Vice President JD Vance just posted a video showing off his Halloween costume! For this Halloween, he hilariously dressed up as the meme version of himself. And, it is utter perfection! We reported earlier:…

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Politics American Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner (Hopefully) A bipartisan bill seeks to clarify the country of origin on beef sold in American grocery stores. Do you know where your beef comes from?  If the sticker reads “Product of the United States” that may not mean exactly what you think it does. That is partially why a bipartisan group of Congressmen led by the Wyoming Republican Harriet Hageman and the California Democrat Ro Khanna reintroduced the Country of Origin Labeling Enforcement Act on October 24, which would reinstate mandatory country of origin labeling (MCOOL) for beef products. The bill would also raise fines for those that falsely label their beef as made in the USA, including multinational packers. In the United States, Country of Origin Labeling, or COOL laws for short, require retailers to print labels on agricultural products to inform the American consumer if a product is imported from other countries.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the labeling system is neither a food safety nor a food traceability program but rather a consumer information program. It’s why when you buy mangos or grapes or bananas you will see a sticker on the goods informing the consumer of the country or countries where the product was grown and harvested.  But when you purchase beef in the United States, are you actually getting beef that was 100 percent raised and packed in the USA? In 2002, Congress passed a series of laws implementing country of origin requirements for select commodities, including beef. But those requirements for beef were scuttled by Congress in 2015 after the World Trade Organization ruled that the U.S. MCOOL laws were in violation of WTO rules. Ever since that decision, beef that is labeled with “Product of the USA” stickers could actually be products that are raised outside the United States but packed for consumption inside our country. This discrepancy is what motivated Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), one of the cosponsors of last week’s bill, to speak out in 2015 when Congress first changed the regulations. “Americans want to know, where does their food come from,” Massie said at the time. “If you buy pork or beef or chicken, wouldn’t you want to know where that food came from? And why would you want to know? Well, different countries have different rules and different cultures.” Different standards are, ironically, one of the reasons why European countries rarely import American beef; EU food regulations prohibit the use of hormones for growth promotion in cattle. Much of the American beef supply is treated with hormones such as estradiol to speed growth and reduce fat which European regulators say pose potential health risks for consumers. As a result, most American beef fails to qualify under European import standards. U.S. regulators such as the USDA and the FDA, however, contest those claims, arguing that the residues are safe for consumers.  For cattle ranchers in America, the laws regulating country of origin labeling and recent decisions by President Donald Trump have created a headache for an industry that is already struggling to compete. Trump, who has repeatedly promised to deliver lower meat prices at the grocery store, and who has so far failed to deliver on that promise in his second term, recently suggested importing beef from Argentina’s meat-producing industry in a bid to provide relief to consumers as well as quasi-embattled Argentina’s President Javier Milei, a close ally of the president. This decision to help Argentinian beef producers at a moment when American cattle ranchers are struggling to make ends meet was met with criticism from the National Cattleman’s Beef Association, who said importing Argentinian beef would “[undercut] the future of family farmers.” “The president hears them,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in response to the NCBA’s statement. “He has to address both of these problems for the ranchers but also for the American consumers. He promised to lower costs and that’s what he’s doing.” But the true numbers are stark. Ground beef is up nearly 55 percent since 2020 and that number is failing to fall as the holiday season approaches.  “The Trump administration is quadrupling Argentinian beef imports while our farmers continue to struggle,” said Khanna in a statement released along with the bill. “We need trade policy that puts America first. I’m proud to lead legislation with Rep. Hageman that blocks multi-national meat packing companies that are importing cattle and falsely labeling it as American.” But do American consumers really care about where their meat comes from if the price remains high? That’s one argument against mandatory country of origin laws that would raise fines on multi-national packers who choose to source beef from outside the U.S. and ultimately provide a challenge to lowering the cost of meat for the end consumer. But isn’t it worth paying a little extra at the shopping market if it means supporting American cattle ranchers whose lives depend on American customers purchasing beef born and raised inside our borders? This is the major dilemma at the heart of the beef price discussion and part of the reason why Trump is looking beyond our borders in an effort to provide pricing relief to consumers at the store.  But for America First conservatives and Democrats in Congress, including Reps. Warren Davidson (R-OH), Chip Roy (R-TX), and Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who cosponsored last week’s bill, sourcing beef from beyond our borders goes against the vision of the MAGA movement that rallied for good jobs and good, quality food expressly for and produced by Americans.  “Americans deserve to know where their food comes from especially if supermarkets are going to be flooded with foreign beef,” added Massie a day after the bill was introduced. “America First!” Hageman’s bill would provide the best of both worlds, creating both the regulated structure needed to ensure “Made in the USA” actually means what it says and also still providing the American consumer with the opportunity to buy cheaper beef imported from outside the States.  “We are grateful for Representative Hageman’s leadership in creating a competitive marketplace for both ranchers and consumers with her bill requiring accurate origin information on beef,” said Bill Bullard, CEO, R-CALF USA. “Consumers deserve the right to choose to buy imported beef or beef from America’s ranchers, and ranchers deserve the right to compete in their own domestic market. This bill will accomplish both.” The post American Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner (Hopefully) appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs In El Salvador, a ‘Shadow Cabinet’ of Venezuelans Runs the Show Is the future government of Caracas advising Bukele in San Salvador? Credit: Casa Presidencial In August, the Salvadoran National Assembly approved a series of constitutional reforms extending president Nayib Bukele’s term from five to six years and allowing for indefinite reelection. In response, the U.S. State Department issued a statement rejecting “comparisons with illegitimate dictatorial regimes elsewhere in our region”. The Salvadoran leader has drawn praise from the White House for reducing crime, angering critics who accuse him of authoritarianism. To be sure, Bukele has dramatically improved public safety in El Salvador. But the Trump administration’s embrace of Bukele—who was once a vocal supporter of former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez—is especially stark given Washington’s ongoing efforts at regime change against Chavez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro. It’s all the more peculiar that a contingent of Venezuelan nationals—many of whom share ties with both the Maduro regime and opposition—have played an integral part in the Salvadoran government. Multiple Bukele officials have reported seeing their functions usurped by a “shadow cabinet” comprised of private secretaries, the president’s brothers, and a group of mysterious Venezuelans. An anonymous cabinet minister said the following to independent Salvadoran outlet El Faro: “If you don’t have a direct line of communication with the President, you’re screwed, because the Venezuelans are the ones in command”. Members of this shadow cabinet run Bukele’s campaigns and serve as liaisons with advisors, friends, contractors, and underworld figures—a clientelistic web that in many ways mirrors those forged by Chavez and Maduro. Indeed, Bukele’s Venezuelans have been compared to the reclusive agents of Cuban intelligence that advise Maduro. The most prominent Venezuelan within the Salvadoran shadow cabinet is Sara Hanna Georges, who reportedly writes Bukele’s speeches and has tailored his public persona. Georges’ right-hand man, Miguel Sabal, recruits Venezuelans in Caracas to work in El Salvador. Another conational, Miguel Arvelo, supervises healthcare policy for Bukele while Tomás Hernández, Ernesto Herrera, and Roddy Rodríguez provide advice on economic policy, security, foreign relations, and education. Finally, María Alejandra García and her aforementioned partner, Hernández, are reportedly in charge of El Salvador’s Emergency Health Program (PES). El Faro has also reported that Venezuelan consultants like Santiago Rosas and Ernesto Herrera developed much of Bukele’s security strategy without so much as consulting the minister of security. Similarly, a group of health professionals complained publicly about Hanna and Arvelo instructing employees from the Health Ministry via WhatsApp not to return Covid-19 results to patients during the pandemic. Hanna Georges previously worked for Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López and his wife Lilian Tintori. Following Lopez’s arrest in 2014, Hanna and Tintori opened a public relations office in Miami aimed at launching an international campaign in favor of the opposition leader’s release. At the same time, Georges played a role in former U.S. Congressman David Rivera (R-FL)’s lobbying efforts on behalf of the Maduro regime. An anti-communist Cold Warrior from Miami, the Cuban-American Rivera was indicted in 2022 on eight counts including money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent for Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA. In 2012, while he was still in Congress, Rivera was observed dining with the son of Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega, who allegedly introduced the congressmen to executives of the Venezuelan oil giant. Five years later, following Trump’s first inauguration, Rivera accepted a $50 million consulting contract with PDVSA and returned to Washington to lobby the new administration along with Venezuelan media tycoon Raul Gorrín; the pair billed themselves to the White House as a backchannel to Caracas. Like Rivera, Gorrín was indicted in 2018 for running a sophisticated money laundering operation for the Maduro regime involving both Hanna Georges and Lilian Tintori; Georges is alleged to have received at least $500,000 from Gorrín. The same year, Georges traveled to El Salvador to join Bukele’s presidential campaign after meeting one of the president’s brothers in Miami. A year later, a group of Republican congressmen wrote a letter to the White House expressing concerns about the Bukele confidant’s ties to Chavismo, the left-populist movement associated with Chávez and Maduro.  In 2020, the Salvadoran Attorney General Raul Melara opened an anti-corruption investigation dubbed “Operation Cathedral” with the support of U.S. federal agencies. The investigation consisted of three planks scrutinizing Bukele’s alleged pact with Salvadoran gangs, prison corruption, and misuse of funds intended for Covid-19 relief. The case describes Bukele’s shadow cabinet as a kind of corporation in which the president’s siblings serve as board directors and their closest advisors—such as Georges—act as executive vice presidents. Beneath this executive level, a second tier consisted of figures like Bukele’s Chief of Staff Carolina Recinos; Recinos is currently sanctioned under the Office of OFAC for corruption.  Since 2013, moreover, the Salvadoran subsidiary of PDVSA, Alba Petroleos, funneled millions into Bukele’s mayoral and presidential campaigns. The firm is accused by U.S. authorities of laundering at least USD$1 billion via shell companies in Venezuela, El Salvador, Panama, and the United States. Just two days before Bukele assumed the presidency in 2019, the Salvadoran Ministry of Finance issued the sale of USD$120 million in debt to Venezuela’s central bank which has since generated around USD$19 million in interest. Thereafter, Caracas authorized a partial interest payment to Drefaza, a firm operated by members of Alba Petróleos as well as the president’s shadow cabinet. The Salvadoran government’s innumerable connections to Venezuelan leftists no longer seem to trouble the Trump administration or congressional Republicans. Until 2017, Bukele was a lifelong member of the FMLN political party, itself a successor to the Marxist guerrilla movement of the same name that demobilized in 1992; many of the members of the president’s New Ideas party were previously part of the FMLN. Various statements from the millennial president can be found praising Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Nicolás Maduro throughout the 2010s. It’s uncanny how Bukele and his Venezuelan advisors have thoroughly imitated their Bolivarian counterparts. A year after taking office, Hugo Chávez rewrote the Venezuelan constitution to extend his term from five to six years. Then in 2009, he did away with term limits altogether, allowing him—and now his successor—to govern for life. Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega likewise suspended term limits in 2014; in 2025 he went a step further and extended his term to six years while also codifying himself and his wife as ‘co-presidents’ with legal authority over all branches of government. Bukele too has engineered the scrapping of term limits. Even seemingly benign initiatives from the Salvadoran government have parallels in left-wing Bolivarianism, including the adoption of cryptocurrencies as legal tender. Under Bukele, El Salvador adopted its own version of Chavismo’s CLAP committees—a state food distribution network in poor neighborhoods that can be weaponized against critics by withholding nutrition assistance. Similarly, the president’s so-called Chivo Wallet project—which is used to make payments in dollars or bitcoin—is a carbon copy of an equivalent used for the Petro, Venezuela’s failed state cryptocurrency launched in 2018, a year before Bukele assumed office. The whole point of a double agent is that it’s impossible to ascertain their true allegiance. In this sense, the Venezuelans active in the Salvadoran government have performed their duties remarkably well, bringing benefits to both the Bukele and Maduro regimes. At the same time, there’s another, more mundane explanation for the conduct of seemingly paradoxical figures such as Hanna Georges: They are interested in power and wealth as opposed to grandiose ideological commitments.  In turn, Bukele’s courting of Washington and especially Trump’s second administration has done wonders for his regime. A third tier detailed in the Cathedral case includes government officials such as prison director Osiris Luna Meza–a key operator in an alleged pact with Salvadoran gangs. Like his FMLN predecessors, Bukele is alleged to have negotiated special privileges with incarcerated gang leaders in exchange for reducing violence. Indeed, most of El Salvador’s decline in homicides preceded Bukele’s presidency as well as the post-2022 state of exception suspending due process. In the four years before the millennial president assumed office in 2019, El Salvador’s homicide rate fell from 103 to 36 per 100,000 before falling to 17 per 100,000 by 2022.  The Salvadoran leader has consequently taken pains to ensure that his covert dealings fail to come to light. In 2021, the Cathedral investigation was shelved after Attorney General Melara was removed from his post and forced into exile by Bukele. Details from the case, however, were used by the U.S. Justice Department to strengthen criminal charges against MS13 leaders. The case also fueled an investigation into prison director Luna Meza. According to an unnamed official from the Biden administration, opposition from the State Department led Justice to decide against an indictment. The same year, Salvadoran authorities illegally and covertly released Elmer Canales, an MS13 member with intimate knowledge of the regime’s alleged pact with the gangs who was due for extradition to the U.S. Canales was later apprehended by Mexican authorities and extradited north of the border in 2023. But just three months into Trump’s second term, the aforementioned investigations were abruptly dropped and Canales and two other gang leaders were deported back to El Salvador as part of the March deportations to the regime’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). Here it’s worth noting that even Bukele’s approach towards security shares similarities with its Venezuelan and other Bolivarian peers. As Trump himself has observed, Venezuela has made significant inroads in reducing lethal crime in recent years. Between 2016 and 2024, the country’s homicide rate fell from around 90 to 26 per 100,000. As with Bukele’s crackdown on crime, this success is due in equal parts to regime negotiations with armed groups as well as a draconian policy of extrajudicial killings in poor neighborhoods; in 2018, security forces executed over 5,000 suspected criminals. Washington can sometimes divide the world between autocratic enemies and democratic allies based not so much on strength of democratic institutions in foreign countries, but on the extent to which those countries bend the knee to the U.S. For Miami neocons like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, pro-American leaders like Bukele are endowed with democratic legitimacy while “narcoterrorists” like Maduro are fair game for regime change. In the same vein, Bolivarian apologists see little comparison between Maduro and Bukele on account of the former’s struggle against the American empire. In reality, the praxis of both regimes follows an eerily comparable, self-serving logic. In the event that Washington pursues the disastrous course of military intervention in Venezuela to oust Maduro, it’s quite likely that many of Bukele’s Venezuelans would be part of the new government in Caracas. It will remain to be seen whether they simply recreate another right-wing variant of Venezuela’s tyrannical Bolivarian regime. The post In El Salvador, a ‘Shadow Cabinet’ of Venezuelans Runs the Show appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics KJP Kills Left-Wing Identity Politics The former White House press secretary’s book tour has forced the left to ask uncomfortable questions. As the Right erupts in debate over identity politics, is it possible that mainstream liberals are starting seriously to reconsider this once-cherished cause? If such an unlikely thing comes to pass, thank the first gay black woman to serve as White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre.  Jean-Pierre’s new book has Washington Democrats pretty annoyed. What looked like it might be a tell-all about her time in the White House under a president who was essentially forced from the top of the Democratic ticket in the middle of the 2024 campaign turned out to be a declaration that she was leaving the Democratic Party because its leaders were mean to Joe Biden. The week before Democrats hope to get back on the winning track in a handful of major elections across the country isn’t exactly the greatest time for the party to be talking about Biden. Yet there were Jean-Pierre and the former Vice President Kamala Harris, the vanquished 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, out on their book tours. At least Harris’s contained some sassy clapbacks against intraparty rivals.  Jean-Pierre is much more earnest. But also, at times, much more confused. Is the “broken White House” in the subtitle the one in which she served or the one in which President Donald Trump now resides? If the latter, is it really an “inside” look even if she is now “outside” the Democratic Party? Friendly (and one arguably not so friendly) interviewers practically implore her to consider the possibility that it wasn’t meanness or betrayal that led Democrats to turn on Biden, but the fact that they believed her messaging that Trump posed a unique threat to democracy—and also the polls that suggested Biden couldn’t beat Trump. Her standard response was to say that the future was unknowable. When Jean-Pierre repeatedly invoked her racial and sexual identity in response to such tough questioning from Issac Chotiner in the New Yorker, even liberals were incredulous.  “Several Democrats have bristled at Jean-Pierre’s emphasis on so-called identity politics, seeing it both as a shield against questions about her book’s coherence and as out of step with the moves by some in the party to recalibrate after Trump won with a campaign geared toward criticizing that rhetoric,” POLITICO reported. This story alone contains quite a few anti-KJP zingers. “One former White House colleague questioned how well Jean-Pierre herself understood her own book,” the piece reads, later quoting said colleague as saying, “She doesn’t seem to have any idea what she’s arguing.” “Some former West Wing staffers are privately texting one another wondering why she can’t answer questions about her own book with greater clarity or coherence,” POLITICO reported. “Others are bristling at her emphasis on identity politics.” Jean-Pierre should have Googled who Chotiner was before doing their interview, one anonymous Democrat complained. She was compared to a car crash and a toddler who had just jumped into the deep end of a swimming pool.  It seems to be gradually dawning on Democrats that identity is no substitute for arguments, answering basic questions or fundamental competence. They are grappling with the fact that Jean-Pierre wasn’t very good at her job: “She was the top communicator for the president of the United States and she can’t get through basic interviews.” Chotiner similarly points out in a parenthetical that at the time she was complaining about the Democrats’ inability or unwillingness to defend Biden, she was the White House press secretary. At this point, I’m almost ready to call the fight. The Democrats now mostly anonymously slagging off Jean-Pierre invented all the low standards and groupthink that they now want to disavow because it lost them an election. They fueled Jean-Pierre’s professional rise and then demanded she perform as if it had all along been a strict meritocracy.  In fairness, it is possible to be a decent communications strategist behind the scenes while not being particularly good as the on-camera talent. Jean-Pierre also got the job after most of Biden’s best years were behind him. Jen Psaki was more skilled at the podium, but she also had the gig at a time when defending Biden was an easier task. Critically, one of the reasons Jean-Pierre was bad at the job was that she didn’t seem to enjoy lying. And her widely panned book reveals that she sincerely believed much of her pro-Biden spin, however implausible it may seem to the rest of us. She is willing to stake her career on it. Other liberals may no longer be willing to stake theirs on DEI when it conflicts with excellence and ruthlessness in political combat. The post KJP Kills Left-Wing Identity Politics appeared first on The American Conservative.