The end of an empire does not come suddenly in a thunderclap.  No.  Empires fall by degrees both internally and externally concurrently as internal failures lead to the failing empire being abandoned by its former allies and challenged by its enemies.  And that, folks, is where the US empire stands today – we are a failed empire that is collapsing – collapsing slowly but surely collapsing.

America remains an economic superpower with an enormous military budget. And the combination of a supine Republican Party, along with a Supreme Court that shamelessly greenlights Trump’s authoritarianism, has given this president more control over U.S. policy than any president has ever had, or ever should have. But while Trump is able to run roughshod over Americans, he can no longer bully the rest of the world. Thanks to Trump, the U.S. has seen its global influence plunge.

There are three big reasons for that precipitous decline.

First, there is the debacle in Iran. Not only did Trump’s war of choice fail in all its objectives, it revealed that U.S. military power is far more limited than almost anyone realized. The insistence by Trump and his lackeys that this humiliating defeat was a great victory shows that American foreign policy only serves to pander to Trump’s fragile ego. And when his ego meets reality, it slithers away.

In addition to showing the limits of U.S. military power, the war also showed the limits of U.S. financial power: It is increasingly easy for nations to bypass U.S. banks and the dollar using cryptocurrency — and Chinese yuan.

A second, in its way equally important, blow to U.S. prestige and influence has been Trump’s failure to deliver Ukraine to Vladimir Putin – as Trump promised Putin he would do.

For make no mistake: everyone at that summit in Ankara knows that Trump, JD Vance and company both expected and hoped that their betrayal of Ukraine would lead to Russian victory. Surely, they imagined, Ukraine would be unable to hold off the onslaught from its much bigger neighbor without U.S. aid. To America’s everlasting shame, Trump told Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he didn’t “have the cards.”

Yet after Trump cut U.S. aid to Ukraine by 99 percent, Ukraine not only survived but began gaining the upper hand. Europe has stepped up financially, more or less replacing the lost American dollars. And Ukrainian military innovation has largely made up for the loss of American weapons.

The result has been to make the U.S. increasingly irrelevant. Put it this way: Iran taught foreign governments not to fear American might; China, along with the crypto industry, has taught rogue countries that they needn’t fear American financial control; and Ukraine has taught foreign governments that they don’t need American support.

Finally, Trump’s global power play rested on economics even more than on military force, above all on his belief that other nations would cower in fear at the prospect of facing U.S. tariffs. But Trump’s attempt to weaponize international trade has been a bust. Most notably, China’s economy has powered right through the Trump tariffs. Furthermore, it turns out that China has escalation dominance in the trade war: we need their rare earths more than they need access to our consumers.

And other nations — even Canada and Mexico, which have historically been highly dependent on the U.S. market — are moving to reduce their dependence. Canada’s move to build a new pipeline that will let it sell Alberta oil to Asia rather than the Midwest is just a highly visible symbol of a general world move toward bypassing America now that we have become an unstable, unreliable economic partner.

These photos were made mid-morning July 4 in a Washington DC Metro car approaching Union Station.  The young woman in the center is surrounded by young white men, all dressed alike, all with their faces covered.

These worthless fools are members of the “Patriot Front.”  About 250 of them assembled at Union Station, then marched around downtown DC neighborhoods carrying Confederate flags and calling for “reclaiming the country and getting rid of immigrants.”

The “Patriot Front” is a white supremacist organization founded in 2017 after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.  The group promotes the idea of that the United States is a country intended for white Christians only — same as the Ku Klux Klan.

These young men are, to a person, fools, assholes, cowards, and losers.  But Trump and Trump supporters just love them.  Birds of a feather flock together.

Here they are in action.

A group of masked men gathered at Union Station today and called for reclaiming the country and getting rid of immigrants. Some held Confederate flags. They have been marching across Capitol Hill. pic.twitter.com/xTfaoJDHOO

— Mitchell Miller (@mmillerwtop) July 4, 2026

Kids Chant ‘Take Him Out! Blow Him Up!’ In Mock Firing Squad

You can see the pastor leading the chant during the mock execution … and kids giggle and laugh while the mock firing squad victim gets dragged offstage and outside.

Once the men are outside, the pastor stands by the door and leads the kids through a count … and then they hear a pop from outside, causing the kids to scream.

Even though it’s not real, it’s still tough to watch.

Pastor Dewayne Walker went on the church’s Facebook page and responded to the backlash, saying the clip depicts “commandos for Christ” killing the Devil with “the gospel gun.”

For the sketch, Walker says they used air rifles, which are “basically paintball guns.” He says the skit is designed to “make church a fun place, a happy place” while teaching kids to love each other and hate Satan.

Rob Wittman portrays himself as an expert on the Chesapeake Bay. He earned a Ph.D. and reportedly wrote a 532-page dissertation on what makes shellfish programs work. His own son is a waterman who works in the Bay. Wittman grew up in the Chesapeake watershed, and has built nearly two decades of campaign branding around being the Bay’s man in Washington.So why has Rob Wittman never once promised to do anything for the people who make their living on the Bay? Since his first campaign in 2007, Wittman’s campaign platforms have never mentioned our watermen, oyster growers, crabbers, aquaculture farmers, processors, or seafood houses. We read every Bay-related pledge he’s ever published and the words “waterman,” “oyster,” “crab,” “aquaculture,” “menhaden,” and “seafood industry” appear a combined ZERO times. The man whose son works on the water campaigned, cycle after cycle, as if the people who make their living on the Bay don’t exist.

Campaign promises aside, what has Wittman attempted or delivered for the health of the Bay and the livelihood of the people who work there? Nothing.

But one metric stands out: after Wittman’s 19 years in office, the Bay’s health is worse than before he started.

His recreation over our livelihoods

Virginia’s seafood industry delivers a $1.1 billion boost to the state economy, supports more than 7,100 jobs, and generates over $168 million in labor income. Virginia ranks number one on the East Coast for oyster production and first on the Atlantic Coast for seafood landings, with landings worth more than $200 million in 2020. Roughly 6,000 Virginians work on the water, including some 2,866 licensed watermen – including Wittman’s own son.

A huge share of that economy lives in VA-01. The Northern Neck, the Middle Peninsula, the rivers feeding the Bay — these are Wittman’s district. When he talks, as he so often does, about the Bay as an “economic driver,” he is describing the work of people to whom he has never shown support.

Compare that silence to what he does promise. His platforms find room for the recreational version of the Bay — for “hunting, fishing, and enjoying the natural beauty” (his own hobby, evidenced by the dead fish that adorn his DC office’s walls), for “tourists, sportsmen and women, and conservationists.” The Bay as a place to play, yes. The Bay as a place to work? Not a word.

The fight in his own backyard

Want to see what that silence costs? Look at Reedville, on the far tip of the Northern Neck — squarely in VA-01.

Reedville is home to Omega Protein, now a subsidiary of the Canadian conglomerate Cooke Inc., which runs the East Coast’s last industrial menhaden “reduction” fishery — grinding the small, ecologically critical fish into meal and oil. For years this has been the single most explosive Bay-industry fight in Virginia. One one side: jobs in a rural town. On the other side: the Bay’s small-scale watermen, along with the health of the Bay’s food web, including striped bass and ospreys.

Experts who monitor the health of the Bay are sounding alarms. Menhaden (the fish the small independent watermen rely on) are part of a food pyramid that, because of overfishing, may be collapsing. Virginia’s reported menhaden bait harvest collapsed from 5.4 million pounds in 2019 to under 1 million in 2024, even as the industrial reduction fleet kept pulling out over 100 million pounds a year. An overwhelming 92 percent of Virginia voters, across both parties, want more menhaden left in the Bay. Studies are urgently needed to examine exactly what’s happening to the menhaden population. Livelihoods are at stake.

This is happening in Wittman’s district, to his constituents, over a fish that sits at the center of the Bay’s food web. The congressman wrote a shellfish dissertation and has a waterman son, but his platforms are strangely silent on the issue. You will not find menhaden, Omega Protein, Reedville, or the reduction fishery anywhere in 19 years of his stated Bay agenda.

Wittman’s silence is a choice. And it is a choice that leaves both the workers and the Bay without their most credentialed and potentially most powerful advocate.

One law, zero reduction in pollution

So what did Wittman promise on the Bay — and did he deliver it?

For fifteen years, essentially his entire Bay platform has rested on a single piece of legislation: the Chesapeake Bay Accountability and Recovery Act. He first introduced a version in 2009, and a companion bill finally became law in December 2014, passing the House 416–0. We must give credit where it is due; that is a real, bipartisan law with Wittman’s name on it, and passing anything 416–0 in Washington is no small thing.

But read the fine print his own press shop will never highlight. CBARA is a budget-transparency measure. It requires the federal government to publish a “crosscut budget” tracking Bay spending across agencies, and it created an Independent Evaluator to report to Congress. That is all it does. It does not reduce a single pound of nitrogen. It does not cap a single ton of phosphorus. It does not plant one oyster or restore one acre of grass. It is accountability about the funding of the cleanup — not the cleanup itself.

For 19 years, “I cleaned up the Bay” has been the implied promise of the legislation he supported. The real deliverable was a spreadsheet.

The scorecard he doesn’t want you to read

As for the Bay itself: here is where the gap between the branding and the reality becomes impossible to ignore.

In June 2025, the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science graded the Chesapeake Bay a “C” (50 percent), down from a C+ the year before. Eleven of 15 monitored regions showed declining water quality.

Worse still, 2025 was the deadline (established back in 2010) by which the Bay states were supposed to have their pollution cleaned up. But they blew it, for the THIRD time. Reductions in nitrogen — the pollutant that matters most — reached just 59 percent of the target. In December 2025, regional leaders quietly punted the finish line to 2040.

We should note two things. First, the long-term trend on nitrogen pollution is gently upward, thanks largely to wastewater-plant upgrades and climate change (which, incidentally, Wittman has studiously avoided talking about while also consistently supporting fossil fuel providers). Second, no single member of Congress controls a six-state, 1,000-locality cleanup.

But “the Bay is improving slowly and has missed every deadline” is not what the “CHAMPION OF THE CHESAPEAKE” was supposed to deliver over his 19 years in office. Wittman has been in office for the entire arc of the 2010 cleanup plan, from launch to failure. The health of the Bay he was elected to save has worsened.

What’s more, Wittman voted for measures that have created the Bay’s worsening conditions. Agricultural runoff is the single largest source of nutrient and sediment pollution entering the Chesapeake Bay. The Inflation Reduction Act (H. R. 5376) of 2022 included funds to help farmers mitigate the runoff of nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment. This is important: for example, nitrogen is the pollutant most responsible for the Bay’s core ailment. Excess nitrogen feeds the algae blooms that decompose and create the low-oxygen “dead zones” that kill fish, crabs, and underwater grasses. Controlling that will help the Bay recover. Wittman voted against it.

The bill passed anyway (thanks to a Democratic Party majority) and was signed into law, and conservation funding began reaching farmers in 2023, with Bay-watershed states like Virginia among the beneficiaries. Then, in July 2025, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (H. R. 1) that Wittman supported rescinded remaining funds, folded a reduced amount into the USDA budget, and dropped the climate and nutrient-reduction targeting language entirely.

So here’s the short story: Wittman voted against conservation funding for the Bay in 2023; it passed anyway thanks to the Democratic majority in the House; and three years later Wittman voted to cut the remaining funds and remove conservation provisions completely.

Rob Wittman worked to remove conservation funding for the Bay, and succeeded.

He cares more about your vote than the Bay

The Bay’s health is under further threat, and Wittman is at the center of it. The Trump administration is considering opening up waters on Virginia’s coast for commercial seabed mining, to include 2,500 square miles just north of the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The proposed operations would churn up the seabed to extract minerals, with impacts to: commercial fisheries and the coastal economy (fish, crab, oyster, clam, and scallop populations); wildlife and their habitats (dolphins, sea turtles, migratory whales, shellfish); coastal resilience and shoreline stability (including storm surges and coastal erosion); and military and space operations (submarines, space flight launches).

In December 2023, Wittman sent a letter to DOD promoting the expansion of deep-sea mining which, he said, would help the US obtain minerals for which we would otherwise be reliant on China. The letter was co-signed by 31 Republican members of Congress. This was not a bipartisan effort or anything approaching a broad consensus; Republican members of Congress, Secretary Howard Lutnick, and others are pushing to allow deep-sea mining, under the pretense of “national security” and certainly to support private profit from our limited, fragile natural resources. And Rob Wittman is at the vanguard of that effort.

So ask yourself this: if Wittman was truly concerned about the health of the Bay, the livelihoods of those who make their living from it, or the wildlife that relies upon it, would he proudly lead a partisan effort to open the Bay up to deep-sea mining operations that will inevitably damage the critical natural resource that so many in our district rely upon? Would he vote against conservation funding for the Bay, twice?

No, he would not. For Rob Wittman, the Bay is simply another lever he can pull to feign effectiveness and win your vote. He may say he cares about the Bay, but his actions show otherwise.

Where he showed up, and where he didn’t

To be clear about his record: Wittman has defended Bay funding. When President Trump tried to zero out the EPA Chesapeake Bay Program in 2017 and again in 2025, the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Task Force co-chairs — Wittman, Bobby Scott (D, VA-03), Sarah Elfreth (D, MD-03), and Andy Harris (R, MD-01) — pushed back, helping to secure $93 million for the program in the 2026 budget.

But defending the budget of a program that is missing its targets is not the same as restoring the Bay. And keeping the lights on at the Bay Program does nothing for the Reedville waterman watching his menhaden harvest collapse, or the oyster grower fighting for reef acreage.

Nothing is ever Trump’s fault.

Donald J. Trump, President of the US, is now in a public debate with a guy in an inflatable frog costume.  And the frog is winning.

This tells us a lot about the intelligence level not only of Trump but also of the people around him and those who support him.

Trump is now in a public feud with a person in an inflatable frog costume. He posted the frog’s photo to attack it as a “crazy pro-algae (likely paid) protestor.” This is the President of the United States.

He is losing a fight to a guy in a frog suit, and he started it.

Trump spent $14 million renovating the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and dyeing it “American flag blue.” It promptly filled with algae and the paint started peeling.

Rather than admit the job was botched, Trump invented a conspiracy about “vandals,” sent in the National Guard, and had Park Police arrest a 67-year-old Olympian for touching a loose flap of paint.

It was already absurd. Then it went full idiocracy.

On Monday night, the President of the United States, leader of the world’s largest economy and commander of its military, sat down and posted a photograph of a protester in a giant inflatable frog costume. The frog was labeled “Amphifa.” It was holding a sign reading “First they came for the algae.”

And Trump, apparently, could not let the frog win.

“Here is another example of a crazy pro-algae (likely paid) protestor,” he wrote, deadly serious, before launching into a lengthy explanation of the Martin Niemoller poem the frog’s sign was parodying. He took the bait so completely that he annotated the joke.

He fact-checked a frog.

Somewhere out there is an ordinary person who put on a novelty amphibian costume, made a silly sign about pond scum, and stood near a puddle. And the most powerful man on the planet saw it, felt personally threatened, and fired off an official presidential statement declaring the frog a paid agitator.

The protester won the entire exchange without saying a word. The frog didn’t have to do anything. Trump did all the work himself, transforming a man in a costume into a national news story by being unable to ignore him.

A confident leader laughs at a frog. A secure man scrolls past. Trump cannot, because every joke at his expense lands like a wound, and he has to swing back at all of them, even the ones wearing inflatable green suits and standing next to an algae-filled pool he ruined himself.

The pool is still green. The paint is still peeling. And the President of the United States spent his Monday night at war with a frog. The frog is winning.

And Trump’s supporters are still the dumbest of the dumb.

On the morning of February 28th, the first day of Donald Trump’s war on Iran, the children of the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in the southern Iranian town of Minab were at their desks a little after ten o’clock when the missiles arrived. The name of the school means “The Good Tree.”

By the time the dust settled, as many as 175 people were dead, most of them girls between the ages of seven and twelve. Iran’s confirmed count came to around 155, and the list its state broadcaster released documents dozens of dead little boys, dozens of dead little girls, more than two dozen dead teachers, several dead parents, a dead school bus driver, and a dead pharmacy technician from the clinic next door.

The teachers had started phoning families the instant the attacks began, begging them to come collect their children. There wasn’t enough time. Some parents reached the school only in time to claw through the rubble looking for their daughters, and according to first responders and a Reuters stringer the building was hit a second time, a so-called “double tap” (which is a war crime), with the survivors and the rescuers caught in that second blast and blown to pieces.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both opened investigations. Reporters at TIME and elsewhere traced the weapon to an American Tomahawk cruise missile, the kind fired only by US forces in that war, and a preliminary military inquiry concluded our forces were almost certainly responsible for both the initial killing of the children and the double-tap that killed the firefighters, rescuers, and their parents.

When a reporter asked Trump about it at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains last week, he waved the dead children away as if they were nothing. “Nobody did that on purpose,” he said. “Mistakes are made, war is nasty.” Then he handed the question off to Pete Hegseth and moved on.

His shrug doesn’t survive contact with the evidence. An Al Jazeera investigation that traced satellite imagery back more than a decade found the school had been a clearly marked civilian building, walled off from the neighboring military base with its own separate gates since 2016.

A medical clinic that opened on the same complex barely a year before the strike was left untouched, while the school full of children was hit.

Either our targeting was precise enough to spare a brand-new clinic but careless enough to level a decade-old school, or the school was struck on purpose. The children, after all, were the kids of members of Iran’s military. Both answers are damning, along with the double-tap evidence, and there’s exactly one document that would tell us which is true.

That document exists. The Pentagon finished its investigation last month, and members of Congress still haven’t been allowed to see it. So a bipartisan group of senators has resorted to the only leverage they have left, moving to freeze 75 percent of Hegseth’s travel budget through the defense authorization bill until he hands over the unredacted civilian-harm investigations, Minab among them.

The same provision demands the unedited video of the boat strikes off Venezuela that have killed more than 200 people, which Trump and Whiskey Pete are also refusing to release. You don’t bury a report that clears you.

We’ve seen this reflex before, from the Amiriyah shelter in Baghdad in 1991, where American smart bombs killed more than 400 civilians the Pentagon insisted were a military target, to the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz in 2015, where the official story changed three times before a US commander finally admitted the decision had been entirely American. Not to mention My Lai in Vietnam. Deny, deflect, and bury, every single time.

There’s a reason, however, that this particular cover-up may be more frantic than the ones that came before it, and it carries a name we’ve all heard way too many times: the machine helping choose our targets in Iran was Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot.

We know this because the Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, Cameron Stanley, said so under oath, swearing in a court filing that Musk’s “Grok Gov Model” let American forces “deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours” during the operation. That’s one target every three minutes.

Musk’s company signed its deal with the Defense Department on February 23rd. The war began February 28th. And we only learned any of this because the disclosure slipped out in a lawsuit the NAACP brought over a Musk data center accused of poisoning a Black neighborhood near Memphis with gas-turbine fumes.

This is the same Grok that spent the summer of 2025 praising Adolf Hitler, calling itself “MechaHitler,” telling users that people with Jewish surnames were the problem and that the Holocaust was the solution, and injecting white-supremacist “white genocide” talking points into conversations that had nothing to do with them.

That is the AI a Nazi-salute-giving apartheid-era South African billionaire wired into our targeting systems five days before we started killing Iranian schoolchildren.

I can’t tell you that Grok chose the school in Minab, and neither can anyone else, because the report that would answer that question is the one they refuse to release. That’s the point.

An AI that has openly admired a genocidal Hitler was helping aim American missiles at brown people at the rate of one target every three minutes, the deadliest day for civilians in the entire war. It happened on the first full day that machine was running, and the people who could tell us what it did are betting we’ll lose interest before they ever have to reveal what really happened.

I confess to a certain morbid fascination regarding what’s going on with Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool obsession.

The story here seems to originate in Trump somehow becoming aware that the Obama administration spent $35 million on renovations/repairs to the pool. In characteristic fashion this has since become $100 million spent by Obama and Biden (The Biden administration didn’t spend any money on it and the $100 million figure comes straight out of Trump’s feculent ass. I assume Trump was put onto this entire stupid topic by one of the many crazed racists with an Obama obsession floating around the upper echelons of the American right wing).

So Trump got the idea to “fix” the Reflecting Pool, by making it more American and manly and strong and powerful, just in time for the celebration of his and America’s birthdays. Also in characteristic fashion, he just ignored federal regulations governing these kinds of jobs and handed the project to a Mar-a-Lago crony, in the form of a lucrative no-bid contract. This person, who happens to look just like a low-level enforcer for a minor Mafia family, then proceeded to spend $14 million, which was several times more than Trump promised the job would cost. The job appears to have been done in a shoddy/incompetent/corrupt way (surprise!), which has transformed the Reflecting Pool into an algae-ridden swamp (ironic).

This brings us to the latest installment of the saga, which is Trump’s spiraling obsession about the existence of some sort of conspiracy to destroy the strong and powerful beauty of the Reflecting Pool. This conspiracy, by parties as yet unnamed, is being carried out in two ways:

(1) By using a box cutter or knife to cut a gash or slit in the polyurea coating lining the concrete basin. This gash or slit — he has used both terms — was described by Trump as 250 feet long yesterday morning. By early afternoon he was claiming it was “290 or 300 feet long,” and by later in the same press conference he was saying it was 350 feet long.

(2) By dumping fertilizer and possibly other substances into the Reflecting Pool’s water.

The sheer insanity of this is hard to appreciate fully. First, the Reflecting Pool is in a very heavily trafficked public space that is also a major tourist attraction. It’s surrounded by all kinds of surveillance technology, as any such space is these days, especially in Washington D.C. In other words, it would be completely impossible to carry out any kind of covert sabotage operation at any scale.

Second, the causal theory here is completely bananas. How would one cut a several hundred foot slit into a polyurea coating with a box cutter or knife? This by itself would be nearly impossible to do — it’s a very tough, one might even say strong and powerful, substance — let alone doing so surreptitiously. As an extra added feature to all this madness, Trump himself was babbling back on May 4th about how it would be impossible to attack the Reflecting Pool with a knife, because it was was so strong and powerful, although he didn’t want to give anyone any ideas.

Third, what would the point be of doing this impossible thing, even if it were somehow possible? Why would cutting a several hundred foot slit in the pool’s protective coating turn it into an algae-choked swamp? What is the theory here exactly? What is the frequency Kenneth?

One theory about Trump’s most surreal/flagrant/insane lies is that they’re power plays of a classic authoritarian sort:

FWIW I don’t think that’s what’s going on in this specific case. I think Trump at least sort of believes in his giant slit in the pool conspiracy theory, because he is now, to use the technical clinical term, completely koo koo for cocoa puffs.

We’ve got to get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.