🚨NEW: Kerry Kennedy has announced Late Show Host Stephen Colbert is the recipient of the 2025 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award for his advocacy for free speech and speaking truth to power.
RETWEET to congratulate Colbert on this honor!
Applebaum's piece is worth reading slowly because the specific details are doing work that the summary can't.
Danish military commanders - inside a NATO alliance the United States founded - had to sit in a room and war-game whether their forces would shoot down American planes and kill American soldiers. Some of them still haven't fully recovered from running that exercise. The most popular app in Denmark during Applebaum's visit was one that identifies American products so users know not to buy them.
NATO has invoked Article 5 exactly once in its history. On behalf of the United States. After September 11th. Allied troops went to Afghanistan and some of them died there. Trump told reporters those allies "stayed a little back, a little off the front lines." The families of soldiers who didn't come back heard that.
Now Trump is in the middle of a war in the Persian Gulf with the Strait of Hormuz locked, oil prices spiking, and he's telling NATO allies - the same ones he insulted and tariffed and threatened - that he's "demanding" they come help solve a problem his own decisions helped create.
Applebaum's conclusion is precise: he doesn't connect what he does on one day to what happens weeks later. Allied leaders have drawn their conclusions. The rupture, as Mark Carney called it, isn't coming. It already happened.
Dear Dept of Defense @thejointstaff: Did you disguise a military aircraft as a civilian plane in your strike on a Venezuelan boat? If so, that’s a war crime.
If America’s adversaries believe civilian planes are in fact military planes, that puts civilian planes at greater risk.
Wait so Kristi Noem’s podium at DHS is just a straight up Nazi slogan now?
"One of ours, all of yours" was a Nazi policy made when an SS officer was killed in a Czech Village and then the Nazis killed every single resident of that village in response…..but don’t you dare call them Nazis!
🚨BREAKING: Once again, ICE agents are admitting, on camera, that Renee Good was not shot in self-defense.
In the video, a U.S. citizen is driving when he sees ICE agents.
He stops his car, exits, and begins blowing a whistle… a lawful act protected by the First Amendment.
An agent approaches him. The man backs away, does not interfere, does not block agents, and does not make physical contact.
Despite this, the agent says:
“Do you think this is a big game? Is this a game to you guys? That’s why that lady got hurt the other day.”
That statement matters.
The agent is threatening a U.S. citizen with lethal force for protected speech.
That is illegal.
Law enforcement cannot threaten, intimidate, or retaliate against civilians for exercising First Amendment rights.
He said this to a man who was unarmed, on foot, and not posing any immediate threat.
By the agent’s own words, Renee Good was not shot because of self-defense, but because she was drawing attention to ICE’s presence. That is not a lawful justification for using deadly force.
This video shows constitutional violations in real time:
• First Amendment retaliation
• Threats of violence without legal cause
• Abuse of authority under color of law
I don’t know how many more videos need to come out before accountability happens. When federal agents threaten to kill Americans for making noise, the law has already been broken… and the Constitution is being treated as optional.
its clear to me that the goal here is to keep escalating until something gives and people push back. and then use that as a means to implement martial law and engage in mass repression. Minnesota is a testing ground.
Breaking NYT:
The Pentagon used a secret aircraft painted to look like a civilian plane in its first boat attack, according to officials briefed on the matter.
The laws of armed conflict forbid combatants from feigning civilian status.
That is a war crime called "perfidy." https://t.co/PZIyEUg4Lk
BREAKING: Jerome Powell issues a DEFIANT message to Trump after his DOJ criminally indicted him. Powell rightly says that this is a politically motivated indictment because he refused to bend the knee to Trump. Retweet to stand with Chairman Powell!
We're a year in of watching America's founding principles circling the drain under this tyrannical regime, but just a reminder: masked agents who can gun people down with “absolute immunity” is called fascism. Pure and simple.
FYI, the government paying influencers $8 million to push pro-ICE propaganda online, is what “paid professional outside agitators” actually looks like.
🚨 BREAKING: ICE agents in Minneapolis are seen arresting another teenager without verifying his identity first, and admit to it on camera.
In the video, the teenager calmly tells agents he can go inside and get his ID to prove who he is. The agents refuse. Instead, they say they’ll “take pictures at HQ”… and then force him into their SUV anyway.
That is deeply alarming.
Law enforcement is not allowed to detain people first and figure out who they are later without lawful justification.
Detaining someone without verifying identity, without probable cause, and without allowing them to present ID raises serious Fourth Amendment concerns.
You cannot seize a person just to “check” who they are.
This also mirrors what DHS has now openly admitted: that people are being detained first and sorted out later based on suspicion alone.
That means innocent people, minors, and U.S. citizens are being taken into custody without verification, without charges, and without due process.
If the government can forcibly detain someone simply to identify them, that is not law enforcement… that is unlawful detention.
Walz just said the quiet part out loud:
A medical professional tried to help the woman ICE shot, identified themselves clearly and an ICE agent replied, “I do not care.”
That’s not law enforcement. That’s a complete collapse of humanity.
🚨NEW: Pete Hegseth is cutting Senator Mark Kelly’s military pension and demoting his rank as punishment for telling service-members to not follow illegal orders in a recent video.
RETWEET if you stand with @CaptMarkKelly against Hegseth!
The oil companies were informed about an act of war before it happened, Congress was not.
That, my friends, is what an authoritarian regime run by oligarchs looks like.
Over twenty-five years in the U.S. Navy, thirty-nine combat missions, and four missions to space, I risked my life for this country and to defend our Constitution – including the First Amendment rights of every American to speak out. I never expected that the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense would attack me for doing exactly that.
My rank and retirement are things that I earned through my service and sacrifice for this country. I got shot at. I missed holidays and birthdays. I commanded a space shuttle mission while my wife Gabby recovered from a gunshot wound to the head– all while proudly wearing the American flag on my shoulder. Generations of servicemembers have made these same patriotic sacrifices for this country, earning the respect, appreciation, and rank they deserve.
Pete Hegseth wants to send the message to every single retired servicemember that if they say something he or Donald Trump doesn’t like, they will come after them the same way. It’s outrageous and it is wrong. There is nothing more un-American than that.
If Pete Hegseth, the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in our country’s history, thinks he can intimidate me with a censure or threats to demote me or prosecute me, he still doesn’t get it. I will fight this with everything I’ve got — not for myself, but to send a message back that Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump don’t get to decide what Americans in this country get to say about their government.
Six months ago, former Minnesota Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by a right-wing extremist.
RETWEET to honor her life of service 💙