The world has 195 recognised countries.
64 of them id go to prison or be killed for being gay.
That’s 32% of the world where it’s illegal and punishable by death for being who I am.
So talk to me about why we shouldn’t have pride.
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
To every kid with a learning disability: don’t let anyone — not even the President of the United States — bully you.
Dyslexia isn’t a weakness.
It’s your strength.
So far the Trump administration has:
• Murdered Americans.
• Arrested journalists.
• Protected pedophiles and rapists.
• Committed war crimes.
• Imprisoned children.
• Targeted protestors.
• Pardoned criminals and drug dealers.
• Normalized political violence.
• Disappeared people.
• Defied court orders.
• Turned public office into a grift.
• Tracked political dissenters.
• Eroded constitutional rights.
• Drove up grocery prices.
Did I miss anything?
Let’s make a few more points on this.
1) Trump thinks Norway, home to the Nobel committee, is actually Denmark, that owns Greenland.
2) Surely, Trump has been told that the 2025 Nobel prize was for things done in 2024, before he was president again. So he wasn’t overlooked. But he still doesn’t get it, and he’s declaring war on NATO as a result.
Donald’s DOJ was required by law to release the entirety of the Epstein files to Congress. In the 30 days since then, he:
added his name to the Kennedy Center.
ordered a deadly strike on Nigeria as “a Christmas present.”
sent U.S. troops into Venezuela to kidnap President Nicolas Maduro, killing almost 100 people in the process.
suspended funding for childcare assistance programs in five blue states.
changed the White House website on January 6 to praise his pardoning of the insurrectionists.
withdrew the U.S. from 66 international organizations.
flipped off an autoworker who called him a “pedophile protector” and said “fuck you” to him—twice.
claimed falsely that Renee Good, who was murdered by an ICE agent, “behaved horribly” and “was very disrespectful.”
threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to unrest his own agencies have incited in Minnesota.
has repeatedly threatened to invade Greenland if it refuses to allow him to buy it.
You know what hasn’t happened? The DOJ hasn’t released over 99% of the Epstein files. Wonder why.
BREAKING: Official reports from the Minneapolis Police and Fire departments finally reveal the truth about the killing of Renee Good — and the details are horrifying.
The MAGA narrative just completely collapsed...
NBC News reports that police files, fire response reports, and transcripts from 911 calls have revealed that Good was still alive when a Fire Emergency medical team arrived on scene. The report from that team stated that Good had "apparent gunshots" to her chest, forearm, and face and was "unresponsive, not breathing, with inconsistent, irregular, thready pulse activity." She was shot up to four times.
While Trump and Kristi Noem have tried to smear Good as a "domestic terrorist," it's clear from the footage that she was simply an innocent woman trying to extricate herself from a mob of masked men. The fact that she was struck by so many bullets shows that ICE officer Jonathan Ross wasn't trying to defend himself, he was trying to kill her.
This is what happens when you don't properly vet your recruits, strap them with weapons, tell them they're above the law, mask them, and set them loose. Bloodthirsty men sign up looking for an opportunity to inflict violence on others.
The first 911 calls from the scene came in at 9:38 a.m. local time and the killer fled the scene at 10:04 a.m. He wasn't concerned about the fact that he took a woman's life, he was concerned about saving his own skin.
“They just shot a lady. Point blank range in her car…. She’s f*cking dead," one caller told 911 dispatchers.
“I had to walk away because I have young kids, and ICE is everywhere over there," said another, painting a clear picture of the terror that ICE has inflicted on these communities.
One caller told the dispatchers that the ICE agents "shot her [because] she wouldn’t open her car door. Send an ambulance please, ambulance please.”
“ICE fired two shots through her windshield into the driver. She tried to drive away but crashed into the nearest vehicle that was parked," said another caller. Note that they didn't say that Good was attacking the agents with her car. She was trying to drive away.
Suspiciously, "large parts" of the 911 call logs have been redacted and blacked out (reminiscent of what the Trump administration did with the Epstein files). The covered up portions are labeled "Law Enforcement."
What possible reason could the authorities have for hiding details about this killing?
The answer is obvious. They want to tightly control the entire narrative around this murder so that they can paint Good as a villain and the ruthless ICE goon who slew her as an upstanding law enforcement agent. America isn't falling for it. They must release the full details immediately.
Please ❤️ and share to demand the full release of the reports!
The #NobelPeacePrize medal.
It measures 6.6 cm in diameter, weighs 196 grams and is struck in gold. On its face, a portrait of Alfred Nobel and on its reverse, three naked men holding around each other’s shoulders as a sign of brotherhood. A design unchanged for 120 years.
Did you know that some Nobel Peace Prize medals have been passed on after the award was given? A well‑known case is Dmitry Muratov’s medal, which was auctioned for over USD 100 million to support refugees from the war in Ukraine.
And the medal displayed at the Nobel Peace Center is actually on loan and originally belonged to Christian Lous Lange, Norway’s first Peace Prize laureate.
But one truth remains. As the Norwegian Nobel Committee states: “Once a Nobel Prize is announced, it cannot be revoked, shared, or transferred to others. The decision is final and stands for all time.”
A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot.
Statement by Becca Good.
Read it @JDVance—and burn in hell.
“First, I want to extend my gratitude to all the people who have reached out from across the country and around the world to support our family.
This kindness of strangers is the most fitting tribute because if you ever encountered my wife, Renee Nicole Macklin Good, you know that above all else, she was kind. In fact, kindness radiated out of her.
Renee sparkled. She literally sparkled. I mean, she didn’t wear glitter but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores. All the time. You might think it was just my love talking but her family said the same thing. Renee was made of sunshine.
Renee lived by an overarching belief: there is kindness in the world and we need to do everything we can to find it where it resides and nurture it where it needs to grow. Renee was a Christian who knew that all religions teach the same essential truth: we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole.
Like people have done across place and time, we moved to make a better life for ourselves. We chose Minnesota to make our home. Our whole extended road trip here, we held hands in the car while our son drew all over the windows to pass the time and the miles.
What we found when we got here was a vibrant and welcoming community, we made friends and spread joy. And while any place we were together was home, there was a strong shared sense here in Minneapolis that we were looking out for each other. Here, I had finally found peace and safe harbor. That has been taken from me forever.
We were raising our son to believe that no matter where you come from or what you look like, all of us deserve compassion and kindness. Renee lived this belief every day. She is pure love. She is pure joy. She is pure sunshine.
On Wednesday, January 7th, we stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns.
Renee leaves behind three extraordinary children; the youngest is just six years old and already lost his father. I am now left to raise our son and to continue teaching him, as Renee believed, that there are people building a better world for him. That the people who did this had fear and anger in their hearts, and we need to show them a better way.
We thank you for the privacy you are granting our family as we grieve. We thank you for ensuring that Renee’s legacy is one of kindness and love. We honor her memory by living her values: rejecting hate and choosing compassion, turning away from fear and pursuing peace, refusing division and knowing we must come together to build a world where we all come home safe to the people we love.”
.@MayorFrey on ICE-related shooting Minneapolis: "They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense … that is bullshit. This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying … To ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis. We don't want you here."
“I don’t doubt that Maduro is a criminal but so is Trump. I don’t doubt that Maduro rigged the elections, but so did Trump. I don’t doubt that Maduro weaponized the justice system but so has Trump” ~Rev Kevin Johnson of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem
Carl Reiner gave Rob Reiner a copy of The Princess Bride, and Rob Reiner loved it and its father/son love story so much he turned it into a movie (with a grandfather and grandson). Three days before Carl’s death in 2020, he and Rob reenacted the final scene and “As you wish”
Remember this name: Ahmed El Ahmad.
Fruit shop owner.
Father of two.
43 years old.
When chaos erupted at Bondi Beach, he became a shield for innocent lives — Jews and Australians alike.
This is what a real hero looks like 🇦🇺❤️
#BondiBeach#Australia#UnsungHero
BREAKING: WHAT IS WRONG WITH MAGAS? Gov. Walz’s daughter says Trumpers are driving past their house screaming “r*tard” at her special needs brother and she TEARS into Donald Trump in viral video!
The callousness and cruelty of Trumpers knows no bounds. Hope Walz shared a passionate, furious video in which she described the disgusting harassment that her family is enduring after Trump called her father, the Governor of Minnesota, “seriously r*tarded” in a Truth Social post.
“I'm talking about this because while my family and I are always going to be the bigger people, the president calling my dad what he did has unleashed a f***ing storm regarding like offensive language towards me and my family and specifically my brother. You can call me whatever you want. You can call my dad, my mom.”
“When it's Gus, f*** to the no. F*** to the no. He dealt with people calling him that last August and now there's a resurgence and, NO!”
“How is it okay that the president of the United States can call somebody, anybody, doesn't matter who they are, that and then all of his freaking cult members come and attack those people and that person's family. Say what you want about my dad. He's an elected official, right? Like that's gonna happen.
I think it's utterly disgraceful that the president would do that. But then the attacks that I have seen, I have people DMing me saying absolutely horrendous things. When I was home last week, somebody drove by and screamed that we were R words, just driving by in their car.”
“I'm like, what world are we f***ing living in? And again, I draw the line at Gus because he dealt with that sh** before and not again. You people are f***ing disgraceful. Shame on you. All of you.”
Couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
It is despicable that this is where modern conservatism is in America under Trump. Family-values Christians are doing drive-by slurrings of special needs kids. MAGA is completely irredeemable as a political movement and needs to be chased out of power everywhere it exists.
Australia just recorded zero cervical cancer cases in women under 25 - for the first time since records began in 1982.
This is what happens when a country commits to HPV vaccination and screening. We protect our girls and save lives.
All this talk of a ballroom to service the super wealthy while the rest of us continue to pay more for healthcare and basic essentials makes me think of this powerful political cartoon from 1906, the artist is William Balfour Ker.