulos argued Trump is only making the situation harder for anyone trying to defend him.

The government had a “duty to warn” those placed at risk, he said, calling the episode “pretty dramatic.”“In this case, you really look, it looks like that Air Force One, the original Air Force One, was at some risk and the secretary of state assumingly knew this, but the press corps and other members of the staff did not,” he explained.

In case you missed it:

“And so I think the American people deserve to know how this decision-making process evolved,” he suggested. “And first of all — or just to kind of bookend President Trump’s remarks there about the alternate aircraft being at greater risk — I have no idea what he’s talking about.”

Polymeropoulos did not soften the assessment. “That actually flies in the face of all of this,” he pointed out. “But I think that’s just kind of the usual verbal kind of word salad we hear that makes no sense whatsoever,” he added.

The comments leave Trump’s defenders with a clear problem: an experienced intelligence official is saying the president’s own account of the security decision contradicts the facts on the ground and offers no coherent explanation for putting staff and the press on a plane that was apparently considered a target.

Watch the segment in the link below:

President Donald Trump told Axios on Sunday that the United States is deliberately downplaying its military campaign against Iran while watching the country’s economic collapse, repeating a phrase nearly identical to one he used with Tucker Carlson shortly before the war began.

In a brief phone call described by the outlet, Trump said of the conflict: “We are low-keying it. We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.”

He then added the line that closely mirrored his earlier comment to Carlson: “It will work out. It always works out.”

The remark has drawn attention because Carlson previously flagged a similar statement as evidence that Trump may have launched the war reluctantly. In a May interview with The New York Times, Carlson recalled pleading with the president not to start the conflict.

In case you missed it:

“He said to me, ‘everything’s gonna be okay’ because I was getting overwrought [and told him] ‘don’t do this.’ He said, ‘it’s gonna be alright,’ and he said, ‘do you know how I know that?’ And I said, ‘no.’ He said, ‘because it always is,’” Carlson told the Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro.

Carlson interpreted the exchange as a sign that Trump understood the war could “end his presidency” yet proceeded anyway, and “against his will.”

“I do think there’s a kind of Teddy Roosevelt optimism there, but that’s not really what it was,” Carlson continued. “This is my read: that was more a justification from a man who feels he has no choice, and that is my strong view, and not just my strong view, [but] the view of others who were around him.”

The war, now deeply unpopular, has driven up food and gasoline prices in the United States by disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway that carries roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil trade. According to a Wall Street Journal report on Sunday, Trump has privately discussed dropping his primary goal of securing a nuclear deal with Iran if Tehran fully reopens the strait, which flowed freely before the conflict began.

Earlier this month, Trump prepared a major strike on Iran but stepped back after reports of critical U.S. missile shortages. On Sunday he outlined the administration’s current approach as essentially waiting while Iran’s economy deteriorates under inflation and financial strain.

Carlson has separately claimed that Israel, a longtime advocate of U.S. military action against Iran, exerted heavy pressure on Trump and has suggested the president may have been the target of a “blackmail operation.”