Michael Kleber 🌐🌅

A small clarification on the Daily Beast piece. James Talarico holds a Master of Divinity from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He has preached at his home congregation, St. Andrew's Presbyterian in Austin. He called Christian nationalism "a cancer on our religion" from a pulpit. His grandfather was a minister. His mother was a preacher's daughter. He cited gospel against the Ten Commandments bill in the Texas House, calling government-mandated religious displays "un-Christian." Stephen Miller, who has never spent a day in a divinity school, was sent on Hannity to question whether this man is Christian enough and whether he is even a man. That is not a head-scratcher. That is a credentialed Presbyterian leading the impeached Texas AG by three points being attacked, on a major network, by a White House aide whose theological background consists of being a White House aide. The asymmetry is the story.

Absolutely insane revelations about Tulsi Gabbard. Throughout her public life, she's been a puppet for a Hindu cult. Washington Post got access to 25,000 pages of documents including directives from Tulsi Gabbard's cult leader telling her which policy positions to take and how to present herself throughout her career. It matches her record in Congress. At one point, she was instructed to say "It’s not a ‘boohoo, I don’t get to go to the party’ situation, Wolf" during a CNN interview, and used that exact phrase. This is one of several examples of her taking direct orders about what to say on TV. They told her what to tweet about too. The cult set up fake accounts to boost her on social media. Gabbard was aware, at one point telling them to add a photo to a profile. An email records a phone call where she was yelled at, but Tulsi is reminded at the end that "we still love you." This woman was always a freak, which is why she ended up in the MAGA coalition. Anti-vaxxers, criminals, racist, and a woman in a weird cult all end up as allies. Trumpism is Kakistocracy.

Nobody "peeled" anything. An industrial coating has to fully cure before it goes back underwater, and this one was rushed into a flooded pool to hit a deadline. Submerge a film before it bonds to the substrate and water works underneath until it delaminates and lifts on its own. That isn't sabotage, it's chemistry. They're now detaining people for touching material the job already failed to hold. Science.

This would be a scandal that would have ended any other presidency. Qatar gave a $400 million Boeing 747 to the Pentagon. Trump calls it a “free” gift. It is not free. The Air Force just spent months retrofitting it with secure communications, missile defense, and electromagnetic shielding. The cost of that work is classified. Estimates say north of a billion. The number is enormous, and you are paying it. Now the part they bury. Under the memorandum signed by the Pentagon and Qatar, ownership of the plane transfers to Trump’s presidential library foundation when he leaves office. His own son says it will sit in the lobby of a future Trump hotel. So follow the chain. A foreign government hands a luxury jet to a sitting president. American taxpayers rebuild it from the inside out. Then Trump takes it home. A gift you use for four years and then keep is still a gift. The Constitution bars foreign gifts to a president without the consent of Congress. This one never got that consent. We are paying a fortune to gift wrap a luxury jet that ends up in his private collection. Grift in plain sight. cbsnews.com/news/air-force…

I apologize for saying that Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset. Apparently she’s just a member of a cult who’s leader is a Russian asset.

Taking a floating paint chip out of the Reflecting Pool is vandalism. Smearing shit on the walls of the Capitol is patriotism. Got it.

An insane accusation from an insane man

He ALWAYS treated your father with class and respect, that’s why he requested Obama speak at his funeral. And what have you done to honor the respect your father and Obama displayed for each other? Nothing.

MAGA Republican: “My problem is, if you go to a Muslim country, they won’t allow Christian churches there” Me: Pulls out Google maps and shows the bigot numerous Christian churches in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Me: You wanna retract that? MAGA Republican: “No” and walks off. And THAT is why I’m done with these Islamophobic bigoted people.

You talk about coming from Middletown, Ohio @JDVance that was forgotten by both parties. I get it as someone who saw Fairless Works, a steel plant, shutdown in lower Bucks County, PA. The problem is you lost nearly 70,000 manufacturing jobs since in office. Those are just the facts, man. There has been no vision. No industrial investment bank to support factories here to make things we currently import. No investment in new trade schools. No plan to buy more steel and invest in factories so we could go from 82 MMT to 115 MMT and be at full capacity. It is all empty rhetoric.

There are people trying to reframe criticism of this whole thing as coming from a position of odious neoconservatism, being hawkish, etc. That's just totally false, though. The real issue is that this war unnecessary. So many civilian lives, including so many children, were lost. Americans died for no good reason. And we up basically back where we started but worse and humiliated. Vance never opposed any of this, by the way. The people trying to frame him as leading opposition against the "neocons" are just partisan shills trying to boost him for 2028. Vance was an enabler every step of the way. The disaster of so much wasted life for no real purpose is on his hands as much as anyone else in this administration.

My friend Jamie Raskin is one of the most careful and principled people in Congress. So when he says the director of the FBI may be running a taxpayer funded slush fund, I pay attention. Here is what he found. Kash Patel directed more than $1 million in bonus payments to a small circle of agents in his inner circle and on his security detail. Some were getting nearly $8,000 every two weeks on top of salaries that were already maxed out at the federal ceiling. A number of them collected close to $40,000 over consecutive pay periods. The payments came so fast that the FBI’s bonus reserve accounts ran dry and some checks bounced. So who got the money? Agents on Patel’s so-called "director’s advisory team." That is the unit created in 2025 and described internally as a payback squad, built to dig up dirt on the law enforcement officials who investigated Trump and his allies. Raskin has given Patel until June 29 to account for every payment, every recipient, and any internal review of whether this was even legal. Patel should answer for all of it. theguardian.com/us-news/2026/j…

Republicans are attacking the administration’s awful Iran deal. The administration is attacking Israel. Israel is attacking the administrations awful Iran deal. The reflecting pool has leprosy. I was told there would be winning.

Just sat down with this piece and…whew. “Inside the White House, Mr. Miller, the influential deputy chief of staff, saw an opening for an idea he had raised previously: What if Mr. Trump simply claimed the power to suspend habeas corpus? Then the locked-up immigrants would be blocked from receiving hearings or even from seeking court orders to prevent their removal from the country. This was an opportunity for Mr. Trump not only to speed up deportations, but also to assert vastly expanded power over a legal system that was getting in his way.” nytimes.com/2026/06/15/us/… via @NYTimes

It is actually crazy to me that there is a small minority of the population who would happily watch our schools close, our national debt explode to fund forever wars, watch their neighbors be taxed out of their homes, see our state drained of water, our rivers filled with Elon’s lithium runoff sludge, or skies filled with the black smog of deregulation, watch children starve without food, and seniors die without healthcare, and decide that they will keep voting for a party that caused all of these things because they have become absolutely obsessed with unconstitutionally forcing women to use their bodies against their will. Women are dying because of this morbid fixation. Leave. Women. Alone.

There is literally a 0% chance the US and Israel abide by the deal with Iran and it's very strange like everybody is pretending the opposite right now

No one actually knows what’s in Trump’s deal with Iran since the administration refuses to release the text, but here’s what I would like to hear Democrats say about what we know based on news reports: ✅Ending the war immediately and reopening the Strait is the best available outcome. Every day Trump delayed would’ve made things worse. ✅Trump lost the war to Iran. Iran now knows it can control the Strait of Hormuz at any time and cripple the global economy. ✅Trump achieved none of his core objectives: Iran still possesses its highly enriched uranium, most of its ballistic missile and drone arsenal, and will almost certainly continue to support proxy groups. ✅The US/Israeli regime change strikes were a disaster for the Iranian people. Iran now has a younger, hard-line Supreme Leader and a more powerful IRGC in place. ✅If the reports about the unfreezing of assets/sanctions relief/reconstruction fund are true, Iran will have access to far more money than it ever got from the JCPOA. ✅Trump could have had a strengthened JCPOA-like deal through negotiations. He was just too impatient to try, and his team was too inexperienced to understand what was on the tabl ✅America did enormous damage to its standing in the world and real harm to poor and developing economies all over the world, which will still face fuel crises and potential famine in the foreseeable future as a direct result of the war. ✅We still don’t know the full scope of the damage to US military bases in the Middle East because the Pentagon is covering them up, but it's safe to estimate this disaster could cost up to $100B in direct costs. ✅Democrats should be skeptical of every claim this administration makes about what's in the deal, and whether Iran follows up. Trump wants this humiliation to go away and change the subject. The result would be an emboldened Iran with de facto control of the Strait. The reason I want to hear Democrats making all of these arguments is because the narrative around this conflict will be set in the coming weeks, and we need to kill off for good this insane, hawkish neocon/FDD worldview that the US can bomb its way to peace.

See the propaganda move? Make the image emotionally overwhelming, then pretend the only possible objection is hatred of America. Nobody has to pretend to be mad at a flyover. It looks cool. That is not the critique. The critique is that cool imagery is being used to launder the structure underneath it. The White House becomes the set. The military supplies the emotional force. UFC supplies the combat aesthetic. Paramount+ gets the paid stream. Trump-world and politically connected corporations get the branding halo. And then accounts like this say: if you notice the machinery, you must hate America. No. I like the flyover. I dislike fake patriotism that turns the country into ad inventory. This is Don Draper selling belonging after tribal sorting so the powerful concentrate more power. Working-class people are not props. Marines are not props. National monuments are not props. The issue is billionaires turning the White House into branded regime content, then hiding behind “the working class” when anyone notices the circus.

Oh so it’s not open?

Listen to this absolutely haunting sound. Putin’s attack on the Lavra must be condemned by leaders around the world. It’s also a wake-up call, Ukraine *is* the Lavra, it’s survived but only by facing off the utter barbarity of Putin’s regime