Greene County Democrat

Tag: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth

  • Newswire : Epstein pressure mounts as Trump turns to Nigeria strikes

    Map of Africa, highlighting Nigeria

    By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent

    As questions mounted over the heavily redacted release of the Jeffrey Epstein files and new material placing President Donald Trump closer to the late sex trafficker than previously acknowledged, the White House shifted abruptly to a familiar tactic. The president turned outward, announcing U.S. military strikes in Nigeria and framing the action as a defense of Christianity, while critics said the move functioned as a political diversion that again placed Black people and Black nations in the crosshairs.
    Trump claimed the United States carried out “powerful and deadly” strikes against Islamic State militants in northwest Nigeria, accusing them of “slaughtering” Christians. The announcement arrived as Trump faced renewed scrutiny over Epstein records that include photographs, internal Justice Department emails, and flight data that raise questions about the administration’s handling of disclosures mandated by Congress.
    “The United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding a Christmas message that included, “MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues.”
    The Pentagon released video showing at least one projectile launched from a U.S. warship, though officials did not specify the precise target. U.S. Africa Command later said the strikes were conducted “in coordination with Nigerian authorities” in Sokoto State. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth thanked Nigeria for its cooperation, even as Trump publicly criticized Nigerian leaders.
    Nigerian officials rejected the religious framing. Foreign Minister Yusuf Maitama Tuggar told the BBC the strike was a joint operation against terrorists and “has nothing to do with a particular religion.” Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu reiterated that position in a Christmas Eve post, writing that Nigeria remains committed to protecting Christians, Muslims, and all citizens and opposing religious persecution.
    Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with roughly 240 million people, has faced years of violence from extremist groups, criminal gangs, and insurgents that have killed people across religious lines. Just days before Trump’s statement, a blast at a mosque in northeastern Nigeria killed five people and injured dozens.
    Meanwhile, California Gov. Gavin Newsom mocked the Justice Department’s release with a video highlighting extensive redactions and past footage of Trump with Epstein. The clip included a headline noting the DOJ’s defense of removing a Trump photograph from the records.
    Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia said the administration failed to comply with the law governing the release. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the disclosure incomplete and misleading, pointing to pages entirely blacked out. Rep. Ro Khanna, who co-authored the Epstein Files Transparency Act, said the release failed both the spirit and letter of the law, while Rep. Thomas Massie said it “grossly fails to comply.”
    The documents do not place former President Barack Obama in the Epstein files and contain no evidence tying him to Epstein. They also do not reveal wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton. Former President Bill Clinton appears in social photographs, though reporting notes no indication of misconduct and Clinton has denied any.
    By contrast, the release includes material that places Trump in closer proximity to Epstein than the administration has publicly acknowledged, including a photograph of Epstein holding a novelty check bearing Trump’s signature and internal emails referencing Trump’s travel on Epstein’s jet. The Justice Department has offered no explanation for why those materials were released while others remain obscured.
    Critics argue the timing of the Nigeria strikes fits a long-established pattern. For decades, Trump has faced allegations of racial discrimination, from the 1973 Justice Department lawsuit over housing practices to his 1989 newspaper ads calling for the death penalty during the Central Park Five case, a stance he revived during the 2024 presidential debate.
    In recent months, Trump has attacked diversity initiatives, defended Confederate symbols, and advanced policies that disproportionately affected Black communities, including mass deportations and federal workforce cuts that heavily impacted Black women. Commentators have noted the administration’s willingness to portray itself as a defender of Christianity and Western identity while stoking grievance politics at home.
    As Nigeria faces new travel restrictions and renewed placement on U.S. religious freedom watchlists, Nigerian leaders continue to reject Trump’s depiction of their country. Tinubu said earlier this fall that labeling Nigeria as religiously intolerant “does not reflect our national reality.”
    “I stand committed to doing everything within my power to enshrine religious freedom in Nigeria and to protect Christians, Muslims, and all Nigerians from violence,” Tinubu wrote.

  • Newswire : Defending Medicaid cuts, Ernst tells Iowans, ‘We all are going to die’

    Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, on Capitol Hill in January.Credit…Eric Lee/The New York Times
     

    By Annie Karni, New York Times


    Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, had a gloomy message for constituents at a town hall in Butler County, Iowa, on Friday morning: “We all are going to die.”
    Ms. Ernst was fielding questions about cuts to Medicaid that were included in the domestic policy bill working its way through Congress, when someone in the audience yelled out that the effect would be that “people are going to die.”
    “Well, we all are going to die,” Ms. Ernst responded, drawing jeers from the crowd.
    Ms. Ernst appeared taken aback by the negative response. “For heaven’s sakes, folks,” she said.
    Democrats moved quickly to call attention to the comment from Ms. Ernst, a second-term lawmaker who is up for re-election next year. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee circulated a video clip of the moment, calling Ms. Ernst’s remark “stunningly callous” and saying that it came as Republicans in Congress were pushing massive cuts to Medicaid that would leave “millions of Americans uninsured in order to pay for a tax giveaway for billionaires.”

    The sprawling legislation Ms. Ernst was discussing, which contains a $4 trillion tax cut that would provide the biggest savings to the wealthy, also would make several changes to Medicaid, including adding a strict new work requirement, an end to state provider taxes to help states match Federal funds, and other steps. The independent, nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected that the bill would cause around 10 million Americans to become uninsured.
    Ms. Ernst’s comment on Friday came after town hall attendees interrupted her as she was highlighting provisions in the domestic policy measure that seek to ensure that undocumented immigrants, who are not eligible to enroll in Medicaid, would not receive any services. As they defend the legislation, Republicans often refer to that aspect of it, suggesting that the only major changes it would make to Medicaid would be cracking down on waste and abuse in the program, including illegal use by undocumented people.
    Still, it is the more morbid portion of Ms. Ernst’s remarks that Democrats are likely to play on repeat in campaign ads against her in the coming months.
    Ms. Ernst’s Democratic challenger Nathan Sage, a Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq and currently leads the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce, was in the audience and said he was stunned when he heard her remark.
    “It was this jaw-dropping moment — how the hell can you say something like that?” Mr. Sage said in an interview. “The crowd was already hot. She was there to answer questions and get out. It just showed she doesn’t care about us.”
    Mr. Sage said he attended the town hall to hear voters’ top concerns. “The overall feeling from everyone in the room was she’s doing what she needs to do to keep her job,” he said.
    With her re-election top of mind, Ms. Ernst, a survivor of sexual assault and the Senate’s first female combat veteran, earlier this year caved to a right-wing pressure campaign and voted to confirm Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth despite expressing reservations about his bid.
    In a statement, a spokesman for Ms. Ernst said that Democrats were trying to “fearmonger against strengthening the integrity of Medicaid.”
    The spokesman added: “There’s only two certainties in life: death and taxes, and she’s working to ease the burden of both by fighting to keep more of Iowans’ hard-earned tax dollars in their own pockets and ensuring their benefits are protected from waste, fraud, and abuse.”

     

  • Newswire : Trump Administration erases Black History at Arlington National Cemetery

    Military graves at Arlington National Cemetery

    By Stephen A. Crockett Jr., NewsOne

     

    It’s one thing to say that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives give an unfair advantage to people of color inside organizations; it’s a gross overstep to use DEI as an excuse to purge the existence of notable Black, Hispanic, and veteran women from Arlington National Cemetery — which is exactly what the Trump administration has done. 
    According to MSNBC, the final resting place for some 400,000 soldiers has scrubbed its website of the gravesites of notable “prominent minority veterans, as well as educational pages on the Civil War, African American history and women’s history.”
    They have also removed all language about diversity and inclusion and placed some pertinent information about extraordinary people of color under different categories that don’t mention race or gender because the Trump administration hates history that makes white people look bad.
    Seriously, why else would they want to stop teachings on African American history or the Civil Rights Movement, all information that was once on the Arlington cemetery’s web pages until the Trump administration war on DEI? There used to be a section on Black war heroes, and that page is no longer there because god forbid some Black child sees these powerful images and thinks that maybe he could be a pilot or a Marine one day. 
    The cemetery is not entirely at fault. A spokesperson for the Arlington National told the Washington Post that they are just trying to adhere to Donald Trump’s policies after confirming that the webpages of “Notable Graves” of Black, Hispanic, and female veterans were taken down. 
    Because Donald Trump and his brood of white cis-gendered men hate diversity, they hate anyone who doesn’t look like them, and they are working diligently to erase years of progress under the guise of “Making America Great Again,” which is really just a synonym for white. 
    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has claimed that he’s getting rid of “wokeness” in the military but showcasing the work of people of color in the Armed Forces isn’t “woke,” unless “wokeness” means people of color (I admit that I don’t know what wokeness means now that it’s been bastardized by MAGA).
    MSNBC notes that one of Donald Trump’s first firings when taking office was to get rid of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown, a Black man, and one of the most highly decorated officers and replaced him with a white cis-gendered man.
    He also pushed out “Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the head of the U.S. Navy and the first woman to lead any branch of the armed forces.” Her firing left the armed forces without any 4-star female commanders. 
    Since being confirmed as defense secretary, Hegseth noted that he believes the dumbest phrase in the military is “Our strength is in our diversity.” So clearly he was for a ban on all cultural heritage celebrations, “including Black History Month, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, National American Indian Heritage Month, LGBTQ Pride Month, Women’s History Month, Juneteenth, Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Holocaust Remembrance Day,” MSNBC reports. 
    Oh and in case you wanted to clear up any doubt, yes, they are looking to ban trans people from serving in the military.
    And get this: After scrubbing the Pentagon of some 26,000 images that showed veterans of diverse races and identities, they also took down an image of a World War II B-29 aircraft that dropped the world’s first and only atomic bomb on Hiroshima because it was named “Enola Gay.”

  • Newswire : After uproar, Tuskegee Airmen video to be added to Air Force training

    The U.S. Department of Defense, and newly confirmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were scrambling Sunday to undo the removal of a Tuskegee Airmen video from Air Force training seminars. 

    The video of the legendary Black Air Force pilots was removed in the wake of President Donald Trump’s executive order eliminating all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in the federal government. Outrage over the removal has been swift and strong.
     
    Alabama Reps. Terri Sewell and Shomari Figures called Saturday for the immediate reinstatement of the video and the associated lesson on the Tuskegee Airmen’s accomplishments. Figures called the removal “pathetic, disgraceful, and disrespectful, not only to the brave fighter pilots who saved the U.S. in World War II, but to the City of Tuskegee and the entire State of Alabama. 

    “It is a slap in the face of the heroic Black men who risked and gave their lives on the front lines in defense of a country that still made them sit in the back of the bus when they returned home.”

    Sewell said it was an affront to the entire country.   “To strip them from the Air Force curriculum is an outrageous betrayal of our values as Americans. Their heroism is not ‘DEI.’ It is American history,” she said.

    On Sunday, Alabama Sen. Katie Britt joined them in calling for the lesson to be reinstated, but called its removal “malicious compliance,” presumably on the part of the Air Force. 
    The video and lesson, however, were part of the Air Force’s DEI training program, which sought to educate current servicemen and women about the contributions of all people to the Air Force. 

    Britt’s social media statement on the issue drew a response from Hegseth, who said the DOD is “all over it.” He went on to say that the decision “… will not stand,” and that would be immediately reversed. 

    By Sunday afternoon, the Air Force released a statement to the San Antonio Express News, which originally reported the story of the video’s removal, stating that the video would be added to the Air Force’s new recruit training program on Monday. 

    Congresswoman Sewell issued this statement, after the video was reinstated, “While I am relieved that our collective calls have forced the Trump Administration to reverse course, the removal of the Tuskegee Airmen from the Air Force curriculum should have never happened in the first place. We should all see the Trump Administration’s attacks on DEI for what they really are—an attempt to whitewash our history and devalue the contributions of African Americans.
     
    “Throughout the next four years, we as Americans will need to remain especially vigilant against attacks on Black history, and as elected officials, we should be prepared to call them out. I hope we can continue to do so in a bipartisan manner.”