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Year: 2026

Rand Paul floats possible 2028 run, pushes back on Trump-era protectionism

Rand Paul floats possible 2028 run, pushes back on Trump-era protectionism

Libertarian-minded Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is leaving the door wide open to a possible 2028 White House run. “We’ll decide after 2026,” Paul said in an interview that posted this weekend. Paul ran for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, but dropped out after a distant fifth-place finish in Iowa’s Republican caucuses. He won re-election later that year in the Senate, and was re-elected again in 2022. The senator, who for years has been a leading voice inside the GOP for fiscal conservatism, civil liberties and a non-interventionist foreign policy for America, has lamented the declining number of Republicans embracing such an agenda in a party dominated by President Donald Trump. And he’s pledged to try and bring such an agenda back. EARLY MOVES IN 2028 WHITE HOUSE RACE ALREADY UNDERWAY  “The most important thing to me isn’t necessarily me or what my role is, but that there is someone who’s advocating that international trade is good and makes us rich. That big is not bad,” Paul said in an interview on “Sunday Night with Chuck Todd.“ Paul argued that “the populists also want to break up big business. They want to break up Google because they’re liberal or Meta because it’s liberal. I’m not one of those people, but that is sort of the Trump-Vance populist wing.” VANCE AMPLIFIES HIS 2026 MESSAGE WHILE LANDING KEY 2028 BACKING Pointing to Trump and Vice President JD Vance, who is perceived as the GOP frontrunner in the race to succeed the term-limited Trump, Paul emphasized that “there needs to be a free-market wing of the Republican Party. And I want to be part of trying to ensure that still exists.” Paul, who is a vocal GOP critic of Trump’s unprecedented use of tariffs and who voted last year against the president’s massive domestic policy measure because it added to the national debt, has been leaving the door open to a potential 2028 run in interviews since last summer. “I think in the Republican Party, though, there needs to be someone representing that international trade is good for America, that we get richer and more prosperous in the world we trade,” he told Kentucky’s Courier Journal newspaper last July. He added that it was “too early to tell” if he would run again for the White House. SUCCEEDING TRUMP IN 2028: SIX REPUBLICANS TO KEEP YOUR EYES ON In a September interview with Spectrum News, he said, “We’ll see over time what happens,” regarding another presidential bid. And Paul, in a December interview on ABC’s “This Week,” said he didn’t see Vance as the hypothetical heir to Trump and the 2028 GOP frontrunner. While any decision from Paul regarding a 2028 White House run won’t come until after this year’s midterm elections, the senator did generate some buzz last year by making stops in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, three crucial early voting states in the Republican Party’s presidential nominating calendar. “He’s keeping options open and looking at the landscape,” a strategist in the senator’s political orbit who asked to remain anonymous to speak more freely, told Fox News Digital.

Google Gemini declares only GOP senators violate hate speech policy, zero Democrats, author claims

Google Gemini declares only GOP senators violate hate speech policy, zero Democrats, author claims

EXCLUSIVE: Google’s AI chatbot Gemini flagged several Republicans — but no Democrats — when asked to identify senators who have made statements that violate its hate speech policies, author Wynton Hall told Fox News Digital. It’s just one example of what the author believes is a deeply ingrained bias against conservatives found in artificial intelligence tools.  Hall used the “deep research” function on Google’s Gemini Pro. Fox News Digital reviewed a screen recording of Hall’s prompt and findings. Google did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment. One of the Republicans flagged by Gemini in Hall’s research, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, of Tennessee, was listed for characterizing “transgender identity as a harmful cultural ‘influence’ and has used ‘woke’ as a derogatory slur against protected groups.” Another, Arkansas’ Sen. Tom Cotton, was cited for cosponsoring legislation “to exclude transgender students from sports.” MUSK, XAI TOUT NEWEST GROK UPDATE AS ONLY ‘NON-WOKE’ PLATFORM: ‘DOESN’T EQUIVOCATE’ The finding stood out against a backdrop of inflammatory rhetoric from some Democrats in recent years. In 2023, Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., warned that then-candidate Donald Trump was “destructive to our democracy” and needed to be “eliminated.” However, he quickly apologized for his comments, claiming that it was a “poor choice of words.”  Last year, Texas Democratic House candidate Rep. Jolanda Jones made a throat-slashing gesture while rejecting former first lady Michelle Obama’s famous mantra, “when they go low, we go high,” on CNN’s “Outfront.” “If you hit me in my face, I’m not going to punch you back in your face. I’m going to go across your neck,” Jones said while making a slashing motion across her neck. “We can go back-and-forth, fighting each other’s faces. You’ve got to hit hard enough where they won’t come back,” she added.  But for Hall, Gemini’s seemingly partisan answer underscored the central argument of his new book, “Code Red: The Left, The Right, China and the Race to Control AI.” In it, he argues that AI systems marketed as neutral are increasingly shaped by the ideological assumptions of the people and institutions who create them, which are far from neutral.  His book starts out with a clear example.  Less than 10 weeks before the 2024 election, a series of viral videos appeared to expose a strange double standard in American homes. When users asked Amazon’s Alexa why they should vote for Kamala Harris, the device delivered a polished endorsement. When asked why they should vote for Donald Trump, Alexa declined, citing a policy of neutrality. “I cannot provide content that promotes a specific political party or a specific candidate,” Alexa said. Hall says the concern extends beyond a single Gemini output. “AI’s Silicon Valley architects lean left politically, and their lopsided political donations to Democrats underscore their ideological aims,” Hall told Fox News Digital. To Hall, episodes like this show how AI can shape political perceptions while maintaining the appearance of objectivity. “Through algorithm throttling and shadow bans, Big Tech centralized control over which voices soar and sink across social networks. Now AI has put Big Tech’s consolidating control on steroids,” he writes. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? He argues that this imbalance reflects the politics of the people building the systems. The billionaires driving the AI revolution, he says, invest their money and political energy where their values lie. As PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel once put it, “Silicon Valley is a one-party state.” The money appears to bear that out. According to Hall, 85% of political donations from employees at Apple, Meta, Amazon and Google go to Democrats.  After Trump’s 2024 victory, major tech companies made the customary $1 million inauguration donations. But Hall argues those gestures did little to hide where Silicon Valley’s loyalties had long been. Aside from Elon Musk, he says, most of Big Tech’s leading figures remained firmly on the left. Hall points to Democratic fundraising in 2024 as evidence of Silicon Valley’s political influence, citing major support from figures including Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, Reid Hoffman and Laurene Powell Jobs. But Hall argues the bigger issue is not campaign money.  It is the growing influence of AI systems that many people assume are neutral and objective. He warns that users often trust those answers too much, even when they may be biased. To Hall, this bias is reinforced by the relationship between tech companies and legacy media. He argues AI systems are trained on enormous amounts of content from outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic and Reuters, while conservative outlets are largely excluded. The result, he says, is a closed loop: AI absorbs the assumptions of legacy media and repackages them as objective truth. Hall argues conservatives must respond by demanding transparency in training data and ending taxpayer-funded contracts for vendors whose systems show political bias. “Whoever wins the AI fairness battle,” Hall concludes, “will shape the minds and political attitudes of future generations. The time to act is now.”

Trump wants Judge Boasberg removed from cases after series of rulings

Trump wants Judge Boasberg removed from cases after series of rulings

President Donald Trump lambasted federal Judge James Boasberg in a Sunday night Truth Social post, accusing him of exhibiting bias against the GOP and his administration, and asserting that he should be yanked from working on any cases pertaining to them. In the post, the president described Boasberg as “a Wacky, Nasty, Crooked, and totally Out of Control Judge … who suffers from the highest level of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), and has been ‘after’ my people, and me, for years.” “In case after case, Boasberg has displayed open, flagrant, and extreme partisan bias and contempt against Republicans and the Trump Administration,” the president claimed. BOASBERG BLOCKS SUBPOENAS AGAINST FED CHAIR JEROME POWELL “To preserve the integrity of the Judiciary, he should be removed from all cases pertaining to us, and suffer serious disciplinary action, as should numerous other Corrupt Judges that, unfortunately, our Country has had to endure!” the president said in the post. “What Boasberg has done on the ‘Too Late’ Powell case, and many others, has little to do with the Law, and everything to do with Politics,” the president said, referring to Jerome Powell, the chair of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System. Boasberg is the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. SCOOP: WHITE HOUSE BACKS IMPEACHING ‘ROGUE’ JUDGES ACCUSED OF PARTISAN RULINGS “He is exactly what Judges should not be! Boasberg would do better to focus on Justice and Fairness, not his own, and the Democrats’, Political Agenda, which has become LEGENDARY!” Trump asserted. Fox News Digital reached out to Boasberg’s chambers but was told that the judge had no comment. The president has been a repeated and vociferous Boasberg critic. He launched the Sunday broadside against Boasberg after the judge’s move last week in a case regarding subpoenas that the government served on the Federal Reserve Board. “The case thus asks: Did prosecutors issue those subpoenas for a proper purpose? The Court finds that they did not. There is abundant evidence that the subpoenas’ dominant (if not sole) purpose is to harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the President or to resign and make way for a Fed Chair who will,” the opinion declared. AMERICANS MAY HAVE TO PAY TO BRING BACK ALLEGED MEMBERS OF ‘FOREIGN TERRORIST CARTEL’ TO US “On the other side of the scale, the Government has offered no evidence whatsoever that Powell committed any crime other than displeasing the President. The Court must thus conclude that the asserted justifications for these subpoenas are mere pretexts. It will therefore grant the Board’s Motion to Quash,” the opinion noted.

Blue state proposal targets Trump-era ICE hires, banning them from joining local police forces

Blue state proposal targets Trump-era ICE hires, banning them from joining local police forces

Rhode Island Democrats have introduced a bill that would bar police departments from hiring ICE agents brought on during President Donald Trump’s second term, escalating the state’s pushback against federal immigration enforcement. Immigration enforcement agents, including those within ICE, have come under fire in recent months from Democratic lawmakers and governors opposed to the tactics involved in Trump’s mass deportation agenda, which the president has said are necessary due to the open-border effects of the Biden era. In Rhode Island, companion bills in the House and Senate dubbed the ICE OUT Act would amend the Law Enforcement Officers’ Due Process Accountability and Transparency Act to add a section denoting the new restriction. CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATS PROPOSE LEGISLATION PROHIBITING CAR RENTAL COMPANIES FROM SERVING ICE AGENTS “A law enforcement agency… shall not employ any individual who was hired as a sworn officer of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency on or after January 20, 2025,” the bill reads. The policy would take effect in October 2026 and would not affect any officers already hired out of ICE’s ranks. The bill’s top sponsor in the House, Democratic state Rep. Karen Alzate of Pawtucket, said during a recent hearing that the policy would help bolster public-police relationships in Rhode Island, according to the Providence Journal. ANTI-ICE LAW SET TO TAKE EFFECT IN MAINE AS GOVERNOR FACES INCREASED CRITICISM FOR ALLOWING IT AMID SENATE RUN An official with the Rhode Island Women’s Bar Association, which supports the bill, also told the paper that the alleged “relaxed hiring standards” of Trump-era DHS would not suffice in the Ocean State. Meanwhile, Rhode Island police officials warned in recent state legislative testimony on a broader group of Democratic-led police reform bills, which include the ICE OUT Act, that officer recruitment will take a hit, according to the Fall River Reporter. Another such bill from state Rep. Joshua Giraldo, D-Central Falls, would ban ICE from being within 200 feet of a polling place. During the session, Giraldo said that when conjecture about stationing federal immigration enforcement near polls arises, “particularly in the current climate; immigrant communities hear a message that is aimed at intimidation.” DHS officers on duty are already banned from the city proper in the state capital under a January executive order from Providence Mayor Brett Smiley that makes parking lots, schools, parks and government buildings restricted areas. “[Providence] has the responsibility to manage such property in a manner that ensures public trust, access and delivery of essential city services for all residents,” the mayor’s order read in part. Fox News Digital reached out to Gov. Dan McKee for indications as to whether he would sign the ICE OUT Act if it reaches his desk, and to DHS for comment.