An angular eagle behind the defense secretary departed from the Pentagon’s established branding. Critics saw echoes of the Third Reich.
A reimagined “Department of War” logo displayed behind Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a recent speech drew immediate comparisons to Third Reich iconography.
Speaking to Air Force Academy cadets on Saturday, Hegseth stood in front of a monochrome logo for his agency that differs from the designs in the Defense Department’s official branding guide. The backdrop features a stylized eagle that critics compared to the straight-edged Reichsadler used by Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler.
Last week, as the war with Iran dragged into its seventh month, gas prices shot up to an average of $4.50 a gallon, and polling showed President Trump about twice as far underwater with American voters as he was at this point in 2018, Republican senators determined that the time had come to discuss something else entirely: youth sports. “Girls’ sports are for girls. Boys’ sports are for boys,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said in a news conference.
DETROIT (AP) — Former President Barack Obama will campaign alongside Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Detroit later this month, lending his support to the progressive nominee after a bruising Democratic primary exposed divisions within the party.
Obama will appear with El-Sayed at an Oct. 24 rally that will also feature other top Democratic candidates in Michigan, including Jocelyn Benson, the party’s nominee for governor. Obama is getting significantly more involved in the midterm elections, with additional campaign stops and advertisements expected to come in the closing weeks, according to plans shared first with The Associated Press.
That’s the conclusion we at Amnesty International have reached after documenting the chilling pattern of human rights violations across the US during immigration enforcement operations.
ICE’s record of violating human rights has been documented for more than two decades, but our latest findings show that the abuses go well beyond a series of incidents. Instead, under the Trump administration, there is a clear pattern that has reached a new and dangerous scale.
For the past year, Norma had parked her brown-and-beige camper van outside [Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey]…most weekends. Converted into a mobile clinic, it was stocked with sutures, glucometers and trauma and CPR kits, and offered health checks to families and protesters. That day, the clinic was busier than usual.
“Can you come over here?” someone asked.
Norma followed, thinking a person may need first aid. Instead, she encountered a wall of two dozen ICE agents in paramilitary vests, carrying batons, tasers and firearms, most of their faces masked.
… Norma looked down and saw a federal agent dragging a young woman across the ground, her bright pink shirt ripping off, until she was down to a black bra.
“Help me!” the young woman shouted. Decades earlier, as a psychiatric nurse, Norma had watched colleagues reach for restraints and sedatives when patients became violent. Her instinct was different: “No, let me talk to him.” She would sit beside them and try to calm them down.
Now that same instinct kicked in: de-escalate the situation and help the woman being dragged across the ground. Norma felt herself going into “mom mode”, moving closer.
That’s when someone from behind yanked her up. An ICE agent in a cap, black facemask, and gloved hands reached for her arms from behind her. She felt her body fling through the air.
The Supreme Court is rebuffing an appeal from a Michigan woman fighting a school district’s ban on shirts with the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon,” a jab at then-President Joe Biden with a coded reference to profanity.
The mother of two boys says their First Amendment rights were violated when they were told to take off the sweatshirts she bought them for Christmas in 2022.
A lower court disagreed, finding that the veiled vulgarity of the phrase, which functions as a stand-in for “F-— Joe Biden,” allows schools to ban it.
The woman’s attorneys argued that the decision wrongly gives school officials wide latitude to squelch political speech based on their personal ideas of what is vulgar. The phrase itself doesn’t contain any swear words or sexual implications, they said.
The school district urged the justices to reject the case, arguing that messages with lewd implications have no place in school, even if they touch on political topics. There has been evidence that some students wore clothing that read “Make America Great Again” or had messages supporting President Donald Trump, a Republican who lost the 2020 election to Biden, a Democrat.
🇺🇸 Today I learned of the "War on Violence". Paradoxical as it sounds, I felt it perfectly captured much of US domestic & foreign policy.
From the "War on Drugs" to current conflicts, the US continues to invoke the prevention of violence as a pretext for unleashing far more of it on the world 🪖🚀💔
Ohio’s MAGA gubernatorial candidate suffered a brutal humiliation in front of voters Saturday when he tried—and failed—to pull off the classic politician move of kissing a baby.
Vivek Ramaswamy was working the crowd at a campaign event in Vandalia, Ohio, when he spotted a child holding a sign that read, according to Ramaswamy, “My dad is deployed—proud military kid for Trump.”
The 10-year-old boy was exactly the kind of young voter a MAGA ally would want to spotlight at a Trump rally: a military kid, a Trump supporter, and an easy opportunity for a candidate to play up his patriotism.
So Ramaswamy invited the child onstage. Then he decided to take things one step further.
“I’m going to pick you up,” he told the boy.
The candidate managed to raise the child a few inches off the ground before appearing to lose his grip.
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said Sunday his party is on track to win back control of the House, confident Democrats can overcome a fundraising disadvantage and reach deep into conservative areas to flip congressional districts won by President Donald Trump just two years ago.
In a conference call with reporters, Jeffries, who is in line to become House speaker if Democrats seize the majority, compared this midterm election to 2018, when Democrats swept to power during Trump’s first term in the White House.
“House Democrats are poised to take back the majority,” he said.
Soldiers who deployed to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan make up the largest single group of military-intelligence candidates nominated by the Democratic Party, 32 out of 67.
https://www.advocate.com/politics/national/pete-hegseth-nazi-backdrop?1Open linkView original on lemmy.world
