what’s all this, then?
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Just a quick heads up that I have not endorsed any of the events or protests circulating under my name.
Dunno, I haven’t heard of any of these events.
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Someone’s pretending to be her, and organizing events in her name. Probably in pursuit of funds to then run away with, though she doesn’t say that.
Is there something else about it that’s confusing to you?
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not confusion, just me being unaware of the nonsense.
i don’t FBook, i don’t X and i don’t Bluesky. i get HCR’s emails as a subscriber and when this one popped up today, i was surprised is all.
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This man is so fucking gross. Every time I hear the words “warfighter”, “warrior”, and “lethality” I throw up in my mouth a little. It’s just kill kill kill with this fucking guy. The bloodlust here is just pathological.
But I thought Trump was all about “no wars while I’m in power”?
Not just pain, non-consensual pain. None of the people in this video asked for the sounds of their suffering to be used as a mechanism for the “pleasure” of others.
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I recently got an email, supposedly from my Congressional representative. It was a similar type of fraudulent event invitation, but the sender’s email didn’t match the usual constituent mailings - so I realized it was bs. My Representative happens to be a woman and a Democrat, so now I’m wondering if it’s part of a wider attack against people who are encouraging resistance. 
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I would absolutely bet that that is what’s happening. Of course they’d used cyber attacks to continue to undermine resistance…
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Yeah, the fake donation requests are one thing. Luring people to a location for an “event*” is…
*is it less bad if the event is virtual?
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For real… I think if it’s a virtual event, it’s a great way to both collect names and to infect lots of computers at once… I don’t know… it’s fucked up.
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February 23, 2025 (Sunday)
Something is shifting,” scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder posted on Bluesky yesterday. “They are still breaking things and stealing things. And they will keep trying to break and to steal. But the propaganda magic around the oligarchical coup is fading. Nervous Musk, Trump, Vance have all been outclassed in public arguments these last few days. Government failure, stock market crash, and dictatorial alliances are not popular. People are starting to realize that there is no truth here beyond the desire for personal wealth and power.”
Rather than backing down on their unpopular programs, Trump and the MAGA Republicans are intensifying their behavior as if trying to grab power before it slips away.
Trump’s blanket pardons of the people convicted for violent behavior in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol were highly unpopular, with 83% of Americans opposed to those pardons. Even those who identify as Republican-leaning oppose those pardons 70 to 27 percent. And yet, on February 20, the Trump Justice Department expanded those pardons to cover gun and drug charges against two former January 6 defendants that were turned up during Federal Bureau of Investigation searches related to the January 6 attack.
Then, on February 21, a number of people pardoned after committing violent crimes, including Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio—who was sentenced to 22 years in prison—and Proud Boy Ethan Nordean (18 years) and Dominic Pezzola (10 years), as well as Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes (18 years) and Richard “Bigo” Barnett, who sat with his feet on a desk in then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office (four and a half years), held a press conference at the U.S. Capitol to announce they were going to sue the Justice Department for prosecuting them.
Kyle Cheney of Politico reported that the group followed the route they took around the Capitol on January 6, 2021, then posed for photos chanting as they had that day: “Whose house? Our house.” Protesters nearby heckled the group, and when one of them put her phone near Tarrio’s face while he was talking to a photographer, he batted her arm away. Capitol Police officers promptly arrested him for assault.
A number of the January 6 rioters were visiting the Capitol from the nearby Conservative Political Action Conference being held in Maryland. There, MAGA participants continued to normalize Nazi imagery as both Steve Bannon and Mexican actor Eduardo Verástegui threw fascist-style salutes to the crowd.
Yesterday, Tarrio posted a video of himself following officers who defended the Capitol on January 6 though the lobby of a Washington hotel where the anti-Trump Principles First conference was taking place. According to Joan E. Greve of The Guardian, Tarrio followed officers Michael Fanone, Harry Dunn, Daniel Hodges, and Aquilino Gonell, saying: “You guys were brave at my sentencing when you sat there and laughed when I got 22 fcking years. Now you don’t want to look in my eyes, you fcking cowards.” Fanone turned and told him: “You’re a traitor to this country.”
Today, the hotel had to be evacuated after someone claiming to be “MAGA” emailed a threat claiming to have rigged four bombs: two in the hotel, one in Fanone’s mother’s mailbox, and one in the mailbox of John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor turned critic. After listing the names of several of the conference attendees—and singling out Fanone—the email said they “all deserve to die.” The perpetrator claimed to be acting “[t]o honor the J6 hostages recently released by Emperor Trump.”
Billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump are also ramping up their behavior even as the public is starting to turn against the government cuts that are badly hurting American veterans, American farmers, and U.S. medical research. The courts keep ruling against their efforts and their claims of finding “waste, fraud, and abuse” are being widely debunked. Rather than rethinking their course in the face of opposition, they seem to be becoming more belligerent.
On Saturday, Trump urged Musk to be “more aggressive” in cutting the government, although the White House has told a court that Musk has no authority and is only a presidential advisor. “Will do, Mr. President,” Musk replied. He then posted a command to federal employees: “Consistent with [Trump’s] instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” Shortly after, emails went out giving workers 48 hours to list five things they had accomplished in the past week.
This sparked outrage among Americans who noted that Musk has spent 24 hours tweeting more than 220 times and engaged in public fights with two of the mothers of his children while allegedly running companies and overhauling the government, while Trump spent at least 12 nights at Mar-a-Lago in his first 29 days in office. S.V. Date of HuffPost noted on February 18 that Trump has played golf at one of his own properties on 9 of his first 30 days in office and that Trump’s golf outings had already cost the American taxpayer $10.7 million.
Reddit was flooded with potential responses to Musk’s demand, scorching it and Musk. The demand also exposed a rift in the administration, as department heads—including Kash Patel, the newly confirmed head of the FBI, as well as officials at the State Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of the Navy—asserted their authority to review the workers in their own departments, telling them not to respond to Musk’s demand.
Then users pointed out that the new government employee email system the Department of Government Efficiency team set up explicitly says that using it is voluntary, and that resignations of federal employees must be voluntary. Musk responded by sending out a poll on X asking whether X users think federal employees should be “required to send a short email with some basic bullet points about what they accomplished” in the past week.
The entire exercise made it look as if the lug nuts on the wheels of the Musk-Trump government bus are dangerously loose. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo commented: “Drunk on power and ketamine.”
Historian Johann Neem, a specialist in the American Revolution, turned to political theorist John Locke to explore the larger meaning of Trump’s destructive course. The founders who threw off monarchy and constructed our constitutional government looked to Locke for their guiding principles. In his 1690 Second Treatise on Government, Locke noted that when a leader disregards constitutional order, he gives up legitimacy and the people are justified in treating him as a “thief and a robber.” “[W]hosoever in authority exceeds the power given him by the law and makes use of the force he has under his command…ceases in that to be a magistrate; and, acting without authority, may be opposed, as any other man, who by force invades the right of another,” Locke wrote.
Neem notes that Trump won the election and his party holds majorities in both chambers of Congress. He could have used his legitimate constitutional authority but instead, “with the aid of Elon Musk, has consistently violated the Constitution and willingly broken laws.” Neem warned that courts move too slowly to rein Trump in. He urged Congress to perform its constitutional duty to remove Trump from office, and urged voters to make it clear to members of Congress that we expect them to “uphold their obligations and protect our freedom.”
“Otherwise,” Neem writes, “Americans will be subject to a pretender who claims the power but not the legitimate authority of the presidency.” He continues: “Trump’s actions threaten the legitimacy of government itself.”
In the Senate, on Thursday, February 20, Angus King (I-ME) also reached back to the framers of the Constitution when he warned—again—that permitting Trump to take over the power of Congress is “grossly unconstitutional.” Trump’s concept that he can alter laws by refusing to fund them, so-called impoundment, is “absolutely straight up unconstitutional,” King said, “and it’s illegal.”
“[T]he reason the framers designed our Constitution the way they did was that they were afraid of concentrated power,” King said. “They had just fought a brutal eight-year war with a king. They didn’t want a king. They wanted a constitutional republic, where power was divided between the Congress and the president and the courts, and we are collapsing that structure,” King said. “[T]he people cheering this on I fear, in a reasonably short period of time, are going to say where did this go? How did this happen? How did we make our president into a monarch? How did this happen? How it happened,” he said to his Senate colleagues, “is we gave it up! James Madison thought we would fight for our power, but no. Right now we’re just sitting back and watching it happen.”
“This is the most serious assault on our Constitution in the history of this country,” King said. “It’s the most serious assault on the very structure of our Constitution, which is designed to protect our freedoms and liberty, in the history of this country. It is a constitutional crisis…. Many of my friends in this body say it will be hard, we don’t want to buck the President, we’ll let the courts take care of it…. [T]hat’s a copout. It’s our responsibility to protect the Constitution. That’s what we swear to when we enter this body.”
“What’s it going to take for us to wake up…I mean this entire body, to wake up to what’s going on here? Is it going to be too late? Is it going to be when the President has secreted all this power and the Congress is an afterthought? What’s it going to take?”
“[T]his a constitutional crisis, and we’ve got to respond to it. I’m just waiting for this whole body to stand up and say no, no, we don’t do it this way. We don’t do it this way. We do things constitutionally. [T]hat’s what the framers intended. They didn’t intend to have an efficient dictatorship, and that’s what we’re headed for…. We’ve got to wake up, protect this institution, but much more importantly protect the people of the United States of America.”
Senator King, along with Maine governor Janet Mills, who stood up to Trump in person earlier this week, are following in the tradition of their state.
On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) delivered her famous Declaration of Conscience, standing up to Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), who was smearing Democrats as communists. “I think that it is high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some real soul searching and to weigh our consciences as to the manner in which we are performing our duty to the people of America and the manner in which we are using or abusing our individual powers and privileges,” she said. “I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”
On July 28, 1974, Representative Bill Cohen (R-ME), who went on to a long Senate career but was at the time a junior member on the House Judiciary Committee, voted along with five other Republican members of the committee and the Democratic majority to draw up articles of impeachment against Republican president Richard Nixon, fully expecting that the death threats and hate mail he was receiving proved that that vote would destroy his political career. But, Cohen told the Bangor Daily News, “I would never compromise what I think is the right thing to do for the sake of an office; it’s just not that important. Only time will tell if the people will accept that judgment.”
Days later, the tape proving Nixon had been part of the Watergate coverup came to light. “Suddenly there was a switch in the people who had been defending the president,” Cohen recalled. “That’s when people back in Maine, Republicans, started to turn around and said, ‘We were wrong, and you were right, and we’ll support this.’ ”
It’s a good week to remember that politicians used to use as a yardstick the saying: “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.”
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I was very down after yesterday’s essay.
This one wants me to pick up and move to Maine.
I am of the opinion, though, sadly, that only dead bodies in the middle of the streets are going to sway the enough republicans to do the right thing and impeach. maybe.
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Dead bodies won’t do anything.
Dead bodies were piled up in the streets from Trump’s covid policies and all they wanted was more of them rotting.
Dead Americans is all the GOP wants now.
They only get upset if they don’t see a quota of hated demographics in the pile.
We have been overthrown by enemies of our people in service to Russia with no greater goal than enriching themselves while the people of our country die. at least half the population are apparently just fine for this so long as it’s spun as “dei” for corpses.
Those aren’t dramatic words they are the facts now and most half-decent people can’t cope so they just cling to a lie that causes more and more dead bodies.
They won’t learn. They can’t. People who know better will have to take power from them and truly defeat them.
Maybe twenty or forty years some people will begin to shift the zeitgeist but honestly I don’t know if I will even want to be alive by then anymore either.
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Yeah, maybe. But what’s that saying, in politics two weeks is a lifetime? Things can change quickly, and unexpectedly. Ketamine might explode Musk’s brain, or hey, Tramp’s looking pretty damn tired and out of it a lot of the time.
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Yeah, I’m pretty sure Elon Musk thinks all the poors should just die, and then the world can be run by AI and robots, and he and his fellow 1%ers can just live a life of luxury. The good news is that it is becoming clearer every day that (a) Musk is actually even dumber than I thought, and (b) he is NOT liked by many others in the MAGA movement. So bodies in the street may not help, but I think there’s a good chance that this administration is going to implode.
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Your words being me a tiny bit of peace/hope.
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February 24, 2025 (Monday)
Three years ago today, a massive influx of Russian troops crossed into Ukraine to join the troops that had been there since the 2014 invasion. At the time, it seemed that Russian president Vladimir Putin thought victory would be a matter of days, and observers did not think he was wrong. But Ukraine government officials pointedly filmed themselves in Kyiv, and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky refused to leave. Rejecting the U.S. offer of evacuation, Zelensky replied: “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.”
For the past three years Ukraine has held off Russia. As Anne Applebaum noted today in The Atlantic, civilian society in Ukraine has volunteered for the war effort, and the defense industry has transformed to produce both hardware and software to hit Russian targets: indeed, Ukraine now leads the world in AI-enabled drone technology. The Ukraine army has become the largest in Europe, with a million people. Ukraine has suffered attacks on civilians, hospitals, and the energy sector, and at least 46,000 soldiers have died, with another 380,000 wounded.
At the same time, Russia’s economy is crumbling as its military production takes from the civilian economy and sanctions prevent other countries from taking up the slack. Inflation is through the roof, and more than 700,000 of those fighting for Russia have been killed or wounded. Applebaum notes that the Institute for the Study of War estimates that at the rate it’s moving, Russia would need 83 years to capture the remaining 80% of Ukraine.
“The only way Putin wins now,” Applebaum writes, “is by persuading Ukraine’s allies to be sick of the war…by persuading Trump to cut off Ukraine…and by convincing Europeans that they can’t win either.” And this appears to be the plan afoot, as U.S. president Donald Trump has directed U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, to negotiate an end to the war with Russian officials. Neither Ukrainian nor European leaders were invited to the talks that took place last Tuesday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Three years ago, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were key to rallying allies and partners to stand against the invasion, providing war materiel, humanitarian aid, money, and crucial economic sanctions against Russia that began the process of dismantling the Russian economy. Today, Ukraine hosted European leaders, but U.S. officials did not attend.
In the past week, President Donald Trump has embraced Russian propaganda about its invasion. Trump blamed Ukraine for the war that Russia began by invading, called Zelensky a “dictator” for not holding elections during wartime (Russia hopes that it will be able to sway new elections, but Ukraine’s laws bar wartime elections), and lied that the U.S. has provided $350 billion to Ukraine and that half the money is “missing.” In fact, the U.S. has provided about $100 billion, which is less than Europe has contributed, and the U.S. contributions have been mostly in the form of weapons from U.S. stockpiles that defense industries then replaced at home. None of that support is “missing.”
As Peter Baker of the New York Times points out, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, said: “we have a pretty good accounting of where it’s going.” Baker’s piece explored how “in Trump’s alternate reality, lies and distortions” will make it easier for Trump to give Putin everything he wants in a peace agreement. For his part, Putin on Saturday launched 267 drones into Ukraine, the largest drone attack of the war.
Today, just a month into the second presidency of Donald Trump, the United States delegation to the United Nations voted against a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression in Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation. That is, the U.S. voted against a resolution that reiterated that one nation must not invade another, one of the founding principles of the United Nations itself, an organization whose headquarters are actually in the United States. The U.S. voted with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Belarus, and fourteen other countries friendly to Russia against the measure, which passed overwhelmingly. China and India abstained.
On Google Maps, users changed the name of Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago to “Kremlin Headquarters.”
The editorial board of London’s Financial Times noted today that “[i]n the past ten days, [Trump] has all but incinerated 80 years of postwar American leadership.” Instead, it has become an “unabashed predator,” allied with Russia and other countries the U.S. formerly saw as adversaries. The board recalled important moments in which “the US displayed its character as global leader,” and those moments “defined the world’s idea of America.” But a new era has begun. Trump’s assertion that Ukraine “should have never started” the war with Russia, and J.D. Vance’s statement that the real danger in Europe is liberal democracy, are “the dark version of those” moments coming, as they did, “straight from Putin’s talking points.”
Each, the board said, “will live in infamy.” It added that “there should be no doubt that Trump’s contempt for allies and admiration for strongmen is real and will endure.” He is “instinctively committed to the idea that the world is a jungle in which the big players take what they want…. He divides the world into spheres of interest.”
“America,” the board concluded, “has turned.”
It appears Putin thought that breaking the U.S. away from Europe would leave Europe weak and adrift, especially with Germany about to hold elections that Russia hoped Germany’s far-right, pro-Russian party would win and with both Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance having demonstrated their support. But French president Emmanuel Macron, a staunch backer of Ukraine, appears to be stepping into the vacuum caused by the loss of the United States. After the U.S.’s reorientation became clear at the Munich Security Conference on February 14–16, Macron invited European leaders to Paris to discuss the U.S. change.
On Monday, February 17, eight European leaders and the heads of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European Union met; on Wednesday, Macron spoke with the leaders of 19 countries, including Canada, either in person or over videoconferencing. Leaders from Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, and Sweden also joined the conversation.
The far-right German party made gains in yesterday’s election but did not win. Instead, the center-right party won and will form a government with the outgoing center-left party. The incoming party strongly supports Ukraine.
“I would never have thought that I would have to say something like this,” Germany’s next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said yesterday, but “it is clear that [Trump’s] government does not care much about the fate of Europe.” He said that his “absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.”
Yesterday the European Union imposed more sanctions on Russia. Today the United Kingdom announced a sweeping package of sanctions rivaling those of the war’s early days. They include sanctions against companies in various countries that supply components like tools, electronics, and microprocessors for Russian munitions. The sanctions also include Russian oligarchs, ships transporting Russian oil, and North Korea’s defense minister No Kwang Chol, whom the U.K. holds responsible for deploying North Korean soldiers to help Russia.
Today, Macron visited Trump at the White House, where the visit got off to a poor start when Trump broke protocol by neglecting to greet Macron when he arrived. During the visit, the two men took questions from the press. Macron maintained a facade of camaraderie with Trump, but as Trump slumped in his chair and recited the inaccuracies that in the U.S. often go uncorrected, Macron seemed comfortable and in command. He interrupted Trump to contradict him in front of reporters and called out Russia for being the aggressor in the war.
John Simpson of the BBC noted that “there are years when the world goes through some fundamental, convulsive change” and that 2025 is on track to be one of them: “a time when the basic assumptions about the way our world works are fed into the shredder.”
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Trudeau has committed several billion dollars and has said that “everything is on the table” when asked about also sending troops to Ukraine. Now, Trudeau is in a lame duck period, and if the right-wing Poilievre wins the upcoming election, I expect those promises to be walked back.
ETA; and I forgot that the money is actually confiscated from Russian holdings. Which is delicious.
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Brings new meaning to the phrase “make them pay”!
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Canada should be getting a very clear object lesson in what happens when you elect the far right from its neighbors to the south…God, I hope they are not stupid enough to ignore it… 
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I think (and others do too), that the swath of destruction from Comrade Krasnov and caused a jump in the polls for the Liberal Party, particularly if Mark Carney wins the party’s leadership race. Unfortunately, they seem to be pulling from the NDP, rather than the Conservatives, who seem pretty committed to Poilievre at a consistent 40% of the population.
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