The Washington Times on X - "‘He lost us:’ Generals, senior officers say trust in Pete Hegseth has evaporated"
Sean Davis on X - "They were fine spending the last 20+ years losing wars, but having to do pull-ups and not be fat was apparently their red line. Interesting."
Cynical Publius on X - "So we today we have generals and admirals slithering to the press anonymously complaining about SecWar reading them the riot act over their incompetence and organizational failures. Let me explain why I take this so very, VERY personally. I served under Bill Clinton. I HATED him as my Commander-in-Chief and thought his poor leadership and social engineering such as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and placing women in high-G combat aircraft were destroying our military. But all of his orders were lawful, and I followed my oath to the letter. He was my Commander-in-Chief and I respected the fact that the American people had selected him for that role. You never heard me utter a single peep against him, neither publicly nor in private. I honored my oath. Pretty much every officer I knew felt and acted the same way. Even though I retired just before Obama took office, I know for certain that the exact same thing happened with the officers who served under him. We did our jobs, honored our oaths, showed the respect the office deserved, and never engaged in the sort of anonymous public insubordination that we see now. We did the same for the rest of our chain of command, even when incompetents such as Les Aspin and Leon Panetta were serving as SecDef. That is NOT what is happening now. The fact that these political Perfumed Prince snakes in the grass wearing stars today even exist affirms something that so many have long suspected--that the Obama/Biden years infected our senior military ranks with men and women not emotionally or ethically qualified for such high rank. The purge of these oathbreakers cannot come soon enough."
Cynical Publius on X - "I’m not sure I’ve ever been angrier at Democrats than I am right now. As a career Army officer, I take this latest nefarious chicanery from these filthy Congressional Democrat veterans quite personally, It is loathsome and disgusting. You know, I know, they know and even their brainwashed acolytes know that what they are REALLY doing is encouraging active duty service members to refuse to follow lawful orders under the guise of pretending the orders are “unlawful.” What these Democrat filth are doing is encouraging a form of military coup where service members get to decide not to do things they disagree with politically by pretending those otherwise lawful things are “unlawful.” This is the greatest threat to US internal stability since the last time Democrats started a civil war. A military ruled by politics is no military at all. Instead, it is a group of armed thugs akin to the South American military juntas of the 1970s. I cannot overstate what an extreme threat this situation is to our nation. This is a precursor to civil war, initiated and deliberately created by traitorous elected officials hiding behind the honor of the uniform they once wore but now disgraced. I have never been angrier.🤬"
Gabrielle Giffords on X - "My husband @CaptMarkKelly is a 25-year Navy combat pilot veteran. He served our country with strength, courage, and integrity, dedicating his career to protecting us and upholding our constitution. Today, the President of the United States called him a traitor and demanded he be executed. It is dangerous and wrong. Americans of all political beliefs need to stand up and say so."
Buzz Patterson on X - "No, President Trump said that the punishment for sedition could result in the death sentence. He’s 100% correct. A court of law should decide if your husband is guilty or not. In any event, he’s encouraging troops to question their commander in chief. That, according to US law, is sedition. He should know better, probably does, but chose to do it anyway."
Cynical Publius on X - "I have long been puzzled by career U.S. military officers who align themselves with Democrats. I know from a number of joint assignments and schools that this is a particularly pernicious problem in the Navy. My explanation of this is as follows:
-The overwhelming majority of career military officers are politically conservative and view themselves as guardians of the Constitution. That means we are guarding the document that allows citizens to chart their own paths in freedom.
-The small minority of career military officers who are leftists OTOH view themselves as being superior protectors of the great mass of inferior citizens. Basically, they infantilize the citizenry and see themselves as intellectually and morally superior to the average American. It’s a patronizing, sneering attitude that is entirely consistent with Marxist control over a citizenry perceived as being unable to care for itself. That’s how they become Democrats, because that’s how the Democrat intelligentsia think.
Kelly is no patriot. He has no love for the actual Constitution. His love is what he sees as his duty to protect you from yourself. He sees himself as modern day royalty. He’s not. He’s neo-Marxist filth trying to incite a military coup so he and his domineering ilk can have more control over you and me."
The Patriot Oasis™ on X - "🚨 JUST IN: Jesse Waters says that he talked with Two CIA agents who CONFIRMED that Democrats' calling for Millitary personnel to disobey orders is part of an Operation to implant MASSIVE Distrust. “It’s straight out of the CIA playbook. It’s a destabilization operation where you get people to mistrust each other.” "They’re trying to condition the country to prepare for something bad that’s about to happen at the hands of Donald Trump.” "You establish authority. 'I'm CIA, I'm military, trust us...' then say the threat is Donald Trump. Then the solution—resist.""
Cynical Publius on X = "What you have been witnessing are the early stages of an attempted military coup. Think that’s hyperbole? In world history, every time a military coup happens against duly elected leadership, it begins with an information campaign by opposition party members attempting to turn the lower ranks of the nation’s military against said elected leadership."
DataRepublican (small r) on X - "Excellent find. I think we are getting very, very warm as to whose NGO's idea it was to have the Senators produce a video about refusing illegal orders. National Lawyers Guild issued a document about refusing illegal orders on 11 November. And now they have partnered with Win Without War to advertise seditious-adjacent behavior on billboards. And Win Without War has multiple Congressional liaisons on their "About" page. National Lawyers Guild is an infamous supporter of antifa per @MrAndyNgo , which of course is now a foreign terrorist organization. cc: @CynicalPublius"
Threads - "🚨 Democrat Who Told Troops To Disobey Trump Forced To Admit She Can't Name One Illegal Order 🔥Democratic Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin appeared on ABC’s This Week on Sunday after she and several other veterans-turned-lawmakers released a video reminding U.S. servicemembers that they are obligated to refuse illegal orders under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. viral #beyou #donaldtrump #trump #fyp"
Save America Movement on X - "Veterans from every branch are speaking out. Senator Mark Kelly is being threatened for reminding troops their oath is to the Constitution, not a president. This isn’t justice. It’s intimidation. Honor your oath. Defend democracy. Don’t give up the ship."
CannCon on X - "Yet they can’t name one violation of said Constitution. This certainly feels like a targeted attack by the CIA and Slotkin’s band of merry morons as President Trump is underway dismantling not only their dark money funding sources via the cartels in Venezuela and Colombia, but their colour revolution machine that is Venezuelan voting systems (that were actually born right here in the US of A). This is Seditious Conspiracy. The question is: how high up does it go?"
The Researcher on X - "This vet group is part of Democracy Inc. What Senator Mark Kelly did was participate in an effort to undermine a pillar of support (the military) for the Trump administration which is a color revolution tactic as detailed in Gene Sharp’s book “From Dictatorship to Democracy” which is the revolution business bible. Democracy Inc. has been running a color revolution against Trump and MAGA since 2016 and will continue to do so until many people are held accountable. Unfortunately, we have worthless congressional republicans who will not tackle the corrupt judiciary and lawfare and a weak AG who is being steamrolled."
🇺🇸 Mike Davis 🇺🇸 on X - "Of course, @SenMarkKelly had a much-different response to the Biden military strikes on children than the Trump military strikes on cartels. Because Mark Kelly is a subversive, partisan hack. Court-martial him."
🇺🇸 Mike Davis 🇺🇸 on X - "Think about how dangerous this is. This Democrat U.S. senator is going on national TV and telling military members, including 18-year-old enlistees, to ignore orders from the President and his Secretary of Defense they are supposed to determine are illegal. Was Obama’s order to drone-strike American citizens—including a child—illegal, @SenMarkKelly ? Is your presidential ambitions worth more than destruction of the chain of command? Your puppet-master @AlexanderSoros must be very proud of you."
🐺 on X - "“They may find out down the road that they did something that is illegal.” YIKES As noted by @redsteeze , they’re telegraphing to service members that following orders from Trump may subject them to prosecution when Democrats get back in power. It’s a very unsubtle way of telling officers “you better not follow Trump’s orders or something bad might happen to you.” They know that very few officers have the depth of legal knowledge to know whether or not an order is actually illegal…(btw we still have no concrete evidence that anyone at anytime gave an illegal order) they’re telling them to always err on the side of refusing an order….which is absolutely insane. This is really democrats telling the military “anything outside of our preferred policy outcomes and politics will be deemed illegal when we’re in power.” It’s really hard to see this as anything other than a highly coordinated effort to strip Trump of his constitutional authority over the military."
Breaking911 on X - "SEN. KELLY: "[Hegseth] runs around on stage talking about lethality and warrior ethos and killing people." "That’s not the message that should be coming from the Secretary of Defense." "He runs around on a stage like he’s a 12 year old playing army.""
Cynical Publius on X - "Freaking seditious moron. The job of any nation's military is to close with and destroy its enemies in as expeditious a manner as possible. No nation's military has ever had a mission of social experimentation and figuring out how not to kill its enemies efficiently. The fact that any American gives this neo-Marxist traitor any credibility of any kind is quite disturbing."
Inciting Terrorism Is Not Free Speech - "“The First Amendment’s protection does not depend on the popularity or palatability of the message conveyed,” wrote the three-judge panel in United States v. Al-Timimi. “On the contrary, it is most vital when speech offends, disturbs, or challenges prevailing sensibilities.” For good measure, the defense attorney whose client was vindicated by the unanimous decision summarized the case as proof that “the government cannot criminalize speech simply because the ideas expressed are unpopular, offensive, or challenge those in power.”... In 2005, a Virginia jury found defendant Ali Al-Timimi guilty of inducing others to use prohibited weapons, soliciting others to commit treason against the United States, attempting to contribute services to the Taliban, and several other charges in the same spirit. According to the Fourth Circuit, a group of men who attended Al-Timimi’s lectures at a Falls Church mosque “began making preparations to engage in jihad in the form of combat.” When members of the group told Al-Timimi that the FBI was on to them, “Al-Timimi chastised them for making their training efforts too obvious. . . . he advised them that they should not cease meeting altogether, because that could raise suspicion, but rather that they should be more discreet.” After 9/11, Al-Timimi addressed the group, telling them to unplug all electronics and “not repeat anything that was said.” “He told us that we need to do three things,” a member of the group would later testify. “First, he said we need to repent; second, we need to leave the United States; and third, he said, ‘Join the mujahideen.’ . . . it doesn’t matter if we fight the Indians or the Russians or the Americans, that this is all legitimate jihad.” Several of Al-Timimi’s mentees did so. He continued to advise these men on “how best to evade detection” and “what to do if they were stopped by the authorities.” (They should “act scared” and ask for their “lawyers and . . . our mothers.”) None of this is mere “unpopular” speech. Al-Timimi was the ringleader of a terrorist cell, with designs on a holy war against the United States. Yes, he primarily used words to facilitate this war. But he was not discussing these topics in an abstract or academic way. His words helped steel his acolytes’ resolve to commit treason. Our law has long recognized that words can be dangerous, even criminally so. That is why we have rules against crimes like solicitation, incitement, and conspiracy. To be sure, the line between protected speech and speech in furtherance of criminal behavior is fuzzy. But courts are perfectly willing to uphold convictions involving, for example, antitrust violations based on this distinction. Despite these precedents, the court of appeals held that Al-Timimi’s convictions could not be squared with the First Amendment. Al-Timimi did not commit incitement, the court concluded, because his “exhortations were vague and general,” failing the “imminent lawless action” standard set out in 1969’s Brandenburg v. Ohio. Though he “encouraged unlawful acts generally,” he was not guilty of criminal solicitation because “the evidence did not demonstrate that he encouraged, with the requisite intent, a specific unlawful act.” This may seem like a loophole for bad actors, but the court reminds readers that “plenty of speech encouraging criminal activity is protected under the First Amendment.” This is true, but plenty of speech is also not protected. The only standard the court employed to tell if Al-Timimi’s speech was protected was whether the criminal acts he encouraged were sufficiently specific. Since that standard can only be resolved by intuition, it’s probably best left to a jury—like the one that concluded Al-Timimi’s encouragement, advice, and instruction did meet that standard. One wonders what is left of crimes like solicitation and conspiracy under the court’s reasoning. After all, prosecutors could have hardly hoped for better evidence in their favor. The men even testified at trial to Al-Timimi’s decisive role in helping them overcome their fears and join terrorist groups. If telling men you know are heavily armed to attack America is too vague and general to warrant prosecution, then any form of solicitation will be extremely hard to prove... The Court has already made clear that limitations on dangerous speech tailored to prevent terrorism are constitutional, even if applied liberally. In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (2010), the Court held that simply explaining the law to terrorist organizations may be prosecuted as material support for terrorism consistent with the First Amendment. “Given the sensitive interests in national security and foreign affairs at stake,” the majority wrote, courts should defer to the political branches when they “have adequately substantiated their determination that . . . it was necessary to prohibit” acts, even speech-based acts, that further terrorism. In spite of this, lower courts have consistently balked at the notion of enforcing laws designed to disrupt terrorist networks before they begin victimizing Americans. They have set the bar for conviction so artificially high that, as in Al-Timimi’s case, no prosecutor could possibly reach them."
Clear proof that Trump met the legal threshold for incitement by calling for peaceful protest!
‘WTF?!’ MAGA Pounces on CNN’s Jake Tapper for Misidentifying J6 Pipe Bomb Suspect as ‘White’ - "CNN anchor Jake Tapper was taken to task by MAGA influencers after claiming on-air Thursday that the newly arrested January 6 pipe bomb suspect Brian Cole Jr. was “white” – moments before showing photos that proved he wasn’t."
Hans Mahncke on X - "As Tapper knows perfectly well but deliberately pretended otherwise through sanctimonious moralizing, President Trump pardoned the January 6 defendants because of the process they were subjected to. It was a total witch hunt driven by the Biden autopen operation, funneled through a deeply corrupt D.C. court system that offered zero chance of a fair trial. Every administration official should have that explanation rehearsed down to the letter, ready to deploy whenever a fake news propagandist tries to pull this stunt."
Peter Baker on X - "The higher the court, the likelier Trump was to win rulings in 2025: District courts: 25% Appeals courts: 51% Supreme Court: 88%"
Buzz Patterson on X - "Thanks for pointing out (I’m sure it wasn’t your intent) that the lower courts are packed with leftist ideologues."
Jonathan H. Adler on X - "Because plaintiffs have a greater ability to engage in forum selection at district court level and appellate panels are selected randomly."
The cope is that higher courts are full of MAGAs and need to be purged
Man Who Called Trump a 'Pedophile' Allegedly Tried Meeting Child for Sex - "A Washington leftist is accused of trying to meet an 11-year-old for sex after previously calling President Donald Trump and his supporters pedophiles. Police in Bremerton, Washington, said 44-year-old Houston Wade was arrested on December 17 after he allegedly tried to meet up with a little girl"
Trump Forces the New York Times’s Hand on Crime - "The New York Times is growing desperate. In its efforts to discredit Donald Trump’s crime initiatives, it has deliberately drawn attention to black-on-black crime... The New York Times had its story: Trump did not care about black homicide victims... “Historically, most murder victims in Washington have been Black.”... The Times’s spin on Trump’s allegedly racist crime policies and rhetoric has a few problems—among them hypocrisy, double standards, and inconsistency. If Trump has failed to publicize the black homicide victims mentioned in the Times’s story, he was only following the paper’s lead. None of those killings got any coverage in the paper at the time. The Times has ignored even more egregious murders than the garden-variety gang violence that now so moves the paper to sorrow... When Trump announced the National Guard deployment, the paper denounced that initiative as a racist intrusion upon D.C. home rule. It said nothing about the crime that was mowing down black lives. The paper may now bemoan the stationing of National Guard soldiers in downtown areas instead of in black neighborhoods, but in August, it wanted no Guard, period. Times columnist Jamelle Bouie expressed the paper’s position: There was “no public safety emergency in Washington, D.C. Crime is . . . at a 30-year low,” Bouie said on August 16. Trump was merely demonizing the “residents of D.C. as essentially incapable of self-government.” What does that acceptable crime picture look like? In 2024, D.C. saw 187 homicides, or over 15 a month. At least 177 of the victims, or 94 percent, were black... nearly 15 black lives lost per month in 2024, in a city of just over 700,000 residents, might conceivably be considered a “public safety emergency” by such racial justice warriors as Times columnists and reporters, whether or not crime was trending downward. Certainly, such homicide numbers would be considered an emergency in First World cities outside of the U.S.—the D.C. homicide rate is about 27 times that of London’s and Berlin’s, for example, and 60 times that of Switzerland’s. The people least concerned with black lives would seem to be the Black Lives Matter activists and their media mouthpieces. If BLM activists have shown up to protest a black toddler being gunned down in a drive-by shooting, the record does not reflect it. The reason for this silence is that drawing attention to black crime victims means drawing attention to black criminals, who are almost invariably the victims’ assailants. In Washington, D.C., from 2019 to the end of 2020, blacks made up nearly 97 percent of homicide suspects, according to the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform. Whites accounted for 0.8 percent of homicide suspects. The black homicide commission rate was roughly 99 times higher than the white homicide commission rate, and remains so. When Trump decries urban crime, therefore, he is by definition decrying the victimization of blacks... There were four white homicide victims in D.C. in 2024, or 2 percent of the black homicide victims. Trump’s D.C. crime initiative redounded disproportionately to the benefit of blacks. But the Times saw only racism in Trump’s National Guard actions. The paper quoted the widow of the late D.C. mayor Marion Barry. The Trump era resembled the Emmett Till era with its state-sanctioned “racism, oppression and violence,” Cora Master Barry said. “Black folks” were and are “disappearing all over the place.” The reason “black folks” are currently disappearing is that other “black folks” are killing them. When Trump first called up the Guard, the Times complained that the soldiers were making “black folks” feel scared and under siege. At the same time, it complained even then that the deployment favored white areas over black ones. Now the Times complains only that the Guard is ignoring black neighborhoods... About 30 percent of the arrests made by federal agents under Trump’s increased policing initiative come from just one of the city’s eight wards. Ward 8 is 10 percent of the city’s population but 81 percent black. It has the highest number of violent crimes in the city. The federal officers are not ignoring black victims; they are picking up their assailants. As predictably as clockwork, the Times has lamented the fact that the “overwhelming majority” of arrestees in the first two weeks of the D.C. crime blitz were black, a “markedly disproportionate share for a city where Black people make up a little more than 40 percent of the population.” That complaint not only contradicted the claim that federal agents were slighting black neighborhoods but also ignored the truth that blacks commit a “markedly disproportionate” amount of crime in D.C. Police officers are damned if they concentrate their resources on areas with the highest incidence of crime and if they allegedly stay out of high-crime areas. In both cases, they are racist. Contrary to the Times’s characterization, Trump’s outraged reaction to the November killing of a National Guard soldier and the wounding of another had nothing to do with the victims’ race. Assassinations of law enforcement officials tear at civilized order. Such attacks aim at the country itself. They necessarily rise to a level of significance not possessed by the daily gang killings that the media do their best to conceal, however heartbreaking such quotidian violence is to the victims’ survivors. The power of the taboo in elite circles against noticing black-on-black crime cannot be overstated. One would never know from mainstream media coverage that dozens of blacks are murdered every day across the U.S., more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, though blacks are only 13 percent of the U.S. population. The Chicago Tribune is the exception in regularly reporting on local Chicago gang crime... The media activate wall-to-wall reporting on a lost black life only in the rare instance that a black person is killed by a police officer. The rest of the time, what Trump has rightly called urban “carnage” is out of sight, out of mind. Only the Times’s revulsion for Trump could have led it to breach the contemporary code of racial etiquette. The breach will be temporary. Trump’s focus on crime and disorder will not be. His refusal to treat urban violence and squalor as inevitable features of life in American cities is among the most salutary aspects of his presidency, however undisciplined his rhetoric."
John Ʌ Konrad V on X - "I spoke today with a well-known European journalist. Most MAGA folks would label his outlet “woke,” but he’s actually center-right. His main point stunned me: right now Europe’s elites are desperate for the United States to keep carrying the load. They’re oscillating between being angry at Trump… and quietly praying Republicans lose the midterms so things “go back to normal.” They’re terrified of the new National Security Strategy, not because it’s extreme, but because it tells them to finally pull their own weight. And they know they can’t. They want the old spigot… USAID, foreign support, kickbacks, endless funding… turned back on like it’s 2016. Here’s what they don’t get: even if Democrats do win the midterms, Trump isn’t signing a massive European rescue package—and the Dems aren’t getting a supermajority to overrule him. Washington would simply grind to a halt, including the spending they rely on today. If Democrats won Congress and the presidency in 2028, maybe Europe gets its funding fantasy… but that requires an extraordinary collapse inside the MAGA world. I wouldn’t bet on that outcome. And I’m worried about the midterms myself. After a week inside DC, it’s obvious: many newcomers in this administration don’t yet grasp the scale of the lawfare and bureaucratic obstruction that’s waiting for them. Veterans of the first Trump term I met with absolutely do, and they’re nervous that lawfare will return with vengeance. But here’s the other side: I’ve watched this administration move fast when cornered (the UN carbon tax reversal is a perfect example). It’s hard to do everything at once, sure, but when pushed, they hit hard and move quickly. I’m not betting against that instinct. So maybe we will win, maybe we won’t. Either way Europe ain’t getting a free ride. So if I had a message for Europe it would be this: stop hoping a midterm result will magically save you. Tone down the rhetoric, stop reacting emotionally to the outrageous press narrative about Trump, and start cutting real deals now. Small concessions today could buy you stability tomorrow. The real problem is emotional, not strategic. Too many European leaders (and frankly, American elites too) are furious at Trump because they’ve internalized media narratives instead of looking at actual geopolitical realities. They’re panicking. And panic loses. Always. In geopolitics, and in markets, the riches go to the actors who stay calm, think rationally, and make small strategic concessions while everyone else is screaming into the void. That’s how power actually works."
