Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Panama for his first foreign trip as America’s top diplomat. When he left, Panamanian president José Raúl Mulino delivered a blow to the Chinese Communist Party.
Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Mulino said his country would not renew its agreement with Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, which seeks to spread Chinese influence worldwide through public investment from the CCP. Panama became the first Latin American nation to join the initiative in 2018. It’s now the first such nation to back away from it.
Beijing views Panama as critical to its foreign influence efforts in the region, particularly because of the Panama Canal. Chinese businesses operate ports near the canal, which the United States owned and operated before formally transferring control to Panama in 1999. Donald Trump isn’t happy with the arrangement, and after Rubio met with Mulino, he said the United States “cannot, and will not, allow the Chinese Communist Party to continue with its effective and growing control over the Panama Canal area.”
Read more here.
In 2023 alone, members of the Palestinian government’s so-called security forces carried out more than 1,500 terror attacks against Israelis, according to a Palestinian Media Watch investigation shared with our Adam Kredo. It’s only fitting, then, that the Biden State Department quietly funneled more than $3 million to the Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF) to conduct “firearms and ammunition” training weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration.
That’s according to a nonpublic notice transmitted to Congress in early January that outlines more than $20 million in funding for regional security projects, including $3 million for the PASF to undergo training centered on “the use of ammunition and firearms” at Jordan’s International Police Training Center. The Palestinian government is reportedly seeking another $680 million from the United States to handle security operations in the war-torn Gaza strip should Israel withdraw.
If history is anything to go off of, the training will be used against Israelis in the West Bank.
“Earlier this month, for example, the PASF announced that one of its officers, Hassan Rab’iah, was killed during a standoff with Israeli forces in Jenin, a West Bank city,” writes Kredo. Shortly thereafter, the designated terror organization Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades announced that Raba’iah “was one of its commanders,” according to the Palestinian Media Watch investigation, which found that nearly 400 Palestinians imprisoned for terrorism are known PASF members.”
The U.S. spending—both past and, potentially, future—”is drawing concerns in both Israel and Washington, D.C.,” Kredo notes. Former HFAC chairman Michael McCaul told us that the Trump administration “must conduct rigorous oversight of this type of funding, which the Biden administration quietly noticed at the 11th hour.” The Trump State Department said its ongoing foreign assistance freeze will help it do just that.
In California, firefighters are just managing to contain the wildfires that have ravaged Los Angeles. And when Gov. Gavin Newsom outlines policies to respond to the damage and to help prevent future fires, you can expect him to take “indigenous knowledge” into consideration.
The “pseudoscience that posits Native Americans possess an innate understanding of how the world works” is thriving in Newsom’s California, the Free Beacon‘s Thomas Catenacci reports. From wildfire mitigation to energy development, wildlife recovery to land conservation, the Newsom administration has leveraged indigenous knowledge across state government—and spent hundreds of millions of dollars to promote it. Just take California’s 2024 climate adaptation strategy, which states that “Western science has overlooked the generations of knowledge held by indigenous communities.”
“The extensive taxpayer-funded indigenous knowledge efforts in California, which are detailed in an intricate web of state initiatives, reports, programs, and laws, highlight just how far a fringe academic theory has proliferated throughout Democratic Party-controlled governments,” writes Catenacci. “While scientists describe it as ‘dangerous’ and a rejection of the scientific method, the Biden administration forced indigenous knowledge into agencies across the federal government, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the Department of Defense.”
Last week, Newsom cited “scientists” in an attempt to push back on the “misinformation campaign” animating criticism of his administration’s water management. Maybe Pocahontas will come to his defense.
Just a stone’s throw from D.C., in National Harbor, Maryland, Democrats elected a new chairman: Ken Martin, the head of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Martin, best known for calling for Donald Trump to be tried for treason, won 246.5 votes to fellow frontrunner and Wisconsin Democratic Party chairman Ben Wikler’s 134.5 votes. Martin will replace South Carolina’s Jaime Harrison, who spent $100 million in a 2022 Senate race he lost to Lindsey Graham by double digits.
The result came as a blow to the Democratic Party’s megadonors, including George Soros and Reid Hoffman, who together contributed $500,000 to Wikler’s political action committee—or nearly 70 percent of Wikler’s total campaign funds. Martin and some party officials aligned with the Democrats’ progressive flank opposed Wikler because of his ties to Hoffman in particular. In addition to the two billionaires, Wikler received endorsements from Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
Shortly after the vote, Martin pledged to take “the gloves off” and usher in “a new DNC.” But so far, he sounds like more of the same old you know what. At a candidate forum on Thursday, Martin—along with every other candidate for chair—raised his hand in agreement with the statement that “racism and misogyny played a role in VP Harris’s defeat.” DNC members, meanwhile, participated in a land acknowledgment before voting on Saturday.
Martin’s vice chairman will be gun control activist and onesie fan David Hogg to serve as DNC vice chair. Hogg has called to defund the police and abolish ICE, says “homophobia and sexism/antifemininity” is the source of the right’s emphasis on “masculinity,” and believes Americans “have no right to own a gun.” Unrelatedly, the New York Times reported Sunday that elected Democrats “appear leaderless, rudderless, and divided” and “have no shared understanding of why they lost the election.”
Away from the Beacon:
- Donald Trump smoked some ISIS terrorists in Somalia on Saturday, and you can watch a video, complete with patriotic music, here.
- The Trump administration is “preparing an order to fold the U.S. Agency for International Development into the State Department, according to administration officials, previewing a move that throws the future of America’s foreign assistance into doubt,” the Wall Street Journal reports. What will we do without grants to help disabled Tajiks fight climate change?
- The Lincoln Project, which recently said “surrender isn’t an option” against Trump’s “destructive, anti-American agenda,” ended 2024 with roughly $200,000 on hand and nearly $1 million in unpaid vendor invoices.
