clearandpresentdanger.blog

Charlie Kirk quote:  “Kentanji Brown Jackson is a diversity hire.  She is only there because she’s a black woman.”

Supreme Court Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson received both her undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University. She graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in Government and earned her JD degree from Harvard Law School, graduating cum laude.  While at Harvard law school she was supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Charlie Kirk dropped out of community college.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is taking time away from murdering boaters in the Caribbean to take aim at the Army chaplain corps’ “Spiritual Fitness Guide.” Now that’s multitasking.

Hegseth is mad that the guide only mentions God once and never mentions virtue, but does mention “feelings” 11 times. The horror.

So, he’s getting rid of it. He posted a video on X with a caption reading, “We are going to make the Chaplain Corps great again.”

Donald Trump’s toadies are all such monsters, but they are also so cringe. Imagine having to constantly frame everything just as Dear Leader would, ever striving to hit that note of petulant bullying that comes so effortlessly to the president.

But back to Petulant Pete.

“In an atmosphere of political correctness and secular humanism, chaplains have been minimized, viewed by many as therapists instead of ministers. Faith and virtue were traded for self-help and self-care,” he whined.

Yeah, wouldn’t want a religion that nourishes the body and soul now, would we? That stuff is for pussies.

Apparently, it’s not just that the guide was too touchy-feely. Hegseth also thinks that the military’s recognition of a wide range of religions is an “ongoing war on warriors.”

So Hegseth is going to “streamline” the list of which religious affiliations will be recognized by the military. No, he hasn’t bothered to explain what will count or how he will decide, but you can count on servicemembers being forced into Hegseth’s “religion.”

“There will be a top-down cultural shift putting spiritual well-being on the same footing as mental and physical health,” he declared.

Unfortunately, we know what “spiritual well-being” looks like for Hegseth, and it is not great.

It looks like Hegseth pushing violent Christian nationalist content on official government social media accounts.

It looks like grooming codes that violate the religious freedom of Muslim and Sikh soldiers by forcing them to either violate their faith and shave, or be forced out of the military.

It looks like Doug Wilson, the head of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.

Hegseth attends a CREC church, and here are some of Pastor Doug’s cool beliefs:

• No same-sex marriage or even Pride parades! 
• Some enslavers were totally good people! 
• Non-Christians should not hold elective office!
• Women should stay home! 
• Sex is an act of colonization where a man conquers and a woman surrenders!

It looks like Hegseth’s Deus Vult tattoo is deemed by the Dept of Defense to be a symbol used by white Christian nationalists. As a D.C. National Guard member, Hegseth was detailed to protect Joe Biden during the 2021 inauguration until a fellow service member informed leadership that his ink was a white supremacist symbol.

It looks like Hegseth’s “kafir” tattoo. Written in Arabic, the term translates as “infidel” or “unbeliever” and is used by far-right Islamophobes. Proud Boy Joe Biggs also sports one.

Hegseth is openly trying to transform the military—once a shining example of American diversity into an all-white, all-christian, all-xenophobic fighting force that will follow Trump anywhere.

Probably to war in Venezuela first.

But at least soldiers won’t have to worry about chaplains giving them any comfort. Just muscular virtue all the way down.

 

Many of us have long suspected or even predicted that Donald Trump would betray America, gut our democracy in favor of a police state, and align us with Russia. You know – Russia – the country that the Financial Times reported this week tried to launch multiple terrorist attacks against the United States and Europe over the past year.

We’re now there.

It’s the most under-reported story of the year, perhaps of the century: under Trump, the United States is abandoning advocacy of democracy (shutting down Voice of America, etc.), abandoning our democratic allies in Europe, and for the past year has abandoned Ukraine to the tender mercies of the Butcher of Moscow.

At the same time, Trump’s building ties to Middle Eastern dictatorships, adopting Russia’s explicit worldview, trashing civil and human rights at home, and now handing to China our most valuable military-potential technology.

In other words, we’ve been betrayed by Donald Trump and the people around him in ways that would have made Benedict Arnold blush.

A few weeks ago, Trump presented Ukraine with a so-called “peace deal” that was apparently written, in first draft, by Moscow. This week, he told that nation they have “until Christmas” to hand over more than 20% of their country to Putin and surrender their own military abilities forever, leaving them vulnerable to Russia’s next attack.

Trump’s brain trust just produced a new National Security Strategy (NSS) for the United States that largely abandons Canada and Europe while embracing a racist, neofascist worldview straight out of Putin’s rhetoric.

As the National Security Desk writes:

“It abandons allies, misidentifies threats, emboldens aggressors, erodes deterrence, and even drives allies to consider nuclear proliferation.”

Alexander Vindman, the former Director of European Affairs for the United States National Security Council (NSC), wrote:

“The prevailing sentiment among European observers was that this document represented not only the closing chapter of decades’ worth of cooperation between the United States and Europe, but also that Washington may soon actively sabotage the political and economic systems of the European Union through the promotion of ‘patriotic parties’ and far-right figures. Amidst an ongoing impasse over a potential peace agreement in Ukraine, representatives of the Russian government claims that the document is ‘consistent with our vision.’”

David Rothkopf, a former senior national security/trade official in the Clinton administration, was equally blunt in an article published by The New Republic:

“Indeed, the document, released by the White House on Thursday, reads as if it were dictated by the Kremlin, much as our recent ‘peace proposal’ for Ukraine turned out to have been. Or, perhaps more accurately, it reads like the product of a collaboration between Vladimir Putin and Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff for nativist hate.”

Russia expert Olga Lautman called it “Russia’s return on investment for interfering in the 2016 election,” and it sure looks like she’s right. An earlier article by her titled “America’s Foreign Policy Now Aligns With Russia” noted:

“The NSS does not merely ‘shift priorities.’ It flips seventy-five years of American policy on its head and declares political war on Europe’s democratic institutions while elevating the far-right parties in Europe that Russia has been cultivating for more than a decade. Trump’s team packaged this as a vision for a ‘new’ transatlantic relationship, but the core message is unmistakable, and that is to weaken NATO, fracture Europe, isolate Ukraine, and empower nationalist movements that are openly friendly to Moscow, with every paragraph carrying the same cold, transactional, subservient logic that has defined Trump’s relationship with Russia for decades.”

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, rarely one to engage in hyperbole, wrote of this document in an article titled “Is This the End of the Free World?”:

“The language is astonishing. Europe, the document warns, faces ‘the stark prospect of civilizational erasure.’ Why? Because ‘it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.’ I don’t know why they bothered with the euphemism: ‘non-European’ clearly means ‘nonwhite.’

“But there’s hope, the document declares, thanks to ‘the growing influence of patriotic European parties,’ by which it clearly means parties like Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD.”

Meanwhile, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are working together to destroy Ukraine, the gateway to Europe, and fielding armies of bots to fill social media and other venues with pro-Trump and anti-democracy rhetoric.

And the world’s richest man and recipient in billions in American government contracts, Elon Musk, the architect of the destruction of America’s soft power via USAID, this week called for the abolition of the European Union itself.

Finally, to the shock of the western world, Trump “cut a deal” to let Nvidia sell some of their most advanced chips to China after our military and intelligence experts have explicitly warned of the danger that this could accelerate that country’s move toward seizing Taiwan and threatening us with World War III.

Add to that Trump’s bellicose and murderous actions against Venezuela that could lead to us engaging in warfare in our own hemisphere, and you have the formula to tie up our military while bringing about the final end of American influence in the larger world, exactly as Putin and Xi want.

NATO chief Mark Rutte yesterday urged the West to prepare for war “like our grandparents endured,” adding:

“Conflict is at our door. Russia has brought war back to Europe. And we must be prepared.”

Trump could use such a war — as has been done before by presidents Wilson and Roosevelt — to gut civil rights in America and imprison the people he sees as his “threats” or political enemies.

And try to call off or steal the elections of 2026.

These developments, combined with the naked brutality of ICE that was revealed by this week’s report from Amnesty International, are shocking. American democracy is being gutted from within, our foreign policy is realigning away from Europe and toward Russia and China, all while dictators and corporate oligarchs openly bribe Trump and members of his family.

Where is our media? Where is the GOP? Democratic politicians are speaking out, as are some commentators, but elected Republicans and the majority of the corporate media are “business as usual.”

This is a five-alarm fire for democracy, both here and around the world.

Pass it along and help wake up our country.

 

 

 

 

On Wednesday, the US seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. When asked why the US seized the ship, Trump claimed there was “a very good reason,” but did not appear to know what that reason was. When asked what would happen to the oil on the tanker, Trump replied, “We keep it, I guess.”

[Sidebar: No, the US doesn’t “keep” the oil. It can file a civil forfeiture action in federal court, sell the oil pursuant to a court order, and deposit the proceeds into a designated account in the US Treasury, such as a terrorism victims’ fund. See Congress.gov, Enforcement of Economic Sanctions: An Overview.]

Trump has no idea about the justification, consequences, or details of the most significant US seizure of an oil tanker in US history. He either isn’t interested in the details or is incapable of comprehending them. Neither option is reassuring.

Trump appears to be dazed and confused about the substantive aspects of the presidency, and has been for every day of his two terms. At this point, Trump’s only interest in the presidency is continuing the grift that is making his family obscenely wealthy by monetizing US relationships, prestige, and resources.

Meanwhile, Americans are suffering under Trump’s heartless leadership—and they aren’t willing to take it anymore. The tide is turning, which is a statement of fact that should boost our confidence and optimism about Democratic prospects heading into 2026.

The lesson we should learn from our change in fortunes is that we must work harder, do more, and motivate more Americans to join us. We have no guarantees about the future, save one: If we give up, we will lose everything. But if we continue the fight, we preserve our ability to shape the future. The choice is ours.

On Wednesday, the political reporting outlet Bolts released an annual report on election outcomes. The news was encouraging: Democrats flipped 21% of GOP-held legislative seats up for election in 2025, while Republicans failed to flip a single Democratic-held legislative seat. See Bolts, In 2025, Democrats Flipped 21 Percent of GOP-Held Legislative Seats | Bolts

Per Bolts,

According to Bolts’ analysis, Democrats gained 25 state Senate and House seats that were held by the GOP, out of the 118 that were resolved this year in regular or special elections.

Meanwhile, Republicans failed to flip any legislative seats this year, losing ground even in New Jersey, where they had high hopes, and failing to gain several districts in New York State that Trump carried last year.

The reason for the trend in state legislative races is clear: Trump is single-handedly trashing the economy by pursuing self-defeating tariffs. On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, acknowledged that inflation is higher than otherwise expected because of Trump’s tariffs. See Reuters, Fed’s Powell says inflation overshoot caused by Trump tariffs.

Per Reuters, Powell said,

It’s really tariffs that are causing most of the inflation overshoot.

Everyone understands the inflationary effect of tariffs, except Trump. Indeed, he continues to falsely claim that foreign countries are paying tariffs when, in fact, US retailers pay tariffs on the goods they import, which are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. But deep in his bones, even Trump doesn’t believe his own arguments. So, he has taken to urging American consumers to cut back on purchases to control costs.

At Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, he blamed Americans for purchasing too many goods. As described by Politico:

Trump stirred up fresh concerns Tuesday at a Pennsylvania rally that was supposed to focus on easing Americans’ anxieties over pocketbook pressures. Instead, he veered off script, at one point urging austerity amid the holiday shopping season by resurfacing a line from earlier this year that American kids should be happy with “two or three” dolls.

As described by NJ.com, Trump is The Grinch who stole Christmas, telling parents to beat inflation by buying fewer toys for their children.

Per NJ.com, Here’s why Trump is telling parents to buy fewer toys for their children. Trump said,

You can give up certain products. You can give up pencils. Every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two. They don’t need that many, but you always need steel. . . .You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice. You don’t need 37 dolls.

Even Trump’s enablers and handlers have been forced to acknowledge the cruel and clueless nature of Trump’s messaging. See Politico, ‘Never going to be pitch perfect’: Trump loyalists see an imperfect messenger. (“One former Trump senior adviser said, “[U]nfortunately I just don’t think Trump is temperamentally capable of reversing himself and saying, ‘Yes, affordability is a concern.’ He’s stubborn.”)

Not to be outdone by Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson is resisting extending Obamacare premium subsidies by offering a smokescreen of supposed “solutions” to the high cost of healthcare that all come down to consumers saving more of their paychecks to pay for healthcare out of their pockets. See The New Republic, Mike Johnson Finally Reveals GOP’s Health Care Plan—and It’s Rough | The New Republic.

Per The New Republic, Johnson told his fellow Republicans at a caucus luncheon that they should pick a handful of ten proposals from a slide deck, which included health savings accounts, allowing doctors to own hospitals, and “fixing Obamacare.”

Mike Johnson’s proposals to the GOP caucus went over like a lead balloon. As a result, Republicans are again circulating a discharge petition to circumvent Mike Johnson’s ability to keep legislation from reaching the House floor. In the most current petition, vulnerable Republicans are proposing a two-year extension of ACA premium subsidies (with additional eligibility requirements added). See The Hill, Republicans launch discharge petition revolt against leaders on ObamaCare.

Per The Hill, vulnerable Republicans understand that the electorate will blame Republicans for increases in ACA premiums, despite Mike Johnson’s contention to the contrary:

Republican centrists have been imploring leadership for weeks to hold a vote to extend the subsidies.

While conservatives appear intent on letting the subsidies expire and pointing fingers at Democrats, centrists warn that Americans will blame Republicans for spiking health care costs and their party’s thin majority will be lost.

There are 22 million people whose monthly premiums are set to increase significantly if the subsidies expire.

As Trump is trying to gaslight American consumers about inflation, he is doing his best to dissuade tourists from visiting America. Trump is demanding that foreign tourists seeking a standard visa waiver to visit the US for 90 days or less provide five years of social media history and intrusive data about family members. See NYTimes, U.S. Plans to Scrutinize 5 Years of Social Media History for Foreign Tourists. (Behind paywall.)

Per the Times,

The change would affect visitors eligible for the visa waiver program, which allows people from 42 countries to travel to the United States for up to 90 days without a visa as long as they first obtain electronic travel authorization.

In a document filed on Tuesday in the Federal Register, C.B.P. said it plans to require applicants to provide a long list of personal data including social media, email addresses from the last decade, and the names, birth dates, places of residence and birthplaces of parents, spouses, siblings and children.

Europeans are increasingly privacy-conscious and have enacted strong protections against the collection and recording of personal data. They will hate Trump’s new data collection efforts.

Tourism to the US has declined over the last nine months under Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, tariffs, and xenophobia. See The Independent, US is the only country facing tourism decline as Trump policies to cost $29 billion in visitor revenue.

Per The Independent,

[T]he U.S. is expected to be the only one out of 184 countries to see foreign visitor spending fall in 2025, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council.

For comparison, while US tourism revenue decreased by $29 billion in 2025, tourism revenue in Mexico increased by $281 billion in 2025.

The $29 billion hit to tourism in 2025 comes before Trump imposes intrusive, offensive data collection practices on foreign visitors. We should expect the hit to tourism to get worse—which will further exacerbate economic anxieties. The decline in tourist dollars is not abstract. It is affecting destinations that provide a significant source of income for local residents. See Travel and Tour World, Grand Canyon Joins Bryce Canyon, Crater Lake, Yellowstone, and Yosemite in Tourism Freefall – American Natural Icons Are Struggling to Survive as Canada Ditches US and Trade War Escalates.

Trump’s increasing militarization of anti-immigration efforts is undoubtedly partly to blame for feelings that tourists are unwelcome or, even worse, subject to arrest, detention, and immediate deportation. Trump’s fixation on using the US military as a Praetorian Guard is shocking to Americans—and must be more so to foreign tourists considering a visit to the US.

For example, on Wednesday, US District Court Judge Charles Breyer ruled (again) that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to California violated federal statutes and the Constitution. See Talking Points Memo, Judge Blocks Federalization of California National Guard, Saying It’s Become ‘National Police Force’.

Per TPM,

Judge Charles Breyer, a Clinton appointee, wrote that there is no feasible reason to justify the continued use of the troops months after the June protest that prompted their mobilization. . . . “That is shocking,” he wrote. “Adopting Defendants’ interpretation of Section 12406 would permit a president to create a perpetual police force comprised of state troops . . . .

Trump wants the world to believe the US is a police state—which is the point of the intrusive social media interrogation for a visa waiver.

In short, nearly everything Trump does is undermining the US economy—even as he tells voters that “there is nothing to see here, move along.” Americans shop for groceries, and they know that Trump is lying to them. They also know that Trump is in charge of the economy and promised that prices would drop on “day one” of his second term.

So, I end where I began: “Trump is single-handedly trashing the economy.” Voters aren’t going to forget that they elected him to reduce prices, and they intuitively understand that tariffs cause prices to increase.

Democrats managed to seize the affordability narrative in the November 4 and December 9 elections. We can do it again as Trump continues to make life more difficult and more expensive by increasing the cost of healthcare premiums.

 

 

 

 

Back in September, most Americans (and the media) thought it was so over-the-top that it had to be a joke. Turns out, it wasn’t a joke and isn’t remotely funny.

In a bizarre directive that could have been written by the staff of The Onion or Putin’s secret police, National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), Donald Trump ordered the FBI, DOJ, and over 200 federal Joint Terrorism Task Forces (coordinating FBI with local police forces across the country) to seek out and investigate any person or group who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential domestic terrorism.

They include, as Ken Klippenstein first reported:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

— Have you ever spoken ill of our country or its policies, particularly under Trump?
— Trash-talked capitalism or praised socialism on social media?
— Publicly questioned Christianity or professed loyalty to Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Paganism, or any other non-Christian belief system or religion?
— Embraced the trans or more general queer community?
— Spoken out in defense of single-parenting, gay marriage, or same-sex couples adopting children?
— Said things or carried a sign that might hurt the feelings of masked ICE agents, Trump, or Noem?

Just imagining that any of these could trigger FBI agents knocking on our doors was so grotesque a notion that when the story first appeared four months ago, it was reported and then largely dismissed by mainstream media within the same day.

Now, in a second bombshell report, Klippenstein has obtained and published a copy of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December 4th memo ordering the FBI to actually begin Russia-style investigations of people and groups who fit into the categories listed above.

Not only that, Bondi also ordered the FBI to go back as far as 5 years in their investigations of our social media posts, protest attendance, and other activities to find evidence of our possible adherence to these now-forbidden views.

Just being anti-fascist is, in Bondi’s eyes, apparently now a crime in America. From her memo to the FBI:

“Further, this [anti-fascist] ideology that paints legitimate government authority and traditional, conservative viewpoints as ‘fascist’ connects a recent string of political violence. Carvings on the bullet casings of Charlie Kirk’s assassin’s bullets read, ‘Hey, fascist, catch’ and ‘Bella Ciao’ — an ode to antifascist movements in Italy. … ICE agents are regularly doxed by anti-fascists, and calls to dox ICE agents appear in the same sentence of opinion pieces calling the Trump Administration fascist.”

At the same time, ICE is using a chunk of the massive budget the Big Ugly Bill gave them — larger than the budget of the FBI or any other police agency in America (or, probably, any other police agency in the world outside of China and Russia) — to buy tools they can use to spy on “anti-fascist” people who protest or oppose their actions.

In a report titled “ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants,” the Brennan Center for Justice details how the agency has acquired “a smorgasbord of spy technology: social media monitoring systems, cellphone location tracking, facial recognition, remote hacking tools, and more.”

They’ve reportedly acquired devices that spoof cellphone towers, so if you’re near them your phone will connect, thinking it’s talking to your cell carrier. Once the connection is established, ICE and/or DHS can monitor every communication to or from your phone and possibly even download all the content on your phone including emails, pictures, apps, and your browsing history.

They’re tying into nationwide networks of license-plate readers, airport facial recognition systems, and using federal surveillance drones to monitor people they consider enemies of the agency. And they’re carefully combing your social media content for posts, likes, and reposts they consider objectionable. As the Brennan Center noted, Bondi’s:

“Homeland Security Investigations recently signed a multimillion dollar contract for a social media monitoring platform called Zignal Labs that claims to ingest and analyze more than 8 billion posts a day. The agency is also paying millions to Penlink for monitoring tools that gather information from multiple sources, including social media platforms, the dark web, and databases of location data.”

ICE is also acquiring Russian-style spy software that can remotely target your phone without your realizing it, infect it with the equivalent of an “ICE virus,” and then have your phone send them everything you do, say, hear, or see on an ongoing basis for months.

The only clue you’ll have will probably be that your battery life seems to have dropped as your phone is pumping out to ICE your data and everything the microphone in it picks up, all without your knowledge or permission.

This Putin-style sort of “search” without a legal warrant is the sort of thing that King George III’s officers did against the colonists (although back then it was reading their mail, spying on them in person, and kicking in their doors) in the 1770s that provoked our nation’s Founders to write in the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

It’s also a clear violation of the First Amendment’s protection of our rights to “free speech” and “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

When Putin ended democracy in Russia, he defined the people who protested his policies as domestic terrorists and had his secret police go after them in ways that are shockingly similar to what ICE is launching and Bondi is ordering the FBI to do.

It’s chillingly un-American.

Reach out to your elected representatives (Congress’ phone is 202-224-3121) to let them know your opinion of this new aspect of Trump’s imperial reign, and pass this along to help wake up others.

If Congress and the courts refuse to give serious oversight and regulation to these agencies, we may all one day soon be facing the same neofascist brutality that killed Alexi Navalny and imprisoned (to this day) so many of his supporters.