Bruce Stokes

During the Nuremberg Trials, Hermann Göring gave an interview to psychologist Gustave Gilbert and said: “Of course the people don’t want war. Why would some poor farmer want to risk his life in a war when the best he can hope for is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, people don’t want war. No one wants war in Russia, England, America — not even in Germany. That’s obvious. But in the end, it’s the leaders of a country who determine policy. And it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it’s a democracy, a communist state, a parliament, or a fascist dictatorship.” Gilbert objected: “But there is one difference in a democracy — the people have a voice through their elected representatives.” To which Göring replied: “That’s all well and good, but whether the people have a voice or not, they can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” — Nuremberg Diary, April 18, 1946 Doesn’t it sound familiar?

Farm bankruptcies are rising again. 📈 Peaked in 2019–2020 under Trump 📉 Fell to a 20-year low under Biden 📈 Now rising again up 46% in 2025 under Trump Where it’s hitting hardest: • Midwest (+70%) • Southeast (+69%) States like Arkansas, Georgia, and Iowa are spiking.

$247,832 in debt and counting A computer science grad from Carnegie Mellon with a 3.87 GPA Class of 2025, recruited by Google, Microsoft, and Meta his sophomore year All three offers rescinded "due to economic headwinds" 1,847 applications sent since graduation 47 interviews 12 final rounds Zero offers His roommate from Stanford drives DoorDash 14 hours a day making $11.23 an hour after gas Another classmate from MIT stocks shelves at Target for $16 an hour The career services office still runs LinkedIn ads about their "94% placement rate" Based on 2019 data Before AI murdered the entire profession He spent four years learning React while React developers were being replaced by Claude Learned Python while Python jobs got automated by Copilot Learned algorithms while algorithms were writing better algorithms than humans The ultimate fucking irony He graduated summa cum laude in the exact skill that just became obsolete Carnegie Mellon's computer science program costs $61,958 per year For a degree that's now worth less than a community college welding certificate But sure, keep telling kids to learn to code

From the outside, there are indeed funny aspects to Brexit. The fact that migration went heaps up is certainly the funniest bit.

When Barack Obama entered the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on May 27, 2016 — becoming the first sitting U.S. president to visit the city destroyed by the United States in August 1945 — the world focused on his speech. Cameras showed the wreath at the cenotaph. Headlines rightly emphasized the weight of the moment. But almost no one noticed a short, quiet Japanese man standing among the official delegation. His name was Shigeaki Mori. He was eight years old on the day of the atomic bombing. By 2016, he was the only person who knew the names of all twelve Americans who died in Hiroshima — U.S. prisoners of war whom America had never fully accounted for. Mori spent forty years finding them. Not for money. Not by order. Simply because he believed the dead should have names. He was born in Hiroshima on March 29, 1937. On the morning of August 6, 1945, he was crossing a small bridge about 2.5 kilometers from the epicenter. The blast threw him into the stream below. Decades later, he recalled: “I climbed out and saw a woman stumbling toward me. Her body was covered in blood, her organs hanging out. Holding them, she asked where the hospital was. I cried and ran away.” He was eight. And there were no hospitals left. Mori survived. He grew up in postwar Japan, worked ordinary jobs — in a brokerage, later at a piano factory — but dreamed of becoming a historian. He never got a formal degree. So he became one on weekends. In the 1970s, a professor showed him a document: a list of twelve American airmen shot down over Japan in 1945. They were crew members of two B-24 bombers — Lonesome Lady and Taloa — captured and held in Hiroshima, just 400 meters from where the bomb exploded. They died from their own country’s bomb. For decades, their story was barely acknowledged. Families were told only: “missing, presumed dead.” No details. No truth. Mori decided to find it. Without funding or institutional support, he spent decades reconstructing their fate — comparing archives, tracking records, even locating surviving crew members. One by one, he restored their identities. Then he wrote letters. In broken English, he contacted families across the U.S. — often seventy years too late — explaining what had happened to their sons, brothers, husbands. In 2008, he published his research, which eventually led the U.S. government to officially acknowledge the deaths of the twelve American POWs in Hiroshima. In 2016, a documentary introduced his story to a wider audience. During Obama’s visit, Mori was invited to attend. In his speech, Obama mentioned the victims — including “twelve Americans held in captivity.” For the first time, a sitting U.S. president publicly acknowledged them on Japanese soil. After the speech, Obama approached Mori — a small, elderly man who bowed politely. Then, unexpectedly, the president opened his arms. They embraced. The image went around the world. In 2018, at age 79, Mori visited the United States for the first time. He attended memorial events, spoke publicly, and finally met some of the families he had written to for decades. When asked why he devoted his life to Americans who died beside him, Mori answered: “My work was not about people from an enemy country. It was about human beings.” Shigeaki Mori died in Hiroshima on March 14, 2026. He was 88 years old.

The Pentagon and State Department have shown a total lack of transparency in revealing the damage done to U.S. facilities by Iran. These are facilities that Americans pay for, but we don't get to know what has happened to them so that Trump can claim some victory that no one believes he is winning who doesn't live in a Fox bubble.

As Trump turns the Justice Department into an instrument of political retribution, more than a quarter of its lawyers have been fired or quit. Some 3,402 lawyers out of a total of 12,955 left the department since the beginning of last year. @kayewiggins ft.com/content/a1316a…

A U.S. defense official told me for @AP the U.S. military didn’t have prior knowledge of Trump’s decision to pull 5,000 troops from Germany and learned about it “in real time.” apnews.com/article/german…

“Unprecedented destruction” Majority of U.S. military sites in the Middle East damaged by Iran, CNN investigation reveals. Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth desperately tried to keep the extent of the damage from the public so people wouldn’t see how badly this was botched. Now the images are coming out and they’re disturbing.

Narrator: Not a single new automobile manufacturing plant has been constructed in the United States. Not one.

Trump to Congress, May 1: Hostilities with Iran "have been terminated." Trump to Florida audience, May 1: "You know we’re in a war." @EricaLG nytimes.com/2026/05/01/us/…

The President of the United States stood at a rally in Pennsylvania this week and called a sitting member of Congress "despicable" by name. He called the country she came from as a child refugee "filthy, dirty, disgusting." He told the crowd we should "get those people the hell out of our country." Those people. Read it again. Those people. Here is the quote, in full, on tape, from the rally at Mount Airy Casino Resort. "Somalia, it's a beautiful place. It's got no anything. It's got one thing that's really strong, crime. All they do is run around shooting each other. It's filthy dirty, disgusting dirty. It's a horrible place. They come here, and Ilhan Omar, she heads it. She married her brother. I would imagine they're looking at her. Isn't she despicable? We ought to get those people the hell out of our country." Now let me walk you through what is true and what is not.

She bought a cradle, left the door unlocked, and dared the city to stop her. In 1869, New York City had a morning routine no one talked about. Municipal workers walked the alleys at dawn collecting the bodies of abandoned infants. It happened so often they stopped writing individual reports. The mothers had nowhere to go. Widowed by war, abandoned by men chasing western gold, too poor to feed another mouth. If they surrendered a child to the almshouse, the city required their name, their address, proof of destitution. Public humiliation in exchange for a system where three out of four infants died within the year. Sister Irene FitzGibbon had walked the charity wards long enough to understand the arithmetic of desperation. She was 46 years old. She had watched women choose death over documentation. On an October morning, she and two other nuns moved into a brownstone on East 12th Street with five dollars and a plan the city had never seen before. She placed a white wicker cradle in the vestibule. She left the inner door cracked open. No questions. No names. No witnesses. The concept violated every civic protocol. American institutions demanded accountability. The law required paperwork. Anonymous surrender didn't exist in the legal vocabulary. City officials arrived within days. The police warned her about housing codes. Bureaucrats argued she was encouraging sin. She owed rent she couldn't pay and had already bought blankets on credit she'd never get. A woman came the first night. She left a baby girl wrapped in a torn shawl with a note pinned to the fabric. The handwriting was shaky. The ink had run. Within four weeks, there were more than forty infants in that house. They ran out of cribs and used dresser drawers. The nuns slept in shifts on the floor. Babies cried through the night. A neighbor complained to the precinct once. His name appears in one police log and never again. When the city refused funding, Sister Irene didn't petition. She didn't wait for legislative approval. She walked into the offices of merchants and politicians and presented them with physical reality: dozens of living children occupying a building the city could either support or publicly evict into February snow. She understood something most reformers didn't. You don't ask permission to save lives. You save lives and make the bureaucracy catch up. The city surrendered. They granted her the charter. The New York Foundling Hospital became an institution. Over her lifetime, it took in more than 27,000 children who would have otherwise died in alleys or ash barrels. The white cradle stayed in that vestibule for decades. Thousands of women walked through that door in the dark and left their children in the hands of strangers because one woman decided the law was less important than a life. The original brownstone is gone now. The steps where the cradle sat are part of a busy Manhattan sidewalk. Thousands of people walk over that exact spot every day without knowing what happened there. Sister Irene FitzGibbon died in 1896. The New York Foundling still operates. It has served over 400,000 children since that first night. Every person who has ever bent an unjust rule to protect someone vulnerable is walking in her footsteps. She didn't wait for the system to change. She just left the door open.

So much for that American exceptionalism, but you just keep on voting against your own interests MAGA.

New CNN Investigation: At least 16 American military sites have been damaged in Iranian strikes, making up the majority of US positions in the Middle East. From CNN's @tamaraqiblawi and the Investigations team.

The Trump sons are, without a doubt, a national security vulnerability AND a national security threat. Everybody knows they are for sale and what they are selling is often “new” and untested to be used by our troops.

"On a peaceful Sunday afternoon in June 1961, just months after leaving the presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower was tending his vegetable garden at his Gettysburg farm when he noticed a young couple had gotten their car stuck in the mud on the rural road bordering his property, and without hesitation, this 70-year-old former Supreme Commander grabbed a rope from his barn, trudged through the muck in his overalls, and spent forty-five minutes helping them push their beat-up Chevy back onto solid ground. What makes this moment so beautifully human is that the couple—newlyweds Tom and Susan from Ohio driving cross-country on their honeymoon—had absolutely no idea they were being rescued by the man who'd led the Allied forces to victory and served two terms as President, and Eisenhower never mentioned it, just introduced himself as 'Ike, the farmer next door' and asked about their travels while hauling on the rope with mud splattered all over his work clothes. When they finally got the car free, Eisenhower's wife Mamie appeared with a thermos of lemonade and homemade cookies, inviting this bewildered young couple to sit on their porch and rest, and for an hour they chatted about marriage advice, good fishing spots in Pennsylvania, and the best route to California, with Ike telling stories about his own road trips with Mamie decades earlier. It wasn't until Tom and Susan stopped for gas twenty miles down the road and showed the attendant a photo they'd taken with 'the nice farmer who helped us' that someone gasped and said, 'That's President Eisenhower!'—and the couple nearly fainted realizing they'd just shared lemonade and marriage tips with one of history's greatest leaders who'd treated them like old friends rather than starstruck strangers. Tom later wrote Eisenhower a letter thanking him for the kindness, and Ike responded with a handwritten note: 'The pleasure was all ours—Mamie and I love meeting young people starting their adventures together. Remember: a good marriage is like farming, it takes patience, hard work, and the wisdom to know some days you're just going to get muddy. Stay happy. Your friend, Ike.' What absolutely destroys you is understanding that Eisenhower could've enjoyed celebrity retirement, could've had staff handle every inconvenience, but instead he chose to be simply *Ike*—a neighbor who helped strangers, a farmer who got his hands dirty, a man who measured his worth not by past glory but by present kindness, proving that true greatness is what you do when nobody's watching and nobody knows your name.

Holy cow. This is the 4th or 5th credible national poll I have seen in the last 7-10 days with Trump in the mid 30s. Devastating if you are a Republican on the ballot this fall.