Elon speaks to fellow ordinary American, Tucker Carlson, revealing a completely beautiful personality and an empathetic, thoughtful, humanistic view of the world.
The People rest. You can cut my Medicare and Social Security any time, big feller. Nobody holds it against you that there’s a federal law making it illegal for government contractors, like you, to spend hundreds of millions to get benefactor politicians elected, you’ve earned it, philanthropist.
Heather Cox Richardson breaks down the dynamic when people who need to control others want to make sure they have a stranglehold on control. You vilify and dehumanize members of the community and force everyone else to choose: share my hatred of these insects or be a hated insect yourself. The majority of people, intent on avoiding trouble and just getting along, will always make the easier choice. (Link if the video below dicks you around as it did me)
https://www.youtube.com/?v=bjdFsAh6PXQ
The chart below tells the whole story of disinformation and how it can infect a population, an election and government policy going forward. The lies the red bars show swung the close election to Trump are demonstrable, and based, feebly, on a larger truth. Yes, most Americans are getting screwed — most expensive health care in the world, highest price on drugs, biggest wealth disparity in history between those who have over 1,000 million dollars and everyone else, stagnant wages for working people, a corrupt corporatist Supreme Court purchased by right wing billionaires, a largely bought and paid for corporate Congress, manifestly incompetent political hacks appointed to important government posts, a two-tiered justice system strictly punishing the poor and letting the wealthy and connected go about their criminal business, child poverty, an epidemic of child murder by gun; killer storms, rising sea levels and climate science dismissed by fossil fuel lobbyists as having nothing to do with burning fossil fuel; every issue blurred and both-sidesed by a spineless, complicit corporate mass media, etc.
If there is no consequence for spreading deliberate disinformation, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, incendiary lies told knowingly to achieve a political result, then you get President Donald Trump.
What does he know about foreign policy that gave him high Republican support on this issue? That he can make all wars everywhere stop instantly with the force of his genius personality. Why do only 25% of Republican voters polled care about red states forcing raped women and girls to give birth to their rapists’ babies? Because Jesus said it’s right, according to their mega-pastors. Everyone has a legitimate beef about the corporate greed at the heart of our economy, consolidation of goods and services under quasi monopolies that can raise prices at will. All these corporate conglomerates had to do was keep ruthlessly raising consumer prices to make 80% of Republicans say “fuck Biden and his socialism, look how expensive bacon and eggs are at Publix!”
Immigration is perhaps the biggest lie on the list, and the most pernicious and powerful one. Immigrants do a tremendous amount of crucial work that Americans won’t do, and they pay a gigantic amount of taxes. They commit crimes at lower rates than born Americans. There was a bipartisan bill to finally solve longstanding border issues along lines proposed by the most conservative Republicans. Biden was ready to sign it, although it was a very good deal for right wing bigots who want to restrict legal immigration from poor countries. Candidate Trump ordered his party to torpedo the bill, knowing it would be a great campaign issue to continue to lie about immense caravans of raping, murdering, sodomizing, blood poisoning mongrel vermin pouring into the country as Biden dithered, napped and slid into catatonic senility. How well did that ploy work? It was the number one reason people voted for the compulsively lying serial fraudster felon. Take that, fact-based assholes! Who’s the political genius now?
From the same great, infallible, doctrinaire team that brought you Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito, Coney Barrett, Thomas and bland, corporate superhero Roberts. Trump, not Biden, is the true Unifier-in-Chief, libtard cucks! So there. Be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray, J6 forever! Deus Vult, heretics.
A very strong case can be made that we live in an extremely toxic culture here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Our culture is so insanely poisoned that the regular slaughter of school children and their teachers by insane “gunmen” is considered, by a powerful, immovable minority, the non-negotiable price for American freedom, somehow. Our toxic culture is the only one in the world that allows the regular mass murder of our children. Number one cause of death for children one to eighteen years old — gunshot.
How toxic is our culture? A candidate for the American presidency can tell this colossal, hateful lie, pulled directly out of his own floridly insane imagination, (in a manner that even Hitler might have hesitated to voice in public) gain millions of likes and as many votes, become president again:
He’s angry about a fact that he just made up, young American girls being raped, sodomized and murdered by these illegals…. the dark brown, scary, violent, pet eating ones who are poisoning the blood of our country like the vermin enemy within (folks like me and Mike Pence)…
Just to be clear, this imagined rampage of rapes of young girls by dark-skinned “illegals” (listen to the evocative way the mad fuck pronounces that word), in the mind of this asshole’s diehard fans, means that, blessedly, (for the ones who wear crosses), even more rapists’ children must be born, because that is how Jesus wants it. Fetuses are clearly infinitely more sacred and precious than kindergarten children.
The public’s reaction to the cold blooded murder of a wealthy health insurance CEO has been, largely, to treat the man who killed him as an avenging folk hero. When I told a friend someone had quipped that there are 50,000,000 Americans with a motive to shoot him, his response was “only 50,000,000?” Another friend questioned whether the gunshots were actually the cause of death, isn’t it likely the dead man had many comorbidities?
What did this CEO do to inspire someone to kill him? He simply did his job, vastly increasing the profitability of his health insurance company by using AI to deny 99% of all claims. He noted that far less than 1% of those denied health care by his insurance company ever appealed the denial of claims by his bots. A fucking genius innovator, this guy. His company, the largest health insurance giant in the world, took in $260,000,000,000 (with a B) last year [1]. They were doing great, more profitable than ever, and the CEO was raking in piles of money for himself.
Did he deserve to be murdered? Arguably, nobody does. The public reaction seems to underscore the feeling that in an age when well-connected psychopaths are constantly rewarded, their crimes excused, where no accountability for powerful white men shitting on the world seems to exist, some will argue that this is exactly the kind of exception to the rule that we need right now.
These CEOs will now all be accompanied at all times by armed guards, ready to maim anyone who might threaten the boss. Nobody wins this kind of war. In fact, American fascists are spoiling for exactly this kind of war. Newly minted acting Minister of Treason General Michael “Q-Anon” Flynn will be empowered with the discretion to create death squads to counter the violent enemy within, particularly in anarchist jurisdictions, where these enemies proliferate like insects.
The point about the brutality of the American health insurance system remains, though. The United States is the only wealthy country where health care is not a right, where buying health insurance is the best anyone can do when it comes to paying for our own health care. Who put these parasitic middle men into the loop?
Why are there so many Medicare Advantage and Medigap plans? Because the gold standard of American health care (health insurance, actually) only covers 80% of covered procedures, while dental, vision and other crucial elements of health care are excluded entirely. Who benefits from this system? A company that had revenues of $260,000,000,000 (with a B) last year. That’s a shit ton of incentive to keep things just the way they are.
No matter who has to fucking die or be killed.
Nothing ever happened to any of the murderously incompetent idiots who willfully allowed twice as many Americans to die of Covid-19 than died anywhere else. The angry moron who oversaw that shitshow of televised carnival barker-led carnage is back in charge again, with loyalty oaths to ensure nobody ever contradicts him again. What a country! Pay your health insurance premiums or die, don’t tread on me!
[1] Forbes
We like to think that there are two sides to every story. Many times there are way more than two sides. The truth can be very slippery to get a grasp on, particularly when compelling stories that contradict each other are told. There are some stories, however, that almost anyone, weighing the events fairly, will relate to as true.
Some stories are not complicated in the least, if you look at them clearly. If you ask one or two people, or ten, likely they will all have exactly the same response that you did.
I think of the daughter who accused her father of wanting to fuck his son’s girlfriend, after he defended the girl as a good match for his son who made his son happy, in spite of what the daughter thought of the girl. The father was pissed off, felt disrespected, gave his twenty four year-old daughter a piece of his mind. Afterwards his wife told him he was out of line, that their daughter was just trying to be funny. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has agreed with the wife’s assessment that the girl was joking and believed the father had no reason to feel hurt by the remark.
There are some stories that simply don’t have two equally compelling sides or a lot of nuance. Sometimes a story has one demonstrable truth — for example, a three hour violent riot filmed and broadcast in real time, with more than a hundred injured police officers taken to the hospital. There is of course a counter story, in this case that the riot we all watched was, actually, “legitimate political discourse.”
The second story, to be remotely true, must discount the violence that injured outnumbered law enforcement, the breaking and entering, mass criminal trespass, vandalism, the necessity of heroic actions by a few policemen to allow lawmakers to flee the threats to their lives, the gas masks, the gallows and all the rest. One can’t believe the second story without dismissing a huge trove of evidence we all witnessed.
We can, of course, discuss which of these stories is closer to true, and millions will be compelled by one side or the other, but what actually happened is the deciding factor in which story is closer to true. You can spin a story, as the studiously both-sides New York Times has become so adept at doing, but that is not the same as presenting an intelligible story that doesn’t make both sides, no matter how ridiculous one side is, seem equally plausible. During legitimate political discourse, for example, people are rarely, if ever, injured en masse or taken to the hospital with grievous injuries.
Here are two nice headlines for illustrative purposes, from our beloved journal of record
Some stories are not complicated in the least, if you look at them clearly. If you ask one or two people, or ten, likely they will all have exactly the same response that you did.
A surgeon described to me a ten to twenty minute procedure that involves no cutting, merely the stretching of a constricted structure by a method called dilation. A little shaving of the place the structure inserts into may be required, he said, but he could only tell that once he was looking through a scope during the procedure. The procedure he described was much less invasive than the one I was expecting to have and without a side effect I was dreading. I was relieved.
A few weeks later when I got the presurgical papers, dilation was not included among the procedures I was scheduled to have. There was a surgical resection described (likely the shaving he’d referred to) and the possibility of something called a cold knife urethrotomy. As I’d never heard of this procedure, I looked it up. Here’s what the device looks like:
I was concerned about this unannounced change of plans. The risks associated with slicing with a urethrotome are not inconsiderable. The odds of success appear to be depressingly low. I needed to talk to my doctor. The corporation the doctor works for, a subsidiary of the the nation’s largest, and presumably most lucrative, corporate provider of such medical services, does not allow patients to directly speak to their doctor. My need for this procedure is close to an emergency level, but I had to finally cancel the fucking surgery today, as there is no way to give informed consent without knowing the risks and benefits of a surgical procedure I was never told about.
This outcome is what I mean by certain stories have only one response. Any patient, or friend of a patient, hearing surgery A proposed, getting notification of surgery B, would have questions of the surgeon. It is not the result of PTSD, trauma, the experience of abuse or being bullied that would make someone need an answer to this question. It is the nature of the questionable behavior that makes the question necessary.
It is like having to inform a loved one that they had no right to punch you in the face when they were drunk. There aren’t multiple sides to this story. If the loved one tells you to shut up, they were drunk, it only happened three times in fifty years, it doesn’t change the essential nature of the story. You are not wrong to either need this talked through to ensure it never happens again, to not see this person again, or whatever the solution you need is. It’s not like there are two equally compelling sides to the story, outside of the question of how you let it happen a second and third time.
Corporations were ruled to be people by a corporatist United States Supreme Court. The kind of person a corporation is has all of the characteristics of a psychopath. Here’s a checklist from the excellent 2003 documentary The Corporation, which lays out the case in a manner so irrefutable it will make your spine tingle.
You can see the entire movie here, on YouTube, for only the cost of having to skip the infernal corporate ads inserted every ten minutes.
Your spine will tingle at the recognition that we are all prey and the corporate person, an eating machine without any other consideration, has virtually no constraints on its appetite.
I have to say, Jefferson’s words (which, of course, applied only to wealthy white men) get to me every time. Who can reasonably argue with the idea that the ideal government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed? Informed consent can only be given based on knowledge of the alternatives. This remains true today, when tsunamis of deliberate disinformation can drown all reasonable discussion among those who must give their consent. Here’s Heather:
The Founders of what would become the United States rested their philosophy on an idea that came from Locke’s observations: that individuals had the right to freedom, or “liberty,” including the right to consent to the government under which they lived. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The driving will of the super-wealthy to become ever wealthier cannot be overstated. While most people could live very comfortable lives on $10,000,000 or $100,000,000, those people are, objectively, losers relative to those competitors who have a billion (one thousand million) or a hundred billion (a hundred thousand million). The greed of those obsessed with owning everything is apparently insatiable.
We can see it every day among our greatest, most admired and important citizens. Elon Musk made $64,000,000,000 in the week following Trump’s election, after spending chump change, $200,000,000, to advance Trump’s electoral chances. An astounding, immediate thirty-two fold return on investment. 3200% profit, most excellent! Mark Zuckerberg rushed down to Mar-a-Lago to sample the famously delicious “ring”.
What is the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire? A millionaire is rich, a billionaire is an insatiably greedy psychopath.
In the old South these best of the best inherited vast fortunes based on slave labor. They inherited land, slaves, a lavish lifestyle of privilege and every advantage. A tiny percentage of white people ruled everybody in the antebellum south, in the manner of the old aristocracy in Europe. Poor whites were regarded, by the “Planters”, as rough tools to keep the slaves in line and were respected about as much as these genteel best of the best respected their dark-skinned human chattels. The poor whites, for their part, got to feel infinitely superior to, and brutally abuse, Blacks who showed them disrespect.
Poor whites died, or were maimed, by the tens of thousands supporting the cause of slavery and defending their masters’ right to rule them as well as their actual slaves. The myth they fought for was their superiority as white men, as a matter of their manhood fighting Northern Aggression to preserve a traditional, Godly way of life. After the Civil War, the Lost Cause myth [1] emerged quickly to explain why they had been righteous to fight, why their fight had nothing to do with slavery and why the South had never actually lost the war. Fast forward 156 years and you have rioters unfurling the Confederate battle flag in the Capitol. Here’s the story, drawn in a straight line, in under five minutes:
[1] Compare this racist alternative history of the Civil War to other myths about lost causes.
Hitler came to power after decades denouncing the “November Criminals” who, in 1918, “stabbed the victorious German Army in the back” by traitorously negotiating a humiliating surrender when the German Army was on the cusp of glorious victory (like they were again in April 1945, when the madman eventually shot himself in the mouth in his bunker).
Trump came to power endlessly screaming about a lost election that was stolen by sick, dangerous criminals and traitors (of both parties) that made a riot by patriots necessary, heroic patriotic martyrs who were viciously persecuted and unfairly locked up for justifiably attacking and hospitalizing more than 100 Capitol policemen in an attempt to selflessly save the nation they love. USA! USA!!!!
Horrifically enough, Biden can’t legally order FBI vetting of Trump’s mad cabinet picks.
Donald Trump, as transgressive a psychopath as we’ve ever had running this country, is doing what he does best, the thing he shares with angry South African superfreak Elon Musk and their proudly stinking ilk, saying a loud, saucy “fuck you!” to the law and the norms it rode in on. His minions love him for his transgressiveness.
The law in question is The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022. This law was designed to fix flaws in the previous laws to make sure a lawless, insane fucker like Trump couldn’t run roughshod over the law to, say, try to get his minions, and an enraged lynch mob, to overturn the lawful results of an election., while refusing to put his estimated $700 trillion dollar brand into a blind trust to avoid conflicts of interest while president.
This law provides that the incoming president must sign papers submitting to the provisions of this orderly transition law, allowing his administration to smoothly flow from the one before it. Trump being Trump is doing what he did when Mueller found his final answer to written questions “inadequate” or however the ultra-polite Mueller put it. Trump left his answer to the final, incriminating question completely blank. Nada. Ain’t signing it. Fuck you, pedophile commie cuck losers!
Biden can’t legally order FBI vetting of any of the incoming corrupt incompetents Trump has nominated until, and unless, Trump signs the paper ensuring an orderly, legal transition of power without obvious conflicts of interest.
This would be a perfect test of the absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts the Federalist Six put into place recently to protect their criminal benefactor. It is clearly an important part of Biden’s official presidential duty to ensure a peaceful, legal transfer of power. If he has to break a law that his successor refuses to obey, in order to enforce the law and protect the republic, why the hell not? What are they going to do, prosecute him?
As for why Trumpie is not obeying the law? As Trump said when asked, after a secret, private meeting with Putin in Helsinki, if Putin interfered in the 2016 election “I don’t know why he would.” Trump ain’t signing Jack Shit, Jack Smith! Also, there is no legal way to enforce the law against him, given that the law smashing turd is firmly in charge of the enforcement of all laws and norms, given his huge, 49.9% electoral mandate and the abject sycophancy of his spineless henchpersons and handmaidens.
Timothy Snyder:
[Trump nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete] Hegseth does not need to know early American history, though, since he disavows the American republic. He is a Christian Reconstructionist who believes that God’s law should prevail. The Constitution has to be understood, Hegseth claims, as subordinate to a broader unwritten Covenant with God, the meaning of which is of course known to him personally. He thus opposes the constitutional structure of the United States as it figures in the actual text.
Hegseth denies the rectitude of the First Amendment, which separates church and state: “without God, America is not America.” He says explicitly that “the diminished role of Christ’s Kingdom in America’s founding” is to blame for the malaise that followed. Switching his metaphysics for a moment, he claims that the separation of church and state opened “the gates of Mordor.” Constitutional patriotism is not a good thing, since it can “untether us from the timeless truth, from the Bible.” Of course, as is always the case, God’s law turns out to mean what Hegseth and his friends say that it means.
The enemy within, broadly defined as “the Left,” is presented as already having a plan to annihilate everyone else. This is, of course, what fascists always say: it is legitimate to destroy the other side, because however invisibly and conspiratorially and secretly, it is planning to kill you first. Thus for Hegseth, the Left has the goal of “erasing America’s soul, culture, and institutions. We are the ones standing in their way—and have been targeted for annihilation.” Hegseth does not dwell, for some reason, on the actual countries that actually want the American system to break.
Only the “enemy within” captures his imagination. Hegseth enjoins his readers to “remember the plan the Left has for you—utter annihilation.” And again: “In more ways than you can imagine, leftists have surrounded traditional American patriots on all sides, ready to close in for the kill: killing our founders, killing our flag, and killing capitalism. The only option for survival in a near ambush is to charge; to close with, and destroy, the enemy.”
Trump’s nominee for the position of secretary of defense seems to believe that we need a cleansing civil war. He instructs us that “we are not only fighting a battle against foreign enemies.” “Sometimes,” he writes, “the fight must begin with a struggle against domestic enemies. Those who would violate the Covenant that binds us as a community of faith and that grants us blessing.”
Tattoo on Pete Hegseth’s strong right arm. A man of unquestioning faith, only God knows how much Hegseth knows about His eternal, awesome, incomprehensible, all-merciful, terrifying will. Deus vult, baby.
Trump transition spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer told Will Steakin of ABC News that discussions of Gaetz’s payments [apparently for sex with two seventeen year-olds] “are meant to undermine the mandate from the people to reform the Justice Department.” (Heather Cox Richardson)
Gaetz would have been the perfect MAGA Attorney General to carry out Trumpie’s mandate to reform the DOJ, considering it’s currently impossible to reanimate the corpse of Roy Cohn, the only better pick for that role. Here’s Trumpie’s latest bestie, South African twat Elon Musk, making a genius case for Matt Gaetz:
If you’re a super-wealthy, born-entitled, angry, attention-craving dork with an oversized taste for trolling and dominating others, you want a smart AG with a spine of steel and an ax to grind. Of course you need a super-loyal bully with an ax to grind, got to have that revenge motive working. What good is power if you don’t get to swing a sharpened ax to make sure your will is forever obeyed?
Meanwhile, the MAGA spokes-shills are tirelessly spinning the myth of MAGA’s enormous, throbbing mandate.
A spokesperson for the Trump transition said of [Trump Secretary of Education pick Linda] McMahon’s misrepresented credentials [lying about having a BA in education while running for a school board position]: “These types of politically motivated attacks are the new normal for nominees ready to enact President Trump’s mandate for common sense that an overwhelming majority of Americans supported two weeks ago.” (Heather)
That overwhelming majority of Americans now stands at an impressive 49.9% of those who voted (in an election with a turn out about 10,000,000 voters lower than 2020). Within the margin of error, true, and we don’t know how many mail-in ballots were undelivered from Democratic-leaning districts in swing states by the smirking Trump megadonor postmaster (and the odds are that we may never learn that number– try finding any clue on-line), but an OVERWHELMING majority, nonetheless.
Compare that mandate to the one Dick “I Am Not A Crook” Nixon, patron saint of these modern day MAGA zealots, got in 1972 (after the infamous Watergate break-in, before Nixon’s inglorious resignation to avoid indictment two years later):
So far we are not even talking about walking Putin talking point, friend of the Syrian dictator and good looking woman who allows the loathsome Orange Polyp to literally paw her in front of a large audience, Tulsi Gabbard, Trumpie’s pick for Putin-approved Director of National Intelligence [1]. Gabbard, a former Democrat, was a dark horse 2020 Democratic contender for the presidential nomination (like her whacky fellow traveler Bobby Kennedy Jr. in 2024) before waking up one day suddenly loving of the taste of the GOP strongman’s “ring”. They all have to kiss it, come on. Lindsey Graham will tell you exactly what it tastes like and why it is so hard to stop “kissing”. Take one look at the smile on MAGA Mike Johnson’s cherubic face, it speaks louder than all of the Christ-fearing extremist’s words ever could.
In other news, hate crimes are up in the USA, and on the rise, as white supremacists stage shows of force in towns and cities all over America. This trend started under the first Trump administration, which saw a 20% rise in hate crimes. Here’s a trusted fake news site, Newsweek, from November, 2020:
Hate crimes have surged nearly 20 percent during the administration of President Donald Trump, according to a new FBI report on hate crime statistics. The report also shows that hate-motivated murders, largely committed by white supremacists, spiked to their highest number in 28 years.
Nothing wrong with violent expressions good old fashioned hatred, of course, if the people your followers hate are hateful, sick, blood poisoning, dangerous enemy-within vermin. Nothing to worry about, unless you’re a hateful loser. That’s why the massive congregations of wealthy Christian theocrats, the Klan and American Nazis helped give MAGA it’s overwhelming mandate.
[1] But Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence makes McMahon look like a prize. As military scholar Tom Nichols points out in The Atlantic, former representative TulsI Gabbard is “stunningly unqualified” to oversee all of America’s intelligence services, including the Central Intelligence Agency. Nichols notes that her constant parroting of Russian talking points and her cozying up to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad make her “a walking Christmas tree of warning lights” for our national security.
Former Republican governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley suggested that Gabbard is “a Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer” who has no place at the head of American intelligence. A Russian state media presenter refers to Gabbard as “our girlfriend” and as a Russian agent. (Heather)
The New York Times reports the details of the incident that caused Fox News host and defender of Navy SEAL war criminal Edward Gallagher [1], Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Defense, to pay an undisclosed amount of money to a woman in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement.
The salacious details don’t matter (read the NY Times account anyway), the agreement is ironclad and absolutely nothing wrong happened, per the agreement and the undisclosed sum of money paid to settle the matter and keep it private forever (see NY Times account).
In other news, Matt Gaetz, also totally innocent and viciously persecuted by angry, name-calling libtard cucks armed with disgusting leaked private details of Mr. Gaetz’s personal life, cleared the way for Aileen Cannon’s appointment as Attorney General of the United States of America.
[1] Gallagher was turned in by his fellow Navy SEALs after, among other things, witness accounts that he stabbed a wounded teenaged Iraqi prisoner to death, and posed with the corpse, holding the cadaver’s head by the hair (as one does). A military tribunal convicted Gallagher of posing for a photograph with a corpse and texting the photo to friends. Gallagher was outraged. So was Hegseth, who became his powerful advocate. Trump gave Gallagher a full pardon. A perfect pardon! As all presidential pardons now are, according to the Federalist Society Six. Here are some of the now irrelevant details about the accusations against Gallagher:
Gallagher was accused of multiple offenses during his final deployment to Iraq and during the Battle for Mosul. The most prominent accusation and the best-attested to was the murder of a prisoner of war, a war crime.[9] Khaled Jamal Abdullah, a captured 17-year-old fighter of the Islamic State, was being treated by a medic.[12] According to two SEAL witnesses, Gallagher said “he’s mine” over the radio, then walked up to Abdullah and allegedly proceeded to stab him with his hunting knife without explanation. Gallagher and his commanding officer, Lieutenant Jake Portier, then posed for photographs of them standing over the body with some other nearby SEALs. Gallagher then text messaged a friend in California a picture of himself holding the dead captive’s (ISIS) head by the hair with the explanation “Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife.”[9][13]
Prosecutors alleged that Gallagher’s sniper work during his 2017 deployment became “reckless” and “bloodthirsty”.[5] He allegedly fired his rifle far more frequently than other snipers;[5] according to testimony, the other snipers in the platoon did not consider him a good sniper, and he took “random shots” into buildings.[1] Other snipers said they witnessed Gallagher taking at least two militarily pointless shots, shooting and killing an unarmed elderly man in a white robe as well as a young girl walking with other girls.[5] Gallagher allegedly boasted about the large number of people he had killed, claiming he averaged three kills a day over 80 days, including four women.[1] Gallagher also was reportedly known for indiscriminately spraying neighborhoods with rockets and machine gun fire with no known enemy force in the region.[9]
A charge of obstruction of justice was brought against Gallagher for alleged witness intimidation. According to the claim, Gallagher allegedly threatened to kill fellow SEALs if they reported his actions.[5] The Navy cited his text messages as attempting to undermine the investigation, with messages sent to “pass the word on those traitors”, meaning cooperating witnesses, and to get them blacklisted within the special warfare community.[9][1] This resulted in him being confined in the brig for a time with heavy restrictions on his ability to communicate, although this confinement was later lessened.[5]
Gallagher was also charged with nearly a dozen lesser offenses.[5] Some of these charges, such as flying a drone over a corpse, were dismissed during preliminary hearings.[14]
According to the original Navy prosecutor Chris Czaplak, “Chief Gallagher decided to act like the monster the terrorists accuse us of being. He handed ISIS propaganda manna from heaven. His actions are everything ISIS says we are.”[6][5] Gallagher’s lawyer, Phillip Stackhouse, alleged the accusations were without foundation and came from a small number of disgruntled SEALs who could not meet Gallagher’s leadership demands. The accusations against Gallagher were recorded to be fabricated by teammates that started a mutiny in the SEAL platoon.[5]
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