U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is acknowledging that the United States, on orders from President Donald Trump, executed a military strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug cartel’s boat loaded with “poison,” and says the U.S. will continue to do so.

“Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up,” Rubio told reporters, according to The Washington Post’s John Hudson. “And it’ll happen again.”

“What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them,” Rubio also said (video below). “The President of the United States is going to wage war on narco-terrorist organizations, this one was operating an international waters headed towards the United States to flood our country with poison, and under President Trump, those days are over.”

Hudson also reported, “When asked if the US sent a warning to the boat before it was destroyed, killing everyone onboard, Rubio insisted that the vessel, like others carrying drugs, posed an ‘immediate threat to the United States’ providing the right to destroy it.”

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Critics, questioning the President’s legal authority, were outraged that the occupants were not arrested and tried through the courts, but the Secretary of State defended the President’s actions.

The Atlantic’s James Surowiecki asked, “what’s the legal authority that allows the US military to execute ‘drug traffickers’ whenever it wants?”

“So despite no Authorization for Use of Military Force and no possible invocation of the War Powers Act, the U.S. military is now going to be drone striking people alleged to be committing a crime?” asked attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. “Again, on what legal authority?”

Constitutional law professor and political scientist Anthony Michael Kreis added, “This is not heroic; it’s criminal. Make no mistake: denying people due process who are not enemies of the United States through extra-judicial executions is repugnant to everything this country is supposed to stand for like the rule of law.”

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The Washington Post earlier reported that the “U.S. military strike on suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea killed 11 people Tuesday, according to President Donald Trump, who claimed that the ‘Narcoterrorists’ targeted in the operation were affiliated with a criminal gang that he says acts at the direction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.”

“The attack occurred ‘while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States,’ Trump wrote on social media. ‘ … Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE!'”

Watch the video below or at this link.

BREAKING: After deadly strike on Venezuelan drug boat, Sec. Rubio says US military will continue targeting cartels

“What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them.”

pic.twitter.com/plkxsMxYof

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) September 3, 2025

READ MORE: ‘Un-American’: GOP Senator Blasted for ‘Racist’ Speech Declaring America Belongs ‘Only’ to Us

Image via Reuters

U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) is under fire after telling the National Conservatism Conference that America “belongs to us, and only us,” drawing accusations of racism and historical ignorance.

Senator Schmitt, a freshman dubbed a “key White House ally” by Fox News, told attendees that the Pilgrims and George Washington’s Continental Army, “believed they were fighting for a nation, a homeland for themselves and their descendants,” and not “for a proposition.”

“They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us,” he declared. “They built this country for us. America, in all its glory is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, it’s our heritage, our destiny. If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all.”

He denounced what he called “a new people” who “believe they can build a new America” by “changing the stories we tell about ourselves.”

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“But America doesn’t belong to them,” he alleged. “It belongs to us. It’s our home. It’s a heritage entrusted to us by our ancestors. It’s a way of life that is ours and only ours. If we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist.”

Schmitt’s full remarks were published at the right-wing Daily Signal. In them, he declares, “it should be clear that the fact that something is sanctioned by our government does not mean it’s good for our country. That much is obvious with various forms of legal immigration today.”

Schmitt also said:

“We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith. Our ancestors were driven here by destiny, possessed by urgent and fiery conviction, by burning belief, devoted to their cause and their God.”

In an opinion piece in Missouri’s Kansas City Star, David Mastio calls out Schmitt for giving “a speech about American history in which the only brown person mentioned was George Floyd, a Black man murdered when a police officer kneeled on his neck for nine minutes over a $20 counterfeit bill.”

Mastio wrote: “Imagine American history without Italians and Irish and Jews. Imagine America without Frank Sinatra. Imagine invading the beaches of Normandy with just the pilgrims’ kids.”

“Imagine American history without Blacks,” Mastio continued. “Imagine fighting the battles of America’s Cold War triumph from Korea and Vietnam and on with just the pilgrims’ kids. Imagine America without Rosa Parks. Imagine our culture with just the pilgrims’ kids.”

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“Imagine American history without Asians,” he added. “Imagine America’s economy today without the silicone-inspired contributions of the tech immigrants. Imagine America without Jensen Huang, the founder of the most valuable company in our history. Imagine tackling the future with just the pilgrims’ kids.”

Other critics slammed Schmitt as well.

“This is ignorant. This is also textbook white nationalism. . . And by the way, fun fact, [your] ancestors weren’t the only ones who built this country so f– off,” wrote pollster Cornell Belcher, an MSNBC/NBC News political analyst.

“This is 100% RACIST. No shock that a member of the @SenateGOP would say this. And not one mainstream network will call this trash out,” declared journalist Roland Martin.

“Who’s ‘us’ Senator?” asked Third Way co-founder Matt Bennett. “Does it include my ancestors, who were still in Polish shtetls in the late 19th c? Does it include people who came here chained to the floor of slave ships? The Chinese who helped build the railroads? I’m guessing that’s a no on all three.”

Tennessee Democratic state Senator Jeff Yarbro called Schmitt’s remarks “Legitimately one of the most unpatriotic, most un-American speeches ever given by a United States senator.”

“By his own account,” wrote Freethink editor-at-large Robert Chapman-Smith, “Schmitt’s ancestors arrived in America from Germany in the 1840s. They arrived in an America steeped in the question of who is American. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln spoke about the ‘electric cord’ of liberty that rebukes this idea of blood and soil nationalism.”

Michigan Democratic state Representative Phil Skaggs added, “What makes America great, why we are a shining city on a hill, is because, at our best, we are a beacon for those in search of freedom and opportunity. We’re not some old European ethno-state. Republicans are veering quickly to a dark Aryan Master Race place. It’s un-American.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

Our ancestors would be astonished to learn that they were fighting for a “proposition.”

They believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants.

America belongs to us, and only us.

If we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist. pic.twitter.com/MBqoP2xNZN

— Senator Eric Schmitt (@SenEricSchmitt) September 2, 2025

READ MORE: ‘Public Health Disaster’: Florida Ripped for Move to Scrap All School Vaccine Mandates

Image by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia and a CC license

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo has moved to abolish all school vaccine mandates, making Florida the first state in the nation to reject the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines. He declared that every vaccine mandate “drips with disdain and slavery,” according to The Washington Post.

The CDC issues a recommended schedule of vaccines, first published three decades ago. These are not mandates but guidelines. Each state separately establishes which vaccinations must be given to children to attend public schools. Massachusetts was the first to require vaccinations, in the mid-1800s.

Now, Florida will become the “first state to completely withdraw from a practice credited with boosting vaccination rates and controlling the spread of infectious diseases.”

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Republican Governor Ron DeSantis supports Ladapo’s decision, but noted that while he can remove some required vaccines, others would require legislation.

The Post reports that Ladapo also “called for a halt to using mRNA coronavirus vaccines last year, citing debunked claims that the shots could contaminate a patient’s DNA. He became the first statewide health official to urge communities to stop adding fluoride to drinking water, a practice widely credited for improving oral health.”

The first to be removed from the mandated list are vaccines against preventable diseases, including measles, mumps, chicken pox, polio and hepatitis, Ladapo said, according to The Guardian.

The Miami Herald added that “Vaccines have saved at least 154 million lives in the last 50 years, according to the World Health Organization. The vast majority of the lives saved were infants.”

Sarah Despres, a former U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) official, responded to Ladapo’s claims of “disdain and slavery,” by writing: “Really? Tell that to the immunocompromised 3rd grader just trying to go to school without dying of measles.”

Florida Democratic state Representative Anna V. Eskamani warned, “Ending vaccine mandates is reckless and dangerous. It will drive down immunization rates & open the door to outbreaks of preventable diseases, putting children, seniors, and vulnerable Floridians at risk. This is a public health disaster in the making for the Sunshine State.”

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