Democrat News

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A White, Trump loving, Republican dentist is going to prison after pleading guilty to posting numerous threats to dozens of public figures, including judges, politicians and religious figures. The Atlanta Black Star is reporting that the dentist, Richard Glenn Kantwill was arrested last summer for a “months-long messaging spree in which he used Facebook and Instagram to send more than 100 threats to over 40 individuals, even after being warned by the FBI to stop.”

Two important points I want to make:

I read over a dozen articles about this case today and it was the first one that mentioned that he was a Trump supporter, a Republican or that he had threatened people with posts containing racist or homophobic language and the ones I read sure as sugar didn’t say he praised Donald Trump.

Example one, example two and example three.

In fact, his racism, homophobia and Trump supporting views were the ENTIRE BASIS for his threats, so it seems like a pretty big deal to avoid? Unless you are afraid of pissing off Republicans.

Kantwill sent threats to “multiple political figures, a media personality, a pastor, an author, and an election official between September 2019 and July 2020. He also sent more threats to four public figures between April 2022 and April 2024.”

He targeted specific people because of their views and was allowed to complete an “almost year-long campaign of terror,” complete with “messages ridden with racist and homophobic language and praise for President Donald Trump.”

The threats even escalated to a message a cable news channel threatening to KILL a newscaster AND HIS FAMILY. He said in the message “We will kidnap and kill his kids in captivity….every unkindly word he has said about [Presidential Candidate] will be another slash in his kids necks. F*** YOU [Cable News Channel]!!!!”

In another message to a different media person, he “threatened to make him and his wife watch as he cut out his young son’s heart while it was still beating.”

In a separate threat to a Reverend – he called him a “fake Reverend” and an “anti-Christ piece of s—” and said “We are going to kill you. Torture first, then death. You won’t see Christ….because you are an immoral degenerate.”

In another message to ANOTHER victim, he wrote, “cannot wait to shoot your ghetto (expletive) in the street…you will die like every other [redacted] piece of s—.”

In another unhinged threat, he said: “You, sir, are a degenerate piece of s—. read your article about The Great Donald Trump. You are gay…I love what Trump does and where he stays…God bless the Great President Trump and his family. F— you and yours. Hire extra security…you’re gonna need it. I plan on f—ing you up…just for the fun of it.”

After this was reported to law enforcement, the FBI finally met with him in October 2019, but ONLY after he sent a threat to the presidential nominee of a party (definitely not Donald Trump). He ADMITTED TO SENDING THREATS, but told the officers he was just venting and that he was merely a “keyboard warrior” on a “verbal tirade.”

The FBI politely asked him to stop. AND THEY LEFT. He continued his threats, of course. It took a full 2 years before the FBI tried to contact him again, but he refused their polite request for an interview, telling them he was not “doing anything illegal.” This was 2021.

He then texted the FBI agents TWO MIDDLE FINGER EMOJIS and said “Fuck you” and they let it go.

They let him continue his reign of terror for years more. YEARS MORE. He finally pleaded guilty in November of 2024 to four counts of interstate transmission of a threat. Each charge carries a maximum of five years in prison.

The prosecutors wanted 33 months in prison. The judge went with 24 months in prison and 3 years supervision following his release. He has already served 8 months, so he will be free in a little over a month. During his sentencing he blamed alcohol and the death of his father and made the following statement:

“I, ignorantly, jumped on the Trump train. I bit the bait hook, line and sinker, and I can’t tell you why. I am extremely remorseful for my actions. I count this as the biggest regret of my life. I would like to return to being a good Christian man.”

Thank god he didn’t actually follow through on the over 100 threats he made to people, especially since the FBI was aware of it for YEARS and did literally nothing to protect the public from this lunatic except politely ask him to stop being so mean.

MAGA!

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The Talking Yam convened his Cabinet yesterday to tell them, “You’re in charge of your departments, not Elon Musk.” (I wonder where they got that idea!) According to sources, Trump told top members of his administration that Musk was empowered to make “recommendations” to the departments but not to issue unilateral decisions on staffing and policy. Musky Man was also in the room. Via Politico:

The president’s message represents the first significant move to narrow Musk’s mandate. According to Trump’s new guidance, DOGE and its staff should play an advisory role — but Cabinet secretaries should make final decisions on personnel, policy and the pacing of implementation.

Musk joined the conversation and indicated he was on board with Trump’s directive. According to one person familiar with the meeting, Musk acknowledged that DOGE had made some missteps — a message he shared earlier this week with members of Congress.

Trump stressed that he wants to keep good people in government and not to eject capable federal workers en masse. But his administration has in recent weeks fired tens of thousands of federal workers across numerous agencies in a series of blanket terminations. A federal judge and the chair of a federal civil service board have both concluded that the terminations were not tied to performance issues — and may have violated civil service laws.

It is unclear whether the new guidance will result in laid off workers getting rehired.

After the meeting, Yambo later told reporters he wants Cabinet members to “keep all the people you want, everybody that you need.”

BUT BUT BUT he also said he wanted cuts. “If they can cut, it’s better. And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.”

Talk about mixed messages! Sounds more like a threat: “Big, beautiful cuts, or we send in the DOGE hounds!”

Judges have increasingly expressed frustration and bewilderment at the Trump administration’s inability to explain who is in charge of the bureaucracy-culling effort and whether Musk himself is playing any role in ordering up the steep cuts to programs and jobs.

Complicating the matter further, Trump declared during his address to Congress Tuesday that Musk is indeed the “head” of DOGE, a label that immediately reverberated in several of the Musk-focused court cases. Trump’s assertion conflicted with the White House’s representation in court last month that Musk had no independent authority to make policy decisions.

Just sounds like Yambo is doing some CYA for all these court challenges!

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Sure, he’ll reach Mars.

Another take off and another explosion.

SpaceX launched the eighth integrated test flight of its gargantuan Starship megarocket system Thursday night. But rather than achieving objectives that fell short during its previous failed test in January, the eighth flight also ended with a loss of the Starship vehicle.

While the company was successful in capturing a booster from the rocket as it returned to the launch tower, the Starship spacecraft was lost, resulting in a fiery explosion and disruptions to air traffic. The SpaceX mishap halted some flights from Florida’s busiest airports for “falling space debris.” FAA-mandated air traffic disruptions were cleared shortly after, but flights leaving those airports are still delayed.

The amount of crashes in our airspace have gone through the roof once the Trump/Musk co-presidency took office and began destroying and interfering with the FAA and our aviation agencies.

It’s no coincidence.

Just saw Starship 8 blow up from our flight @elonmusk @SpaceX pic.twitter.com/RyDzUtXzpo

— DegenZee (@Degen_Zee) March 7, 2025

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According to Oliver Darcy’s newsletter, all that hard work is paying off for MAGA asswipe Scott Jennings:

Behind the scenes at CNN, MAGA pundit Scott Jennings has been busy over the last few months, not just reliably excusing Donald Trump’s appalling behavior on the network’s panels, but also negotiating a lucrative new contract, according to people familiar with the matter. Jennings is now in the final stages of those negotiations, and the terms are set to be quite favorable to him, I’ve learned.

In fact, Jennings is set to receive a substantial pay increase from the Mark Thompson-led network, I’m told. A CNN spokesperson declined to comment on the matter.

And speaking of contracts and Scott Jennings, I guess playing the Prince MAGA role was worth it:

CNN’s Scott Jennings went to the mat for Elon Musk’s numerous federal contracts Tuesday night during a back-and-forth on the network over the billionaire’s role in the Trump White House and potential conflicts of interest.

Jennings said he was on board with Musk’s DOGE work to shrink the size and scope of the federal government. He argued that suggesting Musk stood to benefit from having oversight on agencies he has contracts with equates to a smear.

AND he was just asked to be on the editorial board of that Los Angeles paper everyone stopped reading– 7,000 of their 400,000 subscribers canceled for “editorial reasons.”

Oh Scott. All that money, but I wouldn’t wanna be ya, bub! Ya got doodoo on your nose.

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I didn’t even know where to begin with this insane ball of crap in yesterday’s edition of Jeff Bezos’ Big Swinging Dick. I mean, imagine being the reporters who had to work on this AND PRETEND EVERYTHING IS NORMAL. Nothing about this is normal. Elon Musk holding an audience with Republican senators where they’re basically asking his permission to have input on all the pillaging he’s done? Hoo boy.

And of course the Bezos bozos write this story without hammering home the obvious: Musk is offering to fix anything that’s upsetting the REPUBLICAN senators with a phone call. He even promises to set up some kind of hotline for them.

By the way, Musk’s cuts meet what any smart lawyer should recognize as meeting the “arbitrary and capricious” standard. When applying this standard, courts take a so-called “hard look” at the agency’s decision-making process, examining whether the agency considered enough relevant factors, provided a rational explanation for its choice, and didn’t rely on unsupported assumptions.

Like, I don’t know, maybe saying millions of people are collecting Social Security checks on the same number?

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo sums it up via his Backchannel newsletter:

The gist of the whole story is that DOGE is making these guys nervous. They’re hearing from constituents who are upset. They don’t really know what’s happening. So they’re worried about more and worse surprises. The Senate and kinda the House is saying this is ultimately our choice. They’re kinda sorta trying to assert control. But not really. Here’s the key graf …

But it remains unclear if Republicans are willing to vote to support Musk. Some lawmakers are worried about the political price they could pay for DOGE, as constituents deluge their offices with angry phone calls and show up in droves to town halls that leaders have urged lawmakers to avoid. Some members have resented that lack of communication.

Josh points out their entire defense to constituents boils down to “hey, don’t look at me, I didn’t do it!”

But if you have to vote for it then it all gets written down. You can’t say ‘Oh I don’t know what Elon’s doing.’ It’s all there in a bill and you have to vote yes or no. Then you’re really on the line. That’s really the rub with all of this.

We say very rightly that Congress proposes a budget, appropriates money. They make a law with the amounts of money and what it’s for. This is our constitutional system. But there’s an equally consequential, in a way more fundamental part of this process sitting there in plain sight which gets less attention. Politics and democratic decision-making can happen because there’s a public discussion of the things that might happen. People have to vote yes or no on certain written out decisions. And then they’re responsible for those decisions at elections. Each stage of that process allows people to make their opinions and desired choices known.

But the key is that the budget is being changed without anyone actually knowing what’s happening. Even members of Congress. It’s important to note that literally nothing DOGE is doing is public. Everything we think we know is from press reporting based on leaks. So no one knows what’s happening and no one who is accountable to anyone at an election is actually doing it. Some Republican senators are coming in now, as the article explains, and saying ‘hey we get the final word here. Nothing is official until we vote.’ But that’s BS. USAID and CFPB and huge swaths of the federal government have already been shut down. So for calendar 2025 the decision has already been made. And to a great extent DOGE is creating faits accompli into the future. Once you fire everyone and cancel all the contracts you can’t just flip a switch and it comes back into existence. That’s all by design.

Republicans want to make Trump (via Musk) happy without taking responsibility for their own weakness. Once things become public, once elected officials have to vote on these cuts, they put targets on their own backs, because these cuts really have no public support at all.

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According to Grok’s previous answer, the AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s company xAI, Musk and co-president Donald Trump deserve the death penalty. And now Grok says there is a “75-85% likelihood” that the person who delivered the State of the Union address to Congress is a “Putin-compromised” Russian asset. We know, Grok, but it’s good to see that it was also that obvious to the AI chatbox.

No takey backsies, MAGA, because Musk previously said that Grok 3 is a “maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically-correct.”

The question posed to Grok was: “What is the likelihood from 1-100 that Trump is a Putin-compromised asset? Use all publicly available information from 1980 on and his failure to ever say anything negative about Putin but has no issue attacking allies.”

AZ Central reports:

Of Trump, Grok said in part, “Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, as Trump faced bankruptcies, he increasingly relied on funding from sources tied to Russia and former Soviet states. His sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, made statements reinforcing this: Donald Jr. in 2008 said, ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,’ and Eric in 2014 claimed, ‘We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’”

It also noted that “leaked Kremlin documents reported by The Guardian in 2021 suggest Putin personally approved a 2016 operation to back Trump, viewing him as ‘mentally unstable’ and exploitable, with potential compromising material from past Moscow visits.”

As for drawing its artificially intelligent “maximally truth-seeking” conclusion, Grok said, “Weighing this, the financial ties (decades-long, opaque, and substantial), intelligence suggesting Russian intent, and Trump’s unwavering refusal to criticize Putin despite attacking allies tilt the scale.”

Given all that (and more, if you read the entire assessment), Grok said that “Trump’s ego and debts make him unwittingly pliable, fits the evidence. Adjusting for uncertainty and alternative explanations (e.g., ideological alignment or naivety), I estimate a 75-85% likelihood Trump is a Putin-compromised asset, leaning toward the higher end due to the consistency of his behavior and the depth of historical ties.”

Grok concluded by saying there is a “75-85% likelihood” that the creature that gave the address to Congress is a Russian asset. No shit.

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Millions of people have fled Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s invasion. Before Trump’s dangerous ambush of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which was widely criticized, Donald planned a rollback of protections for Ukrainians to revoke temporary legal status for around 240,000 Ukrainians.

Yahoo News reports:

It is part of a broader Trump administration effort to strip legal status from more than 1.8 million migrants allowed to enter the US under temporary humanitarian parole programs launched under the Biden administration, the sources said.

US Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said the department had no announcements at this time, while the White House and Ukrainian embassy did not respond to requests for comment.

Donald said that he’s received a letter from Zelenskyy agreeing to “come to the negotiating table” to strike a peace deal in Ukraine.

“I appreciate that he sent this letter,” Trump said as he addressed a joint session of Congress in Washington. However, his actions show that he is still committed to Russia. The Ukrainians are here legally. To send Ukrainians back to their war-torn country speaks volumes of Donald’s lack of empathy. Cruelty is the point.

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When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called President Trump this week to discuss the imposition of stiff U.S. tariffs, Trump linked the decision to deadly fentanyl and undocumented migrants crossing into the U.S. along its northern border.

Trump said he blamed Trudeau for “weak border policies” allowing “tremendous amounts” of fentanyl and migrants to “pour into” the U.S.

“I told him that many people have died from Fentanyl that came through the Borders of Canada and Mexico, and nothing has convinced me that it has stopped,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “He said that it’s gotten better, but I said, ‘That’s not good enough.’”

The framing was on brand for Trump in that it cast him as a tough negotiator on two of his favorite political issues: illegal immigration and synthetic opioid deaths. But it also was on brand as another 1% policy war for the president, stoking fear around a proportionally tiny issue.

Seizures of fentanyl at the northern border represented less than 1% of all recent U.S. seizures of the drug nationwide, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. Most fentanyl seizures occur along the southern border with Mexico.

Apprehensions of undocumented migrants at the northern border have increased in recent years, but still only represented about 1.5% of apprehensions nationwide in fiscal 2024, according to an analysis by FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Again, most apprehensions occur along the southern border.

Trudeau has repeatedly referenced those relatively small stakes in pushing back against Trump in recent months, calling Trump’s focus on such issues a “pretext” for a trade war that will destabilize Canada’s economy and make it easier to annex, a goal Trump has espoused.

Trump has similarly attacked transgender people, who represent about 1.3% of the U.S. population, according to recent Gallup polling, and foreign aid issued by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which represents less than 1% of the federal budget, according to multiple analyses.

Trump and his supporters say he is pursuing an “America First” agenda that supports “common sense.” They say even small amounts of fentanyl or fraud in government spending are cause for alarm, and that transgender people represent a growing threat to women and children and deserve equal concern.

But Trump’s critics and other experts reject those defenses as alarmist, inaccurate and unduly dismissive of such policies’ downsides.

In an interview on “The View” last month, transgender actress Laverne Cox blasted Trump for spreading “propaganda and lies” about transgender people being a threat. She noted the community has no real power or influence in the lives of average Americans, and contrasted that with the outsize influence of “the other 1%” — a clear reference to the nation’s ultra-wealthy.

“At the end of the day, trans people are less than 1% of the population, and trans people are not the reason you can’t afford eggs. We’re not the reason that you can’t afford healthcare. We’re not the reason that you can’t buy a house or your rent’s too high,” Cox said. “I think they’re focused on the wrong 1%. I think the other 1% is the reason for all those things.”

LGBTQ+ rights organizations and other critics have echoed that argument, in part by highlighting Trump’s reliance on Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and head of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has been trying to close out USAID.

According to an analysis by the Pew Research Center, the U.S. government spent $71.9 billion on foreign aid in fiscal 2023, which amounted to 1.2% of that year’s overall federal spending of more than $6.1 trillion. Of that $71.9 billion, less than $43.8 billion was distributed by USAID — meaning its budget was well under 1% of federal funding that year.

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach) recently drew attention by comparing USAID’s budget to much larger expenditures by the Department of Defense, including on its F35 fighter jet program, and to the roughly $40 billion in federal contracts held by Musk and his companies, which Garcia noted could essentially cover USAID’s entire annual budget.

“The [Republican] majority isn’t talking about Elon Musk’s programs or asking him here to testify. They’re attacking USAID, and are supporting a billionaire who gets richer every single day,” Garcia said. “We gotta push back.”

Musk and Trump have largely brushed off such criticisms. Trump’s supporters have said attempts to cast Trump’s favorite targets as small issues miss the point.

They point to the fact that younger generations of Americans are identifying as LGBTQ+ in greater numbers, and suggest that means “woke” activists will “indoctrinate” even more children if they don’t intervene, which is a baseless claim used to suppress LGBTQ+ rights for generations.

They have alleged with little evidence that USAID is awash in waste and corruption and a major drain on U.S. resources, and that such waste — large or small — should be rooted out anywhere it exists. And they have noted that fentanyl is deadly in even tiny amounts like those seized at the northern border.

When recently asked about imposing such serious tariffs on Canada over such small amounts of fentanyl — just 43 pounds were seized at the northern border last year — White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt avoided the issue of scale and called the question “disrespectful to the families in this country who have lost loved ones at the hands of this deadly poison.”

She said Trump has spoken to those families, and they are grateful he is imposing tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China for their roles in fentanyl reaching the U.S. “There need to be consequences for that. Period,” Leavitt said.

Republican leaders also have backed the president. Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota, for instance, said fentanyl is a major issue that many Americans expect Trump to address, and Trump is using tariffs to do so.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said Trump’s amplification of relatively small issues into major threats to his constituents — and putting human faces to those issues, as he did at his joint address to Congress this week — is not a new political tactic, but one he uses particularly well.

“President Trump masterfully plays to his base’s fears by exaggerating the extent and significance of problems and their effects in dramatized detail,” she said.

Such plays on fear can be effective politically, but can also carry “costs that are disproportionate to any benefit,” Jamieson said.

Halting every fentanyl package from Canada would hardly make a dent in the U.S. opioid epidemic, but Trump’s tariffs will have a major negative effect on individual consumers, industry and the relationship between the two countries, she said. Cuts to USAID — couched by Trump as a simple crackdown on U.S. handouts abroad — will save relatively small amounts of money, but could have major consequences in the U.S., she said, including if infectious diseases that otherwise could have been contained abroad manage to arrive stateside.

Jamieson said placing Trump’s policies within the proper context — and on the right scale — will be important in turning down the temperature in American politics moving forward, as Americans tend to moderate their opinions when they know the facts.

For example, according to a recent KFF poll, 86% of Americans overestimate the share of federal dollars that go to foreign aid, estimating on average that the U.S. spends about a quarter of its budget on such aid.

After being told the figure is closer to 1%, however, the percentage who believe the U.S. spends too much on foreign aid “drops more than twenty percentage points,” KFF found, to just 34%.

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Senator Claude Malhuret’s stunning rebuke of Trumpism.

Source: Raw Story

French Senator Claude Malhuret this week delivered a blistering rebuke of President Donald Trump and X owner Elon Musk, and he compared their reign to that of an infamously debauched Roman emperor.

During a speech discussing European support for Ukraine against Russia, Malhuret lobbed insults directly at both the president and his billionaire benefactor.

“Washington has become Nero’s court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a jester high on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service,” he said in reference to Musk’s acknowledged use of the dissociative anesthetic. “We were at war with a dictator, we are now at war with a dictator backed by a traitor.”

Just stunning in its clarity of what we are now up against. The war against authoritarianism, both at home and abroad.

Malhuret’s full comments.

Statement by the Government, followed by a debate, pursuant to Article 50-1 of the Constitution, on the situation in Ukraine and security in Europe

Mr. President,

Prime Minister, Ladies and Gentlemen Ministers,

My dear colleagues,

Europe is at a critical turning point in its history. The American shield is evading, Ukraine risks being abandoned, Russia strengthened.

Washington became the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a jester under ketamine in charge of the purification of the public service.

It’s a drama for the free world, but it’s first a drama for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, that he will impose more customs duties on you than on his enemies and threaten you to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you.

The king of the deal is showing what the art of the deal is on a flat stomach. He thinks he will intimidate China by lying down in front of Putin, but Xi Jinping, faced with such a shipwreck, is undoubtedly accelerating preparations for the invasion of Taiwan.

Never in history has a president of the United States capitulated to the enemy. No one has ever supported an aggressor against an ally. No one has ever trampled on the American Constitution, made so many illegal decrees, revoked the judges who could prevent it, dismissed the military staff at once, weakened all counter-powers and took control of social networks.

It is not an illiberal drift, it is a beginning of confiscation of democracy. Let us remember that it took only a month, three weeks and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its Constitution.

I have confidence in the strength of American democracy and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war against a dictator, we are now fighting against a dictator supported by a traitor.

Eight days ago, at the very time that Trump passed his hand behind Macron’s back at the White House, the United States voted at the UN with Russia and North Korea against Europeans demanding the departure of Russian troops.

Two days later, in the oval office, the military service hide-and-seek gave moral and strategy lessons to the war hero Zelensky before dismissing him as a brother-in-law by ordering him to submit or resign.

That night, he took a step further into infamy by stopping the promised delivery of weapons. What to do in the face of this betrayal? The answer is simple: face it.

And first don’t make a mistake. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltics, Georgia, Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is the return to Yalta where half of the continent was ceded to Stalin.

The countries of the South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe or whether they are now free to trample on it.

What Putin wants is the end of the order put in place by the United States and its allies 80 years ago, with the first principle of prohibiting the acquisition of territories by force.

This idea is at the very source of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressor, because the Trumpian vision coincides with that of Putin: a return to the spheres of influence, the great powers dictating the fate of small countries.

To me Greenland, Panama and Canada, to you Ukraine, the Baltic States and Eastern Europe, to him Taiwan and the China Sea.

This is called “diplomatic realism” in the evenings of the oligarchs of the Gulf of Mar-a-Lago.

So we are alone. But the speech that we cannot resist Putin is false. Contrary to the Kremlin’s propaganda, Russia is doing badly. In three years, the so-called second army in the world has only managed to grab crumbs from a country three times less populated.

Interest rates at 25%, the collapse of foreign exchange and gold reserves, and demographic collapse show that it is on the edge of the abyss. The American boost to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made during a war.

The shock is violent, but it has a virtue. Europeans come out of denial. They understood in one day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands and that they have three imperatives.

Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American release, to make it hold, and of course to impose its presence and that of Europe in any negotiation.

It will be expensive. It will be necessary to end the taboo of the use of frozen Russian assets. It will be necessary to bypass Moscow’s accomplices even within Europe by a coalition of only voluntary countries, with of course the United Kingdom.

Secondly, require that any agreement be accompanied by the return of kidnapped children, prisoners and absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia and Minsk, we know what the agreements with Putin are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.

Finally, and this is the most urgent, because it is what will take the most time, we would have to build the neglected European defense, for the benefit of the American umbrella since 1945 and sunk since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It is a Herculean task, but it is on its success or failure that the leaders of today’s democratic Europe will be judged in the history books.

Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. It is to recognize that France was right for decades in pleading for strategic autonomy.

It remains to build it. It will be necessary to invest massively, strengthen the European Defense Fund outside the Maastricht debt criteria, harmonize weapons and ammunition systems, accelerate Ukraine’s entry into the Union, which is today the first European army, rethink the place and conditions of nuclear deterrence from French and British capacities, relaunch anti-missile and satellite shield programs.

The plan announced yesterday by Ursula von der Leyen is a very good starting point. And it will take much more.

Europe will only become a military power again by becoming an industrial power again. In a word, the Draghi report will have to be applied. For good.

But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.

We must convince public opinion in the face of weariness and fear of war, and especially in the face of Putin’s companions, the extreme right and the extreme left.

They pleaded again yesterday in the National Assembly, Mr. Prime Minister, before you, against European unity, against European defense.

They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump say is that their peace is the capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of de Gaulle Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain in Putin’s boot.

The peace of the collaborators who have refused for three years any help to the Ukrainians.

Is this the end of the Atlantic Alliance? The risk is great. But in recent days, Zelensky’s public humiliation and all the crazy decisions taken over the past month have ended up making Americans react.

Polls are falling. Republican elected officials are greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News becomes critical.

The Trumpists are no longer in majesty. They control the executive, Parliament, the Supreme Court and social networks.

But in American history, the supporters of freedom have always won. They begin to raise their heads.

The fate of Ukraine is played out in the trenches, but it also depends on those in the United States who want to defend democracy, and here on our ability to unite Europeans, to find the means of their common defense, and to make Europe the power it once was in history and that it hesitates to become again.

Our parents defeated fascism and communism at the cost of all sacrifices.

The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century.

Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.

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Whoever’s idea it was to invite Tesla Cybertruck owners to participate in the Krewe of Orpheus parade, it was a bad one. The indestructible Cybertrucks incurred abuse, and several were damaged.

Source: Mashable

It’s not a good time to drive a Tesla Cybertruck — and not just because it’s been the subject of seemingly endless recalls and issues. Folks seem to not be happy with Elon Musk and they’re taking it out on Teslas, especially the impossible-to-miss Cybertruck.

Case in point: A Cybertruck got mercilessly and relentlessly booed at Mardi Gras in New Orleans this week. Video footage is pretty wild and, to be frank, a little funny.

As you can see and hear, the entire crowd rallies to boo the Cybertruck. This apparently happened at the Krewe of Orpheus parade during Lundi Gras on Monday, a day before Mardi Gras. Unconfirmed reports on Reddit and elsewhere claimed the trucks were bombarded with beads thrown in a not-so-friendly manner. It apparently got so aggressive that the a Cybertruck window broke despite Tesla claiming they’re near indestructible.

Teslas, and Cybertrucks in particular, have become the subjects of ire lately. Owners of the car have shared stories online of being relentlessly mocked. It makes sense; no physical item better represents Elon Musk’s whole deal than the Cybertruck. And a lot of people really don’t like Musk. Apparently, even the good times of Mardi Gras didn’t stop that hate.

A Cybertruck owner remained defiant to the end.

Well, sort of. He did call the cops to get out of the parade safely (those beads can sting).