Last week, President Trump announced that Kristi Noem would be replaced as Secretary of Homeland Security by Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) and reassigned to the newly created position of Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas.

“Let me translate what this usually means in Washington and may mean this time,” Glenn Beck says.

“When a president moves somebody into a job that hasn’t been fully defined yet, it usually means one of two things: either A, yeah, bye-bye, you’re being pushed aside, or B, you’re being moved in to run something that is bigger but isn’t public yet.”

Which category does Noem fall into?

Glenn speculates that it’s the latter.

“If you look at the timing, this doesn’t feel like a demotion,” he says.

Despite the “mixed signals” coming from Trump, who at times does appear “pissed at her,” Glenn believes that Noem’s reassignment has more to do with the “reorganization of the battlefield.”

“It’s the shield of the Americas. I know that doesn’t mean anything, but follow me on this. Right now, the United States is looking at a hemisphere and a hemisphere problem that most Americans still don’t fully understand or see,” he says.

“When Donald Trump was running for re-election, we were standing backstage someplace, and he was getting ready to go on. He said, ‘You want to look like a prophet? You know what you need to talk about? You just keep talking about Panama,”’ he recounts, noting that Trump’s words were deeply confusing to him at the time.

However, shortly after the election, the president sure enough divulged intentions to take back the Panama Canal.

“He understood what was happening with Panama and China. China had taken the entire Panama Canal and was controlling it,” Glenn says.

The Panama plans were soon followed by talk of Greenland, then Venezuela, Cuba, cartels in Mexico and Central America, Russia in Caracas, and Iranian proxies in the region.

“The southern hemisphere has become the new front line of great power competition. [President Trump] is declaring the western hemisphere is ours, OK? And DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, was not designed for that,” Glenn says.

What Trump is up against, he explains, is “hemisphere-level instability.”

“We have the migration waves. We have state collapse. We have cartels that are moving people and drugs and weapons and intelligence. We have foreign adversaries embedding themselves inside of all of that chaos,” Glenn explains. “So if you’re the president … you’re saying, ‘We have got to shore up America to make sure we last another 150, 250 years.’”

Perhaps Noem’s reassignment has more to do with this: “[making] sure that our darkest, Russia, China, Iran, are not running operations in this hemisphere.”

“Shield of the Americas. Think about the name. It’s not border control; it’s not immigration enforcement. It’s a shield of the Americas, the entire western hemisphere,” Glenn says. “That doesn’t sound like DHS. That sounds more like strategic security architecture for the western hemisphere, doesn’t it?”

To hear more of his theory on Kristi Noem’s reassignment, watch the video above.

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Last September, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins warned that the United States has “offshored our food, our beef cattle, our citrus.” She put the problem plainly: “If we can’t feed ourselves, this is a national security issue.” Fair enough. So why does so much of government land-use policy push projects that devour farmland — hyperscale data centers, utility-scale solar farms, and the sprawling infrastructure that comes with them?

If Washington wanted to drive up land prices, make farming harder, and funnel a generation of acreage into non-agricultural uses, it couldn’t improve on the current playbook. The uniparty does this everywhere, and red states often lead the charge.

Data centers: The ‘cloud’ that drains the water

Texas is suffering through a long drought. Yet Amarillo has approved an 18 million square-foot data center on what used to be cattle country. Land-grabs tell only part of the story. Data centers also drink water — and they don’t act like the kind of clouds that bring rain.

Reports indicate the Amarillo facility alone could use 912 million gallons of water per year. Large data centers can guzzle up to 5 million gallons per day, matching the daily use of a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. That kind of demand crowds out ranchers and farmers who already operate under tight margins and tight water allocations.

If food security is national security, then farmland is strategic territory. Let’s start acting like it.

Texas data centers used roughly 49 billion gallons of water in 2025, rising to 399 billion gallons by 2030 — enough to lower Lake Mead by more than 16 feet annually. Meanwhile, ranchers face reduced access, higher pumping costs, and deeper draws from shrinking aquifers. Less water means smaller herds, smaller harvests, and more pressure to sell.

That’s how the cycle locks in. Water becomes scarce. Ranching becomes less viable. Landowners get squeezed. Tech developers show up with wads of cash and tax incentives. Grazing land disappears for good.

On what planet does it make sense to trade the beef and food we need for speculative gains from chatbots and cloud-based generative AI?

Maybe Elon Musk has the right idea when he suggests building data centers in space. Texas doesn’t need them planted on top of its ranches.

Some red states now treat these projects as untouchable “economic development,” even when they wreck local quality of life. Ohio offers a telling example. An Ohio EPA draft permit for a data center states: “It has been determined that a lowering of water quality … is necessary to accommodate important social and economic development in the state of Ohio.”

That sentence says everything. Regulators will sacrifice water quality to accommodate the newest corporate appetite. Families and landowners can adapt.

RELATED: Living human brain cells are training a chatbot to be ‘more like us’

Photo by Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Solar ‘farms’ crushing farmland

President Trump has criticized the solar agenda from day one. He has called utility-scale solar inefficient and ugly — and he’s right about the aesthetics. Yet the administration now treats solar as a power source for data centers, while some MAGA influencers and pollsters try to sell the right on the plan. Pairing solar with hyperscale AI facilities accelerates the transfer of land out of food production.

Utility-scale solar typically requires five to 10 acres per megawatt. A solar build meant to feed a one-gigawatt hyperscale facility can swallow 5,000 to 10,000 acres. Supporters respond with percentages: Solar uses only a small share of total farmland. That dodge ignores where developers build. They don’t chase scrub. They target flat, well-drained, high-quality fields with cheap and easy access to transmission.

Follow the incentives. In states such as Indiana and Illinois, solar leases reportedly offer $900 to $1,500 per acre annually — far above the average return from corn and soybean ground. Landowners take the deal. Young farmers get priced out. Rural communities lose working land and the local economies that depend on it.

Reuters reported that in Indiana counties such as Pulaski, Starke, and Jasper, solar projects have secured 4% to 12% of some of the most fertile cropland. That’s not “marginal land.” That’s the kind of ground America needs to keep producing.

Tax breaks pour gasoline on the fire. Federal and state subsidies for data centers, solar farms, and battery installations push up land values and rents. In Pulaski County, Indiana, cropland rents reportedly jumped 26% since 2020 amid solar growth, outpacing state and national averages. Young families trying to farm don’t compete with subsidized megaprojects.

Indiana Republicans have compounded the damage by greasing the skids for carbon capture pipelines and special regulatory favors tied to the “Mid-States Corridor,” which will take even more farmland out of service.

Indiana’s own Department of Agriculture reports the state lost roughly 345,000 acres of agricultural land between 2010 and 2022. Residential sprawl drives much of that loss. Industrial conversion is accelerating — and data centers paired with solar build-outs speed it up.

So what exactly are these conservatives conserving?

Imports keep climbing. In 2023, imports supplied 59% of fresh fruit availability and 35% of fresh vegetables — up from 50% and 20% in 2007. America has the land to feed itself and then some, yet policymakers keep nudging production overseas. Mexico alone accounts for over half of imported fruits and vegetables, valued at more than $20 billion.

God gave this country an abundance of fertile land. He gave sun and rain to grow food. Our leaders now treat that ground as a blank canvas for industrial build-outs that don’t feed anyone.

If food security is national security, then farmland is strategic territory. Let’s start acting like it.

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Police have arrested three people believed to be involved in the brutal beating to death of a homeless man found in a vacant home in Klamath Falls, Oregon.

The Klamath Falls Police Department said in a statement that officers found Kolton Esparza just before 11 a.m. on Feb. 26 while performing a welfare call.

‘I beat Kolton with a rock and stomped him out with my shoes.’

The homeless man was found naked, bound with rope, and beaten very badly. Police reported that he had signs of torture as well.

He was transported to a hospital, where he died a day later from his injuries.

After an investigation, police arrested two men and a woman for their involvement in his death.

Prosecutors say 49-year-old Jamie S. Harrington drove Esparza to the Eulalona Trailhead in Klamath Falls along with her brother, 34-year-old Reggie L. Townsend Jr., and a 39-year-old man named Wesley J. Powless, according to a probable cause affidavit.

Esparza was allegedly beaten by the men before he was able to run away, with them chasing after him.

Prosecutors say the men caught up to him near the vacant home and beat him with a brick or rock while kicking him. Powless and Townsend allegedly cleaned up the scene and left with evidence in a black garbage bag.

A medical examiner found that the man’s cause of death was “severe head trauma.”

Investigators claimed to have obtained a confession letter from Townsend to his girlfriend that read, “I beat Kolton with a rock and stomped him out with my shoes.”

KDRV-TV also reported that Townsend had been released only three months prior after serving a sentence for manslaughter.

RELATED: Elderly man confesses to killing his daughter and wife with an ax to avoid homelessness after losing his job, police say

Harrington and her brother were arrested on Feb. 27, while Powless was arrested in a later traffic stop.

Powless and Townsend were charged with second-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping, and tampering with evidence. Harrington was charged with first-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping, tampering with evidence, and being a felon in possession of a firearm.

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On the “Impaulsive” podcast, Logan Paul declared he would wager $1 million against any NFL player willing to face him in a boxing match — claiming that no player is capable of beating him.

“Not a single football player could beat me in a boxing match,” Paul said proudly, adding that he would “throttle Myles Garrett.”

“A million dollars. You come to the gym, we put on boxing gloves, we see how it goes,” he added.

“This started with, ‘I can beat any NFL player in a fight.’ Which is an outright lie. There are a bunch of guys in the National Football League right now that will whoop Logan Paul’s ass,” “Fearless” guest Shaun King tells BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock.

“Then he fixed it, though, when he came back around to it, and he specified it had to be boxing and inside the ring with gloves on. … That is a conditioning thing, and it’s a technique thing, and no matter how good you might be fighting on the street, if you aren’t learned in that specific line of combat, then you probably have no chance,” he continues.

“Probably in a boxing match, something that he’s been training at forever with gloves, three-minute rounds, he has a sizeable advantage. But don’t get it twisted, Logan. In a regular street fight, there are a whole bunch of NFL guys that’ll get on your top,” he adds.

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