President Donald Trump participated on Wednesday in the dignified transfer of the three Americans, including two soldiers and an interpreter, killed in Syria on Saturday.

The post Trump Participates in Dignified Transfer of American Soldiers, Interpreter Killed in Syria appeared first on Breitbart.

Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) Deputy Director Dan Bongino confirmed that he would be leaving the agency in January, as reports swirled of his upcoming departure.

The post FBI Deputy Director Bongino Confirms He Is Leaving Agency in January appeared first on Breitbart.

House Republicans successfully passed a premium-slashing health care package on Wednesday, overcoming a late-breaking revolt from House GOP moderates.

The bill, called the Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act, passed by a vote of 216 to 211.

Only one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., voted against the bill. The Kentucky Congressman has long been opposed to health care subsidies.

The vote is a major win for House Speaker Mike Johnson, who had to overcome an eleventh hour revolt from GOP moderates before passage.

Moderates Revolt

Moderate Republicans revolted against House GOP leadership by signing a discharge petition, led by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., to extend the expiring Obamacare subsidies for three years.

Four Republicans, Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., Rob Bresnahan, R-Pa., and Ryan Mackenzie, R-Pa., joined the Jeffries petition to get the number of signatures over the 218 needed to force a future vote on the extension. But with winter break beginning on Friday, it’s unlikely there is a vote on the extension before the end of the year.

The revolt was in spite of the fact that Johnson had met and negotiated with the “five families” of the House Republican conference. These groups range from the fiscally conservative House Freedom Caucus to the bipartisan Problem Solvers caucus.

The moderate members who revolted, however, still voted for the package. Just before the vote, Fitzpatrick told Politico he would vote for the GOP health care plan despite his support of the discharge petition.

“I’m not going to vote against something out of spite,” Fitzpatrick said.

Earlier in the day, Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., huddled with some of the revolting members on the House floor. The conversation appeared to be intense as the leaders circled up with pro-extension Republicans such as Lawler, Mackenzie, Rep. Nick LaLota, R-N.Y., Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif., and Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif.

LaLota explained to reporters outside the House chamber that the discussion had involved an effort to revive “a deal that was made…yesterday, wherein the speaker preferred the merits of the Fitzpatrick bill but the pay-fors of the [Rep. Jen] Kiggans [of Virginia] bill.”

Fitzpatrick’s bill proposes a two-year, income-capped extension of the credits, and Kiggans has offered an amendment which includes pay-fors in the form of cracking down on fraud in Obamacare exchanges.

LaLota said he hopes that there will eventually be a vote on credit extension in the House.

“I think that it will require now my leadership to contemplate whether they’re going to see a vote on a three-year extension, which will probably get 230 votes or so in the House, and put more pressure on the Senate for that flawed structure,” he said, or come to a deal to vote on a reformed extension with pay-for provisions included.

While the discharge petition for a three-year extension will force a vote on the floor, this extension has already been rejected by the Senate, so bringing such a bill to the floor will likely mean more for midterm messaging for Democrats and swing district Republicans than for real health care policy.

What’s in It?

The bill considered on the floor Wednesday was not a revolution in health care policy. Rather, the Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act is a package of focused tweaks to Obamacare.

It would theoretically deliver lower premium prices for Americans as the expiration of COVID-era subsidies set under President Joe Biden were set to cause premium hikes.

The original premium tax credits were originally put in place by Democrats as part of Obamacare. 

Under Biden, the credits were boosted to higher levels without an income cap in the party-line American Rescue Plan Act, and then extended by the party-line Inflation Reduction Act.

Therefore, Democrats have twice voted—without any Republican cooperation—to give the boosted credits an expiration date.

In October, Democrats shut down the government over the subsidies, which Republicans say are prone to fraud and abuse. Nevertheless, Democrats have continued fighting for extending the credits, which essentially provide massive subsidies for big insurance companies.

The House GOP bill would let these enhanced credits expire at the date set by Democrats under Biden, but put in place other premium-cutting provisions.

As for the premium-lowering provisions, the GOP plan looks to achieve lower health care costs by funding cost-sharing reductions to end a practice called “silver loading.” Silver loading is a term for when insurers increased premiums on the Obamacare silver-level plan to make up for no longer being reimbursed for offering the legally mandated cheaper copays and deductibles.

Additionally, funding CSRs is likely to reduce the federal deficit, per the Congressional Budget Office, because the premium tax credit subsidies have become more expensive due to the premium hikes from silver loading.

The bill will now go to the Senate, where it could have difficulty mustering 60 votes.

The post Speaker Johnson’s Health Care Plan Overcomes Eleventh Hour Revolt From GOP Moderates appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The House of Representatives rejected a bipartisan attempt Wednesday evening to reign in President Donald Trump’s authority to use force against Venezuela. Lawmakers voted 211 to 213 against a war powers resolution that would have blocked Trump from using military force against Venezuela absent congressional authorization. The failed vote comes a day after Trump designated […]

A fatal crash in Tennessee has ignited a national firestorm over New York’s commercial driver licensing practices. Following an inquiry from Breitbart Texas, federal officials confirmed the bus driver responsible was an illegal alien from China who failed basic English proficiency, yet still obtained a New York CDL. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy threatened earlier this week to strip the state of $73 million in federal highway funds unless it revokes licenses issued to illegal aliens.

The post DHS: Biden Released Chinese Illegal Alien with New York CDL Killed Tennessee Trucker – Feds Blast Sanctuary Licensing Practices appeared first on Breitbart.

In a stunning move that represents the first significant turnover of President Donald Trump’s second term, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino is reportedly preparing to step down. Bongino confirmed the […]

The post Breaking: Bongino Stepping Down as Deputy Director of the FBI appeared first on The Western Journal.

Brown University said it will conduct a "large-scale, systematic security review" of its campus following a deadly shooting that has raised serious questions about safety protocols, emergency alerts, and preparedness at the Ivy League school.

Federal Aviation Administration chief Bryan Bedford told senators Wednesday that around 500 air traffic controller trainees left during the 43-day government shutdown.

A father and son duo opened fire on a crowd of mostly Jewish victims on Dec. 14. They were at a large Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in Australia; 15 people were killed and dozens more were wounded in an antisemitic terrorist attack.

Using a legally owned bolt action shotgun and bolt action rifle, the gunmen fired more than 80 rounds during a roughly 11-minute reign of terror before police fatally shot the father and critically injured the son.

This horrific attack should be a wake up call for the Australian government, especially after failing to heed years of warnings about the well-documented rise of antisemitism in the country.

Instead, they’ve taken it as a green light for a grotesque social experiment in national disarmament. It’s precisely the wrong lesson for Australia to learn—or, in this case, to relearn.

Australia already has one of the most restrictive gun control frameworks in the world. After a devastating 1996 mass public shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania, the government implemented far reaching legal changes, passing sweeping legislation known collectively as the National Firearms Act, or NFA.

The NFA effectively banned civilian possession of virtually all semiautomatic firearms and most pump-action shotguns. It subjected Australians, who lawfully owned these guns, to a “compulsory buy-back” program.

Within two years, roughly 650,000 firearms were turned in under this compensated confiscation measure, reducing the nation’s civilian gun stock by about a third.

Currently, Australia’s strict gun licensure system requires first time gun owners to have a “genuine reason” for gun ownership. Self-defense, mind you, is explicitly discounted.

Civilians must then pass comprehensive background checks proving they’re “fit and proper” to be trusted with the privilege of owning guns. They also must participate in a multi-day gun safety course and wait a minimum of 28 days for a mandatory “cooling off period.”

Even then, Australians remain incredibly limited in the selection of guns they can legally possess. Most “general purpose” civilian firearms are capped at a magazine capacity of either five or 10 rounds.

Australia has no concept of a “public carry permit,” and outside of specific exceptions—hunting or for pest control—civilian gun owners must keep their firearms locked away and unloaded.

These restrictions supposedly ensured the horrors of Port Arthur could never be repeated. The terrorists in Sydney apparently didn’t get the message. In fact, they exploited the certainty of knowing their victims would be unarmed.

The Australian government, for its part, apparently believes the real problem here isn’t that evil exists, that people bent on violence will always find ways to inflict unimaginable suffering on the innocent, or that unarmed victims pay the largest price when criminals decline to play by society’s rules.

Instead, Australian officials are content to believe they weren’t harsh enough toward lawful gun owners the first time. The obvious remedy is to render ordinary Australians even less capable of defending themselves in the future.

National leaders are now proposing a slew of new measures designed to burden lawful gun owners in the country even further.

This includes, among other things, limiting the number of guns an individual can own, restricting gun possession to Australian citizens and imposing additional limits on the types of guns. Officials also want to limit lawful modifications for civilians and are looking to expedite establishing a national gun owner registry.

It’s an abysmal and irrational response.

First, despite the never-ending claims made by Australian and American gun control advocates alike, Australia’s gun control regime is not some public safety miracle that “solved” the problem of mass shootings, specifically, or gun violence, generally. Australian gun laws certainly isn’t a viable “solution” to gun violence in the United States.

As scholars like Florida State professor Gary Kleck have explained for many years, the narrative of Australia’s gun control success is based on evidence that, at best, is widely mischaracterized and often grossly overstated. At worst, it’s non-existent.

It’s true, to be sure, that after Australia passed the NFA, its rates of both gun homicide and gun suicide declined markedly, and that mass public shootings have been almost (but not quite) non-existent.

But there’s far more to the story. What gun control advocates routinely ignore is the plethora of mounting evidence which undermines any causal connection between the NFA and increased public safety.

To begin with, Australia has always enjoyed significantly lower violent crime and suicide rates than the United States, even before the NFA.

In the two years preceding the passage of sweeping gun control, for example, Australia’s homicide rate was already 16 times lower than the United States’ homicide rate.

Moreover, Australia’s homicide and suicide rates began falling years before the NFA, and the nation saw an equal decline in rates of non-firearm homicide and non-firearm suicide. This strongly suggests that factors unrelated to gun control caused a general reduction in homicide and suicide, regardless of the means used.

Compounding this problem of causation, the United States experienced an even more dramatic decline in homicide rates and non-fatal gun violence rates during the mid-1990s and early 2000s. This is the case even though the number of civilian firearms more than doubled and states increasingly loosened restrictions on public carry.

Additionally, while Australia has a lower population-adjusted mass shooting rate than the United States, mass shootings rarely occurred there even before the Port Arthur tragedy.

And as the Second Amendment Foundation’s Kostas Moros pointed out, while Australia experienced fewer mass public shootings after it implemented restrictive gun control, it’s unclear if there are fewer mass public killings overall when including mass casualty stabbings, arsons and vehicle attacks.

Moros similarly noted that the focus on gun suicide, rather than suicide regardless of means, creates a meaningless comparison of a nation’s overall mental health.

Australia may have a much lower gun suicide rate, but its overall suicide rate of 12.2 per 100,000 people is only marginally lower than the United States’ rate of 14.6 per 100,000 people.

Additionally, it’s important to note the Australian government doesn’t count the more than 3,300 Australians who “legally” killed themselves via the country’s so-called assisted suicide laws last year.

The nation’s real suicide rate, then, is closer to 19.8 per 100,000 people, and much higher than that of the United States.

It’s little wonder that, just this year, a researcher published a devastating overview of the scientific literature on Australian gun control, concluding, “the majority of studies, including the best methodological study available,” find “no beneficial association between these regulations and homicide and suicide rates.”

Unsatisfied with the reality of the data, some gun control advocates are pivoting to a different argument in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack. They’re now suggesting Australia’s restrictions on semi-automatic firearms prevented the attack from being far deadlier.

There’s simply no evidence to support this claim.

The type of weapon used in a mass shooting is far less relevant to the equation than factors like the circumstances in which the shooting occurs and the length of time the shooter has before he meets armed resistance.

The deadliest mass shootings typically occur when the shooter exploits a “cattle pen” scenario—that is, when victims are densely grouped in a confined space with few options for either making a quick escape or for subduing the attacker while also avoiding the barrel of his gun.

This, especially when combined with lengthy armed response times, is a recipe for devastation.

It’s also, for example, why two of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history—the 1991 Luby’s Cafeteria shooting and the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, in which a combined 55 people were killed—could be carried out with comparatively low-caliber handguns.

Finally, it seems unlikely any of the new gun control measures proposed by the Australian government would meaningfully prevented or mitigated the outcome of the deadly attack now used to justify their implementation.

A national gun owner registry, for instance, is useful only for the limited purpose of determining the lawful owner of a particular gun, and only after that gun is connected to a crime which already occurred. It has no capacity to help law enforcement identify which gun owners are planning criminal violence–though, as Canada found out in the most expensive way possible, lawfully registered guns are rarely used in gun crimes, anyway.

While the citizenship requirement might have prevented the father—who held permanent residency in Australia but retained his Indian passport—from obtaining a firearms license, the same is not true for the son, who is an Australian citizen and could have obtained his own.

Meanwhile, limiting the number of guns any individual may legally own might sound like a grand idea, but in this case, it appears that two gunmen used, at most, three different firearms. Unless the new rule is “one gun per person”—a restriction that’s likely a bridge too far, even for Australia—it’s unclear how a two- or three-gun limitation would have saved lives here.

And, given the devastation wrought by the terrorists with nothing more than bolt-action weapons, it’s unclear what additional “modifications” Australia could prohibit without resorting to a de facto gun ban, or at least a de facto hunting ban.

The targeted attack on Jews in Bondi Beach should certainly be a moment of national self-reflection in Australia. In this case, however, Australians in charge are reflecting on the wrong problem, in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons.

The unfortunate irony is that, as Australia uses an antisemitic terror attack to contemplate further burdens on the ability of victims to defend themselves from violence, it’s Australia’s unarmed Jews who are most likely to pay the steepest price.

The post After Terrorist Attack, Australia Learns All the Wrong Lessons, Again appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The following is a preview of Daily Signal Politics Editor Bradley Devlin’s interview with Ohio State Rep. Josh Williams on “The Signal Sitdown.” The full interview premieres on The Daily Signal’s YouTube page at 6:30 a.m. Eastern on Dec. 18.

One evening, Josh Williams sat on the edge of his bed, gun in hand, and contemplated ending his life.

“I was in a pit of despair that I can’t describe to you,” Williams said in his interview on “The Signal Sitdown.” After hearing some terrible news from doctors regarding a traumatic workplace injury, Williams had told his then-wife to take the kids to the store. “I sat on the edge of my bed with my gun, and I was ready to kill myself. And I wrote out my suicide note.”

William’s three-year-old son, however, was left behind. Before Williams succumbed to despair and ended his life, his son walked in the room and said “Daddy, I’m hungry.”

“I tucked my gun away, and I grabbed my kid, and I cried,” Williams said. “Man, I cried for hours.”

When his wife returned home, Williams confronted her about leaving their three-year-old behind. “She said something kept telling her to leave him behind,” Williams recalled. “She couldn’t explain it.”

“Now, later on, I know that was God working in his own mysterious ways, that he sent one of his foot soldiers in that day to save my life because he had a bigger assignment for me,” Williams told The Daily Signal.

William’s life story is extraordinary. He grew up in poverty in Toledo, Ohio. He was homeless at 18. When he started to put his life together—motivated by providing for his own family—he fell 30 feet from a rail car at his railroad job. For the next six years, Williams was mostly bedridden.

The despair crescendoed when Williams was about to take his own life. But Williams overcame that despair. He would go on to get his college degree and his law degree, and he currently serves in the Ohio Assembly.

While William’s life story is extraordinary, it is powerful because it is a microcosm of a number of social illnesses plaguing this country: fatherlessness, homelessness, joblessness, drugs, suicide—the list goes on.

The aforementioned social ills have especially plagued our young men. Deaths of despair, an umbrella term for drug overdoses and suicides, top the list for causes of death among Americans 18-44 years old.

In a political and cultural environment in which some even celebrate this despair in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion, this is precisely the moment when stories like William’s must be told.

Williams is a candidate for Ohio’s 9th Congressional District. Nothing in this piece should be construed as an endorsement of William’s campaign, as The Daily Signal is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

The post Josh Williams Was on the Verge of Committing Suicide. Now, He’s One of Ohio’s Major Political Figures appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. A lot of officials in the Trump Cabinet are under a lot of criticism, as we’d expect, from the Left. But one has, I think, both got more criticism and more unfair criticism than any other Cabinet member. And that’s Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war—the newly renamed Department of Defense.

Let’s just review a little bit of his record because it does not justify the level of invective that the Left, and even some people on the Right in Congress and the Republican Party, have unfairly attacked him.

We were told during the Biden administration that the recruitment for the Air Force, the Army, the Navy, and even in one case, I think one year, the Marines, was off some 40,000 to 50,000 recruits. And the Pentagon’s reaction under Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was, as we heard this echoed by a lot of the four-star admirals and generals, well, people are out of shape. They’re in gangs. They take drugs. They are wanted by private enterprise.

We have to compete with all of the excuses other than the real cause. The real cause was, as Pete Hegseth said when he came in, that people felt that the military was not emphasizing combat, battlefield efficacy. It was turning into a social justice “program.”

The subtext of Pete Hegseth’s point was that there was a particular demographic, white males from rural and often southern locales. They had died at twice their numbers in the demographic in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they weren’t joining.

Some of them were not joining because of the 8,500, maybe 8,000-8,500, that had natural immunity from prior COVID-19 infections. And yet, they did not want this experimental mRNA vaccine, and they were drummed out en masse. The majority of those fit this demographic.

The others felt that under the DEI obsessions with race and sexual orientation and gender, that people would be recruited, retained, promoted on criteria other than battlefield efficacy. So, they just stayed away from what they felt was a hostile environment. Didn’t help when then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin told the nation before Congress that they were going to invest white supremacy following the death of George Floyd.

That’s over with. There is a record number of Army recruits. The military has met all of its recruiting. That is equivalent to the dramatic revolution on the southern border. Nobody thought we could close the border. We did. Nobody thought we could get recruitment back. Pete Hegseth did.

The other thing, very importantly: We have procurement that we were focused largely, not entirely, but on a few big conglomerates. These were companies that, over the years, had consolidated dozens of defense contractors, who had famous names in World War II. But now they were Lockheed, General Dynamics, Northrop, Raytheon, etc.

And we were buying few platforms—$14 billion carriers, $120 million F-22s, billion-dollar frigates, etc. But our enemies were building lots of things. They were taking our approach to World War II when the United States just flooded the zone with Thunderbolt P-47 fighters, P-51 fighters, Essex carriers, escort carriers, light carriers, Sherman tanks. Good enough. But just swarm the enemy. We weren’t doing that.

So, one of the things that Hegseth has tried to do is look toward a wider variety of startup, off-the-shelf companies that make cheaper products in greater quantity. A million drones they have announced. That’s new.

The third thing is, yes, it was good to worry about American safety overseas, and that’s why, ostensibly, after 9/11, we went into Afghanistan, Iraq, or we take out the nuclear—but if you look, since 1990, when we first had figures, there’s some 900,000 people who have overdosed or killed themselves from foreign imported opiates, and particularly fentanyl, often disguised as designer drugs intended to kill Americans through Chinese agency and cartel fabrication in I guess we would call them pill factories in Mexico and parts of Latin America.

So, these drug interdictions are saving American lives. And he’s saying to the nation, it doesn’t do any good to spend billions of dollars and defend the borders and intervene all over the world if in your backyard you’re losing more people from all the battles combined since World War II. More than Vietnam, more than Korea, more than Iraq, more than the first Gulf War, more than Afghanistan—900,000 dead, 75,000 to 80,000 a year. For now, we’re getting close to the 35th year of this. And he’s trying to stop that.

He ended, as I said, DEI, which was amazing because what had happened—the Left had always despised the Pentagon. They had always tried to rake the generals over the coals. We knew that stereotype of the radical Democratic Party.

But the last 10 years, especially under the Obama administration, they said: Wait, wait, wait, wait. They have the chain of command. They don’t have to argue in Congress. They don’t have to get a bill passed. All we have to do is bring these generals and admirals in here, especially under a Democratic Obama or Biden administration, and say, you’re gonna do this, and you’re gonna do this. Abortion. You’re gonna make that base have abortion to everybody. DEI, you’re gonna make that artillery unit have—so, they could get an instant fiat right through the chain of command.

And all of a sudden, Pete Hegseth came in and said: You’re abusing the military for your political agenda. We’re not gonna do it anymore.

A couple of other things: Pete Hegseth, compared to what?

I didn’t hear anybody say that Lloyd Austin might have had a conflict of interest coming out of Raytheon right into the secretary of defense. Was that a good paradigm that we’re doing? Generals go out of the Pentagon, they go to defense contractors, then they rely on their former subordinates for, maybe, advice about which weapon systems to buy, and then they often go back into government in retirement, and then they’ll go back again to these defense? What Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex.

And Lloyd Austin was AWOL for seven days. We never knew where he was. Did anybody suggest he should step down? No.

So, this is political. And the calls for Pete Hegseth to step down—it’s ridiculous.

And finally, about the drug interdiction. We’ve had about 30 of these. Are we all suffering from collective amnesia? President Barack Obama, on the Pakistani-Afghan border, Somalia, somewhat in Libya, in Afghanistan, in Syria, Iraq, was a master of Predator drone assassinations. He didn’t kill, I don’t know, 60 or 70 narco-terrorists on 30 boats or more. He killed over 500 people, including a 16-year-old U.S. citizen.

And when he was asked about this, according to Mark Halperin’s co-authored book, he said: You know, I never really knew that I was pretty good at killing. Pretty good at killing. It suited me. That’s what Obama said.

He also said at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he joked about using Predators and killing people. He said, if people wanted to date his daughter, they better be careful because of Predators. In other words, that his hallmark, his brand, had been Predator assassination. That’s kind of a very light way of approaching human assassination, if you ask me.

What am I getting at? If you look at what Pete Hegseth has actually done, it was long overdue, and he’s doing it very well. And the criticism against him has two themes: It’s entirely political, and it’s not symmetric. Everything they said about Pete Hegseth in a negative context could have been applied to both the Obama and Biden administration, and much more egregiously.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post Hegseth Did What Biden Called ‘Impossible’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A discharge petition to force a vote on an extension of enhanced Obamacare subsidies that are set to expire passed the House on Wednesday.

The post Centrist Republicans Join Democrats to Sign Discharge Petition Forcing Obamacare Subsidy Extension Vote appeared first on Breitbart.

ANN ARBOR, MI — In the wake of police arresting University of Michigan's football coach Sherrone Moore, authorities have decided to go ahead and just arrest everyone else in Michigan, just to be safe.

The United States Senate on Wednesday confirmed Jared Isaacman as Administrator of NASA in a 67-30 vote, officially approving President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the space agency. The self-made billionaire, commercial astronaut, and aviation entrepreneur, at age 42, becomes the youngest person in history to lead NASA.

The post Jared Isaacman Becomes Youngest NASA Administrator After Senate Confirmation appeared first on Breitbart.