Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins is setting straight the left-wing story that President Donald Trump’s cuts to “waste, fraud, and abuse” will harm veterans. “That’s all I’ve been doing for a little over four and a half months now is fighting lies, innuendo, rumors from the hill and other parts of the press, saying that we’re destroying everything at the VA,” Collins told The Daily Signal. “The reality is we’re actually helping veterans. We’re actually putting the VA back in the proper mode of being a service organization and not a jobs program and not something that’s just perennially complained about on the hill.” While the Trump administration has cut many government grants and laid off tens of thousands of employees, Collins, an Iraq veteran, has made it clear that veteran care is a priority. “I’ve made it clear from day one: No health benefits and no disability benefits are being cut,” Collins said. “The budget that the president just submitted proves that we’re not moving anything.” “I guess they just have the opinion that they just keep telling a lie long enough, somebody will believe them,” he said of Democrats and the corporate media. Contrary to Democrat criticism, Collins said he hears from veterans every day finding better service under the Trump administration. “They’re getting disabilities claims process quicker. We’re 25% down on the backlog,” Collins said. The Department of Veterans Affairs will soon work with the Office of Personnel Management for assistance to carry out widespread layoffs. The VA is still in the evaluation process to determine how many people will be included, Collins said. “What makes much better headlines for Democrats and others on the hill to try to demonize the VA of what we’re trying to do to make changes, but in the end, they’re just scaring veterans and scaring our employees, which I find offensive,” Collins said. The VA is the largest single agency in the administration. “We’re trying to make sure that that’s much more streamlined so that our center directors and our hospitals can make decisions much quicker,” Collins said. One aspect of Veterans Affairs Collins is particularly dedicated to is lowering suicide rates. “We’re spending over $500 million a year in quote ‘preventative programs.’ We spend about 2.3 billion in treatments and, and others for folks who are struggling with PTSD and other things that keep them from taking their life by suicide,” Collins said. Yet the right people are often not being reached, he said. “They’ve never had contact with us, so we haven’t even had a chance to try and turn them on a different way,” Collins said. “So we’re looking at new alternative ways from new media podcasts. We’re gonna be partnering with sports organizations, film industry folks, music people, to try and figure out how we can reach those that may be reached on another platform.” “And if they come to the VA, great, we wanna help direct them there, but we’re also gonna be able to get them to anyone that’s willing to sit down and take a look,” he continued, “and there’s a lot of great nonprofits, [Veterans Service Organizations] out there that can help.” The department announced in April it would no longer cover gender reassignment surgeries for veterans, but the secretary expressed a firm commitment to ensuring that every veteran will continue to access benefits. “If you are transgender and you have earned the benefit as a member, every other benefit is there for you,” Collins said. “We’re just not gonna be a part of the gender reassignments and the dysphoria that’s going on.” When asked if improving the function of the VA played a role in rising military recruitment under Trump, Collins said he sees the Department of Defense and the VA as “fraternal twins.” “We very much do have the same kind of a mission with the same people,” he said. “They do the kinetic mission. We do the aftercare mission, if you would, but it’s the same group.” “When the parents and grandparents or aunts and uncles who served, they come out, they get a good experience in the VA, they can see that we’re fulfilling their promise to them,” he continued. “So when you have the younger generation coming up, they’re more apt to say, yeah, it’s good. Take the initiative, go into the military, because we’d gotten into a point here just in the recent history, where you’d have upwards of 40 or 50% of those who served would tell their children not to serve.” The post How Trump’s Veterans Affairs Secretary Fights ‘Lies, Innuendo, Rumors’ from Democrats appeared first on The Daily Signal.

“How’m I doin’?” the late New York Mayor Ed Koch used to ask constituents on his travels through the city. President Donald Trump, in the opinion of most Americans, is doin’ pretty well. His job approval, which jutted downward after he announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, has recovered and hovers just below 50%. That’s just about the level of Barack Obama’s and George W. Bush’s approval at this point in their second terms and above his own approval at any point in his first term. Many continue to regard some top appointments as eccentric. His style of discourse, OFTEN IN ALL CAPS, is eccentric by any past presidential standard. But in a political system that remains democratic and is increasingly demotic, that which sounds coarse to you (and me) is apparently acceptable to most people. As for his, um, unusual appointments, they may make sense for a president who is less interested in fine-tuning organizations than in affecting the behaviors of mass publics. Candidate Trump in 2024 promised that he would eliminate shortfalls in military recruitment, which he attributed to the Joe Biden Pentagon’s “woke” policies. He pointed out accurately that the Army and Navy fell short of recruitment goals by as much as 25% in fiscal years 2022 and 2023. He named Fox News host and military veteran Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, saying he’d promote a warfighting ethos that would attract un-woke young men and women to join up. The Army raised its recruiting goal from 55,000 to 61,000 and reached it in May, four months early. Maybe that’s a coincidence or a response to other factors. But it looks like Trump’s rhetoric made a big difference. Or look at trade. Trump has made no secret of his love for tariffs and his desire to reduce trade with China. This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that China’s exports to the U.S. in May were the lowest since COVID-19-wracked February 2020. It looks like thousands of American and Chinese market participants have made new decisions in response to Trump’s rhetoric. Meanwhile, the May job numbers in the U.S. increased by a more-than-expected 139,000, despite a 60,000 reduction in federal jobs since January. And despite a drop of foreign-born workers in the labor market estimated between 773,000 and 1 million since March. Three-quarters of a million to a million—those numbers dwarf the number of annual deportations from the interior of the U.S. as compiled by my Washington Examiner colleague Conn Carroll. Those range from 65,000 in the last year of the Obama administration and from 28,000 to 47,000 in the four Biden years. They were higher—81,000 to 95,000—in the first three years of Trump I and then fell to 62,000 in COVID-19 year 2020. These numbers put in perspective the drama that has been playing out in Los Angeles this past week. The Trump administration cannot expect that it can, logistically, remove all the untold millions of illegal immigrants that whoever was running the Biden administration (no one, including the authors of “Original Sin,” has disclosed just who that was) allowed into the U.S. But splashy raids and deportations can get hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of illegal immigrants thinking about what Mitt Romney in 2012 called “self-deportation.” Which is probably happening thanks to what has been happening in Los Angeles these past five days. Demonstrations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation activity resulted in the arrest of the head of the Service Employees International Union. When “sanctuary city” Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., let the rioting go on, Trump nationalized the California National Guard and dispatched Marines. He plainly had the authority to do so when federal law enforcement is blocked, and as my Washington Examiner colleague Byron York recounts. And the Supreme Court in 2012 made it clear that federal immigration law prevails over countervailing state law. There’s no question whose side the public is on. A pre-riot CBS poll showed 54% approving of Trump’s deportation program, and two polls taken this week showed approval: Insider Advantage by 59% to 39%, and the Napolitan News poll by 58% to 36%. After eight years of stark contrast between Trump and Democrats’ policies, as CNN poll analyst Harry Enten points out, most voters give Trump high marks and “believe that Democrats don’t have a clue on the issue of immigration.” Similarly, voters who remember Democrats’ insistence and journalists’ assurances that Joe Biden was fully functional are skeptical that the L.A. rioters were “overwhelmingly peaceful” (Kamala Harris) or “largely peaceful” (The New York Times). There’s ample historic precedent for Trump’s action as well. Dwight Eisenhower in 1957 and Lyndon Johnson in 1965 sent in federal troops to uphold federal law over the opposition of Democrat governors in Arkansas and Alabama. Those governors were defying federal law for a cause—preservation of racial segregation—that the vast majority of voters, after a decade of reflection, were determined to reject. Today’s California Democrats are defying federal law for a cause—permanent amnesty for illegal immigrants—which it appears that voters, after a decade of reflection, are bent on rejecting as well. As for the illegal immigrants themselves, I’m not aware that anyone has conducted a poll of them, or could, since people in their situation are wary of being interviewed. But as the workforce numbers suggest, for many, self-deportation, together perhaps with the Department of Homeland Security’s $1,000 travel stipend, is looking like a good option. One that may be taken up by many more than are legally deported. So how’s Trump doin’? Better, perhaps, than his critics think. COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Los Angeles Riots May Encourage Illegal Immigrants to Self-Deport appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump clearly made it a mission in his second go-around in the White House to make larger institutional changes to the way the federal government does business. He clearly intended not only to make the government more efficient, but to change institutional power structures that embolden the permanent bureaucracy. Some of those efforts, like the Department of Government Efficiency, received a good deal of media attention. However, a number of departments and individuals have been particularly aggressive in carrying out Trump’s counterrevolution, especially in terms of weeding out DEI and other forms of left-wing social engineering. It’s worth noting the efforts of a few of the significant, but perhaps overlooked people who are making things happen. Harmeet Dhillon Harmeet Dhillon, who was selected by Trump in December to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, has been nearly the opposite of her Biden administration predecessor. Former Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who led the civil rights office before Dhillon, was one of the most aggressive in weaponizing the DOJ against political opponents, especially pro-lifers. Dhillon achieved some notoriety before being appointed to office. Her California law office took up a few high-profile cases in the last decade, including that of James Damore, the Google employee who said he was fired because he criticized the company’s diversity policies. “While the Civil Rights Division prosecuted pro-lifers, Dhillon has represented pro-life journalist David Daleiden, who exposed Planned Parenthood staff who sold aborted-baby body parts,” my colleague Tyler O’Neil wrote in December. Dhillon has not only stopped the persecution of pro-life activists but has initiated DOJ investigations into states that have endangered women while violating civil rights law, like California. She announced in May that her department was investigating whether California is violating Title IX by allowing males to compete in women’s sports. “Title IX exists to protect women and girls in education. It is perverse to allow males to compete against girls, invade their private spaces, and take their trophies,” Dhillon said in May. “This Division will aggressively defend women’s hard-fought rights to equal educational opportunities.” Andrew Ferguson Federal Trade Commissioner Andrew Ferguson began his time at the agency with a call to investigate Big Tech censorship. “Big Tech censorship is not just un-American, it is potentially illegal. The FTC wants your help to investigate these potential violations of the law,” he wrote in February. He put out a public inquiry to “help the FTC better understand how these firms may have violated the law by silencing and intimidating Americans for speaking their minds.” He created a portal for Americans to report to the agency cases in which they feel they’ve been censored by Big Tech companies. But more than just aiming at ending Big Tech’s censorship practices, Ferguson and the FTC have launched a project to uncover companies that engage in deceptive practices to foist gender ideology, puberty blockers, and harmful procedures on children. “Under the Federal Trade Commission Act, the FTC is provided broad authority to protect consumers from unfair and deceptive trade acts and practices,” a May memo from the FTC reads, according to the Daily Wire. “There is now considerable reason to believe that the doctors and medical providers pushing [gender-affirming care] on minors are knowingly deceiving parents by exaggerating [gender-affirming care’s] ‘benefits’ and downplaying its harmful side effects.” According to the Daily Wire, citing Fishbowl, the FTC aims to “investigate the doctors, therapists, hospitals, and others who deceptively pushed gender confusion, puberty blockers, hormone replacement, and sex-change surgeries on children and adults while failing to disclose strong evidence that such interventions are not helpful and carry enormous risks.” Andrea Lucas From the moment she stepped into her role at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, acting chair Andrea Lucas has been at the forefront of bringing civil rights lawsuits against schools and businesses that have illegally discriminated—often openly so—in the name of DEI. She has been at EEOC since 2020 when Trump appointed her at the end of his first term in office, but she has been empowered since Trump returned to the White House. In just the first 120 days of the Trump Administration, EEOC Acting Chair Andrea Lucas (@AndreaLucasEEOC) has mobilized the full weight of the agency to restore evenhanded enforcement of employment laws on behalf of ALL Americans. https://t.co/F7j9xvAFcg pic.twitter.com/MaD5SynrC7— U.S. EEOC (@USEEOC) May 23, 2025 GianCarlo Camparo and Dan Mauler, legal fellow and general counsel for The Heritage Foundation, respectively explained how much impact Lucas has already had in her short time at the EEOC. They wrote for The Daily Signal on Friday: Lucas has forced major law firms to stop using DEI to discriminate based on race. She has ordered the EEOC to be evenhanded in its enforcement priorities, rather than picking and choosing winners based on their characteristics. She has made it easier for employees to report DEI discrimination. She has made it a priority to protect Americans from religious discrimination. And she has used what limited powers she currently has to protect women from the dangerous effects of gender ideology. Lucas has put intense pressure on Harvard University. She delivered a message to the school in April that since 2018 it is possible that the school has violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act “by engaging in a pattern or practice of disparate treatment against white, Asian, male, or straight employees, applicants, and training program participants in hiring, promotion (including but not limited to tenure decisions), compensation, and separation decisions; internship programs; and mentoring, leadership development, and other career development programs.” As Camparo and Mauler noted, however, to ensure that Lucas continues her work she needs to be reconfirmed by the Senate and Trump needs to appoint another commissioner to the five-person committee that runs it so that there is a quorum. Russ Vought Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought returned to his post after holding the same office during the first Trump administration and carried on where he had left off. He’s been relentless in rooting out the deep state from the executive branch and ensuring that the president, and not bureaucrats, is in charge of White House policymaking. For that he has drawn the enmity of the Left. Vought’s been instrumental in bringing the recent rescissions package before Congress that would save taxpayers $9.4 billion. But it’s not just about the money saved. What’s notable is that this money is coming mostly from left-wing projects that have been on autopilot. It will drain money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, U.S. Agency for International Development, and other foreign aid programs that have been directed toward social engineering rather than American interests. By pulling funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, this will accomplish the long-standing conservative goal of divesting from NPR and PBS. These two publicly funded media organizations have veered far to the Left in recent decades and have shown obvious partisan bias in recent years. Both NPR and PBS have become particularly obsessed with issues about race and gender. Their coverage of Republicans is almost entirely negative, and coverage of Democrats is broadly positive. The Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez noted that a Media Research Center study determined “congressional Republicans saw 85% negative coverage, while congressional Democrats saw 54% positive coverage on PBS’s flagship News Hour program. Another cited Media Research Center study found that PBS news staff ‘used 162 variations of the term ‘far-right,’ but only six variations of ‘far-left.’” The post 4 Stars in the Trump Administration Who’ve Driven Trump’s Counterrevolution Against DEI appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Israel: 'Tehran Is No Longer Immune'

On a Thursday and a rare Friday episode of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the eponymous host insisted that if you just ignore all the burning cars, robberies, and other criminality, “all hell isn’t breaking loose” in Los Angeles. For Thursday’s show, Kimmel introduced a video, “You know, our announcer, Lou [Wilson], went downtown today where all hell isn't breaking loose. And this is what he saw there.”     In the video, Wilson portrayed the situation as under control, “I’m down here at the heart of the LA protests. To my right, we've got about 50 to 60 protesters all out here chanting and singing together, holding up signs, enjoying the honks of drivers-by. Incredibly calm, incredibly peaceful. Just people together exercising their First Amendment right and their desire for justice.” Nearby “We have an extreme display of military force. We have members of the National Guard and the LAPD who are armed and ready to dispense protesters, be it with rubber bullets or tear gas. A number of military vehicles and, soon, 700 Marines. Though, I'll tell you, the general vibe I get from them is boredom and a sense of, ‘What are we doing here?’” Finally, Wilson turned to the “10, 15 news outlets all here not filming anything. And instead running the same, kind of, three images of burning Weymos from this weekend. So, this is America, baby. We're doing it. Happy Fourth of July. Somebody give me some ribs.” The next day, Kimmel echoed the sentiment about burning cars but added, “Here in Los Angeles, every cable news network is still breathlessly waiting for something to happen downtown. They've been running the same video of the Waymos burning, the guys looting the weed store, and the guys busting the sidewalk with a hammer over and over and over in a loop for five days in a row.”     He also insisted that “It's been very strange to watch the president and his minions blatantly lying about what isn't happening in the city where we currently are. Telling us there are riots when that is not the case and also saying that the protestors aren’t even protestors. They’re actors being paid.” Even if one accepts Kimmel’s framing that the examples he provided are not enough to justify Trump’s response or are part of a sensationalist media, the problem for Kimmel is that there was more to the violence than one video of burning Waymos or one weed store. It was his Democrat mayor that imposed a curfew and his local police department that has made dozens of arrests on everything from attempted murder to arson to looting, among others. Here are transcripts for the June 12 and 13-taped shows: ABC Jimmy Kimmel Live! 6/12/2025 11:40 PM ET JIMMY KIMMEL: You know, our announcer, Lou, went downtown today where all hell isn't breaking loose. And this is what he saw there. LOU WILSON: Hey, it's Lou Wilson, I’m down here at the heart of the LA protests. To my right, we've got about 50 to 60 protesters all out here chanting and singing together, holding up signs, enjoying the honks of drivers-by. Incredibly calm, incredibly peaceful. Just people together exercising their First Amendment right and their desire for justice. To my left, we have an extreme display of military force. We have members of the National Guard and the LAPD who are armed and ready to dispense protesters, be it with rubber bullets or tear gas.  A number of military vehicles and soon, 700 Marines. Though, I'll tell you, the general vibe I get from them is boredom and a sense of, "what are we doing here?" And of course, we've also got about 10, 15 news outlets all here not filming anything. And instead running the same, kind of, three images of burning Weymos from this weekend. So, this is America, baby. We're doing it. Happy Fourth of July. Somebody give me some ribs. *** ABC Jimmy Kimmel Live! 6/14/2025 12:10 AM ET JIMMY KIMMEL: Here in Los Angeles, every cable news network is still breathlessly waiting for something to happen downtown. They've been running the same video of the Waymos burning, the guys looting the weed store, and the guys busting the sidewalk with a hammer over and over and over in a loop for five days in a row. It's been very strange to watch the president and his minions blatantly lying about what isn't happening in the city where we currently are. Telling us there are riots when that is not the case and also saying that  the protestors aren’t even protestors. They’re actors being paid. 

Michael Swango was found guilty of murdering four patients in 2000, but investigators suspect that he may have actually had dozens more victims. The post The Horrifying Crimes Of Michael Swango, The Doctor Believed To Have Murdered 60 Of His Patients appeared first on All That's Interesting.

Dem Sen. Chris Murphy Thinks These Naturalization Ceremony Images Are an Own on Trump

Breaking: Two Minnesota Lawmakers Shot in Their Homes, One Dead, Attacker Still At Large

A surprise Israeli airstrike on Iranian nuclear sites has fractured Democrats on Capitol Hill, ending a brief moment of unity following a dramatic confrontation between Sen. Alex Padilla and security officials at a Los Angeles press event, The Hill reported.