The loose threads they used to tie all these people together with the one who actually did shoot is amazing
Not surprised they’d be tried together - although realistically under normal circumstances they might not be
BUT
Right now
NOTHING is normal
Prosecutors are in USA reacting like the ministery wants. People which just lost the last bit of moral are doing stuffs like this. But this is the line Trump goes. and they follow him. In his big plan.
This AntiFa prosecuting is a dangerous way. They leave the way of legal acting and starting to work against that what they have to protect. The Truths.
It should be the other way around. Facing twenty years of prison is really hard for using your constitutional right of demonstrating against ICE. That they use the way of a criminal organization is dramatical.
The war against Iran and the communication of the american president around it sounds a bit like While E. Coyote against Bugs bunny. And Bunny wins always. Sad is that Trump is Coyote in this movie. And he was not winning anything until now. He believes that Iran’s Army is near an unconditional surrender. it is not. They will not give up. They fight for their life. And this while they know that they will hang if they loose the power in Iran. Never was bombing changing a regime alone. There has to be an Army on ground to do the job. Israel will not do that job. 8 Million people fighting against 93 million. No, that will not work. Even if they have tons of tanks: they would have to bring them to Iran. Also the Amercan Army has no chance to do that. Remembers to Korea and Vietnam. That will not really work. And while so many people are ageinst the regime around 50% are behind the regime, many muslims which are believing that the religious leader is the one which tells how things going.
This war has no target in my eyes and it had never a target except the target was to loose the midterm. I guess and I hope that this is what will be happened. Cause it will cut 50% of the power of this president.
If somebody is outside believing that this president is good for America: there re medical doctors helping with diseases like this. Psychiatrists.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/world-news/360951191/10-damning-words-pete-hegseth-says-quiet-part-out-loud
But Hegseth couldn’t help himself. He had to go further. “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network the better,” he added. In those 10 words, the Defence Secretary said the quiet part out loud.
[…]
Hegseth’s latest remarks put it out in the open – the Trump administration is expecting David Ellison’s Paramount to make significant changes at CNN that are favourable to the government.
Trump is CREATING the ‘Fake News Media’
More in the article
What shocked me is that the UK did the same. Thankfully the courts stepped in.
The UK have restrictional right and not a right for demonstrations like we have in germany. It is much more restricted. And they act like this. If you are in a direction the government does not like you may end in the tower. It was so before 1000 years and this tradition will stay. Very british
They weren’t prosecuted for protesting. From the article:
They faced a mix of charges of providing material support to terrorists, rioting, attempted murder, as well as firearms and explosive charges.
It was a jury trial and they were found guilty by their peers.
.
More fake news. Palestinian Action were not proscribed for protesting, the broke into RAF Brize Norton and damaged military aircraft.
Depressing that some think unelected, unaccountable, activist judges making up law on the fly to overrule democratically elected governments ( even ones I hate like UK’s current Labour government ) is a good thing.
Yes, nice try. But that is the point how to construct this kind of stuffs.
I guess <ou have no Idea why their is this kind of power for Judges. And you believe in better is only elected people will have power. Like Adolf Hitler for example. He was elected. Man, wake up.
I almost expect their convictions on many charges will be overturned on appeal
Maybe not all charges but many
They spray painted something on the planes - hardly what a normal person would call “damage” and “terrorists”.
Pretty ironic that you of all people go down the “fake news” route … 
This problem was and is known. Trump wanted always to be a dictator and not a liberal president of the United States. Now he started even to play warlord what was running into the wrong direction. It destroys the world’s economy and the American one faster than he ever could think. It costs money. Much money. And will bring for him nothing. If he starts (and I believe he will) to send troops to Iran Trump will face the second Vietnam. Not like Korea. Like Vietnam. Many people in Iran standing behind the regime. And it is not helping to believe they are not. And that fact will break his troops every bone in their body. So I guess he wants the oil.He will not get it. And while he was not getting what is going on and what will go on when he starts the war he has now even a bigger problem. If he ends this war (and he is the only one which can do it) this would be a lost war. Then Trump is lost. And he knows that. Cause the regime would be stronger than ever before after this war without any sense.
Three major democracy watchdog organizations have released their reports. These are independent organizations that each use different methods and track different data. They’re based in different countries, and they all arrived at the same conclusion. American democracy is in a free fall.
Not declining slowly, or eroding at the edges, which would be bad enough. But in a freefall. The kind of decline that scholars who have spent their entire careers studying how democracies live and how they die are calling unprecedented.
The first report comes from the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, the largest global dataset on democracy that exists. Over 4,200 scholars and country experts, covering 202 countries, with data going back to 1789. This isn’t a think tank with a political agenda. This is a massive, rigorous, academic measurement system used by political scientists around the world. And their conclusion was devastating: in a single year, the United States experienced the most rapid democratic decline in its history. Our ranking plummeted from 20th to 51st out of 179 countries. We now sit between Slovakia and Greece. Our Liberal Democracy Index score fell 24 percent in one year. And for the first time in over 50 years, the United States lost its classification as a ‘liberal democracy’ and was downgraded to what they call an ‘electoral democracy,’ meaning we still hold elections, but we no longer have the fully functioning checks and balances, the rule of law protections, and the civil liberties that define a liberal democracy. We haven’t been in that lower category since 1965. Before the Voting Rights Act was fully implemented. That’s how far we’ve been set back.
V-Dem also found that freedom of expression in the United States is now at its lowest level since the end of World War II. That Congress’s ability to check presidential power has reached its lowest point in over 100 years. And they classified the United States as one of 44 countries currently “autocratizing.” That’s their word. Not mine. It means actively moving away from democracy and toward autocracy. The institute’s founding director, Staffan Lindberg, said it plainly: the developments in the United States are “moving toward dictatorship, what the founders wanted to avoid.” He called it “the most rapid decline ever in the history of the United States and one of the most rapid in the world.”
And when the White House was asked to respond? Their spokeswoman called V-Dem “a ridiculous claim made by an irrelevant, blatantly biased organization.” That’s the playbook. When the data exposes you, you don’t address the data. You attack the people holding the ruler. Every authoritarian regime in history has done exactly that.
The second report comes from Bright Line Watch, a group of over 500 American political science professors who regularly rate American democracy on a scale from zero to 100. After Trump’s election in November 2024, they gave us a 67. Not great, but still in the range of a functioning democracy. Then, just weeks into his second term, that score dropped to 55. The steepest single decline in the survey’s entire history. They now classify the United States as a “mixed regime.” Nearly midway between liberal democracy and dictatorship. They place us between Israel and Mexico, and below countries we’ve always considered our peers, like the United Kingdom and Canada. And the co-director, John Carey at Dartmouth, said something that all of us need to hear. He said the score might have dropped even further if not for the courts pushing back. And then he added: “That’s the most important set.” Meaning the courts are the last line. And if they fall, there is nothing left.
The third report comes from Freedom House. They’ve been tracking political rights and civil liberties around the world since 1972. The United States has always been rated “free.” Always. But in their 2026 report, we had the sharpest decline in freedom score out of all 88 countries in the “free” category. The sharpest. We received our lowest score since they began using their current scale in 2002. And global freedom has now declined for 20 consecutive years. The title of their report says everything: “The Growing Shadow of Autocracy.”
And then there’s the Century Foundation, which recorded a 28 percent drop in American democracy in a single year. From 79 to 57 out of 100. This isn’t one organization with an axe to grind. This is every major democracy measurement system on Earth, using different methods, studying different indicators, arriving independently at the same conclusion. And the man they’re measuring? He was standing on a tarmac this morning talking about “bombing our little hearts out”.
So how did we get here? How did the country that wrote the blueprint for modern democracy fall this far, this fast? And yes, we are a democratic republic. We elect representatives. We have a Constitution designed by people who had just fought a revolution against a king and were determined to make sure no single person could ever hold that kind of power again. But that entire system, every piece of it, runs on democratic norms. Free press. Independent courts. Separation of powers. Civilian control of the military. The peaceful transfer of power. Accountability. Transparency. The idea that the law applies to everyone, including, and especially, the president. Those are what’s in freefall. And it didn’t happen by accident. It’s not random chaos. It is a playbook. Every move has been used before in countries that lost their democracies the same way we are losing ours. And once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it.
It starts with the watchdogs. Every federal agency in the United States has an inspector general. Their entire job is to find waste, fraud, and abuse inside the government. They are nonpartisan by design. They serve across administrations. And the law requires the president to give Congress 30 days’ notice and a detailed justification before firing one. In his first week back in office, Trump fired 18 of them. In one night. Without giving Congress a single justification for any of them. And at least five of those inspectors general had been actively investigating Elon Musk’s companies at the time they were fired. The man who was handed access to sensitive government data across multiple federal agencies, whose companies hold billions in government contracts, who was never elected and never confirmed by the Senate, and had the people investigating him removed. And now over 75 percent of inspector general positions are sitting vacant. And the staff who remain have testified to Congress that they are terrified to do their work, speak up, or report anything unfavorable. And that is exactly what dictatorships require.
Then they went after the press. V-Dem found something that every single one of us needs to understand. In their data, going back 25 years, across every country they track, attacks on free expression have been the single most common tactic used by leaders who are concentrating power. The first thing they go after. Every time. Because if you can silence the people who tell the truth, you can do anything else you want. The United States just received its lowest press freedom ranking since Reporters Without Borders began tracking in 2002. Countries like Sierra Leone, Romania, and Liberia now rank above us in press freedom. Countries that have lived through civil wars and dictatorships have freer press environments than the United States of America right now.
Congress revoked over a billion dollars in funding for public broadcasting at Trump’s request. NPR. PBS. Over 1,500 local stations, many of them in rural communities that depend on them. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which had existed since 1967, was shut down entirely. The FCC, under a chairman who helped write Project 2025, launched investigations into every major outlet that covered the administration critically. NPR. PBS. ABC. NBC. CBS. And we all know who they didn’t investigate? Fox. That’s not regulation. That’s the government deciding which outlets are allowed to function freely and which ones get punished for telling the truth. Trump sued the New York Times for $15 billion. The FBI searched a Washington Post reporter’s home. And a Free Press report documented nearly 200 federal assaults on the First Amendment in 2025 alone. Two hundred. In one year. They don’t ban the press overnight. They make it expensive to tell the truth. They sue. They investigate. They pull funding. They make every journalist do the math: is this story worth losing everything for? And enough of them decide it’s not. That’s how silence becomes the default. Not by force, but by fear.
Then they came for the courts. And this is where it gets truly dangerous. Because as Bright Line Watch said, the courts are the last set of referees. And when the executive branch stops obeying court orders, the rule of law is no longer operational. It’s just words on paper. A federal judge named Patrick Schiltz wrote something very important. Schiltz is a George W. Bush appointee, a conservative jurist, not a partisan critic. He wrote: “The court is not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt, again and again and again, to force the United States government to comply with court orders.” He searched the entire history of this country and could not find another time when the government had to be threatened with contempt repeatedly just to follow the law. That has never happened before. We are in completely uncharted territory. And Bright Line Watch experts forecast a 53 percent likelihood that the administration will at some point direct law enforcement not to enforce a court order at all. When a president decides court orders are optional, there is no rule of law.
And then they weaponized the justice system itself. The Department of Justice, under this administration, attempted to indict six Democratic lawmakers on sedition charges. Their crime? They posted a 90-second video reminding military members that they are not required to follow illegal orders. These weren’t random politicians. They were veterans. Former military officers. Former intelligence professionals. People who had served this country in uniform. And the President of the United States called their video “seditious behavior, punishable by death.” But a D.C. grand jury, a group of regular Americans, looked at the evidence and said no. They refused to indict. The legal system held. Our fellow Americans held. And during the Epstein files hearing, the Attorney General of the United States was caught with a printed list tracking what a member of Congress had searched on a DOJ computer while they were conducting lawful oversight. The Department of Justice was surveilling a member of Congress during a legal investigation. That is the executive branch spying on the legislative branch. That is a violation of the separation of powers so fundamental that it should have been front-page news for a month. Instead, it barely lasted a day. Because the chaos buries everything. And that’s the point.
And underneath all of it, they are increasing their attacks on our upcoming elections. V-Dem said something that so many of us already know. They said the 2026 midterm elections will be “a critical test for the quality of elections, and democracy, in the United States.” And they warned that if election indicators also decline, “the U.S. will fall even further.” Texas Republicans have already redrawn their congressional maps before the 2026 elections to gain five additional seats, triggering a nationwide gerrymandering push in the middle of a cycle. An executive order attempted to restrict mail-in voting and mandate voter ID nationwide, overriding the authority of states to run their own elections.
And just today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could end grace periods for mail-in ballots in 14 states and Washington, D.C. The conservative majority appeared ready to side with Republicans, with Justices Alito and Kavanaugh both raising concerns about late-arriving ballots undermining “confidence in election outcomes.” A ruling is expected by June, just months before the midterms. If they rule against mail-in ballot grace periods, it would upend voting procedures across the country right before the most important election of our lifetimes, and it would disproportionately affect the voters who have traditionally been most likely to vote by mail: Democratic voters. If you want to know whether a country is still a democracy, there’s really only one question that matters: are the elections free and fair? The people who are tearing down every other democratic norm are already working to make sure the answer to that question is no.
None of this is random. Democracy scholars say the Trump administration is using the tactics of competitive authoritarianism. That’s the model Viktor Orbán built in Hungary. Elections still exist, but the playing field is systematically tilted. The courts are stacked. The media is captured or intimidated. Civil society is defunded. And the opposition is allowed to exist just enough to maintain the illusion of democracy while being denied any real chance of winning. Political scientist Daniel Stockemer developed a six-step model of how democracies die this way, incrementally, from the inside. And by his analysis, the United States breached the first three stages within a single year. Princeton sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele, who spent years tracking Hungary’s democratic decline, put it this way: “We are on a very fast slide into what’s called competitive authoritarianism.” And here’s what we all need to remember. It looks like chaos, and it feels like chaos, and that’s the point. The chaos is the strategy. Because while we’re reacting to the outrage of the day, the insult, the bizarre quote, the latest tarmac meltdown, they are quietly dismantling the system behind the curtain. It’s all moving in the same direction. And that direction has a name. It’s authoritarianism.
But none of this is just one man. Trump is the face, the chaos, the daily circus on the tarmac. But behind him is a machine. It’s the Project 2025 architects at the Heritage Foundation. It’s Peter Thiel funding the movement and profiting from the surveillance state his companies help build. It’s Elon Musk, unelected and unaccountable, who sat inside federal agencies and had free rein to destroy as he pleased. It’s the Epstein-connected elites who have every reason to keep this system in place because it protects them. Trump didn’t build this alone. He’s the front man for people who have wanted to dismantle democracy for decades and finally found someone reckless enough, compromised enough, and desperate enough to let them do it. That’s a post for another night, because there’s a lot to say about who these people are and what they want. But we need to name it tonight, even briefly, because what we’re watching isn’t one man’s decline. It’s an organized project.
And maybe I think about this differently than most people because I’ve seen it before. Not here. In Hungary. I first went to Budapest in the mid-2010s. It was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever been. The architecture, the Danube, the thermal baths, the food. The people were warm and open and proud of their country. I fell in love with it. I wrote travel stories about it, and I couldn’t wait to go back.
And then I did go back, in 2019. And something had changed. It’s hard to explain, but the energy was different. The openness was gone. There was a heaviness to everything. It felt almost more communist, if that could be an identifier, even though Hungary had fought so hard to leave that behind. Orbán had been tightening his grip for years by then, and you could feel it in the streets, in the way people talked, and in what they didn’t say. The country I had fallen in love with just a few years earlier felt like it was holding its breath.
That trip opened my eyes. I was there writing travel stories, but my brain was screaming something else entirely. We’re in trouble. Not just Hungary. Us. I could see what was happening there, and I could feel it at home. And I remember thinking, this is where we’re headed.
And then we went to Germany right after to learn about the rise of fascism. I stood in the places where it happened. And it all came crashing down on me. Everything I had felt in Hungary and everything I had been sensing at home collided in that moment. It was one of those trips that changes you. And in those moments, I was reminded that others had stood where I stood, thinking it couldn’t happen to them or their country. And it did. And I knew it could happen to us.
I don’t know if we’ll ever get to go back to Budapest. I hope we will. My whole family loved it. But the Hungary I fell in love with isn’t really there right now. They, too, are facing an election on April 12 that could determine their entire future. After 16 years of Orbán’s rule, the opposition is mounting the most serious challenge in over a decade. I will be watching their election closely, because it will forecast what to expect from our own in November. My heart goes out to the Hungarian people, and I remain hopeful for their future. History is a warning to us all, here in the US and overseas. You don’t lose a country all at once. You lose it in pieces, so slowly that most people don’t notice until the place they loved is gone.
Much like Hungary, we too have a real chance to have our voices heard and make our own choices for the future of this country. In November, we go to the polls. And everything we do between now and then matters.
But first, we have work to do this weekend. The next No Kings rally is this Saturday, March 28. This matters. We need to show up in numbers that are impossible to ignore. Get your team together and your signs ready. Bring your neighbors. And reach out to the people in your life who know something is wrong but haven’t taken that next step yet. Invite them to come with you. Because when you stand in a crowd of people who see what’s happening as clearly as you do, it changes something in you. And if we can ignite that fire in them, the people they talk to in the coming months will feel it too.
And I want to take a moment to thank everyone for all of your support. Being able to write these every night has been a true gift. So often we feel like we’re spinning our wheels and that there’s not much one person can do, but you have enabled me to do this as my full-time job now. To learn things I never knew I didn’t know and to share them with so many people. I want you to know that your support, through memberships, commenting, and making sure the truth is reaching more people, has a direct impact. We are reaching more people. And we’re also reminding each other that we’re not alone and that better days are coming.
The closer we get to November, the harder they will fight to keep us from the ballot box. Because they know what’s at stake. They know this country still belongs to us, and they are terrified that more people might remember that. They haven’t won yet, and we are never going to let them. The truth is still breaking through. And most importantly, we are still here, still fighting, still refusing to back down, and still choosing country over comfort every single day. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
“Every time the Epstein affair resurfaces, bombs explode somewhere in the world and cause a distraction.” Senator Claude Malhuret stood up in the French Senate this week and systematically torched every single member of Trump’s cabinet.
Nobody was spared. Not one.
“A year ago, here in France, I compared Trump’s presidency to Nero’s Court. I was wrong. It’s the miracle court,” Malhuret began. Then he went through the roster.
“An anti-vaxxer, former heroin addict as Minister of Health.” (That’s RFK Jr)
“A climate-skeptic Minister of Economy.” (That’s Scott Bessent)
“An alcoholic TV host, Minister of the Armed Forces.” (That’s Pete Hegseth)
“An old Qatar agent, Minister of Justice.” (That’s Pam Bondi, whose former firm collected $115,000 a month lobbying for Qatar)
“A groupie of Putin, Minister of National Security.” (That’s Tulsi Gabbard)
Then he pulled back and went bigger.
“A Turkish proverb says: when a clown settles in a palace, he does not become king. It is the palace that becomes a circus.”
Malhuret pointed out that since Trump created his so-called Board of Peace, he has launched more military strikes than Biden did in his entire term. He called out the Boeing jet Qatar gifted Trump worth $400 million.
He called out the stock market manipulation that only insiders benefit from. He called out the Gulf investment deals enriching Trump and his family.
“Any one of these conflicts of interest would have caused an immediate procedure of impeachment here,” Malhuret said. “But we are not here. We are in MAGA’s America where public business is conducted in favor of private interests.”
Then came the line that cut deepest. “Every time the Epstein affair resurfaces, bombs explode somewhere in the world and cause a distraction.”
This is how the world sees us now. Not through Fox News. Not through Truth Social. Through the cold, clear eyes of allied nations watching a great country be hollowed out by crooks.
Every American should hear this speech. Share it everywhere.
In what jurists widely saw as an opinion of breathtakingly bad faith, T Elliot Gaiser, the Ohio-based election denierand a former clerk of Samuel Alito, asserted that Congress had no right to ask the president to preserve records; the imperative to create and keep documents served “no legislative purpose” and could “impede” the day-to-day “performance” of the head of the executive. The act had been crafted in the wake of the misdeeds of Richard Nixon, who had wanted discretion over which of his tapes and papers to destroy; in response, Congress first passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act in 1974, making the government take custody of Nixon’s materials. Nixon sued; the supreme court rejected the view that the separation of powers had been violated; the justices also took the occasion to affirm the importance of “the American people’s ability to reconstruct and come to terms with their history”. Congress then passed the more general Presidential Records Act, which no one up until Trump appeared to have experienced as remotely burdensome.
It’s even more deluded than that. Read this and weep:
