Declan

[Gianl1974 @Gianl1974]

You see folks, as far as I can tell, from the outside, this is what it looks like: America has elected a man who talks and behaves like a megalomaniac, and the rest of the planet is supposed to just trust that he won’t completely lose his grip on reality and drag us all into catastrophe.

You want to steal Greenland.
You want Cuba to “make a deal before it’s too late”.
You talk about bombing or invading Mexico.
You kidnap a President and knock off the peoples oil in Venezuela.
You joke about annexing Canada like it should be a shopping centre car park you can just claim because you feel like it.

Do you have any idea how insane that sounds to the rest of us?

This isn’t tough talk. This isn’t strategy. This is a deeply unstable old man threatening sovereign nations like he’s flipping over a Monopoly board because he’s losing. This is not normal behaviour. This is not leadership. This is not strength. This is a walking, talking international crisis.

And Americans, this is where it comes back to you. Not just MAGA, not just the people who voted for him, all of you. Because when the President of the United States starts talking about kidnapping leaders, annexing countries, and issuing ultimatums like a mob boss, the rest of the world doesn’t get a vote. We just get the consequences.

You don’t get to shrug and say, “Well I didn’t vote for him.” That might fly at a dinner party, but it doesn’t fly when nuclear powers are watching this circus and recalculating their own red lines. This is your system. Your presidency. Your responsibility.

From the outside, it looks like America lit the fuse and then wandered off while everyone else stands around the bomb wondering who’s going to cut the wire.

And let’s be brutally honest. This man is nearly 80. He’s frail. He’s clearly deteriorating. He is not some long term visionary playing chess. He’s at the end of his lifespan and acting like nothing matters after him. That is the most dangerous type of leader there is. A man with nothing to lose and an ego that demands constant feeding.

Why should the rest of the world pay for that?

Why should families in Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, anywhere, have to worry about war, trade collapse, energy shocks, or global instability because America couldn’t get its own house in order?

This is not about left or right anymore. This is about basic sanity. This is about stopping a psychopath before he does something irreversible. Because once a war starts, once a country gets invaded, once alliances fracture beyond repair, you don’t get a reset button.

So yes, this falls on Americans. You got the world into this mess, and you damn well better roll your sleeves up and get us out of it. Impeach him. Remove him. Contain him. Do whatever your system allows, but do it fast.

Because the rest of us just want to live our lives, raise our families, pay our bills, and not wake up one morning to find out World War Three started because an unhinged old man wanted to feel powerful one last time.

This isn’t funny anymore.
It isn’t theatrical.
It isn’t tolerable.

Get this lunatic under wraps before he ruins it for everyone.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

I used to wonder how it was possible that Trump could have won in 2016, and then again in 2024, given how emotionally toxic and depraved he is.
I don’t wonder anymore. I think he won for that exact reason. Because he carried at least one broken shard to reflect the broken shards in millions of others.
If you’re a racist, you found your guy. If you’re a misogynist, you found your guy. If money is your only religion, you found your guy. If your heart is armored shut, you found your guy. If you mock the disabled, you found your guy. If intelligence makes you insecure, you found your guy. If you’re a sexual predator, you found your guy. If you trade in humiliation and conspiracy and filth, you found your guy.
If you’ve never done a single hour of emotional inventory, you found your guy. If you cheat, stiff contractors, bankrupt your obligations, and call it savvy, you found your guy. If you lie as easily as you breathe, you found your guy. If cruelty feels like strength, you found your guy. If white grievance is your comfort food, you found your guy. If your ego is a black hole no title can fill, you found your guy. If warmongering fuels your ego, you found your guy, If empathy feels like weakness and dominance feels like oxygen, you found your guy.
If he’d only carried one or two of these pathologies, he might have been dismissed as just another loud, damaged man. But he carried a buffet of them. That was the appeal. Millions could locate themselves somewhere in the wreckage. They didn’t have to agree with all of it. They just had to recognize a piece of themselves in it.
It was never really about him. It was about the validation. The absolution. The permission. He didn’t invent the resentment; he amplified it. He didn’t create the cruelty; he normalized it. He gave millions the intoxicating relief of hearing their ugliest impulses echoed back at rally volume.
Trump is a symptom. The deeper illness is collective. If there’s one sentence that defines his power, it’s this: “He says the things I’m thinking.”
And that’s the part that should chill us.
Because what does it say about us that so many were thinking those things? That tens of millions of Americans harbored resentments so deep, so seething, that they were simply waiting for a demagogue to baptize them as virtue? That after decades of supposed progress on race, gender, and equality, so many white men felt so threatened, so displaced, so furious, that cruelty became a political platform?
Maybe we were living in a fool’s paradise, mistaking silence for healing, politeness for progress.
Now the mask is off. Now we know.
And knowing is a far more dangerous place to stand.
��� Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.

[👑💥 Serenity 💥👑 @polishprincessh]

People keep asking me why I keep talking about Epstein. Why I won’t “move on.” Why I won’t drop it.

Here’s why: this video shows DIARY Of 16-Year-Old Epstein Victim And It Will SHOCK You

We are talking about children who were trafficked, abused, raped, killed and sold in a system that operated in the open around some of the most powerful people on the planet.

And this wasn’t one monster operating alone in the dark. A billionaire trafficker doesn’t build a global machine like that by himself. People flew on the planes. People attended the parties. People funded it. People protected it.

For years.

The most powerful institutions in the world watched this happen in plain sight and somehow the system still expects the public to accept silence, sealed records, missing information, and the same tired message to “trust the process.”

No.

If someone was involved, expose them. I don’t care what political party they belong to, what office they hold, or how famous they are. Every single person connected to it should be investigated.

Because a system that protects the powerful while children are trafficked is not broken by accident. It’s broken by design.

So when people ask why I keep talking about Epstein, they’re asking the wrong question.

The real question is why so many people seem so desperate for everyone else to shut up about it.

[Madden & Finucane Solicitors @madden_finucane]

An open letter to Gavin Robinson from Robin Livingstone

Dear Gavin,

Last Wednesday you advised the families of the Bloody Sunday dead to “move on”. You were speaking after the PPS decided not to prosecute members of the Parachute Regiment for perjury. The families should stop, you added, “the endless pursuit of others”.

Although I’ve lost someone close to me in violent and unexpected circumstances, and although I write for a living, I will never if I live to write another billion words come anywhere near to bettering a description of the chest-emptying reality of grief and loss that I heard some years ago. Let me share it with you…

“The only relief I get is when I wake up in the morning. There’s a few seconds when you’re still half-asleep, a few more seconds until you’re properly awake, and a few more seconds while you ease into the new day.

“Then, you remember…”

The woman who spoke those words that I’ve just quoted might like to “move on”, I don’t know. Speaking from my own family’s experience and that of the countless victims I’ve met as I potter towards the end of a long career in journalism, I’d say she would. I don’t know for sure, but why wouldn’t she? Who would choose to start every day with an electric jolt of newly-remembered grief in the heart? Who would choose to sob on hearing a bar of a half-remembered song? Who would choose to be suddenly racked with guilt during a moment of family joy? Who would choose not to open a biscuit tin of old family photos because sorrowful smiles are 99 per cent sorrow and one per cent smile.

Your concept of what the Bloody Sunday families are in pursuit of, with its concomitant imperatives of punishment and incarceration, is not one that I recognise. I can’t and don’t as a bereaved relative speak for every name in Lost Lives, that hefty Book of the Dead that’s still as essential to my desk in work as the notebook, phone and keyboard. I can’t and don’t even speak for every member of my family. But I know that what I feel is common coin in the place where grief lives.

Like the Bloody Sunday family, my family is in pursuit of justice, in our case for Julie. We probably won’t know what justice is until we get it – or until we get something that feels like it. At this point all I know about the British soldier who shot my sister dead at 14 is that he’s Welsh. I don’t know his name or where he lives. I have not the faintest idea of what he looks like. Heck, I don’t even know if he’s alive.

Why don’t I know these things? Simply because the man was never made the subject of the kind of meaningful investigation that would necessitate these things being divulged. What’s more, I don’t particularly want to know his name or where he lives – I don’t know if I have sufficient storage in my emotional hard drive to let him into my life. But if these things are made known as we try to complete the picture of how Julie died and why, then so be it.

What I do know, Gavin, is that I don’t want this anonymous Welshman – if indeed he is still alive – to spend a second in jail, never mind long years. What I do know is that the idea of punishing him has never entered my mind. But it goes deeper than that. The man who fired the plastic bullet is likely my age – probably just a little bit older. If, like me, he has children and grandchildren, I hope he loves and enjoys them as much as I do mine. The idea of pursuing him has not only never occurred to me, it is something that I don’t even understand. He is at this point merely a means to an end; as much a part of the drama of Julie’s death as the armoured vehicle and the plastic bullet gun; with more agency, granted, but not much. If he ends up being interviewed I hope it’s on his sofa in Wales and not in a barracks in Belfast. If he ends up being charged I can’t help that, but if he was convicted I’d step forward to ask the judge that he not be jailed, no doubt while your DUP colleagues queued up to get their pictures taken with him and claim him as one of their own.

It’s no surprise to me that you fail to understand that people can no more move on from doing right by those they have lost than they can move on from breathing. Why would you? What does surprise me is that you think victims of the British state like the Bloody Sunday families are in “pursuit” of human beings – of “others”. That is a venal and catastrophic misunderstanding of the sacred and immutable nature of a commitment made while standing over a coffin.

What they are in pursuit of, Gavin, is not Soldier X, or Y or Z. They are merely old and rusted signposts on the road to their journey’s end. What they are in pursuit of is a time when they can fall asleep at night in the knowledge that they have finally kept a promise they made – spoken or unspoken – to the innocent grey face among the mass cards; to the mother, father, husband, wife, brother, sister, son or daughter they lost. What they are in pursuit of is a time when they can wake up, and alongside the every-morning shock of that moment of re-remembering, feel for the first time a surge of pride in a promise delivered.

I don’t know what’s happened to you in the last year or so – maybe a little longer. I specify that time scale because December 2024 was when you crossed the city to get a drive-by picture taken on the Falls Road beside some pro-Palestine graffiti. I don’t think I need to remind you about the extent and nature of the wall art that you passed without comment in your East Belfast constituency to get here, so I won’t mention that except to point out that I don’t remember you ever having your picture taken beside any of it. It struck me forcefully then that this didn’t seem like the kind of stunt that a generally mild-mannered bloke like you would pull.

Then last March you again stuck your barrel chest out, thumbed your lapels and issued another stirring message to Loyal Ulster: you were going to instruct your MLAs to “put a marker down” in relation to the Irish language at Grand Central Station. That also didn’t strike me as a Gavin-style move. And in the autumn you got even more in touch with your inner-Jamie by welcoming the Soldier F acquittal on social media not just with the expected comment that it was a “common sense judgement” but with a big old Para flag. And now, in case anyone thought that the Para flag was a slip of your phone thumb, here you are telling the people still trying to get their heads round your Para play to “move on”.

The most recent LucidTalk poll shows your party up 1% to 19%, and the Belfast Telegraph was reliably excited enough to suggest that this statistically negligible figure points suggests your party’s “shift to the right” has won back voters. But it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than a single point to suggest that the DUP is back, whatever the unionist papers say. I’ve no doubt that your Palestine picture, your Irish language way cry and now your “move on” exhortation will bring familiar fish to the top in the pool you’re currently fishing in. But you need to drop your line in deeper waters and you need a bigger catch if you’re to move out of your polling teens. And in that sense, it may be you who most needs to move on.

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

BREAKING: Music legend Bruce Springsteen just released this incredible song that will be sure to piss Trump off beyond belief.

“Streets of Minneapolis”.

He wrote this song about Alex Pretti and Renée Good Saturday and recorded it yesterday.

Share it far and wide and play it as loud as you can

[Declan @decie7]

@freestateirl powerful episode today horrible what happened to them brilliant men

[Harry Eccles @Heccles94]

The British establishment have all ready covered this new Banksy up.

Can we get it Retweeted 10,000 times to show that they can never cover up their complicity in war crimes??

Protect the right to protest! RT!

[Declan @decie7]

@freestateirl @Davidsgoldblatt Another great interview Dion

[Declan @decie7]

@dianebutler95 Lovely city was there last month

[Declan @decie7]

@GuillermElodie Hate is a very strong word with a lot of meaning dislike distrust and selfish is more fitting rise above them

[Declan @decie7]

@ThrillaRilla369 Depends but think coldplay have stole that thunder

[Declan @decie7]

@gymforthesoul Think that it’s so sad they have to think they are in control who really gives a flying toss 🤷🏼‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️

[Declan @decie7]

@freestateirl Another brilliant Saturday interview Dion

[Michael Magee @michaelmagee__]

remember the burning of Bombay Street

remember that over 3000 catholic families were forced out of their homes / made homeless between August and September 1969

remember how the Northern state was initiated and sustained by pogroms against the minority Catholic population (1920-22, 1935, and 1969) and remember how those pogroms were orchestrated and encouraged by unionist politicians who used Catholics as scapegoats for the rampant poverty and social inequality suffered by working-class people across the six counties

mostly importantly, remember how the broader political and media establishment spent the best part of 50 years (leading up to the beginning of the conflict) portraying Catholics as belligerent, distrustful, lazy, base, and perpetuated the idea that our place in society was conditional, provided our parents and grandparents were accepting of and subservient to the structures of power that oppressed and discriminated against them in every facet of their daily lives

nothing about what we’re seeing in Ballymena and other areas across the six counties has anything to do with protecting women and children, it’s the natural outgrowth of a reactionary ideology based on fear and hatred of ‘the other’

that fear has been redirected away from Catholics (for the most part) and on to people of colour, and the blatant racism we’re seeing isn’t happening in isolation, it has been stoked and facilitated by figures within loyalism and unionism (and the media, under the cloak of ‘genuine concerns’) and compounded by far-right agitators across the 32 counties who have preyed upon and exploited peoples fears and insecurities in the face of deepening inequality

(important to keep in mind that since covid, we’ve seen the biggest transference of wealth from the poorest to the richest people in society in decades)

all this is to say we have a responsibility towards our history and understanding the structural forces behind the racist attacks we’re seeing today

our neighbours are our neighbours, they are our people regardless of the colour of their skin or their religious beliefs, and they have as much a right to be here and make lives for themselves as anybody else

[☀️👀 @zei_squirrel]

lead singer of the band Primal Scream Bobby Gillespie is confronted by a BBC "reporter" on his pro-Palestine activism and support for BDS, and refuses to back down as he calls out artists who gleefully legitimize the genocidal Israeli death-cult.

"It's stolen land."

[Dublin Airport @DublinAirport]

Irish Manchester United fans heading to Champions League games next season