FOOD STAMP FRAUD IN THE US

 

FOOD STAMP FRAUD IN THE US

The American taxpayer is footing the bill for a multi-billion-dollar underground economy, and the U.S. government's food assistance programs have become its unwitting banker. What was designed as a nutritional safety net for the nation's most vulnerable has, through a combination of outdated technology, weak oversight, and deliberate obstruction, morphed into a lucrative international criminal enterprise. From the bodegas of New York City to the black markets of the Caribbean, the story of modern food stamp fraud reveals a systemic failure that conservative lawmakers have long warned about.

The Staggering Scale of a Broken System

The numbers paint a grim picture. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) now operates on an annual budget that has swollen to approximately $112.8 billion, serving an average of 42.1 million people per month. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has publicly estimated that 20% to 30% of that funding potentially tens of billions of dollars annually may be lost to fraud, waste, and abuse.

This isn't a problem of a few bad actors gaming the system at the margins. Since the Biden administration's 2023 decision to create a special program for replacing stolen benefits, the government has already doled out at least $61.5 million to cover pilfered food stamps in 127,290 cases. By the third quarter of 2024, reported fraudulent transactions had skyrocketed to 287,661 in a single three-month period a jump of over 100,000 from the previous quarter affecting families across all fifty states.

Meanwhile, the cost of fraud has grown so sophisticated that for every single dollar in benefits stolen, it now costs agencies $3.93 in total losses a figure that has risen consistently year after year.

Urban Epicenters: Where Fraud Thrives

The crisis is most acute in America's largest cities, where dense populations and diverse commercial landscapes provide ideal cover for large-scale trafficking operations.

New York City stands as the undisputed capital of SNAP fraud. Between August 2023 and early 2025, the city's Department of Social Services processed more than 142,000 claims for stolen benefits, approving over 96,000 claims and disbursing approximately $43.7 million in replacement funds to victims. The fraud problem grew so severe that the city was forced to spend over $28 million in taxpayer money in a single year simply reimbursing people for stolen benefits.

But the skimming and theft that devastates individual recipients represents only the street-level manifestation of a much deeper problem. In May 2025, federal prosecutors unsealed charges in what they described as "one of the largest food stamp frauds in U.S. history." The scheme, centered in the New York metropolitan area, involved six defendants including a USDA fraud investigator who was supposed to be catching criminals and generated more than $66 million in unauthorized SNAP transactions. The group operated approximately 160 unauthorized EBT terminals that processed over $30 million in illegal transactions, with the corrupt USDA employee selling confidential license numbers to enable another $36 million in fraudulent redemptions.

The USDA employee, Arlasa Davis, stands as a particularly galling example of the rot within the system. She worked in the very division responsible for identifying food stamp fraud, yet stands accused of selling confidential government information to the criminals she was supposed to catch accepting bribes disguised in communications as "birthday gifts" and "flowers".

Boston has proven equally vulnerable to exploitation. In December 2025, federal authorities arrested two men originally from Haiti who allegedly trafficked over $7 million in SNAP benefits through two small storefronts in Boston's Mattapan neighborhood. The monthly redemptions at these modest shops ranged from $100,000 to $500,000, dramatically outpacing full-service supermarkets in the same area that typically redeem around $82,000 per month. The investigation revealed an operation in which SNAP benefits were systematically exchanged for cash, and perhaps most disturbingly, donated food products from the nonprofit "Feed My Starving Children" meals intended for humanitarian relief overseas were being sold for approximately $8 per package at these locations.

In the Twin Cities of Minnesota, the problem grew so pervasive that in 2026 federal agencies launched "Operation Cold SNAP," executing search warrants at twenty retail locations simultaneously. USDA Inspector General John Walk minced no words in his assessment: "Fraudulent SNAP retailers steal from victims that include children who rely on federal nutrition assistance and dishonor the charity of American taxpayers who fund the assistance".

Columbus, Ohio, has emerged as yet another hotspot where organized fraud rings have systematically exploited the system. From June 2023 to December 2024, more than 34,000 Ohio households were defrauded out of nearly $17 million in SNAP benefits. Investigative reports detailed how certain restaurant owners allegedly operate attached grocery stores, purchase ingredients in bulk with SNAP benefits, and then funnel the food to their restaurants where it is sold for cash. This closed-loop scheme effectively launders taxpayer-funded benefits into untraceable revenue, with one case resulting in a guilty plea for a nine-year conspiracy totaling over $10 million.

The Barrel Trade: America's Welfare Becomes the Caribbean's Black Market

For years, the most audacious form of SNAP fraud has operated in plain sight. Shipping containers full of food cereal boxes, baby formula, energy drinks, and other non-perishable goods purchased with American EBT cards leave ports in New York, New Jersey, and Florida bound for the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti, and other Caribbean nations, where they are sold on the black market for pure profit.

This is not a new phenomenon. A 2013 New York Post exposé first documented how Caribbean migrants enrolled in SNAP were buying non-perishable items, packing them into 55-gallon blue barrel drums, and shipping them to home nations to be sold. One seller, a Bronx native identified as Maria-Teresa, openly admitted to the practice: "It's a really easy way to make money, and it doesn't cost me anything". She also described how her sister conducted bogus $250 transactions with grocers who would hand her $200 in cash while pocketing the remaining value, calling it "a way of laundering money, but it's easier because it's free".

More than a decade later, the practice has only expanded. The scale and sophistication of these operations now involve organized criminal networks using electronic skimming devices to steal benefits, cloning EBT cards, and purchasing massive quantities of high-value, non-perishable goods specifically for overseas resale. In one Oregon-based case, an Italian national illegally residing in the United States conspired with sixteen others to steal over $2.4 million in SNAP benefits. The group used cloned EBT cards to purchase more than 120,000 pounds of infant formula, energy drinks, and other goods, storing them in warehouses before transporting them across state lines to be sold on the black market.

These schemes represent a complete perversion of the program's purpose. Food intended for struggling American families or, in the case of the Boston operation, meals actually donated for starving children ends up funding a parallel economy in foreign nations, all at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer.

The Enablers: Why Fraud Flourishes

The question that naturally follows is how such widespread fraud continues unabated. The answer lies in a combination of deliberate political obstruction, technological negligence, and a fundamentally flawed approach to program integrity.

Foremost among these enabling factors is the outdated technology that underpins the entire EBT system. While American consumers have long enjoyed the security of chip-enabled credit and debit cards, SNAP benefits are distributed through magnetic-stripe cards that are laughably easy to skim and clone. As of 2024, New York State the state with the highest number of stolen benefits in the nation had failed to transition to chip technology, despite California and Oklahoma having already made the switch. The state initially claimed that federal approval was required, but when pressed, the USDA confirmed that "there is no prohibition on adoption of chip cards and states may choose to do so at any time". This technological backwardness is not merely an inconvenience; it is an open invitation to criminal exploitation.

Equally troubling is the political obstruction that has met efforts to root out fraud. When Agriculture Secretary Rollins requested that states turn over SNAP recipient data including Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and immigration status twenty-one Democrat-controlled states refused to comply. Among those resisting were the very states known to have payment error rates exceeding the national average: California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Maryland, and Massachusetts. These states claim privacy concerns as their justification, but as one former fraud investigator explained to the New York Times, "there is a perception that forcefully tackling this issue might cause political backlash among the Somali community, which is a core voting bloc".

The preliminary data that has emerged from cooperating states is damning. Among the 29 states predominantly Republican-led that complied with the data request, investigators discovered 186,000 deceased individuals still receiving benefits, 500,000 people receiving more than double the allowable amount, and thousands drawing benefits from three, four, even six different states simultaneously. Secretary Rollins has made clear that the fraud in non-cooperating blue states is "likely even worse".

The Immigration Dimension

A particularly contentious but unavoidable aspect of the fraud crisis involves illegal immigration. Although SNAP is legally restricted to individuals with lawful status, the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that 4.5 million illegal immigrants are nevertheless using the program. Their research indicates that 47% of all non-citizen households receive taxpayer-funded food assistance, and roughly 60% of illegal immigrant households use at least one major welfare program.

The nexus between illegal immigration and organized SNAP fraud is not coincidental. The Somali-operated fraud rings exposed in Ohio, the Haitian traffickers arrested in Boston, the international crime ring prosecuted in Oregon these are not isolated incidents but patterns that point to systematic exploitation of America's porous borders and generous benefit programs. International criminal organizations have been identified as heavily involved in and benefiting from SNAP fraud at increasing rates.

The Path Forward: Conservative Reform Proposals

For conservatives, addressing SNAP fraud is not an argument for eliminating food assistance but for restoring integrity to a program that millions of genuinely needy Americans depend upon. The reform agenda is clear and has been championed by Republican lawmakers despite fierce Democratic opposition.

First, the immediate nationwide implementation of chip-enabled EBT cards is non-negotiable. The technology exists, has been successfully deployed in several states, and would dramatically reduce the skimming and cloning that account for a massive portion of stolen benefits. States that continue to resist this transition should face financial penalties.

Second, work requirements must be strengthened and enforced. The "Big Beautiful Bill" advanced by Republicans includes provisions requiring able-bodied adults without dependents to work, train, or volunteer for at least 80 hours per month to maintain eligibility. These requirements would extend to adults up to age 64, reflecting the principle that welfare should be temporary and tied to personal responsibility.

Third, the program needs meaningful restrictions on what can be purchased with taxpayer funds. Currently, nearly 25% of all SNAP spending goes to soda, candy, and other junk food subsidizing the very dietary habits that drive America's obesity crisis. Eleven states have already requested waivers to prohibit junk food purchases, a reform that should enjoy unanimous support.

Fourth, states must be required to share in the financial consequences of poor program management. Under the GOP-backed reconciliation framework, states with high payment error rates would be required to cover a portion of overpayments and administrative costs, creating a powerful incentive for proper oversight.

Finally, and most fundamentally, the law must be enforced. The brazenness of operations shipping barrels of taxpayer-funded food overseas, the audacity of corrupt USDA employees selling access to the very criminals they were hired to stop, and the scale of organized retail fraud demand a robust prosecutorial response. Federal agencies have demonstrated their capability with operations like "Cold SNAP" in the Twin Cities and the multi-agency takedown in Oregon, but consistent enforcement requires political will that too many state and local officials have been unwilling to muster.

Conclusion

The erosion of integrity in America's food assistance programs represents more than a financial scandal; it reflects a deeper crisis of governance in which partisan interests and bureaucratic inertia have been allowed to triumph over the public good. When a USDA employee can sell government secrets to fraud rings, when a small Boston storefront can process more SNAP transactions than a full-service supermarket, and when shipping containers full of taxpayer-funded food depart American ports for Caribbean black markets, something is fundamentally broken.

Conservative reforms chip cards, work requirements, purchase restrictions, state cost-sharing, and aggressive enforcement offer a clear path toward restoring accountability. What remains in question is whether the political establishment, particularly in the nation's large cities where the fraud is most rampant, possesses the will to prioritize struggling families over the entrenched interests that benefit from the current dysfunction. Every dollar stolen from SNAP is a dollar denied to a child who genuinely needs it a principle that ought to transcend partisan politics, even if the evidence suggests it too rarely does.

#Fraud #SNAP #EBT #Crime

Obama's Drone Wars

When Obama Entered Office The US Was Fighting In Two Countries, Iraq and Afghanistan. When He Left Office The US Was Fighting In Seven Countries, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Libia, and Pakistan.

They were basically all drone strikes and 85% of the casualties were civilians not involved in the fight. Yet, Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize after only being in office for only a few months On the other hand, Trump ended at least eight wars during his first several months in office and they call HIM a war monger. Obama was even quotes once as saying "I'm good at killing people."

#Obama #DroneWars #MiddleEast

Drone Wars

From Somalia to Iraq and Afghanistan to Yemen, the U.S. military and the CIA have engaged in secretive drone strikes that have killed thousands of civilians and led to political blowback against the United States. The Intercept has published classified documents, as well as reporting on the ground, about America’s ongoing drone wars.

A Lesson For New Chefs - The Origins of Pizza

  

A Lesson For New Chefs - The Origins of Pizza

Pizza is one of the most beloved foods on the planet, yet it sits at the center of a friendly culinary feud that has simmered for over a century. Ask a Neapolitan where pizza was invented and they will point with pride to their own city’s narrow, sun-bleached streets. Ask a New Yorker and you might get an equally passionate defense of those giant, foldable slices that have defined American pizza culture. As a beginning chef, you are stepping into a world where knowing the story behind your food is just as important as mastering the technique. Understanding where pizza truly came from – Italy, New York, or somewhere in between – will not only deepen your appreciation for the craft, it will make you a more thoughtful cook every time you shape a dough ball or spread a ladle of sauce. Let’s settle this delicious debate once and for all, in a way that honours the real history and arms you with knowledge for your own kitchen.

The Ancient Flatbreads That Were Not Yet Pizza

Before we can crown a winner, we have to acknowledge that humans have been putting tasty things on top of baked dough for millennia. Archaeologists have found evidence of flatbreads topped with herbs, oils, and vegetables in the ruins of Pompeii. Ancient Egyptians celebrated the pharaoh’s birthday with a yeasted flatbread seasoned with herbs. Persian soldiers baked bread on their shields and covered it with cheese and dates. In Greece, plakous was a flatbread adorned with garlic, onion, and olives. Even the Vikings and the Chinese had their own versions of baked dough with toppings. These are all ancestors in the pizza family tree, but they are not pizza. Why? Because they lack the signature ingredient that defines the modern dish: the tomato. Tomatoes are a New World fruit that did not arrive in Europe until the 16th century, and for a long time they were thought to be poisonous. So any flatbread before roughly 1700 could not have been the pizza we know today. For a chef, this is a vital lesson in ingredient history: a dish is defined by its specific components, not just its shape. Pizza as a concept needed tomatoes, and tomatoes needed a fearless culture to embrace them.

Naples: The True Birthplace of Pizza

The story of pizza begins in the vibrant, overcrowded, and fiercely proud city of Naples during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Naples was a bustling port, full of working-class people known as lazzaroni who needed food that was cheap, filling, and fast. Street vendors, or pizzaioli, began selling flatbreads topped with tomatoes, garlic, oregano, and a little lard or cheese, baked quickly in wood-fired ovens. These early pizzas were eaten folded up, often while walking – a portable meal for the poor. The local tomatoes, grown in the volcanic soil of Mount Vesuvius, were intensely sweet and acidic, transforming a simple bread into something vibrant and satisfying. The addition of mozzarella, made from the milk of water buffaloes raised in the nearby countryside, turned the dish into a creamy, stringy marvel. By the early 1800s, Naples was full of pizzerias and street vendors, and the city had firmly established itself as the world’s pizza capital.

The most famous creation myth centres on the year 1889. Legend says that Queen Margherita of Savoy, visiting Naples, grew tired of fancy French cuisine and summoned the city’s most renowned pizzaiolo, Raffaele Esposito, to prepare three pizzas. One was made with tomatoes and basil, one with mozzarella and anchovies, and a third with tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil – a patriotic tribute to the red, white, and green of the Italian flag. The queen supposedly loved the tricolour pizza, and Esposito named it Pizza Margherita in her honour. While historians agree that this story is more romance than documented fact – similar pizzas were certainly eaten long before – it captures an essential truth: pizza was already a proud Neapolitan tradition worthy of royal recognition. The Margherita became the archetype of Neapolitan pizza, and its minimalist philosophy remains the soul of the style: San Marzano tomatoes, fresh mozzarella di bufala or fior di latte, basil, and extra-virgin olive oil on a tender, blistered crust.

So if the question is “Who invented pizza?” the answer is the working-class Neapolitans of the 18th and 19th centuries. Italy, specifically Naples, gave birth to the food that carries the name. The Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana today defines a true Neapolitan pizza by precise rules: the dough must be made only with flour, water, salt, and yeast; it must be hand-shaped; the tomatoes must be San Marzano; and it must be baked in a wood-fired oven at 485°C (905°F) for 60 to 90 seconds. The result is a soft, elastic disc with a high, puffy cornicione (rim) and a wet, almost soupy centre that demands a knife and fork. For a new chef, learning to make this pizza is a study in heat management, fermentation, and ingredient reverence.

The Journey Across the Atlantic

If Italy invented pizza, how did New York enter the conversation with such force? The answer is immigration. Between 1880 and 1920, millions of Italians, overwhelmingly from the impoverished south including Naples and Sicily, sailed to the United States. They brought with them their food traditions, and in the tight-knit neighbourhoods of New York City, street vendors began selling slices of tomato-and-cheese pie to fellow immigrants. The earliest pizzerias were often bakeries or grocery stores that would bake large rectangular pies and sell them by the piece.

The landmark moment came in 1905 when Gennaro Lombardi applied for a license to sell pizza at his grocery store on Spring Street in Manhattan. Lombardi’s is widely recognized as the first licensed pizzeria in the United States. His oven was coal-fired, a crucial detail that would shape New York pizza forever. Coal burns hotter and cleaner than wood, producing an intense, even heat that bakes a pizza in a few minutes, creating a crisp yet pliable crust with a characteristic char. Lombardi’s original creation was a large round pie, cut into wedges, with a thin layer of tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, and a drizzle of olive oil. This was the first New York-style pizza, and it started a revolution.

From that single shop, a lineage of pizzaioli spread across the city. Lombardi’s own employees opened Totonno’s in Coney Island, John’s of Bleecker Street, and Patsy’s in East Harlem. Each developed slight variations, but they shared a DNA: a thin, hand-tossed crust that was crisp on the bottom and chewy inside; low-moisture mozzarella that melted into a uniform golden blanket; and a slightly sweet, cooked tomato sauce made with oregano and garlic. The pizza was served in large, floppy slices that, as any true New Yorker knows, must be eaten folded in half to avoid a mess. This foldability was not an accident; it was an adaptation for the fast-paced urban lifestyle, allowing workers to eat on the go.

The New York Slice Revolution

World War II changed everything. American soldiers stationed in Italy had tasted pizza there and returned home with a craving for it. Italian-American pizzerias were waiting. In the post-war boom, pizza exploded from an ethnic enclave novelty into a national obsession. In New York, the corner slice joint became a cultural institution. The classic New York slice is distinguished by a few key techniques that every new chef should know: the dough often contains oil and a small amount of sugar, which aids browning and creates that slight sweetness. The gluten is developed to give a strong structure capable of holding a large diameter, and the dough is cold-fermented for a day or more to develop a complex, slightly sour flavour. The sauce is typically a cooked, seasoned tomato purée, and the cheese is a dry, aged whole-milk mozzarella, which releases less water and gives a more even melt than fresh mozzarella. Baking takes place at around 260–315°C (500–600°F) for five to seven minutes, far longer and cooler than Neapolitan pizza, producing a crust with a delicate crunch that yields to a soft, foldable interior.

So, did New York invent pizza? No. But New York did something equally important: it reinvented pizza for a new continent, creating a style so distinct and influential that for millions of people it defines the dish. When you hear arguments about pizza’s origin, remember that Italy invented the noun, but New York defined the adjective that follows it.

Italy vs. New York: A Chef’s Comparison

As a new chef, you will be a better pizza maker if you treat Neapolitan and New York styles as two separate masterpieces rather than rivals. They share a lineage but demand different mindsets.

Neapolitan pizza is a sprint. You hand-stretch a soft, high-hydration dough into a delicate disc, top it sparingly, and shove it into an inferno for 90 seconds. The baker must watch it like a hawk, rotating it with a peel to achieve the leopard-spotted char and the trademark puff. The resulting pie is a liquid-centred, aromatic celebration of fresh ingredients, meant to be eaten immediately with a knife and fork. It teaches you about the primal power of fire and the beauty of simplicity.

New York pizza is a marathon. The dough is sturdier, fermented longer for flavour, and rolled or tossed to a larger, thinner platform. It is baked at a slightly more forgiving temperature, allowing you to watch the cheese bubble and the underside crisp to a golden brown. The sauce is deeper in savoury notes, the cheese richer and stretchier. The big, folded slice is designed for portability and a different kind of satisfaction – textural contrast and bold, balanced flavour. Mastering this pizza teaches you dough management, fermentation science, and the art of the large-diameter pie.

Both require respect for the craft. Neapolitan pizza reflects a rustic, hyper-local tradition where ingredients can never be overshadowed by technique. New York pizza embodies the immigrant spirit of adaptation, taking a beloved memory and reshaping it with American ingredients and urban practicality.

So, Who Really Invented Pizza?

The definitive answer for every culinary student is this: The modern pizza, as a tomato-and-cheese-topped flatbread baked in an oven and meant to be eaten as a meal, was invented in Naples, Italy, by anonymous street-food artisans in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The city’s pizzerias, like Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba (widely considered the world’s first true pizzeria, opened in 1830), codified the food that carried the name. Everything we call pizza today flows from that Neapolitan spring.

New York did not invent pizza, but it midwifed the global pizza phenomenon. The first U.S. pizzerias transformed an Italian regional specialty into a scalable, mainstream comfort food that eventually circled the earth. In the process, New York created a distinct style that is itself now protected by a fierce sense of authenticity. Just as France claims the croissant but Viennese bakers gave it life, Italy is the birthplace of pizza, and New York is its most famous adopted home.

What This Means for You as a New Chef

When you stretch your first dough, you are not just making dinner; you are becoming part of a story that stretches from the volcanic slopes of Vesuvius to the neon-lit avenues of Brooklyn. Respect that lineage. Learn to make a proper Neapolitan dough and feel the whisper of the pizzaioli who invented it out of necessity and pride. Then try a New York dough, cold-fermented and tossed wide, and understand the immigrant mindset that adapts and thrives. Each style will teach you something profound about flour, water, heat, and time. The debate over where pizza was invented will never die in pizzerias and at dinner tables, but as a knowledgeable chef, you can smile and say with confidence: Italy gave us the soul, New York gave it a new voice, and we are all richer for it. Now, go flour your hands and make history.

#Pizza #Food #Cooking #NewYork #Italy #Recipes #Recipe

Ebola Is Making A Comeback

 

Ebola Is Making A Comeback

On Sunday, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” (PHEIC) the second-highest alarm the agency can sound. The outbreak, driven by the rare Bundibugyo strain, has already killed more than 80 people among 336 suspected cases, yet there is no approved vaccine and no specific treatment. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called the situation “extraordinary,” citing “a four‑week detection delay” and “extensive uncontrolled community transmission.”

On the surface, this declaration is the WHO doing what it was created to do: raising a global red flag when a pathogen threatens to cross borders. But for those who watched the agency stumble through the COVID-19 pandemic and the West African Ebola disaster before that the alarm invites a more troubling question: Can the WHO still be trusted, or is this just another case of too little, too late from an institution that has lost its credibility?

The COVID-19 Backstory: A Litany of Failures

To judge today’s declaration, one must first revisit the pandemic that shattered the WHO’s reputation. A 2025 scoping review published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications catalogued the critiques: “delays in response, communication failures, vaccine equity, global coordination, governance limitations, and trust and transparency.” Each of those abstract categories translates into real-world harm.

The agency advised the public not to wear masks for months, insisting there was insufficient evidence of benefit, and it repeatedly played down airborne transmission even as a growing body of science pointed to the opposite. Oxford’s Dr. Trish Greenhalgh, who sits on several WHO expert committees, put it bluntly: “Without a doubt, WHO’s failure to endorse masks earlier cost lives.” The mask and aerosol stumbles were not mere academic quibbles; they shaped national policies, delayed mitigation measures, and helped the virus spread unchecked.

Meanwhile, the WHO waited until 11 March 2020  when almost 120,000 cases had already been confirmed to declare COVID-19 a pandemic. By then the virus was entrenched in Europe and North America. Critics argue the delay was not accidental; it was political. “The agency has been accused of delaying sounding the alarm for fear of offending Beijing,” one analysis notes, “and for failing to coordinate a coherent international response.”

Political Interference and the China Shadow

The reluctance to confront China remains the deepest stain on the WHO’s COVID-19 record. Throughout 2020, the agency repeatedly praised China’s “transparent” response even though private recordings later revealed that senior officials were “frustrated at the country’s lack of cooperation.” When a WHO-led team visited Wuhan in 2021 to investigate the virus’s origins, it failed to dismiss China’s fringe theory that the virus might have been spread via frozen seafood.

“The WHO never really criticised China for its handling of Covid,” observed one analysis, “but is often quick to criticise the U.S.” That perception of double standards prompted the United States  under President Donald Trump  to formally withdraw from the organization in January 2026, citing the WHO’s “failure to demonstrate independence from inappropriate political influence.” The U.S., which had been the agency’s largest funder, argued that China’s outsized sway had rendered the WHO incapable of honest reckoning.

Even Tedros himself has been dogged by accusations of pro-China bias. In 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleged without presenting public evidence that China “bought” Tedros’s 2017 election. Tedros dismissed the claim as “untrue and unacceptable,” but the charge has never fully gone away. More recently, U.S. officials pressed for Tedros’s removal ahead of the May 2026 World Health Assembly, citing his “bias towards China” a move African ambassadors condemned as having an “unfortunate racial undertone.”

The Taiwan Episode: A Microcosm of WHO Politicisation

Few incidents illustrate the WHO’s political entanglement more starkly than its treatment of Taiwan. On 31 December 2019, Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control became aware of atypical pneumonia cases in Wuhan. The same day, it emailed the WHO to request information. When Washington later cited this as proof that Taiwan had issued an early warning and that the WHO had “pretended Taiwan didn’t exist” the WHO’s technical lead Maria Van Kerkhove retorted that Taiwan had “not warned us” but “just asked for information.” Taiwan’s foreign ministry produced the email as evidence to the contrary.

Whatever the email’s precise wording, the episode exposed a deeper problem: the WHO allowed geopolitical considerations specifically, deference to Beijing’s “One China” policy to determine who could sit at the table during a burgeoning pandemic. When an agency chooses political expediency over inclusive surveillance, every country is less safe, and the seeds of future distrust are sown.

Institutional Amnesia? Learning (or Not) from Ebola

To be fair, the WHO does not always fail. During the 2018–2020 Ebola outbreak in DRC, the agency helped roll out vaccines and treatments for the Zaire strain, and for the first time “every patient was offered voluntary and equitable access to groundbreaking treatments.” That outbreak was contained after 22 months.

But the current crisis echoes the darker legacy of the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic, when the WHO was excoriated for “unnecessary bureaucracy” and a failure to “see some fairly plain writing on the wall.” Aid agencies had warned of an unprecedented outbreak in June 2014, yet the WHO did not declare an emergency until August by which time almost 1,000 people had died. Co-discoverer of the Ebola virus, Dr. Peter Piot, agreed the agency “acted far too slowly.”

Fast-forward to May 2026. The first symptomatic Bundibugyo case dates to 24 April, meaning the virus spread for roughly four weeks before the international alert went up. The WHO itself admits “there are significant uncertainties to the true number of infected persons and geographic spread.” In other words, the world is playing catch‑up again.

A Crisis of Trust

Public faith in the WHO has eroded sharply. Social-media analysis shows that the agency’s “popular legitimacy” was stable from 2008 to 2019 but “declined significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic.” The retweet‑to‑reply ratio on the WHO’s X account “plummeted through 2021,” signalling a surge in dissent and scrutiny. This is not a fringe phenomenon: it reflects a global legitimacy crisis that spans countries and political systems.

When trust evaporates, declarations of emergency lose their power. Governments hesitate to act on WHO advice; citizens ignore it. The Bundibugyo PHEIC is meant to “mobilise international funding, coordination and emergency response efforts.” Yet if member states view the WHO as a politically compromised, scientifically sluggish body, will they open their wallets and coordinate as urgently as needed?

Can They Be Trusted?

The WHO remains indispensable in many respects. It sets global health standards, coordinates vaccine distribution, and runs surveillance networks that no single country can replicate. The 2018 DRC response shows that, when adequately resourced and insulated from geopolitics, it can still deliver.

But trust is not a blanket endorsement; it is earned through consistent, transparent, and apolitical action precisely the qualities the WHO has repeatedly failed to demonstrate. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed an agency too timid to challenge powerful member states, too slow to correct its own scientific misjudgements, and too willing to sacrifice inclusivity on the altar of Beijing’s sensitivities. The Bundibugyo emergency is testing whether those patterns persist.

Tedros said this week that “peace is the best medicine.” That is an admirable sentiment but peace must also reign inside the organization he leads. Until the WHO can prove it is guided by science alone and not by the political interests of its largest donors or most authoritarian members, the question of trust will hang over every emergency declaration it makes. The world can only hope that this time, the price of that uncertainty is not measured in thousands of lives.

#Ebola #WHO #WorldHealthOrganization

The Duties of The Whitehouse Chief of Staff and Deputy Chief of Staff

 

Susie Wiles, Whitehouse Chief of Staff

The offices of White House Chief of Staff (often called "the Gatekeeper") and Deputy Chief of Staff are two of the most pivotal positions in the U.S. government, which exist not by constitutional mandate but by the sheer necessity of managing the modern presidency. Tasked with translating a president's vision into a governing reality, the Chief of Staff is the ultimate White House operator, while a team of specialized Deputies functions as the essential infrastructure. While their duties are wide-ranging, their most critical functions involve managing the vast federal government specifically the Cabinet and controlling the most valuable commodity in Washington: access to and communication with the President.

Stephen Miller - Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff

The White House Chief of Staff: The Gatekeeper and Honest Broker

The role of the modern White House Chief of Staff was formalized under President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953, who brought a military-style hierarchical structure to the Executive Office. However, the position evolved into its most recognizable form under President Richard Nixon, whose chief, H.R. Haldeman, set the pattern for the modern iteration by consolidating control over scheduling and information flow. Today, the Chief of Staff is the highest-ranking political appointee in the White House, a role that requires no Senate confirmation and serves entirely at the pleasure of the President.

Gatekeeper and Information Broker

The Chief of Staff’s most famous function is that of a "gatekeeper," a role that entails far more than simply guarding the Oval Office door. The chief designs and enforces the rules of access to the President, deciding who gets meetings and what information reaches the Resolute Desk. This is a core function of information brokering. The chief sits atop a "pyramidal interagency policy process" that sifts through the cacophony of data, intelligence, and policy recommendations from across the government to ensure the President receives vetted, accurate, and balanced information on both sides of every critical issue.

Manager and Executor

As the de facto chief operating officer of the federal government, the Chief of Staff oversees the entire Executive Office of the President (EOP), a sprawling organization of approximately 1,800 staffers charged with supervising 15 Cabinet departments and hundreds of federal agencies. This includes managing White House staff, organizing the President’s schedule, directing and managing policy development, and negotiating legislation with Congress.

Confidant and Presidential Proxy

Perhaps the most delicate duty of the Chief of Staff is to serve as the President’s "truth-teller" a confidant who possesses a unique license to deliver hard truths that other advisors might shy away from, a dynamic that has been a notable challenge in administrations resistant to hierarchical structure. Furthermore, the Chief of Staff's words carry the weight of a presidential directive. When summoning officials or giving instructions, their authority is understood to be that of the President himself, making them the administration's primary enforcer and a powerful proxy for the Commander-in-Chief.

The Deputy Chiefs of Staff: The Specialized Engine Room

If the Chief of Staff is the public-facing CEO of the White House, the cadre of Deputy Chiefs of Staff functions as the essential engine room that ensures the smooth running of the White House bureaucracy. Over recent administrations, the role has evolved from a single aide into a structured office with multiple deputies, each bearing a distinct portfolio.

The Deputy Chief of Staff is officially the top aide to the Chief of Staff, serving as a critical extension of their authority. A key feature of the modern structure is specialization. In President Joe Biden’s administration, deputies had distinct roles: Jen O'Malley Dillon served as Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, while Bruce Reed served as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy. This division of labor allows a single office to handle both the strategic (policy and legislative affairs) and the tactical (day-to-day operations and personnel) demands of the West Wing. The number of deputies can vary significantly; the structure in the second Trump administration was slated to include five deputies with specialized portfolios including policy, legislative affairs, and operations.

The path from this role is also a proven training ground for higher office. Historically, at least six individuals who served as Deputy Chief of Staff were later promoted to the position of White House Chief of Staff, a list that includes prominent figures such as Dick Cheney, Andrew Card, and John Podesta.

Interface with Cabinet Members: Coordination and Control

The relationship between the White House senior staff and the heads of the 15 executive departments is a delicate balance of collaboration and command. A core principle of the American system is that Cabinet secretaries serve the President, but they are also often pulled by the institutional cultures of their respective departments or their own political ambitions. It is the Chief of Staff's job to ensure the departments are aligned with the President’s agenda, acting as a crucial liaison between the Cabinet and the White House.

The office of Cabinet Affairs, which often reports directly to or works in close coordination with the Chief of Staff, manages this relationship. Its responsibilities include setting agendas for Cabinet meetings, coordinating schedules and trips, and preparing summaries of departmental activities for the President. This ensures a steady flow of information between department secretaries and the White House. When a secretary goes "rogue" or a department resists a presidential directive, it is the Chief of Staff who steps in to "corral the cabinet" and reassert presidential authority, a management style that has varied dramatically across different administrations.

The White House Chief of Staff’s powerful position within this hierarchy is further reinforced by their integration into the Cabinet itself, a strategic placement that mandates maintaining strong relationships with agency heads and grants them a formal seat at the table to ensure unity of purpose across the executive branch.

The Architecture of Presidential Communication

Managing the President’s time and information flow is the Chief of Staff’s most strategic tool. They act as the "honest broker" of information, ensuring that the President hears all sides of an issue before making a decision, a role that often requires taming the competing factions and power centers that naturally surround any leader.

Crucially, the Chief of Staff is a secret-keeper who possesses unparalleled access to the President's most sensitive thoughts and decisions. There is virtually no classified piece of information that the President learns that the Chief of Staff does not also learn, making them a singular figure in national security communications and a constant presence in nearly every critical meeting to prevent "end runs" by staff pushing personal agendas.

To support this, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications operates as the technical nexus for this flow. This role oversees the White House’s messaging strategy, bridging the gap between policy development and public communication. Meanwhile, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations manages the logistical architecture of the President’s day from the schedule to the execution of every event ensuring that the carefully planned agenda is implemented seamlessly.

Conclusion

The true power of the Chief of Staff and their Deputies lies in their synthesis of these functions. While Cabinet secretaries manage their departmental silos, the Chief of Staff enforces cohesion across the entire executive branch. Simultaneously, the varied cadres of Deputy Chiefs, from Policy to Operations, adapt to the demands of each specific presidency. Ultimately, the strength of this central nervous system determines not just the efficiency of the White House, but the success or failure of a presidency itself, as every decision, message, and crisis ultimately flows through these vital individuals before reaching the President.

#Whitehouse #ChiefofStaff #StephenMiller #WhitehouseChiefofStaff #DeputyChiefofStaff #WhitehouseDeputyChiefofStaff #SusieWiles 

Bock, 45, was convicted for her role in the scheme in 2025. Photo: Shari L. Gross/Star Tribune via Getty Images

"Mastermind" of Minnesota child meal fraud gets nearly 42 years in Feeding Our Future case

#Fraud #Minnesota #FeedingOurFuture

50 Days of Prayer

 

#America250 #God #America

 

World Health Organization declares Ebola outbreak in Congo a global health emergency

#Ebola #Virus #Congo #WHO #Emergency #Prepper #WorldHealthOrganization #Survival #Prepping 

The Party of Slavery and Segregation: How Democrats Rebranded and Blamed Conservatives

 

The Party of Slavery and Segregation: How Democrats Rebranded and Blamed Conservatives

Walk through any university campus, turn on a cable news panel, or scroll through social media, and you will quickly encounter a familiar refrain: America’s struggles with race are the exclusive property of the Right. Conservatives are called bigots, xenophobes, and torch-bearers of an imaginary new Jim Crow. The historical record, however, tells an entirely different story — one that the modern Left has buried under a mountain of carefully crafted euphemisms and historical revisionism. From slavery to the Ku Klux Klan, from the Black Codes to segregationist water fountains, the most repressive institutions of American racial history were conceived, built, and violently defended by the Democratic Party. And when that legacy became politically inconvenient, Democrats did not repent; they simply changed their vocabulary and began calling their opponents the racists.

An honest conservative perspective must reclaim the facts that the academy and the legacy press refuse to teach. This is not about scoring political points. It is about truth, and about resisting a cynical rewriting of history that brands you a bigot simply for noticing that the party of Jefferson Davis is the same party that now lectures you on “white privilege.”

The Party of Slavery

Before the Republican Party even existed, the Democratic Party was the political engine of slavery. Founded around Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, the party elevated states’ rights to a near-religious principle because southern planters needed a federal government too weak to interfere with their “peculiar institution.” From the Missouri Compromise to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, it was Democratic legislators who fought to expand slavery into the territories. The party’s 1856 platform warned that any Republican attempt to restrain slavery would lead to “civil war and servile insurrection.” In the infamous Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court’s Democratic-appointed Chief Justice Roger Taney declared that black Americans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

When Republican Abraham Lincoln the first president from a party founded explicitly to oppose slavery’s expansion won the 1860 election, Democratic states seceded before he even took office. The Confederate Constitution, drafted by slaveholding Democrats, forbade any law “denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves.” Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, a Georgia Democrat, declared that the Cornerstone of the new government rested “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” Every single Confederate state had a Democratic governor, a Democratic legislature, and a congressional delegation composed overwhelmingly of Democrats. Slavery was not some bipartisan sin of a bygone age; it was the founding platform of the Democratic Party, maintained through four decades of political dominance and ultimately four years of bloody war to preserve white supremacy.

The Birth of the Klan and the Democratic Counter-Reconstruction

After the South’s defeat, Republicans in Congress passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments the first true civil rights guarantees in the Constitution over ferocious Democratic opposition. As newly enfranchised black men began voting, they overwhelmingly supported the party of Lincoln, electing hundreds of black Republican legislators and even the first black U.S. senators. The Democratic response was not quiet reflection. It was organized terror.

The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by Confederate veterans who were, to a man, Democrats. The Klan did not function as some fringe independent club; it was the paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party, explicitly charged with suppressing the black vote and restoring white Democratic rule. In congressional testimony from the 1871 Klan hearings, South Carolina Klansmen admitted their goal was “to carry the state for the Democrats.” Republican Governor William Holden of North Carolina called the Klan “the military arm of the Democratic Party.” When Republican Ulysses S. Grant crushed the first Klan with the Enforcement Acts, it was the Democratic press that denounced him as a tyrant. The Klan dissolved only temporarily, but its political purpose was achieved: through lynchings, night rides, and wholesale election fraud, the Democratic “Solid South” was resurrected by the end of Reconstruction.

Jim Crow and the Democratic Solid South

From 1877 into the mid-20th century, the former Confederacy became a one-party state under Democratic control. It was this Democratic hegemony that erected the entire edifice of legal segregation the Jim Crow regime. Every poll tax, every literacy test crafted to disenfranchise black citizens while grandfathering in illiterate whites, every “whites only” sign hanging over a water fountain or a lunch counter, was authored and enforced by Democratic governors, Democratic state legislators, and Democratic judges.

When Homer Plessy challenged Louisiana’s segregated railcars in 1896, it was the Democratic Supreme Court majority that handed down Plessy v. Ferguson, enshrining “separate but equal” as the law of the land. Woodrow Wilson, the first southern Democrat elected president since the Civil War, re-segregated the entire federal workforce — undoing decades of Republican integration — and screened the pro-Klan film The Birth of a Nation in the White House. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the patron saint of modern liberalism, relied on southern Democratic committee chairmen to pass the New Deal and, in return, refused to support federal anti-lynching legislation his entire presidency. Those committee chairmen — men like Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo, who publicly urged “every red-blooded white man to use any means” to keep blacks from voting were not outliers. They were the leadership of the Democratic Party.

It is a historical fact that every single piece of segregationist legislation in the South was passed by Democratic legislatures. The “massive resistance” to Brown v. Board of Education in the 1950s was led by Democratic governors like Orval Faubus of Arkansas and George Wallace of Alabama, who stood in schoolhouse doors and declared “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” When civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964, the local sheriff and his deputies were committed Democrats enforcing a Democratic system. The entire apparatus of state-sponsored racial subjugation was a Democratic invention, maintained for nearly a century.

The Great Switch That Wasn’t

Faced with this damning record, the modern Left and its allies in education rely on a single escape hatch: the “party switch” narrative. According to this story, the parties magically swapped their positions on race during the civil rights era, so that yesterday’s racist Democrats became today’s Republicans overnight. It is a comforting bedtime story for those who cannot bear the cognitive dissonance of waving “Black Lives Matter” signs under the banner of the same party that gave us the Klan. But it collapses under the slightest historical scrutiny.

The central piece of evidence for the switch is that after Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Democratic “Solid South” eventually became reliably Republican. But the timeline destroys the legend. Southern congressional delegations remained overwhelmingly Democratic for decades after 1964. In 1976, Jimmy Carter, a Democrat from Georgia, swept the entire Deep South. It was not until the 1990s and 2000s that southern state legislatures flipped to Republican control — long after the civil rights battles were settled. The switch, such as it was, involved conservative southern voters gradually migrating toward the party that better represented their views on national defense, economic growth, and religious liberty, not a sudden bout of partisan racism.

Moreover, the alleged heroes of the switch narrative were often the very same segregationists who stayed Democrats their entire lives. George Wallace ran for president as a Democrat in 1972, winning primaries from Maryland to Michigan, and remained a Democrat until his death. Robert Byrd, a former Exalted Cyclops of the Klan who filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was a Democratic senator for over 50 years, celebrated by the party’s leadership as “the conscience of the Senate.” He endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008. No great conversion was required; the party simply stopped talking about his past.

The voting record on the 1964 Civil Rights Act tells the real story. In the House, a higher percentage of Republicans (80%) voted for the Act than Democrats (61%). In the Senate, 82% of Republicans supported it versus 69% of Democrats. The obstruction came overwhelmingly from southern Democrats. And when those same obstructionists remained in the Democratic fold for decades, the party smoothed their entry into the new political era not by purging them but by changing the subject.

Rebranding the Narrative

Rather than own their history and atone for it, Democratic strategists in the late 20th century executed one of the most audacious public-relations campaigns in political history: they flipped the script. If you can no longer win elections as the party of the white working man, then you must win as the party that promises to protect minorities from your opponents. But to do that, you must first convince everyone that your opponents are the real bigots.

This rebranding required a linguistic revolution. Old Democratic words like “states’ rights” and “law and order” the exact phrases Wallace and other segregationists used were recast as “racist dog whistles” whenever spoken by a Republican. Welfare programs, which had originally been designed in part to screen out black recipients at the behest of southern Democrats, were redefined as a compassionate war on poverty. Democratic mayors who presided over segregated housing and underfunded inner-city schools suddenly found their language infused with terms like “systemic racism,” a concept that conveniently faulted an abstract historical force rather than the actual policies of the urban Democratic machine. The architects of redlining in cities like Baltimore and Chicago were Democrats, but by invoking “white supremacy,” the modern Left transfers that generational guilt onto the broad back of conservatism itself.

Perhaps the most cynical rebranding came with education and criminal justice. The same party that once championed the “separate but equal” doctrine now insists that school choice and charter schools  policies disproportionately supported by black parents are a new form of segregation. Democrats who built the vast carceral state to control black populations during Jim Crow now attack Republicans over incarceration rates that were rising dramatically under Democratic mayors and a Democratic Congress. No acknowledgment is made that the 1994 Crime Bill, which supercharged mass incarceration, was Joe Biden’s signature achievement as a senator and was supported by two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus. Instead, conservative calls for law and order are labeled the “new Jim Crow.”

Blaming Conservatives Today

The new language allows Democrats to position themselves as the perpetual saviors while painting the political Right as the eternal oppressor. Any policy disagreement can be weaponized. Voter ID laws, which are common in virtually every European democracy and are supported by large majorities of black and Hispanic voters in polls, are branded the second coming of poll taxes. Opposition to racial set-asides and affirmative action is called white supremacy rather than a good-faith belief in colorblind meritocracy. Even criticizing Critical Race Theory in public schools — which teaches children to view every interaction through the lens of racial power dynamics is said to amount to “denying history,” when in fact it is the Left that denies its own history every single day.

The irony is staggering. The Democratic Party was the political entity that told black Americans for a hundred years that they were subhuman by law. It was the Democratic Party that firebombed black businesses, that rolled up voting rights with literacy tests, that commissioned the architectural plans for the segregated water fountain. And after losing the cultural argument on the merits, it is that same party that now turns to a mostly conservative Supreme Court, a conservative state legislature, or a Republican president and says, “Look what they’re doing to democracy.”

An honest conservative does not deny that racism exists in America or that some people who call themselves conservatives have committed racist acts. But the claim that racism is baked into the DNA of the conservative movement is a projection of the first order. The Republican Party was founded to end slavery. It provided the decisive votes for every major civil rights law of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Democratic Party, by contrast, must answer for the blood of millions, from the Middle Passage to the lynching tree to the segregated tenement.

It is long past time to drop the euphemisms and the linguistic trickery. The Democrats did not “evolve” on race; they simply realized that open bigotry was a losing electoral strategy, and so they rebranded their paternalism as progress and their opposition’s principles as hatred. They created the very system of racial oppression they now blame on conservatives, and they count on a pliant media and a historically illiterate public never to notice. An honest reckoning with history is the first step toward national healing. That reckoning must begin with naming the perpetrator, not rewarding its camouflage.

#Democrats #Slavery #GasLighting #JimCrow #Voting #VotingRights

Trump Administration Delivers 11 Straight Months of Zero Releases at the Border

#Illegals #Border #BorderSecurity #Trump

Another Reason Why The LEFT Hates Trump

 

Another Reason Why The LEFT Hates Trump:

For decades Democrats have sucked up to China. For decades China has gotten over on us. Bill Clinton got China into The World Trade Organization. A China spy drove for Feinstein for 20 years. A China spy was Hunter Biden's secretary. A China spy dated Eric Swalwell. Democrats have sold the US out to China for decades.

Trump went to China like a BOSS. He also got treated like a BOSS. He also got real TRADE DEALS.

ANOTHER REASON WHY THE LEFT HATES TRUMP

Basically By Donald J Trump

"They don’t hate me because I’m loud. They don’t hate me because I’m rich. They don’t even hate me because I told the Fake News media to their faces that they’re the enemy of the people. No, no, no. The Radical Left hates me for one very simple reason I exposed their decades-long sellout of the United States of America to China. I lifted the curtain, and the American people saw the whole ugly truth. While the corrupt, globalist Democrats were bowing, scraping, and filling their pockets with Chinese cash, I went to Beijing like a BOSS, got treated like a BOSS, and got real TRADE DEALS that put American workers FIRST.

Let’s be very clear. The Democrats have spent thirty years handing the keys of our country to the Chinese Communist Party. They practically gift-wrapped our industries, our technology, our jobs, and our future. And now, they’re terrified because they know I’m the only one who ever had the strength and the courage to stop them. I put America First, not China First.

Take a trip down memory lane, not the nice trips I took where I was welcomed with military parades and state dinners fit for an emperor, but the ugly, treacherous trips the Democrats took to sell us out. It started with Bill Clinton, a failed president who couldn’t even handle a cigar without a scandal, but somehow had the time to shove China into the World Trade Organization in the year 2000. The “experts,” the donors, the Davos crowd—they all said it would “liberalize” China. They said China would become our friend. The exact opposite happened. The moment Bill Clinton opened that door, China flooded our markets with cheap goods, killed millions of American manufacturing jobs, stole our intellectual property, and used the WTO as a shield to protect their predatory, state-run economic warfare. I’ve been talking about this for decades—long before I ever dreamed of running for office. I said China was eating our lunch. They called me a conspiracy theorist. Now the whole Rust Belt knows I was right. Bill Clinton didn’t just open a door for China; he opened a fire hose of economic devastation on Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The Left hates me because I called out their patron saint’s greatest scam.

But that was just the beginning. The rot goes deep, and it’s not just policy it’s literal espionage. For twenty years, a suspected Chinese spy drove Dianne Feinstein around as her personal driver. Twenty years! Think about that. A high-ranking United States Senator, with access to the most sensitive intelligence in the country, in the Senate Intelligence Committee no less, and her trusted bagman and gofer was working for the Chinese Communist Party. Incredible. The Fake News tried to bury this story like they bury everything that hurts Democrats. But we all know what happened. This driver developed close ties with the Chinese Ministry of State Security. And “DiFi” and her team just looked the other way. Either she was completely incompetent, totally compromised, or both. If that had been a Trump associate, it would have been the biggest story in the history of the world. They’d have me in handcuffs for a speeding ticket, but a Chinese spy ferrying around a top Democrat for two decades? Total silence. The Left hates me because when I bring this up, it shatters their fake narrative that only Republicans are a “threat.”

Then you have the Biden Crime Family the real corruption syndicate, not the fantasy they invented about Russia, Russia, Russia. Hunter Biden, the prodigal son who mysteriously became an international art savant and energy “expert,” had a Chinese spy as his secretary and business facilitator. The woman, Yanjun Xu, was found with Chinese military intelligence ties, and Hunter Biden was paying her through his corporate shill operation. She was, by all accounts, his handler, setting up deals that funneled millions of dollars from the Chinese energy giant CEFC into the Biden bank accounts. “The Big Guy,” Joe Biden, took a 10% cut according to whistleblower testimony. Ten percent for what? For the family name. For access. For selling out the leverage of the Vice President of the United States. Hunter didn’t speak Chinese, didn’t know energy, didn’t know anything except how to smoke crack and buy guns illegally. Yet he was being paid millions by a front company for the People’s Liberation Army. The Left and their media protectors yapped about Trump and Russia for four years, but when actual bank records show a web of Chinese money flowing into the Biden family’s pockets, they look away. I hate to say it, but Hunter was a shady operation, and Joe knew everything. They’ll never admit it, but the Left’s hatred of me is fueled by my willingness to say that the President’s son was a pawn for Chinese intelligence.

And let’s not forget the clown, “Pencil Neck” Eric Swalwell. A sitting Congressman on the House Intelligence Committee the committee, can you believe it? was dating a Chinese spy. Not just a random woman who maybe had some distant ties. A full-blown agent of influence named Christine Fang, who was openly targeting him for recruitment by the Chinese Ministry of State Security. Swalwell, who screams like a deranged lunatic about “threats to democracy,” was so busy falling for a honey trap that he was sharing intelligence with his girlfriend and helping her raise money. The FBI had to warn him. A United States Congressman, involved in the highest secrets, had to be warned by the FBI that the woman he was intimate with was a spy, and the Democrats did nothing! They kept him on the Intelligence Committee! Imagine if one of my people had done a fraction of that. They’d be in solitary confinement at Guantanamo Bay. But because Swalwell is a loud, obnoxious Left-wing ideologue, they gave him a pass. This is who screams about Trump being a Manchurian Candidate? It’s pure projection. The highest levels of the Democrat Party are so littered with Chinese assets that it looks like a Peking opera. Their hatred of me is a defense mechanism scream about Trump’s “threat” to distract from their own treasonous negligence.

For decades, they sucked up to China. Every President before me, whether a “tough-talk” Democrat or a useless, low-energy Republican, went to China and did what? They bowed. Obama bowed to the Chinese premier like a servant. Pathetic. They got nothing. They’d come back with empty photo ops and a gift bag of counterfeit iPhones. They let China dump steel, manipulate their currency, steal hundreds of billions of dollars in intellectual property, hack our businesses, and build a military on the backs of our stolen technology. They let China fix the game so they always won, and the great American middle class paid the price.

Then I came along. I’ve known China for a long time. I love China, I have tremendous respect for President Xi, a strong man who rules with an iron fist. But I put America First. They knew it. When I went to Beijing in 2017, I didn’t go as a supplicant. I went as Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world. They pulled out all the stops a ceremony in the Forbidden City, closed to outsiders for centuries, just for Melania and me. We watched opera in a palace that an emperor built. They treated me like a BOSS because they understood something the weak, pathetic globalists in Washington never did: respect only comes from strength. I didn’t bow. I stood tall. I told President Xi to his face in the most beautiful, private dinner you’ve ever seen that the trade deficit was unacceptable, that the theft must stop, and that I would put tariffs on them like they’ve never seen unless we got a deal that was FAIR and RECIPROCAL.

And what happened? The exact opposite of the Clinton-Obama-Biden disaster. I came home with the historic Phase One Trade Deal. The greatest, most comprehensive trade agreement ever made with China. They committed to purchasing $200 billion more in American goods farmers, manufacturers, energy producers all suddenly had a massive, guaranteed customer. I forced them to open their markets to our beef, our poultry, our agriculture in a way they never did. But most importantly, I forced them to stop forcing American companies to hand over their technology as the price of admission to their market. Intellectual property theft was job number one for the Chinese government, and I stopped it in its tracks. I didn’t get a nice press release; I got enforceable provisions that protected American innovation. Our farmers got huge checks, our steel mills came roaring back, and our economy was the hottest in the world.

The Left says tariffs are a tax on Americans. That’s a lie. Tariffs are a powerful weapon to level the playing field. China pays. They have no choice they need our market more than we need their cheap trinkets. When I left office, China was paying billions to the U.S. Treasury, and we were finally reversing the decades of one-sided disaster. The Democrats and their media puppets said I started a trade war. No, I finished a trade war that China had been waging against us for thirty years, and I WON.

I also made it very clear that we would no longer tolerate the Chinese military’s modern build-up using stolen American designs. I sanctioned their tech theft entities, cut off Huawei, and shut down ZTE’s backdoors. I was the first president to call out the China virus which came from Wuhan, and we all know it holding them accountable for the tragedy that swept the world. I cut off funding to the World Health Organization because they were a puppet for China. Every single action was AMERICA FIRST. No more groveling, no more spying, no more cash-and-carry access to the Oval Office like in the Biden years.

The Left hates me because I proved it could be done. They told you for generations that we had to lose to China that manufacturing was never coming back, that we had to just accept a weaker America. I proved them wrong in 48 months. The economy soared, China got put in its place, and our enemies respected us again. That is the ultimate sin in the eyes of the globalist Left. They don’t want a strong America. They want a weak America, managed by pathetic losers they can control, with Chinese spies driving their cars and Chinese cash stuffing their bank accounts.

Everything they accuse me of, they are guilty of. They call me a threat to national security, yet they’re the ones who coddle spies. They call me a friend of dictators, yet they’re the ones who make servile bows and hand over our crown jewels. Their hatred for me is really just fear. Fear that I will continue to expose them. Fear that I will return to the White House and finish the job crushing their China First agenda forever.

The American people are not stupid. They see the Feinstein driver. They see the Swalwell girlfriend. They see the Hunter Biden payoffs. They see the ruined factories while China builds islands in the South China Sea. The Choice is simple: the America Last Party of Democrat sellouts, or the America First movement that I built. I dealt with China like the BOSS I am, and when I am back in the White House, I’ll do it again. They will pay, they will respect us, and America will be great again, greater than ever before. That’s why they hate me. But believe me, that’s exactly why you love me. And together, we will WIN."

#Trump #China #Democrats