JoJo - SECRETARY OF WAR CRIMES

 

Are you fucking kidding me?! - JoJoFromJerz Secretary of War Crimes We need to call this shit out for what it is. JoJoFromJerz Nov 30 “Kill them all.” That was the order, plain, deliberate, and damnable, issued by the booze and bronzer brined Secretary of War Crimes, Pete Hegseth, as if American power were his personal cudgel and human life his disposable currency. The directive slithered down the chain of command like toxic runoff, moving through people who knew better, people trained specifically to identify unlawful orders, people who could see clearly what the drone feed had already revealed in stark, pitiless detail. Two men. Still alive. Clinging to what remained of a shattered vessel in Caribbean waters. Not threats. Not combatants. Not insurgents or pirates or militants emerging from the fog of war. Just two human beings trying to keep their grip on existence in the aftermath of a United States missile strike. And that alone should have been the line, the moment every person in that operation reached back to their training, to their conscience, to the most basic principles of lawful command, and said: No. These men are hors de combat. They cannot fight. They cannot flee. They cannot harm us. But this administration reveres the rule-shredders, because it was born from a twice-impeached, thirty-four-times-convicted felon who tried to choke democracy into submission on his way out the door, a man found liable for business fraud and sexual abuse, a man who brags about grabbing women as if their bodies were handrails, a professional grifter steeped in the theology of self-exemption, convinced that laws were crafted only for the unlucky, the unpowerful, and the unprotected. Because the fish rots from the head down. And so instead of restraint, they followed the command. Instead of refusing an unlawful order, the explicit duty etched into the Uniform Code of Military Justice, they passed it along. They complied. They aimed again. They fired again. And two men who posed no threat whatsoever were erased from the world in a second detonation. Let me say this plainly: If any other country had done this, we would call it what it is, a war crime. Because that is exactly what it was. I don’t need to know those men to care. I don’t need to see their childhood homes or learn their histories or confirm their innocence. I don’t need to admire them or pretend their lives were anything more or less than what the drone feed showed: two figures gripping splinters of a ruined vessel, two small, stubborn pulses of life flickering against a black sea. Not threats. Not combatants. Just two human beings still breathing, and therefore, in Pete Hegseth’s warped universe, eligible for execution for the crime of surviving. I don’t need to break bread with a drowning man to know he deserves a hand, not a missile. And let me add this, because the disinformation machine is already rolling like a tanker down a hill with no brakes. I have seen no evidence whatsoever that these men were drug traffickers. None. Not a scrap. Not a whisper. Not a single verifiable fact that supports the narrative Hegseth and this administration keep vomiting onto social media to justify the unjustifiable. And even if they were smugglers, even if they had been hauling cocaine clear across the hemisphere, explain to me how that squares with Donald Trump promising to pardon a man who brought five hundred tons of drugs into this country. Five hundred tons. The audacity of pretending to wage some righteous maritime crusade against so-called narco-terrorists while vowing clemency for an industrial scale trafficker isn’t hypocrisy; it is moral rot lacquered to look like law and order. It is the ethical equivalent of screaming “fire” while holding the goddamn match. But the truth still stands. Clinging to the wreckage of a sinking boat isn’t a capital crime. It never has been. What is immoral, illegal, and utterly indefensible is the act of turning that desperation into a death sentence, the act of executing men whose only offense was refusing to die quickly enough. Under the Hague Conventions. Under the Geneva Conventions. Under customary international law. Under the UCMJ. Under basic human decency. The rule is ancient and clear: When a combatant is hors de combat, you do not attack him. Period. Full stop. No exceptions for mood swings, political cosplay, or angling for Fox hits. But the Secretary of War Crimes wasn’t interested in laws. He was intoxicated by spectacle, a lacquered, spotlight-thirsty showman chasing the narcotic rush of domination. He wasn’t looking for justice; he was auditioning for mythology, curating a body count for an audience that mistakes savagery for strength and cruelty for courage. And the people under him, people who knew better, obeyed. Every single person who relayed that order, confirmed it, approved it, or carried it out is implicated in the same crime. You don’t get moral immunity because someone outranks you. “I was just following orders” is not a shield; it is a confession. This is personal for me, not abstract, not theoretical, because my father spent fifty years working for the Department of Defense, five decades of quiet mastery and moral seriousness in a place that once held itself to standards higher than ego or theatrics. I grew up revering those halls, revering the engineers and officers and strategists who carried their oaths like ballast, who understood that American power was never meant to be a stage prop for the insecure or the unhinged. To see that same institution now twisted into a backdrop for a weekend-warrior demagogue, a man who used to lurk around diners with a camera crew and now plays Mussolini for the ring light, is nauseating. It is a desecration. It is an insult to everyone who ever treated that work like service instead of spectacle. And they know it now. You can feel it in the way they’ve started twitching, hedging, recalibrating. What they assumed would vanish into the fog of classified operations has instead begun to bleed into daylight, and daylight is their natural predator. They thought they could blast two men into the sea and walk away clean, leave nothing but saltwater and silence behind, and suddenly people are watching, people are talking, people are connecting the dots faster than they can bury them. And that panic is beginning to show. Because once they realized the eyes were on them, once the whispers began to outrun their spin, they abruptly changed tactics. Suddenly survivors weren’t being executed; they were being repatriated with no arrests, no charges, no paperwork, no explanation. If these men were such monstrous narco-terrorists, why were they being quietly ferried home like misdelivered packages instead of prosecuted? Because this was never about justice. It was about performance, optics, cruelty polished for the camera. And this is why six members of Congress, veterans of our military and intelligence agencies, were compelled to release that stark video reminding service members that their oath is to the Constitution, not to Donald Trump or Pete Hegseth, that they are required by law and conscience to disobey unlawful orders, that loyalty to a man is not loyalty to a nation. And this is why Trump and Hegseth erupted, why they spat out threats of hanging and treason and vengeance. Because they were being called out for what they were already doing, and for what they wanted the freedom to keep doing without scrutiny. Both the Republican controlled House and the Republican controlled Senate have launched investigations into Secretary of War Crimes Hegseth. I don’t expect Republican courage. Please. That bar is so far below ground it’s sharing real estate with fossil fuel deposits. But I do expect the occasional involuntary spasm of self-preservation slathered in red, white, and blue drag. And if these cowards want even a shot at reclaiming the constitutional duty they traded for Trump-branded belly rubs, they can start by cracking open the dank storage closet where they abandoned their balls, scraping them off whatever rodent gnawed on them last, slapping them on the desk, and praying that somewhere inside that shriveled mess there’s a single surviving neuron capable of recognizing integrity. Because this is how democracies decay from the inside. This is how the rot burrows into the foundation. This is what authoritarianism looks like in its larval stage, smoke starting to curl under the locked door while the most comfortable people in the room pretend they don’t smell burning. And to the MAGA cultists telling me to cry harder, to the remedial civics dropouts crowing that this is what they voted for, bless their hollowed out hearts, here’s a truth they’ll understand about as well as they understand a toothbrush or a thesaurus: Authoritarian cruelty always starts with “them,” the distant, the foreign, the nameless, the people whose lives don’t look like ours. It always starts with the disposable. It never ends there. It always comes home. And when it does, it never bothers to ask how you voted. And if we’re lucky, accountability will arrive before they feel bold enough to turn this machinery of violence inward, before they decide that Americans can be erased in the name of “order” just as easily as men in distant waters. But whether it comes early or late, it’s coming. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But it’s coming all the same. War crimes don’t evaporate. Murder doesn’t vanish. Truth doesn’t stay buried, not even under bronzer and bluster. And when the hammer of justice finally falls, every person who carried out that order, relayed it, confirmed it, defended it, or stayed silent for a promotion or proximity to power will face the reckoning they earned. And I won’t care about their pleas for mercy, not when they showed none to the two men clinging to the last pieces of their shattered world. They weren’t just denied compassion; they were denied the most basic possibility of justice, a chance to stand before the law instead of being erased without a word. And when the reckoning circles back to the people who stole that from them, the scales won’t be cruel. They’ll simply, finally, be level.

DHS Secretary's On-Air Admission Places Her at Center of Court Fight Over Defying Federal Judge’s Order

 

DHS Secretary's On-Air Admission Places Her at Center of Court Fight Over Defying Federal Judge’s Order

Noem’s public account contradicting a judge’s halt order could be entered into evidence, raising legal exposure for her and renewed concerns about separation of powers.

The Intellectualist

Nov 30, 2025

Noem publicly described authorizing actions that ran opposite a federal judge’s halt order, a statement that could be entered as evidence and that now potentially exposes her and the Trump administration to significant legal and separation-of-powers concerns.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem speaks during a Nov. 30, 2025 interview in which she blamed the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal and Operation Allies Welcome for enabling the suspect in the National Guard shooting to enter the United States.

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Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Sunday publicly acknowledged authorizing the deportation and transfer of Venezuelan detainees whose movements had been halted by a federal judge, a statement that could be offered as potential evidence as a court reviews whether the Trump administration complied with a binding judicial order. Noem insisted her actions were lawful. Her description of directing operations that a judge had ordered DHS to stop and reverse positions her remarks as potential evidence against her and the Trump administration in an active contempt inquiry.

In her interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Noem initially declined to answer directly when asked whether she personally made the final call to continue the flights after the court’s directive. When pressed, she said that decisions about deportation flights “are my decision at the Department of Homeland Security,” a formulation that mirrors language the Justice Department used in recent filings identifying her as the key decision-maker. Those filings were reported by The Guardian, Politico and CBS News and form part of the evidentiary record in a separation-of-powers dispute.

Host Kristen Welker also read on air the text of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s oral directive from March, stating: “Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States… this is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.” The directive required DHS to halt removals and return detainees who had already departed, so they could seek judicial review. Noem responded that she “did not” defy the order and characterized the judge as “activist,” framing the directive as lacking legal merit; her remarks reflect the administration’s position but do not alter the directive’s legal effect.

Under the Federal Rules of Evidence, a party’s own statements describing conduct at issue in a court proceeding are treated as admissions of fact when offered against that party, according to Rule 801(d)(2) as summarized by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School. Noem’s acknowledgment that she approved the disputed transfers therefore carries potential evidentiary weight as the court analyzes what the government did after the judge issued his oral directive. If the interview is introduced in the proceedings, her on-air account would provide a contemporaneous description of her role in the decisions federal filings say were executed after the halt-and-return order.

The administration relied on the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime-era statute first enacted in 1798, to deport certain Venezuelan nationals identified as security risks. The AEA framework permits removals through streamlined procedures with fewer safeguards than standard immigration cases, contributing to the controversy surrounding its use. Litigation summaries from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse describe these proceedings as part of J.G.G. v. Trump, a broader challenge to AEA-based removals.

Despite Boasberg’s directive, two flights carrying more than 100 Venezuelan men continued to El Salvador, where detainees were placed in the country’s high-security Cecot facility, which the Associated Press has described as a maximum-security complex used to detain alleged gang members. In recently unsealed filings, the Justice Department stated that Noem “directed” that detainees removed before the order was issued could be transferred to Salvadoran custody, characterizing the decision as consistent with a “reasonable interpretation” of the directive. DOJ filings also reference internal legal advice that officials say supported their interpretation, according to Politico and ABC News.

On NBC, Noem defended her actions, saying DHS acted to “ensure that dangerous criminals are removed.” She did not address Boasberg’s instruction to return flights that had already departed. The administration’s position, as reported by CBS News, is that the order did not clearly apply to individuals already in transit or already removed. DOJ has argued in filings that the oral nature of the directive contributed to uncertainty about its scope, particularly for detainees who had departed U.S. airspace before the hearing concluded. Her remarks are now available alongside DOJ’s filings for lawyers on both sides as the court determines whether the government complied with the directive’s timing and scope.

Evidence treatises summarized by Cornell’s Legal Information Institute explain that under Rule 801(d)(2), statements by a party about contested conduct may be introduced as factual admissions when offered against that party. Noem’s remarks therefore give the court a contemporaneous account of her role in decisions detailed in federal filings. The administration maintains that it acted in good faith based on internal guidance about how to interpret the judge’s instruction.

Civil liberties groups describe the dispute as part of a broader challenge to the use of the Alien Enemies Act in domestic immigration enforcement. An ACLU press release from June states that a federal judge found the March removals unlawful and ordered that Venezuelan detainees transferred to Salvadoran custody be given access to judicial proceedings. Those filings represent a separate track of litigation that continues in parallel with the contempt inquiry.

The detainees were later released from Cecot and transferred to Venezuela in a prisoner swap, according to reporting from The Guardian and the Associated Press. The repatriation did not end the underlying legal questions. Boasberg previously found probable cause to examine whether DHS officials defied his directive and, after an appeals panel allowed him to proceed, requested sworn declarations from Noem and other officials, according to ABC News and CBS News.

Public-law researchers cited by the Associated Press and Politico note that disputes over executive adherence to court orders have shaped major national cases, including enforcement of school desegregation rulings and post-9/11 national-security decisions. They point out that while the administration argues it acted in good faith based on internal guidance, the judiciary’s authority depends on the executive branch carrying out its orders without reinterpretation. Commentary published in The Guardian and other national outlets has noted that public statements by senior officials describing conduct that appears inconsistent with a federal order may influence perceptions of judicial independence in the United States and internationally.

Supporters of the administration told ABC News and CBS News that officials acted quickly amid evolving legal guidance and that any ambiguity in Boasberg’s instruction weighs against a contempt finding. Critics cited in The Guardian and ACLU filings argue that the flights’ continuation after the judge’s directive reflects an expansive view of executive authority in immigration enforcement and underscores tensions over the role of emergency powers in removal cases.

As Boasberg examines whether the government followed his directive, lawyers have both DOJ’s filings and Noem’s televised descriptions of her actions to draw on in arguing over what the administration did after the order. Observers quoted in Politico and The Guardian have noted that the outcome of the inquiry may influence how future administrations interpret judicial oversight when invoking emergency authorities in immigration law.

THE DUMBEST CRIMINAL

 

CLEAVAGE TRUMPS COMPETENCE

        CLEAVAGE TRUMPS COMPETENCE
 

HEATHER

 

November 29, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson Nov 30 In the wake of yesterday’s report from Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered Special Operations to kill the survivors of a September 2 strike on a small boat off Venezuela, the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees have announced they intend to conduct “vigorous oversight” and “gather a full accounting” of the operation. The two committees referred to the Department of Defense by that name, rather than by the “Department of War” rebrand Hegseth and Trump have pushed. Today former judge advocate generals (JAGs), military lawyers, in the Former JAGs Working Group issued a statement declaring that it unanimously “considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both,” and called for “anyone who issues or follows such orders [to] be prosecuted for war crimes, murder, or both.” The Former JAGs Working Group organized in February 2025 after Hegseth purged JAGs from the Army and Air Force and systematically dismantled the military’s legal guardrails. “Had those guardrails been in place,” they wrote, “we are confident they would have prevented these crimes.” Congress appears to be stepping up on this issue, and that willingness to cross Trump suggests members are recalculating Trump’s power relative to their own. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted: “This is genuinely big news…. Republicans are challenging Trump now because he seems weak. No one wants to back a weak horse.” A Gallup poll released yesterday shows President Donald J. Trump’s job approval rating at 36% with disapproval at 60%. Since last month, Trump’s approval has plummeted 11 points. Republicans’ approval of Trump has fallen seven points to a second-term low, while approval among Independents has fallen eight points to its lowest point in either term. Only 3% of Democrats approve of his job performance. Although war conditions usually help a president’s popularity, Trump’s threat to attack Venezuela attracts the support of only 30% of Americans. Seventy percent oppose such military action. There are signs that the MAGA coalition is fracturing. A Politico poll released yesterday shows that just 55% of those who voted for Trump in 2024 see themselves as MAGA. While the MAGA 55% remain largely loyal to Trump, 38% do not consider themselves as MAGA and are less enamored of him than are his MAGA loyalists. Last week a new feature on X that permitted users to see where accounts originate revealed that a number of high-engagement MAGA accounts that claim to be those of patriotic Americans are in fact from Russia, Eastern Europe, India, Nigeria, Thailand, and Bangladesh. Since X pays certain content creators for tweets that drive engagement, posters from other countries have a financial incentive to post material that feeds the anger of American users and thus will get reposted. The splintering of the MAGA coalition showed when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) announced on November 21 she would not run for reelection in a public letter that attacked Trump and “Establishment Republicans.” She called out Trump’s threats to primary her, and said, “I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.” Three days later, Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News said her letter “rang true to” many House Republicans. One senior House Republican wrote to Sherman: “This entire White House team has treated ALL members like garbage. ALL. And Mike Johnson has let it happen because he wanted it to happen. That is the sentiment of nearly all—appropriators, authorizers, hawks, doves, rank and file. The arrogance of this White House team is off putting to members who are run roughshod and threatened. They don’t even allow little wins like announcing small grants or even responding from agencies. Not even the high profile, the regular rank and file random members are more upset than ever. Members know they are going into the minority after the midterms. “More explosive early resignations are coming. It’s a tinder box. Morale has never been lower. Mike Johnson will be stripped of his gavel and they will lose the majority before this term is out.” Today, Representative Troy Nehls (R-TX), a staunch Trump ally, announced he would not seek reelection in 2026, saying he intends to “focus on my family.” Nehls co-sponsored legislation to put Trump on the $100 bill—although federal law prohibits using a living person’s likeness on U.S. currency—and to rename Washington Dulles International Airport, which serves the nation’s capital, after Trump. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, recently joined California governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, in speaking out against the Trump administration’s plan to offer up to 34 offshore drilling leases off the coasts of Alaska, California, and Florida. CNN’s Erin Burnett recently interviewed chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase Jamie Dimon. His answer to her questions as to why his company has not contributed to Trump’s proposed ballroom suggested he is anticipating a change in administration. “We have an issue,” he answered, “which is anything we do, since we do a lot of contracts with governments here and around the world, we have to be very careful how anything is perceived, and also how the next D[epartment] O[f] J[ustice] is going to deal with it. So we’re quite conscious of risks we bear by doing anything that looks like…buying favors….” Dissatisfaction with Trump and his MAGA party is showing in Indiana, too, where administration officials have put extraordinary pressure on state legislators to redistrict the state to try to net the Republicans more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. On Wednesday, November 26, Andy East of the Indianapolis Daily Journal reported on Indiana state senator Greg Walker, a Republican who is standing firm on his refusal to vote in favor of redistricting. “I was taught as a child the difference between right and wrong,” Walker told The (Columbus) Republic, “and this is just wrong on so many levels.” Walker said Trump invited him for an Oval Office visit on November 19. Walker declined, suggesting the invitation violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from using public resources for partisan purposes. He said he would have reported the violation to federal authorities “if I thought that there was anyone of integrity in Washington that would follow through on my accusation and actually cause someone to lose their job over it.” He continued: “How does [Trump] have the time to mess with a nobody like me with all of the important matters that are to take his attention as the leader of the executive branch in this nation? There is no way that he should have time to have a conversation with me about Indiana mapmaking when that’s not his business, for starters. But secondly, doesn’t he have anything better to do? I can make a big list of things that are more important for him to focus on.” Mid-decade redistricting was “the president trying to save his own skin by holding a majority in Congress,” Walker said. “It’s so that he’s not impeached again. That’s all this is about.”

Mark Kelly Is Being Investigated for Telling the Truth

 

Mark Kelly Is Being Investigated for Telling the Truth

Nov. 26, 2025

By David Cole

Mr. Cole is a visiting professor at Columbia Law School and a former national legal director of the A.C.L.U.

On Monday Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, directed the Pentagon to investigate Senator Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain who flew combat missions during the gulf war and took several spaceflights as an astronaut before he was elected to serve Arizona’s citizens in Congress. His potential crime? Telling members of the armed services that they do not have to follow illegal orders. But saying so is not a crime; it’s a true statement of the law. And even if President Trump doesn’t like it, it’s protected by the First Amendment.

In a video released last week, Senator Kelly and several other Democratic lawmakers reminded members of the military that they “can refuse illegal orders.” That’s exactly right. “Following orders” is not a defense if you follow an illegal order to commit a war crime, as Allied prosecutors established at the Nuremberg trials of Nazis after World War II. Members of the military have not only the right but the obligation to refuse illegal orders.

The video enraged Mr. Trump, who evidently likes his orders followed, regardless of whether they are lawful. On Truth Social he called the video “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” He then reposted another person’s message that said, “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!” Now his defense secretary has opened an investigation into whether Mr. Kelly committed a military crime by saying what he did. And the F.B.I. has followed suit by seeking to question the six lawmakers in the video, all of whom served in the military or the intelligence service. (Mr. Kelly alone is subject to military jurisdiction because he is “retired,” while the others did not serve long enough to be eligible to retire with a pension.)

If anything is lawless here, it’s the investigations. The video itself mentioned no particular orders. On “Face the Nation” Mr. Kelly, a member of the Armed Services Committee, questioned the legality of the orders to kill suspected drug smugglers at sea. But on that point he’s echoing what countless experts in the law of war have said. Even John Yoo, one of the former Justice Department officials who notoriously greenlighted the waterboarding of Al Qaeda suspects, has questioned the legality of the strikes, arguing that “the United States cannot confuse crime with war.”

It’s hard to find anyone outside Mr. Trump’s inner circle of solicitous advisers who considers the killings legal. The administration has notably declined to publicly disclose a memo that is purported to advance a legal rationale for the strikes, which have already killed more than 80 people. Even if you are tried and convicted of smuggling drugs, you cannot be executed for that crime alone — much less by summary execution meted out from the air.

The notion that we are at war with drug smugglers confuses a metaphor for reality; the war on drugs is no more an armed conflict than the war on cancer is. In any event, during an actual armed conflict, the laws of war prohibit targeting civilians who are not actively engaged in hostilities against us. Yet instead of conforming the military’s conduct to the law and halting the killings, the Pentagon is now investigating Mr. Kelly, and the F.B.I. wants to question both the senator and his colleagues for doing nothing more than stating what the law is.

We’ve seen something like this before, but it’s not a precedent we should be proud of. During World War I, Congress made it a crime to incite insubordination in the military. More than 2,000 people were prosecuted for criticizing the war under this law, and about 1,000 were convicted. Several of these cases made their way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the convictions. Among those convicted was Eugene Debs, who ran for president as the Socialist Party candidate in 1920 while serving his sentence and received nearly a million votes.

In its decisions affirming the convictions, the Supreme Court reasoned, without a shred of convincing evidence, that the speakers posed, as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it, a “clear and present danger” to the country. One defendant, Charles Schenck, had mailed leaflets to men who had been drafted, criticizing the war and urging them to “assert your rights.” Another, John Frohwerk, was convicted of writing a dozen news articles similarly criticizing the war effort. Debs was sentenced to 10 years for praising imprisoned critics of the war in a speech, among other things.

In none of the cases was any evidence offered that anyone had actually acted upon the criticisms, or that anyone had in fact incited insubordination. The mere possibility of interference with the war was enough.

 

Those decisions are now viewed as egregious missteps in the interpretation of the First Amendment. Today’s free speech doctrine looks instead to the subsequent dissents of Justice Holmes and Justice Louis Brandeis in Abrams v. United States and Gitlow v. New York, which argued that the First Amendment prohibits censoring speech because it criticizes the government, and maintained that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” not whether it pleases government officials. Years of repression against union activists, communists and civil rights activists ultimately led the Supreme Court to adopt robust protections for free speech on matters of public concern — under which the prosecutions of World War I would all have been invalid.

As a result, it is now clearly established that I cannot be prosecuted for saying, in this essay, “Members of the military have not only the right but the obligation to refuse illegal orders.” Nor could I be prosecuted for stating, as I also have, that the orders to kill suspected drug smugglers are illegal. The First Amendment protects all such statements. Indeed, it protects explicit calls for illegal conduct unless the speech is both intended and likely to incite imminent illegality, a standard rarely met, and one not even approached by Mr. Kelly’s words.

The administration maintains that it can investigate Mr. Kelly because he is a retired naval officer. In other words, because he fought for his country — something Mr. Trump managed to avoid doing — Mr. Kelly has less First Amendment protection than the rest of us. That’s wrong.

It’s true that the Uniform Code of Military Justice applies to retired members of the military. On very rare occasions, retired members have been called up to stand trial in military court for violating the military code. The only code provision that addresses mere speech, however, is the rarely used Article 88, which prohibits officers from using “contemptuous words” against the president and other high-level officials. Nothing Mr. Kelly said was remotely “contemptuous,” which a military judges’ manual defines as “insulting, rude and disdainful.” Mr. Kelly did not even mention the president or any other official; he simply described the law that governs service members.

The fact that Mr. Kelly is a retired officer does not authorize an exception to the First Amendment. While restricting how officers speak about the president may make sense when applied to active-duty officers, where respect for the commander in chief and military discipline are paramount, it makes no sense when applied to a retiree who engages in no military activity and exercises no military authority.

Precisely because those exercising command authority are often limited in what they can say, it’s all the more important to protect the speech rights of those who have retired and can offer their perspective. Some of the most important voices questioning President George W. Bush’s torture program in the war on terror were retired admirals and generals. Such officials rarely speak out on military matters, but when they do they deserve to be heard, not criminally investigated.

We ask a lot of those who put their lives on the line defending our nation. The least we can do is respect their free speech rights once they’ve retired.

 

ROTHKOPF

 

We Have Descended into Utter Madness

A new sense of urgency is needed. Our national crisis has grown much more acute.

David Rothkopf Nov 29

 

We have descended into utter madness.

We knew we were at risk of it. We struggled against it as it was happening. We called out the warning signs and its first manifestations. And yet, somehow, its onset has accelerated and deepened and we are suddenly in a place of lunacy more acute than this country has ever experienced.

What is more, for all of our awareness and resistance, it is clear right now that our response is too subdued, too complacent, too accepting of the inarguably unacceptable.

At least, as it turns out, frogs do have the common sense to jump out of a pot of water as its temperature grows unacceptably high. We don’t. The water is boiling all around us.

Take the news of just the past few days as sketched out in headlines and shards of social media.

We are about to go to war against another country for no reason. Our president is delusionally barking out orders to the planet, seemingly convinced he rules the entire globe.

He commands closed the skies of a foreign land. He demands the people of another nation vote for his political ally or he will punish them. He sets free a convicted drug lord while arguing that he is waging a hemispheric battle against narco-terrorists. His minions are committing war crimes in his name, lying about their justifications, bringing disgrace on our country and our armed services.

 

In the wake of a tragic killing, he and his aides are making racist proclamations and promising sweeping draconian measures including banning entry to the US of all people from the “third world” and expelling from this country naturalized citizens who do not ascribe to our leaders’ ideas or political opinions. He has turned the legal apparatus of this country against his perceived opponents, even those who are only doing their duty and urging others to do theirs, even those who recognize that illegal orders are being given that are resulting in crimes for which all those involved except the president himself can be prosecuted.

His emissaries are selling out our allies and seeking to pressure them into capitulation to foreign enemies in ways that will undermine our national security and that of many of our most important friends and partners.

Starkly unqualified crackpots have been put in charge of our healthcare system and are actively seeking to undo two centuries of progress in the administration of public health. Children are already dying because they are stigmatizing vaccines, attacking science itself for ideological reasons and with utter disregard for the risks that are being created. They are responding to a climate crisis by systematically stopping programs that might contain it and accelerating those that will certainly make it worse.

Corruption is rampant, in the open, almost celebrated. The White House has been partially torn down and is being replaced by a monstrous monument to the president’s ego…one unlike any ever conceived by any past leader in our history…one that increasingly grows so out of scale with both our executive mansion and the limits of good taste that the architect and contractors are seeking to distance themselves from the project.

Heroes are called traitors. Journalists and others who seek to exercise their first amendment rights are crudely bullied or worse. Racists are being given rein make their twisted vision of what America should be into a reality enforced by the law. Armed thugs are on the march in our cities rounding up the innocent. Vital programs upon which millions depend are being shutdown. Universities are being directed away from learning, intellectual independence, the traits that made them the envy of the world and forced to bend the knee to an ideology that promotes ignorance and prejudice. With a few quick keystrokes, the mentally unstable man who is leading this country believes he can reverse every executive order of his predecessor and threaten him with prosecution.

This is just a summary of the past few days. This is just a progress report on our descent into a state that, unchecked, will surely destroy our country and that, even if reversed, will take decades to undo and repair.

It is not an exaggeration to observe that on virtually every issue of importance—national security, foreign policy, economics, budgets, taxation, tariffs, healthcare, social services, energy, environment, education or the rule of law that the policies and positions adopted by this administration are not just greatly deviant from our past or the views of the opposition or the views of the majority of Americans or our historical positions…they are completely wrong, the opposite of what is needed.

In almost every case, where the president and the administration can make a choice, they make the most damaging choice, the most dangerous choice.

Think about it. Do your own math. Run through your own checklist. Perhaps you will find a few isolated areas in which they are not doing the worst possible thing. On one or two or a handful perhaps, they may be making a positive contribution to our well-being. But that is a handful out of countless instances in which the worse case is the case with which now find ourselves contending.

And it is less than a year into this administration. And the president is clearly, visibly, ever more rapidly declining, losing his faculties, losing any sense of perspective or limitations he might once have had, shouting into the void his commands, serving his needs, and seeking to institutionalize his pathologies in our national institutions and life.

As shocking as this is, however, our president’s dementia and character flaws and the defects of those in his inner circle are not our biggest problem.

We are the problem.

I don’t mean you, per se, no doubt you share my views on the above. No doubt you have been railing against what we see and are profoundly disturbed by where we are.

I mean the American people. I mean the third of the electorate who apparently still support what is happening. I mean the GOP legislators who enable him and their constituents who continue to back and empower them. I mean the traditional media that continues to both-sides a profound national crisis. I mean new media that feels snark and “I told you so” and calling for outcomes that will never occur are adequate. I mean those we know who just seek to change the subject or have grown inured to all this or think it is business as usual and that it will be reversed by time without any effort from them or who assume that shaking their head and lamenting our state is somehow enough.

We have reached a point at which recent events should be demanding that every group mentioned above, that all who have enabled or tolerated or not done enough to prevent where we are now must reconsider.

This moment must be a turning point. It is time to recognize that we have entered a dark, perilous new phase of the drama of the Trump years and it is up to us all that we ensure we are in the last act of that play.

To do so, we must start by recognizing that what we are seeing happening, what has dominated the headlines every day this week, and the spiraling descent into national psychosis that we are experiencing is qualitatively different and much more grave even than that we have experienced before. And we must acknowledge that there are still three years to go in this presidency and we must imagine what they will look like if current trends go unchecked.

The water is boiling.

It is time to get out. It is time to call it a crisis. It is time to sound the alarms. It is time to reject those who would excuse it. It is time to become intolerant of the intolerable, the equivocations, the excuses, the too timid responses. It is time to spend every erg of energy at our disposal to hasten the exits of the enablers and the principal actors at the center of all this.

Electing Trump was a mistake. Trump’s first term was for the most part a series of calamities. He should have been impeached and removed both times it was before the Congress. That he led an insurrection compounded and exceeded past bad choices and actions of he and his team.

But where we are now is qualitatively worse and growing more precarious daily.

Thanks to the Supreme Court and the supine Congress and the right wing media bubble and the apathy of most Americans and the bumbling of the opposition, Trump and those around him have been sent a message that they are above the law and that they have more power than anyone who has ruled here since George III. They believe they are unstoppable. He really does believe he can issue decrees on Truth Social and the laws and the world must submit to his will as soon as he has completed saying, “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

It is for that reason we must see those words as a call to action. We do need to direct our attention to these matters.

My sense is, as I have often written before, that while all of us have a role to play here, it is going to require a new generation of leaders and voters to step up. They will determine the tenor of the debates to come. They will determine—by whether they turn out or not—the outcomes of the elections in 2026 and 2028. They will determine what alternative course of action can be followed that can stop this era of self-destruction and find new goals and remedies and a new path forward.

The problem is that for most of Millenials and Zoomers, Trump has been a fact of political life for virtually all their time as adults. He is the norm. And so they must either come to recognize that is an illusion or they must reject that norm and demand a new one.

In any case, noting the special role emerging generations must come to play while important to note, does not leave the rest of us off the hook. We all must come to terms with the idea that what we have done thus far is not enough. It is not working. Our situation is only growing more dire. Past demonstrations have not been big enough. Past calls to action have not been urgent enough. Each of us has to ask, what more can we do—even if we feel we have done a great deal—and then we must do it.

Because, as I noted at the outset, as I hope all of you have recognized over these past few days, we have descended into utter madness.