Ombudsman column: The Pentagon is trying to silence me
stripes.com
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Funny how the same situations of recent history keep resurfacing. Not only "Iran", but we should recall the details of Iran-Contra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
> further funding of the Contras by legislative appropriations was prohibited by Congress, but the Reagan administration continued funding them secretly using non-appropriated funds
Oh look, it's presidential power contradicting Congress again!
> "what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages."
US attempts to deal with Iran, has incoherent strategy, gets rolled, lies about it.
> Eleven convictions resulted, some of which were vacated on appeal. The rest of those indicted or convicted were all pardoned in the final days of the presidency of George H. W. Bush
Misuse of the presidential pardon power, again, which enables the president to direct people to commit crimes in the sure knowledge that they will not be held accountable to the law or other branches of government (Americans call this "checks and balances" for some reason).
One of those people was Oliver North, who turned his experience providing arms illegally to enemies of the United States into a long career at propaganda organizations the NRA and Fox news.
And so here you are again.
Something tells me that after this dark period is over, there won't be many lessons learned and things changed for the better in the system. 'Great system' not being so great after all (which it isn't, there are much better and more democractic systems implemented all around the world).
Republicans as usually will shield just about anybody including mass rapist and murderer just to not lose face, and democrats will just again have this inept look with 'we couldn't change a damn thing because XYZ but we asked nicely'.
The system did learn and change: they got a lot better at exploiting it. The effort to stack the Supreme Court with Republican partisans took decades.
And now we get near-daily “worse than Watergate” headlines and facts…
They literally can’t do anything. The constitution is structure so the party not in power can only obstruct legislation (filibuster). The current Supreme Court is literally rewriting the constitution or how the constitution has been interpreted for over one hundred years. They’re the bigger threat (to the US at least)
The problem I have with that is that the typical American I encounter online appears to not perceive themselves as part of that system. And if you read your own founding documents We The People are supposed to play a pretty profound role within that system.
Only in the past year or ao I got the feeling that some appeared to have gotten the realization that they are not the temporarily embarrassed millionaires they always pictured themselves, but are in fact a lot closer to the homeless people whose tents you may pass by in your commute.
Some may have even realized that this is not a failure of the system, but a feature for those people who you chose to represent you.
The only two ways I see out of this mess is (1) collective bargaining (through unions and similar and (2) a ship of Theseus-like rebuilding of the established political personal within established party structures. Ideally both in tandem. Be part of the system and change it.
None of this is normal.
reddit at least puts speedbumps up
Not a lot of bleeding hearts over here for criminals lol.
Their actions are the same - gutting the administrative state, squashing environmental regulations, persecuting queer people and racial minorities. Mass deportations. These were all hallmarks of the terrible Reagan presidency too. Even "Make America Great Again" is a reused slogan from the Reagan days.
Unfortunately the same uneducated morons who hold Reagan up as a great president are behind Trump right now, cheering this car crash of an administration even as they get us involved in new wars.
And Obama. Trumpism was in part a reactionary movement against mainstream conservatism from the alt-right/Tea Party set that the Republicans tried to court and control, who turned against the establishment when the Republicans wouldn't go far enough. It isn't at all a coincidence that the President after Obama was the man responsible for normalizing many of the conspiracy theories about him.
While I think that motivation was involved, I think a much stronger argument is that Reagan was elected because interest rates and inflation reached ~20%, unimaginable numbers today. It's very hard to imagine anyone getting re-elected in that situation.
Also, international affairs played a role: The US had suffered a highly demoralizing defeat in Vietnam, was being humiliated by the Iranians holding US hostages, and looked weak in regard to the USSR. Reagan promised a new, more aggressive approach.
Also, it wasn't so much Republicans who elected Reagan but Democrats - 'Reagan Democrats' - who crossed over and elected Reagan, who won overwhelmingly: 489-49 in the electoral college, 42-8 states, 44-35 million popular vote.
Believe it or not, for most of history people did not so strictly vote for parties. Johnson beat Goldwater and Nixon beat McGovern similarly.
> republicans and racists (I repeat myself)
It depends on your definition of racist. IMHO a few people actively strategize for racism and/or white (male and/or Christan) nationalism; in the US they probably are Republican if anything, I think.
Most people follow the behavior and norms of those around them (the strategists target them by normalizing racists behavior). They don't have strong beliefs and are racists mostly by ignorance, IMHO. That's not an excuse - we are responsible for our actions and ignorance just adds another layer to our errors.
Certainly not all Republicans are racist. You might ask, how can they vote for candidates pushing openly or subtly racist policies? The same could be asked of Democrats in many elections.
Many white democrats and their candidates are similarly racist from ignorance, and probably more were back then. From what I've read, most thought that racism had been resolved due to the mid-1960s laws such as the Voting Rights Act, and there were few problems remaining. That was and is a laughably ignorant point of view. You can see people today embrace it - see polls on how many white people think racism is a solved problem and how many black people experience it. How many white people think that the job market is generally a meritocracy (that somehow yields rewards to mostly white people, especially men). How many do nothing in the face of generations of discrimination Plenty bought into the dog-whistle anti-school busing movement, or Bill Clinton's 'superpredator' policy.
Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail was directed to the "white moderate"; an excerpt:
"... I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. ..."
/s
But good for us, more visits of these folks who have very negative image in rest of the world. Any corrupt entrenched a-hole would be nice, what about Fico in Slovakia? Orban's best buddy in mindset and methodologies. Next one is Babis in Czech republic. With that done, EU would be free from corrupt russian double agents, for now at least.
Those tended to be gratuitously misreported as well, where the reports would say "this person was arrested for making [relatively innocuous comment] on social media]" and then you discover that the actual issue was a lengthy period of harassment and doxing directed at a specific trans person. Or encouraging other people to burn down a hotel, or so on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
The USA's score has taken rather a tumble since 2016 (I wonder why?).
How many it's unclear, but it was ~150[0] some years ago, of which 50 in France[1] to monitor 180 countries.
It's worth as a generic "are we doing better than last year?" but I wouldn't consider ranking to be particularly meaningful.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20130819031406/http://en.rsf.org...
[1] https://akademie.dw.com/en/the-press-freedom-index-by-report...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/feb/...
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/28/politics/justice-departme...
There are so many shades of gray in freedom of speech. In free European countries the police are also not at the door of outspoken government critics.
If you are alluding to dictatorial European countries like Russia and Belarus, the US is miles away and moving in their direction. Compared to Western Europe, there is no difference.
I if want to go to the US on the other hand, I need to give them my social media accounts. That doesn't sound like free speech to me
(Intra-Schengen flights lets you avoid most of this, but the heavier enforcement on extra-Schengen is the tradeoff)
But tbh its so much nicer when journalists self censor to not lose their job because of access to healthcare.
Or when billionaires buy entire media empires and fire journalists critical of the goverment.
Bezos owning WP, Murdoch owning everything else, Sinclair owning local stations... the free speech is so fucking goood
But most US population ain't HN, at all. Most don't travel, get their opinion on the world from CNN or Fox news with corresponding results and thus have rather primitive view on rest of the world (sorry, that is true, one needs to travel a bit to understand world).
You don't travel when you are crushed by debt and rising costs from all sides, do you.
Travel produces different distortions. A lot of British people think the rest of the world is a lot better than it is because they visit places on holiday: they visit nice places and have good experiences. I have known some to get into messes when they actually try to live somewhere else.
Just consider prominent recent examples, like the german student protester that was investigated by police and had his sign confiscated (it just said "Merz (current cancellor) suck balls"). This seems ridiculous and draconian by US standards.
Or literally investigating all protestors, at scale? https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/us/politics/justice-dept-...
That is a different argument: The Trump administration is not really shifting the defamation vs. free speech tradeoff in the US (you could argue that it does, in the opposite direction, by slandering political opponents with insulting nicknames like "crooked Hillary" or "sleepy Joe").
The case you quoted did happen, but it is one of a few crazy outliers. In the meantime you have literal university police bashing in on protesters, border police looking into peoples smart phones and policing their social media, students being expelled for pro palestinian positions, ...
You call that a crazy outlier, but under the previous administration some retiree had police knock on his door and confiscate his tablet (!) because he posted a meme calling a member of the green party an "idiot" (Schwachkopf).
Meanwhile, all the counterexamples that people bring up here are strictly tied to the Trump administration.
The DHS is sending subpoenas to google over mildly critical online posts. [0] By your own standards, that must be ridiculous and draconian too, yes?
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/us-dhs-aclu-lawsuit-canadian-j...
But police knocking on your door and confiscating your device because you called some politician an "idiot" by posting an online meme seems almost unthinkable in the US, when even the president himself is slinging insults like that at political opponents all the time.
My point is not that there is clear black/white line and the US have free speech and Europe doesn't, just that the free speech/defamation tradeoff is slightly different.
But your overall point - that not every population defines free speech the same way - is accurate. I think the difference here is just a bit less than sometimes implied.
It makes a lot more sense than being investigated by the FBI because you wrote a negative article about the head or being charged for reposting some cryptic numbers.
I love that story, shows you that the world always was quite small and that what we perceive as progressive and backward countries is just a matter of time.
> Charles XII was in exile in Turkey and needed a representative in Sweden to ensure that judges and civil servants acted in accordance with the laws and with their duties. If they did not do so, the Supreme Ombudsman had the right to prosecute them for negligence.
She even admits she was due to stand down at the end of the year, they could have just waited her out. Instead it seems her calling a spade a spade was just too intolerable for them to bare
If that's all it takes to provoke the desired reaction from them it doesn't bode well at all. It's no wonder they were so easily led into a war with Iran on a leash
Well, they need the troops willingness to do whatever Trump tells them now, not next year. So they want propaganda for the troops and stars now and Stripes should be the medium, not annoy the administration by providing the troops with uncomfortable truth or facts.
Yes, but sometimes they think for themself, refuse stupid orders and sabotage equipment (or even toilets), like what seemingly happened to some US battleships.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
A US president does not have authority to start a war, Congress has, according to Constitution. The president only serves as a Commander in Chief.
So at any point Congress can stop any military action issuing an immediate ruling preventing the president doing anything. If our congressmen don't do that it means they approve it.
It's our, USA, war, not Trump's war. Because we elected the congressmen.
These needs to be repeated everywhere until people understand it. Same situation with tariffs.
Who else should have "owned" it?
Many massacres and genocides are "owner-less" and obscured by history. To give a few exemple, you might find, but the trail of tears is not as front-and-center in US' history teaching as the holocaust is in German history teaching.
You'll find similar situations for all colonial powers who didn't get dismantled and forced to accept their wrongs after losing a war. You may even go as far as to say that Germany is the outlier here.
This stopped being alternate realities a while ago, as it became a collective project to form anti-realities.
— Stephen Colbert, 2006
https://www.c-span.org/clip/white-house-event/user-clip-step...
What entity could? Most of the unprecedented madness of the last few years boils down to:
1. The President does something flagrantly illegal.
2. The remedy is Congress impeaching and removing the President from office.
3. Republicans legislators are completely complicit, and have enough votes that #2 doesn't even start to happen.
The crimes will continue until something about #3 changes or until #47 finally succumbs to dementia.
https://capitalandempire.com/p/top-democrats-try-to-stop-vot...
I can understand that Israel's long-time strategy is to keep all their neighborhood in a state of permanent mess so that nobody is strong enough to be an existential threat. But after almost a century, it's clear this is not working.
how would that look like? I mean, more than what it looks like now. The man is spouting nonsense every single day.
Something we are all coming to realize a little too late
Something tells me the process of finding a replacement ombudsman will be much faster. Hegseth probably already has someone in mind...
Congress, where are you?
It gives you a new found level of empathy or, at least, understanding for the people throughout history who "should have done something". We all (well, most of us) grew up thinking that if we were a workaday German (fill in the conflict) with Jewish neighbors that we'd have obviously hidden them in our attic or whatever. It turns out the reality of taking that class of action is actually a lot more fraught that your 4th grade self thought it was.
Would you harbor a neighbor facing deportation to some far flung prison camp? You have to be willing to face the consequences of losing your home, job, liberty and life. If not, what would change the calculus enough for you to do so? If you know they're in your country legally? If they were pregnant? If the prison was rumored to be executing people?
It's funny my entire adult life has been me slowly realizing that no, it is not. It is easy to do what is right, it is easy to see what is right to do. Stop making excuses and do it.
These are your adult responsibilities, it's time to grow up.