After a service member leaves the military, the Department of Veterans Affairs still has to retrieve Official Military Personnel Files and Service Treatment Records before it can approve health care, disability compensation, GI Bill benefits, or a VA-backed home loan.

That records chase is the red tape.

A veteran can be out of uniform with a claim already filed and still wait while one department holds the file and the other holds the application.

The White House fact sheet on the order states that the lag now runs 90 to 180 days, causing delays in health coverage, payments, school, and job placement.

President Trump signed the executive order Accelerating Access to Veterans’ Benefits and Employment Opportunities on September 8. The order tells the Department of War and the Department of Veterans Affairs to stop treating a veteran’s service file like two separate piles of paper.

The file is to follow the veteran from the first day of service until the VA no longer owes benefits.

The Department of War and the Department of Veterans Affairs have 180 days to stand up the IT systems and the policy memos that make that transfer permanent.

The order cites statutes already on the books for record-sharing and privacy. It also directs both departments to build digital tools, including secure AI, so a veteran is not filling out the same story three times. VA’s own write-up says immediate access to those records is what lets a newly separated service member use what they earned.

The order also gives War 30 days to start sending current service members’ personnel files, health records, and Service Treatment Records to VA as soon as they are discharged.

Within the same 180 days, War, Labor, and VA are to overhaul the Transition Assistance Program and related workforce statutes. The instruction is to give every departing service member career guidance, training leads, and a veterans specialist at the federal, state, or local level who can walk a benefits application instead of handing over a pamphlet.

The administration is stacking this on numbers already in motion. VA says disability claims now average 76.1 days, down from 141.5 earlier in the second Trump term, a 46% cut.

Sharing records with War, the department says, could shave another 20 to 30 days off claims for people just leaving service. The White House also notes the benefits backlog fell below 70,000 in July 2026 for the first time since 2020.

VA Secretary Doug Collins put the records lag in public view. Immediate sharing, he said, will eliminate weeks of waiting for healthcare and financial benefits.

Trump signed the order after an event on the Ellipse with military personnel and 9/11 first responders, Just the News noted.

The order does not create new benefit categories. It removes the handoff that has been slowing the ones already earned. What happens next is on the Department of War and the Department of Veterans Affairs. The red tape is identified. Implementation is the work.

Bringing production home has always been a priority for President Donald J. Trump, and one of the original reasons he ran for office. The White House is treating that pledge as a governing job.

Tariffs, procurement, tax policy, and training are all being used so the work actually returns to U.S. ground.

On Sept. 3, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio launched Foundry School at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace in Washington. Under Secretary Jacob Helberg hosted the event and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise also spoke.

The State Department program is built to train the next generation of American plant operators, engineers, and technicians. Helberg first unveiled the project on June 25 at the Pax Silica Summit as a partnership with Stanford. Sept. 3 was the public rollout. Trillions in investment have already been promised. Foundry School is how this White House intends to staff that rebound.

The gap to fill is people.

Officials put the need at about 3.8 million skilled workers by 2033 in semiconductors, defense, energy, and related industry. A Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte study found that about 1.9 million of those jobs could stay empty without any action. The openings do not fill themselves. They require engineers who can design a plant, technicians who can hold yield, and managers who can permit a site, hire at scale, and keep a supply chain on American soil.

The United States sent the skill of manufacturing overseas and never rebuilt it here. Foundry School is meant to reverse that.

The program sits under Pax Silica, the State Department’s supply-chain project for the stack Washington says will define the next century: compute, AI, chips, critical minerals, energy, and high-end production. Twenty-four signatories are in. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and India are in the room. The premise is simple. America should not depend on a rival’s factories for the industries that matter.

This is a 17-session curriculum built with Stanford and taught across eight universities: Stanford, Arizona State, Georgia Tech, Ohio State, Penn State, the University of Kansas, Vanderbilt, and Washington University in St. Louis. Founders and CEOs from advanced firms in the United States and those partner countries will lead the sessions. The Department of Labor is also a partner.

Rubio called the last generation of trade policy a “terrible mistake.” The idea was that it no longer mattered where things were made, so long as they were cheap. The accompanying fantasy, he said, was that the world would settle into free-enterprise democracies that looked like the United States. It did not. Nation-states remained.

Borders still mattered. Other countries still acted in their own interest. That bargain, he said, left the country “dangerously dependent” on others, not only for cheap goods, but for pieces of its own security. Access to critical minerals as raw material is not enough. The country also has to process them and finish the product again. Reindustrialization, he added, will not look like a mid-century mill. It will demand more skill, and often retraining more than once in a career.

The Trump White House treats the ability to make things here at home in America, as a measure of national strength, and as work that pays.

Foundry School is the training that can cut China dependence, and teach Americans how to build the factory. Scalise framed it as out-building and out-competing Beijing. Helberg called the school a Pax Silica product and a promise kept. Onstage the point was direct.

The habit of treating factories as someone else’s overseas job is finished. Vance and Rubio were making President Trump’s argument. The country had spent years buying what it used to build, and had grown dependent on competitors such as China.

Vance put the security case in plainer terms. COVID, he said, showed what happens when lifesaving equipment is made somewhere else. “You cannot run an economy entirely on services and finance. You have to have a foundation. And that foundation is always going to be making stuff.”

The curriculum has two phases. Phase one is seven regional sessions beginning this month at Arizona State, Georgia Tech, Ohio State, Penn State, Kansas, Vanderbilt, and WashU. They cover factory design, materials and supply chains, assembly engineering, plant economics, regulation and permitting, and hiring at scale.

Phase two is a ten-session core at Stanford starting in January 2027. It covers precision tooling, automation, quality systems, new-product introduction, digital production, capital equipment, energy, site selection, and defense output.

The last session is a capstone on failed ventures: an official admission that plants die when the model never survives a real factory floor. Speaking at the launch, Rubio turned that lesson on the universities already standing. Point them at jobs, he said. Stop letting them drift.

Students are already asking whether a degree is worth the debt if it only leads to another degree. He refused to treat the work as a two-year press cycle. “Multiple American administrations are going to have to make this a priority.” He called for an effort that lasts “a generation,” and put the vice president on the program as proof this White House wants that work to outlast one term.

The seminar series is how the skill gets taught. It supplies people who can lay out production, run operations, and turn promised investment into output here.

Making things in America was once a discipline this country defaulted to. Land-grant colleges were built for agriculture and the mechanical arts, factories ran apprenticeships, and companies kept their own institutes. High schools had drafting, and vocational trades.

School-and-shop programs put students on a worksite and in a classroom in the same year. In wartime Detroit, public-school shops ran around the clock to retrain autoworkers for the arsenal. That respect did not survive cheap foreign labor. The need never faded. Design stayed, production left, and universities chased the degree.

Companies chased cheaper assembly overseas. Building a factory on American soil was no longer a priority. Permanent normal trade relations with China, signed by President Clinton, locked the shift in, and then the work itself left. This program puts industry operators back inside universities to teach real factory work. Industry and the classroom used to train the same people.

This White House is putting the old model back on purpose: train the workers here, build the plants here. Promise made, promises kept. The next generation learns the work in America before the country ships it overseas again. Foundry School is the action. Sessions are scheduled. Enrollment has not been posted.

Ilhan Omar has spent years describing America as a country of linked “systems of oppression” from the House seat that country elected her to. In 2020 she said “we cannot stop at the criminal justice system” and must “begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.” In 2024 she told Somali constituents in Minneapolis that “the U.S. government will do what we tell the U.S. government to do” and that “as long as I’m in Congress no one will take Somalia’s sea.” Those are her words. They do not align with gratitude to the country that took her in as a child refugee and later sent her to Capitol Hill.

The known facts on her marriage history still leave unanswered questions. Last week in Dallas, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Benny Johnson that an investigation into her immigration story is ongoing.

Mullin said she “married her brother to try to bring him into the United States,” and that investigators are also examining “the whole family migration and possibly some illegal activity for them to come to the United States to begin with.” He framed it as enforcement, not politics. If the department moves a case forward, he said, “it’s not a political case. It’s an actual case because they did things wrong.” There is no statute of limitations for certain false statements on immigration applications. If investigators can prove someone should not have been here in the first place, deportation remains an option. He noted that Omar’s former husband now lives in London.

A DHS spokesperson later declined to discuss specifics. “As a matter of policy, DHS does not comment on specific investigative techniques, ongoing investigations, or potential future actions.”

The focus is Omar’s 2009 marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British citizen of Somali origin. Many have long claimed Elmi is her brother and that the marriage was meant to help him obtain U.S. immigration benefits. The rumor spread through Somali forums and news outlets and into her 2016 state House campaign. Omar has called it “absurd and offensive.” The Star Tribune later reviewed public records and could neither confirm nor rebut that Elmi is her sibling.

The probe is not limited to that marriage. Mullin said authorities are looking at the family’s broader path into the United States. Those comments track earlier statements by Border Czar Tom Homan, who in late 2025 said DHS was pulling records on Omar and reviewing visa fraud in Minnesota’s Somali community.

Vice President JD Vance has said “it certainly seems like something fishy is there,” while cautioning against prejudging an investigation. ICE, in a FOIA response to Just the News, cited “ongoing enforcement proceedings” in refusing to release records.

Omar did not enter the United States on a visa. She came as a refugee and became a citizen in 2000, as a minor, nine years before the Elmi marriage. A British passport gets a visitor through the door. It does not confer the right to stay. Marriage to a U.S. citizen does. A spouse petition is faster than a sibling petition, and that is the alleged shortcut. If the 2009 marriage was fraud, the case would concern his green card. It would not, by itself, cancel her 2000 citizenship.

Reviews of Somali visa and pandemic-aid fraud in Minnesota are another file. That fraud was a Twin Cities problem, and much of it sat in Minneapolis, the district Omar represents. Her congressional office is housed inside Sabathani Community Center, a longstanding South Minneapolis community nonprofit.

In 2022 her campaign sent $5,400, matching donations from two men later convicted in Feeding Our Future, to Sabathani Community Center, Shiloh Cares Food Shelf, and Division of Indian Work.

Omar has called the Feeding Our Future meal fraud “reprehensible” and “abhorrent.” She says any claim she knew about the scheme is “flat-out false.” She does not regret the 2020 MEALS Act Republicans tie to the case. She has not testified before the Minnesota House fraud committee and declined to turn over the communications that committee requested.

Safari Restaurant was part of the fraud. Prosecutors identified it as a major Feeding Our Future meal site, and co-owners were later charged. It was also a campaign venue for Omar. She held her 2018 victory party there and later filmed a video promoting its meal program. Co-owners and associates later charged in the scheme had donated to her campaign. Her office said those donations were given to food shelves once the scheme became public.

Other Minnesota programs produced what prosecutors called industrial-scale fraud. Medicaid, childcare, and housing all took hits. Thompson put possible losses in the billions. Feeding Our Future was only the first hole. Empty daycares kept billing the state. None of that proves Omar’s immigration file. It does explain why DHS treated Minnesota as a priority. Prosecutors called the child nutrition case the largest pandemic fraud in the United States.

U.S. law allows denaturalization and removal if citizenship was obtained through material fraud. That process is civil, evidence-driven, and rare for a sitting member of Congress. Mullin said the department would act only if it could prove wrongdoing. Omar’s office has called similar claims politically motivated. In May she said she had not been notified of an investigation.

Every major social/political movement over the last 125 years has inevitably split in two because of ambition, policy, tactical disagreements, and personality conflicts.

In Russia, it was the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The two factions officially split into separate political parties in 1912. The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, argued that Russia could bypass a prolonged capitalist phase by forging an immediate alliance between industrial workers and peasants, seizing power directly through a radical vanguard, and establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The Mensheviks, led by Julius Martov and Pavel Axelrod, favored a broad, inclusive party structure open to trade unionists and sympathetic workers. They believed Russia was still in an almost feudal stage of development and needed to go through a capitalist phase before achieving true communism.

The Bolsheviks ultimately seized power during the October Revolution of 1917, establishing the foundation for the Soviet government and eventually suppressing the Mensheviks.  

In the 1920s, the Nazis were a growing force in Weimar politics, but they too had internal splits that threatened their future. Establishment Nazis like Hitler wanted to court the rich, the elites, and the military. The Strasser faction, led by brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser, wanted to emphasize the “socialist” part of “National Socialism” by denouncing capitalism and supporting land redistribution.

There were also Ernst Röhm’s Stormtroopers, four million strong, who supported Hitler but wanted to replace the regular army. Hitler took care of Röhm, his closest friend, during the Night of the Long Knives.

In both the Soviet and Nazi cases, the most ruthless, the most violent, and the least democratic sides won. I wonder if the civil war now raging within the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will produce a similar outcome?

The DSA dates back to 1982 and was founded by Michael Harrington, a mild-mannered, inoffensive scholar who rejected Soviet-style totalitarian communism in favor of traditional democratic rights, trade unionism, and gradual economic reforms. At the time, the group had a bylaw allowing for the expulsion of members “under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization” to prevent a Marxist-Leninist takeover of the DSA.

No such bylaw exists today.

“We’ve really worked over time through discussions, debates, internal democracy, just seeing and doing what campaigns have worked, advancing, like, how we can move to socialism in this country without getting bogged down on being too dogmatic on any one line,” New York City DSA organizer Josh Kraushaar said on a Zoom call in late August with prospective members.

No worries, then. Big Tent, everyone welcome, yada yada, right? Not exactly.

The Free Press:

With the political success of the DSA, some of its more outrageous policy positions have come to light. And to explain how the DSA would eliminate the police and the Pentagon, and give free stuff to all, the media usually grabs a DSA member from the most radical faction: the Marxist Unity Group.

But the DSA leadership insists that’s not who they are. The largest faction, the pragmatic Socialist Majority and Groundwork caucuses, want to continue running DSA candidates as Democrats, seeing that as the quickest path to legitimacy.

In fact, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s presumed presidential run is revealing the party’s fault lines like nothing else. When the DSA’s radical platform was released earlier in the summer (“Workers Deserve More“), it “laid out the group’s political vision, including several controversial proposals such as abolishing the Senate, defunding the Department of Defense, and working toward ‘fully abolishing the police and prison system,'” according to Axios.

AOC distanced herself from the document and even denied being a member of the national DSA. She claimed she was just a member of the NYC chapter.

Axios:

I should add that the Democrats appear totally helpless. They are now in an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” phase, where prominent Democrats are announcing their acquiescence to the new socialist reality. And why not? Refusing to support the DSA is nearly suicidal in many Democratic strongholds.

“When some DSA spokespeople go on large media platforms and bite the bullet on every wildly unpopular and poorly thought-through maximalist idea that’s arisen in our movement—cheerfully affirming that, yes, we do want that—it’s an easy way to win points for loyalty and radical commitment within the circles of the already converted,” Jacobin columnist Ben Burgis recently wrote. “But it’s a very bad strategy for making our case to a broader public.”

In other words, walk softly, smile a lot, reassure the voter that none of that radical stuff is possible today, and besides, it’s “aspirational.”

Do the Marxist crazies have the patience to wait for the revolution to come to them? America is trending that way as younger voters, ignorant of what turning to socialism really means, are seduced by promises of Utopia and free stuff and are voting for socialists in large numbers.

The same promises that have been made by socialist scalawags since Karl Marx published Das Kapital in 1867.

By PJ Media – https://pjmedia.com/rick-moran/2026/09/10/who-do-we-root-for-to-win-the-dsa-civil-war-the-commies-or-the-crazies-n4957073

Ten hanging deaths of Black people in 2026 were cited this week as “widespread modern-day lynchings” and “racial terror.”

Most of those cases have been ruled suicides by local authorities and medical examiners. One is now a homicide. Another remains open.

That did not stop two members of Congress from calling the list a wave of lynchings. Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted it on X. Community Notes overrode both posts. Pressley called the deaths a “national crisis” and demanded a federal investigation “to stop modern-day lynchings.” Ocasio-Cortez said she was proud to have signed on “to address these widespread modern-day lynchings and put a stop to this racial terror.”

Screenshot of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quoting Rep. Ayanna Pressley on X, with Community Notes attached.

Readers added the context that was missing from the podium: most of the high-profile cases had already been ruled suicides, with no evidence of foul play. Framing them as modern-day lynchings is not what the official findings say.

Elon Musk replied to Ocasio-Cortez’s post and asked Grok to list each of the hangings and identify the race of the murderer. Grok’s reply tracked the local rulings: most of the cited 2026 cases had been ruled suicides with no evidence of foul play, one was a homicide investigation, and, one remained open.  Musk then shared Grok’s reply and added: “Misleading post that fans the flames of hate by AOC.”

Pressley had already led a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel demanding a federal investigation into every hanging death of a Black person. Fifty-nine Democrats joined. The demand went out on official accounts on September 10 — before the one Mississippi case was ruled a homicide that night.

Reporting on the letter’s list treats that Jackson death as the homicide probe and one North Carolina case as still open. The rest of the cited 2026 cases were closed as suicides. Families in several of those cases have disputed the local findings. A family’s questions are not a verdict.

The North Carolina case remains an open, equivocal investigation. Police have not called it a lynching. Chief Lawrence Wiggins said the evidence will provide the conclusion; anything else will create more confusion.

These families buried people they loved. They are entitled to a complete record. A second autopsy, when they ask for one, is that request. It is not a political cue. It does not require branding the full list a wave of lynchings. If Blanche and Patel open a file, start with the autopsy and the warrant. The podium can wait.

Lynching is a specific crime with a specific history. Suicide is also real. So is homicide that is not a hate crime. Police have not called the Jackson case a hate crime. That still does not turn the full list into racial terror.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has never treated CAIR as a problem, and New York taxpayers are still paying the groups tied to it. He took political help from CAIR-linked PACs, hired from the same network, and City Hall now acts like the paper trail is a smear instead of a record.

Texas and Florida designated CAIR a terrorist organization. The UAE did it years earlier.

CAIR spent years selling itself as a civil-rights shop. Prosecutors listed it as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, the largest Hamas-financing trial in American history. A CAIR board member later drew a 65-year sentence in that same world of cases.

None of that stopped CAIR-tied money from becoming one of the biggest institutional boosts behind Mamdani’s rise. Linda Sarsour said it out loud at a CAIR conference: the Unity and Justice Fund, the CAIR-backed super PAC, was the largest institutional donor to the pro-Mamdani PAC. 

Campaign records showed two gifts from the Unity and Justice Fund into New Yorkers for Lower Costs: $25,000 on May 30, 2025, which is on the FEC report, and $75,000 on June 16, which Politico confirmed when it reviewed the filings. Added together that is the $100,000 figure. The later running total on Transparency USA is $120,000.

CAIR’s 501(c)(3) can deny writing a campaign check. That is technically true. The PAC Linda Sarsour called “the CAIR super PAC” on a CAIR stage still wrote those checks, and CAIR Action’s own director was its treasurer (Jerusalem Post).

After the election, CAIR and CAIR-NY treated the win as theirs. They called it a “historic turning point” and a rebuke of “anti-Palestinian politics.” They stood with Mamdani when hewent after Netanyahu and framed pushback as bigotry. Then he staffed City Hall from the same network. Three cofounders of a group that blamed Israel for October 7 landed administration jobs. One of them had already done a tour at CAIR-NY.

The city money never stopped. The Muslim American Society’s Brooklyn shop took more than $265,000 in Council discretionary funds. Then it hosted a fundraiser where vendors sold trinkets for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — all U.S.-designated terrorist organizations. After the story broke, the Council still sent another $85,000. Leadership promised better vendor screening. The checks cleared. MAS people sat on Mamdani’s transition team.

Sarsour’s old shop, the Arab American Association of New York, had already pulled more than $4 million from city and state coffers. Watchdogs mapped tens of millions more flowing to groups tied to Mamdani allies. New York’s matching-funds program made it worse. Small donations from staff at outfits like ICNA got multiplied with public cash. Taxpayers were not just watching the network. They were helping pay for the campaign that put its preferred mayor over a $100 billion budget.

This is not a one-off association. Years earlier, Mamdani recorded a track that sent “love to the Holy Land Five” and told listeners to look them up, the men convicted in the Hamas-financing case that also named CAIR. He has not spent his mayoralty drawing a line under any of it. The answer from his corner is the same every time: call the questions Islamophobia and change the subject.

That dodge only works if you ignore the Holy Land record, the state designations, the vendor tables hawking Hamas and Hezbollah paraphernalia in Brooklyn, and the Council votes that followed.

This week made it harder to miss. Days before the 25th anniversary of September 11, Mamdani signed remembrance orders and then handed the ceremonial pen to an aide who once represented an al-Qaeda defendant. Allied groups still collect city money after selling terror souvenirs in Brooklyn. City Hall made the hire and signed the grants. The rest is commentary.

New Yorkers are allowed to ask why their taxes keep following that money trail. The receipts are already in the Council ledgers and the FEC filings. City Hall can keep calling it a smear. The documents do not.