Day: December 5, 2025

Americans Don’t Trust the Government to Do What’s Right

Buck Banks

17%

A new Pew Research poll finds just 17% of Americans now say they trust the federal government to do what is right “just about always” (2%) or “most of the time” (15%). Frustration has long been Americans’ dominant emotion toward the federal government and 49% say they feel frustrated. Another 26% say they are angry, and 23% say they are basically content.

Our Fascist Idiocracy: Secretary of War Crimes and the Fog of War

Throwing the scapegoat under the bus

Jon Ponder

Reason: “I did not personally see survivors,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday. “The thing was on fire. It exploded, there’s fire, there’s smoke….This is called the fog of war.”

Financial Times: Speaking during a televised cabinet meeting at the White House, Trump said the defence secretary was doing a “great job”, while Hegseth justified Washington’s military campaign against alleged drug boats. “Narco-terrorists know you can’t bring drugs through the water and eventually on land if necessary, to the American people. We will eliminate that threat,” he said.

The Independent: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday continued what appears to be a deliberate effort to blame a veteran naval officer for the order to launch a second missile strike on an alleged drug-running boat that killed two survivors of an earlier missile hit…

Hegseth added: “We always have the back of our commanders who are making decisions in difficult situations, and we do in this case and all these strikes, they’re making judgment calls and ensuring that they defend the American people. They’ve done the right things. We’ll keep doing that, and we have their backs.”

During a subsequent question-and-answer session with reporters, Hegseth acknowledged that he had given the order for the first missile hit on the boat but claimed he’d already left the room when Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the commanding officer who oversaw the mission carried out by the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, ordered a second missile fired on the wreckage.

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