Peter Bradley

[Peter Bradley @bradley_peter]

https://t.co/diFhwuTf5a

[Peter Bradley @bradley_peter]

https://t.co/jamIaQIqQ8

[LateNighter @latenightercom]

A concerned Jon Stewart spies a familiar face in Trump's now-infamous "Jesus" meme....

[Peter Bradley @bradley_peter]

This story is wild...

[Occupy Democrats @OccupyDemocrats]

BREAKING: J.D. Vance is confronted after Trump's Pentagon threatened Pope Leo with the U.S. military during a disastrous meeting — and promptly dissolves into a stuttering mess.

This so-called Catholic is sweating bullets now...

"X has been abuzz the last couple of days with the Free Press story saying that senior Pentagon officials in January, including Elbridge Colby, brought Cardinal Pierre into the Pentagon," a reporter asked Vance.

"Brought who?" Vance asked with a look of slack canine befuddlement on his face.

"Cardinal Christophe Pierre, into the Pentagon," the reporter said.

"Okay. I haven't seen this story, unfortunately," claimed Vance.

"Essentially, the reporting by the Free Press is that they told him that the American military has a lot of might and they can do whatever they want and the church should get on its side," said the reporter. "Does that message sound correct to you? Is that something you would sign off on?"

"So one I— I— With no disrespect to the Cardinal, I don't know who Cardinal Christophe Pierre is," said Vance.

"He's the Ambassador to the Holy See in the U.S." said the reporter.

While Pierre was indeed ambassador when the disastrous Pentagon meeting took place, he has since resigned due to old age and been replaced by Archbishop Gabriele Caccia.

"Oh, okay, okay. I do— I've— I've met him before," stuttered Vance. "Sorry, I just didn't remember the name. I've never seen this reporting. I'd like to actually talk to Cardinal Christophe Pierre and frankly to our people to figure out what actually happened. I think it's always a bad idea to offer an opinion on stories that are unconfirmed and uncorroborated, so I'm not going to do that."

The report in question revealed that Pierre was summoned to a meeting at the Pentagon during which Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby and other Trump officials berated the Vatican's ambassador over Leo's criticisms of Trump's brutish foreign policy.

At one point, a Trump official invoked the Avignon Papacy, a period in the 14th century during which the French King used his military to force the pope to live in Avignon, France, exerting direct state control over the papacy. It's considered a dark, humiliating period in Vatican history and it appears that the Trump administration was implying a similiar captivity could happen in 2026.

Catholic writer Christopher Hale of the "Letters from Leo" substack has independently confirmed that the meeting took place and stated that "the Vatican was so alarmed by the Pentagon’s tactics that Pope Leo XIV shelved plans to visit the United States later this year."

"Many in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See," added Hale.

The meeting went so poorly that one Vatican official told The Free Press, “The Pope may well never visit the United States under this administration.”

If Vance were a genuine Catholic instead of just someone roleplaying as one to cultivate a traditionalist aesthetic, he'd be horrified by this story. This is a man who constantly talks about his adult conversion to Catholicism. He's even publishing a book on that supposed faith journey (which ironically has a Methodist church on the cover).

Of course, it's unlikely that Vance believes in God at all. He believes in nothing. He's a nihilistic opportunist who has thrown his lot in with a genocidal fascist in the hopes that he might one day become president. It falls to all of us to ensure that that never happens.

Please ❤️ and share if you stand with Pope Leo!

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

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.

[Michael Weiss @michaeldweiss]

The U.S. spent a year threatening to invade one European country and castigating all the others as useless deadbeats who shied away from action in Afghanistan, all while Europe spent that year inheriting the full cost of Ukraine’s defense.

Then the U.S. went to war in the Middle East without even trying to build a coalition or formally asking for European assistance—something Trump says he doesn’t need even though its absence in the middle of the war he launched and claims to have already won has made him rethink U.S. membership in NATO, an alliance he characterizes as a busted flush.

This is like a crazy uncle no one wanted over for dinner complaining about the spread and blaming everyone else for not stopping him from shitting his pants and passing out drunk at the table. And insisting he be invited back.

[Peter Bradley @bradley_peter]

@trad_west_ Will it be as historically accurate as The Patriot and Braveheart? 😜

[Peter Bradley @bradley_peter]

@FPWellman They tried that here in Australia. The scandal afterwards was called robodebt. A new computer program wrongly accused people of benefit fraud. $224 million was repaid to 145 000 people plus a $1.8 billion court settlement.

[Peter Bradley @bradley_peter]

@histories_arch @grok fact check please.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

Roald Dahl on Measles: Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.

'Are you feeling all right?' I asked her.

'I feel all sleepy,' she said.

In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.

The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was...in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunised against measles.

...I dedicated two of my books to Olivia, the first was ‘James and the Giant Peach’. That was when she was still alive. The second was ‘The BFG’, dedicated to her memory after she had died from measles. You will see her name at the beginning of each of these books. And I know how happy she would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other children.

Roald Dahl, 1986

[Peter Bradley @bradley_peter]

@Onepeg Hardcore playthrough time? Seriously that's fucked though.

[Peter Bradley @bradley_peter]

@ArsynTV @bstategames Sounds like 9x39 is not the calibre for you.

[Peter Bradley @bradley_peter]

@TheTrueVanguard You have died of dysentery...

[Peter Bradley @bradley_peter]

@Gigabeef Wasn't fast enough. 😪

[Daractenus @Daractenus]

There are, in fact, quite a number of Westerners who have escaped the "unelected EU bureaucracy" over the past four years to embrace true liberty in Russia, and I took it upon myself to document their stories.

Welcome to "Vatnik FAFO Stories", the definitive edition!🧵

[Mick Ryan, AM @WarintheFuture]

“Come spring and summer 2026, Russia will almost certainly try to repeat and one-up its initial success in Dobropillia — and by then, will likely have more tactical tricks up its sleeve.” Another superb assessment of #Ukraine frontline operations and adaptation from @francisjfarrell & @KyivIndependent
https://t.co/71vOCt1Lhk

[Peter Bradley @bradley_peter]

Perfect execution

[Michael Kofman @KofmanMichael]

Good article here. https://t.co/C4fDPojUG2

[ChrisO_wiki @ChrisO_wiki]

Insightful thread here. Ukraine is very innovative, but the Russians are learning to be too - the only saving grace is that they are badly encumbered by their bureaucracy.

[Michael Weiss @michaeldweiss]

A six month-long investigation, based on interviews with European intelligence, law enforcement and a few of the saboteurs…

Revealed: How Russia’s GRU Plotted Europe’s Parcel Explosions - https://t.co/QPQhJmmhDh https://t.co/PIRnUsukc6