Greg Ilkka 🇺🇸🏴‍☠️

Fact.

My whole adult life the narrative has been that conservatives are “patriots”, and liberals are the “American haters”. But liberals are desperately trying to save US democracy from a conservative movement hellbent on sacrificing it for one man’s ego. It’s exhausting.

Trump: "We're going to have to force ourselves upon them, which we have the right to do.” Believing you have the right to force yourselves onto others is exactly what rapists do. It sounds like the president is speaking from experience here. Release the full Epstein files!

Words that a rapist would use.

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We are going to see an accelerating tide of these admissions and conversions as the coming weeks and months pass. And the job of those of us who have opposed Trump for years is to resist saying "I told you so," or "you knew better," or "who needs you," but rather to say "thank you for seeing the light," and to ask people who previously supported Trump to help us stand up now for the impeachment and removal of that terrible man so that we rid ourselves of him sooner, rather than later. The survival of our nation as a constitutional republic depends in no small part on such grace.

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Tom Nichols spent months reading Washington’s letters and walking the halls at Mount Vernon. The article is long. The argument lands in one sentence he almost buries at the end. “Washington personally took up arms to stop a rebellion against the United States. Trump encouraged one.” The specifics behind that sentence: In 1794, armed farmers in western Pennsylvania refused to accept federal law. Washington issued a proclamation calling it treasonable opposition, raised a militia of more than 12,000 men, and personally led them toward the rebellion. He was the only sitting president ever to lead troops in the field. The rebellion dissolved. He pardoned two convicted insurgents after the legal process completed — not before. In his Farewell Address, Washington warned the republic that “sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction” would manipulate public emotion for “his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.” He wrote that sentence in 1796. He could not name the man. Nichols named him. John Kelly stood at Mount Vernon two years ago and summarized Washington’s greatest contribution to American democracy in three words. “He went home.” Every president since has understood that sentence. Every president but one.

Iran's state media calls Trump out on his bullshit way more than our own media ever does. It was really quite jarring how the U.S. media started voluntarily doing the North Korean goosestep once he was reelected.

🇯🇵 Japan is trending on X today. Good. It’s long overdue. Let me tell you three things about this country that will quietly rearrange everything you thought you knew about human nature. And animal nature, for that matter. Someone left an iPhone on a bench in Tokyo. Not in a sleepy suburb. In Tokyo, a city of thirty-seven million people, most of them late for something. The phone sat there. The next day, it was still there. Which means that every single person who walked past it made a small, private decision: not my phone. Leave it. In most cities, that phone would have had the life expectancy of a mayfly in a thunderstorm. Then there are the football fans. Japan plays a match, the stadium shakes, and then they tidy up. Every wrapper, every cup, every last plastic bag. They leave the stands cleaner than they found them. As a matter of course. As if it simply never occurred to them to do anything else. And then there is Nara. In this ancient city, over a thousand wild deer roam freely among temples and schoolchildren and tourists. They have lived alongside humans for thirteen centuries, considered sacred messengers of the gods. They will walk up to you, look you in the eye, and bow. Deeply and deliberately. It is, I should mention, a learned trick to get rice crackers. But here is the thing: somewhere along the way, a deer decided that the correct way to ask a human for something was to bow politely first. In Japan, even the wildlife has manners. No law requires any of this. No fine threatens it. It emerges from something much harder to legislate: the quiet, unshakeable conviction that the space around you is shared, and therefore your responsibility. Three small stories. One very large idea. The rest of us might want to take notes. ありがとう、日本。 Thank you, Japan. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

So Zelenskyy has been visiting the Ukrainian soldiers he recently sent to help the Gulf countries attacked by Iran, while trump prefers playing golf rather than visiting US troops he's sent for a month now. Now who's a leader and who's a weak coward ?

BREAKING: Russia shared satellite images of Prince Sultan US base in Saudi with Iran right before their attack that injured our troops. Ukrainian intel confirms it. Meanwhile Trump refuse to condemn Russia. Is this what you voted for?

That was the russians. U.S. Air Force parked its E-3s on the taxiways as Iran has no space recon capability and thus could not know / aim for an E-3 on a taxiway. russia used its space recon satellites to provide Iran with the exact coordinates / time to strike.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad and Robert Mueller. Both were attorneys. Both had seen heavy combat in the military. Both were FBI agents. Both led lives that embodied values once considered to be the best of America. What happens to a society that elevates the worst in its midst and demeans the best? It was no accident of birth that America produced so many men like my father and Robert Mueller. They grew up in a culture that honored sacrifice, decency, character. There was an assumed civic bond linking personal conduct to the greater good. That is the legacy that these Republicans have betrayed.

This was almost certainly struck using targeting data from Russia and China. These planes a critical and incredibly valuable US assets. The US has lost more critical (non-human) assets in 3 weeks in the Gulf than during the *entire* Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Yet Trump rewards Russia by loosening sanctions on them. Pathetic and foolish.

While Russian Duma members were getting guided tours of US government buildings and Trump was busy pressuring Ukraine to surrender, Russia helped Iran destroy an irreplaceable American $700,000,000 AWACS aircraft.

Treat this as today’s essential clip because it is so on point it should be pinned bookmarked and returned to as the months and years pass. If this cancer is not removed, it’s game over and that is not hyperbole. My thanks to Soprano Big Sister for her essential contribution to the conversation. 🎥 TikTok - vm.tiktok.com/ZNRQn54do/

I want to flag something that may have flown under the radar, but shouldn't. In December 2025, President Trump and @SecVetAffairs Doug Collins moved to ban access to abortion care at the VA, even in cases of rape, incest, or when the health of the mother is at risk. Earlier this week, the Senate voted on our bill to overturn that policy. 50 Republican Senators opposed it, meaning the abortion ban remains in effect. This threat to women's healthcare continues to be real. After losing elections in the wake of Roe falling, Republicans know that it's not politically popular to be publicly for abortion bans. So they do it just like this: quietly, in the dark of night, through bureaucratic rule-making -- hoping we won't catch it. Our veterans deserve access to abortion care. Period. And I will not stop shining the light on this and working to overturn this new ban. ms.now/news/senate-re…

At Newburgh in 1783, Washington walked into a room of soldiers who wanted to march on Congress and install him as a constitutional monarch. He reached into his pocket for his eyeglasses — the calculated theater of a man who understood exactly what the moment required — and said he had grown not only gray but nearly blind in the service of his country. Some men broke into tears. The conspiracy died in that room. Nichols asks us to sit with what Washington chose not to do in that moment. A lesser man, he writes, would have nodded and taken the throne. Washington had the army, the love of the citizenry, and a government too weak to stop him. He chose to go home instead. Trump stood in Arlington National Cemetery and looked at the graves of the honored dead and said: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” He said that in the same country, about the same army, whose commander-in-chief he was. The distance between those two men is not partisan. It is the entire argument for why the republic was designed the way it was.

One can guess that Russian targeting helped the Iranians pull this attack off, which seems to have destroyed very valuable US equipment. But will Trump criticise Putin? No he will not. When will people wake up to the reality that the US president is a Russian agent of influence?

WTAF?! Who’s running DOD?!