Life and Times of Ogn Dulk

Hundreds of Generals Try to Keep a Straight Face Trump and Hegseth push military standards •The Atlantic by Nancy A. Youssef / Sep 30, 2025 at 4:47 PM In the days before Pete Hegseth stepped onstage to address the hundreds of generals and admirals he summoned for a mysterious meeting outside Washington, D.C., officials at the Pentagon joked that the defense secretary could have saved a lot of time and money by making his remarks via email instead. As it turns out, what Hegseth delivered at Marine Corps Base Quantico could very well have been a copy of his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, which offers an exhaustive rebuke of the military he left in 2021 with the National Guard rank of major. Hegseth’s speech, which required yanking commanders from posts dotting the globe and whisking them to Washington at taxpayers’ expense, marked a new phase in the former Fox News host’s campaign to transform the military in his image and align it more closely with the MAGA agenda. All of the patho...

Trump isn't the gravest threat to our democracy — it's something even less human Raw Story by Thom Hartmann / Oct 31, 2025 at 8:29 AM Some data points for your consideration: Last Saturday in Chicago’s affluent Old Irving Park neighborhood, Donald Trump’s secret, masked police violently pulled a 67‑year‑old U.S. citizen — a member of a local running club returning to his home from a run — out of his car and threw him to the street, where they assaulted him with such force that they broke six ribs and left him with internal bleeding. Trump is openly taking bribes, publicly ordering political prosecutions, murdering people in naked violation of both US and international law, all while claiming the Supreme Court gave him absolute immunity from prosecution for any crime. An MIT study finds that lies presented as news travel six times faster across social media than truths. While more than 75 percent of Americans trusted the news 50 years ago, today that number is a mere 28 perc...

The Depth of MAGA’s Moral Collapse The Atlantic by George Packer / Oct 17, 2025 at 11:55 AM When leaders of Young Republican groups around the country exchange texts that say “I love Hitler”; that joke about gas chambers and rape, approve of slavery, sneer about “watermelon people” and monkeys in zoos, and throw around words like faggot and retarded, they aren’t just exposing their own anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, and misogyny. To see only the varieties of bigotry with which we’re painfully familiar is to miss the depth of MAGA’s moral collapse. Professing love for Hitler is more than anti-Semitic—it’s antihuman. It’s a proud refusal to be bound by the most basic standard of goodness, a deliberate expression of contempt for everything decent. The texts degrade all of us. And they’re hardly surprising. Cruelty and humiliation have become the Trump administration’s common currency. With permission from President Donald Trump’s coarse rhetoric and vows of hatred, Elon Musk’s Nazi...

early and often 18 Scarily Stupid Moments From Trump and Hegseth’s Generals Meeting Portrait of Margaret Hartmann By Margaret Hartmann, senior editor for Intelligencer who has worked at New York since 2012 2:52 P.M. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Reuters Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered more than 800 of the country’s military commanders to gather at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. Many flew in from thousands of miles away on short notice, so presumably Hegseth and President Donald Trump had something very important to tell them. Instead, Hegseth called military leaders “fat” and Trump delivered a rambling, rally-style speech. The president spoke in a wheezy, sleepy tone for more than an hour, on a stage clearly meant to resemble the movie Patton. His prepared remarks were full of dictatorlike complaints about “the enemy within,” and justifications for using the military to police U.S. cities. But it was hard to track the major themes, as there were so many long, self-...

politics What the Right Really Means When It Says ‘Free Speech’ Portrait of Sarah Jones By Sarah Jones, senior writer for Intelligencer who covers politics and labor Charlie Kirk and his intellectual godfather, William F. Buckley Jr. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty When Jimmy Kimmel returned to television on Tuesday evening, the late-night host had sharp words for the conservatives who’d briefly forced him off the air. President Donald Trump had put Disney, which owns ABC and made the call to suspend Kimmel, at risk by making “it very clear he wants to see me and the hundreds of people who work here fired from our jobs,” the comedian said. “Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can’t take a joke.” Kimmel had attracted Trump’s ire by suggesting Kirk’s murderer was one of the “MAGA gang,” but previously he was not the most obvious target of the anti-speech right. Once known for co-hosting The Man Show, his late-night persona has always be...

Lower Than Cowards Kimmel returns after controversial suspension •The Atlantic by Adam Serwer / Sep 25, 2025 at 5:36 AM “We have to speak out against this bully,” Jimmy Kimmel said in an emotional monologue after returning to ABC on Tuesday. The network had suspended him, under pressure from the Trump administration, for remarks last week in which Kimmel appeared to inaccurately suggest that Charlie Kirk’s killer was a conservative. Kimmel choked up when discussing the violence and praised Kirk’s widow, Erika. But he also warned his viewers—an audience four times larger than usual—that Trump and his cronies are threatening free speech in all its forms: “Our leader celebrates Americans losing their jobs, because he can’t take a joke,” Kimmel said. But “he’s not stopping. And it’s not just comedy.” True to form, Trump has since threatened to sue ABC for bringing Kimmel back, as if it were illegal not to like him. Kimmel’s refusal to capitulate stands out because so many other well-sit...

Trump Has No Cards 2KThe Atlantic by Anne Applebaum / Aug 16, 2025 at 7:57 AM Is this article about Military? President Donald Trump berated President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. He allowed the Pentagon twice to halt prearranged military shipments to Ukraine. He promised that when the current tranche of armaments runs out, there will be no more. He has cut or threatened to cut the U.S. funds that previously supported independent Russian-language media and opposition. His administration is slowly, quietly easing sanctions on Russia, ending “basic sanctions and export control actions that had maintained and increased U.S. pressure,” according to a Senate-minority report. “Every month he’s spent in office without action has strengthened Putin’s hand, weakened ours and undermined Ukraine’s own efforts to bring an end to the war,” Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Elizabeth Warren wrote in a joint statement. Many of these changes have gone almost unremarked on in the United States....