Happy Veteran’s Day to my American friends. Happy Remembrance Day to my British and Commonwealth friends. Happy Constructive Criticism Day to my Trump administration friends! Most of you I hope will remember some of my concerns expressed about the economy a few weeks ago, both in this e-mail and in interviews. Those warnings appear to have…
While much of the world celebrates Remembrance Day, the people of the United States celebrate Veterans Day. The federal holiday, which began as Armistice Day—much like Remembrance Day holidays—originally commemorated the end of World War I on November 11, 1918. In the first commemoration of Armistice Day in 1919, then-President Woodrow Wilson declared, “To us in America the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service, and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of nations.”
However, with the United States’ history being separated from much of the strife of Europe, the holiday evolved over the years into a day to honor living veterans of the country’s military. Meanwhile, Memorial Day—observed on the last Monday of May—is held as a day of honor and mourning for those who have died fighting for the United States. The evolution of the two federal holidays is a reflection of the uniqueness of the American experience and our history of conflict.
Memorial Day’s roots are in the U.S. Civil War, first instituted in 1868 as “Decoration Day” to remember fallen Union soldiers. As Memorial Day became established in the American tradition, it entered a sort of calendar conflict with the Anglosphere’s Remembrance Day nearly five decades later. For about a 50-year period, the United States marked both memorials.
The initial push to change Armistice Day began after World War II, when veterans pushed to have a national day of recognition. President Dwight D. Eisenhower embraced the idea, and urged Congress to take action.
In 1954—following the Korean War—the United States Congress moved to change Armistice Day to Veterans Day, a holiday that celebrates and honors those who have served the country in any armed conflict. Instead of just the American doughboys who crossed the Atlantic as part of the expeditionary force that provided much-needed relief to Western Europe in the waning years of World War I, Veterans Day became a day to encompass those who fought against the tyranny of Nazism in World War II, and against international communism in the Korean and Vietnam Wars.
Veterans Day now encompasses all who have served and—though no longer in arms and combat—still serve the nation.
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Tuesday night was an unmitigated disaster for the Republican Party, the conservative movement, MAGA, and America.
What made it so much worse is that the disaster was avoidable at multiple levels, and over the next few days, the vested interests will all point fingers at one another in an attempt to distract from their own failures. But we will be very honest and clear with you, even though people have urged us to bite our tongues: this was an institutional failure.
So let’s examine the institutions.
Who runs the RNC? That’s right, it’s Albania’s highest-paid consultant, Chris LaCivita. Who runs the White House? That’s right, it’s corporate America’s greatest ally, Susie Wiles. Don’t say we didn’t warn you of this.
How could two of the highest-paid political consultants and strategists IN THE ENTIRE WORLD not see the carnage of this election night coming? And how did they do so little to avert this wanton destruction?
Long-time followers of The National Pulse know we’ve been harping on about this since mid-way through the 2024 campaign. It hurts us in our hearts that we’re living through this. America finds itself at its wits’ end. We know you are, too.
What makes this more difficult is that, at the same time, we all LOVE DONALD TRUMP and EVERYTHING HE HAS DONE FOR THIS COUNTRY and the free world. Yet in our heart of hearts, we also have to ask ourselves: who allowed these people to take the helm?
President Donald J. Trump needs to wake up now and toss these LOSERS out. Anything less is political malpractice.
That doesn’t mean we love Trump any less. It means we’re trying to have his and America’s back.
Please make no mistake about it: the electorates in New York, New Jersey, California, and Virginia are weapons-grade, suicidal nutjobs for voting for the candidates they’ve elected tonight. But here at The National Pulse, we are both optimists and realists in equal measure.
All of this was avoidable. And we are fuming.
Tuesday night was an absolute travesty and a disgrace. That we couldn’t beat the Islamists, the socialists, and the deep state!?
It’s time we stopped fawning at the feet of the consultants who demand our fealty because they managed to beat the WORST CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY (Kamala).
We know some of you will question us for saying it. We don’t care. Some of us have lived through this in Europe. It’s why we’re here. It’s why we published NO GO ZONES and ENOCH WAS RIGHT. It’s why we’ve resisted every attempt from the left, from corporate America, and from foreign powers to BUY US OUT and SHUT US UP. Believe me, they’ve tried, over and over again. BUT WE BELIEVE IN AMERICA.
We believe in America First.
This is existential level stuff, folks. There can no longer be any sacred cows.
We genuinely could’ve won SOME if not ALL of these races. In fact, many of the influencers you might follow tried to convince you that we would win.
Did the candidates suck? Obviously. Winsome Sears? Dustbin of history. Ciaterelli? Dustin of history. Sliwa? Somewhat respectable due to his history of work in the city. But still, a wildly flawed pick, and a humiliatingly flawed campaign and strategy.
We on the right are pissing up a rope right now.
And we couldn’t care less about the GOP and its apparatus. What we care about is how much WORSE people’s lives will now become as a result of this nonsense.
A golden age? Hell, we’re in the dark ages tonight.
And again, totally self inflicted.
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❓WHAT HAPPENED: Whistleblower revelations regarding the Biden-Harris era Federal Bureau of Investigation’s sweeping Arctic Frost investigation detail how the Biden Justice Department’s weaponized probe evolved from a public corruption unit into a sprawling partisan interference campaign.
👤WHO WAS INVOLVED: Former Attorney General Merrick Garland, former Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray, Biden Department of Justice (DOJ) special counsel Jack Smith, former FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault, United States District Court for the District of Columbia judges James Boasberg and Beryl Howell, President Donald J. Trump, Republican lawmakers, over 430 Republican-aligned organizatsions and leaders, media companies, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
📍WHEN & WHERE: The Arctic Frost probe began in April 2022, with Jack Smith taking over in November 2022 and expanding the investigation in 2023. Revelations regarding Arctic Frost’s unprecedented scope and weaponization were revealed in October 2025.
🎯IMPACT: While the full extent of Smith’s aims with Arctic Frost is likely only known to him and his investigatory team, the latest revelations certainly imply that the Biden DOJ’s special counsel intended to oversee a long-term partisan interference operation that would have—in terms of public scandal—dwarfed the Watergate break-in under the late President Richard Nixon.
In April 2022, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launched a sweeping investigation into an alleged false electors scheme following the 2020 presidential election. Code-named “Arctic Frost,” the investigation—under the guise of probing public corruption—quickly expanded, becoming the impetus for the former Biden Justice Department’s lawfare efforts against President Donald J. Trump. However, recent disclosures made by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) have revealed that Biden Department of Justice (DOJ) special counsel Jack Smith subsumed Arctic Frost’s investigative brief to launch an unprecedented partisan interference campaign against hundreds of Republican lawmakers, political leaders, political action committees (PACs), and activist groups.
The FBI’s Arctic Frost investigation was quietly opened in the Spring of 2022, after receiving approval from former Attorney General Merrick Garland, former Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and former FBI Director Christopher Wray. Initially, the investigation was meant to target an alleged false electors scheme in the name of combating public corruption.
FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault oversaw the investigation. Sen. Grassley contends that whistleblower statements indicate Thibault almost immediately sought to weaponize Arctic Frost, pushing its scope to target President Trump and other Republican lawmakers.
“Whistleblower disclosures to my office revealed how Thibault bent FBI rules and, in so doing, weaponized the federal government to take down a political opponent,” Grassley states, adding: “The Office of Special Counsel confirmed Thibault also broke the law; the Hatch Act prohibits political activity among federal employees while on duty.”
In August 2022, Thibault was forced to resign from the FBI over his handling of a separate probe into allegations Hunter Biden traded on access to his father, then-President Joe Biden. Thibault was accused of working to discredit allegations against Hunter instead of fulfilling investigatory duties.
Despite the departure of Thibault, the Arctic Frost investigation remained open, and in November 2022, it became a key vehicle for newly appointed Biden DOJ special counsel Jack Smith‘s January 6 investigation of President Trump. Under Smith—a notoriously over-aggressive and highly partisan prosecutor—Arctic Frost mutated into an investigatory tool aimed at connecting Trump and several Republican lawmakers to the January 6 Capitol riots, with the end goal being to secure convictions that would effectively bar Trump and his congressional allies from ever again holding office.
In early October of this year, Sen. Grassley released whistleblower evidence that Smith—under the auspices of Arctic Frost—tracked the private communications and phone records of at least twelve Republican Senators. The FBI subsequently confirmed the authenticity of the whistleblower documents.
The targets included Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Josh Hawley (R-MO), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), and Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA). An FBI special agent on Smith’s team conducted preliminary toll analysis on the lawmakers’ phone records, revealing call locations and numbers dialed. The calls were reportedly related to the certification of the 2020 election.
While allegations of the Biden DOJ spying on Republican lawmakers immediately raised serious ethical concerns regarding the scope and weaponization of Arctic Frost under Smith, another—more disturbing—shoe was about to drop.
Earlier this week, Sen. Grassley published a new tranche of whistleblower documents revealing the third life of the Arctic Frost probe. Beyond just President Trump and a number of Republican senators, Smith weaponized Arctic Frost to issue 197 subpoenas targeting Republican-aligned groups and individuals.
According to the documents, by mid-2023, Smith—without any pushback from the Biden DOJ—sought records and communications involving over 430 individuals and organizations, including prominent conservative entities such as the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA (TPUSA) and the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA). The investigation also involved a subpoena related to communications with media companies like CBS, Fox News, Newsmax, and Sinclair.
Notably, non-disclosure orders regarding Smith’s Arctic Frost targets were signed in 2023 by United States District Court for the District of Columbia judges James Boasberg and Beryl Howell. Both Boasberg and Howell have been at the center of recent judicial interference efforts against President Trump’s immigration enforcement actions and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative.
Under the guise of investigating the alleged involvement of President Trump and several Republican lawmakers in January 6, Smith appears to have, in reality, laid the groundwork for an unprecedented, weaponized, and partisan criminal probe aimed at crippling the Republican Party. Financial institutions and political vendors for Trump-aligned PACs were targeted with subpoenas, suggesting that Smith sought to establish monetary links between hundreds of consulting firms, advisors, and nonprofits that he could subsequently prosecute—presumably under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act—if he had secured a conviction against Trump.
The aggressive scale and overreach are reminiscent of past prosecutions overseen by Smith. One of Smith’s most high-profile cases before he indicted President Trump was a corruption case against former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell (R), which ended with the DOJ declining to retry McDonnell after the Supreme Court threw out the conviction based on the trial court’s acceptance of Smith’s legal chicanery.
While the full extent of Smith’s aims is likely known only to him and his investigatory team, the latest revelations certainly imply that the Biden DOJ’s special counsel intended to oversee a long-term partisan interference operation that would have—in terms of public scandal—dwarfed the Watergate break-in under the late President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s.
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It takes a very particular kind of political brainworm to look at a country where nearly half the population is obese, where Medicare and Medicaid hemorrhage cash treating diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and cancer — and say: let’s not pay for the medicine that actually fixes the root problem.
And yet, here we are.
GLP-1 medications, such as Zepbound and Wegovy, appear to be the first truly practical and measurable tools in the fight against obesity. And it’s a fight America has been losing for some time. It makes everything more complicated, including schooling, military and police recruitment, and, of course, it strains the healthcare system in the long term.
These aren’t fad diets or late-night infomercial garbage. They’re clinical, FDA-approved drugs with proven, repeatable results. They make people eat less. They make people lose weight. They make people healthier. The trial data, lived experiences, and economic modeling all back it up, now.
So why, in God’s name, are Medicare and Medicaid still banned from covering them?
The answer, naturally, is bureaucracy. Specifically, rules written in a different century, when “obesity” was treated like a cosmetic problem instead of what it actually is: a chronic, degenerative, society-wrecking disease. These regulations are so old that they might as well be written in typewriter ink or sent via fax. And they remain in place today, even as America’s health outcomes spiral and healthcare costs explode — not despite them, but because of them.
This is both a policy oversight and a moral failure. It’s also an utter financial farce.
Because when you don’t treat obesity at the source, you get to pay for everything that follows: heart disease, diabetes, kidney failure, amputations, strokes, early dementia, and cancers. You also get to pay for all the consequences of those conditions: hospital beds, nursing homes, permanent disability, and premature death.
Americans spend hundreds of billions of dollars every single year dealing with obesity and its aftermath.
A recent study found that covering GLP-1s under Medicare alone, without involvement from private insurance, would generate nearly $1 trillion in economic and social benefits over the next decade. It’s a Manhattan Project for public health, sitting right in front of us and still being ignored. And while America dithers, the consequences compound.
Patients desperate for help are turning to third-world compounders. Backroom operators cooking up unregulated versions of these drugs, often sourced from China or God knows where. The FDA itself has been warning people: these versions are riskier, less effective, and sometimes outright dangerous. But when your insurance doesn’t cover the legitimate option, what do you expect people to do?
And guess who’s hit hardest? Poor people. Working-class Americans who can’t afford the sticker price, or who cannot wait for the system to get its act together. The wealthy are getting thinner and healthier, and everyone else is getting sicker. This is not a populist healthcare model.
This is where the left also usually shrieks about inequality. And for once, they’d be right. However, it’s their regulatory regime that enforces the inequality.
A DPAC poll from earlier this year found nearly 70% of Republican voters and Trump supporters back Medicare and Medicaid coverage of GLP-1s. That is what we call consensus. That’s people using their eyes and their brains and saying, “Yeah, this makes sense.”
Because it does make sense.
Making America Healthy Again means using the tools we have. It means giving people choices.
Tackling obesity isn’t like elective Botox or some reality-TV lifestyle add-on. It’s a public health necessity.
It is infinitely cheaper, more intelligent, and humane to pay for weight loss up front than it is to bankroll the slow, brutal consequences of doing nothing.
America is a nation spending billions cleaning up after obesity, and zero on stopping it at the source.
That’s not just stupid. That’s sabotage.
President Trump and Congress, it is time for change.
show lessIt takes a very particular kind of political brainworm to look at a country where nearly half the population is obese, where Medicare and Medicaid hemorrhage cash treating diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and cancer — and say: let’s not pay for the medicine that actually fixes the root problem.
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For generations, Columbus Day stood as a proud national holiday, celebrating the Italian explorer’s daring voyage across the Atlantic, which set the stage for the later establishment of the North American colonies that birthed the United States. His legacy includes the District of Columbia, which hosts the nation’s capital, and the state capitals of Columbus, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina—but the man, and his holiday, faced a sustained, relentless assault from woke activists and academics over recent years.
Democrats enthusiastically encouraged and even participated in this assault, with Joe Biden proclaiming the rival Indigenous Peoples’ Day on his first year in office, following Democrat-led states such as California, Maine, and New Mexico. Sometimes, the tearing down of Columbus’s legacy has been literal rather than merely figurative, with at least 33 statues of the explorer pulled down by mobs or removed by craven local officials during the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.
In many ways, the elevation of Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a de facto Anti-Columbus Day was the high point of the leftist culture of national self-loathing, smearing the United States as not just a country with a shameful, ugly history, but as a country that should not even exist. That’s why President Trump’s pledge to bring the holiday “back from the ashes” in April was so significant, and why the presidential proclamation that followed through on that pledge last week was so important.
The proclamation is unambiguous: Columbus is “the original American hero,” who “carried thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason, and culture across the Atlantic into the Americas — paving the way for the ultimate triumph of Western civilization less than three centuries later on July 4, 1776.”
The anti-Columbus movement is denounced in no uncertain terms as a “vicious and merciless campaign to erase our history, slander our heroes, and attack our heritage.”
Politics, as the saying goes, is downstream from culture. The polluted waters of the old culture of self-loathing were producing a polluted politics in America, characterized by trampled borders and a loss of national confidence, national identity, and national cohesion.
The reclamation of Columbus Day is a standing rebuke to that era of decline, and you should make sure you celebrate it today.
President Trump just signed a proclamation bringing back Columbus Day:
“Columbus day—we’re back, Italians!” 🤣 pic.twitter.com/VFL8iCy0Qf
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 9, 2025
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Somewhere along the way, Taylor Swift told an entire generation of women they don’t need a man. She began her career with hopeful love songs — the kind that believed in happy endings — and then, like much of culture, pivoted. Her music shifted from soft romanticism to the soundtrack of grievance: albums about how she’d be more famous if she were a man, how her exes were villains, and how girl power was the supreme virtue.
This past week, Swift released The Life of a Showgirl, right after getting engaged to the man she plans to spend her life with. The tone is completely different. She’s writing lyrics like, “When I said I don’t believe in marriage, that was a lie,” and “I just want you, have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you.” It’s a love letter to commitment — to home, family, and peace. She even draws from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, styling herself as Ophelia, only this time rewriting her fate: she doesn’t drown. She chooses to live.
It’s not that Swift never wrote about love before. But her previous “romantic” eras were laced with self-focus and politics — songs like “ME!” and “You Need to Calm Down” — the latter a not-so-subtle anti-Trump anthem. Even when she sang about love, it was filtered through control, independence, and self-image. Her song “Peace” confessed, “Would it be enough if I could never give you peace?” But on this new record, we hear something we have never heard: humility. Reverence. A woman who finally sounds at peace with wanting traditional things.
Taylor Swift is brilliant at marketing, and much of her career is predicated on existing culture, but the responsibility of leaning into this is enormous. She is a large part of the culture that made her the feminist prophet of a generation. Artists evolve, yes — but for years, her message helped steer millions of women toward isolation and resentment disguised as empowerment. Many of those women are now in their 30s, wondering why “doing it all” feels so empty. They were told independence was freedom — when in reality, it often became loneliness. And now, Taylor Swift, of all people, seems to be quietly confessing that she wanted what they were told not to: true, lasting love.
The big Millennial lie is that you cannot “have it all” as a woman, as reflected in Swift’s songs. I recently gave an interview to a large outlet about the so-called “trad-wife” movement in culture. I was asked what it meant, how I balanced aspects of my own life, how I could have a career while advocating for traditional gender roles, whether I thought marriage and kids got in the way of that career (spoiler: they do not), why I think seemingly arbitrary acts, like making dinner for your significant other despite busy schedules, are vital to building a home to return to, and why I believe women can, in fact, have it all.
The women misled by the feminist movement are either utterly fascinated, harshly critical, or both, about the choices women make to pursue happiness, the conservative push to get married and have children, often calling it archaic or misogynistic. Yet, most women I know, of all opinions and creeds, consider the most attractive thing a man can do is to have the desire and leadership to marry you, raise children with you, and grow old with you.
Taylor Swift is at the absolute height of her career: the biggest tour in history, a record-breaking concert film, TIME’s Person of the Year, and a self-made billionaire. With all of those accolades to her name and arguably the most successful period of her career, what was her highest priority this past year? Showing up for her boyfriend’s football games. To the outrage of sports fans and the surprise of feminists — she’s choosing love. And rightly so.
With all the freedom and resources in the world, Swift is choosing what matters most — a life of family and stability, not perpetual self-worship. She’s led a generation to cat-lady level acceptance of loneliness, but she herself is choosing a home at the end of a cul-de-sac, a basketball hoop in the driveway, and kids who look like both of them. In all fairness to her, it seems she is also struck at how she’s changed from finding someone she truly loves, noting in an October 6th interview on SiriusXM that she had captioned a July 4th post with the caption “independent girlies” and saying, “how deranged is that post?” as all of the women in the photo found love shortly after, notably Swift, who met Travis four days after.
This raises the question – maybe those who are so angry about love and domesticity just haven’t found it yet?
The left, naturally, is calling this album a departure from the Swift they know and love, with one online account even posting that she sounds like a “whiny white Republican” now, surrounded by conservatives. Politically speaking, I’m glad this person associates family and good values with a particular party. Yet, I’m saddened for society that we’ve drifted so far as to tie tangible love and happiness to one side, and perplexed that the left finds the shift to traditional values a betrayal.
Here’s the truth: finding a partner who leads and supports you, building a home together, and raising children if you’re able — those are the deepest forms of fulfillment. No amount of career success or independence can replicate the joy of belonging to someone and something bigger than yourself. Feminism robbed women of that by design. It wasn’t about freedom — it was about control. Encouraging women to leave the home and making them grateful for it was one of the most successful social engineering projects in modern history.
And now, whether she meant to or not, the architect of feminist culture herself is helping undo it.
I see this as a glimmer of hope that culture, upstream from politics, will turn even the most anti-traditionalists into believers, continuing to usher in the most conservative boom we’ve seen in decades. It is common sense to reject a culture that tells you that you will be happier alone and angry.
Thank you, Taylor Swift. You’ve just reminded a generation that the truest form of rebellion isn’t rage — it’s love, being a hopeful romantic isn’t outdated; it’s timeless, and the new punk rock is going to the farmers market and making sourdough for your family.
Alexis Wilkins is a political commentator, contributor, and recording artist whose work bridges media, policy, and cultural influence. Operating at the intersection of communications and cultural movement, Alexis has advised national organizations and political leaders on strategy, crisis management, and cultural messaging. Alexis has also played a key role in advancing initiatives such as American Border Story, which highlights the human and national security costs of America’s border crisis, is a Senior Fellow with The American Principles Project, and additionally, she serves on the board of the National Rifle Association, where she contributes to efforts aimed at modernizing outreach and expanding engagement with women, young people, and emerging audiences.
show lessSomewhere along the way, Taylor Swift told an entire generation of women they don’t need a man. She began her career with hopeful love songs — the kind that believed in happy endings — and then, like much of culture, pivoted. Her music shifted from soft romanticism to the soundtrack of grievance: albums about how she’d be more famous if she were a man, how her exes were villains, and how girl power was the supreme virtue.
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Amidst so much negativity, especially online, I decided to honor my friend Charlie Kirk last weekend in a slightly more upbeat way: by raising over $20,000 for U.S. service veterans via the Tunnel to Towers run in New York.
In case you hadn’t yet seen it, here’s my behind-the-scenes video of the entire weekend. I hope you can like it, share it, leave a comment, and subscribe on YouTube – and I especially hope you will consider a donation to Tunnel to Towers, an excellent A+ rated charity that I have supported for half a decade now.
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