ICE white supremacist gang thugs getting even more agressive attacking people. They no longer care about skin color. The gang has reverted to gang tactics of intimidation. They think might makes them right. The ones with the guns are in charge is what they have been taught. And the administration is OK with this as it helps their cause to have a frightened public unwilling to stand up to them. They are covering their faces because they understand they are breaking the laws and that if a police officer tried this they would be in prison. They know that Stephen Miller will not always be there to protect them. And tRump can not pardon people found guilty of state crimes. In this clip a woman rushes into another woman’s home. The police dispatch incorrectly tells her she must hand the woman over and she almost does, but then gains courage as ICE thugs draw closer on her property. Her neighbors come out and give her strength and support. Hugs
The sad fact is the actions of the military has dragged the US again into war crimes territory. It is Kegseth’s responsibility to guild and give direction to the military as its civilian leadership. He is the one that gave the illegal orders. Hugs
Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)
Friday, November 28, 2025 at 5:02:31p EST
Photo from Donald Trump via Truth Social
Shocking as this moment is, none of us should pretend we weren’t warned. When Donald Trump installed Pete Hegseth — a television provocateur whose public record is soaked in belligerence, booze, and culture-war performance — as America’s Defense Secretary, the world could see exactly where it was headed.
Still, nothing prepared us for today’s Washington Post’s revelation that Hegseth personally ordered U.S. forces to “kill everybody” on a small wooden boat off the coast of Trinidad on September 2.
You’d expect rogue militias or failed–state paramilitaries to speak that way. You don’t expect it from the man running the Pentagon.
What the Post reports is almost too grotesque to absorb.
After the first U.S. missile ripped the boat apart and set it burning, commanders watched on a live drone feed as two survivors clung desperately to the charred wreckage.
They were unarmed. They were wounded. They were no threat to anyone. They were simply alive; inconveniently alive for a man who had allegedly already given the order that there be no survivors.
And so, according to two officials with direct knowledge of the strike, the Special Operations commander overseeing the operation ordered a second missile. It hit the water and blew those two men apart.
History tells us to watch out for nations that lose their moral compass in real time.
It starts when the powerful stop seeing human beings as human. It accelerates when the government itself denies any obligation to justify its killings.
And when leaders begin lying to Congress and the public to cover what they’ve done, you’re no longer looking at isolated abuses. You’re staring straight into the machinery of authoritarianism.
Instead of telling Congress that the second strike was designed to finish off wounded survivors, Pentagon officials claimed it was to “remove a navigation hazard.”
That isn’t just spin: it’s an attempt to rewrite reality.
The Post quotes Todd Huntley, a former Special Operations military lawyer now at Georgetown Law, saying exactly what any first-year law student would immediately recognize: because the United States is not legally “at war” with drug traffickers, killing the people on that boat “amounts to murder.”
Even if a war did exist, Huntley notes, the order to kill wounded, unarmed survivors “would in essence be an order to show no quarter,” which is defined under the Geneva Conventions as a war crime.
This isn’t an obscure legal debate. This is basic civilization. Armed states do not execute helpless people in the water.
And yet this is now U.S. policy. The boat strike on September 2 was not a one–off. It was the beginning of a campaign.
The Post reports that since that first attack, Trump and Hegseth have ordered more than 20 similar missile strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing at least 80 people.
The administration insists the victims were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But in classified briefings to Congress, Pentagon officials have not provided even one single verified name of a trafficker or gang leader they’ve killed. Lawmakers from both parties say they’ve been shown nothing beyond grainy videos of small boats being destroyed from the air.
If these men had truly been high–value cartel operatives, Trump would be parading names and photos across every rally stage in America. The silence tells its own story.
Experts warn that many of the dead may not have been traffickers at all. They may have been border–crossing migrants, subsistence fishermen, or small–scale smugglers whose crimes did not remotely justify summary execution.
International human rights groups are already calling these killings extrajudicial and illegal. Some foreign governments are asking whether the United States has effectively created a free-fire zone over parts of the Caribbean, and several have limited intelligence sharing with us for fear of being complicit in prosecutable war crimes and crimes against humanity.
This, too, has been part of the authoritarian playbook since ancient times.
Pick a foreign or criminal “other,” paint them as subhuman monsters, and then declare that the normal laws of war, morality, and basic decency no longer apply.
For years, right-wing media has been hyping Tren de Aragua as a kind of supercharged successor to MS-13, just as Trump once used MS-13 as a bludgeon to justify abuses at home.
The fact that the administration has produced no evidence for its claims isn’t a bug: it’s the point. When the government fabricates an omnipresent threat, it gives itself permission to kill whoever it wants.
This may also explain the ferocity with which Hegseth and Trump went after Democratic lawmakers last week when they reminded U.S. service members that they are duty-bound to disobey illegal orders.
Those officers weren’t being dramatic: they were issuing a warning grounded in fresh blood. And Hegseth’s and Trump’s panicked rage — calling for the death penalty for six members of Congress, including a decorated war hero and a CIA officer — now makes perfect sense: he knows perfectly well what he’s already ordered.
The strike on September 2 is not just a policy failure; it’s a moral collapse. If the Post’s reporting is accurate — and multiple congressional offices say it is consistent with what whistleblowers have told them — then the United States has engaged in the deliberate killing of wounded, unarmed men floating in the sea.
That is the kind of conduct that topples governments, triggers war-crimes investigations, and leaves scars on nations for generations.
Nobody elected Donald Trump or Pete Hegseth to serve as judge, jury, and executioner for impoverished people in wooden boats. Nobody gave them the authority to murder suspects without trial. And nobody gave them the right to lie to Congress about it.
Congress must not let this pass. These allegations demand immediate public hearings, subpoena power, and full investigative authority.
If Hegseth gave an order to “kill everybody,” he must be removed and prosecuted.
If U.S. commanders falsified reports to mislead Congress and the public, they must be held accountable.
And if Donald Trump approved or encouraged these actions, then impeachment and criminal referral are not optional: they’re required to defend the rule of law.
America doesn’t have many chances left to prove to the world, and to ourselves, that we still believe in the value of human life and the restraints of democratic power. This is one of them.
Again we see the institutionalized casual racism in the US. This was the basis of the CRT higher education classes were about. All the media latched on to and went into great detail over a white woman’s shooting by ICE but only report vaguely and sporadically on the shooting of the black / brown people shot by ICE. But when you read the report below think on how racist ICE gang thugs are, the fact that they have broken other laws and assaulted other people with impunity as they are defended by the power of the US government. One last thing to think on. The ICE thug was clearly angry and he had his gun out, ready, and pointed in front of him allowing him to shoot the man without raising his gun. The reported statements from the government never mention him drawing his gun nor raising it, just that he fired his weapon defensively. If he felt threatened why openly approach the man with the long gun? Why no call for back up? Depending on the time was the ICE thug wakened up by the noise of gun fire? Hugs
Friends and family of the 43-year-old man who was fatally shot by a Department of Homeland Security agent in Northridge on New Year’s Eve gathered on Sunday to demand accountability and hold a candlelight vigil for their lost loved one.
They identified the victim as Keith Porter, who they say was a well-known and well-liked person in the community.
“If I could say anything to the ICE agent, it’s that you’re a murderer,” said Jasané Tyler, Porter’s cousin. “You stole my cousin from me. You stole their father from them. You stole Francine’s son from her.”
Porter’s loved ones are demanding justice after the father of two died on New Year’s Eve. He was shot by an off-duty U.S. Immigration and Customs agent at the apartments where they both lived.
Keith Porter, the 43-year-old man fatally shot by a DHS agent in Northridge on New Year’s Eve. Porter Family
His family contends that he was shooting a gun in the air to mark the new year. A statement from DHS on the incident contends that it was an “active shooter situation.”
“On December 31st, an off-duty ICE Officer bravely responded to an active shooter situation at his apartment complex,” the statement said. “In order to protect his life and that of others, he was forced to defensively use his weapon and exchanged gunfire with the shooter.”
Another statement from DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin provided further details. She said that the agent was “in his apartment, when he heard what he suspected were multiple gunshots. The suspected gunfire grew progressively louder, indicating to the officer that whoever was firing a gun was approaching his apartment. The officer took his ICE-authorized firearm and left his apartment to investigate. He moved to the ground level and went outside, where he believed the suspected gunfire was coming from.”
McLaughlin’s statement says that the officer rounded the corner of the building, where he encountered Porter, who they said was allegedly armed with a long rifle.
“The ICE officer identified himself as law enforcement. In response, the individual pointed his weapon at the ICE officer. The officer ordered the subject to put the weapon down, McLaughlin said. “When the subject refused to comply, the officer fired defensively with his service weapon at the subject to disarm him. The subject fired at least three rounds at the officer.”
Porter’s friends and family don’t buy it, especially with members of law enforcement in their own family.
“Every one of them says this is not standard, this is not protocol,” Tyler said.
Black Lives Matter leaders, who hosted the Sunday night vigil, are outraged by what happened.
“Were this anyone else, there would’ve been an arrest,” said Dr. Melina Abdullah, with BLM. “You don’t get to just murder people because you don’t like what they’re doing or how they’re celebrating.”
Los Angeles Police Department officers tell CBS LA that their investigation into the shooting is still ongoing. They also told the LA Times on Sunday that they haven’t yet spoken with the ICE agent due to protocol on how deadly force investigations are conducted when they involve federal law enforcement officers.
Belle talks about the right wing propaganda being generated to discredit the woman shot by ICE in Minnesota, Renee Good. It was not even a good fake hit piece as Belle describes it. I posted a few weeks ago about Russian and other enemy off the US countries posting stuff that is not true so that once it is circulated it discredits the real news in peoples minds. Ron fell for that himself.
Ron watches YouTube clips in the morning with his coffee. Yesterday he was listening to what he thought was a financial newsgroup called Buffet Unfiltered. That site reported that Deutsche Bank had called in tRump’s loans and seized tRump Towers. I questioned it because no other news source reported anything and I felt with news that important they would have. Today they reported how underwater on loans and to creditors tRump was, again that is believable but not the way Ron was telling me was being reported. So I again warned him about misleading propaganda. He asked me who to check the stuff out. I showed him how to both search out the group, which on their YouTube about page said they were fictional dramatizations, then I showed him how to search new groups like ground news for the story reported. Now he is upset these groups do this. But it was a good lesson for both of us. I post a lot of what I think is real news. However I have made mistakes and posted stuff not true or quite accurate. Thankfully the people who come here are smart and have pointed these out to me and I can correct or take the posts down. Thank you for helping keep this site as honest and correct as it is important to me. Hugs
This is an important story of growth and rejection of your core identity. The fact that those closest to you can not accept you and that which makes up who you are. I have not changed the text of the story in any way as I want the voice of the author and his agony of his childhood to shine clearly. This is the way the right wing Christian Nationalist bigots want every family member to be and all children raised. Remember this was only the 1990s. In the 30 years since great progress was made in acceptance, tolerance and education of / about LGBTQ+ kids and how to raise them in loving acceptance of how they feel inside themselves. The Christian hate groups that make their living trying to return the country to a much more regressive hateful time rolling back all rights gained by minorities. And in a very short time they have had a huge effect on how LGBTQ+ people especially LGBTQ+ kids are treated. They stated their goal of driving these kids back into hiding terrified of being outed for fear of being beaten, harassed, and ostracized. That is what they want. Several Christian lawmakers who are trying to make being an out LGBTQ+ kid illegal along with showing any media that represents the LGBTQ+ community have said that when they were kids in school they used to gang up and beat the shit out of LGBTQ+ kids. I know in the 1970s I was not out but targeted as a “faggot” and constantly harassed and attacked. How any adult would want to return to such a time, to having any kid or adult be treated that way is horrendous. Especially from those trying hard to force the country to follow their idea of a Christian lifestyle. Hugs
At 30, I’m finally living as myself. But the man whose acceptance I wanted most still can’t say the word gay.
Jan 10, 2026
Content warning: This story includes mentions of homophobia, childhood trauma and suicidal ideation.
By CorBen Williams
The seventh time I came out to my father wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t happen at a kitchen table or in a parking lot or after he’d found one of my journals. It happened casually, slipped into a conversation like it was nothing:
“As a gay man—” I began.
“You’re not gay,” he interrupted.
“Dad,” I replied. “We’ve done this too many times before.”
Even now, at 30 years old, married to the man I love, fully myself in ways I once thought impossible, my dad still can’t say who I am out loud. It hangs there, suspended between us, as though acknowledging my homosexuality would unravel something he’s built his entire life around.
I’m not sure what exactly. Control? Image? Masculinity? Maybe he simply doesn’t have the language.
Photo courtesy of CorBen Williams.
I grew up in North Pole, Alaska, in a red-sided house at the end of a gravel turnaround. It was the kind of home where the winter light never quite reached the living room and silence carried through the walls like a second language.
North Pole felt like its own universe. A 2,500 person military town where there’s snow on the ground for up to 187 days a year and the Christmas lights never come down. About 70% of the town is white and roughly 30% of the voters are registered Republican, with almost half listed as “undeclared,” which in Alaska is usually just Republican without saying it out loud.
Most families were tied to the church or the base, so you learned fast what was considered normal and what was not. People knew your parents and your business.
Growing up Black and queer made me stand out without trying and forced me to learn early how to tuck parts of myself away.
My parents had both served in the military, and even though my mother had the warmth and softness to move past it, my father emulated parental rejection. Dad demanded respect and expected excellence in the way a man shaped by the military does: loud and without room for negotiation.
You could feel his energy before you heard his footsteps because there was always a tension that entered the room with him. He yelled more than he spoke, and as a kid I was told to listen to what he was saying, not how he was saying it, even when he was screaming in my face.
My father didn’t know what to do with a son who felt things deeply, and before I ever came out to him—the first of seven times—he had already shown me exactly which parts of myself were unsafe to reveal.
But that didn’t stop me from trying. The first time I came out, I was in first grade, sitting in the parking lot of a McDonald’s on Geist Road, right beside my future high school.
“Dad, I think I’m bisexual,” I said.
I knew my ass was gay. But I also knew enough about my father to try to ease him into it. He asked if I knew what that meant, and even though I did, I told him “no.”
“It means you like sucking penis,” he spat harshly.
I was six.
People think kids don’t understand things, but children clock everything. That moment didn’t confuse me about who I was. It clarified who he was. It showed me that there were parts of me he couldn’t handle and wouldn’t protect. I didn’t leave that day understanding my sexuality better. I left understanding the risk of telling the truth.
The second time, I was forced out when my father found my journal. I was 10 years old, and in those pages, I’d written unpolished thoughts about men, about how I felt around them, questions I didn’t yet know how to ask anyone.
He burst into my bedroom and tore the journal up in front of me, little pieces of paper flying around me as I sat in my bed. I tried not to cry.
“As long as you’re a kid in my house, you don’t get privacy,” I remember him barking. It showed me that I need to be wary about how much I trust people and what information I give them.
This rejection led me to the darkest part of my childhood.
“I am tired of living,” I remember muttering to my sixth grade teacher.
I was exhausted by my dad, exhausted from hiding, exhausted from feeling wrong in my own skin.
I should have stopped writing after that, but writing was how I survived. When you don’t have anyone to talk to, you talk to the page.
By 13, I had another journal. This one had drawings of a classmate and fantasies about kissing him. When my dad found it, he brought it up on the car ride home from school, saying “the correct way” to feel about other boys was “brotherly love” and nothing else.
But the third journal set off the biggest explosion.
It was filled with details, drawings and fantasies about my first hookup with a boy. The way I wrote about them, at 15, was more adult. The kind of writing he didn’t want to believe his son was capable of.
“I fucking told you about this shit,” he shouted, with the journal gripped tightly in his hand. “This isn’t appropriate. This isn’t what we do.”
My mom was sitting next to me, shocked, both of us caught off guard by how quickly he had gone from discovery to explosion. I almost cried, but I swallowed it down. My mom guided him into the other room to calm him down.
He didn’t speak to me for seven days. He couldn’t look at me. Each day felt like another nail in the coffin.
Photo courtesy of CorBen Williams.
I kept coming out to my dad anyway. At 17. At 22. At 24. Nothing changed.
Part of me used to think that I was an embarrassment to my family. I felt for so long that I needed to apologize for being the mistake. But in my late teens, I started to see it differently. I realized I just wanted his acceptance and his love in a way that I was never gonna get.
Because of this, I don’t think I ever really got to be a child. Even in first grade, when other kids were talking about Barbies and Legos, I felt like I was always bracing for impact, performing a version of boyhood that never fit. My childhood was spent preparing for adulthood and a career. People would always say to me, “You seem so much older. You seem so mature.”
I left North Pole for good and moved to New York City when I turned 19. I became a performer, a traveler, someone who learned to build softness and resilience, where my childhood had taught me to live in fight-or-flight mode. And then, almost when I wasn’t expecting it, I met Travis.
He was older. Wisconsin-born. A wildlife biologist. Patient in a way I didn’t even realize I needed. My mother said he softened me, brought grey into my black-and-white worldview. With him, I don’t brace for criticism. I don’t edit myself. I don’t shrink. I don’t hide my journals.
We’ve been together five years now, married for three. He’s met everyone in my life, except for my dad.
Photo courtesy of CorBen Williams.
Now, when I think about my upbringing in North Pole, I think about the path through the woods that led to my house, hoping someone on the other side would understand me. I think about how many times I tried to hand my father my truth, and how many times he handed it back to me with rage.
Even now, with the life I’ve built and the love I’ve chosen, acceptance is still complicated. I wish I could say that learning to love myself erased the sting of not being understood, but the truth is I still wrestle with where I fit—inside my family, inside Black spaces, inside queer spaces, inside the places that were never built with someone like me.
I’ve learned to be confident, to be gracious, to be the person who makes others feel seen, maybe because I know exactly what it feels like not to be. But some days, even as a grown man, I feel an instinct to shrink.
I’m learning that acceptance is a practice, one I have to return to again and again. I don’t have it all figured out. But I’m trying. And maybe that’s the real truth at the end of all this: I haven’t just been coming out to my father all these years—I’ve been slowly, steadily learning how to come home to myself.
Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES reached out to CorBen’s father for comment, but he did not respond.
Sam Donndelinger assisted with the writing and reporting in this story.
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Photo from Donald Trump via Truth Social
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