Hegseth's D-Day Disgrace
And another deplorable week in review
It will not surprise you to learn that:
Pete Hegseth managed to enshittify a solemn remembrance of D-Day by lashing out at our European allies and NATO, while embracing a white identitarian narrative.1
Speaking on the 82nd anniversary of the June 6, 1944, Allied beach landings in Normandy, Hegseth said: “Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies — beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece and Bulgaria; boats and men arrive.”
“When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not,” Hegseth said in his speech at the Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer in northwestern France….
Nor will it come as a huge shock to realize that Hegseth’s tortured analogy actually equated the D-Day invasion with the “different, dangerous ideologies,” who are now storming the beaches — and by implication (if you follow his logic) putting our European allies in the place of the German Nazi defenders. (Indeed, his remarks were so moronically tasteless that it seems likely that Hegseth himself wrote them.)
It will definitely not surprise you to be reminded that our president is a thin-skinned man-child. “‘I’ve Had Enough!’ Trump Storms Out of Meet the Press Interview in Wild Fashion — Explodes On NBC’s Kristen Welker After She Hits Him With Fact Checks”
Nor will it surprise you to learn that the corruption is the point. Always. “Trump ballroom donors awarded $50B in taxpayer-funded contracts in last six months.”
More than half of the 27 publicly-identified donors to President Donald Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom have been awarded new or expanded federal contracts since construction work began, according to a watchdog’s report.
Fourteen of the donors to Trump’s pet project saw their government business grow in the first six months after he ordered the demolition of the East Wing, with the contract awards worth a combined $50 billion, new analysis from Public Citizen reveals.
It may actually surprise you (or maybe not) to learn that:
The Trump DOJ claims that “Trump could 'bulldoze' Statue of Liberty” and that no one could stop him.
“If the government decided to move very quickly to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty,” [Judge] Millett began, pointing to a theoretical lawsuit brought by those whose ancestors saw the statue on arrival. “[If] the government moved too fast, nothing can be done?”
“I think that’s right, yes,” [Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Yaakov Roth], in a moment that sparked audible gasps in the courtroom.
Finally,…
It will definitely not surprise you that Scott Pelley isn’t going quietly. “Scott Pelley on the Bari Weiss Era and His Last Days at ‘60 Minutes’ - The New York Times. GIFT LINK
Scott Pelley says “CBS News is on fire” and the news division’s editor in chief Bari Weiss should be removed from her job.
“My hope is that the leadership of Paramount will say to themselves, this isn’t working,” Pelley said in an interview with The New York Times, his first since being fired by CBS on June 2.
Happy Sunday.
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A week of commentary
Congratulations making in throughthe first week of June with your sanity more or less intact (I hope).
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday dogs
The Identitarian movement or Identitarianism is a pan-European nationalist, ethno-nationalist, far-right ideological movement centred on the preservation of white European identity, which it claims is under existential threat from multiculturalism, immigration, and globalisation.
A Letter to the Secretary of War
Mr. Secretary,
You stood on a field of graves and called the wrong people the invasion. You did it on purpose, and you did it with the whole world watching.
You climbed a bluff above Omaha Beach — ground bought with the bodies of people who crossed an ocean to fight a fascist regime — and you used it to warn the living about boats. Spain. Italy. Greece. Bulgaria. *Boats and men arrive.* You did not say the word *migrants*; you only pointed. You took *stormed*, the word that belongs to the dead buried there, and aimed it across the Mediterranean at the frightened and the drowning. You took *invasion*, which on that ground means liberation, and handed it to people in rafts. You needed those graves to give your fear some weight, because it has none of its own. So you went where the graves were.
And this was not one ugly sentence that got away from you. Last December your own administration put it in writing — a national security strategy warning that Europe faced “civilizational erasure,” that the continent would be “unrecognizable” in twenty years. You did not improvise on that bluff. You read your homework out loud over a cemetery. *Stormed. Invasion. Dangerous ideologies.* The men buried on that ground died in a war against a regime that talked exactly that way. You have the threat aimed backward, sir. The danger at that cemetery was not in the water. It was at the podium, in the good suit, reading from the wrong side of the war. The man who tells you he is guarding the door is the one already inside the house.
But here is what you should not be allowed to walk past, and it is the reason I am writing.
You did not know who was buried near where you stood. Three of the women under that grass served in the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion — the only all-Black, all-female unit America sent overseas in that war. Mary Bankston. Mary Barlow. Dolores Browne. A fourth, Elizabeth Richardson, was a Red Cross volunteer, twenty-seven years old when her plane went down.
They crossed the same water you stood there pointing at. They arrived by ship, from across the sea, into a war that did not want them and a country that would not let them eat at its tables or ride in its cars. They came anyway. They cleared a mountain of mail — millions of letters the Army had given up on — in three months, half the time they were handed, working around the clock in cold warehouses so some mother in Ohio could hold her dead son’s last letter. *No mail, low morale.* That was their motto.
They are the invasion you mean. Women crossing an ocean nobody asked them to cross, unwanted, to carry other people’s grief the last mile home.
They went when no one asked them and no one wanted them. That is what those beaches are for. They are buried there still — Bankston, Barlow, Browne, Richardson — yards from where you stood, and you spoke right over them, and you never knew their names.
I thought somebody should say them out loud.
A granddaughter
I don't know who is charge of the D-Day remembrance at Normandy, but it seems ill-advised to have a member of the Trump administration speaking at all. Especially Pete Hegseth.