One by one, they are singing, the men who used to do dirty deeds for the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro. Nobody knows what’s going to happen, whether the United States will attack, and whether Maduro will fall. But these Venezuelans sniff change in the air. As more countries exit Venezuela’s orbit, more allegations are likely to emerge. Two of the men are in prison here in the U.S.: Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal, the former spy mastermind, and Cliver Alcala Cordones, a former general, both of whom have written letters to President Donald Trump airing bales of dirty laundry regarding narcotrafficking to the U.S. A third is a top official who has defected and is cooperating with the U.S. government, to whom I spoke a couple of months ago. Over in Bolivia, where change has already begun, information regarding that government’s involvement with narco-terrorism may soon see the light of day as well. The new president, Rodrigo Paz Pereira, elected earlier this year and sworn into office last month, had his predecessor, Luis Arce, arrested on Wednesday. Many members of Arce’s government may follow him into the clink, and they may soon start “cooperating” by airing dirty laundry as well. Arce’s Movement for Socialism party is every bit as socialist, as steeped in drug trafficking, and as Cuban-influenced as Chavez’s and Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela. They fed off each other back in the heyday of Marxism in Latin America and the Caribbean. Even Spain, currently run by the Left, may soon start producing information. Last week, the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit searched the offices of an airline run by people with close ties to Venezuela and Cuba, Plus Ultra. The firm is also close to former Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, an anti-American socialist who advocates on behalf of Venezuela and China in Madrid. The Venezuelan regime itself forms the Cartel de los Soles, a narcotrafficking, terrorist group that helped flood our streets with drugs. Maduro and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, in fact, lead it, something we already knew, but which Carbajal confirmed in his letter to Trump. But the Venezuelan government, using revenues not just from narcotics but also from the world’s largest oil reserves, which Venezuela owns, led not just domestic bad actors against the U.S., but the region’s communist states. The ideology and deep hatred of the U.S., and the planning on how to operationalize this animus, have come from Havana, but the resources come from Caracas. Grouped in a regional Marxist bloc called the Foro de Sao Paulo, founded by Cuba’s dead dictator Fidel Castro and Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, these Marxist parties swept to power in a second wave—the first was in the early 2000s—four or five years ago in Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Brazil, etc. Voters in Ibero-America are now bringing this era to a screeching halt, which means that many more narco-terrorist secrets will surely come out. In Chile on Sunday, Jose Antonio Kast romped to victory, defeating the communist candidate Jeannette Jara by 20 points. Honduras, too, held elections recently, and the candidate supported by the outgoing Marxist President Xiomara Castro, Rixi Moncada, got less than 20% of the vote in elections held Nov. 30. With 99% of the vote counted in that Central American nation, the Trump-backed candidate, Nasry Asfura, has a commanding lead. Castro and her Marxist husband, Manuel Zelaya, will try everything not to hand power to a Trumpian, but they will only be inviting trouble if they do. All these Marxist presidents who were unable to help their chosen candidates get elected, or may be about to meet the same fate, as Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, is certain to face in elections in May, came to office in our hemisphere under unusual circumstances. This new pink tidal wave was unleashed by the seismic force of Venezuelan-organized riots in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and other South American countries between 2019 and 2022. Marxist revolutionaries emerged victorious in elections in all the countries following the riots. Most of these new governments then aided Venezuela’s narco-terrorist activity. America, too, was rocked in 2020 by nationwide riots organized by Black Lives Matter, whose leaders were close to Chavez and Maduro. According to the defector who spoke with me, at least one of them received financial assistance from Chavez. If you pull the information together, a picture emerges of a Cuban-led plan to create disarray inside the U.S., both by flooding U.S. streets with drugs that would undermine the fiber of this country or with street mayhem. Venezuelan gangs and Colombian guerrillas carried out the plan. Carvajal’s letter, which confirms most of this, starts as an act of contrition: My name is Hugo Carvajal Barrios. For many years, I was a high-ranking member of the Venezuelan regime. … Today, I sit in an American prison because I voluntarily plead guilty to the crimes charged against me: a narco-terrorism conspiracy. I write to atone by telling the full truth so that the United States can protect itself from the dangers I witnessed for so many years. Carvajal clearly does not want to spend the rest of his days in an American prison and is seeking a better deal by revealing what he did. “Today, I see the need to address the American people about the reality of what the Venezuelan regime truly is—and why President Trump’s policies are not only correct, but absolutely necessary to the United States’ national security,” he wrote. Carvajal explained that he “personally witnessed how Hugo Chávez’s government became a criminal organization that is now run by Maduro, Cabello, and other senior regime officials.” The purpose of this criminal organization, “now known as the Cartel of the Suns, is to weaponize drugs against the United States,” he wrote. “The drugs that reached your cities through new routes were not accidents of corruption nor just the work of independent traffickers; they were deliberate policies coordinated by the Venezuelan regime against the United States.” This plan, he wrote, “was suggested by the Cuban regime to Chávez in the mid-2000s.” It was “successfully executed with help from FARC, ELN, Cuban operatives, and Hezbollah,” he wrote of the Narco-Marxist guerrilla groups in next-door Colombia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army. The Venezuelan regime, Carvajal wrote, “has provided weapons, passports, and impunity for these terrorist organizations to operate freely from Venezuela against the United States.” Then Carvajal let dangle that he could furnish more information: “U.S. diplomats and CIA officers were paid to assist Chávez and Maduro in remaining in power. These Americans acted as spies for Cuba and Venezuela, and some remain active to this day.” The letter by Alcala Cordones, dated Dec. 8 and revealed by Venezuelan investigative journalist Maibort Petit, confirms most of the information contained in Carvajal’s own missive. Alcala Cordones is the highest Venezuelan military leader behind bars in the U.S. He is serving a 21-year sentence after admitting to being a member of the Cartel of the Suns and collaborating with the FARC to smuggle weapons, including grenade launchers, and cocaine into the U.S. He fingers Maduro as the man in charge of international relations, especially with Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, and Cabello as the leader who maintains armed protection for the smuggling networks, but he says that the Cartel of the Suns is run by Executive Vice President Delcy Rodriguez and her brother, Jorge Rodriguez. The letter details the evolution of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua into a transnational organization with operatives in U.S. streets and the role of Cuban intelligence. The “current supreme core of Venezuelan power,” Maduro, Cabello, and the Rodriguezes, according to the letter, has ties with U.S. congressmen who were left unnamed. It closes with this warning: “The regime run by Maduro and Cabello represents a threat to the national security of the United States.” Whether this emerging picture provides a casus belli for Washington to act against Maduro by hitting targets inside Venezuela is unclear. The U.S. has been bombing boats coming out of Venezuela that it says are carrying drugs headed for the U.S. But in a way, nothing here is new. In October 2019, Cabello already put the world on notice that Venezuela’s regime would destabilize our hemisphere. “We are headed toward a Bolivarian hurricane,” Cabello warned. “It cannot be stopped by absolutely anyone. What is happening in Peru, what is happening in Chile, what is happening in Argentina, what is happening in Honduras, in Ecuador is just a little breeze. A hurricane is what is to come. It is absolutely impossible that Colombia remains how it is. It is absolutely impossible that Brazil remains how it is. There is no way.” While all the media attention here has been devoted to whether War Secretary Pete Hegseth gave an order to shoot at one of these boats a second time, the so-called double tap, while some survivors were still swimming in the Caribbean, less attention has been paid to the singing Venezuelans. That may soon be seen to have been a case of journalistic malpractice. Originally published by the Washington Examiner The post Maduro’s Narco-Terrorism Plot Against America Unraveled by Defectors appeared first on The Daily Signal.

In this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler discuss the tragic murder of director-activist Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle, and the unfortunate reaction by President Donald Trump to the slaying. Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment from today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. Jack Fowler: We are back with “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.” Victor, as we discussed before we started recording, a few issues relating to [President] Donald Trump and maybe lump them all together. Of course, the most prominent one that’s out and the most current one today is his Truth Social post about Rob Reiner, hardcore leftist, but a movie director, many popular movies and famous to some of us boomers more so as Meathead from “All in the Family.” He and his wife were allegedly murdered by his son, who was very deeply troubled, long-troubled kid … Victor Davis Hanson: He was a very talented, I think people forget that we call him Meathead, but he did do, I think, “When Harry Met Sally” and “A Few Good Men.” “A Few Good Men” was a good movie, especially that it had the unintended effect. Remember, Jack Nicholson had that outburst, “You can’t handle the truth.” And it was supposed to show a deranged military, but he inadvertently made Jack Nicholson sort of, I don’t know, a counter-hero because people would quote that all the time, “You can’t handle the truth,” but not in the context in which Reiner intended. He was a very vocal man on the Left, but I always—since I was a kid from my parents, my grandparents, and classical literature and Christianity—always followed the dictum nihil dicare nisi bonum de mortuis. “Don’t say anything unless it’s good about the recently dead.” So, when the Truth Social posting from Trump comes out, and he says he died because of Trump Derangement Syndrome or the anger, I don’t know if he’s referring to he thinks the son was angry at his father’s politics. I doubt that seriously. I don’t know where any people in Brentwood who are pro-Trump, people of any mental state. But the point is this: I think that’s what you were hinting on is you can’t get angry. I can get angry. You can get angry. We’re angry at all those people like [Reps.] Jasmine Crockett, Ilhan Omar, who said terrible things about Charlie Kirk after he was dead. But you have no moral credibility if you condemn that and you don’t condemn what Trump said. And because he said something right after the death, and it wasn’t just the death, it was kind of a violent and grotesque death like Charlie Kirk’s. He was shot in the neck and the Reiner’s throats were slit by their own son.  That’s something of a Sophoclean tragedy.  At this time, something is wrong with the Trump circle. And what I mean by that is under no circumstances when you have very, very sensitive matters should he ever tweet because what he’s doing is he’s ruining all the goodwill that is accruing to him by his counterrevolutionary and successful program. And then he puts the onus … what is [White House press secretary] Karoline Leavitt going to do now? She’s going to go out in front, and she’s going to try to answer questions on the economy? No, she’s not going to have any questions, but “What do you think about Rob Reiner?” Now, that’s a lose-lose situation, as it should be because she’s either going to say, “Well, Rob Reiner was a very crazy, obsessed anti-Trump,” and they’re gonna say, “Have you no decency? He’s dead, he was murdered, he was grotesquely murdered.” Then what is she gonna say? “Well, we wanna send condolences to the family,” and they’ll say, “But he didn’t do that.”  So, I think what they’re going to have to do is have some kind of, I don’t know what, I don’t know Trump apologists, but he’s gotta do something because what is happening with these tweets, and I know he’s gone through all of these things. I wrote a book about it that’s coming out. But you can’t throw away all these solid achievements by tweeting because what you’re doing is you’re losing the independent voter. And the president is going to submit something, and there’s going to be someone that he trusts, but somebody of sterling reputation who’s going to say, this hurts you or it doesn’t hurt you. And if it hurts you, that’s not going to go out. Otherwise, he’s going to tweet away his accomplishments. You don’t criticize people when they die, and especially you don’t criticize people who die violently, and you don’t criticize people in Oedipean fashion that are killed by their sons. It’s just a family tragedy. And I was not a big fan of his. He didn’t bother me like he did a lot of people because he always attacked Trump. He attacked Trump all the time, but there were—  Fowler: Rob Reiner. Hanson: Yep. I don’t think some of his things were very good, but I do think he made two or three good movies. I really thought his father, who lived to be, I think, 98, Carl Reiner, was very talented.  And he was part of a culture in Brentwood. If anybody’s driven through that neighborhood or visited there, it’s the most upscale, one of the most upscale in California. It’s all left wing, very big homes, O.J. [Simpson]’s former area. So. it is what it is, as they say.  You can disagree with what he said, you can do things, but I just remember very carefully everybody on the Left seemed to be ghoulish and revel in Charlie Kirk’s death, and he didn’t. He didn’t. He said something that was nice about him, how tragic it was.  And the sad thing about what I’m saying is it’s not that Trump’s not capable of it. He’s got a very kind side. He calls people up. When he sees people grieving for their children who have been killed overseas, he doesn’t look at his watch like [Joe] Biden. He looks at them. He calls them up. He’s worried about them.  I have a lot of anecdotes of people who have called me about Trump and said, “You know, I thought he didn’t care, but you know, I talked to this guy whose mother died and needed a burial, and he paid for it.”  Or, “I knew these guys were going to serve a special thing, and he knew they were going to not have tips as what, and he just went out and opened his wallet and gave him money.” I hear that all the time.  So, he needs to just get out of the news cycle.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Victor Davis Hanson: ‘You Don’t Criticize People in Oedipean Fashion That Are Killed by Their Sons’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump touted his 2025 accomplishments in a national address Wednesday night. “Tonight, after 11 months, our border is secure, inflation is stopped, wages are up, prices are down, our nation is strong, America is respected, and our country is back,” he said, “Stronger than ever before. We’re poised for an economic boom the likes of which the world has never seen.” 1. Lowering Prices Trump said the Biden administration “looted the Treasury,” driving up prices, but he is bringing them down. “Under the Biden administration, car prices rose 22% and in many states 30% or more. Gasoline rose 30 to 50%, hotel rates rose 37%, airfares rose 31%,” he said. “Now under our leadership, they are all coming down and coming down fast.” Trump is also solving the price of groceries, he said. “The price of a Thanksgiving turkey was down 33% compared to the Biden last year. The price of eggs is down 82% since March, and everything else is falling rapidly, and it’s not done yet,” he said. “But boy, are we making progress.” Wages are going up much faster than inflation, Trump said. He said tariffs are to thank for record investments, leading to jobs, in Ameica. TRUMP: 100% of All Net Job Creation Has Gone To Native-Born Americans“In the year before my election, all net creation of jobs was going to foreign migrants. Since I took office, 100% of all net job creation has gone to Americans,” touted President Trump during a speech at the… pic.twitter.com/0izISBXGJT— The Daily Signal (@DailySignal) December 18, 2025 “I’ve secured a record breaking $18 trillion of investment into the United States, which means jobs, wage increases, growth, factory openings and far greater national security,” he said. “Much of this success has been accomplished by tariffs, my favorite word tariffs, which for many decades have been used successfully by other countries against us, but not anymore. Companies know that if they build in America, there are no tariffs, and that’s why they’re coming home to the USA in record numbers.” 2. Securing the Border According to Trump, the worst thing President Joe Biden did was open the border, but he has secured it. “Our border was open, and because of this, our country was being invaded by an army of 25 million people, many who came from prisons and jails, mental institutions and insane asylums,” he said. “Starting on day one, I took immediate action to stop the invasion of our southern border,” he continued. “For the past seven months, zero illegal aliens have been allowed into our country, I think, which everyone said was absolutely impossible.” TRUMP: Zero Illegal Aliens Allowed Into US Last 7 MonthIn November 2025, zero illegal aliens were released into the interior of the United States, compared to the 7,185 released by the Border Patrol under the Biden administration in November 2024, according to @CBP. “For the… pic.twitter.com/w2Xwoh4YOY— The Daily Signal (@DailySignal) December 18, 2025 Trump said America didn’t need legislation to secure the border, just a new president. “We inherited the worst border anywhere in the world, and we quickly turned it into the strongest border in the history of our country,” he said. Trump said his administration has cracked down on cartels which smuggled drugs across the border. “They decimated the bloodthirsty foreign drug cartels,” he said. “We did that all by ourselves, with our people, and we’re so proud of it, because they were poisoning and destroying our population.” 3. Ending Eight Wars in 10 Months “I’ve restored American strength, settled eight wars in 10 months, destroyed the Iran nuclear threat and ended the war in Gaza, bringing for the first time in 3000 years, peace to the Middle East, and secured the release of the hostages, both living and dead,” Trump said. Trump touted his reforms to the U.S. military during his first year. He announced that members of military will receive “warrior dividends” of $1,776 in honor of the nation’s founding, saying the “checks are on the way.” “Nobody deserves it more than our military, and I say congratulations, everybody,” he said. “And by the way, we now have record enlistment in our military, and last year, we had among the worst recruitment numbers in our military’s history. 4. Passing One Big Beautiful Bill Act Trump said tax cuts for working families under his “One, Big Beautiful Bill” will yield massive tax refunds this spring. “Under these cuts, many families will be saving between $11,000 and $20,000 a year, and next spring is projected to be the largest tax refund season of all time because of tariffs, along with the just passed One Big, Beautiful Bill,” he said. “Next year, you will also see the results of the largest tax cuts in American history that were really accomplished through our great Big, Beautiful Bill, perhaps the most sweeping legislation ever passed in Congress.” Trump said the bill included 12 bills wrapped up in one, including no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security. ? President Trump Announces 'Warrior Dividend' For Military MembersDuring his address to the nation on Wednesday night, @POTUS announced that, in honor of America's upcoming 250th anniversary, he will be sending $1,776 to over ?1,450,000 military service members."?We made a… pic.twitter.com/Rv4MVxecCQ— The Daily Signal (@DailySignal) December 18, 2025 The post ‘Stronger Than Ever Before’: 4 Highlights From Trump’s Speech Showcasing 2025 Accomplishments appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Former special counsel Jack Smith—who pursued President Donald Trump on two fronts between the first and second term—faced his own scrutiny from House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.  Smith claimed that he had “proof beyond reasonable doubt” of Trump’s guilt. House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told reporters afterwards that his opinion of the Smith probe of Trump has not changed: “it’s political.” “I think we’ve learned some interesting things,” Jordan said, according to the Associated Press. In late 2024, the Justice Department moved to drop Smith’s case against then President-elect Trump. Smith had secured grand jury indictments against Trump regarding his challenge to the 2020 election outcome. A federal court has already dismissed the indictment accusing Trump of mishandling classified information.  Smith told the committee in his opening statement, first obtained by the Associated Press, that his team “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump illegally conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election.  He further said there was “powerful evidence” Trump broke the law in keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida. “I made my decisions in the investigation without regard to President Trump’s political association, activities, beliefs, or candidacy in the 2024 election,” Smith told the committee. “We took actions based on what the facts and the law required—the very lesson I learned early in my career as a prosecutor.” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, said Republicans are lucky Smith didn’t testify in public “because had he done so, it would have been absolutely devastating to the president and all the president’s men involved in the insurrectionary activities.”  Smith did not take any questions from reporters as he walked into the committee room for a deposition.  Smith’s lawyer, Lanny Breuer, briefed reporters after his client was in the room, however. “In today, testifying before this committee, Jack is showing tremendous courage, in light of the remarkable and unprecedented retribution campaign against him by this administration, and this White House,” Breuer said. “Let’s be clear. Jack Smith, a career prosecutor, conducted this investigation based on the facts, and based on the law, and nothing more.”  The deposition came one day after Fox News first reported on emails from FBI officials who expressed doubt about whether there was probable cause for raiding Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home for classified documents. The 2022 FBI raid occurred before Smith was appointed as special counsel.   pic.twitter.com/wsVCy5dU9n— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) December 17, 2025 An FBI official wrote, “Even as we continue down the path towards a search warrant, WFO [the Washington field office] believes that a reasonable conversation with the former president’s attorney, (stating that the FBI and DOJ are readying a search warrant, and have developed information that there are more documents at Mar a Lago), ought not to be discounted.” However, senior Justice Department officials pushed the raid forward. Recent revelations have shown that the Justice Department’s Arctic Frost operation, which Smith took over, gathered phone records of 10 Republican members of Congress. Last month, the House Judiciary Committee referred Thomas Windom, former senior assistant special counsel under Smith, to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution after Windom declined to answer almost every question from the committee’s deposition.  In an October letter asking Smith to appear before the committee, Jordan claimed that Smith’s team “sought to silence President Trump by restricting his public statements in the case, conducted an unnecessary and abusive raid of his residence, attempted to improperly pressure defense counsel with the promise of political patronage, and manipulated key evidence in the investigation.” The post Amid New Arctic Frost Revelations, House Investigators Scrutinize Jack Smith 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. A lot of officials in the Trump Cabinet are under a lot of criticism, as we’d expect, from the Left. But one has, I think, both got more criticism and more unfair criticism than any other Cabinet member. And that’s Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war—the newly renamed Department of Defense. Let’s just review a little bit of his record because it does not justify the level of invective that the Left, and even some people on the Right in Congress and the Republican Party, have unfairly attacked him. We were told during the Biden administration that the recruitment for the Air Force, the Army, the Navy, and even in one case, I think one year, the Marines, was off some 40,000 to 50,000 recruits. And the Pentagon’s reaction under Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was, as we heard this echoed by a lot of the four-star admirals and generals, well, people are out of shape. They’re in gangs. They take drugs. They are wanted by private enterprise. We have to compete with all of the excuses other than the real cause. The real cause was, as Pete Hegseth said when he came in, that people felt that the military was not emphasizing combat, battlefield efficacy. It was turning into a social justice “program.” The subtext of Pete Hegseth’s point was that there was a particular demographic, white males from rural and often southern locales. They had died at twice their numbers in the demographic in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they weren’t joining. Some of them were not joining because of the 8,500, maybe 8,000-8,500, that had natural immunity from prior COVID-19 infections. And yet, they did not want this experimental mRNA vaccine, and they were drummed out en masse. The majority of those fit this demographic. The others felt that under the DEI obsessions with race and sexual orientation and gender, that people would be recruited, retained, promoted on criteria other than battlefield efficacy. So, they just stayed away from what they felt was a hostile environment. Didn’t help when then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin told the nation before Congress that they were going to invest white supremacy following the death of George Floyd. That’s over with. There is a record number of Army recruits. The military has met all of its recruiting. That is equivalent to the dramatic revolution on the southern border. Nobody thought we could close the border. We did. Nobody thought we could get recruitment back. Pete Hegseth did. The other thing, very importantly: We have procurement that we were focused largely, not entirely, but on a few big conglomerates. These were companies that, over the years, had consolidated dozens of defense contractors, who had famous names in World War II. But now they were Lockheed, General Dynamics, Northrop, Raytheon, etc. And we were buying few platforms—$14 billion carriers, $120 million F-22s, billion-dollar frigates, etc. But our enemies were building lots of things. They were taking our approach to World War II when the United States just flooded the zone with Thunderbolt P-47 fighters, P-51 fighters, Essex carriers, escort carriers, light carriers, Sherman tanks. Good enough. But just swarm the enemy. We weren’t doing that. So, one of the things that Hegseth has tried to do is look toward a wider variety of startup, off-the-shelf companies that make cheaper products in greater quantity. A million drones they have announced. That’s new. The third thing is, yes, it was good to worry about American safety overseas, and that’s why, ostensibly, after 9/11, we went into Afghanistan, Iraq, or we take out the nuclear—but if you look, since 1990, when we first had figures, there’s some 900,000 people who have overdosed or killed themselves from foreign imported opiates, and particularly fentanyl, often disguised as designer drugs intended to kill Americans through Chinese agency and cartel fabrication in I guess we would call them pill factories in Mexico and parts of Latin America. So, these drug interdictions are saving American lives. And he’s saying to the nation, it doesn’t do any good to spend billions of dollars and defend the borders and intervene all over the world if in your backyard you’re losing more people from all the battles combined since World War II. More than Vietnam, more than Korea, more than Iraq, more than the first Gulf War, more than Afghanistan—900,000 dead, 75,000 to 80,000 a year. For now, we’re getting close to the 35th year of this. And he’s trying to stop that. He ended, as I said, DEI, which was amazing because what had happened—the Left had always despised the Pentagon. They had always tried to rake the generals over the coals. We knew that stereotype of the radical Democratic Party. But the last 10 years, especially under the Obama administration, they said: Wait, wait, wait, wait. They have the chain of command. They don’t have to argue in Congress. They don’t have to get a bill passed. All we have to do is bring these generals and admirals in here, especially under a Democratic Obama or Biden administration, and say, you’re gonna do this, and you’re gonna do this. Abortion. You’re gonna make that base have abortion to everybody. DEI, you’re gonna make that artillery unit have—so, they could get an instant fiat right through the chain of command. And all of a sudden, Pete Hegseth came in and said: You’re abusing the military for your political agenda. We’re not gonna do it anymore. A couple of other things: Pete Hegseth, compared to what? I didn’t hear anybody say that Lloyd Austin might have had a conflict of interest coming out of Raytheon right into the secretary of defense. Was that a good paradigm that we’re doing? Generals go out of the Pentagon, they go to defense contractors, then they rely on their former subordinates for, maybe, advice about which weapon systems to buy, and then they often go back into government in retirement, and then they’ll go back again to these defense? What Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex. And Lloyd Austin was AWOL for seven days. We never knew where he was. Did anybody suggest he should step down? No. So, this is political. And the calls for Pete Hegseth to step down—it’s ridiculous. And finally, about the drug interdiction. We’ve had about 30 of these. Are we all suffering from collective amnesia? President Barack Obama, on the Pakistani-Afghan border, Somalia, somewhat in Libya, in Afghanistan, in Syria, Iraq, was a master of Predator drone assassinations. He didn’t kill, I don’t know, 60 or 70 narco-terrorists on 30 boats or more. He killed over 500 people, including a 16-year-old U.S. citizen. And when he was asked about this, according to Mark Halperin’s co-authored book, he said: You know, I never really knew that I was pretty good at killing. Pretty good at killing. It suited me. That’s what Obama said. He also said at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he joked about using Predators and killing people. He said, if people wanted to date his daughter, they better be careful because of Predators. In other words, that his hallmark, his brand, had been Predator assassination. That’s kind of a very light way of approaching human assassination, if you ask me. What am I getting at? If you look at what Pete Hegseth has actually done, it was long overdue, and he’s doing it very well. And the criticism against him has two themes: It’s entirely political, and it’s not symmetric. Everything they said about Pete Hegseth in a negative context could have been applied to both the Obama and Biden administration, and much more egregiously. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Hegseth Did What Biden Called ‘Impossible’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.