Mastodawn

To the surprise of precisely no one who isn't a credulous rube high on imperialism, settler colonialism, and weapons contractor bribes, Israel has started bombing children and houses again in Gaza. Naturally of course a Trump regime that wants to pave over Gaza and build luxury hotels and casinos for an obscenely wealthy, globetrotting ruling class if it can just find a way to get rid of all those pesky Palestinians, stands fully in support of resuming the US armed, funded, and politically protected genocide.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-violates-cease-fire

Backed by Trump, Israel Shreds Cease-Fire Deal and Kills Over 400 Across Gaza

"A barrage of Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip early Tuesday killed more than 400 people and left a fragile cease-fire agreement in tatters just over two months after it was reached, with Israel's prime minister pledging "increasing military strength" in an enclave already decimated by more than a year of bombing.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the Netanyahu government consulted with the Trump administration ahead of the latest Gaza bombardment. Leavitt expressed the White House's total support for Israel's attacks.

While Israel had been carrying out more limited deadly attacks on Gaza despite the cease-fire deal—including strikes over the weekend that killed at least nine—Tuesday's bombings were described as the "heaviest assault on the territory since the cease-fire took effect in January."

Speaking frankly, there are more detailed articles featuring a lot more atrocity porn available online, but I chose to highlight this short piece because the headline writer understood the importance of centering the Trump regime's full support for this monstrous, objectively illegal bullshit. The US government is supplying the bombs, funding the Netanyahu government, and actively praising Israel for resuming crimes against humanity; that makes the atrocities in Gaza Trump's genocide, the same as it made them Biden's genocide before him. None of this is lost on most media observers outside of the United States, but an American corporate media complex that has always supported the mass murder of Palestinians remains reluctant to center that knowledge, even if it hurts the fascist assclown currently calling their work "illegal" and threatening to come after them with the full force of the U.S. government.

Of course everyone in the media, American or international, is claiming to be "shocked" that Israel has willfully imploded the ceasefire, and telling you that you should be shocked too. Naturally however, that position too is a grotesque farce that ignores available evidence and reality itself. This may be the first large-scale bombing since Netanyahu agreed to pretend he cared about a cease-fire for a while, but Israel already resumed the genocide when it tightened the blockade of, and cut electricity to Gaza; a region that is more or less constantly in a state of humanitarian crisis because Israel has been conducting a war of extermination there and purposely starving the population inside for seventeen months and counting. Furthermore, all of this is pretty consistent with statements made by various high ranking officials in the Netanyahu government, who have openly flouted their intentions to break the cease fire and ethnically cleanse (by whatever means are necessary) the Palestinian people in Gaza. The fact that American corporate media rarely reports on these stated intentions, and is foundationally committed to credulously taking Netanyahu's word for it when he claims to be seeking peace while bombing hospitals and murdering babies, does not mean the larger US establishment is unware of these facts - just that they're hoping you are.

The fact is, Trump, his administration, and American arms manufacturers should be on trial for crimes against humanity as we speak, and the reality that he is not alone in that because committing genocide in Gaza is a largely bipartisan position in the American establishment does absolutely nothing to alter the situation.

#Gaza #Genocide #Trump #Fascism #SettlerColonialism #Israel #Netanyahu #Imperialism #EthnicCleansing #Media #CrimesAgainstHumanity

Backed by Trump, Israel Shreds Cease-Fire Deal and Kills Over 400 Across Gaza | Common Dreams

"This return to violence does not come as a surprise," said one advocacy group. "Netanyahu has, from the beginning, signaled his intention to abandon the cease-fire process before it could become a lasting peace."

Common Dreams

Show thread

AnarchoNinaAnalyzes

As I've argued (with mixed success) on the other account, the Trump regime "Signalgate" scandal has political relevance for folks who want this fascist government to fail, even if you, like me, do not give one flying fuck about "national security." Trump's warmonger division willfully broke multiple laws, got caught lying about it, and currently look incompetent enough that they'd struggle to run a taco stand, let alone a government. This isn't breaking news to anyone who has been paying attention, but it has inspired the larger liberal establishment to finally make *some* effort to push back against the Trump regime, and I'd rather have them doing that than meekly accepting the boot; which is precisely why the entire fascist manufacturing consent machine in and around TrumpWorld is flailing so hard to justify the regime's actions and make this go away.

For whatever value Signalgate does (or doesn't) have in slowing the Trump regime's agenda down however, I think it says a lot about why we're facing down a fascist government requested by roughly 75M voters, that the "national security" discussion has taken overwhelming precedence over acknowledging that the attack on Yemen itself was unconstitutional, and the leaks also reveal the administration confessing to a war crime.

1) https://www.commondreams.org/news/us-strikes-in-yemen

A Reminder Amid Group Chat Outrage: US Strikes on Yemen Are Unconstitutional

"The advocacy groups Just Foreign Policy, DAWN, and Action Corps released a joint statement Thursday calling on Congress to take action to stop U.S. military action in Yemen by upholding "its sole authority to declare war under Article I of the Constitution and the 1973 War Powers Resolution (WPR)."

The chat messages sent between officials including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz stunned the public and Washington insiders this week because they had accidentally also been sent to Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, but the three groups pointed out that they also included an admission from Vance that the strikes were not defensive—contrary to claims by President Donald Trump."

2) https://truthout.org/articles/democrat-leaked-messages-show-waltz-admitting-to-war-crime-in-yemen-strike/

Experts: Leaked Messages Show Waltz Admitting to War Crime in Yemen Strike

"In an exchange after the strikes first hit, as shown in Wednesday’s leak, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz says that the U.S. had collapsed a building that one of their Houthi targets was supposedly inside, calling it “amazing.”

“Their first target — their top missile guy — we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and now it’s collapsed,” Waltz said. Per the screenshots, Vice President J.D. Vance responds, “Excellent.” CIA Director John Ratcliffe says, “A good start.” Waltz then replies with a fist emoji, a U.S. flag emoji and a flame emoji.

According to Yemen Data Project, the first strike killed at least 13 civilians and injured nine on the night of March 15, hitting north of the capital, Sanaa. Yemen Data Project says that this was the bombing deemed “excellent” by the vice president and “amazing” by Waltz.

The messages are “prima facie evidence of at least one war crime applauded by the people who conspired to commit it,” wrote Dylan Williams, Vice President for Government Affairs for the Center for International Policy (CIP), on social media."

To be clear, I'm not saying these crimes by the regime aren't at least coming up on the margins of the liberal establishment; I've seen a few Democrat politicians expressing these critiques, and brief discussions in even the mainstream corporate media have occurred around these topics. The problem is that the vast *majority* of people with a platform to bring these crimes to light simply don't care. We live in a society where illegal military actions based on the thinnest of pretexts, and war crimes against (particularly Muslim) civilian targets are so normalized that it just doesn't move the needle for a political and media establishment that helped normalize this monstrous shit in the first place. If you haven't figured out by now that one of major reasons the Trump regime is (mostly) succeeding in installing a fascist dictatorship in America, is the powers granted to the imperial presidency to protect "national security" and to fight a racist, quixotic "War on Terror," I'm going to have to ask you how long you've been in a coma. A society that empowers and tolerates crimes against humanity abroad under the auspices of "keeping us safe," is a society that will tolerate the same when their leaders invariably bring the violence back home.

#Signalgate #Trump #Vance #Yemen #WarCrimes #Imperialism #War #WarOnTerror #Fascism #murder #Gaze #Israel #Genocide #Media #Scandal

A Reminder Amid Group Chat Outrage: US Strikes on Yemen Are Unconstitutional | Common Dreams

Leaked messages reveal Trump officials admitting illegal strikes in Yemen. Advocacy groups demand Congress act to stop unauthorized war. Are lawmakers more concerned with protocol breaches or the lives lost in Yemen?

Common Dreams

Show thread

AnarchoNinaAnalyzes Apr 13

In the lead up to the US 2024 election, I made it a sort of policy not to take anyone claiming Donald Trump was "anti-war" seriously; after all, I was conscious during his first presidency and I have a very clear memory of him engaging in nuclear brinksmanship with North Korea via social media, dropping the largest conventional bomb in Afghanistan just to prove he could, and actively *trying* to start a war with Iran - in addition to his material support for the KSA's war in Yemen, scaling up airstrikes and drone attacks in our ongoing wars, as well as a significant increase in American covert military operations which often had disastrous consequences. Perhaps most tellingly, Trump increased US military spending each and every single year during his first four years in office.

As such I found it pretty laughable when motivated observers, including a few in "independent" media claiming to be progressives, defended the rise of Elon Musk's DOGE initiative by suggesting the Trump regime would find and end "fraud, waste, and abuse" in the Pentagon budget. In so much as I bothered to engage with these arguments, I predicted that neither Trump nor Musk would touch the military budget, or any other part of the US government that's about committing violence against their perceived enemies, including domestically; with the possible exception of an FBI Trump still hates because they investigated him for crimes he absolutely committed. As such, I can't say I was surprised to learn that during a sit-down meeting with noted genocidal fascist warmonger and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump bragged about his intentions to *increase* U.S. military spending to literally a trillion dollars.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-trillion-military-budget

Trump Pledges $1 Trillion for US Military While Hitting Working Class With Huge Tax Hike

"President Donald Trump on Monday publicly backed an annual budget of roughly $1 trillion for the U.S. military as his administration rushed ahead with a destructive tariff scheme that amounts to a major tax increase on American households, with working-class families set to bear much of the pain.

Speaking to reporters at the White House during a sit-down with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said his administration has signed off on an upcoming military budget in the vicinity of $1 trillion, which would be a record sum. The military budget for the current fiscal year is $892 billion, more than half of the federal government's discretionary budget.

"Nobody's seen anything like it," Trump said Monday of his $1 trillion budget proposal."

Given that I see no reason to engage with the absurd and typically disingenuous idea that Trump is somehow not a bog standard American imperialist, I'd like to focus in on the budgetary arguments about fraud and waste that are obfuscating and propping up what is clearly a billionaire nazi bust-out operation being conducted on the US government. If you take a step back and simply look at the argument people defending DOGE are presenting here, the whole game falls apart:

- Health inspectors, disease specialists, labor board adjudicators, consumer protection departments, food and drug inspectors, IRS officials working to get the super rich to pay the taxes they owe, feeding starving children in conflict zones, Inspector Generals that oversee government officials, Medicaid and SNAP benefits, the social security check that means your grandma isn't living on cat food? Waste, fraud, and abuse.

- A bloated Pentagon wholly captured by the military industrial complex, that literally cannot pass an audit, is already a source of large-scale fraud and waste, and currently spends more money on "defense" than any other country on earth by a degree that's objectively mind blowing; particularly when you factor in that we're not *officially* involved in a major war at the moment? Vitally important spending and in fact a reason to celebrate!

Look folks, I'm creeping closer and closer to my fiftieth year on this Earth, so you don't need to tell me that imperialism and obscene military spending is a bipartisan objective in American politics. The critique I'm articulating about Trump's spending on the murder machine could just as easily have been written about every Democrat President in the post-war era. But that's also the point; Downmarket Mussolini, a man who just committed a war crime in Yemen, wholly supports Israel's genocide in Gaza, is openly talking about trying to annex Canada, and whose regime is building support to potentially bomb Mexico, is just another fucking imperialist and none of these nazis give a fuck about fraud and waste - they just want to starve your grandparents and poison your children to pay for tax cuts for the uber rich.

#Trump #Imperialism #Pentagon #MilitaryIndustrialComplex #War #DOGE #Musk #Propaganda #Rubes #Gaza #Genocide #Israel #Netanyahu

Trump Pledges $1 Trillion for US Military While Hitting Working Class With Huge Tax Hike | Common Dreams

"Spending $1 trillion on the Pentagon while hollowing out resources for diplomacy and launching a global trade war is a recipe for international conflict and American decline," warned one analyst.

Common Dreams

Show thread

Douglas Edwards 🇺🇦🇨🇦🇲🇽🇵🇦🇬🇱🇩🇰🇪🇺Apr 13

@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes All true. BTW I'm now reading that he's putting troops in #Panama in violation of our treaties with them. Seizure of the Canal Zone, or even of Panama as whole, may be the likeliest choice for his first concrete act of military aggression.