Month: April 2025

El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). Photo courtesy of La Nación.

The recent deportation of MS-13 gang member and Salvadoran citizen Kilmar Ábrego García, whose gang affiliation invalidated his U.S. residency, has drawn attention to the Salvadoran prison where he is now being held. El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) is the brainchild of President Nayib Bukele, who operated on the premise that anyone bearing gang tattoos was likely a member, since non-gang-members with gang tattoos were often killed by gang members. Bukele tasked his police and military forces with rounding up known gang members and domestic terrorists, many of whom are now locked away in this ultra-secure facility.

Since the crackdown began in March 2022, El Salvador’s murder rate has dropped from 52 per 100,000 people in 2018 to just 2.4 per 100,000 in 2023. The country, once considered one of the most dangerous in Latin America, is now ranked among the safest in the region.

There have been some foreign nationals sent there as well, including deportees from the United States and more are expected. However, these are individuals believed to be gang members or affiliated with transnational criminal networks, not ordinary visa overstayers or migrants. Claims that all deportees are being locked up in CECOT are factually incorrect.

In early 2023, President Nayib Bukele unveiled the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a massive maximum-security facility in Tecoluca designed to dismantle the operations of El Salvador’s most dangerous gangs. With a capacity of up to 40,000 inmates, it is the largest prison in the Western Hemisphere and a centerpiece of Bukele’s broader anti-gang campaign launched under a state of exception declared in March 2022 after a sharp spike in homicides.

CECOT was built with one purpose: to isolate individuals with confirmed or suspected ties to violent criminal networks such as MS-13, Barrio 18, and the Venezuelan-born El Tren de Aragua. These organizations—designated as terrorist groups by the United States—are not ordinary gangs but transnational threats. Accordingly, detainees are treated not merely as criminals, but as domestic terrorists.

Since the crackdown began, Salvadoran authorities have arrested over 75,000 suspected affiliates. By targeting leadership and cutting communication lines, the government has effectively dismantled the structure that once allowed gangs to extort, traffic, and kill with impunity. CECOT plays a central role in this strategy, ensuring that high-risk offenders are locked down and unable to direct criminal activity from behind bars—a key flaw of the country’s previous prison system.

In Latin America, many prisons are effectively controlled by organized crime. CECOT, by contrast, remains fully under government authority. Located in a remote region near the San Vicente volcano, 75 kilometers from San Salvador, it is physically and technologically cut off from the outside world. There is no internet or cell service in or around the facility, and signal-blocking extends for 1.5 miles in every direction. There are no phone calls, no visits, and no messages—prisoners are completely isolated. This eliminates any possibility of coordinating gang activity beyond the walls.

Surveillance is total. The prison spans 57 acres and is surrounded by two 9-meter-high concrete walls topped with barbed wire, electrified fences, and gravel flooring designed to amplify footfalls. Nineteen guard towers provide full perimeter visibility. Inside, each of the 256 cells—each housing an average of 156 inmates—is monitored around the clock with CCTV and armed oversight from lattice ceilings. Guards live on-site, are rotated regularly, and their identities are concealed to prevent intimidation or retaliation against their families. Everyone entering the prison, including staff, is subject to physical searches and X-ray scans, reducing opportunities for contraband smuggling and corruption.

Movement inside the facility is minimal. Inmates are shackled and bent at the waist during transfers, allowed only 30 minutes a day for exercise, Bible study, or virtual hearings. High-risk individuals may be held in solitary confinement for up to 15 days in pitch-black cells with a concrete bed and a single ceiling hole for light. The majority of inmates spend 23.5 hours a day in overcrowded cells, with up to 80 people in less than one square meter of space each. There are no mattresses, no utensils, and no educational or recreational programs. Meals are served directly on the floor. The goal is not rehabilitation, but containment.

To prevent any chance of inmate control or rebellion, guards maintain overwhelming dominance. The facility is staffed by 600 soldiers, 250 police officers, and a riot intervention squad—over 1,000 personnel in total. Hooded guards armed with rifles enforce discipline. Inmates are forbidden from making eye contact with anyone, must wear white uniforms, and have their heads shaved to strip away individuality. Psychological control is further maintained through constant artificial lighting and verbal degradation. Many detainees are facing sentences that stretch for centuries or are held without trial under the ongoing state of exception. The government has made it clear: most of them will never leave.

Since its opening in January 2023, no escape attempts or prison riots have been reported. The level of control inside CECOT makes it one of the most secure prisons in the Western Hemisphere.

Despite what the mainstream media would have you believe, CECOT is not a detention center for migrants or individuals deported for minor offenses. It is a facility designed to isolate those considered serious threats due to criminal affiliations. Bukele’s strategy is brutally simple: if you lock up the gang members and make prison a place no one wants to end up, crime goes down. First, because the criminals are behind bars. Second, because no one wants to join a gang if it means ending up in a facility like CECOT.

The strict discipline and surveillance measures at CECOT are not excesses—they are necessary to prevent it from becoming yet another gang-run prison, as is common across much of Latin America. While international NGOs, liberal commentators, foreign media, and academic circles have voiced criticism, the results are hard to dispute: violence in El Salvador has plummeted. The critics had decades to offer a better solution. They didn’t, and still haven’t. Bukele acted and crime dropped.

The post Kilmar Ábrego García and the Prison That Crushed El Salvador’s Gangs appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

This article first appeared at American Thinker and is republished with permission.

Guest post by Jerome R. Corsi, Michael J. Flynn (US Army, Lt. Gen., Retired)

For this Nation to remain true to its principles, we cannot allow any American’s vote to be denied, diluted, or defiled. The right to vote is the crown jewel of American liberties, and we will not see its luster diminished.

—President Ronald Reagan, “Statement about the Extension of the Voting Rights Act,” November 6, 1981

With Tulsi Gabbard’s announcement last Friday that an ongoing intelligence agency investigation has evidence that election computers are vulnerable to cyberattack hackers, President Trump’s actions suggest he is moving quickly to declare an election fraud national security emergency.

On March 24, 2025, when Trump issued Executive Order (“EO”) “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” he did so under the auspices of his Article II executive powers as commander-in-chief, placing it beyond judicial lawfare. Nevertheless, 19 Democrat state attorneys general have already filed lawsuits charging that the EO violates the Constitution’s mandate delegating to state legislatures the power to determine how presidential elections are held.

Trump, however, is correct that election fraud coming from outside America is an overriding national security concern. On January 7, 2021, John Ratcliffe, then the Director of National Intelligence, wrote a memo entitled “Intelligence Community Assessment: Foreign Threats to the 2020 U.S. Elections.” In it, he stated explicitly “that the People’s Republic of China sought to influence the 2020 U.S. federal elections,” in a move that raised “the need for the Intelligence Community to address the underlying issues with China.”

Ratcliffe stressed that political bias, including from within the CIA under Obama, pressured analysts dissenting from “Russian collusion” narratives to downplay reporting that China’s efforts to influence U.S. elections were “undue influence or interference,” leading to “the false impression that Russia sought to influence the [2020] election but China did not.”

Unfortunately, Radcliffe’s memorandum was issued one day after Vice President Pence allowed Congress to proceed to certify the 2020 presidential election without challenge. If it had been delivered two days earlier, history could have been changed. Assuming Pence had integrity and the courage of his convictions, he might have challenged the 2020 election when he presided over the joint meeting of Congress for certification. Had Pence challenged the 2020 election, we might never have had the J6 protest march on Congress that led to the radical left’s “insurrection” prosecutions.

Since then, there’s been increasing evidence that Ratcliffe was correct about China’s attacks on America’s information systems. In November, the Washington Post reported that China-linked hackers penetrated Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen Technologies to collect audio calls of U.S. politicians and their staff in an operation Microsoft characterized as “Salt Typhoon.” One month later, during a secret meeting in Geneva with Biden officials, China admitted to hackingAmerican infrastructure due to U.S. support of Taiwan.

Armed with this information, on April 4, 2025, Trump fired National Security Agency Director Timothy Haugh and the NSA Deputy Director Wendy Noble. Made vulnerable by these moves were John Brennan, Obama’s CIA Director, and Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Nevertheless, despite evidence that China has hacked into America’s systems, the media have relentlessly insisted that there was no fraud in the 2020 election.

A recent example is the AP’s reporting about the lawsuit challenging Trump’s election integrity EO. “Election officials have said recent elections have been the most secure in U.S. history,” the AP reported. “There has been no indication of any widespread fraud, including when Trump, a Republican, lost to Joe Biden, a Democrat, in 2020.”

The AP referred to a much-repeated statement from Christopher Krebs, the former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) director. However, the AP ignored entirely that Trump “terminated” Krebs on November 18, 2020, for making “highly inaccurate” remarks on vote integrity.

The mainstream media have also downplayed an April 9, 2025, presidential memo entitled “Addressing Risks from Chris Krebs and Government Censorship.” There, Trump revoked Krebs’s security clearance, stressing that “Krebs, through CISA, falsely and basely denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.”

In that same memo, Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to investigate CISA’s activities over the past six years to determine if CISA’s conduct was contrary to his January 20 Executive Order about “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” (EO 14149.)

This was the prelude to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s startling announcement on April 11 during a televised Cabinet meeting. “We have evidence of how these electronic voting systems have been vulnerable to hackers for a very long time and vulnerable to exploitation to manipulate the results of the votes being cast, which further drives forward your [i.e., President Trump’s] mandate to bring about paper ballots across the country so that voters can have faith in our elections.”

With this announcement, Gabbard made clear that the investigation into election fraud is now a national security investigation rather than one centered in the DOJ or the FBI. Her reference to manipulation of electronic voting systems was a nod to the work done by Dr. Andrew Paquette, who has found cryptographic algorithms embedded in State Board of Elections (“SBOE”) voter registration computer systems that allow bad actors to create duplicate voters, who then “vote” before being deleted. (See also GodsFiveStones.com.)

Gabbard’s statement was sufficiently broad to establish the truth of the work begun in 2020 by researchers such as Sidney Powell, Patrick Byrne, Mike Lindell, and many others, who have produced evidence that the electronic tabulation systems used to count votes in presidential elections are vulnerable to foreign interference.

With Gabbard’s statement, President Trump can declare that election fraud has created a national security emergency. He can then demand that the U.S. military secure all 50 state board election records, including impounding all computers and servers used to register voters and tabulate votes.

Centering the election fraud investigation in the office of the DNI allows Gabbard to probe all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA’s and the FBI’s counterintelligence powers. The NSA remains under the control of Secretary of Defense Hegseth.

A national security emergency declaration will also allow Trump to invoke 28 CFR Section 600.1 to demand that Attorney General Pam Bondi appoint a Special Prosecutor within the DOJ to organize and direct an FBI election integrity task force.

Thus, Gabbard’s announcement caps a series of events establishing that the Trump administration has already launched an election fraud investigation that focuses on foreign interference. All that remains to make this conclusion official is for Trump to issue a national security emergency declaration. With a national security investigation into election fraud already begun and a criminal investigation almost sure to follow, we can expect to see subpoenas issued, grand juries convened and, possibly, even charges of treason filed against those who held high positions of power and responsibility in both the Obama and Biden administrations.

We have reason to believe, from algorithms embedded in SBOE voter registration computer programs involving intelligence-grade complexity, that the CIA has hacked into SBOE computers. Therefore, it’s a reasonable investigative proposition that foreign nations have also done so. President Trump has repeatedly declared that he intends to prove election fraudsters stole the 2020 presidential election.

“President Trump understands that our state voter registration lists are corrupted and the computers that run our elections are not secure,” explained Peter Ticktin, the attorney to President Trump whose law firm in Deerfield Beach, Florida, has begun filing challenges in state court to down-ballot elections believed stolen in the 2024 election. “Given the cornerstone of the importance of voting rights to our freedoms, President Trump also understands that we cannot sit by idly while our existing election computer systems are vulnerable to cyberattack by foreign nationals.”

The brilliance of Trump’s second term, not yet 100 days old, is that Trump, even though stymied by apparent DOJ and FBI foot-dragging, is determined to expose the 2020 election fraud. Pivoting from a DOJ/FBI criminal investigation, Trump saw more fertile ground exploring whether the CIA expanded its long-established interference in foreign elections into a possibly treasonous CIA conspiracy to subvert our elections.

President Trump is right. A national security emergency exists if the CIA’s 1950s plan to intervene in foreign elections has morphed into an open door for foreign hackers to intervene in domestic elections. How can we continue to ignore that the Chinese Communist Party’s continued cyberattacks aimed at undermining vital U.S. infrastructure, including the computer technology with which we currently conduct our elections, constitute a national security emergency of the highest order?

Note: Dr. Corsi and GodsFiveStones.com are working directly with Peter Ticktin’s law firm, The Ticktin Law Group, in Deerfield Beach, Florida, on election security. Peter Ticktin’s quotation in this article was given to the author for publication.

Lt. General Michael Flynn (Ret.) served under President Trump as the 24th U.S. National Security Advisor to the President. Flynn’s movie, Flynn: Deliver the Truth Whatever the Cost, is available on many platforms, both as a DVD for purchase and streaming on many platforms, as listed on FlynnMovie.com.

GodsFiveStones.com is a tax-deductible 501(c)3 foundation created by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D., and Karladine Graves, M.D., managed by Capstone Legacy Foundation. As reported on GodsFiveStones.com, Andrew Paquette, Ph.D., has discovered cryptographic algorithms in the State Board of Elections voter registration databases in New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Florida, New Jersey, and Oklahoma.

The post Gen. Flynn and Jerome Corsi: Trump’s National Security Emergency Investigation Into Election Fraud Is Ongoing appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Guest post by Joe Hoft at JoeHoft.com – republished with permission

Mental Health “Experts” FEAR Secretary Kennedy’s Investigation into Psychiatric Drugging

Republished with permission from AbleChild.

Within a few weeks of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the President signed an Executive Order establishing the Make America Healthy Again Commission (MAHA), which, among other things, will be “assessing the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants and weight-loss drugs.” In other words, officialdom finally is looking at the out-of-control unscientific chemical experimentation used to address unwanted behaviors.

Alert the media! Get Megyn Kelly on the phone! Finally, a governmental body will be looking into the serious risks associated with prescription mind-altering drugs. It’s decades in the making. But, as they say, “better late than never.” It was no surprise then that within a month of that announcement the mental health industry was none too pleased and released a “joint statement” about the wonders of its mind-altering chemical elixirs.

According to the statement, “these drugs provide relief for many young people enabling them to participate fully in treatment, school, social activities, and family life — all key aspects of healthy development.” Utter nonsense.

“Healthy development?” There is no such thing as the decades-long touted “chemical imbalance.” That theory finally got debunked in 2022 research published by Professor Joanna Moncrieff and Dr. Mark Horowitz. So, since it’s clear that people are not “short” on certain brain chemicals as a reason for depression, then why are those chemicals being prescribed as “treatment?” And, make no mistake, lots and lots of Americans are being drugged.

According to data gathered in 2020 by IQVIA (Formerly IMS Health) and made public by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) in January of 2021, nearly 77 million Americans are taking at least one prescription psychiatric drug. The breakdown of who is drugged is jaw dropping crazy. There were more than 85 thousand 0–1-year-olds, nearly 140,000 2–3-year-olds, 215,000 4- to five-year-olds, two-and-a-half million 6–12-year-olds and more than three million 13–17-year-olds taking psychiatric mind-altering drugs every day.

Just for argument sake, let’s get out of our comfort zone and consider the drugging of 0 to 1-year-olds. Just how exactly does that happen? Given that psychiatric diagnosing is completely dependent on answers to questions, how does a three or six-month-old, for example, tell the physician they are depressed? It’s a head scratcher for sure and some would argue criminal, but as of 2020 nearly 8 thousand 0–1-year-olds were on antidepressants. Wouldn’t you have loved to have been a fly on the wall during that diagnosing session?!

Of course, it’s no different when it comes to two to three years olds. As of 2020, a little more than twelve thousand of these toddlers were diagnosed with depression and drugged with antidepressants. It’s mind-numbing to even think about how doctors believe it is helpful for “healthy development” to drug babies and toddlers. How did the doctors know which antidepressant – which chemical – to prescribe and how did the doctors deduce the drugged children were “better?” Didn’t throw their Legos anymore? Stopped crying? It’s ridiculous.

And the lunacy is greatly enhanced when one considers the fraud that first must occur before the prescribing of mind-altering drugs can take place. That’s right. Fraud. Psychiatric diagnosing is not based on science. There is no abnormality in the brain for any psychiatric diagnosis. There is no measurable test that can reveal any psychiatric disorder. No blood test, no scans, nothing. All psychiatric diagnosing is based on lists of behaviors. Are people depressed. Yep. Is it a measurable abnormality in the brain? Nope.

But the mental health industry “joint statement” continues by explaining that “efforts to discourage, stigmatize or curtail the use of evidence-based treatments for mental illness will have serious deleterious consequences.” Notice how the mental health Gurus don’t say “science-based?” It’s “evidence-based,” which means lists of unacceptable behaviors. And as far as “serious deleterious consequences” one really must understand the possible serious adverse side effects of the psychiatric drugs to really understand the possible consequences.

For example, everyone should know that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires a Black Box warning for suicidality on all antidepressants. Reassuring huh? Give kids a drug that could make them commit suicide and then blame the suicide on the non-scientific mental disorder? That’s what you call a mental health ace in the hole. Couldn’t possibly be the drug! Of course there are other horrific possible side effects that can wreak havoc short of suicide, including the following examples:

Zoloft: emotional lability, aggravated depression, aggressive reaction, aggression, agitation, anxiety, depersonalization, depression, nightmares, mania, hallucination, psychosis, paranoia.

Prozac: insomnia, anxiety, abnormal dreams, agitation, hostility, hypomania, mania, personality disorder, abnormal thinking, depersonalization, paranoid reaction, psychosis, delusions, and hallucinations.

Trazadone: Confusion, mania/hypomania, aggressive reaction, agitation (sometimes exacerbating to delirium), anxiety, cognitive impairment, confusional state, delusions, discontinuation syndrome, hallucinations, hypomania, insomnia, mania, nightmares, restlessness, abnormal dreams, paranoid reaction, psychosis.

The above are possible adverse events associated with the drugs the psychiatric industry believes establishes “healthy development” in kids. Really? If one considers that the number of kids being diagnosed with a mental disorder is up every year, the number of kids being drugged is up every year and the number of suicides and suicide attempts is up every year, then where does “healthy” come in?

And it is ironic that the psychiatric industry is supporting the continued use of psychiatric drugs on kids in light of the recent release of the investigation into the Covenant School shooter, Audrey Hale. Hale had been a psychiatric patient since she was seven years old due to kindergarten anxiety and had been plied with numerous cocktails of mind-altering drugs. Twenty years of drugging and Hale never got better. That “healthy” thing never materialized for Hale.

Or how about we speak about the Massachusetts mother, Lindsay Clancy, who in 2023 was prescribed thirteen mind-altering drugs over a two-month period and killed her kids and tried to commit suicide. Clancy’s purveyors of “healthy” – the psychiatrists – oddly have not been charged in the case. And most recently there is the case of Wyoming mother Tranyelle Harshman who killed her kids and herself after years of mental health “treatment,” including cocktails of mind-altering drugs.

What is really astounding is that when these horrific murder/suicide incidents occur, the psychiatric industry is silent and appears to be protected from liability. The industry screams for the use of the drugs but obtaining the information about what drugs had been prescribed is nearly impossible unless it is offered up by family members or released as part of a court record. Why? If these “treatments” are so “healthy” let the public know what drugs were prescribed at the time of the murderous incidents. Clancy’s prescribed drugs have only been made public because her attorney is using them in her defense. Harshman’s complete drug record has not been released nor has Audrey Hale’s complete, year-by-year, drug regimen been made public. It’s time the psychiatric industry takes some responsibility for the deadly outcomes of their experimental elixirs.

The psychiatric industry can’t have it both ways. It can’t crow about the wonders of the mind-altering drugs, alleging that they are necessary for “healthy development” and then refuse to share the information about the prescribed drugs when a murder/suicide occurs. In fact, why isn’t the psychiatric industry demanding this data for its own research purposes?

If Secretary Kennedy is serious about getting to the bottom of the mental health “crisis” in America, he’ll find a way for psychiatric drug information to be made public in every crime. The psycho pharma industry has, for too long, been allowed to experiment with deadly mind-altering drugs without consideration and intervention. Just saying the drugs “work” is no longer acceptable. Kennedy is demanding to see the science that sells the vaccines and should demand no less with the “science” that determines one in four Americans are mentally ill and drugged daily just to function.

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The post Mental Health “Experts” FEAR Secretary Kennedy’s Investigation into Psychiatric Drugging appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

New York AG Letitia James and her Martinsville, VA home raise more questions.

By Joel Gilbert—the investigative journalist who exposed the Letitia James Files.

New York Attorney General Letitia James’s mortgage fraud problems just got even bigger, and may now include the possible breaking of campaign disclosure laws.

Questions are now being raised about a foreclosure sale in December 2008 that involved James as a purchaser. Documents show her name appearing on the “Final Foreclosure Accounting” for the purchase of a single-family home at 21 Peters Street in Martinsville, Virginia.

Two other names appear on the same document as additional purchasers, Johnsie Finney and Philip Finney. Interestingly, James’s first named is misspelled as “Letitua.” One has to wonder whether this misspelling was intended to make the transaction harder to track. At the time, James was serving on the New York City Council.

Letitia James purchased the 21 Peters Street property with the Finneys at a foreclosure auction sale where full payment was required immediately. The Finneys had been the previous owners of 21 Peters Street, and it was their mortgage that had been foreclosed on by Wells Fargo Bank.

The Finneys, having lost their home, likely recruited Letitia James to buy it back from the bank. Letitia James’s mother was from Martinsville. The Finneys may have been friends, former neighbors, or even relatives.

Curiously, however, Letitia James’s name does not appear on the new deed – the “Substitute Trustee’s Deed” – created just three weeks after the foreclosure in January 2009. Only the Finneys are listed as the new owners. Why not “Letitua James”?

This sleight of hand would seem to violate a Virginia law that requires all foreclosure purchasers to appear on a new deed unless a legal transaction has taken place between them. Letitia James’s name does not appear on any recorded title either.

In the substitute trustee’s deed Tish James goes missing. What’s going on?

There is no record of Letitia James selling her interest in the property to her co-purchasers, the Finneys. This irregularity also raises serious ethical and legal concerns regarding asset disclosure, campaign finance transparency, and possible fraud.

Under Virginia Code §55.1-321 and §55.1-322, a foreclosed property is conveyed by a substitute trustee to the grantee (purchaser) named on the Substitute Trustee’s Deed. While there is no statutory requirement that a purchaser must appear in the deed immediately, the title must lawfully vest for purchasers to assert ownership.

Here is the Foreclosure Final Accounting final document.

As a candidate and public official, James was also subject to NYC Campaign Finance Board Rules (e.g., CFB Rule 1-04 and 3-03) and New York State Public Officers Law Article 4 (a financial disclosures law). Failure to disclose a material asset or a beneficial interest in a property may constitute a violation of campaign finance reporting obligations and a false filing under sworn ethics declarations.

If James directed the purchase of the 21 Peter Street property, paid for it and then intentionally omitted her ownership from all her campaign filings, she may be vulnerable to investigation under Federal mail/wire fraud statutes (18 U.S.C. § 1341, § 1343), Virginia false pretenses and concealment laws (e.g., VA Code § 18.2-178), and Ethics law violations and disciplinary proceedings.

A review of Letitia James’s 2013 and 2017 NYC Campaign Finance Board audits shows no disclosure of the Virginia property, either as an asset, in-kind contribution, or beneficial interest.

Here is a copy of the Substitute Trustee’s Deed.

Letitia James’s failure to disclose her purchase of the 21 Peters Street property in her campaign and ethics filings is potentially actionable. To this day she may have a hidden ownership interest.

Although the home is modest, James’s willingness to flout the law fits a pattern she established in New York State. “No one is above the law,” she reminded us in her Javert-like pursuit of President Trump on alleged loan irregularities, and that “no one” includes Attorney General James.

At the least, Letitia James should be investigated for potential violations of NY Public Officers Law Article 4 to determine whether her omission of her foreclosure property purchase and interest constitutes campaign finance or ethics violations.

Joel Gilbert, is a Los Angeles-based film producer, and president of Highway 61 Entertainment. He is on Twitter: @JoelSGilbert.

The post NEW EVIDENCE AGAINST NY AG: Letitia James’s Fishy Virginia Foreclosure Purchase in Martinsville Warrants Separate Investigation appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Screenshot: Fox News

In one of the most disgraceful media appearances of the year, far-left activist masquerading as a “journalist” Taylor Lorenz got absolutely dismantled by Fox News host Sean Hannity after she glorified accused murderer Luigi Mangione on CNN—and refused, multiple times, to condemn assassination attempts against Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Appearing on CNN over the weekend, Lorenz joyfully discussed Luigi Mangione — a disturbing icon to the radical Left who assassinated a husband and father. Yet, Lorenz gushed about the killer’s ‘appeal,’ even claiming that some women saw him as ‘morally good,’ ‘handsome,’ ‘intelligent,’ and ‘revolutionary.’

“Here’s this man who’s a revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart, he’s a person who seems like he’s this morally good man, which is hard to find,” Lorenz teased in a snippet that was shared on X.

WATCH:

Independent journalist @TaylorLorenz on what media is getting wrong about Luigi Mangione fans.

Tonight on MisinfoNation: Extreme American 8p ET and PT on @CNN https://t.co/gMKMhdRmnr pic.twitter.com/JZJAJSMcnh

— Donie O’Sullivan (@donie) April 13, 2025

On Wednesday, Sean Hannity delivered a brutal takedown of Taylor Lorenz in a fiery segment that exposed the radical left’s moral rot and dangerous flirtation with political violence.

From the very first minute, he confronted Lorenz over her sickening double-speak, demanding to know how any human being with a conscience could express “joy” at a man’s assassination simply because they dislike the U.S. healthcare system.

Lorenz squirmed, deflected, and played semantic games, insisting she wasn’t expressing joy over the killing — just joy that the “brutality of the health care system” was finally being acknowledged.

In a shocking and revealing back-and-forth, Lorenz repeatedly refused to denounce left-wing extremists calling for the assassination of former President Donald Trump and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk. Instead of condemning it, she ranted about “systemic violence” in the healthcare industry — a total dodge that exposed her twisted worldview.

When asked point-blank whether people who cheer on murderers are lacking a soul or conscience, Lorenz responded coldly, “I don’t believe in religious things like souls.”

At one point, Hannity demanded clarity, “Do you condemn the people who tried to assassinate Donald Trump? Or would it be a good thing in your mind? Or would you understand why people want to kill him?”

Lorenz again refused to condemn political violence outright. Instead, she accused Hannity of trying to “rationalize away” her perspective and insisted she’s merely covering “extremism.”

WATCH:

Taylor Lorenz has officially exposed herself—not just as a radical ideologue—but as someone so morally bankrupt, so obsessed with her progressive crusade, that she cannot even say the words “I condemn murder” without qualification.

Sean Hannity showed America exactly what happens when dangerous leftist propaganda meets moral clarity. And no matter how many times Lorenz tried to wriggle out of accountability, the truth was undeniable: glorifying violence, romanticizing killers, and failing to denounce attempted assassinations of political figures isn’t journalism—it’s extremism.

The American people are watching, and they’re disgusted.

The post “Do You Lack a Conscience, a Soul, and a Heart?” — Hannity OBLITERATES Taylor Lorenz for Gushing Over Accused Murderer Luigi Mangione While Refusing to Condemn Political Violence appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Harvard has refused some simple demands President Trump made on behalf of taxpayers. As a result, Trump has withheld billions in federal funding to the far left school.

As the conflict escalated this week, Trump even directed the IRS to look into the process of revoking Harvard’s non-profit status.

Now, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has announced that her department is cutting millions more in grants form the school.

The Hill reports:

Noem announces cancelation of $2.7 million in grants to Harvard

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Wednesday announced the cancelation of more than $2.7 million in grants to Harvard University amid tensions between the school and the Trump administration.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a Wednesday press release that Noem unveiled the discontinuation of two grants from the department to Harvard worth more than $2.7 million. DHS also noted in the press release that the secretary requested “detailed records on Harvard’s foreign student visa holders’ illegal and violent activities” in a letter.

“Harvard bending the knee to antisemitism — driven by its spineless leadership — fuels a cesspool of extremist riots and threatens our national security,” Noem said in the release.

“With anti-American, pro-Hamas ideology poisoning its campus and classrooms, Harvard’s position as a top institution of higher learning is a distant memory. America demands more from universities entrusted with taxpayer dollars,” she added.

One major detail of this story is the fact that if Harvard fails to comply with DHS requirements, they may lose the ability to enroll foreign students. That is huge.

BREAKING: Harvard has been warned that unless it fully complies with all DHS reporting requirements—including disclosing detailed records of misconduct by foreign students—it will lose the ability to enroll any international students. pic.twitter.com/fVCPlnG7zQ

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) April 17, 2025

BREAKING: If Harvard does not fully comply with all reporting requirements to DHS, including providing detailed records of foreign students’ misconduct on campus, Harvard will no longer be able to enroll foreign students. pic.twitter.com/azcn1Q9NhH

— Ben B@dejo (@BenTelAviv) April 17, 2025

Harvard depends on enrolling foreign students, many of whom pay full tuition price. This is hitting them where it hurts most. Right in the wallet.

The post DHS Secretary Kristi Noem Announces Millions More in Grants Cut From Harvard – Threatens School’s Ability to Enroll Foreign Students appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Curt Weldon: Heroes who were being mistreated by Defense Intelligence. The Pentagon’s Inspector General filed

The post Former Rep. Curt Weldon: “The 9/11 Commission is a Cover-Up” appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

It is a difficult time for those of us who wanted a moment where institutionalism and credentialism were torn down in favor of genuine scholarship, erudition, and expertise that exists outside the confines of an ideological academia. The proximate cause: a recent appearance of British writer Douglas Murray on Joe Rogan’s podcast. 

Murray is a raging neoconservative who has been proselytizing since the George W. Bush administration. In our times the word “neocon” is often used unduly to characterize those who prefer a more muscular foreign policy, but that is in itself ahistorical. Neoconservatism has a specific ethos: not just prioritizing high military spending, but using it for spreading a particular set of values in an attempt to institutionalize a more egalitarian society through means of military force. It is an inverse Trotskyism. Neoconservatives don’t believe in conserving anything, although they do pay lip-service to social conservative positions (only to discard them at will when necessary). Their primary instinct is revolutionary: to spread values by force. The term has been used, fairly and unfairly, on many people, but if there’s one man who can justifiably be called one, it is Murray, the author of NeoConservatism: Why We Need It (2005). 

Murray came to debate Rogan and a chap named “Comic Dave Smith” and instantly started questioning why Rogan doesn’t invite experts. Murray’s contention was that, first, there has indeed been a devaluation of expertise, and the expert class hasn’t done any favors for itself in recent years; second, that doesn’t mean all expertise is bad; and, third, the only people who should talk about something are those with direct tangible experience. It obviously doesn’t take a doctorate to understand the vacuity of Murray’s takes, which started with a fallacious appeal to authority and continued from there. (In any normal well-judged debate, he would forfeit his position for that alone.) Murray’s agreement that expertise has been devalued clearly doesn’t touch the foreign policy experts, mostly neoconservatives and neoliberals, who ran Anglo-American political establishments into the ground for over two decades. 

The most deranged contention was that one needs to have visited an area (Gaza in this case) to comment on the generic idea that America shouldn’t be involved in Middle Eastern interethnic wars. In international relations, it is similar to Isaiah Berlin’s fox and hedgehog metaphor. While the fox is a generalist and theorist, with a detached wise view of the whole, the hedgehog burrows deep, and seeks a deeper knowledge of a particular fact. The two are not opposed, but are complementary to each other. The fox relies on primary sources, dug up by the hedgehog, to establish a general theory or grand strategy without which there will be policy paralysis and endless unit-level variables. 

But in reality, a deeper area study actually might bias the hedgehog towards threat inflation, He or she might consider that region of his or her study to be of utmost importance, a contention that upon detached reflection wouldn’t be sustained. Murray, if he was a genuine intellectual, instead of a Received Pronunciation–burbling poser, would have realized that his state-sponsored tour of the region actually biases him more towards a certain set of predisposed conclusions. Dave Smith, or Joe Rogan on the other hand, don’t need to visit Gaza or Israel, to comment that that region is not strategically important to the U.S. and that Americans shouldn’t send tax dollars to defend either side. 

Or perhaps Murray doesn’t care. Given that he is a neoconservative, he is predisposed to take a side in this conflict anyway, and his appeal to area expertise is similar to his appeal to authority, a quick attempt to discredit the other side of a debate, instead of responding. After all, Murray will be equally quick to dismiss those who are present in Gaza and take a position opposed to him. For Murray, just as for his more erudite and intellectually coherent forebear Christopher Hitchens, spreading secular liberal egalitarian values across the galaxy by force is the main aim. The nominal “America First” coat of lacquer on the decaying neoconservative furniture of the Bush era is just that—a change in style, not substance. 

As I have written before, historical revisionism is important, provided it is actually intelligently done. For what it’s worth, there’s one core sentence by Murray which was powerful and correct: “If you throw a lot of shit out there, there’s some point at which ‘I’m just raising questions’ is not a valid thing, you’re not raising questions, you’re not asking questions, you’re telling people something.” He is right, even if the expression is crude; the ironic “just asking questions” line of interrogation is a motte-and-bailey cop-out for those who are incapable of intellectual rigor and too cowardly to take a provocative position without sounding like a complete crank.

The new right is not lacking intellectual heft. In fact one of the core contention of the last decade was that the total ideological dominance in academia with left-wing gatekeeping kept genuine right wing intellect ostracized within the academy. This magazine is not in the business of endorsing individuals. But off the top of my head, there are many among our stable of illustrious writers and editors—from Pat Buchanan, to Dan McCarthy, to Michael Brendan Dougherty, to Curt Mills—who would be willing and far more able to debate neoconservatism with Murray. Sean McMeekin, an occasional contributor to these pages, is one of the finest revisionist historians of his age. Your humble correspondent has made a career writing about burden sharing with Europe and within NATO. 

It will indeed be a tragedy if this moment tarnishes the hard-earned gains of the last decade of battles in the public square. On one hand, the suffocating credentialism and conformism of academia and elite society is unbearable and the revolutionary moment that we are living in brings opportunities, as in post-Reformation Europe. On the other hand, as with any revolutionary moment, there is an inherent disdain for any authority or expertise, and barring intelligent stewardship, the risk is that the movement is dominated by intellectual shock-jocks—shallow but provocative. In the greater scheme of things, this correspondent worries, perhaps unfairly but not without cause, that the right will be permanently damaged by association for at least a generation if we cannot find a way to platform those who can reliably and rigorously defend against the return of an even more muscular form of neoconservatism. 

The post Douglas Murray’s Discredited Credentialism appeared first on The American Conservative.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud is in town, reportedly to plan President Donald Trump’s upcoming visit to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. After hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the president is again exhibiting his affection for ruthless political leaders who have wreaked human carnage and destabilized the Middle East, with ill effects the world over. In doing so, he is sacrificing American national interests.

In fairness, the bizarre American love affair with one of the world’s most brutal regimes is longstanding. President George W. Bush allowed influential Saudis to flee America by the planeload after 9/11, avoiding any embarrassing questions about ties with Islamist terrorists. Bush showed his loyalties with his ostentatious royal handholding, while President Barack Obama earned contempt for his little bow to the king when visiting the KSA. Far worse was the latter’s decision to turn Americans into accomplices to aggression and war crimes, backing Riyadh’s invasion of Yemen. Apparently, Obama was desperate to demonstrate that negotiating the nuclear accord with Iran meant no loss of love for the Saudis, irrespective of the cost to Yemen.

President Joe Biden famously promised to turn the brutal crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, into a “pariah,” but quickly reverted to the usual Washington role of sycophant and supplicant. His infamous fist bump was a prelude to begging MbS to increase oil production, a request the latter contemptuously rejected. Biden ended his term offering to turn the U.S. military into a modern janissary corps, a foreign bodyguard for the Saudi royal family. This for a regime known as one of the world’s worst human rights abusers and military aggressors. The primary beneficiary of extending the so-called Abraham Accords to Riyadh would be Israel, with the U.S. paying another Arab regime to formalize its hitherto unofficial relationship with Israel and abandon Palestinians to the Netanyahu coalition’s abuse.

Trump’s first-term dalliance with MbS was even worse than those of his predecessors and successor. He made the Kingdom his first foreign destination as president. The Saudis bedazzled him with the famous “Sword Dance,” and partnered with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as future profitable deals, like sugar plums, danced in Kushner’s head. Trump intensified U.S. support for the Yemeni war and ostentatiously protected the crown prince from any consequences for murdering and dismembering Jamal Khashoggi, a regime critic and journalist living in America.

The president, in his second term, is picking up where he left off, escalating the illegal war against Yemen, which did so much to resist Riyadh and is now retaliating against Israel for its continuing depredations in Gaza, and threatening to start another illegal war, against Iran, long the bête noire of both the KSA and Israel. The Saudi royals’ status as Uncle Sam’s friends, clients, and dependents is a national embarrassment. Yet for the second time the president is extending to the Kingdom and its ruler the presumed honor of first hosting him overseas.

The Saudi royals are not merely bad on human rights—they help set the global floor. Freedom House ranks Saudi Arabia as bad as China, and worse than Cuba, Iran, Russia, and Vietnam. Explained the group: “Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy restricts almost all political rights and civil liberties. No officials at the national level are elected. The regime relies on pervasive surveillance, the criminalization of dissent, appeals to sectarianism and ethnicity, and public spending supported by oil revenues to maintain power. Women and members of religious minority groups face extensive discrimination in law and in practice. Working conditions for the large expatriate labor force are often exploitative.”

Amnesty International offers a similarly devastating assessment: “The authorities targeted individuals for peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression or association, and some were sentenced to lengthy prison terms or death following grossly unfair trials. Human rights defenders continued to be arbitrarily detained or subject to travel bans following their conditional release from prison. Courts handed down death sentences following grossly unfair trials, including in cases of individuals who were children at the time of their alleged crimes, and people were executed for a wide range of crimes.” Another AI report listed 10 specific ways the regime abuses its people: increasing use of the death penalty, discriminating against women, torturing prisoners and fixing trials, mistreating migrant workers, punishing independent journalists as criminals, prohibiting free expression, association, and assembly, imprisoning and executing gays, banning travel, seizing property without compensation, and forbidding protests.

Nevertheless, the Kingdom was able to curry favor with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, publicly backing his promotion of unalienable rights at the UN. Evidently, Washington just wants the KSA to endorse human rights, not defend them, even for U.S. residents. American connections offer no protection from the anger of the killer prince, who dispatched a death squad to the KSA’s Istanbul consulate to eliminate Khashoggi. Dual citizens have been sentenced to years, sometimes decades, in prison for criticizing the Saudi regime while in America.

Although MbS’s crimes are many, he is buying influence and good PR with the Kingdom’s abundant resources. Explained Human Rights Watch: “Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has consolidated political and economic power, including as chairman of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), a sovereign wealth fund that has facilitated and benefited from rights abuses. PIF investments in high-profile sports and entertainment events domestically and internationally are used to whitewash the country’s abysmal human rights record. Migrant workers, including on PIF-funded projects, face widespread abuses under the kafala (sponsorship) system.”

In this campaign, outside support has been essential. Explained AI: “PR experts were hired to peddle an illusion of progress and reform and counter negative media coverage of the country. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund … built a multibillion-dollar foothold in the entertainment, sports, and tech industries. Businesses, sports and entertainment figures rushed to take advantage of Saudi Arabia’s financial bounty. Forgetting their earlier human rights condemnations, world leaders rolled out the red carpet for the Crown Prince.”

Unfortunately, American politicians and businessmen, and even Christian activists, have joined in. Among the Kingdom’s worst crimes is its repression of religious liberty. Not one church, synagogue, or temple operates in Saudi Arabia. Public demonstration of any other faith is forbidden. Concluded the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom: “the government continues to implement particularly severe restrictions on [freedom of religion or belief] and imposes harsh penalties upon individuals who deviate from the state’s singular interpretation of Sunni Islam. Religious minorities and women are often the primary targets of these FoRB violations.” Yet MbS has cleverly used the strange affinity of some evangelical Christians for today’s modern secular Israeli state to moderate the royal family’s image. More than once he has met with evangelical leaders, hinting at future religious liberalization that has never occurred.

Of course, murderous aggressors are common among the world’s governments. As a result, foreign policy must be practical and prudential. Although human rights should limit and shape international practices, it is impossible to manage a foreign policy independent of national interests. Hence there is good reason to continue economic and energy relations with the Kingdom. However, most of those would occur naturally without Washington’s collective kowtow to the Saudi royals.

Moreover, Riyadh long has acted against important American interests. Unsurprisingly, the KSA’s foreign policy has always been centered on the interests of the royal family, not Saudi Arabia. The exploitative, corrupt, and avaricious regime—in the name of “fighting corruption,” MbS famously shook down rich Saudis by imprisoning and torturing them while negotiating their ransom—ensures a system without popular legitimacy and support. Hence the desire for American military protection to defend what the Saudi people will not, thousands of princes on ostentatious welfare funded by sale of the Saudi people’s resources. Western fears about the stability of the Saudi regime reflect its weaknesses, not the strength of Iran or anyone else.

Moreover, the Kingdom long had a lax attitude toward terrorism, at least toward private contributions to groups such as Al Qaeda. Successive administrations classified multiple reports and assessments about potential Saudi culpability, protecting Riyadh from scrutiny. Questions continue to be raised about the Saudi connection to Al Qaeda and 9/11. Only after the group foolishly targeted the royal family in 2003 did the regime take the issue more seriously, including by expanding intelligence cooperation with the US.

The KSA, especially after MbS effectively came to power, has behaved aggressively, even recklessly, toward its neighbors. In 2011 Riyadh intervened in Bahrain, sending in the military to sustain the oppressive, minority Sunni monarchy against Shia democracy activists. In the same year the Saudis first intervened in Syria’s lengthy civil war, assisting jihadist insurgents. In 2013 Riyadh underwrote the coup in Egypt, returning the country to military rule, only more intense than before. In 2015 the Kingdom began a multi-year campaign to restore a puppet regime to power in Yemen, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Yemeni civilians.

In 2017 Riyadh orchestrated the diplomatic and economic isolation of Qatar, another Mideast U.S. ally and host of a major airbase. MbS even planned to invade the emirate and impose regime change. He reluctantly backed off following opposition from Trump’s officials, if not Trump himself, and Ankara, which deployed troops and established a military base in Qatar. Then came one of the more bizarre episodes of Saudi “diplomacy”—kidnapping the Lebanese prime minister and forcing him to announce his resignation—which he revoked after escaping Saudi custody. MbS later joked about the episode.

Finally, like Netanyahu, MbS and other Saudi rulers promoted a U.S. war with Iran. However, Trump’s welcome refusal to retaliate against Tehran for the 2019 attack on Saudi oil facilities apparently convinced Riyadh that it should improve relations with Tehran. Since then Saudi Arabia has urged the U.S. and Israel not to ignite the Mideast.

This is not the record of a kindred government and reliable ally. The KSA has never fought Israel and need not be paid to keep the peace. Indeed, the two governments have long had informal security ties. If the royals can’t defend themselves after filling their armory with pricey U.S. weapons, the fault is theirs, not America’s. Greater Chinese economic involvement in the Mideast is inevitable and no threat to the U.S. Russia lacks the means to meddle much in the region and wouldn’t much hurt America if it did.

If Washington wants to avoid the revival of terrorism, it should minimize official political and especially military ties with Riyadh. Antagonism toward American troops on holy Islamic soil led to the 1995 bombing of the Khobar Towers compound and encouraged Osama bin Laden’s attacks elsewhere.

Washington need not treat Riyadh as an enemy. They share important interests despite MbS’s tyranny, and maintaining a civil relationship with unlikable regimes is one of the enduring challenges of diplomacy. However, the president should drop any pretense of treating the KSA as a geopolitical soulmate, and bestowing special honors, including the first foreign visit, on the crown prince. It is one thing to reluctantly cooperate with malevolent regimes. It is another matter to enthusiastically do so. The president should choose another destination for his first foreign trip.

The post Trump’s Unholy Alliance with Saudi Arabia appeared first on The American Conservative.

The freshman Republican Rep. Gabe Evans of Colorado was sworn in only on January 3, but Democrats are already targeting him ahead of 2026. Those Democrats include Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who bashed Evans while holding a rally in his district in March. Ocasio-Cortez told rallygoers they “deserve better” than Evans, whom she accused of plotting to “cut Medicaid.”

It’s no secret why the knives are out for Evans. He is the only congressional Republican who flipped a seat in a blue state in 2024, defeating incumbent Yadira Caraveo by less than a point. His primary fight was tough, too. Evans had the endorsement of President Donald Trump but not that of his own state party. Now that he’s arrived in Washington, Evans tells The American Conservative that he plans to use his background as a law enforcement officer and his coveted spot on the Energy & Commerce Committee (rare for a rookie representative) to find bipartisan solutions.

Can you describe your district? Why was it ripe to be flipped?

It’s Colorado’s 8th Congressional District. It’s the northeast suburbs of the Denver metro area, and then up toward Greeley along the Front Range… This district was drawn to be the Hispanic district in Colorado after the 2020 census. It’s 40 percent Hispanic, the highest of any of the eight congressional districts in Colorado. This is the district that builds, feeds, and fuels the rest of Colorado. Weld County in the north [is the] fourth-highest energy producing county in the nation. We produce 82 percent of the oil, 56 percent of the natural gas. We have one of the largest, if not the largest, wind generator manufacturing plants in the world in the district…. We have the only oil refinery in Colorado. 

[Constituents are] concerned about good jobs. They’re concerned about cost of living. They’re concerned about public safety. Unfortunately, the last seven years of Democrat control at the state level and four years of the previous administration at the federal level have just been disastrous… Colorado is number one in the nation—three of the last five years running—for auto theft. We’re number two for teenagers overdosing and dying on fentanyl. We’re number three in the nation for our crime rate. Crime is estimated to cost the economy of Colorado $27 billion a year in lost economic productivity. All of these different issues came to a head in the recent election. I didn’t have to convince [voters] there was a problem. They knew there was a problem. I just had to convince them as a cop, a soldier, a Hispanic kid—my abuelo, my grandfather, he was born in Mexico, and he came to the U.S., got his citizenship in Patton’s army in World War II. My mom is a first-generation American. So being able to share that story, share the experiences that I had, the 22 years of military and law enforcement, as a father, as a husband, those were all of the things I think that resonated with people to be able to show them, “Look, I know how to fix this stuff.”

Ocasio-Cortez parachuted into your district and targeted you recently. What was your reaction to Democrats’ talking points ahead of 2026?

My seat was the only seat in the country where we unseated a Democrat incumbent in a blue state. That makes this the national bellwether seat. It is the bellwether seat in the state of Colorado. You fold in the Hispanic population, and all of the big trends we’ve seen around the country with hard-working Americans, union members, the Hispanic population shifting to the right—all of those things came to a head in this district.

It attracted a ton of attention. As we’ve seen, the Democratic Party both nationally and in the state of Colorado are struggling to find their brand in the wake of a pretty resounding defeat in November of 2024. With AOC and Bernie Sanders, some of the most extreme far-left voices, coming to my district, it really highlights just how out of touch they are. AOC is the inventor of the so-called Green New Deal, which is going to cost all of these people their jobs. I watched it happen in my church. The church that I go to has got a bunch of oil and gas workers, and when the Biden administration took over, the church membership went from about 150 to 50. Because all of these people were being driven out of Colorado, losing their jobs working in oil and gas and all of the associated industries. They were going to places like west Texas and the Permian Basin.

I’m focused on jobs, cost of living, making America energy dominant again, making sure we can produce the cleanest, safest, most socially responsible energy anywhere on the planet here in Colorado. [AOC] is coming to town for purely political purposes. AOC and I actually both serve on the [energy subcommittee]. If she was interested in having a conversation, she could have walked across the room and talked to me rather than, as she might say, increasing her carbon footprint by flying all the way out to Colorado to grandstand.

A lot of AOC’s attacks came on the Medicaid cuts front. What kind of messaging from Republicans will strike the right balance for members like you who face tight races in 2026?

The Democrats have screamed “Gabe is cutting Medicaid.” They actually put up a billboard in the district saying that, and then they had to take the billboard down when they were sent a legal letter pointing out how this is a blatantly false statement. The fact that they complied and they took the billboard down means that they know that that statement doesn’t pass legal scrutiny… The bogeyman they’re trying to generate here is nothing but political noise because they lost an election and they have no message.

The American people are smarter than that. They intuitively know that there is a ton of fraud, waste, and abuse, not just in the federal government, but also in the Medicaid space. The Denver Post just published a story talking about how Colorado has paid $7 million [for] dead people in the healthcare space. We know that the cost of healthcare to illegal immigrants in Colorado, depending on which numbers you look at, it’s forecast to be anywhere between $31 and $51 million in 2025. The state doesn’t have the money on hand to cover that tab, so they’re actually looking to raise fees on private insurers in the state of Colorado.

I have a medically complex kid. My second son, I couldn’t even tell you how many thousands of pages of medical records that he’s had. Five surgeries before the age of five, we’re on two different hormone therapies, one different steroid therapy, he’s in a cast right now—we’ve had a lot of medical issues. It’s critically important to me that working families like mine have the ability to rely on these programs and these programs remain financially viable for generations to come… The [Government Accountability Office] estimates that there’s $31 billion annually just in the Medicaid space in improper payments. For Medicaid, Medicare, that whole space, Republicans are trying to protect the financial viability of those programs. 

Democrats are seizing on a specific CBO report for their Medicaid cut claims – do you take issue with that report and the inferences drawn from it?

CBO has missed by over a trillion dollars in some of their recent financial assessments. When we had the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, CBO said that that was going to cost the federal government money because of the loss of revenue from lowering taxes. What they didn’t take into account is when you lower taxes the economy grows… When you have a bigger economy, the government actually gets more revenue, even with lower taxes… The important part to note is that right now we’re in the reconciliation resolution. That’s the topline numbers. In household budget terms, that’s saying, “Hey, we’re going to spend $600 on food this month and $400 on gas and this much on housing.” And then you’ve got to go back and figure out, “Okay, now that I’ve set my topline budget numbers, am I going to buy peanut butter or Nutella?” 

There are a lot of options to cut out the fraud, waste, and abuse by doing things like closing the 90-day lookback window in Medicaid. An individual doesn’t even have to prove citizenship for 90 days after being put on Medicaid. What’s happening in states like Colorado is somebody gets signed up for Medicaid, they run up a bill for 89 days, and on day 90 they’re kicked back off of Medicaid because the state—it’s very important to remember the federal government writes a big part of the check, but the state administers the program—so the state is taking blatant advantage of the situation to be able to funnel across the country billions of dollars to people without even verifying their citizenship.

You’ve previously spoken about how bad policy was making your job as a law enforcement officer really hard. How does that continue to affect the policies you pursue and the bills you support?

The state of Colorado under the trifecta Democrat control the last seven years has really attacked law enforcement officers, added tremendous amounts of new red tape and liability to cops, and at times outright defunded them. The city of Denver cut their police budget by $8 million in order to pay for illegal immigrants because of their sanctuary city status. Being able to draw attention to those policies to try to help our state and local law enforcement officers is something that’s very important to me from my new perch as a congressman.

In the last couple of years in Colorado, over 7,000 Coloradans have lost their lives as a result of illegal drug overdoses—things like fentanyl. That’s double the September 11 attacks death toll. Being able to equip law enforcement officers to go out and get the drug dealers, get the cartel members, get the bad guys off the street is something I’m working on in Congress. Colorado is a sanctuary state. That means state and local law enforcement officers are often prohibited outright from working with their federal counterparts to get these violent criminals out of our community. A piece of legislation I’ve introduced is the UPLIFT Act: Unhandcuffing Police to Locate and Interdict Foreign Transgressors Act. It does a couple of things. One of the most important is it extends hold harmless protections to state and local law enforcement officers if, in contradiction to state law, they choose to share information with their federal counterparts. Doing things like that reduces the liability on law enforcement officers. It shows them that they’re appreciated. It gives them the tools they need to be able to actually go out and do their job. As a cop, when you’re actually able to go and successfully get a bad guy out of the community, there’s a huge sense of satisfaction in that, and that’s a huge part of what keeps cops coming back and being able to do the job.

A lot of our readers and contributors are history buffs, so I have to ask, do you have a historical figure who stands out in your mind as a role model or favorite historical figure?

Let’s go with Jan III Sobieski. He was the king of Poland who led the Holy League in the relief of Vienna during the 1683 siege that pretty much stopped the Ottoman advance into eastern Europe. Major tipping point in relationships between the East and West at that point. Also critically important to modern day because the relief of Vienna happened on September 10 and 11, so it’s a date that sticks in the consciousness of both the West and then also the Islamic world. It’s also the cavalry charge of the Winged Hussars coming down to relieve Vienna [on which] J.R.R. Tolkien based the ride of the Rohirrim when they relieved Minas Tirith in Return of the King. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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