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Neocons love Trump only when he bombs

The Blaze
1 week 4 days ago


The day-to-day status of negotiations may be uncertain, but the Trump administration appears to be doing everything it can to reach a deal and end the conflict with Iran.

The war had solid support from Trump’s more Fox News-oriented voters, but it remained unpopular with much of the country. It cost Trump several high-profile supporters. It also earned him the favor of political operators who previously despised him. Several figures who had declared themselves “Never Trump” suddenly discovered a strange new respect for the president once they believed he was willing to launch another regime-change war in the Middle East.

Stop allying with neoconservatives. They will always betray you in the end.

Those fair-weather allies are now melting down over the prospect of peace between America and Iran.

In his farewell address, George Washington warned the fledgling republic that foreign entanglements were dangerous to freedom and independence. He encouraged commerce with all nations but cautioned against permanent alliances and favored nations. Washington understood that favoritism toward a foreign power would invite foreign influence and lead some citizens to mistake loyalty to an ally for loyalty to the United States.

No event has vindicated that warning more clearly than the war with Iran.

Trump immediately stood out in conservative politics by taking three positions that were popular with the base and dangerous to the establishment. He opposed open borders, unfettered trade, and endless regime-change wars.

Republican politicians, conservative pundits, and Washington think tanks loathed him for all three positions, but especially for the third. Endless conflict created job security and enormous income streams for permanent Washington. The war class did not appreciate a reality television star barging in and threatening the gravy train.

Many neoconservatives abandoned the GOP once they realized Trump was not going away. Others stayed because the war-hawk establishment had deep roots in the Republican Party. They realized they could gain more influence by pretending to convert to the MAGA movement and working from within to steer policy.

Several figures who swore they would never support Trump began presenting themselves as his greatest champions, hoping they could define what MAGA should become.

When the war with Iran began, these neoconservative champions viciously attacked anyone who pointed out that the conflict contradicted Trump’s previous foreign policy. They invented slurs to brand opponents as traitors to the president and insisted that total ideological conformity was the only acceptable position.

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ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images

The strategy worked for a time. It drove many anti-interventionists away from their previous support for Trump. That made it even more revealing when Trump moved to end the conflict and his new allies suddenly attacked him in blind rage.

America and Israel entered the conflict with very different goals. For the United States, the only real concern was preventing Iran from gaining the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. It is unlikely an Iranian nuke could threaten the U.S. directly, but keeping hostile regimes from obtaining that capacity is a legitimate goal.

Israel saw Iran differently. For Benjamin Netanyahu, Iran was an existential threat that had to be taken off the table entirely. His goal was always to collapse the current Iranian regime, replace it, or let the country become a failed state.

As Marco Rubio indicated after the war began, Israel insisted on starting the fight knowing it would force the United States to join. The two allies were out of step from the beginning, so it is no surprise that Netanyahu has done everything possible to disrupt the peace process and achieve every military objective he can while still under the protection of American arms.

The reaction in Israel to Trump’s pursuit of peace has not been gratitude. The president’s popularity there has plummeted, and headlines accusing him of betraying Israel have appeared across the country’s newspapers. One Israeli media figure even suggested America deserved another 9/11-style terror attack so the public would be frightened back into fighting Iran.

Hardcore Israel supporters in America have reacted no better. Figures such as Ben Shapiro, who briefly departed the Never Trump camp to push for war, are now turning back against Trump. At times they try to hide their anger by blaming Vice President JD Vance for the peace deal, but no one is fooled.

Neocons pushed relentlessly for a conflict that had little to do with American interests. Once they got their war, they expected military escalation to force Trump into the wider regime-change conflict they desperately desired.

Very few presidents would have had the fortitude to exit the Iran war after realizing it was unwise. Trump did. The neoconservatives will never forgive him for that outrage.

It turns out all the rhetoric about loyalty to Trump was a farce. The neoconservatives always hated Trump and his voters, despite their change in tone after his second election. Many pundits who praised Trump’s decision to bomb Iran had tried to replace him with Ron DeSantis in the primary. The people who believed their rhetoric and followed their lead were foolish. They are notably silent now that the neoconservatives are losing their minds and turning on the president.

RELATED: A real nation knows who is in and who is out

Blaze Media Illustration

What should we learn from this unwise detour into foreign adventurism?

First, Americans have little interest in extended foreign conflicts. They elected Trump to address crises at home, not to fix the Middle East.

Second, Washington was right about entangling alliances. Israel is its own country with its own priorities. It cares about the United States to the extent that America helps advance those priorities. Entering a war with an ally that does not share your interests is foolish.

Third, neoconservatives are not domestic political allies. They have no loyalty to Trump or the MAGA base and will turn on both the moment either stops serving their purposes.

The lesson is not complicated, but it is expensive. Movements that cannot distinguish temporary agreement from real alliance eventually wake up serving someone else’s agenda in wars they never wanted to fight at all.

Stop allying with neoconservatives. They will always betray you in the end.

Auron MacIntyre

Florida man allegedly bragged about sexually abusing foster child — cops say he and his husband fostered 23 young boys

The Blaze
1 week 4 days ago


A Florida man arrested for allegedly bragging about sexually abusing his young foster child also fostered 23 other young boys with his gay husband, police say.

Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said in a media briefing that 51-year-old John David Ballard was arrested after police received a cyber tip on May 7.

'By his own statements, he was using these kids for his sexual pleasure.'

Ballard had allegedly admitted on the messaging app Kik that he had been sexually abusing the 7-year-old boy in his care.

Gualtieri said the messages were explicit, graphic, and "gross."

Ballard allegedly admitted to the conversations to deputies when they served a search warrant on his phone in June. He also told officers that he's "into some really weird stuff" after they found videos of bestiality on his phone, according to police.

Deputies allegedly found dozens of graphic child pornography images that included victims as young as 2 months old.

The investigation expanded when investigators discovered that Ballard and his husband, Bradley Borsuk, were very active in the foster community. The couple had fostered 23 young boys between 2017 and 2023 and had adopted five children between 2015 and 2023, according to police.

All of those boys were between ages 4 and 12 years old.

Gualtieri said officers had spoken to most of the boys, some of whom were now young men, and said some had described "concerning behavior" in the ongoing investigation.

Some allegedly said that Ballard would punish them by making them undress and stand in front of a window, and others said Ballard watched them take baths or showers.

Gualtieri said Ballard and his husband had even authored a book described as an adoption journal.

On June 17, Ballard was arrested and charged with 20 counts of possession of child pornography and five counts of sexual activity involving animals.

Ballard's husband has not yet been arrested, and authorities are still considering what to do with the four adoptive children they have living in their home.

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"This is really a very difficult case, because it involved the betrayal of trust that the Child Welfare System puts into people who volunteer to help the most vulnerable among us. And those are children who have been abused, abandoned, and neglected," the sheriff said.

"One thing that is really maddening about the situation is the fraud that Ballard committed on others by holding himself out as this model foster and adoptive parent," Gualtieri added. "By his own statements, he was using these kids for his sexual pleasure.

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Carlos Garcia

The celebrity escape plan backfires as 2 iconic Trump haters just slunk back home

The Blaze
1 week 4 days ago


When Trump won the presidency in 2024, several celebrities made good on their promise to evacuate the United States — but that’s not stopping them from coming back.

Rosie O’Donnell famously fled to Ireland with her 13-year-old child, Clay, immediately after Trump’s win, and returned this June for the Tony Awards.

While O’Donnell had no issues getting back into the States, she made it clear that she was “worried” that it would be “problematic” the first time she returned on a secret trip in February.

“I worried the first time I came back, whether that would be problematic, and I came alone without my child, who is 13 and has autism. She’s my youngest of five,” she told Page Six in an interview. “I wanted to make sure that if anything happened, it didn’t happen in her presence, so it was fine — as it should be.”


O’Donnell explained that Trump “can’t really arrest American citizens without cause” and speaking out against him is “using freedom speech” and “is not a reason to be arrested in America.”

BlazeTV host Jeff Fisher points out that O’Donnell also called Trump an “a-hole and a con man.”

“That’s so surprising for her,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray adds.

But O’Donnell isn’t the only one.

While Ellen DeGeneres also made a big show of moving to the U.K. after Trump’s election, she purchased land in California after the move.

“They’d already sold both their homes in Los Angeles, both their mansions in L.A.,” Gray explains, “and so they had to go back home, and they bought a new mansion in Los Angeles where she spent her birthday this year.”

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To enjoy more of Pat's biting analysis and signature wit as he restores common sense to a senseless world, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

BlazeTV Staff

The housing bill from hell targets red America

The Blaze
1 week 4 days ago


Preserving the continuity, vitality, and quality of life of exurban and rural red America should be a top priority for conservative policymakers.

Instead, red America faces a multifront assault on land use and development. Corrupt local Republican politicians and their developer donors are pushing data centers, solar and wind farms, and Section 8 housing for foreign labor. Now, Congress has sent President Trump a uniparty housing bill — the Obamacare of housing — that will open the floodgates for the federal government, globalists, and special interests to force more of that transformation on red communities.

Conservatives need communities that remain intact, counties that can govern themselves, and neighborhoods that are not remade by federal bribes and developer schemes.

After years of negotiations, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.) just sent the largest housing bill in recent memory to the president’s desk. Only five Senate Republicans voted against it. Every Democrat supported it. Trump had signaled he would sign the bill — but only after Congress passes the SAVE America Act.

The bill is being sold as a magic wand to lower housing prices. In reality, it expands the Housing and Urban Development and Federal Housing Administration programs that helped fuel the housing bubble through artificial subsidies.

Conservatives are being told the bill bars corporate ownership of residential homes. But that provision was tacked on at the 11th hour, accounts for only 19 of the bill’s 381 pages, and is riddled with loopholes. Worse, the bill’s main provisions incentivize overdevelopment and Section 8 expansion in red America, negating whatever limited utility the corporate ownership provision might have.

The result is more social transformation than the partial corporate ownership ban claims to prevent.

Obama-style zoning incentives

Section 107 sets the tone by creating a federal zoning standard for “directing local reforms,” including “mechanisms to encourage adoption” of loose zoning rules — all in the name of increasing housing inventory. It also creates a national standard for developers and builders to request special zoning and appeal denials of variances.

That may sound appealing when discussing onerous regulations in blue states. But in red America, already overbuilt since COVID, this bill will create a federal standard that pressures communities to drop one of their few remaining tools of self-defense against the transformation of their neighborhoods.

The rest of the bill offers incentives to communities that follow this national standard. Inevitably, that will encourage localities to rezone not just for housing but also for other uses, including data centers.

HUD should not exist. It certainly should not dictate zoning policy to rural America.

The zoning guidelines would push communities to “reduce minimum lot sizes and setbacks,” increase the number of “duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes,” and promote “transit-oriented development.” Nothing good will come from federal incentives that effectively impose Section 8-style housing and density mandates on suburbs, exurbs, and rural towns.

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Alex Wong/Getty Images

Grant money as a weapon

Ask any conservative living in red America under RINO leadership — which describes much of America — and he will tell you that one of the greatest threats to the character of his county comes from developers working with corporatist GOP politicians, usually their donors, to transform the neighborhood through overdevelopment.

This bill does not directly mandate adoption of the zoning standards. It does something almost as dangerous: It offers local communities and developers incentives that will function like a mandate.

Section 207, written by pro-Hamas Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), creates new competitive HUD grants for states, localities, tribes, and other entities for planning, zoning reform, barrier reduction, and implementation to increase “affordable” housing supply.

Some grants will go toward reducing environmental barriers, which is how Warren got Republicans to support the bill. But much of the remaining criteria is rooted in urbanizing more of America.

The funds are contingent on adopting plans to rezone and “increase the availability of affordable housing and access to affordable housing.” In practice, this provision places a loaded gun to the head of communities that want to keep out Section 8. Nothing gets between local politicians and grant funds.

Section 208 goes further by granting funds to communities that have already demonstrated measurable progress in expanding housing supply at all costs. Eligibility criteria include localities that build more multiunit housing, reduce lot sizes, create “zoning overlays for mixed-income housing,” and use “local tax incentives or public financing for attainable housing.”

Want to densify your suburb and destroy single-family neighborhoods? This bill is for you.

Then comes the Community Development Block Grant program. Rather than following through on every Trump budget proposal’s promise to abolish this program, the bill expands it. Worse, it creates a zero-sum reallocation within the existing CDBG formula by shifting money from low-growth communities to high-growth communities.

Build more homes, and you get rewarded. Build fewer, and you get punished.

That will either shift more money to blue areas, which make up the lion’s share of places needing more inventory, or incentivize red areas to overdevelop.

Subsidizing the next bubble

No bad housing bill would be complete without provisions expanding the FHA’s authority to extend even more loans to people who cannot afford houses, thereby fueling the next housing bubble.

Section 213 allows the FHA to insure larger loans for apartment buildings, enabling more and bigger multifamily projects to be financed with FHA insurance.

Outside the Northeast, home prices are already beginning to tumble from COVID-era overbuilding, and builders are desperate to sell. In June, 35% of builders cut prices, while 62% used sales incentives to attract buyers. America does not need to expand HUD’s reach into local communities to incentivize what is already happening.

Ironically, this bill is being sold as a way to prevent corporations from transforming neighborhoods by purchasing too many homes. But almost every other provision accelerates an even greater transformation.

Section 1001 supposedly bans very large corporate investors from buying more single-family houses. But it carves out practical exceptions for new construction, build-to-rent developments, meaningful renovation programs, and certain pathways that help renters eventually buy homes.

In other words, the same corporations will enjoy even more subsidies to build Section 8 rentals in the suburbs under the bill’s extremely limited ban than they enjoyed before it.

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Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

No one is home

This is why Congress should not rush through a bill of this magnitude on the suspension calendar without debate.

Then again, nobody is home in the so-called conservative movement to flag a bill this large. Obamacare could pass overnight, and the loudest voices on the right might not even notice.

The bill’s supporters claim they are solving a housing crisis. In reality, they are giving HUD, developers, corporate investors, and local Republican sellouts more tools to transform red America.

Conservatives do need homes. They need communities that remain intact, counties that can govern themselves, and neighborhoods that are not remade by federal bribes and developer schemes.

That is the home conservatives must ultimately construct. Where is the bill to expedite that construction?

Daniel Horowitz