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Trump has banned CNN, Politico and MS NOW from White House, secret service has confiscating or deactivating their press passes, reporters from these three news outlets are barred from entry to the White House. Trump said it's because their reporting is unfair, inaccurate, and "purposely negative" about his administration.
Is Trump within his rights, is it legal, is he violating the 1st amendment?
What do you think about this?
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Does it count spaces?
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He has a mandate; he is the best man for the job.
Go free speech!
Remy, Remy, Remy.
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Real World Consequences: We don’t give a shit about the real-world consequences of our activity, our right to debate supersedes any associated cost or effects we might have. Most members here don’t even know there even is a real world. If women get raped, if women and Jews die, meh.
Moderation: The moderators have transferred responsibilityfor the site to the members who vote. They are now absolved of responsibility or accountability, we are effectively unmoderated (wow, is that cool or what?).
Anything Goes: If inciting violence, advocating rape, and antisemitic hate speech are acceptable, then what isn’t? I think we should all feel emboldened to do whatever the fuck we want, and to make this site into anything we want it to make it into.
Free Speech: We have elevated “free speech” to a sacred principle that applies to everything, everywhere. It is an excuse to disregard truth or consequences, it is more important than ethics, decency, or compassion. The Free Speech ideal absolves you of any responsibility, accountability, or reason to consider doing the right thing.
Membership and Activity: Increasing the number of members and the associated amount of activity is considered the Summum Bonum (Highest Good), independent of what type of membership or activity they are. There is a very large digital space of “antisemitic”, “manosphere” and “pedophile” websites which are ideal areas for recruiting new members and new ideas, if we just tell them, it is a safe space that won’t cramp their style.
The Type of Site: What type of site we want to be came down to a total of nineteen votes; a relatively small number of new members, perhaps a dozen, could come in and make this site into anything they want it to be.
This Site Could Easily Disappear Overnight: It’s clear that a single individual could get this website removed by concurrently raising awareness to just a few advocacy groups and the hosting platform. Advocacy groups exist to bring pressure, and the hosting platform doesn’t see free speech as relevant and isn’t interested in litigating or even debating our asserted “right” to advocate violence, rape, and hate speech.
Fight the Power: If Remy Brown can make the moderators bend over and squeal like little piggies, then we should all be able to. They certainly have no right to tell anyone here their posts are in some way worse than Remy’s for God’s sake, and if they have the audacity to try to, we are entitled to the same due process and democratic vote that Remy got. Remy has empowered us all, MAKE THE MODERATORS YOUR BITCH!
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...and Canadian Geese are now Donald Ducks.
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Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade costs American taxpayers an estimated $2,358 on average.
So far, three Americans, Ruben Ray Martinez, Renee Nicole Good, and Alex Pretti paid with their lives.
How did Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Crusade affect you personally? Do you feel safer, did it make your life any better, are there less drugs, less crime, fewer rapists?
What did you really get for your money? Do you think it was worth it?
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The real reason Trump went to war, so Don Jr, and Eric can make a killing in the Prediction Market.
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Does Graham Platner think he's a Republican or what?
Rape and neo-Nazi, those are considered qualifying attributes with Republicans, if you add pedophile, they might even elect him President.
In the Democratic party those things are disqualifying, he needs to step down, and then do the right thing and become a Republican.
He'd do much better as a Republican, with rape and neo-Nazi on his resume, Trump wight even make him a Supreme Court Justice.
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A lot of people apply a materialistic yardstick to argue against the existence of certain concepts, with an argument that tries to present a contradiction and in so doing, claims that it is proof that the concept in question doesn’t exist. This argument can also be applied to the existence of light, along with everything else considered to exist in the materialistic framework.
Let’s consider light, it manifests the mutually exclusive qualities of particle and wave. Temporally speaking, a wave has periodicity, and spatially, it is spread out in space, a particle cannot have a periodicity, nor can it be spread out in space. A particle has a discrete location in time and space; a wave does not. A wave has amplitude and a frequency, it exhibits the phenomena of diffraction and diffusion, a particle does not. According to most of the materialistic arguments on these boards, these logical contradictions would mean the existence of light is impossible.
Much about light is inconceivable in a materialistic framework, its speed is constant no matter what frame of reference it is measured from, which is bizarre, nothing else behaves like that, and it violates any normal definition of logic and rationality that can materialistically be applied to movement and speed.
Light has no mass, and it moves at the speed of light in a vacuum (of course), but according to theory, the length of an object dilates as you approach the speed of light until you reach the speed of light, when its length becomes zero, zero length means it has no spatial existence.
Relativity theory also says that time slows to zero at the speed of light, so time doesn’t exist from the frame of reference of light.
Light is therefore completely inexplicable, in the end we have “something” that has no mass, no dimensional existence in space, and no existence in time. It’s hard to say something like that exists, it certainly defies any materialistic definition of existence, and yet we know it is “something”, but at the same time, it has none of the materialistic characteristics of existence.
How can a materialist argue that light exists?
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If I was getting married again, my dad wouldn't have come to my wedding either.
Of course, my dad is dead.
I wish your dad could be more like my dad.
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Trump promised his MAGA clowns a "retribution" Presidency and as promised, has weaponized the Justice Department against his political opponents. The first ridiculous attempt ti indict James Comey was thrown out by a judge on the grounds of excessive stupidity, now Trump and his clown car full of Justice Department idiots have indicted James Comey again, this time because he posted a photo of seashells spelling out 86 47, charged with threatening the life of President Trump for this his seashell crime LOL. The indictment claims the image of the shells amount to “a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States." This administration gets more ridiculous every day, I can hardly wait to see what punchline they come up with tomorrow.
DOJ gets indictment against former FBI director James Comey : NPR
James Comey: Ex-FBI boss investigated for seashell photo seen as threat to Trump
James Comey charged with Trump threat in 8647 seashell post
Legal experts shellshocked over new Comey indictment
James Comey indicted over seashell photo that officials say threatened Trump
I wish the MAGA cult could see how absurd and stupid Trump makes you look. This is not a joke, here is the "threatening photo.
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Great article well worth reading
How MAGA’s civility police are trying to weaponize the WHCD attack
The president’s biggest supporters insist they should be able to say anything they want, no matter how vicious — but everyone else should watch their mouths.
That hasn’t stopped the accusations of incitement from the civility cops of the MAGA right, who accuse Democrats of cultivating violence while ignoring — if not celebrating — Trump’s most vicious, inhumane and racist statements.
Apr. 28, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT
We can say anything we want, no matter how vicious, racist, incendiary or violent, but if you call us fascists or Nazis, then that’s an obvious incitement to political violence and possibly criminal.
That’s essentially the insta-reaction of many Republican officials and MAGA pundits to the reported assassination attempt against President Donald Trump and members of his administration at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night at the Washington Hilton.
Based on the accused would-be assassin Cole Tomas Allen’s reported writings before he attempted to storm the dinner, it seems apparent that “politics” in the broadest sense motivated him to try to commit what could have been a history-altering massacre. But it also seems pretty evident by allegedly deciding to take guns across state lines with murderous intent that he’s a deeply disturbed individual acting irrationally. He appears to have had easy access to guns and, by his own telling, encountered shockingly lax security at almost every juncture leading up to his attempted sprint past relaxed-looking Secret Service agents Saturday night.
This is a classic, crybullying civility cop move.
There isn’t a single Democratic official or prominent liberal commentator minimizing or making excuses for Allen’s actions or rationalizations for attempting to commit murder. On the contrary, there’s been universal condemnation from that side. Yet that hasn’t stopped the accusations of incitement from the civility cops of the MAGA right, who accuse Democrats of cultivating violence while ignoring — if not celebrating — Trump’s most vicious, inhumane and racist statements.
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., in a Fox News interview Monday falsely claimed “Democrats want President Trump, Republicans murdered all across this country. Capitalists murdered.” He then pivoted to what seemed like a rehearsed speech about funding the Department of Homeland Security, invoking illegal immigrants accused of killing Americans and saying “Democrats don’t care.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on Monday insinuated the media is responsible for inciting violence for “being overly critical and calling the president horrible names for no reason.” (Blanche, in January, accused Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz of “terrorism” for their resistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s brutal crackdown that left two Americans shot to death in the street.)
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, also on Monday, blamed “the entire Democrat Party” for inspiring violence because they pitch to voters that Trump — who attempted a self-coup based on wholesale lies about election fraud in the 2020 election — “poses an existential threat to democracy, that he is a fascist and they compare him to Hitler.”
Right-wing commentator Erick Erickson posted Sunday, “The only time Democrats oppose collective responsibility for an action is when a progressive tries to kill people, inspired by Democrat rhetoric.”
This is a classic, crybullying civility cop move. Erickson, after all, is not only the same guy who in 2017, wrote “The political left is becoming the American ISIS,” but he also wrote in 2016 that Trump is a “racist,” a “fascist” and, “It can’t be any wonder that so many people with swastikas in their Twitter profile pics back Donald Trump. It takes one to know one.”
Trump in recent months has accused six Democratic members of sedition and suggested they should be hanged. (Sen. Scott dismissed concerns over this as Trump merely being “hypothetical.”)
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on Monday insinuated the media is responsible for inciting violence for “being overly critical and calling the president horrible names for no reason.”
He reacted to the tragic murders of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele by saying their killings “were reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.” And he despicably celebrated former FBI Director Robert Mueller’s death of natural causes: “Good. I’m glad he’s dead.”
As my MS NOW colleague Steve Benen noted last week, Trump is “the president who has told Americans his political opponents are ‘fascists’ who are also guilty of ‘treason.’ His domestic foes are also ‘enemies of the people,’ ‘the enemy within’ and ‘threats to democracy.’ Last year, Trump went so far as to insist Democrats were ‘evil’ and members of ‘the party of Satan.’”
As I wrote last year, “It’s a fool’s errand trying to shame MAGA bigwigs by holding up a mirror to their flagrant hypocrisy. They don’t care, and they relish shameless trolling — like wielding awesome power to police the same words they use all the time.”
But we must remain vigilant that the MAGA cancel culture of censorship, firings, sanctions and even arrests that followed Charlie Kirk’s assassination isn’t replicated. And we should never accept the MAGA demand that their words be met with no recriminations (because that’s “cancel culture” and “incitement”), while insisting that their opponents never call them a mean name — even when the shoe fits.
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I'd personally like to welcome two of our newer members to the resistance ranks of protestors, yes, congratulations go to Melania Trump and Pope Leo who have joined us.
Melania has joined us in demanding full disclosure on the Epstein cover up, and Pope Leo has joined us in protesting Trumps Wars and politics of violence. Special shout out to the Pope for standing firm even after the Pentagon threatened him, consequently, going forward, Pope Leo, the first American Pope, will not set foot in the United States as long as Donald Trump is President.
You just can't make this stuff up, (maybe Fellini could, but he is comfortable with surrealism).
What do you all think of these recent developments?
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I live in Georgia where there is a bitter campaign for governor happening, the negative campaign commercials among Republicans running in the primary are common and intense. If you go by the commercials, there is only one issue at stake, Gender Reassignment Surgery for Minors. The three primary republicans running for Governor are all primarily promising they will put a stop to reassignment surgery for minors, as if there are no other issues upon which we can vote for Governor, they all say they will make it illegal when they become governor.
Fact is, gender reassignment surgery for minors has been illegal since 2023 in Georgia despite the profusion of ads from the front three republican candidates claiming they will make it illegal. Two focus their shock ads on putting a stop to gender reassignment surgery for preteens, something that has never happened in Georgia and nationally. It just doesn't happen.
This campaign issue is simply “made up”, it is not an issue anywhere, nationally, the number of preteen gender reassignment surgeries is zero as it is for under the age of 15, and for 16-17-year-olds, the rate of occurrence is 2 per 100,000 transgender people. That’s almost nothing, and almost all of those are corrective surgeries, not elective surgeries.
How is it that people have been fooled into being outraged about something that doesn’t happen, and Republican Candidates present it as the most important issue in politics. Is it just that they have nothing else? Is it that in issues that matter, the Republican positions are overwhelmingly opposed by the American People?
Can anyone explain why this non-issue is supposed to be such a major political issue?
Are these just imagined issues used to justify hatred and hostility towards transgender people?
If you do have this irrational hatred of transgender people, can you share why?
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....and our Girl Scout cookies arrived today, so there's also thin mints.
This is surely what sports heaven is like.
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As a protest to Bad Bunny’s performance at the Superbowl half time show, the MAGA movement is putting on an alternative “All American” Super Bowl halftime show “celebrating faith, family and freedom” featuring Kid Rock (yes, Kid Rock is still around, turns out he’s not dead, just forgotten).
MAGA is calling their show “All American” and accusing Bad Bunny of “not being an American artist”, because they are collectively too stupid to know that Puerto Rico is a US territory and therefore Bad Bunny is an American Citizen, as are all Puerto Ricans.
Why is Trump so connected to Kid Rock, well maybe it’s Kid Rock’s 2001 song, “Cool, Daddy Cool,” which contains the lyrics, “Young ladies, young ladies, I like ’em underage, see some say that’s statutory (but I say that’s mandatory).”
That explains why Trump loves Kid Rock, they both “like em underage”, and that’s what MAGA celebrates as “American faith, family and freedom”.
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This article explains Trump very well, it's long and it uses some big words, so Trumper's can't read it, but for the rest of us, it is well researched and explanatory of Trump/Epstein/Putin.
Trump isn't running this country, Putin is.
Link and Full Article is below:
Newly unmasked evidence shows who put Trump in the White House | Opinion
Newly unmasked evidence shows who put Trump in the White House | Opinion
The British newspaper Daily Mail is out with a deeply researched investigative report, the result of a long collaboration between columnists Glen Owen and Dan Hodges, along with Mark Hookham (Assistant Editor Investigations), and Daisy Graham-Brown (Investigative Reporter).
It’s shocking in its detail and its implication that Vladimir Putin has basically owned Donald Trump for years, even before Trump ran for president in 2016.
They note of last week’s partial (about 50 percent) Epstein document release:
“The files include 1,056 documents naming Russian President Vladimir Putin and 9,629 referring to Moscow. [Jeffrey] Epstein even seems to have secured audiences with Putin after his 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.”
Essentially, they’re arguing that Epstein was running an operation on behalf of the KGB/Putin that lured wealthy and powerful men to Epstein’s New York and Palm Beach mansions and his island where they were surreptitiously filmed having sex with underage girls.
That material was then presumably passed along to Putin, who used it for leverage when he needed it:
“Intelligence sources believe Epstein was running ‘the world’s largest honeytrap operation’ on behalf of the KGB when he procured women for his network of associates.”
In return for giving Putin videos of wealthy, famous men in criminally compromising positions, Putin reportedly arranged for massive amounts of corrupt Russian money to be handed to Epstein to launder in the US.
Such money typically comes from illicit drug and oil deals, outright theft, sanctions evasions, and Russian organized crime oligarchs (including Putin and his associates) and is frequently laundered in this country using real estate. It’s the Mafia’s favorite, too.
America has the most lax and largely useless real estate transaction laws in the developed world, so a main way to launder such dirty cash is through cash-based real estate transactions (which are illegal in almost every other developed country).
And we know that Trump and his sons, when US and European banks refused to loan him any more money after his multiple bankruptcies, started taking in enough money to ensure the survival of his little real estate empire and it was all coming from Russia.
As Don Jr. told wealthy attendees to a 2008 real-estate conference:
“In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”
Similarly, Eric Trump told a friend, who later testified about it:
“‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’”
This is one of the reasons Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the Ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee (that oversees US banking) has been demanding access to Epstein’s finances and even introduced legislation (the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act) to require that disclosure, which Republicans are currently blocking.
That alone is worth a call to your two US senators.
The documents released last week included a series of email conversations between Epstein and senior European officials close to Putin. This is way beyond Gary Hart and Monkey Business; this is the President of the United States being in the pocket of a foreign power and profiting from it. They pretty much openly suggest Epstein knew about ways to “handle” Trump:
“Other messages revealed Epstein claimed he could give the Kremlin valuable insight into Mr Trump ahead of a summit with Putin in Helsinki. …“In a June 2018 exchange, Epstein indicated that Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, ‘understood Trump after our conversations.’ …
“Earlier that month Epstein had also messaged Steve Bannon, a Trump ally, to tell him Mr Jagland was due to meet Putin and Lavrov and was then staying overnight with him at his mansion in Paris.” [Emphasis added]
Epstein, of course, died under deeply suspicious circumstances in jail while Trump was president (and now Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been moved to a country club type of facility where she reportedly spends the days training puppies). As Republican consultant Harlan Hill noted on Twitter at the time of Epstein’s supposed suicide:
“Dead men tell no tales. Just as Jeffrey Epstein starts to name names, he decides to kill himself? Mkay. Totally believable.”
So, if Epstein had given Putin video of Trump having sex with underage girls, and Trump knows it and has for decades, how might that have changed Trump’s behavior?
In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his first presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).
The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings, all just leading up to the 2016 election.
The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.
Throughout the campaign, he regularly let Russia know where Trump needed specific types of help, and how, and when.
With that help, an army of bots, shills, and trolls were unleashed on social media to successfully swing the young white male vote toward Trump.
Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia and his unpaid efforts to elect Trump.
As The New York Times noted in 2020:
“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”
There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and criminally bringing stolen top secret documents to Mar-a-Lago is just the tip of the iceberg.
The Washington Post reported that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.
Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin told him to?
Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless he’s terrified.
“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” The Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”
When Robert Mueller’s team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with Putin, they were stonewalled.
The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after Flynn’s dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.
As the Mueller Report noted:
“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”
It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:
“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”
There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.
And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November, 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.
In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” that spy.
The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble (creating a brown-skinned refugee crisis in Europe, which both Putin and Orbán exploited).
That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.
As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):
“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”
The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.
Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.
The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:
“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”
Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.
Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act, which Jack Smith was prepared to charge Trump under. Paul further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was worried because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:
“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally burned a man working for the FBI — whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:
“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”
Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.
In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.
In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.
As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:
“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”
On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.
The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…
But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”
Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:
“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”
In the years since, Trump continues to maintain a close relationship with Putin; most recently he revealed that he’d asked “a favor” of the Russian dictator to “pause” his murderous, war-crime bombing of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine “for one week.” Putin, being in the power position, chose to laugh at Trump and continued his assault on the nation, although he did throw Trump a bone by pausing his hits on Kiev for a few days.
These aren’t just “a few bad judgment calls” or a president with “strange foreign policy instincts.” These stories (and literally hundreds of others) point to a man who’s behaved, consistently and predictably, like someone under leverage, someone whose personal fear of exposure of some sort of major crime — like the ones we know Epstein was holding over other billionaires — outweighs his loyalty to the nation he swore to serve.
If Americans don’t demand real investigations, genuine accountability, and impeachment and jail time for what sure looks like the greatest counterintelligence failure in our history, we may lose what’s left of our democracy before the 2028 elections can fix things.
If Democrats can take control of either branch of Congress and if Schumer and Jeffries get spine transplants and begin a serious investigation into Trump’s destruction of the United States and our historic role in the world, they’ll have enough to keep them busy for years.
This is not about politics or personality. It’s about whether a country can survive being led by someone who looks captured and compromised by a foreign power. If even half of this is true, then staying quiet is the same as going along with it.
We must demand real investigations and real consequences, or accept that the presidency can be bought, blackmailed, and used against the country itself.
Let your elected officials know your thoughts on this, and don’t forget to demand your elected Republicans step up and defend America, too. You can reach your member of Congress and both your Senators via the congressional switchboard at: (202) 224-3121.
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The theme for Black History Month 2026 is "A Century of Black History Commemorations". Selected by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), this theme marks the 100th anniversary of the celebration's inception by Carter G. Woodson in 1926. It explores how, over the past century, these commemorations have transformed the status of Black people in the modern world.
“My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.” — Desmond Tutu
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By definition, a “Rogue Nation” is a country that acts outside of accepted international norms, laws, and diplomatic processes, and is characterized as:
The term “Rogue Nation” is a prominent concept used in foreign policy; the Western World hasused the term for decades to describe counties the possess the characteristics of the above definition.
In consideration of US actions in the last year, and given the definition and characteristics of the term, it’s pretty hard to deny that the United States has become a Rogue Nation.
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Trump has won multiple awards recently, his response to all of them, "Nobody deserves this honor more than me". Trump supporters are so proud!
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If they change the name of Greenland to "Epstein Island", he will stop talking about it.
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For years Trump has been open about his desire to receive the Purple Heart and the Nobel Peace Prize.
On Thursday, Trump got Venezuela’s María Corina Machado to give him her Nobel Peace Prize and back in 2016 he took the Purple Heart from Lt. Col. Louis Dorfman (Maybe he earned it for his bone spurs injury).
What an honor, you Trumper's must be soooo proud of him.
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Rob Reiner and his wife were tragically murdered, the next day, sick fuck Trump makes it about him of course, and gloats about it.
The President of the United States' response to the tragedy:
"Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and MIchele rest in peace!,”
What do you think about this?
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Trump says Netflix-Warner Bros. deal could be a 'problem' and he will be involved in approval
Of course, "he will be involved in approval", no way an 80-billion-dollar deal goes down without Trump getting his piece of the action.
The "problem" is they haven't agreed to eliminate any and all DEI programs, to appease his white supremacist base, and of course, there's Trump's approval mantra "Show me the money!".
The Paramount-Skydance deal was only $8 billion, and they had to pay him $16 million, the Netflix-Warner Bros deal is ten times bigger, under no circumstances will that get approved till he gets an airplane, or at least a payoff of hundred-million-dollars or so. And as always, they will need to name a bunch of stuff after Trump, and perhaps a new logo.
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Just so you know, I am a master sourdough bread baker, quite possibly the greatest sour dough bread baker in the world.
As far as sourdough bread is concerned, I look down upon you inferiors with disdain.
138
Trump got his ass kicked last night and he wasn't even on the ballot.
EVERYONE Trump endorsed got their ass kicked, if he wanted to demolish the East Wing quicker; he should have just given it his endorsement. For NYC Mayor, Trump endorsed his brother in sexual assault per the adjudicated rapist code, Mamdani crushed it, after 911 only Trump could get a Muslim elected mayor.
Between now and the midterms it's gonna be fun watching Republicans scramble to put distance between them and Trump, stay loyal and the voters destroy you, don't stay loyal and Trump will destroy you, they earned it.
Democrats only need two house seats in the midterms, I'll bet we pick up a dozen or more. We need 4 senators to flip, harder but I think we will do it.
Finally, the tide has turned, we might just save democracy after all.
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This is a great article that helps explain Trump supporters, link and full article pasted below:
How Donald Trump broke the American mind
Opinion by Sophia A. McClennen
President Donald Trump’s decision to demolish the East Wing of the White House to make way for a ballroom is classic Trumpian theater — grandiose destruction packaged as vision. But the stories of the institutions, buildings and legacies that Trump and his team have destroyed aren’t the most disturbing threats our nation faces. What’s truly at risk of collapsing is the country’s cognitive infrastructure.
The real wreckage of Trumpism isn’t political chaos or partisan decay — it’s the slow demolition of the American mind.
The success of any autocrat lies in their ability to mesmerize their supporters and mentally paralyze the resistance. Opposition depends not only on organized protests, but on the collective capacity to think through the crisis. Despots, knowing this, endeavor to do everything in their power to shut down our ability to think outside of their established narratives.
This means that, while turnout for the “No Kings” protests is cause for optimism, effective resistance will require more than clever signs and animated crowds. It will demand careful attention to the cognitive toll of living under an absurd autocracy that claims to defend democracy while simultaneously dismantling it. How can the collective consciousness of pro-democracy Americans withstand the mental assault of Trumpism?
The first step is to understand how these attacks on critical thinking take place.
Trump’s assault on the American mind operates on five fronts, with each one designed to distort perception, drain attention and degrade the nation’s collective reasoning. While it can be easy to think that these are simply incidental habits or stylistic quirks, it is critical to note that they are strategic modes of cognitive domination and they have been on display since well before Trump began his first term as President.
The culture of lies
Feel tired of making sense of Trump’s lies? If that resonates, it’s because mentally processing constant lying wears you down and, over time, becomes hard to resist.
Trump’s politics depend on what psychologists call cognitive overload. He lies so relentlessly that even his detractors become mentally fatigued as the brain’s basic truth-tracking mechanisms begin to short-circuit. Research by psychologists Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand shows that repeated exposure to falsehoods erodes the brain’s resistance: The more often we hear a claim — true or false — the more familiar, and thus believable, it feels.
Consider one of Trump’s repeated falsehoods: That his tariffs on China brought in “billions and billions” of dollars in revenue. Fact-checkers have debunked it hundreds of times, pointing out that tariffs were largely paid by U.S. consumers, not China. Yet repeated lies often become the message. The cognitive labor of constant rebuttal — the fatigue of knowing and re-knowing the same facts — slowly wears down public reasoning.
The real cognitive toll, though, comes in the exhaustion the mind suffers in the constant rebuttal of falsehoods. Each day the administration saturates the public sphere with a constant litany of lies. Psychologists have proven that processing a culture of lies results in cognitive fatigue.
The faulty logic
If Trump’s lies weaken truth, even greater damage is done to our capacity to use reason to make sense of information.
Trumpian rhetoric relies on a rotating arsenal of cognitive traps: Whataboutism to deflect, false equivalence to confuse, red herrings to distract and gaslighting to exhaust. In fact, the Trump administration offers a constant lesson in all of the most common flaws in logical reasoning.
For example, when it emerged that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth discussed classified U.S. military operations using the encrypted messaging application Signal, the faulty logic of the administration was on full display. The same administration that once led chants of “Lock her up!” over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server now dismissed the breach as “no big deal” and a “witch hunt.”
It isn’t just that the Trump team offers an incessant flood of faulty logic. They also create an environment that makes thinking critically exceptionally difficult. As cognitive scientists Keith Stanovich and Richard West have shown, humans possess two systems of thought: One fast and emotional, the other slow and deliberative. Trump keeps the public in the first mode — triggered, reactive, impulsive. Under Trump, critical reasoning collapses from emotional overload.
The threat, then, isn’t just misinformation; it’s misreasoning.
The misrepresentation of opponents
Trump doesn’t argue with opponents; he distorts them. Former President Joe Biden becomes “Crooked Joe.” Journalists become “enemies of the people.” Any prosecutor investigating him is “deranged” or “corrupt.” The point isn’t persuasion — it’s reframing identity. Once the label sticks, the opponent gets mired in defending themselves from the attack, leaving the control of the narrative entirely in Trump’s hands.
As I have written for Salon, Trump doesn’t just reduce opponents to absurd caricatures; he also creates false versions of their positions, a tactic that destroys the conditions for reasoned debate. By misrepresenting the views of his opponents, Trumpism forces them into a cognitive trap: They get stuck refuting the way they have been misrepresented rather than advancing their ideas.
For those of us watching these manufactured debates, our minds get distracted by the back-and-forth between misrepresentation and defense. The result is that we can risk losing sight of the real issues we need to follow to effectively defend our democracy.
The barrage of spectacle
Trump and his team don’t just lie, twist logic and misrepresent their opponents — they never stop. The chaos is not incidental; it’s the method.
Long before his career in politics, Trump perfected the performance of power and honed his skills at becoming an ongoing source of attention. As Guy Debord warned in “The Society of the Spectacle,” when social life becomes mediated by images, “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Trump is that principle embodied. From “The Apprentice” to Truth Social to his daily barrage of inane memes, Trump has turned politics into a show — collapsing governance into entertainment and politics into virality.
Processing an ongoing spectacle simply fries your brain. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains that constant novelty and interruption deplete the brain’s executive functions — the very ones essential for critical thinking and judgment.
The swagger of impunity
If Trump’s lies corrode truth and critical thinking while his spectacle exhausts the mind, it is his swagger of impunity that leaves us in shock. Every smirk that follows a scandal, every boast of getting away with it, threatens to rewire the public’s moral compass.
From claiming that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and [not] lose any voters” to watching his administration violate one norm, regulation and protocol after another, Trump and his team don’t just brag about breaking rules, they get away with it.
Hannah Arendt warned in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” that when the absurd becomes normal, thinking itself collapses. Trump’s defiance of norms, laws and political consequences boggles the mind. His followers see his shameless disregard for the law as proof of strength, not guilt. Yet, his critics reel from a growing numbness. Each unpunished act dulls outrage until the mind struggles to believe in effective guardrails to democracy.
If you’ve found yourself burnt out, exhausted, confused, dejected and dismayed as you process the daily onslaught of the Trumpian team, you now know why. And while it might be tempting to allow awareness of these authoritarian tactics to sow depression, that would be playing right into Trump’s hands.
Understanding the power of authoritarian confusion must breed clarity, not despair. The more we grasp how Trumpism corrodes thought, the better equipped we are to defend it — because the fight for democracy always begins in the mind.
The post How Donald Trump broke the American mind appeared first on Salon.com.
