“Dozens of federal agents raiding an entire apartment building with kids in it just to see what they can find. It’s the most egregious abuse of our basic rights as Americans I’ve seen in a long time, maybe in my lifetime,” says Chris Hayes
A senior White House official accidentally disclosed that the Trump administration was considering deploying an elite army strike force into Portland by using Signal in a public place.
The Minnesota Star Tribune reported Friday that Anthony Salisbury, one of Stephen Miller’s top deputies, was observed discussing the plans via Signal in view of members of the public while traveling in Minnesota. The newspaper was then contacted by one member of the public who was troubled to see sensitive military plans discussed so openly.
In the messages, senior White House officials discussed the potential deployment of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, an elite unit that specializes in parachuting into hostile territory. The division has been deployed in both world wars, including the Battle of the Bulge, as well as Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Anthony Salisbury, one of Stephen Miller’s top deputies, discussed plans for military intervention in Portland in full view of members of the public.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Across several conversations, the Star Tribune reports, Salisbury spoke about a range of matters with Pete Hegseth adviser Patrick Weaver as well as other officials.
In one of the messages, Weaver revealed that Hegseth wanted Trump to explicitly instruct him to send soldiers to Portland.
“Between you and I, I think Pete just wants the top cover from the boss if anything goes sideways with the troops there,” Weaver reportedly said.
Noting the potentially disastrous optics around sending an elite division into an American city, Weaver told Salisbury, “82nd is like our top tier [quick reaction force] for abroad. So it will cause a lot of headlines. Probably why he wants potus to tell him to do it.”
In March 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth leaked confidential battle plans on Signal.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House, told the Daily Beast, “Tony recently traveled to Minnesota to serve as a pallbearer in his uncle’s funeral who passed away from cancer. Despite dealing with grief from the loss of a family member, Tony continued his important work on behalf of the American people.“
“Nothing in these private conversations, that are shamefully being reported on by morally bankrupt reporters, is new or classified information,” Jackson continued. “Frankly, this story just shows the entire Trump Administration is working around the clock—and even through funerals—to make America safe again.”
President Donald Trump on Tuesday told top generals that dangerous U.S. cities should be used as military training grounds.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
The incident marks the second time in six months that the Trump administration has experienced issues as a result of insecure lines of communication.
Earlier this year, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added to a Signal chat where several high-ranking government officials discussed the logistics of a strike on Yemen’s Houthis.
The fiasco was quickly dubbed “Signalgate” and ultimately led to national security adviser Mike Waltz, who was responsible for adding Goldberg to the chat, leaving his role at the National Security Council. President Trump later appointed him Ambassador to the United Nations.
National security adviser Mike Waltz left his role at the National Security Council after accidentally adding a journalist to a Signal chat.Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
Trump has consistently asserted that sending soldiers into cities is the only way to address rampant crime. Meanwhile, the White House has admitted to “reconfiguring” crime statistics to suit Trump’s agenda after claiming that other official statistics are “phony.”
The president’s crime crackdown, which has been concentrated entirely on blue cities, is proving more and more unpopular with the American public. After looking at recent polling on Monday, CNN data guru Harry Enten told viewers, “If Donald Trump thinks that potentially sending in the National Guard into cities like Portland is a winning political issue, the polling says you’re wrong, Mr. President!”
Trump also faced a significant blow after a federal judge ruled that his deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles was illegal, with Judge Charles Breyer finding that the president had violated the Posse Comitatus Act by requiring armed soldiers to carry out domestic law enforcement activities.
Maybe we all live in red states, and this won’t be a thing with which we deal (just maybe.) But, just in case, here is a pointer for coping. Pass it along!
An anti-Vietnam demonstration. Arlington, Virginia, USA. By S.Sgt. Albert R. Simpson. Department of Defense. Department of the Army. Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations. U.S. Army Audiovisual Center. – This media is available in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration, cataloged under the National Archives Identifier (NAID) 594360. Public Domain. Via Picryl.
Tiffin, Ohio (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – During some of the large anti-war demonstrations during the 1960’s some of the protesters gave flowers to the troops faced off against them. In the 1967 March on the Pentagon it was the 503rd Military Police Battalion, and elsewhere the National Guard was deployed. An iconic photo from 1967 shows a young man placing a flower into a soldier’s gun barrel during the protest. Let’s bring that custom back when the US military occupies your town in 2025, but this time let’s include a note along with the flower.
Allow me to explain.
The demonstrators of the 1960’s understood that the soldiers faced off against him were not the enemy. Nearly all of the soldiers were young and patriotic and trying to do the right thing. Many of them were under economic hardship and wanted help paying for their education. The flower symbolized the protesters’ belief that the soldiers were not their enemies, and they did not wish to be theirs. And in fact, as the almost entirely peaceful protests grew, many soldiers came to sympathize and began to actively oppose the war as well.
Now we have federalized Guard troops being called out by President Trump in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Portland with other cities soon to follow. Chicago is likely next. The authority for this is said to be Title Ten of the US Code which says that the president may federalize the National Guard if the US “is invaded or is in danger of invasion by a foreign nation; there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion . . or the president is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”
Legitimate grounds for a US military or National Guard deployment do not exist. The claim that crime is spiraling out of control is false, and those pushing for the deployments know it. There is zero credible proof that crime is increasing. According to a recent FBI report (August, 2025) robbery, assault, rape and murder all continued a decline that began post-covid. We are not being invaded, there is no rebellion, and the laws are being enforced about as well as ever.
A second reason against deploying the military on our streets is that the Posse Comitatus act of 1878 forbids the use of US military forces within the country for active law enforcement except in exceptional circumstances such as insurrection, and explicitly approved by Congress. The military is forbidden from making arrests, conducting searches, issuing warrants, or interfering with local law enforcement. The law also applies to National Guard forces unless approved by state governors. No governors this year have made any requests for federalized National Guard troops.
And it is worth noting that Trump’s military forays into cities are only being used in areas run by Democratic officials. High crime in red state cities is ignored. And the Trump administration refuses to realize the obvious danger of political violence and threats from MAGA and the American right which are much higher than those from the left, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and others. Antifa is officially (and improperly) designated as domestic terrorists while violent right wing groups get a pass from the administration.
The President’s rhetoric seems aimed at inflaming and dividing. The “enemy from within”, “full force”, “thugs”, “vermin”, and much more. And there is hardly a peep of protest from the Republican party.
So this time around, how about if we give the troops a note along with the flower? You could use wording such as this:
Dear US soldier –
Your service oath included a pledge to uphold the US constitution, and your training taught you to disobey illegal orders.The orders sending you here (insert name of your city or town) are unlawful and unjust. You have a legal obligation to disobey.
We encourage you to go home, and we will support you in that decision.
About the Author
Arnold Oliver is an emeritus professor of political science at Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio. A Vietnam veteran, he belongs to Veterans For Peace, and can be reached at soliver@heidelberg.edu.
I know that the Christian religion has been on a push for forcing the US to be a theocracy run by their personal church doctrines. Why I don’t understand? Do they think that will earn them favor with their god? Is it simply a way for the leaders of the movement to gain more power / wealth? Is it simply they are terrified of after they die and are convinced that their forcing others to follow their church doctrines will get their god to give them more benefits in heaven. The religious strictures on sex and sexual stuff is rooted in an ancient not correct misunderstand of life and sexuality. I still do not understand why others watching porn upsets Christian republicans. I really don’t get it. Is it because they are afraid the people watching will masturbate? Is it because sexual arousal is fearful to them? I really wish someone could explain it to me. Even in the church boarding school I went to my senior year of high school they did not push that no sex stuff very hard, instead they occasionally reminded us not to touch ourselves. They need not have worried, in the boy’s dorm we were touching each other which in our kid brains got around the entire sin of jerking off thing. Hugs.
Michigan lawmakers have introduced a bill that would make it illegal to distribute pornography via the internet in the state.
HB 4938, introduced last week by six Republican members of the state House of Representatives, would “prohibit the distribution of certain material on the internet that corrupts the public morals.”
Pornography is the principal target, though the bill also seeks to criminalize depictions of transgender people.
The bill defines “pornographic material” broadly, to include “any content, digital, streamed, or otherwise distributed on the internet, the primary purpose of which is to sexually arouse or gratify, including videos, erotica, magazines, stories, manga, material generated by artificial intelligence, live feeds, or sound clips.”
The bill appears to exempt from the ban material protected by the First Amendment. Since pornography is constitutionally protected speech, this makes it unclear how the legislation could actually work.
According to the law, “prohibited material” means “material that at common law was not protected by adoption of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States respecting laws abridging freedom of speech or of the press.”
XBIZ spoke with adult industry attorney and First Amendment expert Corey D. Silverstein to attempt to explain what this meant.
“I think they are trying to say that it would not be applicable to content not deemed as obscene under the Miller test,” he said. “But it is written so poorly that there is some uncertainty as to their angle, which also makes the proposal both vague and ambiguous.
“At the same time, it could be another attempt to undercut and soften the Miller test, which we have been seeing in various other states throughout the country,” he added.
The proposed penalties in the bill are severe, including up to 20 years in prison or a fine of up to $100,000, or both. It also allows for civil fines of up to $500,000 per violation.
The bill would require internet service providers to implement “mandatory filtering technology” to prevent Michigan residents from accessing “prohibited material” as defined in the bill, to “actively monitor and block known circumvention tools,” and to block access to specific websites on receipt of a court order.
The bill calls for the state attorney general to establish “a special internet content enforcement division” staffed with “digital forensics analysts, legal experts, cybersecurity specialists, and investigators” to enforce the proposed law.
Silverstein added that he doesn’t believe the bill has much of a chance at being adopted.
“This bill has virtually no chance of going anywhere, given the current makeup of the Michigan legislature and its far-left Democrat governor,” he said. “The bill is unconstitutional at every turn. Regardless, it is alarming that this type of thinking and government waste continues to occur.”
The bill was referred to the Committee on Judiciary.
Talk of porn bans has increased in recent months. Earlier this year, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah introduced federal legislation that would redefine almost all visual depictions of sex as obscene and therefore illegal, a goal that was also laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy blueprint, which has heavily guided the Trump administration’s agenda.
Update, Sept. 19: The bill’s reference to “known circumvention tools” includes VPNs, proxy servers and encrypted tunneling methods, which would make it nearly impossible to access adult content online within the state.
I just read how Pete Hegseth has decided that the best military in the world is “too woke and not male enough to have the warrior ethos”. He wants a military modeled off the 1940 model with all male white straight cis people. A few women in the offices are OK but none of that integrated military that Eisenhower did, whites and blacks serve in different military units and of course now being Christian is going to be a new requirement. I don’t know if Hegseth is paid by Russians or if his Christian nationalism is causing him to idealize the very Russian military propaganda of a male only hyper aggressive military … the same military that has been getting its ass kicked in the Russian war against Ukraine. We are witnessing the dismantling of 80 plus years of integration and what made the US military so powerful. Think of how warfare is done today. With drones and weapons that reach targets over the horizons. You don’t need to be a Rambo for those tasks. I worked in a satellite intel unit. We were not really soldiers. When I was in the Navy we did not have the requirements for PT that the Army did, but we were still as deadly or even more so. This fixation of purging the military of the LGBTQ+ and female members is destroying what makes our military so great. Ask countries that have those people in their military like Israel! Their LGBTQ+ and female members are just effective as the men. But it doesn’t fit with the Christian Nationalist identity that Hegseth and his ilk are trying to push the US into.
Recently the heritage foundation pushed the idea of a trans terrorist idealization that was behind the public shootings and they used faked data that they created to prove their point. It is all to further the push of theirs to make the US a Christian Theocracy where only the biblical pairings they consider hole to be accepted. But in truth the bible allows for a male to have as many sexual partners as he wishes and only constrains the females from having sex with anyone but their husbands or their owners. The entire Christian teachings these people push is constriction for females and complete freedom for males on the issue of sex and marriage. Hugs
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is reportedly preparing to categorize transgender people as “violent extremists,” a categorization supported by organizations affiliated with Project 2025.
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According to a September 18 report by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, two anonymous national security officials said that the Bureau is discussing treating trans subjects as a subset of its new threat category, “Nihilistic Violent Extremists” (NVEs), which was created earlier this year. The Bureau defines “Nihilistic Violent Extremism” as “criminal conduct… in furtherance of political, social, or religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos.”
Officials said that such a classification would give the Trump administration “political (and media) cover” as they escalate their anti-trans campaign in the aftermath of right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk’s death.
“They are cynically targeting trans people because the shooter’s lover was trans,” an unnamed senior intelligence official told Klippenstein. “The administration has convinced itself that the Charlie Kirk murder exposes some dark conspiracy.”
Last week, the false claim that there were “transgender” engravings on the bullets that suspect Tyler Robinson allegedly used to shoot Kirk began circulating widely, boosted by anti-LGBTQ+ conservatives like Rep. Nancy Mace and Steven Crowder. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox later confirmed that there was “no indication that the ammunition included transgender references.” On Sunday, Cox told Meet the Press that Robinson was allegedly in a romantic relationship with a roommate who is trans, providing no additional public corroborating data or information of the roommate’s gender. The authorities have stipulated the roommate has been cooperating with the investigation and was not aware of the shooting prior to its occurrence.
Despite no evidence linking an alleged trans roommate to Robinson’s motivation for shooting Kirk, right-wingers are nevertheless attempting to use this detail to push an anti-trans agenda. In a petition launched on Thursday, the Heritage Foundation — the far-right think tank behind the derided and controversial Project 2025 — and its spin-off group, the Oversight Project, asked the FBI to designate “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism” (TIVE) as a domestic terrorism threat category.
The group defines “TIVE” as “the belief that violence is justified against people who oppose [the trans community],” as well as the belief that opposing trans rights “itself constitutes a form of violence towards people who identify as [trans or gender nonconforming]… or poses an imminent threat to such persons’ emotional, psychological, or physical safety, including through self-harm or suicide.”
As The Independent noted, if such a category is adopted by the FBI, it could be applied to rhetoric used by activists, writers, and allies speaking out against anti-trans policies and rhetoric.
At least a dozen hoaxes have claimed trans people were responsible for mass shootings and other incidents since 2012.In reality, there is no evidence suggesting significant patterns of violence committed by trans people. In 2024, The Gun Violence Archive’s Executive Director, Mark Bryant, said that out of 5,000 mass shootings tracked by the archive, the number of trans or LGBTQ+ suspects is in “the single digit numbers.”
This is what the culture hate warriors want here in the US. They saw what Putin did in Russia and what Victor Orbán did in Hungary. They used the idea of protecting children to limit representation of LGBTQ+ people in society, then they moved it up the war against that community to erase it based on it was an attack on families. The question you need to ask why is family threatened by including same-sex couples as a family? What makes that family unit an attack on families? In their mind it is twofold, one in their mind it doesn’t produce its own offspring and also it offends tradition / religious tradition. We must never change what was done in the past forever in the minds of those who preach the way to live from a book written centuries ago as they read it on their new smartphone. We must find a way to stop this big money steam rolling over personal civil rights to install fundamental religious dictates on how everyone lives in the US. There are those who believe just admitting and allowing LGBTQ+ people to exist is promoting it. Is admitting and showing red hair people exist promoting red hair? Hugs
The council claimed the content “promotes homosexuality,” “disregards family values,” and “conflicts with the shared values of society.”
A scene from “Cobalt Blue”
Turkey’s media regulator has imposed fines on five international streaming platforms and ordered the removal of several films and series, citing violations of “national and moral values.”
The Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) announced the penalties following inspections conducted under the government’s “Year of the Family” initiative. According to the regulator, the inspections aimed to “protect children from harmful content” and “combat productions that threaten the Turkish family structure and shared societal values.”
RTÜK fined the platforms the maximum penalty allowed, amounting to 3% of their annual revenues in Turkey. The decision affects Disney+, Prime Video, Netflix, HBO Max, and MUBI.
Among the targeted content are All of Us Strangers on Disney+, Those About To Die on Prime Video, Cobalt Blue on Netflix, Looking: The Movie on HBO Max, and Benedetta on MUBI.
The council claimed the content “promotes homosexuality,” “disregards family values,” and “conflicts with the shared values of society.” It did not elaborate on the specific scenes or themes that led to the sanctions.
Under Article 32 of Law No. 6112, RTÜK is authorized to impose several administrative measures on broadcasting entities. These include warnings, suspension of programming, and fines. The council can also enforce temporary broadcast bans and revoke broadcasting licenses. (HA/VK)
Scottie's Playtime 