All posts tagged "military"

This Trump rant was his most delusional and dangerous yet — by far

I had intended to write today about a video the repulsive President of the United States loaded up on his odious social media account Monday night. I had intended to warn you (again) that the normalization of terrible things like this by our worthless corporate media was even worse than the repellent videos themselves.

By allowing an obviously mentally unstable man to send out these sickening images to tens of millions of people around the world, without framing in 100-pt. type how grotesque and phony they are, our media was once again abdicating its singular responsibility of holding power accountable to the truth.

They are no longer even bothering to pretend they are up to the job.

I had intended to tell you as I have in the past, to find the truth wherever you can and share it everywhere. I hope this is one of those places, but in the case of this damn video, I’ll let one of America’s national treasures, Heather Cox Richardson, tell it, because I saw it first in one of her “Letters from an American” missives in the early-morning hours Tuesday.

(And if you aren’t subscribing to Richardson’s work you are missing what I believe to be the definitive snapshots of these worrisome times.)

From Richardson’s piece:

Tonight, Trump’s social media account posted a deepfake video of (Chuck) Schumer and (Hakeem) Jeffries speaking to reporters. In the doctored video, Schumer talks with Mexican music playing in the background, while Jeffries stands beside him wearing what appears to be a colorful Mexican sombrero and sporting a mustache with the ends waxed and turned up.

In the video, Schumer’s image is made to say: “There’s no way to sugarcoat it. Nobody likes Democrats anymore. We have no voters left because of all of our woke, trans bullsh*t. Not even Black people want to vote for us anymore, even Latinos hate us. So we need new voters. And if we give all these illegal aliens free healthcare, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us. They can’t even speak English, so they won’t realize we’re just a bunch of woke pieces of sh*t, you know? At least for a while, until they learn English and they realize they hate us too.”

Here is an image from Trump’s childish, racist, and repugnant post:

A post by Donald Trump.

THIS is how the sickly President of the United States is spending his time. Snotty, spoiled five-year-olds behave with more class …

Because we have never had a president who constantly shares disgusting things like this, it should be the very definition of NEWS. Right now I am looking at the lead stories on The New York Times, The Washington Post and Associated Press websites and there is no mention of this video.

It is as if it never happened.

Well, millions saw it, and we should all be outraged by both the madman who shared it, and our worthless press, which can’t see the danger of it.

In her piece 16 hours ago, Richardson also set the stage for what did rightfully get plenty of press on Tuesday: our joke of a Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, speaking to a gathering of our military leadership at Marine Corp Base Quantico in Northern Virginia.

Hegseth, an alleged stone-cold drunk and liar, finished with his foul speech, but not before predictably being upstaged by his repugnant, orange boss, who projectile-vomited all over room, and fully half the citizens of the country he hates.

It is also worth pointing out because they were too damn stupid to consider it, that gathering all our nation’s top generals, admirals and their commander in chief in one room might be the single greatest threat to national and operational security I have ever seen — even stupider than texting war plans to a reporter.

But who cares about little things like that when you have a president who is a pathetic showoff and malignant narcissist, and lives only to feed his insatiable, bloated ego. Acting the tough guy in a roomful of tough guys, was just too much for this low-class coward to pass up.

I could fill 50 column inches with the stench emitted from Trump’s big mouth on Tuesday, so I’ll share just this stained nugget:

“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

These “dangerous cities” he was talking about, of course, are in the country he governs, because nothing excites him more than attacking America.

He lives for it.

He also called people who protest against him and disagree with his policies: “The enemy within.”

Again, he is talking about U.S. citizens. WE are the enemy.

So let me just duck this in before I forget, because I am furious: I served my country, you draft-dodging candy-ass, and you can kiss my ass, sport.

Thanks.

As always, Trump came off as a complete moron today as he crashed from one subject to another, head cocked like Stupid Mussolini.

Any flag officer who wasn’t deeply disturbed and insulted watching this unhinged rant isn’t worth the uniform she or he is wearing, and should apply for a job cleaning Trump’s pool.

And while this nauseating gathering allowed Trump to feel like a real man for about an hour, the real reason for the event was to put military leadership on notice yet again that they, and mostly their troops, are to be loyal to HIM and not the United States of America.

From Day One of this regime, I warned you that the very first thing Trump was going to do was use the military for his evil devices.

Keeping our military loyal to him is an essential ingredient of authoritarian leadership.

In WARNING SHOT: The America-attacking Trump is coming for our military, and then US ... I typed:

“Once you understand that Trump will use his presidency and whatever is left of his miserable life to settle scores and return the favors of the crooked dictators, and slobbery weaklings in his political party, who helped put him back in office, you can better prepare for the hell that’s most assuredly coming.

You can never say you weren’t warned, because if you believe nothing else I type today, you damn well better believe this:

NOTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect the citizens of the United States of America.

EVERYTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect himself from the citizens of the United States of America.

Trump’s true enemy is the truth and anybody who dares speak it, or report it.

As I put this piece to bed, Republicans are in the process of shutting down our government, our military is in our streets, perceived enemies of the crown are being prosecuted, our FBI is firing “disloyal” people at will, and the bedrock of any Democracy, our vote, is under attack.

Fascism is here.

Just don’t expect it to be reported that way.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)

Pete Hegseth wants 'male warrior spirit'? He's lucky my Mom isn't here to set him straight

On Tuesday, our newly-dubbed “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth told our military’s top brass that they must restore the "male warrior spirit" to the armed forces.

“Male” spirit, Pete? Excuse me, Pete. My mother, Gladys Palast, was honored by President Bill Clinton as the very first woman who volunteered for the US Coast Guard after the attack on Pearl Harbor

Let me tell you, Little Petie, Mom was a WARRIOR. How DARE you insult my mother’s courage and initiative and then introduce General Bone Spurs Trump as the guy “who has your back.” Hmmm. Trump got out of the war in Vietnam by claiming he had a bone spur in one foot — but he can’t remember which one.

And let’s not forget, on the day after his second inauguration, Trump fired Adm. Linda Fagan as Commandant of the Coast Guard for no visible reason other than she has a vagina. Trump is lucky that Mom ain't around anymore, because I know she'd go back to the White House to kick his ass and show him what a woman warrior can do.

Gil and Gladys Palast in uniform at their wedding 1943. Dad fought in the Phillipines.

And also, just one day after the inauguration, he fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown, a 4-star general, Chair of Joint Chiefs of Staff, a pilot with 130 hours of combat flights in an F-16, for no other visible reason other than Brown is, well … brown.

Brown was replaced, for the first time in US history, by a guy who never even attained the rank of general. Dan Caine is a flunky who flattered Agent Orange when he visited Iraq during his first term. Before taking charge of America’s military, Caine was a Wall Street speculator. Maybe, if the market drops again, Trump will award Caine a purple heart. Trump said he was moved to appoint Caine because of his nickname, “Razin' Caine.” Actually, his nickname is properly written, ”Raisin Caine,” because he was retired and dried up.

That's OK, because Trump doesn’t use our military to confront bad guys. The military’s new mission is to harass Democratic mayors because TACO Trump always folds and crumbles into pieces when an enemy bites. Vladimir Putin is still living in the glow of the Lewinsky he got from Trump in Alaska, and China boasts about invading Taiwan.

Putin and Xi Jinping don't think that Trump is a paper tiger. They've tagged him as a paper three-toed sloth.

To be old, un-gifted and fat

Hegseth called together all the top brass in the military to boost his side gig as a Jenny Craig Weight Loss Program salesman. He used the term “fat” three times. The generals and admirals, many of whom were ordered to fly thousands of miles to this PR dog-and-pony show, were forced to listen to their Secretary say:

“It's completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world. It's a bad look.“

A bad look? Has Hegseth ever looked at our Commander-in-Chief, the bloviating porcine bigot in a red tie? Mom could have taken General Bone Spurs to the mat. (I am strictly non-partisan, but Mom wasn’t. Here’s a photo of her, two days before she passed away at 97, smiling in her “Impeach Trump” T-shirt.)

Gladys Palast, at 97.

Our enemies must be laughing their keisters off knowing that our commanders were pulled out of the field to hear Hegseth commanding them to get a shave.

“No more beard-os,” said our Secretary of War. (Though I do applaud his physically attacking JD Vance with a razor … OK, I made that up.)

Declaration of War — on America

The most pathetic moment of Trump’s speech was at the beginning when he complained that he did not get applause from the generals upon his entry. Instead of the applause he was begging for, he got sly laughter. Then Trump turned on his threat machine. “Don’t laugh! Don’t laugh! You’re not allowed to do that! ... If you don’t like what I’m saying you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.”

Still no applause but some nervous laughter. This is, after all, their Commander-in-Chief and he’s punished dissent and competence with not only firing but physical threats. After 4-Star Gen. Mark Milley retired as head of the Joint Chiefs, Trump removed Milley’s security detail. It’s only been a month since Trump and Hegseth canned Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency after they caught him telling the truth. (Trump has re-named it the Defense Stupidity Agency … OK, I made that up as well.)

But while the Hegseth and Trump speeches seemed to have been drafted by Groucho Marx, I have to agree with Trump: “Don’t laugh.” His speech was, effectively, a declaration of war on Americans, specifically, “inner cities” — the oldest trope for Black Americans -- “which we’re going to be talking about because it’s a big part of war now. It’s a big part of war.”

WAR??? The generals didn’t miss the point: they were dragged back to the States because their Commander is telling them that the real enemy is America itself, “the enemy within,” a chilling phrase he borrowed from his mentor, Roy Cohn, the Grand Inquisitor of the McCarthy era of political terror. Scarier still, Trump is bringing back McCarthyism with a bullet. Literally. He said,

“I told Pete we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

American citizens will now be target practice.

Think I’m kidding? It’s begun. Just this week, a member of our team was observing a demonstration in a Chicago suburb in front of a new ICE detention center. The demonstrators were outside a fence, protesting peacefully, when, according to our reporter, federal agents on the roof, utterly unprovoked, started firing pepper balls. How soon before some kid, trained as a soldier, not a cop, will fire real bullets after a “provocation”?

Broadview ICE facility, Illinois Protesters in front of the Broadview ICE Processing Facility, Illinois, just before the agents (on roof) began firing pepper balls at the demonstrators. Photograph: Patrice Gallagher for the Palast Investigative Fund 2025.

Trump’s hauling generals to his goofy confab can be put down as a ridiculous publicity stunt. But this stunt was scheduled only days after Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) directing the full force of the federal government to go after those who show “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

We have located the enemy, and it is … Portland.

For all the stifled laughter, the military understood the grim order: their next war will be against America.

Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. See his reports at https://substack.com/@gregpalastinvestigates

Pete Hegseth's speech an 'insane insult' to senior officers: special ops leader

A special operations leader who led a key battle in the Iraq War called Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's meeting Tuesday among top military brass an "insane insult" to senior officers responsible for complex military operations.

“I mean, first of all, that’s like an insane insult to his senior officers, who all made their bones fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Elliot Ackerman, who led Marines in the second battle of Fallujah, told The New York Times. “Those guys have got a lot more dust on their boots than he does.”

Hegseth — who stood in front of an American flag and wore an American flag belt buckle similar to General Patton in the 1970 film "Patton" — served 12 months in Iraq and is a former major in the Army National Guard, The Times reports. His vision of the military is based on this experience, and "much of his address focused on the kinds of issues he would have dealt with as a young platoon leader in the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq or as a company commander in the Guard."

He also decried "the woke" and talked about grooming, saying "no more beards, long hair, superficial, individual expression."

“We’re going to cut our hair, shave, shave our beards and adhere to standards," Hegseth said.

Hegseth also said women would be held to the "highest male standard" for serving in combat roles. And while women can still serve in combat roles, it harkens to World War II-era policies when women didn't fight in war.

“If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it,” Hegseth said.

He implied that physical strength should be a top priority among the ranking military leaders, and appeared to suggest that the U.S. struggles to win wars.

“Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops,” Hegseth said. “Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon.”

He compared himself and his own physical abilities to the other public servants.

“If the secretary of war can do regular, hard P.T., so can every member of our joint force," he said, speaking of himself.

Then, he told them what he expected, while the military officials sat silent.

“You are hereby liberated to be an apolitical, hard-charging, no-nonsense, constitutional leader that you joined the military to be,” he said.

'Are people going to stay in?' Combat vet warns of 'ripple effects' of Hegseth's speech

A combat veteran had a sharp warning after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's comments about women in the military and suggested "ripple effects" would come after his big speech, asking, "Are people going to stay in?"

Major Kyleanne, a retired combat veteran and CEO of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, told CNN anchors Brianna Keilar and Boris Sanchez that using a "culture war" is "distracting from real military readiness." Hegseth's comments could also impact recruiting — a top priority.

"There's real concerns about recruiting, these big recruiting booms that we've seen are largely driven by women joining the military," she said. "But there's also a lot of concerns about retention. Are people going to stay in if that's what's going to happen? But also what it does to our veteran population."

Hunter also pointed to veteran mental health as a major concern. She suggested that Hegseth's comments could have a negative message for struggling veterans.

"We are hearing from veterans, men and women alike, that remarks like this have a real impact on veteran mental health and how they feel about their own services, you know, their own service. And were they actually worthy to be in the service? And so, you know, while there's a focus on the active duty right now, we absolutely need to be focused on that aspect," she added. "We also need to be looking at what are the ripple effects of this rhetoric due to the mental health of our veteran population, as well."

She pointed to current Pentagon changes as concerning, especially for women in the military.

"I have deep concerns about the shutting down of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services," or DACOWITS, she said.

"I had the honor of serving on DACOWITS twice. And what I can say is that the recommendations that we made for women in the services benefited everyone, and increased military readiness increased the authority and increased unit cohesion, whether it was on ensuring there was properly fitting gear and equipment for everyone who goes downrange into harm's way, or ensuring that there is adequate familial support so people retain and stay in the military. These are our actions that impact everyone. And I think with the loss of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women's Services and with these statements that, you know, show that women may not be adhering to the same standards, which is just blatantly not true."

She also argued that merit-based, skill level and achievement are important in the military, not implicit or explicit bias.

"I think it's unfortunate when statements like this get made because it leads to division," she said.

It should be a meritocracy, she explained, and initiatives under DACOWITS removed pronouns from fitness reports or officer qualification records so people would be promoted based on their skills, achievements, and merit.

"And I will say from my time in the military, I had the opportunity that I was judged objectively against my peers. And where I succeeded, I succeeded all my merits and where I fell short, I fell short of my own shortcomings."

The military has tried to make it more common for women to enter the military. But Hegseth's words were the opposite.

"And so the very claims that they're wanting, if they want a better meritocracy system, they are dismantling the offices and the programs that made it a meritocracy to begin with, which is a little counterintuitive in my mind," Hunter said.

This alarming intel shows how TACO Trump will drag us into World War III

The world has often seen great wars ignited not by inevitability, but by weakness, hesitation, and betrayal. Cowards playing with matches.

History shows that one of the biggest risk factors for war is an autocratic leader who fears for his own future. Which is why the kind of pathetic incoherence we saw at the United Nations this week should concern us all.

This week’s news brings some alarming data points:

After four different Danish airports were buzzed by what many assume to be Russian drones (Danes are uncertain), a French airport was hit yesterday and a Norwegian airport was shut down by drones earlier in the week.
The US Navy fired Trident II D5 ballistic missiles from the coast of Florida, lighting up the sky as they were testing devices that could carry thermonuclear bombs deep into Russia.
A massive US Navy presence in the Caribbean and off the coast of Venezuela was just this week joined by F35s and Reaper drones as Trump has blown three Venezuela boats out of the water without congressional authorization.
In an absolutely unprecedented move, Pete “Kegger” Hegseth has ordered all the US military’s flag officers and their staffs to come to Virginia for a meeting with an unknown agenda. This is not normal military procedure; it has the stench of authoritarian consolidation, the kind of maneuver history has shown us precedes purges, coups, and crackdowns.
Russia is experiencing a nationwide fuel shortage (also in Russian-occupied Crimea) as the result of Ukrainian drones taking out refineries and depots across the nation. It’s so bad, the Kremlin has banned fuel exports until the end of the year. The nation’s economy is teetering and Putin is apparently in political trouble.
Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister Wu Chihchung warns, “China is preparing to invade Taiwan.”
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, just said, “NATO and the European Union want to declare, in fact, have already declared a real war on my country and are directly participating in it.”
NATO notified Russia that they may shoot down planes that invade NATO airspace, and Russia replied that “would be war.”

As Russian jets cross NATO skies and intelligence warns of an impending strike, while Trump — desperate for a diversion from the Epstein/Trump sex scandal and a collapsing economy —appears to be trying to provoke a war with Venezuela, the question grows louder: are we watching the sparks of a new global conflict?

And is the dangerous bond between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump the match that could light the fuse of World War III?

Remember back in July when Trump told NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte (during a visit to the Oval Office) that if Europe would pay for the anti-missile defense systems Ukraine desperately needs he’d see to it that they were shipped over there promptly?

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted:

“I’m grateful to our team and to the United States, Germany, and Norway for preparing a new decision on Patriots for Ukraine.”

Rutte coordinated with Germany and Norway (and later other NATO countries) to raise the billions necessary to pay for the systems to replenish stocks held by European nations, particularly France, Germany, and Denmark, that those countries are supplying to Ukraine.

The replacements should have arrived in Europe by now, a continent that’s increasingly on edge as Putin keeps flying MiGs over former Soviet client states in the Baltics.

As they supply Ukraine — which is suffering under unprecedented attacks with hundreds of missiles and drones every night — Europe’s own stockpiles that could be used to deter Russian aggression are vanishing.

Between that Oval Office meeting and now, however, Trump had his infamous red-carpet meeting with Putin in Alaska and apparently got different orders from his self-described friend and probable mentor.

As Vivian Salama reports for The Atlantic, there’s been a sudden change in the Trump administration’s position with regard to providing NATO or EU countries with defensive weaponry to replace what they’ve given to Ukraine:

“Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby said that he didn’t believe in the value of certain foreign military sales, according to two administration officials with knowledge of the discussion.”

Adding to European concerns, news broke last week that a Russian Major General who defected claims Putin is planning a full-on invasion of both Ukraine and parts of the Baltic states — all NATO members — “before Christmas.”

The British newspaper the Daily Express reported, in an article headlined “Russia's 'greyzone' invasion plan to start WW3 before Christmas revealed by defector”:

“Moscow is preparing a ‘greyzone’ attack on Poland before Christmas, a senior Russian military official has revealed.

“The warning, sent through an Eastern European ally during London’s DSEI arms fair last week, has triggered urgent discussions in the UK and US about the risk of a deniable strike aimed at fracturing NATO.”

Poland, Romania, and Estonia have all seen Russian MiGs violate their airspace in the past two weeks, scrambling NATO jets as Poland and Estonia have invoked NATO’s Article 4 process to stand up to potential aggression.

It appears to me (just my opinion) that when Putin met with Trump in Alaska either he ordered Trump to back away from Ukraine and NATO, or simply took the measure of the man and concluded he could launch an invasion of the Baltics with a low probability that the United States under the convicted felon would respond militarily. Trump’s recent blocking of Patriot systems to Europe suggests the former rather than the latter.

Europe is taking this threat seriously. Great Britain this past week dispatched Royal Air Force jets to Poland with backup from Voyager tankers; they join German, French, Swedish, and Danish jets that began patrolling the eastern flank of the Baltic nations after the first Polish incursions.

Donald Tusk, Poland’s Prime Minister, warned that his nation — and, implicitly, the region — is now closer to military conflict “than at any time since the Second World War.” The UK’s OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) Ambassador, Neil Holland, was explicit that these were not accidental incursions into NATO airspace:

“Either Russia has deployed systems it cannot control, or it is provoking us deliberately.”

According to the Express reporting, British intelligence isn’t expecting a full-on invasion of Eastern Europe but, instead — at least initially — the same sort of “deniable” pinpoint attacks Putin has used to precede his later, larger assaults on other nations including Georgia and Ukraine. One UK intelligence official said:

“There’s no suggestion of a full-scale invasion. But a calibrated strike – something deniable, something confusing – is exactly how Russia has operated in the past.”

He added:

“They’re probing NATO. If they can strike Poland and NATO flinches — even slightly — it undermines the whole alliance.”

At the same time, Russia has reportedly launched a full-scale “coordinated information warfare” assault on Finland via the internet and social media. Finland shares a 833-mile border with Russia, which, as the USSR, has invaded that nation twice in modern times, once in 1939 and again in 1941.

Marco Giannangeli, Defence and Diplomatic Editor for Express, pointed out:

“Western officials fear the disinformation campaign is intended to soften the ground for further provocations along the Gulf of Finland.”

Putin’s apparently taking Trump’s TACO (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) label to heart. Tragically, the entire world may soon see the consequence of a blustering, incompetent, race/deportation-obsessed, apparently terrified-of-Putin president who’s surrounded himself with people whose singular quality is not competence but loyalty and a willingness to break tradition and the law on the boss’ behalf.

History will not forgive miscalculation at this scale. With Europe bracing for attack, NATO stockpiles running dry, Trump near provoking war with Venezuela, and Putin — in deep trouble at home — probing for weakness, the world stands at a perilous crossroads.

The only question now is whether this moment will be remembered as the turning point that stopped another world war, or the disaster when Trump and Putin together opened the gates to it.

These shocking acts show Trump thinks he can kill whoever he wants

Actions now being taken by Donald Trump and his regime may seem far-removed from your daily life or the lives of people you care about. But they’re not.

The U.S. military has attacked three boats in the Caribbean Sea suspected of smuggling drugs, killing at least 17 people.

Why should you worry?

Because Trump’s claims that the Constitution gives him the right to kill anyone he believes to be transporting drugs into the United States could be used to justify murdering you or your loved ones.

No judge or jury found that these 17 people did anything illegal. We’re taking Trump’s word for it that they were smuggling drugs into the United States.

We don’t know for sure that they were foreign nationals; they could have been Americans. Hell, we don’t even know that the number was 17; it could have been far more.

What if Trump decides you’re involved in transporting drugs into the United States? Or he doesn’t like you and wants to get rid of you, and uses this as an excuse?

Let me put this as directly as I can. The current occupant of the Oval Office is a thin-skinned sociopath who cannot tolerate criticism and who lies like most people breathe. Do you trust him with the power to murder anyone he says is transporting drugs to America?

It’s much the same with grabbing people from their homes who are legally in the United States and then whisking them off to prison because they’ve engaged in speech that Trump doesn’t like.

This is what happened to Mahmoud Khalil, who graduated from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December, who was in the United States legally on a green card as well as a student visa, and whose wife is an American citizen.

On March 8, immigration agents appeared at Khalil’s apartment building and told him he was being detained. They then revoked Khalil’s green card and student visa and held him at a Louisiana detention facility for 104 days before a federal judge ordered him released.

Khalil has never been charged with a crime. (In September, a Louisiana judge ordered him to be deported to either Syria or Algeria for allegedly failing to disclose information on his green card application. That decision is being appealed.)

Khalil was one of the leaders of last year’s peaceful pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. He expressed his political point of view nonviolently and non-threateningly. That’s supposed to be permitted — dare I say even encouraged? — in a democracy.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump conceded Khalil was snatched up and sent off because of his politics.

“This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump wrote. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”

Nearly 13 million people in the United States hold green cards. Tens of thousands more are here temporarily as foreign students and professors. All are now in danger of being arrested if they speak their minds.

I am not blaming the ICE agents who are merely carrying out Trump’s “crackdown,” and there is absolutely no justification for political violence targeted at them or at anyone else.

My point is that, if you accept the legality of what is happening, nothing can stop Trump from arresting you or someone you care about for supporting any cause Trump doesn’t like — such as, say, replacing Republicans in Congress in 2026 and putting a Democrat in the White House in 2028.

I say this not to frighten you but to warn you of the implications of what is occurring.

Trump’s bombing of three ships — killing at least 17 civilians — on the basis of unproven allegations that they were sending drugs into the United States, and his ICE raids arresting permanent residents on the basis of unproven allegations they are engaged in “anti-American activity,” endangers every one of us.

It’s not just that Trump is nuts. It’s that he’s unilaterally acting as judge and jury in deciding who’s guilty of actions that are being punished with deportation, prison, or murder.

These moves personally and directly threaten the freedoms you and I take for granted. We must resist them. October 18 provides one opportunity (see here).

Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org.

There's still time to oppose these shameless grabs for power

Ohio politicians pressured by an openly corrupt president look to be doubling down on blatantly partisan gerrymandering to help them in the 2026 midterms by manipulating congressional district boundaries in 2025, to silence the voices of opposition.

That’s not normal. Neither is armed troops and tanks in American streets. Neither are unidentifiable, masked federal agents seizing people off the streets because they fit a racial profile.

None of this is normal. Not in a functioning constitutional republic.

But without effective, sustained pushback from fearless pro-democracy leaders and a resolute citizenry determined to keep its inalienable rights, the takeover happening now in Ohio and the country will become the accepted norm by default.

We are not there yet.

There is still time to dissent — loudly — about political dictates from the Ohio Statehouse and the Trump regime.

But the window of opportunity is short.

Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, the mastermind behind Ohio’s unconstitutionally gerrymandered legislative and congressional maps — who called the rule of law on redistricting reform in the state “aspirational” and basically ignored it — is already signaling that new congressional districts will be drawn by GOP fiat without buy-in from the minority party.

Even before the new joint committee on congressional redistricting was announced by Republican legislative leaders, Huffman judged that chances for a bipartisan deal — on GOP plans to grab at least two more congressional districts through gerrymandering — are “not looking good” for passing a map with Democratic support by Sept. 30.

That means the congressional map that gives unfair advantage to one party over the other (which the Ohio Constitution explicitly prohibits) will go the Republican-majority Ohio Redistricting Commission.

If the panel can’t convince the two Democratic commissioners to bless the GOP power grab for more U.S. House seats by the end of October, the process returns to the legislature where Huffman and the Republican supermajority can easily pass their congressional map with a simple majority.

The Speaker — who in 2022 thumbed his nose at the constitutional amendment Ohioans overwhelmingly approved to end congressional gerrymandering — figures he can screw voters again and get away with it by dispensing normalizing assurances to follow the “process voters approved” and “stick to the Constitution and make decisions based on that.”

Huffman presents as conventional and law-abiding as he takes gerrymandering to new extremes in Ohio — like Texas and other red states considering similar steps. But make no mistake: He is razor-focused on undermining the will of Ohio voters so his party can stay in power in Congress regardless of majority opinion.

Gerrymandering disconnects political power from the will of voters by letting the powerful choose their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians. The result is skewed, unrepresentative district maps where electoral outcomes are virtually guaranteed.

That is what Huffman has orchestrated repeatedly with Ohio’s congressional redistricting, but he frames it as good faith map-making in accordance with the law to put a sheen on stealing voter power at the ballot box — as if that were normal.

It is only normal in governments who do not answer to the people they claim to represent.

Same goes for the unprovoked, unwarranted military deployment of troops and armaments in a free society to police its citizens.

It is only normal under regimes flexing muscle at the expense of the constitution and the rule of law.

It is a show of force to intimidate the governed into submission. It is also illegal, ruled a federal judge recently in California about Donald Trump’s use of federal troops for domestic policing in Los Angeles this summer.

Yet the president plans to escalate his use of troops in U.S. cities saying he’ll deploy to Memphis next — one of several blue cities run by Black mayors Trump has targeted to “fix like we did in Washington.”

Nearly 2,300 National Guard troops were deployed to patrol the nation’s capital a month ago after Trump declared a “crime emergency” in D.C. — even though violent crime in the federal district was at its lowest level in 30 years.

Trump falsely claimed the city was the most unsafe in the U.S “and perhaps the world” to justify his militarized policing of Washingtonians.

Six red-state governors, including Ohio’s Gov. Mike DeWine, rushed hundreds of extra Guard troops to D.C. to sightsee with tourists and score points with Trump.

Bored soldiers, used as political props, were relegated to picking up trash, raking leaves, laying mulch, and taking selfies with onlookers startled to see soldiers with rifles and armored vehicles loitering outside Union Station.

DeWine could have declined to be complicit in the dress rehearsal of military used against his fellow citizens; others from his party did. But he chose to put more boots on the ground in an American city to support a bogus “emergency” and call it the “right thing to do.”

The governor said his decision to send troops against the wishes of D.C. officials was consistent with past deployments. How on Earth could it be?

Truth is DeWine just wanted Ohioans to think his armed reinforcements to appease a dangerous megalomaniac was normal.

It was not and can never be as long as democracy has breath in America.

Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist

Ex-soldier linked to far-right groups pleads guilty to gun charge

NEW BERN, NC — A former member of the white nationalist group Patriot Front who was arrested while enlisted as a soldier at Fort Bragg has pleaded guilty to a firearms charge.

Kai Nix, 21, entered a guilty plea for knowingly selling and possessing a stolen firearm for sale in federal court on Wednesday.

Nix was arrested in August 2024. Four days later, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) published a story confirming that he was enlisted in the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg and that as a member of Patriot Front, he operated “a social media account that disclosed personal information about perceived political enemies — including journalists, left-leaning activists, politicians and community members.”

Nix denied his involvement with Patriot Front to The New Yorker, which also detailed his activities.

Nix’s enlistment in the Army abruptly ended at the time of his arrest.

He was originally charged with falsely stating on a security clearance application that “he had never been a member of a group dedicated to the use of violence or force to overthrow the United States government,” dealing in firearms without a license, and a separate count of knowingly possessing and selling a stolen firearm.

The indictment did not name the group, but the SPLC cited leaked messages obtained by the left-leaning media organization Unicorn Riot that showed Nix participated in a Patriot Front rally in Philadelphia in July 2021 and a November 2021 training drill with the group.

One participant in the training, Paul Gancarz, was accused of involvement with the vandalism of a mural dedicated to African-American tennis player Arthur Ashe in Richmond, Virginia, only a month earlier. Gancarz and four other members settled a civil lawsuit for conspiracy to violate civil rights under the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, and intimidation and racial animosity under Virginia state law.

Nix enlisted in the Army in 2022. The following year a channel named Appalachian Archives appeared on the social media platform Telegram. The SPLC linked Nix to the channel by connecting him to various protests attended by the administrator of the channel.

In September 2023, the channel posted a link to a list of “high-value targets” for assassination produced and distributed by the Terrorgram Collective, a far-right group. The list included Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), a federal judge, a U.S. attorney, mayors and scientists involved in vaccine research.

Since Nix’s arrest, three members of Terrorgram have been arrested, and the U.S. State Department has named the group as a specially designated global terrorist entity.

The Appalachian Archives channel frequently posted the phrase “always watching, always listening, always near.”

In January 2024, Raw Story reporter Jordan Green was targeted by a bogus pizza delivery at his home in Greensboro, North Carolina. The next day, a photo of Green at his door appeared on a Telegram channel popular with neo-Nazi teenagers. Green’s security camera captured the license plate of a vehicle parked outside the house at the time of the pizza delivery. A search of the license plate found it was registered to Nix.

Under a plea agreement, the government agreed to dismiss additional charges against Nix, including lying about membership in a group dedicated to the use of violence or force to overthrow the United States government. The plea agreement was not available on Wednesday, and it is unknown whether it includes any agreement that he cooperate in investigations of extremist activity.

Judge Louise Flanagan issued an order on Wednesday requiring that “any motion regarding the substantial assistance of the defendant must be filed under seal” prior to sentencing.

Nix’s lawyer, Keith Williams, said his client was not available for comment.

As the basis for Nix’s guilty plea, a federal prosecutor told the court that in December 2023, Nix communicated with an FBI confidential human source about stolen firearms.

Nix showed a photo of a Glock pistol that he described as “hot,” the prosecutor said. The FBI conducted a controlled buy while providing the informant with a recording device. The FBI determined that the pistol was stolen from a Robeson County sheriff’s deputy.

Nix’s sentencing is set for December 2025. Under the original indictment, he could have received up to 30 years in prison. His maximum sentence with the three charges dismissed is unknown. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina did not return an email requesting comment.

On Wednesday, prior to Nix’s arraignment, a Telegram channel describing itself as a “right-wing” news aggregator published a post praising Nix for “infiltrate[ing] antifa cell Discord servers and discover[ing] vital and sometimes even compromising information.” The post also named Nix as the founder of Appalachian Archives.

“Had the leftist Biden administration not unjustly imprisoned Nix and he was able to continue his good work and defend Americanism, perhaps things could have went differently on September 10th, 2025,” the post stated, suggesting Nix might have disrupted the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk.

Stephen Miller, a senior advisor to President Donald Trump, has claimed without evidence that “a vast domestic terror movement” was behind Kirk’s assassination. But evidence presented by federal prosecutors in Utah on Tuesday gave no indication that the shooter, Tyler Robinson, was linked to any extremist network.

Investigators have taken an interest in Robinson’s messages on the online gaming platform Discord, but a review of some of the messages by journalist Ken Klippenstein shows that the discussions were largely apolitical and belie the notion that Robinson was radicalized on the forum.

These strikes clearly show Trump is a war criminal. Where's the media?

On Sept. 2, the Trump administration shared footage purporting to show a US strike on a Venezuelan fishing boat. Even if we take the incident entirely at face value (and there are a lot of reasons to question the video itself) — the US Navy attacked a fishing boat off Venezuela, killing 11 people. On Monday, another strike was allegedly conducted on a boat, killing three people. The way the media has handled these strikes is an indictment of the state of American neoliberal reporting in a neofascist age.

Why hasn’t the mainstream media pressed the administration on these strikes being illegal and dangerous (and unpopular)?

Why has no one in Washington considered the implications of calling a fishing boat carrying civilians a legitimate military target?

Why isn’t the media calling the Venezuelan boat strike an abhorrent war crime at every turn?

It’s simple: they don’t care about defending the truth or holding the powerful accountable. They have no principles to stand on besides profit and access.

Within hours of these strikes breaking, major outlets were repeating the Trump administration’s line that this was a strike on a “drug boat.” According to this framing, the attacks were justified, necessary, and part of a broader war on drug trafficking.

Virtually none of these outlets even entertained the obvious legal and ethical questions. Instead, they served as stenographers for the administration. This is not what an objective (not neutral) press in an advanced democracy does.

This is reminiscent of the Iraq War era, when corporate media parroted the Bush administration’s ludicrous arguments, paving the way for invasion and occupation that would kill at least 200,000, maim millions, and destroy American democracy further.

Legal experts across the spectrum have already stood up to say the killings were illegal.

Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s conservative Antonin Scalia Law School, called the strike “unjust and illegal.”

Jeremy Wildeman, an adjunct professor of international Affairs at Carleton University and fellow at the Human Rights Research and Education Centre in Ottawa, described it as “part of the dangerous and ongoing erosion of due process and the very basic principles of how we interact with each other in domestic and foreign affairs, regulated by accepted norms, rules, and laws, that the Trump administration has been pointedly hostile toward following and specifically undermining.”

Wildeman added that “this is definitely about regime change and domination.”

Even the Atlantic Council hedged, acknowledging that the legality was at best murky and in some cases advancing arguments to justify it.

Meanwhile, US Vice President JD Vance bluntly stated that he does not care if the strikes are war crimes at all.

The available evidence does suggest this was an outright criminal massacre. The first boat was, we now know thanks to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), turning back to shore, not threatening US forces when it was fired upon. Those killed would be civilians. Even if they were transporting drugs, drug couriers are not lawful combatants. They are criminals under domestic law, not combatants in an armed conflict.

Due process was ignored. There was no trial, no arrest, no attempt at interdiction — just summary execution. And the strikes occurred in Venezuelan territorial waters, not in an international conflict zone.

If another country did this, say Russia bombing a fishing boat in the Baltic, or China attacking smugglers near Taiwan, the Western media would have declared it a war crime the same day. Add this to the list of Western double standards in the international arena — we are seeing the destruction of the “liberal order” in real time.

These strikes are not a one-off. They fit into decades of US policy toward Venezuela, including economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and repeated regime change attempts.

For 25 years, Washington has tried to topple the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro through economic sabotage, coups, and support for far-right opposition. The humanitarian toll of those sanctions has been devastating. They have themselves emboldened repression by the Maduro government, which has used America as a scapegoat, with reason, for all its faults.

Now, with this attack, we see a dangerous escalation from economic to military means. If the precedent is set that the US can strike targets inside Venezuela (this was in Venezuela’s national waters) with impunity, it opens the door to a broader military campaign. That is exactly what think tanks like the Center for Strategic and International Studies have been preparing for. One CSIS report, now deleted, explicitly laid out “options for regime change” in Venezuela, against the “Maduro narco-terrorist regime.”

So why is the media so unwilling to call this what it is?

Major outlets fear losing access to government sources if they challenge the official narrative. They also simply don’t want to admit that America is committing crimes, and may not be the moral actors in every major geopolitical event, as they were taught throughout their lives.

Going back to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent 101, corporate interests are also important, with companies like Exxon and Chevron having billions at stake in Venezuela’s oil fields (and a US-backed government running things in Caracas). US military action that destabilizes or topples Maduro could directly benefit those firms.

Many of the analysts quoted in media coverage are from think tanks funded by the defense industry or oil companies. They have an interest in exaggerating Venezuela’s threat and downplaying US abuses, to make the US intervention seem justified and good. And reporters too often repackage leaks from US intelligence agencies as fact, without independently verifying. A lot of the “analysis” on the strikes in mainstream news has been from the intelligence agencies, who have a direct incentive to lie and manipulate information in favor of regime change.

Even respected outlets have contributed to this dynamic. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have both amplified the claim that Venezuela is a “narco-terrorist state.” That claim has been debunked by organizations like InSight Crime and the International Crisis Group, which show that while drugs transit Venezuela, it is hardly unique; Colombia and Mexico play a much larger role in global cocaine markets, yet they remain US allies.

Meanwhile, outlets like the Christian Science Monitor are pushing a narrative that “more Latin Americans welcome US intervention,” based on flimsy and cherry-picked anecdotes that, once again, helps the Trump administration lay the groundwork for more meddling and war.

Would the Marines be greeted as liberators in Caracas? The hope is to expand the “War on Drugs” into the “War on Terror,” giving the US military more tools to intervene in Latin America, and then bringing repression to the home front (also called the Imperial Boomerang theory).

In reality, the region is increasingly turning away from Washington’s militaristic and blusterous approach, seeking alternative frameworks to the failed War on Drugs.

Joseph Bouchard is a journalist and researcher from Québec covering security and democracy in Latin America. His articles have appeared in Responsible Statecraft, Reason, The Diplomat, Le Devoir, and RealClearPolitics, among others. He is a PhD student in Politics at the University of Virginia and a SSHRC doctoral fellow on Latin American Politics.

This makeshift Confederate army is not about crime. It's about control

This is not about crime. This is about control.

The proposed deployment of the Tennessee National Guard to Memphis is not a response to public safety. It’s a political stunt engineered by a twice-impeached, multi-indicted president exploiting Black suffering and white fear to reclaim political relevance.

It’s a charade rooted in fearmongering, cloaked in the rhetoric of “law and order” but animated by the same authoritarian impulse that called troops to Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. and cages to the border for immigrants. And Memphis, yet again, finds itself on the night shift of American injustice.

Let’s be clear: according to reports from the Memphis Police Department, violent crime in Memphis is at a 25-year low. That should be headline news. Instead, we’re being sold a spectacle — military trucks rumbling through Black neighborhoods, uniforms in place of understanding and surveillance in place of safety.

This isn’t public protection. It’s political theater.

Manufactured misfortune, misleading metrics

This deployment is not isolated. It’s part of a broader pattern where President Donald Trump and his allies target majority-Black cities, especially those with Black or Democratic mayors, as staging grounds for his white nationalist theatrics.

He’s not sending the National Guard to predominantly white towns with drug epidemics or mass shootings. He’s not showing up where far right groups like Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are organizing. No! He’s only sending troops into the heart of Southern Black communities, where governors like Tennessee’s Bill Lee are all too eager to oblige.

This is a makeshift Confederate army, operating under the guise of public safety, weaponized against the very people it claims to protect.

And when the statistics show that crime was already decreasing before the National Guard landed, Trump will no doubt claim victory for what he didn’t cause. He will take credit for what was already happening. And many will believe him, because authoritarianism always rewrites the facts before it rewrites the laws.

Beware the blowback

Some Memphians, even some Black ones, are applauding the National Guard’s presence. I understand the fatigue. I understand the trauma. But I caution us not to confuse fatigue with clarity, or trauma with truth.

When Latino voters supported Trump in 2024, many assumed his deportation policies would only target “others” — those without papers, those from different countries. But immigration crackdowns don’t ask for green cards before the cuffs come out. Similarly, when some white voters supported anti-DEI policies thinking only Black communities would be impacted, they learned quickly that cruelty rarely stops at the color line.

Memphians who think this military presence will only criminalize “the worst of us” need only look at the ICE detention center in nearby Mason, built on a former prison site and now holding undocumented immigrants caught in the dragnet of “tough on crime” posturing. According to NBC News, 40 percent of the 2,300 people arrested during the National Guard presence in D.C. were undocumented immigrants. This isn’t speculation — it’s precedent.

Hypocrisy in high places

What’s most galling is the hypocrisy of state lawmakers cheering this intervention. The same officials who’ve refused federal aid for healthcare, blocked Medicaid expansion, and lamented “Big Brother” when it suited their politics are now welcoming federal boots on our blocks. They’ve done nothing to stem the flood of guns in Tennessee, passed no meaningful policy to support youth or mental health services, but now demand military muscle as a cure-all?

This is intellectually dishonest at best and unserious at worst.

And those of us who dare to call it out are accused of being anti-police or unpatriotic. But I love Memphis enough to tell it the truth: You cannot incarcerate your way to safety. You cannot militarize your way to peace. You cannot criminalize your children and expect your community to thrive.

We’ve been here before

In my sermon this past Sunday, I reminded my congregation that some of the most liberating work has always been done during the night shift. My mother — Claudia Mae Fisher — worked the literal night shift for decades on a bridge in Michigan. And in the spiritual and political sense, we are on the night shift right now. Just like Jesus encountering the man born blind in John 9, we are being asked who is to blame. But I contend the better question is: What is God trying to reveal through this misfortune?

As I said in that sermon, we are not called to applaud political stunts or submit to scare tactics. We are called to do the work of liberation—day or night, with or without military presence.

We are not blind. We see what’s happening.

A call to action

Now is the time to demand clarity and accountability from our mayors, our state legislators, our governor, and those in the White House. We must push back against political spectacle with principled resistance. The presence of the National Guard is not protection. It’s provocation. It is an occupation of our streets and a betrayal of our dignity.

We deserve policies, not performances.

We demand investments, not intimidation.

We are not pawns in a political war. We are people, and we deserve to be treated as such.

Let this be our charge on the night shift: to shine light, speak truth, and refuse to be silent in the face of spectacle.

Rev. Earle J. Fisher, Ph.D. is the Senior Pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee – The Blackest Church in Memphis and Shelby County. He’s also the founder of #UPTheVote901, a nonpartisan voter empowerment initiative committed to producing political power and increasing voter turnout in Memphis and Shelby County