#from a foreigner to americans

[unbreakablemouserat]

I want to give my condolences for the terrible results of this year's American Election. And I even had some panic attacks before I went to sleep and the results were officially announced.

I don't know how to give solace to people I want to share with everyone with an eleven and a half minute song I know. It's from arguably one of the most popular Brazilian rock bands (to the point of them being considered overhyped) and it's something I play when despite the dark times ahead, we need to feel brave and resilient to face the said dark times. I even translated the lyrics for you guys, with the lyric timestamps.

Apologies for this, especially if it comes off as tone-deaf, I can understand, I just wanted to give a message of hope and resilience for you guys, because you're gonna need it in these next four years.

"Metal Contra as Nuvens" - Legião Urbana

Lyrics, if you want to read (some things might be lost in translation):

I'm not a slave of anyone (1:34) None, the lord of my domain (1:40) I know what I must defend (1:45) And, for the valor that I have (1:49) And I fear what's now undone (1:50)

We traveled seven seas (1:58) Through abysses and forests (2:01) By God I have never felt so alone (2:07) It's faith itself that destroys (2:10) These are unfair days (2:13)

I am metal, I am lightning and thunder (2:19) I am metal, I am the gold in your coat (2:30) I am metal, I know the breath of the dragon (2:41)

I recognize my sorrow (2:55) When everything is treason (3:00) What I come to find (3:05) It's the virtue in other hands (3:11)

My land is the land that is mine (3:21) And always will be (3:31) My land has the moon, it has stars (3:36) And always will have (3:45)

I almost believed in your promise (4:00) And all that I see is hunger and destruction (4:04) I lost my saddle and my sword (4:10) I lost my castle and my princess (4:14)

I almost believed, I almost believed (4:29) And, for honour, if there is truth (4:38) There are fools and there is the thief (4:44) And there are those who feed on what is stolen (4:48) But I will keep my treasure (4:54) In the case that you are lying (4:59)

Watch out the breath of the dragon (5:13) Watch out the breath of the dragon (5:19) Watch out the breath of the dragon (5:24) Watch out the breath of the dragon (5:28)

It is the truth that haunts (6:18) The neglect that condemns (6:23) The stupidity that destroys (6:28) I see everything that is gone (6:30) And what no longer exists (6:33)

My senses are now numb (6:38) The body wants, the soul understands (6:43) This is a no man's land (6:49) I know I must resist (6:51) I want the sword in my hands (6:54)

I am metal, I am lightning and thunder (6:59) I am metal, I am the gold in your coat (7:10) I am metal, I know the breath of the dragon (7:20)

I won't give up without a fight (7:33) I still have a heart (7:38) I didn't learn to surrender (7:43) Let the enemy fall then (7:48)

Everything will go, everything will go by (8:18) Everything will go, everything will go by (8:28) Everything will go, everything will go by (8:38)

And our story will not be upside down like this (10:28) Without a happy ending (10:35) We will have beautiful things to tell (10:39)

And until then, let's live (10:51) We still have a lot to do (10:59) Don't look back (11:04) We've only just begun (11:08) The world begins now (11:12) We've only just begun (11:20)

[goryhorroor]

“1950s horror movies contrast radically with their 1940s predecessors. understandably – they were reflecting a whole new world. audiences wanted stories that connected directly to their lives, to the ever-expanding technology in their homes and workplaces. they also wanted horror movies that played to their fears – stoked by politicians – of the shadows that lay beyond their immediate, personal experience of the shiny american dream (applies to some of these movies).”

[not-a-heretic]

you guys… you guys wanna hear about my au!? 😀

some of you may have heard from caitlin that he’s greek but she lied, he’s not. he’s roman. he is roman. the caesar’s weird little foreigner that he keeps around for political counsel.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Matt Davies

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 24, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Mar 25, 2025

Today the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, dropped the story that senior members of the Trump administration planned the March 15 U.S. attack on the Houthis in Yemen over Signal, a widely available encrypted app that is most decidedly not part of the United States national security system. The decision to steer around government systems was possibly an attempt to hide conversations, since the app was set to erase some messages after a week and others after four weeks. By law, government communications must be archived.

According to Goldberg, the use of Signal may also have violated the Espionage Act, which establishes how officials must handle information about the national defense. The app is not approved for national security use, and officials are supposed either to discuss military activity in a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, or to use approved government equipment.

The use of Signal to plan a military attack on Yemen was itself an astonishingly dangerous breach, but what comes next is simply mind-boggling: the reason Goldberg could report on the conversation is that the person setting it up included Goldberg—a reporter without security clearance—in it.

Goldberg reports that on March 11 he received a connection request from someone named Michael Waltz, although he did not believe the actual Michael Waltz, who is Trump’s national security advisor, would be writing to him. He thought it was likely someone trying to entrap him, although he thought perhaps it could be the real Waltz with some information. Two days later, he was included in the “Houthi PC small group,” along with a message that the chat would be for “a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis.”

As Goldberg reports, a “principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.”

The other names on the app were those of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President J.D. Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Brian McCormack from the National Security Council, Central Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe, Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator Steve Witkoff, White House chief of staff Suzy Wiles, perhaps White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Trump’s nominee for head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent.

Goldberg assumed the chat was fake, some sort of disinformation campaign, although he was concerned when Ratcliffe provided the full name of a CIA operative in this unsecure channel. But on March 14, as Vance, for example, took a strong stand against Europe—“I just hate bailing Europe out again”—and as Hegseth emphasized that their messaging must be that “Biden failed,” Goldberg started to think the chat might be real. Those in the chat talked of finding a way to make Europe pay the costs for the U.S. attack, and of “minimiz[ing] risk to Saudi oil facilities.”

And then, on March 15, the messages told of the forthcoming attack. “I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts,” Goldberg writes. “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”

On the chat, reactions to the military strikes were emojis of a fist, an American flag, fire, praying hands, a flexed bicep, and “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” “Kudos to all…. Really great. God Bless,” and “Great work and effects!”

In the messages, with a reporter on the line, Hegseth promised his colleagues he would “do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC,” or operations security. In a message to the team outlining the forthcoming attack, Hegseth wrote: “We are currently clean on OPSEC.”

Two hours after Goldberg wrote to the officials on the chat and alerted them to his presence on it by asking questions about it, National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes responded: “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials.”

When asked about the breach, Trump responded: “I don't know anything about it. I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it's a magazine that's going out of business. I think it’s not much of a magazine. But I know nothing about it. You're saying that they had what?” There is nothing that the administration could say to make the situation better, but this made it worse. As national security specialist Tom Nichols noted: “If the President is telling the truth and no one’s briefed him about this yet, that’s another story in itself. In any other administration, [the chief of staff] would have been in the Oval [Office] within nanoseconds of learning about something like this.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is evidently going to try to bully his way out of this disaster. When asked about it, he began to yell at a reporter that Goldberg is a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.” Hegseth looked directly at the camera and said: “Nobody was texting war plans.” But Goldberg has receipts. The chat had “the specific time of a future attack. Specific targets, including human targets…weapons systems…precise detail…a long section on sequencing…. He can say that it wasn’t a war plan, but it was a minute-by-minute accounting of what was about to happen.”

Zachary B. Wolf of CNN noted that “Trump intentionally hired amateurs for top jobs. This is their most dramatic blunder.” Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) told Brian Tyler Cohen: “My first reaction... was 'what absolute clowns.' Total amateur hour, reckless, dangerous…. [T]his is what happens when you have basically Fox News personalities cosplaying as government officials.” Foreign policy scholar Timothy Snyder posted: “These guys inherited one of the most functional state apparatus in the history of the world and they are inhabiting it like a crack house.”

Many observers have noted that all of these national security officials knew that using Signal in this way was against the law, and their comfort with jumping onto the commercial app to plan a military strike suggests they are using Signal more generally. “How many Signal chats with sensitive information about military operations are ongoing within the Pentagon right now?” Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) posted. “Where else are war plans being shared with such abject disregard for our national security? We need answers. Right now.”

National security journalists and officials are aghast. Former commanding general of United States Army Europe and the Seventh Army Mark Hertling called the story “staggering.” Former CIA officer Matt Castelli posted: “This is more than ‘loose lips sink ships’, this is a criminally negligent breach of classified information and war planning involving VP, SecDef, D[irector of the] CIA, National Security Advisor—all putting troops at risk. America is not safe.” Former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, who spent seven years as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve, posted: “From an operational security perspective, this is the highest level of f**kup imaginable. These people cannot keep America safe.”

Rhode Island senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said: "If true, this story represents one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen. The carelessness shown by President Trump's cabinet is stunning and dangerous. I will be seeking answers from the Administration immediately." Armed Services Committee member Don Bacon (R-NE), a former Air Force brigadier general, told Axios that “sending this info over non-secure networks” was “unconscionable.” “Russia and China are surely monitoring his unclassified phone.”

That the most senior members of Trump’s administration were sharing national security secrets on unsecure channels is especially galling since the people on the call have used alleged breaches of national security to hammer Democrats. Sarah Longwell and J.V. Last of The Bulwark compiled a series of video clips of Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe, and especially Pete Hegseth talking about the seriousness of handling secret information and the need for accountability for those who mishandle it. When they were accusing then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton of such a breach, they called for firings, accountability, and perhaps criminal charges. Indeed, Trump rose to power in 2016 with the charge that Clinton should be sent to prison for using a private email server. “Lock her up!” became the chant at his rallies.

Today, for her part, Clinton posted a link to the story along with an eyes emoji and wrote: “You have got to be kidding me.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[whenmemorydies]

Soooo…anyone else maybe putting too much expectation on season 4 of The Bear to help them escape lift their mood out of the hellscape that is world news atm? Just me? Ok.

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

for pez dispenser debris, has the third sports festival not happened yet or did it happen and it just wasn’t as cool as the second one

Ehhh, this one is kind of a loose thread I’ve been leaving open to do something with if I come up with something cool, but in my mind I’ve sort been playing with the idea that Class 3-A didn’t compete their third year.

The rest of the year didn’t want to compete with them for reasons of personal safety (they were all completely insane and known biters) and the school didn’t want to let them compete for reasons of legal liability. Literally every single year they had competed, these kids had tried to kill each other on live tv. Izuku and Todoroki had tried to murder specifically each other twice. Uraraka put Bakugou in a medically induced coma after their second match. Every single year they cut it closer to a fatal injury, and considering the year before involved a medically induced coma, they thought their luck might just run out the third time around.

There were also safety concerns about just how much information they were letting out about these kid’s Quirks. Before, it wasn’t as much of an issue? The UA sports festival was big, don’t get me wrong, but it usually resulted in the high performers getting recognized by a few more dedicated heroics fans for a few days after the event. Other heroics students looked at them so they could kick their ass in exams, but villains weren’t exactly bothered enough by heroic students to actually study them up in advance of their debut. But for Class 3-A? Villains were watching them.

And the Sports Festival just didn’t do for them what they needed it to anymore. It was meant to be an advertisement of their ability. A way to say “hey, look out for me,” and get agencies, the press, and the public primed for their careers. Class 3-A doesn’t need help with any of that. They are already too famous. But Class 3-B and the rest of their year? They could use a time to shine.

Class 3-A sort of sucks the fucking air out of the fucking room, honestly. Especially for Class B. Like. They are part of the most famous generation of heroes to come out of UA. And they are the less impressive, mostly unknown class. The rest of the school sort of has mixed feelings about Class 3-A. They’re proud of them, but it sucks being their classmates.

There’s nothing to be done about it. Class 3-A has just taken way too big a position in the public eye. The school could put the entire year on with them as usual and give them no special treatment, and the news would still only give a shit about what 3-A did. They’re actively detracting from their classmate’s abilities to get noticed, because everyone’s too busy fawning over one class out of eight.

The teachers also had to have a serious conversation about how including Class 3-A legitimately introduced concerns of societal destabilization. Aizawa had to take some deep breaths to will his way through that conversation.

Again, after their second year, the public started considering Class 3-A a source of new hope—with Izuku at the forefront as the next symbol of peace. A huge amount of that and to do with the miracle they pulled off handling the Tartarus Prison Break. But specifically Izuku came out of the entire mess with a lot of global hope riding on his shoulders.

He was the new unbeatable hero. The world had lost the guy who could be counted on to win any fight when All Might retired. But there was Izuku, shiny and bouncy and fresh to fight, whose Quirk was everything All Might’s was and more. And he had won fights that during Yokohama that no one thought he would win.

Taking down the Fatal Five was a big part of it. I have all this lore built up in my mind around them, these fanfictions villains who only exist in my head and are only based off canon in the loosest sense. It’s so dramatic in my head. There’s espionage. There’s betrayal. There’s gay love. I can’t get into that it’s too far afield. But when they were active, people were legitimately afraid of going outside. They were the only villains that All Might noticeably relied on help to defeat, because Sir Nighteye was so fundamental to their final capture.

Defeating them without All Might seemed more likely than defeating All for One and the League, but not by much. It was expected to take months, if not years, to recapture them again. These were villains who were credited with hundreds of fatalities—and the confirmed injuries clocked at over a thousand. They were city destroyers during their first run. People were absolutely fucking terrified of them doing it all a second time.

Izuku and Mirio pulled off an absolute Hail Mary play with their takedown. No one thought they would win, including them. They couldn’t let these guys go without a fight, but they also thought that they probably weren’t making it out the other side of this match. They weren’t aiming to die, but that just made this a kamikaze where they hoped to survive the plane crash. They went into this fight expecting to both die.

They understood that they lost this match up 99 times out of 100. But they told themselves that they just needed to find the one time they won and make it tonight. And just barely, through a lot of luck, they managed it. People lost their minds when news broke that the Fatal Five had been defeated by two teenagers.

And as stated in a different post, Izuku gets primary credit for taking down all of them because most of the fight happened where no one could see it and people love to discredit Mirio’s abilities. Not everyone thought that way, but the ones that did? They thought it was a sign Izuku would be better than All Might. Izuku did it without help. Even though, objectively, this was very much a two man job.

It was enough to make the world start hoping that Izuku was their new unbeatable hero. He had already won fights that should be unwinnable. So if he could beat the Fatal Five, then maybe he can beat every other opponent he faces. Maybe he can replace All Might.

What happens if that kid fucking loses a low stakes sparring match?

As it stood, Izuku, Todoroki, and Bakugou were considered the most likely to win the third year’s festival. But the other kids were fantastic, and they had a shot still even if it wasn’t as good. So how does the world react if some random fucking kid in class b manages an underwhelming victory after Izuku fumbles it?

Izuku’s existence in pez is basically that wad of napkins you wedge under the short leg of a wobbly table to try and make it stay level but like. For global social stability. Class 3-A rolling up to Yokohama and throwing hands with a bunch of adult murderers and somehow fucking winning is the reason why this Japan isn’t at the Refugees In UA And Chaos In The Streets portion of canon. They were so sparkly and inspiring and heroic that the entire country unified around loving and believing in them and shit stabilized. And everyone stopped freaking out about what they were going to do without All might because the next one was already in the pipe.

So what the fuck do you do if your new unbeatable mega celebrity hero fucking eats it at his friendly school sparring match and proves to everyone that he is, in fact, fallible on live TV? What if the entire class has an off day and does poorly, thereby undermining the current reason the world has for hope?

You’ve got a class that’s so unprecedentedly important that the school has to field phone calls from world leaders feeling out what the situation is with the ol’ sports festival. The fuck do you do about it?

It became almost unfair to the other students to make them fight against Class A, which is what Present Mic said and immediately got both Aizawa and Vlad King violently mad at him.

Aizawa, because he has started to profoundly resent the implication that his kids somehow need to atone to the rest of the school. Admittedly they’re all completely insane and do bite but that’s unrelated to why the rest of the school resents him so it’s a nonissue. Fuck everyone, it’s not their fault that adults have tried to kill them since like their fourth day of school, and UA has never handed out participation medals. If they wash out against his kids it’s because they just weren’t as good.

Vlad, meanwhile, was angry at the implication that his kids weren’t as good as Class A and needed to have them taken out of the running entirely to even stand a shot. Fuck you.

There was a lot of yelling.

But Mic just meant that it was unfair to pit them against Class A in the eyes of the public. Like, hey kids, let’s have a good ol’ fashioned competition for fun, do your best, but just as a reminder that if Midoriya from class a doesn’t win then it may legitimately destabilize the nation. Yeah the ministry of finance called he’s worried about the economic ramifications. But don’t worry, because no one really thinks you’ll beat him anyway. Now let’s all get out there and have fun.

It just felt like it set everyone up to fail while giving villains more footage to find potential weaknesses with. The school decided to just cut them from the competition, which Aizawa shouted at a lot of people about, even though he wanted them cut when the conversation started. He wanted the world to have less of them to chew at, and then he got mad at the implication that his kids somehow would be a problem if they got to participate in a school wide event. He talked himself all the way around to the other side out of spite.

They told Class A that they had lost privileges to the sports festival because they had repeatedly tried to murder each other and also everyone else on live TV, which was fair, really. The school didn’t trust them to not almost kill each other again, which was a concern Class A understood and agreed with, because they were totally going to do that. Plus Ultra, Sensei.

I think they let the kids do like an escape room or something just so they wouldn’t be totally left out, which they ended up televising to quell some of the backlash after they announced Class 3-A would not be participating in that year’s sports festival. It didn’t endear them to the rest of their classmates, because Class 3A Tries To Leave A Room In Groups of Five With Only Marginal Success turned out to be more popular than the sports festival. It bred some resentment amongst the other students, because to them, it seemingly confirmed that the faculty thought of them as lesser than class 3-a.

In the school’s defense, they did have concerns about someone actually murdering the other on live tv and having to deal with the liability. Through sheer luck of the fucking draw, Izuku and Bakugou had never had to do a one on one match with each other for two years running. They couldn’t possibly be that lucky a third time, and someone would die, and the stadium would probably be destroyed in the process, and bystanders would die, and what would they say in the lawsuit? Oh, we didn’t know they’d do that? They try to do that every time. They thought that doing a nice escape room involving no physical contact whatsoever would prevent injuries.

There were still injuries.

[sneefsnorf]

in some ways its funny when i hear people saying THE ANIMATION INDUSTRY IS COLLAPSING!!!! the AMERICAN animation industry is collapsing. australia is doing better than it ever has before

[silverspleen]

STUPID SHIP MEME DRAWINGS.

I just think they should kiss maybe?

Obsessed (positive??) with the dynamic of guy who betrays his country so he can run off with the militia he's been working with because he gets a case of loyalty feelings so bad he goes and blows himself up X morally upstanding traumatic backstory woman having the worst fucking time of her life (again) who really just needs someone to be as fanatically loyal as possible to her, as a person who is really into the inherent eroticism of the hierarchical military power dynamic focus on loyalty and the use of "yes ma'am" as I love you.

Obsessed (negative) with the propaganda implications that we seem to have ignored of the fact that the three most important people in an arabic woman's life are 2 (two) white guys and her brother, who betrays her and becomes a villain in the later games, and the fucking insidious-ass narrative choice of placing one of said white guys in said militia as like, the tacit fact that this organization is ok only because the western white guys are cool with it. Stop introducing more ULF people just to kill them!!! I SEE YOU WRITERS!!! YOU CAN'T HIDE FROM ME!!!!!!

because, once again, the character dynamic? I am sick for it. He dropped a building on himself for her and then came back???? He came back???? He could have gone anywhere but he came back to her???? I'm unwell. I think I have covid. I need to go lie down.

Anyway my city now my characters now smashing them together like barbies watching that .gif of them staring at each other eighty times reading all the fanfiction goodbye

you shouldn't blow yourself up in the furnace I want to blow myself up in the furnace for you as my own personal choice and you should order me to do it because you're such a good leader what is wrong with youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrgh *gnaws on furniture*

WE DON'T EVEN GET TO SEE HIM COME BACK TO HER. THANK YOU FIC WRITERS YOU KNOW THAT REUNION MUST BE SO ANGST THE COMPLEX DYNAMIC OF SACRIFICING YOURSELF FOR SOMEONE AND MAKING IT OUT AND BACK TO THEM AGAIN!!!!!!! THE GUILT! THE YEARNING! THE LOYALTY! I AM GOING TO EXPLODE.

[itsyveinthesky]

The fact that Trump and apparently no one in his team understands how tarrifs work

And his voters think that he will make the other countries pay. THAT IS NOT HOW IT WORKS. Instead every US citizen and US companies will pay more. Just…. the stupidity of it all.

The endgame is to wreck normal people's lives and blame it on democrats and migrants probably.

And it'll probably work as well.

[gildedgoldenamelia]

One thing I'm really glad the hetalia fandom has mostly moved on from is the idea that America is somehow a 200 year old virgin prude innocent lmao

[abyss-is-lame]

Please for the love of everything, SPREAD THIS VIDEO. I'm not one to get into these situations where I'm like 'spread this! reblog! reshare! show your friends!' for mental health reasons but this is very very important. Tag your friends and spread this video as much as you can, read the bill for yourself, TAKE ACTION. @in-a-mello-mood @scraptumblers @amfloofer Read the bill 'HR 7521' here:

[catofoldstones]

I wonder what it would feel like to find out that your husband and father of your two children is a paedophile at Super Bowl in front of the whole of country because that’s what Elia felt.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

World Support For Ukraine After White House Ambush

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 28, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Mar 01, 2025

Today, President Donald Trump ambushed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in an attack that seemed designed to give the White House an excuse for siding with Russia in its war on Ukraine. Vice President J.D. Vance joined Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office—his attendance at such an event was unusual—in front of reporters. Those reporters included one from Russian state media, but no one from the Associated Press or Reuters, who were not granted access.

In front of the cameras, Trump and Vance engaged in what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo called a “mob hit,” spouting Russian propaganda and trying to bully Zelensky into accepting a ceasefire and signing over rights to Ukrainian rare-earth minerals without guarantees of security. Vance, especially, seemed determined to provoke a fight in front of the cameras, accusing Zelensky, who has been lavish in his thanks to the U.S. and lawmakers including Trump, of being ungrateful. When that didn’t land, Vance said it was “disrespectful” of Zelensky to “try to litigate this in front of the American media,” when it was the White House that set up the event in front of reporters.

Zelensky maintained his composure and did not rise to the bait, but he did not accept their pro-Russian version of the war. He insisted that it was in fact Russia that invaded Ukraine and is still bombing and killing on a daily basis. His refusal to sit silent and submit meekly to their attack seemed to infuriate them.

Trump appeared to become unhinged when Zelensky suggested that the U.S. would in the future feel problems, apparently alluding to the new U.S. relationship with Russia. “You don’t know that. You don’t know that,” Trump erupted. “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.”

Zelensky answered that he was just answering the questions Vance was showering on him. “You are in no position to dictate what we’re going to feel,” Trump said. “We’re going to feel very good.”

Zelensky answered: “You will feel influenced.”

Trump disagreed. “We are going to feel very good and very strong.”

“I am telling you,” Zelensky said. “You will feel influenced.”

Trump appeared to lose control at that point, ranting at Zelensky that Ukraine was losing and that he must accept a ceasefire, but also complaining about former presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama and echoing Putin’s talking points. When he could get a word in, Zelensky reiterated that he would not accept a ceasefire without guarantees of security and pointed out that Putin had broken a ceasefire agreement in the past.

Later, when a reporter picked up on that question and asked what would happen if Russia broke a ceasefire agreement, Trump became enraged. Among other things, he said: “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt….” Trump referred to what he calls the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” that Russia had worked to elect him in 2016. That effort, though, was not a hoax: the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 released an exhaustive report detailing that effort.

One of the things Russian operatives believed Trump’s team had agreed to, the report said, was Russia’s annexation of the parts of eastern Ukraine it is now trying to grab through military occupation.

Then Trump continued to rant at the reporter, rehashing his version of the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop at some length, tying in former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) in a larger stew that brought up Trump’s history with both Russia and Ukraine and their roles in his quest to hold power. Clinton ran against Trump in 2016, when Russia worked to elect him, and Zelensky came across Trump’s radar screen when, in July 2019, Trump tried to force Zelensky to say he was opening an investigation into Hunter Biden in order to smear Biden’s father Joe Biden before the 2020 election. Only after such an announcement, Trump said, would he deliver to Ukraine the money Congress had appropriated to help Ukraine fight off Russia’s 2014 invasion.

Zelensky did not make the announcement. A whistleblower reported Trump’s phone call, leading to a congressional investigation that in turn led to Trump’s first impeachment. Schiff led the House’s impeachment team.

After unloading on the reporter, Trump abruptly ended today’s meeting, saying it was “going to be great television.” Shortly afterward, he asked Zelensky and his team to leave the White House.

This afternoon, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) posted: “Generations of American patriots, from our revolution onward, have fought for the principles Zelenskyy is risking his life to defend. But today, Donald Trump and JD Vance attacked Zelenskyy and pressured him to surrender the freedom of his people to the KGB war criminal who invaded Ukraine. History will remember this day—when an American President and Vice President abandoned all we stand for.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[realbeefman]

every american who has ever called light yagami a republican needs to do like one (1) google search about japanese politics. just one. read a wikipedia article even! on hands and knees BEGGING y’all to understand that death note is a JAPANESE story about a JAPANESE guy whose social values and political beliefs are informed by the fact that he is JAPANESE and in JAPAN (which is not the USA or Europe)

[mashamorevvna]

i remember taking up a rec on this poly modern guinevere&arthur&lancelot romance, and a fairly important story element was like. the invention of this conflict, with associated quote unquote terrorist cell, in the middle of eastern europe where the two american male leads had to (really really had to!) quote unquote pacify it, and it was at least partly an excuse to have them forge a gay bond in the trenches or some shit. still, a year later, i wonder: wasnt there someone in the publishing chain being like this is gauche at best, ghoulish at worst?

[sciderman]

I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with so much Iranian hate and drama <:[

oh anon. hate to break it to you (a lot of people make this mistake) but iran and iraq are two entirely separate nations.

and also i think reducing it to the words "hate and drama" kind of doesn't cover it, anon.