Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee have accused Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon of trying to steal funds from the National Institutes of Health to make up for the record amount of taxpayer money they’ve spent in their war on Iran.
Ranking member Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut claimed in a Thursday press release that the Defense Department signed an interagency agreement that could give it access to billions of dollars in funding intended to go toward studies on influenza, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, and Ebola.
“This secretive attempt to siphon research funds away from NIH is outrageous. The interagency agreement needs to be terminated immediately,” DeLauro said. “These funds were provided for lifesaving medical research, not as extra money for the Department of Defense.”
The Pentagon is running so low on money that it apparently needs to take from the NIH’s cup to buy more ammunition—to shoot down Iranian artillery that costs millions of dollars less than ours. That alone shows how devoted we are to the war machine, and how obtuse this administration’s priorities are.
“It is no secret that the Department of Defense is facing enormous financial pressure because of President Trump’s war of choice with Iran,” DeLauro continued. “But the Trump administration cannot make American patients, families, and scientists pay the price. Circumventing Congress to divert money intended to help Americans who are exposed to … deadly diseases—and directing those funds to the Department of Defense—is beyond the pale. DoD already has programs, funded by Congress, to research and develop medical countermeasures to chemical, biological, and nuclear threats, and does not need NIH funding to do so. The administration must provide Congress with a full accounting of how this interagency agreement was developed and exactly how much taxpayer money it is trying to transfer to DoD.”
Flock Safety, the company behind the dystopian surveillance systems popping up in U.S. cities, is training law enforcement officers to use its products to surveil “No Kings” protests, 404Media reported Thursday.
In November, Caity Peak, Flock’s director of market management, led a webinar that explained how law enforcement officials could use FlockOS Real-Time Crime Centers to monitor “everything from small parades, to unexpected protests, to unprecedented disasters.” One example she used was tracking demonstrators at an anti-Trump protest.
“Now imagine that you’re an incident commander, and you’re working this No Kings protest. For the sake of the call, we put this in Denver as an example,” Peak said, explaining that an officer could review a response plan while watching live video footage of an event.
“I’ve got the video footage to monitor when things go sideways, I know when the environment is starting to shift. But I also know a lot of other things as well,” she said.
No Kings protests, which have been recurring since the beginning of the second Trump administration, are historically extremely tame, and generally attract older liberals who love America but hate Trump’s policies. The temperate collective action would likely not be far-left enough for any radical anti-fascist. Historically, it’s far more likely that counterprotesters or federal law enforcement would escalate violence at these events.
Still, the milquetoast demonstrations have managed to inspire outrage from Republicans and the Trump administration—marking their attendees as targets for the president’s police state.
Law enforcement officials, including police officers and border patrol, have used Flock’s automated license plate readers to track protesters at No Kings protests in June and October, as well as other demonstrations protected by the First Amendment, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The group found more than 50 instances of law enforcement agencies using the company’s data servers to search for activity related to protests, and specific activist groups.
One of America’s largest newspapers made an elementary-level error in its obituary for Gloria Steinem.
Thousands of readers who learned of the trailblazing feminist’s death via The Washington Post’s social media notifications Thursday were met with an image of former New York Representative Shirley Chisholm—the first Black woman elected to Congress—rather than Steinem.
Steinem was in the photograph, seated beside Chisholm, who was pictured center. However, due to Steinem’s far-left placement in the image, she was cropped out of most of the paper’s social media posts.
