The Heritage Foundation launched a new ad campaign Tuesday posing a new strategy and a provocative idea for 2026: “The Golden Age is a choice.” The Washington-based think tank’s mission has not changed, but their strategy has shifted. The campaign introduces what the influential conservative organization calls “Heritage 2.0.” Heritage 2.0 will focus on four cornerstones: The American Family The Dignity of Work and the Future of Free Enterprise National Security The American Heritage and Citizenship The national ad campaign, “Our Heritage is Our Future,” launched Tuesday and will be featured later this month at Turning Point USA’s America Fest in Phoenix, Arizona. It will also air this Sunday during CBS News’ interview with Erika Kirk, widow of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. “It’s a choice to prioritize families and empower local communities,” reads the ad, accompanied by soaring music and a montage of iconic American scenes. “A choice to find dignity in prosperous and honorable work. A choice to prioritize our nation’s safety, protecting our homeland and standing strong against foreign threats. A choice to cherish the greatest gift we’ve been given—waking up every day an American citizen.” The Golden Age is a choice. Let's choose well. pic.twitter.com/v6RdfEGzrA— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) December 8, 2025 The goal of the ad is to “reset and reframe the conversation on what’s important as a movement—and reinforce Heritage’s role as the leader of that movement,” The Heritage Foundation shared with The Daily Signal. The ad also emphasizes, “our heritage is our future,” which has been the messaging from Heritage leading up to this launch. Last month, Heritage Foundation President Dr. Kevin Roberts published a piece in The Daily Signal titled, “4 Questions Every Conservative Should Be Asking Right Now,” which foreshadowed the unveiling of Heritage 2.0. Here Are 4 Questions Every Conservative Should Be Asking Right Now: What does it mean to be a flourishing American family?What does it mean to honor the dignity of work and secure the future of free enterprise?What does it mean to have true national security?What does it…— The Daily Signal (@DailySignal) December 1, 2025 This campaign shows The Heritage Foundation on offense. It previews the year ahead, America’s 250th, and major policy initiatives the organization is gearing up to launch. Heritage 2.0 aims to remind the American people that “the key to our future can be found in the principles of our founding.” The post EXCLUSIVE: The Heritage Foundation to Promote Golden Age Vision in New National Campaign appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. This week we have had the 84th anniversary of the surprise attack at seven in the morning on Dec. 7, 1941. And then, given that we’re in the era of revisionism, especially about World War II, I think it’s wise if we just review what Pearl Harbor was about. Remember, the United States was not at war. The war had broken out in Europe on Sept. 1, 1939. So, all of the last four months of ’39, all of ’40, and most of ’41, we’re talking almost two and a half years, the United States had watched the Germans absorb most of Western Europe and the Balkans, and had been in Russia. And at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, they were at the gates of Moscow. Literally, at the first subway station. So, it seemed that they would take Russia. Meanwhile, the Japanese had done two things. They had invaded China, again, a second time in 1937. And they had half of what is now China under Japanese control, in addition to what is now South and North Korea. And remember that the European colonial powers—the Netherlands and France—had ceased to exist as independent countries. So, their colonial possessions in the Pacific—specifically the breadbasket of Asia, in the Mekong Delta of Southeast Asia, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam—were no longer under independent French control. And the Japanese had absorbed them. But more importantly, what is now Indonesia, then called the Dutch East Indies—the Dutch had control of these islands. They were very rich in oil. The Dutch Shell oil company had substantial oil wells there. And the Japanese wanted to absorb those. It was that context that they attacked us. We didn’t attack them. We knew that war was coming. We wanted to deter them by beefing up the Philippines and moving the headquarters of the Seventh Fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, which President Franklin Roosevelt had done. Why did they attack? They said that they did not want to attack. They were in the process of negotiating a peace settlement. They said that we had cut off their oil exports. And we had because we had no other mechanism to convince them to get out of China, it was not their territory, to get out of Korea, to get out of Southeast Asia, and to not absorb the Dutch East Indies. They had refused on all of those accounts and said, yet, we will find a peaceful solution, as they planned the attack. The attack happened at seven in the morning, deliberately, on a Sunday morning when people were either at church or still asleep from Saturday night partying. And they came out of the rising sun. Two waves. And they destroyed four battleships and injured, or just—I don’t wanna say injured, they were inanimate objects. But they disabled four that sunk to the shallow bottom of Pearl Harbor. The three carriers—the Saratoga, the Lexington, and the Enterprise—were not there. That was a gift because had they been, we would’ve had no naval air power in the Pacific. The other thing to remember about this attack, they did not order a third strike. Had they done that, they could have wiped out the oil refinery tanks, aviation fuel, and naval fuel for a year. They did not hit the machine repair shops. And they didn’t mop up and completely destroy all of the aircraft or ships. And the battleships that they did take out were of World War I vintage. So, in other words, these ships, had they steamed out of Pearl Harbor and met six carriers, over 300 planes on the high seas, they may have been sunk very easily on the high seas. And we would’ve lost 2,400 Americans, but perhaps 10,000. So, it was a dramatic wake-up call to us. And we did declare war the next day on Japan. And then Germany and Italy and their allies declared war on us, as did Japan, on Dec. 11. A couple of final thoughts about Pearl Harbor. Don’t believe a lot of the revisionism that has occurred. The United States did not provoke Japan, No. 1. Japan provoked the United States by attacking at a time of peace, thinking—can you imagine this?—that they would so injure us, and we were so disarmed, our army was about the size of Portugal when the war broke out in Europe. And their fleet in the Pacific was much larger than our fleet in the Pacific. But they thought that we would get into a fetal position and beg. They felt, for a piece, because we had not entered on the side of our ally, Britain. And Britain was the only Allied power, other than the Soviet Union, that they worried about. The second thing is, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto was often made into a folk hero, sort of an intellectual, an artiste, who was reluctantly going to war. He said, well, you know, I can raise havoc for six months. But I can’t promise anything. You know. Or sometimes it’s attributed to Yamamoto, sometimes to Adm. Chuichi Nagumo, sometimes it’s made up, but the phrase, “I’ve awakened a sleeping dragon. And I can’t account for what he’ll do when he is active.” Meaning, the United States was mobilized. But Yamamoto had said to the military government in Tokyo, if you don’t let me attack Pearl Harbor, I’m gonna resign. And this is the only solution to our problem as a military one, to shock these Americans. And they’re weak and they’re decadent. Yamamoto had been to the United States. Gen. Hideki Tojo had been to the United States. Their foreign minister had been an exchange student in Oregon. So, they thought that we, having acquaintance with the United States, were decadent, coming out of the Depression, and not a serious people. And they made a serious miscalculation. Another myth about Pearl Harbor is that the Japanese were somehow victimized, that they really didn’t wanna go to war. No, no, no, no, no. They were the most vicious of all the belligerents, in some sense. If you use a simple calculation, what was the size of one of the belligerent armies? And how many people did they kill? And how many people did they lose? If you look at the Japanese Imperial Navy and Army, and given its size and given the number of belligerents, combatants had lost and civilians versus how many they killed, they were more lethal than either the Russians on our side or the Germans on the other side. About 2.5 million Japanese were killed. They killed 16 to 20 million people in China, civilians and combatants. They killed probably another 3 million to 4 million people in Asia, whether that’s the Burma campaign or Southeast Asia or the Philippines. And then, in addition, in the Pacific, and Allied troops, Australians, British Americans, they probably killed another 300,000 to 400,000, minimum. Japanese military was the most vicious and the most lethal force, in some sense, in World War II, in a strictly military sense. It was a vicious force, and only the bravery of the United States military stopped it. And that effort began at Pearl Harbor, when Japan, for no reason, attacked us, and we reacted accordingly and made them pay for one of the stupidest blunders in the history of the Japanese nation. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post America Didn’t Provoke Japan—Here’s What Really Led to Pearl Harbor appeared first on The Daily Signal.

An illegal alien from El Salvador shot a civilian and multiple police officers in Omaha, Nebraska last week.   Juan Ayala Ramos, 28, is reported to have randomly shot 61-year-old Michael Kasper, critically injuring the man, outside a grocery store in Omaha as Kasper was loading groceries into his vehicle.   Using his license plate number, police tracked Ayala Ramos to a local QuikTrip gas station where he barricaded himself in the bathroom. Body camera footage shows the Salvador national exiting a bathroom stall and firing at the police officers. Police returned fire, killing Ayala Ramos.   Following the shooting, four police officers were treated for non-life-threatening injuries, according to the Department of Homeland Security.   “This violent criminal illegal from El Salvador shot four police officers and a 61-year-old man in cold-blood in Omaha on Dec. 3. Despite multiple previous criminal arrests, he remained at large in American communities,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, said.   Ayala Ramos’ criminal record included assault by strangulation in 2019 and burglary and possession of a stolen firearm in 2021, according to DHS.   “DHS sends our condolences to Michael Kasper, who is in serious condition, and all officers involved in these horrific attacks and prayers for a full recovery,” McLaughlin said. “We are thankful for the Omaha Police Department for their brave actions to stop this criminal’s shooting rampage.”    Ayala Ramos entered the U.S. illegally in June 2007 as an unaccompanied minor. Later the same year, DHS reports that an “immigration judge administratively closed his removal case.”   A total of six police officers were involved in the incident, according to the Omaha Police Department, three of whom sustained gunshot wounds and another a shrapnel injury.   Police officers involved in the shooting in Omaha shooting on Dec. 3. From left to right and top to bottom: Sergeant Emilio Luna, Detective Brock Rengo, Detective Jordan Brandt, Detective Kyle Graber, Detective Christopher Brown, and Sergeant Jonathon Holtrop. The incident comes as the Trump administration continues its aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration. Border czar Tom Homan and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem are prioritizing the arrest and removal of criminal illegal aliens. DHS reports that 70% of the illegal aliens arrested since the start of the second Trump administration have either been charged with or convicted of a crime inside the U.S.   The post EXCLUSIVE: Illegal Alien Involved in Shooting of 4 Police Officers and a Civilian   appeared first on The Daily Signal.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary responded to a report saying he is putting off the review of the abortion drug, mifepristone. “We do an ongoing review, but we’re also engaging in a robust study that can serve to validate or not validate other numbers that have been put out there in the literature,” he told The Daily Signal in an exclusive interview.  Makary and Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have pledged to do a review of the safety of abortion drugs following a study from Ethics and Public Policy Center which showed 11% of women experience adverse effects after taking the pill regimen. Bloomberg reported that Makary is slow walking the review, prompting calls from leading pro-life groups for him to be removed from his post.  Makary said he is personally responsible for the review.  ”Ultimately, I’m responsible, and so this analysis is going to be done under my auspices, and it’ll be reported up to me,” he said, “and I’m going to be involved.”  The FDA is currently in the “data acquisition phase” of the abortion pill review.  “Appropriately, many members of Congress have said, ‘Hey, this is a good time to check in and do a robust study.’ So, part of a robust study is data acquisition,” he said. “And so, we’re in that data acquisition phase to get the right data to be able to do this study.”  Makary said he is unable to predict the “results or the timeframe” of the review.  “The shutdown was a little bit of a setback in that, but we’re gonna do it and whenever the results are available,” he said, “we’re gonna make them public.”  He laid out the plan for the review. Once the data has finished coming in, the FDA will review it and ensure there are no missing data fields that change the way the analysis is designed.  “If there are, then you change the design of the study and you account for how the landscape of the data actually is and the way it presents,” he said. “And then you look at the preliminary exploratory results, and then you change the analysis to account for confounding variables.”  Next, the FDA will “repeat and validate.”  “These are all routine steps in robust data analysis,” he said. “Studies are often repeated, done by multiple reviewers or statisticians. So, we’re going to do it the right way. And look, I know there are a lot of voices in this space, but I’m committed to doing this the right way.”  The former Johns Hopkins professor blamed the rumor mill for Bloomberg’s story saying he has slow walked the mifepristone review.  “There’s a lot of rumors that are circulating out there,” he said. “We live in a very partisan time, and so you’re going to see the echo chambers of social media sort of magnify rumors, things that are just not true. There has been an ongoing review of mifepristone.”  The Risk Evaluation & Mitigation Strategies, or REMS, policy already requires the FDA to perform an ongoing review of medication, Makary said.  “There’s always an ongoing review of that medication, and we need to be open to the fact that maybe there’s a new drug interaction that was not appreciated,” he said.  Makary said it’s possible “there’s a complication that was not recognized previously” with the abortion pill. What the FDA finds in the study will join the “broader discussion nationally,” he said.  “We’re not going to decide what the results are before we’ve done the study,” he said. “We’re doing the study the right way. And when you do the study the right way, and I’ve done dozens of these studies as a Johns Hopkins professor, you gotta do the studies in data the right way with the right pace.”  The Ethics & Public Police Center study found that about 11% of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion. This has led to calls to reinstate the in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone. In April 2021, the Biden administration’s FDA stopped requiring that abortion drugs be dispensed to women in person, which allowed women to receive them through telehealth appointments and by mail. The FDA has not enforced the in-person dispensing requirement ever since. Seven out of 10 American voters say they don’t think it’s safe for abortion drugs to be sent via mail, according to a McLaughlin & Associates poll.  When asked by The Daily Signal if it’s safe for women to take the abortion pill at home without seeing a doctor first, Makary said the Ethics & Public Police Center study “was done in claims data, so it didn’t have granularity into the patient characteristics in a way that many researchers would want to have.”  “That’s one of the reasons why we are doing a bigger, more robust study,” he said.  The FDA approved a second generic version of the abortion pill on Oct. 2, shortly before the government shutdown, another move which sparked pro-life backlash. Makary said the FDA had to approve the drug or get sued.  “There’s a law that requires the FDA to approve a molecule if it’s similar to a branded molecule, so we had no discretion,” Makary told The Daily Signal. “If we chose to look at that application and say, no, we’re not going to approve this, we’d 100% get sued, and we’d 100% lose.” “It would all happen very quickly because the law is very clear now with drugs that we approve as new branded drugs,” he said. “It’s a very different law. So we have discretion to weigh risks and benefits. But when it comes to generic compounds, the law is pretty clear.”  The post EXCLUSIVE: Makary Responds to Report Saying He Slow Walked Abortion Pill Safety Review  appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Poland is no stranger to conflict with Russia. After World War II, Poland and other Slavic European nations spent more than a decade battling Russian aggression.   “It was a tragic, tragic struggle against Russians and their totalitarian rule,” Deputy Speaker of Poland’s Parliament Krzysztof Bosak explained during an interview with The Daily Signal, adding that the Polish people had the “will to fight.”  While a long way from reaching a decade, it has been nearly four years since Russia launched its full -scale invasion of Ukraine, and when considering how long the war between Russia and Ukraine should be permitted to continue, Bosak says “this is not the decision of any other nation than Ukraine.”   “This is up to them to decide how long they are going to fight, and for other nations and other countries to decide how long they are going to support Ukraine, and to what … extent,” the politically conservative Polish leader said.   Deputy Speaker of Poland’s Parliament Krzysztof Bosak delivers a speech in Warsaw, Poland, Oct. 15, 2023. (REUTERS/Lukasz Glowala) When considering if a long, even 10-year, conflict against Russia would be worth the fight, Bosak says that if the alternative is Russia conquering other countries, “it’s better to stop [Russia] in Ukraine.” On the other hand, it would be worth Ukraine giving up a little bit of land for a “peaceful coexistence” with Russia, he said.   The issue, according to Bosak, is that “nobody believes” giving Russia some Ukrainian territory is a “true alternative” to create lasting peace in the region.   “Russian strategy is always about extending their borders, their sphere of influence,” Bosak said.   “They have imperialism in their political DNA,” he continued, adding that in the past 100 years, when Russia has agreed to peace, it has only been to prepare for another war.   Efforts to Reach a Peace Deal President Donald Trump has been working to secure a peace deal to end the war between Russia and Ukraine since he returned to office in January. In November, Trump announced a 28-point plan for peace between Russia and Ukraine that would give the Crimea Peninsula and the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk to Russia. It would further declare current battle lines as the new borders of Ukraine and Russia.   As recently as Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy affirmed he will not agree to any plan that involves ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia.   “Do we consider ceding any territories? According to the law we don’t have such right,” Zelenskyy told reporters in a WhatsApp chat on Monday night, according to Politico.   “According to Ukraine’s law, our constitution, international law, and to be frank, we don’t have a moral right either,” Zelenskyy added.   Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it clear he will not agree to a deal that does not include Russia receiving at least some Ukrainian territory.   Putin said he believes Trump’s 28-point plan “could form the basis for a final peace settlement,” but neither he nor Zelenskyy endorsed it in its entirety.  Even if Trump is able to get Putin to agree to a deal, not only Ukraine, but also the Europeans will have to agree as well, Bosak said.   Russia Has ‘Upper Hand’ During an interview with Politico’s Dasha Burns on Monday, Trump said Russia has always had the “upper hand” in the fight because it is much larger than Ukraine.   “I give the people of Ukraine and the military of Ukraine tremendous credit for the, you know, bravery and for the fighting and all of that. But you know, at some point, size will win, generally,” Trump said.   The Trump administration rolled out a new 33-page national security strategy in recent days that addresses the U.S. relationship with Europe, and specifically the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.   It is the priority of the U.S., according to the newly released strategy, “to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, in order to stabilize European economies, prevent unintended escalation or expansion of the war, and reestablish strategic stability with Russia, as well as to enable the post-hostilities Reconstruction of Ukraine to enable its survival as a viable state.”   Trump has repeatedly stressed he wants “hostilities” between Russia and Ukraine to end quickly, and despite both Russian and Ukrainian leaders expressing a desire to see the war end, neither Putin or Zelenskyy have indicated they are ready to compromise on the issue of territory.   The post How Long Could the War Between Russia and Ukraine Last? Polish Leader Provides Insight   appeared first on The Daily Signal.