Here’s the news bulletin from The Guardian:

In a post on Truth Social today, Trump said he would institute the centuries-old, seldom used law – that allows the president to use the military domestically to suppress an invasion or rebellion – if “the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job”.

On Wednesday, a federal officer shot a man in the leg during an enforcement operation in north Minneapolis, sparking further protests in the city, just a week after the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good.

In the very first weeks of this power-mad president’s administration, very wise analysts — historians, political pundits, law school professors, specialists in fascism —warned that Trump would try to manufacture a crisis that would allow him to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 in order to effectively invoke martial law, turning the United States into a military dictatorship. He would, then, simply cancel elections and declare himself king or emperor of whatever gilded fantasy his mind dreams up this week.

The Bulwark, this morning, put it bluntly:

ICE STARTED THE FIRE

and their brilliant article is a must-read. Find it here:

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/ice-started-the-fire-minneapolis-shooting-trump-renee-good-protests-blanche-miller-walz-frey-police-homeland-security

Meanwhile, this mid-morning salvo from Forbes lays out the spectacular authority the Act gives Trump and how courts may, with no little effort, challenge it:

The Supreme Court has given the president wide latitude to deploy federal troops under the Insurrection Act, ruling in the 1827 case Martin v. Mott that the decision on deploying troops to suppress insurrections “belongs exclusively to the President.” Justices have since said there are instances where courts can second guess the president’s actions, Nunn noted for the Brennan Center, such as if the president deploys troops in bad faith or deploys troops in a way that’s clearly unlawful. “What are the allowable limits of military discretion, and whether or not they have been overstepped in a particular case, are judicial questions,” the Supreme Court wrote in a 1932 ruling, arguing “there is a permitted range of honest judgment as to the measures to be taken in meeting force with force.” The Supreme Court also said in 1932 that courts can consider what the military does once it’s deployed. That means even if Trump was lawfully able to send the military into Minnesota or any Democratic-led city, if those troops did something that violated the law, the courts could still step in. Trump officials have been concerned in the past that invoking the Insurrection Act could lead to the invocation being struck down at the Supreme Court, NBC reports, due to not being sufficiently justified, and had been “focused on charting a legal pathway” for using the law that could withstand a court challenge.

Now is the time to inundate Congress

If Trump is restrained at all on this—which the just-impeached Kristi Noem is practically foaming at the mouth to see done—it will be by Congress, pushed by us. Call them now. Even if the call doesn’t go through, your message IS counted.

The Minneapolis Incident Tracker Is Here

https://thebastionusa.com/twin-cities-ice-and-cbp-abuse-and-misconduct-tracker

Stay safe, Minneapolis, and to the degree you can, do as Tim Walz says: FILM EVERYTHING.

To Order Go To www.PleiadesBooks.com

522 pages, 147 images (most color), with a Foreword by Dr. Dennis Patrick Slattery and notes on John Milton and a mythic analysis by Dr. Morgaan Sinclair. A wealth of mythic, image, cultural and historical notes.

TO DELIVER TO YOUR EMAIL BY CHRISTMAS DAY, PLEASE ORDER BY END OF DAY DECEMBER 23rd.

We are overjoyed to announce digital publication of Paul Zolbrod’s magnificent book Paradise Revisited: Lines from John Milton’s Paradise Lost and the Navajo Creation Myth.

It was the last great dream of Dr. Zolbrod, a consummate Milton scholar and the man who compiled and translated the Navajo creation myth into English, to establish the great epics of the Native American oral literature as equal to any epics laid down in writing by any culture. He has succeeded spectacularly using the ravishing poetic work of John Milton and the complex, poignant, sometimes humorous, always deeply spiritual masterwork of Navajo story craft. The mythic landscape of the Navajo world is deeply moving, believing as they do that the earth is sacred and sentient and that the goal of one’s life should be the creation and maintenance of hozhoon, which roughly translates as the synergy of beauty, balance, and harmony. For them, spirit is immanent in all things and in all people.

532 pages, 147 mostly color images. With a Foreword by Dr. Dennis Patrick Slattery and a discussion of John Milton and a mythic analysis by Dr. Morgaan Sinclair.

IF YOU WANT TO SEND A COPY AS A GIFT, DO THIS:

CLICK THE BUTTON ABOVE AND MAKE YOUR PURPOSE:

THEN IMMEDIATELY WRITE ME at MorgaanSinclairPhD@PleiadesBooks.com

Once a purchase is made, I will wait 24 hour to hear from you. Write me and give me the name and email of the person who’s getting the gift, and I will send the PDF to them with a note that you are giving them a present! I’ll forward the email to you so you know your present went out.

WE WILL START SENDING OUT DIGITAL COPIES AT NOON ON SUNDAY, DECEMBER 21st.

A FEW IMPORTANT NOTES:

• We will not at this point be using Kindle or any other digital book marketing platform. We’ll just handle it in-house for the moment. Here’s why: We have 147 images in this book. The overwhelming majority of them are color, and they are licensed from professional photographers, museums, and art galleries all over the world. They come from Getty, Alamy, Adobe and other professional agencies. AI is ripping off images from artists all over the planet, and it’s just killing them. Until the legal terrain becomes much clearer, we have no idea we can protect these photographers OR DR. ZOLBROD’S WORK if we put out on as vulnerable a platform as Kindle.

• Second, we cannot encrypt a book on Kindle. The way we’ll send the book out is reader’s spread PDF with a passcode. The file will be read-only so it can’t be copied in case a virus gets onto your computer—and if it never happens to you, I think you might be the only one in history that lucky!

• For you scholars out there, we’ll also send you permissions instructions if you want to quote. You can let us know which passages you’d like to quote and for what purpose—academic, editorial, or in a book you write. And then we’ll let you know how to proceed.

• If you want to access images for use in newspaper reviews, etc., we can help. Some images can’t be used at all (photographer’s privilege) and some are public domain and some are from Wikipedia and easily accessible. Every image in the book is accompanied by the photograph’s information, so you’ll be able to locate images to license very easily.

PRINT BOOKS ARE IN PRESS NOW

AND WILL BE AVAILABLE IN JANUARY. WE’LL LET YOU NOW WHEN AND HOW TO GET ‘EM FAST.

NOW FOR SOME FUN STUFF.

Consistent with Carl Jung’s theory that the archetypes of the collective unconscious appear in the myths of all peoples—and with Joseph Campbell’s theory that the Hero’s and Heroine’s Journeys are fundamental myths that appear in virtually all cultures globally—both the Christian myth of Paradise and the Navajo tale of how Five-Fingered Earth-Surface People emerged in the Fifth World are chock-full of heroes and heroines, gods and goddesses, demons and monsters—and instances of our all-too-human fantastic successes and devastating failures. However, though our myths have many features in common, they are also shot through with and sometimes crucially shaped by beliefs that are particular to isolated human families. These are beliefs engendered by individual groups’ unique natural environments and their specific experiences, challenges, quests, and imaginative attempts to resolve the vital and sometimes existential questions we have about who we are and why we are here, about our purposes and potentials, about how we relate to the divine, and about how we should solve specific, pressing problems.

So, the myths Dr. Zolbrod explores are stunningly similar and radically different. The Judeo-Christian worldview is monotheistic, top-down hierarchical, and resolutely patriarchal, with a singular-authority deity who creates the natural world and yet is separate from it. For the Navajo, Spirit is emanate in the world, shining in everything. Women and men are equal—and need each other very much.

In both myths, the relationships between masculine and feminine conjure the generative forces that ignite evolutionary processes that will usher humanity into the physical Earth=world. These are human beings as we know them: beautiful and flawed. They love and are swept away by passions; they fight and are wounded by their disputes, Worse, they are subjected to the chaos wrought by Tricksters: in the case of the Navajo, that is a trouble-making rascal of a coyote; in the case of Adam and Eve, it is a quintessentially evil and viciously malignant demon.

But Tricksters, manifestly iniquitous or merely mischievous, are boundary-dwellers, and once boundary-dwellers are engaged, the world will change. For in every case, a boundary-dweller will take a knife to the sky of human reality, and the energies of change, pent up behind the starry veils between worlds, will rush through the gaping slit and bleed like dye into the fabric of consciousness. Happily, all is never lost, for from the ashes of the burnt old world’s fabrics, flocks of phoenixes will always rise.

Paradise Revisited is a joy to read, start to finish. It is, first, graced with the incandescent language of Milton. The poet’s riveting terrors of the war between God and Lucifer—at the end of which the Angel of Light is condemned to hell for eternity—are nothing short of mesmeric. His account of the Serpent’s cruel manipulation of a curious Eve—with the one thing she can’t have—is heartbreaking. And these are only two of the passages from Milton’s epic poem, among the most lauded works in the English language, that Zolbrod includes in Paradise Revisited.

Paradise Revisited is further blessed with the great narrative powers of the Navajo and the archetypal presences of Asdzaan nádleehe (Changing Woman), Jóhonaa’éí the Sun, the Warrior Twins, and the Trickster Ma’ii (the Coyote), whose great talent is wreaking havoc. In one episode he casts the stars into the heavens with no aforethought whatsoever—because he is impatient—and creates a dangerously disorganized mess strewn all over the sky—an act of truly asinine recklessness. The damnedest thing, of course, is that Coyote will be forgiven every single time—though he doesn’t deserve it, and though it certainly is not fair. No one has any other choice as Coyote is immortal: though he is repeatedly killed, he will be serially resurrected from the dead, becoming instantly available to subject humanity to his supremely irritating waggery once again. Apparently, annoying rascality, like hope, springs eternal.

There is devastation and soul-crushing loss in the story of Adam and Eve. There is pain, ribald sexuality, and healing humor in the creation mythology of the Navajo. Both are gifts for our time, yet blessings that never grow old.

Inside the covers of Paradise Revisited there wait two great epics. They are tales told by a man who is, in the same moment, one of the greatest storytellers in the world and one of the finest mythologists of our time. It is a profound honor for Pleiades Books to publish this work. We are grateful, dear professor. We are grateful indeed.

There’s no specter scarier than a vengeful Donald Trump with a fistful of America’s nuclear codes—unless it’s a raging Trump with nuclear codes and a glitter of sycophantic MAGA generals and a Secretary of Defense with a brain pickled in alcohol who will do whatever Trump wants, to whomever he wants to punish. That may involve the use of military troops and surveillance against American citizens or nuclear weapons against foreign “enemies”—whether they are really enemies or not.

For the quintessential history lesson on alcohol and horrific military blunders, we need look no further than the Memoirs of Soviet Foreign Affairs wizard Andrei Gromyko (1909-1989), who served every leader of the USSR from Stalin to Andropov. It was Gromyko who witnessed the meltdown of a hyper-emotional Leonid I. Brezhnev, who, upon the assassination in Kabul of a protégé, ordered the invasion of Afghanistan while he was blind drunk.

Brezhnev, it seems, had suffered a “Becket moment.” (In)famously, England’s King Henry II (1133-1189) had grown frustrated by the insistence of Thomas Becket (1118-1170), Archbishop of Canterbury, that clergy be subject only to Church law, not to English common law. After hearing of an intense outburst between Becket and members of his court, Henry—who was in a drunken rage—is alleged to have shouted, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest!”

Four men, perhaps not the most sparklingly intelligent of Henry’s lackeys, took this to mean that they should rough up said archbishop. Confronting him at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral, one struck him on the shoulder with the flat of a sword and attempted to arrest him. When Becket resisted, the four butchered him, felling him with a blow to the head so vicious that it cracked his skull wide open. His brains oozed out onto the floor.

Henry was aghast. Maybe he and Thomas had turned on each other, but they had once been best friends—friends so close, it was said, they had “but one heart and one mind” between them. Henry grieved, wore sackcloth, powdered himself with ashes, and fasted for three days—but the damage was done: Becket became a saint, his slayers were sent to fight in the Crusades, and the Church’s hand was strengthened in Great Britain.

Fast-forward 800 years and find, in Kabul, two men whose fortunes in rising to the pinnacles of power in Afghanistan were as interwoven as those of Henry II and Thomas Becket. Nur Muhammad Taraki and Haifzullah Amin were, as Taraki once commented, “like nail and flesh, not separable.” They had worked for years to establish Soviet-linked socialist power in this gorgeous, fabled “Heart of Asia.” With the Saur Revolution of 1978, they achieved it: Taraki led the country; Amin was second-in-command.

In the course of their friendship, Amin, the press magician, had crafted a personality cult around his beloved friend Taraki that rivaled those of Kim Il-Sung, Idi Amin … and Donald Trump. Amin called Taraki “The Great Leader” and “The Star of the East.” The problem was, Taraki began to believe his own PR, and made the fatal mistake of slowly sidelining his friend. Camps formed around the two, and the Soviet KGB took sides. A series of tit-for-tat intrigues ensued: fake news that Taraki was going to assassinate Amin caused high government officials to seek shelter in the Soviet embassy—an attempt by Amin to intimidate Taraki by delaying his flight into Kabul enraged the head of government—an attempt by Amin to arrest Taraki was a spectacle and a failure—and an attempt by Taraki to fire Amin may have sealed Taraki’s fate.

It was then that Amin, on a trip to the Soviet Union, whined to Brezhnev, “Taraki is still around. What should I do with him?” Brezhnev left the choice to Amin, and Amin took the chairman’s reply to mean it was fine for him to kill Taraki. Which he did. On 14 September 1979, three men sent on Amin’s orders killed Nur Muhammad Taraki, suffocating him in his study. Amin became Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of Afghanistan and promptly jailed 28 of Taraki’s relatives, including his wife.

But Brezhnev had promised to protect Taraki and never meant Amin to kill him. Described by Gromyko as “an emotional man easily moved to tears,” Brezhnev reeled. Gromyko: “When the news came through that (Nur Mohammed) Taraki, the general secretary of the Afghan Communist Party, had been murdered brutally in his study, it was too much for Brezhnev to bear. He was simply beside himself.” On Christmas Eve, Brezhnev, blind drunk and emotionally off the rails, ordered the invasion of Afghanistan, starting the Soviet-Afghan War, the first foray of the Soviet troops beyond their borders since World War II. Three days later Amin was dead. His family was arrested and imprisoned for more than a decade.

In his memoirs, Gromyko detailed his major tension with Brezhnev—the alcoholism that plagued the Soviet peoples. Asked if Brezhnev had a drinking problem, Gromyko responded. “Yes, yes, yes.” He added, “It was perfectly obvious that the last person willing to look at this problem was the general secretary himself.”[1]

Hegseth Cometh

Nations cannot escape their leaders’ depravities and degeneracies. In Trump’s case, they are reflected in his nominees for several Cabinet positions. Virtually all the objectionable nominees have been accused of sexual abuse, and their prospective new boss, Trump, the convicted rapist, certainly doesn’t seem more than mildly annoyed by it. If sexual abuse and rape become completely normalized in this country, Trump can only benefit.

Trump wants two things only: complete loyalty and the willingness of all around him to cheerfully sell their souls to Satan to do whatever he wants without question. But apparently, the country is not completely willing to cave on that one just yet. Gaetz went down, and that was a loss, because Gaetz as attorney general would have shut down every single case against Trump, including all potential sexual assault cases still threatening him, and would have turned the most sightless of eyes as Trump rolls out Project 2025, fat as it is with unconstitutional potentials its creators hope Trump will illegally institute by fiat.

“Kill all Muslims! Kill all Muslims!” – Pete Hegseth

Yet Gaetz was never Trump’s most dangerous nominee. That dishonor goes to Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense—leader of the world’s most powerful and lethal military—whom whistleblowers accuse of gross financial malfeasance, bullying, belligerence, bigotry towards and hatred of Muslims and everything “Woke,” and alcohol-soaked rages, serial sexual abuse, and rape.

For the record, the Trump team was furious to learn that Hegseth had settled out of court with a woman who accused him of a rape that may have involved a date-rape drug. Apparently, Hegseth just “forgot” to mention the NDA-bound payoff. But the rest—the serial sexual abuse, financial malfeasance, and frequent drunkenness leading to profound misconduct—are ones the Trump team knew about. How bad is all this? Writes The New Yorker:

A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom (VFF) and Concerned Veterans for America (CVA)—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.[2]

Every problem drinker has a unique “signature” of personality disorders that accompanies a binge. His “signature” appears to include serial sexual assault, drinking to unconsciousness, and staggeringly poor judgment. Examples, but the tip of a very large iceberg, as cited by The New Yorker include:

• Hegseth took co-workers to a strip club and got so inebriated he tried to join strippers onstage and had to be restrained by co-workers. That same evening, he allegedly tried to assault a female member of his own staff in the club.

• A complaint from a co-worker in 2015 says the married Hegseth and other male members of his management team at CVA divided up women employees into categories of “party girls” and “not party girls” and sexually pursued female staffers, creating a hideously toxic work environment for CVA’s women.

• A separate complaint from 2015, made by a different employee, states that in the “early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio” (for CVA) Hegseth, drunk again, chanted “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”[3]

Then there’s Hegseth’s serial binge-drunkenness at Fox News. To get the story, Rolling Stone interviewed three current and seven former colleagues at Fox, who told them:

• He was so drunk at the wedding of a Fox producer he could hardly stand.

• He’d arrive for his early morning broadcast either smelling of alcohol or hung over, and he was so often drunk that he had to be “babysat” by Fox staff who knew he’d have been out drinking the night before.

• Once, at 10:00 a.m., he drank ten warm, stale beers that had been left out from a display.[4]

Given such evidence of a major drinking problem, Senate Armed Services Committee member Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) summed up why Hegseth must not be confirmed:

“Much as we might be sympathetic to people with continuing alcohol problems, they shouldn’t be at the top of our national-security structure. It’s dangerous. The Secretary of Defense is involved in every issue of national security. He’s involved in the use of nuclear weapons. He’s the one who approves sending troops into combat. He approves drone strikes that may involve civilian casualties. Literally life-and-death issues are in the hands of the Secretary of Defense, and entrusting these kinds of issues to someone who might be incapacitated for any reason is a risk we cannot take.”[5]

Today what we are hearing, on one side, is that Trump and Vance—obviously having done some serious arm-twisting in the last few days—are confident they’ll get Hegseth through. On the other side, Blumenthal is saying he’ll be surprised if we’re still talking about Hegseth next week:

“The power of the presidency, not to mention this president-elect, and what the retribution might be, I think, is pretty daunting, and so I think Republicans are reluctant to step forward and be the first one, but I think privately, they’re much readier to advise the president that the better part of wisdom would be to urge withdrawal of this nomination.”

What’s really happening, Blumenthal is saying, is that half a dozen or more Republican senators are “waiting for the right moment to say no.”[6]

Why Would Trump Fight So Hard for This Drunken, Abusive Bigot?

Well, why Trump is so hot for Hegseth is because he’ll carry out the American civil war through which Project 2025 writers hope to bring down liberals, non-Whites, women, and non-Christians. Hegseth has already, literally, written the book on using the U.S. military against the civilian Liberal population of the United States when Trump begins his “Retribution Tour” to punish the Woke Folk.

And, wouldn’t you know, there’s a Christian cult behind his views. And while it’s fairly comical watching a drunken abuser like Hegseth invoke the name of Jesus—rather like watching Jimmy Swaggart blubber and bleat to Jesus on national TV after he was caught with a prostitute—Hegseth’s willingness to use the U.S. military against U.S. civilians, which is as unconstitutional as it gets, to invoke a conservative Christian state by civil war is no laughing matter. Trump would order it, and Hegseth would absolutely do it, and this time, we’ll have no General Mattis to stand between us and the loss of the country—and to stand up to Trump.

“The Christian ISIS” War at Home and Abroad

Based on numerous public statements and writings, it’s likely he will aim to undermine the military’s long-standing nonpartisan pluralism by scrubbing diversity from the ranks, banning women in combat, urging the military to choose sides in a “civil war” against “domestic enemies” on the left. He has invoked the need for “a 360-degree holy war” to exorcise “the leftist specter dominating education, religion and culture.”

Also on the home front, The Guardian Writes:

[Hegseth] explicitly supports forms of election-rigging through gerrymandering. Fair electoral boundaries, he writes, amount to “Playing nice to placate the so-called middle,” which “has been a losing strategy for patriots for decades”. Since “the other side is stacked with enemies of freedom”, Hegseth argues, “Republican legislatures should draw congressional lines that advantage pro-freedom candidates – and screw Democrats.”

A Drunk with God on His Side: Hegseth and Far-Right Christianity

As it often is, it’s Politico that uncovered Hegseth’s potentially deadly association with one of the most radical of all the reformed evangelical denominations:

Two years ago, he moved his family from New Jersey to Tennessee, where Hegseth joined a school and church associated with reformed reconstructionism, an ideology helmed by the far-right theologian Doug Wilson.

Wilson’s denomination opposes religious pluralism and embraces the idea of a nation founded on the premise that Jesus Christ is the “lord of all.” He has written that owning slaves in biblical times was not antithetical to being a Christian and, while he says he rejects racism, he has asserted that “the system of slave-holding in the South was far more humane than that of ancient Rome, although it still fell short of the biblical requirements for it.”

Wilson, himself a former submarine navigator for the Navy, has also described himself as philosophically “indebted” to Robert L. Dabney, the military chaplain to Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson who defended slavery and believed in white supremacy.

He claims border defense and Christian dominance are divine conflicts, and claims God has deemed women and children legitimate military targets in such affairs. “The word of God,” Wilson preaches, “tells Christian soldiers what to do, even if Christian soldiers are in the service of an unbelieving magistrate.”

There’s also a system of church courts that metes out punishments for heresy. “They think the Bible applies to every area of life, and they want to see that made into law,” explained Julie Ingersoll, a religious studies professor at the University of North Florida. “In that sense, they are not unlike the Taliban.”[7]

The American Taliban State

If Trump is able to force through Hegseth’s confirmation, Hegseth’s statements and hatred of Muslims, hatred of liberals, and choice of a religious orientation that is solidly white supremacist and Christofascist and excuses slavery indicate that the U. S. military will be in the hands of the crafters of Project 2025, with whom he wholeheartedly agrees and who wish to make America “a Christian nation.”

And Hegseth’s drinking, I predict, will continue and no one will care. Because Pete Hegseth will not make a single decision. Project 2025 authors, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk, on behalf of Vladimir Putin, will make every decision and Pete Hegseth will rubber-stamp their every whim and have a drink.

And at some point, power that has corrupted completely will escape the confines of the nation and strike out at the world as the Jerusalem Cross on Hegseth’s chest foretells. And then this country will reap the whirlwind, just as did the rash drunken Henry II and the blubbering, drunken Leonid Brezhnev, whose blunder in starting the Soviet-Afghan War in 1979 resulted in the harboring of Osama bin Laden and his attack on America, the slaughter of tens of thousands of Afghans, and the enslavement of three generations of Afghan women. And the United States will be led by the same kind of stupid, uneducated, bigoted males who think have God on their side. They are indistinguishable from the Taliban.

[1] From NewsDay in LA Times Archives: “Afghan Slaying Spurred Invasion, He Says : Gromyko Calls Brezhnev a Problem Drinker.” https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-04-04-mn-958-story.html

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secret-history

[3] Ibid.

[4] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/pete-hegseth-alcohol-abuse-allegations-1235193884/

[5] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secret-history

[6] https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5024462-blumenthal-republican-senators-hegseth/

[7] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/06/pete-hegseth-defense-religion-christian-00192117

There’s no specter scarier than a vengeful Donald Trump with a fistful of America’s nuclear codes—unless it’s a raging Trump with nuclear codes and a glitter of sycophantic MAGA generals and a Secretary of Defense with a brain pickled in alcohol who will do whatever Trump wants, to whomever he wants to punish. That may involve the use of military troops and surveillance against American citizens or nuclear weapons against foreign “enemies”—whether they are really enemies or not.

For the quintessential history lesson on alcohol and horrific military blunders, we need look no further than the Memoirs of Soviet Foreign Affairs wizard Andrei Gromyko (1909-1989), who served every leader of the USSR from Stalin to Andropov. It was Gromyko who witnessed the meltdown of a hyper-emotional Leonid I. Brezhnev, who, upon the assassination in Kabul of a protégé, ordered the invasion of Afghanistan while he was blind drunk.

Brezhnev, it seems, had suffered a “Becket moment.” (In)famously, England’s King Henry II (1133-1189) had grown frustrated by the insistence of Thomas Becket (1118-1170), Archbishop of Canterbury, that clergy be subject only to Church law, not to English common law. After hearing of an intense outburst between Becket and members of his court, Henry—who was in a drunken rage—is alleged to have shouted, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest!”

Four men, perhaps not the most sparklingly intelligent of Henry’s lackeys, took this to mean that they should rough up said archbishop. Confronting him at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral, one struck him on the shoulder with the flat of a sword and attempted to arrest him. When Becket resisted, the four butchered him, felling him with a blow to the head so vicious that it cracked his skull wide open. His brains oozed out onto the floor.

Henry was aghast. Maybe he and Thomas had turned on each other, but they had once been best friends—friends so close, it was said, they had “but one heart and one mind” between them. Henry grieved, wore sackcloth, powdered himself with ashes, and fasted for three days—but the damage was done: Becket became a saint, his slayers were sent to fight in the Crusades, and the Church’s hand was strengthened in Great Britain.

Fast-forward 800 years and find, in Kabul, two men whose fortunes in rising to the pinnacles of power in Afghanistan were as interwoven as those of Henry II and Thomas Becket. Nur Muhammad Taraki and Haifzullah Amin were, as Taraki once commented, “like nail and flesh, not separable.” They had worked for years to establish Soviet-linked socialist power in this gorgeous, fabled “Heart of Asia.” With the Saur Revolution of 1978, they achieved it: Taraki led the country; Amin was second-in-command.

In the course of their friendship, Amin, the press magician, had crafted a personality cult around his beloved friend Taraki that rivaled those of Kim Il-Sung, Idi Amin … and Donald Trump. Amin called Taraki “The Great Leader” and “The Star of the East.” The problem was, Taraki began to believe his own PR, and made the fatal mistake of slowly sidelining his friend. Camps formed around the two, and the Soviet KGB took sides. A series of tit-for-tat intrigues ensued: fake news that Taraki was going to assassinate Amin caused high government officials to seek shelter in the Soviet embassy—an attempt by Amin to intimidate Taraki by delaying his flight into Kabul enraged the head of government—an attempt by Amin to arrest Taraki was a spectacle and a failure—and an attempt by Taraki to fire Amin may have sealed Taraki’s fate.

It was then that Amin, on a trip to the Soviet Union, whined to Brezhnev, “Taraki is still around. What should I do with him?” Brezhnev left the choice to Amin, and Amin took the chairman’s reply to mean it was fine for him to kill Taraki. Which he did. On 14 September 1979, three men sent on Amin’s orders killed Nur Muhammad Taraki, suffocating him in his study. Amin became Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of Afghanistan and promptly jailed 28 of Taraki’s relatives, including his wife.

But Brezhnev had promised to protect Taraki and never meant Amin to kill him. Described by Gromyko as “an emotional man easily moved to tears,” Brezhnev reeled. Gromyko: “When the news came through that (Nur Mohammed) Taraki, the general secretary of the Afghan Communist Party, had been murdered brutally in his study, it was too much for Brezhnev to bear. He was simply beside himself.” On Christmas Eve, Brezhnev, blind drunk and emotionally off the rails, ordered the invasion of Afghanistan, starting the Soviet-Afghan War, the first foray of the Soviet troops beyond their borders since World War II. Three days later Amin was dead. His family was arrested and imprisoned for more than a decade.

In his memoirs, Gromyko detailed his major tension with Brezhnev—the alcoholism that plagued the Soviet peoples. Asked if Brezhnev had a drinking problem, Gromyko responded. “Yes, yes, yes.” He added, “It was perfectly obvious that the last person willing to look at this problem was the general secretary himself.”[1]

Hegseth Cometh

Nations cannot escape their leaders’ depravities and degeneracies. In Trump’s case, they are reflected in his nominees for several Cabinet positions. Virtually all the objectionable nominees have been accused of sexual abuse, and their prospective new boss, Trump, the convicted rapist, certainly doesn’t seem more than mildly annoyed by it. If sexual abuse and rape become completely normalized in this country, Trump can only benefit.

Trump wants two things only: complete loyalty and the willingness of all around him to cheerfully sell their souls to Satan to do whatever he wants without question. But apparently, the country is not completely willing to cave on that one just yet. Gaetz went down, and that was a loss, because Gaetz as attorney general would have shut down every single case against Trump, including all potential sexual assault cases still threatening him, and would have turned the most sightless of eyes as Trump rolls out Project 2025, fat as it is with unconstitutional potentials its creators hope Trump will illegally institute by fiat.

“Kill all Muslims! Kill all Muslims!” – Pete Hegseth

Yet Gaetz was never Trump’s most dangerous nominee. That dishonor goes to Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense—leader of the world’s most powerful and lethal military—whom whistleblowers accuse of gross financial malfeasance, bullying, belligerence, bigotry towards and hatred of Muslims and everything “Woke,” and alcohol-soaked rages, serial sexual abuse, and rape.

For the record, the Trump team was furious to learn that Hegseth had settled out of court with a woman who accused him of a rape that may have involved a date-rape drug. Apparently, Hegseth just “forgot” to mention the NDA-bound payoff. But the rest—the serial sexual abuse, financial malfeasance, and frequent drunkenness leading to profound misconduct—are ones the Trump team knew about. How bad is all this? Writes The New Yorker:

A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom (VFF) and Concerned Veterans for America (CVA)—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.[2]

Every problem drinker has a unique “signature” of personality disorders that accompanies a binge. His “signature” appears to include serial sexual assault, drinking to unconsciousness, and staggeringly poor judgment. Examples, but the tip of a very large iceberg, as cited by The New Yorker include:

• Hegseth took co-workers to a strip club and got so inebriated he tried to join strippers onstage and had to be restrained by co-workers. That same evening, he allegedly tried to assault a female member of his own staff in the club.

• A complaint from a co-worker in 2015 says the married Hegseth and other male members of his management team at CVA divided up women employees into categories of “party girls” and “not party girls” and sexually pursued female staffers, creating a hideously toxic work environment for CVA’s women.

• A separate complaint from 2015, made by a different employee, states that in the “early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio” (for CVA) Hegseth, drunk again, chanted “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”[3]

Then there’s Hegseth’s serial binge-drunkenness at Fox News. To get the story, Rolling Stone interviewed three current and seven former colleagues at Fox, who told them:

• He was so drunk at the wedding of a Fox producer he could hardly stand.

• He’d arrive for his early morning broadcast either smelling of alcohol or hung over, and he was so often drunk that he had to be “babysat” by Fox staff who knew he’d have been out drinking the night before.

• Once, at 10:00 a.m., he drank ten warm, stale beers that had been left out from a display.[4]

Given such evidence of a major drinking problem, Senate Armed Services Committee member Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) summed up why Hegseth must not be confirmed:

“Much as we might be sympathetic to people with continuing alcohol problems, they shouldn’t be at the top of our national-security structure. It’s dangerous. The Secretary of Defense is involved in every issue of national security. He’s involved in the use of nuclear weapons. He’s the one who approves sending troops into combat. He approves drone strikes that may involve civilian casualties. Literally life-and-death issues are in the hands of the Secretary of Defense, and entrusting these kinds of issues to someone who might be incapacitated for any reason is a risk we cannot take.”[5]

Today what we are hearing, on one side, is that Trump and Vance—obviously having done some serious arm-twisting in the last few days—are confident they’ll get Hegseth through. On the other side, Blumenthal is saying he’ll be surprised if we’re still talking about Hegseth next week:

“The power of the presidency, not to mention this president-elect, and what the retribution might be, I think, is pretty daunting, and so I think Republicans are reluctant to step forward and be the first one, but I think privately, they’re much readier to advise the president that the better part of wisdom would be to urge withdrawal of this nomination.”

What’s really happening, Blumenthal is saying, is that half a dozen or more Republican senators are “waiting for the right moment to say no.”[6]

Why Would Trump Fight So Hard for This Drunken, Abusive Bigot?

Well, why Trump is so hot for Hegseth is because he’ll carry out the American civil war through which Project 2025 writers hope to bring down liberals, non-Whites, women, and non-Christians. Hegseth has already, literally, written the book on using the U.S. military against the civilian Liberal population of the United States when Trump begins his “Retribution Tour” to punish the Woke Folk.

And, wouldn’t you know, there’s a Christian cult behind his views. And while it’s fairly comical watching a drunken abuser like Hegseth invoke the name of Jesus—rather like watching Jimmy Swaggart blubber and bleat to Jesus on national TV after he was caught with a prostitute—Hegseth’s willingness to use the U.S. military against U.S. civilians, which is as unconstitutional as it gets, to invoke a conservative Christian state by civil war is no laughing matter. Trump would order it, and Hegseth would absolutely do it, and this time, we’ll have no General Mattis to stand between us and the loss of the country—and to stand up to Trump.

“The Christian ISIS” War at Home and Abroad

Based on numerous public statements and writings, it’s likely he will aim to undermine the military’s long-standing nonpartisan pluralism by scrubbing diversity from the ranks, banning women in combat, urging the military to choose sides in a “civil war” against “domestic enemies” on the left. He has invoked the need for “a 360-degree holy war” to exorcise “the leftist specter dominating education, religion and culture.”

Also on the home front, The Guardian Writes:

[Hegseth] explicitly supports forms of election-rigging through gerrymandering. Fair electoral boundaries, he writes, amount to “Playing nice to placate the so-called middle,” which “has been a losing strategy for patriots for decades”. Since “the other side is stacked with enemies of freedom”, Hegseth argues, “Republican legislatures should draw congressional lines that advantage pro-freedom candidates – and screw Democrats.”

A Drunk with God on His Side: Hegseth and Far-Right Christianity

As it often is, it’s Politico that uncovered Hegseth’s potentially deadly association with one of the most radical of all the reformed evangelical denominations:

Two years ago, he moved his family from New Jersey to Tennessee, where Hegseth joined a school and church associated with reformed reconstructionism, an ideology helmed by the far-right theologian Doug Wilson.

Wilson’s denomination opposes religious pluralism and embraces the idea of a nation founded on the premise that Jesus Christ is the “lord of all.” He has written that owning slaves in biblical times was not antithetical to being a Christian and, while he says he rejects racism, he has asserted that “the system of slave-holding in the South was far more humane than that of ancient Rome, although it still fell short of the biblical requirements for it.”

Wilson, himself a former submarine navigator for the Navy, has also described himself as philosophically “indebted” to Robert L. Dabney, the military chaplain to Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson who defended slavery and believed in white supremacy.

He claims border defense and Christian dominance are divine conflicts, and claims God has deemed women and children legitimate military targets in such affairs. “The word of God,” Wilson preaches, “tells Christian soldiers what to do, even if Christian soldiers are in the service of an unbelieving magistrate.”

There’s also a system of church courts that metes out punishments for heresy. “They think the Bible applies to every area of life, and they want to see that made into law,” explained Julie Ingersoll, a religious studies professor at the University of North Florida. “In that sense, they are not unlike the Taliban.”[7]

The American Taliban State

If Trump is able to force through Hegseth’s confirmation, Hegseth’s statements and hatred of Muslims, hatred of liberals, and choice of a religious orientation that is solidly white supremacist and Christofascist and excuses slavery indicate that the U. S. military will be in the hands of the crafters of Project 2025, with whom he wholeheartedly agrees and who wish to make America “a Christian nation.”

And Hegseth’s drinking, I predict, will continue and no one will care. Because Pete Hegseth will not make a single decision. Project 2025 authors, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk, on behalf of Vladimir Putin, will make every decision and Pete Hegseth will rubber-stamp their every whim and have a drink.

And at some point, power that has corrupted completely will escape the confines of the nation and strike out at the world as the Jerusalem Cross on Hegseth’s chest foretells. And then this country will reap the whirlwind, just as did the rash drunken Henry II and the blubbering, drunken Leonid Brezhnev, whose blunder in starting the Soviet-Afghan War in 1979 resulted in the harboring of Osama bin Laden and his attack on America, the slaughter of tens of thousands of Afghans, and the enslavement of three generations of Afghan women. And the United States will be led by the same kind of stupid, uneducated, bigoted males who think have God on their side. They are indistinguishable from the Taliban.

[1] From NewsDay in LA Times Archives: “Afghan Slaying Spurred Invasion, He Says : Gromyko Calls Brezhnev a Problem Drinker.” https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-04-04-mn-958-story.html

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secret-history

[3] Ibid.

[4] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/pete-hegseth-alcohol-abuse-allegations-1235193884/

[5] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secret-history

[6] https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5024462-blumenthal-republican-senators-hegseth/

[7] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/06/pete-hegseth-defense-religion-christian-00192117

For those of you who are new subscribers and followers and didn’t see this earlier, we have written several articles on fascism. Here they are, with another coming soon.

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Earlier this week, Trump attorney Joe Tacopina said he would call no witnesses for the defense in the Carroll v Trump rape case before the court of Judge Lewis Kaplan. Today Tacopina rested his case.

But across The Pond, Trump, on a tour of his gold courses in Scotland and Ireland, went on just the kind of rant about which Judge Lewis Kaplan warned Trump and son Eric in the last fortnight.

Trump told reporters in Ireland on Thursday he’ll “probably attend” the trial, saying:

“I have to go back for a woman that made a false accusation about me, and I have a judge who is extremely hostile,” Trump said in Doonbeg, Ireland, according to Reuters.

He added:

“And I think it's a disgrace that it's allowed to happen, false accusations against a rich guy, or in my case against a famous, rich and political person.”

Judge Lewis Kaplan said that “in the interest of justice,” he would give Trump’s team until 5 p.m. Sunday to make a motion to reopen his case “for the purpose and the sole purpose of testifying as a witness in this case.”

“I am not saying that I will grant it. If it is made, I will consider it,”  Kaplan said. “He has a right to testify that has been waived, but if he has second thoughts, I’ll at least consider them and maybe we’ll see what happens. I won’t attempt to summarize them any further or comment in any way on the substance,” Kaplan said of Trump’s comments. “But I have taken the precautions I have just taken in light of those statements.”

Developing.