Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Hegseth “in hot water”

Has Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth started drinking again? With the pressure he’s under, it would surprise no one. The Hill reports that Hegseth faces “bipartisan scrutiny over his reported order to strike a boat in the Caribbean a second time, killing two survivors who were clinging to the ship’s wreckage on Sept. 2.”

BBC:

US lawmakers are pressing the Trump administration for answers about military strikes on suspected Venezuelan drug boats, after a report alleged that a follow-up strike was ordered to kill survivors of an initial attack.

Republican-led committees overseeing the Pentagon have vowed to conduct “vigorous oversight” into the US boat strikes in the Caribbean, following the report.

If reports are true, what gave him and Donald Trump the idea that blowing up small boats in international waters was a thing? Consider then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission: “No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon … into the World Trade Center, using planes as missiles.”

Um, Tom Clancey?

Stephen Miller advocated drone strikes on migrant boats filled with unarmed civilians in 2018. He argued the boats were in international waters and not protected under the US Constitution, according to Miles Taylor a former Trump administration official.

Color me unsurprised! pic.twitter.com/8q4l7Ut5l4

— Geoff (@GeoffBrown82) June 27, 2023

It turns out that someone in the Trump administration did imagine using drones to blow up boatloads of civilians in international waters. Stephen Miller did. It’s who he is.

From Rolling Stone in 2023:

Stephen Miller, one of Donald Trump’s top immigration advisers, advocated using U.S. predator drones in 2018 to blow up migrant boats full of unarmed civilians, according to an upcoming book by a former administration official.

In a passage reviewed by Rolling Stone, former Trump Department of Homeland Security appointee Miles Taylor writes about an April 2018 conversation in which Miller allegedly advocated an attack on a migrant ship headed for the United States. Miller, Taylor writes, argued for the potential mass killing of civilians by suggesting they were not protected under the U.S. Constitution because they were in international waters.

Miller contested Taylor’s account at the time.

“This is a complete fiction that exists only in the mind of Miles Taylor desperate to stay relevant by fabricating material for his new book,” says a spokesman for Miller.

What about now?

According to a converstion related in Taylor’s book Miller agued with Paul Zukunft, then an commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard:

[The] United States launched airstrikes on terrorists in disputed areas all the time, Miller said, or retaliated against pirates commandeering ships off the coast of Somalia. The Coast Guard chief calmly explained the difference. America attacked enemy forces when they were armed and posed an imminent threat. Seafaring migrants were generally unarmed civilians. They quarreled for a few minutes. Stephen wasn’t interested in the moral conflict of drone-bombing migrants. He wanted to know whether anyone could stop America from doing it.

I’m thinking Hegseth did not come up with the idea of striking boats in the Caribbean (and leaving no survivors) alone.

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Democracy Docket got the inside scoop on what some right wing vote stealing operations are up to:

Anti-voting activists met earlier this month in Worcester, Mass. for the annual fall summit of the New England chapter of Cleta Mitchell’s influential Election Integrity Network. I obtained the agenda and notes from the confab, where Mitchell and other anti-voting activists and election deniers, as well as two friendly state lawmakers, discussed plans to push for severely limiting early and mail voting.

“In-person voting on Election Day should be primary,” Mitchell said at one of the event’s panels, explaining to attendees that nearly all voting should take place in person on Election Day. Her voting policy wishlist is close to what President Donald Trump has called for, and would radically curtail access to the ballot, taking the U.S. back decades to the era of one-day elections.

Throughout the panel, Mitchell spread a stream of voting conspiracy theories, including false claims that early-voting polling places are more prone to voter fraud and that Service Employees International Union members who work at care homes for the elderly frequently steal ballots from their patients.

One of the state lawmakers who spoke at the event was a Maine Republican who marched on the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6, 2021, and has falsely accused Capitol Police of trying to incite violence that day.

They are working feverishly to end early voting and vote by mail, under the assumption that it will help them. I’m not so sure. Republicans like to use those options as well. And unless the Supremes decide to change the constitution to put themselves in charge of elections (certainly possible…) even red states may balk at doing this.

But they also have other tricks up their sleeves which I suspect is where they are really headed:

Also at Friday’s EIN meeting, Phani Mantravadi, a Michigan anti-voting activist who co-founded the group Check My Vote, discussed ways for citizens to take it upon themselves to hunt for voter fraud, according to the notes. 

In addition to plugging Check My Vote, which uses incomplete or inaccurate public data to check voter registrations, Mantravadi encouraged attendees to drive by the homes of voters they suspect of fraud to check that their addresses are valid. 

That’s probably the tip of the intimidation iceberg, I’m afraid. They are working feverishly to ensure that they never lose elections in the future. It’s going to be a huge battle for some time to come.

If you’re unfamiliar with Mitchell’s work, read this. She’s a very dangerous person.

Henry Bolton, British former politician who was the leader of the UK Independence Party, is utterly aghast at the rumors that Trump is sending emissaries to moscow to rubber-stamp putin's invasion.

If this is true, bolton argues, Trump isn't just selling out Ukraine, he's… pic.twitter.com/y3xFm1zYJQ

— Yasmina (@yasminalombaert) November 30, 2025

Via X:

Henry Bolton, British former politician who was the leader of the UK Independence Party, is utterly aghast at the rumors that Trump is sending emissaries to moscow to rubber-stamp putin’s invasion. If this is true, Bolton argues, Trump isn’t just selling out Ukraine, he’s tearing up every rule that’s kept europe relatively peaceful for the last 50 years and confirming to every tin-pot dictator that borders are just suggestions. it’s either total incompetence or something “far worse.”

Bolton: “The Daily Telegraph and other outlets are reporting that President Trump has sent Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner to Moscow to tell President Putin that he is prepared to formally recognize Luhansk, Donetsk, and Crimea as Russian territory. And if that’s correct, then this marks a very, very dark day for European security.

If he does this, he’d be rewarding an invader, an aggressor, betraying Ukraine’s defense, and ripping up something called the Helsinki Final Act, which laid the foundations for peace and territorial integrity in Europe since 1975. He’d be driving a wedge between the United States and the European allies, undermining NATO’s deterrent power and effect, and would send a very bad signal indeed to every autocrat in the world that they can change borders by force.

We have of course got to try everything we can to end this war, but appeasing the aggressor has never, ever brought peace. It’s only invited further conflict. And if we’ve learned anything at all from history, it’s surely got to be that. And as I say, I keep saying, if indeed this is happening, I’m praying it’s not, but if it is, then it’s not diplomacy or pragmatism. It is surrender, American surrender.

But even worse, President Trump could be undermining the security of all of us here in Britain and Europe without even consulting us. It would confirm either extraordinary incompetence on his part, arrogance, or maybe even something far worse. I mean, after all, what is motivating the American president if it isn’t the interests of Ukraine, Europe, or the United States?

The world is watching, and people in the know are holding their breath. Britain and Europe have got to stand firm. We’ve got to defend the principles of sovereignty and law and resolutely remind Washington and Moscow that peace cannot be built on the foundations of force, aggression, or oppression. And this is a moment I think for clarity, courage, and leadership, not capitulation or compromise.

Someone in Britain or in Europe has got to stand up and show some real statesmanlike leadership in a measured, proper, diplomatic manner, but firmly and strongly, because otherwise, the years to come are going to be…”

Yep.

Black Friday spending was up. Maybe. And if it is, it’s because the wealthy are having a gay old time while everyone else is struggling:

US retail sales on Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year, climbed 4.1% compared with last year, according to data released Saturday by Mastercard SpendingPulse. Online shoppers alone spent $11.8 billion, up 9.1% from 2024, according to data collection platform Adobe Analytics.

But those gains don’t account for higher prices due to inflation, so actual spending could be flat. “We have 3% inflation, so maybe (the 4.1% increase in spending) is a real increase of just 1% or so, which is not that much of an increase,” Rick Newman, who writes The Pinpoint Press, a newsletter on the US economy, told CNN on Friday.

There’s also a bifurcation in who’s spending. The Federal Reserve’s most recent Beige Book, a collection of anecdotes about the economy, showed consumer spending among low- and middle-income consumers is on the decline. Meanwhile, the Fed found high-end consumers are continuing to spend — including on luxury items and travel.

Consumers have bought fewer items this holiday season, but the average selling prices are higher, according to Claudia Lombana, a national consumer expert. “The ones that have higher income are spending at will, but those who are less affluent are budgeting,” Lombana told CNN’s Omar Jimenez on Saturday.

It’s part of the so-called K-shaped economy, in which higher earners get a boost from their stock market investments and home valuations and use their fatter paychecks to spend. But lower earners increasingly live paycheck to paycheck and look for discounts — or curtail their spending to cope with rising prices.

Wealthier people don’t have any problem with these higher prices, natch. It’s all fun and games for them. Everyone else, not so much. Is this sustainable? Unlikely, since the political blow back from the have nots tends to get very intense.

Income inequality is nothing new, of course. But it’s gotten much worse over just the last few years and with Trump at the helm hosting lavish celebrations with his billionaire buddies, the public will get less and less tolerant of this “let them eat cake” bs. He promises bread and circuses and he’s certainly delivering on the latter. But the bread comes first and he’s certainly not delivering on that.

She wrote this last week in the wake of Trump’s calls for the death of veterans who said that the military must not follow illegal orders, but I think it applies throughout this holiday season as we gather with colleagues friends and family:

In many American homes, discussion of politics has become verboten. Whatever the value of sacrificing discussion to keep the peace, this news from today is not politics, and it should be discussed at kitchen tables and Thanksgiving dinner tables across our country. Every American should understand both this news and what it means: That the president of the United States, who has killed people abroad, is now asserting the desire to see elected representatives in this country killed, that the president who stood alongside the Saudi crown prince who suborned the murder of Jamal Khashoggi defended the murderer, not the victim. George Washington would, most certainly, not have hanged members of Congress for expressing their views. He would not have approved of what Donald Trump said today, or pretty much any day. We can no longer afford to permit those around us to bury their heads in the sand and pretend this isn’t happening. It is all too real. It is all too risky, given that this president’s words have all too frequently become actions once spoken to his followers.

This is about country, not politics.

Word.

Trump’s latest atrocity:

He once boasted that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” He accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him.

At the federal trial of Juan Orlando Hernández in New York, testimony and evidence showed how the former president maintained Honduras as a bastion of the global drug trade. He orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy that prosecutors said raked in millions for cartels while keeping Honduras one of Central America’s poorest, most violent and most corrupt countries.

Last year, Mr. Hernández was convicted on drug trafficking and weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison. It was one of the most sweeping drug-trafficking cases to come before a U.S. court since the trial of the Panamanian strongman Gen. Manuel Noriega three decades before.

[…]

But on Friday, President Trump announced that he would pardon Mr. Hernandez, 57, who he said was a victim of political persecution, though Mr. Trump offered no evidence to support that claim. It would be a head-spinning resolution to a case that for prosecutors was a pinnacle, striking at the heart of a narcostate.

I am including a gift link for you to read the whole sordid story. This man is a monster. One of the worst ever. And Trump pardoned him.

That may seem counterintuitive since he’s simultaneously waging war on Venezuela over cocaine trafficking but he’s acting entirely on impulse now and Roger Stone told him that he was “unfairly” prosecuted so Trump did it. He rightly sees himself in Hernandez — a corrupt criminal president:

For many Hondurans, his conviction was a rare taste of justice. A woman in a crowd outside the courthouse celebrating his punishment had held a sign that read “No clemency for narcopolitics.”

But on Saturday, Mr. Trump said in a statement to The New York Times that “many friends” had asked him to pardon Mr. Hernández: “They gave him 45 years because he was the President of the Country — you could do this to any President.”

No doubt that is the argument Roger made to him.

Trump 2.0 has been a train wreck from the beginning but it does feel like he’s just saying “fuck it” now and doing what he feels like doing no matter how insane it might be. We are entering a new phase of lunacy.

Although Republicans have expressed just a tiny bit of “concern” over Pete Hegseth’s order to “kill ’em all” in the Caribbean, I haven’t heard any of them speak out about this. I honestly don’t think there’s any red line for them. If Trump decided to set up camps to throw all of his political enemies in them I’m fairly sure he wouldn’t get any trouble from the GOP.

That was fun.

A secretive Fort Bragg operation that specializes in influencing people’s thoughts has released a hypnotic recruitment video that is laced with hidden meanings and strange images.

Known as the 4th Psychological Operations-Airborne, or 4th PSYOP, the group specializes in “using the power of the mind to persuade opinion and discourse” among the nation’s enemies.

The 1:17-second clip, posted Nov. 19 on social media, is a string of baffling clips, including old cartoons, masked figures hiding in plain sight and a group of people staring blankly at the viewer over the phrase: “We are everywhere.”

“There is another force applied in combat that we generally don’t think of as a weapon of war. That weapon is words,” the video says. “Words are weapons. … This is psychological warfare.”

The video then beckons: “Join PSYOP.”

Some responses:

Among the surprises found, references to conspiracy theories, the “Ghost Army” that deceived the Nazi generals in WWII and the popular Pepe the Frog GIF shows up in a clown suit. At one point, the phrase “anything we touch is a weapon” flashes and fades.

“Watch it over and over again. Great little nuggets of information for us,” Nidia Law posted on Facebook.

“A lot of crumb drops in this one,” TheJason wrote on Instagram.

“I think y’all have so much fun at work! Would love to be on the other side of this ‘fog show’,” Leigh Eschew said on Instagram.

I’m sure the recruits will be the finest conspiracy theorists the country has to offer.

Oh, and then there’s this. (Note that eleven stars represented the eleven states that had originally seceded from the Union to form the Confederacy.)

Interesting font choice too, don’t you think?

What in the world is happening????

From Pete Hegseth’s book which every Senator had access to when Trump nominated him. They knew what he was and they knew that Trump was a sociopathic moron. I imagine they thought the generals would be a “guardrail” but they aren’t. (Those who might have been willing to do it have been fired.)

This is the simple-minded, delayed adolescent we have in charge of the U.S. military because all of those Republicans betrayed America.

Is pretty American

The targeted shootings on Wednesday last week of two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C. were a nightmare. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died after being shot. Her colleague, Andrew Wolfe, 24, is still reportedly “fighting for his life.” The alleged shooter is an Afghan refugee and former CIA battlefield asset admitted to the country under a Biden administration program and given asylum status in April under the Trump administration. He is hospitalized with gunshot wounds sustained during his capture.

When Americans commit mass shootings, as they often do, conservatives offer thoughts and prayers, as they often do, declare shooters mentally ill, as they often do, and warn the left not to politicize the shootings.

But raging xenophobes like Stephen Miller feel no such constraints. He declared that “importing” men, women, and children “at scale” from “broken” countries simply leads to them turning ours into another failed-state hellhole.

X-user Tabitha throws that argument back in Miller’s face:

Ah yes, the classic “importing societies” lecture from the guy whose great-grandparents fled pogroms with nothing but the clothes on their backs and somehow didn’t recreate Tsarist Russia in Pennsylvania.

Funny how that magic transformation worked just fine for the Miller family, but suddenly stops functioning when the skin is browner and the prayers face Mecca.

We need security, yes—but humane, targeted, and blind to race or origin.

Immigrants from “failed states” have lower crime rates than native-born Americans, built more businesses per capita, and many of the Afghans you’re targeting literally risked their lives helping U.S. troops. But sure, keep cosplaying 1924 immigration quotas while pretending it’s about “security” and not demographics. We see you.

NY Times Pitchbot satirizes Miller’s argument that such people are unable to assimilate as Americans. He shot multiple innocent people, didn’t he?

Stephen Miller says Afghan immigrant Rahmanullah Lakanwal was incapable of assimilating to American culture. But a factcheck shows that Lakanwal used a gun to assault and kill multiple innocent people. Four Pinocchios.

He allegedly used a .357 Smith & Wesson.

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Let God sort ’em out

One would have to be culturally illiterate not to see it coming. Men like Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller would be comically cartoonish, B-movie villains if their statements and behaviors were the least bit funny. People are dead and disappeared. Men killed in the Caribbean on Sept 2 by U.S. forces were murdered, according to a statement released Saturday by “Former JAGs Working Group.”

Former US military lawyers speak out

"The Former JAGs Working Group unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both"

Statement on Media Reports of Pentagon “No Quarter” Orders in Caribbean Boat Strikes pic.twitter.com/eXo0bs4zyb

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) November 29, 2025

Secretary Pete Hegseth gave verbal orders to kill everybody aboard a small boat in the Caribbean targeted as smuggling drugs, according to two unnamed sources “with direct knowledge of the operation.” The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump and the Pentagon claim that “the Sept. 2 strike targeted members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua but have not provided evidence to support those claims.”

Once a missile struck the boat, drone footage showed two survivors clinging to the burning wreckage. The Washington Post reported, “The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack [Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, per the Post] … ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.”

Hegseth, unsurprisingly, declared the reporting “fake news.” The man with the Crusader tattoos called the story “fabricated, inflammatory and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland.”

The former JAGS presumably know more about the laws of war than a former Fox News Weekend host. “The Former JAGs Working Group unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both,” reads their statement:

• If the U.S. military operation to interdict and destroy suspected narcotraficking vessels
  is a “non-international armed conflict,” as the Trump Administration suggests, orders to
  “kill everybody,” which can reasonably be regarded as an order to give “no quarter,” and
  to “double-tap” a target in order to kill survivors, are clearly illegal under international
  law. In short, they are war crimes.
• If the U.S. military operation is not an armed conflict of any kind, these orders to kill
  helpless civilians clinging to the wreckage of a vessel our military destroyed would
  subject everyone from SECDEF down to the individual who pulled the trigger to prosecution under U.S. law for murder.

A former Pentagon associate general counsel concurs, telling CNN that it is a crime either way you slice it:

“They’re breaking the law either way,” said Sarah Harrison, a former associate general counsel at the Pentagon who now serves as a senior analyst at the Crisis Group think tank. “They’re killing civilians in the first place, and then if you assume they’re combatants, it’s also unlawful — under the law of armed conflict, if somebody is ‘hors de combat’ and no longer able to fight, then they have to be treated humanely.”

Harvard Law Professor and former head of the Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush, Jack Goldsmith, writes at his Substack, “One can imagine stretching Article II of the Constitution to authorize the U.S. drug boat campaign.” One might also, he writes, “possibly, stretch the laws of war to say that attacks on the drug boats are part of a ‘non-international armed conflict,’ as OLC has reportedly concluded.”

But, Goldsmith concludes, “there can be no conceivable legal justification” for the killings reported by the Post. He quotes chapter and verse:

Section 5.4.7 of the DOD Law of War Manual says:

Prohibition Against Declaring That No Quarter Be Given. It is forbidden to declare that no quarter will be given. This means that it is prohibited to order that legitimate offers of surrender will be refused or that detainees, such as unprivileged belligerents, will be summarily executed. Moreover, it is also prohibited to conduct hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors, or to threaten the adversary with the denial of quarter. This rule is based on both humanitarian and military considerations. This rule also applies during non-international armed conflict.

Hegseth denies he gave the “kill everybody” order. Those who carried out the supposed non-order are not talking. Leaders of the House Armed Services Committee stated on Saturday that they intend to investigate. So does the Senate Armed Services Committee:

A top Republican senator, Roger Wicker, has joined his Democratic counterpart in calling for “vigorous oversight to determine the facts” of allegations that the military intentionally killed survivors of a boat strike. 

“The Committee has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances,” said Sen. Wicker, R-Miss., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

What makes the Sept. 2 strike even more curious is an Oct. 18 statement from Donald Trump. Survivors of a strike on an alleged drug-carrying submarine were captured and would be “returned to their Countries of origin, Ecuador and Colombia, for detention and prosecution.” But survivors from an alleged drug boat from Venezuela had to die. Wouldn’t survivors of an alleged Tren de Aragua drug boat be a source of valuable intelligence on cartel smuggling operations? The committees will surely ask that question.

Hegseth has directed the killing of dozens in the Caribbean, possibly illegally, including Columbian fishermen. Secretary Kristi Noem’s masked Customs and Border Patrol and ICE have launched a reign of terror against Latinos and other non-white U.S. residents. Both the undocumented and U.S. citizens have been impacted. Donald Trump wants and chief advisor Stephen Miller is likely directing deportations without due process, defying court orders, instituting a new kind of extraordinary rendition, and now targeting duly naturalized citizens for denaturalization and deportation.

If this were a movie, they’d plainly be the villains. They are making all of us villains by proxy. This is the part of the movie where the heroes stand up and fight back. That’s you.

Update: Oh, by the way

On the horrific news that Pete Hegseth ordered the killing of boat bombing survivors, remember: The DOJ memo "authorizing" the strikes preemptively clears those carrying them out. That's unusual. And we still haven't heard from the commander who resigned:https://t.co/LaeGR5jqLh pic.twitter.com/vLr4Ojut3j

— Greg Sargent (@GregTSargent) November 30, 2025

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

No King’s One Million Rising movement 
50501 
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink 
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense