#general charles q brown

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Joel B. Pollak

General Charles Q. Brown Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed Thursday that the U.S. is not providing Israel with all of the weapons it has requested for its war against Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

Earlier this month, reports emerged that Israeli military leaders believed that the U.S. was “slow-walking” deliveries of arms and ammunition as a way to create more leverage over Israeli policy and appease critics of Israel in the U.S.

General Brown appeared to confirm those reports — at least partially.

Reuters (via the Times of Israel) reported:

The United States’ top general says Israel had not received every weapon that it has asked for, in part because US President Joe Biden’s administration was not willing to provide at least some of them. “Although we’ve been supporting them with capability, they’ve not received everything they’ve asked for,” says General Charles Q. Brown, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Some of that is because they’ve asked for stuff that we either don’t have the capacity to provide or not willing to provide, not right now,” Brown adds, while speaking at an event hosted by the Defense Writers Group.

Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant spent two days in Washington, DC, this week, meeting with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, partly to request more arms and ammunition for the continued fight against Hamas and Hezbollah.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse:

Friday night, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who is black) and the Navy's top admiral (who is female) were fired, along with the most senior Judge Advocates General (JAGS) for the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the African American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an advocate of anti-racism training in the armed forces, has been replaced by Dan “Razin’” Caine. Caine is a retired Air Force lieutenant general, with none of the traditional qualifications for this position and whose return to active duty from retirement will require a legal exemption. Trump made it clear that Caine possessed the key quality he looks for in all of his top-level appointees: personal loyalty. In announcing the selection he recounted the story of meeting Caine in 2018, when Caine supposedly said, “‘I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.” Trump claims he then put on a Make America Great Again hat. Laughing, Trump said, “You’re not allowed to do that, but they did it.” It forces the question: Is Donald Trump trying to turn the military into a political weapon, just like he’s trying, and at least partially succeeding, in doing at the Justice Department? The Founding Fathers created a military with civilian leadership to minimize the prospect of a takeover by a military strongman. The principle of civilian leadership of the military is so deeply ingrained in Western democracies that it’s a requirement for inclusion in NATO.

[...] And that’s the heart of it, why dismiss them? Why on a Friday night? Why so many all and once? And why the Judge Advocates General? Members of the Judge Advocates General Corps, for instance, respond to legal questions about rules of engagement, targeting, intelligence law, and detainee operations. They are military lawyers whose core functions involve military justice and law of war. They offer advice on questions including what constitutes an illegal order, what is a war crime, what is a constitutional violation. Replacing their leadership with Trump loyalists could have serious implications for how the military reacts in a number of situations, including assisting with mass deportations and policing protests, which they are currently prohibited from doing by the Posse Comitatus Act. Members of the military take an oath to the Constitution, not a loyalty oath to the president. The idea of loyalty to the Constitution is deeply ingrained in the officer corps and among senior enlisted soldiers. But principles can be undercut, and the concern is that is what Trump and Hegseth are putting into motion.

Hegseth is now making good on the opinions that likely got him the job in the first place. On November 7, 2024, in a podcast interview, he said, “First of all, you got to fire the chairman [of the] Joint Chiefs. But any general that was involved—general, admiral, whatever—… in any of the DEI woke shit has got to go.” Hegseth criticized chief of naval operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve as the Navy’s top combat officer, in his 2024 book, where he dismissed her as “another inexperienced first.” Hegseth’s baseless insistence that Black people and women can only achieve high rank by scoring what he characterizes as “DEI points” is despicable. And it’s belied by the fact, that Brown and Franchetti both have military experience that far exceeds Hegseth’s. They also have demonstrated commitment to the Constitution and our national security.

The Trump/Hegseth purges of military leadership on Friday night are about turning the military into a tool that serves Trump instead of the Constitution.

Guess who the ones purged by this military readiness-weakening move?

Mostly women and minorities in leadership roles.

[usainsider55]

Trump Fires Joint Chiefs Chairman Amid Flurry of Dismissals at Pentagon

read more..

[sawbeentheblog]

Trump Fires Nation's Top Military Officer in Late-Night Pentagon Purge

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Charles Q. Brown, Jr. was fired Friday night in a Truth Social post from President Donald Trump. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has previously called for his dismissal based on DEI efforts. Latin Times President Donald Trump fired the military’s most senior officer in a sweeping Friday night purge at the Pentagon that removed six senior officials,…

[doueverwonder]

hi, hey, I don’t see anyone talking about this at all but I think it’s important: military personnel that have been removed by the administration thus far.

Admiral Linda L. Fagan, former commandant of the Coast Guard and first woman commandant. He did this on the second day of his term, and it was in my opinion, the warning shot for what’s happened in the past few days.

General Charles Q. “CQ” Brown, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. He was both the first African-American to lead a branch (serving as chief of staff of the Air Force) and the second to be Chairman.

Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to be Chief of Naval Operations, as well as the first to be on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

General James Slife, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff.

and Army, Air Force and Navy Judge Advocate Generals: Lt. Gen. Joseph B. Berger III, Lt. Gen. Charles Plummer, and Rear Adm. Lia M. Reynolds.

The First three had “DEI” cited in their reasons for firing (ah yes, two women and a black man being fired for focusing on diversity and inclusion, DEI didn’t get them the jobs but they’re losing them because of it funny right/sarc.) also not concerning, firing lawyers, reasoning for the three have not been released (as far as I can find); but I’m sure it has something to do with the current administration thinking they would get in their way. I’m also unable to find reasoning for Gen. Slife, either official or speculative. Even if you don’t fuck with the military I can’t be the only one who finds this horribly concerning.

Not to mention Musk is going through and firing thousands upon thousands of civilian DOD employees, I’ve also seen some posts from enlisted personnel saying they’ve received emails from Musk asking to summarize their job. Which I’m not entirely up to date on this but I do believe the government can end your contract at any given time, so who knows, maybe they’ll start laying off soldiers/sailors/airmen/guardians as well. Who’s to say in Musks America.

[misfitwashere]

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February 22, 2025

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

FEB 23

Last night’s Friday Night News Dump was a doozy: Trump has purged the country’s military leadership. He has fired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown, who Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested got the job only because he is Black, and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who was the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and whom Hegseth called a “DEI hire.” As soon as he took office, Trump fired U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Lee Fagan, giving her just three hours to vacate her home on base. Last night, Trump also fired the Air Force vice chief of staff, General James Slife.

In place of Brown, Trump has said he will nominate Air Force Lieutenant General John Dan Caine, who goes by the nickname “Razin”—as in “Razin Caine”—to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Joint Chiefs of Staff is the body of the eight most senior uniformed leaders within the United States Department of Defense. It advises the president, the secretary of defense, the Homeland Security Council and the National Security Council on military matters.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the highest-ranking and most senior military officer in the United States Armed Forces and is the principal military advisor to the president, the National Security Council, the Homeland Security Council, and the secretary of defense.

Caine has held none of the assignments that are required for elevation to this position. His military biography says he was a career F-16 pilot who served on active duty and in the National Guard. Before he retired, he was the associate director for military affairs at the CIA. The law prohibits the elevation of someone at his level to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unless the president waives the law because “such action is necessary in the national interest.”

Marshall notes that Trump is “reaching far down the pecking order to someone who isn’t even on active duty in the military for the critical position not only as the chief military advisor to the President…but the key person at the contact point of civilian control over the military.” In Trump’s telling, his support for Caine comes from the military officer’s support for him. “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir,” Trump claims Caine said to him. Trump went on to claim that Caine put on a Make America Great Again hat, despite rules against political messaging on the clothing of active-duty troops.

Trump appears to be purging military officers with the intent of replacing them with loyalists while intimidating others to bow to his demands. It seems worth recalling here that Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) stalled the nominations of 451 senior military officers for close to a year in 2023. On February 10, Trump purged the advisory bodies of the military academies for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard, saying: “Our Service Academies have been infiltrated by Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years…. We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards. We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!”

The purge of military leaders wasn’t the only news last night. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth indicated he intends to fire the judge advocates general, or JAGs—the military lawyers who administer the military code of justice—for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. “Among many other things it’s the military lawyers who determine what is a legal order and what’s not,” Talking Points Memo’s Marshall pointed out. “If you’re planning to give illegal orders they are an obvious obstacle.” “Now that Trump has captured the intelligence services, the Justice Department, and the FBI,” military specialist Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, “the military is the last piece he needs to establish the foundations for authoritarian control of the U.S. government.”

National Security Leaders for America, a bipartisan organization of people who served in senior leadership positions in all six military branches, elected federal and state offices, and various government departments and agencies, strongly condemned the firings, and urged “policymakers, elected officials, and the American public to reject efforts to politicize our military.”

Observers point out how the purging of an independent, rules-based military in favor of a military loyal to a single leader is a crystal clear step toward authoritarianism. They note that Trump expressed frustration with military leaders during his first term when they resisted illegal orders, saying, as then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley did, that in America “[w]e don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator…. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”

Observers note that during his first term, Trump said he wanted “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” apparently unaware that Hitler’s generals tried to kill him and instead imagining they were all fiercely loyal. They also note that authoritarian leader Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union purged his officer corps to make sure it was commanded by those loyal to him.

While the pattern is universal, this is a homegrown version of that universal pattern.

In order to undermine the liberal consensus that supported government regulation of business, provision of a basic social safety net, promotion of infrastructure, and protection of civil rights, reactionaries in the 1950s began to insist that such a government was socialism. A true American, they claimed, was an individual man who wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to provide for himself and his family.

In contrast to what they believed was the “socialism” of the government, they took as their symbol the mythologized version of the western American cowboy. In the mid-1950s, Americans tuned in to Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza, Wagon Train, and The Lone Ranger to see hardworking white men fighting off evil, seemingly without help from the government. In 1959 there were twenty-six westerns on TV, and in a single week in March 1959, eight of the top shows were westerns.

When Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, in his white cowboy hat, won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, the cowboy image became entwined with the reactionary faction in the party, and Ronald Reagan quite deliberately nurtured that image. Under Reagan, Republicans emphasized that an individual man should run his life however he wished, had a right to use a gun to defend his way of life, and that his way of life was under attack by Black Americans, people of color, and women.

It was an image that fit well with American popular culture, but their cowboy was always a myth: it didn’t reflect the reality that one third of cowboys were Black or men of color, or that cowboys were low-wage workers whose lives mirrored those of eastern factory workers. The real West was a network of family ties and communities, where women won the right to vote significantly before eastern women did, in large part because of their importance to the economy and the education that western people prized.

In the 1990s that individualist cowboy image spurred the militia movement, and over the past forty years it has become tightly bound to the reactionary Republican project to get rid of the government Americans constructed after 1933 to serve the public good. Now it is driving both the purge of women, people of color, and Black Americans from public life and the growing idea that leadership means domination. Trump and Hegseth’s concept of “warfighters” in an American military that doesn’t answer to the law but simply asserts power is the American cowboy hideously warped into fascism.

In a press conference in Brussels, Belgium, on February 13, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters: “We can talk all we want about values. Values are important. But you can't shoot values. You can't shoot flags and you can't shoot strong speeches. There is no replacement for hard power. As much as we may not want to like the world we live in, in some cases, there's nothing like hard power.”

That statement came after a troubling exchange between Hegseth and Senator Angus King (I-ME) during Hegseth’s nomination hearings. King noted that in one of his books, Hegseth had said that soldiers—he referred to them as “our boys”—"should not fight by rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms 80 years ago." King noted that Hegseth was referring to “the Geneva Conventions,” a set of international rules that try to contain the barbarity of war and outlawed torture, and he wanted Hegseth to explain what he meant when he wrote: "America should fight by its own rules, and we should fight to win or not go in at all."

Hegseth explained that “there are the rules we swear an oath to defend, which are incredibly important, and…then there are those echelons above reality from, you know, corps to division to brigade, to battalion. And by the time it trickles down to a company or a platoon or a squad level, you have a rules of engagement that nobody recognizes.” “So you are saying that the Geneva Convention should not be observed?” King asked. “We follow rules,” Hegseth said. “But we don't need burdensome rules of engagement that make it impossible for us to win these wars. And that's what President Trump understands.”

Hegseth refused to say he would abide by the Geneva Conventions. He refused to condemn torture.

This idea that modern warfare requires torture shines a harsh light on Trump’s January 29 order to the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare a 30,000-bed detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to detain migrants Trump called "the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.” Rather than simply deporting them, he said, “Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't want them coming back, so we're going to send them out to Guantanamo.”

Now it appears the White House is moving even beyond turning the military into cowboys with unlimited powers. On Thursday the White House posted on X a 40-second video that purported to be of migrants, in shackles and chains, faceless as the chains clank, with the caption “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” As Andrew Egger explained in The Bulwark, ASMR videos use video cues to create feelings of relaxation and euphoria, or “tingles.”

No longer is the cruelty of utter domination a necessity for safety, it appears. Now it is a form of sensual pleasure for its own sake. As Jeff Sharlet wrote in Scenes from a Slow Civil War: “Listen to this, the White House is saying. This will make you feel good.” It is, he points out, “a bondage video” in which “[t]he sound of other people’s pain is the intended pleasure.”

Elon Musk posted over the video: “Haha wow,” with an emoji of a troll and a gold medal.

While MAGA seems to have turned an American icon into the basis for a fascist fantasy, President Theodore Roosevelt, who took office in 1901 after the assassination of President William McKinley, had actually worked as a cowboy and deliberately applied what he believed to be the values of the American West to the country as a whole. He insisted that all Americans must have a “Square Deal”—the equal protection of the laws—that the government must clean up the cities, protect the environment, provide education and healthcare, and stop the wealthy from controlling the government.

And, when Roosevelt learned that American soldiers had engaged in torture in the Philippines, he deplored those acts. He promised that “determined and unswerving effort” was “being made, to find out every instance of barbarity on the part of our troops, to punish those guilty of it, and to take, if possible, even stronger measures than have already been taken to minimize or prevent the occurrence of all such acts in the future.”

—

[victusinveritas]

Advice from a friend on Facebook (The Unofficial Captain):

"Here’s words from a retired officer

Op-ed: Hold Fast: A recently retired senior naval Officer’s take on the recent turmoil in our armed forces.

I take my retired privilege again to speak out on issues that are important to me. The views expressed here are my own and increasingly do not reflect the policies of the Navy or the Department of Defense.

On Friday, two of our nation’s finest military leaders—General Charles Q. Brown and Admiral Lisa Franchetti—were summarily dismissed. These were not pencil-pushing brass; they were proven warfighters, leaders with unshakable dedication to service at the highest levels.

They were not fired because of job performance. Both had distinguished careers. Under Admiral Franchetti’s leadership, the Navy’s performance in the Red Sea proved that our surface anti-air warfare capabilities are not only effective against scores of asymmetric threats but also that our investment in surface ballistic missile defense was worth every dollar.

Some may point to mishaps under Franchetti’s tenure, but those critics ignore a glaring inconsistency: Why was the Army Chief of Staff not also dismissed, despite overseeing more mishaps with greater loss of life over the same time period? Again, the answer is simple: this was never about job performance.

We have now entered a new phase of this administration—one that prioritizes ideological purity over competence. It is a purge, a systematic effort to rid the military of those who do not fit the administration’s narrow and dangerous vision of military strength: one that is hyper-masculine, racially homogenous, and blindly obedient.

To be even more direct—General Brown was dismissed because he is Black and had the audacity to discuss how his blackness led to struggles in his life. Admiral Franchetti was dismissed because she is a woman and had the audacity to speak in support of women’s roles in the modern armed forces.

The administration’s defenders will argue these leaders were too focused on “DEI, not lethality.” Yet, they conveniently ignore that the Army and Air Force had the exact same diversity programs as the Navy. They ignore that the Army had a higher percentage of transgender service members than the Navy. They ignore that as recently as last fall, the Army Chief of Staff publicly stated, “Without diversity, a homogeneous team of soldiers would lack the resilience, perspective, and growth offered by teammates from different backgrounds.”

And yet, he remains while Franchetti is dismissed.

“But they serve at the pleasure of the President, he can decide who he wants!”, is something I’ve heard throughout. That is not what is being questioned here. Nobody denies the President has this right. The real question is, “Why does the president’s pleasure align with racism and misogyny?” Of the 8 serving joint chiefs, why were only the female and black members dismissed? Why was the female 3-star general who acts as Chief of Staff for SECDEF fired, but none of the male 3-stars? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the pattern.

Further, the firing of the top JAG officers is equally disconcerting. As the SECDEF said this morning, he fired them because he didn’t want lawyers who would “attempt to be roadblocks”. This is an abrogation of the rule of law. It is a chilling sign that controversial and possibly illegal activities are forthcoming and the administration does not want lawyers who will stand in the way of their plans

These firings mark a turning point. Loyalty is no longer measured by allegiance to the Constitution but to the administration’s ideology. Stray from it, and you risk your career—or worse. That the Administration has nominated for CJCS Air Force Lieutenant General Dan Caine, an under qualified officer in need of a waiver, undercuts the meritocracy argument. That this officer said to President Trump, in Trump’s own words, “I love you, Sir…I would kill for you…” confirms that ideological purity is our new threshold.

This is not just outrageous; it is immoral. It is un-American.

Many have chosen to resign rather than serve under these conditions. That, of course, is exactly what this administration wants—a strategic purge designed to drive out those who believe in the rule of law and replace them with those who will obey without question.

But I urge my fellow service members: Do not give them what they want.

Which brings me to the question I’ve been asked over and over: What do we do?

I have two words for you:

Hold. Fast.

Remember your oath. Remember what it means to serve this nation, not a political faction. But be smart. Protect yourselves.

How to Stay Safe While Standing Your Ground

1. Stay Under the Radar

• Avoid public criticism, especially in official channels or on social media. Assume anything you say online can and will be traced back to you. This includes Reddit. Could people diss out who you are based on what you’ve shared here?

• In public, maintain a neutral—or if necessary, mildly supportive—demeanor.

• Remove bumper stickers, yard signs, or anything that identifies your political leanings. Your spouse and family should also be cautious about social media.

2. Choose Your Allies Carefully

• There are like-minded people in the ranks, but trust must be earned. The walls have ears.

• Be discreet in conversations. Small, non-committal statements can help gauge where others stand before you reveal your own views.

3. Document and Observe

• The purge of JAG officers and Inspectors General is no coincidence; it is a deliberate attempt to remove oversight and silence whistleblowers.

• If you witness illegal actions or corruption, document everything carefully.

• If necessary, leak information to trusted external channels—investigative journalists, oversight committees, or trusted Congresspersons.

4. Stay Informed and Resilient

• Propaganda thrives in the absence of truth. Read critically and verify information.

• Maintain morale by finding purpose in small victories and supporting fellow shipmates.

• Stay physically and mentally prepared for the challenges ahead.

The Line That Must Never Be Crossed

I remain hopeful that we will never reach the point where service members are ordered to carry out unlawful or immoral directives. I pray that our leadership will intervene before that line is crossed.

But history has shown that hope alone is not enough. If that day ever comes, we will need men and women in uniform who stand for the rule of law, not the rule of fear.

To them, I say again: Hold fast."

[darkeagleruins]

Why is Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Victoria Nuland (I thought she retired) and on Secure Unified Communications/Video, General Charles Q. Brown Jr., USAF, having an emergency meeting to discuss Ukraine and Russia at Michelle’s War Room, down the street from the Alzheimer’s Retirement Home aka the White House?

And is secretary of defense Austin MIA again?

Michelle Obama’s War Room: 2446 Belmont Rd NW, Washington, DC 20008.

[usafphantom2]

PHOTOS: USAF F-15E jets return home from the Middle East with "kill marks" and "nose arts"

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 05/11/2024 - 12:26 in Military, War Zones

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A few weeks after shooting down a swarm of Iranian drones during the defense of Israel, the 494º U.S. Air Force Fighter Squadron is back at the RAF Base of Lakenheath, in the United Kingdom, sporting a new and intriguing painting.

Photos publicly released by the U.S. Air Force show the F-15E Strike Eagles returning to their home in the 48ª Fighter Wing with vivid art on their nose, as well as missile markings and bombs alluding to their exploits in the region.

Photos of an F-15E nicknamed "Hellcat" show the aircraft painted with more than two dozen bomb marks, suggesting that he launched a large amount of ammunition. The plane was also decorated with nine red missiles, indicating numerous air-to-air combat. An F-15 called "RAWR" boasts more than a dozen missile and bomb marks. Another jet, "El Jefe", carries multiple bomb marks and a missile mark. The "Mullet" carries nine missile markings and numerous bomb markings. Yet another F-15 has nine missile markings and five bomb markings. These are just some of the F-15s that have recently returned to their base.

Photos released by the Air Force show that the first jets arrived on May 8, and a spokesman for the Air Forces Central (AFCENT) confirmed on May 10 that the 494º Fighter Squadron had returned to the RAF Base of Lakenheath.

Violence in the Middle East increased after Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7 and Israel's subsequent military operation against the group in Gaza, causing unrest throughout the region.

In February, the U.S. conducted airstrikes against targets in Iraq and Syria in response to more than 170 attacks on U.S. troops and recently helped Israel defend itself from a massive drone and missile attack from Iran.

In April, U.S. Air Force aircraft shot down more than 70 drones that Iran launched against Israel on the night of April 13 and in the early morning hours of April 14. These planes included F-15Es of the 494º Fighter Squadron and the 335º Seymour-Johnson Air Base Fighter Squadron, North Carolina, as well as American F-16s.

"I am very confident and proud of our joint strength and what they were able to do with our allies and partners," said Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q. Brown Jr., to reporters on April 26.

The 494º Fighter Squadron first arrived at CENTCOM in October, a few days after the Hamas attack. More F-15E were rushed to the region on April 12, just one day before Iran's attack.

"One of the fighter squadrons appeared, like, the day before, and was right in the middle of the flight, and that says something about our level of training, our level of capacity," Brown said.

The 335º Seymour-Johnson Fighter Squadron is now the only F-15E squadron in the region, deployed in the Middle East along with the F-16 and A-10. The A-10s of the 104º Maryland National Guard Fighter Squadron and Seymour-Johnson's F-15E recently completed a three-week Desert Flag exercise.

"Maintaining multi-capable and ready teams is essential to fulfill the mission," said AFCENT commander, Lieutenant General Derek C. France, in a statement of May 9 reflecting on his first month in charge. "I was impressed by the level of dedication of AFCENT's aviators. They have been operating beyond my expectations and I am extremely proud to be part of this team."

Tags: Military AviationF-15E Strike EagleUSAF - United States Air Force / U.S. Air ForceWar Zones - Middle East

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Fernando Valduga

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, he has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Dayton Airshow and FIDAE. He has works published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. He uses Canon equipment during his photographic work in the world of aviation.

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[darkmaga-returns]

Pentagon prepares for a reshuffle after President-elect Donald Trump enters the White House, as he stated to get rid of "wokeness" in the ranks of US Department of Defense officials.

The US Department of Defense is bracing itself for a scenario of its ranks being purged when President-elect Donald Trump enters the White House, unnamed current and former officials told Reuters.

They claimed that Trump’s second term will see him prioritize loyalty and fire the Pentagon’s high-ranking military officers and career civil servants he regards as disloyal. In particular, the President-elect could target the current and former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown and Mark Milley, respectively, perceived by Trump as “woke” generals.

One US military official, however, played down concerns over high-level firings among the armed forces, arguing in an interview with Reuters that the firing-induced chaos within the US military's chain of command would create political backlash and be unnecessary for Trump to achieve his goals.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern?:

President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk justify dismantling the civil service as cost cutting. The federal government has “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse,” Trump claimed earlier this month, and Musk has complained about a “staggering amount of waste of taxpayer money.” Their actions—a barrage of executive orders, memos, layoffs, and attempts to unilaterally eliminate entire agencies—have sparked outrage, but Musk sees that only as proof of their achievements: “They wouldn’t be complaining so much if we weren’t doing something useful.” To start, let’s dispense with the notion that the government is too big. It is not. As a share of the workforce, federal employment has declined in the past several decades. Civilian employees represent about 1.5 percent of the population and account for less than 7 percent of total government spending. According to the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, seven out of 10 civilian employees work in organizations that deal with national security, including departments—such as Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security—that the public supports. The reality is that the federal government has long faced a human-capital crisis. Since 2001, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has classified human-capital management—the number of people who are successfully recruited to fill skilled positions—as an area of “high risk” for the federal government. The workforce is older than the private sector, and the federal government already has a hard time hiring people. The Trump administration has created a toxic work environment. I’ve spent 25 years studying public administration and have never seen anything like the deep sense of dread that federal employees are now experiencing. I spoke with workers who feared reprisal if their names were published. One told me that there’s an “eerie” mood in the Census Bureau office: “No one can openly discuss anything.” Another civil servant said that people who’ve worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for decades are afraid and “can’t believe what’s happening.” [...] Back in December I wrote about the the possibility that Trump would pursue and unprecedented politicization of the military by purging its senior officers. Well, it happened. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown Jr, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the who lead the Navy; and Gen. James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force, were all pushed out. Some takeaways.

Three senior officers were let go. The two most senior were a Black man and White woman. This reflects an ethos among the Trump administration that DEI is not just training programs, but the presence of non-White males in senior positions. Brown is being replaced by a three star general, who may need a Congressional waiver because he lacks sufficient experience as a commander. It reflects a pattern of less experienced and qualified White men replacing Black men: Hegseth replacing Lyold Austen, and Trump replacing Obama.

The other three who were removed were lawyers, the Judge Advocates General for the Army, Navy and Air Force. Why them? They are not involved in any conflicts. Why are they as important as the Joints Chief of Staff? The answer is that this is part of a broader pattern where Trump has been targeting General Counsels and other lawyers across government. It has long been part of his second-term strategy for governing.Having loyalist lawyers in place will make it much harder for military officers to resist Trump’s orders. Hegseth has been critical of military lawyers constraining officers in the field. In practical terms, this might result in a legal blessing and greater practice of what is commonly regarded as war crimes. Hegseth’s selection for Secretary of Defense came after he lobbied Trump to pardon convicted war criminals. Now it is simply less likely they would be prosecuted. Military loyalist lawyers can also greenlight the use of military as a domestic police force, by invoking the Insurrection Act.

Authoritarians focus on controlling the bureaucracy, but especially the legal system and national security system. Whatever else Hegseth says about readiness or DEI, Trump’s military purges are about control. This may be only the start of a series of actions to build an American military centered on loyalty to Trump.

…and Complacent Judges

At this point, we are putting a great deal of hope in the judicial branch. A good measure is how many judges put emergency injunctions in place to stop harm from occurring before they rule on the legality of the actions. We are seeing such orders. On the other hand, we are also seeing judges allowing the Trump administration to move forward based on the faulty assumption that they are operating under normal conditions.

Don Moynihan wrote over the weekend about the unfolding Trump/Musk coup, targeting the military and civil service.

[quovadisamerica]

Allen West

For all the leftists and politicized military pundits lamenting the dismissal of General Charles Q. Brown, where was your wailing about national security when Barack Hussein Obama fired nearly 200 Generals in five years? General Brown was released because he felt it more important to delve into matters of social justice than national security. He also commented that he preferred only a certain % of pilots be white in the Air Force. He was an acolyte of cultural Marxist philosophy known as DEI/CRT. And for you chuckleheads, General Pete Schoomaker was recalled from retirement, promoted from LTG to Four Star General, and became the 35th Chief of Staff of the Army. Memo to progressive socialists, y’all lost and Major Generals and above are political appointees and serve at the behest of the Commander in Chief. And Article II of the Constitution designates that person as the President of the United States. So have a nice hot cup of Shut the Hell Up because no one cares about your unrighteous indignation and laughable hypocrisy.

[mitchipedia]

News that got my attention today

Trump dismissed four-star Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the joint chiefs of staff, a fighter pilot, and replaced him with a retired white three-star general loyal to Trump, passing over the usual chain of command. The chief of staff traditionally spans administrations. The change included a purge of six Pentagon officials, including a woman, and furthers the Republican white supremacist, anti-women, sexist, authoritarian agenda.

Protesters confronted California Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones, of Santee, Calif., who is pandering to white supremacy and xenophobia by restricting California’s so-called “sanctuary city” law.

School shooter Brenda Spencer, 62, was denied parole for the sixth time. She opened fire on a San Diego elementary school in 1979, killing two and injuring nine others, and later explained her reason: “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.” The shooting became the inspiration for a song, “I Don’t Like Mondays," by the Boomtown Rats, an Irish band, written by Bob Geldof and Johnnie Fingers. It is a lovely piano ballad. The video is a perfect capsule of cheap, cheesy 1979 music videos. Geldof later said he regretted writing the song because it made Spencer famous.

Also:

An 87-year-old widower went viral for hand-delivering party invitations door to door that read “4 pm unitl the cops arrive.”

A 94-year-old woman reunited with a toddler she saved from drowing 64 years ago. He’s now 66 years old.

Authorities seized 303 cocaine-filled ceramic bananas.

9.3% of US adults identified as LGBTQ+ last year, up from 7.6% in 20230. This is the kind of thing that means TRUMP-DOGEism will have a short shelf-life. Trump came into office with the slimmest of margins; only about a third of eligible voters supported him. Those LGBTQ+ people make up a big part of the population, and they have plenty of friends, families and allies in the cisgender-heterosexual community (like me). Trump-DOGEism will continue to lose popularity as their stupid and dangerous policies harm more and more people.

Additional source: 1440

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

SEP 22, 2023

The Senate has confirmed three top defense leaders. Last night it confirmed Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr. to replace Army General Mark A. Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he retires at the end of the month. Today, it confirmed General Randy A. George as Army chief of staff and General Eric M. Smith as Marine Corps commandant.

The Senate filled the positions at the top of our military by working around the hold extremist senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) has put on more than 300 military promotions, allegedly because he objects to the government’s policy of providing leave and travel allowance for service members who have to travel to obtain abortions. 

Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post focused on the House Republicans today, though, when she wrote: “The GOP completely gone off its rocker—incapable of passing House spending, ranting and raving at AG, cooking up ludicrous and baseless impeachment, unable to greet Zelensky with joint session. This is not normal. This is egregious. You'd think the reporting would reflect it.”

Indeed, the House Republicans remain unable even to agree to talk about funding the government, let alone actually passing the appropriations bills Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) agreed to four months ago. Today, right-wing extremists in the House blocked a procedural vote over a Pentagon funding bill, keeping what is normally an easily passed bipartisan bill from even reaching the floor for debate. McCarthy acknowledged to reporters that he is frustrated. “This is a whole new concept of individuals who just want to burn the whole place down. It doesn’t work.”

The extremists do indeed appear unconcerned about the effects of their refusal to fund the government, and since they have the five or six votes they need to sink the measures McCarthy wants to pass with only Republican votes, this handful of representatives are the ones deciding whether the government will shut down. 

McCarthy could pass clean funding bills through the House whenever he wishes, but he refuses. To do so would mean working with Democrats, and that would spark a vote to throw him out of the speakership. And so, rather than keep the members in Washington, D.C., to work on the appropriations bills over the weekend, McCarthy recognized he did not have the votes he needs and sent them home.

The extremists are bolstered by former president Donald Trump, who posted on his social media platform today that the Republicans in Congress “can and must defund all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Government…. This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots. They failed on the debt limit, but they must not fail now. Use the power of the purse and defend the Country!” 

Experts say shutting down the government would not, in fact, end the former president’s legal troubles, but he is actually doing more than that here: he is trying to assert dominance over the country. As Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) said: “Let’s be clear about what the former president is saying here. House Republicans should shut down the government unless the prosecutions against him are shut down. He would deny paychecks to millions of working families & devastate the US economy, all in the service of himself.”

Extremist leader Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) responded to Trump’s statement with his own: “Trump Opposes the Continuing Resolution” to fund the government,” he wrote. “Hold the line.” Ron Filipkowski of MeidasTouch noted: “House Republicans refuse to fund the government to protect Donald Trump.” 

Trump’s accusation that President Biden is weaponizing the Justice Department against him and others who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election is the opposite of what has really happened. Not only has Biden stayed scrupulously out of the Justice Department’s business—leaving in place the Trump-appointed leader of the investigation into Biden’s son Hunter, for example—but also we received more proof yesterday that it was Trump, not Biden, who weaponized the Justice Department against his enemies. 

Nora Dennehy, who abruptly resigned from former special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, explained in her confirmation hearing to Connecticut’s state supreme court yesterday that she quit because Trump’s Department of Justice was tainted by politics. Before joining the probe, she said, “I had been taught and spent my entire career at [the] Department of Justice conducting any investigation in an objective and apolitical manner.” 

But Trump and his loyalists expected Durham’s investigation to prove that there was a “deep state” conspiracy against him, and then–attorney general William Barr seemed to be working to support that fantasy, even though there was no evidence of it (as shown by the fact the investigation ultimately fizzled). Barr was, she thought, violating DOJ guidelines in his public comments about the investigation and in his consideration of releasing an interim report before the 2020 election.

“I simply couldn’t be part of it,” Dannehy said. “So I resigned.”

The resistance of the extremists to McCarthy’s leadership is spilling over into foreign affairs as well. Today, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky was in Washington, D.C., where he met with President Biden at the White House and with leaders at the Pentagon, and spoke to a closed-door session for the Senate. But he did not speak to the House of Representatives. While McCarthy met with him privately, the speaker maintained that “we just didn’t have time” for him to address the House. 

As part of their demands, House extremists want to cut funding for Ukraine’s defense. This would, of course, work to strengthen Russian president Vladimir Putin’s hand in his war against Ukraine. Earlier this month, former Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan told MSNBC that it is “absolutely essential” to Putin that Trump win back the White House in 2024. “I think it is Putin's main lifeline in order to find some way to salvage what has been a debacle in Ukraine for him," Brennan said. "If Trump is able to return to the White House...Putin could have a like-minded individual that he can work with, detrimental to U.S. interests certainly and detrimental to Western interests overall.” The intelligence community assesses that Putin worked to help Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections, and is pushing pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine propaganda now.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III assured Zelensky that the U.S. will continue to support Ukraine and work with allies and partners to make sure it has the weapons it needs. Lara Seligman of Politico reported today that the Pentagon will continue to fund Ukraine operations even if there is a government shutdown. Military activities deemed crucial to national security can be exempted from being shuttered during a government shutdown.

And finally, 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch announced today that he will be stepping down as chair of his media empire, including both Fox Corporation, which includes the Fox News Channel (FNC), and News Corporation, which owns the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, among other newspapers. In 1996 the Australian-born mogul launched the Fox News Channel with media specialist Roger Ailes, who had packaged Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon in 1968 by presenting him to audiences in highly scripted television appearances. 

The Fox News Channel initially presented news from a conservative viewpoint, but over time its opinion shows, delivered as if they were news, came to dominate the channel. Those shows presented a simple narrative in which Americans—overwhelmingly white and rural—wanted the government to leave them alone but “socialists” who wanted social welfare programs demanded their tax dollars. Isolated in the fantasy world of FNC, its viewers became such fanatic adherents to right-wing politics that FNC wholeheartedly trumpeted Trump’s Big Lie after he lost the 2020 presidential election because viewers turned away from FNC when some of its personalities acknowledged that Biden had won..

Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, said today that “Murdoch created a uniquely destructive force in American democracy and public life, one that ushered in an era of division where racist and post-truth politics thrive.”  Margaret Sullivan, formerly the Washington Post’s media critic, wrote in The Guardian that FNC was “a shameless propaganda outfit, reaping massive profits even as it attacked core democratic values such as tolerance, truth and fair elections.” Murdoch, she wrote, wreaked “untold havoc on American democracy.”

Murdoch sees it differently. In his resignation letter, he attacked “bureaucracies” who wanted to “silence those who would question their provenance and purpose” and “elites” who “have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class.” “Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth,” he wrote. 

Forbes estimates that their media empire has enabled Murdoch and his family to amass a fortune of more than $17 billion.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[magustiel]

Biden did not actually call the strike.

Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Victoria Nuland (I bet you thought she retired) Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, General Charles Q. Brown Jr., USAF, and also present were C-suite executives from BlackRock, Blackstone, State Street, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE, United Technologies, L-3 Communications, all having an emergency post-election meeting at the Obama’s War Room, down the street from the White House.

2446 Belmont Rd NW, Washington, DC 20008

Lockheed Martin and BlackRock were definitely the alphas in the room. Two unidentified gentleman calling in from Switzerland were keeping the meeting on task.

[yourreddancer]

Heather Cox Richardson

February 22, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 23

Last night’s Friday Night News Dump was a doozy: Trump has purged the country’s military leadership. He has fired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown, who Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested got the job only because he is Black, and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who was the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and whom Hegseth called a “DEI hire.” As soon as he took office, Trump fired U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Lee Fagan, giving her just three hours to vacate her home on base. Last night, Trump also fired the Air Force vice chief of staff, General James Slife.

In place of Brown, Trump has said he will nominate Air Force Lieutenant General John Dan Caine, who goes by the nickname “Razin”—as in “Razin Caine”—to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Joint Chiefs of Staff is the body of the eight most senior uniformed leaders within the United States Department of Defense. It advises the president, the secretary of defense, the Homeland Security Council and the National Security Council on military matters.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the highest-ranking and most senior military officer in the United States Armed Forces and is the principal military advisor to the president, the National Security Council, the Homeland Security Council, and the secretary of defense.

Caine has held none of the assignments that are required for elevation to this position. His military biography says he was a career F-16 pilot who served on active duty and in the National Guard. Before he retired, he was the associate director for military affairs at the CIA. The law prohibits the elevation of someone at his level to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unless the president waives the law because “such action is necessary in the national interest.”

Marshall notes that Trump is “reaching far down the pecking order to someone who isn’t even on active duty in the military for the critical position not only as the chief military advisor to the President…but the key person at the contact point of civilian control over the military.” In Trump’s telling, his support for Caine comes from the military officer’s support for him. “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir,” Trump claims Caine said to him. Trump went on to claim that Caine put on a Make America Great Again hat, despite rules against political messaging on the clothing of active-duty troops.

Trump appears to be purging military officers with the intent of replacing them with loyalists while intimidating others to bow to his demands. It seems worth recalling here that Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) stalled the nominations of 451 senior military officers for close to a year in 2023. On February 10, Trump purged the advisory bodies of the military academies for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard, saying: “Our Service Academies have been infiltrated by Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years…. We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards. We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!”

The purge of military leaders wasn’t the only news last night. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth indicated he intends to fire the judge advocates general, or JAGs—the military lawyers who administer the military code of justice—for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. “Among many other things it’s the military lawyers who determine what is a legal order and what’s not,” Talking Points Memo’s Marshall pointed out. “If you’re planning to give illegal orders they are an obvious obstacle.” “Now that Trump has captured the intelligence services, the Justice Department, and the FBI,” military specialist Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, “the military is the last piece he needs to establish the foundations for authoritarian control of the U.S. government.”

National Security Leaders for America, a bipartisan organization of people who served in senior leadership positions in all six military branches, elected federal and state offices, and various government departments and agencies, strongly condemned the firings, and urged “policymakers, elected officials, and the American public to reject efforts to politicize our military.”

Observers point out how the purging of an independent, rules-based military in favor of a military loyal to a single leader is a crystal clear step toward authoritarianism. They note that Trump expressed frustration with military leaders during his first term when they resisted illegal orders, saying, as then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley did, that in America “[w]e don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator…. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”

Observers note that during his first term, Trump said he wanted “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” apparently unaware that Hitler’s generals tried to kill him and instead imagining they were all fiercely loyal. They also note that authoritarian leader Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union purged his officer corps to make sure it was commanded by those loyal to him.

While the pattern is universal, this is a homegrown version of that universal pattern.

In order to undermine the liberal consensus that supported government regulation of business, provision of a basic social safety net, promotion of infrastructure, and protection of civil rights, reactionaries in the 1950s began to insist that such a government was socialism. A true American, they claimed, was an individual man who wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to provide for himself and his family.

In contrast to what they believed was the “socialism” of the government, they took as their symbol the mythologized version of the western American cowboy. In the mid-1950s, Americans tuned in to Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza, Wagon Train, and The Lone Ranger to see hardworking white men fighting off evil, seemingly without help from the government. In 1959 there were twenty-six westerns on TV, and in a single week in March 1959, eight of the top shows were westerns.

When Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, in his white cowboy hat, won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, the cowboy image became entwined with the reactionary faction in the party, and Ronald Reagan quite deliberately nurtured that image. Under Reagan, Republicans emphasized that an individual man should run his life however he wished, had a right to use a gun to defend his way of life, and that his way of life was under attack by Black Americans, people of color, and women.

It was an image that fit well with American popular culture, but their cowboy was always a myth: it didn’t reflect the reality that one third of cowboys were Black or men of color, or that cowboys were low-wage workers whose lives mirrored those of eastern factory workers. The real West was a network of family ties and communities, where women won the right to vote significantly before eastern women did, in large part because of their importance to the economy and the education that western people prized.

In the 1990s that individualist cowboy image spurred the militia movement, and over the past forty years it has become tightly bound to the reactionary Republican project to get rid of the government Americans constructed after 1933 to serve the public good. Now it is driving both the purge of women, people of color, and Black Americans from public life and the growing idea that leadership means domination. Trump and Hegseth’s concept of “warfighters” in an American military that doesn’t answer to the law but simply asserts power is the American cowboy hideously warped into fascism.

In a press conference in Brussels, Belgium, on February 13, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters: “We can talk all we want about values. Values are important. But you can't shoot values. You can't shoot flags and you can't shoot strong speeches. There is no replacement for hard power. As much as we may not want to like the world we live in, in some cases, there's nothing like hard power.”

That statement came after a troubling exchange between Hegseth and Senator Angus King (I-ME) during Hegseth’s nomination hearings. King noted that in one of his books, Hegseth had said that soldiers—he referred to them as “our boys”—"should not fight by rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms 80 years ago." King noted that Hegseth was referring to “the Geneva Conventions,” a set of international rules that try to contain the barbarity of war and outlawed torture, and he wanted Hegseth to explain what he meant when he wrote: "America should fight by its own rules, and we should fight to win or not go in at all."

Hegseth explained that “there are the rules we swear an oath to defend, which are incredibly important, and…then there are those echelons above reality from, you know, corps to division to brigade, to battalion. And by the time it trickles down to a company or a platoon or a squad level, you have a rules of engagement that nobody recognizes.” “So you are saying that the Geneva Convention should not be observed?” King asked. “We follow rules,” Hegseth said. “But we don't need burdensome rules of engagement that make it impossible for us to win these wars. And that's what President Trump understands.”

Hegseth refused to say he would abide by the Geneva Conventions. He refused to condemn torture.

This idea that modern warfare requires torture shines a harsh light on Trump’s January 29 order to the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare a 30,000-bed detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to detain migrants Trump called "the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.” Rather than simply deporting them, he said, “Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't want them coming back, so we're going to send them out to Guantanamo.”

Now it appears the White House is moving even beyond turning the military into cowboys with unlimited powers. On Thursday the White House posted on X a 40-second video that purported to be of migrants, in shackles and chains, faceless as the chains clank, with the caption “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” As Andrew Egger explained in The Bulwark, ASMR videos use video cues to create feelings of relaxation and euphoria, or “tingles.”

No longer is the cruelty of utter domination a necessity for safety, it appears. Now it is a form of sensual pleasure for its own sake. As Jeff Sharlet wrote in Scenes from a Slow Civil War: “Listen to this, the White House is saying. This will make you feel good.” It is, he points out, “a bondage video” in which “[t]he sound of other people’s pain is the intended pleasure.”

Elon Musk posted over the video: “Haha wow,” with an emoji of a troll and a gold medal.

While MAGA seems to have turned an American icon into the basis for a fascist fantasy, President Theodore Roosevelt, who took office in 1901 after the assassination of President William McKinley, had actually worked as a cowboy and deliberately applied what he believed to be the values of the American West to the country as a whole. He insisted that all Americans must have a “Square Deal”—the equal protection of the laws—that the government must clean up the cities, protect the environment, provide education and healthcare, and stop the wealthy from controlling the government.

And, when Roosevelt learned that American soldiers had engaged in torture in the Philippines, he deplored those acts. He promised that “determined and unswerving effort” was “being made, to find out every instance of barbarity on the part of our troops, to punish those guilty of it, and to take, if possible, even stronger measures than have already been taken to minimize or prevent the occurrence of all such acts in the future.”

—