Foreign Affairs

What Pro-Palestinian and Pro-Israel Voices Both Miss

The people of Gaza are not a means to an end. 

Credit: anas mohammed/Shutterstock

Those who get their news by way of the corporate media in the West might not be aware of it, but Palestinians in Gaza have risen up in protest against Hamas. And to those who belong to the cynical and shallow political movements of the West, that might come as a shock.

Ihab Hassan, a Palestinian Christian and human rights advocate, put it beautifully this week. He praised people in Gaza for finding “the courage to rise up and protest against Hamas” even while being “under constant bombardment and Israeli airstrikes.” However, as Hassan pointed out, “the protests were overwhelmingly ignored by major pro-Palestine voices, accounts, and media outlets that claim to support Palestinians. The bravest act of defiance—dismissed, simply because it didn’t fit their narrative.”

Worse, Hassan continued, “many didn’t stop at silence.” Self-styled pro-Palestinian voices “went further—smearing these courageous protesters, accusing them of betrayal, and lecturing them that Hamas is ‘resistance.’”

Even compared to Palestinians loyal to Hamas, activists in the West presented “the harshest backlash against anti-Hamas protesters in Gaza,” Hassan noted, condemning “pro-Hamas voices in the West and keyboard warriors, thousands of miles away, sitting comfortably as they preach ‘resistance’ while Palestinians bleed.”

And here’s the key: These onlookers, who “aren’t pro-Palestine” but “pro-Hamas,” are “indifferent—because they’re not the ones paying the price, but Palestinians in Gaza,” Hassan wrote.

That’s right. And of course, it goes without saying that the “other side” in the sick narrative wars being waged by opinion-makers in the West are just as thoughtless of the vulnerable people of Gaza.

Worse than thoughtless—actively hostile. We have mainstream Christian commentators publicly goading Israeli forces to “flatten” and “carpet-bomb” entire civilian cities. Respected public intellectuals calling Arabs in general and Gaza’s population in particular a “people of death,” suggesting they must be terminated in order to save Western civilization. Popular religious leaders spreading bizarre, gnostic claims that Palestinians have the spirit of the ancient Amalekites and so must be treated as eternal enemies.

Or just look at the dehumanizing comments on X from “conservatives” responding to a video from my apostolate, The Vulnerable People Project, in which we join President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV in calling for Netanyahu to allow aid into Gaza to save starving women and children.

Many commenters blame Palestinians for the actions of Hamas, justifying collective punishment (or rather, trying to justify it). In fact, only a fraction of Gaza’s current residents voted for Hamas during the last election.

Another fact: The election in question took place some 20 years ago—making the rule of Hamas a bygone conclusion rather than something anyone in Gaza has had any real opportunity to embrace or reject for many years. 

Another fact is that some of Hamas’s funding has come thanks to the state of Israel under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who saw the terror group’s power in the strip as a chance to keep the Palestinian territories politically divided.

But the main thing missing from the trendy activist narratives and corporate press in the West isn’t just facts like those—or even just reportage of the courage of the Gazans who rose up against Hamas.

No, the main thing missing is a fundamental belief in the dignity and worth of the human beings most directly under threat during Netanyahu’s current campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza: the men, women, and children who live there.

However complex a situation might become, this belief in the dignity of the vulnerable, and a consequent commitment to standing in solidarity with them as ends in themselves, is the duty of every one of us who claims to be a Christian and an inheritor of Western values.

We must stop treating the people of Gaza as another “issue”—a “debate” for loud onlookers on either side to use as a means to further their petty causes from a safe distance.

The people of Gaza—and all people, especially when they are under threat and find themselves ignored and unsupported by the powerful—are ends in themselves. And as a Christian, I would add that they are images of God. The God who became man, allowed Himself to be handed over to violence and abandoned by those who should have been loyal to Him, and made clear that He expected us to treat others who face the same ordeal as if they were Himself.

“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me,” says the King of Kings.

And “whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.”

The post What Pro-Palestinian and Pro-Israel Voices Both Miss appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics

From Foggy Bottom to Fertile Ground

Why I abandoned a career in foreign policy.

(By Patrick Jennings/Shutterstock)

Washington, DC, teaches you how to read the room, speak in acronyms, and feign conviction in things you do not believe. I learned that firsthand during my years at the U.S. Department of State, where the highest levels of American diplomacy are often staffed by people who don’t particularly favor Americans. The contempt was rarely explicit, but it was always there—in the disdain for small towns, in the eye-rolls at Christianity, in the quiet belief that the average American was provincial and unenlightened. At first, it was thrilling: the proximity to power, the jargon, the overseas travel. But over time, the sheen wore off. What remained was a gnawing sense that I was just one more cog in a soulless machine—what President Dwight Eisenhower rightly warned against: the military–industrial complex.

Foreign policy, once the noble realm of statesmen and cautious realists, has morphed into a self-justifying industry. Today, its primary products are risk inflation, endless deployments, and strategic ambiguity. It is a culture that rewards cynicism and punishes honesty. In off-the-record moments, colleagues confessed they didn’t believe in the policies that would actually benefit the American people. But the incentives—contract renewals, think tank fellowships, defense consulting gigs—kept everyone in line. It is an ecosystem fueled not by principle, but by inertia, ambition, and defense appropriations.

The deeper I went, the clearer it became: We weren’t solving problems. We were sustaining them. Stabilization missions masked occupation. Democracy promotion meant regime change. We trained “partners” who turned into warlords. And always, there was another summit, another strategy, another surge. Each misstep was treated not as a warning, but as a reason to harden the line.

I left because I couldn’t square that reality with my conscience. I left because I was tired of intellectualizing destruction. And I left because I longed for something rooted in creation rather than collapse.

So I turned to agriculture.

It began not with a business plan, but with a return—to Wyoming, a state I have always loved and where my roots run deep. Along with a steep learning curve, I found a life that, while physically demanding, was spiritually restorative. In agriculture, there is no strategic ambiguity. A seed either grows or it doesn’t; a cow calves or she doesn’t. Nature doesn’t issue press releases. It requires attention, humility, and presence. And it repays those who meet its terms.

Farming and ranching is not a retreat from responsibility; it is its highest form. You feed people. You care for animals. You steward land for the next generation. You live at the mercy of seasons, not polling cycles. You wake up every morning to work that matters—not in theory, but in practice. And in doing so, you rediscover what Henry David Thoreau once wrote about: “Come forth to this hill at sunset to behold and commune with something greater than man.”

Notably, my disillusionment coincided with a moment when the foreign policy establishment was being openly questioned in a way I had never seen. In 2016, I joined President Donald J. Trump’s campaign, because he marked a sharp departure from the bipartisan consensus that had governed American foreign policy since the Cold War. He was willing to say aloud what many inside the Beltway only whispered: that our endless wars were wasteful, that NATO’s burden-sharing was lopsided, and that the defense industry had too much power over national priorities.

In Washington, those ideas were dismissed as isolationist or unserious. But to many Americans—especially in the rural counties where sons and daughters had borne the burden of deployments—they rang true. By shifting the national conversation toward domestic renewal and questioning the automatic logic of intervention, the Trump administration gave voice to a Middle America that foreign policy elites had long ignored.

His first term didn’t bring about a wholesale dismantlement of the military–industrial complex, but it was a disruption. And in that disruption, there was room for people like me to rethink what service really means. For me, it meant walking away from the abstraction of geopolitics and toward the concreteness of land and life.

One of the most unexpected blessings of this life is that agriculture has allowed me to grow not just a business, but a family. The culture of foreign policy is not just unmoored from American life—it is unmoored from the rhythms that allow family to flourish. The late nights, the overseas trips, the performative ambition: None of it is designed for those who want to raise children and remain tethered to home.

Farming and ranching, by contrast, are profoundly family-friendly. Work and life are integrated, not compartmentalized. My daughter is not an abstract priority—she’s in the corn chopper, on the cut floor, in the pasture, at my side. She is learning where food comes from, how to care for animals, and what it means to contribute to something larger than themselves. In building a home on the land, I’ve also built a home for her—one rooted in purpose, continuity, and faith.

There’s also a political dimension to this life. Building local food systems, preserving working land, protecting heritage breeds—these are acts of cultural conservation. They push back against the technocratic impulse to centralize, standardize, and sterilize. The small farm is a bastion of independence, the kind of place where localism lives and the human scale still matters. It is where subsidiarity isn’t just a theory—it’s how the irrigation gets fixed, how the neighbor’s corn gets planted, how the eggs get delivered down the road.

In Washington, I was told I was “serving my country.” And serving President Donald J. Trump for four years was an honor of a lifetime. But I serve my country far more honestly now—by feeding its people, healing its land, and rejecting the lie that a career in our nation’s capital is the same thing as greatness. National renewal won’t come from another campaign cycle or policy coordination meeting. It will come from families who stay rooted, from food grown close to home, from lives oriented around place.

The agrarian path is not for everyone, but I believe it’s the antidote to the alienation that afflicts so many. We are not meant to spend our lives in cubicles and conference calls, working for abstract causes we can’t name or don’t trust. We are meant to belong—to land, to community, to each other. Agriculture offers that belonging in a way foreign policy never could.

I left the Beltway for the back 40 not because I gave up on America, but because I still believe in it. And I believe that a revival of the American spirit will not come from abroad, but from the soil beneath our feet.

The post From Foggy Bottom to Fertile Ground appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics

The Gen Z Right Is Pat Buchanan’s Lasting Legacy

A new culture of realism has prevailed among American youth, and it may finally put to rest the conservative status quo.

Credit: Steve Liss/ gettyimages

On December 2, 2023, in the modest gymnasium of a community college in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, President Donald Trump addressed a raucous crowd of supporters. As he spoke about the enduring force of the movement he ignited in 2015, he paused to reflect on a man many had forgotten—but whose ideas are increasingly animating the rising generation of conservatives.

“You know there was a man, Pat Buchanan, a good guy, a conservative guy,” Trump began.

A sudden, collective cheer erupted from the left side of the stage—unmistakably youthful, unexpected in tone. “Wow! Young people, they know him,” Trump responded with a mix of surprise and amusement.

The cheering came from a group of College Republicans—mostly young Midwestern men. They represented more than just campus enthusiasm. They were the surface current of a deeper, surging tide within the American right: a generation of young conservatives who have not merely rejected progressive orthodoxy, but who have turned their backs on the neutered, market-centric consensus that long dominated Republican politics.

Their affinities lie not with Reaganite optimism or Bush-era globalism, but with the sobering, culture-first realism of Pat Buchanan. These are the heirs to the original Buchanan Brigade, animated by a blend of cultural traditionalism, economic nationalism, and a deep-seated skepticism toward America’s post–Cold War trajectory. They’re not interested in conserving the status quo. They want to recover something lost.

Three developments define the social fabric of 21st-century America: the triumph of multiculturalism, the commodification of the consumer, and the cultural conquest of the Left. For decades, neither major party offered a meaningful response. Democrats embraced the transformation; Republicans timidly adjusted to it. In the 1990s, Buchanan was virtually alone in warning that the West was in decline—culturally, spiritually, and economically. The relative prosperity and comfort of the ’90s muffled his prophecy, and few listened.

Then came the Great Recession. For millions of Americans, it was more than an economic downturn—it was the unveiling of a deeper, festering crisis. Young people, in particular, felt it viscerally. The America they inherited no longer resembled the country celebrated in their parents’ stories or history books. The economy seemed rigged, the culture foreign, and the future grim.

By the time Donald Trump descended the escalator in 2015, a vanguard of young men had already begun rejecting the stale dogmas of Conservatism, Inc. They were the ideological foot soldiers of Trump’s first campaign—angry, disillusioned, and increasingly well-read. What started as a populist rebellion quickly matured into something more coherent.

Tax cuts and platitudes about the Constitution no longer sufficed. Legal immigration was no longer seen as harmless. Endless foreign aid and wars of choice were now understood as betrayals—not of international obligations, but of national ones. The refrain “Democrats are the real racists” gave way to “Stop playing by the Left’s rules.” Conservatism, these young rebels concluded, should not exist to preserve the wreckage of liberalism—it should stand to restore greatness.

It is no surprise, then, that Buchanan’s The Death of the West has become a sacred text among this emerging young right. In an era when most of their peers don’t read, these young conservatives have made it required reading. It has even shaped elected officials. The third-youngest vice president in U.S. history—himself a product of the Midwestern populist realignment—publicly cited Buchanan’s work as formative in 2021 during an interview with David Freiheit.

This revival of Buchananite thought has unnerved many in the conservative establishment. The backlash has come not just from the left, but from within the right—from those who seek to redefine conservatism as a more polite version of liberalism. Joel Berry of The Babylon Bee, for example, dismissed the “Pat Buchanan Right” as radicals, himself seemingly more comfortable cracking Reagan-inflected jokes than grappling with the real challenges faced by today’s young workers, parents, and future homeowners.

But the old consensus is crumbling. The new generation doesn’t want talking points; they want answers. They see through the empty gestures of conservative influencers who quote the Founders one minute and promote materialism the next. The polite right has had its time—and failed.

While Trump may be the most visible beneficiary of Buchanan’s intellectual legacy, the future belongs to those young men and women now entering the institutions of politics, media, and civic life. Their influence will not be limited to elections, but to the cultural soil out of which political movements grow.

Buchanan was once a lone voice, a dissident within his own party. Today, his ideas no longer echo in isolation. They resound in lecture halls, in podcasts, in online reading groups, and in quiet conversations among friends questioning what went wrong with the American dream.

It is likely that Buchanan will not live to see the full fruit of this realignment. But it is his vision—of a nation rooted in faith, heritage, and cultural continuity—that may yet shape the American right for decades to come. This is his final, and perhaps most enduring, gift to the country he tried so long to save.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

The post The Gen Z Right Is Pat Buchanan’s Lasting Legacy appeared first on The American Conservative.

In a speech Thursday in North Carolina to soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth pledged to restore what he called the U.S. military’s “warrior ethos” and announced pay raises for paratroopers.

Speaking during All American Week at Fort Bragg, Hegseth laid out President Donald Trump’s vision focused on combat readiness, merit-based standards, and investment in the American warfighter.

“We’re going to bring it back to the basics,” Hegseth said. “We’re going to restore the warrior ethos… and we are across our formations, a standard that’s set here every single day.”

According to the Department of Defense, Hegseth used the occasion to announce an increase in hazardous duty incentive pay, known as jump pay. It will rise from $150 to $200 per month for paratroopers, and for the first time, jumpmasters will receive an additional $150 on top of their existing pay.

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“For the first time in 25 years… we are increasing jump pay,” Hegseth said. “Not only are we increasing jump pay, but… jumpmasters… are going to receive an additional $150 a month in incentive pay.”

He added: “Here’s to our paratroopers, our jumpmasters, who do the difficult things in difficult places that most Americans can never imagine.”

Hegseth told the crowd that troops remain the focus of every major Pentagon decision. 

“Inside the corridors of the Pentagon, you are on our minds, with the decisions we make in budgets, in planning, in deployments, in orders, in reorganizations. We have you and your families in mind.”

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In his remarks, Hegseth shared a core defense strategy promoted by Trump: prioritize readiness, reject identity politics, and reassert American deterrence.

“We will focus on readiness, on training, on warfighting, on accountability, on standards. Black, white, male, female, doesn’t matter. We’re going to be colorblind and merit-based warfighters just like you are here in the 82nd.”

This return to fundamentals, Hegseth argued is necessary to rebuild the force and deter growing global threats. 

“President Trump is committed to historic investments inside our formations. Our promise to you is that when the 82nd Airborne is deployed… you will be equipped better than any other fighting force in the world.”

Drawing a contrast with prior administrations, Hegseth referenced global instability, including the war in Ukraine, the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“Unfortunately, for a number of years, the world watched and wondered where American leadership and American strength was,” he said. “By putting America first, we will reestablish peace through strength.”

Hegseth closed by honoring the legacy and future of the 82nd. 

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“Like those who came before you, you keep showing the world the stuff you’re made of. Because we know you are ready for the important work that lies ahead.”

The Army office of Public Affairs did not immediately return Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

The Supreme Court upheld President Donald Trump’s removal of two Democratic appointees from federal boards, handing the administration a legal victory and settling a high-stakes dispute over the president’s power to fire agency officials.

The Thursday ruling comes after Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts agreed to temporarily halt the reinstatement of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) member Gwynne Wilcox and Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) member Cathy Harris, two Democrat appointees who were abruptly terminated by the Trump administration this year. 

Both had challenged their terminations as “unlawful” in separate lawsuits filed in D.C. federal court.

However, the high court suggested that it could block attempts to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who, according to Trump, has complained has not cut interest rates fast enough. 

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The issue confronting the justices was whether the board members, both appointed by President Joe Biden, can stay in their jobs while the larger fight continues over what to do with a 90-year-old Supreme Court decision known as Humphrey’s Executor, in which the court unanimously ruled that presidents cannot fire independent board members without cause.

The court’s three liberal justices dissented. 

“Not since the 1950s (or even before) has a President, without a legitimate reason, tried to remove an officer from a classic independent agency,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Kagan wrote that her colleagues were telegraphing what would happen. 

“The impatience to get on with things—to now hand the President the most unitary, meaning also the most subservient, administration since Herbert Hoover (and maybe ever)—must reveal how that eventual decision will go,” she wrote.

Lawyers for the Trump administration urged the Supreme Court to either keep Wilcox and Harris off the job while the case moves through the lower courts, or to resolve the issue directly. They asked the justices to grant certiorari before judgment – a fast-track procedure the court uses occasionally to bypass the appeals process in cases of significant national importance.

They urged that Wilcox and Harris not be reinstated to their positions, arguing in their reply brief that the “costs of such reinstatements are immense.”

They argued that keeping both Wilcox and Harris in place would “entrust” the president’s powers “for the months or years that it could take the courts to resolve this litigation,” something they said “would manifestly cause irreparable harm to the President and to the separation of powers.”

“The President would lose control of critical parts of the Executive Branch for a significant portion of his term, and he would likely have to spend further months voiding actions taken by improperly reinstated agency leaders.”

Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit voted 7–4 to restore Wilcox and Harris to their respective boards, citing Supreme Court precedent in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States and Wiener v. United States – landmark rulings that upheld limits on the president’s power to remove members of independent federal agencies.

The majority noted that the Supreme Court has never overturned the decades-old precedent upholding removal protections for members of independent, multimember adjudicatory boards – such as the NLRB and MSPB – and said that precedent supported reinstating Wilcox and Harris.

It also rejected the Trump administration’s request for an administrative stay, which would have allowed their removals to remain in place while the challenge proceeds in court. 

“The Supreme Court has repeatedly told the courts of appeals to follow extant Supreme Court precedent unless and until that Court itself changes it or overturns it,” judges noted in their opinion. 

The ruling would have temporarily returned Harris and Wilcox to their posts – but the victory was short-lived. The Trump administration quickly appealed to the Supreme Court, which granted an emergency administrative stay blocking their reinstatement.

In their own Supreme Court filings, lawyers for Wilcox and Harris argued that the court should reinstate them to their roles on their respective boards until a federal appeals court can consider the matter.

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Both Wilcox and Harris opposed the administration’s effort to fast-track the case, warning against skipping the normal appeals process and rushing arguments. “Rushing such important matters risks making mistakes and destabilizing other areas of the law,” Harris’s lawyers told the Supreme Court this week.

Wilcox, the NLRB member, echoed this argument in her own brief to the high court. 

Counsel for Wilcox cited the potential harm in removing her from the three-member NLRB panel – which they argued in their filing could bring “an immediate and indefinite halt to the NLRB’s critical work of adjudicating labor-relations disputes.”

“The President’s choice to instead remove Ms. Wilcox does not bring the Board closer in line with his preferred policies; it prevents the agency from carrying out its congressionally mandated duties at all,” they said.

Harris and Wilcox’s cases are among several legal challenges attempting to clearly define the executive’s power. 

Hampton Dellinger, a Biden appointee previously tapped to head the Office of Special Counsel, sued the Trump administration over his termination. Dellinger filed suit in D.C. district court after his Feb. 7 firing.

He had maintained the argument that, by law, he could only be dismissed from his position for job performance problems, which were not cited in an email dismissing him from his post.

Dellinger dropped his suit against the administration after the D.C. appellate court issued an unsigned order siding with the Trump administration.

The Justice Department, for its part, said in February a letter to Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., that it was seeking to overturn Humphrey’s Executor.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

Far-left progressive billionaire Alex Soros is being slammed online for his statement condemning the killing of two Israeli embassy staffers despite funding anti-Israel groups through his Open Society Foundation (OSF).

Soros, who is the son and heir to George Soros’ fortune and philanthropic empire, condemned the killings in an X post, saying “the murder of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky at the Capital Jewish Museum was evil in its most basic form” and that “this brutal antisemitic act must be condemned in the strongest terms.”

Milgrim and Lischinsky, two Israeli Embassy staffers who were set to be engaged, were killed outside an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday night.

D.C. police identified the suspect as 30-year-old Elias Rodriguez, who was taken into custody after the shooting attack. He was allegedly seen pacing outside the museum before he approached a group of four people, including the two victims, and opened fire. Rodriguez then reportedly went into the museum, where he was detained by security. He allegedly shouted “Free, free Palestine!” while in custody.

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Though Soros condemned the killings, his statement was flooded with replies calling out his funding of radical anti-Israel groups that foment anti-Jewish sentiments.

“Alex, you and your father created this problem through the ruthless and international silencing of critics to open borders policies,” said one X user named Joseph Janecka. “Their blood is on your hands as much as their murderers. We will never forget.”

Carl Wheless, another user, commented, “You are behind the hate, so excuse us if you don’t wish to hear from you on the matter.”

Another, Eitan Fischberger, asserted that Soros “funds the revolutionary Marxist group the shooter belonged to.”

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Though the details of Rodriguez’s affiliations are currently unclear as chair of OSF, Soros has helped to fund several leftist groups that have accused Israel of genocide and called for the end of the Jewish state.

In 2023, Israel’s minister of diaspora affairs and social equality, Amichai Chikli, told Fox News Digital that Soros is a mirror image of father George’s anti-Israel agenda.

When asked if Soros would continue to fund anti-Israel entities that bash the Jewish state, Chikli said it “looks like the son is a replica of his father. We have no expectation that his son will be a big Zionist.”

Chikli added that OSF funds Human Rights Watch, which he said, “is attacking Israelis heavily and attacking Israel as an apartheid state and delegitimizing and demonizing Israel.”

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He also said OSF funds “J Street,” an organization that claims to be pro-Israel but has faced criticism because of its support for positions that allegedly favor Iran’s regime and the Palestinians.

Chikli also noted that the Soros foundation “gives money to radical small Palestinian organizations in Israel that describe Israel as a colonial state and a moral sin.” He cited the NGO Adalah, which means “justice” in Arabic, as an organization “denying the vision of Israel as a Jewish state” in its “published vision for Arab society in Israel.”

The elder Soros has also faced intense criticism from Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. for pumping over $15 million into a network of nongovernmental organizations that allegedly support Hamas. 

“George Soros’ donations to organizations that seek the destruction of the State of Israel as a Jewish state is shameful. However, I am not surprised,” Israeli ambassador Gilad Erdan told Fox News Digital in December 2023.

“For years, Soros has backed and transferred money to organizations supporting BDS that want to isolate Israel,” added Erdan, who has been leading the diplomatic campaign at the U.N. to spell out Hamas’ crimes against humanity. “They have never been about real peace or any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said during a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) event Thursday that the Trump administration is making history with its approval of numerous waivers that will eliminate junk food from food stamp programs. 

Rollins was in Nebraska on Monday to sign the first alongside Republican Gov. Jim Pillen. She has also signed a waiver for Indiana and Iowa, “with half-a-dozen more coming down the line,” she said.   

“We are on track to sign multiples of snap waivers to get junk food and sugary drinks out of our food stamp system,” Rollins said at the Thursday afternoon event, centering around the release of a 69-page report from the Trump administration’s MAHA Commission on how to effect change around childhood chronic disease. 

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“That has never happened before under Republican or Democrat administrations,” Rollins added. “We have never made that happen before. So I am so proud and so grateful.”

On average, 42 million low-income Americans receive food stamp assistance each month, according to the MAHA report released at Thursday’s event. It added that 1 in 5 American children under 17 receive SNAP benefits.

With Nebraska’s waiver, it became the first state in the nation to bar recipients of federal food stamp programs from using the money to buy junk food, soda and other high-sugar items. The exemption will begin as a two-year pilot program, local media reported.

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Other GOP-led states, including Texas and West Virginia, have applied for this waiver.

“SNAP was created to increase access to nutritious food; however, many SNAP purchases are for food with little to no nutritious value,” Texas GOP Governor Greg Abbott wrote in a letter to Rollins requesting a waiver last week. 

“Under the Trump administration, for the first time since the program was authorized, states can take steps to eliminate the opportunity to buy junk food with SNAP benefits and assure that taxpayer dollars are used only to purchase healthy, nutritious food.”

West Virginia’s Governor Patrick Morrisey, one of the leaders requesting a waiver, has also been spearheading other MAHA efforts in his state. In March, Morrisey signed House Bill 2354 into law, which made it the first state in the nation to begin prohibiting certain synthetic dyes and additives used in food items sold in the state.

Welcome to the Fox News Politics newsletter, with the latest updates on the Trump administration, Capitol Hill and more Fox News politics content.  Here’s what’s happening…

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is eliminating the student visa program at Harvard University due to “pro-terrorist conduct” at campus protests, Fox News Digital has learned. 

It’s a severe consequence for what DHS claims is Harvard’s refusal to comply with its requests for behavioral records of student visa holders. 

“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” said DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. “It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments. Harvard had plenty of opportunity to do the right thing. It refused. They have lost their Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification as a result of their failure to adhere to the law. Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.”…READ MORE

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‘EVIL OF ANTISEMITISM’: White House decries ‘evil of antisemitism,’ vows justice after fatal shooting of Israeli embassy staffers

NEW TACTIC: ICE begins new, nationwide effort to arrest illegal aliens at immigration hearings

SICKEST GENERATION: RFK Jr.’s highly-anticipated MAHA report paints dismal state of child health, national security concerns

SPLIT DECISION: Supreme Court upholds Oklahoma decision, in blow to religious charter schools

‘DID THIS FOR GAZA’: Who is the suspect in the killing of 2 Israeli embassy staffers?

HISTORY OF TERROR: Gunman kills Israeli embassy couple in Washington, following decades of embassy-targeted attacks

TERROR AT HOME: Antisemitic shooting of Israeli diplomats adds to alarming rise in domestic terrorism

ENFORCEMENT FIRST: This state just became the latest in the country to ban sanctuary cities

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