Court rules NSA program overstepped their authority

There are over 4000,000 regulations on the books. It’s believed the average American commits three felonies a day. But don’t worry - there’s no way a corrupt federal government will target you! Thankfully, Americans had a small victory for freedom when a federal court ruled the NSA overstepped congressional authority with their collection of bulk phone data under the Patriot ACT. Senator Rand Paul joined Glenn on radio to discuss this huge step towards freedom and other news of the day.

Below is a rush transcript of this segment:

GLENN: Yesterday, the NSA, the Domestic Spying Program was deemed illegal by an appeals court. And we have Senator Rand Paul on the phone with us. Congratulations, Senator Paul. I know this is something you've been working tireless on. How are you, sir?

RAND: Yeah, Glenn, thanks.

You know, about a year ago, I sued the NSA and the president and Eric Holder on this. The Fourth Amendment is very explicit. It says you have to name the person. You have to name the things you want. You got to have probable cause, and then you have to ask a judge for permission. And one of the reasons we did that is, we didn't want to allow general warrants, where you can be rounded up because of your ethnicity, rounded up because of your religion, rounded up because of your political beliefs. It had to be individualized.

It was what John Adams said -- it was the spark that led to the American Revolution. When James Otis fought against these generalized warrants. So, yeah, it's a big deal for the court now to agree and say they're illegal. I really though want this to go to the Supreme Court. And I want the Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality on whether or not a general warrant is constitutional or not.

GLENN: This is surprising to me. I don't know enough about the courts. You probably know much more. This is the second US Court of Appeals. And if I'm not mistaken, isn't there two appointees from Obama and one from Clinton. So this isn't like the Fifth Circuit Court. This is -- this is -- you know, the left is part of this court as well.

RAND: I'm not sure of the composition, because I think sometimes there's more judges than that. I think there's actually more judges in the appellate court than the three.

GLENN: I'm saying that the three-panel judge -- the three judges on the panel, Clinton-appointed judge and two Obama-appointed judges.

RAND: Yeah, that could well be on this. And there's more that could be picked. But these particular three, I think you're correct.

The ultimate question though is that: In order for it to be enforceable ruling across the country, it needs to come from the Supreme Court. My understanding is that this decision will be sent back to the lower court. It won't necessarily go to the Supreme Court. So we're still sort of working and fighting to get this to the Supreme Court level. Because there's a really important question here, and that's whether or not a warrant can have somebody's name Mr. Verizon. And I tell people in a tongue-in-cheek way in speeches that I don't know anybody named Mr. Verizon.

So can you put the name of a business and yet get hundreds of millions of individuals' records who do business with that particular business? And I think that's where the question is: Does the Fourth Amendment requirement to individualize, to put a person's name on it, does that qualify, or does this sound suspiciously like a general warrant?

GLENN: So there's really no teeth to this, is there? I mean, there was no injunction. They don't have to stop. This was just like, yep, that's against the law.

RAND: It will have an important ramification for this reason. They're saying that the Patriot Act, as passed, does not cover in a statutory way, does not give authority for this bulk collection of phone records. The reason this is interesting is, is that Senator Wyden and I have a bill to end the bulk collection. But we don't reauthorize any part of 215, and we don't acknowledge that 215 allows this. There's a competing version of this called the USA Freedom Act, and it would actually replace this and give new statutory authority. So there's actually a danger that the reform that lurks out there, if it passes, would actually give affirmative legal justification for this program. So I think everybody needs to really think long and hard about whether the reform that's out there will actually be good or bad. I think it's better just to tell the government they can't do bulk collection, rather than replacing it with something that may give new authority.

GLENN: Two questions. First, have you ever had to run to a trash can to vomit in it every time you hear something like the Patriot Act or the Freedom Act. I mean, it is so -- you know there's trouble whenever it comes out with the Everybody Likes Ice Cream Act, you know it's deadly.

RAND: Yeah, whatever the acronym is, the more benign sounding, the actually more dastardly it is the closer you read the text.

GLENN: Okay. So do you have any confidence at all -- I mean, Mitch McConnell, I'm sorry, but, you know, as we call him here, he's a turtle head. Because he looks like a turtle head. And I defy you to look at him and not laugh because he looks exactly like a turtle. You expect his head to go in past his shoulders. But that's a different story. Notice there's no laughter there. He's very smart.

STU: He's smart.

GLENN: So you -- Mitch McConnell is already trying to, you know, push a clean extension of the Patriot Act. He's not really on the side of -- of you on this. And of us.

RAND: There is a division within the Republican Party. There's also division in the country. But the interesting thing is, when you look at my numbers versus Hillary Clinton in purple states, the reason we're winning the independent vote is because I am for the right to privacy. I am for the Fourth Amendment. And we're getting a large segment of the youth vote and of the independent vote. So I don't know, I think the Republican Party needs to be open to our point of view.

GLENN: But they don't seem to be.

RAND: Well, up here, they're not. In Washington, they're not. But go out anywhere in Texas and go to a large crowd and ask them, do you think the government should be collecting all your phone records without a warrant without your name on it? And I'll bet you 75, 80 percent of Republicans -- I've been there. I've been to Lincoln Day dinners in Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston. And when I give those lines, I get a rousing cheer and often a standing ovation saying, the government -- it's none of your damn business what you do on your phone or with your phone records. And so I think the people outside of Washington are different than people in Washington.

GLENN: I know that.

RAND: I'll give you another quick example. I had an amendment that said, no more American tax dollars through foreign aid to countries that persecute Christians. Countries that put Christians to death or put Christians in jail for life. For blasphemy. Interfaith marriage. Or apostasy. And I lost the vote 18-2. Eighteen people in Washington said we should continue it. Two said no. But if I poll that question anywhere in America, it's 99 percent of Americans say, hell, no, we shouldn't send our money to countries that persecute Christians.

GLENN: That's unbelievable. But that would include China as well. I mean, that is -- you want to talk about picking a fight, and God bless you for doing it, but that's a fight-picking question.

RAND: And here's the interesting thing, as rich as China is and as much as we have a trade deficit with them, we do send money to China. Not foreign aid. We send them economic development assistance. Because they really need some economic development over there.

GLENN: Yeah, don't they? Yesterday, the Senate passed a bill that would require congressional authorization on any deal the president would make with Iran. Is the House -- it's going over to the House. Will the House pass this, and does this have any teeth?

RAND: It's a big victory in this sense. The president for the last six months to a year is saying, we don't get any say. He's been he's going to send it directly to the UN. He's been saying, this is an agreement and there's no congressional authority at all. Well, when enough Democrats told him otherwise, all the Republicans were saying otherwise, but when enough Democrats got on board and he knew he would have his veto overturned, he changed his tune, support the bill, and it passed 99-1. Can it stop him? The only thing that can stop him, the only thing that can do anything to the president when you disagree with him is 67 votes. Because it takes 67 votes to overturn a veto. So some people are complaining whether this is disapproval or approval. The bottom line is, any scenario that you want to stop a president that disagrees with you on any piece of legislation or any kind of foreign agreement, it takes 67 votes. But the fact that this was 99-1, there is a chance that there could be 67 votes saying the deal with Iran is not a good deal. This is a good bipartisan way of getting to the next step. Which is, if we were to get rebuked with more than 67 votes, it would be the end of the presidency. He would get nothing done the rest of the year and he would be completely without any capacity to get anything done, which would be good for the country.

PAT: Why is that the case? Why would one vote like that, shut him down so badly?

RAND: I think it's because it's very, very rare that people don't vote in partisan lockstep. So I think if there were a vote that rebuked him. This one was a rebuke, but he changed his mind and said I'm for it. But if the Iranian deal comes forward and people have doubts -- and this is my biggest doubt is that the Iranians are not sincere, credible partners because they tweet out in English the opposite of what apparently the Americans say the agreement means. The other thing that concerns me is when the president's spokesman comes forward, Josh Earnest, comes forward and says, oh, well, it looks like -- yeah, they'll continue to probably be involved with terrorism after they sign this agreement. It makes you wonder, doesn't it, whether or not we're having a sincere two-party agreement here. But I think if that's shot down and the Democrats say this also, it really goes to the heart of whether the president really leads his party anymore.

GLENN: Let me talk to you a little about freedom of speech. And what happened here in Texas. The media was all for the cartoonists in France. And so was I. Even though I disagreed with the cartoons. I personally don't think we should be mocking each other's religion. Those were very offensive cartoons. But they have a right to do it. And so I stood by them. And I stand by them. Same thing with Pamela Geller. I don't necessarily agree with the cartoon contest. And I wouldn't have, you know, done that myself. But she has a right to do that.

The press is coming after Pamela Geller. And saying that, you know, she was just inciting hatred and that it was not freedom of speech. Any comment on that?

RAND: Well, you know, I like the pundits or the constitutional critics that say the First Amendment really isn't about easy speech. It's about speech you find despicable. It's about speech you find offensive. That's the hard thing to allow that to happen in a free society. And I agree with you. I think it doesn't serve any purpose. You can talk about the First Amendment without doing things that are really offensive to other people's religion. But in our country, that's part of one of our basic freedoms is the right to be wrong. The right to be offensive. And the right to say things that people find despicable. Now, you don't you have to pay for them. You don't have to have them in your building, if it's your building.

GLENN: It's the Westboro Baptist Church. It's the Westboro Baptist Church.

RAND: Exactly.

GLENN: I despise the Westboro Baptist Church. But they have a right to say what they want to say. I don't have to listen to them. I don't have I don't want to have them over for dinner. But they have a right to say it.

RAND: Yeah, and that's the hard part about the First Amendment. Because it's easy if I'm saying, hey, what a great guy Glenn Beck is. You love my First Amendment rights. But if I'm criticizing you, it's a little harder. But that's what the First Amendment is about.

GLENN: Right. Let me play a piece of audio here that we found in Al Sharpton. He said this a couple of days ago. This is extraordinarily disturbing to me because of the way we have militarized our police and the way these riots now are being coordinated by people like Al Sharpton. But I want you to listen to what he said when he was talking about the riots in the streets of Baltimore and how they're going to spread.

AL: -- all over the country, which is why we're going to do this march from here to Washington. We need the Justice Department to step in and take over policing in this country. In the 20th century, they had to fight states' rights and to get the right to vote. We're going to have to fight states' rights in terms of closing down police cases. Police must be held accountable.

GLENN: Okay. So here's what he said in case you couldn't understand him. He said. These things are going to happen all around the country. Because it is time we get the Justice Department to take over policing in America. We had to fight states' rights to get the right to vote. Now we need to fight states' rights on policing.

RAND: Well, the interesting thing is, there was a time in our history when, you know, the South was all white and African-Americans were mistreated. And there was a role for the federal government to get involved at one point. This now is not a racial problem because all the government in Baltimore was African-American. And the rioting also. So I don't think the federal government being involved -- I do think there's a problem in our criminal justice system. There's a problem -- we have -- and there's no silver bullet. There's a variety of problems. But there's no excuse for violence or rioting. And the primary thing you have to do in the early stages. You have to have security of people's, you know, person as well as their property. And then over time though, I do want to be part of the dialogue, because I'll tell you one quick story. And this story I think represents why some people and a lot of people in our society feel like they're not being treated fairly.

Kalief Browder was a 16-year-old black kid in the Bronx arrested and kept for three years in prison. He was accused of -- an illegal immigrant. Illegal alien. And he spent three years in jail and was never tried for his crime. Tried to commit suicide. Was kept in solitary confinement. You can see if you're his parents and his friends, you would think something is wrong in America. So that kind of stuff does need to be fixed, and it's part of the unease.

GLENN: Senator, I have to go. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time with us. Senator Rand Paul. You bet.

Patriotic uprising—Why 90% say Old Glory isn’t just another flag

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In a nation where the Stars and Stripes symbolize the blood-soaked sacrifices of our heroes, President Trump's executive order to crack down on flag desecration amid violent protests has ignited fierce debate. But in a recent poll, Glenn asked the tough question: Can Trump protect the Flag without TRAMPLING free speech? Glenn asked, and you answered—thousands weighed in on this pressing clash between free speech and sacred symbols.

The results paint a picture of resounding distrust toward institutional leniency. A staggering 85% of respondents support banning the burning of American flags when it incites violence or disturbs the peace, a bold rejection of the chaos we've seen from George Floyd riots to pro-Palestinian torchings. Meanwhile, 90% insist that protections for burning other flags—like Pride or foreign banners—should not be treated the same as Old Glory under the First Amendment, exposing the hypocrisy in equating our nation's emblem with fleeting symbols. And 82% believe the Supreme Court's Texas v. Johnson ruling, shielding flag burning as "symbolic speech," should not stand without revision—can the official story survive such resounding doubt from everyday Americans weary of government inaction?

Your verdict sends a thunderous message: In this divided era, the flag demands defense against those who exploit freedoms to sow disorder, without trampling the liberties it represents. It's a catastrophic failure of the establishment to ignore this groundswell.

Want to make your voice heard? Check out more polls HERE.

Labor Day began as a political payoff to Socialist agitators

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During your time off this holiday, remember the man who started it: Peter J. McGuire, a racist Marxist who co-founded America’s first socialist party.

Labor Day didn’t begin as a noble tribute to American workers. It began as a negotiation with ideological terrorists.

In the late 1800s, factory and mine conditions were brutal. Workers endured 12-to-15-hour days, often seven days a week, in filthy, dangerous environments. Wages were low, injuries went uncompensated, and benefits didn’t exist. Out of desperation, Americans turned to labor unions. Basic protections had to be fought for because none were guaranteed.

Labor Day wasn’t born out of gratitude. It was a political payoff to Marxist radicals who set trains ablaze and threatened national stability.

That era marked a seismic shift — much like today. The Industrial Revolution, like our current digital and political upheaval, left millions behind. And wherever people get left behind, Marxists see an opening.

A revolutionary wedge

This was Marxism’s moment.

Economic suffering created fertile ground for revolutionary agitation. Marxists, socialists, and anarchists stepped in to stoke class resentment. Their goal was to turn the downtrodden into a revolutionary class, tear down the existing system, and redistribute wealth by force.

Among the most influential agitators was Peter J. McGuire, a devout Irish Marxist from New York. In 1874, he co-founded the Social Democratic Workingmens Party of North America, the first Marxist political party in the United States. He was also a vice president of the American Federation of Labor, which would become the most powerful union in America.

McGuire’s mission wasn’t hidden. He wanted to transform the U.S. into a socialist nation through labor unions.

That mission soon found a useful symbol.

In the 1880s, labor leaders in Toronto invited McGuire to attend their annual labor festival. Inspired, he returned to New York and launched a similar parade on Sept. 5 — chosen because it fell halfway between Independence Day and Thanksgiving.

The first parade drew over 30,000 marchers who skipped work to hear speeches about eight-hour workdays and the alleged promise of Marxism. The parade caught on across the country.

Negotiating with radicals

By 1894, Labor Day had been adopted by 30 states. But the federal government had yet to make it a national holiday. A major strike changed everything.

In Pullman, Illinois, home of the Pullman railroad car company, tensions exploded. The economy tanked. George Pullman laid off hundreds of workers and slashed wages for those who remained — yet refused to lower the rent on company-owned homes.

That injustice opened the door for Marxist agitators to mobilize.

Sympathetic railroad workers joined the strike. Riots broke out. Hundreds of railcars were torched. Mail service was disrupted. The nation’s rail system ground to a halt.

President Grover Cleveland — under pressure in a midterm election year — panicked. He sent 12,000 federal troops to Chicago. Two strikers were killed in the resulting clashes.

With the crisis spiraling and Democrats desperate to avoid political fallout, Cleveland struck a deal. Within six days of breaking the strike, Congress rushed through legislation making Labor Day a federal holiday.

It was the first of many concessions Democrats would make to organized labor in exchange for political power.

What we really celebrated

Labor Day wasn’t born out of gratitude. It was a political payoff to Marxist radicals who set trains ablaze and threatened national stability.

Kean Collection / Staff | Getty Images

What we celebrated was a Canadian idea, brought to America by the founder of the American Socialist Party, endorsed by racially exclusionary unions, and made law by a president and Congress eager to save face.

It was the first of many bones thrown by the Democratic Party to union power brokers. And it marked the beginning of a long, costly compromise with ideologues who wanted to dismantle the American way of life — from the inside out.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Hunter laptop, Steele dossier—Same players, same playbook?

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The Durham annex and ODNI report documents expose a vast network of funders and fixers — from Soros’ Open Society Foundations to the Pentagon.

In a column earlier this month, I argued the deep state is no longer deniable, thanks to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. I outlined the structural design of the deep state as revealed by two recent declassifications: Gabbard’s ODNI report and the Durham annex released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

These documents expose a transnational apparatus of intelligence agencies, media platforms, think tanks, and NGOs operating as a parallel government.

The deep state is funded by elite donors, shielded by bureaucracies, and perpetuated by operatives who drift between public office and private influence without accountability.

But institutions are only part of the story. This web of influence is made possible by people — and by money. This follow-up to the first piece traces the key operatives and financial networks fueling the deep state’s most consequential manipulations, including the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.

Architects and operatives

At the top of the intelligence pyramid sits John Brennan, President Obama’s CIA director and one of the principal architects of the manipulated 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment. James Clapper, who served as director of national intelligence, signed off on that same ICA and later joined 50 other former officials in concluding the Hunter Biden laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” ahead of the 2020 election. The timing, once again, served a political objective.

James Comey, then FBI director, presided over Crossfire Hurricane. According to the Durham annex, he also allowed the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server to collapse after it became entangled with “sensitive intelligence” revealing her plan to tie President Donald Trump to Russia.

That plan, as documented in the annex, originated with Hillary Clinton herself and was personally pushed by President Obama. Her campaign, through law firm Perkins Coie, hired Fusion GPS, which commissioned the now-debunked Steele dossier — a document used to justify surveillance warrants on Trump associates.

Several individuals orbiting the Clinton operation have remained influential. Jake Sullivan, who served as President Biden’s national security adviser, was a foreign policy aide to Clinton during her 2016 campaign. He was named in 2021 as a figure involved in circulating the collusion narrative, and his presence in successive Democratic administrations suggests institutional continuity.

Andrew McCabe, then the FBI’s deputy director, approved the use of FISA warrants derived from unverified sources. His connection to the internal “insurance policy” discussion — described in a 2016 text by FBI official Peter Strzok to colleague Lisa Page — underscores the Bureau’s political posture during that election cycle.

The list of political enablers is long but revealing:

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who, as a former representative from California, chaired the House Intelligence Committee at the time and publicly promoted the collusion narrative while having access to intelligence that contradicted it.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), both members of the “Gang of Eight” with oversight of intelligence operations, advanced the same narrative despite receiving classified briefings.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, exchanged encrypted text messages with a Russian lobbyist in efforts to speak with Christopher Steele.

These were not passive recipients of flawed intelligence. They were participants in its amplification.

The funding networks behind the machine

The deep state’s operations are not possible without financing — much of it indirect, routed through a nexus of private foundations, quasi-governmental entities, and federal agencies.

George Soros’ Open Society Foundations appear throughout the Durham annex. In one instance, Open Society Foundations documents were intercepted by foreign intelligence and used to track coordination between NGOs and the Clinton campaign’s anti-Trump strategy.

This system was not designed for transparency but for control.

Soros has also been a principal funder of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which ran a project during the Trump administration called the Moscow Project, dedicated to promoting the Russia collusion narrative.

The Tides Foundation and Arabella Advisors both specialize in “dark money” donor-advised funds that obscure the source and destination of political funding. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was the biggest donor to the Arabella Advisors by far, which routed $127 million through Arabella’s network in 2020 alone and nearly $500 million in total.

The MacArthur Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation also financed many of the think tanks named in the Durham annex, including the Council on Foreign Relations.

Federal funding pipelines

Parallel to the private networks are government-funded influence operations, often justified under the guise of “democracy promotion” or counter-disinformation initiatives.

USAID directed $270 million to Soros-affiliated organizations for overseas “democracy” programs, a significant portion of which has reverberated back into domestic influence campaigns.

The State Department funds the National Endowment for Democracy, a quasi-governmental organization with a $315 million annual budget and ties to narrative engineering projects.

The Department of Homeland Security underwrote entities involved in online censorship programs targeting American citizens.

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The Pentagon, from 2020 to 2024, awarded over $2.4 trillion to private contractors — many with domestic intelligence capabilities. It also directed $1.4 billion to select think tanks since 2019.

According to public records compiled by DataRepublican, these tax-funded flows often support the very actors shaping U.S. political discourse and global perception campaigns.

Not just domestic — but global

What these disclosures confirm is that the deep state is not a theory. It is a documented structure — funded by elite donors, shielded by bureaucracies, and perpetuated by operatives who drift between public office and private influence without accountability.

This system was not designed for transparency but for control. It launders narratives, neutralizes opposition, and overrides democratic will by leveraging the very institutions meant to protect it.

With the Durham annex and the ODNI report, we now see the network's architecture and its actors — names, agencies, funding trails — all laid bare. What remains is the task of dismantling it before its next iteration takes shape.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

The truth behind ‘defense’: How America was rebranded for war

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Donald Trump emphasizes peace through strength, reminding the world that the United States is willing to fight to win. That’s beyond ‘defense.’

President Donald Trump made headlines this week by signaling a rebrand of the Defense Department — restoring its original name, the Department of War.

At first, I was skeptical. “Defense” suggests restraint, a principle I consider vital to U.S. foreign policy. “War” suggests aggression. But for the first 158 years of the republic, that was the honest name: the Department of War.

A Department of War recognizes the truth: The military exists to fight and, if necessary, to win decisively.

The founders never intended a permanent standing army. When conflict came — the Revolution, the War of 1812, the trenches of France, the beaches of Normandy — the nation called men to arms, fought, and then sent them home. Each campaign was temporary, targeted, and necessary.

From ‘war’ to ‘military-industrial complex’

Everything changed in 1947. President Harry Truman — facing the new reality of nuclear weapons, global tension, and two world wars within 20 years — established a full-time military and rebranded the Department of War as the Department of Defense. Americans resisted; we had never wanted a permanent army. But Truman convinced the country it was necessary.

Was the name change an early form of political correctness? A way to soften America’s image as a global aggressor? Or was it simply practical? Regardless, the move created a permanent, professional military. But it also set the stage for something Truman’s successor, President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower, famously warned about: the military-industrial complex.

Ike, the five-star general who commanded Allied forces in World War II and stormed Normandy, delivered a harrowing warning during his farewell address: The military-industrial complex would grow powerful. Left unchecked, it could influence policy and push the nation toward unnecessary wars.

And that’s exactly what happened. The Department of Defense, with its full-time and permanent army, began spending like there was no tomorrow. Weapons were developed, deployed, and sometimes used simply to justify their existence.

Peace through strength

When Donald Trump said this week, “I don’t want to be defense only. We want defense, but we want offense too,” some people freaked out. They called him a warmonger. He isn’t. Trump is channeling a principle older than him: peace through strength. Ronald Reagan preached it; Trump is taking it a step further.

Just this week, Trump also suggested limiting nuclear missiles — hardly the considerations of a warmonger — echoing Reagan, who wanted to remove missiles from silos while keeping them deployable on planes.

The seemingly contradictory move of Trump calling for a Department of War sends a clear message: He wants Americans to recognize that our military exists not just for defense, but to project power when necessary.

Trump has pointed to something critically important: The best way to prevent war is to have a leader who knows exactly who he is and what he will do. Trump signals strength, deterrence, and resolve. You want to negotiate? Great. You don’t? Then we’ll finish the fight decisively.

That’s why the world listens to us. That’s why nations come to the table — not because Trump is reckless, but because he means what he says and says what he means. Peace under weakness invites aggression. Peace under strength commands respect.

Trump is the most anti-war president we’ve had since Jimmy Carter. But unlike Carter, Trump isn’t weak. Carter’s indecision emboldened enemies and made the world less safe. Trump’s strength makes the country stronger. He believes in peace as much as any president. But he knows peace requires readiness for war.

Names matter

When we think of “defense,” we imagine cybersecurity, spy programs, and missile shields. But when we think of “war,” we recall its harsh reality: death, destruction, and national survival. Trump is reminding us what the Department of Defense is really for: war. Not nation-building, not diplomacy disguised as military action, not endless training missions. War — full stop.

Chip Somodevilla / Staff | Getty Images

Names matter. Words matter. They shape identity and character. A Department of Defense implies passivity, a posture of reaction. A Department of War recognizes the truth: The military exists to fight and, if necessary, to win decisively.

So yes, I’ve changed my mind. I’m for the rebranding to the Department of War. It shows strength to the world. It reminds Americans, internally and externally, of the reality we face. The Department of Defense can no longer be a euphemism. Our military exists for war — not without deterrence, but not without strength either. And we need to stop deluding ourselves.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.