Trump Envoy Grenell Gets US Veteran Released From Venezuela

From Newsmax.com (May 20, 2025):

A U.S. Air Force veteran unlawfully imprisoned in Venezuela was released Tuesday after secret talks between dictator Nicolás Maduro's representatives and President Donald Trump's special envoy, Richard Grenell, Newsmax has learned.

Grenell flew on a secret mission to Antigua Tuesday to meet with top Venezuelan officials and secured the release of Joseph St. Clair, a 33-year-old combat-disabled veteran.

Newsmax also learned that Grenell and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Tuesday extended the waivers for U.S. companies' oil licenses in Venezuela by 60 days.

Grenell also met with Venezuelan officials to discuss continued cooperation with the U.S. on deportations. Already, Venezuela has accepted more than 3,000 illegal aliens from the U.S.

The release of Joseph St. Clair is another gesture that the Maduro regime wants to do business with the Trump administration.

He and a friend from Colombia were traveling as tourists near the Venezuelan border in October 2024 when they were arrested by Venezuelan authorities, Stars and Stripes reported.

After being detained, he was transported across the border to a prison that has been condemned by human rights groups for abuse violations, according to his family.

"We learned that Joe decided to take a trip near the border with one of his friends to visit [the friend's] family member and got too close to the border and got abducted by the Venezuelan police," said Scott St. Clair, Joseph's father, Stars and Stripes reported.

"They were shaken down, questioned and searched. All their possessions were taken."

Washington's two Democrat senators, Sen. Patty Murray and Sen. Maria Cantwell, sent Trump a May 2 letter asking that he personally seek Joseph St. Clair's release. Scott St. Clair and wife Patti live in Washington state.

Joseph St. Clair served as a tech sergeant in the Air Force until 2019, when he was honorably discharged after nine years of service, his family said.

"Joe St. Clair endured four combat tours in Afghanistan to protect this country. Now, he is the one who needs protection," Patti St. Clair said, Stars and Stripes reported.

Little more than a week after Trump took office Jan. 20, Grenell earned the release of six Americans detained by Venezuela's government under Maduro.

Grenell traveled to Caracas to demand that Maduro's government accept the unconditional return of Venezuelans deported from the U.S. or face consequences.

He and Maduro met at the Miraflores presidential palace in one of the first known meetings by the second Trump administration with a government it considers hostile.

Trump commended Grenell after the six Americans were freed.

"Just been informed that we are bringing six hostages home from Venezuela," Trump wrote in a post on X. "Thank you to Ric Grenell and my entire staff. Great job!"

In February, Trump wrote after Grenell's visit that the Maduro government had agreed to receive "all Venezuela illegal aliens who were encamped in the U.S., including gang members of Tren de Aragua," and pay for their transportation.

In March, Maduro said the flights to bring migrants back from the U.S. were affected when Trump canceled a license that allowed Chevron to continue to operate in his country, citing a lack of progress on migrant returns and electoral reforms.

Less than a week later, Venezuela reached an agreement with the U.S. to resume repatriation flights of migrants. Maduro announced the deal in a televised address.

The State Department has indicated that the U.S. has not been negotiating with Caracas, but sources tell Newsmax that Trump ordered that direct negotiations continue. [source]

Nice. Welcome back home!

3 Questions Angry Democrats Need To Answer About Illegal Alien Deportations

From The Federalist.com (May 2, 2025):

Democrats and their supporters in the corporate media are still attempting to controversialize the Trump administration’s efforts to remove illegal aliens from the country, as required by federal law. But there are three questions they should all be forced to answer before anyone has to hear more of their whining. Here they are, in no particular order.

1. Can You Identify a Single Alien You Would Deport?

This is the most important question because the answer is no, they can’t, because they don’t want to deport anyone. We know that because they’re on record opposing the most innocuous efforts during President Trump’s first term to remove violent Latin American gang affiliates.

In 2018, Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Kristen Gillibrand, pushed to “abolish ICE.” That same year, Senate Democrats blocked a vote on a bill that would have withheld federal funds from “sanctuary cities” that refused to comply with federal immigration law enforcement. They shouldn’t get to pretend they’re not opposed to deporting illegal aliens if they can’t answer this simple question.

2. How Many Appeals Should an Illegal Alien Get for It to Be Considered ‘Due Process’?

Most irksome about the never-ending Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia saga is Democrats’ repeated and false claim that the Salvadoran national was denied “due process” when feds placed him on a flight in March to be sent back to his home country. This is a lie. Abrego Garcia had been residing in the U.S. for more than a decade.

In 2019, he was arrested, he admitted in court to being in the country illegally, and he was determined by a court to be a violent Latin American gang affiliate. A second judge upheld that opinion. He had multiple immigration court proceedings, one of which resulted in a judge issuing an absurd ruling that he could be deported, but not back to where he came from.

How many appeals and hearings should an illegal alien be entitled to, sucking up court hours in hopes of eventually landing on some trick that allows him to stay? If Democrats can’t state a clear number, it’s simply another way of admitting they don’t want to see anyone deported.

3. What Would the Ideal Deportation Look Like?

There is no end to the list of complaints Democrats have about any given deportation: The plane was inappropriate, the home country is terrible, the illegal alien is just a “gay makeup artist,” and on and on.

They don’t actually care about the planes or return destinations or the character profiles of any given deportee. These are just more excuses for why Democrats oppose deportations. If they’re going to trifle with the logistics, they should have to offer alternative, acceptable conditions for deporting aliens.

But they wouldn’t be able to do that, because that’s not the point. The point is stopping deportations altogether. [source]

The first answer to the first question the Left would answer: No.

The 2nd answer: Never ending appeals.

The 3rd answer: Deportations should not exist.

Yea, that's, pretty much, their answers since illegals could be potential Democrat voters or make redistricting more in their favor.

Along the same lines...

ICE Rescued Kids From Likely ‘Exploitation’ At Marijuana Farm And Democrats Are Furious

The Weight of Too Much “Choice”

From John Stonestreet & Maria Baer on Breakpoint.org (Aug. 24, 2022):

Regular listeners to the weekly Breakpoint This Week podcast know that my co-host Maria and I are fans of the reality competition show Alone. Ten wilderness experts are dropped in the middle of nowhere, usually a place that is cold and full of bears, forced to fend for themselves. Whoever stays the longest wins.

In the latest season, a military veteran with strong survival skills and extensive experience overseas seemed poised to win. Instead, he called it quits just a few weeks in. In an interview afterwards, he explained, “When I was in the military and separated from family, I didn’t have a choice. Out here… I had that opportunity to get on the radio or the phone and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to go back to where I’m comfortable.’” In other words, having the choice to go home made staying much harder.

According to conventional wisdom, at least the kind accepted in this cultural moment, the opposite should have been true. More control and more choices are supposed to bring easier and more satisfying lives.

That misconception is, in fact, a feature of life since modernism. For most of human history, humans held no illusions of being masters of their own fate. Writing back in 1976, American sociologist Peter Berger identified what changed, especially for Westerners. Because of the dramatic progress brought by science and technology, humans in the modern period began to believe that the world would eventually be fully understood. And if understood, it could also be mastered, as well.

“What previously was experienced as fate now becomes an arena of choices,” Berger wrote. “In principle, there is the assumption that all human problems can be converted into technical problems… the world becomes ever more ‘makeable.’”

A mark of our late postmodern era is the obsession with having choices. The higher the stakes, the more acute is the illusion of freedom. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy described this impulse in his now overturned Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, when he wrote that “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” In his view, the “freedom of choice” extends to even choosing what is real. Is it any wonder that people now believe that choice extends beyond sexual behavior to sexual identity?

However, if happiness truly comes from the control made possible through infinite choices and the ability to “make the world,” why did the military officer competing on Alone find the opposite to be true? Why did his freedom of choice turn out to be too much of a burden? Why do so many studies show that we are less happy than ever?

The postmodern assertion that we can “make the world” exploits a weakness inherent to our fallen humanness and especially acute today. We struggle to delay gratification. We might fool ourselves into thinking that we can, in fact, define our existence or choose our gender. We may think our decision about whether to stay married or whether to bring an unborn child to birth is based on deep reflections. However, because we can, we tend to choose comfort now at the expense of flourishing later. If we have the option, we call the producers and tap out.

Justice Kennedy was wrong. No matter how many choices we have, we cannot remake the world. Everywhere we turn, we butt up against the limits of creation. According to a Christian worldview, this is actually good news. God created the world with limits: physical and moral laws, bodies, certain geographic locations and times in history, and not other ones. He gives us specific parents and siblings and children, whose specific needs constantly impose limits on our choices.

Even if, in modernity and postmodernity, such limits are anathema, to be resisted and fought against with all the science and technology we can muster, true freedom is found by recognizing and resting in God’s good limits, both physical and moral. If God is good, then the limits He imposes are not burdens. They’re blessings. [source]

No matter what you believe about Reality, Reality always has the last say and doesn’t care what you believe. If your beliefs don’t match Reality then you are deluding yourself.

How Attacks on Faith, Family, and Conscience Threaten All Our Freedoms

From Daily Signal.com (Aug. 6, 2020):

During these tumultuous times, as practically every American institution comes under attack from the far left and its allies, two of our most essential values seem to be especially targeted in an effort to “transform America.”

Those values are faith and family, the two essential pillars that serve as true stabilizing factors in any society.

The attacks on faith and family seem to be relentless.

In Nevada, amid the COVID-19 crisis, casinos are open, but churches are told they must remain closed. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom told churches that their congregants no longer could sing worship songs, even though they are wearing protective masks while doing so. In Portland, Oregon, radicals not only are burning the flag but Bibles as well. And tragically, in the same vein, vandals are targeting churches.

So, how did we get to this point? It didn’t happen overnight.

It is not a coincidence that our current cultural condition, and the turn to hard-left progressivism, began in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, as these values started to erode and lose influence in American society.

Those on the far left actively were launching attacks—sometimes stealthily—through seizing all the major corridors of cultural and political influence.

When these pillars of faith and family—both of which are key components of the Judeo-Christian principles upon which our nation was founded—started to come under attack, all other principles such as fiscal restraint, freedom of conscience, and limited government came under assault as well.

Regarding the family, several factors led our nation down the progressive path and away from conservatism. The social engineering of President Lyndon Johnson’s liberal Great Society of the mid-1960s devastated the family, as fathers no longer had to accept fiscal responsibility for the children they bore.

Legalized abortion greatly devalued human life and further enabled personal irresponsibility and selfish, rather than selfless, behavior. No-fault divorce made it easy for either spouse to walk away from the commitment of “until death do us part,” leaving a trail of broken children behind.

And attacks on the fundamental beliefs of the faithful created a culture where those beliefs not only were mocked but increasingly criminalized. One example: the persecution of those who do not wish to use their skills to participate in facilitating abortions.

On the faith front, many mainline denominations swapped out the Gospel for social justice and the abandonment of absolute truth. This left a spiritual vacuum for progressive thought—which sought governmental, rather than faith-based, solutions—to fill. Lost were the virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance—all of which are needed for society to thrive.

Thus, once the pillars of faith and the family were weakened, the rest of the house started to collapse, just as Abraham Lincoln warned the nation in 1858 that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

With the gap that was left by the removal of these two pillars of faith and family, progressives were able to introduce policies that destabilized rather than stabilized society. One such policy: encouraging single parenting, which has led to the tragic loss of fathers—an essential individual in every child’s life—in ever-increasing numbers.

Progressives attacked religious freedom and the role churches play in creating a “safety net” that government never could—by feeding both the body and the soul. [read more]

Learning Styles Don’t Actually Exist, Studies Show

From FEE.org (Aug. 12, 2022):

Are you a visual, auditory, reading/writing, or kinesthetic learner? For millions of students, this question has become so familiar that they already have an answer ready to go. Some identify as visual learners, which means that, in theory, they learn best by seeing concepts in pictures and diagrams, perhaps on a blackboard or in a video. Others identify as auditory learners, which means they learn best by hearing, or reading/writing learners, which means they learn best by reading books and taking notes. Still others identify as kinesthetic learners, which means they learn best when they can physically engage with things, such as in a chemistry lab.

For most of us, the idea that different people have different learning styles is so obvious that it is simply common knowledge. But there’s a problem here, a big problem. No matter how hard scientists have looked, they haven’t been able to find any good evidence for the learning styles theory. Indeed, many academics who study this for a living consider learning styles to be one of the biggest myths in education.

“There is no credible evidence that learning styles exist,” write psychologists Cedar Riener and Daniel Willingham in a 2010 paper titled The Myth of Learning Styles. “Students may have preferences about how to learn, but no evidence suggests that catering to those preferences will lead to better learning.”

If that sounds far-fetched, well, there’s plenty more where that came from.

In a 2009 review paper entitled Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence, researchers investigated the “meshing hypothesis,” which is the idea that students learn better when instruction is provided in a format that matches their learning style. Their conclusion is a hard pill to swallow. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers wrote. “If classfication of students’ learning styles has practical utility, it remains to be demonstrated.”

A 2006 study looking at multimedia instruction came to a similar conclusion. “There was not strong support for the hypothesis that verbal learners and visual learners should be given different kinds of multimedia instruction,” the authors concluded.

But perhaps this is just a few fringe studies? Perhaps there is still some debate on this within academia? Not so, says the American Psychological Association. “Many people, including educators, believe learning styles are set at birth and predict both academic and career success even though there is no scientific evidence to support this common myth,” the APA wrote in a 2019 press release titled “Belief in Learning Styles Myth May Be Detrimental.” The release goes on to say that “numerous studies have debunked the concept of learning styles,” and that there is a “lack of scientific evidence supporting them.”

This lack of evidence stands in stark contrast to popular opinion. Indeed, surveys show that 80-95 percent of people in the US and other industrialized countries believe in learning styles.

Having said all that, it’s important to be clear about what exactly researchers are criticizing when they talk about the myth of learning styles. They aren’t saying there are no differences between students, or that tailored teaching approaches can never be helpful. There are plenty of individual differences between students, such as talent, background knowledge, and interest in the field, and researchers agree that teaching with these differences in mind can have a positive impact.

There is also evidence that using multiple teaching approaches together (such as words and pictures) tends to improve learning across the board, a phenomenon known as the multimedia effect. Again, researchers don’t take issue with this. What they dispute is the idea that each student has a particular learning style, and that teaching to a student’s preferred learning style will improve their educational outcomes. [read more]

A Satanist Pedophile Gang Is Torturing Kids. The FBI Didn’t Seem To Care Unless It Could Blame White Supremacy.

From Daily Wire.com (Nov. 16, 2023):

A Satan-worshipping cult of pedophiles is blackmailing girls into cutting themselves — but the FBI didn’t seem interested in that so much as the fact that one of its members once used the n-word, a Daily Wire investigation found.

For years, the group known both as 764 and Harm Nation has tortured what is believed to be hundreds or thousands of girls. But the FBI didn’t put its cybercrimes or violence-against-children investigators on it. Instead, its interest appears to have piqued mainly by the fact that the group — most of whose victims are white teens — was once racist to a black girl.

The domestic terrorism unit is investigating the Satanist pedophiles for white-supremacy RMVE, or “racially motivated violent extremism” — even though the sole known arrest by the FBI is a Hispanic man who called the judge a “cracker” in court, according to court records and interviews.

Angel Luis Almeida was indicted in January in New York City on charges of sexual exploitation, violation of the Mann Act, and possession of Child Abuse Sexual Material, with prosecutors writing that, “The defendant was an outspoken member of ‘764,’ a neo-Nazi network.” One of the group’s leaders is a 19-year-old called Yuri who calls himself a “femboy,” a term associated with left-wing queer culture.

Critics say, at best, it’s an example of the FBI misclassifying cases in order to tell Congress that right-wing domestic terrorism is the greatest threat to America. At worst, they say, it’s an example of the heinous torture of girls by pedophiles not being a priority — unless there was an angle making it politically appealing to Democrats.

Advocates for children say what it should be is a reminder that children of all types are being exploited online by bad people, and they need help. [read more]

Just terrible. I guess the Briben FBI is too busy going after Christians and J6 protesters or anyone critical of the Demented One. So glad his regime is no longer in power and the FBI is more competent.

China using AI as ‘precision instrument’ of censorship and repression, at home and abroad

From The Register.com (Dec. 3, 2025):

China has embraced AI to help it censor and surveil its citizens and is exporting its techniques to the world, according to a new report by think tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

Titled “The party’s AI: How China’s new AI systems are reshaping human rights” and published yesterday, the report observes that in Europe and the US the concept of “AI safety” is largely understood as making the technology safe and fair.

In China, the report says, the definition of AI safety is “ensuring that AI serves ‘core socialist values’ and the political stability of the state.”

The report says AI helps China to meet those goals in several ways, one of which is censoring large language models so they refuse to respond, omit sensitive details, or restate official narratives. ASPI tested four Chinese AIs – Baidu’s Ernie Bot, Alibaba’s Qwen, Zhipu AI’s GLM and DeepSeek’s VL2 – using a dataset of images depicting the 2019 Hong Kong protests, the Tiananmen Square protests and related memorials, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, Falun Gong demonstrations, and eight other sensitive topics.

“Those tests show that Chinese-developed models display stronger censorship behaviours in response to politically sensitive imagery than their US-developed counterparts,” the report found. “The most direct censorship behaviour was an outright refusal to respond, which was especially common in models accessed using inference providers headquartered in Singapore rather than the US, where sensitive prompts frequently triggered error messages or blank outputs.”

ASPI thinks those non-responses matter because Chinese AI is becoming accessible and popular around the world.

“The threat lies less in overt propaganda than in quiet erasure, when the machine that describes reality begins deciding which parts of reality may be seen,” the report states.

Erasure is already happening online, because China has made it plain that its publishers and web giants should use AI to filter material on their platforms.

“In China, AI now performs much of the work of online censorship, scanning vast volumes of digital content, flagging potential violations and deleting banned material within seconds,” the report finds. China requires its web giants like Tencent, Baidu and ByteDance to develop AI to filter content, and those companies have productized their efforts and therefore become part of the AI-powered censorship apparatus.

The report notes that China’s censorship regime still needs human content reviewers, because AI can’t yet interpret satire, keep up with evolving idioms, or understand all minority languages.

China has therefore “effectively ‘deputized’ small and medium-sized enterprises, under the principle of ‘self-discipline’ (自律), to police their users on behalf of the authorities, thus showing how they adopt AI tools and train censorship workers in a system in which human judgement remains indispensable – for now.” [read more]

Big AI is watching China's citizens. 1984 part two. The ultimate in high-tech surveillance. I wonder if George Orwell could dream this up. He probably wouldn't be surprised though.

More tech used on its citizenry:

China’s sci-fi spherical Death Star-like robot cop uses AI, facial recognition to track criminals