The right-left divide is getting even more petty with the “makeup wars,” which of course are partisan.

Democrats say that “Republican makeup” is too heavy on foundation and thick eyebrows. Republicans say that “Democrat makeup” is clownish and sloppy with bright dyed hair, piercings and neon lipstick.

The two sides are indicating that their opponents not only have bad politics but also bad taste. It’s another way to make fun of people you disagree with.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Comedian Suzanne Lambert popularized “Republican makeup.” [She] said her posts were meant to be cutting and provocative. Accuracy is not necessarily the goal.

“They’ve called us blue-haired liberals for years, right?” said Lambert, a former Republican who has light brown-blonde hair, in an interview. “They’ll make fun of our tattoos and our piercings, and we’ve never really clapped back.”

It’s not clapping back. It is childish and it is each group selling themselves a false notion of their own superiority.

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What is half of 4,133? That is how many employees will be eliminated at the Department of Education.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said that this will help eliminate “bureaucratic bloat.”

“The Department of Education will continue to deliver on all statutory programs that fall under the agency’s purview, including formula funding, student loans, Pell Grants, funding for special needs students, and competitive grantmaking,” the agency said.

Before you get poetic about education, recall that the DOE does not have the federal authority to instate education standards and has never resulted in high standards in the first place. President Trump wants education run by the states, which is what the Constitution calls for too. See our piece on the Department of Education and its inception.

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The White House says that the Columbia University student that ICE detained and is attempting to deport was circulating “pro-Hamas propaganda flyers” and that those flyers even have a Hamas logo.

Is this enough to deny the right to free speech, even to a legal immigrant that is not a U.S. citizen? What would the constitution say? Remember that the ACLU in 1977 defended the rights of Nazis to march in a town of Holocaust survivors because the fierce defense of free speech is the fabric of American society. This case calcified who we are: a people committed to the idea that free speech must include speech that you don’t like.

Free speech advocacy group FIRE says that this is not enough. “The Press Secretary used the word ‘propaganda.’ What is another word for propaganda? Speech. And that’s the problem here is that we are talking about expression.”

Is there also unlawful conduct that the government count prosecute? The public should be made aware of this because the case is not black and white. It also highlights the Western problem of having immigrants who hate the culture they have moved into. This one is tricky and uncomfortable too.

Thousands of protestors in New York City have taken to the street to protest Khalil’s deportation, leading to clashes with police.

The post Frequent Flyers appeared first on Redacted.

The U.S. State Department says that Ukraine has agreed to “an immediate, interim 30-day ceasefire, which can be extended by mutual agreement of the parties, and which is subject to acceptance and concurrent implementation by the Russian Federation.”

Don’t get too excited about the word “ceasefire” though. The ceasefire’s conditions are bombs. If Ukraine agrees to the ceasefire, the U.S. “will immediately lift the pause on intelligence sharing and resume security assistance to Ukraine.”

Security assistance means money and weapons.

Additionally, the deal involves “a comprehensive agreement for developing Ukraine’s critical mineral resources to expand Ukraine’s economy and guarantee Ukraine’s long-term prosperity and security.”

So will Russia go for it? Well, it would mean Ukraine still has Western weapons on Russia’s borders, which Russia rejects but it would put Ukrainian President Zelensky back under the thumb of the U.S., putting him out of reach of the Europeans.

White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said this about it:

“He [Trump] is a negotiator-in-chief, and he put Zelensky in his place and told him that the Americans are serious about a long-term peace deal.”

The post Ceasefire Deal in Ukraine appeared first on Redacted.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard says that she has revoked the security clearance of 51 former senior intelligence officials who signed a letter declaring that the Hunter Biden laptop was a “Russian information operation” along with many powerful people. They include:

• Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken
• Former U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan
• Former deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco
• Lawyer Mark Zaid who represented the whistleblower who leaked President Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Zelensky, which led to his impeachment;
• Lawyer Norman Eisen who represented the House Judiciary Committee during the above referenced impeachment trial;
• New York Attorney General Letitia James, who continues to prosecute President Trump over his organization for alleged fraud
• New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg who brought the Stormy Danie’s hush money case to trial
• Lawyer Andrew Weissma who was one of the lead investigators of the Mueller investigation.

Director Gabbard also directed that the “President’s Daily Brief is no longer being provided to former President Biden.”

Many of these people have done odious things, to be sure, but many odious people still have security clearance.

In Edward Snowden’s book, Permanent Record, he writes about the “security clearance economy” that drives Washington D.C. He says that “having a security clearance is practically a prerequisite for getting a job—any job, not just in intelligence or defense.” He describes it as a “golden ticket” to work in Washington, not just in government and intel work. Everyone from security guards to IT support need this.

Is this just punishment for lying to the American people or is it political retaliation? Many of them are lawyers so they may in fact sue.

The post May I Have Your Badge Please? appeared first on Redacted.

President Trump may be losing patience with the budget resolution. On Monday, he threatened to primary Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie for opposing the GOP budget.

Representative Massie and Senator Rand Paul both say that they will vote against the GOP budget because it does not cut spending. Their point is: Why cut all of this government waste, only to bring on more?

Representative Massie said this about it: “The argument for [continuing resolution] in September 2024 was to fight in December 2024 after the election. The argument for CR in December 2024 was to fight in March 2025 after the inauguration. The argument for CR in March 2025 is to fight in September 2025 because… we’re not ready yet ?!?!”

Representative Massie is not a Republican loyalist who President Trump can pick on without consequences. He is Peanut the Squirrel to the independents who brought the Republicans the White House and the majority. It is not a fight the Trump administration should even consider.

If the House budget does not pass, the government faces a shut down by Friday.

The post Infighting Over The Budget appeared first on Redacted.

What evidence is there that Mahmoud Khalil has committed crimes? He is the Palestinian man who was arrested by ICE and targeted by the State Department to have his green card revoked.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says that he was “presented with evidence” that was used to determine that he was a “national security threat” but the public hasn’t. This leaves us worried that he is being labeled as a “Hamas supporter” for criticizing Israel, both of which are protected beliefs in a free society. Secretary Rubio says that he was “actively engaging in supporting Hamas.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said that “Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas.” Notice no one is saying he had ties to Hamas. He may have only had overlapping beliefs, which is why the public should demand answers. If he committed crimes, he should be prosecuted for those crimes. If not, we do not have thought crime in the United States.

Free speech organization FIRE sent a letter to many government organizations demanding answers. They say this: “To be clear, demonstrations on Columbia’s campus since Oct. 7, 2023, have included both constitutionally protected speech and unlawful conduct. But the government has not clarified the factual or legal basis for Mr. Khalil’s arrest.”

A judge has temporarily blocked his deportation after he filed a petition with the court alleging that he was illegally detained.

It is shocking to many people that green card holders have Constitutional rights but they do!

The post Show Me The Evidence appeared first on Redacted.

Elon Musk says that X and Tesla were both targeted with a major cyberattack on Monday, causing massive outages.

Musk said this to Fox Business: “Well… we’re not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the ecosystem with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”

Could people in Ukraine act alone with such powerful resources? That is hard to believe. It is easier to believe that the same CIA resources that brought Ukraine its 2014 coup may be working against Elon Musk’s efforts to undo the regime change that the CIA so masterfully enacted. That is conjecture on our part, to be clear.

Meanwhile, US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, said that Ukrainian President Zelensky has apologized to President Trump in a letter, indicating that diplomacy to secure a peace deal with Russia may resume.

The post X Targeted By Ukraine? appeared first on Redacted.

Over the weekend, a Palestinian man on a student visa had his green card revoked after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) arrested him at his home. Mahmoud Khalil was one of the lead organizers of the sit-in at Columbia University. His wife is an American citizen and she was threatened by ICE too, according to reports.

What did he do? Did he incite violence or simply support the same cause as Hamas, which is a two-state solution? So far, Redacted has not seen proof that he incited violence or broke laws. If he has, he should be prosecuted on those grounds, not for support of an idea.

Free speech organization FIRE says this about it: “Anyone facing arrest and detention must be afforded due process. Just as students and other demonstrators are obliged to abide by lawful rules of conduct, our government must abide by the First Amendment. The government must be clear and transparent about the basis for its actions to avoid chilling protected speech.”

This comes on the heels of the Trump administration declaring that it will defund Columbia University and investigate “the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

Axios reports that the State Department is launching “an AI-fueled ‘Catch and Revoke’ effort to cancel the visas of foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups.”

“Support Hamas” is code for “critic of Israel.” So the State Department will scan social media of foreign nationals and punish them if they don’t like what they see, even if it involves protected speech?

Free speech organization FIRE says this about it: “AI tools are emerging technologies, not trusted experts on the limits of protected speech under the First Amendment. They cannot be relied on to parse the nuances of expression about complex and contested matters like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Using AI to scour student visa holders’ social media for “pro-Hamas” speech and report that speech to an administration that threatens to deport international students for protected expression will undoubtedly encourage self-censorship on our nation’s campuses. America’s national strength is our commitment to free expression — let’s keep it that way.”

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President Trump says that he would like to have diplomatic discussions with Iran. He claimed to have sent a letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader.

He said this to Fox Business: “I hope you’re going to negotiate because it’s going to be a lot better for Iran and I think they want to get that letter. The other alternative is we have to do something because you can’t let [Iran] have a nuclear weapon. I’ve written them a letter, saying I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily it’s going to be a terrible thing for them. You can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”

The Ayatollah is reportedly not interested, calling Trump’s offer a “bully” tactic.

How does President Trump know that Iran is making a nuclear weapon? Iran has said MANY times that it is enriching uranium for nuclear power plants and has worked with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to prove that.

Tucker Carlson called out Fox News for its “wall to wall [coverage] with dead-eyed politicians telling you that Iran is a dangerous ‘sponsor of terror.'” He said that this is “softening up the base for a war.” But why is Iran the biggest threat, he asks? “Here’s one measure: over the past twenty years, how many Americans have been killed by Iran on American soil? Try to find that number, and then compare it to the number of Americans killed by drug ODs. Or suicide. Or illegal aliens. Or carjackings, diabetes and the Covid vax. Still think Iran is the greatest threat? How about we focus on our own country for a minute.”

Clearly it is Isreal that leads the U.S. war drum against Iran. No studied person would come to any other conclusion. Carlson is taking the heat on this – as he often does – particularly by Zionist allies, which tells us how these positions are drawn.

The post Negotiations with Iran appeared first on Redacted.

Canada’s new Prime Minister is Mark Carney of the Liberal Party. He won the job in a vote within the party against Chrystia Freeland, former Deputy Prime Minister to Justin Trudeau. He was not elected by the people of Canada in a general election.

The people of Canada are supposed to get a chance to vote for a new Prime Minister this fall if all goes according to plan but again. His most staunch competitor will be the Conservative Party’s Pierre Poilievre. He also faces Maxime Bernier of the People’s Party.

Carney is only the second Prime Minister to jump into the job without first holding a parliamentary seat. He bills himself as a political newcomer with a background with big banks but his opponents say that he is a “disconnected member of the globalist elite.” Well, he has never explained why he was associated with Ghislaine Maxwell.

Carney has a lot of perplexing ideas, such as a commitment to net zero. He also holds British and Irish citizenship but says he is in the process of renouncing them in order to be the Prime Minister.

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The United States and European Union are acting surprised that the Syrian regime has allowed killing people in Syria. Even though the people who run Syria after the overthrow of Bashar Al-Assad are terrorists known to the State Department as such.

The State Department says that the U.S. “condemns the radical Islamist terrorists, including foreign jihadis, that murdered people in western Syria in recent days.  The United States stands with Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities, including its Christian, Druze, Alawite, and Kurdish communities, and offers its condolences to the victims and their families.  Syria’s interim authorities must hold the perpetrators of these massacres against Syria’s minority communities accountable.”

Except Syria’s “interim authorities” are the Al-Nusra faction called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is a branch of Al-Qaeda. So, after warring with Al-Queda for years, the U.S. is now asking them to stop being terrorists and surprised that they are?

The President of Syria says that he will launch an investigation into this matter.

The videos of civilians being killed is horrifying but should not be shocking. David Sacks put it this way: “What did removing Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad get us? Chaos, civil war, genocide. The rule for regime change operations in the Middle East is that they don’t flip a country from bad-to-good. They flip a country from bad-to-worse.”

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Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has demanded an investigation into who was running the country while President Biden was in cognitive decline.

“It appears staffers and officers in the Biden administration may have exploited Biden’s incapacity so they could issue orders without an accountable President of sound mind approving them,” AG Bailey writes. “This would explain why the Biden administration’s orders were aggressivey much farther to the left than any previous President. If in fact Biden’s staffers were exploiting his mental decline, those orders are null and void.”

AG Bailey says that “it is black-letter law that a document is void, ab initio, when the person signing it lacks mental capacity.”

He is asking the Department of Justice to investigate “who has been running the country for the last four years.”

How do you think they would do that? Could they ask President Biden NOW why he did many things and to produce evidence of his understanding of those things? I doubt that would lead to very much. Could they ask for a document trail that led to executive actions? And would these Deep State actors be easy to identify?

The post Who Was In Charge All That Time? appeared first on Redacted.

Russia has offered to broker talks between the U.S. and Iran.

These two countries are not at war but they are at loggerheads. The U.S. continually accuses Iran of having a nuclear weapon. Iran has worked with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to prove that it doesn’t but the U.S. keeps escalating accusations. Earlier in the week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had a call on Monday with Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz and “both leaders agreed that Iran remains a threat to regional security and agreed to work together on this challenge.”

Iran offered diplomatic talks with the Biden administration but has not offered any with the Trump administration. Could Russia be the middle man to cool down this rhetoric?

“Russia believes that the United States and Iran should resolve all problems through negotiations,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Bloomberg. Moscow “is ready to do everything in its power to achieve this,” he added.

Who cares who does it, as long as it gets done!?

The post Diplomacy With Iran? appeared first on Redacted.

The Trump administration has paused weapons and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, according to the Wall Street Journal. What intelligence did the U.S. have? Apparently the U.S. helped Ukraine track Russian troops in order to fire HIMARS on them.

Without the weapons and intelligence, how will Ukraine keep its war going? Europe is digging through couch cushions to find the money. The plan is called the ReArm Europe Plan. It calls for the EU to spend more than €800 billion in defense spending but…they’ll have to borrow it. The rules allow each member state to increase their defense spending “without triggering the Excessive Deficit Procedure.”

In other words, they don’t have it. The EU is letting them borrow it. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says that this is necessary because “We are living in the most momentous and dangerous of times.” Her goal is for the E.U. to have a military budget equivalent to the U.S. annual military budget, which is also based on debt. Why in the world would anyone want to emulate that failing model!?

The post Ukraine is Europe’s War Now appeared first on Redacted.

The U.S. is reportedly preparing to engage directly with Hamas to negotiate a peace deal with Israel. But if it is this kind of diplomacy, don’t hold your breathe.

President Trump wrote this on X and this on TruthSocial, threatening: “I am sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job, not a single Hamas member will be safe if you don’t do as I say… RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW, OR THERE WILL BE HELL TO PAY LATER!”

He said that Hamas cannot keep any more dead bodies and continued, “Only sick and twisted people keep bodies, and you are sick and twisted!”

Israel also has dead bodies to exchange and had hostages long before October 7. Does he know that?

President Trump has repeatedly said that he cannot arrange a ceasefire in Ukraine without participation from both sides but has been called out for not engaging both sides of the conflict in Gaza. Well if this is his manner of engaging them, it is not to catch flies with honey.

Israel violated the terms of the ceasefire but the Trump administration sent a new round of shipments this week.

The Israeli government has cut aid to Gaza and reportedly has a “hell plan” that would “cut off electricity and water into Gaza to prepare for a full-scale resumption of the war.”

The post About That “Diplomacy” appeared first on Redacted.

The head of the New York FBI office has been ousted. He says that he was not given a reason for this but this internal memo from a few weeks ago may have something to do with it.

James Dennehy is a Marine Corps veteran. After President Trump took office, he sent a staff email calling the Trump administration “a battle of our own” and advising his staff to “dig in.”

Dennehy said that this: “Late Friday, I was informed that I needed to put my retirement papers in today, which I just did. I was not given a reason for this decision.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi is now saying that the New York field office had withheld evidence about Jeffrey Epstein. She claims that this office had “thousands of documents” that were withheld when she requested them but she has them now and that her office is going through them for forthcoming release.

That doesn’t quite explain the influencers with binders that happened last week. This narrative from the government has been hard to follow. They have over-promised and under-delivered. Could it really have been this one guy holding it up for the rest of us or is there something else to it?

The post Did the FBI Hide The Epstein Files? appeared first on Redacted.

Protests broke out at the Israeli Knesset on Monday because guard personnel did not allow bereaved families of October 7 victims to attend a speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The families are demanding a probe into October 7. They want to know what the Israeli government knew in advance, how it responded with lethal force on civilians and why the Prime Minister has repeatedly failed to negotiate for hostage releases when Hamas demands all along have been “all for all.”

The Prime Minister says that anyone who wants an investigation like that is from the “deep state.” He said that an investigative committee would only be “a committee whose conclusions are already predetermined, and they have been written, all concentrated at one end of the political spectrum.”

He compared this to the political persecution of President Trump in the U.S.

“Most of the people see everything that is happening here, the cooperation between the bureaucracy, the deep state, [which] in the United States, did not succeed. And it will not succeed here either,” he said.

The Prime Minster warned Hamas of “consequences you can’t imagine” if the remaining prisoners are not exchanged. He spoke of a “hell plan” to stop all aid to Gaza while resuming military attacks. The U.S. is apparently on board because Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had a call on Monday with Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz and they spoke of the two countries’ “unbreakable bond.”

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President Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico were not idle threats. They went into effect today.

The Trump administration wanted serious efforts from both countries to curb the flow of drugs over the border but, the White House says that t”hey have failed to adequately address the situation.”

So, game on.

The original plan was to put a 10% tariff on China but on Monday, the White House doubled it to 20%.

The President also announced a plan to put tariffs on “external” agricultural imports. He told farmers to “get ready to start making a lot of agricultural product to be sold INSIDE of the United States.”

We are in unchartered waters now. The stock market faltered on the uncertainty of what tariffs will do to the economy.

The Atlanta Fed recently predicted a 2.8% drop in GDP in the first quarter of 2025. This may look bad but, as economist Peter St. Onge points out, “its not necessarily flagging distress. It’s flagging that the country is healing” from the over-spending of the Biden administration. I like the optimism. Let’s hope it’s on target for all of our sake!

China retaliated by announcing new tariffs on U.S. food and agriculture products, which will go into effect on March 10.

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President Trump has reportedly paused all military aid to Ukraine. This reportedly “applies to all US military equipment bound for Ukraine that’s not currently in the country, including weapons that are in transit on aircraft and ships or waiting in Poland to be delivered.”

The Pentagon said that the pause will be “until the country’s leadership demonstrates a good faith commitment to peace.”

The ultimatum gives me pause. This should be the end of the end, not because of President Zelensky’s behavior. It should end because it is the right thing to do.

Most Americans support ending the war in Ukraine and more than half of Ukrainians want the war to end too, only you wouldn’t know it if you only listen to Zelensky. He said this to the Associated Press on Monday:

“An agreement to end the war is still very, very far away, and no one has started all these steps yet. The peace that we foresee in the future must be just, honest, and most importantly, sustainable.”

President Trump took to Truth Social to blast that statement, writing: “This is the worst statement that could have been made by Zelenskyy, and America will not put up with it for much longer! It is what I was saying, this guy doesn’t want there to be Peace as long as he has America’s backing and, Europe, in the meeting they had with Zelenskyy, stated flatly that they cannot do the job without the U.S. – Probably not a great statement to have been made in terms of a show of strength against Russia. What are they thinking?”

Is this really the end of aid to Ukraine or is President Trump just punishing Zelensky for now? The personalities of this are a shame. Innocent people are still dying.

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