BravoZulu

a woman’s place is in the #Resistance 🦅I #followback all #Resistors 🌊

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

Dear Joe,
I wish I could sit down with you face to face and explain why so many of us were offended by the UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House.
For me, it had nothing to do with the UFC or who showed up for the fights. The brand you and Dana have built is a bona fide American success story. More power to you. As for the fighters, in my book, anyone brave enough to put it all on the line in the arena is remarkable to witness. Their dedication and discipline inspire me. I don’t understand anyone who can’t admire that.
And as for the people who attended, I, for one, love Shane Gillis. I think he’s hilarious and brilliant. It was a show. A once-in-a-lifetime spectacle. I can’t blame anyone for wanting to witness it firsthand.
My problem is that I believe some of our public spaces are sacred. And unlike many of the great powers that came before us, these American monuments belong to all of us. Not to whoever happens to hold power at the moment.
The White House does not belong to Donald Trump. It does not belong to any President. It belongs to the people. To treat it as Caesar treated the Colosseum is antithetical to everything our founding fathers fought for.
This is not Rome. Presidents are not emperors doling out bread and circuses for the peasants. The White House is the People’s House. This “celebration” could have happened in any stadium within a stone’s throw of the South Lawn. No one would have had an issue with it.
But that was obviously Donald Trump’s whole point. By holding the event on the South Lawn, what he was saying to the rest of us is:
“This is my house. I own it. I will do with it what I please. I’ll build a colosseum and have the gladiators fight under my gaze. I’ll tear down the East Wing. I’ll pave over the Rose Garden. I’ll cover everything in gold and marble. I’ll erase the names of all the men who came before me.”
The fights were an exhibition of imperial domination, not a celebration of our 250th anniversary as a democracy.
The White House is not Buckingham Palace. It is not the Palace of Versailles. It is not the Forbidden City of Beijing. It does not belong to an emperor, or a king, or a commissar.
The White House belongs to us. All of us. The person who sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office is nothing more than an honored guest. A temporary caretaker.
The President is our servant. Not our Caesar.
Respectfully, Hunter

P.S. Cage match between me and Don Jr.? Your call on the venue. Anywhere but the South Lawn.

[Lucas Sanders 👊🏽🔥🇺🇸 @LucasSa56947288]

RETWEET if you still call it Twitter to this very day!

[D.B. Miller @DBMillerIMO]

The face of an abuser when confronted by a female.

[Liam Nissan™ @theliamnissan]

Remember when Hunter Biden was found guilty of raping a woman in a department store dressing room and then also found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up his affair with a porn star? Because I don't

[Olena Rohoza @OlenaRohoza]

“AND YOU STILL DARE TO OPEN YOUR MOUTH…”

Sasha Legerman: This is too accurate not to share.

This Australian’s response to Trump’s rant that “NATO does nothing for America” is absolutely devastating:

“Mate. You run a country where 600,000 homeless people will sleep on the streets tonight.

A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money.

A country where insulin costs more than a car payment, and people ration it just to stay alive.

A country where medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy.

A country where women die in hospital parking lots because doctors are too afraid of abortion laws to treat miscarriages.

You imprison more of your own citizens than any country on Earth.
More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea.

In the land of the free, 2 million people sit in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything.
They’re simply too poor to afford bail.

Your life expectancy is declining. You’re the only developed nation where that’s happening.

Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s.

Your children practice active shooter drills between math and English classes while you sell defense stocks to your friends.

Your minimum wage hasn’t changed in 15 years.

Your teachers work two jobs, your veterans sleep under bridges, and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that never attacked you.

And now a convicted criminal — found liable for sexual abuse, defending a pedophile, sleeping with a porn star, and running the biggest dumpster-fire campaign since the Taliban — is thanking you for yet another disaster.

And you call Greenland badly governed?

Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world.
Nobody there goes bankrupt because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because insurance refused treatment.

‘NATO wasn’t there when we needed them.’

When exactly was that, champ?
September 11?

Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU.

Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU.

Australia wasn’t even in NATO, and we still showed up. For twenty years.

And then you left at 2 a.m. without telling anyone and left everybody else to clean up the mess.

You don’t care that a great nation is being terrorized by your friend, and you haven’t shown it a single ounce of sympathy.

So maybe before calling other countries badly governed, take a look at your own backyard, you aluminum siding salesman with a spray tan.

The only thing badly managed in this picture is your damn mouth.

And you still dare to lecture the rest of the world?”

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[BravoZulu @CrossingGuard]

@bakwasbandkrein Levon

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

Thank you to the millions of Americans who turned out in small communities and big cities all over this country to say loudly and boldly:

No more kings.

In America, We the People will rule.

[BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ @mmpadellan]

BREAKING: Exclusive footage showing an insurrection broke out at yesterday's No Kings protest where cops were tased and beaten with flagpoles and... oh wait, that was MAGA on Jan 6, 2021.

OUR protest was PEACEFUL.
Again.

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

The No Kings protests aren’t for Trump to see.

They’re for the marginalized so they know they aren’t alone.

…for unaffected people so they know this isn’t normal.

…for Republicans so they know their blind obedience to fascism won’t be tolerated.

[emma @sunsetpascal]

#NOKINGSDAYOCT18TH

[BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ @mmpadellan]

Good morning and Happy Sunday to everyone who was THRILLED to see 7 million people participate peacefully in No Kings protests: not just in Blue states, but in red states, and all over the world!

A complete rejection of trump's fascism.
Make sure everyone sees this!

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

🚨Holy shit. Someone made a new ad for Trump’s ballroom and it’s absolutely perfect. Trump would hate if this went viral…

[Brad @BraddrofliT]

This Senator - who represents a state whose population is smaller than the city of Albuquerque - sold out the rest of our country.

She tried to get her 750,000 constituents a special deal.

Meanwhile, she screwed over 350,000,000 other Americans.

[BravoZulu @CrossingGuard]

@SenTedBuddNC Liar.

[Mario @PawlowskiMario]

I live in a small MAGA town.
I know MAGA people. I drink with them. I talk to them. I study them.

They’re not the loud Twitter yappers, at least most of them. They’re quieter. Slower. But the delusion runs deep, just bottled up in passive smiles and soft voices.

A few weeks ago, one of them tried to convert me at a bar. He knew I wasn’t into the Trump cult, but he started soft. Calm voice. Friendly tone.

“Mario, you’re white. You can drink a lot, you eat meat, “he was just surprised that I was eating rare burger” and drinking vodka chasing it with Guinness. He also said, “You’re one of us. You should feel proud.”

That’s their seduction tactic.
Not facts. Not logic. Just subtle tribal grooming.
“You’re white. You drink. You belong.”

It was almost sweet, in a sad, culty way.
Like a Jehovah’s Witness trying to sell you eternal life with a shaky brochure and cheap suit.

But let’s talk about the whole ecosystem.
The truth.

MAGA men?
Most are not warriors.
They’re out-of-shape, insecure, jealous small-town boys who peaked in high school, still clinging to stories from when they “almost went pro” or “should’ve been in the military.”
They’re proud of being able to drink a case of light beer, drive a truck, and scream about freedom while their knees buckle from sugar and rage.

They’re easy to manipulate because they don’t ask questions.
They don’t read.
They react.

They memorize memes like scripture and repeat them like gospel.
They think being loud equals being right.

They think the world is laughing with them.
It’s not.
The world’s laughing at them, when it’s not just ignoring them entirely.

MAGA women?

They’re caught in a brutal paradox, constantly screaming about how proud and strong they are, while reshaping every inch of their body to meet a fake beauty standard pushed by the very system they claim to hate.
Plastic lips. Inflated cheeks. Eyelashes thick as windshield wipers.
Trying to look rich while shopping clearance at Walmart.
They scream about “natural family values” while injecting Botox and collapsing into MLM scams that promise empowerment through overpriced lipstick.

They mock liberals for being “gender confused” while wearing more synthetic parts than a Barbie made in a Russian factory.

Here’s the thing: MAGA America isn’t just backward.

It’s boring. MAGA folks are simply subsimple.

There’s nothing imaginative about it. No new culture. No innovation. No ideas.
They don’t invent, they imitate.
They don’t challenge, they chant.

It’s the same five phrases over and over.
The same flag. The same truck. The same outfit.
Patriot cosplay.

And that’s why the world doesn’t just hate MAGA.
It forgets it.
Because once the shouting stops, there’s nothing under the hood.

Just cheap beer breath, fake smiles, and a belief that whiteness and loudness are still enough to matter.

You want the brutal truth?

Even without Trump, even without the cult, most of them would still be irrelevant.
Not because they’re evil.
But because they chose comfort over growth.
Tribalism over truth.
Imitation over imagination.

They don’t want to understand the world.
They want the world to stay small enough to understand them.

And that’s the saddest, most humiliating part.

[JoeyBonanno @RealJoeBonanno]

@JDVance So unelected people can comb through the USA checkbook and look at who gets paid, privacy laws make that illegal, but republicans only care about privacy laws if they get caught