Jamey Johnson and his wife, Brittney Johnson, are giving back. Over the years, it’s no secret that Jamey Johnson has left his mark on country music. The “In Color” singer is a prolific songwriter and an immensely talented singer, but he’s much more than an artist. Since arriving in Nashville in 2002, Jamey Johnson has been committed to making it in the music industry, but did not want to lose touch with himself, and made it a priority to give back when he could. Johnson helped start the Nikki Mitchell Foundation for pancreatic cancer after his good friend passed away from the disease. Johnson also has a close relationship with Toys for Tots, giving back to the Marine Corps, which holds a special connection for him, given that he served for eight years. While those are two organizations that Johnson has close ties to, his charitable efforts do not end there. He’s also helped advance Toby Keith’s OK Kids Korral, Feherty’s Troops First Foundation, Sisters on the Fly “Sister Corp”, East Kentucky Dream Center, and more. Now, Johnson wants to establish an organization in his name that will continue to support established charities, such as the ones mentioned above. Partnering with his bride, Brittney, the two hope to provide funding for these various organizations, as giving back has been a significant building block in their relationship.  “Volunteer work has always been an important part of my life. One of the things I admired most about Jamey when we first met was his massive and generous heart. We share a love for helping people, and I think that has been an important part of our relationship from the beginning.” Brittney shared in a press statement. The Johnsons’ fund, officially dubbed the Give It Away Foundation, is named after, you guessed it, the hit George Strait song released in 2006. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jamey Johnson (@jameyjohnsonofficial) “Give It Away,” while made famous by The King, was penned by Johnson, Bill Anderson, and Buddy Cannon. After the song’s release, “Give It Away” won Song of the Year at both the Country Music Association Awards and the Academy of Country Music Awards. Johnson shared that when considering the name of the fund, he wanted it to reflect his music career as well. After thinking about it, “Give It Away” was the perfect song to double as the foundation/fund’s name. “I laughed when we were talking about what the name of our foundation was going to be. At first, we thought it should be the In Color fund, and then I thought, ‘Wait a minute! I have a better song than that!’ Give It Away is the perfect name for any fund. It is exactly what we are doing with the money.” Johnson’s mission statement clearly and concisely states the foundation’s mission and the group it aims to help. “Give it Away is dedicated to supporting well-managed charities that are close to our heart, while impacting lives within the community during times of crisis.” The nonprofit organization is dedicated to assisting communities in crisis and supporting well-managed charities. Some of the causes they support include Disaster relief, hunger relief, cancer research, and military support, which make up only a portion of the fund’s mission. This is an incredible cause, and it’s always great to see country stars giving back. We’ve seen a lot of that lately, given the numerous Texas flood relief concerts; this is another example of how the country music genre consistently goes above and beyond to give back to causes that are near and dear to their hearts. Jamey Johnson fans, if you’re looking to support, Johnson will donate a dollar for every ticket sold at participating shows to his fund. He will donate all proceeds from the sale of a special T-shirt to his fund, which is available for purchase at his shows and online. Before you go, it only feels right to fire up Johnson’s performance of “Give It Away” from the 2024 CMA Awards. The post Jamey Johnson & His Wife Launch The “Give It Away Fund,” Providing Support To “Communities Experiencing Natural Disasters & Other Tragedies” first appeared on Whiskey Riff.

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Politics The Ben Franklin Fellowship’s State Department Renovation Conservative career officials are fighting to break the globalist-woke mindset that is deeply ingrained in the U.S. foreign affairs bureaucracy. Credit: image via Shutterstock In the early 1980s, the Federalist Society was established to intellectually counter the judicial activism agenda that had captured America’s legal profession. To many conservatives it seemed a hopeless endeavor, but FedSoc founders were determined to win back the country’s court system, law schools, and legal associations that had largely been abandoned to the liberal-left and radical legal activists. With time, they made great progress. In the same spirit, foreign policy conservatives have created an organization called the Ben Franklin Fellowship (BFF), which is engaged in challenging the mindset that dominates among career officers at the State Department. Fed up with the globalist and woke ideologies that pervade State, a group of retired foreign service officers (FSOs) launched BFF in early 2024. BFF took the iconic name of Dr. Franklin, America’s first envoy, as a symbolic call to return to foreign policy common-sense: U.S. national interests, sovereignty, secure borders, and meritocracy—not DEI and wokeism—in diplomatic service.  The ambitious plan was to reassert venerable but long-ignored traditional American ideas and values within the foreign affairs bureaucracy. BFF organizers undertook this daunting effort by quietly networking like-minded career officers. The concept was simple enough, and the new group was (and still is) a distinct minority of career officers, but it is a growing enterprise. None of this is to suggest that State’s Goliath mindset is about to be toppled. The old crushing orthodoxies still rule inside Foggy Bottom, despite the arrival of the second Donald Trump presidency. BFF founders launched their initiative by proclaiming eight guiding foreign policy principles. The principles are a framework for a big-tent community that can accommodate different right-of-center U.S. foreign policy schools, but anchored in hard-headed international realism and a conservative view of the world. BFF’s broad principles cannot spell out all the specific answers for Washington’s current thorny international challenges, like those in Ukraine, China, and the Middle East, but as a declaration of convictions, they set an important new foundation for a new career culture inside Foggy Bottom. The principles are a rejection of Wilsonianism and the foolhardiness of past U.S. foreign adventurism that unwisely carried the State Department into fruitless missions of nation-building, forever wars, and global social work. The principles call for federal government thrift in our age of massive public debt; they call for secure borders and policies that discourage mass migration, so that we can take care of our own ailing society and economy while others look to theirs. Perhaps most importantly, the principles also make a clarion call for meritocracy: rejecting DEI favoritism, treating employees as individuals, and aligning State with the Constitution and civil rights law on employment practices. All of these concepts offer a roadmap that can help guide the much-needed reforms inside the State Department and shape a more nimble and effective organization. It is BFF’s campaign for meritocracy and rejection of DEI favoritism that particularly riles State’s career old guard. During the Biden administration, senior careerists enthusiastically joined with former Secretary of State Antony Blinken to forcefully inject DEI into all aspects of U.S. diplomacy. Blinken’s DEI indoctrination, like all radical ideological campaigns, predictably punished skeptical and noncompliant employees. Two mid-ranked FSOs recounted:  This ideology metastasized into every aspect of the department’s operations, forcing employees to demonstrate the DEIA precept to the satisfaction of the Foreign Service promotion boards by endorsing, promoting, and implementing policies that violate their personal beliefs, professional ethics, and that are at odds with the views of the majority of Americans. Blinken’s DEI overreach made a significant number of State employees ripe for BFF recruiting. Starting early in 2024, BFF’s personal networks inside Foggy Bottom linked at first a handful of like-minded employees, then dozens, and later hundreds of State’s active-duty and retired career officials. Despite the department’s dominant liberal tendencies, conservatives emerged and were often joined by moderates, who realized how alienating and extreme Blinken’s policies actually were; many observed that only a right-of-center approach had the intellectual courage and moral firepower to actually fight the scourge of wokeism.  It was the experience of the first Trump administration that underscored for the BFF founders the dire need to have a network of conservative career officers inside Foggy Bottom. For decades, progressive-liberals who dominate academia, the media, and nearly every other national institution maintained robust professional alliances, connecting senior and mid-ranked State career personnel with Washington’s left-of-center foreign policy institutes, large universities, congressional staff, and diplomatic associations. Although Washington has powerful conservative public policy foundations, they have been largely inept in this kind of networking. They thought there was nobody to find, but they did not search hard enough.  Consider how badly things went upon Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s arrival in Foggy Bottom in 2017. He had virtually no known senior State career officials to help him run the railroad, much less to implement his aggressive reform agenda. Predictably, Tillerson floundered because of it, and the experience exposed the myth, again, that the senior career bureaucracy at State was composed of officials dedicated to making the secretary successful. In fact, they wanted him to fail. When Mike Pompeo next assumed the helm, he also tried to nurture allies among senior professionals, but as the former secretary’s memoir makes clear, a hostile career bureaucracy also thwarted him.  This failure, premised on the good faith of career bureaucrats, was a mistake not repeated in 2025. BFF was a going concern before the arrival of the second Trump administration and was ready to play a supportive role. BFF’s cadre of mid-level and senior diplomats included many prepared to work enthusiastically with Secretary of State Marco Rubio on his first day. Legal tools such as the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 authorized the president to select his own “acting” officials from the career ranks, instead of relying on those Blinken left in place, and BFF’s expanding network presented a pool of many highly qualified career officials for the Seventh Floor to consider.  Many BFF members were elevated into senior and influential positions to immediately assist Secretary Marco Rubio. Career officials provided the secretary valuable insights on how State’s offices and bureaus actually did business, and how to implement his reorganization project. Not surprisingly, Rubio’s critics charge that BFF has helped “politicize” the career ranks, conveniently ignoring the history of the liberal establishment, with its long-established networks and nepotism.  The Ben Franklin Fellowship is a non-partisan educational and membership foundation. It does not “engage in politics,” and its members were not motivated by “partisanship” in assisting the Trump administration. However, BFF members saw in Secretary Rubio and his leadership team, such as Deputy Secretary Chris Landau and Counselor Mike Needham, officials deeply committed to first principles and enduring American values.  BFF supports the constitutional order that unequivocally requires career State employees to carry out the policies of the sitting president, whoever that may be. Professional diplomats, like military officers, are sworn to uphold the Constitution and must support their commander in chief in carrying out his mission or resign. They should not leak documents to a hostile media, drag their feet in implementing policy, or deliberately undermine a sitting chief executive—but everyone knows it happens.  The “resistance” State exhibited during both Trump administrations makes it abundantly clear that the globalist-woke bureaucracy has its own agenda. The public disapproval expressed by some 1,000 State employees to Trump’s legal bans on certain categories of migrants in the first administration and the reaction to Rubio’s recent layoffs inside Foggy Bottom speak volumes. By comparison, there was no significant public expression of protest inside State to Blinken’s woke policies or Biden’s open borders, although many career officers bitterly opposed them.  Typically, the old-guard State Department hiring machinery seeks new diplomats who are in step with the ingrained orthodoxies. Just as the Federalist Society understood that the battle of ideas begins at America’s law schools, BFF recognizes that reshaping State’s culture requires a new approach to the recruitment of diplomats that doesn’t concentrate on woke universities and similar “elite” foreign policy schools. These institutions send many graduates (not all) into the foreign policy profession deeply imbued with a worldview that is woke, anti-capitalist, and globalist—and often hostile to the U.S. national interest. In response, BFF is finding ways to bring new blood into the foreign policy profession. The BFF recruiting project is reaching out to bright young Americans from overlooked communities across our country, who are often thriving in another universe of higher learning centers, ignored or scorned by the Washington establishment. These are universities where the focus is still on American exceptionalism, service, and optimism—and their graduates are drastically underrepresented inside State.  BFF organizers and members are prepared to play the long game in challenging State’s self-perpetuating old order. It is still a hard slog, but BFF draws inspiration from the example of Ben Franklin’s consequential life: Very modest beginnings carried forward with principle, honor, and goodwill—and a passion for America—can end in great success.  The post The Ben Franklin Fellowship’s State Department Renovation appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs The U.S. Should Be Skeptical about ‘Iran-Backed’ Militants Misleading Israeli narratives could push Washington toward war.  Israel carried out airstrikes on Thursday that killed the civilian political leaders of Yemen’s Houthi movement. Though they grossly violated international law, the bombings were nonetheless celebrated in Washington. Corporate media like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reported the strikes as a “symbolic and psychological blow” that demonstrated “improved Israeli intelligence” against the Houthis and their Iranian sponsors, while neocons like Mark Dubowitz of the mysteriously funded Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a pro-Israel think tank, applauded the attack on the “Houthi-controlled terror leadership.” But despite the “mission accomplished” attitude from Israel and its neoconservative loyalists in America, the attacks will likely do very little to stop the Houthis, whose campaigns reflect Yemen’s own history of resistance rather than Iranian control. The group remains extraordinarily independent, producing much of their own weaponry and pursuing a strategy driven by their own political grievances with Israel and the United States. Their central grievance is the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide and famine currently being perpetrated against the Palestinians in Gaza, with whom the Houthis identify—because, as political scientist Norman Finkelstein explains, “what was done to Gaza was done to them.” Before Israel set out to fulfill the demands of its ultra-nationalist politicians to “destroy all of Gaza’s infrastructure to its foundation” and “erase the Gaza strip from the Earth,” Yemen was the country considered to have the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, with over 23 million people in need of humanitarian assistance by 2022. Yemen’s humanitarian crisis, like Gaza’s today, has been entirely man made. More specifically, it has been perpetrated by Saudi Arabia, the U.S., and Israel. They imposed a brutal blockade and bombing campaign that reportedly caused the deaths of nearly 377,000 people in Yemen between 2015 and 2021, more than 85,000 of whom were children who starved to death. The Houthis’ identification with the Palestinians of Gaza is therefore neither rooted in religious “fundamentalism” nor in subservience to Tehran—it reflects a deep sense of solidarity forged through parallel suffering at the hands of U.S.-backed clients in the Middle East. This explains why, despite the assassination of its civilian leadership, the Houthis have vowed to “escalate [their] operations as long as Israel continues its policy of genocide and starvation.” The corporate media largely ignores these motivations, obfuscating the political grievances of Israel’s enemies by recasting them as irrational and intractable. Treating the Houthis as mere Iranian proxies has about as much explanatory power—and serves the same propagandistic function—as George W. Bush’s claim that America suffered the 9/11 attacks because “they hate us for our freedoms.” By erasing the role of U.S. military action on behalf of Israel in generating the very groups that threaten it, Israel and its American lobby are able to portray Houthi attacks as further evidence of a region-wide Iranian conspiracy to destroy Israel. This axis of resistance, the story goes, simply can’t be reasoned with and potentially threatens the United States as well, therefore requiring unlimited funds and unconditional support from American taxpayers. As the Israeli government pushes President Donald Trump to attack its regional adversaries, Washington ought to be skeptical of Israel’s intelligence about them, especially regarding the purported threat posed by the so-called “Iran-backed” network of militant groups. It was with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s encouragement that the U.S. launched its own air campaign against Yemen in March, intense bombing which failed to deter Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping lanes but killed hundreds of civilians. That bombing campaign revealed, among other things, that U.S. and Israeli intelligence on Yemen remains outdated and often wildly inaccurate. Revealing their ignorance of Houthi operations, the Pentagon may even have relied on anonymous X accounts to coordinate targeting, a method that led directly to airstrikes that killed innocent civilians. Further evidence of U.S. and Israeli ignorance is the continued deployment of expensive MQ-9 Reaper drones over Yemen, dozens of which have been shot down by Houthi surface-to-air missiles. That the Pentagon is willing to risk hundreds of millions of dollars on these missions underscores how little Washington actually knows about Houthi capabilities and positions. Yet despite the demonstrable shortcomings of Israeli and American intelligence, U.S. analysts continue to treat the Houthis as directed by Iran and motivated by Islamic fundamentalism. Even attacks on American MQ-9 drones are routinely cited as proof of Tehran’s vast arms-smuggling network, which we are told supplies the Houthis with the SAM missiles to bring the drones down. But as reporting from Drop Site News and other independent media has shown, the Houthi movement produces a substantial portion of its own weaponry, rendering it largely independent of foreign support. That the Houthis keep their arsenals and bases well-hidden and fortified helps to explain why Israel chose to target the Houthis’ civilian political leadership rather than its military commanders. Houthi self-sufficiency exposes a striking irony: While the Houthi arsenal is in large measure indigenously produced, Israel’s weaponry is mostly foreign made and funded by American taxpayers. Like the bombs that drop every month or so in Syria and Lebanon and every day in Gaza, the bombs that fall on Yemen are financed by Washington. The persistence of Houthi operations, despite assassination campaigns, bombings, and sanctions, demonstrates that their movement will not be stopped with bombs and bullets. As Trump himself acknowledged after concluding his own airstrikes on Yemen, even though “we hit them very hard,” the Houthis have “a great capacity to withstand punishment,” adding that “there’s a lot of bravery there.” The fortitude and capabilities of the Houthis cannot be explained away by alleged Iranian control. To reduce them to Tehran’s puppets is to erase their actual grievances and the solidarity with Gaza that drives their campaign. It is precisely their shared suffering—not foreign directives—that explains why the Houthis have been more willing than any other group in the region to take up arms for Gaza, and why Washington’s blank-check support for Israel’s wars will not stop them. Indeed, it will only deepen their resolve. The post The U.S. Should Be Skeptical about ‘Iran-Backed’ Militants appeared first on The American Conservative.

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